War Thunder players take a break from leaking classified information to review bomb their beloved game for adding an auction house - Related to auction, break, sees, had, review

Apex Legends season 24 sees Arsenals arrive and Assault Class Legends take center stage

Apex Legends has presented Takeover, the 24th season of Respawn's battle royale, which introduces a new way to grab weapons called Arsenals. Additionally, Assault Class Legends take center stage with several perk changes, while Ash and Ballistic gain strong buffs. POIs will now be visible from the drop ship so you'll be able to see exactly where you're headed. Finally, there's new ranked challenges and the introduction of Mythic weapons - in short, there's a lot to sink your teeth into.

Arsenals will be available in all game modes across Apex Legends from the start of the season, as a new way of obtaining weapons once you land from the drop ship. They'll be across the map near POIs, be visible from the moment you exit the drop ship and they'll have map icons as well as HUD elements.

In a nutshell, Arsenals are small weapon caches that you can visit to change the weapons in your inventory or those you pick up at the beginning of a match, somewhat reducing the chaotic scramble to grab anything before you get shot. Arsenal locations are fixed but the weapons stored in them will be randomised. In a recent press event attended by Eurogamer, we learned that this was designed in part to give players more effective chances for getting the weapons they want and are more comfortable with.

Speaking of weapons, Mythic guns are being added that will serve as the best version of weapons already available in-game, with their own twists on the classics. These weapons will be inspired by individual Legends, and the Season 24 addition is the Mythic R-301 inspired by Wraith. Complete with a new void-inspired look, the Mythic version comes with new animations you can equip on other R-301 skins you own as well.

In addition, every weapon this season has been buffed and most of them have received a damage increase as well as an alteration on their headshot multiplier. The Havoc, for example, is staying in the care package for this season and, while the Kraber remains a one-shot headshot weapon for most armor pieces it will become more than one-shot when faced with the new red helmet armor piece.

White, blue and purple helmets will be fully removed for Takeover to make the headshow damage value consistent for each weapon; it will no longer be dictated by the helmet a target wears. However, the only way you can get one will be to grab the red mythic grade helmet that will only show in late game care packages and in mythic bins. Once equipped, this helmet will turn the rest of your armor red. This is the only way to get this level of armor in Season 24 and armor evolution for every player for white, blue and purple armor pieces will be capped at level three. To help you stay alive longer with these changes, Shield Cells, Med Kits and Syringes are now faster to use.

Assault Class Legends have been buffed with new perks for Takeover. In addition to being able to access red supply bins and carry one extra ammo per stack, the Combat Reserve perk means they'll also have two extra ordinance slots specifically for grenades. Battle Surge is gained after an Assault Legend cracks an enemy shield - once active, they'll get a temporary speed boost, faster reload speed, and highlight the cracked target for the rest of the team. The Stowed Reload perk will auto-reload any stowed weapon after two seconds.

Ash and Ballistic in particular have seen more buffs for this season. Ash's ultimate will further and you can move through it faster with more effective end point detection, the tether will snare from its own location rather than at the enemy target's location. Her passive has changed, and she now has an omni-directional dash ability, Predator's Pursuit. Both Ash's ultimate and passive can be upgraded through the upgrade tree to have two charges. She'll still be able to see Deathboxes on the mini-map too.

Ballistic's sling upgrade and dual tactical charge has now been integrated with his base kit, plus it can now carry crate weapons with unlimited ammunition when active. His upgrade that used to allow extra charges has been replaced with an upgrade that doubles his tactical charges, meaning at tier three Ballistic can carry four charges of his Whistler. His Tempest also now has a team movement speed bonus added to it too.

However, Support Class Legends have had their heal expert perk removed for the upcoming season to focus them more on reviving.

Road to Ranked is a fresh way for new players to get into Apex Legends' ranked mode. The previous account requirements for joining ranked has been removed and replaced with a set of challenges designed for you to prove you can make it in ranked modes. Road to ranked challenges are for you to show you're a good enough teamplayer and have the skills, as well as experience, to succeed in ranked mode. However, if you're already a ranked player from previous seasons then you won't need to participate in these challenges - these are just for new players trying to get into ranked.

Your starting skill value will be influenced by your performance in non-ranked modes across Apex and there will be more transparency in displays for the lobby as well as improvements made to the end of match summary screen, Respawn has mentioned. Account progression has a dedicated home and access away from the main ranked lobby for Takeover. Finally, weapon mastery trials have changed, and the system itself has been simplified with some of the more intense and complicated challenges being removed.

Apex Legends Takeover will see different creators from the Apex community helping to create and curate their own challenge and rewards all season. As well as a collection of new takeovers and limited-time modes. Some to look forward to are a second change mechanic and an OG-inspired loot pool takeover.

Alongside the creator modes and challenges, starting at season launch Rampart Care Packages will appear in all PUBS modes for the first three weeks of the season. Within these care packages are Rampart-designed weapon variants and this time they'll be dropping with three mythic R-301 weapons. Each variant has its own unique perks, for example, the red vermillion has increased critical hit damage and triggers thermite on knocked enemies.

There are more creator modes, challenges, events and rewards coming in Season 24.

Apex Legends Takeover launches on Tuesday, 11th February 2025 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch.

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War Thunder players take a break from leaking classified information to review bomb their beloved game for adding an auction house

Gaijin Entertainment's War Thunder is usually in the news for one repeated reason: The people who play this military simulator take it incredibly seriously, and have a habit of leaking classified information onto the game's forums in an effort to win Internet arguments. But when they're not targeting each other, the favourite target of the playerbase is developer Gaijin and in various ways the game's extreme F2P grind: And they have a new focal point.

War Thunder introduced a new auction system on February 3 that, at the moment, allows players to bid on vehicle cosmetics with Gaijin Coin, an in-game currency bought with real-world money. The sense of putting limited time windows on premium currency sales, and the obvious FOMO of mixing that with time-limited items, is where the problems begin.

The feature is currently in beta and is intended for players to be able to sell each other their own cosmetics, though gaijin retains an element of control over what's selected. But the players don't think things are going to end there, and the negative reactions to the auction house centre on a single suspicion: Gaijin is going to use this to sell actual vehicles, the game's holy grail.

To be clear, Gaijin has neither done this nor indicated any plans to do so. But the players are convinced, and the most devoted are in uproar across the game's forums, subreddit and social media, as well as executing something of a small-scale review bombing campaign. The downward spike on Steam reviews consists of the same complaint: "The newly implemented auction system is predatory and one of the most greedy decisions Gaijin has ever made," says Galaxian, who has 2,700 hours in War Thunder.

It's unclear just why players are so distrustful of Gaijin's motivations. The auctions are at the moment limited to player-created content, and allow the community at large to bid Gaijin Coin, the premium currency, to try and win a given item (the launch set are cosmetics related to the Lunar New Year). The player with the largest bid by the time the auction closes wins, and the system also allows for auctioning multiple items, with all players who make the highest bids receiving the items.

"Give it a year and they'll have ," says AscendMoros on the game's subreddit." This enterprise has proven they will go as far as they can. So they'll start with skins, then a premium vehicle here and there that you can buy in game for GE or someshit. Then a unique vehicle will roll up. This shit needs to stop here. Cause if it doesn't it won't ever stop."

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There are countless other comments on similar lines, and the announcement post on the game's official forum is now at 754 replies and counting. Gaijin has responded to the unrest with this statement:

"We released the Auction with the intention of making it an experimental feature, aimed to support community content creators. The items that will be offered for sale will be made by content creators and the authors of these items will get a percentage from the total sales as a reward.

"We may add other cosmetic items besides the ones currently available during the Auction testing period. The purpose of the Auction is to provide an opportunity to purchase cosmetic items of interest without having to rely on luck, as well as to give authors the opportunity to receive a reward that corresponds to the demand for the items they create."

That line about maybe adding other cosmetic items, even though it's obvious, means this is continuing to run for the moment. The War Thunderers are convinced that this system which, right now, is entirely community focused is going to be the Trojan horse for the kind of excessive monetisation seen in something like World of Tanks. I'm not sure what if anything Gaijin can do to reassure them otherwise and the flipside, of course, is that the players may well turn out to be right.

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Marvel Rivals' destructible environment was apparently the 'first major technical challenge' the devs had to overcome

One of Marvel Rivals' most distinctive capabilities (apart from all the superheroes running around) is the destructible terrain. If you press B, the map in front of you will turn grey, except for everything that you can destroy, which will turn yellow. Give it a try for yourself and you'll see just how much is breakable in this game.

In various places across the maps, you'll be able to find breakable areas that can lead to the enemy backlines or expose a flank. Next to the first point on Tokyo 2099: Shin Shibuya, there's a breakable wall that will expose one of the defending team's paths back to the point. If you break it around head height and then just hold that line of sight, you can kill players before they even make it back to the first point, and usually, they never see it coming.

But taking advantage of the breakable terrain doesn't just make strategic sense; it's also just worth it for the sake of making use of the dev's hard work. The lead technical designer, Ruan Weikang, explained in an interview with Unreal Engine how the destructive environments presented the developers with some pretty significant issues.

First off, the developers had to make sure the rubble fell in distinct motion patterns . "Whether it's Hulk's devastating punches, Punisher's sustained turret fire, or Storm's sweeping tornados, debris exhibits carefully crafted motion patterns that reinforce each hero's identity," Weikang says. It may not be obvious at first, but Magik's blade and Punnisher's gunfire will break the terrain in slightly different ways.

Then there's the performance cost of having all this large-scale destruction. Initially, I found that Marvel Rivals performed pretty badly, whether I came across harsh FPS spikes, which at times turned my game into a PowerPoint presentation, or it just took an age for the map to load each game. While this has changed for the advanced since launch, it was apparently in an even worse condition beforehand.

"Implementing large-scale environmental destruction while maintaining competitive performance standards presented our greatest technical challenge," Weikang says. "Fragment count emerged as the critical performance factor. To meet both gameplay and visual requirements, we implemented a two-tiered fragmentation system for static structures (this turns big rubble into little rubble). Additionally, post-fragmentation scenes experienced dramatic increases in polygon count, significantly impacting GPU rendering loads and memory utilization."

To optimise this, the developers had to implement a couple of fundamental improvements. These include hiding the transition from primary to secondary fragments so players' GPUs don't explode and reducing the fragment polygon counts by adding native unsupported LOD functionality to Geometry Collections (assets that can break apart using the fracture mode). However difficult all of this may seem, the biggest obstacle turned out to be how the rubble impacted the lighting in Marvel Rivals.

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"Implementing extensive environmental destruction presented our first major technical challenge: selecting an appropriate global illumination solution," lead technical designer Weikang says. "Traditional baking approaches proved inadequate for environments dominated by dynamic objects and frequent lighting changes."

It turns out that Lumen's software-based ray tracing couldn't quite get the lighting right at first for the destroyed areas of the map. There would be light leakage in the wrong places or just static flat lighting next to the rubble. Now, this isn't a game-breaking issue, but it does look funky and ruins the pretty aesthetic of the maps.

It was only until the team took a hybrid approach to Geometry Collections, "attaching Static Meshes (SM) capable of distance field generation to each fragment," Weikang says. "During the fragmentation process, we convert building collision geometry to SM components and process them simultaneously."

This may sound complicated, but it's essentially just a way to help convince UE5 that the destroyed buildings are consistent material properties, not just confusing rubble. All of this means that when you break a wall, you'll get a nice little shadow in the correct areas. It may not be much, but it sure is honest work.

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