Cross-progression in Apex Legends is a "gnarly as hell" problem for Respawn that won't be solved until 2022 at the earliest.

This is according to Respawn director of communications Ryan Rigney, who spent some time in a Reddit AMA thread last week answering questions directly from players. Rigney explained that cross-progression is "a mess" of challenges, but that the team is committed to making it happen.

"Cross-progression is gnarly as hell in terms of being a problem to solve," Rigney said. "It's not only that you have to solve the technical challenge of merging existing accounts, but there are also legal and contractual issues to navigate with purchasing on other platforms."

Rigney said that different regions have different laws that Respawn has to navigate and that cross-progression is a mess as a result.

Cross-progression would be especially useful in a game like Apex Legends due to its availability on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch. Cross-progression would allow players to play on PC, and then pick up with the same account on Switch while laying in bed, or on a PS4 in a different room. Add in that Apex Legends has well over 25 million players, and that the game has been so popular that EA is doubling down on live-service games, and it's easy to see why cross-progression would be a big deal for the battle royale.

Elsewhere in the AMA, Rigney said that the team is very excited about a next-gen update for Apex Legends.

"Oh man, I WISH I had an update to share but we can't say anything definitive at the moment — so can't spoil anything here," he said. "Trust us though, it's in the works and we're excited about it too."

It would seem that big news about Apex Legends, be it a next-gen update or cross-progression, is due for 2022 at the earliest. Only time will tell, though.

While waiting to hear more, read about how Respawn has seemingly been working on its next-gen release of Apex Legends for over a year if a job listing from April 2020 is anything to go b. You can also read about how EA is handling all of its PS5 and Xbox Series X upgrade plans. Check out this Apex Legends Season 10 explainer after that, and then read about how EA is doubling down on live-service games as full game sales drop.

Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.

Warner Bros. has released yet another poster for Dune, its upcoming sci-fi epic based on Frank Herbert's novel.

This latest poster is a classic theatrical one; the ensemble cast is collected together in a central montage, with lead Timothée Chalamet up top. Surrounding him are Zendaya, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Rebecca Ferguson, Jason Momoa, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, and Javier Bardem. Together, they represent they key players of protagonists House Atreides and the Fremen. Below the montage, we also see Chalamet's Paul Atreides walking on the sands of the planet Arrakis, dressed in his stillsuit.

This ensemble poster follows fourteen character posters that Warner Bros. revealed last month, which also put key members of House Harkonnen in the spotlight, too.

Dune, as noted at the bottom of the poster, releases October 22 in cinemas, and will also be available to stream on HBO Max on the same day. This is a little later than originally planned due to a recent delay.

The tag line of the poster also states 'It Begins', a nod to the fact that this film is just the start of the Dune story. The movie covers the first half of the original novel, and while a sequel hasn't been formally greenlit, Dune is planned to be a two-part story. Hopefully, despite fears of a HBO Max release impacting financial performance, Dune will generate enough success to see the story completed. From what we've already seen, the movie is a feast for the senses that deserves to be seen on the big screen.

Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Entertainment Writer.

The second part of Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi's Apple Arcade RPG, Fantasian, is almost upon us, with developer Mistwalker announcing today it would release this Friday, August 13.

Part 2 of Fantasian is, per the studio's announcement, more "quest-driven" than its very story-heavy first half. Mistwalker expects it to take players between 40 to 60 hours to fully experience, with Part 2 being approximately double the size of the first half. New features include the ability to swap party members in and out of battle and an expanded character Growth Map.

In its totality, Fantasian is made up of nearly 160 handmade dioramas, approximately 50 of which are original to Part 2. Part 2 will also include 34 new tracks from Nobuo Uematsu.

Fantasian follows the story of a young man named Leo who is looking for his father and ends up traveling across dimensions as he searches, suffering memory loss and encountering a number of companions and friends who join him on his way. Its "Dimengeon Battle" allows you to bank encounters with monsters as you run into them in the world, then fight them all at once in an alternate dimension for greater rewards.

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

Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game launched on Kickstarter on August 3 and has since become the highest earning tabletop RPG to launch on the platform after just a few days of being on the site.

The officially licensed tabletop RPG by Magpie Games, which is set in the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, went live on Kickstarter with a crowdfunding target of $50,000 on August 3. The game smashed through its initial target in just 16 minutes before raising over $1,000,000 in just its first day on the website.

Things have barely slowed down since – the tabletop RPG has now raised over $4,000,000, eclipsing the previously held Kickstarter record for a crowdfunded TTRPG by some margin. Matt Colville's Strongholds and Followers, an unofficial Dungeons & Dragons crowdfunded campaign, previously held the record for the highest crowded funded TTRPGwhen it raised $2.1 million in 30 days in 2018. Not only has Avatar Legends blown the previous record out of the water by comparison, it still has 24 days left of its campaign.

As previously reported by IGN, fans of the Avatar-based RPG have worked their way through a number of different stretch goals since fully funding the core game. Included within the game's surpassed stretch goals are a range of additional NPCs, a velvet dice bag, various physical playbooks, and more. Magpie Games added additional funding updates as recently as August 8 (from time of writing) and so it remains to be seen whether the company has an upper limit for stretch goals and, if so, what that limit is.

For those of you who haven't kept up to date with the story so far, you can find out more about the premise of Avatar Legends, as well as the basic principles behind the tabletop game's mechanics in our original article. Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game will remain on Kickstarter until September 3.

For more on Avatar: The Last Airbender, why not check this article about the Avatar and Spongebob podcasts announced by Nickelodeon in May and later released in June. Alternatively, you can read this article detailing how Nickelodeon has started to lay the groundwork for an "Avatar Airbender universe" that will feature multiple series and movies.

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Highly customizable audio gear rarely comes cheap. V-Moda, for example, lets you choose colors, texture and laser engraving on its $280 audiophile-targeted Crossfade 2 headphones. But moderately-priced gaming headphones? It’s much harder to find cans you can personalize. That’s why the Scuf H1 wired gaming headset is so intriguing; for a starting price of $130, there are no fewer than 6 design elements you can customize, plus the option to swap out the graphical plates covering the earcups anytime you like. The question, of course, is if there’s anything here for gamers aside from style points.

Scuf H1 – Design and Features

You don’t have to go very far to compare the Scuf H1 to another popular headphone. Now a part of the Corsair family, Scuf has based the H1 on the Corsair Virtuoso, a modestly styled wireless headset that gets great marks for sound quality. Scuf has taken the overall Virtuoso aesthetic, changed it to a wired connection, and applied a heavy dose of customization. The result is a gaming headset that is utterly unique.

Like the Corsair that this headset is based on, the H1 has large, comfortable ear pads and a nicely cushioned headband. The headband should accommodate a wide variety of head shapes and sizes; it expands by nearly 1-3/8-inch on each side with 11 detents to lock in your preferred position. And the earcups pivot a full 90 degrees in both directions.

The frame applies surprisingly little pressure on your noggin – if your head is anything like mine, you’ll never feel like you’re wearing a vice clamp on your head, which makes it comfortable for all-day wear. In fact, I wore the H1 for 4-5 hours at a time on multiple occasions, and it never bothered me at all. My ears didn’t even overheat, despite being wrapped in memory foam. On the other hand, the H1’s light touch makes them a bit “sloshy” – if you turn your head quickly, they don’t stay put, which you might not care for very much. Personally, I preferred that to more clamping pressure.

At the bottom of the left cup you’ll find a 3.5mm audio jack (which makes it universally compatible with PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox, Switch and more) and the detachable microphone port. The left/right legend is almost invisible on the inner shoulder of the headband – good luck reading that in the dark – but with the microphone stationed on the left, it’s hard to put it on backwards.

You get a 6-foot audio cable with inline controls 12 inches from the headphone end. The volume control is easy to spin by feel alone, and there’s a microphone mute slider you can manipulate without peeking as well.

The most intriguing aspect of the H1’s design, though, is its customization, which is surprisingly extensive. When you order the H1 on Scuf’s website, you get to configure the headset as if you were building a custom PC. You choose the base color (black or white), speaker tag (more on that in a moment), and which of six ring colors will accent the earcup. From there, you also choose the ear cushion material – the standard synthetic leather or a somewhat comfier hybrid of synthetic leather and cloth. You can choose between a uni-directional or omni-directional microphone and even whether you want the audio cable (and inline controls) to be black or gray.

If the H1 has a signature feature, it’s probably the speaker tags. These magnetic plates easily pop on and off the earcups to jazz up your mostly-white or mostly-black headphones. There are roughly 30 tags to choose from – a half-dozen solid colors, a few camouflage patterns, and then a rich assortment of cool, colorful designs that range from star patterns to splatter art to other snazzy designs. You get to pick one tag when you build your headphones and buy others a la carte if you want to swap around within a collection of tags later on.

All this customization adds up, though. The base H1 costs $130, but most options cost extra. There are three “free” tags – black, white or red – and the rest vary from $10 to $30, depending on the design. The upgraded ear cushion and omni-directional mic are an extra $10 each. If you deck out your H1 with every premium option, the final price climbs to $172, and adding extra tags later can become an expensive pastime, so I suspect most people will stick to owning just one or two. That said, I’ve been wrong before about how much money people are willing to spend accessorizing stuff, so if collecting tags is your jam, godspeed to you.

Scuf H1 – Performance

I ran the headset through its paces in music, movies and games. The earcups are built around large 50mm neodymium speaker drivers that delivered a solid audio experience overall, particularly for gaming. I am not certain if the Scuf H1 has the same guts as the Virtuoso it’s based on, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the two headphones were substantially the same. I enjoyed the Virtuoso except for its infernal clamping pressure, and these headphones seem to have a very similar sound profile, minus the skull pain.

While these headphones don’t have a lot of bass power, the low end was still well represented – explosions were visceral, and when playing GTA5, I enjoyed the music playing in my car. Even so, the headphones are clearly tuned for the midrange, and that paid off in games like Call of Duty: Warzone, in which footsteps, ambient noises and weapons handling were crisp and articulate – and though there’s obviously no virtual surround sound (these are analog, without any software for digital processing), the stereo separation was superb, making it easy to pick out directionality.

I also really enjoyed wearing these headphones for private movie watching; when I spun up Netflix, I found that dialog was crisp and understandable, sound effects were visceral and the soundtrack was well-rendered. And just like with gaming, there was excellent stereo separation throughout.

Chances are that you’ll sometimes want to use the H1 for music as well, and here’s where I was somewhat less impressed. In short sessions the headphones were fine, but for longer listening I found them less than ideal. They certainly didn’t sound bad per se, but I found they weren’t really tuned for music. As one example, I found that 50 Foot Wave’s grungy psychedelic opus Power + Light was the perfect storm of things I didn’t care for in the H1: simultaneously boomy and too bright, which had the overall effect of sounding somewhat harsh.

On the other hand, I loved the H1’s detachable microphone – both the fact that it popped off easily when you don’t need it and how well it performed. The mic is mounted at the end of a flexible boom that (mostly) stays where you put it. You have two choices when customizing the headphones: the default uni-directional or an omni-directional for an additional $10.

This H1 came with the omni-directional, and it performed superbly – 5 by 5, as they say in the military, delivering excellent clarity during chat sessions without picking up background noise like typing on my keyboard or the buzz of my 3D printer. It was definitely susceptible to popping from plosives, but that’s not going to be a problem for routine chats; just don’t record a podcast with this headset, and you’ll be fine. One other thing to keep in mind: There’s no mic monitoring here, so you might have trouble hearing yourself if there’s a lot happening in the earcups when you’re talking.