We're in the home stretch leading up the next expansion for the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, and as is tradition, director and producer Naoki Yoshida detailed everything in the next wave of content during a Live Letter from the Producer stream. FFXIV Patch 7.5, called Trail to the Heavens, goes live on April 28 and is the first part of a two-part story update series before the upcoming expansion. And as usual, it includes a new dungeon and trial boss fight for the main scenario quest, and a ton of updates to side content shown in a hard-hitting trailer for Patch 7.5 itself.

Here, I'll break down all the important details from the Live Letter to make sure you're ready for FFXIV Patch 7.5, where you're in it for the Beastmaster Job updates, the Crystalline Conflict PVP content, or the next Alliance Raid, or all of it!

FFXIV 7.5 New MSQ Details and Dungeon

While this is closing out the Dawntrail patch series, 7.5 seems to be deeply rooted in story threads from Endwalker. The next dungeon, called The Clyteum, takes us and the Scions back to the snowy ruins and abandoned factories of Garlemald, and the Garlean character Jullus seemingly plays an important role in this stretch. MSQ will also take us back to the moon, Mare Lamentorum, as the new baddie Halmarut and her stuffed toy with Calyx's soul drags the Scions there.

Yoshida mentioned that lore enthusiasts will have a lot to pick apart from The Clyteum as the dungeon is designed to show remnants of Garlemald before its destruction. The new trial boss, Enuo, and while its place in the story isn't clear, Yoshida said it's going to be more difficult and fast-paced, but with fewer environmental gimmicks compared to Patch 7.4's Doom Train fight. You can see moving AoE attacks and pathing mechanics in the fight, but more surprising is seeing Zero and Golbez involved as hinted in the trailer, calling back to Endwalker's patch series.

Although the story arc will close out with part two in Patch 7.55 in early September, Patch 7.5's MSQ will be the typical length as other patches in the past.

Echoes of Vana'diel Alliance Raid Preview – Windurst: The Third Walk

Closing out the 24-player Alliance Raid series for the Dawntrail patch series, Windurst: The Third Walk goes further in this Final Fantasy XI crossover. Yoshida jokingly likens this to an HD remastered version of FFXI as it pulls directly from the old MMORPG. This new instance has a few new gimmicks and mechanics as seen in the opening boss fight against Shantotto, who's a Tarutaru Black Mage from FFXI, but much bigger this time. Those who play Black Mage will notice Shantotto using the Job's abilities in raid form and manipulating the arena's platform.

This will close out the Echoes of Vana'dield raid series and conclude the story of guest characters Alxaal and Prishe. We also got a look at the new gear set you can earn for all Jobs from Windurst: The Third Walk.

New Crystalline Conflict PvP Map – Archeia Harmonias

PvP players can get ready for the new map for the payload-pushing mode Crystalline Conflict – Archeia Harmonias takes place in a library and Yoshida mentioned that the team has worked its map design, tinkering with lines of sight and spaces where fights tend to happen. It also has unique on-map mechanics, such as:

• Healing glyphs are in front of each spawn point and will reduce damage by 50% and heal over time when standing on it.
• Aetherometers are checkpoints at the halfway point between the map's center and teams' spawn points, and the payload will stop at the aetherometer. The team advancing the payload standing in its proximity will charge the aetherometer, and the payload will move again once it reaches 100%. This number will reset if the advancing team leaves the payload's proximity or if an opponent enters the proximity. After fully charged, it'll create a bridge and a jump glyph for players to advance. Yoshida showcased how the meter fills fast to keep up the match's pace.
• Jump glyphs act as shortcuts for teams that activate it and will be at teams' spawn points to help them get back into action. These will remain for the rest of the match.

Other Gameplay Updates in FFXIV Patch 7.5

Many of the system-level changes coming to Patch 7.5 are for convenience such as consolidating dyes and making glamour outfits easier, which were made simple for A Realm Reborn in 2013, but FFXIV outgrew a lot of those UI elements. Here are the notable changes:

• Duty Support system comes to The Dusk Vigil and Shisui of the Violent Tides dungeons.
• Lots of gear will now be storable in the Armoire.
• Dyes will be consolidated to color groups to save inventory space; current dyes will not be functional once Patch 7.5 goes live and can be exchanged for the new dyes.
• Updates to the Housing system include increased limits for indoor and outdoor furnishing, new interior fixture designs, and an option to adjust the number of character models rendered within housing.
• Sightseeing Log's log message will display the emote required to complete it and if specific time and weather conditions haven't been met, if required.
• Outfit Glamour update includes gear from FFXIV 3.0 onward being able to be stored as outfit glamour, and individual gear pieces can be removed from outfit glamour.
• Crafting is being made more convenient – players can now change Jobs, use food and potions, move items in their inventory, and join/leave parties and use linkshells while on standby with the crafting log open.
• Chocobo companions have new animations associated with companion rank and they will now react to the Pet and Poke emotes.

This story is developing.

Daredevil actor Charlie Cox has finally played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, having previously admitted to feeling like a "total fraud" whenever fans brought up his appearance in the game.

For Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the Marvel star only provided the voice of Gustave rather than full performance capture for the character, which meant his time actually spent recording for the project was minimal, while motion capture was separately filmed by another actor.

In June last year, Cox said he felt like a "total fraud" anytime someone gushed to him about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and admitted he had recorded all of his lines in around four hours.

The following month, Cox was asked about Clair Obscur again and admitted he was still to play it, and needed to buy a new games console first. "I remember being in the studio and thinking, 'This is beautiful, the visuals are extraordinary,'" Cox said. "They've come a long way since Mario 64, which is probably the last computer game I played."

Then, in November, Cox said that any awards he might win for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 should really be given to his character's French motion capture artist instead. "Yes, I'm thrilled for this nomination," Cox acknowledged. "I've said this before and I think it's important to say: there's an amazing French actor, by the name of Maxence Cazorla, who did almost all of the motion capture for that role in that game.

"So any nomination or credit I get, I really have to give to him — I believe that the performance of that character is really down to him, and my voice was just part of that process." Cox had been nominated for Best Performance at The Game Awards 2025 for his role in Clair Obscur. The award went to fellow Clair Obscur co-star, Jennifer English.

Now, speaking to GamesRadar+, Cox has provided another update, saying he’s finally given Clair Obscur a try.

"I've since played a bit of it,” he said. “Not the whole thing, I haven't completed it." Then: "I've played the opening bit for a while and kind of walked around and met the people and garnered the information and all that kind of stuff. Not very well."

"I'm not very good, because obviously, it's a skill set, but I've played it,” he continued.

Last month, it emerged that Cox was working on a new video game project. Speaking to YouTube channel Agents of Fandom, Cox said his Clair Obscur role — his first in the realm of video games — had "opened a new avenue for my professional work" and inspired him to take on another video game project this year, one that he was "much more involved" in.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

In some ways, Samson reminds me a little of 2025’s MindsEye. That is, like MindsEye, it’s regularly gorgeous, has some neat vehicles, and is intentionally narrower and far less GTA-adjacent in scope than it may look like at first blush. However, also like MindsEye, Samson is pretty bad. With extremely janky combat, predictable car chases, and a small pool of constantly repeating missions, this open-world driving-brawler hybrid became a dull and annoying slog long before I reached the end of my 12-hour stint with it. Worse, even though I’ve cleared the mammoth $100,000 debt that drives Samson’s daily grind of crime, a game-breaking bug has left me soft-locked out of actually finishing the main missions and rolling credits. It’s as if this game doesn’t want me to finish it properly any more than I do.

Samson’s setup is simple: you are ex-con Samson McCray, who’s recently returned to his neighbourhood of Tyndalston. It’s the 1990s, but disappointingly the choice of time period has virtually no impact besides forcing McCray to use payphones. There’s certainly no ’90s music on the car radios. In fact, there’s no car radio at all, so there isn’t even anywhere players could potentially mod or dump their own.

McCray has a $100,000 debt being held over his head by an out-of-town crew using his sister as leverage, and must make daily payments to keep them both alive in the long-term. Parallel to this, there are 14 story missions involving some criminal rivals of McCray and his Tyndalston pals, of which Samson served me up seven before getting gummed up by some kind of bug that has prevented me from seeing the rest.

There’s a finite amount of jobs you can take on per day, and the sense of urgency and pressure this places on your actions is quite compelling for a brief time. Before I grew weary with the general sloppiness of the brawling, the bugs, and the overall repetitiveness of the missions themselves, chipping away at the huge sum was an admittedly compulsive loop.

Each day is broken up into three sections – afternoon, evening, and night – and you initially have six action points to devote to taking on missions that cost two or three apiece. You must complete jobs to scrape together enough cash to service your debt every single day, and if you come up short you’ll be greeted by hired goons paid to pound it out of you the next morning.

Damn, Son

Allow me to note that I’m well aware Samson is not exactly a big budget game and, on the Venn diagram of open-world action-driving games that operate on the fringe of Grand Theft Auto’s turf, there admittedly isn’t exactly a ton of crossover. At its core, Samson is really a straightforward open-world brawler with a basic driving component, and that’s it. However, its narrow scope isn’t its problem; the problem is how drastically unfinished and unrefined it all is.

Make no mistake: Samson is regularly very good-looking. From the way the midday sun pierces into McCray’s crumbling apartment, to the wafting steam emanating from manholes on the rain-slick streets, Samson’s visuals have truly been wonderfully realised. Tyndalston itself is also a genuinely fascinating place to inspect, thanks to its remarkable level of detail. The world is better described as more of a single neighbourhood rather than a city on account of its small size, with the main part of town just a few blocks wide and flanked by two waterside industrial zones – plus there’s a thin strip of freeway across a river accessible via several bridges. However, keeping it small has clearly allowed developer Liquid Swords to dress it with layers upon layers of credible urban grime. From the piles of garbage and stripped-down cars to the splashes of unique graffiti and hastily scrawled slogans, Tyndalston feels lived-in in a way that not all open-world games manage.

Unfortunately, Samson’s admirable aesthetics can’t counteract the shonkiness of its combat, the dullness of its driving, or the dreariness of having to do the same missions over and over for no measurable payoff.

Samson’s strictly hand-to-hand brawling is clunky and graceless – and there’s no firearm combat at all, which begs the question of whether this whole game might have been better off set in a different country altogether. Cops will occasionally fire on McCray, but they often forget they’re armed. At one point I killed a man surrounded by police in the forecourt of a precinct, and not one of them thought to pull a pistol. Enemies appear to have very little environmental awareness, struggling with tight spaces and doorways, and getting hung up on props and clipping through parts of the world. Sometimes they just ignore your presence altogether.

With no lock-on available, fights typically devolve into spamming McCray’s light attack button and swinging the camera around as you swipe at the air trying to connect with opponents. There’s also a slow and highly telegraphed heavy attack that lands with a pleasing-enough meaty crunch, but it’s not something you can use much when surrounded by enemies.

Combat isn’t particularly responsive, either. For instance, staggered opponents will have a prompt appear above them for a finishing move – but getting this to trigger feels inconsistent. I often found myself simply spamming the button with no result, before subsequently giving up and windmilling another salvo of punches out ahead of McCray until his fists find some face flesh by accident.

Extracting him from combat is even more frustrating. Mashing the dodge button is effective enough, but his ability to actually sprint away is seemingly blocked when being swarmed by thugs – that means trying to turn and slowly jog in the opposite direction will just get you punched in the back of the head a bunch.

Some fights can be avoided by staying in your car, but there’s a limit to what you can achieve behind the wheel. A bit of this is the result of Samson’s habit of having invisible enemies drag McCray out of his vehicle and toss him several storeys into the air – just far enough away that you’ll automatically fail the mission. This may well be a trade off for all the times enemies will go through the animation of yanking him out of his car without actually doing so, leaving you able to continue driving.

More annoying, however, is how enemies generally have a supernatural ability to simply skate out of the way of your speeding vehicle – like animals and pedestrians in licensed racing games that aren’t permitted to let you run down living beings. Unless the environment prevents it, your car will often just push enemies out of danger like identical poles of a magnet. This is not only annoying, but it looks awful and unfinished, particularly when trying to mow down large groups. For some reason, however, enemies are completely oblivious to reversing cars – so if you back towards baddies, they’ll simply run mindlessly toward your rear bumper until you smear them onto the asphalt.

Magnum Bogus

Unfortunately, the driving pillar of Samson’s action isn’t any sturdier. There are a smattering of driving-specific missions – including checkpoint races, deliveries, takedowns, and getaways – but none of them are especially enjoyable.

Getaways are probably the most disappointing, since the wanted system transparently cheats to get a fix on you. Even when you’ve broken line of sight, if you stop, police will continue to make all the correct turns to get you. Failing that, Samson will simply spawn in a new police cruiser out of nowhere directly behind you. Think you’re safe tucked away down an alley, far from the initial pursuit? So did I, until a police car blinked into existence metres away and slammed straight into me – seconds before the cooldown timer had finished.

Takedowns are disappointing, too. Despite Samson’s trailers hinting at the prospect of thrilling crashes as enemy cars wipe out and tumble alongside you, this doesn’t really happen much. What we typically get is rival vehicles bumbling around town on predefined routes. You’ll know when a T-bone is on the cards because, after a few takedown missions, you’ll know exactly where your targets are going to turn. Watching your rivals doing the same laps of the neighbourhood makes for very formulaic chases.

Occasionally they’ll get hung up for no apparent reason and refuse to proceed, giving you an easy target to smash into. However, sometimes that takes too long and the moment you wreck that car, the other vehicles are too far away and you’ll instantly fail. Other times your own car won’t survive long enough, meaning you’ll have to hoof it to the closest parked one – Samson bafflingly doesn’t let you carjack vehicles with drivers in them already. If you’re lucky, there’ll be one close by. If you’re not, you’ll be running for a while.

Takedown missions often end the millisecond you cause enough damage to your final target. At that point, the action will freeze to congratulate you on your success, but the moment play resumes the target car will disappear off the face of the planet. Sometimes all the cars in the area will disappear.

Much like the 2015 Mad Max game’s Magnum Opus, there’s an overt attempt in Samson to have players become attached to McCray’s personal vehicle. It’s perhaps not a coincidence considering there’s a good deal of talent at Liquid Swords who formerly worked at Mad Max developer Avalanche and, as a total car dork, it’s something I fundamentally understand.

In practice, however, it just doesn’t work. The cost of repairing McCray’s car is roughly as much as a typical mission will pay out, so the requirement to constantly do so in order to keep using it is too big a burden – and an unnecessary one at that. I quickly pivoted to using stolen cars to complete missions. Aside from mild variations, excluding McCray’s one-of-a-kind muscle car, I think there are only about four different traffic cars in Samson. That’s really very low for the genre, however (with the exception of a few checkpoint races with particularly unforgiving time limits that I quickly learned to avoid), I eventually found I could reliably complete missions in any one of them.

I took down the same street racer on several occasions in an old Ford Econoline-style van, and at one point I disabled a whole four-car convoy in a boxy old off-brand Chevy Caprice. The ’90s European and Crown Vic-inspired sedans don’t feel appreciably slower than McCray’s car, and I completed plenty of checkpoint races in them. I see what Liquid Swords was trying to do, but it pushed me away from McCray’s car rather than increasing my desire to nurture it.

Tyndals-done

There’s a whole XP system with perks and upgrades, but none of them feel meaningful. They largely just increase attributes like health and power and such, which means little when enemies get similarly stronger alongside you.

Reaching the end of my loan repayments only took me halfway through the XP levels, so I can’t really say if you’ll eventually outpace your enemies if you level up all the way. That said, there’s simply no good case to keep playing Samson after hitting that point. Clearing the debt got me a giddy phone call from McCray’s sister, Oonagh, and… that’s it. From that point on it’s noted McCray can keep what he earns, but there’s no purpose to have cash on hand other than to afford car repairs – and I have no desire to keep playing the same recycled missions I’ve already completed three or four times each.

If you want an open-world brawler with a little drama baked around it, play Sleeping Dogs, where the hand-to-hand combat drastically outclasses Samson in every way. If you want satisfying car chases in hefty American land yachts, play Driver: San Francisco. If you want an open-world action driving game designed to foster a relationship with a single vehicle (that simultaneously showcases the best of what a core part of the Liquid Swords team is capable of), play Mad Max. And if you want an open-world crime epic that actually feels like it's set in the ’90s, just dust off a copy of GTA: San Andreas.

Developer 3DClouds has announced it has partnered with the FIA Formula E World Championship for a fully licensed expansion for its 2025 racer Formula Legends.

The Formula E: Electric Evolution expansion will arrive on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation platforms on April 30, 2026, with Nintendo platforms arriving at an unspecified later date. The expansion will feature all the manufacturers, drivers, and teams, plus six real-world tracks from the official Formula E series (Berlin, Tokyo, London, São Paulo, Miami, and Shanghai).

In sync with Formula Legends’ established approach to its representation of racing over multiple eras, it will also feature GEN1, GEN2, and GEN3 cars.

“To have a series as prestigious and entertaining as the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship in our racing game Formula Legends is truly extraordinary,” said 3DClouds CEO Francesco Bruschi in a statement provided alongside the announcement. “Formula E has been a fantastic partner for us and incorporating drivers, teams, tracks, cars, branding from this series and even its iconic theme has been a joy from start to finish. We hope players will enjoy our efforts bringing this unique motorsport series to life in our game.”

IGN’s review of Formula Legends called it an “earnest and consistently charming unlicensed homage to seven decades of F1 racing that’s one part Art of Rally and one part Micro Machines.”

Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can track him down on Bluesky @mrlukereilly to ask him things about stuff.

The Epic Games Store is almost 10 years old, launching all the way back in 2017. And while it's kind of come a long way since then – it has a search function now – it's still exponentially worse than Steam, which it was built to dethrone.

To this day, Epic's storefront is slow and devoid of the features that transformed Steam from an annoying piece of DRM you had to install with Half-Life 2 into the community-focused storefront that's nearly synonymous with "PC gaming” itself. It's little wonder, then, that an Epic employee told Polygon that most users "come for the free games, then leave." If Epic really does want to dethrone Steam, then I can't help but wonder if it has its priorities completely backwards.

Publishers Aren’t The Ones Buying Games

When the Epic Games Store first launched, a lot was said about how it would finally be the PC storefront to actually pose a challenge to Steam. We here at IGN even said that Epic’s store actually had a chance to dethrone Valve. But eight years later, that really hasn’t happened, even if it still gets a few exclusives here and there.

A lot of that comes down to Epic’s philosophy around selling games. You see, every platform – whether it’s Valve, Apple, Google, or any other – takes a slice of revenue from games and apps sold on its storefront. Epic’s approach was to offer a much more favorable revenue share – just 12% – compared to the larger margins taken by most other storefronts. (Valve takes a 24% cut of every game sold on Steam, for example.) The problem is, that doesn’t mean much to the average gamer that just wants to play games.

If it did, Epic’s market share would account for a much bigger slice of the pie. But despite Valve’s apparent greed here, Steam was estimated to generate $1.6 billion in December 2025 alone, according to Alinea Analytics – more than the $1.16 billion that Epic made in the whole of 2025.

It’s no secret why Valve sells so many more games than Epic, it has a huge install base of loyal users that have been using Steam for years. For as long as it’s existed, Epic has been desperately trying to carve out its own dedicated userbase, mostly by giving away free games every couple of weeks. And while dangling free game keys in front of people’s faces is a good way to get people to download the app once, it doesn’t do much to keep people coming back, especially when the games store itself is kind of a mess.

Need To Go Faster

IGN interviewed Steve Allison, VP and GM of the Epic Games Store back in February, where he told us that Epic is investing in making the Epic Games Store a better experience for users. Specifically, the company is focused on making the launcher “feel fast and snappy and just be what you expect, frankly.” To its credit, Epic seems to have a finger on the pulse of what makes its platform such a slog to use.

To this day, the Epic Games Store takes forever to load, and once you start scrolling through your library, you often have to wait for a couple seconds for the next batch of games to load. That would be bad enough for a brand new app, but the Epic Games Store has been around for nearly a decade at this point, and even though computers are orders of magnitudes faster than they were in 2018, it still takes way too long to load my library, even when I have it set to a list view.

Epic claims that the new, more efficient store will launch in June, and that’ll be awesome if it’s true, but the store doesn’t exactly have a sterling reputation for improving its storefront on time. Back in 2019, Epic released a roadmap of features that would be added to the app, thankfully preserved by Wccftech, and while a lot of those features did end up getting worked in, there are still features like user reviews that are nowhere to be found.

Playing Catch-Up

While Epic runs in circles, trying to improve its game store, Valve isn’t exactly sitting on its hands. Steam is still incredibly snappy, especially when you’re just scrolling through your library, and it continues to add actually useful features. I mean, just a couple of weeks ago, files were found in Steam’s beta that suggests that the platform will help you figure out exactly how well games will run on your PC.

It’s this focus on making PC gaming more user-friendly that has turned Steam into the juggernaut it is today. And now, it’s at the point where you can argue that Steam is more than just some program that you use to buy video games. You can just use it to buy games, but there’s a reason that there’s a bold “Community” tab that lives at the top of the window.

Steam has everything from message boards, to user reviews, to extremely customizable profiles. Hell, I remember back when Trading Cards came out in 2013 – I was obsessed, for like six months, on collecting them and raising my Steam Level, just so I could add more bullshit to my profile. Features like this are probably why the Valve logo is often shown alongside the Playstation and Xbox symbols whenever a multiplatform game is released. Steam just kind of is PC gaming.

If Epic wants to compete with that, that’s awesome. By all means release an updated Epic Games Store that makes people actually want to use the platform, because the PC gaming scene absolutely needs more competition. But that competition needs to actually compete. Epic Games can continue dangling free games in front of people, but expecting that gamers are just going to flock to its store, even though it has a worse UX and no community features, is just delusional.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra

Apparently the settlement that would become the city of San Francisco was once called Yerba Buena, which is where this quirky physics platformer got its name. Set in an alternate reality 1970’s version of the City by the Bay, my 90-minute demo had me rushing to rescue a friend, discovering the first seeds of a government conspiracy, and scratching my head over a lot of the writing decisions.

On the plus side, the art in Yerba Buena is quite charming. It reminds me a bit of some of Telltale's older games, like it was torn out of the pages of a graphic novel. The characters are richly designed with clothing and hairstyles that ground everything in the ‘70s. The colorful streets capture an almost mythological ideal of SF, a city I lived in for years and still feel very fondly about. And the jaunty soundtrack is fun, too. The writing doesn't exactly complete the illusion, though.

The main character is Barb, an out-of-work Midwest transplant who’s likeable enough. But nothing in Yerba Buena's plot seems to flow naturally from what came before it. There are simply fixed moments it wants to get to and it will make any excuse to jump from where we are to where it wants to be, even if it requires bizarre leaps of logic or characters coming to really weird conclusions. The whole tension of the first section hinges on the fact that the SFPD have decided the life of one of Barb's friends who was taken hostage by bikers isn't important, and they're going to storm the building to get the perp even if it means sacrificing a civilian.

Look, I've had my fair share of negative interactions with the police, but no hostage negotiation I've ever heard of amounted to, "Tough luck, he shouldn't have been taken hostage!" This leads Barb to have to mount a one-woman vigilante rescue mission involving time travel and physics puzzles. And that's where we get into the main gameplay mechanic: The Oscillator.

In essence, Yerba Buena seems like it kind of wants to be Portal. The Oscillator is a technomagical device that allows you, at first, to copy the movement of one object and apply it to another. There are some genuinely cool applications for this. You can copy a speeding car and then apply it to an entire apartment, causing it to fly across the street with you in it and let you access the rooftops the next block over. Later, it gains the ability to "copy" any vapor and then apply that property to a solid object to allow you or other objects to pass through it.

It's a neat idea, even if there are only two areas to mess around with The Oscillator in the demo aside from a brief training course: a San Francisco city block and a psychedelic amusement park that exists in some kind of pocket dimension? Again, the story is pretty difficult to parse. I found a mix of clever puzzles with a few that I'm not sure were super well thought-out. But the potential of these mechanics at least has me curious to see what else the full game might pull off. I suppose the writing does as well, but in more of an, “unable to look away from a train wreck” sort of way. There's a very, "I went to San Francisco for GDC a couple times and decided I wanted to set a game here" feeling to how German studio Mad About Pandas depicts everything. It's the ‘70s, but there's a major plot point about a tech mogul wanting to ruin a local park by building a giant TV antenna, which seems like it's struggling to take more recent problems and transport them back in time to the chosen era.It gets even weirder when you find out the fugitives who kidnapped your friend were apparently – and I'm not making any of this up – a special biker gang unit in the Vietnam War who were experimented on to give them superpowers like the Avengers or something. You reveal this by discovering a certificate of Court Martial – that looks like an award you would get in school and hang on the wall – with the name of the gang filled in on a blank line. The tone is kind of light-hearted, but this isn't played for laughs. It's not a comedy game. At least, I don't think it's supposed to be?In addition to this, the leader of the gang, Bear, seems to be able to reload a save any time he dies. Literally. You see a menu pop up over his dead body while he selects the option to reset time to an earlier point. Seemingly all of the characters are aware that this is happening, including the ones who aren't in the gang! But they handwave it away as a trivial oddity just like they do everything else, because no one in this universe follows logic resembling our Earth logic.

Its endearing visual style and relatable main character weren't quite enough to get me excited to play more Yerba Buena given the confusing plot and dismal quality of the writing. The puzzle possibilities of The Oscillator might, though. Especially if we haven't seen all of the tricks it can do yet. You'll be able to see it for yourself on May 26 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.

Leana Hafer is a contributing freelancer for IGN with a specialty in RPGs, strategy, horror, and survival games. She has been reviewing video games professionally since 2010 and is one of IGN's most prolific contributors, with more than 100 reviews published. You can also find her work on sites like PC Gamer and PCGamesN.

In March, Ubisoft released the first piece of concept art for Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced, confirming the existence of the remake of the beloved pirate installment of the series, and today we have a release date, July 9. The date was reported by Insider Gaming but hasn't been confirmed by Ubisoft as yet.

In a (now deleted) March blog post from Ubisoft's Jean Guesdon, Head of Content did hint at the rumors of the remake. "Speculation around Assassin's Creed is not new, but it's worth repeating: "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted." Well, except in this case, some whispers have a little more wind in their sails. Keep your spyglass on the horizon. 🦜"

The project's official name, Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced, was seen in December, when it popped up via a European PEGI ratings board listing. That sighting followed a few hints from the original game's lead actor.

"Players can be excited about some remakes,” Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said in June 2024, “which will allow us to revisit some of the games we've created in the past and modernize them; there are worlds in some of our older Assassin's Creed games that are still extremely rich.”

Rachel Weber is the Head of Editorial Development at IGN and an elder millennial. She's been a professional nerd since 2006 when she got her start on Official PlayStation Magazine in the UK, and has since worked for GamesIndustry.Biz, Rolling Stone and GamesRadar. She loves horror, horror movies, horror games, Red Dead Redemption 2, and her Love and Deepspace boyfriends.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 has now hit a hugely impressive 12 million players, with publisher Focus Entertainment celebrating its success.

“A couple years ago, we had great hopes for this project. Today, it has surpassed even our wildest dreams,” Focus said.

It’s worth noting this is not an announcement of 12 million sales. While Space Marine 2 has sold wonderfully well, its player count was boosted by its recent addition into video game subscription services. All told, the Saber Interactive-developed third-person action game has blown away all expectations, with Space Marine 3 in active development even as Space Marine 2 updates continue.

In a recent interview with IGN, Saber development chief Tim Willits denied the suggestion that the priority is now the development of Space Marine 3, promising more content to come.

“No, we actually just released a big update and it's still going strong,” Willits said, referring to the Techmarine update. “Were we at number four on the top sales? So it's still doing great for us. And we just released a big update. And like World War Z, we're still making content for that, while the team obviously works on Space Marine 3.”

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

The Lenovo Legion Glasses 2 was released back in February 2025 at a starting price of $399.99. Today you can get it for way less: Amazon is currently offering a pair for just $249.99 with free shipping. If it sells out there, you can also get it for the same price right now at Lenovo direct. These glasses make for an easily transportable "room-filling" display for your portable gaming handheld or console, perfect for gaming on the road or away from your TV.

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Street Fighter 6 added Alex to its fighter line-up last month. But what should have been the welcome return of an old character turned into controversy, as Alex’s complex family dynamics were revealed in the arcade mode ending and World Tour scenes, namely his marriage to younger step sister/distant cousin Patricia. However, the resulting April 15 patch has drawn criticism for making Alex’s convoluted family relations even vaguer.

American fighter Alex Winger debuted as the face of 1997's Street Fighter 3 New Generation, which also introduced his adoptive father and mentor figure, Tom. Alex’s relationship with Tom’s daughter Patricia was always portrayed as a sibling bond, as they grew up together. However, Street Fighter 6 turns this on its head by revealing that Alex and Patricia are now married, with a baby on the way.

This alone was icky enough for some fans, but the situation was further complicated by revelations in Street Fighter 6’s World Tour mode. Alex’s dialogue states that Tom is actually a cousin of Alex’s mother, making Alex and Patricia second cousins.

Patricia and Alex. Patricia is pregnant with a girl. Special artwork (right) was drawn by Keisuke Mizuno https://t.co/4GKHaKKFVD pic.twitter.com/JCQc04p7V3

— Women of Street Fighter (@WomenofSFseries) March 17, 2026

The situation prompted so much backlash that the game’s director apologized and announced adjustments to dialogues in a future patch. Fast forward to Street Fighter 6’s April 15 update, which adjusts some of Alex’s World Tour story text in certain localizations (including English).

So what did the patch change? Story-wise, very little. Instead of explicitly stating that Tom and his mom are cousins, Alex’s dialogue now says that Tom is “a distant relative of my mom or something, and was a sparring buddy of my dad.”

Alex’s line about Tom’s significance in his life also got made vaguer. The pre-patch English localization was, “He’s my trainer, my manager, my adoptive dad… No, he is my dad.” Now, Tom’s just, “basically the dad I needed.” This adjustment, however, does bring it a bit more in line with the original Japanese version, which uses the more ambiguous term ‘sodate no oya,’ which can simply mean a parent-like figure who played a role in raising someone (not necessarily a formal adoption).

Prior to the patch, Street Fighter 6 director Takayuki Nakayama posted an apology on X for the “confusion” that Alex’s backstory had caused among fans. He explained that, "While we have not changed the characters’ backstories, after internal review by the development team, we plan to revise certain text passages that may have been misleading." The post linked to ‘A Toast between Fathers,’ an official short story by Street Fighter 6’s scenario team that explains how Alex and Patricia’s once sibling-like relationship took a romantic turn.

Basically, Capcom’s approach to the marriage controversy so far has been to add backstory to justify how Alex and Patricia’s relationship changed over time, and to make their biological connection even vaguer.

Overall, the patch seems to have caused a mix of dissatisfaction and bemusement among fans, with many wondering why Capcom seems so determined to keep Alex and Patricia biologically related in some way. The change to Tom being a distant relative of Alex’s mother “or something” prompted many LOL reactions (“They're hoping that "Or something" does A LOT of heavy lifting,” opined one Redditor). If anything, the changes just make Alex sound unsure about, or even embarrassed by his complicated family.

Verity Townsend is a Japan-based freelance writer who previously served as editor, contributor and translator for the game news site Automaton West. She has also written about Japanese culture and movies for various publications.

If you’re a fan of seeing iconic fighting game franchises on the big screen, then 2026 is truly your year. Not only is Warner Bros. releasing the second film in its rebooted Mortal Kombat series, we’re also getting a brand new Street Fighter movie courtesy of Paramount Pictures and Legendary Entertainment. Hollywood has tried and failed to adapt this colorful franchise in the past, but will the third time be the charm? Well, it can’t be any worse than 2009’s Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.

We’ve finally gotten our first good look at Street Fighter thanks to a new trailer released during CinemaCon 2026. And if there’s any one takeaway from this footage, it’s that Street Fighter looks like a whole lot of fun. It even opens with the countdown timer sound effects from the games. Could we be looking at the best fighting game movie since 1995’s Mortal Kombat? For now, let’s break down all the characters we meet in the trailer and how they fit together in this epic tale of guys and gals beating the snot out of each other.

Noah Centineo’s Ken Masters

Street Fighter may feature an ensemble cast of fighters pulled from all over the globe, but the trailer makes it pretty clear that this story will revolve heavily around Noah Centineo’s Ken Masters and Andrew Koji’s Ryu. We’re not surprised, as this Dynamic Duo tends to be the focus in most incarnations of the Street Fighter franchise. Ken and Ryu have been there from the beginning. They were the only playable characters in the original Street Fighter game from 1987, and they’ve been series mainstays ever since.

In the games, Ken and Ryu are lifelong friends who both trained under the same master, Gouken. That’s why they wear different colored variations of the same martial arts uniform. But whereas Ryu is totally dedicated to perfecting his fighting craft, Ken is a bit more freewheeling and sociable.

We’ll focus more on Ryu in a bit, but for now, let’s dig in with Ken. The trailer reveals that the game is set in 1993, which seems to be an intentional nod to the original era of Street Fighter mania in the early ‘90s. We can see from this footage that Ken has become a bit of a celebrity, even hosting his own show on MTV. But that fame seems to have come at a heavy price. Ken is clearly a washed-up has-been who’d rather get drunk and belt out karaoke than hone his skills as one of the world’s best fighters.

If anything, we notice a lot of similarities between Centineo’s Ken and Karl Urban’s Johnny Cage from Mortal Kombat II. Both are world-class fighters-turned-celebrities who are arguably past their prime, and both will have to prove they’ve still got it when they enter the fighting ring.

Ken features in a couple of cool Street Fighter Easter eggs in the trailer. We see him performing several iconic fighting moves from the games, including an obligatory Shoryuken punch, a rolling back throw, a Jinrai Kick from 2023’s Street Fighter 6, and axe-kicking a character we assume is El Fuerte. In another shot, we see him kicking and punching a car, a nod to those infamous bonus levels where players try to destroy a car with their expert fighting moves.

Andrew Koji’s Ryu

Now let’s turn our attention to Ken’s BFF Ryu. The two characters are clearly having a bit of a relationship crisis in the movie. Even as Ken has molded himself into a drunken cable TV star, Ryu has seemingly retreated from the world and become a modern-day martial arts hermit. Ryu seems happy enough to be reunited with his old buddy, but not Ken. His first instinct when he sees Ryu is to bust out a flying kick.

Ryu is the closest thing the Street Fighter franchise has to a main character. Again, he’s a top-tier fighter obsessed with perfecting his craft. But though he’s a good-natured warrior who’s always eager to meet new opponents and test his skills, Ryu also harbors a secret dark side. That may explain why he’s in hiding as the movie opens. Ryu may be afraid of unleashing the true power within.

We get a taste of that power at the end of the trailer when we see Ryu summon one of his iconic fireballs and shout the word “Hadouken!!!” Street Fighter may be built around hand-to-hand combat, but many of the fighters have superhuman abilities they can bring to the battlefield.

Callina Liang’s Chun-Li

What would a Street Fighter movie be without the mighty Chun-Li joining Ryu and Ken? This time around, this deadly Chinese fighter is played by Callina Liang.

Chun-Li was introduced in 1991’s Street Fighter II and has appeared in most of the games since then. She’s portrayed as a skilled warrior and Interpol agent who seeks revenge against M. Bison for the murder of her father. But, as we know from Raul Julia’s infamous rant in the original Street Fighter movie, he’s killed a great many fathers over the years.

Here, Chun-Li appears to be the catalyst that brings Ryu, Ken, and other fighters together to partake in a high-stakes martial arts tournament. Why she’s seeking out these elite world warriors isn’t entirely clear, but it may all be part of a plot to bring down M. Bison. What we do know is that she seems rather unimpressed with both Ryu and Ken. One is hiding from the world, the other is “a sideshow,” and neither is living up to his true potential. Chun-Li aims to fix that.

The trailer drops another amusing nod to the games when Chun-Li meets Mel Jarnson’s Cammy and the latter makes a comment about Chun-Li’s thighs. One of the hallmarks of Chun-Li’s character design from the games is her extremely muscular legs, and the movie is clearly having some fun with the fact that her reputation precedes her. We also see her put those legs to good use when she busts out a Hundred Lightning Legs move.

David Dastmalchian’s M. Bison

David Dastmalchian is playing M. Bison, the character we’re assuming is the main villain of the film. Bison is definitely one of the most important villains in the franchise, dating back to his role as the final boss of Street Fighter II.

Bison is a tyrant with aims of world domination. He runs a criminal organization known as Shadaloo, one that manipulates world governments. He’s also the architect of the World Warrior tournament (hence why it’s a bit odd that his nemesis Chun-Li seems to be recruiting for said tournament).

If the movie is anything like the games, we expect to see Bison try to recruit Ryu and possibly Ken to his cause. He sees the dark power residing within these warriors, a power that can rival his own “Psycho Power.”

Joe “Roman Reigns” Anoa’i’s Akuma

Bison is probably the main villain of the new movie, but don’t count out Roman Reigns’ character, Akuma. Akuma is another major antagonist from the games with a deep connection to both Ryu and Ken. Akuma is the subject of much fascination for Street Fighter fans, in part because he was introduced as a secret playable character in 1994’s Super Street Fighter II Turbo.

Akuma’s name literally means “demon” or “devil” in Japanese, and he lives up to that name. He’s the younger brother of Ryu and Ken’s master Gouken, and he seeks to harness a dark power known as Satsui no Hado. Like Bison, he senses great and terrible potential in Ryu.

We only briefly see Reigns’ character in the trailer, but he’s shown battling Ryu and tapping into his own dark energy to charge up his Empyrean's End super move. We expect that face-off to be one of the major set pieces of the film. But will Akuma be a major player in this conflict, or is this more a taste of things to come in a possible sequel?

Cody Rhodes’ Guile

Street Fighter features another familiar WWE face in the form of Cody Rhodes, who plays the overconfident military man Guile. Guile was the central character in the first Street Fighter movie, but based on the trailer it looks like he serves in more of a supporting role this time around. Expect a lot of comic relief from this dude, and not just because of his ridiculous haircut.

Guile is another series mainstay introduced in 1991’s Street Fighter II, and like Chun-Li, he has a major grudge against M. Bison for the death of his partner, Charlie.

Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson’s Balrog

One of the more intriguing casting choices in this movie is 50 Cent, who’s been tapped to play elite boxer Balrog. If the costume and makeup don’t make it obvious, Balrog is heavily modeled after real-world boxer Mike Tyson.

In the games, Balrog is a disgraced fighter who joins Bison’s Shadaloo organization. We see him battling Ken in the trailer, where it looks like he’ll be one of the first real challenges this washed-up martial artist faces on the road to victory.

Jason Momoa’s Blanka

Street Fighter gained some real star power with the casting of Jason Momoa as Blanka. Another iconic character introduced in 1991’s Street Fighter II, Blanka is also one of the most colorful and unusual characters in the games. As the story goes, he was once a guy named Jimmy who mutated after a plane crash and became an oversized, green-skinned monster with the power to generate electricity.

Eric André’s Don Sauvage

Any global martial arts tournament worth its salt needs a good announcer, and that’s the role being filled by Eric André’s Don Sauvage. Sauvage is a flamboyant announcer and promoter inspired by pro wrestling personality Jimmy Hart. It appears he’ll be providing play-by-play commentary for at least some of the matches in the film.

Orville Peck’s Vega

It seems only fitting that the Street Fighter character known for always wearing a mask would be played by an actor infamous for rarely showing his face in public. Orville Peck is playing Vega, a graceful but very deadly fighter who wields Wolverine-like claws. Vega is known as the “Spanish ninja,” as his fighting style combines elements of ninjutsu and bullfighting.

Olivier Richters’ Zangief

Street Fighter characters don’t get much bigger or more imposing than Zangief, who’s played here by Olivier Richters. In the games, Zangief is a professional wrestler from Russia who’s determined to prove his country’s superiority by piledriving all challengers into submission.

We see several larger-than-life feats of strength from Richters’ character in the trailer, including an Ultimate Atomic Crusher Ultra Technique from 2008’s Street Fighter IV, which makes it plain that the movie is opting for a more cartoonish style of violence.

Hirooki Goto’s E. Honda

We don’t see much of him in the trailer, but Hirooki Goto has been cast as master sumo wrestler E. Honda. Honda is another long-running Street Fighter character who dates back to 1991’s Street Fighter II.

Vidyut Jammwal’s Dhalsim

Rounding out the cast of Street Fighter II legends is Vidyut Jammwal as Dhalsim. This yogi and mystic is one of the more unusual fighters in the games, as he can stretch his limbs in impossible ways. He’s also a hardcore pacifist who only participates in the tournament to raise money for his impoverished village. We see Dhalism at several points in the trailer, both fighting in the ring and being recruited by Chun-Li.

Mel Jarnson’s Cammy

Cammy is arguably the most popular Street Fighter character to debut after that initial batch of World Warriors, so we’re not at all surprised to see her in the movie. Cammy has proven very important to the mythology of the series, as she’s been revealed to be one of M. Bison’s former assassins who loses her memory and becomes an MI6 agent. We don’t know how much the movie will get into that backstory, though, as we mainly see Cammy acting as a foil to Chun-Li.

Andrew Schulz’s Dan Hibiki

Finally, how could we forget about Dan Hibiki, probably the most divisive character in the Street Fighter franchise? Dan is played by Andrew Schulz in the movie. He, too, is a former student of Gouken, though unlike Ryu and Ken, he’s pretty much all bluster and no substance. Don’t expect him to make it very far in this tournament. Actually, it appears he may be Ken’s manager in the film, rather than an active fighter himself.

Those are the fighters you need to know before watching Street Fighter. What do you think of this upcoming video game movie? Does the trailer have you ready to bash cars with your bare fists, or is this another disaster in the making? Let us know what you think in the comments.

For more, check out every video game movie and series in development.

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

James Bond video game 007: First Light will feature a main title theme sung by Lana Del Rey, publisher IO Interactive has announced.

Bond fans have long suspected Del Rey is behind 007: First Light's title track — ever since she registered a fresh song titled "First Light" to the ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) database late last year. Del Rey had used her real name, Elizabeth Grant, for the registration — but internet sleuths quickly connected the dots.

Now, the track is live on Del Rey's YouTube channel — and it sounds a fitting Bond song, while also playfully referencing the fact First Light is a video game (and perhaps also Del Rey's own iconic tune, Video Games). Veteran Bond composer David Arnold (who scored five Bond films, from Tomorrow Never Dies to Quantum of Solace) is behind its score.

"Can't say I'm surprised to see you running toward the sun," Del Rey sings. "It's the first light of day... Ah, you're ready? All the fates just watch you, dying just to know whether you'll play your life like a game."

The track is a fitting addition to the franchise for Del Rey — who previously recorded her 2005 track "24" to feature in Daniel Craig movie Spectre, the franchise's 24th film, only for Sam Smith's "Writing's On the Wall" to ultimately be chosen in its place instead.

007: First Light has suffered a string of leaks over the past few months, and perhaps most notably this week, when the game's ending was accidentally made available publicly due to a major slip-up by the Indonesian ratings board. With just six weeks still to go until the game's launch, IO has been keen to keep much about the game under wraps to avoid spoiling narrative surprises.

The long-awaited next game from the developer of Hitman, 007: First Light features a starry cast and big ambitions to kickstart a fresh James Bond game trilogy. While its story remains largely secret, we know it'll feature a fresh-faced incarnation of Bond played by Dexter: Original Sin star Patrick Gibson, in a new origin story that features The Eternals' Gemma Chan, The Walking Dead's Lennie James, and The Hunger Games' Lenny Kravitz.

Following an earlier delay, 007: First Light is now set to launch on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on May 27. A Switch 2 version is also set to follow — though not until "later this summer."

Of course, Del Rey isn't the only music mogul involved with the project. Singer and actor Lenny Kravitz will star in the game as Bawma, a villain who at one point hangs poor Bond upside down and threatens to feed him to a pair of waiting crocodiles.

Image credit: Theo Wargo/Getty Images

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Bigger maps, naval warfare, and persistent servers are just a few of the additions coming to Battlefield 6, as its developers have promised to finally, directly address community feedback with a series of major updates throughout 2026.

After months of outcry for more content and reports of declining interest from players, the four-studio group that makes up Battlefield Studios is going to great lengths to win back fans. IGN was invited for a Q&A session with the team to learn more about what is coming in Season 3, 4, and even 5, and while it’s unclear if it will be enough to reach the heights of launch, one thing is certain: they are listening.

Season 3

EA and BF Studios are, at last, implementing their plans to finally let Battlefield 6 soar, and Season 3 is the runway – but what took so long?

“We want to make sure we are making and moving as quickly as we possibly can to really address the concerns that players are having but also making sure they are having the experiences that they want to have,” Ripple Effect executive producer Ryan McArthur said. “That being said, the most important thing for the team is to make sure we get it right. Things like maps and game modes, and things that really take some time and some balancing, we want to make sure we’ve got the time to put the effort in to make sure the experience the players want is the experience we get.”

Getting it right starts with the previously announced plan to launch a remake of Golmud Railway with Season 3 this May. This version of a classic Battlefield 4 map, now called Railway to Golmud, is set in Tajikistan and comes with updated visuals, reworked play areas, and updated audio design. It also happens to be approximately four times the size of the already quite large Mirak Valley, giving players a taste of how BF Studios will address long-standing calls for larger multiplayer maps.

The second map of the season is another returning location: Grand Bazaar. Now called Cairo Bazaar, this smaller Battlefield 3 map has been reworked to somehow feature even more intense encounters. Motive executive producer Philippe Ducharme added that players will have access to vehicles in the smaller version of the map, explaining only that it’s “not the full roster” like what will be seen in Railway to Golmud.

Ranked play is also coming to Battlefield REDSEC in Season 3, with BF Studios promising battle royale quads fans that they’ll be able to earn exclusive rewards, with more competitive-leaning content planned to arrive in Battlefield 6 at a later date. A solo battle royale matchmaking option is also set to launch this season.

Season 4

Season 4 looks like it could be a make-or-break moment for Battlefield 6 when it launches in July, but players should be happy to hear that the developers are looking to make a splash with the resurfacing of naval warfare. Aircraft carriers, a dynamic wave system that affects player aim, naval-based vehicles, and even naval challenges and rewards are just the tip of the iceberg, with the first water-based Battlefield 6 map set to be yet another reimagining of Wake Island.

“For me, what is really interesting and good of Battlefield is the years and years of history with what I think are, personally, the best maps in FPS ever.” Motive senior creative director Roman Campos-Oriola said when asked how Battlefield 6 will balance the release of new and remade maps. “There are a lot of those in Battlefield. There’s definitely a willingness from the team to revisit some of that experience, but we also want to add and bring new maps, new layouts, new unique level design experience for Battlefield 6.”

BF Studios is more than just dipping its toes back into naval combat with Season 4, as the second map of the season will introduce more water warfare with Tsuru Reef. It’s said to have more room to fight than even Railway to Golmud and will stand as the largest map in Battlefield 6 upon its debut.

So, yes, just as fans have hoped, bigger maps are coming to Battlefield 6 for at least the next two seasons. Those who love “meat grinder” maps like Season 2’s Hagental Base won’t be completely left behind, though, as the team says it’s hoping to strike a nice balance after finally delivering targeted feedback.

“Earlier in BF6, in the first seasons, we were slightly over-indexing in the smaller or medium-scale type of map,” Campos-Oriola said. “Now, for Season 3, Season 4, we want to deliver more broader, bigger experiences to have that all-out warfare and more larger-scale vehicle combat. In the future, for Season 5 and onward, we’ll continue to look at that balanced approach. We will continue to release smaller or medium-sized maps – and also much larger maps.”

Season 5

Where BF Studios has previously waited until the days leading up to a major update to pull back the curtain, it took today’s grand reveal as an opportunity to be a bit more forthcoming with fans about what is coming to Battlefield 6 in 2026. That said, the team isn’t quite ready to totally spill the beans on Season 5 yet, though when it launches this fall, it will come with another highly requested (but temporary) change: three new maps in one season.

There’s no confirmation on what these maps will be, with BF Studios only sharing a teaser image featuring some oily water. The team also notes that it’s viewing Season 5, it’s final season of the year, as a "holiday treat," so don’t expect to see three maps per season often or even again at all.

"We still plan to stay with the current strategy we have, which is adapting our season and our seasonal structure to meet the experiences that we want our players to play," McArthur clarified.

More Features Throughout 2026

Each seasonal update for 2026 comes with highlights players have begged to see since Battlefield 6 launched for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X | S in October 2025, but BF Studios is still working to deliver comparatively smaller adjustments, too. While that, of course, means balance tweaks are planned to roll out through the year, players can also expect to see major features, such as a proper server browser with persistent servers, launch before 2026 ends.

Leaderboards, spectator mode, platoons, and proximity chat are also in development. Meanwhile, two existing maps players have deemed especially problematic – New Sobek City and Blackwell Fields – are getting reworks. BF Studios isn’t yet ready to commit to a release date for these aforementioned, smaller changes.

"Battlefield 6 is the most engaging Battlefield, I think, we’ve ever created," McArthur said when asked if the team is concerned about reports of player numbers dropping. "I think we’re really happy with the game we’ve got, but the most important thing for the team day over day is to constantly make the game better, too. As Roman and Phil have said repeatedly, it’s working with Battlefield Labs, constantly pushing the game for more, constantly giving the players what they need, addressing their feedback."

Following a strong start last fall, Battlefield 6 faced a rough start to the year. Season 1 ended with a whimper in the eyes of many when BF Studios announced it would be extending its content run while delaying Season 2 to mid-February. EA then hit the team with layoffs in March.

Although the Contaminated and Hagental Base maps certainly had their fair share of fans, the Battlefield community has wondered if future seasons can repair the damage. For more, you can read what studio design director Justin Wiebe had to say about the team’s approach to fan feedback.

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

Hytale developer Hypixel Studios is taking legal action against a copycat game that popped up on the Nintendo eShop last week.

Hytale, the sandbox RPG, is taking action against Hytale: Sandbox RPG, a recently released Switch game with striking similarities that go far beyond just its name, including a suspiciously similar art style and promotional images.

Asked if he was aware of the possibly copyright-infringing game, Hypixel Studios founder Simon Collins-Laflamme confirmed he had, writing on X/Twitter: "Yeah, it's being handled by the legal team" (thanks, Automaton).

The clone seems to have been developed by the same team behind Coin Pit, a "scam knock-off of Clover Pit," as one player accurately surmised.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg on the Switch eShop," wrote another Hytale fan on Reddit. "It's littered with knock-off games still despite Nintendo saying they are cracking down on them." Another admitted they were nearly misled into buying it, writing: "Recently bought a Switch 2 and saw this in the eShop. My first thought was, 'Why was Hytale released on Switch before Steam?' Insane how Nintendo does zero vetting for products on their platform."

Unfortunately, Hytale is not the only victim of these prolific copycats. Many hit games spawn low-effort clones as unscrupulous developers hope to fool players into believing their copycat game is the real deal. For instance, this time last year, The Pokémon Company was awarded "substantial" damages for Chinese copycat mobile game, Pocket Monster: Remake. The game featured seemingly unaltered Pikachu artwork from the Pokémon Yellow box as the app icon, while other branding for the game featured what appeared to be Ash Ketchum, Pikachu, Tepig, and Oshawott, again unaltered.

The real Hytale is currently available via early access on PC and can only be purchased on its official website. It blends the freedom of a sandbox with the momentum of an RPG, letting players explore a procedurally generated world full of dungeons, secrets, and a variety of creatures, then shape it block by block. Our early access Hytale review returned a 7/10. "Hytale's Early Access launch already offers an enjoyable take on Minecraft with some thoughtful additions and lots of room to grow," we wrote.

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

Pragmata is Capcom’s second RE Engine-based game in just a few months, and while the gameplay feels like it was ripped straight out of the Xbox 360 era, the game looks much better. And, because it’s a relatively small game built on the engine Capcom built for Resident Evil, it runs extremely well across a wide range of hardware. Hell, it even looks pretty good on the Nintendo Switch 2.

Most gaming PCs should be able to run Pragmata with little issue, but just like with any PC game, the trick is finding that perfect middle ground between image quality and performance. For anyone with a high-end machine packing something like an RTX 5080, this will just mean cranking up all the settings, turning path tracing and frame generation on and just going wild, but for most people, some light tweaking can go a long way here.

The Ray Tracing Problem

Pragmata largely takes place on a giant space station on the moon or something – I don’t know, I didn’t really pay much attention to the story. Because of this setting, there are a ton of reflective surfaces and cool lighting effects that really lend themselves to ray tracing. And, well, yeah, ray tracing does make the game look much better, but only if you’re lucky enough to have a high-end Nvidia card.

There are basically two types of ray tracing effects on offer in Pragmata, a ‘ray tracing’ toggle which will enable RT Global Illumination and Reflections, and Path Tracing, which completely replaces the rasterized lighting engine with ray tracing. You’d think that in a game with so many shiny surfaces, the regular ray traced reflections would go a long way to enhancing the look of the game, but in some places it actually makes the game worse.

This is very apparent in the Hideout, the Firelink Shrine in space that you return to whenever you die or have to make some upgrades. The metallic floors have a dark gray reflective sheen to them, which looks awesome when combined with the path traced lighting. But on the lower ray traced settings, the reflections from the indirect lighting are incredibly noisy.

There’s one hallway I found a couple hours into the game where this setting makes it look like there are raindrops falling on the floor, even though we’re indoors… in space. Curiously, this type of floor looks better with no ray tracing at all, which is excellent news for anyone that wants to maximise performance anyway.

It’s a shame, though, because when you’re in an environment with a lot of more transparent reflective surfaces, the ray tracing genuinely looks fantastic. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s worth the trade off of noisy, static-y floors. A solution for this, at least for Nvidia graphics cards, would be the DLSS Ray Reconstruction setting, but that’s conveniently grayed out unless you’re using path tracing.

That’s likely because it does come with a performance cost, but it would go a long way to making the baseline ray tracing look better, especially when combined with upscaling.

However, if you have a mid-to-high-end Nvidia graphics card, I’d recommend at least trying the path tracing, because it looks incredible. Unfortunately, you can’t even turn it on with an AMD graphics card, even with FSR.

Pragmata Recommended Graphics Settings

With how easy it is to run Pragmata, most people are going to be able to run the game at high settings, even with modest graphics cards. For instance, with the RTX 3060 Ti at 1080p, you can get a good 97 fps with ray tracing enabled, and with no DLSS upscaling. It does struggle a bit when you try to turn on path tracing, with the frame rate dropping down to 44 fps, especially since that card is a bit too old to support frame generation.

Instead, the question comes down to what your performance goals for pragmata actually are. If you’re good with 60 fps, most people will be able to reach that by just turning the preset to “Quality” or “Balanced” and calling it a day. But PC gaming is, at its core, all about tweaking things to get it running just right, and you can tune Pragmata to give you close to the "Balanced" preset when it comes to performance, while looking extremely similar to the “Quality Preset.”

In the interest of time, it’s best to start with the “Balanced” preset and tweak it from there. Luckily, the settings menu has a little preview image that shows you roughly what each setting is changing, along with the impact to your VRAM and the GPU itself. My goal here is to keep image quality as good as possible, particularly in combat, while maximising the frame rate.

Global Illumination Quality: Medium

In most modern games, lighting is one of the biggest drags on GPU performance. There are three different settings, and the Balanced preset sets the global illumination quality to high. However, while this does make a big difference to atmospheric lighting and really enhances reflections, it is quite heavy on your performance.

By my measurements, moving from the high setting to medium will save you a solid 11% performance. That will give you a bit of a hit to image quality, to be sure, but with the RTX 5080 it took me from 101 fps with max lighting to 113 fps at 4K. That’s worth it.

Hair Quality: Medium For some reason, modern developers keep trying to work some version of fancy hair technology into games, and every time it comes with a huge cost to performance. The same is true here, too. The worst part is that there’s only really hair on one character, so it feels completely unnecessary.

My gut tells me that most people should turn this setting down to low, but it genuinely looks bad when turned all the way down. I’d pick the middle ground here, and set it to medium. Or, if you just care about maximising frame rate, and especially if you’re on a handheld, just turn this all the way down.

Texture Quality: It Depends

When you select the “Balanced” preset, it’s going to default to the “High: 2GB” setting for textures. That’s fine if you have a low-end card, but my advice would be to crank this setting all the way up and only lower it if your game starts stuttering. Texture Quality only affects game performance if you’re running out of VRAM, so the right setting really depends on what kind of GPU you’re using.

If you have at least 8GB of VRAM, just leave it maxed out, unless you’re playing at 4K. And, really, if you’re playing at 4K, you should have a GPU with more than 8GB anyway.

Texture Filtering: It Also Depends Just like with Texture Quality, Texture Filtering only really affects your performance if you’re running out of VRAM. Turn it all the way up if you have the VRAM budget for it, and only turn it down if you start stuttering.

Mesh Quality: Max

Mesh Quality is another VRAM budget question. It changes how 3D models are rendered, and I prefer to keep character models looking as high-end as possible. Especially with all the weird robots that you’ll be going against in Pragmata. Max out mesh quality, and then turn it down to “High” if you’re over your VRAM budget.

Shadow Quality: High

Ok, hear me out. The Balanced preset sets shadow quality to medium, which does save quite a bit of performance. But with the way that the lighting is set up in this game, there are shadows all over the place, and moving it up to high just goes that extra little way to making it look better, especially since we turned down Global Illumination earlier.

Bumping up the shadows like this hardly touches the actual processing load of the game, and only slightly increases the VRAM demand. So, if you’re right up against your VRAM limit, absolutely keep shadows at medium. For everyone else though, you probably won’t notice the performance hit of High Shadows.

Shadow Cache: On The shadow cache is simply a toggle that lets the game store shadow information in your VRAM. If you have the spare VRAM, this will greatly improve performance, because the game has less to dig for whenever it’s drawing a scene. For most people that aren’t VRAM-limited, turning this off will basically just shave 10% off of your fps. Nobody wants that. Leave this on unless you’ve already turned everything else off and you still need VRAM.

Contact Shadows: On

This is another toggle, and it changes the way shadows are cast on 3D objects. Turning it off makes basically no impact on your performance, so I’d just leave it on. The game looks a tiny bit better with them enabled, and unless you’re really scraping by with low-end hardware, it’s going to run fine.

Effects Quality: Max
This is largely why I turned down the global illumination earlier. Listen, after you fight basically any enemy, it explodes into a mass of fire, metal and some kind of blue goo. It looks really freaking cool. You can save a bit of performance by lowering the effects quality, but you’d really be missing out.

This is definitely one of those things that come down to personal preference, though. So, if you care more about environmental lighting than explosions, then turn up Global Illumination instead. I, for one, wouldn’t trade these robot explosions for the world.

Video Quality: It Depends on What Resolution You’re Playing At

There are only two options for Video Quality, and it only affects cutscenes. If you’re playing at 1080p, keep the video quality at 1080p. And, then, if you’re playing at 4K, turn it up, it’s that simple.

Of course, turning up the cutscene quality will lower your frame rate in cutscenes a bit, but it’s a cutscene, it doesn’t need to be running at 120 fps. I said it.

Anti-Aliasing: FXAA+TAA

The right setting for anti-aliasing is going to depend entirely on whether or not you’re using upscaling. If you’re turning on DLSS or FSR, then you don’t really need the game’s built-in Anti-Aliasing. However, if you’re intent on playing the game at native resolution, just enable FXAA+TAA or turn Anti-Aliasing off if you’re really struggling with performance.

Ambient Occlusion - SSAO

Ambient Occlusion is one of the most obvious places to cut in order to save performance. By turning it off, you’ll get around 5% more frames, but the game will lose a lot of subtle detail in various objects. I prefer to keep it on, but this is one of the first things you should turn off if you’re having trouble hitting 60 fps.

Bloom: Personal Preference

Bloom doesn’t really affect your performance, so keep it on or turn it off depending on how much you like the effect.

Screen Space Reflections: On

Because of the sheer amount of reflective surfaces in Pragmata, Screen Space Reflections make a huge impact on how the game looks. There are so many glass panels and shiny floors that look really cool with this enabled. That said, turning it off will probably improve your frame rate by 10%, so it makes a lot of sense to disable it if you’re trying to maximise frame rate at all costs.

Subsurface Scattering: Off

Subsurface Scattering changes the way that light interacts with skin, making it look much more realistic. This was a huge deal in something like Resident Evil: Requiem, because everything was human or human-adjacent. In Pragmata, though? It really only affects Diana, and you’ll be spending most of the time looking at the back of her head as she rides on your shoulder hacking robots. It doesn’t affect performance that much, but it’s still not really worth the performance cost.

Motion Blur, Lens Flare, Lens Distortion and Depth of Field All of these are post-processing effects that hardly impact game performance. They do change the overall presentation, but it’s really down to your personal taste here. I despise motion blur, so I turn that off in every game that’ll let me, but really it’s up to you.

How Do These Settings Affect Performance?

To test my settings for Pragmata, I found a section relatively early on, with a bunch of lasers and glass surfaces, along with a little combat encounter at the end to give me a good idea how well it would perform.

I then tested the game at three separate resolutions, with three different graphics cards to get a rough idea of how the game would perform. I ran the game with an RTX 3060 Ti at 1080p, an AMD Radeon RX 9070 at 1440p and an RTX 5080 at 4K.

I was most surprised by how well the RTX 3060 Ti held up. That graphics card is getting quite old at this point, but with my tweaked settings, it was able to get around 100 to 110 fps in this section. The GPU was even able to stretch up to 1440p, getting around 60-70 fps at that resolution.

Then, the Radeon RX 9070 absolutely soars at 1440p, able to get between 130 and 140 fps with my recommended settings.This GPU was also able to stretch up to 4K, getting around 70 to 80 fps.

At 4K, the RTX 5080 is able to swing between 100 and 110 fps with the recommended settings, with plenty of space left over for ray or path tracing if you really want to make the game look better. Though, with the latter, I’d suggest setting DLSS to the Performance setting.

To test each of the presets themselves, though, I tossed in an RTX 5090 and set the resolution to 4K to see how much of an impact each change would have on the massive second boss battle. This is a scene with a lot of complicated effects and lighting, so the differences are really going to show themselves. It’s important to keep in mind though, that every time I did this boss fight was slightly different, so there’s some wiggle room in these results.

The minimum preset is what you’d be playing on a handheld, and it’s no surprise that the RTX 5090 was able to get a solid 195 fps, but the game looks incredibly flat and lifeless. That’s kind of fitting for a game about 3D printed robots, though.

The balanced preset brings the average frame rate down to around 126 fps, but it already looks much better. The reflections in the little puddles around Times Square make the game pop, and the boss’s attack effects actually have some meat to them.

What’s interesting, though, is that my recommended settings, even though I turned up effects settings and shadows, the frame rate actually goes up to an average of 129 fps. That’s not a huge difference by any means, but it does make all the little explosions look much better, without having too much of an impact on the ambient details of the scene.

Then, of course as we start turning up the settings the frame rate starts to drop. Bringing it to the Quality preset enables ray tracing, and the frame rate drops all the way down to 115 fps. That’s still a very solid frame rate, and you can always enable DLSS to bring the performance up a bit higher.

Finally, maxing out every setting with path tracing comes with a pretty massive performance hit. However, the game won’t actually let you turn on path tracing without DLSS, so that softens the blow a little bit. But, even with DLSS set to balanced and without frame generation, the RTX 5090 only gets an average of 59 fps here. So, you should really only turn this setting on if you’re going to set DLSS to performance, and even then you might need to turn on frame generation to fully saturate your monitor.

At the end of the day, Pragmata runs extremely well no matter what hardware you’re running it on. Even on the RTX 3060 Ti, which is almost six years old at this point, you’re able to get nearly 120 fps at 1080p, which is going to be more than enough for most people.

But even though the game is extremely accessible for lower-end hardware, it still has plenty of room to scale up, so that even the most high-end gaming rigs can stretch their legs a bit. Tuning Pragmata really does come down to what you want out of the game, I’m just glad that it’s scalable enough to actually let people make meaningful choices about its performance.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra

Ashes of Creation director Steven Sharif has hit out at alleged "coordinated attacks" against him and his studio, Intrepid Studios, insisting recent claims about the company's finances were "completely false and already faltering under judicial review," and calling the drama "one of the craziest stories gaming has ever seen."

Earlier this week, the public fallout of ill-fated MMO Ashes of Creation continued, this time with an alleged full breakdown of Intrepid Studios' expenses. It painted "a troubling picture of a company that was on the threshold of financial death at multiple points in its history," and revealed millions of dollars allegedly spent on dubious purchases. Sharif has disputed the claims.

YouTuber NefasQS claimed to have "obtained and processed the entire Intrepid Studios general ledger from 2015 to 2026," and to have corroborated documents and records that "help us finally finish most of what remains of the mystery surrounding Ashes of Creation and the implosion of Intrepid Studios." He published the full ledger online and uploaded a video discussing some of the details, including "the interesting numbers ranging from mysterious withdrawals by John Moore (former Intrepid CEO Steven Sharif's husband) to the costs of game development, especially when it comes to outsourcing."

NefasQS's claims were damning. The video alleged his team had uncovered evidence of a "lavish lifestyle," with $220,066.46 spent on DoorDash, $48,568 on antiques, $21,000 for a personal chef, $8717.15 on plants, $15,981.70 on movie theater tickets, $595,098.83 on Amazon orders, $21,346 on Magic the Gathering cards, and $2,200 on hotdogs. $81,166 was reportedly also provided to Gore Oil, the company that appears to own Sharif and Moore's $4.9 million San Diego mansion, which they bought in 2020.

How did we get here? Well, back in February, Valve quietly withdrew Ashes of Creation from sale after its director and leadership team quit just weeks after it launched as a $50 Early Access game on Steam. At the time, Sharif said "much of" the senior dev team had quit "in protest," claiming the management board had asked him to do things he "could not ethically support." We then learned the "entire" development team was laid off without notice or their January paychecks, and, last month, a court in San Diego issued a temporary restraining order in Sharif's favor against Intrepid's Board of Directors, led by Chair Rob Dawson, and their affiliated entity, TFE Games Holdings LLC.

Since then, however, the court found no cause for a preliminary injunction, and the temporary restraining order expired, given "the trade secrets are returned to Intrepid and there [were] no longer serious questions going to the merits on the appropriation of trade secrets claims."

Now, in a statement and an 11-page document posted to Discord, Sharif blasted the "flood of speculation, misinformation, and coordinated attacks surrounding me, Intrepid Studios, and Ashes of Creation," and called for fans to dismiss "these lies" that he insisted were "completely false and already faltering under judicial review."

"I know the public discourse around me, Intrepid, and Ashes of Creation has been flooded with knives-out narratives driven by a coordinated defamation campaign orchestrated by the opposing parties in my lawsuit," Sharif wrote. "That campaign has been amplified through content creators, including those serving as a mouthpiece for [one of the game's investors], a known violent individual with multiple prior arrests.

"Do not mistake noise for truth. If you genuinely care about what happened to Ashes of Creation and Intrepid Studios, and this is not directed at the casual observer, I ask that you take a moment to read today’s court filings. In them, I have included more than 45 exhibits consisting of texts, emails, internal communications, and witness testimony from six individuals with firsthand knowledge of the events as they unfolded. I understand that creators can be easier to consume and more entertaining to watch, but some are chasing headlines and clicks, not accuracy, context, or the truth which can only be found reliably in court."

In the 11-page report, Sharif appended snippets of filings, exhibits, and witness statements, writing "they will shock you, but they are a true and accurate record of what occurred to Intrepid and why."

"As alleged in our federal complaint, and further supported by the sworn declarations and documentary evidence now filed with the Court, the Board defendants, led by Chairman Rob Dawson, engineered a plan to seize control of Intrepid’s assets for their own benefit through threats, coercion, deception, and unlawful self-dealing with zero regard for the company they destroyed and the human lives damaged by their illegal conduct," Sharif alleged.

"That plan involved starving a viable company of cash to manufacture a default, using fear and leverage to force signatures and concessions, terminating more than 200 people while stripping them of wages, benefits, and accrued obligations, leaving vendors and creditors high and dry, and then using the crisis they created to justify a foreclosure designed to transfer Intrepid’s assets and intellectual property into an entity controlled by Robert Dawson."

Sharif claimed that the only reason the injunction relief was not granted was because "the defendants abruptly reversed course and attempted to undo their own foreclosure." "They tried to put the assets back after the theft was exposed," he alleged.

"I have the receipts. I have the texts. I have the emails. I have the internal documents," he added. "And the people who were present and aware of exactly what these individuals were doing while they lied publicly about it, just spoke up in today’s filings."

Sharif said he "tried to keep the peace" for the sake of his team and their families, and "for the millions of players waiting for Ashes." "I did so at the expense of my own health, my own safety, and my own peace of mind. But there is a line. And that line was crossed when their conduct showed complete disregard for the human beings under my leadership."

"As founder of Intrepid, and the original creator of Ashes of Creation, I also personally want to say that I am sorry," he added. "I took on people who represented that they wanted to help build Ashes and support its future. I did not know they would ultimately try to destroy it and seize it for themselves. But hear me clearly: I will not let that be the ending of this story."

He closed by appending a Q&A document, answering questions such as, "For the last 10 years, you claimed there was no board to answer to. When did that change? Was there always a board? Were you lying?" ("No"), "Why didn't you inform the community when that change happened," (because doing so "would have triggered immediate consequences"), and, "Why did you approve the Steam early access launch, and why did you say the company wasn't out of money?" (Because "based on the information I was given at the time, the company was not out of money.")

Sharif closed his statement with: "They did not expect that I would challenge their actions as aggressively, and successfully, as I have. They were wrong. I hope this post and the documents below help to provide some answers for those interested in knowing and seeing the truth."

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

Capcom has forced a YouTuber to remove more than 1,000 "adult-orientated" mod videos showing Resident Evil Requiem characters in skimpy clothing.

British streamer GrizzoUK reported being contacted by Resident Evil publisher Capcom's legal division, and told to pull down his videos or face further action.

"It has come to our attention that these assets have been used to produce adult-orientated MODs, and that related videos have been created and published on YouTube," the company wrote in an email to GrizzoUK that he subsequently shared on a stream.

Capcom stated that the mod videos were "inconsistent" with the company's Terms of Service, "as well as relevant copyright and intellectual property laws." In response, GrizzoUK questioned why his channel was being targeted specifically (as similar clothing mods are shown on numerous other YouTube channels), though he did ultimately remove the long list of videos.

"I've gotta figure out what I've gotta do with my channel," GrizzoUK said via a lengthy stream that discussed Capcom's action. "Obviously I can't do costume mods no more, but I'm sure I can do weapon mods as I've seen many weapon mods be done and not removed. But this seems like the beginning of the end for costume mods."

At the time of writing, GrizzoUK's channel is still active and full of videos, including dozens of other clips showing lingerie mods for different games, such as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered and Stellar Blade, where female characters are shown running or emoting in bikinis and underwear.

The channel also still features a few Resident Evil Requiem videos that include modded gameplay — such as mods that allow you to play through the game's campaign as Hunk or Sherry. Both of these characters are shown with just their default in-game models, however, revealing no more skin than normal.

Back in 2023, Capcom expressed concern about the use of mods in its PC games, saying they could potentially lead to "reputational damage."

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

A version of Starfield for Nintendo Switch 2 has been leaked by the Taiwan ratings board, suggesting Bethesda's space RPG will land on the console.

As spotted by Universonintendo, the listing shows a Switch 2 version of the game being approved for release just this week, though there's no mention yet of a formal release date.

Starfield just touched down on PlayStation 5, nearly three years after its original arrival on PC and Xbox Series X/S. Billed as the next big franchise from the makers of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, the space-based role-player has received a more muted response.

Bethesda has since launched various updates to add fan-requested features, though recently played down the game's latest big update as not being a "2.0" version of the game. "I think it’s the kind of thing where if you love Starfield, we think you’re going to love this," Bethesda development chief Todd Howard said last month. "It’s updates and things that change the game, not in an isolated way, but sort of meta."

Recent months have brought rumors of a Switch 2 version being in the works — though Bethesda itself has not confirmed anything publicly. With technical issues currently affecting players on PS5, Bethesda will likely want to ensure that whenever Starfield does finally hit Switch 2, everything is running smoothly.

Of course, Microsoft has published various other former console exclusives on Switch previously — such as Grounded and Pentiment. Bethesda's Indiana Jones and the Great Circle launches on Switch 2 next month, while Oblivion Remastered is also set for release later this year.

Back in 2023, Howard discussed the benefits of Starfield being an Xbox exclusive at the time, namechecking the brand association Nintendo enjoys with its first-party games. "I do also think people attach brands to certain games," he said. "When you think of Zelda you think of the Switch and I think there are times when that can be a real benefit."

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Between the ubiquitous virtual assistants cheerfully patronising us from almost every electronic device and the disposable slop that nobody asked for clogging up our social media feeds, it’s becoming pretty hard to escape artificial intelligence these days – but it could be worse: what if you had an AI actually implanted in your brain? Such is the premise of Replaced, a 2.5D action platformer that follows a scientist named Doctor Warren Marsh who’s on the run after a sentient AI called REACH is shoehorned into his skull. The twist here is that you don’t actually play as the scientist, you play as the AI that’s effectively puppeteering him – with your sole objective to return to the laboratory so you can unpair from your human host. It makes for a compelling 11-hour quest that winds its way through an alternate ‘80s America rendered in a pristine pixel-art style, and one that I ultimately remained engrossed in despite some dull sidequest design and combat that occasionally felt more unresponsive than a muted Siri.

It really can’t be overstated just how stunning Replaced’s 16-bit inspired game world is. It basically updates the look and feel of classic 2D adventures like the original Prince of Persia and Flashback in a similar way that Octopath Traveler’s HD-2D style transformed SNES-era RPGs, enhancing primitive yet personality-packed character sprites and pixelated landscapes with 3D depth and lighting that really pops. From ruined scientific research facilities, to neon-soaked streets, and down into the flare-lit depths of an underground enemy hideout, Replaced’s world is consistently captivating to explore. Developer Sad Cat Studios is clearly – and quite rightfully – proud of its work, since REACH will occasionally pause to marvel at some immaculately crafted cyberpunk skyline that looms in the distant background. I really appreciated these opportunities to stop and pore over every perfectly crafted pixel.

REACH and Clear

REACH isn’t equipped with a particularly extensive arsenal, but its omniscience seems to include the same martial arts info dump that Neo had installed in The Matrix, since it turns Marsh’s pencil-pushing scientist body into a kinetic killing machine. Armed with a gun that transforms into a baton, REACH is able to indulge in a sort of 2.5D tribute to the Batman: Arkham style of fisticuffs anytime it finds itself surrounded by burly police squads or menacing underworld mutants. In addition to delivering simple strings of skull-cracking combos, coloured indicators that appear above each enemy’s head briefly telegraph when to dodge and when to counter, so Replaced’s skirmishes demand something more than merely button-mashing your baton-smashing. Meanwhile, the use of REACH’s gun is sporadic since it can only be fired after first charging up with successive melee strikes, while getting hit or performing dodges depletes that gauge, putting further emphasis on striking a careful balance between attack and evasion.

It’s a mostly engaging system, and it gradually introduces welcome strategic wrinkles such as tank-like foes that need their armour stripped off before you can damage them, and other more nimble nasties that will dodge every incoming attack other than counters. It’s just a shame that it’s all regularly undermined by controls that frequently fail to respond – at least in the PC version, even after a day one patch. In particular, the button to apply a medkit routinely failed and often saw me copping a death blow while REACH was seemingly fumbling with its coatpocket. At other times, the input to deflect an enemy gunshot was apparently ignored and REACH’s arms would remain rooted to its sides while it copped a dose of hot lead to the face, which was equally frustrating.

As much as I think Replaced’s visual design is an absolute standout, it too managed to spoil the combat on occasion. Since you’re only ever pit against a set number of enemies at a time, reinforcements often linger in the background waiting for their turn to enter the fray like the curiously courteous extras in a Bruce Lee movie. The trouble is that it’s extremely tough to discern one 2D plane from the other in the heat of battle, and I’d invariably find myself trying to land blows on enemies that technically weren’t there, making me swish my baton through an empty space and leaving myself open to a genuine threat waiting to strike while I was distracted.

Thankfully, I found Replaced’s platforming sections far more consistent. Though it doesn’t ever reach the heights of Shinobi: Art of Vengeance or Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound’s complex midair maneuvering, it is fun to wall-jump your way up narrow elevator shafts, monkey-swing along suspended ceiling pipes, and carefully flip past electrified surfaces. There are also a number of interesting environmental puzzles to solve throughout, such as carefully positioning industrial fans to boost the double-jumps powered by REACH’s multipurpose pistol. To be fair, there are some cases where the checkpointing seems a little severe, and a number of times I had to painfully retrace lengthy platforming stretches after mistiming a jump and falling to my doom, but for the most part I got a kick out of Replaced’s pixelated parkour.

Attack of the Drones

When you’re not throwing down with increasingly well-armed riot squads or fighting a one-on-one battle with gravity as you scramble and flip up the side of a skyscraper, Replaced changes things up in the form of regular instant-fail stealth sections. Initially these deadly encounters with surveillance drones feel pretty uninspired, and patiently waiting for the arc of a spotlight to swing away from your position so you can scramble to safety behind a stack of conveniently placed crates is something that’s been repeated in the likes of Limbo and the Little Nightmares series many times over at this point. However, Replaced eventually makes its sneaking a little more involved with the welcome addition of a hacking system, which both introduces a neat little shape-matching minigame, as well as the ability to temporarily disable enemy turrets or create distractions for mechanical sentries. I appreciated the more puzzle-oriented form of stealth that Replaced’s hacking provided, I just wish it had been introduced earlier on.

Those stealth sequences may demand a rigidly slow and steady approach, but it's the story pacing that staggers to a crawl each time you return to the train station hub between outings. This combat-free zone offers a series of sidequests of the bog standard go-here-and-fetch-that variety, forcing you to shlep your way through the various tent-lined streets and makeshift hospital areas inhabited by homeless hordes in search of trivial items like missing comic books or food for a local dog. While it’s true that much of this busywork is entirely optional, skipping these uninteresting chores means you miss out on vital rewards like health boosts and expanded medkit slots that prove to be pretty crucial against the heavier enemy groups in the story’s second half. I would have preferred if these menial tasks had been scrapped in favour of just buying upgrades with a currency or an XP system before hurrying back to the more exciting main objectives, but as it stands each trip to Replaced’s train station felt like my progress would go off the rails a bit.

That said, I was a big fan of the playable arcade cabinets found in the station’s basement level, as well as the funny interactions with the sassy young girl who operates them. The inclusion of playable Frogger and Space Invaders clones may seem pretty antiquated in an era when each Like a Dragon adventure features fully-working Sega Rally or Virtua Fighter machines, but since they each have a high score table you better believe I still sat on them until I topped it. Those aren’t the only nostalgic nods I appreciated either. I also loved the Wingman, a sort of GameBoy and Walkman hybrid that can be whipped out of REACH’s pocket in order to play catchy collectible synth tunes or to scan the environment for enthralling scraps of story.

In fact, it’s the story, in tandem with the jawdropping visual design, that ultimately had me hooked on Replaced all the way through to its rousing climax, in spite of any issues I had with its frequently fussy controls or sidequest stumbles. REACH’s journey and evolution feels surprisingly human given its artificial origins, and the quirky cast of side characters show plenty of personality despite the fact that each and every interaction with them is entirely text-based (even the so-called ‘audiologs’ you collect in the environment can only be read rather than heard). Sad Cat Studios has crafted one heck of a dazzling sci-fi dystopia, and with some post-release patching it could still be elevated into something really special.

If you're planning out a PC build and have been hoping to get one of the new Nvidia Blackwell graphics cards at a reasonable price, this might be the best opportunity you'll get in the near future. Walmart is offering a retail boxed PNY GeForce RTX 5070 12GB graphics card for just $599 shipped. Mind you this is still $50 over MSRP, but it's the best price I can find right now for a standalone 5070 GPU and the first time I've seen this card drop below $600 this year.

PNY GeForce RTX 5070 12GB OC Graphics Card for $599