Monthly Archives: August 2017
Out This Week: Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, Everybody’s Golf, Yakuza Kiwami
With so many new games and movies coming out, it can be hard to keep up. Lucky for you, IGN is here to help with a weekly round-up of the biggest releases each and every week. Check out the latest releases for this week, and be sure to come back next Monday for a new update.
Note: The prices and deals compiled below are accurate at the time we published this story, but all are subject to change.
Gearbox CEO on Possibility of Making Half-Life 2: Episode 3
While Gearbox Software is no stranger to the Half-Life franchise, having worked with Valve on the Opposing Force and Blue Shift expansion packs, as well as the PS2 version of Half-Life, studio president and CEO Randy Pitchford isn't so sure his team should return to the franchise.
On the latest episode of our monthly interview show IGN Unfiltered, we asked Pitchford if, given the opportunity, Gearbox would be interested in making the long-awaited and seemingly never-coming third episode that continues the Half-Life 2 story, and he replied with an air of uncertainty.
Amazon’s Bank Holiday Deal Event: Shop the Future (6 Days of Deals)
Game of Thrones: “The Dragon and the Wolf” – Dragons on the Wall
Full spoilers for Game of Thrones: Season 7's "The Dragon and the Wolf" continue below. Read on at your own risk!
Game of Thrones went all in on its Season 7 finale, delivering everything from the confirmation that R+L=J to Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen finally getting it on to the Wall coming down. There was so much to talk about, in fact, that IGN's Dragons on the Wall hosts Terri Schwartz and Joshua Yehl delivered an extra long episode to dig deep into "The Dragon and the Wolf."
This week's Dragons on the Wall topics include:
-What Jon Snow's parentage (and true name) mean for his future in Westeros
What Makes a Great Tutorial?
Tutorials are essential to every game experience. In that time we learn the game mechanics, the key players, and of course the main quest. The first few hours of a game can easily make or break our opinion of it.
So what makes a great tutorial? Beyond just explaining the controls, what do some games do that hook you at the start and keep you coming back?
A bad tutorial can be boring, it can be tedious and repetitive. But a good tutorial can be funny, insightful, entertaining, and give you a great first impression of the world you’re going to spend hours in.
From the Cemetery of Ash in Dark Souls 3 to Vault 101 in Fallout 3, here are some great tutorial levels and the archetypes that hold them together.
Game of Thrones Showrunners on Finale’s Big Betrayal
Full spoilers for Game of Thrones' Season 7 finale, "The Dragon and the Wolf," continue below.
Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish met his end at the hands of Arya Stark in the Season 7 finale of Game of Thrones. During the "Inside the Episode" segment for "The Dragon and the Wolf," series showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss discussed the work that went into setting the stage for that shocking moment, much of which was done in Season 7's prior episodes.
Game of Thrones Showrunners Talk THAT Ending
Full spoilers for Game of Thrones' Season 7 finale, "The Dragon and the Wolf," continue below.
The wall that protected the people of Westeros was breached at very end of "The Dragon and the Wolf," and Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have shed light on why they decided to conclude Season 7 on such a dire note.
"For many years now we've known this would be the ending of the penultimate season," Benioff revealed during the finale's "Inside the Episode" segment.
"The wall's kept these things out for eight thousand years and there's no really reason it can't keep doing that unless something puts a hole in the wall," Weiss explained. "There's one thing on the board from the beginning that is now big enough to do that and that's a dragon." As such, Weiss said that having the undead dragon blaze a hole through the wall "just started to suggest itself as a logical way forward."
Game of Thrones Finally Confirms Who Jon Snow’s [Spoiler] Is
Full spoilers for Game of Thrones' Season 7 finale, "The Dragon and the Wolf," continue below.
At long last, once and for all, Game of Thrones has set the record straight: Jon Snow is not the bastard son of Ned Stark and some mystery woman, but instead the legitimate son of Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen. Additionally, Jon Snow isn't his real name. Instead, his birth name is Aegon Targaryen.
This is a huge revelation for not only audiences but the show itself. (And yes, for the record, HBO did accidentally reveal this after Season 6.) Bran Stark's confirmation that Jon is the one true heir to the Iron Throne couldn't have come at a worse time, because it was right when Jon was in the middle of having sex with his aunt, Daenerys Targaryen.
Game of Thrones: Season 7 Finale Review
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.
And that's all she wrote for Season 7 of Game of Thrones! Let's hope this is enough to tide us over until quite possibly 2019, for the eighth and final season, though I don't think we've left all that much on the table here as far as pretty bows placed atop fan theory gifts. Unless you count the recurring theory that Bran is somehow also the Night King thanks to a Three-Eyed time travel snafu and the Prince Who Was Promised prophesy.
"The Dragon and the Wolf" was almost feature-length, shaving it close to 80 minutes. It's definitely the longest episode of the series to date and, unsurprisingly, it was heavily dialogue-driven. Here's the thing: We've reached the end of the seventh season and when you combine all the characters killed off and storylines ended thus far, there's not much going on all over the place compared to the way it used to be. Right now we've got, at most at a time, four places to hop around to per episode. It used to be that you could flip back and fourth from anywhere to five to eight separate stories in a single chapter.
Splatoon 2: The Ideal Online Shooter for Non-shooter Fans
There are numerous reasons as to why I let the original Splatoon pass me by when it debuted on the Wii U in 2015, but chief among them was that, in recent years, I just haven't been enjoying online shooters like I used to. This is largely because I'm older and more anti-social now; I have less desire to talk to or even interact with strangers online while playing games, not that I've ever found much of what's said in online lobbies to be worth engaging in.
Because of this, if I do ever feel the need to dabble, it tends to be in those shooters that are large in scale and with a high number of concurrent players, or at least something in which I can go lone wolf, leave the mic unplugged, but still contribute to an overall team effort. To this end, the Battlefields and Titanfalls of this world have been solid options for me, but even then, my online investment in such games has been fleeting at best.