Polygon

When Diablo 4’s eighth season launches on April 29, the battle pass will look completely different. Instead of a linear track, it will be split into categories, or Reliquaries, for you to chase after specific types of cosmetic tweaks for your demon slayer. Like a lot of popular live service games that have introduced more choices in their battle passes, Blizzard’s goal is to make it fit with how people actually play Diablo 4.

There were three problems with the old battle passes, senior manager of game design Dan Tanguay told Polygon in a recent interview: The rewards “didn’t feel meaningful enough,” they were “intrinsically tied to seasons,” and they had a general “lack of agency.”

In my experience, this is all true. I’d hop into a new Diablo 4 season, maybe take a peek at the battle pass page, then inevitably forget about it until I felt like clearing the notification telling me something new had unlocked. And a lot of times, the new cosmetic was for a class I wasn’t actively playing, which made me care about it even less.

That seems to be the kind of experience Blizzard is trying to avoid with Reliquaries, a reinvention of the battle pass that lets you pick the rewards you want first. There’s still a price attached. Three of the four categories have an up-front cost before you can start unlocking their rewards, like mini premium battle passes. But if all you care about is the glowing tiger from the Beasts Reliquary instead of the fancy sword from the Weapons Reliquary, you can just skip it. And players who don’t bother starting a new character every season will now have access to the system on the game’s Eternal Realm, too.

Tanguay said the team felt the old battle pass stuck out in an action RPG that’s all about satisfying decision-making. “You’re choosing basically all the choices that comprise your build, you’re choosing how you look, and we then have a battle pass that’s just highly, highly linear and very deterministic, and it’s like, ‘Wow, there’s just not a lot of choice here,’” he said.

Each Reliquary reward costs Favor, a new currency you can only earn by mowing down monsters as you play. Everyone will be able to spend it on cosmetics from the free Reliquary for the duration of the season. Event Reliquaries, like the one launching with Diablo 4’s Berserk collab in May, will show up for a limited time and require a unique currency. Tanguay couldn’t confirm whether returning events will have their own Reliquaries, but said the team is still “talking through” those opportunities.

The Reliquary system is another step inBlizzard’s ongoing approach to reworking parts of the game that have fallen behind. Tanguay added that by disconnecting battle passes from seasons, Blizzard can do more with the Season Journey, which is a free set of challenges, like killing bosses and completing dungeons, that reward loot and cosmetics. These were often so straightforward that you’d complete them accidentally. But Tanguay said the team is trying to get players to “stretch and do more aspirational type of content” to complete the later chapters. I spotted one for season 8 that asks you to defeat one of the endgame bosses using a specific seasonal power, which should be fun to figure out how to accomplish once the new season opens.

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Practicing mindfulness is often an intimidating prospect. You’re tasked with being still, noticing things inside and outside of your body, and most challenging of all, not really thinking about anything. But what if you could practice that skill while also playing a little 15-minute solo board game? That’s what A Gentle Rain offers.

Designed by Kevin Wilson (Arkham Horror, Descent: Journeys in the Dark, the Kinfire Chronicles series) and currently published by Incredible Dream Studios, A Gentle Rain is a tableau-building game where one or more players pull random squares and place them on the table, with the ultimate goal of growing lotus blossoms. Each square has four half-flowers, which you must match up with half-flowers of the same color that are already on the board. A yellow half-flower links up with another yellow half-flower, for instance, to make one full flower. If you match four tiles up in a square, you’ll reveal a circular pocket that perfectly fits one of eight plastic lotus blossoms.

Technically, A Gentle Rain can be scored. But I don’t care about that. Instead, even after several rounds of the game solo and with friends, I care most about blossoming all eight lotuses in one game, which I’ve only accomplished once so far. And as I mentioned, it really functions as a way to practice mindfulness: You must take the time to notice each color on the square you pull, then take note of each square on the board. It is impossible to make the game go faster, because there are no extra steps. Instead, you just have to sit there, breathe, feel the soft matte square in your hand, and maybe turn it a few times to think about where it’ll fit. And look at that — suddenly you’re sitting still, noticing sensations, and not really thinking about anything.

I picked up A Gentle Rain during a week where I really needed it. My family was dealing with something terrible, the last dregs of my winter depression were rearing their head, and the news was unavoidable and filled with atrocities. I didn’t want to avoid those things completely by immersing myself in some fantastical world or complicated game, but I didn’t want to face them head-on, either. After a few rounds of A Gentle Rain, I genuinely felt calmer, and I spent the next few days playing a round before work, after dinner, or before heading to bed.

Is the game making me meditate? Not quite. But it is doing a great job of reminding my body what it feels like to slow down, look inward, and spend some time just being. Pretty good for a $20 board game you can grab at Target, right?

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Lockpicking is one of the best ways to unlock chests and doors The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered — and to get loot.

You will encounter loads of locked chests and doors while exploring the lands and dungeons of Oblivion Remastered. To bypass these locks as you encounter them, you will need to play a little lockpicking minigame.

Our Oblivion Remastered guide will explain how to lockpick chests and doors and walk you through the tricky mechanics of this minigame.

Where to find lockpicks in Oblivion Remastered

First, you’ll need a lockpick, an item that allows you to attempt to pick a lock. The quickest, easiest, and cheapest way to get lockpicks is by exploring dungeons. You can get lockpicks by searching the corpses of some enemies and by checking chests, barrels, and crates in dungeons.

You can also buy lockpicks from fences (characters who purchase illicit goods) after you join the Thieves Guild. Ongar, the fence located in Bruma, will sell you lockpicks for 6 gold a piece.

What can you unlock with a lockpick in Oblivion Remastered?

Lockpicks can be used to unlock doors and chests. While many doors and chests can be unlocked with a lockpick, some cannot be broken and require special keys. (The game will tell you can’t use a lockpick if this is the case.)

If the door or chest can be unlocked with a lockpick, just walk up to either a chest or door (with a lockpick item in hand) and interact with it to start the lockpicking minigame.

How to use a lockpick in Oblivion Remastered

Lockpicking in Oblivion Remastered can get pretty frustrating pretty quickly. In short, it’s a timing minigame.

When you start the lockpicking minigame, you’ll see a cross-section view of a lock with five different tumblers, each inside a tiny chamber. Tap the inner metal piece upward with the left control stick and then hit A (on Xbox) to “set” the tumbler. To pick a lock, you must set the tumbler just as it taps the top of the lock. If you get the timing right, the tumbler will “set” in place and go dark, as shown in the final image of the slider above.

It is a deceptively tricky timing game. Some tumblers fall faster than others, and the speed at which they fall from tap to tap varies. If you mess up one tumbler, you need to start the entire lock over and set every single one (if you’re still ranked novice for Security). There are three difficulty levels of locks: easy, medium, and hard. An easier lock will have fewer tumblers you need to set, thus less room for error.

Here are some tips to help you pick locks in Oblivion Remastered:

Our best advice is to fudge the numbers a bit. If you think a lock will give you trouble, make sure you save before. That way, you can try the lock as many times as you need and can load the save file if you run out of lockpicks.Some other guides suggest you listen to the lock. This might just be us, but we couldn’t hear a difference. However, it can be hard to focus on the game if there is a lot else going on, so we found it helpful to turn off the game’s background music in the game settings.We can’t confirm this for sure, but there appears to be a pattern for each tumbler. Tap it a bunch of times to get a feel for each tumbler, and you can try to predict when the tumbler will stick at the top.Just keep at it. Eventually, you’ll level up your Security skill to the point where the minigame is less punitive.

How lockpick auto attempts work in Oblivion Remastered

The auto-attempt feature can let you bypass the minigame and lockpick automatically — in certain circumstances. For example, we used the auto-attempt after setting one tumbler on a medium lock, and it automatically set the final two tumblers, thus unlocking the door. We also used it to bypass an easy lock without doing anything.

However, there are limits to the auto-lock. We tried to use it multiple times on another medium lock, and it broke a ton of lockpicks. At the time of writing, it’s unclear if any of the skills influence this feature.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

Humble is currently offering an amazing bundle for anyone who’s as excited as we are to rejoin the Doom Slayer in Doom: The Dark Ages on May 14. The $28 id & Friends bundle features every Doom title ever published, including Doom 3, Doom 64, and all of the post-launch DLC for Doom Eternal, in addition to MachineGames’ Wolfenstein franchise. To top it all off, this bundle also includes a 10% coupon for Doom: The Dark Ages and Doom: The Dark Ages Premium Edition.

This coupon lets you pick up the standard edition of Doom: The Dark Ages on launch day for $62.99. However, if you’d like to play up to two days earlier, you can also pick up the Premium Edition for $89.99, which includes a handful of cosmetics and access to the campaign DLC when it launches.

As with other Humble bundles, a portion of each sale goes to benefit a nonprofit. In this case, it’s Direct Relief, an organization that provides disaster aid in resource-poor communities in the United States and across the world. You can use the “Adjust Donation” drop-down menu on the right side of the bundle page to adjust how the funds from your sale are distributed.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

While everyone was enjoying the massive deluge of Switch 2 news Nintendo uncorked on April 2, my broken brain couldn’t help but focus on something far less important: awkward marketing language.

I’ve struggled to come up with a succinct and simplistic way to explain this to other people, so let’s instead use an example from last week’s presentation on Mario Kart World. Listen to how the narrator begins this video around the 21-second mark and see if you can spot what I’m talking about.

“Drivers! Start… your… engines!”

All good so far. Go-karts traditionally have both drivers and engines.

“Welcome to the Mario Kart World game…”

Hm. I’m noticing a few unnecessary words there, but maybe over a decade in writing has given me permanent editor brain.

“…available exclusively on the Nintendo Switch 2 system!”

Okay, yeah, he’s definitely using too many words.

The phrases “the Mario Kart World game” and “the Nintendo Switch 2 system” are so awkward, and this isn’t the first time Nintendo’s referred to its products like this. Here’s another example from a Super Mario Bros. Wonder stream from August 2023. It starts around the 1:34 mark if my timestamp doesn’t work.

“In this presentation, we’ll go over what’s new in Mario’s latest 2D, side-scrolling adventure, the Super Mario Bros. Wonder game!”

My dude, just say “Super Mario Bros. Wonder.” When Sony and Microsoft put on these kinds of direct-to-consumer broadcasts, they don’t say “the Death Stranding 2: On the Beach game” or “the Xbox Series X system.” Why are you doing this? I hate it so much.

I reached out to Nintendo asking for context on this odd quirk, and while a rep acknowledged my request, no one got back to me for a week. Fortunately, former Nintendo public relations manager and host of the Kit & Krysta web show Krysta Yang was more than happy to fill me in.

“Essentially, this is a legal requirement for Nintendo to properly refer to their products at all times,” Yang told me via email. “The legal and [intellectual property] teams at Nintendo are very strict with how products are referred to.”

She went on to say it was also a matter of Nintendo not wanting its product names to weaken with overuse.

“The legal team would use the example of the brand Bandaid and how that is actually a brand name but now the name has been diluted as people refer to any bandages as a bandaid,” Yang said. “They do not want this to happen to any Nintendo product hence the very stilted way they would refer to all products.”

It’s official: Nintendo is weird. Then again, four out of five of the top-selling consoles are Nintendo products and the company continues to thrive despite mostly staying out of the resolution and frame rate arms races proliferated by its ostensible competition in the video game industry. Maybe those lawyers know what they’re doing after all, even if it still bugs the hell out of me.

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A fancy new crafting/gathering game mode, Cosmic Exploration, is out in Final Fantasy 14 with some pretty enticing rewards, so the reasonable thing to do is… immediately look up macros to help you automate the process and ease the grind, right?

Well, I have some bad and good news for you. The bad news is that each crafting job has dozens of items to craft, each with varying durability, quality, and progress requirements — which means there’s no “one macro” for everything, as there is for Ishgard Restoration. Rather, if you want to be able to macro everything, you’ll need tons of macros set up. The good news is that you don’t really have to keep all those macros on your hotbar.

I’ll disclaim this by saying I’m not an expert crafter. I use macros and I know fundamentally what the crafting skills do, but I don’t have enough expertise yet to make my own optimal macros from scratch or anything like that. That said, my recommendation below may not be the best way to go, but it has worked fairly well for me. I’ll update this guide with better information if other strategies being to appear, though. (As of this writing, Cosmic Exploration has only been out for a day, so… y’know.)

Below we explain how you can use macros to make FFXIV’s Cosmic Exploration easier, though it won’t heavily automate the process for you the way it would have in other crafting content.

How do Cosmic Exploration crafts work in FFXIV?

As mentioned above, Cosmic Exploration crafts all have varying levels of durability, required progress, and quality. You may need to craft scrambled eggs with 60 durability for one craft, but then you’ll need a solution that only has 20 durability for the next. Since these numbers fluctuate wildly, it’s impossible to make a macro that’ll work for everything.

While you can definitely make a set of macros for each individual item (especially for the lower leveled crafts), even heavily melded crafters are going to have a tough time juggling the high level stuff, most of which requires at least two macros (30 lines) to make one craft. Your macro page will fill up pretty fast. On top of that, some of the Class-A missions have time limits, so your lengthy macro that takes 80 seconds to play out might not cut it.

(For context, half my gear is pentamelded and the rest is still overmelded, and it takes anywhere from 30 to 32 lines of macros for me to complete the A-rank crafts with food and potions — and despite that, there are still a few crafts I haven’t hit gold on.)

All of that said, it can be tough to make things work in Cosmic Exploration, but I have a kind of janky solution for you!

How to make crafting macros for Cosmic Exploration in FFXIV

Here’s what I did to both scratch my completionist itch, completing “Stellar Successes” (achievements), and minimize the number of macros I kept around:

Find all your crafting stats on your character screen and plug them into Raphael, a website used to generate macros based on your stats and the item you desire.Open your “Stellar Missions” (the green button on the Cosmic Exploration UI) and select your mission.Input whatever recipe the mission says to craft into Raphael.Copy and paste the generated macro into the User Macros menu. (I pasted it over the same two macro slots because… my macro menu is pretty full already.)Use that macro to craft however many of the item you need to complete the mission.Turn in the mission.

Repeat steps two through six to complete as many missions as you can with a gold rating and unlock as many higher-rank missions as you can. If your crafters aren’t maxed, you will hit a wall eventually. Once you’re done gold starring the lower-level stuff, you can wipe all those macros out, if you’ve been saving them.

After you hit that wall (whether it’s from needing to grind out more levels or from just hitting the end), you’ll need to figure out which set of missions you can complete conveniently, taking your personal and differing factors into account. Do you want to deal with food/potions? How long does it take to complete one craft? Are you able to clear is consistently with a silver or gold rank? From there, use Raphael to make yourself a set of three to five macros for that tier of crafts.

For example, if you’re max level, but you’re struggling to complete the Class-A missions, you can just opt to do the Class-B ones instead, ideally hitting gold for each one you complete. I have macros for the culinarian recipes “Stable Jelly Drink,” “Stable Ration,” and a few others and I just purposely make sure to select missions that I know I have macros set up for.

Unfortunately, this specific strategy really only works efficiently on PC. While you can type out macros on PlayStation and Xbox, since you can’t paste them directly, it may be annoying to make new macros for each craft. That said, you can just literally use the skills that Raphael shows you in order, and then manually type up the few macros for the missions you plan on grinding.

Also, don’t forget to enlist into Critical Missions as they pop up to get more loot and EXP. Ideally, you should just be crafting to pass the time and get EXP/loot between these events.

Of course, you will ultimately need to figure out how to get the Class-A crafts done, if you want to make a coveted Cosmic Tool (the relic tool for Dawntrail). However, if you’re just looking to farm currency and EXP, crafting the easier stuff will get the job done.

Looking for the short version? Plug your stats into Raphael and make macros to gold star everything, and then just keep a few for crafts that you can repeat.

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When I first heard about Anne Shirley, the new Anne of Green Gables anime series from The Answer Studio, I knew exactly which scene from L.M. Montgomery’s 1908 novel I was looking forward to the most: Anne smashing her slate across the head of cocky classmate Gilbert Blythe after he teases her about her bright red hair. Fans of the books know that this is just the start of Anne and Gilbert’s relationship, which turns from bitter childhood rivals to romantic partners over the course of the entire series. It’s one of the best love stories in literature, and it starts with a smack on the back of the head that sets the tone for their entire relationship.

And the anime scene did not let me down. In fact, it’s actually become one of my favorite interpretations of the scene. Many adaptations decide to have Anne deliberately ignore Gilbert’s taunting, but Anne Shirley stays true to the original and has Anne simply daydreaming. The actual smack plays out in slow motion, with Anne dramatically rising up in a rage. When she smashes the slate on Gilbert’s head, we get to see it from a few different angles, like it’s some super-intense anime showdown and not one of the most iconic moments in children’s literature. And then, when Gilbert apologizes, he looks at Anne with big, shiny shoujo eyes — it is on. It’s clear this boy’s got it bad.

I’ve never seen a Gilbert Blythe with big sparkly shoujo eyes, but damn it makes sense, because the only proper way to adapt the big feelings of Anne of Green Gables is an anime adaptation.

This isn’t the first Anne of Green Gables anime series; that honor goes to the 1979 adaptation, though the book itself has a long history of popularity in Japan. An anime adaptation just made sense, considering how many elements of Anne of Green Gables — the plucky orphan who views life through a rosy-colored lens (who also has a flair for the dramatic), the episodic nature of the chapters, the close, almost romantic friendship between Diana and Anne — are also prevalent in popular anime.

Anne Shirley works particularly well because it fully uses the medium of animation to bolster the existing anime-like elements of the original work, as it does with the slate-smack scene. There’s also the moment Anne’s prospective guardian Matthew picks her up from the train station; we see Anne through a fish-eye lens, planting us in Matthew’s point of view and showing us how strange yet endearing this plucky orphan girl is.

Anne tends to overromanticize everything — for better or worse — and watching her gush about how gorgeous the ride to Green Gables is, then seeing the absolutely lush painted backgrounds, support those fancies. But it’s not just the scenery that’s really there; Anne has a tendency for lavish daydreams. And in this version, we actually get to see them play out when she waxes on about those imagined scenarios.

Even though it’s an animated adaptation, Anne Shirley actually grounds the story a little more. Anne is a quintessential weird little girl, which is why she’s sparked to so many readers over the past century. She’s not just a plucky orphan, but a resilient character who uses her daydreams to cope with her traumatic childhood, yet still lets her temper slip. Yes, she’s over the top sometimes, but this version of the story uses the visuals and the unique aspects of animation to pull us fully into her perspective of the world. Not all adaptations do her justice, but Anne Shirley honors the character by making the whole world a bit more indulgent to meet Anne’s energy where it is.

The first three episodes of Anne Shirley are streaming on Crunchyroll, with new episodes on Saturdays.

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On Tuesday, Tenderfoot Tactics developer Ice Water Games removed the open-world RPG from the Xbox digital storefront as a way of showing support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) movement after the organizers added Microsoft to its list of boycotted targets two weeks ago.

“We hope that Microsoft will listen to the voices of their workers and customers and stop all business with the criminal Israeli military, which we have watched conduct an open genocide in Gaza over the last 18 months,” the studio said in a statement posted to Bluesky by Tenderfoot Tactics designer badru. “We hope that the broader community will join in the pressure campaign and fight for an end to occupation and apartheid in Palestine and across the world.”

We have removed Tenderfoot Tactics from sale on @xbox.com in solidarity with @bdsmovement.bsky.social . We call on others in our community to do whatever they can to fight this historic injustice. Free Palestine 🍉

— badru (@sonofbadru.bsky.social) 2025-04-22T20:15:08.159Z

Tenderfoot Tactics launched on Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch on Feb. 21, 2024. The original Steam release from 2020 currently holds a “very positive” rating.

Microsoft provides Azure cloud and AI services to the Israeli government that the BDS movement claims are “central to accelerating Israel’s genocide of 2.3 million Palestinians in the illegally occupied Gaza Strip.”

During a July 2024 presentation at the “IT for IDF” conference, Colonel Racheli Dembinsky of the Israeli Defense Forces praised the, “very significant operational effectiveness” the military’s partnerships with cloud companies gave them in Gaza while featuring logos for Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud in her slides. Leaked documents reported on by The Guardian in January 2025 indicate Microsoft deepened its ties with Israel following the attacks of October 7, 2023 by providing Israel with computing and storage services as well as agreeing to a $10 million deal for thousands of hours of technical support.

Ice Water Games is the first video game studio to receive significant attention for publicly supporting the BDS movement’s recent boycott. Other tiered suggestions made by the organization for consumers to show solidarity include canceling Xbox Game Pass subscriptions, boycotting flagship Microsoft franchises Candy Crush, Minecraft, and Call of Duty, and finally boycotting all Xbox-branded consoles, accessories, and games published by Microsoft-owned publishing labels.

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Some of history’s finest ideas seem obvious in hindsight: Add peanut butter to chocolate; create a global trade network to build a complex, lucrative system of mutual reliance that disincentivizes war; make a Predator movie in which the alien hunter is the hero instead of the villain.

Long relegated to “Predator extended universe,” the concept that fans have long pleaded for is finally becoming a reality: Predator: Badlands, as shown in this fresh trailer, will let audiences see a predator’s side of the story. Badlands is directed by Dan Trachtenberg, who previously directed the other standalone Predator film, Prey, along with the criminally underrated 10 Cloverfield Lane.

In the footage, a young outcast predator named Dek has been banished from his clan. Fortunately, a human-ish looking Elle Fanning appears to lend a hand. Together, they will try to slay something that “can’t be killed.”

20th Century plans to release the film in theaters and IMAX on Nov. 7, but series fans won’t have to wait so long for something new. Trachtenburg has been, alongside this film, putting together Predator: Killer of Killers, an adult animated anthology filmset to release on Hulu on June 6. And for the real sickos, I have a bonus recommendation: Ander Monson’s Predator: A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession, 146-pages of experimental non-fiction bliss.

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Dark Horse Comics and Critical Role Productions are teaming for a free Mighty Nein comic to be given away at Free Comic Book Day, featuring heroes Caleb and Beau on their most harrowing adventure yet: Surviving an evening of interactive, musical dinner theater.

You can check out five pages of Critical Role: The Mighty Nein Origins – Acquired Taste below, written by Sam Maggs (Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy) and drawn by Leonardo Cino. And you can pick up the whole comic for free at participating comic shops on Free Comic Book Day.

Here’s how Dark Horse sums up the short story:

In Critical Role: The Mighty Nein Origins – Acquired Taste, Beau and Caleb get a tip that an individual they are searching for will be at a meeting at the Taste of Tal’Dorei in Bassuras. When they arrive, the pair are surprised to be treated to some dinner theater and decor themed around a legendary band of adventurers from the area. They get entranced by the story, even experiencing it themselves, only to be interrupted by some interesting new faces entering the restaurant . . .

Free Comic Book Day 2025 is on May 3 basically everywhere, but check in with your local shop to make sure they’re participating!

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As part of a weekly quest in Fortnite Chapter 6 Season 2, you’ll need to jam alone using all instruments at once.

In the past, you’ve always needed other players for a jam session, but with the Fortnite Festival Season 8 update, players are now able to create a jam session all by themselves. You can now mix four different jam tracks into one, but figuring out how to do it can be a little tricky.

Here’s how to jam alone using all instruments at once in Fortnite.

How to jam alone using all instruments at once in Fortnite

To complete the weekly quest “Jam alone, using all instruments at once” in Fortnite, follow these steps:

Press the emote button (B on Windows PC or down on the D-Pad on console by default).Switch to the “Jam Loops” or “Locker Jam Loops” page.Look at the inner circle and make sure you’re set to “All.”Select a jam track to start jamming alone!

Additionally, you can swap songs for other instruments by hovering your reticle over the instrument circle and pressing the emote button. This will open the jam loops wheel, and you’ll need to select another jam track to play.

Completing the quest is not immediate, so you will need to jam for a short period of time. Because of that, we recommend landing in an uncontested area or waiting for a time where you’re alone to start jamming out.

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We have a winner: Sony is the first publisher to dare put a fall release date on a major video game in the year 2025, Grand Theft Auto 6 be damned. Ghost of Yōtei, Sucker Punch’s sequel to its 2020 open-world samurai adventure Ghost of Tsushima, will come to PlayStation 5 on Oct. 2.

It’s the first tentative toe-dip into the fall release window by a game industry that has been running scared of Rockstar’s behemoth. GTA 6 has been confirmed for a fall release by Rockstar’s parent company Take-Two Interactive, and other publishers are reportedly considering delaying their games to get out of its way.

One publishing executive told The Game Business that a late October or early November release date for GTA 6 was their greatest fear: “We don’t want to launch just before or just after the game. If it arrives in late October, that means you either have to launch early – which a lot of people seem to be doing with the recent glut of summer release dates. Or go later, putting you up against the Black Friday sales.”

Prior to Ghost of Yōtei’s release date announcement, the latest big releases on the 2025 calendar were Borderlands 4 and Marathon, both due on Sept. 23. It seems like Sony considers day two of October early enough to be safe.

Sony also debuted a new story trailer for the game, with a lot of cut-scene and a little bit of gameplay footage, detailing lead character Atsu’s quest for vengeance as she hunts down six names responsible for the death of her family.

Pre-orders for Ghost of Yōtei begin at 10 a.m. EDT on May 2, including for a packed Collector’s Edition, which includes a replicas of Atsu’s Ghost mask, sash, and the Tsuba from her katana. Sony didn’t announce a price for this edition, though. The standard edition of the game will cost $69.99 and there will be a $79.99 digital deluxe edition, too. Head over to the PlayStation Blog for full details.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, which preceded The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, is one of the most modded games of all time; despite it’s age, the modding community remains vibrant. While Oblivion’s modding community has been much smaller, it’s still active — and interest has grown since Oblivion Remastered was released Tuesday. The catch, though, is that developer Bethesda Game Studios isn’t “officially” supporting mods for the game.

That, of course, doesn’t mean you can’t mod Oblivion. You absolutely can. In the past, Bethesda has offered officially-made tools to help support the mod community. “Mods are not officially supported for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered,” Bethesda wrote on its support website. “If you are experiencing gameplay issues while playing with mods, it’s recommended you first try uninstalling your mods, then verify your games files on Steam, or the Xbox App.”

For Skyrim and other games like Starfield and Fallout 4, Bethesda allowed players to download and tinker with the game using the official Creation Kit. The Creation Kit is an editor that makes it more streamlined to modify the game’s quests, characters, and other parts of the game. Oblivion itself had official mod support when it was released 19 years ago, too. It was called the Construction Set, available only to PC players. Oblivion players on Reddit suggest that you’re able to open the new game files using the Construction Set tools from the old game. (Polygon has not confirmed this.)

Regardless of official mod support, modders are already working on Oblivion Remastered. The game’s been out for less than a day, and there are already more than 100 mods listed on popular modding website NexusMods — everything from “engine tweaks” and game optimization to a difficulty slider and colorful reshades.

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Nintendo’s president Shuntaro Furukawa has apologized in advance for the company’s failure to meet demand for the Switch 2 in Japan after 2.2 million people applied for the My Nintendo Store pre-order lottery alone.

In a post on X (translated by VGC), Furukawa said that this “astonishing” number “far exceeded our prior expectations and greatly surpasses the number of Nintendo Switch 2 units we can deliver from the My Nintendo Store on June 5.” As a result, “a significant number” of customers would miss out, he said.

古川です。みなさまのお手元に「Nintendo Switch 2」をお届けすべく、事前に多くの部材を調達し、生産を進めてきました。4月2日には「Nintendo Switch…

— 任天堂株式会社 (@Nintendo) April 23, 2025

“We deeply apologize for failing to meet your expectations despite our preparations,” Furukawa said. He added that unselected applicants would be carried over automatically to a second lottery, but cautioned that there would still not be enough Switch 2 units in this second batch to meet initial demand. He also noted that other Japanese retailers would open pre-orders soon, and promised to increase production after launch.

“In response to this demand, we are currently taking steps to further strengthen our production system,” Furukawa said. “We are planning to produce and ship a substantial number of Nintendo Switch 2 units moving forward. We sincerely apologize for the time it will take to fully meet your expectations and kindly ask for your understanding.”

With Switch 2 pre-orders due to open in the U.S. on Thursday, April 24, Furukawa’s statement to Japanese fans comes as a stark warning (or humblebrag, perhaps) of how high demand for the new console is, and how difficult these pre-orders may be to secure. However, it’s also worth noting that, at 49,980 yen (approximately $343), the Japan-only edition of the Switch 2 is more attractively priced than the $449.99 U.S. “multi-language” version.

Ahead of the announcement of the Switch 2, Nikkei reported that Nintendo had delayed the release of the system in part to secure enough stock to ensure a smooth launch. After the announcement, Furukawa promised that Nintendo was “taking all possible measures” to combat “scalpers and the like.” And in his statement on Wednesday, Furukawa once again underlined that “to deliver Nintendo Switch 2 to all of you, we have been procuring a large number of components in advance and proceeding with production.”

But Nintendo has now been forced to admit that these efforts have fallen short in the face of intense demand for the new console. If Japan’s Nintendo Store pre-orders are anything to go by, it will be a lucky few fans who get their hands on a Switch 2 on June 5.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

Macabre queen Wednesday Addams (as played by Jenna Ortega) finally returns to Netflix in August — then again in September, because Netflix is splitting the second season of Tim Burton’s Wednesday into two parts.

Set to a grim, trailercore version of “My Favorite Things,” the season 2 teaser shows Wednesday going through airport security, removing weapon after weapon, before returning to Nevermore Academy and reuniting with some characters from the first season.

There’s plucky werewolf roommate Enid (Emma Myers), as well as unassuming barista-turned-murderous monster Tyler (Hunter Doohan). And, it looks like her including brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) is here to join her once again. He now sports some sick lightning powers! Behind the scenes, we know from the showrunners that the whole Addams Family have been promoted to regular cast instead of just guest appearances, so expect more of Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luiz Guzmán as Morticia and Gomez.

In addition to the season 1 cast members returning, Steve Buscemi and Billie Piper are joining as season regulars, with Christopher Lloyd (who played Uncle Fester in the 1990s movies), Tandiew Newton, and Joanna Lumley starring in guest roles.

Part 1 of Wednesday season 2 hits Netflix on Aug. 6, with part 2 following on Sept. 3.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

Wingspan and Vantage publisher Stonemaier Games announced on Monday its intention to join a lawsuit against United States President Donald Trump over his new, sweeping 145% tariffs on goods imported from China. For weeks, the tabletop industry has been in a state of panic as the ever-increasing tariffs devastate makers who largely rely on manufacturers in China for printing and to make the pieces that go into tabletop games.

The Trump tariffs, which were announced on April 2, have already caused disruption in the board game industry specifically. At least one company has officially suspended operations, while others — including fan favorite Cephalofair Games, maker of Gloomhaven and Frosthaven — have effectively seen their products trapped overseas. According to Stonemaier, the lawsuit is being handled by Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit law firm that champions “individual liberty,” and which as of 2024 has won 18 of its 20 cases before the United States Supreme Court.

St. Louis-based Stonemaier Games’ co-founder Jamey Stegmaier wrote in a blog post published Monday that the company he founded in 2012 must now reckon with the same difficulties as other tabletop publishers: “We face an unprecedented $14.50 tariff tax for every $10 we spent on manufacturing with our trusted long-term partner in China,” he wrote. “For Stonemaier Games alone (a US based company in which all 8 employees are US citizens), that amounts to upcoming tariff payments of nearly $1.5 million.”

So, the company is joining a larger lawsuit that intends to challenge Trump on the tariffs. “We will not stand idly by while our livelihoods–and the livelihoods of thousands of small business owners and contractors in the US, along with the customers whose pursuit of happiness we hold dear–are treated like pawns in a political game,” Stegmaier wrote.

Stegmaier’s blog originally solicited queries from other businesses impacted the Trump administration’s tariffs, but less than 24 hours later, the law firm had “as many clients as the case can handle.” Stegmaier updated the post to include a form for others to express how the tariffs are “directly damaging” livelihoods, saying that information will be used to “reinforce the case by continuing to gather information from sole proprietors and companies who are directly impacted by the tariffs.”

Stegmaier told Polygon via email that the law firm intends to file the lawsuit later this week. He said he’s unable to comment on the details of the suit or the other plaintiffs until it’s been filed. However, Stegmaier told Polygon that he’d been contacted by “over 100 companies” impacted by the tariffs since the blog post was published on Monday.

Stonemaier Games is also taking other action to mitigate the impact of the tariffs on the business and its customers. Its upcoming game, Vantage, is scheduled to be published later this year; Stonemaier Games has 50,000 units of the game and even more accessories to ship from China “in a few weeks.” Stonemaier Games intends to still send Vantage directly to U.S. buyers, though the price may be slightly impacted.

“I’ve spent too long trying to make this game affordable that I’m not going to let one person with unchecked power get in the way of me serving my customers,” Stegmaier wrote in the post. “The tariffs may have a slight impact on the US price, but the plan is to largely keep our direct price the same and give customers the option to cover the tariff cost at checkout. The plan to release Vantage to US distribution and retail may need a delay–the lack of margins there have a bigger impact on a new game than on reprints.”

Similarly, out-of-stock games will be restocked as planned in the United States. Finspan is currently out of stock, and Stonemaier Games said it’ll absorb most of the tariff costs, which it says “more than doubles” its cost to produce the hit game. The company will also continue to sell directly to other countries, both to consumers and through distributors and at retail. Some stock it intended to send to the U.S. will now be stored in China, with the hope that tariffs decrease before the company needs it.

“Again, these strategies are focused on products we have already manufactured, as the tariffs did not carve out a grace period for such products,” Stegmaier wrote. “We are fortunate to have a buffer at Stonemaier Games to weather this storm, and my heart goes out to the many other small businesses–in the US and beyond–who invested their resources in products that they can no longer afford to bring into the US.”

From Polygon via this RSS feed

The most important news related to the recently announced (and released) Oblivion Remaster is the fact that the infamous horse armor was updated as well. It’s an extra $9.99 for the Deluxe Edition of the game, which includes the horse armor and two other categories of goodies, which means it’s — if you divide it by three — nearly the same price it was 19 years ago: $2.50.

Back in 2006, $2.50 downloadable content was a joke — an insult to a generation of people who were used to buying a game with everything included. It seems quaint now, but when Bethesda first asked players to pay for purely cosmetic horse armor, they laughed. “Horse armor” became synonymous with overpriced and pointless DLC, evolving into a meme that has haunted Bethesda for years.

According to Joel Burgess, a senior level designer at Bethesda at the time, the original horse armor was a test. Bethesda leveraged its mod-friendly development tools to see how much it could do with DLC. Horse armor galloped so Oblivion’s bigger DLC could run.

“We needed something that would test enough of our systems, add some new art, add some new dialogue, add some new hooks and quests to the game; something that would test the pipeline and just sort of feel out the market for what was the best thing we could possibly do,” Burgess told Polygon in 2015. “So what we came up with was horse armor.”

Today, you’d be lucky to get any kind of cosmetic, horse or human, for under $20. Live service and gacha games have completely transformed the economics of the industry, and a lot of it traces all the way back to the era when publishers were still figuring out how to sell DLC to people. We went from balking at horse armor to celebrating skins that cost much, much more.

Whether or not you still have some resentment for horse armor, I think we can all agree that the Oblivion Remaster wouldn’t be complete without it.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

Andor has returned for its second season and it’s just as fantastic as ever. While the first three episodes of the show get us ever-closer to the Death Star-focused finale in Rogue One, scenes of characters hiding from visa-checking Imperial forces also make it clear in this first batch of episodes that Andor hasn’t lost the real-world grounding that made it great in the first place. And while it’s easy to map moments from these episodes onto our current political moment, perhaps its strongest real world comparison came from paralleling the Empire to the Nazis.

Star Wars’ Galactic Empire has never been far from Nazi Germany comparisons — if nothing else, the aesthetic inspiration is instantly obvious and totally inescapable. But rarely, if ever, has the connection between the two been drawn quite so clearly as Andor creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy draws it in the first episode of season 2, when Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) calls together a secret Imperial meeting to discuss Ghorman.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Andor season 2, episodes 1-3.]

During the meeting, Krennic shows the table an informative video about the planet of Ghorman, and shows a video about the fabric it exports, which is widely renowned as some of the finest in the galaxy. He then lets everyone know that Ghorman also hosts a rare substance inside the planet that the Empire needs for completion of Emperor Palpatine’s “Energy Program” — and that mining it will mean destroying the planet completely. In order to take over the planet without fomenting negative fervor, Krennic details a series of propaganda campaigns the Empire has been running to make the Ghormans seem aloof and stuck up, in an attempt to foment negative sentiments from other planets against Ghorman itself.

It’s an absolutely harrowing scene on its face, but when coupled with Tony Gilroy’s inspiration, it becomes downright chilling to see the connections seep from surface-level signifiers into social and political tactics that were really used.

“I mean, look at the very first episode,” Gilroy told Polygon in an interview. “Krennic’s conference that he has, where he first brings up the topic of Ghorman. That’s very much modeled after the Wannsee Conference that the Nazis had when they, you know, had a PowerPoint luncheon to figure out the final solution.”

Drawing an even deeper connection, it’s hard not to notice that the ornate and carefully hidden castle they’re meeting in looks an awful lot like Wewelsburg, a castle in Germany that served as one of the central bases for Heinrich Himmler and the SS.

Of course, all these direct parallels shouldn’t be mistaken for clues that Andor season 2 will only parallel the Galactic Empire with the Nazis. Just like Gilroy has said that Andor isn’t simply a story solely about modern times or modern political issues, it’s also not a story of just one political past either. Instead, it weaves in various aspects of historical empires and rebellions across history.

“I’m not psychic; we did not write this with a newspaper,” said Gilroy. “The show was supposed to come out a year ago, [but] for the strikes. So the opportunity of the show was to be given this gigantic canvas and to do a show about revolution. And the opportunity for me was to use all the debris that I’d accumulated in my brain from reading about history that I never thought I’d have a chance to use. So I’m catalogue shopping throughout 6,000 years for all kinds of things I can [use] all the way through the show.”

You can see this once you start to look for it: The real world rhetoric Nemik applies to the Imperial takeover of Aldhani, the rebellion’s use of tactics pioneered by T.E. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt, or the clear inspiration that Andor takes from The Battle of Algiers and its realistic portrayal of the National Liberation Front. The show might have given the Empire some heavier shades of Nazism during Krennic’s secret meeting, but the truth is that its cycle of resistance and oppression are more a mosaic of historical references than any one allegory.

This, to Gilroy, is exactly what makes the show feel so prescient.

“What’s sad about it is that it’s really the moments of peace and prosperity that are unique, and the rinse and repeat of history is the sorry truth. I think you could drop this show almost anywhere in history and and people would say, Oh, that’s where we’re at.”

From Polygon via this RSS feed

Principal Magic: The Gathering designer Gavin Verhey announced that some cards are now legal to play once more in Commander, the trading card game’s most popular multiplayer format. Five cards in total were unbanned by publisher Wizards of the Coast. Conspicuously absent from that list, however, were the cards involved in last year’s controversial bans — Dockside Extortionist, Jeweled Lotus, Mana Crypt, and Nadu, Winged Wisdom. Those cards are still banned, and will almost assuredly remain so until at least 2026. The announcement was made in a blog post on the game’s official website.

The newly unbanned cards are Gifts Ungiven; Sway of the Stars; Braids, Cabal Minion; Coalition Victory; and Panoptic Mirror. Verhey said that all of these cards will now be included on the Game Changers List, which is part of an ongoing beta test of the so-called Commander Brackets system. The newly unbanned cards are each emblematic of different strategies, techniques, and styles of play. He said it’s the team’s hope that these unbans will excite the community and lead to interesting adaptations in the beloved Commander format.

He also acknowledged that not acting further on Dockside Extortionist, Jeweled Lotus, and Mana Crypt in particular are not going to make everyone happy. (Apparently it’s assumed that everyone still hates Nadu, though.) He also provided quite a lot of the reasoning given by members of the new Commander Format Panel for not acting on those cards at this time:

Opinions from the Commander Format Panel varied. Some believe Commander is more fun without them, others would like more time to see how the Commander Bracket system is adopted before doing anything here, and others felt it’s too soon to do anything with these cards. There were a few people who were open to doing something with Jeweled Lotus now, but that was not the majority opinion. The overwhelming majority of the panel did not want to do anything with any of these cards at this time.

I will be transparent and say that I believe if any of these are ever to return, the most likely one is Jeweled Lotus due to its one-shot nature, iconic feel, and ability to help support high-mana value commanders. I want to be clear, this is not me saying that will ever happen, but that was the one among the panel with the most traction.

In closing Verhey said that, as a nod toward returning stability to the format, there would be “no further changes to the banned list for the rest of this year.” The one caveat being, of course, that “if a new or unbanned card begins to become generally reviled […] we can break that seal and act earlier.”

From Polygon via this RSS feed

Tatooine might be the inescapable center of the Skywalker Saga, but when it comes to the most influential planets in the Star Wars galaxy, Ghorman just hyperspace jumped to the top of the list.

In the season premiere of Andor season 2, the Earth-like planet lands in the crosshairs of Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), the cape-wearing Imperial crony last seen in Rogue One. In a secret meeting on the Maltheen Divide, Krennic and various representatives from across the Empire watch a 1950s-style PSA about the prosperous business of harvesting silk produced by Ghorman spiders, or ghorlectipods.

But Krennic’s interest in Ghorman goes beyond — or rather, deeper — than textiles: Underneath the planet is an ore, kalkite, that could completely reshape and empower the Empire. He intends to mine it at all costs.

Ghorman has been on the periphery of Star Wars lore while never in complete focus. In the first season of Andor, Ghorman pushback against Imperial rule led to sanctions from their overlords and cries in the planet’s defense in the Galactic Senate, spearheaded by Mon Mothma. Mentions of the planet’s silk production pop up in other parts of Star Wars — mainly in the High Republic book Convergence, set nearly 380 years before the events of the show — but Ghorman’s real claim to fame in Star Wars history is a violent turn.

Ported from “Legends” EU material like Dark Apprentice into canon auxiliary material like 2023’s Star Wars Timelines, the “Ghorman Massacre” saw the Empire “slaughter peaceful protestors” (per Timelines) who stood against trade blockades. Compilations of the bits and pieces of lore about the attack suggest thousands were killed. The Andor season 2 premiere sets up the pieces to depict this horrific event, which, if things follow current canon, should be an inciting moment for Mon Mothma to go full rebel.

Star Wars’ screen stories have their fair share of devastating Imperial action, but the way Krennic lights the fuse for the Ghorman Massacre is particularly ugly and despicable. If the established timeline holds, the Empire’s attack on Ghorman protestors will go down in BBY 2. We see Krennic’s meeting at the Maltheen Divide in BBY 4. What may have sounded like a moment of bubbled-over rage on the part of the Empire now looks like a diabolical plot.

“Ghorman is of great interest to the Empire,” Krennic says to his goons. The reason is kalkite energy; instead of manufacturing synthetic alternatives, the Empire could mine the real thing from the planet and truly fulfill the “Emperor’s dream of energy independence,” which sounds like the most cheery presidential executive order hogwash imaginable. The Empire surely does seek “stable, unlimited power,” as Krennic puts it, but I have feeling that coating “reactor lenses” has less to do with sustainability than powering, I don’t know, a Death Star? We know where Krennic winds up in Rogue One.

Krennic knows his pitch to frack Ghorman won’t even fly with all of his Imperial collaborators. So he brings in Dee Shambo and Nisus Osar from the absolutely evil-sounding Ministry of Enlightenment to lecture the group on the need to “weaponize the galactic opinion” over the Ghorman’s “arrogant” business affairs and the government’s general “secrecy.” Tony Gilroy’s metaphor for modern political chicanery feels so thinly veiled (in a forceful, satisfying way) that you almost expect someone to claim George Soros is fueling the Ghorman resistance effort. Only a few minutes later, one of Krennic’s goons wonders aloud if they should just unleash a plague on Ghorman to wipe out the population so they can swoop in with drills.

It gets uglier. Krennic has the majority on his side, but doesn’t trust his own propaganda plan. He turns to Security Bureau lieutenant Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) for better ideas. “You need a radical insurgency you can count on,” she tells him. “You need Ghorman rebels to do the wrong thing.”

Woof. The days of blowing up Alderaan in a single shot almost seem quaint. The stage is set for the Empire to get the best of the Ghorman people through their own slippery resistance. If the Empire can fuel enough rage, the protest movement will go over the line and give permission for them to enter, like militarized vampires. Like life, but unlike most Star Wars, it seems no one will show up at the perfect time to scream “It’s a trap!” The silk, the spiders, and the Ricola commercial of a planet will all be wiped out over something that has nothing to do with any of it. Most prequels tend to go back and shade in the familiar. Andor, on the other hand, plucks from Wookieepedia obscurity — then decimates accordingly. Good luck, Ghorman; we hardly knew you.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

Still staring at this image from 2018…

The biggest Elder Scrolls news of the year just dropped: Bethesda Game Studios and remaster pros Virtuos remastered Oblivion, the fourth game in the action RPG series, and it’s out now. Long anticipated — and regularly leaked — the upgraded version of Elder Scrolls 4 arrived to PC, Xbox Game Pass, and PS5 with minimal fanfare, but all the hype.

And with it came a burning question: What’s up with Elder Scrolls 6?

It’s been 19 years since the original release of Oblivion. It’s been 14 years since the fifth sequel, Skyrim. It’s been 11 years since the launch of Elder Scrolls Online. And it’s been nearly seven years since Bethesda took to E3 (RIP) and first announced that it was developing Elder Scrolls 6. It’s been a long time since anyone set foot in a new patch of the fantasy continent of Tamriel.

Updates have been few and far between, with the rumor mill grinding in the void of Todd Howard saying anything meaningful (but he understands fans’ pain). But here’s what we do know about Bethesda’s plans for Elder Scrolls 6.

Elder Scrolls 6 doesn’t have a release date, but the timeline isn’t totally nebulous

Bethesda has yet to officially date the in-development Elder Scrolls 6 on the calendar. Howard has said that the prioritization of Starfield ultimately led to a delay in the Elder Scrolls 6, though work continued throughout that game’s development and launch. Thanks to documents released during the FTC’s legal battle against the Microsoft-Activision merger, we do know that, as of two years ago, the game was on track for 2026 at the very earliest.

The good news is that Elder Scrolls 6 is no longer the most longterm, ways-out project Bethesda has in the pipeline. According to Howard during press rounds for Starfield, the plan is to release Elder Scrolls 6 before a Fallout 5, which is also in the works (though technically unannounced).

It’s “hard to imagine” Elder Scrolls 6 as an Xbox exclusive, says Howard

Even five years ago, before Microsoft evolved into a massive publisher with reach beyond the core Xbox console and Game Pass platform, Todd Howard could not imagine Elder Scrolls 6 as an Xbox exclusive. When Microsoft acquired Bethesda parent company ZeniMax Media way back in 2020, the executive was clearly forecasting the multi-platform that has become key to Microsoft’s strategy. There have been no formal announcements about which platforms Elder Scrolls 6 will hit — a new generation of consoles seems likely, at this point — but based on the recent release of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PC, Xbox, and PS5, one expects Bethesda to make sure everyone is playing the dang thing when the time comes.

How far along is Elder Scrolls 6?

To commemorate the 30th anniversary of Elder Scrolls in March 2024, Bethesda posted a loving message to fans that tucked in a minor update on Elder Scrolls 6, confirming it was still in the works: “Even now, returning to Tamriel and playing early builds has us filled with the same joy, excitement, and promise of adventure.”

In a recent interview, former Bethesda animator Jeremy Bryant told YouTuber Kiwi Talkz (via GamesRadar) that the development time might be a result of Howard controlling the size of the Elder Scrolls team and growing the company through slower-drip acquisition. Because of the strategy and time allowed, Bryant didn’t expect the studio to grow much just because a giant open-world tentpole was on the horizon.

“Todd has the vision for the game that he wants to make and he knows he needs X number of people to do it,” Bryant said.

A leading theory: Elder Scrolls 6 takes place in High Rock

While there are few specifics on the status of the game, it’s even less clear what to expect from the Elder Scrolls franchise in terms of story. But a few clues dropped over the years suggest the drama will unfold in Tamriel’s northern region.

The original teaser for The Elder Scrolls 6 featured ocean, mountains, and forests, leading our resident Skyrim-brained sleuths to deduce that the setting was along the North Kambria plateau.

The theory gained more traction after, of all things, a Starfield teaser trailer. What at first glance appeared to be a scratch inside a Constellation dashboard looked, in close-up, to be an island — one that looked awfully like Elder Scrolls’ canon cartography.

Will Elder Scrolls 6 head to High Rock? One day we’ll know more. Just not right now.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

Anyone who’s taken language lessons on the Duolingo app is certainly familiar with the Duolingo owl, Duo. If you skip out on lessons, Duo will ping you — crying! — to come back. Over the past few years, he’s gotten more aggressive with his approach: He died, and was brought back to life by people completing their daily lessons. Talk about guilt tripping. Now, he wants to teach you to play chess.

Duolingo is testing out chess lessons on the app; they’re rolling out a limited beta that began Tuesday and will go wider “soon.” A Duolingo spokesperson said it’s the first new course subject to be added since it added math and music in 2023. Chess is more popular than ever, gaining traction with a younger generation of players. (Teens got absolutely obsessed with chess in 2023.)

“As chess increases in popularity, we wanted to provide a fun, accessible way for people to learn,” a Duolingo spokesperson told Polygon. “We want to teach subjects that people can learn for a long time, like languages, math and music. Chess is a game you can play your whole life and continuously improve your skills.”

Like its other courses, Duolingo breaks down learning into small parts that can be completed in short bursts, daily. It’ll teach everything from what the pieces are, how they can move, and go into patterns and strategy. “Most lessons focus on solving short puzzles to sharpen your thinking, and learners can apply what they’ve learned in fast-paced ‘mini-matches’ or full games against the in-app chess coach, Oscar, one of Duolingo’s beloved characters,” per the news release.

Chess will come to all iOS Duolingo users “in the coming weeks.”

From Polygon via this RSS feed

The Oblivion Remastered game is finally here and it looks, well, modern. And by modern I mean brown. The mud’s brown, the water’s brown, and the grass is brown. It’s all extremely brown and I’m not sure how to feel about that as someone who was wowed by Bethesda’s bright fantasy world 19 years ago.

Comparing screenshots between old Oblivion and Oblivion Remastered make it pretty obvious: There’s a thick haze hanging over everything that darkens every scene. The entire world looks like a bonus level in PowerWash Simulator waiting to be blasted back to its original look.

In terms of detail, it certainly looks improved. Torches glow in the darkness, water shimmers in the sunlight, and docks look like actual wood and not mossy stone. But the actual mossy stone is now charcoal for some reason. The original game was much brighter, lightening up the grassy hills and trees, but Unreal Engine 5 has the remaster looking burnt.

Interior sections in Oblivion Remastered are a bit better. The amazing intro to the game where you escape prison with Patrick Stewart is all suffocating stone corridors and the occasional beam of light bleeding through the ceiling. It’s surprisingly close to the chilly vibe of the original. In fact, it might be an example of what the improved lighting gets you when it’s not working with overcooked textures.

The pale character faces from the original didn’t survive the remaster, which is mostly an improvement to me. In a perfect world, we’d get the weirdly smeared NPC mugs of the past in 4K, but I’ll take the hyper-detailed wrinkles and pores if it means better facial animations can exist. And don’t worry, when they open their mouths, they still sound just as goofy as before.

I just can’t get over how muddy the outside has become in the remaster. But I’m also the person who won’t forgive Virtuos for turning the stylistic Dark Souls bonfire into a realistic fire in Dark Souls: Remastered. It’s also entirely possible that Oblivion Remastered’s visuals coalesce the deeper you get into it and explore new areas. If they don’t, I’m at least happy that the original Oblivion is still available whenever I want to go back.

From Polygon via this RSS feed

Cosmic Exploration is a massive instanced gameplay mode in Final Fantasy 14 that allows players to cooperate to level up their crafters and gatherers, while also exploring the moon.

Once you load into the zone, it can be overwhelming, as you’re shoved into a new UI with many support menus. While using shout chat to ask your fellow Warriors of Light for help will get you far, we’ve compiled everything you need to know before starting Cosmic Exploration so you don’t have to embarrass yourself in chat.

Below, we explain what FFXIV’s Cosmic Exploration is, how it works, how to unlock it, and what the notable rewards are.

What is Cosmic Exploration in FFXIV?

Cosmic Exploration is almost a mix of a field operation (like Bozja or Eureka) with Ishgard Restoration. You’ll be sent off to an instance with many other players and you’ll get access to a bunch of specialized tools and missions.

The missions in this work a lot like leves, if you’ve done those. They’re individual quests that require manual activation via your “Stellar Missions” tab. If you’re a crafter, you’ll need to craft a few items of a certain quality, and if you’re a gatherer, you’ll need to go gather items from nodes marked on the map. You’ll get Cosmocredits and Lunar Credits, as well as research points for each one you complete.

Participating in these missions gives you what is functionally a job-specific EXP for Cosmic Exploration, allowing you to rank up your “Cosmic Research” for each job. The higher your research level, the better tools you’ll get access to — some of which will buff the rewards you get from doing missions.

There’s also “Stellar Successes” which are just achievements. You’ll complete these as you take on missions and whatnot, and this gives out both Cosmocredits and Lunar Credits.

There are also FATE-like things that spawn around the map, referred to as “Critical Missions,” as well as “Mech Ops,” the latter which requires you to buy a mech pilot’s license for 1,000 Cosmocredits.

Unfortunately there are limitations: You can only participate in Cosmic Exploration on your homeworld, so you cannot group up with any friends you have across other worlds. Sad. You also can’t use mounts in Cosmic Exploration, but you do have a beefed-up specialized Sprint skill to help you get around.

As the people in your world progress and build up your base, you’ll have access to new features, like a transport system so you don’t have to sprint around to all the various locations.

The short version here is to pick a crafter/gatherer you like (or need to level) and spam Stellar Missions until Critical Missions appear. Complete the Critical Missions and then go back to doing Stellar Missions to load up on currency and Cosmic Research.

Where to unlock Cosmic Exploration in FFXIV

To unlock Cosmic Exploration, you’ll need to talk to Namingway in Old Sharlayan in the location below to start the quest “A Cosmic Homecoming.” You’ll need at least one crafter or gatherer job at level 10 and the “Endwalker” main story quest complete.

Once you finish the quest, you’ll be able to freely travel to Sinus Andorum via Drivingway in Bestways Burrow to participate in Cosmic Exploration.

What are the big rewards for Cosmic Exploration in FFXIV?

There are a few notable rewards you can get for participating in Cosmic Exploration in exchange for trading Cosmocredits:

The “Star Crew” glamour set“Reading Glasses” eyewear“Bearing Insult” (rage) emoteCosmic Exploration Framer’s Kit“Hey, Cid!” Orchestrion Roll“The Airship” Orchestrion Roll

You can also trade 1,000 Lunar credits for a cosmic fortune, which has a chance to give you the following:

The “Vacuum Suit” mountThe “Micro Rover” minion“Tinted Sunglasses” eyewear“Close in the Distance (Instrumental)” Orchestrion Roll“Echoes in the Distance” Orchestrion Roll“Stargazers” Orchestrion Roll“Visage Capture” (selfie) emoteThe “Cosmosuit” glamour setThe “Loparasol” umbrella fashion accessory

That said, cosmic fortune is a literal roulette wheel, so you may get non-exclusive items like Magicked Prisms (yuck!) and materia instead.

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The rumors and the Steam listings were real: Oblivion is back. On Tuesday, Bethesda formally announced a remaster of the 2006 open-world RPG — developed by Dark Souls: Remastered studio Virtuos — and then promptly released it.

The precursor to Skyrim is available right now on Windows PC and Xbox Series X for $49.99. PC players can get it on Steam, the Epic Games Store, or Bethesda.net. Game Pass Ultimate subscribers will have access to it on PC and Xbox too.

Oblivion Remastered uses Unreal Engine 5 to give the entire world a high-resolution makeover with improved lighting and textures. While it’s technically the first Bethesda game to run on an engine separate from the studio’s propriety ones, it still uses parts of the old engine to keep things close to the original.

The remaster has changes to the UI and leveling system to be closer to modern RPGs. Enemy combat animations, sound and visual effects are more realistic to add some heft to the game’s first-person combat too. There’s even a sprint button now.

Naturally, everyone’s next question is whether or not you can create a stairway into the sky with paint brushes, or reproduce any of the other bugs from the original Oblivion. Even though the game is still running on its original engine behind the scenes, we don’t know if any of these things have been changed yet.

The same goes for mod support, a feature that is usually synonymous with Bethesda RPGs. The folks on Nexus Mods are out there changing Skyrim and Fallout 4 into entirely different games. Bethesda didn’t say if existing Oblivion mods can be brought over, nor has it said if it’ll be as easily moddable as the original game. But given how popular the Bethesda modding community is, I’m sure we’ll find out soon.

The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remaster is available now for Windows PC and Xbox Series X.

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