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Guerrilla Games debuted the first PS5 gameplay footage of Horizon Forbidden West last week via a new State of Play, and with it revealed new details about exploration and combat.

And while the presentation offered plenty of answers, it did raise more questions about the sequel too, so IGN spoke with Game Director Mathijs de Jonge and Narrative Director Benjamin McCaw about details from the State of Play and what they mean for Horizon Forbidden West’s advancements to the series’ gameplay and storytelling.

Free Climbing Is Much Freer

While Horizon Zero Dawn’s open world let players explore plenty of nooks and crannies of its world to uncover secrets, reach new biomes, and more, the climbing traversal was rather limited, largely defined to specific areas with only one clear path to explore. Not anymore with Horizon Forbidden West, which will allow for more freedom to climb from ledge to ledge than before.

In terms of the traversal and the human combat, this was a point from Horizon Zero Dawn, where we wanted to improve the mechanics. And this [State of Play] is a showcase for that, to show you can now free climb anywhere in the world,” de Jonge said in an interview with IGN, noting that the way Forbidden West allows for free climbing actually changed during development.

“We hand annotated lots of the rocks, the cliffs, the mountain sides. But at some point, we changed that to an automatic system that just detects if there is a latch somewhere in the geometry,” he said.

“So now the entire world, everything is automatically annotated. That means you can climb anywhere,” he continued, noting that this will be somewhat limited inside settlements, where players also shouldn’t expect to fight, either.

“There is more hand-placed, controlled exploration going on there. But outside of the settlements, in the open world, you can climb anywhere.”

De Jonge clarified that what players saw in the State of Play – when Aloy’s Focus zeroes in on a few handholds on columns of dilapidated buildings – isn’t a sign that that’s the only structure people can climb. Rather, the Focus lets players get a better sense of where these grabable spots are.

“I think some people think that you have to [use the Focus] to be able to climb, but that’s not true. This is just for light, for low light conditions, to be able to highlight them so you can actually see them better. But the player could climb anyway without having to ping.”

A Bigger World, But a More Varied One, Too

While not yet offering an exact size comparison, Guerrilla has indicated Forbidden West will be a larger world that Zero Dawn for players to experience, but during my interview both de Jonge and McCaw emphasized that the developers really aimed to deepen the world players would explore, rather than just making it bigger.

“The map is a little bit bigger, but in general, we’ve really looked at increasing the density, and adding more content, making sure there’s a lot more to do for the player across the map, and then making that content also engaging by telling little micro-stories,” de Jonge said.

That philosophy played into the open world storytelling players will encounter, which McCaw described as quite layered.

“There’s the tribal world, there’s the world of the machines, and there’s also our world. We really tried make sure there’s exploration throughout the open world related to all three, and also that we are deepening and evolving this story of all three,” McCaw said. “Aloy is venturing into a mysterious and dangerous frontier. That’s what the Forbidden West is. And we wanted to make sure that there is always a mystery for her to unravel, and always more for her to explore.”

Of course, one key way the developers are adding depth to the world is, literally, by adding depth. Aloy will be able to explore underwater, and it’s an area of the world the team really wanted to live up to the surface world players have come to know and will explore further in Forbidden West.

“Exploration is really the theme. And it’s not enough for us to just show underwater. We wanted to make sure that it’s every bit as beautiful as what you see in the natural world above it,” McCaw said.

“But it wasn’t just enough that you could swim around underwater. We wanted to do some things that are really surprising and interesting. And I think that’s where some of the story stuff comes in, and we just absolutely can’t wait for players to see what they’re going to experience.”

While the team is understandably remaining tight-lipped on the story, there are some mechanics players can see hinted at in the presentation, including underwater currents and “stealth kelp” as de Jonge referred to the underwater spots for Aloy to hide, as well as a “cat and mouse” approach to fending off enemies in the water.

Making Human Combat More Tactical

While Zero Dawn’s robotic enemies required a number of different strategies to properly take down, fighting against human foes was largely the same across the land. Forbidden West is looking to change that, as evidenced by the State of Play. The new footage showed a finisher-style move, the Valor Surge, as well as a fight against a larger foe that forced Aloy to use a combination of ranged and melee attacks.

“With the machines, the combat is pretty tactical. And there’s always multiple ways you can take them down. With the Focus scan, you can scan the machine, check out what are the weaknesses and what are the interactive components… So for this game, we [thought] with the humans, what if we Focus scan them? What kind of things could we see, and what kind of extra things can we put on them to evoke this tactical play around them,” de Jonge explained.

“We’ve added armor on them. You see this after Aloy has taken down one of those Raiders, and she runs towards the next one, she starts meleeing and hitting him. Several plates light up on him. And this is armor that can be knocked off, so you expose more vulnerable parts, as well, that you can then shoot at.”

Players will have to be more clever and tactical when taking on humans too, especially because de Jonge noted the studio has also made the human enemies a bit more aggressive as well.

Horizon Forbidden West currently doesn’t have a release date, but Hermen Hulst recently said that the next Horizon is aimed for a holiday 2021 launch. For more on the latest gameplay, be sure to watch our immediate reactions to Horizon’s State of Play and read a breakdown of all the new Forbidden West details.

Jonathon Dornbush is IGN’s Senior News Editor and host of Podcast Beyond! Talk to him on Twitter @jmdornbush.

Signify, formerly known as Philips Lighting, has released a brand new version of the Hue application that gives you a quick way to control your smart lights. The company has redesigned the Philips Hue app from the ground up, starting with the Home tab that now shows all your lights and scenes in Tile view. 

You don’t have to go digging if you want to set the each light’s brightness, temperature and color or if you want to create and edit presets for groups of them. In addition, you can discover and preview scenes crafted by Hue’s lighting experts from the tab’s new Hue scene gallery. If you have multiple Hue bridges, the tab will give you the ability to switch between them quickly, as well.

As for the Routine tab, it’s been replaced by an Automations tab that offers more advanced options for customization. For the Coming home or Leaving home automation, for instance, the app can now check if anybody is home before running it, thanks to the new multi-user geofencing feature. That way, it won’t switch off all the lights if anybody else is home when you (assuming you’re the one controlling the automation) leave the house. In addition, Signify has also upgraded the sunset and sunrise automations, allowing you to choose a specific time for the automation to start and to turn off the lights after it’s over.

Among the other new features and small improvements that make the app more user-friendly is the ability to add a new light to a Room from within the Room tab itself. The redesigned Hue app is now available in the Apple App Store and on Google Play, and the update will automatically hit your device in the coming days. 

Samsung has announced two new Windows laptops running Arm-based processors. The Galaxy Book Go and Galaxy Book Go 5G both use Snapdragon chips from Qualcomm rather than Samsung’s own Exynos designs.

The Galaxy Book Go is an entry-level model that starts at $349. It has the updated Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 processor that Qualcomm announced last month, as well as 4GB or 8GB of RAM and 64GB or 128GB of eUFS storage. The display is a 14-inch 1080p LCD and the laptop is 14.9mm thick, weighing in at 1.38kg.

The Galaxy Book Go 5G, meanwhile, uses Qualcomm’s more powerful Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 processor — though other laptops with that chip aren’t exactly powerhouses — and, as the name suggests, it includes 5G connectivity. Despite running on a Snapdragon chip with an integrated LTE modem, the $349 Galaxy Book Go is actually Wi-Fi-only.

Specs otherwise appear to be shared between the two laptops. The Galaxy Book Go has two USB-C ports, one USB-A port, a headphone jack, a 720p webcam, and a microSD card slot. Samsung hasn’t given pricing or release information for the Galaxy Book Go 5G just yet, but the $349 Galaxy Book Go is going on sale on June 10th.

Huawei used to be the world’s biggest phone maker—until the US imposed damaging sanctions in 2019. Among other things, it banned Huawei from using the official version of Google’s Android operating system on its smartphones. Now, the Chinese tech giant hopes it can stage a comeback by developing its own operating system: HarmonyOS.

Huawei rolled out HarmonyOS for its latest smartphones today (June 2) and announced it would update older phones to the new operating system throughout the year. The company’s stated goal is to reduce its reliance on Android, and develop a rival operating system that can compete with both Android and Apple’s iOS, which currently provide the operating systems for virtually every smartphone on earth. Independent reviewers, however, have concluded the operating system is just Android’s open-source code under a new name.

Tech observers are optimistic HarmonyOS can catch on within China, where there’s considerable political pressure to create homegrown alternatives to US tech offerings.  And even if HarmonyOS is just a copy of Android, it at least has the imprimatur of a Chinese tech giant to make it seem like a true domestic alternative. But it’s less clear if HarmonyOS can become a true competitor abroad, especially given that US sanctions still prevent Huawei devices from incorporating popular apps from American tech giants like Google and Facebook.

What is HarmonyOS?

Huawei first launched HarmonyOS in August 2019, four months after Google revoked the Chinese tech giant’s license to use its Android operating system. Although the company claims HarmonyOS is “completely different from Android and iOS,” an independent review by Ars Technica found several telltale signs that it’s just a lightly modified version of Android.

The biggest difference between Android and HarmonyOS is that Huawei’s version isn’t officially licensed by Google, so it can’t include Google apps. Huawei has instead developed its own alternative apps, including a Google search replacement dubbed Petal Search, Petal Maps instead of Google Maps, and a Huawei AppGallery instead of the Google Play Store. HarmonyOS also doesn’t support major US-based apps like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

Will HarmonyOS succeed in China?

There’s a good chance HarmonyOS can catch on within China, where authorities are eager to replace Western technology with homegrown alternatives. Beijing, for instance, has ordered all government offices to replace foreign computers and software with Chinese tech by 2022. As the technological rivalry between the US and China continues, HarmonyOS could become a more attractive alternative to Android and iOS, which are both controlled by American companies.

Plus, Chinese consumers aren’t likely to miss the US-based apps that aren’t available on HarmonyOS, because Facebook and its ilk are banned in China anyway. HarmonyOS does, however, support Chinese alternatives like Weibo and WeChat.

Huawei said it plans to have 300 million devices running HarmonyOS by the end of 2021, which would offer evidence that its operating system is viable in the Chinese domestic market.

Will phone makers outside China adopt HarmonyOS?

Huawei has said it will make HarmonyOS an open-source software available to any phone maker who wants to use it (much like the open-source Android operating system on which it is based). But HarmonyOS will be a harder sell outside of China, where consumers are more likely to want mainstream Western apps and the full Google Play Store, and governments are more likely to face diplomatic pressure from the US to abandon Huawei technology.

A reference to “homeOS” was recently found in an Apple job listing, suggesting that Apple may have plans to change how it classifies and presents the software running on devices like the HomePod mini in the future.

Twitter user Javier Lacort discovered the terminology in an Apple Music-related job listing and posted a screenshot to Twitter. “You’ll get to work with system engineers across Apple, learning the inner-workings of iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and homeOS,” the posting reads. “The Apple Music Frameworks team owns the technology stack that enables the system-integrated Apple Music experience on all of our mobile platforms: iOS, watchOS, and homeOS,” it adds shortly afterwards.

The job listing appeared to later be updated to say “HomePod” instead of “homeOS” in the first case and “tvOS” instead of “homeOS” in the second case.

Currently, the software running on the HomePod mini has no public-facing name, though it appears to be a variant of tvOS, which itself is a variant of iOS. It is, of course, possible that Apple simply refers to the operating system for HomePods as “homeOS” internally and unofficially, and the author of this job listing simply let that informal terminology slip.

But the potential leak is more intriguing in part because of a recent Bloomberg report that claims that Apple plans to further expand its smart home efforts and that Cupertino is working on one or more products that combine some of the features of the Apple TV 4K and the HomePod. For example, Bloomberg’s sources said that Apple is working on a home theater sound bar that uses technology seen in the HomePod but which can act as an Apple TV as well, giving users access to various streaming video apps, as well as Apple Music, Apple Fitness+, and Apple Arcade content.

Should those plans come to fruition, homeOS could act as a name for a unified operating system from the HomePod, Apple TV, and new smart home products that Apple plans to introduce in the future. It could be closer to an iPadOS-like rebranding than an entirely new operating system, though.

Apple’s annual developer conference, WWDC, kicks off this coming Monday. That’s the most likely time and place for an announcement if homeOS does become a user- or developer-facing product.

I’ve been reviewing a bunch of routers in a row, and the difference between my own experiences and the wildly good numbers and boasts on a manufacturer’s website is enough to make me feel gaslit. Sometimes my results might be mediocre or the router fraught with instability or other problems, and I think to myself, “Are my expectations just too high? Do I just like my normal router because I already worked out all the kinks over time?” Then I hook up something like the Netgear Nighthawk RAXE500 and am reminded that there are exceptional experiences to be had. Not every router has to be a struggle.

Distinctive Design, Intuitive Interface

If you’re not familiar with the Netgear Nighthawk line, it’s likely you’ve at least seen pictures of them. Remember Kylo Ren’s shuttle? It’s a miniaturized, murdered-out manta ray spaceship with fold-up wings that contain the antenna array. It’s pretty well-positioned as a future-proofed router, with a single, configurable 2.5G LAN/WAN port, and link aggregation supported on the 4 LAN ports, as well as on the WAN port in combination with the first LAN port. It features two USB 3.0 ports on the back, an LED light toggle, recessed reset button, on/off switch, and power port.

The power supply is, regrettably, a wall wart-style external supply, so you’ll need to make room for it when you plug it in. When you first turn it on, you will hear the surprisingly loud onboard cooling fan kick on and blow for a bit, but that was the only time I ever actually noticed the fan. Still, if that’s the sort of thing you’re sensitive to, you may consider it before you buy one.

I found a lot to like about the UI, both via web browser and the Netgear Nighthawk app. The aesthetic is a pleasant black-and-white affair, with a basic home screen layout that is easy to understand and navigate. From the home screen, you’re a click away from seeing how many and which devices are connected and to which band, an Ookla-powered internet speed test, security, router settings, guest wifi, and a traffic meter. The traffic meter isn’t a live, in-motion chart, but more in line with Eero’s approach, showing you a summary of the total and average amount of data downloaded and uploaded over various periods of time. Eero’s version of this is involves more granularity, displaying which devices are using how much data, which would be nice to see here, too, but it’s certainly better than nothing.

The device manager list is also quite nice, allowing you to pause or resume the connection of a given device with a simple toggle next to each one in the list. Security for the Nighthawk is provided by Bitdefender, and requires a 1-year, $70 subscription, with a 1-month free trial to start. Pleasantly, no credit card information is required for the trial, so no need to worry about forgetting to cancel the subscription if you didn’t like it. It will just bug you to add that information until the trial is cancelled, so if you can take that, then it’s a no-brainer to sign up.

I quite liked the feature set here, among them a scan of your devices and evaluation of the security steps you’ve taken, with advice on things like your password, which is a great start, but you’ll also get notified about which smart home devices you may have that present security threats. Lastly, Bitdefender includes a VPN with the Netgear Armor subscription. It’s not a replacement for a traditional VPN, however, as it only works for up to 200MB of daily traffic, so I wouldn’t count on it for your legally-questionable downloads. But you can route your phone’s data through it when out and about, which is nice?

The browser UI has a similar layout and set of options as the app, though I found it a tad more convoluted. That said, if you want to access some more advanced configuration options, this is where you’ll find them. In the browser, you can enable or disable OFDMA or decide whether you’d like to not broadcast a given SSID, for instance. You can also enable or disable Smart Connect, a feature on many routers that lets you use a single SSID for all of the bands. When it works well, it can be a very convenient, simple way to set up a smart home. However, I found that with the Nighthawk, nothing connected to the 5 GHz band. Many routers get around this with a feature called Band Steering, which attempts to encourage a device to move to the fastest band it can connect to. I asked Netgear about it, and was told band steering is something that is being worked out; they intend to release the feature in a future update. Settings get more advanced from there, and though this well doesn’t go as deep as Asus routers tend to, I think it would satisfy most people for whom routers go beyond a simple means to an end.

Astonishing Performance

The Nighthawk RAXE500 has a 1.8 GHz quad-core processor with 1GB of RAM and 512MB NAND Flash. Each band is capable of 4×4 MU-MIMO, meaning the router can transmit to multiple devices simultaneously—a feature that was, until WiFi 6, only available on the 5 GHz band. It also supports OFDMA, which is a new technology that comes with WiFi 6 that subdivides channels, cramming more data in at once for low-bandwidth applications. Future smart home devices will benefit from this as WiFI 6 propagates through newer devices. The router will also, because of its WiFi 6 compatibility, support WPA 3, which is a breakthrough new security protocol that will largely compensate for your terrible wifi password.

In testing the router, the numbers I got were pretty astonishing. For testing, Netgear sent me a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, which besides being a stellar Android phone is also one of precious few devices on the market at all that is capable of sucking up internet on the 6 GHz band, so it’s ideal for checking throughput on this router. Honestly, it was suspiciously ideal. In testing, it actually did better on the 5 GHz band than it did on the 6 GHz band, both when I was in the same room and at further distances (although, curiously, it was on the 6 GHz band that I saw faster speed at about 25 feet). In fact, I was getting near-gigabit speeds in my backyard, which is absolutely bananas.

Then I ran tests using iperf 3, which lets you test your local network speed by very easily and quickly setting one device up as the client and the other as a server. In the same room with the router, I saw throughput that approached 2 Gbps on the 6 GHz band, which I expected. What blew my simple mind was when I saw slightly better performance on the 5 GHz band using otherwise the same setup, in the same position. Then, moving to the second position, I saw drastically faster speed on the 5 GHz band, averaging 673 Mbps to the 6 GHz band’s 416.5 Mbps. Of course, both are very fast, and the Nighthawk RAXE500 should be, but I simply hadn’t seen performance like this yet with WiFi 6 on the 5 GHz band, and spent far more time than I’m willing to admit trying to figure out what I was doing wrong before concluding it was just that fast.

Netgear explained that the Samsung devices have “compatibility” with this router, and while I’m not sure if there is some special, otherworldly bond between the two, or if the Samsung device’s wifi is simply that good, those numbers did prompt me to carry out a lot more testing with other devices.

Once I did, I found numbers way more in line with the higher end of my expectations. Speeds on my MacBook Air using WiFi 6 on the 5 GHz band was almost identical with what I got on the Linksys Atlas Max 6E mesh system I recently finished testing, while the Nighthawk still crushed the Atlas when I tested with my sixth-gen iPad, which is limited to WiFi 5. On the 2.4 GHz band, the Nighthawk generally performed as well as others I tested, jamming over 100 Mbps through the tiny 2.4 GHz pipeline using the WiFi 6 protocol up close, and still managing nearly 60 Mbps when I took testing out to my back yard. That’s easily enough to stream 4k video, whereas you would struggle with any non-WiFi 6 router on that band at any appreciable distance from your nearest access point.

Gaming with this router was generally fine, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re looking for top-tier gaming performance—the Nighthawk RAXE500 is not part of Netgear’s Pro Gaming series of routers, after all, so you won’t see the kind of performance afforded you by the likes of the very excellent XR500, for instance. That said, for the casual fan, it’s not going to ruin your sessions.

Real-Life Use

After the more intense, directed testing I performed on the first couple of days, I lived with the Netgear Nighthawk as my primary router for a few days to look for any issues cropping up with my smart home devices. I really never saw any major problems here, with the devices all remaining online and communicating with one another. Siri was a little slower to respond than usual, but it wasn’t noticeable until I paid attention and started counting, noting about a half-second extra delay between my commands and the resultant action. This made sense later, when I discovered all of my devices had been stuck on the 2.4 GHz band for the previous several days. I found it telling that I didn’t actually think to take a look at which band I was connected to, despite having streamed a few 4K movies in that time, played a decent amount of MarioKart 8, and listened to music in several rooms at once, all without any major hiccups.

Worth Buying?

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have any issues with the Netgear Nighthawk RAXE500. The smart connect thing is chief among them, because being able to run everything on the same SSID makes a smart home so much easier, but generally my issues can be chalked up to personal tastes. When it comes to pure wireless performance, the Nighthawk knocks it out of the park.

I saw a steady connection everywhere in my home, but also truly fast speeds everywhere I went, making this a rare single access point router that really seemed to, at least in my small home, handle every bit of interference I threw at it with aplomb. Top that off, with a pretty intuitive user interface that still manages to give you satisfying configurability beyond the surface level experience, and you have a general purpose router that really is a cut above.

There is, of course, the matter of its steep price tag—$600 is nothing to sneeze at, and it clearly puts the Nighthawk out of reach for many consumers. But for the early adopters among you, this router is mostly free of the types of “there be dragons here” warnings that typically accompany technology sitting on the edge like this.

Amazon has unleashed a massive PS5 restock starting today, Wednesday 2nd June, as predicted by the widely-respected PS5Instant Twitter account.

“Amazon #PS5restock planned 2-9th June 8-10am,” read the tipster’s tweet. Amazon was said to be sitting on a shipment of up to 13,000 Sony PlayStation 5 consoles in the UK.

Nintendo has announced that its Uji Ogura plant will be turned into a public gallery to “showcase the many products Nintendo has launched over its history.” The factory, located in the Ogura district of Uji, a city just outside Kyoto, was built in 1969 and was mainly used for manufacturing playing cards and hanafuda cards, which is how Nintendo got started as a business in the 19th century.

“Nintendo has been discussing the possibility of building a gallery, as a way to share Nintendo’s product development history and philosophy with the public,” the company says in a statement. “To this end, the Nintendo Uji Ogura Plant will be renovated to accommodate the gallery, a decision reached after taking consideration of The City of Uji’s plan of re-developing the nearby Ogura Station area.”

Nintendo expects the gallery to be completed in its fiscal year from April 1st, 2023 to March 31st, 2024. Right now the working title is “Nintendo Gallery.” The facility will no doubt be popular with tourists visiting Kyoto, many of whom make the pilgrimage to Nintendo’s headquarters even though it’s a nondescript office block that’s closed to the public. And of course, the new Super Nintendo World area at Universal Studios Japan is located fairly close in neighboring Osaka.