PlayStation’s live service games could be seeing a day and date release on PC along with the usual PlayStation launch, but other kinds of games will take at least a year.

In an interview with YouTuber Julien Chieze, PlayStation CEO Hermen Hulst says, “I think going forward, we’ll see at least a year between our own platform, PlayStation, and on the PC platform…possibly with the exception of live service games.”

He continues, “Live service games are a little bit different in nature because you want to have a really strong community and really strong engagement right away when you go live. We might, in the case of our live service offerings, go day and date with PC and the PlayStation platform.”

PlayStation has continued to push further into the PC market, releasing games onto the platform like Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, Days Gone, and Marvel’s Spider-Man. Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection and Sackboy: A Big Adventure are making their way onto PC this month too, along with Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and The Last of Us Part I sometime later.

PlayStation is also trying to expand its live service and multiplayer games, as studios such as Haven are working on a live-service title right now and Naughty Dog is developing a multiplayer game set in The Last of Us universe. Sony is also reportedly making a multiplayer game set in the Horizon universe.

While PlayStation is venturing into more live-service games, it also said that gamers won’t have to worry about single-player narrative falling by the wayside.

George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @yinyangfooey

The Moon may have formed almost immediately following a devastating impact between Earth and a Mars-sized world in the ancient past, according to the results of a new supercomputer study.

Earth’s moon is a silent witness to the history of our entire species. Its gravitational influence is responsible for the tides, and its simple presence in the night sky has profoundly influenced humanity’s cultural development.

Yet despite its ever present nature, the scientific community have yet to come to a consensus on how exactly Earth’s largest natural satellite came to form.

It is widely agreed that the Moon was created when a roughly Mars-sized solar system body — which has been dubbed Theia — collided with Earth roughly 4.5 billion years ago. This impact devastated both our planet, and primordial Theia, and sent vast amounts of material from both worlds hurtling into Earth’s orbit.

Many of the previous theories surrounding the Moon’s formation suggest that it slowly coalesced from this soup of orbital debris, until finally the remainder of the material not accumulated by the satellite fell back in towards Earth.

In this scenario, the orbital debris would have been largely comprised of the remains of Theia. However, rock samples recovered from the Moon’s surface by Apollo-era astronauts showed a surprising structural and isotopic similarity to those found on Earth.

Whilst it is possible, the authors of a new study found it unlikely that the material from Theia would have such a close match with that of the Earth.

In the new study, a team of researchers from Durham University in the UK used the powerful DiRAC supercomputing facility to run a range of simulations that could account for the creation of Earth’s moon.

The supercomputer used a significantly larger number of particles to simulate the ancient collision compared to previous studies. According to the team, lower resolution simulations can omit important aspects of the collision process.

Over the course of the study, the scientists ran hundreds of these high-resolution simulations while varying a range of key parameters, including the masses, spins, angles, and speeds of the two unfortunate worlds.

The simulations revealed that a large body with a Moon-like mass and iron content could have coalesced almost immediately in orbit following the Earth-Theia collision. The detailed simulation showed that the newly born hypothetical satellite would have been created beyond the Roche limit - which is the orbital distance at which a satellite can orbit a planet without being shredded by its gravity.

Furthermore, the outer layers of such a world would be rich in material ejected from Earth, thus explaining the similarities between the Apollo-era rocks and those from our planet.

“This formation route could help explain the similarity in isotopic composition between the lunar rocks returned by the Apollo astronauts and Earth’s mantlle," explains study co-author Vincent Eke, an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Exeter. “There may also be observable consequences for the thickness of the lunar crust, which would allow us to pin down further the type of collision that took place.”

If the Moon did form quickly following the impact, then its internal structure would likely be different than if it had grown gradually from a circumplanetary disk of debris. Astronauts returning to the Moon in the coming decades under NASA’s Artemis Program will collect fresh samples from the lunar surface that can be used to test the quick formation theory.

The research could help update scientist’s understanding as to how moons form in the orbits of distant worlds spread throughout the universe.

Anthony Wood is a freelance science writer for IGN

Image Credit: Dr Jacob Kegerreis

Elon Musk has agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion, averting a trial that had been set for later this month. AP reporter Seung Min Kim broke the news of the agreement.

NEW YORK (AP) — Elon Musk averts trial, agrees to $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.

— Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) October 4, 2022

This follows a report by Bloomberg, in which Musk reportedly offered to buy the social media app for $54.20 a share — the original offer Musk proposed back in April. In July, however, Musk withdrew his offer to buy the company; in response, Twitter announced it would file a lawsuit to try and get Musk to complete the deal.

"We received the letter from the Musk parties which they have filed with the SEC. The intention of the Company is to close the transaction at $54.20 per share," a Twitter spokesperson told IGN via email.

The trial date was set for October 17th. Ahead of the trial, Twitter's shareholders announced last month that they approved Musk's original proposal to buy Twitter. During a pretrial hearing last week, Musk argued that Twitter has been withholding the truth about how many bots are on the platform.

As Intelligencer notes, Musk hired five companies to analyze Twitter's bot numbers. One company confirmed Twitter's bot user numbers. However, the outlet notes that the other company says "with only weak confidence that the number of bots in Twitter's mDAU metric was as high as 11 percent."

Taylor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

Thumbnail image credit: JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

The U.S. government's National Labor Relations Board has found that Call of Duty and Overwatch publisher Activision Blizzard withheld pay raises from some Raven Software employees as a result of their unionization. Activision Blizzard has disputed this, however, saying it wasn't possible to offer raises due to "legal obligations".

As reported by The Washington Post, the NLRB's findings will likely fall in favor of the Raven employees in their ongoing negotiations with Activision Blizzard. The group of quality assurance workers became the first union at a major North American video game company in May 2022 and filed the NLRB complaint in September.

"It’s a very preliminary win for the union at this point. It gives them a little bit of leverage," said former chairman of the NLRB Wilma Liebman. "It’s part of their tactics, you know, hit them wherever they can, to put pressure on the company in order to reach an agreement with them and to stop violating the law."

Activision Blizzard — who announced that the unionized employees would not be receiving a pay rise given to 1,100 other QA workers in July — has maintained that it's not an active decision made by itself but is instead a legal issue.

"Due to legal obligations under the [National Labor Relations Act] requiring employers not to grant wage increases while an election was pending, we could not institute new pay initiatives at Raven," a spokesperson told The Washington Post.

Essentially, Activision Blizzard claims it legally wasn't able to offer the employees a pay rise because they were in the midst of voting to unionize, as per Labor Board v. Exchange Parts Co., 375 U.S. 405 (1964). The company was found to be actively discouraging the union efforts, however, as it sent emails to employees that read: "Please vote no".

It's unclear how long the negotiations between the union and Activision Blizzard will go on, or how successful they will be for either side, but the move has already sparked others to follow suit. What is certain, however, is that Xbox boss Phil Spencer will recognize the union if Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard goes through.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

EA Motive has unveiled a new trailer for its Dead Space remake, teasing some of the nightmarish horrors that await players in the sci-fi survival horror game.

The terrifying teaser follows Dead Space protagonist Isaac Clarke as he navigates the eerie, echoing corridors and workspaces aboard the mining ship, USG Ishimura, where something has gone horribly wrong. He is shown sidling around the vessel to investigate the situation while fighting off any Necromorphs that come into his seemingly treacherous path.

The game features a new damage system called peeling, which actually allows players to shoot the flesh off of Necromorphs. It's a grotesque visual treat that also serves as a sort of diegetic health bar for enemies, much like Isaac Clarke's spine-mounted lights, which deplete as the user takes damage from the deadly ship-dwellers.

Motive's take on Dead Space has been rebuilt from the ground up in EA's Frostbite engine, with Assassin's Creed Valhalla game director Eric Baptizat at the helm alongside creative director Roman Campos-Oriola, who previously promised "all new assets, new character models, [and] new environments" based on the original game designs.

The game's developers turned to diehard fans to help keep them on track in offering all-new gameplay content and improvements while staying faithful to the vision of the original game. The remake team consulted with their very own community council every six weeks to get their opinions on a variety of "polarizing" topics during the project's development.

Dead Space will be released on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC on January 27, 2023.

Want to read more about the updated version of the beloved survival horror game? Check out every EA game in development as well as a deep dive into how Dead Space is being remade.

Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.

Popeye the Sailor Man is pushing 100 these days, but he's still scarfing down spinach and clobbering bullies as readily as he was back in 1929. To celebrate Popeye's enduring pop culture appeal, Clover Press and Yoe! Books have teamed for an art book dubbed Popeye Variations: Not Yer Pappy's Comics n' Art Book.

As the title suggests, Popeye Variations reimagines and remixes Popeye and friends through the lens of a number of different contemporary artists. No fewer than 75 cartoonists, filmmakers and comic book creators have been tapped to lend their own spin on Popeye's world. You can get a better idea of what's in store by checking out our exclusive preview in the slideshow gallery below:

Popeye Variations is a 10" x 10" hardcover book featuring 100 pages of artwork and comic strips. In addition to a wealth of brand new Popeye strips, the book also reprints the striking cover art from IDW Publishing 2012's Popeye reprint series and various classic strips from legendary Thimble Theatre Starring Popeye artist Bud Sagendorf.

The lineup of creators involved includes Adventure Time's Derek Ballard, The New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, The Book of Life director Jorge Guiterrez, Batman artist Kelley Jones, Sam & Max creator Steve Purcell, Darth Vader and Son's Jeffrey Brown, The Ghoul Next Door's Cat Farris The Red Hook's Dean Haspiel, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl's Erica Henderson, The Legend of Auntie Po's Shin Ying Khor, cartoonist Liniers, The Muppets' Roger Langridge, The Humans’ creator Tom Neely, Masterpiece Comics' R. Sikoryak, The Incredible Hercules' Jeff Parker, The Greatest Thing's Sarah Winifred Searle, The Simpsons Comics' Scott Shaw! and Usagi Yojimbo creator Stan Sakai.

"I loved watching Popeye cartoons when I was a kid, but I didn't discover how great the comics were until I was older (it also took me that long to discover I liked spinach, except not from a can)," Brown tells IGN. "As much as I enjoyed all of the slapstick physical comedy of Popeye, I always come back to thinking about the relationship...are Popeye and Olive Oyl a couple? A former couple? Is it unrequited love? I like to think it's a more complex relationship, something without a label, kind of ahead of its time. Although for my comic, I thought about how each of them sees their relationship differently, and the humor that comes from that."

Popeye Variations is now live for preorder on Kickstarter. In addition to the standard hardcover, higher pledge tiers will offer art prints of some of the Popeye covers included in the book.

Fans of Brown's hilarious take on th Star Wars movies should also be keeping a eye out for Thor and Loki: Midgard Family Mayhem, a comedic, all-ages spin on the Thor comics due out in April 2023.

In other comic book news, Comixology is bringing its popular trading card series back to NYCC, and Audible just dropped the third installment of its Sandman audio adaptation.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.

CD Projekt Red has announced the codenames and brief descriptions for five new games, including 3 Witcher games, a new Cyberpunk, and a brand new IP.

Revealed on Twitter, it marks a major next step for the developer in multiple respects – from developing its own IP from scratch, to developing multiple 'full-size' games at one time. In a separate release, the company says it is also "adding multiplayer to the majority of future projects." This also marks the first time that we've learned the new Witcher trilogy will not be the only new games set in that universe.

The five games are:

• Orion - "A codename for our next Cyberpunk game, which will take the Cyberpunk franchise further and continue harnessing the potential of this dark future universe." Orion will be developed by a brand new CD Projekt studio set up in the US.
• Polaris - "A codename for the next installment in The Witcher series of games, which we recently announced was in pre-production. It is the beginning of a new saga: we aim to release two more Witcher games after Polaris, creating a new AAA RPG trilogy." The full trilogy is intended to be released "in a six-year period".
• Canis Majoris - "A full-fledged Witcher game, separate to the new Witcher saga starting with Polaris. It will be developed by an external studio headed by experienced developers who have worked on past Witcher games." It's not currently clear which developer is working on this project.
• Sirius - "A codename for the game developed by [The Molasses Flood], set in The Witcher universe and created with support from CDPR. It will differ from our past productions, offering multiplayer gameplay on top of a single-player experience including a campaign with quests and a story."
• Hadar - "A codename for a third, entirely distinct IP, created from scratch within CDPR. The project is in the earliest stages of the creative process, which means we are not developing any game yet, but working exclusively on the foundation for this new setting."

Orion is a codename for our next Cyberpunk game, which will take the Cyberpunk franchise further and continue harnessing the potential of this dark future universe. pic.twitter.com/JoVbCf6jYZ

— CD PROJEKT RED (@CDPROJEKTRED) October 4, 2022

Canis Majoris is perhaps the most intriguingly different project for CD Projekt among the list. Developed externally by a currently unknown developer, the strategy announcement explains, "This is the first such product being developed outside of the Group. However, this does not imply that its quality will lag behind our in-house productions. From the technological standpoint it will be based on Unreal Engine 5, along with the toolset created for Polaris. Expect additional announcements soon."

Canis Majoris marks what seems to be a newly open CD Projekt, which is willing to work with partners on both games and other media after the success of Netflix's Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. "Our goal is to work with experienced partners who can meet our quality requirements and deliver worthwhile experiences for our fans," said CFO Michał Nowakowski. "We are doing this to create new, exciting ways of interacting with our brands, and also to enable our internal teams to focus on what drives us as a company: developing revolutionary role-playing games."

Details on the new IP, Hadar, are understandably scant but Nowakowski added, "We started toying with the idea several years ago. Early-stage conceptual work commenced in 2021, and – for the first time in our history – the IP is being incubated entirely within CD Projekt Red. It is important to understand that right now we are still working on basic concepts and laying the groundwork for this new franchise."

The news comes after CD Projekt announced it would begin developing Witcher and Cyberpunk games simultaneously, while also purchasing The Molasses Flood to work on games in its universes. Its new North American studio will incorporate the Vancouver studio it already bought.

As part of the glut of announcements, we also learned that co-CEO Adam Kiciński would be leaving his role to apply to be Chairman of the company.

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 newstips@ign.com.

It's that time again—New York Comic Con is back! East Coast's largest pop culture convention is taking over Gotham City from Oct 6th to Oct 9th and will be filled once again with exciting announcements, cosplay, guest panels and so much more from your favorite franchises across anime, gaming, film, TV and comics.

Something you can expect to see during NYCC this year in the world of premieres is the new Super Mario movie trailer premiere, starring Chris Pratt. Announced on Twitter (below), the first teaser trailer for the film will premiere at the convention.

Join us October 6th at 4pm ET for the teaser trailer premiere of Nintendo & Illumination’s upcoming Super Mario Bros. film, releasing April 7, 2023. pic.twitter.com/1jEFnlvCnU

— New York Comic Con (@NY_Comic_Con) September 22, 2022

Originally announced back in 2018, Super Mario: The Movie is being produced by Nintendo and Illumination. The film would resurface again during the September 2021 Nintendo Direct, where Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto announced the film's cast.

When Does The Super Mario Bros. Trailer Drop?

It will be shown on October 6 at 1pm Pacific / 4pm Eastern / 9pm UK.

For those attending NYCC in person, the convention's official website notes that the trailer will be shown at the Empire Stage.

IGN's NVC Podcast will be hosting a live celebration of Super Mario during this time and we will be reacting to the trailer when it's made available to the public!

IGN's NVC Podcast's Live Celebration of Super Mario at NYCC 2022

We’ll be hosting a livestream here and across our many channels on platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, Facebook, and more. Here’s the full list of places you can watch:

• IGN.com (homepage)
• IGN's Facebook Channel
• IGN’s Twitter
• IGN's Twitch Channel
• IGN’s Youtube Channel
• IGN's TikTok
• IGN's iOS App
• IGN's Android App
• IGN's PlayStation 4 App
• IGN's Xbox One App
• Roku
• IGN App for Android TV
• IGN for Amazon Fire TV
• Apple TV
• IGN 1 on Samsung TV Plus
• Pluto TV
• Plex Live TV

Catch Up On Super Mario Movie News

Release Date

The film was originally set to release in December 2022. However, Universal Pictures announced earlier this year that the film's release date had been pushed back to April 7, 2023 in North America.

Voice Cast

• Chris Pratt as Mario
• Anya Taylor-Joy as Peach
• Charlie Day as Luigi
• Jack Black as Bowser
• Keegan-Michael Key as Toad
• Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong
• Kevin Michael Richardson as Kamek
• Fred Armisen as Cranky Kong
• Sebastian Maniscalco as Foreman Spike

Charles Martinet will also have a series of featured cameos in the movie, known for his longtime voice acting of both Mario and Luigi in the Super Mario video game series since 1992!

Related News

• Is "The Morton Jankel Cut" any better than the 1993 theatrical version? Find out in our Super Mario Bros.The Movie Extended Edition Review.
• While you wait for the new Mario movie release, check out our list of upcoming video game movies.
• Who will be at NYCC 2022? You can see the entire guest list here. Some of the biggest names in the biz confirmed to be guests of honor include:
  • Oscar Isaac (Moon Knight)
  • Cassandra Peterson (Elvira Mistress of the Dark)
  • Brendan Fraser (Doom Patrol)
  • Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future)
  • Michael J. Fox (Back to the Future)
  • Sebastian Stan (Infinity War & Endgame)
  • Leigh Bardugo (Demon in the Wood, Shadow and Bone)

Taylor is the Associate Tech Editor at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

Filmmakers are just as much artists as photographers, painters, and sculptors, so there is some level of creative license that they have for the content they produce. With the advent of big-budget streaming though, some filmmakers might not be up to the task of making sure everything they make is as watchable as they might hope compared to the perfect environment of a movie theater.

Why House of the Dragon is so dark

House of the Dragon's seventh episode, titled "Driftmark," is one such example. The show’s director, Emmy-award winner Miguel Sapochnik, specifically chose an extremely dark motif for a majority of the episode. For many viewers at home, this meant long stretches of time where barely anything was actually visible on screen.

Fans have complained about this online and HBO has confirmed that this was a deliberate choice.

Most televisions released in the last several years come with some version of HDR support, and that’s where we need to start. HDR, which stands for high dynamic range, takes the previous standard video format — standard dynamic range or SDR — and widens it to encompass more colors and shades. HDR content allows for brighter whites and darker blacks, in addition to allowing for a wider range of colors — more shades of reds, greens, and blues, for example.

There are many HDR profiles, which means that depending on which one your TV can read and which one content is being broadcast in, you'll see something different. The one that HBO is using is a proprietary one called Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision HDR is supposed to streamline that previously messy HDR experience and make it so everyone is seeing basically the same thing. It's a good goal, but with so many differences among panel technology, this only kind of gets everyone in the general ballpark and not necessarily the same seating section.

As a result, even if you and I are both watching a Dolby Vision stream, our experiences aren’t necessarily going to be the same. Still, in this case, both of us probably had a pretty dim experience.

Dolby Vision, luckily, has a few user-level tweaks that can be made to it. Combined with some other settings that are pretty easy to adjust, you can make your viewing experience of this particularly dark episode significantly better. None of this is too difficult either.

Strategies for making House of the Dragon easier to see

1. To start with, if you can easily turn off HDR, that will probably have an immediate impact on how much more of this episode is visible. If you can’t, you’re not out of luck. While some televisions will let you turn HDR off entirely and bypass this problem, many televisions do not — or make it so confusing to do so that it’s not worth trying to figure it out just to enjoy one episode of a weekly show. Depending on your TV, you might be able to squeeze a bit more light into these scenes through your Picture menu.

Some TVs do have ways of making the picture in this particular episode easier to see, I just wouldn’t go so far as to say it is a blanket “improvement” since there are tradeoffs. I’m going to use two different TVs as an example of how you might find a way to make this episode a bit more watchable, but the options you’ll have are going to vary.

I do want to take this time to mention that adjusting “brightness” and “contrast” on most TVs doesn’t actually make the picture brighter or increase, but instead tends to just wash out what little image is there. You can adjust this on your own, and for some TVs it might make the picture easier to see, but it has limited payoff and you’re likely not going to be happy with how washed out the picture quality gets. Odds are it will make the screen whiter, but the subjects aren’t going to be any more visible than they were.

All that said, let’s start with my Sony A80J OLED, a model from 2021. When I fire up the show, it automatically changes from standard definition to Dolby Vision, which I can see when I go to the Picture Settings. There, my usual long list of options has been significantly cut down to just three: Vivid, Dolby Vision Bright, and Dolby Vision Dark.

If you thought the default setting, which is Dolby Vision Bright, was hard to see, have a laugh and switch over to Dolby Vision Dark: it really does just look like a black screen. Even with all of my other brightness settings such luminance and backlight turned up to max, the scene is pretty difficult to make out in either of these settings.

2. Vivid, however, does make the picture significantly easier to see. This does come at a cost as the picture becomes very blue in this particular example scene. You can expect the colors for the whole episode to be a bit wonky when you have Vivid selected, but at least you’ll be able to see what is going on. This is probably the only time I will recommend watching anything in Vivid since it usually warps the colors so badly, but here I will make an exception for the sake of visual clarity.

Switching over to the Hisense U7H, a model from 2022, which uses a mini LED display, and we can get some much better results. My Sony OLED might provide better color accuracy and true blacks, but when content is super dark, the lack of overall brightness means there isn’t a lot I can do to make the picture appear brighter. Hisense has far less of a limitation, as it can get more than twice as bright as the Sony.

Even though I am once again only given Dolby Vision options — this time Dolby Vision IQ, Dolby Vision Dark, and Dolby Vision Custom, all of which appear to be varying levels of bad — there are a few other things I can change to boost the brightness.

I managed to get a pretty bright scene by making sure that my backlight was at high and the backlight level was at 100. With the Hisense, I usually have these set to those levels all the time because I have it set up in a room with a lot of windows and I need that brightness to overcome the glare. But your options for brightness don’t stop there.

3. If you go down to the Advanced Settings options, you’ll find a setting that dramatically improves the perceived brightness of this episode: Active Contrast. Generally speaking, the results of Active Contrast are mixed since it’s based on what is on screen and isn’t a singular blanket change for all content. But in this case, it had a huge impact on how much brighter the scenes appeared. Overall contrast — that is to say, the difference between whites and blacks — is pretty poor and the overall picture is kind of a washed-out gray, but I at least can make out what is going on.

Bear in mind, I took all of these test photos in the middle of the day when glare and natural light are at their peak, so all of these settings will look a lot better at night when the surroundings are dark.

4. One other feature you might be able to adjust is the gamma, usually found in the advanced calibration settings inside your picture settings. When turned to its lowest numerical setting can have an impact on the overall apparent brightness of scenes, though my televisions had this option grayed out due to the Dolby Vision HDR format taking precedence.

Unfortunately, there's no easy solution

Unfortunately, there is no cure-all for every television make and model that will give you the best viewing experience possible for super-dark scenes. Even comparing the Sony OLED best result against the Hisense best result shows how much variation there is between just two displays. But if you do have the ability to make similar adjustments to the ones I’ve outlined, you might at least be able to enjoy this episode a bit more.

Once you've got your television issues sorted, check out our explanation of how a survival in the episode changes Game of Thrones history. You can aalso check out our House of the Dragon episode guide, which will let you know when to expect the eighth episode.

Jaron Schneider is a freelance contributor at IGN.

Filmmakers are just as much artists as photographers, painters, and sculptors, so there is some level of creative license that they have for the content they produce. With the advent of big-budget streaming though, some filmmakers might not be up to the task of making sure everything they make is as watchable as they might hope compared to the perfect environment of a movie theater.

Why House of the Dragon is so dark

House of the Dragon's seventh episode, titled "Driftmark," is one such example. The show’s director, Emmy-award winner Miguel Sapochnik, specifically chose an extremely dark motif for a majority of the episode. For many viewers at home, this meant long stretches of time where barely anything was actually visible on screen.

Fans have complained about this online and HBO has confirmed that this was a deliberate choice.

Most televisions released in the last several years come with some version of HDR support, and that’s where we need to start. HDR, which stands for high dynamic range, takes the previous standard video format — standard dynamic range or SDR — and widens it to encompass more colors and shades. HDR content allows for brighter whites and darker blacks, in addition to allowing for a wider range of colors — more shades of reds, greens, and blues, for example.

There are many HDR profiles, which means that depending on which one your TV can read and which one content is being broadcast in, you'll see something different. The one that HBO is using is a proprietary one called Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision HDR is supposed to streamline that previously messy HDR experience and make it so everyone is seeing basically the same thing. It's a good goal, but with so many differences among panel technology, this only kind of gets everyone in the general ballpark and not necessarily the same seating section.

As a result, even if you and I are both watching a Dolby Vision stream, our experiences aren’t necessarily going to be the same. Still, in this case, both of us probably had a pretty dim experience.

Dolby Vision, luckily, has a few user-level tweaks that can be made to it. Combined with some other settings that are pretty easy to adjust, you can make your viewing experience of this particularly dark episode significantly better. None of this is too difficult either.

Strategies for making House of the Dragon easier to see

1. To start with, if you can easily turn off HDR, that will probably have an immediate impact on how much more of this episode is visible. If you can’t, you’re not out of luck. While some televisions will let you turn HDR off entirely and bypass this problem, many televisions do not — or make it so confusing to do so that it’s not worth trying to figure it out just to enjoy one episode of a weekly show. Depending on your TV, you might be able to squeeze a bit more light into these scenes through your Picture menu.

Some TVs do have ways of making the picture in this particular episode easier to see, I just wouldn’t go so far as to say it is a blanket “improvement” since there are tradeoffs. I’m going to use two different TVs as an example of how you might find a way to make this episode a bit more watchable, but the options you’ll have are going to vary.

I do want to take this time to mention that adjusting “brightness” and “contrast” on most TVs doesn’t actually make the picture brighter or increase, but instead tends to just wash out what little image is there. You can adjust this on your own, and for some TVs it might make the picture easier to see, but it has limited payoff and you’re likely not going to be happy with how washed out the picture quality gets. Odds are it will make the screen whiter, but the subjects aren’t going to be any more visible than they were.

All that said, let’s start with my Sony A80J OLED, a model from 2021. When I fire up the show, it automatically changes from standard definition to Dolby Vision, which I can see when I go to the Picture Settings. There, my usual long list of options has been significantly cut down to just three: Vivid, Dolby Vision Bright, and Dolby Vision Dark.

If you thought the default setting, which is Dolby Vision Bright, was hard to see, have a laugh and switch over to Dolby Vision Dark: it really does just look like a black screen. Even with all of my other brightness settings such luminance and backlight turned up to max, the scene is pretty difficult to make out in either of these settings.

2. Vivid, however, does make the picture significantly easier to see. This does come at a cost as the picture becomes very blue in this particular example scene. You can expect the colors for the whole episode to be a bit wonky when you have Vivid selected, but at least you’ll be able to see what is going on. This is probably the only time I will recommend watching anything in Vivid since it usually warps the colors so badly, but here I will make an exception for the sake of visual clarity.

Switching over to the Hisense U7H, a model from 2022, which uses a mini LED display, and we can get some much better results. My Sony OLED might provide better color accuracy and true blacks, but when content is super dark, the lack of overall brightness means there isn’t a lot I can do to make the picture appear brighter. Hisense has far less of a limitation, as it can get more than twice as bright as the Sony.

Even though I am once again only given Dolby Vision options — this time Dolby Vision IQ, Dolby Vision Dark, and Dolby Vision Custom, all of which appear to be varying levels of bad — there are a few other things I can change to boost the brightness.

I managed to get a pretty bright scene by making sure that my backlight was at high and the backlight level was at 100. With the Hisense, I usually have these set to those levels all the time because I have it set up in a room with a lot of windows and I need that brightness to overcome the glare. But your options for brightness don’t stop there.

3. If you go down to the Advanced Settings options, you’ll find a setting that dramatically improves the perceived brightness of this episode: Active Contrast. Generally speaking, the results of Active Contrast are mixed since it’s based on what is on screen and isn’t a singular blanket change for all content. But in this case, it had a huge impact on how much brighter the scenes appeared. Overall contrast — that is to say, the difference between whites and blacks — is pretty poor and the overall picture is kind of a washed-out gray, but I at least can make out what is going on.

Bear in mind, I took all of these test photos in the middle of the day when glare and natural light are at their peak, so all of these settings will look a lot better at night when the surroundings are dark.

4. One other feature you might be able to adjust is the gamma, usually found in the advanced calibration settings inside your picture settings. When turned to its lowest numerical setting can have an impact on the overall apparent brightness of scenes, though my televisions had this option grayed out due to the Dolby Vision HDR format taking precedence.

Unfortunately, there's no easy solution

Unfortunately, there is no cure-all for every television make and model that will give you the best viewing experience possible for super-dark scenes. Even comparing the Sony OLED best result against the Hisense best result shows how much variation there is between just two displays. But if you do have the ability to make similar adjustments to the ones I’ve outlined, you might at least be able to enjoy this episode a bit more.

Once you've got your television issues sorted, check out our explanation of how a survival in the episode changes Game of Thrones history. You can aalso check out our House of the Dragon episode guide, which will let you know when to expect the eighth episode.

Jaron Schneider is a freelance contributor at IGN.