The Silent Hill Townfall X-Ray puzzle has you taking X-Rays of a patient's skull and chest. You'll need to align the machine and find the correct kV, mA and time settings to get it to work, using some instructions and a table to understand what to do. Like the Townfall blood pressure, pulse and O2 puzzle before this, there is a lot to read and try to keep in your brain as you fiddle with machines. Below is the short version to help you get through it all quickly.

How to start taking the X-Ray in Silent Hill Townfall

The first thing you'll need to do when taking an X-Ray is turn the computer on and move the image up to find the skull, as shown above. You won't see the head as it's under the cloth but you'll see some small white squares you can align with the camera image. You'll know you're in the right place when it says Patient Skull - Aligned.

Now you need to turn the X-Ray machine on using the power switch on the control panel but before you can do anything else you'll need to check the X-Ray Dosage Table on the laptop in the other room. That will give you these figures:

To X-Ray the skull you now need to set the various dials on the control panel to these values for the skull:

• Site - Skull
• kV - 3
• Time - 1
• mA - 7

That should look like this on the panel itself:

If you've got it all set up right you can then press the green X-Ray button to take the picture and trigger the next stage.

How to take the chest X-Ray in Silent Hill Townfall

With the skull X-Ray taken you'll now have to take a picture of the chest. Use the camera again to first to move the machine down and align its view with the lower set of white squares around the panel with the wire going in, as shown above.

Now, using the X-Ray Dosage Table from the laptop, you want to set the dials to these values:

• Site - Chest
• kV - 7
• Time - 1.2
• mA - 3

That should like this in the instrument panel:

Get all the dials in the right place, then press the green button to take the shot and if it's all set up right you'll be able to collect hard copies of the pictures from a printer at the back of the room. You can now place these on the light box on the wall in the other room to relay what they show to the doctor on the intercom. Once that's done you'll now have to find the infusion drugs in Silent Hill Townfall. This is a lengthy and dangerous stealth heavy section, where you'll have to explore several floors of a large building to find what you need.

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The scales puzzle in Silent Hill Townfall sees you searching for three things to place into three scales in the clinic, with a cryptic clue as to the order to put things in. When you first find this set up you'll only have one of the items you need, and will have to visit two different places to get the remaining things before you can work out what goes where. It's the first of the longer puzzles in the game, with some travel involved and a couple of sub-puzzles to clear to get what you need. So here's everything you need to do and where to go.

What is the scale puzzle in Townfall?

The scales puzzle is found in the Z Ellis office in the Clinic, the same room where you get the Townfall clinic reception door code. There are three scales on boxes directly in front of the door as you enter, and the note you see above just to the left.

The key bits that matter in the note are the underlined sections:

• I didn't listen closely enough
• I made mistakes and couldn't focus on the task at hand
• I'm not fit to work in this role any longer

The last underlined phrase, 'Please show me you understand' is your call to action, telling you to show Zoe you know what these three clues mean by eventually placing some relevant objects in each scale. However, you need to find everything first...

How to get what you need for the scales puzzle in Townfall

When you reach the scale puzzle, the only thing you will have for it is Zoe's ID card, which you got from solving the Silent Hill Townfall organ box puzzle. That is the answer to the 'I'm not fit to work in this role any longer' clue and can go in the third and final scale.

The two other items you need relate to clues you get nearby in the clinic. Firstly, when you check the computer in the same room as the scales and read the 'Where are you' email you'll see Jess's flat added to your map. Then, secondly, you'll get the Pharmacy added to the map when you check the reception answerphone you can find after using the Townfall clinic reception door code found on the same computer. Both are shown on the map above.

You can do these two new objectives in any order. If you go to the pharmacy you'll need use the scalpel to get in, and then find the Silent Hill Townfall pharmacy locker code. We have that guide to cover things in more detail, but you basically need to get numbers off the posters you can find on the walls, while using the TV signal to put them in order for the combination. That will get you an incorrect prescription for 'I made mistakes'.

Going to Jess's flat is more or less a fetch quest to get a broken stethoscope you can find on the bed for 'I didn't listen'. You'll need to use the scalpel to open the gate to St Amelia's Park, and you'll have to stop off at number 16 (shown below) to get Jess's backdoor key along the way:

The back door key can be found on the table by the window in the upstairs flat. Once you have the key, you can get in to Jess's Flat around the back.

It's also worth noting that there is a lock box in the ground floor flat at No 16, and a lock box key in the kitchen drawer at Jess's flat - so remember to pick up the key and open the box on the way back.

Where to place items in the scales in Townfall

Once you have the stethoscope and the prescription to go with the ID card you got earlier, you can solve the scales puzzle using the information on the note to put each one in the right place:

1. I didn't listen closely enough / stethoscope
2. I made mistakes / incorrect prescription
3. I'm not fit to work in this role / Zoe's ID

As soon as you place the final item, a short cutscene will play and then you'll progress to the next part of the game. I won't say any more than that so as not to spoil anything but you will face a couple more puzzles fair soon after, including trying to open Jane's Shed and finding some blood pressure, pulse and O2 reading in Townfall.

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The Silent Hill Townfall vital signs puzzle sees you finding blood pressure, heart rate and 02 for a doctor on an intercom. However, there are multiple machines to reach, and an array of numbers to choose from. And, every time you pick the wrong machine you take damage. To get the answers you need means reading the instructions for each machine on a laptop to find out which ones are wrong, and using that to find the right numbers to pass on to the doctor. Here's how to do that.

How to get the blood pressure in Townfall

Key to finding the blood pressure, and any other readings you need, is to check the laptop in the corner. Go there and into the Equipment Overview menu and read the Valentudo View S-100 option.

This is the instruction manual for the vital signs machine and it will tell you to 'disregard values outside of 70/100 mmHg' for blood pressure. These are the green systolic and diastolic figures on the lefthand side of the display, so look for anything that fits that range and interact with that machine. It was the values shown above for me, although they seem to alternate between 71/39and 70/40.

How to find the pulse in Silent Hill Townfall

When the doctor asks for the heart rate or pulse you'll see that the Valentudo View S-100 details on the laptop say that 'Heart Rate (BPM) values outside of 40 to 160 BPM are often inaccurate'. So you need to find a machine with a yellow number for the pulse reading that fits outside those values. For me that was the machine showing a 161, although it changed to 162 when I reported it.

How to get the O2 in Townfall

If you check the Valentudo View S-100 option in Equipment Overview on the laptop for blood oxygen it says that 'SpO2 (%) values under 75% are unreliable', so you need to find a machine with a red SpO2 (%) number to fit that. I used the machine showing at 81%, which changed to 80% when I reported it.

Once you've reported all three values you'll then open up the next room, and have to move on to solve the Silent Hill Townfall X-ray puzzle, which is a whole other thing but still involves reading instructions to work out what to do.

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After six years of Genshin Impact, I've settled into a comfy rhythm and rarely have strong enough feelings to commit them to print, but new 5-star Vesna is the kind of character I've wanted for ages. I am hootin' and hollerin', by which I mean I am telling my boss, and now you, about her.

Vesna is one of two newly released 5-star characters in Genshin Impact update 7.1, opposite Vodyanitsa, who is one of Vesna's best teammates. She's a fae warrior, and an on-field damage-dealing character who specializes in the new Stellar Swirl reaction introduced with Snezhnaya.

Vodyanitsa is a solid support character, but Vesna is something else. Granted, her play style is very similar to Zibai, a Lunar Crystallize DPS character released in the Nod-Krai arc. You activate her skill to enter a special stance, use normal attacks to build up a resource, and then use that resource to launch powerful elemental skills, weaving in an elemental burst whenever you can (ideally before your final three skills).

I like Zibai, so obviously I like Vesna. I'm also attracted to power in games like this, so it helps that Vesna has been rated by many reputable Genshin theorycrafters as one of the strongest DPS characters in the game, if not the singular best for some team and build assumptions.

But what really pushes Vesna over the top is her movement utility. This is the first Genshin Impact character to fly so fast and so freely out in the open world. Chasca, another Anemo flyer, has nothing on Vesna, even with Natlan's regional bonuses supporting her.

If you hold a dash or jump on Vesna, she'll unfurl her wings and take off, able to cover surprising distances and quickly ascend before running out of stamina. In Snezhnaya, you can also swap to Vesna, and only Vesna, mid-air to instantly begin flying and regenerate a chunk of stamina.

Genshin Impact is just a different game now. For context, Xianyun is one of the weakest limited 5-star characters in the game today, but she's also one of my most-used simply because her triple-jump skill is incredibly fun and useful for exploration. Chaining Xianyun's jump into Vesna's glide in Snezhnaya is utterly transformative, and even in other regions where Vesna can't be swapped into like this, her flight time is astounding.

Exploration is a pillar of the Genshin experience, and Vesna is literally never leaving my exploration party from now on. At least not until Genshin releases, I don't know, Anemo Spider-Man. But frankly, it's hard to imagine exploration getting much breezier than this. I've played a lot of Mavuika, Sandrone, Varesa, Xilonen, Yelan, Kazuha, and all the other exploration standouts barring Wanderer. Nobody comes close. I've never had this much fun just roaming around Genshin, and I don't think I could recommend a character more strongly.

Nodusfall isn't a gacha game, Mihoyo confirms, because unlike Genshin Impact you'll unlock characters "through continued play" instead.

Amy Hennig had a plan for Uncharted 4, and it's still hard for some people to accept they'll never quite know what it was. Over 10 years later, we at least have enough scattered details from former Naughty Dog developers and self-appointed fan detectives to help us form a compelling, although incomplete, picture.

The latest insight on Amy Hennig's Uncharted 4 comes from ex-Naughty Dog visual effects artist Matt Radford, who joined the studio during Hennig's apparently tortured production of the roguish adventure. He tells Kiwi Talkz in a new interview available to Insider Gaming App Premium Plus subscribers that he remembers Hennig's game as "very different, very different" from what The Last of Us director Neil Druckmann ultimately helped ship in 2016.

"Amy's vision for the game that I saw didn't have the same characters," says Radford, explaining that protagonist Nathan Drake's older, thieving brother "Sam was the villain." We've heard this before, with Hennig herself saying in 2019 that, "There was an antagonistic element to Sam in the final version of [Uncharted 4], but it wasn't right there from the outset. So we kind of, in my story, it was a little bit more of the journey from this ghost from Drake's past being an antagonist to sort of reconciliation and reunification."

"The DNA and the core story were all there," Hennig said about Uncharted 4. "The major differences had to do with like, I was introducing the idea of Sam as the brother. But my take on it was sort of different, that it was a little bit more – I mean I wouldn't call him the antagonist in the classic sense, but it was an antagonistic force in Drake's life that he then had to reconcile."

Earlier this year, an Uncharted 4: A Thief's End dataminer Michael Kemp cleaned up some evidence of what this alternate version of the game would have looked like. Kemp, or Thekempy on YouTube, had exhumed scenes of what he said "didn't seem to be related to anything I recognized. References to levels that didn't exist, things in the story that didn't happen." There was more shipwreck exploring with Nathan's wife Elena and less gun violence. Sounds like a good day to me.

Radford recalls about the early days of Uncharted 4, which began production some time around Uncharted 3 released in 2011, "I remember we built this green light demo for Uncharted 4 and it ran at like one FPS on like a PC." He thought the game "was just like crazy scrappy back then."

"And Amy's vision seemed cool,” he added. "Like, to be honest, it seemed cool." But the visual effects artist is ultimately happy with the definitive, Druckmann version of the game, which might never enjoy the same social cachet as Amy Hennig's unreleased Uncharted 4. It was nonetheless a strong entry in a strong adventure series.

Now, Radford says, "I just want to see Amy have her comeback." He says – over 10 years later from what could have been – "You know, when are we going to get Amy's games? She's really talented." Hennig is currently working on the delayed Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra after coming up with the story concept for Forspoken, Square Enix's tedious 2023 action-RPG. But while Hennig is still trying to rebuild her name in the gaming industry, many Uncharted 4 fans just want to rebuild her game.

"This game sucks": Former Uncharted 4 dev says a mystery Naughty Dog project was torn apart by corporate, leading to threats of pulled funding and a huge leadership shake-up.

Even as Fallout has evolved into a mega-franchise with massively popular open-world games and TV show spin-offs, certain elements of the original 1997 RPG remain – things like the SPECIAL stat system and the iconic Vault Boy mascot. As it turns out, these two creations were very closely related.

Fallout was originally meant to use the Generic Universal Role-Playing System (GURPS), a tabletop RPG system published by Steve Jackson Games. In this iteration, Fallout had a bunch of different characteristics between skills, advantages, disadvantages, and quirks, all of which had to be rendered in a way the player could understand at a glance.

"For every single one of those characteristics, we had to make an icon, because the game used the icons when the skill or advantage or disadvantage was displayed," OG Fallout lead Tim Cain explains in a new YouTube video. "We used an icon next to its name so that later on, if something happened related to that skill in places we didn't have a lot of room for text, we could use the icon."

The work of creating all those icons fell to an artist named Arlene Summers, whose contributions to this original version of Fallout have apparently gone largely uncredited for all these years. "I think there were over a hundred, maybe close to 200 when you summed up all the different things," Cain says.

Cain was starting to lose his color vision around this time, so he encouraged Summers not to use color as a differentiator for the icons. It started to become more and more difficult to create icons that were distinct enough from each other to tell them apart at a glance – which was the whole point of the icons in the first place.

The solution came from art director Leonard Boyarsky. "Leonard had the idea that the skilldex – where we had the title and the description – instead of putting the icon there, we do a cartoon of somebody performing the action or looking like the attribute that was in question," Cain explains. "He even referenced Monopoly, the rich uncle Pennybags, and he created it. He sketched it up and we all thought it was really cool."

Artist George Almond further refined the Vault Boy design, and the job of actually drawing all the final Vault Boy icons fell to fellow artist Tramell Ray Isaac "He drew hundreds of these things," Cain says. "If you're going through Fallout, they appear in the skilldex. They're all over the manual. They're in the opening cinematic. And now, of course, it's on mugs and bobbleheads and all kinds of things. It was a really creative thing he did."

Famously, however, Vault Boy is part of why Fallout had to drop the GURPS system, as it was one of the key issues Steve Jackson himself took issue with. According to a 1998 PC Gamer feature, Jackson didn't like the violence in the opening cinematic, the small-scale characters, or the Monopoly-inspired Vault Boy. Cain expands on those objections a bit in the video.

"Among other things that Steve Jackson Games didn't like about Fallout was Vault Boy," Cain says. "They specifically singled out Vault Boy as needing to be removed. They didn't like it. We explained the Monopoly reference. They didn't like it. They thought it tonally didn't fit. Keep in mind, we already had done the cinematic and they didn't like it there. There's other things in the cinematic they didn't like, but they didn't like Vault Boy there either."

Unwilling to accept these kinds of demands, the devs ditched GURPS in favor of their own home-grown stat system, and eventually, SPECIAL was born. So, in a way, Jackson's objections to Fallout accidentally gave us two of the series' most iconic legacies.

Where would the best Fallout games be without Vault Boy?

The Witcher 3 Remastered is coming to all players as a free update on September 29, and new footage from developer CD Projekt Red suggests you'll want to take a close look at what settings you have enabled, because I fear some details and atmosphere may be lost in translation.

CDPR posted a new side-by-side comparison for The Witcher 3 and its upcoming remaster on its channels, and boy has it stoked some conversation. The clip sees Geralt torching a group of Drowners in a swamp with a flame spell, both pre- and post-remaster.

I hate to say it, and I'm surprised to say it given how good the remaster has appeared in footage until now, but the new version looks worse to me. With zero hyperbole, I had the "before" and "after" clips mixed up for several seconds, to the point that I checked CDPR's YouTube and Twitter to make sure the studio hadn't made a mistake in the labels.

The caveat here is that we don't know the exact graphics settings or hardware environment that were used for these side-by-side clips. Maybe some elements were disabled to emphasize others. The video also comes with a disclaimer: "Work in progress. Does not represent the final look of the game." But we are just days away from the remaster's launch, so I don't know how much work is left.

A few changes stand out. The skin and muscle of the Drowners feels less detailed, not necessarily because it is – you can see the same creases and patterns if you look close, though they do seem scalier in the original – but perhaps because of the bizarrely glossy, metallic shine they have in the remastered clip. Either these are rare Chrome Drowners or GPUs have gone too far.

The fire effect lingering on the Drowners arguably looks more realistic in the new version, but it feels less powerful to me – artificial, less like an inferno and more like a torch. In the new version, it looks like there is fire on them; in the OG, they look to be on fire. The remastered clip also doesn't have the same fiery, scarlet reflections in the water, which is strange given how gorgeous the updated water is otherwise. The lighting on the plants, which are certainly lush, also seems less affected by the fire itself in the remaster.

Maybe this is a function of when during the in-game day these clips were recorded, but the original Witcher 3 has more noticeable fog and a rich, dusky atmosphere with a warm redness to it, while the remaster feels almost sterile in its path traced brightness. Combined with the missing fire reflections, the new version feels a bit washed out, and this is worryingly close to the color shortage and vibrancy famine that we've seen in some other remasters as well as modern AAA games.

I look at this clip and I feel a clash of contrast. A lot of individual components might look better up close in the remaster, but when you pull back and see the whole canvas, the original game looks more cohesive to me, not to mention more saturated. Maybe that will change when I'm actually in, and accustomed to, the remastered game world, but a lot of these differences feel pretty empirical. I have a pretty beefy PC, so I would definitely throw this remaster under the microscope when we get it in our hands.

Many other people seem to feel the same. "Why removing the colours and the fog?" replies one Twitter user. "Hope you add those sparkles and reflection you did a great job," says a YouTube viewer. "Lighting and Clarity in the latest looks great , but I really liked the red glow/filter (idk) in the before," agrees another.

CD Projekt Red has now moved on from its in-house REDengine and adopted Unreal Engine 5 for The Witcher 4, but co-CEO Michał Nowakowski says that wasn't due to the technical issues that Cyberpunk 2077 ran into.

What's new in The Witcher 3 Remastered?

The battle pass reaper has come for Arc Raiders. In the Frozen Trail update out October 8, developer Embark's hit extraction shooter will introduce a new "rewards pass" with free and paid tiers of loot.

"The Frozen Trail Reward Pass consists of 60 levels of in-game rewards, and two tracks: the Free Pass, available to all players who own the base game, and the Premium Pass," Embark explains in a press release.

If you complete the full pass and unlock every reward, you'll earn more than enough raider tokens to purchase another pass, assuming the pass price stays fixed. It's currently unclear if or when the pass will expire.

"The Premium Pass can be unlocked via the in-game store for 1,150 Raider Tokens, or via the Frozen Trail Collector Set store bundle, and includes 50 additional rewards, including exclusive Raider cosmetics and 1,150 additional Raider Tokens," Embark adds. "This brings the total of Raider Tokens available for completing the Reward Pass across both Free and Premium Tracks to 1,350."

In other words, if you're an avid player, you should be able to buy the premium pass just by using tokens you've accumulated and, by completing passes, profit tokens in the long run.

The premium rewards pass is also included with Arc Raiders' newest paid DLC, the Frozen Trail collector set, which, Embark says, comes with "exclusive cosmetic items including the Renzo outfit, plus Dragon's Breath Weapon Stencil, Bob Hair Style, as well as 2,400 Raider Tokens."

In a video showcasing Frozen Trail, product director Gerardo Basurto describes reward passes as a "new progression mechanic" and an "evolution of Raider Decks," Arc Raiders' existing reward track.

Basurto says the free tier of the pass "gives you access to all of the basic cosmetics, so you get all of the outfits." The premium tier adds special toggles like outfit color variants, hair styles, backpacks, and new weapon skins called "stencils."

In a press release, Embark shares a little more detail on weapon stencils: "The update introduces a new system for customizing the appearance of weapons, granting distinct aesthetics (weapon stats are unaffected). Weapon Stencils can be acquired in various ways, and once learned and consumed Raiders will have the permanent ability to apply them to any compatible weapon."

Additionally, Embark says the premium pass only contains cosmetic items.

At a virtual preview event attended by GamesRadar+, executive producer Aleksander Grøndal explains, "The premium path of the reward pass, that is purely cosmetics and things that make you look different. It will be some weapon stencils, it will be new customization toggles for the cosmetics that you get in the free tier, and it will be more premium currency, amongst others. But all of this is just vanity and cosmetics, so no kind of gameplay advantage for those players who decide to upgrade into the premium tier."

Everything we know about Arc Raiders Frozen Trail.

Arc Raiders' big Frozen Trail update, out October 8, includes a new endgame crafting grind called "weapon amplification," and it sounds like a game-changer.

Tied to a new research bench found in your expanded raider outpost, weapon amplification lets you add unique functions and attachments to, for now, 15 different weapons. You can upgrade a Renegade rifle with a scope (!), make the Burletta pistol fully automatic, or build a Rattler rifle that shoots incendiary rounds, for example.

In the absence of an Arc Raiders PvE mode, Embark says one goal with this system is for players to lean into PvP or PvE with their upgrade choices.

In a new Frozen Trail reveal video, Embark explains that amplified weapons are made by splicing Arc tech with gunsmithing. "An amplified weapon is kind of like the fifth quality level, except that it doesn't give you stats inherently, it instead upgrades a branching path for you where you can select different modules that change and amplify the behavior of the weapon in different ways," a developer says.

At a recent virtual preview event, I asked executive producer Aleksander Grøndal if Embark expects weapon amplification to make PvP fights shorter by lowering the time-to-kill. He says amplified weapons aren't meant to be demonstrably stronger, and Embark has been careful not to buff the already top-performing weapons. Instead, the aim is to make more weapons more interesting and give players additional PvP and PvE options for loadouts.

"I expect PvP to be more varied in terms of what's a valuable item or weapon to use," Grøndal explains. "What we see in PvP is that it's dominated by a certain group of weapons, in terms of, that's what lowers the TTK. A lot of the weapon amplification that we're doing isn't necessarily to make the top end of those weapons perform even better at what they're already really good at. Rather, give you other weapons that can perform well, and give you other choices to have in PvP.

"And with the weapon amplification system, there's also choices that you have to make where certain weapons can take one direction or the other," he continues. "Typically, that would mean certain things in terms of how good a weapon would be in PvP versus how useful it will be against Arc, for instance. So we could see more variety in how to play, and that is kind of the goal with the amplification system, not necessarily just adding pure output power to the top-end weapons."

A big question hanging over weapon amplification, which Embark has yet to fully answer, is how the resource grind works. My understanding is that certain items in the world are worth research points, and you spend those back at the research bench to unlock weapon options, among a suite of other new features.

My hope is that amplifying weapons isn't so costly that it feels like it's not worth the effort. If the economy is right, it could add a lot of life and a fun endgame pursuit to Arc Raiders. If nothing else, it should be fun to craft, save, and finally uncork the good stuff for special Arc fights or events.

Everything we know about Arc Raiders Frozen Trail.

The Arc Raiders Frozen Trail update has been announced, bringing new weapons, a new map, new Arc enemies, and plenty more besides. It's been a long time since the last major update for Arc Raiders after an intentional choice was made to slow down the rate of content updates, but now it looks as though Embark is making the most of that pause to bring back what is arguably the largest update for the game that we've ever seen.

Below, I'll take you through everything you need to know about the Frozen Trail update for Arc Raiders, including all the new content, the release date planned, and what you can expect from this next era of the robot-fighting extraction shooter.

What is the release date and time for the Arc Raiders Frozen Trail update?

The Frozen Trail 2.0 update will be a free content patch for Arc Raiders that goes live on October 8, 2026. No comment yet has been made about what time during the day that will be, but historically patches for Arc Raiders have had a habit of going live roughly around 3:00AM PDT / 6:00AM EDT / 11:00AM BST.

Everything revealed in the Frozen Trail update for Arc Raiders

A huge amount of content is being added to Arc Raiders in the Frozen Trail, much of it focused around a new snowy location that players will be able to explore and loot. We'll quickly go through everything here, before going into further detail below.

• New Map: Pendola Pass
  • A large, snowy, mountainous map in the shadow of a fallen "Emperor" Arc Robot, with a variety of playstyles, a focus on verticality, and occasionally afflicted by "Flash Freeze" weather conditions that force players to take shelter.
• New Minor Map Condition: Redirection
  • Specific to Pendola Pass, players can call in Harvester payloads from the Collector, prompting both PvE and PvP conflict.
• New Enemies
  • Frigate
  • Bully
  • Skulker
  • Hydra
• New Weapons
  • "Stiletto" Battle Rifle
  • "Bantam" Revolver
• New Gadgets / Tools
  • Grappling Hook
  • Tether Launcher
  • Yank Grenade
• New Instruments
  • Banjo
  • Harmonica
• New Feature: Weapon Amplification
  • A new system wherein players can upgrade weapons further and modify them.
• New Feature: Weapon Stencils
  • Allows players to customize weapon appearance and aesthetic without affecting their stats.
• New Feature: Outposts
  • Customisable player bases and homes that players can craft/acquire items to display in.
• New Feature: Skill Tree update
  • New skills are being added to the Skill Trees, with others being modified or rebalanced.
• New Feature: Camera
  • A handheld camera gadget that players can bring into missions to take photos with.
• New Quests
  • Frozen Trail will add new quests, as well as quests with optional objectives for bonus XP rewards.
• New Trials
  • Trials Season 6 will be kicked off with the Frozen Trail update.
• New "Frozen Trail" Reward / Battle Pass
  • A two track battle pass of in-game rewards, with a free pass that includes all Cosmetics, and a Premium Pass that includes everything.
• Frozen Trail Collector Set DLC
  • A DLC Bundle with new cosmetics will be added to the game on the same day, costing 2400 Raider Tokens.

Some elements have been explained in more detail while others are still yet to be revealed, such as the upcoming changes to the Skill Tree. Still, we'll go over all the biggest elements to come below.

New Map: Pendola Pass

The new Arc Raiders map is a snowy, mountain region specifically based around a giant, dead "Emperor" Arc walker robot. The map is specifically meant to push a wide range of gameplay styles, with both enclosed spaces for close quarters, open spaces for long-range, and a mention of verticality.

The map also includes its own unique weather condition: Flash Freeze, unpredictable moments of cold which will force players to take refuge indoors (or even in Avalanche Shelters) or else be negatively hit by the cold.

Pendola Pass is also the only map where players will be able to experience the New Minor Map Condition: Redirection, where players can call in an Arc Raiders Harvester away from the Queen, but in so doing draw the attention of both Arc robots and players.

New enemies

The Frozen Trail update comes with four new Arc enemies, though one is less of a traditional enemy and more of an event.

• Frigate. Described as a "pirate ship", the Frigate is a massive endgame challenge, less of a traditional enemy and more of a flying carrier vehicle wherein players will have to get on top and navigate various hazards to obtain the loot it's carrying. The Frigate cannot be killed, only sabotaged.
• Bully. A four-legged walker similar in size to a Leaper but with a turret on top, these squat enemies charge at you in relentless offense, described as "in your face" and "relentless".
• Skulker. A small, opportunistic enemy that uses stealth to hide from the player, take a few pot shots at them from a distance, then hide again. It's a fast, stealthy sniper that you need to listen out for as much as anything else.
• Hydra. A floating weapons platform similar in look to a Shredder, the Hydra has three pairs of gun turrets that can all target individual enemies separately, meaning that there's a viable strategy in diverting its attention among groups.

New weapons

The Frozen Trail adds two new weapons for players to use, each of which has a clear niche.

• Stiletto. A light ammo battle rifle designed for medium-to-long range, and better for PvE than PvP.
• Bantam. A snub-nosed revolver with a unique fire-from-the-hip animation, designed as an alternative to the Anvil, a popular favourite among the Arc Raiders weapons.

New gadgets and tools

There are four new gadgets and tools being added to Arc Raiders with Frozen Trail, assuming you include the Camera.

• Grappling Hook. An alternative to the Snap Hook, the grappling hook is a hand-thrown rope and hook that lets you rappel, swing, climb or even tether to enemies and be dragged along behind them.
• Tether Launcher. A device that fires two tethers attached by a wire. When both are fired, they pull together, allowing you to drag enemies or other players around.
• Yank Grenade. A thrown version of the Tether Launcher, that fires a wire at the nearest character from where it detonates and pulls them towards it. Can be used to smash Arc enemies or pull players out of cover.

Outposts

Outposts are a new form of progression being added in Frozen Trail, where players will be given a new base that they can customize and make their own, including crafting furniture and cosmetics from items found on missions.

Weapon Amplification

Frozen Trail adds a new system for upgrading guns called "Weapon Amplification", in which players will get a new workbench for their base where they can research upgrades for certain guns, then build those upgrades with materials found on missions.

These are different to weapon mods or levelling up guns in that these are more about specializing than general improvements (as as converting weapons to fully automatic or adding incendiary rounds). It's also been revealed that not every weapon in the game will immediately be viable for Amplification: when the update is released, only 15 of them will compatible with this new feature.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Arc Raiders Frozen Trail is the biggest update yet and a "2.0" milestone for the game, developer Embark Studios says.

Embark buries the lede in a press release covering today's Frozen Trail reveal. "ARC Raiders’ Frozen Trail 2.0 update will be available on October 8," it reads.

Arc Raiders only just released update 1.47.0. The jump to 2.0 is significant, marking a new era for the game with implications of a soft relaunch. Many players were hoping for a major shift after several quiet months saw the game slow and deflate after an enormous launch last year.

There's a lot in Frozen Trail: a big new map, four new Arcs, two new guns, 15 weapons updated with wild customization options, an Outpost base to decorate, skill tree changes, and quite a bit more.

Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal discussed the scope of the update and Embark's plans for the future at a preview event attended by GamesRadar+.

"We're finalizing the update, I think the team is kind of sitting here working on that today," he says. "We have the end of polish today, which means that most of the things needs to be done today, so I think they're a bit stressed out. Things are looking good, though, and I think if you take a look at where we were when we did the monthly updates and where we are today, we feel a lot better about what we're putting out and what quality we're putting into the updates. I think the team feels good about that.

"Of course, it's scary every time we do a big update. To me, the best way to describe it is that it almost feels like we're shipping the game again because I kind of get flashbacks to last year when we were in this very same position trying to make the game complete. So it becomes almost scarier in a way because the updates are larger and more complicated to execute. But overall I think the team is pretty happy and excited to share what we've been working on for, basically, since May of this year, and I'm also excited."

Under Arc Raiders' new update cadence, we're now looking at roughly one Frozen Trail-sized update every six months. "That is approximately what we're targeting," Grøndal affirms. "We haven't really set the dates for our next update yet, but we have planned it out, and we are starting the work on that.

"I think we want to keep that to roughly about the same as we said. That's the plan so far, and hopefully we can take great learnings from looking at how the reception is with Frozen Trail, and also include some learnings there [for] the next update. So we are feeling good about it."

You may not know the name Luke Muscat, but you've almost definitely played his games before. He was a team lead and designer on Fruit Ninja – you know, the one where you swipe at various fruits on the screen for hours on end – and he designed Jetpack Joyride, among other zany releases. His latest is a solo venture, and it's a completely ridiculous spin on golf.

It's called Normal Golf Game, because, well, it's a normal golf game, right? You hop onto the course for a nice, relaxing 18 holes. The birds are singing, there's a gentle breeze, it's all very quaint.

So long as you don't try to leave. The rules are pretty lax – you can tee from anywhere and it doesn't really matter where you send your ball. But you shouldn't try to go home. That's bad.

It's only been out two days, and reviews are already 98% Very Positive on Steam.

To accompany the release, Muscat put up a YouTube video called "My game is out and I have to stop doing this," where he discusses making Normal Golf Game and why it marks a change for how he approaches his creative endeavors.

"This is working myself into oblivion until I'm burning myself on every single project," he says.

"That's what needs to stop," he continues. "That's what I can't keep doing on every release. And I feel like I say that on every release, and I would still do it. And I would say on this game, this is undoubtedly the hardest I've ever worked on any game in the last 20 years of my career."

He admits a little bit of him is "proud of that," because he enjoys burning the midnight oil. "I care about my games, but I know it's unsustainable," he comments.

I imagine a great many developers across the medium can relate to what he's saying. You want the thing to be great, and you wind up sacrificing a little too much of yourself to get it there. Elsewhere, he says outright that he thought releasing this was "putting this game out to die." That's a very relatable kind of anxiety

Normal Golf Game has a bunch of bundles with other, equally milquetoast golfing sims on Steam. Give them a look if you'd like Muscat to know he's scored an eagle here.

"Just buy the game on Steam": Indie publisher behind a recent banger that sold 300k copies in its first week warns against key resellers after canceling hundreds of scalped keys.

When Blizzard first unveiled World of Warcraft: Forever during BlizzCon 2026, many fans saw it as the MMO developer's answer to their Classic+ prayers – and, according to world builder Matthew Armstrong, it sounds like it basically is just that.

The dev goes into detail on who Forever is truly "for" in a lengthy new thread on Twitter, saying that he had a very particular type of player in mind while helping design Blizzard's revamped take on its 2004 gem: the hardened Classic fan who didn't feel satisfied with the non-retail version and how it deviated from the original game.

"I'm seeing a lot of discourse about who WoW: Forever is being made for," he writes. "While I cannot speak for anyone else on the team I can speak for myself. I am making WoW: Forever for the Classic gamer and for the millions of people who have had their accounts lapse over the years because they were not satisfied with changes that were made to the game. Whether those changes were to the art style, the story, social aspects, game design, or changes to their favorite class."

World of Warcraft: Forever is no retail, that's for sure. "I did not spend the last year of my life relearning and mastering how to do things like we did it 20+ years ago for retail players," as the world builder puts it.

"I could have taken it easy and just kept doing things like I had done for the past eight years on retail… because I was much more familiar with it and it actually takes a lot less time to do (height maps on textures do a ton of heavy lifting)."

And, as Armstrong points out, "because the reality is that the majority of retail players wouldn't care and would probably actually prefer it." That's not what he did, though.

"I felt I had a duty to uphold an artistic vision and integrity that millions of people expect from us" – both players and fellow devs "past and present who worked on it over 20 years ago." He wanted to "create something that resembled their work.

That's what Forever is – an Old School RuneScape-style upgrade to the original World of Warcraft MMO many folks know inside out and love. And, Armstrong clarifies that it's not a diss aimed at fans of the retail version.

He simply "wanted to make Forever as authentic of a vanilla experience as possible," which is "wildly different" than retail, obviously. There are three "sayings" he says he's followed throughout development, too.

"Convenience is the death of the journey" is the first – which checks out. Then, "If you're making a game for everyone then you're making it for no one." Again, that aligns well with what Armstrong says regarding Classic and retail fans. Finally, "Every change we make incurs a debt to the authenticity of the game and sooner or later that debt will be paid." I suppose Classic (and all the Classic+ requests) proves this point.

"These are my core beliefs and I had a specific group of people I was targeting with my work," he concludes. "These beliefs cannot be shaken and I will try to hold the line against anything that goes against them and will continue to pester the team about things that feel out of place."

Armstrong does still hope World of Warcraft: Forever "will pull in as many people as possible," Classic, retail, or otherwise.

"I hope you can all remember what made this game so special in the first place and that starts with understanding why we are so passionate about keeping it authentic."

I certainly do, and judging by the comments, it's safe to say the majority of players do.

"You can't tell me this isn't WoW 2": Blizzard says World of Warcraft doesn't need a sequel thanks to Forever, but MMO fans say it already made one.

As of now, messaging platform Discord operates under an age "assurance" system that automatically sorts you in either an adult, teen, or unconfirmed age group based on context, like how long you've had your account and what servers you're a part of. It's the best co-founder and chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy could do after apologizing in February for the whole thing.

Now, most of what Discord is incorporating in its age assurance policy is what Vishnevskiy outlined in his February confession. As the CTO said then, Discord will restrict teen accounts by doing things like blurring sensitive messages and removing access to Stage channels. If you've been wrongly labeled a teen account, you can correct it with true age verification – providing things like a photo of your government-issued ID to one of Discord's age verification vendors.

This inherently invasive process of age verification – plus, the mystery of what third parties really do with your data – is what initially frightened Discord users and led to Vishnevskiy's self-effacing letter. But, strategically, Vishnevskiy never committed to ditching age assurance, or to doing a substantial rework. A lot of what Discord has just launched is exactly as described in Vishnevskiy's last attempt at "transparency."

The CEO repeats in a new blog, "More than 90% of you won't be asked to confirm your age." He also reiterates that he knows, "Any form of age assurance, and the possibility of sharing something biometric or an ID, is a controversial topic. Rightfully so, because of what it represents and where internet legislation around the world is heading: toward a more gated internet."

"This is bigger than us," Vishnevskiy concedes. But he suggests Discord has no choice but to analyze your personal data, since, "Laws requiring age assurance are expanding around the world. Rather than waiting to be told how to do it, we're launching our own privacy-preserving approach."

Vishnevskiy knows, "No model is perfect, and ours is going to make mistakes, though we believe our model performs as accurately as other available methods. [...] We'll keep learning and continue working to improve the model over time, even as the misses inevitably make their way into memes and social posts."

"In February, the only methods we'd planned for to confirm your age were facial age estimation or an ID scan," the CTO says, but "based on your feedback, we committed to giving you more options that meet our high privacy standards." So, "depending on factors such as your region or device, you may" also be able to prove your age using credit card information, your age range as recorded by the Apple App Store, and a passkey from the website AgeKey.

Vishnevskiy seems to anticipate what you're thinking at this point – everything is getting worse, and every single tech vampire wants to drain my data. But you're going to have to get over it.

"I grew up on the early internet. It's where I found people who were into the same things I was, even when no one around me shared those interests, and that changed the direction of my life," says the Discord CTO. But, "The internet has changed since then, and we don't live in a perfect world, which is why our goal is the same one I wrote about in February." At least he's consistent.

Discord will "evaluate the validity and scope before responding" to controversial GTA 6 leaks court order, but the platform "has not yet been served."

The success of Diablo 2 Resurrected proves there is hunger for updated versions of Blizzard's original genre-defining ARPGs, and the next remake should be 1996's Diablo. It's one of my favorite games ever and probably the most formative to my career in games. It's aged incredibly well for a 30-year-old game, or at least I thought it did until I saw parts of it beautifully reimagined in Diablo 4's latest update, Season of Hell's Legacy.

In case you missed it, which is understandable in the wake of Diablo 5's surprise announcement at BlizzCon 2026, Diablo 4's 15th season is one giant trip down memory lane for longtime fans of the series. Diablo himself, the Lord of Darkness, is one of the main highlights, but he joins other returning baddies like Mephisto and Baal, not to mention friendlier faces like Deckard Cain, who acts as your guide through the seasonal questline.

Waking Nightmares are the big highlights of the new season. Aptly timed to coincide with Diablo's 30th anniversary this year, these seasonal dungeons take you through iconic moments and boss battles from the series' history, with my favorite being an almost complete recreation of Diablo 1's main mission, all the way from Tristram Cathedral, down to the catacombs, the caves, and then into Hell itself to face off against the Dark Lord himself.

New Tristram

I can't think of a game more consequential to my love of gaming than OG Diablo, so this dungeon was super special for me. But when I found out you can actually return to a fully recreated version of Old Tristram, complete with the same landmarks and NPCs featuring original voice lines from the first Diablo, I knew I had to explore my old stomping grounds. Tristram – that music, those characters, they're like my virtual home. Diablo is the first game I ever became obsessed with as a kid, and I would spend hours chatting with strangers in Tristram, unknowingly forming friendships that would endure decades. Going back was intense, but more than anything it made me want a full-blown Diablo remake.

There are still three long years to go until we get to play Diablo 5, and that's assuming there won't be any delays. Diablo 4 is great, especially this new season, but three years is a long time, and we need something to do in the meantime. A full-fat remake of Diablo, not a remaster like Diablo 2: Resurrected, would not only give ARPG fans more demons to click to death while they wait for Diablo 5, but it would also give newer fans of the series, who might've started with Diablo 4, or Diablo 3, or even Diablo 2, a reason to go back and experience the very beginning of the whole saga, which could provide key context or at the very least a narrative foundation for Diablo 5.

Diablo 1 is also just a sick game with a great story and ridiculously vibey world that I think everyone should experience at least once. But with 1996 visuals and designs being what they are, I understand why someone under, say, 30, might bristle at the idea of sitting down for a full playthrough of a game that old. I would certainly accept a touched-up remaster with gratitude, but a ground-up remake would be a much stronger draw for people who've never played the game.

Blizzard missed a big opportunity to announce something like this during the series' 30th anniversary celebrations at BlizzCon 2026 – I suppose it was a little preoccupied – but it's not too late! Getting it into players' hands before Diablo 5 would be ideal, but even outside the context of a new game that's shaping up to bring the whole series full-circle, a Diablo remake just makes sense. It's a super old, equally beloved game that hasn't been updated meaningfully in 30 years. Diablo 4's bite-sized recreations are nostalgic treats, but they're mere teases of what's possible in a proper remake.

Check out all the best Diablo games to play while we wait for D5!

Build and Kill Zombies codes will give you a helpful head start, as you try to construct an undead-slaying vehicle that will carry you as far as possible before it's destroyed or you run out of fuel. Adding weapons and more fuel tanks can help with this, but then you need to make other upgrades to account for the extra weight or you won't get anywhere fast!

The promos available here will give your account an injection of Cash, so you can afford to purchase the Parts and Weapons you spin for, as well as providing Hacker Tokens and some items for your inventory in this high-octane Roblox experience. If you're ready to take on the hordes, then here are the codes for Build and Kill Zombies and how to redeem them.

If you're searching for some more general promos that unlock rewards for all of your experiences, we've got the recent Roblox promo codes covered.

All Build and Kill Zombies codes

The following Build and Kill Zombies codes can be claimed for rewards:

• IAMPRO – 5,000x Cash [requires a best distance of 1,000 studs]
• ROBLOXCLASSIC – 1,500x Cash (expires September 26, 2026)
• SCIFI – 1,000x Cash (expires September 26, 2026)
• LASTHACKEREVENT – 2,500x Hacker Tokens [requires a best distance of 2,500 studs] (expires September 26, 2026)
• NEWBOSSNEXTWEEK – 1,500x Hacker Tokens (expires September 26, 2026)
• PAINTEVERYWHERE – 1,000x Cash 1x Crossbow, 1x Mounted Gun (expires September 26, 2026)
• COMMUNITY – 1,000x Cash, 1x Small Engine, 1x Small Tank
• CashDrop – 500x Cash
• MOREFRIENDS – 2x Passenger Seats
• HACKER – 50x Hacker Tokens
• 1x1x1x1 – 150x Hacker Tokens

There are plenty of Build and Kill Zombies codes available, though some of them have a fixed expiry date so don't leave it too long before claiming them. These promos mainly unlock Cash, though you can also get Hacker Tokens plus various Parts and Weapons to add to your vehicle.

How to redeem Build and Kill Zombies codes

Once you've completed the brief tutorial, you can redeem Build and Kill Zombies codes by hitting the SHOP icon on the left hand side of the screen, to bring up the EXCLUSIVE SHOP menu. Scroll down to the bottom where you'll find the Enter Code text box, so type in a promo there then use the REDEEM button to claim your rewards. Codes for Build and Kill Zombies are not case-sensitive, so you just need the right spelling.

Expired Build and Kill Zombies codes

• CYBERHACK – 2,500x Hacker Tokens

The list of expired Build and Kill Zombies codes is going to grow over time, as plenty of them have a limited number of uses or a cutoff date applied. Grab all of the active promos as soon as possible, to bank their rewards for later use.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Jane's shed in Silent Hill Townfall is a quick garden puzzle you'll need to solve to reach the medical center. It can trip you up if it doesn't click straight away because there's nothing obvious to guide you initially. There's a padlock that needs a code and a gate you can't open, and no clear clue beyond the plaque naming Jane's shed. If it wasn't for the fact that this then gets named on the map as point of interest, you'd wouldn't really have anything to go on. Here's what you're looking for.

How to get through the gardens in Townfall

There are two locked doors in the community gardens - Jane's shed, and a gate that apparently 'isn't usually locked'. The two are obviously related and key to it all is actually Jane herself.

If you look around the gardens you'll be able to check various plaques on all the different planting beds. Each one will name various different people, dates, achievements and other bits of info, but the one you want can be found here, near the bird table:

If you examine this bed in particular you'll find a plaque for the eponymous Jane herself, saying she was the winner of the 'Community Spirit Award' in 1993:

Unsurprisingly, 1993 is the four digit code you need to open Jane's shed. Enter that code into the padlock to get inside, and you'll be able to find some alcohol, a note about Jane and, most importantly the Community Garden Key. That will open the gate and allow you to carry on to the St Amelia Medical Center.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

The massive Xbox "reset," as the brand's leadership calls it, continues. Yesterday, the company announced another 268 jobs eliminated along its quest to lay off 3,200 employees throughout the fiscal year. We also learned that several Xbox studios and franchises were coming under the Activision Blizzard banner, including Age of Empires developer World's Edge.

Studio creative director Adam Isgreen says there have been substantial layoffs at World's Edge alongside that transition. "I am of course disappointed that this is the way the time with World's Edge and Age ends for myself and many of my talented teammates that were also impacted – we had some great plans for what's next – and I hope the team that remains can rise to the occasion down the line," Isgreen says in a LinkedIn post (thanks, Rock Paper Shotgun).

In a separate post on ResetEra, Isgreen adds that "just under half the studio was let go." We have reached out to Microsoft for comment and will update this story if we learn more.

Isgreen's roots in the RTS genre go back decades. He was a designer on the first Command & Conquer: Red Alert, working at Westwood Studios from 1995 through 2003. He worked on the beloved Star Wars: Empire at War at Westwood successor Petroglyph, and eventually joined Microsoft in 2010.

He served as creative director on a number of projects at Xbox, including such varied projects as Killer Instinct, Crimson Dragon, D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die, and ReCore. Eventually, he helped lead the company's Age of Empire revival, again working as creative director on a massive pile of remasters and 2021's Age of Empires 4.

"I never thought that I'd work at Microsoft, let alone spend a significant amount of my career here – 16 years! – especially in a creative-first role," Isgreen notes in his LinkedIn post.

"What's next?" he asks. "No idea. Maybe games? Maybe not? Pinball machines? Always loved the combination of design + art + engineering they represent."

These are the best RTS games you can play today.

The Xbox PC app has seemingly unveiled Mythic Achievements, the Xbox equivalent of a PlayStation Platinum Trophy.

Earlier this year, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma confirmed that Xbox would be getting its own version of the PlayStation Platinum Trophy for Xbox's Achievement system. For those unaware, on PlayStation, when you unlock all of the Trophies for a game, you're then given a Platinum trophy as a stamp of "I've done everything," whereas over on Xbox you simply have the 1,000 Gamerscore to show off. But Sharma mentioned a bit over a month ago that the "team is working on something for later this year."

And now it looks like the update is imminent. Last week, a user uncovered a filter namedropping a Mythic Achievement, and now the Xbox PC app has been updated with the reveal of the Mythic Achievement symbol and sound effect.

A source speaking to TrueAchievements has reported some more details about how the new achievement will work. Notably, Mythics will apparently be awarded upon completing the base game – with DLC achievements not included in the completion – and they will be worth 0 Gamerscore. Mythic Achievements will reportedly also be retroactively applied to any games a user has already completed.

The source reports that the system is set to launch soon, and with updates appearing on the Xbox console and PC app that certainly seems to be the case. It's unclear whether this will be part of the Xbox Insider Program first or just launch for everyone, but we'll likely find out in the coming weeks.

Hideo Kojima doesn't know if Physint will release on PlayStation after Xbox picked up publishing duties, and hasn't "decided" if he'll use the Sony-owned Decima engine, either.

Needle In A Haystack Simulator, a co-op sim game on PC that's exactly what it sounds like, went viral on social media over the summer – which, of course, means clones galore.

In case you missed it, Needle In A Haystack Simulator made the rounds for its amusing premise: you and your friends work to dig a singular needle out of a massive haystack (we're talking like five million pieces of hay, y'all), much like the old saying.

Unsurprisingly, it spurred a plethora of clones shortly after it went viral, with some eight copycats popping up on Steam early last week… and, well, there are plenty more now.

So many, in fact, that folks are posting about it on Twitter, drawing the attention of the original Needle In A Haystack Simulator's creator.

In response to a screenshot of 10 or so copies of the silly sim, Nas of Studio Bitdot writes, "As the dev of the one that went viral, I would like to formally apologize to the Steam storefront."

It's funny, sure, but it's all a bit bleak, too. One commenter dubs it "the Robloxification of Steam" and, yeah, I get it.

Much like Roblox boasts clones of Meccha Chameleon and various other trendy hits, Steam is now seemingly playing host to many of its own copycats.

A quick search on my end brings up loads of Needle In A Haystack clones, and, yes, many of them do evidently rely on generative AI to some extent as well – the cherry on top of the cake here, so to speak. It's not a great look for Valve's platform, but I'm sure it's also not easy to control.

When something goes viral, it's just about anywhere and everywhere. The problem begins when it overtakes genuine, original versions of an idea, though, or simply steals it altogether (which I'm seeing is more than likely the case with many of the Needle In A Haystack Simulator clones, honestly).

As for whether or not the copycats will be taken down – that remains to be seen, I suppose. The original is coming sometime later this year.

Searching for some solid upcoming PC games to look forward to? Be sure to browse through our roundup of the best new games coming this year and beyond to wishlist.

The CRKD Atom+ controller has begun to ship globally. That means if you pre-ordered your tiny, retro-style pad in March earlier this year, you should expect it to arrive at your door sooner rather than later.

The $29.99 (Amazon) pad, much like CRKD's Nitro Deck 2, was subject to delays and was originally expected to begin shipping from late June 2026, but as you're likely well aware, the summer is officially over and June it is not. The shipping window was then moved to August 17-31 2026, but it wasn't until today that the brand confirmed that its four models were shipping out to customers. Better late than never.

While CRKD has given official word that the impeccably cute Nintendo Switch 2 controller is shipping out, some people got theirs weeks ago, like r/Controller Reddit user TheLoFiPunk, who picked up the 'Retro Purple' pad.

They also waited through the many delays to grab theirs, but shared it was "worth it", which makes me more eager than ever to try the new one out for size. I have four of the older Atom controllers in my setup, and their small stature makes them absolutely ideal for playing the Switch 2 on the go, as it takes up little to no space in my bag. However, the adorably petite controller was missing an important feature that made it awkward to play anything beyond Nintendo Switch Online's NES and SNES library - a pair of thumbsticks.

The Atom+ has that covered with the inclusion of not just two precision thumbsticks, but TMR sticks which can help prevent any drift issues from rearing their ugly head. It also includes digital bumper and trigger buttons to offer a more tactile gaming experience, which sounds ideal for some Mario Kart World action, as do the new built-in vibration feedback and motion controls.

While CRKD has piled on plenty of new features, it still keeps what I loved about the previous Atom pad - its compact size and cute designs.

Like the version before it, the Atom+ plays into the nostalgia with its retro-fueled colorways. Instead of a plain all-black design, you've got transparent Smoke Black and Glacier Blue models, which harken back to the see-through tech of the early 2000s. My personal favorite is the Pal Grey design, which was kept over from the previous incarnation. It replicates the colors of the PAL SNES and, as a Scottish kid who grew up obsessed with Nintendo in the 90s, I'm a little bit obsessed.

All of these retro controller designs are covered by the same $29.99 / £27.99 MSRP too, so you don't have to pay any extra. All four designs are currently available to purchase straight from the CRKD online store or Amazon, and should ship without delay. Meanwhile, you can stick with the older $19.99 (via Amazon) Atom (which is also Switch 2 compatible) if you want more colors and are happy sticking with just a d-pad.

• View all CRKD gaming accessories at Amazon
• View the CRKD Nitro Deck 2 at Amazon

Creating the ultimate Switch 2 setup? Check out our guides to the best Nintendo Switch headsets, the best Nintendo Switch 2 cases, and the best Nintendo Switch 2 controllers while you're here.

A new Counter-Strike 2 update is here with a plethora of exciting features, from a 3v3 mode to, erm, chicken eggs – but the anti-cheat fix folks have long been hoping for isn't part of the patch, much to their dismay.

Valve unveiled its big update over on Steam earlier today, a patch aptly dubbed "Rush Hour" after the new game mode it boasts, unveiling various additions and tweaks.

First, of course, is Rush, "a new fast-paced 3v3 queued mode" for Counter-Strike 2. In it, players run a gauntlet "of randomly-selected battle arenas" and fight to capture the enemy castle to win. The arenas are different every time, ensuring that no two matches are the same.

Rush Hour has changed Premier up a bit, too, making it so that "instead of banning down to a single map, teams will vote to pick two maps each." After all four are up, one map will be randomly selected and then the match will begin.

On top of that, there are "several quality of life improvements," like blood and bullet impact visibility, and a new Music Kit: Starjunk 95. Plus, I kid you not, the update seemingly shadow-dropped chicken eggs.

Yes, a new pet system – and with it, a new gambling system – is apparently upon us, as fans share screenshots of differently-colored chicken eggs online. These weren't mentioned in Valve's official patch notes, interestingly enough, but it's amusing nonetheless (and worrying for players' wallets, sadly).

As silly as it is, however, there's another update the community would've preferred to see before chickens, Rush, and all: anti-cheat.

The top comment on Steam is literally "BETTER ANTICHEAT, PLEASE UPDATE VAC!" So, yeah. Another similar exclamation reads, "WE NEED BETTER ANTICHEAT FIRST!" The discussion isn't limited to the patch notes post, either.

Over on Twitter, one player sums up the sentiment I'm seeing all over the web perfectly: "Some really, really cool stuff in here, but the game is slowly dying without a working anti-cheat."

So, what'll Valve do next? Aside from expanding its strange new pet system, which I have a feeling it undoubtedly will, perhaps the developers will address the whole anti-cheat matter – it's evidently on fans' minds.

Gabe Newell once spent months loudly throat singing in the Valve office, Counter-Strike co-creator says, and "a lot of people" were "kind of annoyed."

All systems are firing are Wardogs HQ at the moment. The FPS managed to bring in hundreds of thousands of players from the jump when it launched into early access a couple of weeks ago, putting developer Bulkhead on the backfoot in terms of maintenance and updates. Leadership admits there are some shortcomings, but the studio's gradually getting up to speed.

On Twitter, Joe Brammers, Bulkhead CEO and executive producer of Wardogs, comments on the availability of infantry-only servers and the team's current status. "We're failing on getting Infantry servers to you guys," he says. "We originally decided to let community servers run them, but we're not seeing enough of them."

These remove vehicles, both on the ground and in the air, to make the gunfight more about your skill and tactics on foot. In theory, they create more intense matches, where you can't rely on a helicopter or the surrounding chaos to help you out, but it's hard to consistently get into matches.

The player queue is something Bulkhead's contended with since launch. Being the hot new game is a blessing and a curse when you're a smaller studio because keeping everything operational requires a lot of your attention, and that means more meaningful updates can take longer than planned.

But Brammers asserts the trajectory remains unaltered, the devs are just undergoing a trial by fire at the minute. Noting that "Infantry mode should be one of the ways to change the game to remove some of the power vehicles," Brammers says: "We are learning more and more how to balance the game to our vision. Excited for seasons two and three and to continue making the game."

I'd expect more modes in those seasons, and plenty of servers to back them up. Now, if they could make one where I'm not popped ten minutes into deployment, I'd be happy.

Wardogs price will increase throughout Steam early access, and "if you don't agree with that, please don't buy it," CEO says.

I've waited a long time to play as Nagash in Total War: Warhammer 3, but no amount of dreaming could prepare me for the real thing. To begin with, (un)life as Warhammer's first lich is surprisingly hard. Nagash's starting position is sandwiched between two greater daemons of Chaos, an angry French crusader, and Settra – fellow bone-man and Nagash's biggest hater. Most of the necromancer's nine books of power are scattered across the world, his Mortarch lieutenants are still infuriatingly independent, and to top it all off, I immediately lose the first tome I find in a pitched battle.

That was 200 turns ago. I would normally have succumbed to the urge to start a fresh campaign by now, but Lords of the End Times and its accompanying update 9.0 make Immortal Empires far more interesting in its middle and late stages. And when the titular End Times arrives – not brought on by Nagash, unfortunately, but Chaos big-bad Archaon – it feels like my campaign is broken in two.

Everybody wants to be Nagash

When Archaon arrives, I assume my campaign is coming to an end. Scores of Chaos invaders land on my southern shores, while the Everchosen commands them from the rear. Archaon is nigh invincible. Each Chaos army and unholy fortress grants him a percentage of invulnerability, so taking Archaon on requires blunting his invasion force. All the while, a ticking counter tells me how much of the world has been destroyed – settlements razed during the End Times can't be recolonized until (or if) the crisis ends, making it feel like a true apocalypse. Especially when the world's surviving civilizations come to me with last-ditch alliance offers – mankind, dwarfs, elves, even Skaven; all want Nagash on their side to face Chaos.

During the End Times, my tome-hunting mission is put on hold as Nagash inadvertently becomes the world police. Three quarters of the world is razed by the time I finally beat Archaon, besting him once on the battlefield and again in a climactic quest battle that involves besting every champion of Chaos before taking on the Everchosen. I'm a… hero?

Not for long. With most of the world lying in ruins, Archaon's defeat spurs a race to resettle as much land as possible. I rush to raise mausoleums and burial chambers across the Nehekara, using Nagash's Ritual of the Dead to dramatically warp the landscape into sickly (but visually impressive) wastelands. New powers rise – Kislev survives the End Times and takes over the Empire's old lands – and one by one, my allies remember Nagash is evil incarnate and declare war. But I'm in my lane, happy, unmoisturized: with a firm grip on a Mordor-like empire in the south, I'm free to continue gathering my Mortarchs and precious books.

I'm now in the campaign's late-game, requiring just a few more Mortarchs to achieve a Long Victory, but this is the most exciting Immortal Empires has ever been. A greater emphasis on narrative and structure gives the sandbox so much more definition, and seeing the post-apocalyptic world return to life gives me the same rush as starting a whole new campaign. Even with my Long Victory ticked off, I plan to keep playing this and perhaps even go for my first Domination victory since the first Total War: Warhammer.

Only war

I'm delighted by how fresh and tight Immortal Empires feels, even without Lords of the End Times' paid factions. Equally impressive is how well Nagash lives up to my expectations. The lich is a powerhouse in battle, but on the campaign map he's the tip of a spear that can only be pointed in one direction at a time. Entrusting my idiot psuedo-son Arkhan with his own conquest ends with daemons of Tzeentch beating him and spiriting one of my books away, while marching Nagash to fight Skaven in the north results in a lore-accurate slog that keeps him busy while other frontlines falter.

Nagash's tricky campaign spot is an excellent counterweight to his strength in battle. Defending my ghastly empire, I feel a stab of sympathy for Nagash, Sauron, and every other necromancer who's had the courage to launch their own start-up. It's not easy! But it's worth it – so worth it – to field Tomb King monstrosities, Vampire Coast artillery, and Vampire Count infantry in the same armies, all while Nagash funnels necromantic energy into his Black Pyramid to power them (and himself) up.

To give you some idea of how much fun I'm having with Nagash, I'm already considering another playthrough as the lich once this world is ashes. But there are another three lords to play in the pack (Skaven schemer Thanquol, the Empire's Boris Todbringer, and Nurgle-loving siblings The Glotkin), and I'm also tempted to see how update 9.0's End Times play out through other perspectives. In the 1007 hours I've put into Warhammer 3 since launch, this is the most exciting Immortal Empires has ever been. And with Nagash living up to a decade of expectations, I could die happy. Just don't expect me to stay gone…

I played Total War: Warhammer 40K and saw a generational strategy game in the making

Final Fantasy 7 Remake series director Naoki Hamaguchi says splitting the project into three games wasn't a business decision, as it's a risky endeavor.

When it was announced that Final Fantasy 7's remake would be an episodic release, many scoffed at the idea, but here we are years later, with two great RPGs to show for it and Final Fantasy 7 Revelation being one of the most anticipated games of all time. Remaking the game's sheer scale seemingly necessitated the multi-game approach, but some saw it as nothing more than Square Enix trying to milk its most popular game for all its worth. However, the director of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy says business didn't factor into it at all.

Speaking to Final Weapon, Hamaguchi says he can't imagine many other games that would be remade across multiple titles, with the director thinking he won't see a game on the same scale as the trilogy ever again. And while from "a creative perspective" the game necessitated this massive project, Hamaguchi notes "from a business perspective, it's a totally different story."

"If the first title had sold really poorly and been poorly reviewed, I mean, what do you do with the rest of the titles?" Hamaguchi says. He notes that with a project like this, "There's also this need to keep the team as similar as possible across all of the titles," with him calling it "another huge headache, especially for people who control the strings."

Hamaguchi says these are "big risks that you have to take" for a project like this, and he doesn't think "many will" take that on. In an era of ballooning AAA budgets, the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy is especially impressive, and sure the devs have reused assets and other factors, but given the reported budgets of the Marvel's Spider-Man sequels, I feel like even that's not a given for a smooth development now.

Final Fantasy 7 Revelation lets you automatically level characters and blast through the campaign after Rebirth players begged director Naoki Hamaguchi for a break from the JRPG grind.

Microsoft has laid off the story director of Gears of War: E-Day days after he confirmed that the game has gone gold.

Xbox announced its latest wave of redundancies that continue the planned 3,200 jobs cut throughout FY27 confirmed earlier this year. Xbox confirmed 268 job losses yesterday, including at Halo Studios, whose franchise has been moved to Activision, and unfortunately, there are more job losses across Xbox studios not outlined by Microsoft.

Juan Vaca, story director at The Coalition, posted on his LinkedIn account that he is among those losing their job as part of the latest wave of Microsoft layoffs. Vaca acted as the story director on Gears of War: E-Day, which is set to release in less than two weeks.

In a sad turn of events, this post came just five days after a previous post from Vaca, celebrating that "Gears of War: E-day has gone gold" and that he's "excited for the world to see what the whole team's been cooking."

According to a Kotaku source, a small number of people were cut from The Coalition, with reasons not related to the wider Xbox restructuring. Gears of War: E-Day is set to release on October 6, 2026, so just why Xbox is laying off prominent members of staff this close to launch is unknown.

Microsoft is still planning to cut over 1,000 jobs before the end of the fiscal year, with discussions over Dishonored maker Arkane's potential buyout still ongoing, while discussions over the closure of Ninja Theory are set to begin after two potential buyers fell through for the studio. This follows what have been yearly batches of layoffs since Microsoft purchased Activision Blizzard in 2023.

In terms of industry-altering decisions, Valve's decision to open Steam is up there with Nintendo making Super Mario Bros. and Sony creating the PlayStation. It revolutionized PC game distribution practically overnight, and one of the creators of Counter-Strike believes it all stemmed from dissatisfaction with the publishing landscape.

Minh Le was a co-creator on Counter-Strike, and he worked at Valve under Gabe Newell for a number of years after selling the multiplayer shooter to the company. Chatting with Indie Game Joe on YouTube, he explains how poor dealings with Sierra led to the inception of Steam.

"I think Gabe was the guy who said, 'Fuck these publishers,'" he says. "Valve, they were working with a company called Sierra, which was their publisher. So Sierra was publishing Half-Life, and I think they published Half-Life 2, but working with Sierra was such a bad experience and it left a really sour taste in Gabe's mouth that he wanted to just say, 'Fuck it. I never want to deal with publishers anymore.'"

Sierra did indeed publish the first Half-Life, but not the second, because Valve's relationship with the company had soured dramatically, resulting in lawsuits going in both directions. The sequel was fundamental to Steam's launch – back in 2004, Valve made the extremely smart choice of making its shiny new marketplace mandatory for anyone who bought Half-Life 2.

The follow-up to the groundbreaking FPS had a lot of buzz surrounding it, and Newell and his cohorts understood those people could be converted into an install base for their fledgling digital distribution platform. Even though change was definitely necessary, Le remembers a certain amount of skepticism.

"A lot of people at Valve, a lot of my coworkers, we were like, 'Is this going to work?'" he says. "Because this was 2001, 2002. In 2002, peoples' internet was not very good, [it was] very slow. So we had these physical stores where you had to go and buy your games. Back then, I would say everybody was just buying the game. There was no such thing as downloading games. Everybody's internet was so slow. We were like, 'It's taking me a day just to download Half-Life, this is not gonna work.'"

But he admits, they "didn't have the forethought" for broadband and Wi-Fi and the internet becoming as fast and as ubiquitous as it is now. "We just didn't really anticipate the speed at which the internet would grow," he adds. "Seeing everything change, 25 years on, and watching Steam's evolution has been really eye-opening."

Valve devs "can't believe we get away" with such small updates for Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike, ex-writer says.

If you've got some space in your stables, these Kick an Uma codes can help you earn more money fast. Despite the misleading title, you don't technically ever kick your Uma in this simulation game, but rather a lucky crate, and the further you can kick it, the luckier you'll be, and the better the Uma you get from it.

However, in order to kick further and run faster, you'll need cash, and to get cash, well, you need Uma. To get this cycle off to a good start, then, use the Kick an Uma codes below for Uma and Carats, which themselves can be used to buy special Champions in this Roblox game.

If you're after some more general rewards that can be used in all of your experiences, then we've got the current Roblox promo codes covered too.

All Kick an Uma codes

These are the Kick an Uma codes you can redeem right now:

• 300KVISITS - Curren Chan Uma
• 30KGROUP - Mejiro Palmer Uma
• 1000CARATS - 1,000x Carats

Not only does using these Kick an Uma codes get you some Carats to boost your balance, but you'll also receive some handy Uma to earn you some cash. Since they're free, they're not always the best Uma available, but they're particularly useful if you're looking to Rebirth, which resets your current inventory - including Uma.

How to redeem Kick an Uma codes

To redeem Kick an Uma codes, simply click on the rainbow-colored Codes button on the left-hand side of the screen, enter a code into the box, and hit the large green Redeem button. It's as simple as that!

Expired Kick an Uma codes

• SORRY4DELAY

The only 'expired' Kick an Uma code so far actually didn't expire, but was limited to just 300 people, which is very exclusive when you consider how many people are playing the game. As such, I'd recommend checking back here as frequently as possible in case the team runs another limited code.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Just yesterday, we learned that Bethesda is taking control of Obsidian Entertainment amid all of the Xbox reshuffles – but not everyone is sure it's a good move.

Baldur's Gate 3 and Larian Studios publishing director Michael "Cromwelp" Douse is one such person, stepping forward to share his concerns of the management handover on Twitter.

"I can't imagine what it must feel like to have independent agency and then, suddenly enough, find yourself working *under* a competitor," he writes. "I can't imagine that feels great." I suppose his take makes sense, but commenters don't necessarily agree.

One person points out that the two studios aren't necessarily "competitors" anymore, so to speak, as they've both been under the wing of Xbox for some time now, prompting Douse to respond.

"Putting aside the fact I was referring to a time prior to the sale, the fact that you think two entities under the umbrella of one parent company can't be competitors tells me you've never had a corporate job," he replies – and that does check out, as they certainly can be.

But, again, it's important to note that both Bethesda and Obsidian have been working together for a while now. Two months ago, they unveiled their mysterious, collaborative new Fallout game – although we're not quite sure what it is just yet.

At that point, Bethesda said Fallout 5 is in pre-production and unveiled both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas remasters, so it could be any of these… or perhaps something else altogether.

Only time will tell, I suppose, but, again, Douse's worries here aren't out of place at all. The industry is suffering quite a difficult time. After all, Microsoft's plans to cut 3,200 employees at Xbox hit both Bethesda and Obsidian previously, with the latter reportedly seeing around 25% of its studio impacted.

Following 1,600 redundancies from earlier this year, another 268 layoffs of that total 3,200 were announced yesterday. You know, the same time that news of Bethesda's new management over Obsidian dropped – so, yeah… it's not really a strange time to have a bit of anxiety about it all.

Searching for some new games to keep on your radar? Browse through our roundup of all the upcoming Bethesda games to look forward to.

Amid ongoing layoff chaos at Xbox, now-former Halo Studios cinematic director Josh Daniels says he was promoted and then immediately lost his job.

"Promoted and laid off in the same week is pretty wild," Daniels says in a LinkedIn post. "I’m one of the many hit by the Halo Studios layoffs. I’ll be taking some offline time today but very much would love to talk to anyone looking for Cinematic Direction or Production roles. Feel free to get in touch if anything looks like I might be a fit."

Earlier today, Microsoft announced the elimination of another 268 employees under Xbox, with Halo Studios seemingly hit especially hard. The Halo IP is now in the hands of Activision. Meanwhile, studios like Ninja Theory and Arkane are looking at closures, while Obsidian has been absorbed by Bethesda, Playground and Turn 10 have been combined, and Undead Labs is spinning out. Xbox's studio lineup is unrecognizable compared to even nine months ago.

The breadth of the layoffs is still coming into focus, with members of multiple teams including Gears of War: E-Day developer The Coalition reporting cuts.

In a statement, Xbox CCO Matt Booty said these layoffs have brought Xbox "roughly three-quarters of the way through" the restructuring plan previously announced by new CEO Asha Sharma, which will see 3,200 employees cut in total. This has forced countless Xbox employees and studios to work with an axe looming over them the entire year, uncertain of who will be laid off next or when.

Even as Xbox rushes to get games out and reportedly puts Bethesda's feet to the fire over Fallout and The Elder Scrolls production timelines, Microsoft leadership has overseen layoffs that cut veteran talents including many Fallout and The Elder Scrolls seniors. Nobody anywhere seems safe.

Halo Studios didn't have the chance to launch even one original title before Xbox decided to let Call of Duty publisher Activision try instead

Wardogs has become a breakout hit on Steam even at a relatively steep $40 for early access. According to Joe Brammer, the outspoken CEO of developer Bulkhead and executive producer on the game, the developer is charging what the FPS is worth, and the price is going to continue to increase as the game improves during early access.

"We have scaling pricing," Brammer tells GamesRadar+ in a Gamescom interview. In 12 months, which is around the time they plan to reach "0.5," the price will increase to $49.99. In 24 months, the price will hit $59.99. "If you don't want to get in now, wait for there to be more content, more stuff, buy it later," Brammer says. "You want to buy in cheap now? That's fine too. But really, we just think it's fair to scale the price as the game becomes bigger and bigger and bigger."

Bulkhead straddles the line between "indie" and "AA," Brammer says, acknowledging that "no one knows what these mean. But you can see this isn't just an indie FPS game." Producing high-fidelity graphics and physics for a game like this "takes time and costs a lot of money."

"Our thing is like, 'Look, we control our salaries and we don't want to blow them out the water or anything. This game costs a lot to make. If you want to play a cheaper FPS, you may go and play a cheaper FPS. That's absolutely fine. But this is what our game is worth. Our game is worth this, and if you don't agree with that, please don't buy it.'"

Brammer knows that the studio is setting a "precedent" with this kind of pricing, and says "players should expect the quality that we deliver for that price." He even acknowledges that some players will take issue with early access price increases when "we haven't fixed this and that." But for the devs? "We believe that our price needs to go up to make this game sustainable. Otherwise, how can we support the game long term? It is a big FPS game that costs money to make. The end."

Wardogs CEO braces for an Arc Raiders situation: "We're not going to have enough content for people."

Some players might be cynical about the whole early access process here in 2026, but it's still produced some of the best games in recent memory. Case in point? Just look at the top Steam releases for 2026, where six of the top 10 games are early access escapees that finally got their 1.0 update.

That's according to Steam250, which shows Palworld and Valheim as the year's top-rated new releases following each game's respective 1.0 launches. Other 1.0 launches in the top 10 include shopkeeping game TCG Card Shop Simulator at #5, farming RPG Fields of Mistria at #7, beaver city builder Timberborn at #8, and machinery-focused survival game Scrap Mechanic at #10.

Steam250 is one of the best resources when it comes to finding top-rated games on Valve's platform, but it's worth noting that its ratings aren't absolute. The platform uses a formula where the percentage of positive reviews are weighted by the number of reviews, so tiny releases with just a handful of all-positive scores don't dominate the rankings.

In other words, there's some subjectivity to these rankings. But no matter the framework, it's still notable to see so many early access graduates standing tall against traditional bangers, including Capcom hits like Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata.

There are plenty of reasons to be cynical about early access. Why pay for the opportunity to beta test a game? What happens when the devs take the game in a direction some players hate, as we've seen with Slay the Spire 2? What if the final game never delivers on the initial promises of the early access period?

But everything from Palworld to Scrap Mechanic show how powerful early access can be, too. Most devs will tell you that the process of making games is deeply iterative, and feedback from playtesters is essential to creating something great. What better way to get that feedback than from a bunch of players who're already invested in a given game's success? Clearly, it's working for some of 2026's best Steam releases.

Check out more games like Palworld here.

Uncertainty circles Halo after a major shakeup at Microsoft that has seen hundreds more Xbox employees laid off, including many developers at Halo Studios, and the Halo IP moved to Activision. Former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra, at least, seems thrilled by this, calling the move "the best news in a decade plus" for fans of Xbox's most recognizable series.

Ybarra shared a post highlighting key details from the latest chapter of the ongoing Xbox reset. That post, from game news hound Shinobi602, first notes that "268 roles are being eliminated across Halo Studios, Xbox Game Studios management and other first party teams," adding that Halo Studios has been reduced to a "small team" supporting the series' community as Activision takes the reins of the next Halo game.

Ybarra seems to think this is very good news. "Rob Kostich, Dave Stohl, Pat Kelly and team at Activision are rock star, old school game developers," he says. "Non-political, no bullshit - just flat out Halo at its best."

Kostich is president of Activision, (David) Stohl is its executive vice president and head of development, and (Patrick) Kelly is head of creative for Call of Duty.

It's not at all clear what political boogeyman Ybarra saw in the handling of Halo up to this point, nor does he clarify what political issues have been swerved through this change at Xbox. We may find some context in Ybarra's response to a misquote credited to Ed Sheeran, a musician currently facing backlash and boycotts for maintaining a fence-sitting stance on the Israel and Palestine conflict after rapper Macklemore was dropped from his upcoming show following a public show of support for the movement to "free Palestine."

Days ago, Ybarra wrote: "People just want to have fun at concerts and escape from the bullshit we hear every day re: politics. Keep the BS out of concerts, let people escape, and have fun with less worrying. The same can be said about video games. No one wants to hear others viewpoints - they want to escape reality for a little bit of sanity."

Indeed, who wants to deal with politics in Halo, a series known for such apolitical topics as militarism, weapons of mass destruction, religious extremism, genocide, and child soldiers, just to name a few.

On Halo's new apparent shepherds, Ybarra adds: "They are not afraid to take risks and deliver a Halo experience that blows people away and sets the stage for the next 10+ years. Props to Xbox for making this decision. LFG!"

Xbox CCO Matt Booty says the Activision-run Halo will be overseen by "a new, purpose-built team that is separate from ongoing development and plans for Call of Duty."

In a statement to GamesRadar+, Activision says, "Our goal is clear: make the greatest Halo game ever, worthy of its universe and legacy, while staying true to what made players love it in the first place. It is a bold ambition, one that this franchise deserves."

This Xbox reshuffle, which also saw Fallout: New Vegas studio Obsidian swept under Bethesda's control, has been criticized as the latest example of companies and executives treating game developers as replaceable, if not irrelevant, resources detached from how games are made. If Microsoft was looking to prove that it can run a studio and get some games made, closing more studios, laying off hundreds, rearranging brands, and saddling independent and once-vibrant teams with new overseers – after purportedly pushing to simplify the company's mangled management pipeline – sure is one way to do it.

Hideo Kojima doesn't know if Physint will release on PlayStation after Xbox picked up publishing duties, and hasn't "decided" if he'll use the Sony-owned Decima engine, either.

Halo Studios lived a short, utilitarian life – Microsoft used it to create the perfectly serviceable Halo: Campaign Evolved remake, and now the studio is effectively retired after 268 layoffs impacting it and other first-party Xbox developers. But it never had the opportunity to be anything more interesting.

Thus is the plight of Western gaming. Big corporations keep being impatient for results, so they move straight to relentless "restructuring." That's what's happened here – Halo: Campaign Evolved was a fine remake, but it was not good enough to compete with the Call of Duties absorbing the modern FPS player's time.

So we can only mourn Halo Studios' recently summoned potential. Formerly known as 343 Industries, Halo Studios had been the guardian of Halo games for 20 years; Xbox established it in 2007, after Halo creator and former Microsoft baby Bungie went independent. Xbox then rebranded 343 as Halo Studios in 2024, saying in a press release at the time that the developer had new energy to produce more Halo "without distraction, without impediment, to create better games with players' hopes and wishes at the heart of the endeavor." … It didn't last long.

Following September 22's 268 layoffs, made in service of 3,200 total gory cuts to Xbox, Microsoft also shared that it was passing along the Halo franchise to Call of Duty publisher Activision. About the layoffs, Xbox writes in an announcement on its website, "We are reorganizing our studios. The goal is to strengthen our franchises and games by operating fewer business units, aligning groups that already work closely together, and focusing our publishing expertise."

Basically, it's going to let the behemoth that regularly ships billion-dollar Call of Duties handle Halo instead. Activision president Rob Kostich says the publisher wants to "make the greatest Halo game ever, worthy of its universe and legacy, while staying true to what made players love it in the first place. It is a bold ambition, one that this franchise deserves. We have already begun assembling a purpose-built team, unique in capability and talent, ready and excited to deliver this next chapter with the community."

While Xbox disclaims in its press release that "a small team at Halo Studios will continue supporting the Halo community and games in-market," it seems like, for the most part, Activision is scraping off the old paint and starting again.

This is starting to sound like an old story – studio releases game, studio immediately undergoes mass layoffs no matter how much money it made, and whatever major corporation that owns it isn't concerned with the layers of grime coating its reputation. Just this year, this sad story has applied to Battlefield 6 developers, Destiny 2 developers, Directive 8020 devs, Tomb Raider devs, and many more in an especially difficult year.

ASGC Games Industry Layoffs Tracker creator Amir Satvat, who recently spoke to Edge for a feature now available to read in the Knowledge newsletter, says, "I think this is as bad as the '83 crash if you're a game developer based in North America or western Europe, in a traditional triple-A studio."

Notice that Satvat calls out Western developers in particular. The Japanese games industry has been triple-fortified from the storm of 2026 layoffs because, "They didn't get swept up in the live-service trend, or into these mega-blockbusters with 500-person teams," Satvat says. It probably helps, too, that they don't pay their executives $38,649,984 like EA did for CEO Andrew Wilson despite all those Battlefield 6 layoffs.

Laid-off id Software producer Andrew Willis shared a similar observation about Japan's brawny games industry in a recent interview with Kiwi Talkz, saying about Nintendo, "They're feeding the tree fertilizer and water. Trimming, you know, where necessary, and just making sure that it will healthily produce fruit forever."

"Our folks here," Willis continues, "in the more Western game executive side, they're just cutting it down. They want it now. And then they look around and they're like, 'Why aren't there any apples?'" It's almost as ridiculous as introducing Halo Studios and then firing everyone before they could make the next Halo.

Activision was playing the long game – the Call of Duty dev lost a bidding war to acquire Rare over 20 years ago, and now it's overseeing the studio.

As we get closer to the release of Stellar Blade: Blood Rain, it's been revealed the series was almost a complete non-starter. Developer Shift Up struggled to gather enough investment to ship the first action game, with the company's boss saying the financial runway got perilously short at one point.

Speaking to Inven, as translated by Automaton, Hyung-Tae Kim, CEO of Shift Up, talks about the timeline for the first installment. Essentially, investors and publishers believed the project was too big a risk for the studio and denied requests to get monetarily involved. According to him, some even suggested if the team pivoted, they'd be more interested. Several major publishers, who are unnamed here, apparently turned the game down.

"While we were developing Stellar Blade, there was a time when the company was in a situation where we could only pay salaries for about three months," he mentions. The sequence of events is murky here, but it seems likely he's talking around 2020 to 2021.

Stellar Blade had been revealed as Project Eve, but was still years away from coming out. The 2022 release Goddess of Victory: Nikke, a free-to-play RPG with gacha mechanics, brought in tens of millions of US dollars soon after hitting the market, providing plenty of help in keeping Shift Up afloat.

After rejection upon rejection, Shuhei Yoshida, former president of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios and head of PlayStation Indie, got his hands on a playable build, and offered a publishing deal. The rest is literal history; Kim was given a presidential commendation in December 2025 for services to the South Korean games industry.

He pins the company's prosperity squarely on that of the players who enjoy its games. And rightly so, it's those communities that are ultimately keeping the lights on. Stellar Blade's Switch 2 port is on the way, and Stellar Blade: Blood Rain is in development.

There's at least one other, untitled project happening as well. Thankfully, it seems the people making it have a lot longer than three months to get it done.

Stellar Blade boss offers to help PlatinumGames make Bayonetta 4.

Of all the surprise new games to top Steam's charts this year so far, Dressmaker might just be one of the most mind-boggling – but I'm so here for it.

If you haven't spotted it on your storefront home just yet, Dressmaker is a cozy new indie sim that does exactly what it sounds like it does: places you in the shoes of a dressmaker running a busy little boutique.

As developer Cozy Lives describes it on the wholesome game's official Steam page, you get to "choose fabric, cut out patterns, and sew them all together to satisfy (or sabotage!) townsfolk in this cozy crafting game inspired by real dressmaking."

Yes, sabotage. We love a bit of chaotic flair in our otherwise relaxing experiences, right? It seems most folks agree, anyway, seeing as Dressmaker already boasts a solid 96% rating and "Overwhelmingly Positive" reviews overall… and it only released yesterday, y'all.

The hype is so, so real. As one person comments, "This game is everything I wanted it to be and more." Another adds, "You should buy this game. You can feel the love poured into it."

In fact, I can't find even one negative review unless I specifically filter for them – that tells you all you need to know about what players think of Dressmaker so far.

That and the fact that it's sitting nicely in ninth place over on Steam's list of global top sellers, beating out the likes of Control Resonant and Diablo 4. That's no small feat, especially for a small sim about making dresses.

I'm counting this as a win for us fashion-loving girlies, honestly.

Now we just need a solid remake of the early Bratz hits on Wii and Barbie's fashion DS titles – then I'll be satisfied. Until then, though, I'll be cutting cloth and designing dresses.

Searching for more gems to wishlist? Browse through our roundup of the best upcoming indie games to look forward to this year and beyond.

Hero x Hero codes will provide you with a helping hand if you're trying out this VR experience in Early Access, as it can be tough stepping into the virtual shoes of a Super Hero. As you smash your way across the city fighting demon mobs and huge bosses, you'll unlock fresh abilities as you become more powerful and gather unique Hero Souls so you can transform into different characters. To get the lowdown on this, here are the current Hero x Hero VR gift codes and how to redeem them.

All Hero x Hero codes

The following Hero x Hero VR gift codes can be claimed now:

• 361821 – 300x Chips

Hero x Hero codes most often provide Chips, which can be used to power up your Super Hero, as well as cosmetic items to change your appearance. They usually are only valid for a week or even just a few days, so you'll want to check back here regularly for the latest promo additions.

How to redeem Hero x Hero codes

To redeem gift codes in Hero x Hero VR, you just need to launch the game on your device and then head to the code keypad. Use the number buttons to type in a promo, then hit the CLAIM GIFT button next to them to receive your reward.

Expired Hero x Hero codes

• 150000 – Imp x Imp Suit
• 26353 – 300x Chips
• 12012 – 120x Chips
• 98660 – 100K Glasses Cosmetic
• 33912 – 1,000x Chips
• 43064 – Level 2 Prize
• 15580 – 1,000x Chips
• 90674 – Level 1 CC Armband
• 80085 – CC Prize
• 82918 – Level 2 CC Armband
• 34249 – Creator Hero

There are a fair number of expired Hero x Hero VR gift codes, which goes to show that promos don't stick around for long before they stop working. Make sure you've claimed any active codes we've listed earlier, so you don't lose out on their rewards.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Sacrifices must be made in the name of democracy – but occasionally even Super Earth must admit to carelessness. A DSS buff in Helldivers 2 that was causing more friendly fire than it's worth has been turned off for the time-being, allowing developer Arrowhead Game Studios to give it a good old rework.

The announcement was made on social media, in typical fashion. "Attention, Helldivers," starts the post. "High Command has made the decision to deactivate the DSS Eagle Storm due to an unquantifiable situation with serious impacts on resource budgets for the next financial quarter."

You can literally see the proposal get rubber stamped and all, just to make it formal. This has been a long time coming for the DSS Eagle Storm, since it has a habit of taking out those who call it in.

The Eagle Storm targets enemies on the map and fires explosives at them through multiple runs in the air. It's a tactic that involves the whole map, and runs for the entirety of your mission. That may sound handy, except when it torches you and your teammates in the process because the targeting is indiscriminate and the bombs are hefty.

You can find complaints about the Eagle Storm going back to June last year, with players noting any time they rolled it out, their own fiery death would arrive soon after. One commenter on Reddit mentions they've had missions where their only deaths were self-inflicted because of this cursed bit of tactical pyrotechnics.

Going by immediate responses, the community would prefer changes rather than losing it entirely, and I'd concur. It's a good idea – and incredibly useful, in the right circumstances – but how it manifests could use a bit of fine-tuning.

There's palpable relief in the meantime. "My god they finally did it," one player writes.

While you're here, be sure to check out our guide to everything in the Helldivers 2 Ironclad Democracy Warbond.

Sonic Team boss Takashi Iizuka is reflecting on the franchise as it reaches 35 years old, saying Sonic himself is like a child to him.

Speaking to One More Game, Iizuka says that the franchise's journey has been a very personal one for him, having been a part of it since 1992's Sonic 2, which he did debugging work on before becoming an integral part of the franchise from then onwards.

"It has been 35 years," Iizuka begins, acknowledging that means Sonic has been around longer than even his own children. As such, he adds that "I look upon this franchise" like you might a child – "sort of like my own son."

Iizuka also recalls the times the series was under threat of cancellation by Sega, noting that the release of 2020's Sonic The Hedgehog film was a major turning point. "That had been a great hit and definitely changed the course of this franchise," he says.

The lead singles out Sonic Adventure as the game that changed the series the most, saying, "I believe the Sonic franchise now wouldn't have been the same if it wasn't for Sonic Adventure," with it being the first game to bring the character into 3D and introduce "Sonic's voice. He was able to speak. From there on, that had been pretty much the foundation of the new modern Sonic."

As of right now, there isn't much news as to what Sonic's future will be in games. While the character has a new Netflix show and film coming in the near future, there's been no word on a follow-up to Sonic Frontiers. Iizuka has teased there is more to come for the character's anniversary however, so we may find out soon.

Sonic Team boss says the most memorable game he's ever worked on is Sonic Adventure 2, and he was "really delighted" its story was used for the third movie.

Valve lead Gabe Newell is nothing if not an eccentric billionaire, much to fans' amusement – so eccentric, in fact, that he apparently went through a… throat singing phase?

Yes, you read that correctly. Counter-Strike co-creator Minh "Gooseman" Le recalls as much in a new interview with Indie Game Joe over on YouTube (below), explaining how Newell would bring his interests to the office – whether or not his coworkers approved – starting with Mongolian throat singing.

"He watched this documentary on them and he really got really fascinated with this concept and he started to practice that."

Yes, at work.

"So he started to do this Mongolian throat singing stuff and he was doing it throughout the office," as Le says. "You would hear him try to sing with his throat as he's walking down the halls. And, I remember a lot of people in the office, they were kind of annoyed with this because it's kind of loud, right?"

Did that deter Newell? No. "He would just walk along the halls just doing this throat singing thing, and he would do it daily."

It got so bad, Le states that "people would just started closing the doors and it started to become quite a closed office," describing it as "an interesting time." How long did it all go on for, though?

A whopping "five months" or so, apparently… and Newell ended up picking up other wild hobbies afterward, too. Le discusses everything from knife collecting to whole rooms filled to the brim with medieval-style axes and swords.

So, there you have it – Newell has always been a bit quirky (in the best way possible, of course). This is the same man who invested his $9.5 billion fortune into yachts last year, after all, after making clear that he's a scuba diving enthusiast.

I wonder what else he'll pick up, honestly. There's plenty out there to collect and hobbies to adopt, much to the Valve boss's delight, I'm sure… even if not his poor coworkers'.

Former Valve writer says "giant teams just don't work" in video game development, unless you're making GTA 6.

Needless to say, things could've gone better for Monster Hunter Wilds on PC. The hit game suffered a plethora of performance problems and other issues, leading to a decidedly mixed reception on Steam. Ahead of new expansion Ascendance, the devs are hoping to learn more about adapting to the platform, compared to the needs of consoles.

"We've been working hard on bringing the lessons learned from the launch of Monster Hunter Wilds to bear on Ascendance," Ryozo Tsujimoto, a producer on the series, tells VGC, "and it just takes a lot of time and research to examine what it is you need to achieve on PC to make the game perform well on a variety of hardware."

Therein lies the difficulty. You need to optimize for a spectrum of potential hardware rather than the particularities of the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Nintendo Switch 2. That doesn't necessarily excuse the wide berth of problems players have encountered after buying Monster Hunter Wilds on Steam, especially given we were getting PC-specific patches right up to January of this year, but it does explain the struggle Capcom faced in getting the game right.

"It's just a matter of experience really, so I'm hoping that we can bring those lessons forward into Ascendance," he adds.

This much is correct. The team now has a lot of feedback on how to make sure Wilds runs well regardless of your setup. These days, one year and four months removed from the launch, the Steam reviews sit at Mostly Positive, suggesting the release now runs much smoother than it did back in May of last year.

That alone is a sign of good tidings for Ascendance, which is due to arrive some time next year. We don't yet know everything that'll be in this DLC, but it's expected to be a large addition to the base game. There'll be fresh parts of the map, newer creatures, and all sorts of other bits and bobs for players to enjoy. Should it run well on PC, it should give the community on that platform a second wind. And probably a third, given how many hours the average Monster Hunter fan sinks into these games.

Capcom is finally removing scummy character customization vouchers from Monster Hunter Wilds, players immediately dance on their grave.

It's been over a year since Dune Awakening debuted on PC (you'll never guess in which month). Depending on who you ask, it was either a fantastic, atmospheric survival game, or a tedious desert trek even more boring than someone trying to explain Children of Dune to you unsolicited in a crowded bar. Now, alongside a big update on PC, it's arrived on PS5 and Xbox Series X, just in time to binge during the wait for Dune: Part Three.

Regardless of what you thought of it, there's no denying Funcom created an impressive open-world take on Arrakis, Dune's super-deadly desert planet. We called it a "true Dune love letter" in our Dune Awakening review. A beautiful recreation that nailed the look of Villeneuve's films, all made with a clear love for the source material and a clear hatred of onboarding anyone not familiar with said source material. Yeah, fair warning – if the words 'Bene Gesserit' are gibberish to you, do not start here.

DuneScape

The good news is it's still a visual treat on PS5. You can choose between lovely silky-smooth 60fps, which we all know is the mode a true Messiah would play. Or you can blaspheme and play at 30fps, which admittedly adds more visual detail and suffers less pop-in I suppose. As you've probably guessed, I'm a 60fps stan. The game feels far better to play, still looks terrific, and the pop-in is minimal enough to be a worthwhile compromise.

The setup; you're some nobody who's being shipped off to Arrakis to enjoy a life of endless slavery. But then your ship is blasted out of the sky, leaving you stranded in the middle of the desert (to be fair, Arrakis is basically all desert). The sun wants to burn you alive, water is seemingly scarcer than a first-party PlayStation game release, and a walk on open sands will likely end with you in the belly of a giant worm. Yikes.

It's a great hook for a survival game. My genre favourites, Subnautica and Grounded, love throwing you into a desperate situation, knowing that it'll be far more rewarding when you somehow survive against impossible odds. Considering Arrakis could only be more hostile if the ground was made out of freshly-unpinned grenades, Dune Awakening has the potential to be one of the best survival games and a true all-timer.

Except, over a year since release, this still feels like a game that's spread itself too thin without nailing the basics. It doesn't want to be seen as 'just' a survival MMO – it now even has a strictly single-player mode. It's also got stealth, shooting, climbing, flying, vehicle combat, and more. But, all those moving parts aren't as polished as they could be, meaning the core survival experience suffers.

Take the water system. Water is everything on Arrakis. It powers your base, your tech, your powers, and you quickly start to suffer when you run out. You can drink the dew from flower patches for some limited hydration, but it's clear from the disgusted bark your character makes that Dune Awakening considers this gross. That's why it encourages you to murder people and harvest water from their blood instead. OK then.

Forcing you to become a desert vampire is a wonderfully nasty idea, let down by the game's enemies being dumber than rocks. The smarter ones will hang back and shoot you, though they'll still rarely get into cover or do anything to avoid your gunshots. But they're practically MENSA members compared to the suicidally-stupid grunts who sprint towards you with knives, somehow oblivious to the fact I'm emptying my gun into them. By the time they reach me, they collapse dead at my feet, blood ready for the taking. Er, thanks, I guess?

In the world of Dune, characters have shield suits that make guns useless, forcing everyone to engage in close-quarters melee combat. Some characters in Awakening are wearing these, and the sight of one running towards you is properly tense, especially considering how much better the knife combat is than the utterly pedestrian gunplay. Knife combat is a little unwieldy, but that works here. A knife fight to the death in the desert should feel desperate and scrappy, after all.

But why are enemies who aren't wearing these shields – which is most of them, early on – also running towards me as if they are? One quest giver sent me to a testing facility and warned me that the people there had lost their minds. He described how they would run up to people and attack them senselessly. Buddy, that's half the idiots in this game!

Water shame

Because scavengers are so easily dispatched, that means the water they carry – which should be a precious resource – is easy to get, too. I set up my base near a camp where two scavengers reliably respawn, meaning I have two fresh water bags on tap. True, If you're playing single-player you can turn up the difficulty, but that doesn't stop enemies behaving mindlessly.

This did not go unnoticed in our three-star Dune Awakening verdict last year ("Both extremely compelling and extraordinarily boring, sometimes at the same time"). But it's elements like the "dull combat" that I was hoping would have been spruced up by now. Other potentially winning features still feel too janky, like its The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild-style climbing.

Like in Nintendo's classic, you can basically clamber up anything so long as you watch your stamina meter. Getting up a sheer cliff is mostly fine, but descending is still an imprecise chore, your character far too happy to fling themselves away from the cliff and take the quicker, more fatal way down. At least Link could survive a decent tumble, whereas in the early-game of Dune Awakening, your body is more fragile than games editor Oscar Taylor-Kent whenever I mildly criticize the Ocarina of Time remake.

Let's take a break from all this whining to talk about what Awakening does do well. The skill tree is full of great treats, including a terrific dash move for escaping Sandworms like a Looney Tunes character, and a hookshot that counters some of my complaints with the climbing. Its atmosphere and sense of place is spot-on. The power curve, though too stingy and slow, is rewarding if you persevere. Eventually you'll craft wearables that negate fall damage entirely which is somewhat a solution to the janky climbing.

And who doesn't like the idea of building their own awesome desert base? Me. I don't like it. Because I had to do it on PS5 with a DualSense, an experience about as friendly on the hands as sticking them in a couple of Pain Boxes, followed by an immediate vinegar bath.

Now obviously translating a complex PC game's UI to console is a nightmare. Baldur's Gate 3 managed it – just – whereas my recent Mistfall Hunter adventures showed how menus can come unstuck. But considering Dune Awakening's UI was a bit of a mess on PC, the poor PS5 version never really stood a chance.

Basic things you want are a chore to track down, buried in sub-menus within sub-menus. Open the pause screen and you can't see your objectives, which means by the time you do figure out which God-Emperor damn tab-menu-tab you need to be in, you've long forgotten what you were looking for anyway.

Over a year ago we said this game was "hindered by obtuse menus that make finding various projects on the tech trees and placebales an exercise in frustration." If that's been improved at all for this release, I shudder to think how bad it was before. Something's gone awry in your survival game when cold-blooded murder is a brain-off grind, but figuring out which menu the fabricator is hiding in has cost me what remains of my hair.

There's a decent Dune experience in here, but one I'd only recommend persevering with if you have a deep love of the source material. If you're more a casual fan of Timothée Chalamet movies, then I'm shocked to inform you that, unofficially, Lies of P is a far less stressful option you should consider playing instead.

Dune Awakening was played on PS5, with code provided by the publisher.

Awakening to more survival? 2,045 days later, Valheim's 1.0 launch proves its scope for epic journeys is still unbeatable, and if you want more we have great games like Valheim recommendations for you!

The 44th annual Golden Joystick Awards will be held on November 11 later this year, and to mark the occasion, the longest-running publicly voted game awards are getting a brand new look, which can be seen in the image above.

The critically curated shortlist for this year’s awards will be revealed on September 25 at goldenjoysticks.com, which is also when voting will open for the initial 21 categories, including Best Storytelling, Console Game of the Year, Best Lead Performer, and more.

Public voting for the first set of categories will then close on October 23, ahead of the public vote for Ultimate Game of the Year, which takes place between October 26 and October 30, thereby widening the net of consideration for games that are set to launch over the next month.

You can find a full list of the GJA 2026 eligibility conditions and rules on the Golden Joystick Awards events website.

With GTA 6 arriving on Nov 19, a little over a week after the Golden Joystick Awards, focus is drawn to the last year of game launches, which has seen blockbusters like Resident Evil: Requiem and 007: First Light take the spotlight, as well as acclaimed indies like Mina the Hollower and Big Walk. It’s one of the most open playing fields in recent Golden Joystick Awards memory and still ripe for competition, with a wealth of great games launching to acclaim in the last few weeks, including Control: Resonant, Marvel’s Wolverine and The Blood of Dawnwalker.

Last year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 swept the Golden Joystick Awards, with the French RPG taking home a record-equalling seven trophies, including the top prize, Ultimate Game of the Year. Other big winners on the night included Hollow Knight: Silksong and Ghost of Yōtei, with GTA 6 picking up two awards for Best Game Trailer and Most Wanted Game.

Who will sweep this year’s awards? Start making your lists ahead of Friday September 25, when you can cast your ballot and decide who gets to grace the stage on November 11.

You'll find the Silent Hill Townfall reception code blocking the way when you get to the clinic for the first time. It's not clear how important it is to get in initially, and the combination itself can be easy to miss as you poke around opening doors and exploring. Especially as there's some far more interesting stuff to look at when you first enter the room where you get it. However, finding the code and using it is important for a later puzzle and progress generally, so here's where to find it to save you time.

The Townfall clinic reception code

There are a few rooms to search in the clinic but the reception code is 2869 and found on a post note on a computer in Zoe Ellis office, which is the last room you can search as you explore. You don't even need to interact with it to use it, you can just plug it straight into the door when you get there (unlike the Silent Hill Townfall organ box puzzle, which will make you go through the steps even if you know it in advance). You will need to interact with the computer to get an address you need to continue, so even if you have the code from here, make sure you check out the PC as well.

Overall you can miss it as you look around, because it's the last room and the computer is tucked away in a dark corner, plus there's a far more interesting thing to look at in the shape of the Silent Hill Townfall scales puzzle, that dominates the room. However, that will take a fair bit of time to solve and it can only be completed using what you learn from the computer when you get the code, and the answer phone once you've used it to get inside the reception.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Xbox has announced a major reorganization of its entire first-party studio ecosystem. Rare and World's Edge will now operate under Activision Blizzard. The Call of Duty publisher is also taking stewardship of the Halo franchise.

This is a significant shift, with Rare and World's Edge having previously operated under the Xbox Game Studios banner. This means that Activision Blizzard will assist Rare in steering the evolution of Sea of Thieves, and take command of the Age of Empires franchise moving forward.

The decision to move Halo to Activision is also something of a surprise. 343 Industries has overseen the Halo franchise ever since Bungie regained its independence from Microsoft in 2007, having shipped Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Halo 4, Halo 5: Guardians, and Halo Infinite. The team was rebranded to Halo Studios in 2024 as it sought to push the franchise in a new direction – the recently released Halo: Campaign Evolved serving as an example for how the series would function on Unreal Engine.

Activision president Rob Kostich said this of the change:

"We're thrilled to welcome Halo, Rare, and World's Edge to Activision. It's an honor and a responsibility that we do not take lightly. These teams and their games have inspired fans around the world for decades."

"For Halo, our goal is clear: make the greatest Halo game ever, worthy of its universe and legacy, while staying true to what made players love it in the first place. It is a bold ambition, one that this franchise deserves. We have already begun assembling a purpose-built team, unique in capability and talent, ready and excited to deliver this next chapter with the community."

"To the World's Edge and Rare teams, we can't wait to get to work together."

The 2026 remake of Combat Evolved is expected to be the only new title released by Halo Studios, with the group now operating in a support capacity for existing Halo games. The studio is expected to endure a substantial reduction in headcount as a result of the franchise control moving to Activision.

While Xbox is yet to make any further announcements regarding the next mainline Halo installment, a new team – rather than one of the studios responsible for keeping Call of Duty on its annual release cadence – will be put into place to steer its development. Matt Booty, Xbox's chief content officer, has said in a statement that Activision's Halo will be "led by a new, purpose-built team that is separate from ongoing development and plans for Call of Duty."

In addition to these changes at Activision Blizzard, Xbox has also announced that Bethesda will begin managing Obsidian Entertainment (the two studios are already developing a new Fallout title), and that Playground Games (Forza Horizon) and Turn 10 (Forza Motorsport) will "come together as one studio" to help define the future of Forza, Fable, and the ForzaTech engine which powers both open-world games.

These big changes in the way that Xbox operates come as part of the broader Xbox Reset that CEO Asha Sharma and chief content officer Matt Booty announced earlier this year. Touted by Sharma as "the most significant restructure in Xbox history", the reset has already led to over 1,600 redundancies and a divestiture with Compulsion Games, Double Fine, and Undead Labs as the group attempts to "return to growth" and streamline its content portfolio.

As a part of today's news, Xbox announced a further 268 redundancies across the business. It also confirmed that Arkane (Marvel's Blade) will remain in consultancy throughout the rest of the year, and that Ninja Theory (Senua) is facing the prospect of closure after two potential deals to secure its future fell through.

For more on Xbox, check out the full list of upcoming Xbox Series X games.

Bethesda Game Studios is now managing Obsidian Entertainment – news that comes just two months after the studios unveiled their mysterious, collaborative new Fallout game.

Xbox Game Studios has managed Obsidian for over seven years now, following the acquisition of the legendary RPG developer in November 2018. The team delivered Grounded and its early access sequel, Pentiment, Avowed, and The Outer Worlds 2 during this time.

While the change in leadership is certainly big news, it does make a degree of sense. Bethesda is of course the the studio behind Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, franchises that Obsidian and its leadership are strongly aligned with. This news is especially intriguing right now, seeing as we know there are various projects in the works currently that are relevant to both teams.

There's the new Fallout game that Bethesda confirmed it was working on alongside Obsidian back in July – but it's not clear which Fallout game this is. In the same breath, Bethesda also had said Fallout 5 is in pre-production and unveiled both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas remasters as well.

So, could it be Fallout 5 the two are collaborating on? I'd wager it's more likely to be the Fallout: New Vegas revamp, seeing as Obsidian headed the original back in 2010, or potentially something else entirely.

It's exciting news nonetheless, especially when the industry is otherwise suffering quite a difficult time. After all, Microsoft's plans to cut 3,200 employees at Xbox hit both Bethesda and Obsidian, with the latter reportedly seeing around 25% of its studio impacted.

Following 1,600 layoffs taking place earlier this year, another 268 layoffs (of that total 3,200) were announced today, as was news that Rare, World's Edge, and the Halo franchise will be moving under operational control of Activision Blizzard.

I'll be keeping my own fingers crossed for what's to come from the dynamic duo now that they're working more closely together than before, that's for certain. Who knows – perhaps we'll see something entirely new come from the two rather than just a remaster. Only time will tell for sure.

Searching for more new games to keep on your radar? Browse through our roundup of all the upcoming Bethesda games to look forward to.

Xbox has announced a new wave of redundancies, with 268 staff set to exit the business. In a statement on the Xbox Wire, chief content officer Matt Booty says the role eliminations are focused "across Halo Studios, other first-party studios, and the XGS management and central functions layer."

This all follows the 1,600 role eliminations that were made in July, after Xbox CEO Asha Sharma instituted "the most significant restructure in Xbox history."

The decision to 'Reset Xbox' is expected to ultimately cost up to 3,200 jobs throughout FY27, and this announcement only builds to that number. The reason for the restructure is multi-faceted, although Sharma has said that change is necessary for the company to return to growth and profitability.

As part of the restructure, a number of first-party studios have already exited the Xbox Game Studios ecosystem. Xbox separated from Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions earlier this year, with the developers of South of Midnight and Psychonauts 2 regaining their independence eight years after they were originally acquired.

Undead Labs and Ninja Theory were undergoing similar considerations. Xbox has announced that Undead Labs "has now successfully transitioned on similar terms," and has located a new publisher for State of Decay 3. Unfortunately, the news isn't as positive for the Hellblade creator. Booty says "two separate agreements for Ninja Theory fell through. We will now begin consultation with employees on a proposed closure while continuing to explore other paths forward." It's unclear what all of this means for the future of Senua, which is slated to release in 2027.

As part of the Xbox Reset memorandum in July, Xbox had announced that Arkane's future was also uncertain and that, in accordance with French law, the studio's management was required to consult with its "Works Council to review potential strategic options." Xbox says that "consultation with Arkane remains underway and is expected to continue through the end of the year." There are no updates of what this means for its Marvel's Blade project.

This latest round of layoffs means that Xbox is around three-quarters of the way through its total planned redundancies, and comes on a day where the company has announced a fairly significant restructure. Obsidian Entertainment is now being managed by Bethesda, with the pair now collaborating on a new Fallout title.

Activision Blizzard King is also expanding its remit; the Call of Duty publisher will now have operational control of Rare and World's Edge (including the Sea of Thieves and Age of Empires franchises), and will establish a new team to lead production of the next mainline installment to the Halo series.

If you've been exploring Control Resonant you've probably seen pillars of light that form changing symbols above them as you get close, dotted around the map. The game doesn't explain what these are, though you might be kicking yourself once you find out, as we'll explain here.

The changing symbol pillars in Control Resonant explained

The shifting symbols around Control Resonant are checkpoints / respawn save points that automatically trigger when you get close to them. Before being activated, these pillars simply fire a beam of light into the sky, but when you get close, a changing sequence of symbols appears above them, several of which are associated with saving games or files (such as a retro floppy disc).

Keep in mind that the world state and your progress in the game is saved automatically whether you find these checkpoints or not, it's simply that the pillars log your position within the game. That means that if you're about to go into a dangerous area, or just want to save the game to quit, look around for one of these pillars firing off a beam of light, and walk over to it.

They're generally distributed around the game pretty evenly and frequently, so they shouldn't be too hard to find, especially with how the light tends to stand out and they're usually placed pretty prominently (such as in the middle of streets).

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

The best weapon in Control Resonant is something you pick when told to choose your Aberrant Form - i.e., what shape you want your weapon to take. There's three primary weapons and three secondary weapons in Control Resonant to pick from, and we found that in both categories there was an explicit ranking for each, intended or not. To help you out, I'll lay out the best choices for all weapons and Aberrant Forms, as well as how they rank against each other.

For more help with Dylan's firepower, check out all the best Abilities and powers in Control Resonant.

What are best weapons and forms in Control Resonant?

The best weapons in Control Resonant are the following Aberrant Forms:

• Best primary: Cleave
• Best secondary: Crush

The reasoning for this is pretty straightforward - the Cleave form is a powerful all-rounder that comes with a good blend of damage and speed, as well as a useful damage boost for backstabs, which happen fairly frequently in Control Resonant. Meanwhile, the Crush form (aka, the hammer) does massive Falter damage and frequently stunlocks opponents, allowing you to smash them over and over with very little danger to yourself. If you can pick out one of the appropriate Control Resonant Combo Finishers, you can really do some damage.

Best primary weapons and forms ranked

There are three primary forms to pick from in the whole of Control Resonant, listed below in descending order of effectiveness.

1. Cleave. As mentioned, the Cleave is an all-rounder that would probably equate to a longsword in a fantasy game. It's fast enough and powerful enough to never feel lacking, and the increased damage done to enemies from behind rewards the evasive playstyle that Control Resonant is usually encouraging.
2. Strike. Dual-wield daggers that rely on speed over damage with a 30% critical hit chance, these are actually very solid options, even if Cleave is slightly better. These work well for targeting individual opponents and allowing for mobility and agility, landing quick hits and remaining agile.
3. Glaive. A scythe that does wide, swinging attacks that can hit multiple enemies at a time and shove them back, the Glaive form is the most damaging of the three, but its slower movement makes it harder to use moment to moment. It's best for fighting crowds of weak enemies, but considering Dylan has plenty of powers that serve that roll after a while, the Glaive must therefore take third place.

Best secondary weapons and forms ranked

There are three secondary forms in Control Resonant, chosen after first leaving the Oldest House, within the first hour of the game. All these weapons are ranked below.

1. Crush. This giant hammer is easily the best secondary: it does huge damage, massive Falter status increases, and it's not as slow to wind up as you might worry it is. Perhaps most importantly, it stunlocks many enemies, effectively allowing you to land long hammer combos with no chance that the enemy you're hitting will escape. Plus, the high Falter impact means that you can probably end the combo with an execution.
2. Extend. This sweeping whip is the least damaging of the three secondary Aberrant Forms, but it can hit multiple opponents and is the most agile. It's not great (the charge attack locks you in place and you have to time it correctly), but it might suit those who like a faster playstyle.
3. Drill. A drilling spear that you ram into opponents, the drill is initially fast but has to be built into slower combos to get the most out of it on later strikes. It's clumsiest of all three secondary forms, though arguably is good for precision shots on weak points, when they arise.

How to change weapons and forms in Control Resonant

You can change your weapon's Aberrant Form any time outside of combat, by simply pausing the game and going into your loadout, where you can choose to swap out your primary and secondary weapons, but only for those you've unlocked.

Control Resonant gives you one Primary and Secondary Aberrant Form for free, when you first make the choices, but the other four forms have to be purchased from the Gap hub zone, requiring rare Living Shards to do so (you can buy these from Vendors or get them as rewards for certain major quests). Otherwise, you can always use one of the Control Resonant Reset Items to respec and pick something else.

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Powers and abilities in Control Resonant are broken into two types: combat abilities, used to damage enemies, and traversal abilities, used to explore the world and reach new locations. As a general rule, combat abilities are unlocked by defeating Resonants, the power bosses found throughout the game, while all your traversal powers are tied to the Faults in dimensions that you'll encounter as part of your pursuit of Jesse.

However, what makes things tricky is that certain combat abilities are mutually exclusive. After defeating a Resonant, you'll be given a choice between two or three combat abilities, and choosing one will prevent you from utilising the other. You can choose again by using a Reset Item, but these are rare and limited throughout the game, so it's better to just get it right the first time.

Below I'll lay out all the powers and abilities in Control Resonant, where to get all of them, and the best choices of abilities when they're provided to you.

Want to focus more on your gear? Check out the truth behind the best weapon in Control Resonant.

Where to get all abilities and powers in Control Resonant

Below we've laid out the locations of every traversal and combat ability on the Control Resonant map, as well as the rough order that they'll be unlocked and thus recommend pursuing them.

Combat abilities are marked in orange, traversal powers in blue.

1. Double Jump traversal ability. Complete the Fault in Downtown. Allows you to double-jump as well as air-dash and elevate for greater distance.
2. Barrage / Volatile Anomaly / Shield combat ability. Defeat the Artist Resonant boss fight in West Downtown. Either fire projectiles, summon an explosive ally, or conjure a protective shield.
3. Shift traversal ability. Complete the Fault inside the parking lot in West Incursion Zone. Allows you to align your gravity with Gravity Anomalies and walk along certain surfaces.
4. Ground Slam / Push combat ability. Defeat the Dancer Resonant boss fight in the West Incursion Zone Theater Hall. Either slam the ground from the air, or fire a telekinetic pulse that knocks foes back.
5. Ignite / Inferno combat ability. Defeat the Deserter Resonant boss fight in the Central Patterned Factory in Control Resonant. Allows you to either set your weapons ablaze, or to unleash short range waves of fire.
6. Reach traversal ability. Complete the Fault inside the Subway in The Evacuation Zone. Allows you to grapple to the various Control Resonant distortions for quick movement.
7. Spore Burst / Growth combat ability. Defeat the Collective Resonant boss fight under the Park after eating four types of Mold (no, really). Either fire a barrage of projectiles that build the Infected Status, or summon a Mold turret that fires Infected projectiles.
8. Spike / Astral Rebuke combat ability. Defeat the Physicist Resonant boss fight at the top of the Spire in the Underpass. Allows you to either summon an ally that attacks enemies, or a spike from the ground that raises up and hits enemies. Both inflict the "Astralized" status, which leaves enemies more susceptible to other status effects.
9. Command combat ability. Defeat the Co-Director Resonant boss fight in the Unknown Field Office. Allows you to turn hostiles into allies and have them fight on your side. Requires unique "Command" charges.
10. Resonant Combat Token. After completing the main story, complete the "Pope's Research" side quest in Unknown. This Token allows you to get one additional combat power from any of the previous choices without giving up the other one.

These is a bit of leeway on this ordering: some powers are mandatory (such as the Double Jump), while others are side quests, such as the Fire abilities in the Patterned Factory. The ordering above is a rough guide that is occasionally enforced by certain mechanics and story events.

What are the best combat abilities in Control Resonant?

With multiple combat abilities being split into choices and having the player decide which one sounds better to them, it's important to know which of the options provided are best. Below I'll lay out what I consider to be the best "build" of combat powers and abilities based on the choices given to you, and go into further detail beneath that.

• Shield / Barrage / Volatile Anomaly
• Ground Slam / Push
• Ignite / Inferno
• Spore Burst / Growth
• Spike / Astral Rebuke
• Command
• Growth (Purchased with Resonant Combat Token)

The philosophy on this build is generally focused around the idea that the Summons in Control Resonant aren't particularly impressive as a rule, in part because they tend to be a bit weak and need constant direction, which somewhat defeats the purpose of having a Summon who can do the work for you.

The Growth Summon is sort of the exception to the rule, but this build generally is built around speed, agility, and most importantly, the relationship between Infection and Burn damage. When both are maxed out on a single target, they cancel each other out and cause a powerful explosion, so the goal here is to use Spore Burst to infect opponents, close the distance, and hit them with Ignited Weapons until they pop for massive damage. It's a pretty simple strategy that works even into the post-game.

Barrage, Volatile Anomaly or Shield?

After defeating the Artist boss fight, you'll choose between these three powers for the first time. Having tried them all, I'd say that Shield is actually the best, especially when you unlock the talent that allows you to Detonate it for increased damage. Shields are a bit of a power drain, but they do serious Falter when you dash into an enemy, and can give you the safety needed to close the distance for Health pickups.

Ground Slam or Push?

After defeating the Dancer in the West Incursion Zone, you'll be given the choice between Ground Slam or Push. These powers are probably roughly equal in viability - Ground Slam is more damaging while Push is easier to use - but in terms of the build laid out above, I'd say Ground Slam is definitely more useful. Control Resonant tries to give players several types of projectile attack, but you only really need one, and Push isn't the best of them.

Ignite or Inferno?

After defeating the Deserter Resonant in the Patterned Factory in Central, you'll be given the choice between two fire-themed powers: Ignite, which lets you add Burn to your weapon attacks, or Inferno, which is a series of short-range fire attacks.

Ignite is absolutely the best one: it massively increases the damage your weapons are already doing, allows you to inflict long-term burns on enemies, adds Falter effects to every hit, and allows you to quickly set up the fiery side of the combo mentioned above incredibly quickly.

Spore Burst or Growth?

After a bizarre quest in the Park where you have to eat several sorts of Mold to access the Collective Resonant boss fight, killing it gives you the choice of two Infection-themed powers. Spore Burst is a machine-gun barrage of Infection projectiles, and Growth is a summoned turret that fires infection at nearby foes.

I definitely recommend you choose Spore Burst, as, you can max out an opponents' infection status with a single burst - a seriously useful ability, especially on late-game opponents.

Spike or Astral Rebuke?

When you reach the Underpass region, the Spire leads up to a gap in the Astral Plane that ends with a fight against the Resonant known as the Physicist. Defeat them, and you can choose between Spike, a controlled summon that hampers opponents, or Astral Rebuke, which is a.... uh, spike that comes out of the ground and knocks foes upwards. Are the labels mixed up on these?

Either way, I suggest you choose Astral Rebuke, though I don't think either power is particularly impressive as an addition to your arsenal. Astral Rebuke is better simply for requiring less thought (tap one button and off you go), though keep in mind it can only be used on grounded opponents, not flying ones.

How to respec abilities in Control Resonant?

If you're not happy with your choices of combat abilities in Control Resonant, you can change your choice of powers around by going back to the Gap hub area and interacting with the mural on the left when you enter, as shown above. At the top there'll be an icon to "Reset All" by holding down the Square / X button (depending on controller).

This will cost you one of the Control Resonant Reset Items, but will allow you to make all your choices of Powers again from the start (and yes, I do mean all - one Reset Item lets you rechoose all your powers).

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