BioWare is dead, and my feelings are a strange cocktail of anger, sadness, and Jack’s Complete Lack of Surprise. The legendary RPG studio was bought by a private investment group earlier this year, and history shows that venture capital frequently kills what it touches, extracting whatever value out of it that it can before moving onto the next victim. It’s a hell of a contrast to the beginning of BioWare, which started out as such a pure thing. Two practicing doctors, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, quit medicine to pursue their dream of making computer role-playing games. Sure, the studio was bought and sold a couple of times between then and now, and yes, BioWare’s recent results haven’t lived up to its venerable past, but my goodness, what a legacy this studio leaves behind.

Everyone knows Baldur’s Gate now on account of Larian Studios’ Game of the Year-winning, 10 out of 10 Baldur’s Gate 3 from 2023, but what younger gamers might not know is that the first two Baldur’s Gate RPGs were built by BioWare in the late ‘90s. While they weren’t the studio’s first games – that honor goes to the 1996 mech action-sim Shattered Steel – they were the two that put BioWare on the map. Each was an incredibly deep and sprawling RPG based on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset that was good for upwards of 200 hours of gameplay. At the time, they reset the bar for what a CRPG could be. Let me put it this way: Baldur’s Gate 1 took home IGN’s Game of the Year award in 1998… over Half-Life. That’s how good Baldur’s Gate was.

After another action-game pitstop in the form of 2000’s excellent MDK2, BioWare returned to role-playing with Neverwinter Nights, another CRPG that arguably brought video games closer to the pen-and-paper, pizza-party-at-your-best-friend/DM’s-house version of D&D than any game before it. It was the runner-up for IGN’s Best Role-Playing Game of 2002, finishing behind just one game: a little project you might have heard of called The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind.

Up to this point, BioWare had primarily been known in PC circles as a prominent CRPG developer. And then Microsoft made a deal with the studio and LucasArts to develop an exclusive new Star Wars RPG for the fledgling Xbox console. You already know what the result was: the absolutely unimpeachable Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which happens to be my personal favorite role-playing game of all time. My biases aside, it is unquestionably one of the best RPGs ever made. It’s also a lock for top-3 Star Wars games of all-time, and it has a strong case for No. 1 on that list. It told an incredible story in Star Wars’s ancient past and truly let you embrace the Light Side or Dark Side of the Force. I went fully evil just because KOTOR let me do so! And not only that, it embraced those choices. At one point, I distinctly remember triple-crossing someone – double-crossing the guy that I’d already double-crossed. Its plot twist is legendary, and on the off chance that the long-in-development-hell remake ever comes out, I won’t spoil it for you here. But whether it was visiting plenty of planets (including Kashyyk!), bonding with your party members (shout-out to my favorite droid, HK-47!), or planning out my evil Force attacks by stacking up my attacks in the turn-based combat system, KOTOR was the ultimate pairing of a beloved IP and an industry-leading developer.

Another Xbox console exclusive followed, albeit from a different team within BioWare. While KOTOR director Casey Hudson was planning something even bigger for his team’s next project, another crew at BioWare delivered the sublime and historically underrated Jade Empire, which was steeped in Chinese mythology. IGN gave it a 9.9 out of 10 (on a 100-point scale!) back in 2005, and while it was nowhere near the commercial success KOTOR was, it was every bit as big a hit with critics and fans.

And then came Mass Effect. BioWare promised us a space opera – a trilogy in which our choices in each game would carry over to the next and ultimately affect the ending to the whole story. Microsoft had wisely signed it as a console exclusive, and boy oh boy did it pay off. Mass Effect was one of the core memories most people have about the Xbox 360. It was released in fall of 2007, the greatest stretch in Xbox and quite possibly gaming history – and it actually delivered on its space-opera promise. As your custom Commander Shepard, the first in the trilogy introduced us to the universe and humanity’s place within it – including Shepard’s path to becoming a galaxy-protecting Spectre. It introduced the Reapers, and so many phenomenal companion characters from Wrex to Garrus to Liara among many others. And like KOTOR, it too allowed you to be a Paragon of good or a Renegade of evil. (And yes, I once again tested the limits of how bad BioWare would allow me to be.)

The first is my personal favorite of the trilogy, but for many that honor goes to Mass Effect 2, which leveled up your relationship with Shepard’s companions and more or less built the entire campaign around them. As promised, your save file imported into the sequel, bringing with it your Shepard’s look and choices from the first game. It also evolved Mass Effect’s gameplay from light turn-based, semi-tactical combat to more of a pure third-person cover shooter while sacrificing none of its role-playing elements.

The controversial trilogy-capper is best remembered for its ending, which upset fans so much that BioWare tried to improve it in a post-launch patch. But forgotten alongside that is how great the rest of it was. It took the time to really let you – and your Shepard – say goodbye to the friends you’d made along the way (or at least, the ones you hadn’t chosen to kill or sacrifice), and its combat was improved further over Mass Effect 2, making Mass Effect 3 a truly world-class third-person shooter alongside its well-established role-playing bonafides.

Whatever your thoughts of Mass Effect 3’s ending, BioWare had done what they said they’d do: They built a three-game space opera that spanned more than 100 hours of gameplay over the course of the five years it took to get all three games out the door. We developed meaningful bonds with its characters, in part because they’d been written so well. It was a bold RPG experiment, and one that, for my money, hasn’t been replicated or even attempted since.

The Mass Effect trilogy was, in hindsight, probably BioWare’s peak by just about any measure, but the studio kept going. Another original IP, Dragon Age, saw four RPGs released over a decade and a half – with the third of those, 2014’s Dragon Age Inquisition, taking home IGN’s Game of the Year Award. Anthem was a bold but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to bring BioWare’s storytelling talents to the hot-at-the-time live-service space. The studio cleaned Mass Effect up nicely for an excellent remaster of the trilogy in 2021 after the BioWare Montreal team’s disappointing Mass Effect Andromeda in 2017. Heck, BioWare even made a full-blown RPG starring Sonic in a team-up with Sega in 2008’s Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood!

And after announcing a fifth Mass Effect game that fans hoped would redeem the series after Andromeda, that project is now canceled alongside the studio being shut down. As sad as this day is – for both fans and BioWare employees who were there at any point during its 31-year history – I am left with a fulfilling sense of gratitude to this studio for all of the memorable gaming experiences it’s given me. With respect to CD Projekt Red, Larian, and Bethesda Game Studios, there’s never been a better RPG developer over a longer period of time than BioWare. It won’t be forgotten.

This is an IGN opinion piece by Jackie Thomas, who has been playing and replaying Mass Effect for nearly 20 years now.

I'm the sort of person who replays my favorite games whenever there's a big gap between releases. And those favorites usually end up being from the Mass Effect series, whether it's just the first game or a run through the entire original trilogy. So, for me, a Mass Effect 5 that captured the magic of the first three games has been something I've been looking forward to since before it was even announced in 2020. Now, that game will never exist, thanks to EA closing down BioWare. And that f**king sucks.

When Mass Effect came out in 2007, I stood in line to get it on release night, and I played it incessently until I finished absolutely everything in it. I did the same thing when the second and third games came out, except I also played the previous games again ahead of time so everything would be fresh in my mind.

Ever since Mass Effect 3 came out, I've replayed the original games maybe a dozen times. I don't even drastically change the way I play Mass Effect each time I play it. Even after nearly 20 years of experiencing the original game, I still play an Adept every time, because pistols are OP and biotics are cool. And I still ultimately do a paragon playthrough, even when I tell myself that I'm going to be bad and play renegade. Mass Effect has felt like home to me for years, and it became my ultimate comfort game.

But eventually, Mass Effect Andromeda came out, and even though I tried to power through it, I ultimately gave up after a deluge of bugs and weird writing turned me off. I still haven't gone back and finished that game, but I still find myself downloading and playing Mass Effect when I run out of other games to play. Hell, with the amount of times I've played the first game, I can probably navigate most of its empty optional planets with my eyes closed. After today's news, I might just download it and play it again in solidarity.

You'd think that after getting burned on Mass Effect Andromeda, I would've learned my lesson. But in the years since Bioware teased what should have the fifth Mass Effect game, I let myself hope that it would redeem the series once again and land in that annual ME replay rotation.

And I know that after Anthem, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard's weird shift to a straight-up action game, I didn't have much of a reason to believe that Mass Effect 5 would have been this magical return to form. But I think what's hitting me the hardest about BioWare's closure is that we'll never know whether or not Mass Effect 5 would have been good.

The truth is, we didn't know much about the next Mass Effect game at all. Hell, I don't even know if it would have been called Mass Effect 5, but that's just easier to say than 'the next Mass Effect game' over and over again. Ever since it was announced, BioWare had been pretty quiet about the project, only really speaking up to reassure fans that it was still in development. And look how that turned out.

But some of the things that popped up about the game over the years did look pretty cool. Bioware showed off some concept art late last year, showing a Krogan civil war with a properly grizzled Krogan leading a whole squad of the grumpy lizards in a fight. I want to play that game.

Likewise, in one of the only teasers we ever got, the camera zooms through the galaxy, past what looks like the ruins of the Citadel, until it finally shows an older Asari climbing up some snowy ruins. And we don't see her full face, but even from the side, it sure looked like Liara. And, again, I'd love to revisit her character after she fully becomes an Asari Matriarch. But again, that game will never exist.

But there is at least hope that some games that are at least similar to Mass Effect are on the horizon. Just last year, Mass Effect director Casey Hudson's new studio announced Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic. I'm a huge Star Wars fan, so when that game comes eventually comes out, I'm sure I'll burrow my way into it like a tick and not come out for a week. But, just like Mass Effect 5, there's not a lot we know about Fate of the Old Republic quite yet. But at least Hudson has come out and said that it won't take until 2030 to release, so maybe we'll get it in 2029.

The Expanse: Osiris Reborn is another one that I've had my eye on, and while I haven't really watched the show or read the books (even though both are on my list), I know that universe has a lot of potential for a Mass-Effect-Like. Then, there's Exodus, which is made by Wizards of the Coast of all companies, and has Mass Effect alumni working on it. The art style even makes it look like a Mass Effect game. Luckily, both of these titles seem like they're on track to actually come out next year, but only time will tell there.

As much as I'm earnestly looking forward to all three of those games, they're simply not Mass Effect. The aesthetics are there, the writing should be there, and it looks like the gameplay for Exodus at least is going to be quite good. And Fate of the Old Republic is a Star Wars game, and my love of Star Wars is what led me to play Mass Effect in the first place.

But no matter how good they end up being, I don't know if it's going to be as relaxing as hunting down all of the Keepers in the Citadel, and I probably won't be fighting a giant Reaper skeleton inside of a black hole. I am at least thankful that no matter how controversial Mass Effect 3's ending was, it was at least an ending. I would have loved another chapter and a chance to see whatever Bioware was cooking up with Mass Effect 5. But, at least I'll always have those first three games, and no amount of EA's mismanagement is going to take that away from me.

Nintendo has released a new The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake trailer that pays homage to the 1998 commercial for the N64 masterpiece — and we’ve got a comparison video showing just how close it is to the original.

Cast your mind back to 1998 and you might remember seeing a commercial for Ocarina of Time that had phrases like “A dark time is approaching,” “Willst thou run?” and “Have ye what it takes?” It’s an iconic advert that certainly got my teenage blood pumping at the time.

Now, Nintendo has recreated the advert in a new trailer for the Ocarina of Time remake. It features some of the same shots and even some of the same language. “Willst thou flee? Or Fight?” the trailer asks, leaning heavily on nostalgia as Link encounters Ganondorf on his horse — just as we see him do in the original trailer.

Check out a comparison in the video below.

Reaction to the new trailer has been overwhelmingly positive, with warm memories of weekends spent in the glow of a CRT television successfully rekindled. “THEY DID THE TRAILER THING OMG,” one person said. “NO WAY THEY DID IT,” another added. “THY WILL PREORDER AS SOON AS THY GETS PAYDAY,” one fan joked.

There is one major difference though: Nintendo’s recreation does not include the custom-recorded version of the track "Riddle of Steel / Riders of Doom" from the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian, as the original trailer did. Music rights!

Marketing for the Ocarina of Time remake has ramped up, with Nintendo releasing a number of new commercials ahead of the game’s November launch. Nintendo recently released two new TV spots for Japan that, while brief, reveal a tantalizing glimpse at some never-before-seen characters, chief among them Dark Link.

As Nintendo has pulled back the curtain on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, we’ve begun to get a better understanding of how this Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive will look and feel to play. IGN has already got you covered with an extensive hands-on preview, as well as a roundup of all the changes we’ve noticed so far compared to the N64 masterpiece.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake launches on Nintendo Switch 2 on November 5, 2026. While you wait, check out a special episode of Nintendo Voice Chat where we dive deeper into our Zelda preview.

Amazon has launched another buy 1, get 1 50% off book sale this week and it includes the wonderful Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia. This hardcover book is a great gift for fans of the video game series and the latest discount makes it a good time to pick up a copy for yourself and a friend.

The encyclopedia was originally published back in 2018, but has consistently been one of the most popular Legend of Zelda books out there. In addition to being part of Amazon's BOGO promotion, it's also on sale for 45% off list price.

Google researchers have released a paper claiming that four Google Gemini 4 Argon AI agents just beat Minecraft without any help from humans. It took them just over 27 hours to take down the Ender Dragon in what is believed to be a world first.

Of course, it’s not as simple as just turning up and firing arrows at the thing. To reach The End and defeat the Ender Dragon in Minecraft, there are a series of trials you have to complete.

You have to get Ender Pearls, Ender Rods, and craft Eyes of Ender, before tracking down a Stronghold and completing a puzzle. This takes a fair bit of farming and requires you to work up through the basic Minecraft tools.

To start the test, Google placed a team of four agents into a random Minecraft seed with a goal of defeating the Ender Dragon. According to Google, the agents used in-game chat to coordinate but otherwise had no strategy assigned going in — just a goal.

"Each agent controlled a player via an open-source library called Mineflayer and coordinated with its teammates through in-game chat and shared memory," the researchers said. "No one assigned roles or wrote game logic. The agents planned, wrote, and debugged every program themselves. Researchers could watch the run on a live dashboard and pause or stop it at any time, but they had no cause to intervene."

The agents settled into roles quickly, with some building Enderman shelters for farming materials, others gathering food, and others focusing on exploration. They shared combat tips and helped each other recover lost gear when they died.

Over the playthrough, the four agents exchanged 229 messages, ran 2,783 programs, and died 605 times, which suggests worse performance than my kid when he was five. A fifth agent oversaw the process to make sure the other bots weren’t cheating, but you can tell they weren’t by how many times they died anyway.

It took around 13.5 hours to reach The End, and the remaining time was spent trying to kill the final boss (and dying a lot). The current Minecraft speedrun record is six minutes and 36 seconds, so the AI agents won’t be breaking any records any time soon. The agents used 1.35 billion input tokens, which would cost a normal user around $1,620. That’s $60 per hour, which works out at $15 an hour per agent. Not a bad salary for a group of computer ghosts who don’t need sustenance.

"To our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end autonomous completion of Minecraft by AI agents, achieved using only the standard Mineflayer library without pre-scouted seeds or other game-specific tools written by humans," the team wrote in a paper, via Engadget. "Winning required the agents to keep a coherent plan across thousands of dependent steps for more than a day."

What is the point of all this? The researchers said they wanted to study how teams of agents coordinate in a setting where every step is visible to help understand such systems before they are trusted with real-world tasks. "The skills required to solve Minecraft such as coordinating a team, recovering from failure, and pursuing a goal for more than a day, are also what agents need to work reliably alongside people," they said.

If you've been on gaming Twitter at all over the last month, you're probably aware of the massive wave of people using AI to rapidly decompile, port, and remix games. That wave of AI decomps has forced a massive decompilation community to sunset.

In a blog post, admin @encounter from decomp.dev, a community repository for people to track decompilation posts, cites a wave of bad actors who are using AI to essentially steal the hard work of programmers working on existing decompilation projects.

The act of decompiling games itself isn't new, and people have been taking games and trying to decompile them down to the source code for years. But what was once a herculean task requiring coding expertise can now be done with little effort thanks to new AI models like GPT 6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5.

The blog post doesn't blame the models themselves for the surge of vibe-coded decompilations and ports, but rather claims that bad actors are taking existing projects and then using AI to rush them to completion. While there might be some developers who are open to people with a Claude subscription using their work to create, say, a browser port of Halo, that should be up to each developer.

The post says, "Every project works differently: some may not want to use AI for legal or ethical reasons, and others may be okay with AI, or use AI themselves, but do not want drive-by contributions from folks who have put no effort into making sure the contributions are good. The bottom line is that these kinds of hostile forks put little to no effort into meaningfully contributing to existing projects, tearing apart our community fabric."

As for the ports themselves, the blog claims that people are taking the code from hobbyists and forcing a barely functioning port out of them. "While community members put in the effort to decompile a game, opportunists have frequently raced to release a half-baked, barely-functional port from it," @encounter writes.

The blog post also mentions that this recent wave of AI decomps, recomps, and ports is muddying the waters of what the decomp community is trying to do. A lot of classical decomps are done out of the love of games and a desire to know how they work, but this trend of using AI to brute force working PC ports has caused a lot of people to rush into communities like decomp.dev looking for simple ways to create easy PC ports of games.

As for decomp.dev itself, the website will still exist, and users can use it to track existing projects, but @encounter is taking down the main index and disabling new projects.

Unfortunately, when it comes to Opus 5.5, Astra 6, and decomps, the cat is out of the bag, and it's unlikely that one decomp repository going offline is going to meaningfully stop this trend. We've seen everything from making Minecraft playable on X/Twitter to modders shoving Minecraft and Elden Ring together. There have also been a lot of browser ports, with games like Halo: Combat Evolved and Grand Theft Auto 5 being briefly playable on Chrome before those games' respective publishers predictibly brought them crashing down.

Either way, it's a shame to see a community built out of the love of programming essentially die off because a bunch of people with Claude subscriptions are using game developers' work as a starting point and finishing it with AI.

Eric Barone, aka ConcernedApe, has briefly discussed the difference between his all-conquering indie game Stardew Valley and his hotly anticipated follow-up, Haunted Chocolatier.

Barone announced Haunted Chocolatier back in 2021, but amid ongoing work on his phenomenally successful Stardew Valley, progress on the follow-up has been slow going. Indeed, in June, Barone admitted to feeling somewhat embarrassed to have to keep on saying he was still working away on the game. “Feels kinda dumb posting this same thing over and over, but that’s the reality,” he said at the time.

In a new interview with GQ (thanks, Eurogamer), Barone touched on what to expect from Haunted Chocolatier when it eventually comes out, and it sounds more different from Stardew Valley than I had expected. It’s set in a more “metaphysical” locale, for a start, and in terms of gameplay it’s more of an action RPG.

“It is still what I call a town game,” Barone said, “But it’s more of an action RPG — the main focus is more about adventuring, finding equipment and getting more powerful. There are monsters, there are boss fights. It's for the people in Stardew Valley that go into the mines. That's what I do, honestly.”

In June, Barone admitted fussing over every last detail in a bid to make Haunted Chocolatier as close to perfect as humanly possible. “I am being very thoughtful about every aspect of the game,” he said at the time. “The things in the game which the player will be interacting with or using very often need to be ‘perfect.’ They need to be seamless, clear, intuitive, satisfying, aesthetic.”

He used the example of iterating on the recipe book for making chocolates, which sounded like a significant challenge.

“To me, it’s not a simple task, as I torture myself over every last detail,” he said. “This is a UI you will be using fairly often, so it has to be perfect. You need to be able to accomplish your goal with the minimal number of clicks. There needs to be just the right amount of data presented to the player: not so much as to be overwhelming, but not so little as to be trivial or mundane. And the way that this data is laid out on the page is crucial… If the data is all clustered together, it will be disgusting to look at. The data needs to be grouped into compelling, intuitive and easy to read/understand groupings. It needs to look appealing and intriguing. And this is just the bare minimum, that players will likely take for granted. If all of that is accomplished then the player is now comfortable while perusing the recipe book. But I want more than just comfort. I want to delight the player. All of this typically requires me to iterate on something several times before I’m satisfied with it.”

Barone also explained why he didn't want to show Haunted Chocolatier off too much at this stage of development. “Partly, it feels like I’m serving a half-baked bread. I would rather serve a fully baked bread,” he said. “Also, I know that many parts of the game will likely evolve and change before release, so if I reveal them early, I risk disappointing players if the final product does not match their expectation. Fortunately, I’m in a position where I don’t need to market the game, so I can take my preferred approach.”

Haunted Chocolatier is so far without a release date, as is Stardew Valley 1.7 update, which Barone isn’t working on directly. Earlier this year, he explained his current way of working in an interview with IGN.

“Well, part of the reason why I've expanded my team a little bit is so that hopefully I can spend more time working on Haunted Chocolatier," he told us in February. "And it's worked out pretty well so far, I would say. On 1.7, the approach we're taking is that I am like, you might say the creative director and I'm involved with like, 'Okay, here's what we're going to do. Here's some of the ideas.' Then I let the team work on that. And then meanwhile, I'm working on Haunted Chocolatier.

"At some point in 1.7's cycle, I will get heavily involved, because I feel like my hand needs to touch every part of the game, every aspect of the update. I need to go over it and adjust it or at least approve everything. So it will require a lot of my time anyway, but I think the balance has been a little bit more shifted, so that I can spend more time focused on Haunted Chocolatier. And I think it's been working out pretty good. That's been a big change from the 1.3 update or 1.1 or something where it's completely me. I had no time to work on a new game. So that has changed.

"It is difficult because it's hard to shift gears, I guess. If I'm thinking about Haunted Chocolatier, it's difficult to be like, 'Okay, I'm going to one day of the week or two days of the week work on Stardew Valley.' That's not how my brain works. I'm all in one thing or the other. So I've been trying to work on that. I feel like it requires a lot of discipline, which I'm always working to improve on."

We interviewed ConcernedApe and chatted about topics such as the addition of two new marriage candidates with 1.7, the one secret players still haven't found yet, and why there isn't a Stardew Valley TV show yet. We also chatted with the Stardew Valley community about what the game has meant to them over the years.

Xbox has announced a new TV, movies, and entertainment division called XP. It will be headed up by Kayleen Walters, a Lucasfilm veteran who moves over from her most recent post as president of Minecraft maker Mojang, where she also served as an executive producer on last year's A Minecraft Movie.

XP brings together four "areas of investment": Xbox Pictures; Xbox Products; Xbox Partnerships; and Xbox Places. Microsoft said XP was set up to help Xbox become the number one entertainment and gaming company in the world, which requires broadening its big franchises beyond video games themselves. But it is not a production company. Rather, Microsoft wants to find the right partners to work across film, TV, physical experiences, and consumer products.

Microsoft has already seen significant success in the movie and TV space, with Warner Bros.' A Minecraft Movie breaking box office records, and Amazon's Fallout TV show setting records for Prime Video. Upcoming Xbox adaptations include movie sequel Minecraft Squared, Fallout Season 3, a Call of Duty movie with Peter Berg and Taylor Sheridan, and a Diablo animated series with Netflix. Microsoft's deal for Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid spiritual successor Physint includes film and TV rights, so expect an adaptation of that eventually.

XP is also about live events, and again, Xbox already has success there. Blizzard's BlizzCon saw a number of significant announcements, with 35,000 people at the physical event in Anaheim, California, and 12.5 million watching at home. The most recent Minecraft Live, which saw the announcement of the first new dimension for Minecraft in 14 years, reached more than 144 million people.

Meanwhile, Microsoft cited partnerships such as Gears of War's takeover with WWE, and Xbox's range of Ikea furniture. A Minecraft theme park is set to open its gates next year.

"XP was created from a simple but powerful belief: the world's most beloved gaming franchises have an opportunity to reach people far beyond the boundaries of the game itself," Walters said. "Fans don't just play our franchises. They watch them, wear them, attend them, celebrate them, and connect with them in countless ways. XP brings together the teams responsible for helping Xbox franchises show up in the world in bigger, more meaningful ways."

"XP is a play on 'Experience Points' and formalizes four investment areas for us: Xbox Pictures for film and television adaptations; Xbox Products for licensing and merchandise; Xbox Partnerships for sponsors and brand partners; and Xbox Places for our marquee broadcast and in-person events, theme parks, and other location-based experiences," Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote in a company-wide memo also posted to Xbox Wire.

"Our franchises can mean more to people than the time they spend playing them, and Kayleen knows how to build those experiences with the industry without losing what made people care about the franchise in the first place."

Microsoft noted the uplift its video games can get when movies and shows do well. For example, Fallout games on Game Pass saw a 5x increase in hours played during Fallout Season 1. Minecraft, meanwhile, saw over a 75% increase in weekly active users year-over-year since the movie released (as of April 30, 2026).

If this sounds a bit familiar, it's because Microsoft has tried this before. In 2012 (back in the Xbox 360 era!), Microsoft announced Xbox Entertainment Studios with an aim to produce TV shows that would air directly on Xbox consoles. XES revealed plans to create shows based on Gears of War, Fable, Forza, and State of Decay — not to mention, of course, the original version of the Halo TV show announced at E3 by Stephen Spielberg, who was set to executive produce. They even planned to make an unscripted street-soccer drama called Every Street United. The entire XES effort lasted just two years before getting shut down as the Xbox One's "all in one" message failed to resonate with gamers following its reveal in 2013.

As part of the changes, Mojang has a new boss. Maria Angelidou-Smith, who joins Xbox as CEO of Mojang, spent nearly a decade at Meta working on Facebook Groups before stints at Personio and Reddit, where she was Chief Product Officer. "She has built products used by billions of people and led product and engineering organizations through significant growth and change," Sharma said.

"She will bring that experience to Mojang while learning from the people who know Minecraft best. Her first order of business is for her to learn from the teams and communities that make Minecraft so special."

Minecraft is, of course, one of the big Xbox franchises the company is doubling down on amid Sharma's ongoing "Reset," which has seen nearly 2,000 staff cut from the gaming business so far this financial year. Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time, having shifted over 425 million copies. Its significant merchandising business became one of the top 20 globally.

As one of Nintendo's most iconic franchises, The Legend of Zelda has no shortage of merchandise. There are figures, clothing, replicas, and just about everything else you could imagine, and sometimes, a very neat product comes along that stands out from the rest.

As part of Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days event, this Zelda Hylian Shield backpack is 20% off. This matches the previous all-time low price of $55.99, so if you're on the hunt for some stylish new Zelda merch, look no further than this backpack.

Prepare for Adventure With the Zelda Hylian Shield Backpack, Now 20% Off

The AI video game clone explosion continues at pace. Now, someone has made Minecraft playable inside X / Twitter with working multiplayer. X user jaivin used AI to make Mojang’s Minecraft playable inside posts on Elon Musk’s social network, and is letting people buy in-game sponsorships with cryptocurrency.

“Tweetcraft is a block game in a post: every world is a link on X, and everyone who opens it plays together,” reads the official blurb. “Put your ad at the top of the server list, in a world’s sponsor leaderboard, or your logo on the Block Dragon.”

So, what’s going on here? Essentially, "Tweetcraft" is a custom browser-based Minecraft clone where you generate a shared world and post its unique link on X / Twitter, which acts as a shared entry point. Anyone who clicks on the link joins the same real-time multiplayer session. The game itself renders in your browser.

This “port” is, obviously, unauthorized, and will no doubt draw the attention of Microsoft’s lawyers sooner rather than later. Jaivin’s launch post has had 7.4 million views already. Various follow-up posts detail an explosion of popularity as people try it out.

Perhaps in a bid to downplay any potential trademark or copyright infringement, jaivin has called the game “Tweetcraft,” although it’s clearly Minecraft in shape and form. Jaivin also insisted that “Tweetcraft uses none of Minecraft's assets and is not associated with Mojang or Microsoft.”

Responses are similar to those we’ve seen over the last two weeks amid this AI-powered video game clone and “game-merging” mod explosion, which has spawned a number of viral gameplay clips of famous video game franchises mashed together. There’s a mix of excitement and disgust, with some saying a clampdown is inevitable.

“The name is brilliant because now you can lose two separate trademark lawsuits,” one person said of Tweetcraft.

“The ‘I do not own this music video’ description when uploading a music video on YouTube defense,” another said.

October has already seen GTA 5 and the original version of Halo on Xbox made playable on a browser, with more surely to come. The GTA 5 clone was hit by a takedown, as was a Fallout: New York game that was released in-browser.

Clearly, this Whack-a-Mole between IP owner and AI-generated video game isn’t sustainable, so the question will be what the video game industry does long term to prevent this sort of thing happening in the first place. Indeed, can it do anything? With AI models becoming increasingly powerful, the time it takes for unauthorized versions of established video games to appear outside of official platforms will reduce potentially to just hours or even minutes. With GTA 6 releasing on PS5 and Xbox Series X and S only, how long will it take for someone to use AI to make it playable on PC via a browser?

Update: This deal is now expired.

Nintendo fans have an opportunity to score one of the best LEGO x Nintendo collabs at an outstanding price, but you really don't want to hesitate. For Prime Day, Amazon is offering the LEGO Super Mario World: Mario & Yoshi 71438 for just $89.99 with free shipping after a 30% off instant discount. Not only is this the lowest price I've ever seen, this set is also possibly retired; it's currently sold out at the LEGO Shop with no ETA for restock.

Save Over 30% Off the LEGO Super Mario: Mario & Yoshi (71438)

Don't hold your breath for a new Watch Dogs game anytime soon.

As reported by Game File, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot was asked by an investor about the future of the Watch Dogs franchise. The CEO noted that Ubisoft considers the IP "to be an important brand for the future" but neglected to explain how. Game File's Stephen Totilo stated that Guillemot suggested that there are no Watch Dogs games in active development at the moment, which suggests Ubisoft may still be figuring out where to take the series from here.

There is a Watch Dogs movie on the horizon, but there's no word on when it will be released. The film wrapped production two years ago and had reshoots last year, but there hasn't been any sort of meaningful promotion for the film to date. As of right now, it doesn't even have a release date, which makes it even more of a mystery.

Watch Dogs made its debut back in 2014, though it was initially meant to launch simultaneously with the PS4 in November 2013. Ubisoft hyped it up as a direct competitor to Grand Theft Auto 5, which released in September 2013. Unfortunately, many felt it was unable to reach some of its ambitions, but it still managed to make a dent in the open-world crime genre. Two years later, Ubisoft launched a much more impressive sequel set in San Francisco, but failed to keep the momentum going with its third installment.

Watch Dogs: Legion was released in 2020, also boasting ambitious ideas, such as the ability to control any NPC in the world. Unfortunately, the game received generally mixed reception from fans. Since then, there have been a lot of question marks around the future of the franchise. It seems Ubisoft wants to do more with Watch Dogs, but it may be trying to figure out how it can separate itself from a game like Grand Theft Auto 6, which is set to shake up the genre in November.

There may be more Watch Dogs games one day, but don't expect them within the next few years.

Mighty Mike Plays dad Dave has promised refunds and issued a lengthy explanation after the internet demanded more information about the YouTube ads allegedly purchased by his son and the drama that followed.

The saga began when a father took to his son's YouTube channel, Mighty Mike Plays, to announce that his child had allegedly used a company credit card to purchase $118,000 in video ads. It was a painful and highly relatable story that snowballed into a full-fledged internet spectacle when pricey AI-generated T-shirts and questionable details led many online to look for concrete answers.

The controversial father figure came clean in a new video titled "Allow me to Explain" that was uploaded to the Mighty Mike Plays channel last week (via Dexerto). Dave started the hour-long explainer – which has since been deleted and re-uploaded on a new YouTube channel called Coffee Time with Dave – promising that everyone who purchased one of those T-shirts would receive a refund.

“this might be the end of Mighty Mike Plays…” is the funniest thing you could say in front of your dad after putting him 118k in debt and getting him fired

— Mako Fukasame 🦈👩‍🏫 | Vershion AU (@MakoFukasame) September 15, 2026

"Dave here. A.k.a. Devoted Dave. A.k.a. Dazzling Dave. A.k.a. Dependable Dave, and the list goes on," Dave said. "I want to give you guys an update: First off, I'm going to say that everyone that got a shirt got refunded whether they asked for it or not. So, whether you wanted a refund or not, you got it."

The full video covers allegations related to the Mighty Mike Plays drama and also covers a lot that has nothing to do with it at all. Dave's headline he wants to share, though, is that this all blew up so much faster and so much bigger than he ever expected it to be.

He explained that he thought he was simply "venting" about his son's spending with a story that sounds like the kind of thing you'd tell a friend at a bar. Millions of views and a sea of video responses later, and it's clear it didn't pan out the way he ever imagined it would.

"I remember thinking, like, you know, I wonder if this video will hit 10,000 views," he said. "That's kind of where I thought it would cap. I didn't think it would go so viral. Everything happened real-time, organically, and I obviously didn't handle everything the right way, essentially, but just to make it clear: I didn't come to YouTube to ask for help. I wasn't looking for any sort of help."

Part of the reason why the internet gathered with Minecraft fans to help out is because Dave said the $118,000 hole his son put in his company card resulted in him being fired. He also stated he had just 30 days to make up for the missing money, but in the new video, Dave has clarified some of those details.

Instead of losing his job, Dave suggested he technically was not fired in a traditional sense, with that part of the story being a "simplified version" of what actually happened. The reality, he said, is that "the contract between company A and company B just got terminated," adding, "isn't that the same thing?" As many had suspected, he doesn't just own his own company – he owns 12.

"Yeah, I own my own company. So what?" Dave clarified. "In fact, you guys didn't even see – I have like 12 companies. Not all of them are productive, as we speak. Some of them are just collecting dust, and just because someone has a company or is a CEO doesn't mean that, 'Oh, OK. Just by having those titles you're actually conducting a profitable business.'"

He continued: "But just to clarify, I consider that being fired. If my company lost a contract with this important company, then, I mean, how is that not being fired? Fine. I'll be more specific next time."

As for those controversial T-shirts and why he's issuing refunds, Dave said he "didn't want to sit around and let these actual scammers sell people who wanted to be involved in this story." His plan for an official merch page, which allegedly put him "another $10K in the hole," still drew much ire from the internet, at least partially due to its prolific use of AI-generated designs. He explained why he's issued refunds – even if not all that many people found something to buy.

"In retrospect, was AI and the merch the way to go? Was the price the way to go? No," he said. "Look, I'm going to admit when I was wrong: That was not the move. I shouldn't have used AI. Although, at the time, I know I defended it. There is a now-infamous deleted post, which I crashed out."

He later added: "I do agree now, and if I could go back, I'd do it differently, but again, I didn't have the luxury of time. Time was running out. We had to figure something out, so yeah, I had AI create some designs. I still feel like those designs were flawless, gorgeous, beautiful, superb, and there is about 100 people who got free shirts."

It's unclear if Dave's explanation video will be enough to satisfy the many online who looked into the Minecraft YouTube channel after the events surrounding it kicked off last month. If this is the first time you're hearing of Mighty Mike Plays and the drama surrounding AI-generated T-shirt designs, there's no need to fear. We broke down everything you could ever want to know about the story right here.

Former NFL coach Mike Tomlin spent 19 seasons with the Pittsburgh Steelers and won Super Bowl LXIII, and now he's added another major accomplishment to his resume: becoming a Minecraft YouTuber.

The former coach gave football fans a little something different when he launched his new YouTube channel earlier this week. With a profile picture taken in front of NBC's Football Night in America logo, watchers probably weren't expecting Tomlin's first upload to see him confess how his love for architecture and family led him to work on a Minecraft city he spent 12 years building.

"You know, 12 or 13 years ago, when my kids were in middle school, they'd be in their room all weekend and have friends over. They were obsessed with playing this game, Minecraft, that I knew nothing about," he explained as his son and channel operator, Dino, sat in the background. "I got interested because I just was mesmerized by what could occupy their attention for such large periods of time."

He admitted he lacked the "stick control" to handle something like Minecraft's Survival mode but still managed to find enjoyment in Creative Mode. That's where Mojang's systems really started to click.

"I like to build," he said. "I've always had an interest in architecture, and so forth, so I started doing this creative city. It was a means of spending time with them. They participated all over this city. All my kids have buildings."

However, as his kids went off to high school and college, their interest in Minecraft waned. For Tomlin, it was just beginning. In 2026, after 12 years of building, the sandbox phenomenon has become therapeutic for the former NFL coach, and what he's built has the internet in disbelief.

"This is where it all started for me," Tomlin said as a blocky blue pond surrounded by detailed city buildings faded into view. His tour then begins with a closer look at a hotel. This one building features a fully fleshed-out interior with labeled rooms, a lobby, a ballroom, a pool, bathrooms, and more. Tomlin even factored in how lighting might affect the views in some of these rooms – and that's just one of many locations he's made.

"I was always inspired," he added. "I'd go places, and I'd see things and buildings, and I get inspired, I go home, and I work on it."

Tomlin then referenced the off-campus housing around universities that he recreated after dropping Dino off at college. The color, floor plans, and other memorable elements all came from these memories, with much of his creation also built around different bodies of water.

Tomlin stepped down as the Steelers' coach in January 2026, with today's video showing how he's spent at least some of the downtime since. He spent years in the NFL, but it's his work as a Minecraft YouTuber that has everyone talking today.

Mike Tomlin has been working on his Minecraft world for over a decade

It’s UNREAL pic.twitter.com/XWxu9zMinY

— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) October 1, 2026

Aaron Rodgers: “CALL THE F*CKING PLAY!”

Mike McCarthy: “F*cking asshole”

*Loses to the Cleveland Browns*

Meanwhile, Mike Tomlin: pic.twitter.com/axnE3655rT

— NFL Memes (@NFLMemes) October 2, 2026

Steelers down 20 in a playoff game.

Mike Tomlin: pic.twitter.com/J4u56digNW

— Donny Football (@DonChed54) October 1, 2026

Mike Tomlin leaving the presser early to go finish building the Executive Spa in his Minecraft world pic.twitter.com/yHF2FOzeiZ

— ant ☘️ (@anthshiesty) October 1, 2026

"I'm obsessed why is he genuinely a better builder than me," content creator @Krtzyy said.

"Mike Tomlin becoming a Minecraft YouTuber was not on my bingo card for 2026," one X/Twitter user said.

Tomlin signed off, promising to take a closer look at his city in future videos. He also teased plans to show off something that "I think you're going to find interesting." Despite being maybe the most creative celebrity gamer to come out of 2026, the ex-NFL coach isn't the only notable name to share their love for gaming in the last year. Obsession breakout Inde Navarrette garnered attention for her The Last of Us and Call of Duty streams a few months ago. Newly announced X-Men star, Samara Weaving, is also a big gamer.

Photo by Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images.

I have spent the last three days scrolling through some of the most insane mod videos I've ever seen. Modders are taking games that have been decompiled with Claude, and mashing them up with other games. As the week has gone on, there have only been more clips of these mods pouring out on X/Twitter.

One person created a mashup of World of Warcraft and Call of Duty: World at War; another combined Escape From Tarkov with Skyrim. There’s even one that takes Insomniac’s Spider-Man and combines it with Batman Arkham City, where the player is able to swing around Batman’s turf.

These mods are everywhere online right now, though they thankfully haven’t filtered into modding websites like Nexus Mods yet. But, with the sheer volume of these mods and with how accessible Opus 5.5 is, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before the gates are fully torn down. And if that happens, it could change the face of the modding scene entirely.

Why Now?

Claude Opus 5.5 launched last week, promising cheaper tokens and more efficient code work. I'm sure that Anthropic meant for it to be used by professionals, but gamers have used it to create some of the weirdest mods I have ever seen.

Opus is a model that can power AI agents, which can be deployed to create entire games from the engine, to the art and enemy behavior. Brendan Jowett has a great video on YouTube of the model in action: He develops little slices of video games and compares them directly with the same tasks from OpenAI’s Astra 6 model. While the results of both are far from what you’d expect from a fully featured game, Claude’s new model has clearly come a long way.

The problem with the examples in Jowett’s video is that while the models are good at piecing together disparate parts of a game, enemy AI (lol) and art assets are lackluster to say the least. In one of the slices, a space combat sim, the space fighter flys at a diagonal angle, while moving in a straight line ahead, and shooting. In another slice enemies completely ignore the player character.

As good as Claude Opus 5.5 seems to be, it’s still lightyears away from developing something like a true mashup of Minecraft and Elden Ring from scratch. But the model doesn’t have to start from scratch.

The big, driving force behind a lot of these mods is decompilation, where people are pointing Opus at a game and letting the agent break it down to its source code (here’s a handy blog if you want to really get in the weeds). Just earlier today, we covered Halo: Combat Evolved being decompiled and ported to run natively in a browser. Once that step is complete, it takes little effort to take that source code and work huge swaths of games into other games as mods, and with very little input from the user.

Couple that with the relatively affordable tokens, and it shouldn’t be surprising that X/Twitter’s generally pro-AI users went wild with it, creating hundreds of mashups. And it doesn’t seem like it’s slowing down any time soon; what started off as a weird video that my boss sent me on Tuesday has now evolved to the point where I can’t even open X/Twitter without seeing a deluge of these mods.

Piracy?

The obvious problem with all of this is that these models are breaking open games developed by real people, getting the source code and then just mashing stuff together without consideration or permission from the original developers. That’s nothing particularly new – the modding scene is definitely no stranger to mashups, all the Thomas the Tank Engine mods are proof of that. However, this trend might be breaking into new territory, thanks to decompilation.

This could be another reason none of these mods have made their way onto any distribution platforms. Nexus Mods doesn’t outright ban AI-generated content, but it doesn’t let people use AI tools to upload content that they don’t have the rights to.

In a blog post from 2023, Nexus laid out its rules around AI generated content. The policy states that, “In order to prevent any issues with your mods, we encourage you to avoid using these tools unless you have explicit permission to use all the assets. This is particularly true for AI-generated voice acting but also covers images, models, code and anything else that you can use this technology to create.”

Every single one of these passthrough mods are using images, models, and code that the people generating them don’t have the rights to. But it’s only a matter of time until some platform holder allows these mods to be hosted, and I’m sure a massive legal battle will happen immediately afterwards.

The Modding Community Hates This

Way before all of these Claude-authored mod videos started cropping up online, people had been creating mods by hand for years, typically out of pure love for the game. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that a lot of mod authors aren’t fans of this phenomenon.

Mod authors have been expressing their frustration on X/Twitter as this has been happening. “I mod games and I'm not shy about the fact that I use AI to do it. I hate this bullshit ‘trend’. Pure slop, there's nothing creative about this at all,” kran27_ posted. “AI has a lot of potential in the modding scene, but the shit that's getting the clicks is this jingling keys bullshit.”

Kran wasn’t alone, with discountmodder ready to just leave the scene, saying, “Dude I'm really disappointed. If this becomes the permanent state of modding, this may be my last project. I don't wanna be involved in an AI slop-factory.”

I can’t escape the feeling that most of these mashups are born from people just playing with a new AI model and seeing what will happen, and I hope that this weird trend will die off soon. Modding is one of the best parts of PC gaming, and there is a lot of incredible content that people make just because they love a game. Some of the best games started off as mods, after all, and without them we never would have got the likes of Half-Life or League of Legends.

I hope that this is just a trend, rather than a sign of where the modding scene is heading. Fortunately, because these mods seemingly only exist to farm engagement on Twitter (at least so far), you don’t have to worry too much about them if you just want to start a new modded run of The Witcher 3 Remastered. If anything, it just means that if you want to avoid AI content, you need to pay even more attention to who you’re getting your mods from.

Metro 2039 is not terribly far away now, launching on February 4, 2027. While that game will truly bring the franchise to current generation consoles, developer 4A Games is launching next-gen updates for the first two games.

Both Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light were incredible tech showcases for their time, but they haven't exactly aged gracefully. Despite getting an intial remaster all the way back in 2014, Metro 2033 doesn't play super well with modern hardware, and I've needed to tweak it every time I've gone back to play it. Luckily, these next-gen updates should bring some long-needed bug fixes to the game.

The update will look different on console and on PC. For PS5 and Xbox Series X, the Metro games will run at either native 4K at 60 fps or an upscaled 4K at 120 fps, with PSSR on PS5 Pro and traditional temporal upscaling on the Xbox consoles. Over on PC, though, the game will finally have DLSS support, along with some unnamed quality-of-life improvements.

4A Games hasn't shared a lot of details on the updates coming to Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light, but it does promise to share full patch notes ahead of its October 22 release on PC and October 29 release on consoles. Either way, as long as the games are more stable, I'm all in.

As a lifelong PC gamer, all three of the Metro games hold a special place in my heart, for all the torture they've put my graphics cards through in the past. Luckily, if you don't like putting your hardware through the wringer, it doesn't sound like 4A is going to add ray tracing or anything crazy to 2033 or Last Light, so they should be significantly easier to run at high settings than they were when they launched in 2010 and 2013.

We've already gone hands-on with Metro 2039, and it seems like an incredible and brutal post-apocalyptic shooter — just like I'd want out of the franchise. The visuals we've seen so far look incredible too, so I can only imagine that it's going to stay true to its roots of pushing PC hardware to its limits. Although, it is launching in the middle of an ongoing RAM crisis, which is going to limit its already niche appeal a bit when the benchmarks start rolling out. Here's to hoping 4A Games finds a way to make a Metro game scalable at launch for once.

Amazon is discounting a bunch of officially licensed Legend of Zelda shirts this week. The new sale arrives just a week before Prime Big Deal Days, with more than 40 T-Shirts down to $16.99 for Prime Members.

Seeing as I couldn't fit every shirt onto this page, I've gone ahead and curated some of the coolest designs. If you're looking for some of the more obscure options available, though, I recommend you browse the full sale yourself.

A 15% discount may not seem like much, but it's likely the best price you'll see on these shirts this year. Amazon regularly discounts it's licensed Nintendo T-Shirts, but we rarely see prices this low. If you've been wanting to spruce up your wardrobe, now's a great time to do so with a Zelda gift for yourself.

The biggest draw of this sale is that it encompasses such a wide range of shirts. 2026 marks the 40th anniversary of the franchise, and there have been many Legend of Zelda games since the NES version first came out. Because of that, there are a lot of different directions a shirt can take. There are subtle nods to the original game as well as more modern depictions from Tears of the Kingdom. Whatever type of Zelda fan you are, there's a shirt for you getting discounted here.

I myself currently own four different Legend of Zelda shirts that a regularly work into my weekly rotation. With that in mind, my two top picks from this sale are variations of T-shirts I already own. The first is a unique depiction of the Hylian Shield and Master Sword. The image is entirely made up of various weapons, characters, and references to the games. If you want something that looks great up close or from afar, I highly recommend picking this one up.

My second recommendations is just a simple shirt depicting the Royal Crest in gold. I've gotten more compliments on this shirt from random dudes at the grocery store than anything else I own. It doesn't overtly say "The Legend of Zelda", it just looks like a cool design. Fans of the games will immediately recognize the Triforce, but anyone else will think nothing of it.

More 40th Anniversary Legend of Zelda Merch

The Legend of Zelda movie isn't coming out until next year, and a new mainline game has yet to be announced. So with that in mind, most of the biggest Legend of Zelda stuff has been centered around the upcoming Ocarina of Time remake. The game is set to release on November 5 alongside a new Zelda-themed Switch 2 console and Pro controller.

LEGO has also been teaming up with Nintendo to release new Zelda-themed sets. The first new set was released earlier this year and depicts 'The Final Battle' in Ocarina of Time. Nintendo announced an additional Link & Epona set, but it won't be releasing until spring 2027.

Mojang has teased Minecraft’s next game drop, giving fans a sneak peek at some of its features.

As revealed at Minecraft LIVE, Ice Caves are coming to the game, adding a new and rare underground extension of cold biomes with glowing ice crystals and environmental variety. Ice Caves include a new hostile mob, the frozen zombie, which can apply freezing effects and throw damaging ice balls. The ice balls can also be used as weapons or to craft potions, adding strategic options for combat scenarios.

Mojang said Ice Caves add a whole new layer of variety to cold biomes, making exploring underground even more interesting, thanks to the increased environmental diversity. “Though they may be beautiful, these caves are far from safe,” the developer said.

Ice crystals can be found in ice caves and can be placed both vertically and horizontally, providing lots of potential for decoration and building. They can even be used as a light source. The Frozen Zombie, meanwhile, applies a stacking freezing effect with its melee attacks. If you take enough hits, you'll freeze. It also throws ice balls at you, which apply knockback and deal damage. Normal zombies can convert into Frozen when exposed to powder snow. Players can already convert Husks into Zombies, and now Zombies into Frozen, opening the door for advanced mob farms.

Frozen drop ice balls on death, allowing players to use them as well, but they can also be crafted and used to brew a new potion. As a weapon, ice balls deal damage and apply knockback, and as a potion it can freeze players.

For more, check out everything announced at Minecraft LIVE.

Minecraft World got two announcements at Minecraft LIVE today: the world’s first official Minecraft hotel, and the name of the first ever Minecraft rollercoaster.

Minecraft World Hotel and the Escape the Nether rollercoaster are confirmed for the Minecraft experience at Chessington World of Adventures Resort, and are set to open their doors at some point next year, Merlin Entertainments and Mojang Studios announced.

Check out all the new Minecraft World images and photos in the slideshow below.

Concept art already released for Minecraft World features wooden houses, Creepers, TNT blocks, and even a Nether dining area. Expect interactive adventures, blockbuilt playscapes, and themed retail.

For more, check out everything announced at Minecraft LIVE.

Minecraft developer Mojang has announced that the Sift is coming to Java and Bedrock Edition in 2027 — the game's first new dimension in over 14 years.

As revealed at Minecraft LIVE September 2026, the Sift, which had been announced for upcoming dungeon crawler Minecraft Dungeons 2, is also coming to Minecraft Java and Bedrock Edition next year. It joins the Overworld, The Nether, and The End as Minecraft’s official fourth dimension.

Today at Minecraft LIVE: Dungeons II, our first new dimension in more than 14 years, new ways for creators to build, Minecraft on Nintendo Switch 2, and more.

More than 300,000 people play Minecraft for the first time on an average day. After 17+ years and 425M+ copies sold, I… pic.twitter.com/fdhkwuh258

— ASHA (@asha_shar) September 26, 2026

Mojang said next to nothing about the Sift in terms of how it will work in vanilla during Minecraft LIVE, and only teased how it will look during the stream. Here's Mojang's official blurb on the Sift, which briefly touched on the new mob which we can see in the image above.

Minecraft LIVE revealed that the newest Minecraft dimension isn’t just finding its home in Dungeons II, it’ll also be coming to Minecraft Java & Bedrock Edition next year. This will be the first new dimension in over 14 years – joining the Overworld, the Nether and the End as our fourth dimension. During the broadcast, you got a glimpse into this dimension in Minecraft – and even one of the mobs that calls it home. But surely that’s not enough! Luckily you can experience it for yourself in Minecraft Dungeons II – coming September 29, 2026.

Perhaps we should look to the Sift in Minecraft Dungeons 2 to get a sense of what to expect. In the dungeon crawler, the Sift is described as "beautiful, vibrant, and teeming with souls." It features new biomes such as the Meadow and the Carapace.

For more, check out everything announced at Minecraft LIVE.