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New Arc Raiders Patch Finally Takes Aim at the Il Toro to Make it Feel 'More Like a Weapon of Its Rarity'

Embark Studios has published Arc Raiders update 1.20.0, revealing a somewhat short list of patch notes with two noticeable changes: nerfs for the Il Toro shotgun and energy clips.

Patch notes for today’s update were published on the extraction shooter’s website today. Highlights for the update, which is now live across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X | S, include the new Rawhide outfit and new haircuts, as well as several fixed glitches, but the real game-changers will affect PvP and PvE players across the board.

The Il Toro has prevailed as one of the more popular – and powerful – weapons for PvP players in Arc Raiders. Its close-range damage, coupled with well-timed dodge rolls, feels almost unstoppable in the right hands, with the punch line being that this shotgun has remained a fan-favorite despite only being an uncommon (green) weapon.

The 1.20.0 update finally brings it down a peg, reducing its damage and fire-rate while increasing its base dispersion and reload time. Embark says these changes arrive not only as a response to feedback but also to make the Il Toro feel “more like a weapon of its rarity.”

“We will of course continue to keep a close eye on this to see how it plays out in practice, and make additional adjustments when needed,” Embark said. “Thank you for your feedback and patience!”

Arc Raiders fans have long hoped to see changes to the Il Toro as it took over PvP-focused lobbies, but today’s update also comes with another, slightly more surprising change. Energy clips, which have been collected and sold by Raiders for 1000 coins for months, are now only worth 200 coins. In other words, if you’ve been farming energy ammunition to save up for that next Expedition, you may want to find a new resource to trade.

“Energy Clips have unintentionally become a very profitable craft,” the patch notes say, “so we are reducing the sell price to make the value profitability in line with other crafts.”

Arc Raiders update 1.20.0 arrives ahead of this month’s highly anticipated roadmap addition, Flashpoint. Unlike February’s Shrouded Sky update, we know little about how Flashpoint will make traveling topside more rewarding and dangerous. Highlights for the update, which is expected to drop in the next two weeks, include a new map condition, Arc threat, player project, and a mysterious Scrappy update.

Embark finds itself tackling fan feedback in between major updates but has made headlines for a few different reasons in recent days. While speaking with GamesIndustry.biz, CEO Patrick Söderlund told players that Arc Raiders now contains fewer AI voice lines than it did at launch. He also took that time to praise the Bungie team for their work on their newly released extraction shooter, Marathon. Meanwhile, the company just announced that it has “mutually agreed to part ways” with co-founder and CCO Rob Runesson following allegations that he engaged in sexual misconduct with a popular The Finals streamer.

Finally, you can check out the full patch notes from today's update below.

Arc Raiders Update 1.20.0 Patch Notes

Raiders!

Patch 1.20.0 is rolling out on all platforms, please restart your game to download.

Rawhide Outfit.Two new haircuts.Il Toro Balancing:Dev Note: This is an adjustment many of you requested. We have tuned the Il Toro to address its DPS and effectiveness at range, especially when combined with a choke. We're also making some changes so it performs more like a weapon of its rarity (less versatile at lower upgrade levels and more dependent on upgrades and mods). Most notably, fire-rate and reload time have been reduced, which will make it more important to fully utilize positioning, cover, and timing to defeat your opponents. We will of course continue to keep a close eye on this to see how it plays out in practice, and make additional adjustments when needed. Thank you for your feedback and patience!Pellet Damage reduced from 7.5 to 7Base Fire-Rate reduced from 43 to 38Base Dispersion increased from 4.5 to 6Total Reload Time increased from 4.3s to 5.7sLooping Reload Entry increased from 0.8s to 1sLooping Reload Time increased from 0.5s to 0.7sDamage loss from Falloff increased from 40% to 50%Fixed an issue that would cause persistent audio from destroyed Comets and Fireballs.Fixed an issue where players could get pushed through the wall and stuck on the Dam Controlled Access Zone.Fixed missing collision issues near the east elevator and under pipes on Spaceport.Reduced Energy Clips sell price from 1000 to 200 coins.Dev note: Energy Clips have unintentionally become a very profitable craft, so we are reducing the sell price to make the value profitability in line with other crafts.

See you topside,

Ossen

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth for PS5 Has Hit Its Lowest Price Yet at Amazon

Amazon's Big Spring Sale may be right around the corner on March 25, but already we've spotted some excellent video game deals worth grabbing. The most exciting pick to catch our eye is on Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth for PS5, which has dropped to $24.99 at the retailer (see it here).

Not only is this a massive 64% discount from its original list price of $69.99, but it marks a brand new low for the game at Amazon, according to price tracker camelcamelcamel. What better time to grab it, really?

Save on Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth for PS5

If you haven't added it to your library yet, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is a game we consider to be one of the best video game remakes of all time, so you can feel content knowing you're in for a great time playing it. We had quite a lot of praise for it back when it was released as well.

Our review from IGN's Michael Higham said, "Final Fantasy VII Rebirth impressively builds off of what Remake set in motion, both as a best-in-class action-RPG full of exciting challenges and an awe-inspiring recreation of a world that has meant so much to so many for so long." Soon, Switch 2 and Xbox Series X players will be able to experience this thrilling journey, too, which is also great news.

Save on Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade for Nintendo Switch 2

And speaking of Switch 2, there's another Final Fantasy deal at Amazon right now that caught our eye: Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade for Nintendo Switch 2. At the moment, it's on sale for $29.99, $10 off its list price of $39.99. Unfortunately, it's temporarily out of stock at the moment, but you can still place an order to take advantage of this discount and Amazon will notify you when they have an estimated delivery date.

Hannah Hoolihan is a freelancer who writes with the guides and commerce teams here at IGN.

We Build: LEGO The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time - 'The Final Battle' Set

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has a special place in my heart. I know, I know, not exactly an unexpected take, but it's the game that got me back into the Nintendo 64 ecosystem. I had one at launch but sold it about a year later. It wasn't until the summer of 1999 that I got an N64 again.

It was right after I'd come back from a temporary deployment to Tirana, Albania when I was in the Air Force. Since I'd just spent three months building a expeditionary base in support of humanitarian efforts inside Kosovo, I didn't have the opportunity to spend money on much of anything. When I finally returned to my dorm room at Ramstein AB in Germany, I had surpluses of two extremely dangerous things for a 22 year-old: money and time.

I threw both my excess time and money at Ocarina, immediately setting myself up with an N64 and a spanking new 27" JVC tube TV. I then spent the next two weeks catching up on a game I'd missed, and it was an incredible experience. Yes, the game is one of the greatest ever made, and at the time there really was nothing that could come close. It was reconnecting with a hobby I'd fallen out of in the best possible way.

This fondness for Ocarina, and what it meant to me at the time, had me giddy with excitement when we got that first tease for the LEGO 'Final Battle' set (available now at LEGO Store). And now that I've spent over two and a half hours putting it together, I can say this LEGO The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time set is good. I wish it had just a little more, but I'm being greedy.

Hey! Listen!!

The LEGO The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - The Final Battle set has 1,003 total pieces and three minifigs: Link, looking very much the part of the Ocarina-style minifig from the Deku Tree set, the titular Zelda about whom legends are told, and the Demon King himself, Ganondorf.

Ganondorf's minifig is awesome. He's got a cape, which I always love in minifigures, as well as a shoulder pauldron piece that goes over his neck and under his head. He's awesome, maybe the best of the small group of Nintendo minifigs so far.

One of the action features of this LEGO set is a hideaway Ganondorf who pops up via a clever lever mechanism. It's pretty cool and I'm always a fan of LEGO sets with moving features. It simulates the final battle, when Ganondorf crashes up from the floor before transforming into the much more terrifying Ganon.

My only problem with this set up is when Ganondorf is in his minifigure Gerudo form, the set is pretty empty. So much of what makes it impressive is the giant Ganon build. If you're like me, which I doubt, you don't want to have them both on display. I mean, how could Ganondorf AND Ganon be in the same place at the same time? It's preposterous! I ended up tucking the Ganondorf minifig away and putting the fearsome Ganon in his place, which is a damn shame. Yes, I really love the Ganondorf minifig, but not at the expense of screen accuracy. I'm not a monster.

The Ganon figure itself is really cool. Again, there's a cape, and I do love me a miniature cape. There are also plenty of decorative elements silkscreened onto the bricks. That's something I thought was pretty interesting about this set: there are no decals at all. Everything you see that you'd think is a decal is printed right there on the brick itself. It definitely looks cleaner, but it probably limits their use in MOCs (my own creations, custom builds in other words).

Once completed, Ganon cuts an imposing figure, but his poses feel weirdly limited. Unlike the LEGO Transformers Soundwave I put together a while back, Ganon is much less like an action figure and more like a statue with some limited pose potential. His legs and feet move pretty freely, but his arms are very limited. In fact, his elbows aren't even jointed at all. I wish he had more flexibility, literally.

Ocarina of Time LEGO Easter Eggs

At the onset, I was a little worried this was going to be a straightforward, milquetoast build, but it does have a few hidden secrets. One of the first recognizable things you put together is the Megaton Hammer, which hides inside the ruined castle spire. There's a also a hidden cache of hearts, if Link takes damage and needs some quick healing. They, too, are hidden from view during the build.

It's exactly the sort of thing I love about modern LEGO builds. The LEGO Game Boy set hid a "save" battery in the Link's Awakening cart, and the LEGO Batman: The Animated Series Gotham City diorama spoiled me on what a LEGO set can do when it comes to Easter Eggs.

It's not a knock against the LEGO Ocarina of Time set in any way, but this is probably the LEGO build with the most tiny pieces I've ever put together. The number of 1x and 2x bricks is astonishing, and if you drop one on the floor, depending on your space, you may never see it again. I was fortunate to somehow not have dropped a single piece on the floor during this build, a new personal record.

OK, here's where I have to admit my biggest gripe. And I want to preface it by saying, I completely and totally understand why this little feature isn't part of the set. I also want to preface what I'm about to say with a spoiler warning for an almost 30-year-old game, because I know how important it is for a lot of people not to have things spoiled even if the thing is older than they are.

So, spoilers for the 1998 game Ocarina of Time: In the final cinematic of The Final Battle, Link dispatches Ganon by thrusting the Master Sword into Ganon's forehead. Yes, I get it, that's probably not something LEGO and Nintendo want in their set, but I would love to have had the option, even unofficially, to slot that tiny minifigure Master Sword just over Ganon's pronounced demon-brow for the death blow.

LEGO The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - The Final Battle

The LEGO The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time - The Final Battle set is available now for $129.99 and as of this writing, it's only available at the LEGO Store. If you have a little extra cash and are torn between getting this one and the much more expensive Deku Tree set, I personally recommend saving up for the Deku Tree. But also... that one costs more than twice as much and it's hard to really say whether or not you'll get more than two times the enjoyment out of it. This is a fine Nintendo LEGO set, but the simple Game Boy and the complex Deku Tree sets both set a high bar.

Seth Macy is Senior Social Commerce Producer, and just wants to be your friend. You can find him online @SethFromMaine.

Nvidia's DLSS 5 Is a Slap in the Face to the Art of Video Game Design

So, Nvidia just revealed DLSS 5, its new AI graphics tech that uses generative systems to “enhance” video games with more photo-realistic effects, and I’m not going to worry about mincing my words here: I think it looks shit. Yes, we’ve barely seen a minute of it in action, but if what’s teased is where technology giants think the future of graphics tech in games is going, then I’m afraid I’m out.

The first shot of Nvidia’s DLSS 5 announcement trailer gives us a good look at the impact the technology has on Capcom’s latest, Resident Evil Requiem. It’s already a stunning-looking video game, so I can’t say I ever felt it was in need of enhancements, but lo and behold, as that green bar sweeps across the screen, a yassified Grace Ashcroft is left staring back at us, devoid of any discernible character, as if the light behind her eyes has been switched off by the technology. It’s the sort of smoothed-over face and unrealistic lighting that we’ve become accustomed to seeing in the corners of the app store, or on the advertising banners of websites you’d only look at in incognito mode. It takes a character so carefully crafted by the art team at Capcom, and says “no, we can do that better,” adding a layer of sheen that makes Grace stand out in Requiem’s world, rather than feel a part of it.

Not once on my playthrough of Resident Evil Requiem did I think that it didn’t look photo-realistic enough or that either of its two protagonists was in need of a glow-up, and I have definitely never played a match of EA FC 26 where I wished that Virgil Van Dijk looked less like his real-life counterpart. I play games to experience a crafted piece of artistry, whether the developers are aiming to take me to far-flung fantasy worlds, or recreate real-life with as much fidelity as possible. But DLSS 5 offers none of this to me, instead replacing the paintbrush held in a human hand with an AI slopping a big vat of oil over the canvas. What are we doing here?

AI has no artistic or authorial intent. What it does is read an image as if it were purely zeros and ones and overwrites it according to its training data, theoretically in an attempt to make it look “better.” On Nvidia’s accompanying blog post, the company explains that the model is trained to "end-to-end understand complex scene semantics such as characters, hair, fabric and translucent skin, along with environmental lighting conditions like front-lit, back-lit or overcast – all by analyzing a single frame." The idea, in theory, is to improve the look of characters while also keeping them grounded in the scene they already stand in. The results are just off-putting to my eye, though. Each one of the Hogwarts Legacy characters in the trailer looks like they’re now spotlit from behind the camera in an off-putting way that by no means looks natural. Yes, we now live in a world where game environments are largely dynamically lit, but the developers and technical artists behind those systems still have ultimate control over how they look. They can decide the mood they’re trying to set and will spend much of their time making sure it fits the game’s vision, but Nvidia and the tech behind this AI filter obviously think it knows better.

The technology behind DLSS 5 threatens not only to make games visibly distracting, but also completely alter the emotions of a story.

Art direction is such a huge part of video game design. The worlds and characters that these developers spend years handcrafting are what root us in the experience. I very recently started a replay of Uncharted 4, and it still strikes me in this nearly decade-old game how incredibly nuanced Nathan Drake’s face is during its cutscenes. There are little wrinkles, bashes, and bruises that come and go throughout its story that reflect his place in the world and the struggles he’s going through. I couldn’t imagine ever wanting an AI filter layered on top, that would no doubt smooth over his wrinkles and remove his blemishes, recalibrating Naughty Dog’s flawed hero to better reflect the “perfect” men that are promoted by society and thus flood its training data. But cuts, scuffs, and genetic “imperfections” are the small details that make us connect to characters, and are the intent of the artist who made them.

The technology behind DLSS 5 threatens not only to make games visibly distracting, but also completely alter the emotions of a story if it is embraced by the corporations that employ these artists. I can only imagine the collective sigh let out by the majority of video game developers when this trailer was released, but fear that the people in charge of the money may have let out a little smile instead.

This feels like the dawn of a new era, and a saga that will stretch on far beyond Nvidia’s announcement this week. Already we’re seeing pushback from fans slamming DLSS 5 as “AI-generated slop,” and Bethesda has quickly committed to “further adjusting the lighting and final effect” of Starfield’s implementation of the tech after it showed multiple characters suffering from the same smooth-faced fate in its space RPG. “This will all be under our artists’ control, and totally optional for players,” Bethesda Game Studios added on social media. It may well be completely optional for now on existing games, but I fear for what happens when studios start having to use this tech more in step with the development process.

If we allow this sort of technology to thrive, are we giving the go-ahead for companies to place less importance on curated art direction and instead do the bare minimum and let AI fill in the gaps? I don’t know about you, but I like my art to be made by humans. I want to know if someone decided to light a scene in a certain way or if the small details on a character’s face were sculpted with intention. So I’ll continue to say that visual “upgrades” like this look like shit — it’s not like the tech behind it has any feelings to hurt anyway.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.

Arc Raiders, The Finals Dev Embark Studios Parts Ways With Co-founder Following Misconduct Allegations

Embark Studios, the dev behind Arc Raiders and The Finals has "mutually agreed to part ways" with co-founder and CCO Rob Runesson following public allegations that he engaged in sexual misconduct with a popular The Finals streamer, as well as an external legal investigation that Embark claims "did not substantiate" the allegations.

These allegations, shared by an anonymous person, first arose around a month ago via The Finals streamer Balise who read them on stream. The anonymous allegations were later distributed via Google Doc in various The Finals social communities.

In summary, the anonymous person claims they were in contact with a popular female streamer of The Finals, who allegedly spoke to them frequently about engaging in a romantic and sexual relationship with Runesson. The anonymous accuser says the female streamer reported becoming increasingly uncomfortable with Runesson's requests for sexual conversations and favors as well as concerned about the potential conflict of interest they presented, but felt they could not push back due to becoming financially dependent on Runesson's promotion of her streams. The anonymous accuser claims they eventually went to an Embark community lead to report the behavior, but was not made aware of any action being taken to investigate at that time.

In response, Embark says it has parted ways with Runesson. Here is Embark's statement, in full:

"Our leadership team was recently made aware of allegations against an Embark employee. We take these matters seriously, and as a part of our process for addressing any types of allegations, we immediately hired a law firm to conduct an external investigation. The investigation did not substantiate the allegations, but we found the situation unsustainable and mutually agreed to part ways with Rob."

Runesson was one of the co-founders of Embark, along with fellow former EA DICE employees Magnus Nordin, Stefan Strandberg, Patrick Söderlund, Jenny Huldschiner and Johan Andersson. He has frequently been a public face for the company as its profile has grown through The Finals and Arc Raiders, both through interviews as well as direct community engagement.

These accusations come at the same time as another, similar controversy where multiple male The Finals esports players have been accused of inappropriate behavior toward women in the community. In a Discord statement from one month ago, Embark announced it would be pausing its current outbound esports efforts while it underwent an evaluation and review of its competitive system. "We have reviewed these concerns carefully, including with external legal counsel, and are confident that at this time, our decisions and actions have been appropriate and within the scope of our responsibilities as a publisher and organizer. We take these matters seriously."

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

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World of Warcraft

Sturmgrenadier is more organised, more active, and more structured than most guilds you would come across in WoW. We believe this gives us a distinct advantage in being the best guild we can be for our members, because everyone knows where they stand, and are treated equally. Players with negative attitudes will not be tolerated. That means that there is no epeen measuring, no belittling of other players, and no trolling.

 

EVE

EVE Online is Sturmgrenadier’s longest-played game, with over 16 years of continuous influence throughout New Eden. Traditional hallmarks of our gaming syndicate; organization and leadership, have propelled our in-game history to include participation in many of the defining moments of EvE gameplay.

New World

New World is an upcoming massively multiplayer online role-playing video game by Amazon Game Studios set to release in May 2020. Set in the mid-1600s, players colonize a fictional land modeled after British America in the Atlantic Ocean. Players scavenge resources, craft items, and fight other players.

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