After four long years, Ragnarök is almost upon us. Kratos has seen more than his fair share of bloodshed over the years while removing multiple gods from their seats of power, and now that we have a release date for God of War: Ragnarök, we don't have much longer to wait until he does the same with the Norse pantheon. It's safe to say that Ragnarök looks to be one of the biggest releases in the latter half of 2022, and many of us on staff are excited to see where the story will take us after the events of God of War 2018.

Welcome back for another edition of Let's Talk About. Today's topic is God of War. Is God of War: Ragnarök your most anticipated game for 2022? Are you spending extra to get the Collectors or Jotnar edition? Do you prefer the original God of War games or the new style in 2018's God of War and the upcoming Ragnarök? Which moments from the franchise stand out the most for you? If you're not a fan of God of War, what game is your most anticipated release for the rest of the year and why? Let us know in the comments.

Jada Griffin is IGN's Community Lead. If she's not engaging with users here, chances are she's developing her own games, maxing the Luck stat in her favorite games, or challenging her D&D players with Intense combat or masterful puzzles. You can follow her on Twitter @Jada_Rina.

Hellboy and Abe Sapien are far from the weirdest characters created by Mike Mignola. That honor may rest with a Civil War-era hero named The Amazing Screw-On Head. And with that comic being reprinted in a new 20th anniversary collection, fans are being treated to a lost story from Mignola's archives.

IGN can exclusively reveal a preview of that story, dubbed "Axxor, Slayer of Demons." Check it out in the slideshow gallery below:

For those unfamiliar, The Amazing Screw-On Head was a one-shot comic released through Dark Horse in 2002. The story revolves around a sentient robot who works as a secret agent for the Lincoln Administration. Inspired by classic action figure lines of the '80s and '90s, The Amazing Screw-On Head can attach his head to different bodies, each with powerful abilities of its own.

While the original comic remains, to date, the only to feature the character, it was later adapted as an animated pilot episode in 2006, written and executive produced by Hannibal's Bryan Fuller.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the comic, Dark Horse is releasing a new hardcover collection called The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects. That book will include roughly 40 pages of new material, including the Axxor story. The book will be released in comic shops on July 20 and bookstores on July 26.

Dark Horse is also marking this anniversary with a new Amazing Screw-On Head fine art print. Featuring a new image from Mignola and colorist Dave Stewart, this print is being sold exclusively through Dark Horse Direct.

The print measures 18" x 24" and is priced at $49.99. It's limited to 300 units worldwide. You can preorder an Amazing Screw-On Head print now.

Both of these releases are being timed to the upcoming first public screening of the documentary film Mike Mignola: Drawing Monsters. The premiere event is being held at Los Angeles' Million Dollar Theatre on Saturday, August 13. Tickets are available for purchase now.

That documentary will offer Mignola fans another glimpse of a lost project, as it turns out Mignola worked on a Thor animated series based on traditional Norse mythology.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.

With World of Warcraft preparing to roll out its Dragonflight alpha this week, one notable concern is that, if Dragonflight is indeed intended to drop this year, this will be the shortest alpha/beta cycle World of Warcraft has had in recent memory. But Blizzard says this is due to a change in how it’s doing testing, and not a cause for concern.

Speaking to IGN ahead of the alpha release, production director Patrick Dawson reassures that Dragonflight will have plenty of time to cook. For one, he says, it’s been in development since before Shadowlands shipped, and the team has had about as much time working on it as they have any other expansion.

But to answer the question of the late alpha, Dawson admits that while it’s coming at an “awkward” time compared to past alphas, it’s just because Blizzard is shifting how it handles public World of Warcraft testing pretty dramatically.

“In prior alphas…we’d have a two, two-and-a-half-month-long process where different things came online in a haphazard and less structured way,” he says. “Maybe you’d get one zone, then have to wait two to three weeks, maybe even longer for the next zone. Systems wouldn’t come on at a consistent rate, that kind of stuff.

“But…one of the models we liked was how we do things like raid testing. What we do is we open up a boss for people to focus on, everybody plays that boss, we get great, focused feedback on that, and then we shut it down and move onto the next boss. Likewise, we looked at our alpha strategy, and we said, ‘How can we get that type of feedback out of an alpha?’ And the answer was, instead of having this long alpha, let’s compress it a bit and focus the feedback on specific things each and every week.”

What this means for Dragonflight, he continues, is that while the upcoming alpha is focused on one zone, the Azure Span, it won’t be available in the alpha for the duration of the test. Once Blizzard gets focused feedback on that specific zone, they’ll shut the Azure Span down, and open up a completely different zone.

But there’s another reason for the new model, aside from just testing efficiency. World of Warcraft is a very heavily community datamined game, between its alphas, beta, and public test realm. But this time, Blizzard wants to keep more secrets back from the public until it’s ready to fully release them.

“Let’s not spoil everything in the alpha,” Dawson says. “Let’s not spoil everything in test. We’ll make sure to test that level of gameplay so that everyone has a quality experience when they play, but there maybe are some things we’re going to hold back a bit to surprise and delight the players.”

We also spoke to Dawson about how Dragonflight’s Dragon Isles are the largest expansion continent Blizzard has made yet, as well as how Dragonflight is building more evergreen updates than expansion-specific. Blizzard is on the cusp of opening up its Dragonflight alpha to the first wave of players, so we’re sure to hear more about Dragonflight in the coming weeks. For now, you can check out our full preview of what we’ve seen so far.

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

World of Warcraft’s dragons come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, but historically, its most important and interesting dragons have been, well, really darn big. So it’s unsurprising that their home in WoW’s upcoming Dragonflight expansion, the Dragon Isles, needs space for all of them to hang out.

Which is why, according to production director Patrick Dawson, the Dragon Isles are the biggest continent Blizzard has ever made for an expansion.

“This is the biggest expansion continent we’ve ever done, and that was designed with dragon riding in mind so you can traverse it a little more simply,” Dawson tells IGN. “It’s the land of dragons. They need space.”

When you think of pure geographical size, it’s easy to limit that scope to just horizontal size, but critical to Dragonflight’s alleged enormity is its verticality. The Dragon Isles are built for dragon riding, one of the biggest new features being added this expansion, so there need to be enough heights, valleys, and open spaces for WoW players to rapidly zip, flip, and barrel roll all over the continent.

In fact, the Dragon Isles are so expressly designed around dragon riding that Dawson says Blizzard is unlikely to ever break the feature out of Dragon Isles and take it to other zones, though it’s certainly considering bringing the existing flight feature into the isles at a later point if it makes sense.

For now, Blizzard is focusing on getting the feel of dragon riding just right. In our preview of the pre-alpha, our dragons only knew a couple of flight tricks, but Dawson reassures us that we’ll unlock plenty more flight abilities as the story progresses and won’t always be running out of stamina at the bottom of a hill.

And because the Dragon Isles are so large and flight-focused, he hints that Blizzard may have taken some cues from Mists of Pandaria’s cloud serpent riding and the unique flight side quests and minigames that came with that to give dragon riders more activities to do across the isles.

“I think there’s some stuff we’ll show in the alpha and some stuff maybe we’ll hide and keep back so players can experience it for the first time in release,” he says.

Blizzard is on the cusp of opening up its alpha to the first wave of players, so we’re sure to hear more about Dragonflight in the coming weeks. For now, you can check out our full preview of what we’ve seen so far, and hear more from our interview with Dawson on how Dragonflight is building more evergreen updates than expansion-specific, and why the studio is making big changes to how it tests new content.

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

Since the announcement of Dragonflight, the ninth World of Warcraft expansion, Blizzard has been determinedly tight-lipped on the details of what's coming. Understandably so, given that now seems like a really critical time for Blizzard to impress.

Coming off the heels of Shadowlands, which garnered significant criticism for its endgame content and its story (looking at you, Sylvanas), Dragonflight has a lot to prove. It's an expansion that the community has asked about for years, featuring playable dragon characters in the Dracthyr Evoker hero class and a high-speed new mount system in dragon riding. It promises much-needed upgrades to the profession system, and customizable UI. And it's all coming out by the end of this year, per Blizzard.

Fortunately for those of us who have been wondering when the fog around the Dragon Isles might finally lift, Blizzard is preparing to launch its public alpha later this week, and I was able to get a brief, limited taste of what the dragons there have in store.

I spent a few hours in the colorful, scaly skin of a Dracthyr Evoker, the new race/class combo launching with Dragonflight. Were my time not limited, I probably could have spent hours fussing with the Dracthyr character creator before I ever got into Dragonflight, customizing every detail of both the draconic and human forms of my Evoker – from her multicolored hair right down to the scales on her feet. It's the most robust character creation Blizzard has made for a WoW race before, though at least some part of that is due to Dracthyr's unique draconic forms requiring a custom armor set they wear all the time rather than taking on the visual appearance of whatever armor they happen to have equipped. I can see that trade-off being off-putting to those with massive transmog collections, but fortunately, the human Dracthyr appearances will wear whatever armor they're currently donning, so you can still show it off. It definitely makes the character creators for all of Blizzard's other races, especially the older ones, look woefully thin, though, and I hope once Dracthyr are locked in some of that love will get shared around.

The healing specialization, Preservation, wasn't available yet, but I got a decent tour of the ranged magic abilities of the Devastation spec. Sturdier than a mage, warlock, or priest, but far more mobile than an elemental shaman, Devastation Evokers have a curious toolkit that deftly mixes crowd control, multi-target damage, and movement. For instance, I was able to use Landslide to root multiple enemies in a line in front of me, then take to the air with Deep Breath and soar above their heads, blasting them all with fire where they stood. I could then remain where I landed, or use Recall to warp back to my starting point before they'd even broken out of my Landslide.

I also enjoyed the novelty of the charged ability Fire Breath, which does more damage if you hold the button down to charge it fully, though currently its quick charge time doesn't make the wait feel like much of a sacrifice. I'd like to see Blizzard do more with the charge mechanic, and hope it doesn't get relegated to a one-move gimmick that's quickly patched out. I see a lot of potential for some fun risk/reward play here, especially for such an otherwise mobile caster class.

It's tough to know exactly how the Dracthyr's talent tree will play out this early on, but another aspect I enjoyed was the criss-crossing customizability of both the Evoker tree and the Devastation tree. Devastation splits off into fire-themed and arcane-themed branches, but depending on how you spend your points it's easy to either focus almost entirely on one with only a few benefits of the other, or mix and match while still unlocking some of the more powerful talents. The same goes for the Evoker tree, which has a side dedicated to crowd control and another dedicated to healing. All of this is likely subject to change, and the endgame will probably dictate what the best players use. But the differentiation in the trees is nonetheless enticing, almost like sub-specializations. I hope that dedication to themes bears out in other classes, too.

My brief stint in the Dragon Isles took my Evoker and me to the Azure Span, one of the five new zones in Dragonflight. The Azure Span's blue dragonflight caretakers evoke thoughts of mountains and ice, and certainly the zone had plenty of that. But it also featured a lush green wood further down the mountain, and golden grassy stretches dotted between. It's still early yet, and Blizzard is clearly still filling in the Azure Span with creatures, characters, and secrets, but what struck me most were the colors. There's no denying that World of Warcraft looks increasingly dated the longer it goes on, but interesting color palettes, architecture, and geography can do a lot to mitigate that. Shadowlands already did a promising job of breaking WoW of some of its worst visual impulses (read: grey/brown wastelands and green fire), so if the Azure Span ends up emblematic of the rest of the Dragon Isles, then Dragonflight on the whole might not be so bad to stare at for the next two years or so of expansion content.

Especially from the air.

The best bit of Dragonflight thus far is, wonderfully, the exact thing being advertised in the title: the dragon flying (or riding, to use the technical term). Prior to this, all of WoW's flight was merely accelerated movement across all three axes, and unlockable only after having jumped through numerous hoops with each new expansion. It was a means to an end, a way to get from Point A to B without having to tromp tediously up mountains or use winding flight paths. Dragonflight promises something far more dynamic, though. It promises speed and verticality; an activity undertaken for its own sake, with its own customizations and improvements unlockable throughout the expansion as opposed to a one-time reward.

The pre-alpha gave me extremely limited access to the new and dramatically improved flying feature, but that was enough to sell me. The Azure Span my pre-alpha tour took place in is wonderfully vertical, allowing me the pleasure of leaping off its absurdly high cliff faces and swooping down into the valleys below at high speeds. I was able to build speed on declines that was then spent as I soared upward again, but I could also spend energy on a special stamina meter (called 'Vigor') to flap back upward or zip straight ahead even faster. With a bit of practice, I was mapping out flight paths from the Azure Span's highest peaks that took me all the way across the zone and (oops, sorry) into a few areas Blizzard clearly didn't want me poking around in yet. I cannot wait to unlock barrel rolls.

Early dragon riding admittedly leaves a few things to be desired, though. The Azure Span I soared through wasn't finished yet, and I'm hoping its final cut includes more in the way of interesting flying tests or quests that can only be completed by mastering the swooping skills I was tooling around with. And the climbs back uphill when your energy is spent are about as enjoyable as dragging your toboggan up a mountain after a gleeful sled down. Blizzard has clearly left room for more skills and more stamina, unlockable throughout the expansion, that could trivialize this problem for those who invest enough in their dragons. I already picked up a number of cosmetic customizations for my mounts just from finishing a few regular sidequests, which leaves me optimistic that dragon riding will be effectively woven through both the leveling experience and the endgame when the time comes.

With just a few hours to spend in pre-alpha and some pretty significant training wheels on what I was allowed to do, it's hard to get a very exact taste of how Dragonflight will shape up. I didn't get a solid grasp of where the main story was going, for instance, but I did spend a lot of time doing very World of Warcraft activities like collecting pinecones and killing a set amount of air elementals. The expansion is bringing with it a significant profession overhaul, and I did get to fuss with the crafting menus for a bit, but so much of its success depends on resource availability, economy, and tuning that it's tough to get a handle on whether this is more than just an interface improvement just yet. Similarly, UI customization appears to still be in its infancy, so while I'm optimistic for the feature, we're likely in for a lot of tinkering time left before anyone can say one way or another whether we should all ditch our old add-ons or not (though I'm delighted to have a toggle to combine my bags at last!). That doesn't even mention all the keys to endgame: dungeons, PvP, raids, and whatever other scenarios Blizzard wants to throw at us.

For now, though, the Dragon Isles seem a welcoming enough place to spend some time in, and are certainly worth the vigor it takes to swoop and soar around. I'm curious to see whether Blizzard can ultimately deliver on its grandest promises for an expansion fans have been asking for since World of Warcraft expansions first became a thing, especially at such a chaotic time for the company and studio.

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