It’s lovely when a game feels so good to play, and then someone comes along to explain exactly how and why that game is so successful at what it’s trying to do. The video above, from the Cool Ghosts YouTube channel, does a very impressive job of explaining what The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild does well in terms of open-world design. The game gets a lot of mileage out of having its own map be an item that’s part of the world itself. This helps Breath of the Wild neatly avoid that open-wor

The massive Evo fighting game tournament takes place at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas this weekend. Street Fighter 5Evo was built on Street Fighter, it’s grown with Street Fighter and Street Fighter is going to be the main event of any Evo. This game can get very aggressive, and one-sided perfect victories are more common than in most fighting games. A great basic, introductory fighting game with as much depth as anything else. Dengeki Bunko Fighting Climax Ignition – A beginner-oriented f

The Overwatch World Cup is kicking off this weekend with the Group Stage qualifier in Shanghai, China. Eight teams are squaring off to make their way toward the Overwatch World Cup finals in November. OVERWATCH WORLD CUP SHANGHAI QUALIFIERS SCHEDULE AND TIMEThe Shanghai Group Stage qualifier is happening this weekend from July 14-16. If you miss the live times, the Overwatch Twitch account is airing replays throughout the weekend. You can get more in-depth Overwatch World Cup coverage on our sis

The developer of Her Story, the breakthrough interactive murder mystery adventure, is teaming up with Annapurna Interactive for his next game, Variety reports. Titled Telling Lies, the successor to Her Story will draw inspiration from Steve McQueen’s erotic drama Shame and Francis Ford Coppola’s thriller The Conversation, according to creator Sam Barlow. Barlow said that he and Annapurna Interactive, the game’s publisher, are trying to secure Hollywood talent for the live-action game. Variety de

The beta arrives next week, less than two months before Destiny 2 launches on consoles on Sept. 6. Anybody who has a beta key can preload the Destiny 2 beta right now on PS4 or Xbox One. The beta will be available first for people who have pre-ordered the game on PS4, starting at 10 a.m. PDT next Tuesday, July 18. Two days afterward, at 10 a.m. on Friday, July 21, the beta will open up to all PS4 and Xbox One owners. The beta will end 35 hours later, at 9 p.m. on Sunday, July 23.

The NA LCS finally returns on Friday after a week long break thanks to Rift Rivals. With an incredibly successful Rift Rivals tournament, in which North America’s three teams managed to completely dismantle Europe, TSM, Cloud9 and Phoenix1 should all three come back with new found invigoration after a slow start in the first five weeks of the LCS. Speaking of Team SoloMid and Phoenix1, their head to head match up will be Saturday’s kick off. The series should provide the perfect chance for us to

Daily Quests of YouTube has a strikingly well reasoned argument for this mode’s rise and fall in a time that seems only like yesterday. Remember that Trials and Alien Hominid both started life as Flash games and found mainstream appeal on consoles (Trials, especially). Daily Quest rightly points to the rise of mobile gaming and in particular the free-to-play model as overwhelming Flash games’ main channel of relevance. In Flash games’ heyday, there was no mobile gaming distribution other than th

Castlevania is atop the gaming mind right now thanks to Friday’s debut of a Netflix animated series (clocking in at a deliciously bingeable length). Here to reintroduce everyone to everything Castlevania — this is a franchise that goes back to the Reagan administration — is Did You Know Gaming, with its own easily binged seven-minute video about the series’ canon, inspiration and references. As a result, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, and its two sequels for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Windows ha

North America’s Team SoloMid have won the first ever NA/EU Rift Rivals tournament securing victory in the Finals against Europe’s Unicorns of Love in a clean 3-0 sweep. The first game of the series was all about TSM as they dominated UOL thoroughly, pulling into a 10k gold lead at just 20 minutes. From there, UOL had no chance to come back, with TSM playing a careful and measured strategy to close out the game. This sweep completes a near perfect tournament from Team SoloMid who only lost one ga

The Polygon Show brings in episode five with severe misunderstandings of emoticons, identifying our D&D alignments, how a fake butthole can determine morality and much more. The Polygon Show will be available for you to listen to every Friday on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher. If you like what you hear, don’t forget to rate and review The Polygon Show on Apple Podcasts. Have any serious or just plain strange questions that you want answered on the show? Email us at polygonshow@polygon.com and we mi

When you think about competitive League of Legends it’s hard to come up with three regions that have a richer international history than the LCK, LPL and LMS. At nearly every tournament these teams meet each other at one point or another and the results are never quite certain. Finally, we will have a chance to see all three regions compete head to head to head at Rift Rivals 2017. The top four teams from each region will attend the tournament as representatives of their regions. This post will

Team SoloMid have won the first game of the 2017 NA/EU Rift Rivals tournament, taking down European champion and Mid-Season Invitational runner-up G2 Esports. In response to that, both teams kicked off Rift Rivals by drafting compositions focused on the late game with TSM picking out Tristana for AD Carry Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng, while G2’s Jesper “Zven” Svenningsen played Kog’Maw. As the game began to get late, both teams seemed dead set on settling their competition through teamfights, which

An animated Assassin’s Creed feature is coming soon from Adi Shankar, the producer of the animated Castlevania series for Netflix that debuts on Friday. Shankar, writing on his Facebook page earlier today, said Ubisoft contacted him about the project and asked him to develop an original story. In addition to the upcoming Castlevania series, Shankar is known for his work on 2012’s Dredd and 2011’s Machine Gun Preacher. Assassin’s Creed last year got a full length theatrical feature. The next Assa

It’s almost unusual just how much director Matt Reeves is willing to talk about The Batman, Warner Bros. and DC’s next stand-alone installment for the character. “What studios are willing to make at the moment is a very, very narrow band of films,” Reeves said. “It’s trying to allow a perspective to come through despite the fact that we’re in this very large studio movie world,” Reeves said. As someone who helped create one of the best Planet of the Apes movies in recent memory and a director of

The sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming will kickstart a new chapter for the Marvel Cinematic Universe after the events of Avengers 4, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige confirmed. After that movie, Feige explained, the sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming will represent a new period for Marvel. Despite Feige using the term “end,” Avengers 4 won’t mark the conclusion of a canonical universe. Captain Marvel, Doctor Strange and Black Panther all seem to be strong bets for the company, and they will likely c

In case you’re out of the loop, in last month’s Batman #24, Batman popped the question to his long time will-they-won’t-they love interest, Catwoman. As you might have guessed, it concerns a city-wide war between the Joker and the Riddler, taking place in Batman’s early years of crime-fighting. Batman #26 has its own mirror scene … Riddler managed to stumble out of the Joker’s hideout unseen, and here it seems that he’s managed to recover from his injuries, albeit with a nasty scar. You’ll hav

Horizon Lunar Colony is Overwatch’s latest map, and it’s pretty horrifying. What happened on Horizon is one of the darkest stories in Overwatch yet, and we still aren’t sure of everything that happened. One day, the simians threw a violent coup, and Winston found himself unwelcome on Horizon. Some day, we’ll have to go back.”The Horizon Lunar Colony has been foreshadowed for a while. Horizon is currently ruled by a gang of furious, exhilarated apes as the station slowly crumbles around them.

If Baby Driver felt like a feature-length, slightly more filled out version of a music video, that’s because it is. The entire sequence of events in the video is dictated by the song, not too unlike how Wright uses music in Baby Driver. Wright told Entertainment Weekly that it was around the time of directing “Blue Song” that he got the inspiration for Baby Driver. While Wright’s extension of “Blue Song” into Baby Driver is an interesting origin story, he’s not the only director to find some ins

From cries of betrayal when Final Fantasy 7 jumped ship to PlayStation to frustration over the story changes Final Fantasy 15 underwent during its tortuous 10-year development process, there’s simply no such thing as an easy birth when it comes to Square Enix’s biggest franchise. Amidst this turmoil and the uncertainty surrounding the online-only Final Fantasy 11, fans could at least rest assured that the next numbered Final Fantasy would be a mature, grounded work created by some of the most ta

Fire Emblem Warriors won’t only have swordsmen to play around with, and the game’s latest trailer gives us our first taste of how its diverse roster plays. Several heroes from Fire Emblem Awakening, like axe-wielder Lissa and black mage Robin, make their first appearance, diversifying the gameplay. The Nintendo 3DS game’s roster has a large presence in Fire Emblem Warriors, reportedly due to the size and scope of its character classes. Unlike previous Fire Emblem games, it’s a real-time, hack-an