Arc System Works is blowing the dust off its 2015 2D fighting game BlazBlue: Central Fiction and adding a new DLC character a decade down the track.

Arc System Works made the announcement in a note at the end of a brief teaser trailer today, as part of its 2026 showcase. However, the publisher otherwise refrained from adding any further specifics about the character itself. Fans will not need to wait long, though, as the complete reveal of the character will occur at EVO 2026 this weekend.

“As you saw in the trailer, we will be adding a new playable character to the game,” said BlazBlue: Central Fiction producer Riku Ozawa during the showcase. “It’s been many years since this game [was] released. We were able to make this new development happen thanks to the continued support of fans around the world who have kept the game alive. Truly, thank you so much.”

According to Ozawa, development for this DLC character was only settled “very recently.”

“Normally, we should wait to make the announcement until we have footage of the character in-game,” he conceded. “This time, however, I wanted to share with everyone that we are working on this as soon as I could, so we’ve made this announcement without gameplay footage.”

Ozawa confirmed the new character will be “a certain someone who has appeared in the main BlazBlue games.”

Developed by 2D fighting game specialists Arc System Works, BlazBlue: Central Fiction was initially released in arcades in late 2015 before arriving on PS3 and PS4 in late 2016. The game was subsequently ported to PC and Switch.

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

A few hours after the State of Unreal keynote speech, founder and CEO of Epic Games Tim Sweeney, alongside EVP of development Marcus Wassmer, met with us to talk about everything new with Unreal Engine. They’d just announced that UE6 is set for early access at the end of 2027 with a 12-14 month period before its full launch, had developers on stage speak to how Unreal made their games technically possible, and, well, showcased AI tools being integrated in future iterations of the engine.

It feels redundant to say at this point that the games industry is in unprecedented times, but it really is – at the convergence of unaffordable consumer hardware, development studios getting shuttered, and AI getting pushed onto everything in between; this is where we are. With Unreal Engine being so ubiquitous as the framework for which some of the biggest games are made, Epic and its tech has a major role in stewarding the games industry, as fallible as they may be. We talked about all that in the following interview, which you can read or watch below.

IGN: How is UE6 going to change AAA game development? As it gets more expensive and tools get more advanced, it seems like the idea is to help create an environment that’s more seamless for developers and to cut down on development time. Can you dig a little more into that as you transition over to UE6 in the coming years?

Wassmer: I think it's two things – one, the efficiency of development. Games are getting bigger, games are getting more difficult [to make]. So, all the architectural work we're doing on the engine should just smooth things out. Not to mention AI creation flows. We showed some demos, and it really should take a lot of the tedium out of game creation and let people just actually focus on the creative part, which should be really nice. Then, the really cool thing, I think we're kind of inventing a new type of economy here, hopefully with the interconnected and interoperable assets between games, which I don’t think has ever been done. I haven't seen it done at scale, at least anyway.

Sweeney: I'm really looking forward to the increased simplicity. I wrote the first generation Unreal Engine and with every generation, out of necessity of taking advantage of new features of hardware and expanding the engine capabilities, we've made the engine progressively more and more complicated, to the point where it's somewhat daunting to open up Unreal Engine 5 and look at the five-level MUI nested menus in some cases.

The C++ programming model really requires expert level programming, and the great cleanup in Unreal Engine 6 is to adopt the Verse scripting language that we've been pioneering in Fortnite with the Fortnite creator community and bring that into UE6 as the primary way to develop gameplay code. So, it brings the ease of development and programming that you have in an engine like Unity or Godot together with the full power of UE6 on the high-end AAA feature-sets. And to tame complexity of the engine, the ability to prompt a lot of different systems, and have it help you create a particle system and tweak it; it’ll enable you to focus on the details that really matter rather than the boilerplate of creating and repeating the same rote actions over and over. It's going to be really freeing.

I think it will bring back some of the magic that we had in earlier days that each engine had in its first few years before each engine grew more complex. It’s just making it really easy to create stuff, giving the user an immense amount of creative freedom and the feeling that they can exercise it pretty easily without going off and spending hours or days on tutorials.

IGN: While the State of Unreal keynote was more developer-focused, what would you say to someone on the outside looking in who’s wondering how this affects the games they play?

Sweeney: The biggest opportunity is for games to connect their economies. Not every game wants to connect every part of it; in some cases it's logical and in some cases it’s not. But if you look broadly across games, there's an awful lot of stuff that could be shared in common. Every game with human [characters] could share emotes, and a lot of games with similar art styles could share characters such that from a player's point of view, it would be a whole lot more valuable if everything we bought that is cosmetic in nature worked across all of the different games that we owned.

I think that creates a huge opportunity in the future for an ecosystem where there's lasting value created in the sense that whether or not you're playing the current game you're in, weeks, months, or years from now, the things that you've done and earned in it are of lasting utility to you as long as you're playing some game somewhere.

Wassmer: On top of that, and just even more directly, I think we're going to continue to see small teams being able to punch above their weight. You take a look at Claire Obscur: Expedition 33 and No Law getting shown off – really small teams doing really, really impressive stuff. I think you're only going to see that trend accelerate as we go toward the UE6 era.

IGN: One of the things that is also top of mind, especially for games built on Unreal, is performance and scaling for mid-level to low-end hardware. UE5 has had its ups and downs when it comes to playing well on handhelds, which have blown up with the Steam Deck and ROG Ally – and people are playing more PC games on lower-end specs. How is that being accounted for with UE6?

Wassmer: I think we've actually been addressing it through 5.7 and 5.8 even, and I think the trend will continue through UE6. We're a game developer, too. Fortnite players have the same issues as anyone else and we try to scale from mobile all the way into high-end PC.

You see initiatives like Lumen light we showed on stage as an effort to bring the costs of Lumen down to be accessible to more people for global dynamic illumination. We were showing off Mesh Terrain where you can see the new features we're building that’s built inherently to scale from Nanite to non-Nanite platforms. So, when it cooks down for a non-Nanite platform, it just cooks down to regular meshes that should run efficiently and more efficiently than the old landscape system in most cases.

So, it's really on our mind. I think you can see games lag a little bit in shipping on engine releases, but as more games kind of hit that 5.7 and 5.8 mark, I think you’ll already see a trend toward efficiency. We have a ton of stuff in the pipeline as we progress towards UE6, and that's going to land in the engine as well.

Sweeney: It's the cumulative set of optimizations that have been done. We have Fortnite back on mobile, we're putting a lot of effort into optimizing the engine so that a developer can ship a game and run on everything from the highest end hardware all the way down to low-end Android and several-year-old iPhones. Over time, we've also come to an increasing appreciation of the need to make the engine automatically scale much more of the content in the game. It's always been the case that with enough effort and trickery, a developer could make their game run on low-end devices. But the more our systems like Nanite can automatically scale, the better. That's going to be a source of ongoing attention.

IGN: As people who have worked with bleeding edge tech for many years, I want to get your perspective on the increasing cost of hardware – even mid-level hardware just to engage with games that are built on these pretty sophisticated technologies. Does it cross your mind when working on new versions or builds of the engine, do you account for that? And what's your perspective on the unprecedented times with pricing and hardware availability?

Sweeney: Well, it's an unfortunate and completely unexpected event that AI would surge so much and place so much competitive pressure on memory prices and everything to the point where it's significantly affecting the cost of gaming hardware. I think it's a temporary effect, but temporary over the next two or three years.

I'm sure throughout Asia, there are massive fabs being built to manufacture memory at scales that will eventually relieve the supply pressure. In the meantime, we're going to have to be judicious and spend more time optimizing knowing that we can count less on Moore's Law to solve our problems for us, as the game industry has always done with or without intention.

Wassmer: We definitely talk about it and think about it as we're doing development, for sure. As Tim says, you can’t count on hardware trends to help us out at the moment. So, it is increasing the pressure for a push on optimization across mobile and mid-spec, for sure.

IGN: It’s interesting to see UE5.8 and UE6 using the MCP server and including support for multiple LLMs into its ecosystem. With this increasing ubiquitousness of AI, what's the role of AI in the game development process from your point of view?

Wassmer: I think its role is as a helper where it's useful, right? You go look back at Codegen tools back in last November, they kind of weren't that great. Now they're pretty good, so you can pretty easily put them into engineering pipelines. I think the main thing is you want to make sure of is to use AI to reduce all of the tedium. All the tedious tasks, like, you don't need an engineer to go and spend half a day doing root cause analysis on a crash if you can have a thing do that for you in 20 minutes and then tell them what's going on so they can spend that time optimizing the engine instead, helping a content creator, or whatever. I think it's horses for courses and there will be places where it's not useful, there'll be places where it will.

Sweeney: The whole space is moving so fast. We recognized early on that Epic should just broadly enable everybody to use the tools they prefer and be able to plug them into Unreal Engine in any way they want. We didn't go out to build like the Unreal Engine coding model, rather, we built an MCP server so that people could bring Claude code, Gemini, or whatever tool they prefer and connect it. Every week or two, there are going to be new capabilities coming out with lots of different companies competing, and we want to be able to support them all and put each game developer in charge of how they want to integrate AI tools into their pipelines to get maximum usefulness out of it and figure out what really gets acceleration maximized.

IGN: There will always be concerns about artistic intent. We saw the demo of how you can build a virtual world foundationally with MCP and Claude coding. There are a lot of people who are on no-AI policies, and these kinds of things get marked on Steam pages as using generative AI. So, when it comes to building worlds and building games, I want to get your thoughts on preserving artistic value when it comes to using AI.

Wassmer: Sure, we're building all the pipelines in Unreal to maximally preserve artistic intent. We gave the demos and you can see every step of the way. Our intention is, whatever gets built is a real Unreal scene that people can tweak and make exactly the way they wanted it to be rather than just typing into the prompt and trying a million times to get whatever pops out right. It's really meant to help people explore creatively more quickly, then settle in on the details of what they actually want, and then do the tweaks they need by hand right in the engine. So for us, it's human control all the way through the pipeline.

Sweeney: Yeah, exactly that. You know, gaming has always been driven by great games built by great development teams and that will continue to be the case. Every generation has had its stereotypical low quality games, from just plain old bad games to asset flips and now we’ll have AI slop. But in the hands of awesome professional creators and serious indies building a game, these tools are just an accelerant. And just as the industry moved from pixel art to Photoshop and then from 2D to 3D, these are just going to be ways to make content more efficiently and avoiding the drudgery of handwiring a giant blueprint and debugging really complicated problems in a program.

IGN: I also want to get your perspective on the physical cost of using AI when it comes to data centers and energy usage, and your thoughts on the impact of AI outside of artistic intent. Is that something that is at the top of your mind or are you looking at this as just enabling the tools in Unreal? Is that something that you account for?

Sweeney: I think that's for the model providers to sort out. Some of them are operating at a loss such that there's actually a higher cost than they're charging to try to grow their businesses. Then there are trade-offs between local AI and server-based hosted AI. I think the whole industry is going to have to sort that out.

With our part, Epic doesn't have billions of dollars to invest in building a bleeding edge model to compete with these things. What we can do is build an awesome MCP interface so that every one of them can talk to our engine and so on. I think developers and the market are going to ultimately sort that out, and I think there’s plenty of incentive for everybody to do these things efficiently. Cost is going to be formidable when you're using a bleeding edge model at its maximum capability. And optimizing that is going to be a first-class objective for everybody.

IGN: You’ve been in the business for a long time, and along with the unprecedented times with hardware cost, it’s also unprecedented times with AAA studios more or less collapsing. We've seen big name developers either cutting significantly or being shut down by parent companies. Being part of game development for so many years, I want to get your thoughts on the contraction of a lot of these bigger studios and where you think things are going wrong. What lessons do you think need to be learned from all this?

Sweeney: I guess I've been around the longest. But you can't say that this is the first time the industry has gone through a shakeup because there have been many before. I was a young gamer in the 1980s when the Atari crash happened, and the transition from 2D gaming to 3D when suddenly a lot of the games at the time that were being developed ended up not finding a market. And then BitTorrent hit the industry pretty hard, too. There was a time when the industry rumor was that Crysis had sold 100,000 copies and 10 million people had played it. And the solution to that was multifaceted.

Every technology generation, whether it's seven or ten years – changes accumulate so much that the way people build games and play games changes. The answer can't be that every generation we just spend exponentially more on game development because the market doesn't always support that. And I think we've seen some very specific problems with specific games. Sometimes a really big budget game ships that wasn't very good and didn't sell. But much more often as we've seen with a bunch of the big multiplayer games – it could be a good game – the market dynamics prevented players from coming in simultaneously with enough scale to make it viable.

We should set aside flukes where a game didn't meet expectations of gamers and just look at more of the structural changes. And those are really appreciable, the fact that games are becoming increasingly multiplayer. And not just multiplayer but social, where you're getting together with your friends and then you're deciding what to do, what to play, and how to play it. This trend of the gaming economy shifting – some people like it and some don't – is going more and more towards buying things in games rather than buying games. In-game economy is driving gaming, especially at scale and especially over long durations as you see with these long-lasting multiplayer games.

You have much more of a winner-takes-all phenomenon where it's really hard for any new entrant to compete with an established game, even if it is incrementally better. After years of established games continually reinvesting and making the game better, it's hard for a new entrant to compete with a game that's had many years of development and potentially billions of dollars of development investment going into it over time with a small team building a small game.

Those are the huge challenges and those are generational, different challenges than you've seen in the past. Each of them was kind of an isolated problem that had a solution [before], and here the answer has got to be pretty broad change in the way that everybody goes about developing games. We've got to develop better games more consistently and we've got to develop them a lot more efficiently.

The only way that we can hope for new games coming into the market to be able to succeed when there's so much Metcalfe's Law at play and so many captive audiences in the really big games – you know, Fortnite, Roblox, PUBG Mobile, and a few other really huge ones – it's got to be that those games get momentum by connecting to the economies in other games. I think that can really reinvigorate the market if people are constantly looking to new games and sources of new items that they can earn everywhere and be able to really easily move together with their friends.

It shouldn't be understated how badly broken the social ecosystem is in gaming as a whole. Most games now are broadly multi-platform. You have a lot of games that are across mobile, a lot of games that are across PC and console, and then you have games that are across all platforms like Fortnite and Roblox where the game is literally on every platform everywhere in the world. For those to compete against that sort of thing, you've got to build games that run everywhere and be able to have social connections that work everywhere.

If you look at Epic and a number of other independent multiplatform game developers, we've built social ecosystems for that. Your Fortnite friends are your friends across all platforms. You can connect with them; an iOS player, an Android player, an Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch player, and a PC player. And, like, we bled for that. We had a pretty big confrontation with Sony in which we ultimately got a cross-platform play across consoles sorted out in 2018, and we're grateful for that and the industry is better off for it. But still, most game developers are locked into these single-platform ecosystems. Xbox voice chat doesn't chat with PlayStation voice chat, and Nintendo's a separate thing still. All these players on Steam can't talk to their friends on Xbox and PlayStation unless they're playing a big game that's developed as a bespoke custom system.

One of the solutions to this has to be making social work across all platforms natively and naturally, and getting all the platform holders and all the big game makers to work together to make that happen. I think it's in everybody's interest to do so, like, massively so. I think every platform would have a lot more engagement, and every game acting through the system would have a lot more engagement if we connected things, literally. Not just Epic, but name all of the top game developers, I think Xbox, Epic, Roblox, Riot, Tencent, EA, all the different studios within Microsoft – we'd all be better off if we connected our stuff. We'd all be making more money and our gamers would be happier, so it'll be just a great outcome for the world.

Michael Higham is an editor at IGN who regularly contributes with reviews, previews, features, and news in written and video form. He's usually entrusted with covering long RPGs and tech products, but he's got range when it comes to games. You'll also catch him at events and hosting video content, including IGN's weekly podcast Unlocked.

GTA 6 is a “single-player experience,” Rockstar has confirmed in a note sent to IGN, as well as on storefronts where you can now preorder the game. This suggests the $80 base game does not include any new version of GTA Online, should such an experience be in the works.

While many are assuming Rockstar plans to release a new and improved GTA Online at some point in the future, there remains questions over how it will be released. Will Rockstar release a new GTA Online for free within GTA 6? Or will it release it as a standalone experience, potentially charging more?

Rockstar’s announcements today have made it clear that the existing GTA Online is the focus for now. A digital preorder gets you a free month of GTA+, with Rockstar referencing GTA Online in its press release:

"Experience the dynamic blockbuster GTA Online now with the best way to get the most out of its ever-evolving world. Pre-order any edition of Grand Theft Auto VI on the PlayStation Store or Microsoft Store and get one free month of GTA+ — featuring a recurring monthly GTA$500,000 deposit into your GTA Online character's bank account, access to special Shark Cards with 15% bonus GTA$, access to free and discounted GTA Online vehicles, a rotating selection of classic Rockstar Games titles and other featured games in the GTA+ Games Library, and much more."

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by the lack of a new GTA Online for GTA 6 at launch. GTA Online continues to print money for Rockstar and parent company Take-Two, and its availability on PC, where GTA 6 will not be available day one, will surely maintain its momentum even as GTA 6 hits PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S.

Last year, IGN asked Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick about the fate of GTA Online, and in his response he referenced NBA 2K Online, the free-to-play online-focused version of 2K Sports’ hugely successful basketball franchise aimed at the Asian market. NBA 2K Online launched all the way back in 2012, and then 2K Sports released NBA 2K Online 2 in 2017. Both games were maintained simultaneously, so fans of the first version could continue to play and invest their time and money safe in the knowledge they wouldn’t be left behind.

“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 began. “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. If I'm not mistaken. 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.”

That last line is of particular importance. It suggests — but doesn’t confirm at this stage — that if there is a GTA Online 2, it won’t come at the cost of GTA Online falling by the wayside. If people keep playing GTA Online, Zelnick is suggesting here, then Rockstar will continue to support it.

So, while a new GTA Online feels inevitable, perhaps fans shouldn’t hold their breath for its release. While you wait, we've got plenty more on GTA 6 following today's announcement, including confirmation of the GTA 6 price, over 60 new GTA 6 screenshots, and Sony's boast that GTA 6 "plays best" on PS5.

Half-Life 3 may not be here yet, or ever arrive, for that matter, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t already plenty of incredible games from developer Valve Corporation to play. And now with the brand new Steam Machine console to experience them on, what better time to get stuck in? The custodian of Steam may not be anywhere near as prolific as it once was when it comes to actually making games, but it still has a ridiculously strong list to pick from – some of which are daily destinations for hundreds of thousands of players. But which are the best? Well, that’s exactly what we’ve tried to decide here as we take in the importance, endurance over time, and innovation each of these games has brought to the table over the past three decades. Here are the 10 best Valve games to play right now.

10. Left 4 Dead

A blood-soaked homage to zombie action cinema as much as it is a revolutionary landmark piece of co-op game design, Left 4 Dead was unlike anything else when it arrived in 2008. Across its multiple four-player modes, tight gunplay and edge-of-your-seat encounter design, it dished up ultra-satisfying combat that left the undead decapitated, but bathed in a stunning sheen of filmic lighting and grain effects that George A Romero himself would be proud of. It’s a perfect example of the blend of artistry and technology that has driven some of the studio’s most valued creations.

Valve is a developer known for its innovation, and nowhere in Left 4 Dead is this seen more clearly than in its campaign “Director” — an AI that oversees the player experience, tailoring the flow of combat and the challenges it presents. It's this dynamic overlord that makes this zombie horde shooter so compelling, twisting each run against Boomers, Hunters, and the much-feared, screeching, Witches into ever-surprising gauntlets of survival that were hard to tear ourselves away from, even when knowing the horrors that lurked within them.

9. Dota 2

The story of Dota 2’s development is a curious one, and a tale too long for the mere couple of paragraphs I have here. Essentially a sequel to a fan-made mod of Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft 3 called Defence of the Ancients, Dota 2 was announced following designer IceFrog’s hiring by Valve to create a MOBA of their own after Blizzard passed on his services. With the resources of Gabe Newell’s empire fuelling it, a multiplayer online battle arena giant was born, as deep, intricate combat systems overlapped to form the basis of one of the biggest eSports games of all time.

It was a brave move back in 2010 to announce a direct competitor to the phenomenon that was League of Legends, but that gamble paid off almost immediately, as it topped Steam's concurrent player numbers with 330,000 users a whole month before its official release. Over fifteen years later, Dota 2 has more than proved its worth in the MOBA space and is still played fervently to this day by as passionate a fanbase as you’ll see anywhere in games.

8. Left 4 Dead 2

Left 4 Dead 2 built on the already brilliant foundations of its predecessor, improving its co-op undead action in pretty much every way to continue Valve’s long history of sensational sequels. Across its five campaigns, new types of infected were introduced, each controlled and sent to hunt you by the improved AI Director 2.0, which now had power over the geography of the levels themselves, creating deadly, shifting labyrinths that tested the most hardened of Left 4 Dead enthusiasts.

Upping the ante in every facet, boycotts and concerns over the graphic nature of its violence couldn’t stop Left 4 Dead 2 as it far outsold its predecessor, taking both PC and Xbox 360 sales charts by storm. Many imitators would follow over the years — Warhammer: Vermintide, Back 4 Blood, and Deep Rock Galactic, to name a few — but none could ever truly rebottle the magic created within Valve’s walls with the Left 4 Dead series.

7. Team Fortress 2

Although its origins can be traced all the way back to a 1996 Quake mod, 2007’s Team Fortress 2 can largely be credited with the mainstream popularity of the hero shooter. Combining two of Valve’s greatest loves — turning mods into sequels and innovating new subgenres — one of the first “games as service” focused on tried and tested multiplayer shooter modes such as king of the hill and capture the flag, but injected them with a set of uniquely skilled and armed characters that made squadmates completely rethink how to approach each match.

In development for almost a decade, Team Fortress 2 made the successful transition from military shooter vaporware to Source engine success upon Valve’s acquisition of the project, thus turning it into a multiplayer mainstay for years on PC and console thanks to its inclusion in the best-selling Orange Box. It was that Valve coating of character and humour that really made TF2 stand out from the crowd, though, making each member of its roster a joy to play with and listen to. Its success would be eclipsed by the likes of Overwatch in the years after, but its legacy lives on as a pioneer of a subgenre that burned brightly in the 2010s.

6. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Counter-Strike’s loop of objective-based, high-stakes battle is a simple concept for a shooter, but one that demands mastery. The pursuit of pinpoint accurate headshots and practically precognitive reactions has kept the series locked in as one of the most-played multiplayer games for the best part of two decades. Global Offensive is arguably the height of its success, despite initially arriving as an uncertain successor to the beloved CS: Source, drawing in near-unprecedented player numbers on Steam, as well as nurturing one of the biggest eSports scenes ever built.

Most of its nine modes tweak the 5v5, terrorist vs. counter terrorist formula to some extent, but none are more enduring than the pulsating plant and bomb defusal action of Competitive, which has gone on to inspire many other shooters since. Without CS: GO, there would be no Rainbow Six Siege, and there would be no Valorant. Although it’s since been replaced by the more advanced Counter-Strike 2, and its reputation has occasionally been tarnished by gambling scandals and its role in normalising microtransactions via weapon skins, many would argue that nothing has quite captured the magic of Global Offensive’s very best days. Yet another example of Valve seeking out a shooter subgenre to make their own, CS: GO remains one of the studio’s greatest achievements.

5. Portal

In 2008, Portal took Half-Life 2’s physics-enabled Source engine and asked the question: “What if guns weren’t used to cut down enemies, but instead to sharpen the mind?” The answer was a short-but-sweet masterclass in puzzle design that tasked you with manipulating space, mass, and momentum in a lab a thousand times more fun than any science classroom. All-seeing AI construct GLaDOS plays equal parts tutor and torturer within the walls of the Aperture Science headquarters in a tale that may borrow whole pages from the script of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but delivers it with a nod and a wink that has become synonymous with Valve storytelling.

What starts out as an adventure that tasks you with moving giant white cubes from one part of a room to another takes on a much more sinister tone as your handy portal gun opens up doors into the unknown. A sublime marriage of story and top-class puzzle design punctuated with pitch-black humour, Portal only left us wanting more of this world from Valve. Thankfully, they would deliver exactly that four years later.

4. Half-Life: Alyx

It’s safe to say that, despite huge leaps in headset technology, VR has been massively underserved by triple-A developers. That’s one of the reasons why Half-Life: Alyx is so notable; stepping into its newly rendered version of City 17 genuinely feels like slipping into a new reality, so detailed are its props, rooms, and streets. It’s the kind of trick only a studio like Valve could pull, pumping untold millions into an incredibly niche experience.

That budget doesn’t mean this prequel to Half-Life 2, in which you play as Alyx Vance, is as innovative as many of Valve’s other games – it’s primarily focused on adapting existing FPS ideas for VR, which it does with an unrivalled level of success. But that budget does mean that Half-Life: Alyx is by far and away the most immersive game in the series; you’ve not known fear until you’ve bumped into a headcrab zombie in virtual reality, or hidden in a storecupboard from a stalking beast, hands literally cupping your mouth to muffle your panicked breath. Combine all that with a campaign that feels perfectly structured for VR, both in terms of pacing and level design, plus a truly astonishing final act, and you’ve got what is undoubtedly the most unforgettable Half-Life game, even if it’s not the series’ lofty highpoint.

3. Half-Life

A permanent fixture on the Mt. Rushmore of first-person shooters, Valve’s 1998 debut remains one of the greatest and most significant video games of all time. While its innovations in environmentally driven storytelling are now merely chapters in a history book, and its blocky characters, relentless load screens, and awkward “long jump” erode some of its magic in the eyes of modern gamers, Half-Life’s uneasy atmosphere, incredible level design, and tense combat encounters render it immortal.

The 21st century’s best FPS campaigns have all learned from Valve’s immaculate construction, which builds each new chapter and environment around unique concepts. There’s the hide-and-seek attack on the Tentacles in 'Blast Pit', the bombardment of laser-guided rockets in 'Surface Tension', and, later, the solving of portal puzzles in 'Lambda Core'. The story undulates between frantic, bloody gunfights, terrifying horror sequences, and extended moments of exploration and discovery – a trio of flavours that are perfectly balanced. And while it all culminates in the misstep that is Xen, a mushy alien planet that fails to offer the precision engineering of the Black Mesa Research Facility’s sharp corridors, there’s no denying that Half-Life is still, in many ways, a guiding light for the genre.

2. Half-Life 2

Speaking of the 21st century’s best FPS campaigns, there’s still a very valid argument that nothing has bettered Half-Life 2 since its release over 20 years ago. Gordon Freeman’s transition from scientist to resistance fighter following an alien invasion on Earth sets the stage for some of gaming’s most memorable moments, all the way from its influential stage-setting opening to its full-blown descent into horror through the undead streets of Ravenholm. But even outside its fantastic story, Half-Life 2 impresses on every level, acting as a showcase for Valve’s Source engine by introducing next-level physics simulations that remain impressive to this day.

All roads lead to the Gravity Gun, perhaps Valve’s signature harmonic combination of innovative tech and gameplay. One of video games’ most iconic weapons, it turns set dressing into offensive and defensive tools, allowing you to catch and hurl back grenades, hold boxes high as shields, and send swirling saw blades spinning through the air to decapitate oncoming headcrab zombies. It’s a genius piece of gameplay design inside a genius piece of campaign design, and remains one of Valve’s crowning achievements.

1. Portal 2

The original Portal was a near-perfect first draft, but limited by its relatively small ambitions. Its 2011 sequel, Portal 2, smashed expectations and expanded upon every idea introduced in 2007, delivering an intricately designed, story-led puzzle adventure that is somehow even closer to perfection. Revisiting an abandoned Aperture Sciences many years after the events of the first game gives Portal 2 an instantly eerier feel, but offsets that with a level of charm and humour not often seen in games. A lot of credit for that can be given to the writing and performance behind the player’s robot guide, Wheatley. British comedian Stephen Merchant’s delivery is spot-on as a friendlier AI to counterbalance the remaining GLaDOS threat that digitally stalks the lab.

It’s a tale whose twists and turns shift in tone as much as the geography you manipulate with the series’ signature portal gun. Much like the story’s scope, the challenge each puzzle room poses is expanded greatly in the sequel, with huge spaces having to be navigated through doors of your design, and Valve once again magically turning complex physics lessons into the purest of fun. It’s now been 15 years since Portal 2, and, sadly, we’re yet to play another. Still, it remains the developer’s finest combination of innovative campaign design and compelling story to this day, and as such, is Valve’s greatest game.

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.

PlayStation fans are fearing the worst after Microsoft set the price of Call of Duty: Black Ops 1 and 2 at $40 without DLC.

As reported by CharlieIntel, PC and Xbox marketplaces were recently updated with new DLC prices, while locking in the 2010 and 2012 Call of Duty games at $39.99 each. Black Ops 1 and 2 have been available on Xbox consoles for some time thanks to extensive backward compatibility support on Microsoft's consoles, with the real changes arriving in individual DLCs that now seem to be $10 instead of $15, and season passes now priced at $30 instead of $50.

It's an update that follows news that Activision would launch ports – not remasters – for the two classic Treyarch games for PS4 and PS5 in July. However, without prices for the new releases officially announced, PlayStation fans are worried the Xbox listings suggest they'll soon need to fork over a hefty amount of cash for games that are more than a decade old.

"Not including the DLC and charging $40 on games from Obama’s first term is nasty work," one X/Twitter user reacted.

"Games this old should be 20 bucks max WITH the DLC," another popular post suggested.

Activision revealed its port plans last week, only promising it would include Campaign, Multiplayer, and Zombie modes when they launched. There's been no mention of how DLC will be handled, and the emphasis on the word "port" suggests little to no changes when it comes to the base experiences that released in the early 2010s.

Should the prices shown on the Microsoft Store carry over to the PlayStation ports, players who want both games might need to shell out $80. Add in the cost of both season passes and you're looking at a total cost of $140 for the full package. Again, without confirmation from Activision, it's hard to tell just how much any of this will cost or what will be included, but that same lack of clarification is exactly what has fans so worked up.

"Wait what the f**k that's insane lmao," one Reddit user said. "That's worth like $20-30 max with all DLCs included. For a remake/remaster with the DLCs I would've said $40, maybe $50 at the very high end."

"The numbers Mason, they're telling you not to buy..." someone else joked.

"$40 for games we already purchased (allegedly with no enhancements btw) is an absolute atrocity," someone else said.

IGN gave the original Call of Duty: Black Ops an 8.5/10 review when it launched in November 2010, and its sequel a 9.3/10 review when it launched in November 2012. They've spent the years since as two of the most celebrated and quotable titles in Call of Duty history, making next month's ports two highly anticipated titles as players wait for this year's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. For now, the ports have no firm release date outside of the promise to see them launch next month.

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).

The latest update to Square Enix’s Final Fantasy Tactics remaster adds New Game+, and fans are already debating whether Ramza’s story really needs the mode and what fresh possibilities this could open up for the beloved turn-based strategy game.

Update 1.5.0 dropped on June 17 and adds a bunch of UI improvements and adjustments to Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles. However, the big draw of this update is New Game+, something the original game never had back in 1998. This allows players to carry over their units and inventory from a completed game save into a new game, and continue to grind these units up to Level 100.

Other improvements in the update include letting you see a unit’s status effects at a glance, and another option lets you instantly remove all gear from a unit (which is, incidentally, a valuable tactic for drawing enemy fire to one character during battle). The new Zodiac Compatibility function on the status screen lets you see how well or badly each unit works together with each other. This sheds light on one of Final Fantasy Tactics' more mysterious elements: exactly how the star signs of your party members affect aspects like accuracy, the amount of damage dealt and health recovered.

Regarding New Game+, some fans are hyped that the additional mode will enable players to snag multiples of the missable Genji equipment. These pieces of top-tier gear can only be obtained by stealing them from Marquis Ondore during the battle on the roof of Linberry Castle Keep in Chapter 4. It also gives you a chance to pick up any of the optional party members you may have missed out on during your first playthrough.

However, the New Game+ doesn’t include any new difficulty levels or level scaling, dampening the challenge for seasoned players. There is also some continuing disappointment that the Final Fantasy Tactics remaster did not include content from The War of Lions version of the game, which was released on PSP in 2007. This has prompted fans to call on Square Enix to add in aspects from The War of the Lions. These include calls for the restoration of Lions-only content such as FF12’s Balthier as a playable character (a powerful reminder that Tactics and FF12 share the same setting), additional job classes like Onion Knight, and extra story scenes.

Yasumi Matsuno, the director of the original Final Fantasy Tactics, recently explained on X that “New Game+ was a feature I had been requesting since the very beginning of the remaster project. With so many guest characters in the game, I felt that they did not have enough opportunities to shine during a single playthrough. However, due to budget and development resource constraints at the time, the feature was ultimately postponed.” He went on to explain that thanks to the remaster’s commercial success, the developers were able to work on new updates for the strategy game.

Elsewhere, others have questioned if Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles really needs a New Game+ in its current form, as it does not have multiple endings nor challenging secret bosses. Others hope that Matsuno’s comment signals that devs will continue working on the title, perhaps adding on some more optional endgame content like a brand new dungeon.

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.

Final Fantasy 14 players in Japan now have the opportunity to get in-game cosmetics and items by paying their real life taxes, as reported by Famitsu. These rewards include the online MMORPG’s Megashiba Mount.

Japan has a Hometown tax initiative (Furusato Nozei), which allows people to redirect portions of their residence tax to other areas of the country, even if they don’t live there. In return, you can choose a special gift from the region (everything from local snacks and traditional handcrafted items, to hotel stays and local cultural experiences). The scheme launched back in 2008 with the aim of directing tax funds back to rural, less-populated areas, but now almost every municipality in the country offers some kind of reward via the scheme. It’s a win-win as local governments receive more funds, while taxpayers receive presents in exchange for tax money they would have had to fork out anyway.

In recent years, some areas have started offering digital rewards. For example, last year Shibuya ward offered in-game currency in the popular mobile games Monster Strike and Kotodaman (as reported by Automaton).

Now, Shibuya ward and Square Enix have teamed up to offer rewards for the online MMORPG Final Fantasy 14. As the special site shows, players in Japan can choose between six different sets of in-game items and cosmetics to purchase with their residence tax. Namely, three costume sets priced at 7,000 yen (approx. $43) each: the Majitek Attire, Collegiate Attire (Skirt), and Collegiate Attire (Slacks) sets), four dance emotes for 11,000 yen (approx. $68), a set of five Phials of Fantasia for 17,000 yen (approx. $105), and the Megashiba Mount for 9,000 yen (approx. $56).

Final Fantasy 14 players outside Japan needn’t feel too left out though, as these items can be purchased from the Final Fantasy 14 online store.

Some of the Final Fantasy 14 rewards on offer sync up nicely with this area of Tokyo. The Megashiba mount is a giant, rideable dog. Shibuya is famous for Hachiko, a dog who loyally waited for his owner outside of Shibuya Station, even after his master passed away. There is a statue dedicated to the patient pup outside the station, and the true story has inspired a couple of movie adaptations, including Hachi: A Dog’s Tale, starring Richard Gere.

Although Hachiko was a different Japanese dog breed (an Akita rather than a Shiba Inu), it seems likely that Shibuya Ward and Square Enix decided to include the Megashiba Mount in the Hometown tax scheme as a reference to Shibuya’s famous dog. The Collegiate Attire Costumes also mesh well with Shibuya, as with its fashion stores, live music venues, cafes and night clubs it’s known as an area for youth culture.

Image credit: Square Enix.

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.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 1 and 2 are being brought to new platforms in July, courtesy of Iron Galaxy.

Treyarch confirmed today that its beloved Call of Duty games are making a grand return via new ports, courtesy of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 developer Iron Galaxy. These ports will only be available on PlayStation, though it's unclear which PlayStation platforms. The initial leak for these ports indicated they'd likely be available on PS4 and, as a result, would also be available to play on PS5 through backwards compatibility. It's currently unclear if PS5 will get native ports.

Treyarch also confirmed that the ports will include campaign, multiplayer, and Zombies, so players will get to experience the full packages. It's not known if players will be able to carry over their progress, if cross-play will be enabled with other versions, or if these ports will simply live in isolation.

While Treyarch made no mention of any upgrades coming to Xbox or PC, keep in mind both of these games are readily available on those platforms already. Both Black Ops games have been available on Xbox for years thanks to the platform's far more extensive backwards compatibility environment, but there's no native support for PS3 titles on PS4 or PS5. Either way, it's exciting news and somewhat unexpected since Call of Duty has largely steered clear of re-releases over the years.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was remastered in 2016 and was a huge hit, but it also took focus away from Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. A remaster of Modern Warfare 2's campaign followed in 2020, but fans were upset that the game's iconic multiplayer mode was left on the cutting room floor.

Fans have speculated that Activision has avoided such projects since, as it can split the player base of newer Call of Duty games.

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.

GTA Online is getting its next big update in just a few weeks.

The new update, known as The Kortz Center Heist, will let players ransack Los Santos' most prestigious art gallery. The building has been in GTA 5 since launch, but has largely been unused for any significant content outside of a standoff between various law enforcement agencies in the story mode. It's never had an accessible interior, and there's not much reason to go visit it, but that will all change in July.

If it's anything like other GTA Online updates, this will likely be quite expansive and feature new vehicles, weapons, clothing, and potentially, gameplay mechanics. Previous heists are also highly replayable thanks to different approaches, which allow you to take on these high-risk jobs in a wide variety of ways. Details are still scarce on what exactly the update will feature beyond this heist, but Rockstar will likely give fans a rundown a few days before it launches.

Fans may also want to start preparing, as you'll need a fair bit of money and assets to partake in this heist. Players will need to own one of the mansions that were added in the last major GTA Online update, as the mansion's art studio will be renovated into a heist planning room. If you don't have a mansion yet or you're broke, Rockstar will be offering ways to earn bonus GTA$ in the coming weeks. Additionally, GTA+ members will be able to get a $2 million discount on the mansions very soon.

Finally, if you're still playing the Xbox One or PS4 versions of GTA Online, Rockstar is giving you a free upgrade to the current-gen versions of the game. All in all, it seems like a perfect time to jump back into GTA Online if you've played it before, especially as anticipation builds for GTA 6's release this November.

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 own a digital copy of Grand Theft Auto V on Xbox One or any kind of copy on PS4, you'll be entitled to a free upgrade to the current-gen versions of the game starting tomorrow, June 18.

Rockstar Games announced the upgrades while detailing GTA Online's next big update, which arrives in July. Rockstar specified that these upgrades will apply to the digital version on Xbox One and to any copy on PS4, which seems to include physical copies as well. Presumably, this will only apply within platform families (PS4 to PS5, for example). As has been the case for years, you'll also be able to migrate all of your progress over, ensuring everything you've earned transfers with you.

Currently, GTA 5 costs $39.99 on current-gen platforms, so this is a steal. If you haven't been interested in double (or triple!) dipping on GTA 5, Rockstar is making things easy on you. The current-gen versions of GTA 5 have been available since March 2022, and while it isn't a wildly dramatic leap from last-gen, it does provide a much smoother experience thanks to things like 60 FPS.

Although this is partly to get people interested in the upcoming update, which will revolve around yet another heist, there is another big reason: GTA 6 is finally coming out this November, which means sales for the juggernaut title will likely begin to soften a bit over the next few months as fans prepare for what's next. It makes sense to give GTA 5 one last big push before it is inevitably sent out with a bang.

As of right now, Rockstar has yet to release any details about GTA 6's online mode, so it's hard to say if any of your progress will carry over. Given that people have spent 13 years building a life in GTA Online, some fans are hoping they'll get to bring some goodies with them to Vice City, but it wouldn't be surprising if everyone got a fresh start when the mode drops.

Fans are currently waiting with bated breath for the next look at GTA 6, which is expected to arrive this summer. It wouldn't be surprising if Rockstar waits until after the release of this new update in July, so it doesn't distract anyone from the new content it's trying to push to fans.

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.

Dan Houser doesn’t care that much if you get all the way to the story credits on his games, as long as you’re having fun in the worlds he’s created. “If someone enjoyed a game, that's great,” the Rockstar co-founder and Grand Theft Auto/Red Dead Redemption writer said at a panel at the Tribeca Festival in New York City on Saturday. “If you can’t finish a story, but you loved it in other ways: Great, I don't care. I mean, I would like it if you finish the story because I spent ages on it.
If you enjoyed it, that's enough for you.”

Houser’s longtime creative partner Lazlow — who founded the multimedia studio Absurd Ventures with Houser after leaving Rockstar in 2020 — also sat on the panel, adding: “We also love burying very deep Easter eggs and games. Sometimes they take one or two years or longer for players to discover. I mean, we love burying stuff so deep that sometimes three or four years goes by, I'm like, ‘Maybe this makes it too hard to find.’ And somebody finds it and then it blows up on Reddit, and we're like, ‘Yay.’” Just earlier this year, Red Dead Redemption 2 players discovered a spiderweb mystery that had gone unnoticed for seven years since the game’s release.

“The whole point of an open world game is we provide guides,” Houser said. “We want you to experience the story. Our goal was always — from GTA 3 onwards — to try and get more and more people to finish the story. And the numbers went up and up; they used to be pretty level.
But ultimately, that's up to the player. The players enjoy being in the world, mucking around, doing whatever they want to do, messing with the systems. The most fun thing about the game isn't any rubbish we write, it's the systems that we make.

“[What’s] always gonna be the most fun is being in this world, seeing what happens when you jump off this building, when you punch that person, you drive that car, when you interact with this thing, or that thing, whatever way,” Houser continued. “That's always gonna have a sort of magical quality to it, and we are on some level on the story side, just the icing on the cake.
We can't be precious about what they do. We can encourage them to play it the way we want them to play it. But we have to give them agency.”

Lazlow also spoke to the difficulty of creating fleshed-out satirical worlds that, when they’re crafting them, seem patently deranged until reality catches up to their fiction. (It's something that The Boys also recently dealt with in its fifth season).

“We would set out with a massive list in every game of all the media that we wanted, be it a phone that you can disappear into, just like you do in the real world,” Lazlow said. “I mean, we're basically like an in-house ad agency because there would be a billboard for a brand, you'd hear a radio commercial from the same brand. You can see a TV commercial for the same brand, and then you get a pop-up on your phone for it, but it's all got to be this hyper-ridiculous satire that also speaks to the tone of that place and the vision that [Houser] has for how he wants you to experience that world.”

Lazlow specifically recalled creating GTA 5’s Jock Cranley: “The thing that became difficult as the projects took longer, is making ridiculous characters, brands, products, situations so that the world doesn't catch up with you. I remember we had a politician that we came up with in GTA that was an ex-stuntman who was running for governor, and a Hollywood guy, and he came out with this campaign ad saying that he hates the elderly, he hates crippled people, he hates the military. We're like, ‘Ha ha ha ha, this kind of crazy shit will never happen in real life.’”

Since its founding, Absurd Ventures has released the comic series American Caper via Dark Horse Comics, and the novel A Better Paradise along with an audiobook adaptation. An animated series of shorts, Absurdaverse, first premiered at the Netflix Is a Joke comedy festival, and an unnamed AAA open-world sci-fi action-adventure game set in the A Better Paradise universe is in development with South Korea’s Smilegate as publisher.

Ubisoft has published a new Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced deep dive, promising loads of new content that wasn't present in the original release.

The publisher put a spyglass up to how the remake expands on the 2013 pirate game with a blog post on its website today. It's a lengthy message that teases new Blackbeard missions, reworked assassination and tailing missions, tweaked level design, a skip time feature, and more as Ubisoft does its best to justify a revisit for one of its franchise's most beloved entries.

Remakes sometimes boil down to offer little more than updated visuals and minor gameplay tweaks, but that doesn't seem to be the case for Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced. The post begins with the tease that a new endgame chapter, titled "A World Without Gold," has been added, bringing eight new Blackbeard missions. Although Ubisoft revealed little about the quest, it also promised a new Sequence 8 treasure quest focused on Blackbeard, as well as a Sequence 9 quest that will "honor the legacy" of Stede Bonnet.

"Coming back to the Caribbean gave us some opportunities to address some hanging threads from the original game," game director Richard Knight said. "In the years since, players have been wondering what happened to Blackbeard and Stede, and we’ve seen Stede featured in a number of very cool movies and shows, so people know even more about his interesting life. We wanted to give both characters a proper send-off and to tie a bow on this Bonnet."

While additional Animus Rifts and Officer side missions will freshen up Edward Kenway's story, returning players will notice that the beaches and jungles of the Caribbean Sea have been reshaped over time. Creative director Paul Fu said that quests in Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced have been "built from scratch," adding that directors jotted down notes while playing through the original in hopes of addressing "confusing" elements. He continued: "The result was a lot of changes – sometimes small and sometimes large – to the level and mission design."

New parkour paths, scripted events, collectibles, and layouts will be clear from Edward's first mission on, as the Ubisoft team attempted to create a more intuitive and coherent experience without compromising the original's vision. That's why you'll see the endlessly useful Rope Dart tool make a comeback with an earlier debut in Sequence 3 instead it being unlocked in Sequence 11 like in the original game.

"Many Assassination missions have also been expanded with optional objectives and secrets," says Paul. "We wanted to expand on the lore of the assassination targets without violating the original narrative. For example, in one particular mid-game assassination, you can find a target’s room (with a hidden reward) by eavesdropping on some soldiers."

One often-criticized element from the 2013 game was its easy-to-fail tailing missions. While getting caught in the original would cause instant desynchronization, players who pick up Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced will have more freedom to gain the information they seek. It's a tweak that makes playing as Edward a bit more open-ended than before, while the new skip time feature gives players the freedom to mold the setting to their desires before heading into a mission.

Other highlights from Ubisoft's post include increased rewards for Playas, additional local events in the game's world, and new upgrades for Edward's Hideout. There will also be three difficulty options for players to choose from: Forgiving, Intended, and Hard.

Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced launches for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X | S July 9, 2026. For more, you can read about why we think Edward Kenway is the franchise's best assassin. You can also see our seven reasons why we're looking forward to the remake – and three reasons why we're worried about it.

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).

Beginning its life as a Shin Megami Tensei spin-off, the Persona series has quickly launched into something entirely of its own and become one of the biggest names in modern RPGs. From multiple major sequels and remakes to anime adaptations and even stage plays, Persona is a multimedia sensation, and its popularity doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon.

With the official announcement of both Persona 4 Revival and Persona 6, new players are probably wondering where’s the best place to start. Below, we’ll give you a full rundown of every game and spin-off, including the best entry point for newcomers and both the chronological and release order of the series.

Jump to:

• How to play in order
• How to play by release date
• Upcoming releases

How Many Persona Games Are There?

In total, there are currently 21 Persona games. Several of these are expanded versions of the mainline entries in the series, whether that’s in the form of re-releases featuring new story content or remakes. While we won’t include direct ports or remasters, we’ll make sure to note every alternate version of each game when listing them below.

Which Persona Game Should You Play First?

If you're looking for the perfect place to start, you can’t really go wrong jumping into Persona 3 Reload, Persona 4 Golden, or Persona 5 Royal. They’re the latest versions of the third, fourth and fifth mainline entries in the series, and, aside from Persona 3 Reload missing Nintendo Switch, they’re all available on PC and every major console.

For those concerned about skipping the story by jumping into later entries in the series, you won’t miss anything by going straight to Persona 3, 4, or 5. Each game tells an entirely new story with original characters that’s largely disconnected from its predecessors, so they’re great launching points for those coming in fresh. To narrow your choices down, I'd recommend taking a look at some gameplay videos and some of the social links across each of the games to see what "stands out" to you.

Every Persona Game and Spin-Off in Chronological Order

These blurbs contain mild spoilers for each game, including characters, settings, and story beats.

1. Revelations: Persona (1996)

The first game in the series, Revelations: Persona was Atlus’ reaction to the positive reception of Shin Megami Tensei: If…, which was another Shin Megami Tensei spin-off centered around high-schoolers battling demons. Capitalizing on how much players enjoyed the central concept, Revelations: Persona offered a full dungeon-crawling RPG centered around a group of high schoolers battling a supernatural uprising throughout the town of Mikage-cho.

Along the way, they use the powers of their awakened Personas to take down shadows and explore dungeons filled with random encounters, leveling up their party and growing stronger over the course of the game. Revelations: Persona was the foundation of the franchise as we know it today, introducing elements like wielding Personas in combat, the Velvet Room and a teenage cast of heroes.

2. Persona 2: Innocent Sin (1999)

The second entry in the Persona series, Persona 2: Innocent Sin launched in 1999. The game follows a new set of high-school students led by protagonist Tatsuya Suou, who set out on a mission to take down a mysterious villain known as Joker and the cult of the Masked Circle.

Centring around an evil plot where malicious rumors spreading around the town of Sumaru come to life, Persona 2 once again focuses on exploring dungeons, wielding Personas, fighting shadows and leveling up your party. Unlike other entries in the series, it received a direct sequel just a year later, with Persona 2: Eternal Punishment acting as a continuation of the game's story.

Read our review of Persona 2: Innocent Sin.

3. Persona 2: Eternal Punishment (2000)

Following up the events of Innocent Sin, Eternal Punishment promoted side character, Maya Amano, to the protagonist role. Sent to write an article about a new rumor regarding a phenomenon known as the Joker Curse, the game quickly sees Maya and her allies rally against a returning foe.

Acting as a direct continuation of Innocent Sin's story, it centers on the same style of turn-based, dungeon-crawling gameplay, as players build their party and wield their Personas to battle shadows.

Read our review of Persona 2: Eternal Punishment.

4. Persona 3 (2006) / Persona 3 FES (2007) / Persona 3 Portable (2009) / Persona 3 Reload (2024)

The third mainline entry in the franchise, Persona 3 was a major evolution of the Persona formula. Opting to focus on its high-school premise, Persona 3 introduced a daily calendar, with one half of the game tasking players with attending school, developing friendships and studying, while the other sent them to fight shadows in the supernatural realm of Tartarus.

The story focuses on high school student Makoto Yuki, who finds he's able to experience a mysterious space of time known as the Dark Hour, where regular people are trapped in coffins and a demonic tower sprouts from his school. Teaming with his classmates, he explores the tower, uncovering a sinister plot that threatens the entire world. Persona 3 is considered a landmark entry for the series, introducing social links, day-to-day activities and many other mechanics that have since become synonymous with the franchise.

Read our review of Persona 3 Reload.

5. Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight (2018)

A rhythm-based dancing spin-off of Persona 3 that takes place during the main campaign, Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight sees Elizabeth challenge the S.E.E.S team to a dance-off in the Velvet Room. The events of the game are set during a dream but are completely canon to the story, and follow the team performing various dance routines to iconic Persona 3 tracks.

6. Persona 4 (2008) / Persona 4 Golden (2012)

The fourth mainline entry in the Persona series, Persona 4 takes place in the rural town of Inaba. Players assume the role of Yu Narukami: a high schooler from the city who moves to the country to live with his uncle and cousin for a year. After arriving, a string of violent murders begin to take place in the town, as Yu and his friends quickly discover they’re somehow linked to a mysterious otherworldly realm they can access by stepping through TV monitors.

Delving into this mysterious new world, Yu and his friends face supernatural forces as they learn more about the murders, using their powers to try and stop them. Building off the mechanics of Persona 3, Persona 4 once again utilizes the calendar system, as players build social links and attend school while also exploring vast dungeons and defeating enemies with their Personas.

Read our review of Persona 4 Golden.

7. Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth (2014)

Technically taking place during the Persona 3 and Persona 4 storylines simultaneously, Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth is a crossover between both games. During the typhoon segment of Persona 3 and the Culture Festival segment of Persona 4, the S.E.E.S team and the Investigation Squad are trapped inside a warped version of Yasogami High School.

The time-bending event sees both teams come together to investigate the strange occurrence and escape back to their respective spots on the timeline. Along the way, players explore a labyrinth filled with new enemies and uncover an original story, with the spin-off acting as a callback to the series’ more traditional dungeon-crawler roots.

Read our review of Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth.

8. Persona 4 Arena (2012)

A continuation of both Persona 3 and 4’s narratives and the franchise’s first major spin-off, Persona 4 Arena sees Yu Narukami return to Inaba and stumble into a new adventure, as he returns to the TV world for a mysterious fighting tournament. Forced to battle against his allies and a group known as the Shadow Operatives, which is comprised of Persona 3's Mitsuru, Akihiko and Aigis, Arena offers a full fighting game boasting a roster of iconic Persona characters.

Read our review of Persona 4 Arena.

9. Persona 4 Arena Ultimax (2013)

A year following the release of Persona 4 Arena, the spin-off received a sequel titled Persona 4 Arena Ultimax. Taking place directly after the events of the first game, the Persona 4 squad teams up with the Shadow Operatives to return to the TV World and battle against the mysterious forces running the fighting tournament. Ultimax was ultimately an upgrade for the first game, bringing in an expanded roster including returning characters like Yukari, Junpei, Ken and Koromaru.

Read our review of Persona 4 Arena Ultimax.

10. Persona 4: Dancing All Night (2015)

The fourth and arguably most unexpected spin-off of Persona 4, Persona 4: Dancing All Night is a rhythm-based dancing game where the Investigation Squad performs routines to iconic Persona tracks. It offers a completely canon continuation of the storyline, following Yu and the team as they’re sucked into an alternate dimension known as the Midnight Stage.

Read our review of Persona 4: Dancing All Night.

11. Persona 5 (2016) / Persona 5 Royal (2019)

The fifth mainline entry in the series, Persona 5 hit shelves in Japan in 2016 before launching worldwide in 2017. Taking players to Tokyo, it casts them as a new protagonist known as Joker, who finds himself on probation after being framed for a crime he didn’t commit. Attending the local high school, Joker and his friends discover a supernatural alternate dimension, which allows them to infiltrate mystical palaces and change the hearts of evil-doers around the city.

Before long, the group becomes notorious on the streets of Tokyo, going under the alias of the Phantom Thieves. The game builds heavily off the formula established by Persona 3 and 4, including massive story-focused levels that unfold over a month, the return of the negotiation system and a new dungeon system known as Mementos. Persona 5 launched the franchise into the stratosphere, quickly becoming Atlus' best-selling game of all time and cultivating a huge fan base.

Read our review of Persona 5 Royal.

12. Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth (2018)

A sequel to Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, New Cinema Labyrinth once again depicts a crossover between various Persona characters. After the Phantom Thieves find themselves trapped in a movie theater, they ally with Persona 3's S.E.E.S team and Persona 4's Investigation Squad to find an escape, traveling into the movies on the screen in an attempt to fix their endings.

Much like the original game, Persona Q2 simultaneously takes place during the Persona 3, 4 and 5 storylines, with the adventure pulling each group out of their respective timeline. There, they explore dungeons from a first-person perspective and fight turn-based battles against various enemies.

13. Persona 5 Tactica (2023)

Taking place during the events of Persona 5, Persona 5 Tactica is a strategy-focused spin-off that’s similar in style to the XCOM franchise. The story follows the Phantom Thieves mysteriously traveling to an alternate realm known as the Kingdoms. Unable to escape, Joker and Morgana are forced to abandon the rest of the Phantom Thieves after they're brainwashed by the realm's monstrous ruler, Tyrant Marie, forcing the pair to begin an adventure to save their allies and return home.

Along the way, they team up with the local resistance, helping them fight against Tyrant Marie's forces. The game revolves around a tactical grid-based combat system, as players direct three units across the battlefield and take out enemies.

Read our review of Persona 5 Tactica.

14. Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight (2018)

Atlus’ third rhythm-based dancing spin-off, Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight sees Caroline and Justine bring the Phantom Thieves to the Velvet Room and challenge them to a dance off. There, the group perform dance routines to several of Persona 5's catchiest tracks.

15. Persona 5 Strikers (2020)

A spin-off set four months after the events of Persona 5, Strikers sees the Phantom Thieves reunite for a summer vacation. However, the team find themselves sucked into the Metaverse after using an app known as EMMA. Escaping with the help of a new ally, the team don their Phantom Thieves gear once more and set out to discover the truth behind EMMA, the Metaverse, and what it means for the people of Tokyo.

Persona 5 Strikers is a crossover with the long-running Dynasty Warriors franchise, introducing real-time combat to the series. Battles center around the Phantom Thieves taking on large hordes of enemies, which they can deal with through combos or by calling on Personas.

Read our review of Persona 5 Strikers.

16. Persona 5: The Phantom X (2025)

The most recent Persona release is yet another spin-off of Persona 5. This one's a bit funky. Developed by Black Wings Game Studio, Persona 5: The Phantom X is a free-to-play game with microtransactions (otherwise known as a gacha gama) that takes place in 'alternate timeline' to Persona 5 itself. You take on the role of Wonder, a high school student who, of course, awakens his Persona and gains access to the Metaverse.

Read our review of Persona 5: The Phantom X.

What's Next for Persona?

After the massive success of Metaphor: ReFantazio (it picked up quite a few awards), Sega announced their desire to keep investing in Atlus, and the Persona IP in particular, in a developers' Q&A session.

Persona 4 Revival was announced at a the 2025 Xbox Showcase, a new remake of the game that originally released on PS2 in 2008 before being remastered as Persona 4 Golden in 2012. The remake is scheduled for release on February 18, 2027, and will be available Day One on Xbox Game Pass.

Now we're in 2026, and... we finally have confirmation that Persona 6 is real. A short teaser gives us a glimpse at least at some cool aesthetics in classic Atlus style, and there's no word on a release date. But it's real! Here's a breakdown of everything we know so far.

In the meantime, the Phantom Thieves from P5R continue to pop up in pretty much every franchising opportunity they can, most recently as skins in Overwatch 2.

Callum Williams is a freelance media writer with years of experience as a game critic, news reporter, guides writer and features writer.

Swords are awesome. Whether you're a Final Fantasy 7 fan or not, there's no denying the draw of a massive buster sword. It's like an oversized meat cleaver that looks incredibly inconvenient to use, but absolutely awesome to display on your wall. It's one of those things you didn't know you needed until an Amazon discount suddenly thrusts its way into view.

Which is exactly what's happening right now with this Cloud Strife replica sword. It's made out of stainless steel and is currently discounted to its lowest price in months. We posted this on the IGN Finds X account yesterday and it was easily one of the most popular items of the day at this price.

Obsession breakout star, Inde Navarrette, is going viral for her gaming livestreams, including Sony hit The Last of Us.

Last month, a brand new horror movie known as Obsession was released, and it has been one of Hollywood's biggest success stories. The film was made for just $750,000 before being picked up by Focus Features for distribution. It has since gone on to make over $200 million at the box office, making it one of the most profitable movies ever made. The film also catapulted the careers of first-time director Curry Barker and star Inde Navarrette. The actress plays a young woman who becomes erratic after her friend wishes for her to fall in love with him.

Navarrette charmed audiences with her wicked performance, but has also been building an audience outside of film. Fans quickly discovered that the actress once streamed games on Twitch, such as Call of Duty, as well as single-player games like The Last of Us and Outlast, although it seems all videos have been pulled from the channel. A YouTube channel under her name also popped up earlier this month, uploading her past streams. It's unclear if the channel is actually owned by her or if someone else is just capitalizing on her old content, but nevertheless, you can still check out some of her old streams on the channel.

Her partial playthrough of The Last of Us has racked up over 650,000 views in just three days, leading to a quippy response from PlayStation itself. "We're obsessed," said PlayStation UK's X account.

In a recent interview with GQ, Navarrette talked about how she grew up with video games and eventually started streaming during her downtime.

"It’s just something that I really love to do," she said. "One of my first games growing up that we would play, me and my older brother Amani, it’s the only thing we had to do at my Dad’s house. We started on the PS2, and we would play Shrek games in Big Head mode with my mom. And then I would branch off by myself to play campaign games. Me and Amani would play Call of Duty. He was really into Halo. Then we got into Red Dead and like, Fallout, like all of these games.

"I just would play or watch my older brother. And then I built my own PC during COVID and that was really fun to start to get into PC games. It really just took off with me loving watching YouTubers growing up, like Markiplier. So for me, it was like, oh, why not? If I'm not working on a show and I love playing video games by myself and I love playing with friends, then why not stream? It became a lot of fun."

It doesn't seem like Navarrette is active on Twitch these days, which isn't much of a surprise given that she is likely quite busy after the success of Obsession. The actress had previously played supporting roles in shows like 13 Reasons Why and Superman & Lois, but Obsession will likely take her to an all-new level. Whether she will have time to stream again remains to be seen, but at least there's a surplus of older content for fans to dig into.

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.

Earlier in 2026, Sony shut down Bluepoint Games, the studio behind the fantastic Demon’s Souls and Shadow of the Colossus remakes. In an interview with IGN, Fumito Ueda, the original creator of Shadow of the Colossus, expressed his sadness at Bluepoint's demise, saying he'd hoped to work with the developer at least once more.

Ueda had collaborated with Bluepoint a number of times, including on 2011's The Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection and the aforementioned 2018 Shadow of the Colossus remake. “So obviously, we had no heads-up,” Ueda said of Bluepoint's closure. “We're not directly in relation with any project, so I heard about it at the same time you guys probably did in the news, and it was disappointing and sad to hear. I would have hoped that maybe in the future there could be a chance to work with them on something. So yeah, it's very sad to hear the news.”

Ueda is already hard at work on his upcoming project, gen ATLAS, a sci-fi adventure starring giant robots in a move away from the fantasy settings the legendary developer is known for. But it’s intriguing to think about what other project he could have worked with Bluepoint on. So, naturally, I asked exactly that.

“That would be hard to answer,” Ueda explained. “I mean, maybe I guess, as we know how Bluepoint operated, is that they work on really good remakes, right? So it would be maybe something [like that]. But yeah, it's just sad that they're no longer around.”

“Maybe Ico?” I asked. “Maybe Ico,” he replied with a smile.

The remake of Shadow of the Colossus was as good a modern interpretation of that masterpiece as we could ever have dreamed of getting back in 2018, so thinking about what could have been done with Ico is a tantalising prospect indeed. Sadly, this will obviously never happen, certainly not under Bluepoint, which, as I wrote earlier this year, is yet another example of a PlayStation acquisition horror story.

Before its shutdown, Bluepoint spent several years developing an unannounced live-service God of War title. After Sony canceled that project in early 2025, the studio spent their final months pitching various new concepts, including a Ghost of Tsushima spinoff, a Bloodborne remaster, and a renewed Shadow of the Colossus remake. There was no word on Ico, however.

Still, we have new Fumito Ueda games to look forward to, as gen ATLAS received its full reveal at this year’s Summer Game Fest. The debut game from The Last Guardian director’s new studio, genDESIGN, will be the first time one of his releases has not been a PlayStation exclusive, after entering a publishing deal with Epic.

Stay tuned for more from my interview with Fumito Ueda, as we reveal everything we learned about gen ATLAS, including its themes, gameplay, and much more.

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.

For decades, Sony first party studio Naughty Dog absolutely dominated the conversation when it came to triple-A console gaming. The studio’s talent for creating expressive, endearing, beloved characters and putting them in deadly jungles (there's almost always a deadly jungle), gorgeously rendered at the absolute technical limits of whatever the hardware of the day could manage, has long been the envy of game developers everywhere. It's fair to say that the studio's output has been instrumental in the establishment and ongoing success of Playstation as a platform synonymous with the big budget single-player action-adventure.

So where the hell was it last week? At this most crucial of Not E3s, very possibly the penultimate one before the hype cycle starts in earnest for the next generation of consoles, we haven’t heard a peep out of it, or seen any proof of life of its upcoming new IP, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. And so it seems increasingly and frankly alarmingly likely that one of Sony’s biggest draws is going to end up sitting out current gen entirely, bar the concessional remakes and remasters that came out back when PS5 was essentially just a Fabergé PS4.

This has, I think, contributed massively to the perception that the PS5 has no games. Which patently isn’t true: aside from the fact that gaming generally is enjoying one of its most bountiful release calendars since the gluttonous days of the Xbox 360 era, Sony’s other first party studios have massively stepped up to fill the big Uncharted-shaped hole in PS5’s lineup. Insomniac alone will have delivered Miles Morales, Spider-Man 2, Ratchet and Clank: A Rift Apart and Wolverine before we even know what PS6 looks like. We’ll have had two mainline God of Wars from Santa Monica Studio, Team Asobi has deftly established Astro Bot in the pantheon of great console mascots: there’s so much great work being done. I could go on listing things, but after a long time where it felt as though the PS5 was spinning its wheels, even the most hardened cynic can’t deny that the 10th gen has now, finally, picked up some momentum. Well, they can, but not with any credibility.

But there’s no denying the fact that this is an era of many blunders, whichever platform or publisher you look at, and one of the most significant of these is the industry’s pervasive obsession with Games as a Service. A mad, decade-long scramble where everyone and their dog wanted to make the next Destiny, or seemed obligated to even if they didn’t. Even Naughty Dog, a studio so keenly devoted to its signature craft of cinematic action adventures, got caught up in this folly.

Sony wanted its own Destiny so bad it even bought the Destiny studio. For a ludicrous amount of money. And it's not making Destiny any more, which, I dunno, I’m not a “business guy” but… not having Destiny is an outcome every other publisher arrived at without spending three-billion dollars.

Over the years, but particularly from the start of this decade, Sony has doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on live service, culminating in a huge, slate-wide pivot following the COVID boom where the firm infamously reinvested billions of that macabre windfall into projects that have, just as infamously, fizzled out or flopped so dramatically they’ve become instant memes for publisher hubris.

And this trend is part of the reason why Naughty Dog just doesn’t seem to have done anything for the last five years or so. The Last of Us Online, something that had been in the works for around seven years when it suffered a surprise cancellation in 2023, soaked up so many of Naughty Dog’s resources that it gummed up their development pipelines.

In fairness, The Last of Us Online isn’t the silliest idea by half. Though multiplayer isn’t the first thing anyone associates Naughty Dog with, it’s something the studio has done well at in the past: the old Uncharted games and the original The Last of Us all had popular online modes that were generally well liked by anyone who tried them out.

The Last of Us Online would have effectively been TLOU 2’s multiplayer, spun-off and expanded into a full, standalone release. It was revealed in 2019 that the project’s ambition and scope had far exceeded that which could be reasonably expected of a bundled deathmatch mode. Reading between the lines, this rather suggests that feature creep may have been a factor in its long development cycle.

But that doesn’t mean it was doomed to fail. Who knows what might have been? The stratospheric rise of TLOU as a hot property following two blockbuster games and an acclaimed HBO show would, surely, have given it a curiosity advantage had it ever come out. And, if it had the juice, people would have stuck around: we might well be having a much different conversation about Naughty Dog right now had it persevered with it. I would be sitting here complaining about how TLOU Online’s success ruined Naughty Dog, because, while I can appreciate the appeal of a good online game from an academic perspective, I personally feel that the least desirable feature in any video game is the presence of other people.

And that’s not baseless conjecture on my part: when the decision came to axe The Last of Us Online in 2023, the reasons cited were concerns that the studio simply didn’t have the resources to spend on launching and maintaining a live service game while also continuing to make the single-player action adventure tentpoles it is known for. That the people there, presumably, wanted to continue making more than anything else.

So, that’s a massive, well-documented part of the story here: Naughty Dog lost the best part of a decade on an all-consuming multiplayer project that never came out. Given how much the bottom has fallen out of the whole live service ecosystem in the years since, cancelling it is, at least, the second most prudent move they could have made after simply not pursuing the idea in the first place.

The other factor here is that, over the years, Naughty Dog’s top brass have been whittled down, constituting a huge brain drain. In 2023, former Head of Technology Christian Gyrling left for Meta: he oversaw the firm’s technology pipelines, the ones that made it such a powerhouse for showing off the capabilities of Sony’s hardware. Evan Wells retired at around the same time: he’d been co-president of the firm through its most successful eras and before that, one of its top game designers. Bruce Straley, co-director of Uncharted 2, 4, and The Last of Us, who would almost certainly be Neil Druckmann’s right-hand man on Intergalactic had he not left to start his own studio in 2017.

And, it would be remiss to talk about Naughty Dog shedding talent without mentioning Amy Hennig, creative director of the original Uncharted trilogy, who left under reportedly tense circumstances back in 2014, later citing burnout among other factors. But she was crucial to establishing the Naughty Dog house style that I would argue carried them right through to The Last of Us Part 2.

This leaves Neil Druckmann, the firm’s most senior creative, as top guy at Naughty Dog, and given how much of his time was being spent over at HBO until recently, I think it’s fair to question whether he’s been a bit of a bottleneck for decision making: this happens all the time at creative firms. It’s well known, for example, that his counterpart over at Bethesda Studios, Todd Howard, signs everything off personally like a Vault Overseer, which probably contributes a lot to the painfully long development cycles they are associated with.

There are no easy answers as to why big companies make the decisions they do: no one single factor can account for Naughty Dog’s absence at this year’s Advertisement Bonanza. I mean, Intergalactic might get Beyonce Dropped at the next State of Play and make me look like a proper turnip. Stranger things have happened.

It’s a great shame that a confluence of factors has conspired to bench Naughty Dog at a time where it should be thriving and dominating. To think we might never get to see what that studio running on all cylinders could accomplish with a project built for the PS5 and PS5 Pro is yet another unforgivable sin of this industry’s obsession with squandering its most talented teams on things they are not best positioned to make. From Naughty Dog to BioWare, from Bethesda to Bluepoint, it’s seemingly never enough to be great, brilliant, or even completely unassailable at just one kind of thing.

I’ve said this many times now but it’s a hill I’ll die on: the fact that the PS5, this many years in, doesn’t have its own Uncharted game is a scandal. That’s like Sonic skipping the Sega Saturn. That’s like paying Hulk Hogan to sit at home. Unconscionable things that have happened because someone somewhere along the line was really shit at doing business.

Sony could have put one of their mid-card studios on a Sully prequel and printed money. Put the Days Gone lads on a sepia-toned Uncharted with big moustaches and flared trousers. It’d be rubbish, but I’d buy it, 'cos I’m a mark for games about guys who climb stuff while doing quips, and so are half the people reading this.

In answer to the question, “Where the hell is Naughty Dog?”: that’s easy. Santa Monica, California. And what it's doing there, undoubtedly, is cooking. Getting ready to make a huge comeback potentially on the next PlayStation. Building its expertise, its talent, and those crucial technical pipelines back up again ready to re-assert itself as king of the blockbusters for the next phase of triple-A. Games that actually shift consoles (what a concept!). Whether this hit-making institution can get back onto its perch, or surpass it, remains to be seen. With the best will in the world, it's not the same studio that it was during its golden era. I just hope it emerges strong from its current abyss.

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!

It would seem as though Call of Duty: Black Ops 1 and 2 may be coming to modern platforms.

According to PlayStation Game Size, an account that monitors PlayStation's backend for updates, new game listings for PS4 and PS5 versions of Black Ops 1 and 2 have mysteriously appeared on PlayStation's servers. The account tweeted images of the icons for both games, which showcase the logos from their original releases.

These listings come weeks after a South Korean ratings board posted new listings for both Black Ops games. Since then, fans have been confused about whether this was an error, or if there was something quietly in the works. It's now being speculated that these games could arrive as a shadowdrop during the Nintendo Direct tomorrow.

Modern Warfare 4 is slated to release on Nintendo Switch 2 later this year, but Activision may want to grease the wheels ahead of time to get Call of Duty fans interested. The Modern Warfare 2 remaster was also shadowdropped back in 2020, so there is precedence for dropping something like this out of the blue.

The news also comes at an interesting time, as Black Ops 7 just added a Black Ops Classic playlist, which alters the gameplay to more aligned with the original Black Ops games. Were they just conditioning players for a return to these games? Only time will tell, but it would be a bold decision. Call of Duty has long avoided remastering fan-favorite games in the franchise, as it seems to distract from the newer games and pulls players away. However, with Black Ops 7 not doing too hot and Modern Warfare 4 being just a handful of months away, this may be a smart move.

If these rumors are real, it remains to be seen if these ports will include the full packages. Both games featured a meaty campaign, franchise-defining multiplayer modes, and revolutionary iterations of the Zombies co-op mode. If both games have all three modes and their respective DLC content, this could be massive. As of right now, we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

We've reached out to Activision for comment.

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.

When you have a series that's consistently gotten new games for almost 40 years, you have to think about how younger generations will be able to play them. That, and, of course, thinking about your bottom line, has led every publisher to lean more and more into multiplatform releases. On top of PC ports, Square Enix has released a decent amount of remasters and special editions of the Final Fantasy series specifically for Nintendo's handheld.

The Final Fantasy games hitting Switch isn't entirely unprecedented. The connection between Final Fantasy and Nintendo dates back to the series’ infancy, when the first game debuted on Nintendo's Famicom system in 1987. In fact, the first six mainline Final Fantasy games debuted on Nintendo platforms before Square Enix jumped to PlayStation as the series’ primary platform with Final Fantasy 7.

Below, we’ve compiled a complete list of Final Fantasy games available on the Nintendo Switch and what to expect next.

How Many Final Fantasy Games Are Available on Switch?

There are 23 Final Fantasy games you can play on the Switch — 14 mainline games (including two remakes), one prequel, and eight spinoffs. These games have been split into two sections below: mainline games (ordered by original release date) and other games (ordered by Switch release date).

Every Mainline Final Fantasy Game on Switch and Switch 2

Final Fantasy 1–6 Pixel Remaster

The first six Final Fantasy games are all available on Switch as part of Square Enix’s Pixel Remaster collection. Each game has been overhauled with new graphics, rearranged soundtracks, updated UIs, and new galleries for players to explore the creatures, illustrations, and music from all six games. If you're interested in diving into the original Final Fantasy experience, this is the best way to do it.

The Pixel Remasters are available individually ($12–18 USD/each) or as part of the six-game Final Fantasy I–VI bundle ($75 USD). If you're looking at the games individually, I'd recommend FF6, as it has one of the more immersive storylines.

Final Fantasy 7

One of the series’ most beloved games, Final Fantasy VII, is also available on Switch. This is not a remastered version of the game but rather a port of the 1997 original with three extra features: a 3x speed mode, the ability to turn battle encounters off, and a battle enhancement mode to make encounters easier. While the newer remasters, Remake and Rebirth, introduce modern action RPG mechanics to Cloud Strife's battle against Sephiroth, the Switch edition of FFVII is one of the best opportunities to experience what made the original PlayStation game so impactful.

Final Fantasy 8 Remastered

The series’ next entry is also available on Switch as Final Fantasy VIII Remastered. This updated version was released in 2019, 20 years after FF8 originally debuted on PlayStation. Additions to the remastered version include a 3x speed mode, the ability to turn off random encounters, and battle assist options to lessen the difficulty of combat.

Final Fantasy 9

Final Fantasy IX on Switch, like FFVII before it, is a port of the original RPG, which, despite not being quite as "famous" as Final Fantasy VII, is considered to have one of the best storylines in the series. The Switch version includes a few extras compared to the 2000 original, including high-speed and no-encounter modes, an autosave feature, and HD cutscenes and character models.

Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster

Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster is a bundle of Final Fantasy X and its sequel X-2 (the series’ first-ever direct sequel). The two games feature over 100 hours of RPG content, according to IGN sister site How Long to Beat, and include upgraded graphics and reworked audio (with the ability to switch back and forth between the new and original sounds).

Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age

Skipping the now-shuttered MMORPG Final Fantasy XI, the series’ next mainline game available on Switch is Final Fantasy XII The Zodiac Age. The Zodiac Age, a remaster of the 2006 original, features HD graphics and a re-recorded soundtrack, as well as the Zodiac Job System, an increased battle tempo, an optional high-speed mode, and autosave functionality.

Final Fantasy 15 Pocket Edition HD

Final Fantasy XIII and XIV: Online are not available on Switch, which brings us to Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition HD. It’s the latest mainline game available on the platform, as FFXVI is still only available on PS5 and PC.

Final Fantasy 15 Pocket Edition HD is an abridged version of the original game with cartoonish character models, simplified combat, a reduced skill tree, and fewer side quests. Pocket Edition HD does, however, retain the full FFXV story, boys on the road and all.

Final Fantasy VII: Remake Intergrade (2026)*

We have officially entered the 'only on Switch 2' section of this list. In this case, that has nothing to do with the game being Switch 2-exclusive. Rather, the increased power of the Switch 2 console has allowed for some heftier ports, including Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade. We specifically re-reviewed this game when it launched on the Nintendo console, acknowledging that while you're limited to 30fps, it "checks pretty much every box you could ask for from a portable version."

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (2026)*

The second part of the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy became available on Switch 2 several months after Remake itself. When it first launched on PS5, we called it a "best-in-class action-RPG full of exciting challenges and an awe-inspiring recreation of a world that has meant so much to so many for so long" in our 9/10 review. Writer Michael Higham also said it took him over "82 hours to finish the main story and complete a decent chunk of sidequests and optional activities," and that there was still tons more to discover.

Unsurprisingly, the notoriously massive JRPG had to take a somewhat minimalist approach to optimization for the Nintendo console.

Other Final Fantasy Games on Switch

World of Final Fantasy Maxima (2018)

World of Final Fantasy Maxima, co-developed by Square Enix and prolific Japanese developer Tose, came to Switch with new content and the subtitle ‘Maxima’ two years after it was first released on PS4 and Vita. It’s an accessible RPG aimed at younger audiences that combines the series' Active Time Battle system with the ability to capture Mirages (i.e., creatures) to use in battle.

Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon: Every Buddy! (2019)

Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon: Every Buddy! is a remastered version of the 2007 Wii game Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon. This Final Fantasy spinoff is a turn-based RPG with randomly generated dungeons and a buddy system that allows players to bring other creatures or characters along for the dungeon-crawling chaos.

Collection of Mana (2019)

This collection of three Mana games is on this list due to its inclusion of the 1991 Game Boy game Final Fantasy Adventure. Despite beginning as a Final Fantasy spinoff, the Mana series dropped those ties with the release of its second game, Secret of Mana, and has since remained an independent franchise.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition (2020)

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition is an enhanced version of the 2004 RPG/dungeon crawler originally released for GameCube. Crystal Chronicles for Switch features a cute aesthetic, online co-op, and the addition of English voiceover for the first time. It’s a graphical improvement upon the original that also added new areas, monsters, weapons, and a higher-difficulty option.

Collection of SaGa Final Fantasy Legend (2020)

Collection of SaGa Final Fantasy Legend compiles three Game Boy games: Final Fantasy Legend I–III. We’ve included these games in service to creating a comprehensive list, though these are only Final Fantasy games in name; the SaGa games belong to an independent franchise of RPGs inspired by but not necessarily connected to Final Fantasy. The first three SaGa games were given the Final Fantasy name to capitalize on the brand recognition with western audiences.

The collection adds a high-speed mode and Switch-specific enhancements like adjustable screen magnification and the ability to play with your Switch oriented vertically (when in handheld mode, with Joy-Cons detached).

Crisis Core –Final Fantasy VII– Reunion (2022)

A prequel to Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core –Final Fantasy VII– Reunion is a remastered version of the 2007 PSP RPG. The game stars a young warrior named Zack Fair, whose connection to Cloud and FFVII is revealed throughout the story. Reunion features remastered graphics, new character and background models, fully voiced dialogue, a newly arranged soundtrack, and a refined battle system.

Theatrhythm Final Bar Line (2023)

A rhythm game that celebrates the music of Final Fantasy, Theatrhythm Final Bar Line launched with 385 tracks from across the Final Fantasy series, though that has since grown to include music from other Square franchises for a total of 505 tracks. The Final Fantasy music pulls from 46 games, according to Squre, including FFI–XV. Theatrhythm Final Bar Line features over 100 characters and online multiplayer support for up to 8 players.

Chocobo GP (2023)

Chocobo GP is a Final Fantasy-themed kart racer developed by Arika (Tetris 99). While there are better kart racers available on Switch, Chocobo GP is a fun respite from the more involved RPGs that make up the majority of the Final Fantasy franchise. Like other kart racers, it features time challenges, tournament-style races, and options for multiplayer racing.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles (2025)

A remake of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles recently came to PS5 and Switch with enhanced graphics, voiced dialogue, and various quality of life improvements over the original PS1 game. Ronny Barrier's review for IGN says the remake of the tactical RPG removes "the cruft of Final Fantasy Tactics while surfacing what made it special through smart UI tweaks, convenience features, and excellent new voice acting."

Upcoming Final Fantasy Games on Nintendo Switch

Square Enix has confirmed that all of the Final Fantasy VII remakes will be making their way to the Nintendo Switch 2 over time. Final Fantasy 7 Remake Integrade released on the Switch on January 22, 2026, followed by the Switch 2 release of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth on June 3.

The third and final part of the remake is now confirmed to be Final Fantasy VII Revelation. Unlike the previous parts, Revelation will release simultaneously across all platforms, including Nintendo Switch 2. We don't have an exact release date, but Square Enix has confirmed they are targeting a launch in Spring 2027.

That's not all. Final Fantasy Resonance, a new game that's bringing back the turn-based combat in an HD-2D style, is slated to arrive on Switch 2 this October. You can learn more about that one in our hands-on preview.

Jordan covers games, shows, and movies as a freelance writer for IGN.

To say Call of Duty is an important piece of video game history would be an understatement. It’s hard to think of first-person shooters (or action games in general) without mentioning this series, which has become one of the most successful franchises ever after revolutionizing single-player campaigns and online battles.

For decades, CoD has dominated the multiplayer scene. Apart from creating iconic characters like Captain Price and Alex Mason, the series has also introduced unexpected figures to their ranks, like Spawn, Snoop Dogg, and Lionel Messi. With Modern Warfare 4 on the horizon, you might want to look back on over 20 years of Call of Duty history.

With entries exploring conflicts from both our past and our possible future, here's every Call of Duty game in chronological order.

Jump to:

• How to play in chronological order
• How to play by release date

How Many Call of Duty Games Are There?

Due to quite a few subseries, a reboot, and the many studios that have worked or are working on the series, it can be a bit troublesome to determine how many Call of Duty games have been released.

If we consider only the main entries with single-player campaigns, including all the World War II titles, the Modern Warfare subseries (plus its reboot), and the Black Ops subseries, there are 21 games in the Call of Duty franchise.

That said, things get complicated when you add all the expansions, online experiences, mobile games, and spin-offs. For example, Call of Duty: United Offensive is an expansion for the first game, while Call of Duty: Finest Hour and Call of Duty 2: Big Red One are side stories of the first two entries.

Spin-offs include strategy game Call of Duty: Siege, launched in 2016 based on Infinite Warfare’s universe; Call of Duty: Heroes, released in 2014; and the mobile version of Call of Duty: Black Ops. In fact, many main entries have significantly different editions for mobile/handheld when compared to the major console releases. Examples of this are PS Vita’s Call of Duty: Black Ops: Declassified and Nintendo DS’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3: Defiance.

Then there’s the Chinese free-to-play Call of Duty Online, released in 2015 and shut down in 2021. 2019’s Call of Duty Mobile took its place and is still running today.

The unique Zombies modes have become a staple of the series since their first inclusion in 2008’s World at War, and they have appeared in multiple entries since.

Finally, the franchise entered the battle royale and live service genres with Warzone, launched in 2020, which became a huge success. Two years later, it was replaced by Warzone 2.0, a complete overhaul of the game’s map and experience. Warzone Mobile brought the battle royale experience to iOS and Android devices in early 2024.

To avoid confusion, it’s worth mentioning that the reboot of the Modern Warfare series will be numbered with Roman numbers. Also, Black Ops 4 is not added to the list below for its lack of campaign (it’s a multiplayer-only experience).

Which Call of Duty Game Should You Play First?

For the sake of simplicity and accessibility, we recommend 2019's Modern Warfare reboot as a solid starting point for Call of Duty campaigns. Starting here creates a straightforward path through the rebooted Modern Warfare trilogy, as all three games are available on modern Xbox and PlayStation consoles, as well as PC. Plus, unlike the Black Ops subseries, each game was released within the last five years, meaning none should feel too dated.

Call of Duty Games in Chronological Order

Beware of minor spoilers for the stories, characters, and relevant events of each game in the list below.

1. Call of Duty (2003)

The franchise's first game was developed by Infinity Ward and published in 2003. This is the first of many entries in the series focused on World War II, following the steps of other household names like Medal of Honor.

In the first Call of Duty, you play three different campaigns as different soldiers from three countries: the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union.

The North American soldier, Private Martin, starts his training in 1942 and participates in the invasion of Normandy in 1944, while the British Sergeant Evans fights in Operation Tonga that same year. Evans will later be helped by Captain Price, a recurrent name in the franchise. On the other hand, the Soviet Alexei Ivanovich Voronin’s campaign takes place in the Battle of Stalingrad.

2. Call of Duty 2 (2005)

The sequel of the original title repeats the settings and nations but with some different perspectives. Instead of three campaigns, you experience four: one from the perspective of a North American soldier, one from the Soviet Union, and two from Britain.

As Private Vasili Koslov, you have to defend Moscow from Nazi German soldiers, while North American Bill Taylor joins the army that assaults La Pointe du Hoc during the infamous D-Day. The British soldiers, Sergeant John Davis and David Welsh, participated in the conflict in North Africa. Davis is led by Captain Price.

3. Call of Duty: World at War (2008)

A few years after Call of Duty 3, the team at Treyarch came back and delivered their last entry based on the conflict the series has been breathing off since its beginnings. This time, however, the campaign was only divided into North American and Soviet forces.

You follow American Marine Private C. Miller during the Makin Island raid in 1942, and later in the Battle of Peleliu, in which American forces confronted the Japanese army. The Soviet section takes place in the Battle of Stalingrad, but this time on the Eastern Front as Private Dimitri Petrenko.

4. Call of Duty 3 (2005)

The first main game in the series not developed by Infinity Ward, Call of Duty 3 was Treyarch’s first attempt at recreating World War II events.

Taking place in 1944, armies from Britain, Poland, the United States, Canada, and France fight against Germany's Nazi forces in the village of Chambois, France, during the Battle of Normandy.

This is the only main entry you cannot play on PC.

5. Call of Duty: WWII (2017)

Almost a decade and a half after the first game, studio Sledgehammer Games returned the franchise to World War II. This was the first time in the main series there was only one protagonist in the campaign: Ronald “Red” Daniels, accompanied by his loyal squad. As Red, you fight Nazi German forces across the European theater, from Normandy to Germany.

While WWII has some brief flashback sequences in 1940, which would set it as the first game in the series chronologically, the core of the title takes place in 1944.

6. Call of Duty: Vanguard (2021)

In the latest entry set in World War II, developer Sledgehammer Games tried once again to bring Call of Duty to its roots and explore this historical event from a different perspective.

Contrary to 2017’s WWII, you are presented with multiple characters on different fronts. The main objective is to learn more about Phoenix, a secret Nazi project that could change the tide of the war in favor of Nazi Germany.

Vanguard also has flashback sequences for different protagonists starting in 1941, but the majority of the campaign is set in 1945, near the end of the war.

7. Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010)

Developer Treyarch changed eras with Black Ops. Going from 1961 to 1968, you’ll experience the events of the Cold War and part of the Vietnam War for the first time in the series.

The main protagonist, Alex Mason, works with the CIA and is tasked to remember events that would help find Soviet sleeper agents. These agents are around the United States, and they plan to release a dangerous chemical weapon called Nova 6.

8. Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020)

Developed by Treyarch and Raven Software, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War helps connect the original Black Ops and Black Ops 2. While the main protagonist this time is nicknamed “Bell,” you get to choose your name, gender, and other details like dialogue lines.

Set in 1981, you team up with characters from previous games, including Alex Mason, Frank Woods, and Jason Hudson. Under CIA’s Russell Adler, your elite team is supposed to catch a Soviet figure that goes by “Perseus” who is planning to attack the United States.

9. Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (2012)

The sequel to the original Black Ops presents two timelines. On the first one, you follow Alex Mason’s footsteps several years after he and his team successfully stopped Nova 6. It’s 1986, and Jason Hudson asks Mason to aid with the search for Frank Woods, who disappeared in Cuando Cubango, Angola.

The second timeline is centered around David Mason, Alex’s son, who’s looking for Raul Menendez in 2025. Menendez is the leader of Cordis Die, a terrorist organization that provoked the Second Cold War.

10. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (2024)

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 takes place in the early 1990s, beginning in 1991, after the events of Black Ops 2's late-80s storyline. The story is centered around the Gulf War, wherein Frank Woods and his team of rogue agents are hunted by a shadowy group that's infiltrated the CIA.

Historical figures represented in the game include former U.S. president Bill Clinton and former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

11. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007)

The last entry to have a number after “Call of Duty,” Modern Warfare is the first time the series abandoned its classic Allies vs Axis conflict for something more recent.

In 2011, Yasir Al-Fulani, the president of a fictional Middle Eastern country, was executed by Khaled Al-Asad, the leader of a revolutionary party. Meanwhile, Russia is going through a civil war provoked by Imran Zakhaev, an arms dealer.

A squad commanded by Captain Price and formed by protagonist John “Soap” MacTavish have to stop an international crisis.

12. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009)

Set five years after the events of the previous game, Modern Warfare 2 tells the story of Vladimir Makarov, an Ultranationalist who continues the work of Imran Zakhaev. It turns out this extremist party gained control of Russia, so Makarov gained the power to start committing terrorist acts against the United States.

Well-known faces like the Captain Soap and Captain Price join forces with Sergeant Gary "Roach" Sanderson, Lieutenant Simon "Ghost" Riley, “Nikolai”, and other agents to stop Makarov’s secret plan.

13. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011)

The end of the first Modern Warfare trilogy brings the pursuit of terrorist Vladimir Makarov to its climax. Captain Price’s team re-arranges itself with Yuri, an ex-Spetsnaz known by Nikolai. Captain John "Soap" MacTavish is also present for the final mission.

Makarov captures Boris Vorshevsky, the president of Russia, who was going to establish peace with the United States. After threatening the president’s daughter, Makarov acquired nuclear launch codes, becoming an international danger once again.

14. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019)

In 2019, Infinity Ward rebooted the successful Modern Warfare series by reusing some classic characters in a new timeline. Well-known faces like Captain Price are present in a new conflict with Russia.

Set in the same year it was released, a fictional republic called Urzikstan is invaded by a Russian army. While this attack is going on, a terrorist organization called Al-Qatala, also from Urzikstan, begins with operations against different countries in the world. Captain Price, alongside his Task Force 141 and the Urzikstan Liberation Force, try to de-escalate the conflict.

15. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022)

Taking place in 2022, Modern Warfare II follows the story of the MW reboot, featuring returning characters from Task Force 141 and the Urzikstan Liberation Force leader Farah Karim.

Al-Qatala is still a threat, but all eyes are on Quds Force, an Iranian revolutionary group commanded by Hassan Zyani. Zyani is supported by Al-Qatala and a Mexican cartel from the fictional city of Las Almas, and he plans terrorist acts against the United States after the assassination of General Ghorbrani, an Iranian forces leader.

16. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023)

Picking up after the events of 2022's Modern Warfare II, MWIII once again stars Task Force 141, including recurring characters John Price, Simon "Ghost" Riley, Kyle "Gaz" Garrick, and John "Soap" MacTavish. Ultranationalist terrorist Vladimir Makarov, the villain from 2011's Modern Warfare 3, once again serves as the antagonist.

17. Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013)

A standalone entry with few connections to previous titles, Call of Duty Ghosts was developed by Infinity Ward in 2013. As its name indicates, it focused on the special operation group called Ghosts, a U.S. team tasked with secret missions.

It’s 2027, and after a decade of conflicts in the Middle East and an oil crisis, a South American force called the Federation of the Americas initiated a war against the United States. Working with your new team, you have to stop Gabriel T. Rorke, the former leader of Ghosts.

18. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 (2025)

While positioned toward the end of this list, the Black Ops 7 campaign most directly follows the events of Black Ops 6, which split across the Gulf War and modern day. And all of Black Ops, to be honest. BO7 brings back David Mason, the JCOC, and Mason's classic arch-nemesis. The game is set in 2035, over 40 years after Black Ops 6, and also brings back co-op campaigns. Seth Macy was particularly impressed with this iteration's multiplayer, which features gunplay he claims "works exactly how I want it to."

19. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014)

Advanced Warfare was the first entry to take place several decades beyond its release date. It was also the first game developed primarily by Sledgehammer Games.

Set in 2054, you control Jack Mitchell, a member of the United States Marine Corps who later fights in the private military corporation known as Atlas after suffering an accident. On this occasion, the enemy forces are a Chechenian separatist group called KVA led by Joseph "Hades" Chkheidze.

It was one of the first entries to feature futuristic changes in gameplay due to its setting, like the fact that soldiers now wear exoskeletons, which bring them unique abilities.

20. Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 (2015)

The end of the initial Black Ops trilogy was also set in the future. More specifically, in the year 2065, when a Third Cold War between the Common Defense Pact and the Winslow Accord is happening. Robotic drones, cyborg supersoldiers, unpiloted air forces, and other technological advancements take center stage.

A black ops team composed of you (simply referred to as “The Player”), Jacob Hendricks, and your cybernetics division will be tasked with preventing the conflict from reaching a more dangerous state. You investigate a strange event in Singapore and look out for the 54 Immortals, a crime organization.

21. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (2016)

No Call of Duty game went further into the future than Infinite Warfare. Around the 2080s, the United Nations Space Alliance was created after humans had spent all the natural resources available on Earth. Beginning the colonization and exploitation of resources on other planets, this alliance is defended by the Solar Associated Treaty Organization, a military force that battles the totalitarian regime Settlement Defense Front from Mars.

What’s Next for Call of Duty?

Another year, another Call of Duty. This year's release is yet another throwback to a classic sub-series: Modern Warfare. Modern Warfare 4 is being developed by Infinity Ward and is slated to be released across consoles (including Nintendo Switch 2) on October 23. The game will include three modes at launch: Campaign, Multiplayer, and a new take on the classic Modern Warfare extraction mode, DMZ.

Outside of games, Activision struck a deal with Paramount to produce a live-action Call of Duty movie. David Ellison, Chairman and CEO of Paramount, has said he’s a big Call of Duty fan who’s put “countless” hours into the franchise. Little is known about the direction the movie will take, but Ellison did refer to Paramount's recent success with Top Gun: Maverick as a "guiding star."

Axel Bosso is a contributing freelancer for IGN, covering everything related to video games (he's behind some of the Wikis you might have used over the years)!