Valorant Introduces Act 2 Battlepass, New Skins and Modes
Riot Games has revealed that Act II of Valorant will begin on August 4, 2020, and will bring with it a new Battlepass, a new agent, a new Glitchpop Skinline, and a free-for-all Deathmatch mode.
Valorant’s Act II Battlepass will feature “unique unlockables, including gun skins, gun buddies, sprays, player cards, player titles, and Radianite Points,” and will cost 1000 VP.
The new agent arriving in Valorant, Killjoy, was revealed last week and will become playable on August 4 as well. She is a “wunderkind” that can use a variety of robots and gadgets to gain the upperhand against her enemies.
[widget path=”global/article/imagegallery” parameters=”albumSlug=valorant-act-ii-screenshots&captions=true”]
The new Glitchpop Skinline “leans into a dystopian future where death has no consequence and comes to life through bright, colorful skins and a playful but deadly attitude.” These new skins will be available for Frenzy, Odin, Bulldog, and Judge. There will also be a melee weapon as well.
Free-for-all Deathmatch will launch in Beta form and will become available on August 5. It will see 10 players battling for dominance, with no abilities, infinite money, and no Spike.
A player will become victorious with 30 kills or if they have the most kills after 6 minutes. All weapons will be available and players will start with heavy armor. When a player dies, they will respawn within 3 seconds and will start with 8 seconds of invulnerability that will allows them to swap weapons if desired. Once they move or fire, the invulnerability goes away.
[ignvideo url=”https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/07/29/valorant-new-agent-reveal-killjoy”]
Health packs will drop after an enemy is killed, an UAV will reveal the current location of enemies every 5 seconds, and Kill Banners will appear for those who can achieve a double kill, triple kill, etc.
[poilib element=”accentDivider”]
Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN who is a Sova main. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
Valorant Act 2 Adds New Agent, Deathmatch, Battle Pass, And More This Week
Developer Riot Games has announced that Valorant‘s second act starts on Tuesday, August 4 for PC. The new season of content introduces a brand-new Agent, battle pass, and more.
Act 2’s headlining feature is Killjoy, the brand-new Agent coming to Valorant, who was recently leaked. A tech specialist, Killjoy has a variety of abilities centered around using drones and turrets to dish out damage. And her ultimate ability, Lockdown, does just as the name suggests: ensnares all enemies caught in the radius.
Act 2 will also bring about a new set of skins called Glitchpop Skyline. The skin set features multiple variants for the Bulldog, Frenzy, Judge, Odin, and dagger, and costs between 2,175 and 4,350 Valorant Points for each individual skin. The entire bundle will set you back 8,700 Valorant Points. You can check out the Glitchpop Skyline set, and the trailer showcase, below.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Season 5 Patch Is Massive, but Will Shrink the Game Size
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s latest patch, containing the update for Season 5, has been deployed. It is, as they always are, massive, but Infinity Ward says that the update will actually shrink the overall install size of the game.
[widget path=”global/article/imagegallery” parameters=”albumSlug=call-of-duty-modern-warfare-and-warzone-season-4-screenshots&captions=true”]
The Season 5 update, available to download now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One ahead of the season launch itself, weighs in at a chunky 36GB on PS4, although requires 90GB of free space on the hard drive to initiate the download. But Modern Warfare’s Production Director, Paul Haile, has said that this won’t just add more space demands on top of what the game currently takes up.
this means the download will be big, but the overall size of the game will actually shrink on your consoles after you download the patch, even though we’re adding a bunch of new content for the season.
— Paul Haile (@Tyrael) August 2, 2020
“The overall size of the game will actually shrink on your consoles after you download the patch, even though we’re adding a bunch of new content for the season,” he says. He also explains that the patch contains not just new content, but optimisation for the existing asset packs.
With Modern Warfare taking up pretty much 200GB at the moment across all platforms, this shrinkage of the install size will come as good news to many players who’d like to have other large games installed on the same drive.
For more on Call of Duty, check out Infinity Ward’s current stance on cheat bans, a listing that appears to be for this year’s unannounced Call of Duty game, and how our obsession with Yegor’s pink tracksuit jacket revealed some fascinating things about game design.
[poilib element=”accentDivider”]
Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer.
New Stephen King Novel Announced, Available To Pre-Order Now
Earlier this year, Stephen King released his latest collection of novellas titled If It Bleeds, a follow-up to his bestselling novel turned HBO series The Outsider. Anyone who follows King knows he’s ridiculously prolific, and now we know his next book will arrive next spring. Later, a new novel in Titan Books’ Hard Case Crime line, will be published on March 2, 2021, and it’s available to pre-order now at Amazon.
Revealed via Entertainment Weekly, Later will be published in paperback and digital. The paperback edition is available at Amazon for $14.95, while the digital edition for Kindle is $10. If you pre-order the paperback edition now, you’ll get it for the lowest price offered until release thanks to Amazon’s pre-order price guarantee. Titan Books will also publish a limited-edition hardcover version of Later, though a publication date hasn’t been announced.
What’s New To Netflix This Week? More Anime, Movies, TV, And Originals
Summer continues to march along, bringing with it more and more content to watch every week. From a Netflix point of view, the next seven days bringing new releases is a bit of a mixed bag, and therefore also a mixed blessing: There isn’t a ton that’s super-exciting, meaning this might be a good time to catch up on your watchlist.
Before you dive completely into things you’ve been meaning to get around to watching, August 6 is bringing the third season of the anime TV series, The Seven Deadly Sins. The upcoming season arc, subtitled “Imperial Wrath of The Gods,” continues the story adapted from the popular Japanese manga of the same name. The show chronicles the fallout from a kingdom taken over by tyrants, inciting a deposed princess “to find a group of evil knights to help take back her realm.”
Connected: The Hidden Science Of Everything is a Netflix newcomer from journalist Latif Nasser, a docuseries about “the surprising and intricate ways in which we are connected to each other, the world and the universe.” Releasing during a time where many of us continue to be stuck inside and quarantined, possibly feeling disconnected, the show’s trailer suggests this is is a somewhat upbeat show that zooms out on humanity to help us feel a little more, well, connected.
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson Is Now Part-Owner Of The XFL
In what almost seems like an episode of HBO’s Ballers, former WWE star and movie mogul Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has swept in, along with a financial group, to buy the XFL and all of its assets.
Johnson teamed up with Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital to buy the league just hours before a planned auction was scheduled to begin. According to a report by Sportico, Johnson and Cardinale paid $15 million, splitting it evenly. Johnson’s business partner, Dany Garcia, will be a stakeholder as well.
BREAKING NEWS: @TheRock is the new part-owner of the XFL.
Read more: https://t.co/2KzxOEUTVz pic.twitter.com/x3u2Q8q9Ik
— Sportico (@Sportico) August 3, 2020
The newest version of Vince McMahon’s Xtreme Football League was announced back in December of 2018 with plans to launch in 2020. Those plans were soon affected by the global COVID-19 pandemic and in April, filed for bankruptcy only after a few games in the rebooted season of the football league that plays during the NFL’s off-season.
Tekken Producer Katsuhiro Harada’s Signature Sunglasses Were Mandated By Capcom
During the Japan Fighting Game Publishers Roundtable that took place recently, Tekken director and producer Katsuhiro Harada revealed that he began wearing his trademark sunglasses after Capcom asked him to become a villain.
“I was actually forced by Capcom to wear these sunglasses, originally,” Harada said during the live stream as reported by Event Hubs.
“They told me, ‘Please wear these sunglasses for four years since you’re the bad guy.’ And now I’m still wearing them 10 years later.”
Sony Hosting New State Of Play This Week, But Don’t Expect PS5 News
Sony has announced its next State of Play stream, which will take place Thursday, August 6, at 1 PM PT / 4 PM ET. Sony says the stream will be 40 minutes in total.
After the PS5 reveal stream in June, updates for Sony’s latest console have been slim. That likely won’t change this week either, as the company has cautioned fans not to expect any big PS5 announcements. That includes updates on PlayStation Studios titles such as Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, and Horizon Forbidden West. This also means PS5 pricing will not be discussed, as both Sony and Microsoft continue holding out on pre-orders.
The event will primarily focus on upcoming PS4 and PlayStation VR games that are still set to launch soon. Although the announcement does mention potential updates for third-party PS5 titles, the wording explicitly states that the core focus of the stream will be current-gen titles and not next-gen ones. Any third-party PS5 title updates will be for games that were previously revealed for the console, and not new announcements.
PS5 Games Can’t Be Played With PS4 Controller, But Here’s What Accessories Are Supported
With the PlayStation 5 just around the corner, Sony has detailed how peripherals will work on the next-gen console. While some existing PS4 peripherals will be usable on PS5, your likely main point of interface–the DualShock 4 controller–will not make the jump.
In a post on the PlayStation Blog, Sony explained that PS5 games will not be compatible with the DualShock, because it feels that the games “should take advantage of the new capabilities and features we’re bringing to the platform, including the features of DualSense wireless controller.”
The PS4 DualShock and licensed third-party controllers will work with supported PS4 games on PS5.