Cobra Kai will keep on keeping on as Netflix announced it has renewed The Karate Kid continuation series for a fifth season.
Season 4 of Cobra Kai isn’t even out yet, but Netflix wants fans to stay in its dojo with the early season renewal announcement. Season 4 is set to premiere in December.
Cobra Kai stars Johnny Lawrence and Daniel LaRusso decades after LaRusso beat Lawrence in The Karate Kid. Older and washed up, Lawrence and LaRusso’s rivalry reignites after Lawrence begins teaching karate and re-opens the Cobra Kai dojo.
The series originally premiered on YouTube Red, YouTube’s shelved original programming service. While YouTube Red was eventually shuttered, Cobra Kai was regarded as one of the best shows on the platform and Netflix took over the series starting with season 3.
After years of teases, Destiny 2‘s scariest and most ubiquitous villain, Savathun, has finally made her appearance. She’s not only central to the Season of the Lost, Destiny 2’s current content season, she’s also making huge moves in The Witch Queen, the next big expansion for the game. Bungie revealed some of what we can expect from The Witch Queen in its recent Destiny 2 showcase, detailing one incredibly important new element: We’ll be facing Hive Guardians.
In the story of Destiny 2, this is a massive development. “Guardian” is the term for the sci-fi superheroes the players embody, and they wield specific powers granted by a physics-defying force called the Light. Those powers include the ability to resurrect from death and to use magic to shoot fire or create black holes. Up until now, only humanity has wielded the Light, thanks to its source, the giant machine god-thing called the Traveler, and its Ghosts, the tiny robots that follow players around.
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Now Playing: Destiny 2: The Witch Queen – What You Need To Know
The Hive, meanwhile, are perhaps Destiny 2’s greatest enemy. These eons-old aliens are a billions-strong cult that worships death and exists only for conquest and genocide. Where humanity embodies the Light and, we’ve always assumed, the will of the Traveler, the Hive embodies the Darkness, the other god-like power in Destiny’s universe. A Hive enemy that controls the Light and its attendant powers–including near-immortality–is an incredible threat.
But what Bungie hasn’t told us just yet is how Savathun and her Hive army came by these powers. In fact, that question seems to be a major mystery of the expansion. The description for The Witch Queen on Bungie’s store reads, “The Witch Queen awaits those who are driven to understand her inexplicable control of the Light.” It also sports the tagline, “Survive the truth.”
That instantly leads to some serious deliberations. Where could Savathun have gotten the power of the Light, and what could the “truth” we need to survive actually be? There are a couple of possibilities, but one we likely need to consider sooner rather than later is that Savathun got the Light the same way humanity did: from the Traveler.
That would be a world-shaking revelation for Destiny–definitely a truth we would have to survive. Just about everything in the world of Bungie’s game is predicated on the idea that human Guardians are righteous defenders of the innocent, more or less, and that we’re granted the power of the Light by the benevolent and all-knowing Traveler because wedeserve it. Everything we do is based on the presupposition that we’re the heroes. If the Traveler gave the Light to the Hive, a species who has spent its entire existence bent on the destruction of all other life, it would call into question all the assumptions humanity has made about itself, and all the actions we’ve taken since the series started.
But there’s a lot that’s happened in the story of Destiny 2, particularly since the Beyond Light expansion, that grounds this line of thinking. The Traveler may well be rethinking its past choices because it faces an unprecedented situation–it’s staring down the Black Fleet, the pyramid-shaped spaceships that are the physical manifestation of the Darkness, and it’s standing and fighting, rather than running away. We’re apparently watching the story of the Traveler’s last stand, and desperation changes priorities.
To understand what might be happening, you should check out a key batch of Destiny 2 lore called “Unveiling.” This lore book popped up back in the Shadowkeep expansion, when we first started discovering the pyramid ships and coming to understand the Darkness’s whole deal. Though we’d always believed that the Darkness had nearly destroyed humanity after attacking the solar system way back in Destiny’s history, when the Black Fleet finally arrived once again, it didn’t immediately start destroying everything.
Instead, the Darkness spoke to us, offered gifts, and tried to make us see its side. Unveiling plays on that idea: It’s a lore book written from the perspective of the Darkness but which explains the relationship between it and the Traveler, who are described in the book as the “Winnower” and the “Gardener.” The book gives a creation myth of the universe, where the Gardener (or, seemingly, the Traveler) created life, allowing it to grow unchecked, while the Winnower (or, seemingly, the Darkness) embraced death, paring back that life so that only that which was strong and capable survived. Over time, the Gardener became bored with the situation–the life it created always wound up becoming the same brand of strong and ruthless because of the Winnower’s influence. The Gardener wanted to create all sorts of different life that would be diverse and interesting, and develop in new ways. The Winnower disagreed, claiming that helping weaker life to flourish would ultimately lead to more suffering when the Gardener’s help was finally removed. The two forces made a wager about whose philosophy was better, and that conflict is apparently what we’re playing through now. The Traveler wanders the universe, uplifting life, before the Darkness shows up and attacks. So far, the Traveler has always lost these conflicts and fled. According to Unveiling, humanity and the Guardians are the Traveler’s ultimate answer to the Darkness–we’re its last, best attempt to prove that its view is the right view.
Except, what if we’re not the Traveler’s last, best attempt? Lately, we’ve given the Traveler some pretty good reasons to be concerned about picking humanity to represent it in a final throw-down with the Darkness. After all, the Black Fleet arrived and immediately started offering gifts, and we Guardians took them. In Beyond Light, we started wielding the Darkness’s power alongside that of the Traveler with Stasis. The idea was that we would use the weapons of the enemy to defeat it, but there are lots of lore entries (specifically attached to the gear from the Trials of Osiris) that suggest plenty of Guardians are just falling to the Darkness’s side, growing cruel and corrupt.
The Traveler has tried to counter the pull of the Darkness with gifts of its own. That’s what the mission Harbinger, which rewards us with the powerful Light-infused gun Hawkmoon, is all about. But it doesn’t seem to be enough; Guardians all over the place are running around, wielding Stasis, and even among humanity, people are split on the best course of action.
One might think the Traveler is watching all this and getting a bit nervous.
Meanwhile, we’ve got Savathun. As revealed at the start of the Season of the Lost, the Hive’s Witch Queen is looking to get rid of her worm, the parasitic organism all Hive have inside them. The Hive’s origin myth is all about the species’ pact with these worm gods, which grant the Hive Darkness-borne powers and force them to adhere to what they call the “Sword-Logic.” It’s the same as the Winnower’s philosophy: The Hive try to kill everything they can, as a way of pursuing perfection, or the “final shape” of life in the universe. Anything that can be killed must be killed, by the Hive’s reckoning, including themselves. The idea is the relentless pursuit of strength until nothing exists but the absolute strongest life possible.
The Hive get their power from the worms in exchange for feeding the worms through constant conquest and murder, but the Hive can never stop conquering and killing, because their worms never stop being hungry. Stop feeding the worm, and the Hive who bears it is consumed instead. And the more you feed it, the hungrier the worm becomes. So Savathun asking for help getting rid of her worm, looking to break free from this pact, is a rejection of the Sword-Logic and the life of constant murder and conquest. It seems the Witch Queen is pretty tired of this whole “endlessly killing, conquering, and deceiving” existence, but she can’t stop doing those things without being consumed herself. If she wants to stop serving the Darkness, she needs help, and that’s what the Season of the Lost seems to be about.
So consider the situation from the Traveler’s point of view. You’re making your final stand against your greatest enemy. The Guardians, your greatest heroes, have been tempted by that enemy, and many of them are falling to its influence–or at the very least, are willing to take its gifts and listen to its requests and ideas. Meanwhile, your enemy’s greatest asset, the ever-conquering Hive, has grown tired of your enemy’s philosophy and is jumping ship. For the Traveler, suddenly an opportunity has presented itself to use the Darkness’s sharpest tool against it.
If we believe what’s written in Unveiling (which might be a bit foolish, since it’s a description of the Traveler given by the Darkness), then it’s fair to say that the Traveler doesn’t really care so much about the individual species it uplifts for their own sake, but merely that it’s interested in life in general. It does not, perhaps, have a particular soft spot for humanity. Unveiling paints a picture of the Traveler as caring primarily about beating the Darkness. If the Hive give the Traveler its best shot to do that, then it’ll take that shot.
But that’s also a massive betrayal for humanity and most of the characters in Destiny 2, many of whom haven’t just dedicated their lives to fighting the Traveler’s enemies, but who worship it as a deity, the physical embodiment of the concept of Good. If the Traveler gives the power of the Light to the Hive, a group of beings that are essentially the embodiment of Evil, it flies in the face of everything everyone has ever believed about the Traveler. It would, in essence, destroy Destiny 2’s notion of God. The repercussions would be enormous.
If you ask me, though, that’s the direction Destiny 2 is going. So much of this year’s story has been about the ideas of peace, reconciliation, and forgiveness. According to Savathun, her many machinations this year have been about helping humanity, rather than harming it, and the results of those machinations do bear her out, at least to some degree. The Season of the Splicer in particular seemed to show Savathun testing humanity to see if it was capable of forgiving its enemies, and asking for help in destroying her worm suggests that Savathun may actually, potentially, be seeking forgiveness.
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Destiny 2 Savathun Animated Cutscene (SPOILERS)
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At least, Savathun working for our forgiveness seemed like a possibility before Bungie’s showcase for The Witch Queen. Perhaps, though, it isn’t our forgiveness Savathun is after.
We’re clearly going to fight Light-wielding Hive when The Witch Queen launches in February, at least at first. But it seems to me the question for the future of Destiny 2 is whether humanity can get over this. Can we recognize the benefits in making allies out of former enemies when taking on something worse? Can we forgive the Hive, at least enough to co-exist or fight side by side? Can we withstand the abandonment of our god, or the realization that its benevolence has limits?
Of course, time will tell. But it’s worth keeping in mind what else we know of the future of Destiny 2’s story: namely, the titles of its last two expansions. The first is dubbed “Lightfall,” which is self-evidently ominous. The last, straight of the philosophy of the Hive and the Darkness, is “The Final Shape.” At the very least, things are set to get a lot, uh, darker.
In a blog post, Microsoft’s Joseph Staten revealed why Halo Infinite’s campaign was absent from Gamescom and Opening Night Live. Meanwhile, community manager John Junyszek revealed how XP will work in the game’s multiplayer.
Location descriptions from Bethesda’s upcoming game Starfield have been revealed in new developer update videos. These locations include, the United Colonies capital city of New Atlantis, the pleasure city of Neon, and the capital of the Freestar Collective, Akila.
Rhythm of the Universe: Ionia brings together the latest in VR technology with an epic story about saving the environment. Revealed during Gamescom, ROTU Entertainment announced that its award-winning VR game, Ionia, is coming to Oculus Quest, PlayStation VR, and SteamVR on September 23, 2021.
Ionia is set in a fantastical world overgrowing with nature. Unfortunately, it’s in danger, and in order to keep the environment safe, you’ll need to embark on a journey to save the mystical Harpa.
ROTU Entertainment specializes in music, and it plays a key part in Ionia. You’ll need to solve music theory-based puzzles and interact with virtual flowers scattered throughout the Ionian forest that emit musical sounds like drums and bells. You’ll also be able to traverse the massive virtual forest by climbing trees or ziplining across ravines.
Ionia won the Cannes XR Development Showcase award in 2020 for its immersive technology, and environmental message. ROTUE Entertainment announced that it will donate five percent of the proceeds to the non-profit Wildlife Warriors Worldwide, an organization founded in 2002 by Terri and the late Steve Irwin.
For more, check out IGN’s full Gamescom coverage including new announcements, trailers, and news.
Matt T.M. Kim is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.
Welcome to No More Heroes 3! Whether you’re a seasoned assassin or a beam katana rookie, there’s a lot to consider and understand before going into this ultraviolent action-packed adventure. To start off on your journey to climb to #1 on the UAA charts, we’ve prepared some advice to help you get on your feet.
For more about how the game stacks up, be sure to read our No More Heroes 3 review. Otherwise, read on for our essential tips and tricks around the game.
Throughout the various areas of NMH3, you’ll find sushi carts offering a variety of eat-in and take-out dishes for Travis to snarf on. Eating sushi provides various benefits depending on the type you chow down on, ranging from simple health and power restoration to boosting Slash Reel odds.
Take-out sushi can be used during battle, except for special fights where Travis dons his armor. Travis can hold up to five of each kind of sushi and snarf pieces mid-fight to get their effects. You’ll always want to keep health and power restoration sushi on hand, but having a few pieces of the other types at the ready is also a good idea–having tension and attack-power boosts you can activate at any time is always great. (How does the sushi stay fresh so long? Don’t ask.)
Eat-in sushi acts differently. You can’t take it into battle, but eating it confers some really great boosts–reducing Death Glove skill cooldown, augmenting your health and damage output, and even granting you an on-the-spot revival should Travis die (with a few exceptions). It’s expensive but worth it. Before major boss fights, you should always grab an eat-in bowl of sushi. Fortunately, most big boss fights have a sushi cart located right outside, so you can stock up on take-out and get a meal in before the big showdown.
DON’T FORGET TO GO DOWNSTAIRS
It’s surprisingly easy to miss the fact that Travis’s hotel room has a lab in the basement. You get there by sliding down the pole from the room with Jeane, the wardrobe, and the toilet. Here, you’ll find numerous functions that will be immensely beneficial to your assassination experience.
The first is the power-up machine, which lets you spend WESN to upgrade Travis’s health, attack strength, beam katana power, and death skills, and even unlock new moves. Investing in Travis’s stats goes a long way towards making the tougher boss encounters significantly less of a nightmare. If you want to change your build, all you have to do is press the X button to reset your current stats and get the WESN you’ve spent returned to allocate elsewhere. Nifty!
You’ll also find a machine that makes chips for Travis’s Death Glove. Making chips requires money and specific items, which can be earned through sub-quests and combat. Up to three of these chips can be equipped to customize Travis’s abilities further. We recommend making the 80 chip as soon as possible, as it will assist you immensely in the item-hunting subquests by indicating when something you’re looking for is nearby.
There’s a time machine here, too, but its use is rather limited: You can only use it to re-fight bosses you’ve previously conquered. However, you can choose to fight them at higher difficulty levels for a challenge and to earn some rare loot–several chip-creation items are only available as drops from boss battles. Depending on the difficulty, you’ll get some money and WESN on the side, too! Finally, there’s a room where you can review various in-game tutorials if you so please. Make full use of the lab facilities to augment your assassination capabilities!
HELP THE PEOPLE OUT
Even when you’ve cleared enough of the Designated Matches to get access to that chapter’s boss fight, you still might find yourself short on cash for the entry fee. When that happens, it’s time to get to work! You’ll find folks all over the various open-world areas who need a helping hand. When you enter a new area, look on the map for “?” signs–these are points of interest you have yet to visit. Some of these spots will be opportunities for volunteer work, which usually involves playing a short minigame.
The first time you encounter a minigame, you’ll usually play a basic “tutorial” level to acquaint yourself with the controls. You’ll get a small reward for completing this. Afterward, a small star in a circle will appear on the ground near the person asking for help. These are additional levels of the minigame at a higher difficulty, which can be completed for better rewards (and, sometimes, unlocking even tougher difficulty levels.) You don’t need to talk to the quest-giver every time if you’ve already finished the “tutorial”–just head for the star mark and confirm. Exceptions are the item-hunting minigames (like Deathman cards and Jeane’s kittens), the toilet-unclogging minigame (which opens up save points), and the highway driving battles.
There are several minigames scattered throughout, like lawn-mowing, mining, and cleaning up garbage in an alligator-infested water pit. When you find one you like, you can repeat it infinitely for extra money, WESN, and materials.
GO ON THE DEFENSIVE
But maybe you don’t want to help people out. Travis Touchdown doesn’t have time to mow lawns when he’s got alien scum to kill, you say. Well, thankfully, you can also earn extra cash, materials, and WESN through fighting at Defense Mission points, marked with a pair of green crossed swords on your map.
During these Defense Missions, you’ll take on a pre-set number of enemy waves. Defeating all the enemies from one wave summons the next until you’ve cleared them all. Each wave will have a different set of enemies to fight, so be prepared to change up your strategies when needed–and don’t forget to bring some sushi if things go south.
Like the other minigames, Defense Missions can be repeated infinitely, so if you’d rather earn your wages through bloodshed, that’s a perfectly valid option.
DEATH KICK IS YOUR RELIABLE BEST FRIEND
Travis’s Death Glove gives him special abilities he can use by holding down the L button and pressing one of the face buttons. You’ll fill out all four of the abilities over the course of the game, but the skill you start the game with, Death Kick, will remain amazingly useful and versatile from start to finish. This dropkick has a lot of great properties: It does a good chunk of damage, knocks an enemy down, and, with proper timing, it can interrupt enemy attacks. If you see an enemy winding up for a really damaging attack, it’s good to have a Death Kick at the ready to knock them out of it.
The Death Kick, like all Death Glove skills, has a cooldown timer attached, so you’ll need to wait a little bit before you can use it again. Fortunately, its timer is pretty short compared to other Death Glove skills, and the cooldown can be reduced by augmenting Death Skills with the Power-Up Machine or eating certain sushi. Having a Death Kick ready to go in a pinch is always a good plan.
KNOCK ‘EM OUT AND GO FOR THE THROW
It’s a giant pain in the ass when your beam katana juice runs out, and you’re forced to run away and recharge mid-fight. There are two much easier ways to replenish its juice, however! The first is to eat a power-restoring sushi, but those are limited, and you could likely run out during a particularly long battle. The second option–using Travis’s wrestling moves–is a lot more fun and badass.
During a fight, you can stun enemies by hitting them with a lengthy combo. Ways to catch them off-guard and go into a long combo include executing a dodge to activate slow-mo, successfully winning a sword-clash, or simply getting to their sides or behind where they lack the ability to defend. Then go to town! Hit them with a flurry of normal and heavy strikes. When you see small stars pop off their bodies, that means that they’re almost stunned, so keep at it! You’ll know that they’re fully stunned when you see a bunch of stars circling their head.
Once you’ve stunned them, stop attacking normally and go in for the throw! By performing a wrestling move on a stunned enemy, you’ll recharge the beam katana power to max. If your grapple lands the killing blow, you also stand a good chance of starting up the Slash Reel. You should try to go for throws on stunned foes whenever you can to avoid having to recharge manually–feeling like a totally awesome death machine is just a nice little side benefit. Be careful, though: If you knock down an enemy that’s stunned (for example, with a Death Kick), they will no longer be stunned when they get up.
CROWD CONTROL TIPS
Travis is just one guy who often finds himself up against multiple enemies at once, but fortunately, he’s got a couple of nice skills to help with keeping the hordes at bay. The simplest of these is the jumping heavy attack: Travis will fall down and create a small shockwave when he hits the ground, causing enemies in the radius to stagger. It won’t work on guarding enemies, though, who can retaliate as Travis recovers. For a group of attack-happy enemies, however, it works great–do the attack, focus on one enemy as they’re all recovering, then work to isolate that enemy from the pack with attacks and movement for an easier kill.
Sometimes, however, you might find yourself assaulted on all sides by enemies with sturdier defenses. A good option for these situations is the Death Rain attack you will learn a little ways into the game. This opens up a small portal above an enemy, raining down energy blasts that do a constant stream of damage. It’s good for both mostly stationary enemies and large groups in a small area. Finally, Death Force allows you to clear a path for Travis by knocking one or more enemies back a good distance, leaving them on the ground and vulnerable.
After spending a little over a year in Early Access, Vagrus: The Riven Realms officially has a release date, with its full release set for October.
Originally released into Early Access last year, Vagrus: The Riven Realms is a simulation RPG in which you guide a caravan across an apocalyptic wasteland. It features a mixture of turn-based combat and high-level strategy built around a series of granular decisions, such as who will handle the night’s watch.
The original Early Access release included around 50 hours of content as well as a free prologue. It has enjoyed very positive reviews on Steam and elsewhere, but as one user notes, it’s also very hard.
Vagrus is Lost Pilgrims’ first major release. First founded in 2017, it is dedicated to bringing the spirit of tabletop role-playing and dark fantasy to a wider audience.
Vagrus: The Riven reals was funded in part on Fig, with its fundraising campaign being structured around a series of milestones. All Fig backers received immediate access to the Alpha build.
No word yet on a console release for Vagrus: The Riven Realms. It’ll be out October 5 on PC via Steam and Good Old Games. For lots more Gamescom 2021 news, make sure to check out our Gamescom 2021 hub.
While “indie” can be either a loaded word or a confusing one in the games industry these days, there’s one thing that just about every developer under the umbrella of smaller, self-run creative studios has in common: it’s hard to be indie.
A small team of developers might have a brilliant idea for a game, and might have all the skills needed to make that game truly incredible. But being indie often means struggling with any number of barriers unrelated to making games. There are complex publishing agreements full of legalese, storefronts bursting with competition, the constant need for funding, a never-ending parade of digital showcases and (eventually) physical events, and figuring out how to release a game on consoles — and that’s all on top of the difficulty of making a game to begin with.
Of course, plenty of indie games get released and applauded anyway, but what if all that could be made easier by a support network of indie publishers committed to uplifting one another and the developers they work with? That’s the pitch of The Indie Houses, a group of seven publishers behind games like Call of the Sea, Paradise Killer, Lake, Monster Prom, Mutazione, Coffee Talk, and Lamentum, who have banded together to try and make things a little better not just for themselves, but for everyone else in the same boat.
The Indie Houses currently consists of Akupara Games, Fellow Traveller, Neon Doctrine, Raw Fury, Those Awesome Guys, Toge Productions, and Whitethorn Games, a group of publishers whose collective is, among other things, holding its first showcase event on August 31. The Indie Houses Showcase will happen alongside a week-long Steam event with game demos, sales, developer livestreams, Q&A sessions and other festivities — though the showcase is far from the end of their ambitions.
In truth, the bones of what has become The Indie Houses has existed for some time now according to several of its founding members. Iain Garner, co-founder of Neon Doctrine, tells me that he has been chatting with Raw Fury since befriending them “on a 7-11 booze run in Taipei,” and has also been assisting with Chinese publishing for Toge Productions for years. And David Logan, CEO of Akupara Games, points out that some of the publishers in the group had already worked on initiatives for the collective good of indie publishing, such as Akupara’s Indie Calendar Buddy to help indies submit their games and booths on time for festivals.
According to Raw Fury CEO Vic Bassey, it was the pandemic that ultimately catalyzed what the seven had been working on in small ways for years. He started reaching out to his colleagues for video chats, positing the question he’d been wondering for some time: Why don’t publishers work together?
As Vlad Calu, communications director for Those Awesome Guys tells me, his studio had been trying to put together some kind of indie “Super Group” for years, so when Indie Houses came around with the values they already espoused, it all made perfect sense.
Almost everyone [in indie] I’ve come across is quick to share info, contacts and help each other out.
“I think that the last year and a half also provided us with the necessary time to sit down together in a more informal and relaxed format (quiet beverages of choice over the internet seem to lead to more fruitful and meaningful discussions than loud parties at live events) and think about how we can all improve ourselves in order to better serve the developers and partners that we work with,” he says.
Per Akupara’s Alyssa Kollgaard, The Indie Houses’ collective goal is “to elevate each of the companies involved, our respective developers, as well as indie games and games as a whole.” The intention is to help indie developers be successful, regardless of whether or not they’re published by an Indie Houses member or even whether or not they have a publisher at all. She says they want to help indies “recognize and avoid predatory practices, navigate industry challenges, gain access to resources and to advocate for their own needs.”
At the core of The Indie Houses’ beliefs are three pillars: Bigger Together, More Helpful Together, and Better Together. Common to all three is the idea that the traditionally smaller, often struggling indie space can gain visibility, negotiate more funding, create better opportunities for developers in underrepresented markets or from marginalized groups, and generally better be able to compete in a challenging marketplace dominated by AAA..if they work as a team.
“I’ve been working in indie games for ten years, having spent around the same time in AAA publishing before that,” says Chris Wright, founder and managing director of Fellow Traveler. “One of the things I love about it is that there is a pervasive spirit of cooperation. Even though, technically, everyone is competing with each other, almost everyone I’ve come across is quick to share info, contacts and help each other out. So something like The Indie Houses is a great way to do more of that with the other members but also amplify and enhance the ways each of us are helping the broader indie community.”
While some initiatives like The Indie Houses’ showcase next week are just for its members, the group is committed to sharing resources and information more widely. It’s already beginning the process of building its website as a resource hub — for instance, Akupara’s Indie Calendar Buddy lives there now — and its members are committed to other similar projects such as Raw Fury and Whitethorn Digital’s open sharing of their respective publishing contracts earlier this year.
“At every single level of our industry, everything from legal, contracts, production resources, task management resources, backends, surfacing and visibility tools, discounting, milestones… all of this was made to support the AAA enterprise with indie games benefitting tangentially, if at all,” says Matthew White, CEO of Whitethorn Games. “By banding together, we can leverage our mutual resources to build inroads that would otherwise be impossible.”
Aside from resource sharing and showcases, Indie Houses is looking to add other initiatives, including funds like the existing African Game Dev Prototype Fund and Toge’s Southeast Asian Dev Fund. Funds like these are especially important to members like Gardner and Sarah Johana, head of community at Toge Productions, who work extensively with marginalized developers and developers from underrepresented regions.
“As a publisher from a third-world country, we understand deeply how hard it is for small indie developers and even publishers to get access to stuff like reaching out to big media and attending game events,” Johana says. “Basically, having the chance to get out there and be heard is very minimal. Being part of The Indie Houses helps us tackle that problem. We can now provide more chances for the developers to get more visibility and we now have better access to resources that help them by allowing us to market and publish their games more effectively.”
At every single level of our industry, everything …was made to support the AAA enterprise with indie games benefitting tangentially, if at all.
The group also wants to be a visible part of ongoing discussions on social issues that connect to the games industry, such as harassment directed at creators or fighting back against bigotry. They feel that with strength in numbers, they can better push for positive change.
Put together, this would ideally mean more stellar indie games making it past the numerous hurdles standing in their way so they can reach the people who want to play them most. The Indie Houses Showcase is just the first step.
While they’re seven publishers for now, they’re open to future structural changes too, such as welcoming in additional publishers whose values align with their own, or as Gardner puts it, stepping out of the group if one of them ever “got bought by EA tomorrow (lol)”. The principles of Indie Houses, he says, are more important than the individual numbers.
Bassey and Gardner tell me that his ultimate future hope for The Indie Houses is to remove the negative connotation from the word “publisher,” and provide an example for the entire games industry on how publishers can work together and respect their partners.
“There’s no reason developers need to compete,” Logan says. “There are plenty of gamers who constantly have a desire to play more games. We should work together, learn from each other, and ultimately get as many developers to succeed as possible.”
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
Call of Duty: Vanguard‘s alpha is officially live for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, which features the recently announced Champion Hill mode. This new multiplayer mode feels like a mashup of Gunfight and battle royale, with duos competing in a series of rounds to be the last team standing. Basically, Champion Hill is a more chaotic and strategic Gunfight tournament.
Champion Hill combines four small maps to make one large arena, where players in duos compete in 60-second rounds of a Team Deathmatch-style tournament against other squads. Every team begins with a total of 12 lives. In Champion Hill, players want to move through the rounds and work to eliminate all other squads’ life count to zero before their squad is eliminated.
All squads start with the same loadout of a pistol and submachine gun. However, better gear can be obtained by collecting cash and using the Buy Stations. All players start with $500 cash, and more cash can be earned through the rounds by eliminating players and scavenging cash piles found around the map.
There are four Buy Stations that can be used during “Buy Rounds,” which are phases that happen between every three rounds of combat. Each Buy Station offers something different. Players can choose whether they want to spend cash on perks, killstreaks, equipment like armor plates, or better weapons. Here you can find Champion Hill’s full list of available weapons, perks, streaks, and equipment for this alpha.
Champion Hills Support Buy Station
Players can also upgrade their weapon by pressing right on the D-pad, and the gun can continuously be upgraded with up to 10 attachments to beef it up. It does get more expensive with each upgrade, but it’s definitely worth adding some of those attachments early on. Weapons can be upgraded during the Buy phase as well as mid-match.
The cash feature reminds me of Black Ops 4’s Heist mode, which seemed inspired by Counter-Strike’s strategic Buy feature. How players spend their money is important. Going for better weapons and weapon upgrades feels crucial, but having enough money to splurge on something like a UAV streak or Ghost perk could be helpful too.
An extra life token does spawn on each map area once per round, so there is an opportunity to grab it and earn a free life. Players can also buy one for the hefty price of $3,000, but that’s a lot of money that could be better spent on weapons or perks to help win gunfights. Running low on lives, players might be enticed to spend that cash on the extra life to get them to the next round, sacrificing the chance at better weapons or even additional armor. Players must pick and choose wisely.
The four maps can be daunting at first, but they’re not much more complicated than the traditional 2v2 Gunfight maps. It just takes some time to learn all the lines of sight, and knowing what parts of the map are destructible, as Vanguard features some destructible cover. The parts that can be destroyed all seem to look like thin wooden boards, so they’re pretty easy to spot. Players can either shoot through the cover or completely demolish them for a better line of sight.
Champion Hill’s maps are also all connected with the Buy Stations as the central hub, so players will hear gunshots and explosions from the other 2v2 matchups happening on the maps near them. Each round is only 2v2, but they can sound much more chaotic. It definitely becomes important to focus and distinguish which gunfights sound close and which are far away.
Champion Hill Map Overhead View
Once the teams have been whittled down to just two, the final match begins. Players will get to gear up at the Buy Stations before the final showdown. This is the last chance to spend money on extra lives, killstreaks, armor, and any perks. Final team standing will claim the win as Champions of the Hill.
I’m a huge fan of 2v2 Gunfight, so I was worried that Vanguard’s new variant would be too chaotic and less fun. However, it still holds that competitive intensity and the rounds still play pretty quickly, with the big differences being the respawning and Buy feature. So, it’s like a giant, more intense 2v2 Gunfight tournament with respawns and a 12-life count. This won’t be everyone’s favorite mode, but this is worth trying for fans of Gunfight, battle royale, and maybe even Heist.
At this time, only 2v2 matches are available, but Champion Hill is also said to have a 3v3 option, so maybe trios becomes available either later in the alpha or at launch.
This PlayStation-exclusive alpha will run until August 29. A second alpha will occur for preorder members on all platforms who can play September 16-17. Then from September 18-20, everyone can play, regardless of platform or preorder status. Next month will also feature Vanguard’s standard multiplayer beta. Call of Duty: Vanguard launches on November 5.
Saints Row is coming back. A reboot, simply called Saints Row, is set to release for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC on February 25, 2022. It’s available now for preorder (see it at Best Buy). We have full details about where you can find it, how much it costs, and what preorder bonuses to expect below. Read on for the goods.
The digital-only Platinum Edition includes everything in the Gold Edition, plus a copy of Saints Row the Third Remastered. Here’s the full rundown:
Saints Row the Third Remastered
Idols Anarchy Pack
Saints Row Expansion Pass
Los Panteros American Muscle Bundle
Saints Criminal Customs
Saints Row Preorder Bonus
Preorder any edition of Saints Row, and you’ll receive the Idols Anarchy Pack, which includes the digital items seen in the image above.
What Is Saints Row (2022)?
Saints Row is an all-new open-world game, with a new cast of characters. It’s set in a fictional city in the southwestern U.S. called Santo Ileso, and this particular metropolis is bursting at the seams with violent criminals.
You play on a team of up-and-comers who just want to accrue some cash and power, and they’re not afraid to break some laws to get it. There’s the Boss, Eli, Nina, and Kevin.
Now, you may be on a team of criminals, but you’ll face off against a bunch of even worse villains. Three gangs are vying for power in the city. One is Marshall, a high-tech corporation that’s out for total domination. Another is the Panteros, a group of heavy-hitters who favor melee weapons. Finally there’s an anarchist gang called the Idols, whose members wear LED helmets.
While the game still offers plenty of chaotic action, it looks like the silliness and over-the-top-ness of some previous entries has been dialed back here.
Other Preorder Guides
Chris Reed is a deals expert and commerce editor for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.
Ghostrunner will add its promised Wave Mode and Assist Mode on August 31, alongside a new pack of neon-themed cosmetics.
Announced earlier this year, Wave Mode adds a roguelike element to the cyberpunk action game, tasking players with beating 20 waves of enemies using randomised upgrades. Assist Mode will make the game easier, allowing players to experience the story without much challenge. Both modes will be added as a free update to the game.
They’ll come alongside the new Neon Pack paid DLC, which adds four sets of sword-and-glove combos, each fully animated with neon effects. Alongside the Neon Pack, four new DLC bundles will also be released:
Art Bundle – SRP: £5.99 / €7.99 / $7.99 – The Art Bundle includes the Original Soundtrack and the Artbook (Available only for Steam, Epic and GOG)
Summer Bundle – SRP: £9.99 / €12.99 / $12.99 – The Summer Bundle includes Winter, Metal Ox, Neon Packs and Art Bundle (Available only for Steam, Epic and GOG)
Jack’s Bundle – SRP: £5.99 / €7.99 / $7.99 – Jack’s Bundle includes Winter, Metal Ox, Neon Packs (Available only for PS4, XboxOne & NSW
We awarded Ghostrunner an 8/10 review, saying that its “lightning-fast gameplay makes for a short-lived but memorable action game with some incredible moments.”
For more from this week’s huge gaming event, be sure to check out our Gamescom 2021 schedule.
Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
