Capcom is planning for Dead Rising's future. In its latest earnings report, the Japanese games company said it plans to nuture a handful of franchises for growth, with one of them being Dead Rising.

Dead Rising is mentioned alongside the likes of Devil May Cry, Dragon's Dogma, and Okami. But what does this mean? Capcom mentions, generally, this "nurturing" of "leading brands" includes ports, remakes, and even sequels. But it's the mention of Dead Rising in all this that has sparked most debate.

Dead Rising 1 and 2 are respected survival horror games, and the third game received a decent reception as a launch title for Xbox One. However, 2016's Dead Rising 4 received mixed reviews from critics, and we haven't seen a new mainline sequel since.

The series returned with a well-received remake of the original Dead Rising in 2024, sparking hope that either a Dead Rising 2 remake or Dead Rising 5 will follow. However, some fans feel like the series has failed to capture audiences or make enough of an impression to be worthy of continuing.

"Dead Rising? Seriously? The franchise should stay dead after how much of a disaster Dead Rising 4 was," said one fan. However, some are championing its return and are hoping that Dead Rising 5 will come to fruition. "We used to pray for times like this," said another.

Rumors of a Dead Rising 5 set in Hollywood have been circulating for a while now, but it remains to be seen if it will see the light of day. There were plans for a Dead Rising 5 right after the fourth game, which would have reportedly featured the return of Chuck Greene and his daughter, Katey. The two would've ventured into a fictional Mexican city in pursuit of Zombrex, but would've gotten into conflict with a drug cartel as well as the undead. The game was scrapped after Capcom Vancouver was shuttered in 2018.

Capcom has turned around a lot of franchises in recent years, with the likes of Resident Evil now more popular than ever. The recently released Resident Evil Requiem has sold 7 million copies and been hailed as one of 2026's best games. If Capcom could do the same thing for Dead Rising, it would be huge.

Cade Onder is a freelancer for IGN's news team. He covers all things entertainment, including gaming, film, and more. You can find him on Twitter @Cade_Onder.

If you're looking to expand your library of physical games ahead of summer, we have some fun news: Amazon has slashed the price of quite a few PS5 games.

From Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds to Demon's Souls and Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, we've spotted a solid selection of these discounted titles that are well worth scooping up right now.

Alongside having some truly excellent discounts, some of these deals even mark brand new best prices at Amazon. Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is one that's currently sitting at a brand new low price at the retailer, according to price tracker camelcamelcamel. Yakuza 0: Director’s Cut is another that's hit an all-time low price, as has Yakuza Kiwami 1+2.

There's also plenty of games in the selection above that we think very highly of, which is a nice little bonus on top of the discounts themselves. To name a few, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, Demon's Souls, and Sonic X Shadow Generations each earned 9/10 in their respective reviews from us.

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is another we thoroughly enjoyed, earning an 8 in its review. Personally, I really enjoyed playing through Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater as well, and definitely think it's worth adding to your library if you're a fan of the other games. Our review called it a, "faithful, visually impressive remake," and I certainly agree.

This selection of game deals is a nice little surprise from Amazon, as we're in a bit of a quiet period at the moment before more sale events kick off this year. If you're curious what's to come in the months ahead, have a look at our breakdown of upcoming sales events to see when the next opportunity will pop up where you can score some more video game deals.

Hannah Hoolihan is a freelancer who writes with the guides and commerce teams here at IGN.

They’re calling it the biggest entertainment launch of all time – a record GTA 6 is set to smash, currently held by none other than its own direct predecessor. It seems like a no-brainer that developers Rockstar and publisher Take Two will be popping champagne corks like a 21-gun salute come November, but will it be a party or a funeral? The only difference, after all, is context.

GTA 5 remains one of the most expensive games ever made, with a combined development and marketing budget believed to be well over $250 million, numbers already utterly eclipsed by GTA 5’s protracted, beleaguered development cycle which has been marred by hostile data breaches and various internal struggles, but is also reportedly spending unfathomable resources on realistic details like breakable glass and water physics.

This wouldn’t exactly be a leftfield move from the studio that brought you Seasonally Affected Horse Genitals, so it’s doubly unsurprising that GTA 6 is currently believed to be well over $1 billion into its practically infinite budget, and that’s before the promised 2026 marketing blitz has even kicked off in earnest.

In short, GTA 6 will have to be one of the best-selling games of all time just to break even. To be considered a success worthy of the time and money that’s been crammed into it, the expectations are mind-altering: anything less than 20 million sales on day one will likely be considered a disappointment. This thing could make more money than Brazil and still trigger a bunch of layoffs because we live in hell.

With the global economy teetering on the edge of disaster, and a runaway cost of living crisis that’s eating every last penny of disposable income out of average household budget, it won’t take much to turn a chorus of champagne corks into a firing squad aimed directly at the games industry’s already-exposed guts. And so, Take-Two’s CEO is right to be terrified: if they get something as fundamental as the base price wrong, the results could be apocalyptic, not just for his company but for the games industry at large.

Despite the eye-watering amount of money spaffed during its protracted development, GTA 6 is going to make money gland over fist. That’s not in dispute. The question is whether it makes enough: and with so many stakeholders involved, “enough” is a difficult concept to nail down.

So that’s the first problem GTA 6 has: It could do more business than any video game before it, and still fall short of expectations.

The concept of success in the corporate bureaucracy of a publicly traded company is arcane, ever changing, and subject to factors completely outside anyone’s control: We live in a vast, interconnected global economy that runs on chaos theory. A proverbial butterfly flaps its wings, or grounds an oil tanker, and all of a sudden, there’s a hurricane on the other side of the planet, or a banana now costs twenty dollars.

Had GTA 6 come out during its initial release window back in 2025, there probably wouldn’t have even been a question mark about its price tag, but now it finds itself releasing in an existentially frightening year for all tech and creative industries, where the spiralling cost of making and selling computer hardware is killing businesses and turning casual hobbies into expensive luxuries, where middle-class consumers are struggling more and more to justify any frivolous expenses because the energy and food bills they used to barely think about are now all-consuming. For an increasing amount of people, even the now standard MSRP of $70 is out of the question for a piece of entertainment no matter how hyped or hotly anticipated it is. The higher that number goes, the more people are going to just wait until a sale.

In a world in thrall to the knee-jerk whims of the stock market, any major hit to those crucial first few weeks of sales could be a major problem for Take Two, and also present a cat among the pigeons in terms of wider industry investment. If the industry is so screwed that even its biggest golden goose fails to lay enough eggs, then what hope does any other project have? Yes, it would be a stupid, unnuanced, self-sabotaging conclusion for investors to draw, but boardroom capitalism is often an arena of nonsense and vibes.

In short, perception is everything: if GTA is “too expensive,” it might miss targets in that initial window of launch week hype, and the consequences of that would be ludicrously far-reaching.

However, a diminished short-term performance of GTA 6 might not be an issue as it will likely, eventually, provide the basis for GTA Online 2.0: Much of the reason that GTA 5 continues to enjoy such longevity as a going concern is because of its ever growing, ever evolving online component. And its capacity for printing seemingly infinite money is the reason why Rockstar is allowed to spend nearly a decade ploughing billions into the GTA 6 furnace while the rest of the industry just burns down.

But without a reasonably low barrier to entry, the next GTA Online might face an uphill battle for attendance, with its chief competition being its own predecessor that Rockstar will continue supporting beyond GTA 6’s release. It’s not a given that GTA Online’s current players will make the jump: convincing people to go from an established, content-rich platform to essentially starting again from scratch is an age-old problem faced by anyone cultivating a large online community. At some point, growth requires new pastures, but you can’t make people eat grass.

We’ve seen the unthinkable happen before in Red Dead Online: once tipped to be a sister or successor project to its GTA equivalent that is now more or less abandoned by the devs because, well, it just didn’t have the juice. Now, an online western is a very different proposition to the chaotic urban playground provided by GTA Online, but both projects shared much of their core DNA and there was no reason to think, with the runaway success of Red Dead 2, that Red Dead Online couldn’t tap new audiences and do as well or even better than its stablemate. It simply wasn’t meant to be.

GTA 6’s long-term prospects are currently very precarious, which means that Rockstar’s position in the industry as a studio whose entire USP is the ability to plough infinite money into everything it does is also precarious.

Finally, the real issue here is that so much of the games industry finds itself both scared by and dependent on the success of one single project. Every time GTA 6’s release date changes, the rest of the industry reorganises itself to give it a wide berth, like Moses parting the Red Sea with nob gags. It has affected the lives and livelihoods of countless people who aren’t even directly involved with GTA but whose own studios and publishers have to navigate the choppy waters left in its wake. The games media ecosystem is in a state of constant flux right now as we keep betting the farm on a big GTA 6 content push that has so far failed to materialise twice, and this has led directly to a lot of turmoil.

It shouldn’t be like this. Our industry long touted itself as recession proof, and entirely insulated from petty mainstream ideas of what constitutes art, what constitutes a valid pastime. Now, we find ourselves at the hard, bleeding edge of the consequences of a world order in its death throes, a civilisation on the brink. How did we get to a place where the most important piece of media in my entire lifetime is, as much as I adore it, a wilfully stupid game about car theft and blowjobs?

GTA 6 will be brilliant, and do a phenomenal amount of business by any reasonable standard – it’s unthinkable to suggest otherwise. But we live in a time of the unthinkable becoming reality. And on that basis, we need to brace ourselves for the possibility that GTA 6, rather than being the saviour of the video games industry, might trigger its next big crash.

Jim Trinca is a Video Producer at IGN, and when he isn't fawning over Assassin's Creed, he can be found watching Star Trek and eating stuff. Follow him on @jimtrinca.bsky.social, and check out The Trinca Perspective playlist over on IGN's YouTube channel!

IGN recently spoke to Bioshock developer Ken Levine about his new game Judas and his thoughts on the ever-changing world of game development. He explained why cutting-edge tech and ultrarealism weren't appealing to him as a creator.

"I don't think we've ever been a company that was like, oh my God, we need the latest and greatest technology. In the rendering space we've never been a company; outside of SWAT 4, we never really tried to do ultrarealism in our games," he explained.

"It's expensive, and it doesn't age as well as sort of more stylistic things because BioShock still looks good, I think, because it wasn't trying to get every nut and bolt super realistically rendered. It was realistic-looking, sort of, but it was more stylized."

He pointed to newer gaming machines like the Nintendo Switch 2 and the upcoming Steam Machine as signs that the medium has hit "a bit of diminishing returns" with the race for better and better visuals.

"I think if you have the right art director and the right approach, you don't need to be on the cutting edge of technology all the time," he said. "Even the stuff we're doing with Judas, all this narrative stuff we're doing is not CPU intensive. It's work intensive on our side, and Baldur's Gate is the same way. That was just like a ton of work behind that. None of it was particularly technologically demanding, right? It was just a billion branching tree structures that they had to manage and think about - which I tip my hat to those guys because they did an amazing job with it - but that's not a technological, hardware challenge. It's an engineering and thought challenge."

Levine's next game, first-person shooter Judas, doesn't currently have a release date, but when it's ready, it will be published on PS5, PC and Xbox Series X and S.

Levine spoke to IGN as part of our IGN Icons series, celebrating the last 30 years of the video game industry and the people responsible for pushing it forward.

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.

Psychonauts and Kiln developer Double Fine Productions has laid the groundwork to become the latest Microsoft studio to form a union.

As first reported by Aftermath, the San Francisco-based game studio filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board May 7, 2026. The organization effort with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) follows the 450 Blizzard Entertainment staff who voted to unionize in August 2025, and the union formed by 165 developers at id Software the following December, as well as others. As outlined in the petition, the Double Fine union will include 42 "regular part-time and full-time employees."

“On May 7, the workers at Microsoft studio Double Fine Productions announced their decision to form a union with CWA to preserve and extend the studio’s commitments to creative excellence, diversity and inclusion, and worker quality of life," CWA told Aftermath in a statement. "In tandem with requesting voluntary recognition from the company, workers have also filed an election petition with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to secure union representation. We appreciate that Microsoft has taken a neutral approach and agreed not to interfere in any way with worker’s rights to organize unions.”

Double Fine was acquired by Microsoft in 2019 and has a 25-year history in the gaming space. Its most well-known title is probably the mind-bending platformer Psychonauts, which went on to get a sequel in 2021. Other popular titles under its belt include Brutal Legend, Broken Age, and Costume Quest. Kiln, a multiplayer brawler that lets players control moldable pieces of pottery, arrived as its most recent project just weeks ago, on April 23, 2026.

Double Fine's move to unionize arrives in the midst of a period of uncertainty for Microsoft. Following layoffs that affected around 9,100 employees in July 2025 and even more in 2024, a Bloomberg report in October of last year stated that the Xbox company had allegedly been pushing its game developers to deliver a steep 30% profit margin. In addition to the layoffs, Microsoft cancelled multiple projects, including games from the now-shuttered The Initiative, ZeniMax Online Studios, and Rare, in 2025 alone.

Shakeups at the company continued in February 2026 when it was announced that both Xbox CEO Phil Spencer and Xbox president Sarah Bond would be leaving the company. Then-Microsoft CoreAI president Asha Sharma has since replaced Spencer as CEO, with Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty stepping in as chief content creative officer. Sharma's time in the spot has already been followed by a number of other changes, including a leadership reshuffle and the discontinuation of Copilot on console last week, as well as Game Pass price cuts.

The CWA said in its statement that Microsoft has agreed to take a neutral approach to unionization at Double Fine after the expiration of a previous neutrality agreement late last year. Other Microsoft developers who worked to form unions before the agreement expired include staff from the World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and Blizzard Story and Franchise Development teams. Meanwhile, Raven Software Quality Assurance developers became the first Activision Blizzard workers to unionize in 2022 before scoring their first contract with Microsoft just last August.

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).

Mortal Kombat II is in theaters today, and IGN is partnering with Atomic Monster and Blumhouse to give the opportunity to take home a special keepsake.

IGN, Atomic Monster, and Blumhouse are inviting you to sign up for Blumhouse’s The Van now for an opportunity to take home one of 25 Mortal Kombat II lobby cards signed by Producer James Wan. This opportunity is on a first come first served basis until they’re all gone. Blumhouse will reach out to participants who manage to snag a signed lobby card, so keep an eye on your inbox!

Mortal Kombat II is in theaters now, and sees familiar faces join the action like Johnny Cage (Karl Urban) and Kitana (Adeline Rudolph) along with returning characters Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), Jax (Mehcad Brooks), and more.

For more on Mortal Kombat II, check out our interview with Liu Kang actor Ludi Lin, see the exclusive trailer revealed at IGN Fan Fest, and read about who’s making a cameo in the new movie.

In a blog post, Rockstar Games teased that an "exciting" new GTA Online update will be released this summer, sparking speculation about what it could involve given GTA 6 is set to launch in November.

Historically, Rockstar releases two megaton GTA Online updates every year: one in the summer, one in December. With GTA 6 due out on November 19, 2026, could the summer update mark a turning point for GTA Online?

"After 13 years and almost 50 content updates, the end is almost here. Hopefully, they send this game off with a bang," said one fan. "They don't specify that it'll be the last one, but are we ready to say goodbye to Los Santos after 13 years?" asked another.

Rockstar has given fans very little to go on. "There’s also plenty more to look forward to in GTA Online, including a variety of special events and celebrations, along with an exciting new update this summer," the developer's blog post concludes. But fans are of course speculating about what it could mean. Does Rockstar plan to launch a new iteration of GTA Online alongside GTA 6, or will it come some time later? What happens to the current GTA Online when the new GTA Online comes out?

There is no suggestion here that Rockstar will all of a sudden shut the GTA Online servers down whenever GTA Online 2, or whatever it's called, comes out. And it's worth noting that GTA 6 launches in November on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S only. There's no GTA 6 day one on PC, where GTA Online remains hugely popular.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick previously teased that GTA Online could continue after GTA 6 (and given how much money it continues to make, that would make a lot of financial sense), but it remains to be seen how that would work. Perhaps GTA Online will follow in the footsteps of Red Dead Online, which gets small, bite-sized updates that don't radically change the game's content.

"I'm going to speak theoretically only because I'm not going to talk about a particular project when an announcement hasn't been made,” Zelnick told IGN last year when quizzed on what happens to GTA Online when GTA 6 comes out. “But generally speaking, we support our properties when the consumers are involved with those titles. As an example, we launched NBA 2K Online in China, I think originally in 2012 if I'm not mistaken. And then we launched NBA 2K Online 2 in China in 2017. We did not sunset Online 1. They both are still in the market and they serve consumers and they're alive and we have this massive audience. So we've shown a willingness to support legacy titles when a community wants to be engaged with them.”

It won't be long until we start getting some concrete answers. GTA 6's big marketing push is set for this summer, and fans are going to extreme lengths to predict the GTA 6 Trailer 3 release date. Similarly, we'll probably hear more about the next GTA Online update in greater detail within the next month or two, as the summer updates tend to release in June or July.

Could Rockstar use GTA Online to tease GTA 6? Rockstar used GTA Online to market Red Dead Redemption 2 prior to its release. The developer added an in-game treasure hunt, which gave players access to an old-school revolver in GTA Online once completed. It wouldn't be surprising if we see some in-game events to build up to GTA 6 as a result.

Cade Onder is a freelancer for IGN's news team. He covers all things entertainment, including gaming, film, and more. You can find him on Twitter @Cade_Onder.

The long-awaited Mortal Kombat II movie is finally upon us, and with it, our first introduction to Karl Urban’s version of beloved character, Johnny Cage. But what convinced him to take the part?

IGN recently spoke to Urban, star of The Boys and The Lord of the Rings, and asked him exactly that. His answer was somewhat surprising, considering all the previous versions of the cocky, Hollywood character Cage that we’ve come to know and love/hate.

“I think what made this project an easy yes for me [was] when I read the script and saw that Jeremy [Slater, MKII’s writer] had quite wisely steered away from making the character that classic ego-driven Johnny Cage that we just know from all the plethora of games and movies,” Urban explained.

“So, he really stripped the character back and started him at a point where he has neglected his martial arts training,” Urban continued. “His career is in the tank. He has zero self-confidence. And it's at this very juncture that he gets called upon, you know, by Raiden and Sonia to ostensibly save the world. And I just thought that was so cool and interesting and easy to relate to because we've all been down in the dumps. I just found that the writing had a lot of heart, and it sort of set it apart from being, you know, just a fight movie.”

It comes after the Australian actor admitted to knowing what a big role he’d stepped into upon accepting the job. “I definitely felt the pressure,” he said. “I remember when I got cast, I said to my two sons — who I actually played the game with, which was my first introduction to the world of Mortal Kombat — and I said, ‘Hey guys, I'm going to be Johnny Cage.’ And they were like, ‘Oof… Big fan base. Don't f**k it up.’

Of course, Mortal Kombat has been known for its fighting for more than 30 years, and, in particular, the violent extremes it takes it to. Will this more measured look at Johnny Cage signal a softer side to the series is about to be seen on screen? Well, maybe not quite, but its cast certainly appears to be going all-in on finding out who these characters are beyond their signature fatalities.

Jax actor Mehcad Brooks recently revealed that he “actually sat with my therapist for about six sessions and figured out why he was who he was” ahead of filming the sequel after admitting that he struggled with fight scenes in the first movie. “I like to overthink a character and then underplay them,” he continued. “And then I think what happened for me was the first film, I didn't know if I belonged in the fighting scenes. So that was the hard part for me.”

Mortal Kombat II hits theaters May 8, 2026.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.

Ubisoft has announced Heredis, a "spectacular new stage experience" set within the world of Assassin's Creed, that's set to debut later this year.

The two-hour show will feature circus artists, acrobats and dancers from Les 7 Doights (The 7 Fingers) company in a "high-energy" performance that features "urban parkour, choreographed combat and physical feats within large-scale immersive environments drawn from Assassin's Creed games," Ubisoft stated in a press release today.

Details on the show's plot and how it will actually link to the Assassin's Creed games is thin on the ground, though artwork for the show features a character who looks a lot like Desmond, leaping through the air against an Ancient Greek backdrop from Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

"The show follows a young man searching for his father, who disappeared years ago," a blurb for the show teases. "On his 25th birthday, a mysterious letter leads him to the HEREDIS program. This quest becomes the starting point of a journey across centuries..."

It may be that the show features a wholly original story, but that artwork — and the description of a young man searching for his missing father — raises one intriguing possibility.

Assassin's Creed lore fans will know that Desmond Miles, the series' original modern day protagonist, fathered a child prior to his death at the end of Assassin's Creed 3. (And the extent to which Desmond is dead, technically, is also up for debate — something the character's voice actor Nolan North has recently discussed.)

While the Assassin's Creed games have left Desmond's story long behind (save for a teasing moment at the end of Assassin's Creed Valhalla), this stage show could be a cool opportunity to showcase a search for the fallen hero through his now-adult son, Elijah.

The Assassin's Creed games did not specifically reveal the existence of Elijah, but he is the focus of the canon Assassin's Creed: Uprising comic series. And while he won't be 25 years old until 2030, the franchise is now telling a new "present day" storyline set many decades from now — so moving the narrative forward to feature a young adult Elijah would not be a problem.

It's easy to imagine a "greatest hits" style stage show taking in various locations seen in the franchise so far (which, Desmond has either travelled to, or his bloodline has been a part of). This would allow the performance to feature fan-favorite locations and characters from throughout the franchise, while also telling a fresh story.

Heredis will debut on stage in Montreal on December 3, at Théâtre Maisonneuve. The show will then begin a world tour in 2027, beginning in France at the Casino de Paris, from January 21.

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

There has been a ton of buzz around Dishonored's future, following a rather innocuous post on X.

Dishonored is easily one of the best stealth-action games out there. The Arkane-developed game made waves for its open-ended level design, allowing players to take down targets and complete objectives by combining their powers or using the world around them to their advantage. It also had an extremely unique setting with a steampunk-inspired aesthetic and a layered universe infested by a rat plague. There's not really anything else quite like it, which was recognized by fans and critics alike. IGN gave Dishonored a 9.2 back in 2012, and the game was showered in awards in addition to respectable sales.

A sequel followed in 2016 and was met with similar critical acclaim, but the sales didn't follow. Dishonored 2 was considered a disappointment commercially, and ever since, the franchise's future has remained in doubt. Arkane's Austin-based studio shut its doors in 2024 following the disappointing release of Redfall, but Arkane Lyon remains active and is working on Marvel's Blade.

However, some are hoping that recent fan interest could revive Dishonored. A recent X post praising Dishonored went viral, racking up over 10 million views and over 33,000 likes on the platform. Hundreds of fans joined in to share their love of Dishonored and encouraged others to give it a chance if they haven't. Arkane even personally thanked the original poster for playing and enjoying the game. Another post stated that the discussion may have single-handedly saved the Dishonored franchise.

Thanks for playing.

— Arkane Studios (@ArkaneStudios) April 28, 2026

Although that is an extremely optimistic view, it's hard to imagine that being the case. Social media is often an echo chamber where algorithms show users things they are interested in. While it wouldn't be surprising if some people discovered Dishonored through this discourse, the hype doesn't seem to be reflected in the player numbers on SteamDB. Both Dishonored games have fewer than 1,000 players on Steam and have each peaked at around 800 players in the last 24 hours.

It does seem like Dishonored 3 may have been in the works at some point. In 2023, a leaked Microsoft document revealed the game was in the works back in 2020 and was targeting a release in fiscal year 2024. Unfortunately, nothing has ever come from that. While it's possible the game was delayed, other projects in that document have since released, including the Oblivion remaster, Doom: The Dark Ages (previously known as Doom Year Zero), and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. One other notable project from that document that hasn't surfaced yet is a remaster of Fallout 3, but rumors indicate that is still in the works whereas there has been nothing but silence for Dishonored 3.

Maybe Xbox will give Arkane the go-ahead to pursue another Dishonored game in the future, especially as the platform tries to rebuild goodwill after a rough generation. However, even if that did happen, it's unlikely we'd see Dishonored 3 until the early 2030s, given that Marvel's Blade still seems to be a year or two away from releasing.

Cade Onder is a freelancer for IGN's news team. He covers all things entertainment, including gaming, film, and more. You can find him on Twitter @Cade_Onder.

Everyone has their own expectations for Grand Theft Auto 6. While many hope it will live up to the dizzying standards set by GTA 5 and Read Dead Redemption 2, I’d actually like the next installment in the franchise to be less like recent hits and more like GTA 4, San Andreas, and the original Read Dead – games that had more restraint and, as a result, more focus. Above all, though, I wish the upcoming game would take a page from the textbook of one of the Rockstar’s most overlooked titles: Bully.

Developed by Rockstar Vancouver and released in 2006, Bully is often described as “GTA with kids”. Instead of a career criminal, you play as unruly teenager Jimmy Hopkins. The setting isn’t some big modern metropolis ruled by rival gangs, but a stuck-in-time New England-style boarding school (aptly named Bullworth Academy) where students are divided into different cliques like jocks and greasers. You steal bikes instead of cars, and when you break the rules, it’s not the cops that come for you, but headmasters and hall monitors.

Despite the critical and commercial success it enjoyed upon release, Bully is sometimes remembered as the “step child” or “black sheep” of Rockstar’s catalog. Not only do I disagree, I’d go as far as saying that Bully is actually Rockstar at its best: charming, atmospheric, and far removed from the direction the developer has taken since. Though similar to a game like Grand Theft Auto 5 on the surface, it was created with a completely different design philosophy, and that’s exactly why it’s the perfect blueprint for GTA 6 – a game that shouldn’t simply be “GTA 5, but more.”

Bigger isn’t always better. GTA 5’s map was larger than any other game in the franchise up to that point, but most of the area outside Los Santos turned out to be empty space. Unlike in, say, Red Dead 2, where the rolling meadows and barren mountainsides serve a thematic purpose, the backcountry of GTA 5 is not a living, breathing world so much as a playground for police chases and sandbox shenanigans.

Bully has one of the smallest maps of any Rockstar game, comprising only Bullworth Academy itself and the surrounding town. But because space is so limited, hardly any of it went to waste. The campus includes a library, gymnasium, and dormitories, while the town features a carnival, BMX park, and an insane asylum, to name just a few distinct and memorable locations. Put simply, Bully shows it isn’t the quantity of virtual space, but the quality of the content in it, that makes a game world feel believable and immersive.

Fortunately, there are already some indications that GTA 6’s design philosophy will harken back to Rockstar’s Bully days. Though the game’s map is rumored to be more than two and a half times as large as GTA 5’s, its Florida-inspired setting promises to create a much more striking and cohesive visual footprint that should compensate for any empty space.

Instead of a cookie-cutter Californian no man’s land, we’ll get Sunshine State idiosyncrasies: luxurious seaside boulevards, alligator-invested swamplands, state-of-the-art theme parks, and white beaches littered with the worst kinds of tourists. GTA 5 gave us a bastardized version of Los Angeles and little else; GTA 6 will draw inspiration from a variety of specific real-world cities and biomes, including Miami, Tampa, Orlando, the Keys, the Everglades, and more.

I don’t think we should be free to dive into those varied locations from the off, though. Bully demonstrates the value of limiting player freedom – another quality of open-world design that’s long fallen out of fashion. In GTA 5, you need only complete Franklin’s prologue before you’re free to explore the map in its entirety. But this lack of restriction comes at a cost, as reaching a location that’s always been accessible to you isn’t nearly as satisfying as visiting a place that you were previously unable to get to.

Older Rockstar games did this constantly, and to great effect. San Andreas takes you to three different cities, each of them unlocked at different parts of the story. Similarly, the original Red Dead doesn’t let you go to Mexico until several hours into the game (though there are admittedly one or two ways to glitch yourself across the border). Its sequel also restricts player freedom to some degree, keeping the prologue confined to the snowy Grizzlies West region.

In Bully, you cannot leave Bullworth Academy until the second chapter. Far from annoying, this setup gives you an opportunity to thoroughly explore the school, which will remain your base of operations throughout the game. Better still, the map opens up at a moment when you are just beginning to get bored of the place. Because we were made to yearn for a change of scenery, our newfound freedom tastes all the sweeter.

GTA 6 will hopefully return to the days of gated regions. While Vice City is clearly the game’s key metropolis, I’d like to see it as an aspirational destination – a land of neon lights, loose values, and criminal profit that takes a little work to get to. Places like Port Gellhorn and the Leonida Keys could be stepping stones to the big city, just as San Andreas had us master Los Santos, San Fierro, and Las Venturas in sequence.

This leads into another, even more valuable lesson that GTA 6 can learn from Bully. In GTA 5, there is a huge disconnect between you and the characters you control. Except for when we play as Trevor, whose volatile personality not only reflects but actively encourages the most haphazardly destructive way to play the game, we rarely get to experience a character’s emotions along with them.

In Bully, story and gameplay mechanics work side by side to make you identify with Jimmy and share his motivations. After being confined to campus grounds for the first chapter, he’s eager to go into town. You’re excited too – so excited, in fact, that you’ll probably spend a solid hour vibing, riding around on a stolen bike before starting the next mission.

Another mechanic that helps ease you into Jimmy’s shoes is the game’s curfew system. After 11 p.m., the school becomes overrun with prefects who’ll send you to bed if they catch you, filling up your Trouble Meter (the higher the meter, the more suspicious and hostile certain NPCs will behave towards you). Avoiding punishment puts you on edge, while making it back to the safety of your dormitory draws out a sigh of relief.

Emotional responses like these are hard to come by in GTA 5, where the frequent over-the-top police chase action quickly turns numbingly mundane. The same cannot be said for GTA 4 or San Andreas, where character writing and plot development actually made you care for their protagonists. In Bully, the lower stakes and slightly subtler tone allow events to escalate at a more gradual, satisfying pace, ensuring the story remains engaging right until the final face-off with its main antagonist, a sociopathic, unmedicated fellow student named Gary.

Unlike its predecessor, GTA 6 does seem poised to treat its playable characters as actual people rather than vehicles for chaos and carnage. Dual protagonists Lucia and Jason, we’re told over and over, will be Bonnie and Clyde-style partners in crime, and as in Bully, story and gameplay could conspire to put the player in the middle of that no doubt complicated relationship.

Perhaps the most important thing that Bully can teach GTA 6 is the importance of restraint when designing a game. Rockstar wanted GTA 5 to be big – as big as it possibly could be, both in terms of content and appeal. But by prioritizing size and variety, the developers gave the game a much weaker sense of identity than GTA 4 or San Andreas, both of which were made with very different goals in mind.

Thanks to the specificity of its setting, Bully has perhaps the strongest identity and atmosphere of any Rockstar game out there. Though full of over-the-top caricatures, Bullworth Academy can be a genuinely oppressive place – the kind of harsh environment that forces an otherwise well-intentioned kid like Jimmy to toughen up and treat others as shiftily as they treat him.

The feelings a game evokes stay with you long after you finish playing, strengthening your memory of the overall experience. Though I haven’t done a full playthrough of Bully in years, I can still picture Bullworth Academy’s layout in my head. But drop me anywhere in GTA 5’s gigantic backcountry – a place I have spent many more hours – and I’d struggle finding my way back to civilization without looking at the mini-map.

Despite persistent pleading from the game’s cult following, Bully is unlikely to receive a sequel any time soon. Gone are the days when individual subsidiaries like Rockstar Vancouver (long since part of Rockstar Toronto) could work on their own, original IPs. Whatever Rockstar’s next game will be, it almost certainly won’t be Bully 2. Still, if Rockstar has found a way to inject additional purpose and show extra restraint in its new massive open world, there’s a small chance that the franchise’s feisty spirit will live on through Grand Theft Auto 6.

Tim Brinkhof is a freelance writer specializing in art and history. After studying journalism at NYU, he has gone on to write for Vox, Vulture, Slate, Polygon, GQ, Esquire and more.

Between Amazon's big Gaming Week sale, Woot's Spring Sale, and Best Buy dropping some exciting deals of its own, it's an excellent time to stock up on new games for your library. And while each of these retailers has had a nice variety of discounts to look through, there have been some great offers available on select Final Fantasy games, in particular.

Above, you can see some of our favorite picks from these various sales, including Final Fantasy I-VI Collection on Switch for $49.72, Final Fantasy XVI on PS5 for $24.88, and Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade on Nintendo Switch 2, which is sitting at its lowest price right now at Amazon of $29.99.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth on PS5 is another pick marked down to $29.99 at Amazon, and while it's not at its lowest price there of $24.99, it's still very close. I'd definitely recommend scooping it up now if you've been hoping to have it in your library.

Over at Woot, which is an Amazon-owned online retailer, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles on PS5 has received a big 46% discount that's dropped its price to $26.99, though similar to the Amazon deals, this may not last for long. Woot's sale events only run for a limited time or until the item is sold out, so this is the time to make a move on this game if you want to save on it.

If you're curious what other games are discounted right now, it's worth having a look at our full breakdown of Amazon's 2026 Gaming Week sale to see more of our highlights. This includes select Resident Evil games marked down to just $16, which I highly recommend taking advantage of while they're still available.

Keep in mind that a lot of these deals may not last long beyond the Gaming Week sale, so if something catches your eye, this is the time to scoop it up.

Hannah Hoolihan is a freelancer who writes with the guides and commerce teams here at IGN.

Far Cry 4 creative director Alex Hutchinson has spoken out after comments from Fargo and Alien: Earth creator Noah Hawley drew ire from video game fans online.

Hawley, who is currently preparing to launch a new Far Cry TV series, sparked controversy when discussing why his series would not adapt any of Ubisoft's popular open world games.

"I'm not specifically adapting any of the games that they've put out," Hawley told Deadline. "I'm saying much as I did with the Coens or X-Men or Alien, 'Let me have a dialog with this franchise, because this is what I think a Far Cry story is.'

"We can have a larger conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of adapting video games specifically because games are built in a way that doesn't make for the best drama," he continued. "When you play a video game, you only really move forward through the gameplay section, and then you have these cutscenes that you can skip, so when you go to adapt those games you have to be aware that makes the human drama kind of irrelevant to the storyline. That is death for a show."

This last comment has not gone down well online, particularly among fans of the franchise you'd think Hawley would be keen to court as his next TV audience. Hutchinson, too, was one of those expressing annoyance at Hawley's words. "This is kinda pissing me off," he wrote on LinkedIn. "And I like Noah Hawley's work."

Now, speaking with IGN, Hutchinson has responded to Hawley's comments in more detail, saying that "gamers just want to feel their loves are respected not dismissed as they often were historically."

"I think in certain genres a lot of people skip cutscenes," Hutchinson began, "and certainly the player story takes primacy, but story is a complex topic in games. Theme, setting, character are all key to story and are certainly drivers of player engagement, so even if they're skipping some cinematics, they are deeply engaged in narrative as they occupy a role and move through a designed space."

This is especially true in Far Cry, Hutchinson continued, where protagonists (and players) are challenged by being a stranger in an unfamiliar setting.

"The best Far Cry game to me is a fish out of water story," Hutchinson said, "dropping the player as a 'normal' person with limited knowledge into an extreme situation with a bunch of toys and challenges. Then the story acts as both asking the player questions and then providing reactions based on the player's input.

"My biggest problem is the dismissal of the game stories as pointless," Hutchinson said, addressing Hawley's comments directly. "His position isn't without merit, and his adaptions of Alien and Fargo also basically threw away history. This worked well in Fargo but less well in Alien, which turned into a kind of weird Peter Pan gets a dog story instead of remaining true to the best elements of the brand.

"I think gamers just want to feel their loves are respected not dismissed as they often were historically."

Of course, Hawley has huge experience with adapting existing works for TV. He wrote more than 48 episodes of his Fargo series, created X-Men spinoff Legion, and is now working on Far Cry simultaneous to the second season of Alien: Earth.

So far, however, there's been little detail of what Far Cry series will be about — other than it telling a new story, with the expectation it will become a fresh anthology franchise if all goes to plan.

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

Amazon’s annual Gaming Week sale is live, running from April 27 to May 4, and it’s a bit of a mixed bag this year. There’s no obvious headline-grabber doing the heavy lifting, but dig around enough and you can find a handful of deals that are genuinely worth your time.

Square Enix is doing a lot of legwork in the sale, with plenty of big highlights that can be rattled off fairly easily. Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined has dropped to just $49.99, alongside FF7 Rebirth for $29.99 on PS5, and even Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake for just $29.99. JRPG fans are sure eating well right now.

Capcom’s Resident Evil lineup is the other clear highlight, with several now just $15.99 in the sale. That includes my personal favorite, Resident Evil 4, which is probably one of the best remakes the industry has ever produced. I even prefer it over the original, and that's saying something!

Resident Evil 2 and 3 are matching that price, and the Gold Edition of Resident Evil 7 is also in the mix.

Elsewhere, Hitman: World of Assassination at $19.99 is arguably the smartest purchase in the entire sale. There’s a huge amount of content, but it’s tightly designed, replayable, and consistently high quality.

It also doubles as a useful primer for IO Interactive’s approach ahead of 007: First Light, which is right around the corner (releasing May 27).

There are a few smaller wins too. Nintendo eShop gift cards are discounted by 10%, which isn’t exciting, but it’s effectively free money if you’re already planning to buy digitally.

And on the hardware side, Nintendo is knocking $20 off when you bundle a Switch 2 with Super Mario Galaxy 1 + 2, though that sits under a separate promotion ending May 9. I'd still recommend picking this up if you're yet to bag a Switch 2, as I'm fairly sure it'll be following the PS5 with price hikes at some stage in the near future.

Overall, if you're looking to play some incredible RPGs or survival horror games, there’s enough here to make Amazon's Gaming Week worth a look. If not, maybe you'd be better off waiting until Prime Day this summer.

Robert Anderson is IGN's Senior Commerce Editor and resident deals expert on games, collectibles, trading card games, and more. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Bluesky.

After nearly 30 years of speculation, Resident Evil 2 director Hideki Kamiya has confirmed that, yes, Leon S. Kennedy is named after the Léon: The Professional movie.

The Capcom alum and action game developer icon revealed the inspiration for one of the most recognizable horror protagonists of all time with a simple post on X/Twitter today. It follows decades of theories from fans who already believed Leon's name had originated from the 1994 film, but it's still confirmation, nonetheless.

Kamiya recalled naming Leon when consulting with Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami. After a few ideas were shot down, the director said (via Google Translate), "Well, why don't we just take it from that movie I watched the other day?"

"And his response was simply, 'Yeah, that works,'" Kamiya added.

Resident Evil fans have drawn the connection between Léon: The Professional and Leon S. Kennedy long before today. Aside from the obvious similarities between the names of the survival horror video game hero and the character Jean Reno played in the '90s, Resident Evil has famously featured a "Professional" difficulty setting for years.

There's also the Matilda, a handgun that Resident Evil Leon has been known to use in the past, which has always been assumed to be a reference to the character Natalie Portman played in the film, Mathilda. Kamiya clarified that this potential reference, however, is not one he came up with, but something someone else at Capcom added after he left.

Fans were already quick to react to the Resident Evil revelation after it brought an end to speculation that dates back to the release of the original sequel back in 1998. Kamiya said the reaction is unexpected, joking that he's surprised he hadn't mentioned the connections to Léon: The Professional because it wasn't something he intentionally tried to hide.

Kamiya directed Resident Evil 2 before going on to carve out a stylish new direction for action gaming with the original Devil May Cry. He later went on to lead celebrated classics like Okami and Viewtiful Joe before leaving Capcom to co-found PlatinumGames, which eventually helped result in games like Bayonetta, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, the Wonderful 101, and more. After leaving PlatinumGames in 2023, he's since started his new studio, Clovers, which is helping Capcom develop Okami 2.

Kamiya's influence on Resident Evil can still be felt to this day. In addition to the massively popular Resident Evil 2 remake that arrived in early 2019, Leon has remained an important name in gaming thanks to titles like the Resident Evil 4 remake from 2023 and Resident Evil Requiem, which launched this past February.

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).

Have you ever sat through a Metal Gear cut-scene and not understood what the hell just happened? Turns out you're in good company — the ultimate company, in fact.

In an interview on Fall Damage, David Hayter — the voice of Snake from the original Metal Gear Solid up to Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, along with the series' numerous offshoots and spinoffs — revealed that, perhaps like most of us, he too has struggled to keep up with series creator Hideo Kojima's complex storylines.

"Do I understand the story of Metal Gear Solid?" he said when asked (thanks, FRVR). "Uh, basically, I do. Do I understand all of it? Absolutely not.

"I’d be like, ‘What does this mean?’" he joked. "And they’d say, ‘Just say it.'"

That said, Hayter admitted that while the stories can be difficult to follow at times, they are what "makes Metal Gear, Metal Gear."

“There’s more information," he added. "There’s more character development. There’s more detail to the story than you can ever possibly absorb, no matter how many times you play it. That's what makes the world feel real and rich and lovable."

Hayter revealed last year that he had finally "forgiven" series creator Hideo Kojima for not casting him in 2015's Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain after playing the "amazing" game.

At the time he was jettisoned for Hollywood movie star Kiefer Sutherland, Hayter admitted that playing the game at the time would've felt like "60 hours of humiliation," adding: "I've got no particular love for Kojima. I don't feel any need to go back and work with him again."

Now, with more distance, Hayer said: "There was reluctance. I didn't want to play the game because I figured it would hurt my feelings. Then, you know, 10 years went by and I was like, 'Ah, to hell with my feelings. What do I care?' [...] I'm a screenwriter, so I get fired for a living, like I literally, eventually, get fired from every single gig that I've got, and I'm not a child. "I was like, 'Stop being a baby and play the game.' So I played it. It's amazing."

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.

Fresh leaks point to a major change for the upcoming witchcraft-themed Assassin's Creed Hexe, and expectation of an Assassin's Creed 1 remake.

With Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced now fully revealed by Ubisoft, attention has turned to what's going on elsewhere with the franchise. Over the weekend, reliable Assassin's Creed insider j0nathan detailed further behind-the-scenes changes for Hexe — following confirmation of another top developer leaving the project.

As reported yesterday, Hexe's game director Benoit Richer recently departed the game (and Ubisoft itself) for reasons unknown. His loss comes swiftly after the exit of Clint Hocking, Hexe's creative director, following a major internal reshuffle at the top of the franchise that saw Ubisoft veteran Jean Guesdon ascend to become Assassin's Creed Head of Content. Guesdon is also now serving as Hexe's creative director.

Now, in a post on social media, j0nathon has claimed that Hexe has gone through changes since Guesdon's promotion, including a decision by him to "get rid of everything that was 'magical' in Hexe." Said j0nathon: "For example, we were supposed to control a cat, well, ultimately that's been canceled."

Assassin's Creed has frequently dabbled in sci-fi or magical elements — indeed, its core conceit relies on the ability to access memories stored in DNA, and wield special powers (such as the ability to see enemies through walls) left over from the bloodline of an ancient previous civilization. But the extent to which it has included more dramatic super-powered elements has waxed and waned over time. For instance: compare Assassin's Creed Odyssey, where you essentially level up protagonist Kassandra into a demigod, and the more recent Assassin's Creed Mirage, the stripped-back smaller-scale adventure that feels far more ground level.

While little has been officially confirmed of Assassin's Creed Hexe's focus, what we do know has pointed to it being an entry focused on the 17th century era of witch trials in central Europe. Some expectation of witchcraft-y magical powers had seemed likely, then, and befitting the setting. Presumably, characters with witchcraft-like powers would be explained in the same way other abilities throughout the series have been — via the use of special artefacts (for example the Apple of Eden to control minds) bloodline-related abilities (such as Eagle Vision), or, simply something the series handwaves as possible (jumping off a cathedral into a small pile of hay).

Indeed, controlling animals has been possible for a while, ever since Assassin's Creed Origins introduced the ability to warg into your eagle drone — a feature that returned in Odyssey and Valhalla. There are numerous reasons why Assassin's Creed could explain the ability to control a cat, then, but it sounds like this won't be possible.

Finally, in another leak, j0nathon stated that Ubisoft was working on an Assassin's Creed 1 remake — or had been a couple of years ago, with no word it's been canned in the years since. A remake of the original Assassin's Creed is not a surprise, seeing as Ubisoft previously confirmed it had multiple remakes (not just Black Flag) in the works, and the positive response to the similar, AC1-esque Mirage. AC1 is now also the most dated of Assassin's Creed games, even if its backwards compatible Xbox 360 version plays at a higher frame-rate on modern consoles.

In other words, it is long due a proper spruce-up — and could benefit from the many later advances added to the series, which really only found its footing in its subsequent Ezio era. Indeed, it's intriguing to think what an AC1 remake might look like, perhaps with each of its large open areas combined into a wider open world. Potentially, its story could be expanded with hints to characters and settings in later entries — just as numerous later entries have harked back to its events, and the story of original Assassin protagonist Altaïr.

Before all of that, of course, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced will arrive on July 9. Assassin's Creed Hexe is not expected to arrive until 2027.

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

Publisher Sega and developer Creative Assembly have revealed what appears to be a teaser trailer for Alien: Isolation 2.

A mysterious video titled "A False Sense of Security" was posted by the franchise’s official YouTube account today, April 26, which also happens to be Alien Day. It’s little more than an atmospheric teaser that features a rainy, outdoor location and a familiar emergency phone save station.

The teaser trailer doesn’t outright confirm that it is for the long-awaited Alien: Isolation 2, but given that Creative Assembly announced it was working on a follow-up back in late 2024, fans are already expecting an impending announcement. The only text included in the video’s description says, "A feeling of being safer than one really is."

Despite earning a strong fan base in the decade following its release, Creative Assembly and Sega refrained from making an official announcement about a sequel until the 10th anniversary of its launch in 2024. Little information about Alien: Isolation 2 was shared at the time, with the team, which includes original creative director Al Hope, mostly telling players to expect more information "when it’s ready."

"Today, I'm delighted to confirm, on behalf of the team, that a sequel to Alien: Isolation is in early development," Creative Assembly said at the time. "We look forward to sharing more details with you when we're ready."

Sega has not confirmed platforms or a release date for Alien: Isolation 2 yet. While we wait for Sega and Creative Assembly to shine more light on their Alien Day teaser video, you can see where the original game landed on our list of the top 25 best horror games of all time. You can also see where it fell on our list of the top 10 licensed games based on movies.

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).

Alice: Madness Returns creator and director American McGee says he "pasted dildos" on the head of a giant snail after publisher EA requested developer Spicy Horse Games "make things more sexy."

The name behind the dark, video game twist on Alice in Wonderland shared behind-the-scenes details about how it came to be in a recent reply to a marketing video posted on X/Twitter. He admits there was "a fairly big disconnect" between his vision for the 2011 sequel and what the marketing team at EA wanted.

McGee says EA wanted to push Alice: Madness Returns to be a "Hard M title" that leaned more into gore and horror with a "psychotic" main character – but the requests didn’t stop there. When someone at the company requested the Shanghai-based Spicy Horse adjust how "sexy" the game was, McGee got creative.

It would be fair to say that there was a fairly big disconnect between the game I wanted to make and the game EA Marketing wanted me to make when we were developing Madness Returns.

The marketing team felt strongly that a Hard M title focused on gore, horror, and featuring a… https://t.co/HddXtHuWXz

— 🔪 American McGee 🖤 (@americanmcgee) April 23, 2026

"I did NOT want portray Alice as a psycho, cover her in blood, or 'make things more sexy' (yes, that was a request)," he said. "Famously, I pasted dildos onto the head of a giant snail in response to the 'sexy' request and emailed that to the Marketing team."

With a laughing-crying face emoji, he added, "They stopped making those requests."

McGee clarified that he feels he was able to deny requests like this because Alice: Madness Returns was funded by a Los Angeles bank, not by EA. The nature of the deal meant that Spicy Horse maintained complete control of the project as long as it stuck to the development schedule and didn’t push the budget.

It was successful up to the end of development, when the team felt it needed "another 30-60 days for polishing." McGee said EA’s refusal to extend the deadline was "probably a bit out of spite," resulting in a slightly less polished launch with little interference from the publisher.

"We made history in relation to all this," he added. "Madness Returns wasn't just the first AAA game fully developed by a Chinese team. It was also the first ever game to be bond financed in China. We were also the first team ever to tell EA [go f**k yourself] and (kinda) get away with it."

Alice: Madness Returns launched in June 2011 for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. Although reception from fans and critics wasn’t the strongest upon its release (we gave it a 6.5/10), its grim fairytale style helped it find an audience, landing it as a cult classic in the years since. McGee has attempted to make Alice 3 in the past, and there was even once a TV show in the works, but the franchise otherwise remains dormant.

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).

Square Enix has announced plans to bring Final Fantasy XIV to Nintendo Switch 2 this August – but there is a catch.

FFXIV director and producer Naoki Yoshida (a.k.a. Yoshi-P) and Square Enix president and CEO Takashi Kiryu revealed plans to bring the massively popular MMORPG to the Nintendo platform as part of Final Fantasy XIV Fan Fest 2026 today. It’s news that marked an end to a long wait, but it also came with the reveal that players on the hybrid gaming platform will need to rethink their subscription plans.

The presentation continued following the announcement with a graphic confirming that subscriptions for FFXIV on Switch 2 will operate differently than other platforms. While players previously only needed to purchase the game itself and the monthly subscription fee to play on any platform, the Switch 2 version will require players to purchase an additional, separate subscription.

"After discussions with Nintendo, it was decided that the Switch 2 version of Final Fantasy XIV would require a separate subscription," Yoshi-P said via translator. "Again, this was decided after many months of discussions with Nintendo, and I understand that this is different to how we’ve done things before."

Thankfully, Yoshi-P said that there were able to make some concessions. A Nintendo Switch Online membership, for example, will not be required to play FFXIV on Switch 2. Additionally, those with active subscriptions on other platforms will receive a 50% discount for a subscription on Switch 2.

Final Fantasy XIV currently has no specific release date for the Switch 2 version outside of the promise to see its launch arrive in August. It will be playable via early access to try for free for one month before its release. The Nintendo portion of the presentation then came to an end with a live demo of the game running on Switch 2.

"A week ago, I had this great idea to play the Switch 2 on stage here, and Nintendo kind of freaked out a little,” Yoshi-P added. "They were like, 'What?!' But they cooperated and helped us so much to make this happen, so thank you, Nintendo, very much to help us make this happen on-stage today."

The base game Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn originally launched in 2013 and, after only a few teases in the years since, it is finally coming to a Nintendo platform. Also revealed at the 2026 Fan Fest keynote, the upcoming expansion, Evercold, is coming in January 2027. and got an announcement trailer which you can see above. A crossover with Neon Genesis Evangelion is also in the works, which will be a 24-player raid series coming after Evercold.

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).