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A Fallout 76 bug caused some PC users to accidentally delete the entire game, prompting Bethesda to extend the beta as a make-good. After warning users not to click any buttons on the client, it told them to allow the beta game file to redownload. The company later took responsibility for the bug and announced the extension.

Eurogamer reports that the bug only impacted PC users, but those affected had to redownload the entire 50 GB beta file. That could lead to long wait times and ISP data restrictions, so the company was compelled to issue a mea culpa. It will now run on November 2 from 11 AM to 8 PM PT. The tweet notes this extension is for everyone, so users on the PS4 and Xbox One get a little extra benefit without having been impacted by the bug.

Several test dates were already planned for next week: November 1 from 11 AM to 4 PM PT, November 3 from 2 PM to 6 PM PT, and November 4 from 11 AM to 6 PM PT. You’ll be able to keep your progress from the beta into the full game, so read up on all the upcoming beta times and how you can still get in before the game launches in our beta guide.

If you’re already exploring the wastes and looking for some advice, check out our guide for some beginner survival tips and what you should check out first. Fallout 76 launches for PC, PS4, and Xbox One on November 14.

Red Dead Redemption 2‘s world includes some nice callbacks to the first game in the main story, but also through Easter Eggs sprinkled throughout the environment. One of these Easter Eggs involves Bonnie MacFarlane, who was one of John Marston’s biggest allies in RDR1. In the Red Dead Redemption lore, Bonnie gets married, but it doesn’t work out.

In Red Dead Redemption 2, you can find a man lying by the shore of the Flat Iron Lake (see exact location below), and at first he appears dead. You poke him and he emerges from his slumber, thrusting a letter into your chest before collapsing and dying on the beach. The “Letter To Bonnie MacFarlane” appears to be written by her divorced husband.

Where to find the man

It is very sad.

In the letter, the unnamed man apologises to Bonnie for how things get “out of control” in his head, before going on to say he and Bonnie and destined to be together. Unfortunately for him, that’s not going to happen.

Here is the full text of the letter:

“Dear Miss MacFarlane, I’m sorry. I said it. I’m sorry. You’re right. I do let things get out of control in my head. I always have. I see that but I love you. We are meant to be together. It is our destiny. I know it is. I saw us in a dream, raising kids. You were very happy as my wife and I was proud to be your husband. Dreams don’t lie and neither do I.

“I’m heading off to make my fortune and when I come back as a rich man, you’ll see what a fine husband I will make you, and a father to our children. And no, I won’t grow up. On that subject you’re wrong. I’ve got so many things to say to you. I’m going to continue with the writing of this letter later, but believe me when I say, we are destined for a long, happy life together. Even your father will come to believe it and accept me, no matter how humble my birth.”

After you’re done reading the letter be sure to loot the boxes nearby his corpse; you’ll find money, whiskey, a watch, and other items.

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GameSpot will have a big video coming up soon where we round up some of the more notable and interesting Easter Eggs we’ve found so far in Red Dead Redemption 2, so check back with us for that.

The Resident Evil 2 remake is right around the corner, and Capcom is playing into your survival horror nostalgia with a little treat for long-time fans. The company announced that the classic costumes for Leon and Claire will be unlockable in the game for free.

That means Leon’s “Classic Police Costume” and Claire’s “Classic Jacket Costume” will be available for all players. As some eagle-eyed fans have noted, Claire’s is slightly different than her original look, which had black sleeves and a high neck from the shirt worn under her jacket. As an homage, though, it’s recognizable.

This comes just after a new trailer revealed exclusive costumes that you can get by purchasing one of the game’s Deluxe and Collector’s Editions. Those included a Military and Elza Walker outfit for Claire, and the Arklay Sheriff costume for Leon. Both also have a Noir costume for that smoky old-school look. All of those are included in both the Deluxe and Collector’s Editions, which come with a few different goodies. The Deluxe includes an exclusive pistol and additional music options, while the CE has all that plus some physical items: a 12-inch Leon statue, art book, and RPD renovation blueprints.

The Resident Evil 2 remake is coming on January 25, 2019 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. While the remake is striving to stay true to the mood and tone of the original, it’s taking some big liberties. The controls and camera are more akin to later Resident Evil games, making for a uniquely fresh take on the classic.

Capcom has announced Resident Evil, Resident Evil 0, and Resident Evil 4 are getting Nintendo Switch ports. All three ports are currently scheduled for 2019, but a specific release dates haven’t been revealed yet. Capcom tweeted that more info is coming “soon.”

The original Resident Evil first released in 1996, and it went on to spawn an entire franchise of zombie-killing video games. Some, like the 2002 prequel Resident Evil 0, are also third-person survival horror games, while others are more action-centric or play out in first-person. 2005’s Resident Evil 4 is widely considered as the best in the series, and received critical acclaim upon release.

When Resident Evil first released, we gave it an 8.2/10 in our review, praising it for “the gorgeous, photorealistic, dilapidated rooms and abomination-filled corridors” and describing it as a “genuinely” scary experience. In our Resident Evil 0 review, we gave the prequel an 8/10, wishing the game had acknowledged all “the things that have made Resident Evil a nuisance to some” but enjoying the gameplay and story all the same. We awarded a 9.6/10 in our Resident Evil 4 review, assuring that the game would blow away anyone who’s “entertained by any other mature-rated action game.”

While Switch owners may appreciate them, this certainly won’t be the first time these games been ported to another platform. The original Resident Evil is available on Playstation, PC, and Nintendo DS. There’s also an HD remaster for GameCube and Wii, as well as a remake for Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS4, PS3, and PC. Resident Evil 0 is available on GameCube and Wii, with an HD remaster on Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS4, PS3, and PC. Resident Evil 4 can be played on GameCube, PS2, PC, Wii, and mobile, with a HD remaster available for Xbox One, PS4, Xbox 360, and PS3.

The last new game in the main-line franchise was Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, which went first-person but retained the survival horror roots of the original game. A remake for Resident Evil 2 is in the works and scheduled to release for Xbox One, PS4, and PC on January 25 in 2019.

They don’t call it the Wasteland for nothing in the Fallout series. The alternate history, nuclear war-ravaged world is complete with mutated creatures, radiation-soaked zombies, and a mess of other scary things that hunt anybody foolish enough to go wandering around. But despite the hardships of the post-apocalypse, the Fallout series has also always had its survivors, whether they’re farmers learning to live in an irradiated world, organizations hoping to rebuild society, or warlords trying to rule whatever’s left.

Fallout 76 takes a different approach. Rather than the usual single-player RPG that finds players leaving an underground Vault to discover the Wasteland and the people who live in it, Fallout 76 removes NPCs, devoid of various characters to interact with, and replaces them with other players.

The result is a Fallout game that feels a bit strange. Through about eight hours in various sessions of the Fallout 76 beta, it’s been hard to shake a feeling of loneliness while playing the game. Even though you’re surrounded by other players from the start, there’s a feeling that West Virginia is already dead, and you’re picking clean its corpse.

The creepy feeling comes early in the game, after you leave Vault 76, where you’ve waited out the first 20 years of nuclear fallout. Your job as one of Vault-Tec’s best and brightest is to rebuild the world. You’re a little late doing that at the start of the game, thanks to over-partying the night before the Vault opens. As a result, the main quest at the beginning of the game has you following the Vault’s former Overseer as she travels the world hoping to find and take control of three remaining nuclear missile silos–ostensibly to keep those weapons from ever being used again.

Tracking the Overseer’s path through the Wasteland takes you the town of Flatwoods near the Vault, where you learn about some folks trying to make the post-apocalypse a better place: the Responders. This group, mostly consisting of former first-responders like paramedics and firefighters, roam the Wasteland looking to help people, and have set up several communities for that purpose. When you arrive in their town, you take part in an automated process to join up as a volunteer. It’s a tutorial that has you wandering around town, trying to find the people who can teach you to cook, clean your water, and perform other essential survival tasks. The state of the town makes what you’re going to find a foregone conclusion, though, and before long you confirm that none of the nice people of Flatwoods has survived.

Your Responder volunteer training continues apace, thanks to audio diaries left behind by the Responders who didn’t make it, and which give you a sense of the lives they lived as they fought to survive their new world. Before long, you intercept a Responder radio signal that directs you to their headquarters at Morgantown, a larger city with an airport. The signal is pretty desperate: the Responders are expecting an attack by zombie-like people called the Scorched, and they need all hands on deck in order to repel it.

Spoiler alert: They didn’t.

Fallout 76’s lack of NPCs turns its setting into a ghost world, with the player arriving just after the worst has already happened. Stumble on the cabin of an old moonshiner and you might find evidence of his existence, but not the man himself. Head over to Grafton, a town where the mayor is broadcasting a radio signal asking for assistance, and you find the humans are dead and a computer is running the show. The world of West Virginia was full of people before–it just isn’t anymore.

Contrast that with previous Fallout games and it becomes clear why Fallout 76 just feels a bit off. In past games, pretty much the first thing players do is stumble into post-apocalyptic civilization, where the people of the Wasteland aren’t just eking out lives for themselves, but often thriving. One of the first people you meet in Megaton, the first town in Fallout 3, is its sheriff, which shows that the settlement isn’t just a bunch of people barely hanging on, but one that has laws, and someone to enforce them. Places like Diamond City in Fallout 4, or the Strip in New Vegas, show just how strong civilization can become. These aren’t just places where you pick up quests, they’re evidence that Wasteland life continues. They make the world feel substantial and lived-in, and they give your actions in that world stakes.

Fallout 76 makes its approach a little more uncanny by constantly supplying audio diaries and information about those lost souls in whose wakes you follow. A group of audio tapes left by the Responders called Survivor Stories gives the characters just enough backstory to make their absences more haunting. Your path following the Overseer is similarly replete with bits of character-building audio, as your leader visits the important places from her pre-Vault life and talks about her memories. All these tiny stories are well-written and well-acted, which makes them stand out even more. There was life in the Wasteland in Fallout 76–we just missed it.

Adding other players to Fallout 76 at the expense of NPCs is a trade that sacrifices something essential about the Fallout games. The series has always been both somber and satirical in equal measure, but at its heart it was at least a little bit hopeful. The world didn’t end when the nukes fell, it just changed.

Filling the Wasteland of Fallout 76 with players doesn’t make it feel any less dead. We might build camps and buildings, but it’s likely we’ll all eventually put on party hats and aviator sunglasses, flash goofy emotes at each other, and try to murder each other. There’s a transitory lightness to the multiplayer side of games like this that no amount of audio logs can overcome.

Without characters, Fallout 76 has no narrative balance against the people just screwing around in the Wasteland, and therefore, nothing to make the world feel substantial. It’s sad, because the fascinating, engrossing stories of the people who once populated Fallout’s West Virginia are there. They’re just not around to make you care anymore.

The Birds of Prey have found their villain. The upcoming DC universe film that centers around the female trio of Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) will find them doing battle with the evil Black Mask. Now, according to a new report, we know who is taking on that role.

According to Deadline, Ewan McGregor is joining the film’s cast to play the baddie that first appeared in a 1985 issue of the Batman comic book. In the comics, Black Mask is a vicious Gotham City mob boss named Roman Sionis. Pitting him against the Birds of Prey certainly make it sound like this will be a much more grounded movie than when we last saw Harley in Suicide Squad–or films like Justice League and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, for that matter. For more information, make sure to check out our explainer on who Black Mask is.

The Birds of Prey movie will be directed by Cathy Yan and will be rated R. The film is currently scheduled for release on February 7, 2020, which means it will arrive before Wonder Woman 1984 hits theaters on June 5, 2020.

There is still plenty more DC action before then. Aquaman, starring Jason Momoa arrives in theaters on December 21, with Shazam following on April 5, 2019. The Joker movie, starring Joaquin Phoenix, is expected to release on October 9, 2019. The DC universe can’t be contained to movies, though. It looks like Suicide Squad is also crossing over with PUBG.

The Fallout 76 beta is now open to players on PlayStation 4 and PC, in addition to those who were previously playing on Xbox One. With the latest beta session comes a new addition to the game: the Atomic Shop, Fallout 76’s premium currency store. In it, you can purchase new threads for your Wastelander, emotes to communicate with other players, different skins for your Pip-Boy, and a lot more.

Players in the beta right now should have some Atoms in their stock to try on the shop. There’s a lot to choose from: You can snag clothes for your Wastelander, unlock tattoos, change the skin of your Pip-Boy, and even add emotes to your bag of communication tricks, or poses to Photo Mode. There also are extra skins you can buy for your CAMP structures, to make your wasteland home look a little less wasted.

The 500 or so Atoms we started with (and which should come with pre-orders of Fallout 76) won’t get you far on the store, though. You can’t currently buy Atoms, the premium currency of Fallout 76, so it’s not clear how much any of the stuff in the shop will cost in real money. The idea of tattooing an eagle across your Vault-Dweller’s face is pretty tempting, regardless.

Here’s everything that’s currently available for purchase in the Atomic Shop in Fallout 76, along with the prices in Atoms they sport.

Prospect is different from most of the sweeping, universe-scale sci-fi epics that come out these days. No one is trying to destroy any planets or galaxies, there’s no millennia-spanning lore about ancient races seeding the future with mysterious artifacts, and Earth isn’t locked in a desperate war with any distant colonies (that we know of). Instead, Prospect is the story of a man, his daughter, and a bandit trying to simply stay alive on an unforgiving alien frontier. And it has some insanely awesome practical special effects.

Directed by Christopher Caldwell and Zeek Earl, and based on their 2014 short film of the same name, Prospect follows Cee (Sophie Thatcher), her father Damon (Jay Duplass), and a bandit named Ezra (Game of Thrones’ Pedro Pascal). It’s the plot of a Western transplanted onto a faraway planet: Damon and Cee are essentially gold prospectors who score big before Ezra strikes and turns their lives upside-down. Just replace gold with larvae-like alien bug crystals, cowboy hats and chaps with clunking space suits, and the dusty frontier with a lush jungle pervaded by thick, poisonous clouds of “dust” that necessitate keeping those suits on nearly 24/7. That’s Prospect.

“Unlike a lot of very either futuristic or contemporary-feeling science fiction, our movie isn’t about impressive or magical-feeling technology,” Earl told GameSpot during a recent interview. “We had a mantra up in our pre-production shop that said, ‘Technology cannot save you.’ And that’s very much at the core of what Prospect is. It’s a story that’s driven by the characters, not by any gadgets.”

“We grew up on those classic sci-fi films, like Alien, Blade Runner, the original Star Wars trilogy. I mean, we were the type of kids that would be poring over the Star Wars visual encyclopedia and obsessing over all the guns and ships and all the side characters–the people that you only see for a frame,” Caldwell said. “I think part of what we wanted to do with Prospect was to channel some of that excitement that we experienced, and I think it also informed a lot of the texture and the aesthetic. We very intentionally wanted the world to be rendered not so heavily in green screen backdrops and computer generated stuff, but in physical things that you feel, like it’s a world that you can reach out and touch.”

The pinnacle of that philosophy in Prospect turns out to be the characters’ space suits, creaking hodgepodges of cobbled-together-looking tubes, wires, antennae, plating, visors, and more. They’re straight from the Star Wars original trilogy school of sci-fi design: Space is dusty, dirty, and half broken down, not sleek, shiny, or “futuristic” in a mid-20th-century, Jetsons kind of way. They appear heavy, restrictive, and real, and the actors wear them for about 95% of the movie’s run time.

“The suit took 15 minutes to take off, and I didn’t want to delay production or anything, so I stopped drinking water, and then it became really hot and that became a problem,” Thatcher told GameSpot. “I’m being honest,” she laughed. “Maybe I shouldn’t be so honest!”

“We had to be careful with action scenes, because you get winded faster when you’re wearing [the suits],” Earl explained. “You can’t breathe as readily. I mean, they’re constantly fogging up. We had anti-fog wipes going constantly between takes.”

“They’re just also heavy,” he continued. “We designed them to be as light as possible, but I think after two weeks, Jay Duplass was like, ‘I’m going to immediately go get a massage. I can’t do this anymore.'”

Their dedication to practical sets, props, and effects paid off when it came to immersion for the actors. “It helped create a realistic atmosphere,” Thatcher said. “Sometimes I felt like I didn’t even need to act, because everything was there right in front of me, and I was reacting to my surroundings–especially with the helmet. The helmet helped me the most. Once I put on the helmet, it helped me to fully plunge into the Prospect universe and really get into the mindset.”

It was more than just a stylistic choice. The directors have seen a trend in sci-fi movies: “They’re constantly coming up with excuses for actors to take their helmets and suits off,” Earl lamented. “We were very like, ‘No, no, no. They’re trapped on a toxic moon. They’re trapped in these suits. They’re trapped in these helmets. We want the actors wearing them the whole time.’ And man, I’m happy with the result.”

He did acknowledge the actors’ suffering, though: “I’m glad we did it, but I feel legitimately bad for how much Sophie and Pedro Pascal and Jay Duplass had to endure because of this vision, because man, you wear these helmets and obviously they’re props, but the airflow is pretty restricted, and they fog up. We had whole teams of people that would have to rush in once we yelled cut and whisk the visors off and rub them down. It was a major ordeal. For the record, Sophie, I’m very thankful for your suffering.”

Focus in on any aspect of this movie, and you’ll notice the same dedication. The poisonous dust floating around the jungle isn’t a CG particle effect, but images of real dust, shot in Caldwell’s basement, “painstakingly” layered into nearly every shot. The movie’s unique weapons, which look like railguns and gatling guns cobbled together from plastic, mining tools, and spaceship parts, were designed by a real firearms expert and crafted from 3D printed segments, hand-carved parts, and a handful of “off the shelf” components. Caldwell and Earl started their own production design shop–mostly composed of their friends crafting away for seven months in a warehouse–because they simply couldn’t afford to outsource all the work.

Caldwell said using practical effects is important to keep audiences grounded. “When you’re creating an alien universe, an otherworldly universe, if there’s any suspicion that something’s not real, it takes you out of it,” he said. “And I think for Prospect it was really important that the narrative feel grounded–that we wanted to do otherworldly science fiction that feels very, very real.”

Their obsession over worldbuilding extended beyond the practical effects, too. Every time they wanted to introduce a new element, like a band of mercenaries, a mining company, or a song Cee listens to on her headphones, they had a writing exercise to flesh out far more background story than was needed.

“There’s just so much detail in the real world that you take for granted,” Caldwell explained. “If you set something in a contemporary setting, everywhere you point the camera, you’ve got all of that detail in there. When you’re starting from scratch, you have to really compensate for it, and what we were trying to do was to overcompensate as much as possible–to take as much of the flavor of the world and expository elements out of the mouths of the characters, and put it into what is visually apparent in the backdrop of every scene.”

That degree of attention to detail helps elevate an indie movie with a relatively small budget to an engrossing story that takes place in a believable sci-fi setting. But it’s also that very indie-ness that may make Caldwell and Earl’s way of doing things possible.

“Somewhere half way through production the financier sent down their head of production to check in on things, see how we were doing, and he showed up to set and just started laughing,” Caldwell recalled. “We had triple the amount of detail in our props and in our backgrounds, and the whole set was 360 [degrees], and for him it was just like, no other movie does this. You just figure out what’s going to be on camera, and make it to that. Well, we were actually trying to make complete, fully immersive environments that we could point the camera every direction, and give it a real sense of place.”

That may not be a pragmatic or efficient way to make a movie, but the result is out of this world.

Prospect is the first feature film from Gunpowder & Sky’s sci-fi label DUST. It hits theaters Friday, November 2.