GTA 6 is targeting 30 FPS on PS5 and Xbox Series X. The same goes for the beefier PS5 Pro, which can now sit another exclusive on the shelf alongside Sony's marketing deal for the game: ray-traced shadows that have seen some people shell out $1,300. This is all fine and expected news, yet I'm saddled by the same tiny disappointment I feel every time a big console release targets 30 FPS.

It's not that I'll turn my nose at any game that isn't running at 60 FPS or higher, filthy PC gamer that I am. But if we're talking preferences, yeah, I do wish everything ran at 60 FPS at 1440p or below. I'd gladly accept lower graphical fidelity as a tradeoff for that and, more pertinently, I'll happily wait to play GTA 6 on PC if it means better performance.

The case for 60 FPS

This is easy for me to say, of course. I didn't have to move mountains to get a game of this scale running at 30 FPS to begin with. It might sound easy to put fidelity and frame rate on a scale and just subtract material until the FPS side rises, but I know it's not that simple, even if cuts could surely be made.

It's not just about the visible sweat, intricate clothing, innumerable environmental wrinkles, granular animations, or ray-traced shadows – all the little details that people at Rockstar have presumably achieved through blood sacrifice. This might actually be the best-looking game ever made by many metrics. But GTA 6 also has to handle dense NPC crowds, a sprawling city, seamless character switching, and all the unseen systems supporting that experience. That, to me, is the truly important, gameplay-affecting stuff.

It all amounts to more things for that frame rate to haul, and Rockstar seemingly chose 30 FPS with all the fixins' over higher FPS with all the sacrifices. I understand and respect that. Devs should make what they want, as ludicrously complex as they want it to be. But on that scale, my taste leans heavily toward frame rate for a few reasons.

Console generational leaps are getting smaller. This generation has, as far as I'm concerned, had only two real difference-makers: M.2 NVMe SSDs that dramatically improve loading times, and the spread of performance-focused graphic settings (or performance modes). As you may have guessed, I go for performance mode every single time.

Some games benefit more from having higher frame rates than others, but maximum FPS is always my pick until I hit 60. A fast-paced martial arts game like Phantom Blade Zero would be seriously hurt by a low or inconsistent frame rate, for instance. But I'm currently playing Persona 3 Reload, and its turn-based combat and simple environments aren't really bothered as long as the frame rate is half-decent and stable. But the choice is still simple: I never care about graphics in any way that matters, and I always care about smoothness. GTA 6 isn't a frenetic wuxia fiesta, but its driving and shooting definitely push it toward the more FPS-sensitive camp in my mind.

There's a point where I lose interest in graphical improvements, and that point came at least 10 years ago. I can appreciate a cutting-edge game, whether it's GTA 6 NPCs whose calves flex with each step or a huge RPG like Cyberpunk 2077 with every setting cranked to the moon. But if AAA games eternally looked like late-gen PS4 releases, I honestly wouldn't complain. My threshold for game that looks good is comfortably below that, and an art style far removed from realism is more likely to grab me anyway. Now and forever, I'm more interested in games that run better and console gaming that feels, not necessarily looks, more like my PC experience (again, M.2s really helped with this). Hell, right now I just want consoles that people can actually afford, and pushing hardware to fruitlessly advance graphics won't get us those.

Every generation, I think these will surely be the systems to normalize 60 FPS, and I'm consistently let down by games going in the opposite direction for visuals that don't, and will never, move me. In all graphical discussions, my mind goes to an early Uncharted: Drake's Fortune demo showing how water would convincingly dampen Nathan Drake's clothes and then dry in the sun. Nearly 20 years later, it feels like we are still hung up on the equivalent of Nathan Drake getting wet even though this detail didn't mean squat to the experience of Uncharted and this kind of thing is infinitely less novel and relevant today. The real or imagined title of 'best-looking game ever made' has never meant less, and a significantly uglier version of GTA 6 would still assuredly blow my socks off. I'll tell you what would really impress me: a promise that this runs at twice the frame rate of GTA 5, a 13-year-old game.

Back in 1997, Final Fantasy 7 on PS1 felt as glossy and cutting-edge as you could get for an RPG or otherwise. Now, for 2027, Final Fantasy 7 Revelation and its remake trilogy predecessors feel just the same way. Closing out the saga, this series is a reimagining of an epic saga with just the same sensibility as its source material, respectful of recreating what came before while also making seriously bold moves with how it reimagines it. After all, at the end of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, it became clear its remake title was as much verb as adjective, breaking down the notion of what it means to break down and re-craft an icon.

Square Enix are in a lucky position with tackling this monumental task, with a cohesive development team not just across the trilogy but one that stretches back to the original game in the '90s as well. Final Fantasy 7 Revelation's imminent conclusion isn't just a testament to the quality of the original game, but the team that made it. "Everything in the game has to feel both nostalgic and new at the same time," says series director Naoki Hamaguchi, speaking on the upcoming final release.

Old and new

"There's a very consolidated and consistent philosophy we have going through the whole of the trilogy in terms of how we balance [old and new]," says Hamaguchi. Combining both feelings is "the mission for this whole project".

Which is one of the reasons the trilogy also serves as a pseudo-sequel as well as retreading old ground. "We realized this fairly early on," he says. "In terms of the storyline – especially the main storyline – if it is just exactly the same story from the original game, then as the series continues, will people lose interest just because they know what's coming?"

Even when Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth hits a lot of the beats we're familiar with from the globetrotting adventure that underpins the PS1 original's middle act, by credits we're still left second-guessing quite what the villainous Sephiroth's true machinations are, and how much of what we've come to know we can trust. Final Fantasy 7 Revelation has plenty of room to surprise with exactly how it approaches sticking the landing. Even if it's much the same as its source material, the journey to get there promises to be very different – which may change how we end up feeling about it. "We have to do something to keep that interest up and add that surprise and that uncertainty going through it," says Hamaguchi.

When it comes to making those changes, however, "there's a very limited number of people on the team who are in charge of that," Hamaguchi explains. "Adding completely new developments and aspects to the story," is far from a simple matter, especially for a story as dear to fans and developers alike as FF7 – but it's part of what makes the trilogy remain new and exciting. "Things like the Whispers, for example, where they turn up and the timeline might have changed, or when you see Zack in a different dimension and wonder how that's affecting it. [...] All those extra elements that are really part of that design."

"I want to leave [those decisions] to the original Final Fantasy 7 creators," clarifies Hamaguchi. "They have to approve that and come up with those big changes themselves. So that's people like obviously Mr. Kistase, Mr. Nomura, Mr. Nojima, Mr. Toriyama as well – Motomu Toriyama – and myself. Obviously, I'm involved in that, but they are the ones who have to be making the big changes. It's not the rest of the team."

But changing and redefining the narrative of Final Fantasy 7 is only one part of how Final Fantasy 7 Revelation and its predecessors have evolved what came before. "The other type of change is going deeper, the fleshing out of existing content, how that's reimagined for the modern gaming environment," says Hamaguchi. "That's something I think that I really want the younger generation, the new creators, to be working on."

Where once we explored this world through a somewhat abstracted top-down perspective, now we get to explore and get lost in immense levels of detail. That's true both in terms of scale and visuals, but in battles too, which mix together turn-based tactics with real-time combos.

"I think by splitting it to have the original creators doing big changes and the reimagining done by the new guys – that balance works really well, and that's why we managed to achieve that feeling that we really set out to do," he says.

Hamaguchi really means what he says about the original team being solely responsible for the narrative changes to Final Fantasy 7. "That's not taking fan expectations or fan feedback into account really at all," he says. "That fan feedback is looked at for other aspects of the game, but [the big changes are] really consistent with the creators' vision. I think, ultimately, maybe quite paradoxically, that is actually better for the fans in order to do it that way."

While plenty of Final Fantasy 7 Revelation's biggest changes – alongside those in FF7 Remake and FF7 Rebirth – are completely fresh, some of those tweaks are informed by expansions to the series lore that came after the PS1 in the first place. "One of the other ways we're approaching the wider Final Fantasy 7 universe, the compilation content [is] the mission the team has is to basically recreate a new Final Fantasy 7 that includes all of that wider universe content from the start," says Hamaguchi. "So that's all consistently part of the world in the games that people will be playing."

Ideas from the likes of prequel Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7, movie sequel Advent Children, and even multiple phone games have wormed their way into the mixture that is the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy. It's a novel approach to adaptation that has worked well for other projects taking a similar approach. I'm reminded of HBO's Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which adapts George RR Martin's Game of Thrones prequel from 1998 but makes smart decisions to incorporate aspects of worldbuilding he only thought of many years after the fact – like the Blackfire Rebellion.

Likewise, plenty of groundwork has been laid across the FF7 Remake trilogy so far to fold in Compilation of Final Fantasy 7 material, leaving plenty of plot threads dangling for FF7 Revelation to tie up. Hamaguchi seems to suggest, however, that a lot of these elements will be felt even more strongly this time around.

"With this being the finale – the concluding part of the series – we really want to give the fans as much of the things that we know they want to see, the content that they want to look at, and we've included quite a lot of those references and connections to the wider Final Fantasy 7 universe in the last game," he teases. "I'm really excited to have people experience that and be surprised at seeing all these things that they know from the wider Final Fantasy 7 too."

Check out our best Final Fantasy games ranking for what to play while you wait, or our best RPGs, best JRPGs, and best ARPGs for even more!

Few games have made the same impact as the original Final Fantasy 7 did on PS1, making the most of a genuine technological revolution to spin a story that still has its hooks in us over two decades on. Case in point: the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy, which has been re-telling and reimagining that RPG tale over the course of several lush, super detailed games for years. Now, with Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, that trilogy draws to a close.

Early next year, the remake project that questions what a 'remake' even is will have its final entry, and it's one of the biggest new games on our calendar for a reason. The whole saga has been truly monumental, so there's no game better poised to kick-off our look ahead to 2027 than this one with a Big Preview devoted to it. We've played every hands-on demo we can get our mitts on, spoken to the development team putting it all together, and have plenty of thoughts on the whole FF7 saga to help get you caught up, or just dive deeper into what to expect from the journey's end.

In director and Naoki Hamaguchi's own worlds, this is an era-spanning landmark release: "Over these 10 years of working on the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy, it's really felt like I should be giving back all of that experience and all of that knowledge and learnings that it's given me over my career."

Join us below to explore our Final Fantasy 7 Revelation Big Preview with us on GamesRadar+, updating throughout the week with more dev interviews, hands-on impressions, and deep dives into the whole trilogy so far.

FF7 Revelation: The Big Preview

FF7 Revelation video

Dive deeper

Don't forget to look at our best RPGs, best JRPGs, and best ARPGs rankings for what to play next, and browse our upcoming RPGs calendar for what's coming next while you wait for FF7 Revelation.

Between Summer Game Fest, Gamescom, and the PlayStation State of Play, director Naoki Hamaguchi and the team at Square Enix have showcased Final Fantasy 7 Revelation's massive open world. It's a huge sandbox brimming with activities, map markers, and interruptions from the slightly overtuned robotic companion MAI.

It's been an overwhelming amount of content packed into tight demos. However, after spending some time with the first chapter in a brand new preview session, I finally feel like I have a better handle on the huge offering in store. It’s clear that FF7 Revelation's scope tightens quite a bit as Cloud and the rest of the party make haste to the North Crater to stop Sephiroth.

Crate(r) expectations

This roughly 45-minute linear dungeon presents a more grounded look at the narrative parts of FF7 Revelation as we see Cloud and the gang still reeling from the loss of Aerith. Now focused on avenging her at any cost, the party urgently presses forward through the twisting and turning paths of the North Crater as they hustle toward the center.

Cloud's mental state is still rapidly declining and Sephiroth's hold over him grows stronger. Traversing the dangerous caverns and roads is broken up by intermittent cutscenes of our silver-haired villain telling Cloud to remember his SOLDIER number. To remember where he came from. These small but powerful moments remind me what I love so much about the FF7 Remake trilogy: the mystery and intoxicating intrigue of Sephiroth, and how it envelops everything around it.

As I cut through enemies like the tentacle-ridden Vitalipolis on my way through this Mako-infused crater, I begin to experiment with the new Function-Integrated Tactical Suitwear (or FITS for short). This system is a smaller version of a traditional Job system found in other Final Fantasy games and gives each character a unique suite of abilities to complement their kits.

Cloud is equipped with the Summoner FIT, which provides the ability to – you guessed it – summon classic creatures such as Shiva and Ifrit. Just like any other ability in Final Fantasy 7, you'll need ATB gauge to spend, and these new powers can be found under a special slot in the tactical menu (or bound to one of four shortcut keys). Having Shiva fight alongside the party and attack in sync with my button presses provides spectacle, but the fights aren't long enough to see real depth in the moment-to-moment decisions.

Cid Highwind finally takes up his lance and joins the party as a playable character alongside emo vampire heartthrob Vincent Valentine. Both additions immediately slot into the combat system with ease. Cid's flashy Dragoon attacks provide a sense of mobility, letting him easily jump and dash around the battlefield. There's more depth beneath the surface with Cid's combat kit, though. Timing your button presses with the blue aura flashes around him presents an opportunity for stronger attacks, adding another plate to spin during combat and one that rewards the player in spades with long sweeping swipes and a whirlwind of pain.

Vincent Valentine's brooding looks are accompanied by deadly accurate pistols. He twirls around the arena dishing out ranged attacks and applying pressure before spending ATB bar to transform into the Galian Beast, Vincent's true bestial nature unleashed. But, this does come at a cost. Chaos Levels build up the longer I stay in beast form, with each new level reducing my max HP. So far, this hasn't kicked me out of Galian Beast form, but it's clear that this is another resource to be managed in the middle of hectic battles.

Both Cid and Vincent have deceptively simple combo strings. At first it seems like a straightforward "mash square and spam abilities until the enemy is dead," but more layers continually unfold. Playing these characters feels more akin to a rhythm game, precisely timing button presses to match the combat pace. I still know there's more to how they fit into the larger team composition, but a short demo was never going to allow for understanding the full breadth of how it all fits together.

Eventually, I find myself going toe to toe with another version of the extraterrestrial lifeform Jenova, a rather straightforward fight that largely consists of whaling on a stationary target and staggering it for extra damage. Large undulating tentacles glommed onto the outskirts of the arena. I'm quickly reminded of the sheer spectacle that the Remake series always puts forth, and it's clear that Final Fantasy 7 Revelation continues to harbor that mantra.

At the end of the combat section there's one final tease of something greater. Sephiroth appears and takes the crew to the events of Nibelheim that started it all. Cloud and the gang are confronted with that horrid day as Sephiroth walks through a dark portal begging to be followed.

The party sees a frozen Zack Fair, questioning his relationship to it all. My own head swirling with questions alongside them. Just as Cloud walks through, the demo ends. I don't know what's on the other side of that portal, but this small slice of Revelation puts its characters and story first.

There's still so much to see as the final chapter of the Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy hurdles toward its conclusion, and this window into it all has me excited to see what's on the other side of it all.

Far from final, you can check out our best RPGs, best JRPGs, and best ARPGs rankings for what to play next, and keep an eye on our upcoming RPGs calendar for more!

Everything began with an unloved game jam prompt. In August 2012, fresh off The Binding of Isaac's enormous success, Edmund McMillen took part in Ludum Dare 24. The theme for that competition's entries was put to the vote until, after five rounds, the organisers were left with a top 20. "Plus one joke theme," according to the now-deprecated webpage: "1,000 kittens."

This theme came dead last in public voting. McMillen took it as his inspiration regardless, and together with Team Meat co-founder Tommy Refenes began prototyping a game that featured not just 1,000 cats but – according to an early marketing tagline – 12 sextillion of them. "I just love the idea of going infinite," McMillen says. This number was achieved using a method McMillen had developed with his previous game, using Flash to add multiple layers of ‘animation clips' to augment the character's look. "I really liked how he'd change visually as you went," he says of Isaac. "And that was the initial spark. I could make a cat-like shape with a bunch of different clips for arms, legs, bodies, heads, whatever – randomise them. We could simulate those as DNA, and then you could have the cats breed and spit out all these different combinations."

It was a simple idea, but one McMillen found himself "pretty obsessed with". Dig up his blog posts from the time, and the enthusiasm is evident. "It's been very hard to keep this one a secret," he wrote in the announcement post for Mew-Genics, as it was then known. This was in October 2012, just weeks after the game jam.

Of course, the game would go on to be a success that dwarfed even Binding of Isaac, selling a million copies in its first week of release. But it'd take an awfully long time to get there, and at the beginning, in the case of everyone but McMillen, the idea was as unloved as the prompt that had spawned it.

From Mew-Genics, to Mewgenics

A year on from that fateful Ludum Dare, McMillen and Refenes had a version of the game they reckoned they were ready to show in public – albeit not one that looked anything like the Mewgenics we know today. "There was a house you could upgrade over time, where you could interact with the cats, and they'd have these wacky animations, and then use those cats as avatars in minigames," McMillen recalls. "I think we only had one functional minigame, the cat fights, which was this Pokémon-esque turn-based combat game."

That was the version of the game Team Meat intended to demo at PAX Seattle in August 2013. At the very last minute, there was a change of mind, and the pair attended without the playable build they'd announced. It proved to be a turning point in more ways than one.

"When we came back from PAX, Tommy was like, ‘I can't work on this anymore," McMillen says. "And I begged, I pleaded… but it was cancelled. That was it. There was nothing I could really do about it." At the time, Refenes' sole interest was making a follow-up to Team Meat's hit platformer, which would be announced the following August as Super Meat Boy Forever. In the announcement blogpost, McMillen explained: "Mewgenics is not cancelled, we just put it on hold to work full time on this one."

Super Meat Boy Forever would eventually be released in 2020. By then, McMillen was no longer part of the project, or Team Meat. "I realised we wanted very different things," he reflects now. At the time, though, he kept trying to make the Mewgenics dream a reality. "I was still pitching it to Tommy before I left. I was trying to wrap it in a genre that I thought he would be excited about."

One version McMillen remembers was closer to Spelunky, the game that had inspired his step into Roguelikes with Isaac. Another came from his longtime friend and collaborator Tyler Glaiel, a fellow traveller in the '00s Flash webgame scene. "I remember suggesting back then: ‘Why not try Final Fantasy Tactics-style combat instead of Pokémon combat?'" Glaiel says. "Because they're on the same tree, kind of, but you can do a lot more with the positioning stuff." McMillen laughs: "Yeah. One has depth, and the other has the illusion of depth."

After McMillen left Team Meat in December 2016, he and Glaiel were free to work together again – not on Mewgenics, but on action platformer The End Is Nigh. "The whole time this was happening, I kept pushing these Mewgenics-like ideas at Tyler," McMillen says. One was a game featuring randomly generated aliens that the player could breed.

"There were some differences," Glaiel says. "The animation was weirder, because it was more rigged and physics-y, because the body parts were so different from each other." Still, Glaiel knew exactly what his old friend was up to. "You just wanted to make Mewgenics, I could tell," he says to McMillen. And, after working on the alien prototype for a week or so, he concluded: "This is a worse theme than cats." After all, it lacked the heartfelt motivations that had driven McMillen to this idea in the first place.

Because, despite the way Mewgenics encourages you to treat your cats, the developer is an animal lover. "Our first cat, Guppy, was a stray kitten that was abandoned in a planter box by its mother," he says. Guppy passed away in 2014 but was immortalised as a powerful character transformation in The Binding of Isaac. "And then, with money and whatever else, my wife was like, ‘I want a hairless cat.'"

That was his introduction to the world of designer cat breeding. The McMillen family have owned three hairless cats, the latest "a Russian import named Puggy", but he has little love for the industry that produces them, which he feels prioritises aesthetic features – unusual ear shapes or fur patterns – over the health of the cats themselves. "They're breeding for rare drops! It's the same as in the game!" These words are delivered with a righteous fury that seems to have burned in McMillen through the long journey from inception to release. "And that's what really kept me going throughout."

Hairless horrors

After The End is Nigh shipped in 2017, McMillen and Glaiel were finally ready to start turning this idea into a reality. The game's themes were already in place, as was a visual style and a cast of characters: Dr Beanies, Butch and the rest made their debut in blogposts dating back to 2012. You can even find an early version of the theme tune, recorded by rock duo Ridiculon. The one remaining question: what kind of game was this going to be?

"There's a bunch of prototypes from that era," Glaiel says. One was "a Castle Crashers-esque beat-'em-up". That proved difficult given the developers wanted multiple characters in play at once, "because you can tell more interesting stories when it's a group, instead of just one cat". So how were they to make that work in real time, without taking the multiplayer route? Glaiel remembers some possible solutions: "What if you have one main cat and a bunch of smaller follower cats that repeat what you do? What if it's just three AI-controlled cats, and one main cat you're controlling?"

They also experimented with making a StarCraft-style RTS. That proved to be "a nightmare to control," Glaiel says. "There was no strategy. You couldn't dodge attacks because you didn't have direct control. You could only tell things what to do, so if an enemy was going to hit you, it had to have a five-second windup so you had time to click your cats and move them away."

"It's funny," McMillen says to his friend. "When you describe them now, they don't sound bad." Glaiel agrees: "Both of those prototypes, I think there's a world where we executed on them and made a decent game. Probably not as interesting as the one we ended up making…"

The game they ended up making, of course, came back to Glaiel's old suggestion of turn-based tactics. Years earlier, McMillen had brushed off the idea because it would mean an awful lot of work. "And that's true," says Glaiel, having worked on this incarnation of the game from 2020 to 2026. "Certainly can't disagree with that!"

Part of what made things so complicated was that the game had two layers. The pet sim McMillen had started out with, and the tactical RPG Glaiel had introduced to the mix were dependent on each other to function. The specifics of the cat-breeding system couldn't be nailed down until they'd "made sure the combat was working fine," Glaiel explains. "Because the breeding doesn't really matter if you don't have anything to use the cats you're breeding for."

Their solution to this sticky situation? "We just kind of worked on the systems seemingly at random, until they were mostly complete, and then we connected them all together," McMillen says. "And we never spoke about it, really." This was only possible because of the pair's dynamic and shared sensibilities – and even so, it didn't always work out. "We were just kind of hoping our assumptions were correct," McMillen says. "And some of them were wrong."

One of those dead ends involved the game's cast of weirdo NPCs, who'd been around since 2012. What role they'd actually serve in-game didn't become clear until late in development, McMillen says. "Initially, the idea was that you'd upgrade the NPCs with money." They didn't like the player grind that encouraged, and so he searched for an alternative before eventually realising: "Wait, we have a resource right here. We have cats."

In the final game, any kittens with undesirable traits or elderly fighters past their prime can be dumped on these characters in exchange for rewards – something else that wasn't obvious at first. "Dr Beanies giving you side quests, we figured that out less than a year before the game came out," Glaiel says. "Before that, he'd give you an ability needle, with a random ability from one of the cats you'd sent him. And they'd just clog up your inventory, because most of the time it would just be some colourless ability."

Rather than ditching this idea entirely, however, the developers found another home for it – you can obtain ability needles by beating an optional hard route with one of the late-game areas. "There's a lot of that," McMillen says, "where we'll do a system, it'll be really in-depth and interesting, but maybe doesn't work how we intended. We don't forget it's there. We make a mental note, and in the future, when there's a hole we need to fill, we can just pull that shit back out."

This resulted in one of Mewgenics' greatest strengths: its wealth of ideas, where something originally designed as a headline feature might be tucked away where relatively few players will ever find it. "The people who have been playing it hardcore since release are starting to go, ‘I've got 300 hours in this game, and I've never seen this before'," McMillen says. "There's a tremendous amount of this very rare, difficult-to-find shit that we just kept adding. And those details, even though they're somewhat needless at times, create the illusion this is a living world. That's where the magic is with games like this."

That's something McMillen learned with Isaac, over the many post-launch updates developed alongside Mewgenics' very long journey to release. He admits to feeling competitive with his own game: "The bar got raised so high, especially with where Isaac ended. Going into this [project], we had this not-so-indirect comparison of: ‘This is what we're going up against – this game that has ten years of development content in it already'."

Although it's less than a year old, Mewgenics already feels like a game that's undergone a similar decade-long period of iteration and expansion. And with many millions of cats having already been fed through its meat grinder, McMillen and Glaiel have been able to see that old magic at work over and over again.

"There are things we forgot were in the game," Glaiel says. He describes an online discussion where a player was trying to figure out why a particular unit had been blinded in battle. "And it's like, ‘Oh, he was standing on a dirt tile, and he used a wind ability – and that apparently blinds them'. I don't remember putting that interaction in the game."

This is apparently news to McMillen, too: "I remember we briefly joked about it very early on, when we made those tiles. I didn't know it was ever implemented." The pair begin trading possible interactions, wondering if they're in the game or not, or whether they should be. Do holy-element powers cause grass to grow, the same way water does? Gravity powers crush grass, and immobilise flying units – but what about water? And how does it interact with rocks?

"I don't think it does a lot," Glaiel replies. "It's mostly just there as a tag for Psychics to interact with." And that gets them onto the ways the elements' effects could be expanded in future. Glaiel, on the spot, starts musing: "One of our DLC classes could probably do stuff with gravity…" When it comes to "going infinite", McMillen has clearly met his match.

This Mewgenics article was first published in issue 424 of Edge Magazine. To get more like this delivered straight to your doorstep (or digital device) consider subscribing to Edge.

I have a plea for you: don't sleep on Warhammer Age of Sigmar. It may not be a household name like its grimdark sibling 40K, but this fantasy wargame is some of Games Workshop's best work – and the new Khazalite Holds range (which has just gone up for pre-order) is a good example of that.

When it comes to Games Workshop, Warhammer 40,000 gets a lot of attention. Understandably so; it's a deeply compelling world with iconic factions and trend-setting gameplay. However, Age of Sigmar is no slouch. Besides intuitive mechanics that shave off any excess for an incredibly tight, focused experience, it being the scrappy younger brother with everything to prove has given it an excuse to go wild creatively. I genuinely think this wargame is responsible for some of the company's boldest and best-looking models. The Khazalite Holds exemplify this top-of-class nature.

I've mentioned before that the new faction plays it safer than I'd like visually, and I stand by this assessment now that I've got the full range on my desk (with a couple of exceptions we'll cover later). For me, Age of Sigmar is at its best when it mucks about with walking castles, bizarre tree people, or armies powered by caged demons. But by god, are the Khazalite Holds the best example of 'classic' fantasy dwarves I've ever seen. They bring beloved tropes together in an elegant and timeless way.

The Thrynn – a warleader for your army – is a good example. It absolutely nails the stoic warrior king idea with a simple pose that nevertheless radiates power, an imposing mask that genuinely makes them look intimidating, a bear-skin cloak to go with their obnoxiously large hammer, and, of course, a truly magnificent beard.

Similarly, the Valayan Guardians (which are hands down my favorite troops in the range) channel a Valkyrie-esque air while also managing to look more dynamic and speedier than you'd expect from often-cumbersome fantasy dwarves to be. Because one of their special abilities lets them cut through foes as they charge toward a new target, that's only fair.

The most impressive of all the Khazalite Holds is, quite rightly, High King Valankrom. The faction's leader is hands down the most bizarre and imaginative miniature in the range, and it's everything I love about Age of Sigmar in one hulking plastic monster. Besides the astounding attention to detail (providing lore tidbits and hidden secrets on what is basically a diorama), it seamlessly combines that well-trodden quasi-Viking aesthetic with a mind-bending boat of marble that sails through the earth, not water. It's a true show-stopper and centerpiece that is only bested by the Cities of Sigmar Cogfort, in my opinion.

Basically, it's everything that I think works so well about Age of Sigmar models in one miniature... and it's creativity like this that makes think the game deserves to do more than live in the shadow of its bigger sci-fi brother.

I'll be running a breakdown of each individual unit and character in the next week or so once I've finished putting them together, but until then, why not check out our guide to early Black Friday Warhammer deals?

• See all offers on Warhammer Age of Sigmar at Amazon

Shuri was never supposed to be the Black Panther. In 2020, Chadwick Boseman, who portrayed T'Challa with so much regal gravitas, died at the age of 43. In the terrible aftermath, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was released – a beautiful entry in the MCU that functions both as a deeply loving tribute to Boseman and an emotional passing of the torch to Letitia Wright's Shuri.

It's this context that makes Black Panther: Wakanda Forever such an extraordinary accomplishment. Not only is it a genuinely thrilling chapter in the MCU, but it also pulls off the tricky task of handing over the mantle in a way that feels respectful and natural to the characters involved, while honoring the real Boseman. It doesn't shy away from this reality, instead choosing to tell a story that focuses heavily on Shuri's raw grief and her complicated journey to stepping up as her nation's protector.

Now, Shuri is set to return in Avengers: Doomsday, standing alongside other Marvel titans like Chris Hemsworth's Thor and the original X-Men. I just hope that, among the stacked cast, Shuri gets her chance to shine – because she's earned it.

Love persevering

Wakanda Forever begins with T'Challa dying from a mystery illness. Despite her super-genius intellect, Shuri is powerless against this invisible enemy and unable to synthesize a new heart-shaped herb, and so T'Challa dies. Shuri, who idolized her big brother, is devastated – and, after a time-skip of a year, she is still struggling with her all-encompassing grief, which is making her as angry as she is heartbroken.

It's this raw emotion that makes Shuri's journey to becoming a fully fledged hero so compelling. Shuri, very understandably, does not want to become the Black Panther. It doesn't even cross her mind. Instead, she has the incredibly human reaction of simply wanting to grieve. But in the Marvel universe, nobody has any breathing space for long, and the arrival of Namor and the threat of CIA intervention over Vibranium pushes Shuri back into the fray. It's when the situation spirals out of control, and Namor kills her mother, Queen Ramonda, that Shuri finally returns to attempting to reconstruct the heart-shaped herb.

As a showdown with Killmonger in the Ancestral Plane demonstrates, though, Shuri is not solely motivated by an altruistic desire to be a hero: she wants revenge. Her anger and pain at the loss of T'Challa have been exacerbated by the murder of her mother, resulting in a furious grief that threatens to plunge Wakanda into an endless war with its underwater neighbours. It's a natural breaking point in her struggle to deal with so much loss, and sets Shuri's arc apart from the rise to greatness of other MCU heroes in its messy, intense vulnerability and pain.

Ultimately, though, Shuri, movingly encouraged by the spirit of Ramonda, chooses peace by sparing Namor's life and putting an end to the fighting between Wakanda and Talokan. This triumphant finish clears the way, allowing Shuri to finally process her grief – and even meet her nephew, T'Challa II. Her story in the film ends with a quiet moment on the beach, burning her mourning clothes, letting go of the painful past in order to face a more hopeful future.

Shuri's journey is not easy, and it's not one she even wanted – mirroring the awful real-life circumstances that led to the storyline. In this anguish is a beautiful evolution, powered by a standout performance from Wright, that brings Shuri from the fun, kid sister sidekick to the Black Panther herself. This passing of the torch is so effective because it truly means something, both within the MCU and in real life, and it gifts Shuri with boundless potential.

The Black Panther lives

It was announced at SDCC that Shuri will soon be passing on the mantle herself, this time to T'Challa II. The Long Walk star David Jonsson will play the character, though how it will all work out is unclear at the moment, since Jonsson is much older than the young T'Challa II at the end of Wakanda Forever. ("In this next film, he grows up, comes of age, and we had to find an incredible actor," director Ryan Coogler shared on stage.)

Hopefully, then, Shuri gets her chance to shine in Avengers: Doomsday before surrendering the mantle. This is her first opportunity to truly spread her wings as the Black Panther after Wakanda Forever, and, with such a stacked cast, there's every risk Shuri might fall by the wayside – which would be a huge mistake, after how far she has come. She can be glimpsed in the trailers so far, though sadly not for very long.

But Wright may have already inadvertently let slip that she's part of the Avengers: Secret Wars cast, which would mean we have one more chance after Doomsday to see her in all her power before Jonsson takes over in Black Panther 3. What might happen in Secret Wars heavily depends on Doomsday, of course, but this duo of blockbuster event films offers the perfect chance to bring Shuri's MCU story to a meaningful close, paying off the emotional set-up of Wakanda Forever.

Shuri was never supposed to be the Black Panther, but she has more than proved how capable she is of being Wakanda's protector – and I hope Doomsday gives her the chance to truly show it.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is available to stream now on Disney Plus, ahead of the release of Avengers: Doomsday on December 18.

Look ahead with our list of upcoming Marvel movies and check out how to watch the Marvel movies in order ahead of your next rewatch. See you next week as we revisit Captain America: Brave New World.

I'm on a roll as I enter Dodongo's Cavern, the fiery labyrinth and second dungeon in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake. Despite plenty of tweaks and changes, muscle memory of my previous playthroughs has kept me on task – adult wallet acquired, deku nuts on lock, Hylian Shield strapped on my back. Then, I walk forward a few steps towards ledges above flaming pools of lava and immediately faceplant, my poor little elfin boy immediately set aflame. Yes, Navi, I need some hearts.

Perhaps the biggest gameplay change in Ocarina of Time remake compared to the Nintendo 64 original is swapping the auto-jump to a manual button press. Previously, running toward an edge would have the green-garbed Link always jump from the furthest point possible. Now, I have to press a button to do it myself. Great. And why don't I rock up to my local pizza place to bake my own pie next time I order, too? While I see Super Mario 64 challenge runs completing that game without jumping at all, I've been doomed to tap the jump-button in the Zelda equivalent endlessly.

Jump to the past

I'm exaggerating, but only a bit. There are actually loads of times in which the manual control of Link's hops, and how reactive all his moves are in a world that feels utterly teeming with life, helps this remake buzz with a new energy. Small layout changes to early areas add a smidge more naturalistic verticality to some zones, while scampering through towns and mantling ledges simply makes navigation of the overworld much more swish.

Still, it's in the more traditional Zelda dungeon exploration and challenges that I stumble. I'm so used to routing my way through these dangerous areas by pointing myself in the right direction and chaining together auto-jumps that I find myself forgetting or mistiming the input to go early or roll by mistake and end up going splat. This is very embarrassing to admit as a big platformer fan who usually wastes no time click-clacking the stick to do side somersaults up forbidden pathways. Something about having to press the jump button in Ocarina of Time is vexing me. And I'm far from the only one.

the OoT remake experience

— @othatsraspberry.com (@othatsraspberry.com.bsky.social) 2026-11-06T12:17:26.900Z

In part, it's because I have played these games before. These jumps are deeply familiar to me, designed without a manual jump button at all, only to now have the need foisted upon them. It's not like Elden Ring where the addition of a more natural jump compared to Dark Souls was incorporated into its level design approach from the ground-up.

While the position of, say, the pond with the platforms in Kokiri Village may have been adjusted, the sequence is the same as the original. Except, now, you have to press another button the whole time while doing it rather than thinking only about steering.

I'm being picky, and a bit of a grumbler – I do agree with Anna's 5-star Ocarina of Time remake review. This is an exceptional overhaul. But, it's not as if the concept of a jump-button was completely alien to the N64 development team – the original game was intentionally designed not to need a jump button. It's not like they just forgot to include it.

In fact, I'd say more isn't always better – like a sloppy, delicious-looking burger with too many toppings to get your jaw around. For me, some of the joy of revisiting classic Zelda is the simplicity of control that allows depth elsewhere. It's not as if auto-jumping was an N64 limitation, the traversal mechanic having remained in the series all the way through to Breath of the Wild.

Many of the best Zelda games, as a result, make fantastic use of auto-jump without the need for manual jump at all – Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, all the rest. In Breath of the Wild it made sense with the design shift to the open world, freeform focused exploration, away from tight dungeon design. Ocarina of Time remake isn't so different that this fundamental control choice suddenly needs an overhaul.

I'm not fuming it's here, but I'm a bit baffled at the dedication to manual jump. If you're going to add it in, why not keep auto-jump as a toggle or additional option? After all, the Ocarina of Time remake dev team explicitly kept the classic jump-attack and rolling options alongside their modern control versions. Granted, some reworked sections now require manual jumping – climbing up a bit of wall into the Hyrule Castle gardens, for example, which I quite like – but why does that mean I also can't auto-jump when I run at an edge?

Largely, Ocarina of Time remake is a more well-considered overhaul than I had first feared. Over the last few years, I've been finding remakes broadly very hit and miss. Loads of small tweaks feel dialled in to perfection, from the exact amount of luscious detail to enemy animations making combat feel more reactive – all while respecting much of the core design that made Ocarina of Time such a classic. But, when I'm tumbling into the lava because I forgot that not all original design concepts are quite so revered as others at the altar of strapping on more game mechanics, well, it burns a little.

Time marches on. Check out our upcoming Switch 2 releases for more adventures on the horizon!

The Godzilla Minus Zero ending is a dramatic one, with tons of kaiju action. So, you'd be forgiven on missing some of the finer details of what exactly goes down at the conclusion.

That's where we come in. Below, we've got a summary of the film's ending as well as a breakdown of all the biggest questions, so you can get up to speed at a glance. Naturally, that means there are spoilers ahead for the film. Turn back now if you're not up to date!

So, for everything you need to know about the Godzilla Minus Zero ending, head to the below. For even more on the film, check out our spoiler-free Godzilla Minus Zero review.

Godzilla Minus Zero ending explained *Spoilers*

The Godzilla Minus Zero ending kicks off with a plan to bring Ghidorah and Godzilla to the same place in Ginza, Tokyo and have them fight. Ghidorah is lured to the location with generators, since the kaiju loves electricity, while Godzilla is lured there via a resonance wave machine made by biologist Kanji Murakami – the frequency attracts the kaiju when Noriko Shikishima is hooked up to it, since Noriko has Godzilla's DNA embedded in her after being attacked in the first film.

Godzilla and Ghidorah do indeed start fighting once they see each other, but Ghidorah is able to overpower Godzilla. The plan is to trap Ghidorah and freeze him with liquid nitrogen, but, when the trap is threatened by the destruction, Kenji Noda goes to fix the fuel lines himself – and his car is caught in a blast from Ghidorah. Noda is trapped, but Koichi Shikishima fires a missile from his plane to attack Ghidorah, accidentally killing Noda in the process. However, meteorologist Makoto Aoyama lies to him that Ghidorah was the one who killed Noda, sparing Koichi any further guilt.

Godzilla is then revived with the resonance machine, and both kaijus gear up for another showdown. This time, though, Godzilla is able to kill Ghidorah with his atomic ray. The US military then arrive on the scene and begin to attack Godzilla, before they are given orders to stand down.

Koichi holds Murakami at gunpoint, planning to escape with Noriko, before it's revealed that Murakami is on their side. Together, they destroy the plane and the resonance wave machine: Murakami has already set a trap to destroy his own research. This way, no one will be able to control Godzilla or use Noriko and her Godzilla DNA in the future, ending the cycle of war.

Godzilla returns to the ocean, but Murakami is captured by the US military before he can escape. Koichi and Noriko plan to go on the run and leave their child, Akiko, behind for her safety, but cannot bring themselves to abandon her. They end the film escaping together as a family.

Who dies in Godzilla Minus Zero?

Countless civilians die in Godzilla Minus Zero, but there is only one major character death. Hidetaka Yoshioka's Kenji Noda dies in the showdown with Ghidorah, when Ghidorah's energy blast crashes Noda's car and traps him. Koichi then fires a missile from his plane, which inadvertently kills Noda in the ensuing explosion – though, meteorologist Makoto Aoyama lies to him that Ghidorah was responsible for Noda's death to spare him further guilt.

Is New York City attacked in Godzilla Minus Zero?

No, New York City is not really attacked in Godzilla Minus Zero. This is a dream sequence from Min Tanaka's Kanji Murakami, who lost his family in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. He secretly harbors a desire for revenge and wishes to unleash Godzilla on New York City to inflict the same kind of damage – though he is ultimately convinced against his plan by Kenji Noda.

What happens to Ghidorah?

Ghidorah takes a lot of damage in the film, but it's Godzilla who finally finishes him off. After Godzilla is seriously hurt by Ghidorah, he is able to regenerate and return for another round after Noriko and the team on the plane wake him with the resonance machine. He charges up his atomic breath and, this time, is finally able to kill Ghidorah.

What happens to Godzilla?

After winning his battle with Ghidorah, Godzilla simply returns to the sea. It seems the US military had designs on controlling the kaiju with the resonance wave machine, though luckily it gets destroyed before anyone can get their hands on it. That means Godzilla is free – though that probably means he's likely to continue his rampages, which could be bad news for Tokyo.

What is the device used on Noriko?

This is a resonance wave machine, which is capable of attracting Godzilla thanks to the kaiju's DNA Noriko still carries in her body after being attacked in the previous film. The machine is used to lure Godzilla to the site of the showdown with Ghidorah, though, when the US military arrives, everyone onboard the ship makes the decision to destroy the machine and everything in the plane so it cannot be used to control Godzilla's movements in the future and continue the cycle of war. All of Kanji Murakami's research is also destroyed.

What does the US military want with Godzilla?

The US military wants to use the resonance wave machine so that they can control Godzilla's movements (though, this wouldn't control Godzilla entirely, it would just make it possible to lure him somewhere). It's heavily implied that the US desires Godzilla and his atomic breath as a weapon when troops are ordered not to hurt the kaiju.

Do Koichi and Noriko leave Akiko behind? Are they fugitives now?

No, Koichi and Noriko do not leave Akiko behind. In the end, they don't have the heart to after Akiko gets extremely upset at the idea of them abandoning her. Of course, the young couple think they're doing the right thing, since they're likely to be on the run forever thanks to Noriko's Godzilla DNA and Koichi's role in helping to destroy the resonance wave machine. Still, Akiko is probably better off with her parents than without them, so it's a welcome sight to see the youngster on the motorbike with Koichi and Noriko at the end.

Does Godzilla Minus Zero set up a third film?

Godzilla Minus Zero certainly leaves the door open for a third film, though nothing has been confirmed yet. Koichi and Noriko are on the run with Akiko, and Godzilla escaped into the ocean, while Kanji Murakami is in the custody of the US military. These are all plot threads that could be picked up in a third film.

"I have been a huge Godzilla fan since I was a small child, and I swung for the fences with Godzilla Minus Zero," director Takashi Yamazaki recently told SFX magazine. "[These films] are huge milestones, looking back at my career and in my life so far. But that doesn't mean I would never work on another Godzilla film again. If Toho came to me with another offer to explore this world even further, I'd probably say yes.

"Yet at the same time, if you told me this is my last Godzilla film, I would be quite satisfied with what we were able to achieve," he continued. "I'm very grateful to Toho for trusting me with their baby. I'm just happy that I was a Godzilla fan, because that's what enabled me to do this." So, we'll just have to wait and see.

Godzilla Minus Zero is in theaters now. For more, check out our guide to all the most exciting upcoming movies left of 2026.

Does Godzilla Minus Zero have a post-credits scene? It's a fair question, since a lot of movies are hiding bonus material in stingers at the end of the movie.

Below, we've got everything you need to know about whether Godzilla Minus Zero has a post-credits scene or not, including a spoiler-free section on what you're waiting for, and then a breakdown that reveals just what is lurking at the end of the credits.

So, for everything you need to know, head to the below. For even more, check out our Godzilla Minus Zero review.

Does Godzilla Minus Zero have a post-credits scene?

There is technically no Godzilla Minus Zero post-credits scene, however there is an audio tease at the very end of the credits. So, if you absolutely don't want to miss a thing, remain seated until the credits have finished rolling.

What happens in the Godzilla Minus Zero post-credits scene?

The Godzilla Minus Zero post-credits scene isn't exactly a scene per se, but rather a tease. As the credits come to an end, we hear the earth-shattering sound of Godzilla stomping, as well as his almighty roar. It's a reminder that the fearsome kaiju is still out there, even though he vanished into the sea at the end of the film.

It's unclear if a third film will happen, but this certainly leaves the door open for more. "I have been a huge Godzilla fan since I was a small child, and I swung for the fences with Godzilla Minus Zero," director Takashi Yamazaki recently told SFX magazine. "[These films] are huge milestones, looking back at my career and in my life so far. But that doesn't mean I would never work on another Godzilla film again. If Toho came to me with another offer to explore this world even further, I'd probably say yes.

"Yet at the same time, if you told me this is my last Godzilla film, I would be quite satisfied with what we were able to achieve," he added. "I'm very grateful to Toho for trusting me with their baby. I'm just happy that I was a Godzilla fan, because that's what enabled me to do this."

That's a wrap on the Godzilla Minus Zero post-credits. For more, check out our guide to all the most exciting upcoming movies left of 2026.

The Steam Controller is one of the coolest bits of gaming hardware I've tested this year, and it's made a real name for itself. With the Holiday season coming up, that means it's nearly deals o'clock, and people who have been waiting for discounts on the games and accessories that have launched throughout the year will be able to benefit. The Steam Controller isn't one of the most expensive PC controllers out there, but it's hardly the cheapest either, so is it one you should think about this Black Friday?

To be completely honest, Valve has had a difficult enough year with its hardware stock, pricing, and even a few data leaks for good measure, so I'd be very, very surprised if the Steam Controller saw a discount this Black Friday. On the other hand, plenty of other gamepads for Xbox, PS5, PC, and Switch 2 will almost certainly get the deal treatment over the next few weeks. With that in mind, if it's good value and lower prices you're holding out for, maybe the Steam Controller isn't for you.

The TLDR here is that, as someone who has tested the Steam Controller as well as countless other gamepads, the Steam Controller is an amazing accessory to have if you play games on a PC away from a desk. Since it's essentially a mouse and keyboard you can hold in your hand, it acts as a remote control for couch setups and for any game that doesn't have controller support on PC.

If you're doing those things, the Valve's gamepad should be on your shortlist just for the ease of using your PC for gaming like a console and not a desktop computer. But if you're looking for a pro-level gamepad for a specific genre or you want the last word in comfort and features, there are other options to shop for that will get you better deals this Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

You should buy the Steam Controller if:

You play on PC, away from a desk:

If you're building a couch setup, or you have a mini PC to play less technically demanding games away from a desk, the Steam Controller is going to be an absolute godsend for navigating your PC. Having to get up off the couch to grab a mouse or keyboard defeats the entire point of a comfy couch PC setup, so why wouldn't you go for the Steam Controller in this instance?

The right trackpad of the Steam Controller works like one would on a laptop. Trace your finger around it, and the cursor will move with it. The left trackpad can scroll up and down a page, the right trigger clicks on something, and handy shortcuts can bring up a keyboard or other functions you want to use.

All the while, it doubles as a pretty capable controller. There are TMR thumbsticks, four back buttons, and great haptic feedback at work. For users like this, Valve's gamepad is going to kill two or three birds with one stone by cutting the number of peripherals you need down to one.

It's honestly the best way to navigate a PC from the couch, so I recommend it strongly to these people.

You want to play games designed for a mouse and keyboard, but with a controller:

If you're a fan of city builders, Planet Coaster, Planet Zoo, or an RTS game that isn't designed with controllers in mind on PC, the Steam Controller is what you need. This thing is excellent for using the Steam Input system to naturally map control schemes from mouse and keyboard to a gamepad when the developers of that game haven't catered to one.

This can also help with certain older games too - I was playing Assassin's Creed 2 before writing this, and its lack of controller support on Steam meant it was particularly tricky to get working. The Steam Controller managed it though, and that was thanks to awesome control schemes made by the wider Steam community that you can download and install in a heartbeat.

Shop around for a different controller if:

You want to specialise in a certain genre:

If you're shopping for a new gamepad because you want great features and comfort that lend a peripheral to one specific type of game or a competitive title, I wouldn't really opt for the Steam Controller.

For starters, its polling rate leaves a lot to be desired against other modern gamepads like the GameSir G7 Pro 8K, the GameSir Tarantula 8K, or even officially licensed wireless controllers for Xbox like the Nacon Revolution X Unlimited that have a 1,000Hz polling rate. Compared to that, the Steam Controller's 250Hz makes it feel pretty sluggish if you're looking for absolutely no latency or the last word in responsiveness.

You like clicky buttons:

A big must-have for a lot of gamers when it comes to pro controllers today is microswitch buttons. Personally, I can take or leave them, but for a lot of folks, traditional membrane buttons just don't cut it and don't offer the same sort of snappy feel.

Maybe the most responsive alternatives with super clicky face buttons are the Razer Wolverine V3 Pro and the Asus ROG Raikiri II, so take a gander at those if this sort of thing matters to you. Personally, the best buttons I've ever come across that blend comfort with responsive clickiness is the Nacon RXU.

You don't like the faff of setting up controller profiles for the games you play:

I have to admit, one of the factors about the Steam Controller that fatigues me when using it full-time is that you have to create back button assignments for each new game you play. There's no onboard memory that saves profiles for all games, it's a case of selecting a new profile for every game you play, and assigning buttons you want.

It's a total pain, and something that gets tiresome quickly, especially if you're like me and you end up using the same back button assignments in 90% of the games you play. The good news is that pretty much all of the pro controllers on the shelves today have some sort of profile system whereby you can create a few that stick to the button mappings you want regardless of the game you're playing. Take a look at the window below to see some I'd recommend.

The Steam Controller isn't the only one with TMR sticks. Check out the best TMR controllers out there, the best PS5 controllers, and the best Switch 2 controllers.

PATCH NOTES 5.11.2026 – Following developer BioWare's closure under EA, a fan-made petition to "#SaveMassEffect" is gaining momentum. Its ultimate goal – encouraging EA to either resume development on now-canceled Mass Effect 5 or sell the IP to another studio – is a tough sell, especially given the publisher's track record. But the petition's popularity has opened an exciting new door for the RPG franchise: the opportunity for rebirth.

What's going on in gaming this week?

• After Mass Effect 5's cancelation, a Bioware co-founder is so touched by the #SaveMassEffect movement that he wants to reconnect with OG members of the dev team.
• CD Projekt Red keeps adding to its host of RPG experts, with ex-Kingdom Come: Deliverance devs added to its star-studded roster.

Why is this happening now?

• One of the petition's goals is to get EA to sell Mass Effect to a studio like CDPR, which continues to prove itself a home for RPG specialists.
• Hope has been rekindled for original BioWare and Mass Effect writers to band together once more, keeping a candle lit for the series' resurgence someday.
• Industry trends mean an eventual reboot cannot be discounted – even if #SaveMassEffect's demands aren't immediately met.

Meta Shift

• #SaveMassEffect's power is in what the petition represents, as long as fans can play the waiting game.

The news of BioWare's shuttering and the subsequent cancelation of Mass Effect 5 Universe was a bitter pill to swallow. So much so, many RPG fans refused.

#SaveMassEffect, a petition to rescue the canned franchise from EA's video game graveyard, has over 300,000 signatures on Change.org at the time of writing. These are promising numbers, but what hope does the petition have of actually meeting its goals?

The chances of EA selling or licensing Mass Effect to another developer or publisher are extremely slim. EA's habit of sitting on its sunsetted franchises has been widely reported over the years, so I wouldn't hold my breath. Fans are eyeballing studios like Larian and CD Projekt Red for the task all the same, though each studio is hard at work on their own RPGs.

But this might not be the end of Mass Effect, because games get rebooted all the time. Look at how Xbox is reviving Fable under Playground Games after original developer Lionheart shut down in 2016. Or how Larian Studios was chosen to develop Baldur's Gate 3, the first two games having been developed by BioWare in partnership with lapsed license-holders Interplay. EA even brought Dead Space out of a 10-year dormancy to remake the first game in the trilogy. #SaveMassEffect shows that there is still overwhelming passion and desire for a continuation of the RPG series – we just might need to be patient.

Patch Notes summary

Two weeks later, the buzz around #SaveMassEffect is still resounding. There's no telling if EA will reconsider its actions or acknowledge the petition at all, but whether or not it succeeds is beside the point. Its popularity speaks to the unified strength of players' voices in showing discontentment with corporate moves in an industry that continues to be rife with layoffs, studio shutdowns, and cancelations, as well as how important this franchise is to so many.

If it inspires even one handful of BioWare devs not to give up hope, which seems to be the case for its co-founder, it might be enough to keep Mass Effect's spirit alive long enough to see it resurrected sometime in the future. Even if, like Baldur's Gate, it might take a decade or two.

Related

A project like D&D World of Warcraft can become a poisoned chalice if you're not careful. It'd be easy to fall into the trap of rehashing the MMO that inspired it, key-jangling your audience with nostalgic-yet-empty references. In much the same way, the two franchises share enough DNA to be siblings – finding something new that doesn't retread old ground in one of the best tabletop RPGs is easier said than done.

After a few days rifling through this book, though, I'd say it's clear that the team at Wizards of the Coast have been able to thread that needle. D&D World of Warcraft manages to serve both its audiences well with compelling new challenges for one and a meaningful opportunity to explore beyond the edge of the MMO map for another. There's obviously room to improve and expand here, just like the video game it's based on. However, first impressions suggest this is sweet wine rather than toxin.

While it's appealing enough to galavant across Azeroth on tabletop (with each continent and conflict detailed in a busy worldbuilding chapter), let's be honest: one of the real draws for this book is its classes. A grand total of 13 are introduced in the first chapter, and they act as subclasses for D&D's core class list. While many are reskinned or edited versions of existing Dungeons & Dragons builds, a few are entirely new. By and large, they work well – but from what I've seen, it's a sliding scale.

First, the good. Some really do add a compelling, shiny new toy for us to play with, and chief amongst these are the three 'Hero' classes: Death Knight, Demon Hunter, and Evoker. The implacable Death Knight got an "oh, damn" out of me as we progressed from powerful Runeforging and ghostly steeds that can pass through foes to deadly spells that will make your allies very grateful you're on their side. Meanwhile, the Demon Hunter is a force to be reckoned with long before you consider Soul Fragments that let you regain health and damage foes in one fell swoop… or start double-jumping like goddamn Super Mario.

While these Hero classes are only available from level 3 (which makes sense in-universe, what with them representing the best of the best), they're appealing no matter whether you're coming at this as a D&D player wanting something new or a WoW veteran hoping to recreate their favorite character.

At the other end of the scale are classes that feel a bit too similar to their D&D equivalent. Despite some revolving around specializations that help them avoid being lost in the shuffle (like the Hunter's emphasis on pets, the Monk's focus on Mystic Brews, or Druid's beast forms with bespoke powers), it's more an extension of something we already have rather than a completely novel approach. The Warrior is particularly thin, with just a few new Battle Master maneuvers beyond what D&D Fighters normally get.

That's not a huge problem, of course, and I may change my tune once I've dug into them some more. Nonetheless, I have a feeling some of these classes will shine brighter than others.

It's a similar story with lineages. While the majority (from Earthen to Mechagnomes) provide bespoke traits with a unique flavor to make your WoW character feel more Warcraft, the likes of Orcs and most Elven variants don't add anything mechanically speaking beyond what we see in the Player's Handbook. Considering how Orcs are one of WoW's most recognizable species, I was a bit surprised by that.

Fortunately, every single one I've seen so far ties into a faction with Reknown points to increase your standing with them. I'm yet to finish that chapter, but organizations appear to play a far more significant role here than they do in standard D&D. They're baked into your character from the get-go, which says a lot about their importance.

Dungeons are much the same. And because these are a major reason many of us will rock up on D&D World of Warcraft's shores, I'm happy to report that they deliver the goods.

Squirrelled away in the back half of the book are six dungeons, all drawn from across WoW history – from Shadowfang Keep to Onyxia's Lair. All of them weigh in at around six-to-eight pages each, and every one is stuffed to the gunwales with encounters, plot hooks, and bosses that should give most parties plenty to chew on. Alongside fierce encounters fans will be happy to see again, there are plenty of fun complications to spice up standard combat (like sabotaging the pirate ship Juggernaut in Deadmines or enduring waves of foes while ritual braziers light your way to the final boss of Blackfathom Deeps).

Crucially, they don't just have to be a gauntlet of fights; you're encouraged to allow any and all plans to complete the mission, be it stealthy disguises or some other cunning plot that can only be achieved with the imagination in D&D. This – and the inclusion of random encounter tables – help avoid these dungeons feeling like simple retreads.

Just be aware that none of them are blow-by-blow guides on how to run each dungeon. Much like other releases for D&D's revised Fifth Edition, the broad strokes are spelled out but you're left to fill in the gaps yourself. This is fine if you're an experienced Dungeon Master who's used to improvising, but may be trickier if you're totally new to this game.

Still, that shouldn't stop you from trying – from what I've seen, the effort is more than worthwhile. Which is just as well; there's a lot riding on D&D World of Warcraft. After all, it's the first 'Universes Beyond' crossover ahead of next year's D&D Star Wars project.

If this book is any indication, I'm feeling hopeful about what comes next.

Speaking of D&D Star Wars, it's giving me Andor vibes with promises to let you "fly daring missions" and fight the Empire as a secret Rebel team.

• See the latest D&D books at Amazon

This week, PlayStation has removed PSVR 2 from its own virtual stores in the US and in Japan, which follows on from months of stock shortages in the US and UK for the VR headset. The news also comes just a month after it was found that Sony has sold all of its mixed-reality patents to one of its biggest rivals in the space, Meta.

Just three years on from its arrival, the headset seems to be reaching the end of its supported life. Sony's second headset received countless glowing reviews from critics and fans, but its lack of support has led it to an even shorter lifespan than the first PSVR.

To be completely clear, there's been no official word from Sony about it discontinuing PSVR 2, but even for an optimist and massive VR apologist like me, the writing's on the wall.

Immediate reception from fans was cold because of PSVR 2's launch price. Its lack of support for PC until halfway through its life almost certainly cut it off from a big chunk of this comparably small gaming market. A price drop definitely restored some good faith, but by the time it arrived, Sony had already made its lack of support on the games side a big red flag.

Since reviewing PSVR 2, I've held the strong belief that this is the best option for gaming that people can buy - even after testing newer rivals. Meta has produced affordable, mixed-reality excellence with the Quest 3 headsets. Pimax and HTC have proven visually lossless will always be unmatched, but PSVR 2's all round features, its jaw-dropping displays, and its gaming-centric design have always given it an edge I haven't found elsewhere on the shelves.

Which is why I'm now scratching my head.

Sony made something that, although had a lofty price tag, was far beyond the competition in terms of its specs, features, and user experience. It knew from its first VR rodeo, and countless game console generations, that dedicated software support is the name of the game, and yet, it chose to sit idly by and let the idea of PSVR 2 gather dust just as the headset itself did on people's shelves.

If you ask a lot of gamers, the fate of PSVR 2 was sealed long before its gradual withdrawal from stores. In 2024, Sony shuttered or repurposed all of the VR studios it had spent so much money to acquire during the PS4 lifecycle. Sony London, the developer of PlayStation VR Worlds, was closed. Firesprite made Horizon Call of the Mountain, but has since seen downsizing. Guerilla Cambridge was closed despite making PSVR's well-received RIGS. Team Asobi made an Astro Bot VR title for PSVR, but it was repurposed for flat-screen Astro titles that admittedly went on to win GOTY.

Even if that was all unavoidable for business reasons I'm not privy to, it didn't need to be the death knell for PSVR 2.

There's plenty that PlayStation could have tried to do to keep interest alive. The VR category on the PlayStation Plus catalog has gotten smaller and smaller by the month. Free games as part of the service almost never included a VR game, which incentivized absolutely none of the PS5's user base to adopt the hardware. A lack of VR games in the wider market is a larger chicken-and-egg problem at the moment, but there are plenty on SteamVR that PlayStation could have made a bigger deal of securing.

Despite even the first PSVR headset having a multitude of bundles and demos to support its sales on the shelves, PSVR 2 still only has one: the Horizon Call of the Mountain bundle it launched alongside.

State of Plays have made it clear that VR is no longer a priority to the PlayStation ecosystem for people who spent their hard-earned cash on a VR headset. The last time a VR game featured was back in the middle of 2025 when Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow was announced.

While I find it difficult to fault the design of PSVR 2, I can't condone its lack of a PC lifeline, namely, any anticipatory support for PC when it launched.

In the end, the lack of an intuitive linking system to PC cut the legs out from under PSVR 2 from the first. The PC adaptor was such a welcome addition that gave the headset a bit more momentum, but almost every review from customers and critics found it was clunky, complicated, and a very imperfect fix for a device that should have been able to link to a PC much more simply.

A $50 add-on that went out of stock almost immediately and was then imitated by unlicensed third-party brands was not the most appealing to begin with, but the fact that even when it worked, foveated rendering and headband haptic feedback didn't carry over from PS5 probably didn't add much appeal.

Fair enough, today, PlayStation has pulled back from any and all PC support, but back in 2023 its experiment with PC hardware and software releases was in full swing. It seems both incredibly arrogant and even more short-sighted of the folks at Sony not to make such a pricey bit of hardware compatible with the biggest segment of the VR market. A DisplayPort or HDMI port on the headset, or even a natural Windows USB connection from the get-go that lined up with Sony's Inzone hardware, could have given PSVR 2 a failsafe if the PS5 player base didn't adopt it.

Sony's mishandling of what is still a top-class bit of hardware will puzzle me for years to come. Like I say, I'm a massive VR fan, so my biases are clear, but I believe PSVR 2 could have survived a lack of support on the software side, or a lack of wider (and easier) PC support.

It didn't stand a chance against both of those things at once.

If you're interested in buying a different VR headset, check out our review of the Steam Frame, the Meta Quest 3, or the Pimax Dream Air.

VisionQuest is drawing closer to its conclusion as episode 7 ups the ante for Vision and his gang of AIs. After the drama in Madripoor last week, the new outing picks up in the midst of the race to save Lisa as Jacosta edges closer to reaching her nefarious goal. The latest episode of the Marvel show also brings with it a whole bunch of answers as we find out more about the creation of AI as well as the identity of a key character.

Alongside all that exposition are some neat Marvel references. Below, we get into all the major in-universe moments that we spotted, as well as pop culture nods and more WandaVision callbacks. Before we do, here's your spoiler warning, as we'll be discussing major details below.

For more on the show, check out our VisionQuest review and our guide to the VisionQuest release schedule.

VisionQuest episode 7 Easter eggs

Shared faces: Paul Bettany stays booked and busy in the new episode of VisionQuest, playing three characters. As well as playing Vision, he also plays Phineas Horton and his first AI, Jim Hammond. This is a pretty cool reveal as it seems to indicate that Phineas may be the reason Vision looks the way he does, deepening the character's backstory even further.

The Raven: Jacosta quotes 'The Raven' by Edgar Allen Poe when revealing her plan with the nano-bots. It's a pretty apt poem to be referencing for the Butcher Bird and it also has an interesting connection to the Marvel universe. Marvel Comics once published a mini-series adapting Poe's works and there's a HYDRA character named after him too.

Corvus Glaive's glaive: At the Paladin's hideout, it's revealed he has Corvus Glaive's glaive, a weapon that Vision knows all too well. He was impaled with it at the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War. Not only does it appear here, but we also find out that the Wakandans had been keeping it in the years since the events of Infinity War.

J.I.M. Hammond's story: VisionQuest changes up J.I.M. Hammond's story a bit from Marvel Comics. After finding out earlier in the season that he caught fire, it's revealed in this episode that it's because he found love, which became his downfall. We also learn that his creator, Phineas Horton, died with him.

Phineas Horton's words: This becomes all the more painful too when Phineas Horton tells Vision, "You need never know the consequence of love. It's sorrow, pain and valeting out for someone who can no longer hear you. You will be free, my boy. You will be free". This all echoes Vision's most famous line, 'What is grief if not love persevering,' which has been a theme explored throughout VisionQuest so far.

Vision's new suit: Fully embracing his past, Vision suits up this episode. It's a cool new costume that features a comic-accurate collar and a whole lot more gold.

Pinocchio: We don't have to look hard to work out what Ultron's favorite Disney movie is, as the character has once again referenced Pinocchio. Alongside his "no strings" quips so far, he says to Vision in this episode that Horton has "made you a real boy".

WandaVision: Vision leaves Tommy a heartfelt message explaining to him what his real past is. He gives him WandaVision to watch and makes reference to one of Wanda Maximoff's most iconic lines, telling him that "family is forever." As Wanda famously said in the series finale of that show, "A family is forever. We could never truly leave each other, even if we tried."

VisionQuest is airing now on Disney Plus. For more on the MCU, here are all the upcoming Marvel movies and shows on the way.

Back at the beginning of summer, I rebuilt my PC for the umpteenth time. Since it had started its life in a small form factor ITX case, it was still using a tiny ITX motherboard that, although wasn't giving me any performance problems, was stuck with Raptor Lake processors. As a CPU reviewer, I needed to move on. But there was a problem with the new board I picked. I thought something had gone wrong when I rebuilt everything because when I had all of my USB devices plugged in, the entire gaming PC kept shorting.

It made me question everything. I was troubleshooting in every direction, trying to find the problem. Was it a screw I had wrongly used to secure the new motherboard to the case? Was it a faulty motherboard? Was it some other tiny mistake I had made with the rebuild?

Actually, it turns out it was a very, very niche problem with one of my bits of content creation gear, and one that any owner of the Rodecaster Duo could run into depending on how they use it.

From the beginning, having all of my USB devices plugged in was causing issues - that includes a mouse, keyboard, a few controllers, a Stream Deck+, and the RodeCaster Duo (twice, since it has dual USB connections you can use to separate audio channels). Shorting the board would cause the PC to crash, trap in a boot cycle, or even clear the CMOS and reset all of my BIOS settings.

To avoid the problem, I was ensuring that I was clearing any residual power from the board every time I shut down, which was a giant pain in the ass. That meant turning off the PSU switch after shutdown, holding down the button, and waiting until all the inner lights turned back on, then went off. It also meant shutting down the Rodecaster Duo before the PC so there wasn't this weird power cycle going on, leaving more inside the PC for the next time I came to boot it up.

Oddly, if I turned the Rodecaster on before my PC, it would be less prone to shorting.

It was inconvenient, but seeing as I literally could not work out what I had done wrong in the building process, and the Rodecaster Duo hadn't given me any trouble before this on an older, less powerful motherboard, I figured it was happenstance that the Duo was triggering something - it must be the PC itself, I thought.

But then the Duo started acting up. It got trapped in a boot cycle where its loading bar you see everytime you power it up, got stuck near the end. It wouldn't turn on, so off to Rode's brilliant customer support team I went.

See, the Rodecaster Duo is a really clever bit of kit. Remember I mentioned those dual USB outputs you can plug into one PC to separate audio sources onto different faders? Well, one of those has a very rare power-giving-and-receiving feature - something that the folks at Rode aren't sure exists in any other USB-C product. Essentially, so it can power a USB mic or a storage drive, it has the ability to send power out to a device, but it can also just receive data and be treated like an external device itself.

As Isabella, a very helpful Rode customer service agent, explained to me: "When plugged into a USB port, the interface will negotiate over USB in order to ascertain what it is connected to. This process includes sending 5V power output with a view to powering up an external device if one is connected," she told me.

"Some motherboards can struggle with this USB power negotiation process, which may lead to issues such as the computer failing to boot correctly, shutting down unexpectedly, or other connected components drawing power from the USB connection."

It suddenly all added up - it wasn't my perfect PC building skills failing me; Gigabyte's motherboard couldn't work out whether to power the RodeCaster, or somehow let a USB device... power.. it? I know which of those things a motherboard of a desktop PC should only be doing, but seeing as this is such a niche issue with one device, I'm not going to judge too harshly.

So, what was the solution?

"A potential workaround is to use an external USB hub as an intermediary," said Isabella. This was news to me, especially seeing as, when I had so much as thrown the USB-C connections into the wrong USB ports on my motherboard before, the Rodecaster would be very stroppy and not work correctly due to speed discrepancies.

But as it turns out, connecting to a fast enough USB hub, everything works just great. By connecting the Duo through a USB hub, it effectively isolates the 5V output from the computer's detection process. As a test, Rode sent me its own very speedy USB hub, and plugging both USB-C connections from the Duo into it solved my motherboard shorting issues. As for the Duo, despite trying a few troubleshooting and reset methods, leaving the device completely unplugged for 24 hours fixed its booting issues.

This was a really complicated and bizarre mismatch of motherboard and USB device, so I'm aware it's going to take some very small chances for anyone to run into my exact issues. But in writing this, I hope someone doing a frantic Google search to figure out problems with pricey technology is met with something that they can relate to - I know when I was troubleshooting, I was at a loss as to what I could do.

So, next time your motherboard is shorting due to USB devices being plugged in, trust that it's almost never a faulty board, and it's not so likely to be an issue with your building. USB hubs can actually come in handy, and one may just solve your tech problems.

For more PC building talk, take a look at the best CPU for gaming, the best RAM for gaming, or the best computer speakers.

Sam Altman made headlines over the weekend by ruffling the feathers of the very consumer market he's already been pissing off for the last year: PC gamers. In an interview, the CEO of OpenAI seemed to be pleading for sympathy as he said it was "quite terrible" that RAM for gaming exists, and suggested that we as humans should all be for funneling more supply toward training AI models in data centers.

For full context, Altman said: "From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAMs sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time.

"Like, you want maximum utilization in a cloud if you're trying to deal with a very supply-constrained environment," he said.

I've been covering this year's global RAM shortages from the get-go, so as you can imagine, I have some thoughts. But perhaps more alarming than anything is the fact that Altman, one of the foremost names in AI and tech, seems to suggests that consumers who buy and install RAM in their personal computers are only making use of it 5% of the time? I don't know how many gaming PCs he's tried to build, but if he's only used RAM in 5% of them, I don't think he'll have been very successful.

Now, to be as fair as I can be, I'm sure he wasn't talking about active PC gamers like you and me. It's far more likely he was talking about inactive computers or older ones that aren't in use anymore but still have RAM in them that data centers could make use of. Either way, what a bold and dangerously inaccurate statement for someone in his position to make, especially considering how much of the global tech market his company's relentless development of AI has disrupted in 2026.

In case you don't know, there's a global RAM and storage shortage going on right now, specifically because of AI companies building data centers and training their models, all of which need a ridiculous amount of compute in order to learn. For example, Samsung is one of the three biggest manufacturers of RAM on planet Earth, and it signed a supply deal with Altman's company late last year to supply OpenAI with 900,000 DRAM/HBM wafers per month - which counts as roughly 40% of the entire world's RAM manufacturing output. Only yesterday, it was reported by Tom's Hardware that Altman has negotiated a further deal with Samsung amidst RAM shortages.

Remember too, that this is only one of the big AI companies we're talking about here. Anthropic, Google, Meta, XAI, and more will all need their own massive stores of RAM as well.

And yet, in his viral interview from a few days ago, Altman seemed to think it's terrible that we as consumers are stealing up the world's supply of RAM - interesting. Especially when, only last month, IDC reported that PC hardware shipments fell 20.1% in Q3 2026.

From where I'm sat, Altman's thoughts only go to show just how out of touch AI companies are with the ways consumers use technology.

Anyone investing enough money in a gaming PC to buy RAM right now is going to put it to very good use - especially when they'll likely settle for less of it than they planned because of budget constraints. As someone who isn't a fan of AI in the slightest, Altman's flippant attitudes certainly support the argument that most AI companies have an insular, full-steam-ahead attitude to development that doesn't consider the consequences of doing so.

Is Altman suggesting that we build gaming PCs just to leave them sitting idle most of the time? Is he suggesting that RAM isn't used in most computing tasks, because that couldn't be further from the truth. Try booting a PC without memory and let me know how you get on.

Is Altman asking us to donate our RAM and go without any sort of personal computing until AI Jesus has been born anew, ready to atone for our sins?

The prices of PC hardware have gone through the roof this year, leaving entire companies and segments of the market in a scramble. That's forgetting the even worse issues of massive pollution that's happening due to AI data centers. Or, indeed, the unfathomable amounts of water being used to cool them, or the potential risks to humanity from unchecked and unregulated AI arms races. It's no real surprise that Altman doesn't consider all of those things, but you'd expect the CEO of a massive tech company like Altman to be wise to the impacts AI training is having on consumer markets.

The global RAM shortage is set to continue for at least a few years yet, and even if it doesn't, RAM companies are already finding ways to secure profits for themselves long after a supply shortage is done. Micron has signed agreements with some of its clients that all but secure this year's pricing until at least 2030. VRAM, used in the best graphics cards, is now so expensive that there are questions around whether Nvidia and AMD will even launch a new generation in 2027, and prices on existing cards are going through the roof.

The reason for all of that isn't that consumers are buying up so much RAM supply that there's now massive inflation and shortages. AI companies are to blame, so next time you use that RAM in your laptop or computer, take joy in the fact you're keeping it from them.

For more, take a look at the best gaming PCs, the best CPU for gaming, and the best computer speakers.

PATCH NOTES 2.11.2026 – GTA 6 is launching this month, and Edge Magazine's exclusive special unearthed loads of fresh dirt on it. Jason and Lucia's player-defined relationship is the most earth-shattering revelation of all to me, and it's making me look at GTA 6 a whole other way. Namely, as an RPG.

What's happening with GTA 6 this week?

• Edge Magazine's GTA 6 exclusive has given us plenty of fresh insights about the game's characters and open world.
• GTA 6's Jason and Lucia can be allies instead of lovers, and players can break them up if desired.
• Rockstar says that the game was also inspired by a Skyrim-like sense of discovery and that "You can go anywhere, [to] any random location".

Why is this happening now?

• Grand Theft Auto has always been considered an action sandbox with fixed narrative elements.
• As GTA 6 doubles down on player agency, it's pushing the franchise further into RPG territory.

Meta Shift

• Jason and Lucia's relationship is the biggest clue as to how RPG-like GTA 6 will be.

The biggest thing I learned from Edge's GTA 6 special is that Jason and Lucia don't need to be a couple. Despite all the GTA 6 trailers and promotional imagery leaning so heavily into their Bonnie and Clyde dynamic, Rockstar lead Rob Nelson spilled to Edge that the two actually kick the game off as exes, "wanting to be together, and wanting to give this relationship of theirs another shot. But, as the game progresses, it's yours to keep or yours to lose."

This changes everything I knew about GTA 6, both in terms of what I was expecting of its protagonists and what their established relationship (or lack thereof) tells us about the game's genre. Giving players so much control over Jason and Lucia's relationship feels like it has the power to change the foundational context of the game. With the duo as a romantic couple, the stakes are higher – we all do stupid things for love, like robbing banks or something. As pals, this may as well be GTA 5 all over again.

It's a relinquishing of narrative control that I didn't expect to see from Rockstar, even with GTA 6 being the studio's biggest deviation from the franchise's core structure yet. Choice and consequence are two of the defining aspects of the best RPGs, even without character leveling or skill trees. We'd already seen a departure from more rigid, preordained narratives in GTA 5, which had three endings to choose from. But if Rockstar is giving us control over how much its heroes love, loathe, miss, or care about each other, it's sounded even more open-ended and changeable than ever. Not unlike, say, an RPG.

But what's in a name? Genre isn't everything, true enough. However, when it comes to GTA, it's important in charting the growth of the series. The move toward a player-divined world, from characters to how they approach the world and one another, feels like a paradigmatic shift for Rockstar, actively growing and reshaping our concept of what a GTA game feels and looks like. It's an evolution of GTA 4 and 5's choice-based endings, the studio's earliest flirtations with putting a greater emphasis on player choice.

With more lifestyle simulation elements being introduced atop a more nuanced relationship system in general (including video-gamified social media) Grand Theft Auto 6's more flexible parameters and RPG-lite mechanics finally make it sound like something more than a violent crime sim. Though, I guess it is kinda in the name…

Patch Notes summary

With GTA 6 almost here, Rockstar is shucking off the shackles of genre puritanism to make it the most sophisticated, RPG-like entry in the whole series. Jason and Lucia's relationship will be player-determined, making their dynamic just as much yours to establish as the open world will be yours to explore. The countdown to GTA 6 for the month of November is now truly underway, yet somehow, all this just proves there's always more to learn about one of the biggest games of the decade.

GTA 6 is just one of many upcoming PS5 games, but it's probably the biggest on the list....

Nearly 25 years on from its release, Mass Effect can feel like a forgotten relic. The game’s achievements as a character-driven space opera have been appropriated by its immediate successor, Mass Effect 2, leaving behind a reputation for clunky combat and awkward driving segments (see ‘Mako or break’). 2021's Legendary Edition remaster attempted to conceal its many blemishes while collecting the trilogy in one package – and in doing so, highlighted the gulf in quality between games one and two.

But the dented legacy of the 2007 original, first released as an Xbox 360 exclusive, doesn’t do it justice. Mass Effect remains a special game, with flaws that aren’t as obvious as you remember and a setting to match any that BioWare has created. Yes, the second game’s ensemble cast will always be the series standout, but Mass Effect built a believable galaxy for those characters to live in, home to trillions of inhabitants and dozens of races. Without that history, you wouldn’t understand the motivations of your Mass Effect 2 companions, or care about their collective fate. And in some ways Mass Effect betters the games that came after it – certainly, at least, with its hub world, the Citadel.

My favorite store on the Citadel!

Commander Shepard, your customised avatar, first arrives here to report the betrayal of Saren, a member of the elite force known as the Spectres, which operates above the law at the will of the intergalactic Council. The Citadel is a megaship positioned right at the heart of the galaxy, a five-armed monolith that is home to the Council and to 12 million people besides: the kind of location that would’ve been difficult to depict in any detail on screen in the mid2000s. BioWare didn’t try to build a giant city that looks believable, as Rockstar would with GTA 4’s open world a year later. Rather, it built a world that feels believable.

The twinkling urban sprawl you see when you look out of the curved windows lining the Citadel’s corridors is mere set dressing, not intended to truly fool you. None of the sections it is carved up into is especially large or bustling – but they are all distinct, in ways that leave room for you to imagine what might happen when you’re not around. The cavernous Presidium is a marvel of sterile grandeur, its simulated blue sky, trimmed trees and white fountains forming the kind of characterless utopia in which smiling ambassadors of each species would want to operate. In contrast, Flux, the nightclub down in the Wards, the “cultural heart of the galaxy”, flashes with neon lights and pulses with music while patrons mingle at tables or at the bar, and others try their luck on arcade machines upstairs.

BioWare deploys multiple tricks to make these spaces feel bigger than they actually are. Corridors have multiple nooks with no apparent purpose, or which are only used for a specific sidequest, while aliens tap away at banks of computers in side rooms, their purpose unknown. Walkways crisscross and overlap, and elevator rides – infamously – take an eternity, during which you listen to news reports about humanity’s efforts to colonise distant planets.

But the characters are what really sell the idea that both the Citadel and the galaxy beyond are bigger than what actually exists on your hard drive. The line of embassies and administrative offices you find in the Presidium are an excuse to meet a variety of alien races: the polite Elcor, who preface their words with a summary of what they’re about to say, and the diminutive Volus, who specialise in commerce and are bitter that they lack a seat at the Council. The way you learn about their cultures feels contrived (Shepard will say, straightfaced, “Tell me about Volus culture”), but the answers speak to a universe of varied environments, economies and political systems.

Your crewmate companions are in on it too. Enter Flux with Wrex, your Krogan companion, and he’ll comment how “places like this” always want to hire Krogan bouncers, “like we’re a status symbol for them”, which reveals something about both Citadel and Krogan life. When Garrus, a humanoid Turian, meets a gambler who has been kicked out of the club, his statement that if Doran, its Volus owner, “says you’re cheating, you’re cheating” suggests that he has visited countless times before. Walk past a Krogan statue, gleaming white in the Presidium, and Wrex will begin arguing with Garrus about the violent reputation of his species, and about the genophage, a biological weapon deployed by the Turians to wipe out the Krogan after a decades-long war – a topic that’s repeated in multiple quests and creates an underlying tension within your squad.

It’s a technique not dissimilar to the ‘iceberg theory’ of storytelling associated with the writer Ernest Hemingway, which holds that the sparse, surface elements of a story should hint at vast, deeper meaning below. Here, the technique is used for worldbuilding: the Citadel is the tip of the iceberg, a snapshot of the numerous alien races in the galaxy that speaks to a vast world beyond.

We have no beginning. We have no end. We are infinite.

It’s a philosophy that continues when you leave the Citadel and head for your next destination, using a vast map. The overarching plot – chasing Saren across the galaxy, with the fate of civilisation in your hands – feels like standard science-fiction fare, but it’s split into missions that provide self-contained stories about people and places, each one sketching in more detail about the universe you’re moving through. When trying to track down Saren on Feros, a colony world run by the ExoGeni Corporation, you learn about the exploitative relationship between people and business while helping settlers with shortages of food, water, and power. On Noveria, you discover – and decide the entire fate of – the Rachni, an insectoid species believed extinct.

This achievement dwarfs the actual roleplaying, which doesn’t stand up too well to modern examination. Mass Effect’s dialogue wheel promised to steer away from binary good and bad, but instead created a morality-by-menu that lets you swing wildly between space racist and compassionate empath. Some of the ‘renegade’ dialogue options are ridiculous, such as being able to punch a reporter on camera, out of nowhere, after she asks perfectly reasonable questions. The writing that underpins it is occasionally stiff, too. We don’t need to be told that “shooting people isn’t always the answer” after defusing a tense situation in the gentleman’s club Chora’s Den, for example, and some jokes, including an early one about how “size isn’t everything”, fall flat.

Perhaps the part of Mass Effect that has been most maligned over the years, though, is its combat. In truth, it’s perfectly passable, even 15 years on. Put side-by-side with Mass Effect 2, it’s admittedly clunky: weapons overheat quickly and sometimes don’t shoot straight; Shepard rarely sticks to cover; your abilities and ‘first aid’ heal recharge slowly, slowing the pace of fights. But once you accept these limitations, firefights turn into challenging puzzles where solutions can be invented in the moment, pausing combat to conduct your squad’s arsenal of explosive powers.

The best of these are biotics – explained away as a result of the titular energy fields, but in essence Mass Effect’s equivalent of the magic systems found in BioWare’s fantasy games, or the Force abilities offered by Knights Of The Old Republic. The two classes that can use biotics – Adept, a purist, or Vanguard, which sacrifices some biotic power for shotgun skills – are effectively space wizards, able to suck enemies into a swirling blue vortex or tug them out of cover and into the air, where they hang suspended as target practice for the rest of the squad.

The makeup of that squad is essential to making the most of Mass Effect’s combat. It’s telling that only one of the characters on offer, Ashley Williams, is a pure soldier, as if the game is trying to push you away from relying on guns, knowing how quickly it will get repetitive. Better to choose the pairing of Garrus and Wrex, who can combine biotics with tech explosions triggered by Garrus’s omni-tool, and dive into another of Mass Effect’s strengths: character customisation. This stretches beyond picking guns and powers, into weapon attachments and ammo types that can completely change the way you play. Level up Wrex’s biotic barrier skill, and he can be directed to rush in solo, tanking damage while tearing through shields with phasic ammo, before pausing to line up Garrus’ sniper Assassination skill.

This customisation is lost somewhat in Mass Effect 2’s streamlining of the design. It’s missed, but not as much as the Citadel, to which we can’t help but return after every main mission, just to see what’s different. The sequel’s version is a shrunken, more static hub, but here, on every visit, enough has changed to give the illusion that this is a dynamic, evolving place in which NPCs come and go. Side missions zigzag between the financial district and Chora’s Den, each unlocking new dialogue options with existing characters, or revealing a new secret about Citadel life.

Returning to the med clinic, where an early story mission takes place, you’ll find a doctor who’s being blackmailed by a Krogan in the Citadel’s markets. Scaring the Krogan off reveals a mystery about a “classified project” in a far-off system – a plotline which doesn’t resolve until Mass Effect 3. This should be how Mass Effect is remembered: not as a rough draft, but as a remarkable act of scene-setting, making promises for future games to fulfil and building a believable stage on which one of gaming’s greatest science-fiction series could play out.

This Mass Effect article was first published in issue 373 of Edge Magazine. To get more like this delivered straight to your doorstep (or digital device) consider subscribing to Edge.

Game preservation takes many forms. For some, it's archiving video game history in museums. For others, it's fighting legal battles to make saving that history easier. Still others collect consoles and TVs from out of time, to play games precisely as they were released.

But most players just want to have access to their classic games, and that's where GOG steps in.

The acronym once stood for Good Old Games, and while GOG.com has long since become a prolific distributor of modern titles, the site's founding intention rings true today. Publishers are dipping into their archives for big-budget remakes, boutique developers specializing in remasters are cropping up with increasing frequency, and movements like Stop Killing Games making players aware of how fragile their "ownership" of modern software really is.

Modern, downloadable games are almost universally protected by digital rights management (DRM). Some forms of DRM, like the Steam launcher, are barely noticed these days, but more obtrusive types of protection like Denuvo are a constant source of controversy. They all serve the same purpose: preventing games from being pirated. But they also put roadblocks between legitimate users and their games.

DRM-free

"There is no game preservation with DRM," says Marcin Paczynski, senior business development and partnerships manager at GOG. These days, Steam's built-in digital rights management is so unobtrusive that players barely notice it's there. But GOG launched in 2008, when many PC players saw any DRM as an unnecessary barrier.

GOG offered an alternative, and while now there's a fancy Steam-style launcher with cloud saves and automatic updates, every single game on the store still comes with a standalone installer that you can download, back up, and use however you like without ever relying on an online server. It's exactly the kind of solution the activists supporting Stop Killing Games are looking for, and Paczynski says the team "definitely saw a spark of interest in people downloading the offline installers" when the movement gained momentum.

Beyond preserving these games as they originally released, GOG also wants to make them more palatable to modern audiences. GOG isn't really a remaster studio, but it does offer versions of games with visual and gameplay upgrades. But how do the devs draw the line between upgrading a game and fundamentally changing the original experience?

It's a question the GOG devs constantly ask themselves. "When we were releasing Resident Evil, we were having a conversation whether we should change tank controls to some modern controls," technical producer Adam Ziółkowski explains. "But if you change that, you basically need to rewrite the whole game, because the difficulty level and everything is tied to this decision that was made 20 years ago."

So Resident Evil kept its classic control scheme. But other games have gotten meaningful upgrades on the platform. Take Thief Gold, for example. "We were approached by a modder that actually created full controller support for Thief, including the radial menu that allows you to switch through the inventory and stuff like that," Ziółkowski says."It doesn't break the immersion and the game loop, so we decided to add it and make it more enjoyable for the modern users."

"It's always a discussion," Paczynski says. "I like to think that during those eighteen years of doing that, we kind of feel where the line is."

Let's get physical

GOG's distribution is all digital, but given the waves PlayStation's plan to end discs has made in the preservation community, I had to ask Ziółkowski and Paczynski their thoughts on physical games.

"Ideally, my dream would be to be able to buy physical versions of those games on GOG," Paczynski explains. "You go to your shelf on GOG, you click on the game that you would like to receive a physical copy of, you order it, and it gets to you. That would be a perfect scenario."

This idea has "been floating around GOG for years," and Paczynski still has "hope" it will be realized. But the reality – handling the licensing issues and the logistics of those physical products – makes the dream a distant one.

Still, it's an example of just how passionate the GOG team is about its work. The site built its business on the classic era of PC gaming, which was dominated by 'feelies' – physical objects like maps, manuals, lore guides, and more, all of which were integral to the experience. GOG offers digital versions of most of that material alongside the games themselves, but sometimes the devs are on their own when it comes to sourcing it.

"It depends on the publisher, but in general, [with] a lot of the classic games that we have signed over the years the only thing that we got from the publisher was a title in the email," Paczynski explains. "Everything else we needed to source ourselves. They were very open – like, 'we can license you those things, but we have absolutely nothing for them.'"

It's often up to GOG to track down and digitize these games and their ephemera. "We have a lot of '90s and early '00s gamers at GOG," Paczynski says. "We have huge collections. Some of them are really impressive. And if we do not have something in our collection, it's on Amazon [or] eBay. There are a couple of games that we paid really, really good money for, because it was really important for us to have all of those things digitalized and added to the versions of the games that we release on GOG."

In some cases GOG works with the community, sourcing, for example, alternate language versions of manuals that might be difficult to track down outside of their native regions. "We cannot add everything because a lot of times there are legal reasons why certain cool things cannot be added," says Paczynski, "but we try to add as much as we can, practically speaking."

Preservation as a business

While publishers don't always have their own games properly archived, they are starting to see the value. "A lot of the game preservation discussions that were very hard for us to start are, right now, a bit easier," Paczynski explains.

Paczynski admits that GOG's efforts are not purely altruistic. The team "still have a business to run," but "thankfully found a business model for GOG in which we can support those initiatives without strictly being tied to GOG sales."

That's the GOG Patrons program, a $5 monthly subscription that supports the company's preservation efforts. Users do get some goodies in exchange for their donations – access to behind-the-scenes content and influence over the games the team focuses on, for example – but that $5 is more or less a donation. Making donations to a retailer is an odd proposition, but GOG's built enough goodwill that over 10,000 people have signed up.

But there's an elephant in the room: piracy. While GOG is doing its best to make sure a wide array of games remain available to players on its platform, the reality is that all of those games – and many more whose licenses remain lost – are already being distributed for free.

"Almost everything is available on the internet for free, practically speaking," Paczynski acknowledges, but he hopes that the "user experience" GOG can provide makes it a more attractive option than piracy. That echoes comments from Gabe Newell on competing with piracy and certainly, Steam has done a lot to help convince the world that digital games are worth paying for. But piracy can be a roadblock to preservation.

"A lot of those games can be preserved because there is a business case. Preservation costs a lot of money, so having the sales of those games is extremely important. If you find a strong enough business case, you can bring back and preserve any game in existence," Paczynski says, but "the problem is scale."

Paczynski offers an obscure example of how complicated it can get: Westwood Studios' Dune games. "The original game was developed by Westwood Studios," Paczynski explains, and that studio was eventually acquired by EA. "So currently, Electronic Arts has the game code, the assets, all of the rights to those things, and all the materials around the game. But of course, they do not own the IP. The problem with the IP is that it is not directly owned by the Herbert Foundation, because the games were not based on the books; they were actually based on the movie from 1984. That movie was created by Universal Pictures, and the main producer for that movie was [Dino De Laurentiis]. The problem is that he also has part of that movie license with him. But he died 15 years ago."

With that in mind, it seems like a wonder any classic game manages to get a legal, modern release. Ziółkowski says he's already got his dream game – the original Final Fantasy 7 – on GOG, but he's also hopeful to get an Amiga puzzle platforming classic called Fury of the Furries on the platform. The problem? The rights to that game were bought by Namco many years ago, which reskinned it as the Pac-Man-themed Pac-In-Time.

Another game, another licensing nightmare. "I need Marcin's help with that," Ziółkowski says, turning to Paczynski with a laugh. But from legendary classics to obscure personal favorites, the fight to preserve gaming history goes on.

Still nursing that weekend coffee? Find out how Grand Theft Auto became a musical tastemaker, and why "having a hand in the game etches you in history."