Crystal Dynamics has announced that it will be removing Hero's Catalysts and Fragment Extractors from the Marvel's Avengers in-game marketplace. The game's official Twitter account laid out the reasoning.

"We apologize for not responding sooner to your concerns about the addition of paid consumables in the Marketplace,” said the statement. “We introduced them as an option for an evolving player base, and did not see them as pay-to-win since they don’t offer power directly.”

The Hero Catalysts and Fragment Extractors were consumable items that boosted XP for characters and speed up the usual grind in the game. The items can still be earned as normal gameplay rewards and those already earned will still be usable.

We have decided that by the end of today we will remove Hero’s Catalysts and Fragment Extractors for purchase. pic.twitter.com/8am9nSstP2

— Marvel's Avengers (@PlayAvengers) November 2, 2021

Marvel's Avengers was added to Xbox Game Pass on September 30 for console, cloud, and PC. This news was received favorably given its potential to attract new players, but the mood quickly soured. The decision to include these consumables into the in-game marketplace last month was met with backlash.

Fans noted that the game's website said any content that was purchasable in the game with real-world money would be limited to cosmetics only. Fans thought that the inclusion of purchasable XP boosts directly contradicted the statement.

As for the future of Marvel's Avengers, fans can look forward to the PlayStation exclusive Spider-Man DLC, which will have its own story and cutscenes.

George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @yinyangfooey

In the last month or so, World of Warcraft has been working on a number of small changes to older parts of the game, removing or editing content that, well, hasn't aged all that well.

Some of this, Blizzard explicitly addressed, such as its removals of references to real-life employees who have departed the company in the wake of a lawsuit alleging harassment, discrimination, and a toxic work environment. Other changes are more subtle, though, like the toning down of some in-game paintings and the removal of a number of "joke" lines that players could deliver using a chat command. Much of the removed content could be considered unnecessarily sexual compared to the tone of the rest of the game, or was explicitly or implicitly degrading toward women.

These changes have been steadily rolled out on World of Warcraft's Public Test Realm, but are preparing to go live in an upcoming game patch. As websites have datamined, discovered, and reported on these changes, the community's reaction has been mixed, a reaction that was acknowledged in a recent VentureBeat interview with game director Ion Hazzikostas.

While many welcomed the removal of inappropriate content, he noted, others were confused or even frustrated. Why was Activision-Blizzard removing years-old joke lines instead of spending its energy on more pressing matters, like fixing its company culture or dealing with the lawsuit?

In the interview, Hazzikostas argued that the World of Warcraft team is doing its part of the whole to improve the company's work culture with the tools in front of them:

"On the other end there are those who have expressed concern that we’re almost doing this as a smokescreen,": he said. "Rather than actually tackling the hard issues, we’re just changing some words in a game. This isn’t an 'or.' It’s an 'and.' We understand that we’re not fixing systemic injustice by changing an emote in World of Warcraft. But why not do that while we’re also working on larger cultural unity and diversity and safety issues and more?

"As we’re improving our processes for evaluating managers, for sharing feedback with the team; as we’re improving our recruiting and hiring to build a more diverse team, let’s also turn that same eye on our game. That’s one thing that may be more visible in the short term. But in the long term we understand that what we’re going to be judged for as a team, as a company, and as a game is far beyond that. That work is still underway."

What does that work entail, then, exactly? Hazzikostas says that the system for changing game content was born in the wake of the lawsuit from a need for individual teams to assess where they, specifically, could be better.

"One thing that came up is that there are pieces of our game that, over the course of 17-plus years now, that were not necessarily the products of a diverse or inclusive range of voices, that did not necessarily reflect the perspective of the current team and of many of our players. There are things that people on our team were not proud to have in our game. These are many things that people, over the years, have pointed out in the community, but we didn’t necessarily listen in the way we should have at the time."

So they set up an internal process for the World of Warcraft team to flag pieces of the game for review, such as old quests or specific dialogue lines. For instance, jokes and references "made a dozen years ago" mocking male blood elves for being feminine. "That doesn’t sit right in 2021," Hazzikostas said.

The content submitted is then reviewed by a group that "reflects the diversity of our team today" on the WoW team to determine whether it should be kept or changed.

"We made decisions on whether to leave some things standing, because they’re borderline, but we’re not looking to reinvent everything, turn over every single stone and rewrite 17 years of WoW," Hazzikostas continued. "It might be a little bit juvenile. It might be off-color. But this isn’t something that is really making our game feel less welcoming for people, which is what we’re aiming to change. Those things we left. Others were removed, others were rewritten or changed accordingly."

Aside from content changes, Hazzikostas reassured that the WoW team is also working to tackle in-game toxicity by improving machine learning to catch bad behavior in-game. Previously, WoW has relied heavily on manual reporting, a system that works well enough in big cities when someone is spamming a general chat, but not as well in small parties or for harassment over messages sent to individuals.

Finally, Hazzikostas stressed how and why the World of Warcraft team is trying to improve diversity in its new hires.

"We can’t just open up a position, take the first couple dozen resumes, look through them, and pick someone out of that pile, because we may just get a couple dozen white male resumes," he said. "…This is not about any preferential decisions in the hiring process itself. It’s about working harder to understand how our job descriptions, the way we’re sourcing candidates, the way referrals work, and all the rest are filtering out qualified candidates of other backgrounds before they even make it to us. And then once we’re interviewing people, we’re going to pick the best person for the job at the time, but doing that extra work up front, we have found and continue and find, leads to a more diverse team that is more reflective of the country that we’re in and the player base that plays our game globally."

Hazzikostas's discussion occurred prior to today's Activision-Blizzard quarterly earnings call, during which former Blizzard co-lead Jen Oneal stepped down from her position after only three months, leaving Mike Ybarra as sole leader of Blizzard. Both Ybarra and Oneal were appointed to their positions following the departure of former president J Allen Brack in the wake of the lawsuit.

Activision-Blizzard has pushed a number of company-wide changes since the lawsuit, such as an end to forced arbitration and a massive CEO pay cut, but an attempt at a settlement unearthed a potential conflict of interest on Activision-Blizzard's part.

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

Is id Software moving onto Quake after Doom? Job postings suggest that might be the case, and we discuss what we'd like to see out of what would be Xbox's next major exclusive first-person shooter. Plus: Miranda and Ryan tell you about their visit to 343 Industries to play Halo Infinite, Sega and Microsoft forge a new partnership, and more!

Subscribe on any of your favorite podcast feeds, to our new YouTube channel, or grab an MP3 download of this week's episode. For more awesome content, check out our Halo Infinite new multiplayer map reveal below:

Oh, and you can be featured on Unlocked by tweeting us a video Loot Box question! Tweet your question and tag Ryan at @DMC_Ryan!

For more next-gen coverage, make sure to check out our Xbox Series X review, our Xbox Series S review, and our PS5 review.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

Actor Jason Momoa announced Monday that he has tested positive for COVID-19. Momoa shared the news on Instagram Monday (which was later shared via a fan TikTok, reported by ), saying he'd been "hit with COVID" sometime after the in-person theatrical premiere of Dune, in which Momoa plays House Atreides' swordmaster Duncan Idaho.

"There's a lot of people I met in England, so…I got a lot of aloha from people, but who knows?" Momoa said. "But either way, I'm doing fine. Thank you for all your concerns and love."

Momoa says he's now "camped out" in his house. Another Instagram video shows Momoa in good spirits at home hanging out with his friend Erik Ellington, a pro skateboarder.

England's COVID prevalence has risen to its highest count since the beginning of the year according to Britain's Office for National Statistics, Reuters reported late last month. 1 in 55 British residents are reportedly experiencing some symptoms of COVID.

Momoa had been filming Aquaman 2 at Warner Bros.' Leavesden Studios in Hertfordshire, England. The last significant update on the film came via DC FanDome earlier this year, when DC showed off Momoa's new Aquaman suit.

Joseph Knoop is a writer/producer/desert power enthusiast for IGN.

When Darkest Dungeon was first released in early access in 2015, it was a minor miracle. The tension-filled roguelike-ish design, the stress system on top of a Lovecraftian horror setting, and especially the sound, amazingly atmospheric narrator, and music combined to create an instant classic of a tactical role-playing game that was then refined into an outstanding and distinctive final version a year later. It’s a tough act to follow, but Red Hook Games has given it a worthy shot with the early access launch of Darkest Dungeon 2. The good news is that this sequel has a different enough structure and technical improvements that it more than justifies its existence, taking the original formula into surprisingly new directions instead of simple additions we often see in follow ups. The less good news is that there are some pretty significant tweaks that seem necessary before it can really hold a torch to the original.

Aside from the switch to animated 3D graphics that closely match the gritty style of the original’s 2D paper doll characters, there are two massive changes to Darkest Dungeon 2: the campaign is significantly smaller in scope, and character relationships are now the center of the stress system instead of individual mentality. Both take the experience in fascinating, if not always good, new directions.

Darkest Dungeon 2 takes place in a single wagon as it travels through a handful of hostile territories before landing at the occasional inn to regroup. Instead of hundreds of hours spent building up a town and juggling dozens of heroes as in Darkest Dungeon 1, a campaign takes place over the course of five or six hours, with five total campaigns promised in the interface (only one is available in the initial Early Access release).

The wagon proceeds through three settings that you choose, and moves to different nodes within each, functioning fairly similarly to rooms within a dungeon. Upgrades to characters come either at the inn every so often or by choosing to take the wagon to hospitals or shops in the traveling sections. Permanent upgrades don't come from building infrastructure, but unlocking items and characters on a progress bar at the end of each run.

There are several side effects of this. The biggest is that it shrinks the story, both of the campaign directly and the one that you can tell yourself over the course of a run. Instead of being a larger strategic management challenge, it's only about the four people who happen to be in the wagon at a given time. This makes it a lot easier to jump in and out of a run, but I personally miss the feeling of managing a large team of characters in a tactics game, like the original Darkest Dungeon, XCOM, Battletech, or even something like Football Manager. There's no longer-term emergent storytelling happening in Darkest Dungeon 2, and this makes it overall less exciting, even if it is more manageable.

On the other hand, a major knock-on effect of the smaller campaign focus is that Darkest Dungeon 2's characters feel like distinct individuals instead of classes. In the first Darkest Dungeon, Dismas was a name given to one of several members of the Highwayman class you'd be likely to recruit. In Darkest Dungeon 2, Dismas is the name of the singular Highwayman you use in every run and that you’ll develop over every campaign by unlocking skills; at the same time you’ll see each character's backstory in flashbacks that occasionally have little combat puzzles in them. It all makes characters feel like people instead of merely cogs in a machine; for example, poisoning Audrey the Grave Robber's rich abusive husband is surprisingly satisfying, as is customizing her new skills to make her into a stealth character.

Another way that Darkest Dungeon 2 diverges from its predecessor is by having its characters become friends or enemies across the course of a run. Since Fire Emblem: Awakening, tactical RPGs with character relationships have become common, and it's almost always either amazing or at least fun background color, like in XCOM 2: War of the Chosen… except for here, where it threatens to derail everything.

In Darkest Dungeon 2, health and sanity meters – the big innovation from Darkest Dungeon 1 – still exist, but each character also has a relationship bar with everyone else in the party. When those meters fill up with either positive or negative emotion, that triggers a friendship or a rivalry of a certain kind, like Hopeful or Hateful, that can trigger buffs or debuffs or even give certain extra combat actions. (There's also "Amorous," for those of us who are excited to know that their Darkest Dungeon characters are smooching.)

Stress also works a bit differently in that, instead of causing an individual to develop a negative reaction, a full stress bar causes a meltdown which damage the relationships in a group. The net effect is that you're managing your party's overall happiness with one another, and if that starts falling apart with one person, there's a cascading effect of negative feelings. On paper, this seems like a good idea: what Darkest Dungeon 1 did for the individual effects of stress turning people paranoid or cowardly, Darkest Dungeon 2 does for small group dynamics. Unfortunately, there are a couple major issues with it.

The first issue is conceptual. One of the strengths of Darkest Dungeon 1 was the simplicity of its system: there's a single stress bar and having it fill in probably makes that character useless. In Darkest Dungeon 2, a four-person party means four individual stress and health bars, and a total of six different relationships within the party. Fracturing that central mechanic across several different meters makes it feel harder to track and less important when it does break down.

This combines with the other major issue with the relationship system in the early access version: it's just not especially well-balanced right now. If you want to manage your party's stress level, you pretty much have to upgrade one of a few skills like the Plague Doctor's "Ounce of Prevention" skill at the start of a run and use it regularly. Alternately, if you don't want to worry about stress, you can get by without even bothering to take those characters or upgrades. I found it pretty easy, at least early in a run, to simply fight my way past the debuffs. They're annoying, certainly, but they're not run-ending the way a breakdown in Darkest Dungeon 1 could be.

And this is the biggest issue with Darkest Dungeon 2's new mechanics. They combine in a way that removes the signature tension that Darkest Dungeon 1 created. Because a run is a single, multi-hour progression, there's no ability to run away and only get partial rewards for the current set of characters – in Darkest Dungeon 2 you're either going forward or you're starting over. Darkest Dungeon 1 was filled with the compelling decision of "should I try to guide this barely standing party to a finish line or should I bail now and keep them alive?" In Darkest Dungeon 2, you simply go as far as you can until you have to click "Abandon Run" and then try again. Having a single long dungeon run means there are a bunch of smaller decisions with smaller effects overall. This isn't necessarily a bad thing! If you were stressed about those difficult decisions in the original, Darkest Dungeon 2 might be much more your speed. It's much less intense overall, for good and for ill.

Darkest Dungeon 2 is still a very strong moment-to-moment game, despite those systemic issues. Combat is largely the same as it was in its predecessor; it's a one-dimensional tactics game where face monsters on a line and use appropriate skills to bash, weaken, and zap them before they can do the same to you. What's dramatically improved, however, are the character models and animations. Instead of being barely animated paper doll-style cutouts, the characters move and sway when idle and prepare to attack when you start clicking on different combat skills. I still get excited just switching between two different skills with the Hellion and watching her raise her halberd above her head versus pulling it behind her body.

The sound and music is also top-notch – again. Narrator Wayne June, whose deep and unsettling voice set precisely the right tone in the first game, has returned for an encore, as has composer Stuart Chadwick. Both seem to be slightly more subdued than they were in the original, but in a way that fits Darkest Dungeon 2's long road-trip vibe.

The early access version of Darkest Dungeon 2 contains only one of six planned campaigns in the initial menu, although it's hard to tell what exactly – other than a final boss – would change from one campaign to the next. The early access period also has some quality of life issues and a sparse options menu: a brightness adjuster would be extremely welcome, as would an option to mute the sound when it's in the background.

It's also only got nine characters, as opposed to the first game's 16-plus classes; most of the new cast are holdovers, although the new Runaway character is a welcome addition. I managed to finish that campaign on my fifth or sixth try and unlocked most of the characters after less than a week of play. So there’s certainly some content here, but it’s likely only scratching the surface of what Darkest Dungeon 2 should become in a year or so.