343 Industries picks up the pace with Halo Infinite, BTS remakes Idol in Garena Free Fire, and players use Margit’s Shackle to find secret passages.
First of all, congratulations on making it to the weekend. I’m sure that you had a very rough week. You probably slept the day away, but don’t worry because these news roundups are here to get you back up to speed. Today, we heard about how the people over at 343 Industries plan to pick up their socks with Halo Infinite, BTS remade its classic Idol music video in Garena Free Fire, and somebody figured out that you can use Margit’s Shackle to find hidden walls in Elden Ring. These are just our top stories and so read on for the rest.
Halo Infinite got off to a great start when it launched last year, but the developer behind the game, 343 Industries, dropped the ball when it came to releasing new content, pushing many players away. There however is a light at the end of the tunnel. Community Director Brian Jarrard noted on Reddit that "we're certainly not happy to be unable to meet player and community expectations. It's a difficult situation that's going to take the team time to work through. Right now, the focus is on Season 2 and we'll have more to share on that in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, a lot of production planning, costing, planning, hiring, etc. is all happening which doesn't really lend to detailed regular updates."
Someone going by the name of Sultim-t just added ray tracing support to the original Doom and the result is pretty spectacular. You need to have a graphics card made by Nvidia in order to use the mod, so not everyone can enjoy this feature for the moment, but things might change in the future. In any case, the game looks very different with ray tracing enabled. Remember those demons that kind of just poke around until you approach them? Now they’re shrouded in terrifying shadows.
Players noticed a couple of weeks ago that if you hit a wall enough times in Elden Ring, you might just discover a secret passage. The latest development is that you can use Margit’s Shackle to reveal these by simply slamming it onto the ground. The news comes from a Reddit user going by NateThePunk2 who apparently made the discovery by accident. People have been speculating as to why Margit’s Shackle does this, coming to the conclusion that it produces a kind of invisible, non-damaging area of effect attack.
There have already been several big business deals this year including the acquisition of Bungie by Sony. We found out earlier today that even despite this merger, Sony has no plans of slowing down. According to President and Chief Executive Officer at Sony Interactive Entertainment Jim Ryan, "we’re growing our studios organically and we’re growing through acquisition. We acquired five studios during the course of 2021. We’re in discussions with Bungie and we have more planned. This is getting us into a virtuous cycle where success begets success.”
BTS recently remade their classic music video Idol using only game assets in Garena Free Fire. Idol debuted at number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 list when it came out in 2018. The song ranked first in sales for the week, totaling over 43,000 downloads and 24 million streams in the United States. This comes in the context of the ongoing collaboration between BTS and Garena Free Fire which is being called Gen FF. The partnership has already brought custom skins, emotes, and even a couple of new game modes to Garena Free Fire.
Justin is a news editor at TheGamer. He specializes in labor relations, intellectual property law, and game development. You can find his work in EGM, Vice, Unwinnable, Heterotopias, and more.
