You can currently get unlimited Legendary Shards for free in Destiny 2

If you’re short on Legendary Shards in Destiny 2, there’s once again a new exploit you can take advantage of to get more than you’ll ever need. This probably won’t apply to most people who’ve been playing for a while, since you tend to accrue a surplus, but for new-ish players who are always running short for upgrades and purchasing weapons and exotics from Banshee and Xur, this might come in handy.

As with all exploits, like when Destiny 2 players found a way to finish that two-week long community event in a few minutes (opens in new tab), this is likely to be patched very soon, so be sure to grab your Legendary Shards quickly if you don’t want to miss the opportunity. With that in mind, here’s what you need to do to currently get unlimited Legendary Shards in Destiny 2. 

Last thing before we start: if you don’t have the Guardian Games’ class item from last year unlocked in collections, this exploit won’t work for you.

How to get infinite Legendary Shards 

Legendary Shard exploit”

The essence of this exploit is pretty straightforward. You simply have to head into Collections, Armor, then Events, and find the Guardian Games class item from last year. This is the Medal Mantle for Hunters, the Medal Bond for Warlocks, and the Mark of the Medal for Titans. Now, this only costs 777 glimmer to purchase, but refunds you with four Legendary Shards and 250 glimmer.

Since you can buy 10,000 glimmer from Rahool in the Tower for only ten Legendary Shards, you can effectively keep creating and dismantling the class item for as long as you want, farming up a surplus of shards. Create nine, scrap them, and then repeat the process. Since you’re dismantling armour, this will also let you farm gunsmith XP with Banshee if you feel so inclined. When you run low on glimmer, just head to Rahool and buy some more with a tiny fraction of the shards you’ve earned. If you want to see the exploit in action and can’t see the gif above, this video by Cheese Forever (opens in new tab) shows the whole process. 


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Massive Dota 2 patch makes the map 40% bigger, changes the UI, matchmaking, so much other stuff it’s basically Dota 3 now

It’s not every day Dota 2 gets a new map. In fact, it’s pretty much just today. The New Frontiers Update (opens in new tab) brings Dota 2 up to version 7.33, and it’s a hefty patch that changes the matchmaking algorithm, alters the interface, adds a new hero type, makes a heap of balance changes, and expands the map by 40%.

Valve notes that, while there is “40% more terrain” around the map’s edges, the lanes remain as close together as always. There’s just more to explore around and between them, and “Both main jungles have also been fully reconfigured, shaking up vision placement, juke routes, farming and more.” Here’s what’s new.

(Image credit: Valve)
  • Four new named areas: The Well, The Graveyard, The Statue, and The Mines.
  • Roshan has two pits instead of one.
  • Twin gates let you teleport between the top and bottom lane. Roshan also uses them to move between his pits.
  • Lotus pools on the map’s left and right spawn healing lotus that gives mana as well as HP.
  • Neutral creep minibosses called tormentors spawn near the bases 20 minutes into a match.
  • Eight watchers scattered across the map grant vision to whichever team activates them. That’s handy, because outposts no longer grant vision or True Sight.
  • Two new outposts, the original ones have been repositioned too.
  • 12 (!) more creep camps.
  • Two new power runes: wisdom runes on the map’s edge and near bases give XP, while shield runes in the river give barrier equal to half your max HP. (Also shield is called barrier now.)
  • Defender’s gates are one-way emergency back doors on each base, or as Valve puts it, “Defender’s Gate combines the sparkly high fantasy of Dota with the practicality of doors on your house that you can lock when you go to the grocery store to destroy its Ancient.”

On the mechanical side of things, the most significant-seeming change is a whole new hero type: Universal heroes. Universal heroes are ones who don’t specialize in a single attribute, instead getting 0.6 damage for each point they have in any attribute. Existing heroes who have been reshuffled into the Universal category include Bane, Broodmother, Enigma, Lone Druid, and Vengeful Spirit.

There are plenty of other tweaks as well, like neutral creep abilities now scaling over time, and every disable effect having its duration reduced so you’ll spend less time stunlocked. Neutral creeps no longer drop items, instead dropping tokens that can be spent on one of five neutral items, and there’s a whole bunch of new items too. The kill formula and Black King Bar have been reworked, and some heroes given major overhauls, including Muerta, Arc Warden, Ogre Magi, Medusa, Alchemist, and Clinkz. As Valve puts it, “Most of Clinkz’s abilities, like the best abilities in life, now create skeletons.”

Matchmaking has altered in response to what Valve calls “an undesired clumping in the 0-1000 MMR range” and how hard it was for returning players to get back to an accurate Matchmaking Ratio after spending time away. From now on, rather than MMR being calculated with the Elo algorithm, Dota 2 will use the Glicko algorithm. In fact, it’s been doing that in the background for a minute, with Valve saying, “We’ve been running both matchmaking systems simultaneously behind the scenes for a while now to help us build confidence in these changes.”

Finally, UI changes should make keeping track of your HP and everyone else’s easier. Barriers (the things that used to be called shield, remember?) are visible on the health bar, and anything that doesn’t have a HP total but is instead defeated after receiving a set number of hits—like those skeleton archers Clinkz now summons on the regular—have health bar pips to signpost that. And abilities that cost health display that as a number, just like mana cost. Sensible!

As you’d expect in a MOBA, any update is going to come with a big old helping of balance changes in addition to the hero overhauls mentioned above. Have a look at Valve’s New Frontiers Update page (opens in new tab) where you can see full details of that stuff, as well as mouse over an interactive version of the new map.


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Unrecord dev posts noclip video to prove the realistic bodycam FPS isn’t ‘fake’

Yesterday, developer Alexandre Spindler and Studio Drama revealed Unrecord, a first-person shooter with a striking bodycam perspective which frequently sells the illusion of being real camera footage.

It’s so convincing that some questioned whether they were looking at a pre-rendered, on-rails game, or perhaps actual video footage with some 3D graphics overlayed. A few hours after the announcement, Spindler responded: “It’s not a rail shooter or an FMV, it is indeed an FPS and these images are from real-time gameplay, not pre-rendered.”

Today, Spindler went further, uploading a new video of the game (embedded above and in the tweet (opens in new tab) below) which includes the Unreal Engine user interface. Near the end of the video, he frees up the camera, no-clipping through the level to prove that it’s genuinely an FPS with free movement. “For those who thought Unrecord was fake or a video, sorry,” Spindler wrote.

A lot contributes to the believability of Unrecord’s “bodycam footage,” and it isn’t all raw graphical fidelity. The exposure adjustment effect, where the sky transitions from overblown to cloudy, is very effective. The free hand movement is another big part of the illusion: the camera follows the motion of the hands on a delay, as if genuinely responding to movements of the chest.

Beneath all of that is the actual fidelity of the environments, which is remarkable, but not unique. Using photographs to build and texture 3D worlds, called photogrammetry, has been doable in real-time rendering for a number of years. The effect was used in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (opens in new tab), for instance, and that was almost a decade ago. Combined with the features of Unreal Engine 5, presumably some ray tracing for the reflections, and today’s other graphics processing advancements, Unrecord’s look isn’t totally out there. Similar fidelity can be seen in Epic’s first Unreal Engine 5 demo (opens in new tab).

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That doesn’t mean Unrecord will necessarily run like a dream with the average PC components. The studio did say yesterday that “realistic effects do not solely rely on textures or polygon count, therefore it will be possible to experience immersion on less powerful machines,” but specifically how less powerful, they aren’t ready to say.

For as realistic as it appears, there is a distinct ‘Unreal Engine 5 look’ to Unrecord that I can’t precisely describe, but can identify when I see it—the longer I look at the trailer, the more I can see through the illusion. But it is frequently startling how much it looks like real camera footage. It’d make a great basis for a found-footage horror game, but Studio Drama says it’s going for a detective thriller vibe, which has led to some discomfort and criticism, given that genuine police bodycam footage is commonly seen in real life as evidence of police brutality and killings.

Responding to the conversation emerging around Unrecord yesterday, Studio Drama said that it doesn’t want to spoil the story by explaining its themes, but that it understands “people who may feel disturbed by the game’s images.” You can read more about the Unrecord, which doesn’t have a release date yet, and its premise in my article about the announcement from yesterday (opens in new tab).



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