Month: December 2020

I was quite a young girl when I first got interested in video games. It was something of an awkward transition. At the time, games were largely considered “boy toys,” so moving from typical “girly” things like princess dolls and My Little Ponies into gaming was jarring at times, especially since not a lot of games catered to the cute, colorful things I’d been enjoying at playtime to that point. Sure, I loved the fantasy worlds of Mario and Sonic, but I also wished there was a fun gaming playspace for me that echoed the fluffy-cats-and-rainbow-unicorns aesthetic of my Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers.

Had my third-grade self seen Calico, an open-world animal cafe and social interaction game, she would have lost her mind. Calico embraces an aesthetic and theme that is shamelessly, unabashedly girly in the best ways–a world of happy magical girls living in pastel-colored lands with fluffy, cotton-candy trees where all kinds of lovable animals roam freely. But while Calico’s concept and visuals are a delight, the simplistic, bug-ridden gameplay dragged me kicking and screaming out of the childhood fantasy world I so wanted to exist in.

Calico starts off with your created player character inheriting a cat cafe in a faraway world where magic is very real and a part of everyday living. Your job is to fill your little cafe with animals, decorations, and cute kitty-themed pastries while exploring the world and helping your new friends with various errands. It’s a very laid-back, play-as-you-please experience in the vein of other life-sim games, but with an air of play and fairy magic baked in: You can buy potions with funny effects to use on yourself and your animal friends, like shrinking down to mini-size to cook, zooming around while riding on giant red pandas and bunnies, decorating your house with clouds, flowers, and cat paws, and collecting basically any animal in the game (that isn’t already someone else’s pet) to be a part of your cafe or your traveling posse.

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Patty Jenkins, the director of both Wonder Woman and Wonder Woman 1984, has revealed that Warner Bros. made her change the ending of the original film.

IGN’s Joshua Yehl spoke to Jenkins during Wonder Woman 1984’s press tour and asked her if the decision to make this new film’s finale more “personal and intimate” as opposed to the original’s “epic battle with lots of visual effects” was a conscious choice.

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“The original end of the first movie was also smaller but the studio made me change it at the last minute,” Jenkins explained. “And so, that’s always been a little bit of a bummer that that’s the one thing people talk about because I agreed, and I told the studio we didn’t have time to do it, but it was what it was and I ended up loving it, but that was not the original ending of the movie.

“This time around, you know what I loved about it? I love that it has both at the end. We had visual effects… a big battle, which I just dug into and had such a blast executing, which I felt so satisfied with. But ultimately the end of the movie is much more pared down. That was really, really fun. No spoilers, there’s all kinds of stuff going on, but, yeah, it was really fun to shape it differently.”

Wonder Woman 1984 will be released on December 25 in theaters and on HBO Max and is the first of Warner Bros. films for the next year that will release day-and-date in theaters and on the streaming service.

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In our Wonder Woman 1984 review, we said it “is a film with a heart full of hope and love; a nostalgic look back to a beloved time that provides escapism from an exceptionally difficult year.”

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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. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

It’s pretty amazing how fast you can fill up a PC, PS5, or Xbox Series X/S hard drive. Here are games with massive file sizes clogging up our machines.

Many of the stories featuring Geralt of Rivia are, at their core, mystery stories with a medieval fantasy twist. The first season of the show operated primarily on a mixed-timelines premise that was confusing at times and definitely didn’t work for everyone, but season 2 seems to be digging into that mystery premise based on a page of the first episode’s script posted by Netflix to Twitter this week.

The story starts with a merchant and his family traveling alone by carriage, finding themselves looking for lodgings in an empty town. The merchant turns his back for a second and then back around to find his wife missing, his daughter covered in blood.

Geralt narrates over it. “You dogged my every footstep. But struck down others I passed on my way. Why?” he begins. “I was meant to end up alone, wasn’t I? So I would finally begin to be afraid?”

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CD Projekt Red has released another hotfix patch for Cyberpunk 2077–it closely follows on the heels of Patch 1.05, which addressed numerous glitches that occur in the opening hours of the main campaign. This new hotfix, Patch 1.06, doesn’t fix as much, but it addresses the noteworthy save file corruption glitch.

Patch 1.06 fixes the glitch that caused your save file to become corrupted if it exceeded a certain limit–something that could be done if you were holding onto too many items in your inventory. The patch is live across Xbox One, PS4, and PC.

Unfortunately, the patch cannot recover what has been lost. If you’ve already fallen victim to the save file glitch, your save will still be corrupted. Patch 1.06 simply prevents the bug from ever occurring again. You can see the full breakdown of what Patch 1.06 does in the full patch notes, which are listed below.

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With 2020 just about wrapped up, a new and thrilling year of games is approaching fast. Compared to 2020, 2021 is shaping up to be an even more exciting year, as Sony and Microsoft–with their successful launches behind them–will undoubtedly have to prove the worth of their new-generation consoles. Games are everything for a new console’s success, so the quality of the output delivered will be key this year. And let’s not forget Nintendo; the tenured company certainly has a lot to deal with this year, maintaining the momentum of its success in the wake of PS5 and Xbox Series X|S entering the market.

Fortunately, there’s quite a promising schedule ahead in the first six months of 2021, and that’s likely to expand with exciting new games as we get more confirmation from publishers and developers around what’s coming. While the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impose challenges upon the games industry at large, there still seems to be no shortage of thrilling new games to play in the new year.

Below we’ve pinpointed the release dates for 2021’s biggest games in tables for your reference, which include big games like Halo Infinite, Hitman 3, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Persona 5: Strikers, and more. We’ve not listed every game under the sun, but the most notable ones that are worth keeping an eye on. At the very bottom, you’ll also notice a table containing other massive games that are without release dates, which includes a slew of new-generation and old-generation games. We’ll likely hear more details about when these are launching in the months ahead, so be sure to check back often as we update this feature with the latest confirmed dates.

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