As Gears of War: E-Day launched, developer The Coalition was thinned by more Xbox layoffs. It's a heartbreaking circumstance by any metric, but the timing feels crueler since rolling credits on E-Day's campaign and seeing the extent of their triumph – an ode to big-screen action that restores Gears to the cutting edge of third-person shooters.

Too often, AAA shooter campaigns can feel like bolt-on afterthoughts in a multiplayer-oriented genre. But E-Day builds an entire city in excruciating detail, only to tear it down brick-by-brick around you.

Good kid, bad city

Kalona is an industrial city, with Gothic streets criss-crossing between dockyards and military forts. Headlines splashed across billboards celebrate the end of a war fought against the Union of Independent Republics (UIR). Kalona's gothic grandeur has been untouched by the war – I'm reminded of New York City's celebrations post-World War 2, which in pictures seems far removed from mainland Europe's devastation.

The conflict casts a long shadow over returning Gears protagonists Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago. Brought closer by the death of Dom's brother and Fenix's squaddie Carlos Santiago, who died fighting the UIR, the pair are ditching a military ceremony to get drunk when the titular Emergence Day begins. The earth cracks open and hordes of subterranean humanoids – some scuttling on all-fours, others geared with guns and armor – spill onto the surface and kill indiscriminately. The horror is awfully believable: civilians are slaughtered as they run while fire and sinkholes lay waste to Kalona itself; leaving Fenix and Santiago to link up with a back-footed defense alongside fellow Gears Carter and Reyes.

With E-Day's campaign set entirely within Kalona, The Coalition shows its destruction in unflinching detail. Hammering home that this is happening as we play, E-Day rarely cuts away from Fenix – who leads Bravo Squad from one fire to the next – and instead uses returning locales to ground Kalona's downfall. One setpiece, Legacy Bridge, is used several times – but with the campaign's full-throttle pacing makes it feel like lifetimes have passed between each visit, to say nothing of the city falling apart around it. I'm reminded of Halo 3: ODST's excellent single-setting, which made you ache for New Mombasa through reminders of the world that was.

The bleak tone is surprisingly complementary for Gears' larger-than-life action, personalities, and load-bearing use of the word "fucker". But even the latter is additive to E-Day's story. In the moments we spend with Fenix, Bravo Squad, and other survivors; the bravado is stripped back to explore grief, trauma, and humanity. And going so long without discussing shootouts (in a Gears of War game!) speaks to the strength of E-Day's setting. But this is an action game first and foremost – not that any reminder is needed.

Reloaded

Gears of War: E-Day is the best cover shooter I've played since the series' Xbox 360-era heyday. Where 2024's excellent Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 thrived by pushing its scale and melee combat, E-Day reaches new heights for cover shooters in a more literal sense – turning encounters into scrappy, fluid gunfights. An adaptive cover system means nearly anything can be used, not just ol' reliables like car bonnets and concrete corners, and on plenty of occasions I'm saved by Fenix's willingness to dive behind shin-high rubble and shoot whilst lying on his back. Cover being more naturalized does wonders for Kalona – the absence of traditionally signposted cover makes it feel like a city, not a level.

Surviving is tricky, even on normal difficulty. The Locust are smart foes and know how to press an advantage. Twitchy crawlers rush at your position even as well-armed Drones dig in and fire from cover, the latter preferring to shoot and flank rather than charge forwards. Unique enemies reveal themselves across the campaign, and are deployed rarely enough that they are always an 'oh shit' moment – be it acid-spitting toad-creatures or, to coin an in-game description, "floating ballsacks" that rain fire from above.

In your corner, precision and brute force are equally viable. For most of the game I opt to play at mid-range where possible, using bolt-action rifles to carefully pick off targets. But limited ammo means you'll often fight with whatever gun you can scavenge, and after one such fight in an overrun train station, I grew attached to the Gnasher shotgun – its buckshot initially feels lackluster, but when you're close enough to fire without first aiming, it's devastating.

There were several times when E-Day sold me on a gun I had initially written off. Weapon and armor mods, found in hardcases across the city, are deliciously impactful. My favorite switches the Gnasher to slug rounds, allowing it to capably pop Drone heads from several meters, and my Longshot sniper rifle was unrecognizable by the end of the game, having swapped its long-range scope for an over-the-shoulder reticle in tandem with a mod that reloads its chamber with every headshot.

The result is so much variety that I struggle to draw the line under examples – it would be sacrilege, surely, to not praise the acid-spitting Incinerator shotgun, or the return of the Lancer assault rifle. The Lancer is Gears' most famous weapon, thanks to the iconic chainsaw blade fixed beneath the barrel like a bayonet. But, I find melee disappointing in E-Day – a little too soft and weightless in comparison to trading desperate gunfire from cover.

It took me 16 hours to finish E-Day's five-act campaign. That includes most of its side objectives – not to chase down collectibles, but because I wanted the extra shootouts they promised. I rolled credits days ago, and feel the same melancholy that finishing a good book can leave me with – in this case, a testament to those engrossing few days in Kalona.

I'm a little less enthused by E-Day's multiplayer, which is a mixed bag. Versus – PvP modes ranging from team deathmatch to objective-based scraps – is too uneven to feel truly competitive. Expect to be matched with level 50+ players while you're still level one, resulting in too many one-sided stomps in quickplay. I can live with that in isolation, but more damning is how poorly E-Day's cover-based pacing survives contact against other players.

The emphasis on positioning that fuels the campaign's scrappy shootouts is gone, as players (including myself) careen around the map with one-shot-kill Gnasher shotguns – which is fun in its own way, but better-suited as a Quake-style LAN party game than something to be taken too seriously. Especially as guns and loadouts are locked behind a leveling system, so you can't just mash together your preferred kit and lean into the chaos.

Much better is Gears' Horde Siege mode, which drops three teams of four players into Kalona to fight the Locust on several fronts. Each squad has their own primary objective, but with optional side objectives encouraging detours, you'll often wander into someone else's war. It's an excellent dynamic: I've been on the cusp of being overrun during an objective defense, only for friendlies to crest the horizon, Lancers blazing, to save the day. It's even better when the shoe is on the other foot, and I've barreled through Locusts and over rubble to revive someone outside of my squad. A hero? Me? You're too kind (and correct).

The world feels harder nowadays, and layoffs at The Coalition are just one facet of that. I often look to games to meet me in the moment, but equally important are those with the power to take us away. Gears of War: E-Day does this sublimely, its campaign contrasting quiet vulnerability and cataclysmic setpieces so dramatically that it would be comical if not so well done. Versus mode isn't for me, but I continue to dip into Horde Siege on evenings and I'm already planning to run through the campaign on a harder difficulty with friends. E-Day is a very good time, and it's easy to underestimate how powerful that can be.

We reviewed Gears of War: E-Day on PC, with a Steam code provided by the publisher.

Gear up for your next adventure! We've rounded up the best shooters to play in 2026.

There's still no mining. Or crafting. But the Dungeon aspect? Well, that's going great guns. Bigger, better, yet impressively streamlined for younger players to get started, Minecraft Dungeons 2 is one of the best-made loot-based dungeon crawlers you can buy. If you're looking for classic video gamey fun, you've come to the right place.

You're thrust straight into the story in which three Illagers have opened up a portal to the Sift – an all-new dimension in the Minecraft universe. This new dimension enables the game to feature some genuinely new scenery (even if it does look a bit cellophaney, like 1960s Star Trek). It also brings time-limited, global modifiers called 'Sift Tides'. These bring harder mobs, decreased cooldown timers, or cessation of passive soul generation, affecting your magic, though it still feels the same to actually play. There are new enemies too, which is a good thing because the Overworld's mobs look way too familiar if you've played the original.

Hitting the arcade

The other genuinely new thing is the ability to jump. What do you mean, I'm scraping the barrel already? It does make a difference, allowing for some basic 3D platforming (thankfully with forgiving collision detection) and, accordingly, fun new jump attacks. Some modifiers even turn these into special moves, scorching the land ahead of you with fire, for example. It also means you can jump over some projectiles during boss fights, which makes everything feel more arcadey. It's a good thing; this is giving old school video game vibes and I love that.

The movement is super-solid with only a precious few instances of slowdown on Xbox Series X when you're at a Storm Tower, making the game feel like Minecraft Dungeons Arcade – all chunky and super-assured. It's also noticeably easier to see what's happening compared to the first game, making for clearer gameplay decisions. The action can still become overwhelming when you find yourself in the middle of a mob, but that just makes it all the more satisfying to use firebomb magic or a soul explosion to knock back a score of enemies.

Co-op can be played locally, online, or a mixture of both, but characters created as 'offline' cannot go online and vice versa. It's plausible for two players with a large disparity in character level to enjoy a game together. The game splits currency 50/50 and loot is dropped for specific players, so a newbie can't pick up a Level 100 pickaxe – they'll have to wait for their own, low level drop instead. A more experienced player may have to revive the less-experienced player more often, but it works really well. Co-op is a lot of fun as you shout to each other to heal up, or NOT EAT THE FOOD UNTIL WE NEED IT. OK?!

That said, there is so much loot on offer, you'll soon spend almost as much time in the menus equipping new weapons and armor (which now has chest, legs, and head separation for extra depth) as you will playing. You can easily spend a few minutes buying, upgrading, and enchanting (and now non-destructively disenchanting) a full set of weapons, armor, artifacts and talismans only to blast through a dungeon and have 70% of it to do again 15 minutes later.

There is a new quick inventory feature allowing players to change their gear without using the whole screen, but you'll likely take turns to do it full screen anyway because sharing the experience of equipping great gear is such a big part of the fun.

The main story rattles along nicely and is a little longer than the first game's campaign, clocking it at around 10 hours. But even though it gets a bit samey after 5 hours or so, I still wish the story lasted longer. Further side quests continue some plot lines and keep things focused, but it never quite feels as convincing once you hit endgame.

Weathering the soul storms

The biggest endgame feature is the appearance of Soul Storms, which occur in random locations and are time-limited. In these storms, you get harder mobs to beat, along with three storm towers which are real damage sponges. These are best tackled in co-op, though you can take them on solo too. Things do get a lot harder at this point, especially when prior bosses spawn in the middle of the maelstrom, and the forthcoming DLC promises even greater tests of your skills.

But with greater difficulty comes increased frustration, and you may start to lose interest if completionism or maxing out your character doesn't appeal to you. Combat also changes from pleasantly skill-centric early on to keeping your health above zero while you alternate magic attacks.

There are a few bugs and rough edges that surprised me. I got stuck in the scenery by jumping where I wasn't supposed to, forcing me to fast travel to escape, and I had far too many instances of keys disappearing and characters vanishing when they were supposed to be following me. Quitting the game and reloading always fixed the issue, respawning everything, but if you don't realize it's bugged out, you can spend quite a while wondering what you're doing wrong.

Despite its few irritations, Minecraft Dungeons 2 is a classic example of 'how the first game should have been done'. It's impressively balanced, and rewards experimentation and careful enchantments, while still feeling like a Minecraft game. There's depth there for those who seek it, but younger siblings will have just as much fun spamming the attack button and screaming when Enderman randomly shows up.

Minecraft Dungeons 2 isn't quite as clever or flashy as, say, LEGO Horizon Adventures (which is very similar to play and likely cheaper too at this point), and Diablo fans are likely to stick with Diablo 4. But there's honest fun here for any type of gamer, which is quite the achievement.

Minecraft Dungeons 2 was reviewed on Xbox Series X, with code provided by the publisher.

No need to mine for games if you want more like this. Our games like Diablo and games like Minecraft recommendation lists have plenty for you to enjoy!

An Xbox rep has reportedly addressed rumors that it will remove day-one releases from Game Pass, but hasn't denied them either.

Earlier this week, a rumor posted by ResetEra moderator Slayven reported that Microsoft is set to change Xbox Game Pass next year. They report that there will be a tier with ads costing $12.99 a month, while the tier without ads will run players $19.99 a month. This is a $3 discount; however, it will reportedly be at the expense of a few things. Notably, they report that starting sometime between February and April, the day-one releases won't be included, and that cloud streaming will be removed from the service, which will cost $5.99 for 25 hours.

This was an unsourced rumor posted by the moderator, and thus was absolutely worth taking with a major grain of salt. However, Forbes' Paul Tassi reached out to Xbox about this rumor, and posted their reported response in a Tweet.

The statement reads: "We regularly test different Game Pass offerings and look at what works best for players in different markets. We don’t have any changes to announce today or plans that have been finalized. There are no changes to previously announced games coming to Game Pass Ultimate on day one."

A pretty standard statement, but the final line is fairly eye-catching; specifically calling out "previously announced games" seems to imply that bets are still off for future releases. So something like Fable, which is already being advertised as a game you can "play day one on Game Pass," will be safe, but perhaps the recently acquired Physint will not be a part of this.

Frankly, as convenient as it is for players, day-one releases on Game Pass have never felt sustainable, as Xbox has conditioned players to think their games have the value of a monthly subscription. However, once that band-aid is ripped off, I'm not sure it's one you can put back on either, because the type of person who will play Clockwork Revolution because it's on Game Pass may not be the type of person to pay $70 for it. I just hope whatever Xbox does doesn't result in even more layoffs for the studios under its banner.

Xbox Game Pass is "extremely poorly managed" and Doom should never have been part of it, says former producer

It seems to me that no one is ever convinced that Game Pass deserves an oxygen tank while it's dying, not even Xbox executives. Having experienced what it's like to actually have your game on the sickly subscription service, Doom veteran Andrew Willis – who was impacted by the enormous job cuts at id Software in July – suggests a simple reason for all the confusion.

The former producer candidly tells Kiwi Talkz in a new interview that Game Pass is "poorly managed. Extremely poorly managed." He adds, "I think it was executed with so little foresight and so little attention to detail or understanding of the consumer market."

"So little sight there," Willis continues to say about Microsoft. "I think they just got caught in the trap of, 'Well, let's just make everything Netflix.'"

Microsoft could never decide how to measure Game Pass' success, Willis thinks. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma herself said in May that lowering the service's price to $23 was simply "a good first step" in improving it, and that Xbox staff would otherwise "have to outwork the problem in front of us in our path to restore durable growth." We know now that Microsoft's plan to "outwork the problem" includes a total of 3,200 layoffs at Xbox and, I guess, opportunistically deciding to publish another Hideo Kojima game.

Still, Sharma said as recently as July that "our business today is not healthy," partly because, "To grow, we bet on Game Pass, multi-platform, and a broader portfolio of content."

"While those businesses have created meaningful value," Sharma added at the time, "they did not grow at the pace we expected."

Willis could have predicted this. He says, "When you start making decisions about commercial art that are investor-driven rather than consumer, or even developer driven, you're eventually going to make some pretty big mistakes. And I don't think Microsoft was ever able to figure out exactly how to measure the success of Game Pass."

"Was it hours played?" Willis wonders. "Was it games installed, was it user retention? I and many of my colleagues certainly never heard anything, like, metrics that we needed to hit. Is this a game you just want people playing in perpetuity? Do you want it to be super long? Do you just want people to see it and, like, want to install it right away, and you don't care if they play?"

This is why Doom: The Dark Ages had no business being on the platform. Willis says, "Doom should not have been on there. That was a stupid idea." While he was never explicitly told that its underwhelming commercial success contributed to id Software getting bludgeoned during Xbox layoffs, Willis wonders anyway if the game would have sold better had it not been available to Game Pass subscribers to play for free.

After The Dark Ages' 2025 launch, IP holder Bethesda was glad to tell fans, "Thank you for making DOOM: The Dark Ages the biggest launch in id's history - 7x faster to 3 million players than DOOM Eternal." But The Game Business reported at the time that a huge chunk of those 3 million players were on Xbox – over two million of them, actually – compared to just half a million fans on PS5.

"I know that sales didn't do as well as they were expected to," Willis says, "but I would suspect that's probably a huge part of Game Pass. And I guess whatever tradeoff from buying the game outright, to being on Game Pass, and whatever that metric was – installs, playtime, whatever – I guess maybe that wasn't good enough."

"I can only speculate why id was treated the way it was," the veteran producer adds. "I don't really have a good idea as to why id got chopped in half."

Unpopular and underperforming, Xbox doesn't have any answers, either.

Id Software dev says Microsoft's layoffs prove "they fundamentally don't understand" art, games, the entire business, or the destruction they just caused.

Fable has a while to go before its release on February 23, 2027, but we're already salivating at the prospect of buying up every property in Albion and milking the fantasy land for all the gold it's worth.

After chatting with its game director Ralph Fulton, we now know exactly how we're going to do it. He shared key tips on manipulating the game's simulated economy and maximizing profits.

Treasure horde

"While there will be a way to optimize every business, one of the best ways to optimize a business is to identify whether an employee is actually working hard enough to increase the amount the business earns, and if not, fire them and just keep trying new employees to find one whose trait fits the business. [That's an] inside tip for you."

In Fable, not only can you play the role of a gallivanting adventurer, but if you fancy it, a ruthless business magnate. With tailors, bookshops, barbers, pubs, tattoo parlors, and bakeries all available to invest in, there's plenty of capitalistic possibility to sink your teeth into.

"Now," says Fulton, using a bakery as an example, "I can raise their wages, which in turn makes them happier, which would make them like me more and may make them a better employee, which then increases the overall yield of the bakery. But it might not. It might just lose me money. I could put their wages down. That's undoubtedly going to make them dislike me, think I'm greedy, and it may decrease their performance. But it might not. See what I mean? So you're kind of playing with a set of levers."

Specific NPC traits can help or hinder your enterprise. But which traits should you look out for? The most important one is 'hard-working'. Any NPC with this trait will apparently boost profits by 20% right off the bat. For Fulton, however, there's one industry in particular you'll want to invest in if you're after a shortcut to the millionaire's club: farming. That's because farms are among the most lucrative ventures, capable of supporting six workers.

"Now, if you can go and get six hard-working NPCs, put them to work on a farm, that all stacks. So suddenly you can be making a ton of money from that. I didn't know that until someone in our level design team pointed that out to me. But that is actually the smart play if you're going the property route."

So, by stacking buffs triggered by traits (the 'helpful' trait is another effective one), you can get the most out of Fable's layered financial systems. Buy up a farm, introduce your own hired help, and make bank. But it's the kind of help you bring in that determines how much money it makes.

Here's where Playground Games' incredible attention to detail comes in. It refuses to use a randomizer tool for NPCs, instead applying every single one of these thousands of traits one by one.

Doing this in a settlement like Bowerstone is monumental work. This is a location containing 400 NPCs alone, each with their own routines, personalities, likes, and dislikes. Doing this across the whole of Albion is downright Herculean.

"We individually picked everything about every NPC to make it into an NPC that you could read, that made sense top to bottom. We originally had a tool that would randomize it, and just 'roll' an NPC, and that would have been a massive labor-saving device. That would have saved us so much time, but what we found was, they just didn't make as much sense."

Business fantasy

Randomized NPCs resulted in unconvincing mismatches between trait, job, and look – like a hairdresser with a bland bob, a pacifist weaponsmith, or a vegan butcher.

As with everything in Fable, building the best business is a delicate balancing act. Pay your employees too little and you'll make more profit, sure, but they'll come to resent you, spreading word around town of your miserly ways.

This results in drastic changes to your reputation. You may become known as selfish, cruel, or any number of different pejoratives applied to your character in response to your actions. Adjectives are expressed as a word cloud floating next to your character's head, and what's really interesting is when you get contrasting ones.

For example, if your penny pinching avatar also has a way with words, there's nothing stopping them being known as charming and Scrooge-like at the same time.

"You could," says Fulton when asked if it's possible to have a reputation as a friendly murderer, "if you were being kind and generous on one hand but also killing people."

"You can see that's contradictory. But actually it's a more accurate representation of the things you're doing, and what people know about you, rather than moving incrementally up-and-down a single scale."

For some, the endgame for all this gold might be a glitzy mansion. If you're in the market for one, you'll want to hit up a place on the outskirts of Bowerstone called Manor Fields. Here you'll find impressive stately homes, some with their own hedge mazes.

For others, the goal will be more modest: a simple house and a family. In Fable, that family is more detailed than ever. Your wife and child have their own routines, as with every single NPC you encounter. They won't just wait around for you all day to return home after a full day of adventuring, but run errands around town as they live their own lives.

Fulton describes the challenges in implementing this system. He details a playtester whose in-game wife would teleport around at odd hours randomly giving out birthday presents.

These glitches are, thankfully, fixed. Your spouse won't get up in the middle of the night to wish you many happy returns, instead waiting until morning. But it's just one of innumerable game-breaking bugs that could potentially befall a game of Fable's magnitude, one in which your actions reverberate across the land morally, ethically, and economically.

"You can certainly transform the economic future of people," says Fulton. "By using the levers at your disposal as a landlord, as a business owner, you can change the lives of people."

Our best RPGs and best story-driven RPGs lists are no fable, but great places to get more recommendations on what to play next!

Warhammers have never been my thing in RPGs, and I expected the same to be said of my approach to Fable. But, loading into my hands-on combat demo, I found myself falling for a hefty hammer over my usual go-to dagger.

I try out two loadouts during the session: one with a bow and arrow in addition to my hammer, and another with a more rapid-fire, SMG-like crossbow. Each comes with four requisite spells, from levitation to thunder spears and huge floating swords to pin my prey down before finishing them with a big hammer swipe. Most excitingly, I get to polymorph wraiths into little ghost chickens and boot them across the screen.

Hammering home

For Playground Games' first stab at third-person combat (the Forza Horizon developer has been more comfortable behind the wheel until now), Fable absolutely impresses. There’s irreverent delight in experimenting with the two systems, seeing which spells synergize with my weapon as I discover powerful new ways to beat up baddies.

Slaughtering a skeleton makes a spirit burst out of its crumpled form, which spawns even more deadly foes until you beat it to undeath all over again with a well-timed arrow to the head, fire bolt to the face, or wallop with my beloved hammer. Combat here can feel more inventive than typical hack and slash fare.

But, there are a few areas that still need smoothing. My character model's head and neck feel stiffer than expected while breaking into a run, and a seemingly automatic enemy lock-on can get frustrating when I'm swarmed out the gate. The rapid-fire crossbow also seems to break for me now and then – holding RT on my Xbox controller should send out a barrage of arrows, but every so often I need to hammer the button to make it fire instead. I'm not sure if it's meant to feel like it's jamming or not, but it's not the most pleasant experience when angry skeletons have a bone to pick.

There are also moments where I wish enemies would feel more reactive and aggressive. Even on the hard 'Legend' difficulty, crossbow-wielding skeletons and their lengthy reload animations leave ample time for me to close the gap and finish them off. I don't feel overly challenged at the moment. Obviously, early demos can still be a ways off final balance, but in Fable I want to earn the right to call myself a Hero.

Thankfully, the stiffness never distracts from how spells facilitate some truly magical moments. My personal favorite spell lets me disappear and dash behind a group of enemies before knocking them flying with a heavy melee spin attack – which is also how I manage to finish off a huge wraith boss, spawning legions of ghostly minions to his aid.

Beyond these kits that make up my hands-on, I'm told there will be other weapons to choose from in the full game, and that new spells acquired through narrative progression can be swapped out any time you fancy, all in the name of player choice and experimentation.

I'm torn. There's an argument to be made that Playground should delay Fable once more. The next six months running up to launch will certainly be crucial for Playground to refine its work.

The ingredients are there for a sharp, dynamic combat system that packs a mean punch as well as a crackling bolt of lightning. But, so far, I feel like I'm reading a fable that still has notes in its margins. It's just about making sure everything connects to deliver an RPG worthy of Albion's legend. We've waited long enough as it is, and I can be patient if it means getting it right.

Looking to spin more fables of your own? Our best RPGs and best story-driven RPGs rankings are filled with recommendations for tales that'll stick with you!

Quick Resume is a regular column dedicated to all things Xbox from GamesRadar+'s Editor-in-Chief. This week, Josh is (regretfully) arguing for Fable to be delayed once again.

If Xbox is serious about wanting to return to growth in 2027, then chief content officer Matt Booty should make one more difficult decision before year's end – he should delay Fable one final time.

When I spoke with Booty following the Xbox Games Showcase, the CCO told me that part of his job "is making sure that every game has a place to shine." He reasoned that Gears of War: E-Day "can be a game that pushes through in September" as it leads Xbox's return to console exclusivity.

And as for Fable, Booty told me: "We really want to give it its own space – its chance to shine. It made more sense to move it out of the year, instead of having to come right at the end of it."

The upcoming RPG was pushed to February 23, 2027 – moving it clear of the GTA 6 vortex. When the decision was made in May to delay Fable, its new release window was relatively clear of competition. Now it looks like the sort of month where time goes to die.

• Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, February 12
• God of War Laufey, February 16
• Persona 4 Revival, February 18
• Fable, February 23
• Metro 2039, February TBC

The new games release schedule for Feb 2027 reflects one of the strongest months of the console generation. It's an exciting lineup, and I have no idea how I'm going to play them all. God forbid Rockstar relaunches GTA Online within this timeframe.

I wouldn't advocate for a Fable delay were it not for Sony Santa Monica deciding to date God of War Laufey for February at SDCC. It's hard not to feel as if PlayStation Studios has made an active decision here. It swerved clear of the relatively clear January and March windows to position its first PS5 exclusive of 2027 a week before one of Xbox's most important upcoming titles.

Remember, Fable is a multiplatform release. Xbox is surely hoping that positive reception from the massive audience of PS5 players will help push this long-awaited franchise revival to new heights – reestablishing Fable as a core pillar of the Xbox platform, one which could (whisper it) draw PlayStation owners to Xbox when it inevitably comes time for a platform-exclusive sequel to Project Helix.

The situation is complicated further by Xbox granting five days of early access to whomever pre-orders the Premium Edition. So, come February 18, PS5 owners will have a tough choice to make. If Xbox is serious about wanting to return to growth in 2027, having recorded a $1.7 billion decline in revenue last year, then it needs to give Fable the clearest runway to succeed on both platforms.

When I spoke with Playground Games' general manager in June, he noted that there was "a little bit of disappointment" within the studio that Fable had been pushed to 2027. I'm certain that another shift would be similarly received internally, but the argument for Fable's original delay still rings true today:

"We could all absolutely see the benefits of that movement – moving out of that really congested period towards the end of the year, and obviously avoiding Grand Theft Auto," said Ralph Fulton. "The thing I love about it now, and the thing I've tried to sell the team on, is that going into February and having a much less contested window allows us the opportunity to go out and really make a moment for ourselves, and get the attention that I think this game deserves."

Fulton is correct in his assessment. Fable is deserving of attention. Everything I have personally seen of the game so far is exceptionally promising, and I firmly believe that it has the capacity to reshape the way we think about RPGs through its expressive, interlocking living population and social systems.

What Fable needs is the space to shine. Room for discussion to flourish out of it, rather than risk getting caught in the inevitable, exhausting 'Kratos vs. Laufey' debate that's surely (and sadly) going to dominate February.

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Even the best online multiplayer games aren't firing on all cylinders all the time. In fact, I'd argue that's what makes their best moments standout – the clutch sniper nest you establish to help your team make a comeback in Black Ops 7, finally clawing back some rounds in Tekken 8 from a random player who for that evening has become your absolute nemesis, the (for some of us) rare, glittering Victory Royale in Fortnite.

The same holds true for Gears of War: E-Day's newest mode – Horde Siege – which I've been playing in early access, which at times feels like Gears as you've never played it before. At others, the same old. But, the attempt to craft these moments across large-scale player-versus-environment co-operative play is ambitious enough to be worth a respectful hat tip. Three squads of four players battle locusts across a stonking massive district of Kalona City while clearing a checklist of activities before battling to safely extract.

City boy

Gears of War E-Day's Horde Siege vision comes together when these squads collide, interacting across their different objectives to make it really feel like the city has burst into war. A few of your squad's goals may have you circling the edge of the district, before all at once lines moving through the city intersect with those of other players, bullets fly, and hulking groups of locusts all converge as well.

Kalona City, even as it's being reduced to rubble, is gorgeous – bringing to life the mix of brutalism and futurism that so characterizes what remains of civilization in the Gears games set after this prequel (E-Day, 'Emergence Day', is when the world is rocked by a locust invasion from beneath the earth). Gears of War: E-Day's single-player campaign is set entirely within Kalona City, aiming to ground this disastrous first incursion with a real sense of place. The same seems to be true of Horde Siege, maps centering on districts so large it's easy to barely see players not in your squad during large chunks of play. (There's one district in my hands-on, but there will be three maps at launch).

All this is to say that the map design is incredibly open, and the unpredictable nature of how other squads are moving through it means battle lines can feel like they emerge anywhere. If the match was only catering for to squad, you'd have a good idea of how to move through, say, a courtyard, while making effective use of cover. But when another squad is coming from a different direction with the same idea, things can get messy. Yet, thanks to the overall co-operative nature, alliances come naturally, firefights ebbing and flowing between units all driven by the same goal to wipe out locusts and get out of there intact in order to do it all over again.

Gears of War: E-Day marks a rare case where I'm more curious about the multiplayer than the campaign. I remain a bit grumpy about fleshing out the titular E-Day, as I think the still-incredible first Gears of War handles its gritty, sci-fi worldbuilding almost immaculately.

But, I'm not so cold-hearted that the prospect of a back-to-fundamentals approach to Gears doesn't appeal (I vastly prefer the original trilogy to the later games), and I can rock more with the idea of E-Day being a backdrop to multiplayer scenarios than I really need to have my 'Solo explaining Han Solo's name' moment with Marcus Fenix and the iconic lancer chainsaw rifle.

Which doesn't mean Gears of War E-Day's Horde Siege multiplayer is without flaw (for clarity, I only played this mode – not Versus). For all the moments where Kalona City comes alive with converging squads, there are many more when it doesn't, and I'm left with just my squad defending a point from oncoming Locusts, and the action doesn't feel all that evolved from my recent replay of Gears of War Reloaded.

Shifting gears

Gunplay, once meaty, feels sedate in these more modest encounters, with bullets glancing off enemies like they don't feel it as they plod directly for cover, almost ignoring I'm there. (Executions, though, are delightfully brutal). I'm not sure if this is a consequence of Horde Siege's sheer scale – combat looked more tactile in the campaign footage I've seen. After all, even when two other squads are duking it out on the other side of the map to me, they're still there.

Some of this is also the case in Reloaded, but there I can excuse it because it's a remaster of a game from 2006, and constant splurges of gore to cap off kills are frequent. Here, draining whole clips into locusts, I'm conscious of the fact I'm not seeing the chunks of them flying I'd like to see. Perhaps, also, I'm spoiled by the excellent Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2, where co-op encounters felt considerably meatier – though I understand that Space Marine 2's encounters are more tightly crafted than the sprawling scale of E-Day's Horde Siege. Whatever the case, it's true that Gears has more meathead gore-blasting competition now than it did back in the day.

I'm not sure what the solution is other than to see how Gears of War E-Day's Horde Siege mode performs once it's out in the wild. There's a chance squads run into each other more frequently than in my experience, and it feels more electric as a result. As it stands, those moments where Horde Siege shine are few and far between, and rather than feeling like exemplar moments that make the build-up worth it, I'm left soaking enemies with whole clips while I wish it was happening more often.

There's definitely solid craft within what I've played of Gears of War E-Day so far, but I'm struggling to really get a sense of overall intention. Did I mention you can jump at any point now? No, I didn't, because it seems – at least here – relatively pointless. You can slide constantly now as well, which I can see getting annoying much as it did in Modern Warfare 3. The variable cover size is a nice touch, the tutorial having me crawl along small bits of rubble on my back. But, in what I play in Horde Siege, it's still all waist high cover still rules the day.

Alongside Halo: Campaign Evolved, Gears of War: E-Day is yearning for the past, much as I'm sure Xbox is as it enacts thousands of lay-offs across some of its best-in-class development studios, has become the target of boycotts, and is staring down the barrel of massively inflated hardware prices thanks to the component crisis. But, I'm not yet convinced E-Day or Xbox fully understand what made its historic moments work. The same old can never be entirely new, and while Horde Siege can feel special, too much of the time I'm left grasping for reasons to play another match, especially when Versus mode is right there.

But what about you? Looking forwards to returning to Gears' online offerings when E-Day launches? Let us know in the comments!

Take a look at our best co-op games ranking for more!

Xbox has announced Xbox backward compatibility for PC, with four original Xbox games released today on the Xbox app.

In a post on Xbox Wire, Microsoft says, "Today, we’re introducing Xbox Backward Compatibility on PC, making it easier to play classic Xbox games from the past across PC and handhelds, including the ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X."

The post adds, "As players, we don’t want to leave our gaming legacy behind even as technology continues to evolve and advance. We expect our library of games to move forward with us and to be able to play them in entirely new ways." If that isn't a soft confirmation of Project Helix having backwards compatibility, I don't know what is.

Included in this list is Rare remake Conker: Live and Reloaded, flight combat title Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge, failed mascot Blinx: The Time Sweeper, and Bill Gates' favorite game Fuzion Frenzy.

The post continues, "This marks the beginning of a broader effort to preserve Xbox games from the past and bring them to PC over time." Oh, and all four are included with all Xbox Game Pass plans.

Microsoft also says these editions will have enhancements, explaining, "We are also adding new features to make your gaming experience better than ever."

These include "4x resolution upscaling, VSync support, Fullscreen and Windowed display modes, anisotropic filtering, enhanced anti-aliasing, and more. These games also include customizable language and audio settings."

Xbox confirms that Achievements will be coming to these original Xbox games, with the four games released today set to be updated to include them "in the coming months."

Arkane founder asks Xbox CEO "how much" Microsoft wants for the studio: "I'm asking for a friend"

Forza Horizon 5 director Mike Brown says Xbox Game Pass simply hasn't taken off enough to be viable.

Speaking to MinnMax (via Eurogamer), Brown – who departed Playground Games in 2023 and is now directing open-world racer Clutch at Maverick Games – was asked about the current wave of layoffs facing Xbox studios. Brown singles out Xbox Game Pass and says Microsoft "invested a fortune in the concept," which led to teams being acquired, games being funded, and jobs being created. However, he adds, "The reality is not enough people have subscribed to it at the prices that they needed to pay in order to make that business viable."

Brown explains, "We’re now going to see studios getting shut down or spun off. Loads of people are going to lose their jobs. And that is honestly just a result of a well-meaning player-focused concept of Xbox Game Pass not quite landing."

Bloomberg's Jason Schreier talked about Xbox Game Pass on the Triple Click podcast, where he claims, "there are a lot of people out there in studio leadership within Xbox who absolutely detest Game Pass and think it has destroyed the value of their games, think it has taken away from the value of all games in general just as a service" He adds, that some of those people believe "It's been a detriment to the games industry."

Brown has a bit more of a favorable view of the service, however, saying, "It's a good idea. Let's have a subscription, make it affordable, try and get games to more people. We'll have a really diverse selection of games on there. We'll get a load of studios involved. We'll make some games that probably couldn't exist otherwise."

Last year, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate reached $30 per month, which led to subscriber loss according to Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who promptly took the price down to $23 per month.

Arkane founder asks Xbox CEO "how much" Microsoft wants for the studio: "I'm asking for a friend"

Xbox is in the midst of an aggressive recalibration. CEO Asha Sharma is pursuing a "reset" of the content portfolio. Compulsion Games and Double Fine have regained their independence, Ninja Theory and Undead Labs have been sold; thousands of jobs have been cut across Activision Blizzard, Bethesda, and Xbox Game Studios. We're still getting a grasp on how severely individual studios are impacted, although some appear significant.

Reportedly, id Software has lost 50% of its staff. It's a shocking development, leaving a pioneering developer – the stewards of the id Tech engine, and creators of Doom and Quake – with drastically lowered capacity. Bethesda Game Studios, id, MachineGames, and ZeniMax Online have apparently been given a mandate to refocus on Bethesda's "strongest franchises", but it's difficult to know where id goes from here.

Doom, Eternal, and The Dark Ages performed admirably, but didn't necessarily rip and tear the market to shreds. Quake Champions launched out of early access in 2022 but failed to gain momentum – arena shooters remain a challenge in an environment dominated by battle royale, extraction, and hero shooters. It's been over seven years since Rage 2.

Common sense would dictate that id shifts to support MachineGames – long rumored to be developing a sequel to 2017's Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus. This would make sense: MachineGames has collaborated with other Bethesda studios around Wolfenstein in the past, having launched Cyberpilot and Youngblood with Arkane Lyon in 2019.

There's also external pressure to consider. A live action Wolfenstein television series is in development at Amazon MGM Studios, and given that Asha Sharma recently outlined a trans-media vision for the future of Xbox, it's unlikely that she will want to repeat the mistake made with Fallout: two hugely successful seasons of the show landing without a new Fallout game to meet raised interest.

Speaking of Fallout, id Software could help Xbox pursue its ambition of getting players back into the wasteland a little faster. Given the palpable appetite within the Xbox community for Obsidian to deliver New Vegas 2, I'd rather see id's expertise placed elsewhere. The studio is world renown for making the best feeling shotguns in video games – that would be wasted on V.A.T.S.

Xbox owns arguably the greatest catalogue of shooter franchises in the video game industry. Brink, Call of Duty, Doom, Gears of War, Halo, Overwatch, Perfect Dark, Prey, Quake, Rage, Singularity, Soldier of Fortune, StarCraft, and Wolfenstein to name but a few. If Xbox is serious about wanting to deliver more of its biggest franchises faster, it could do far worse than transition id to Gears or Halo.

Halo 3: ODST proved that Halo can thrive under tonal shifts; perhaps a faster, more furious id instalment would work wonders as Halo Studios gets its arms around the future of the mainline series. But really, id and Gears are a match made in heaven. The series could do far worse than an FPS experiment.

The gritty setting is perfect territory for a grounded, viscerally violent FPS. Don't just take my word for it, Cliff Bleszinski (designer of the original trilogy) toyed with taking Gears in this direction before Epic sold the IP to Microsoft. "I can tell you I wanted to actually consider going first-person with it," he told XboxEra. "I mean, can you imagine chainsawing a Locust in first person?"

I can imagine it, Cliff, and I want to play it. And there's no studio more equipped to make it a reality than id Software. Whether it will be given the opportunity under this new era of Xbox remains to be seen.

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From the outside looking in, it would appear that Undead Labs is a victim of mismanagement. The team was acquired by Xbox Game Studios in 2018, just weeks after the release of State of Decay 2. A sequel is set to land in 2027 after navigating a turbulent trajectory – revealed before it was ready for public consumption, development stalling during pre-production, challenges in shifting to Unreal Engine 5. The survival shooter finally opened its doors to public alpha testing earlier this spring.

Undead Labs didn't contribute any new games to the ecosystem in eight years. That's an irrefutable fact, which may speak to why Xbox just sold the studio as part of an internal reset. Although that doesn't mean the team hasn't been busy.

State of Decay 2 was a quiet success – amassing 10+ million lifetime players by its fourth anniversary. Undead supported this community with an expansion, multiple updates, new features, and years of refinements. Given how starved PS5 is for new co-op titles, it's shocking SoD2 wasn't part of the first wave of Xbox games to abandon platform-exclusivity. Another error from the prior Xbox administration.

Xbox has historically done a poor job of drawing attention to collaborations across XGS. The Coalition is an Unreal Engine 5 center of excellence. Other teams have made use of Ninja Theory's high-end motion capture studio. Rare provided the networking know-how for Double Fine's Kiln. Blizzard lent its cinematics expertise to Playground for Fable. Obsidian's proprietary dialogue editor is used by various in-development RPGs at Xbox. There's countless other examples.

Just like State of Decay helping bring Grounded to life. Operating with a small budget, Obsidian sought a novel way to achieve its co-op ambitions. And so it turned to Undead Labs, who had developed a system to store world-data as a shareable save file in the cloud. It's what allows multiple players to independently drop into the same persistent world without requiring a community's host to be online.

"It's almost like a pseudo-dedicated server space," Marcus Morgan, Obsidian's VP of operations, told me last year. "It's effectively just a shared cloud save, but you don't need any of the dedicated server infrastructure – or the cost that goes with it."

"The intention behind that was, because we were a small team (there were only like 20 people working on it, and the cost of making it was relatively small) this was a good way to satisfy player's needs," he says, adding: "That stemmed from a collaboration between us and Undead Labs. I have to give a big shout out to that team. They built this tech initially, and then we built upon it."

This 'Shared Save' technology helped Obsidian scale quickly to build more vibrant and collaborative backyards. Eventually, Undead received an expanded 'Shared World' system in return – allowing State of Decay 3 to support far larger communities, no longer constrained by the co-op tethers that plagued its predecessor. It'll be interesting to see whether the tech evolves again in the future.

Still, it's an interesting example of the sort of value that Undead Labs brought to Xbox, and the way the XGS group has been able to leverage wider expertise to bring concepts to life. Eight years without releasing a new game clearly isn't enough for this next era of Xbox, but the legacy of Undead Labs and State of Decay will live on through Grounded 2's ever-expanding Brookhollow Park forever.

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I hope that Clockwork Revolution doesn't mark the end of an era for Xbox. Every time I see it in action, I feel like I'm getting a glimpse into the future of role-playing games.

inXile Entertainment is showcasing an experience built on a foundation of depth and flexibility; an RPG where you're charged with changing the past to take control of your future. Expressive combat and detailed customization combining with a spiraling approach to choice and consequence. If Clockwork Revolution delivers on its potential, it'll show what can be achieved when a talented team is afforded six years to raise its creative ambitions.

Following the Xbox Games Showcase, CEO Asha Sharma announced an internal reset. While she stated that "a reliable pipeline of first- and third-party exclusives and new IP are critical to our success", it was also acknowledged that Xbox has "over extended" itself after expanding too rapidly under old leadership. Rumors of widespread layoffs and studio closures have followed.

I suspect the version of Xbox that exists by 2027 will be one that prioritizes shorter development cycles, less creative risktaking, and a pivoting of resources to support faster deployment of "industry-defining franchises" like Fallout, Forza, Gears, and Halo. Which is to say, it won't necessarily be an environment where something like a Clockwork Revolution is possible.

Clockwork has this neat system built around the lives of companions. As you reach into the past, pulling at threads to reshape the steampunk city of Avalon, the worlds of your favorite characters can change in unexpected ways. "The crew you come back to might not be the same one you left," teases game director Chad Moore. It's a big creative concept layered atop wild time manipulation / displacement powers, and storytelling split across different timelines.

There's a reason Clockwork has been selected as the first Xbox console-exclusive of 2027. It could be a genuine system-seller, the sort the Series X desperately needs. There's also a chance it'll be the last of its kind. Clockwork Revolution will technically mark the first inXile release for Xbox. The team was acquired in 2018, and spent its first two years in the XGS ecosystem shipping Wasteland 3. Six years later, the most ambitious RPG in inXile's history is almost here.

In an era where development is more complicated, expensive, and time intensive than ever, it's going to take that sort of timeframe to create something capable of pushing genre boundaries. My fear is that a changing Xbox, one more brutally responsive to industry pressures, may no longer burden the risk of producing new IP in this way. Clockwork Revolution is among my most anticipated games, I just fear it'll mark the end of Xbox's acquisition misadventure.

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It's been 15 years since a mainline installment to the Gears of War series supported four-player campaign co-op. Developer Epic Games introduced the experiment back in Gears of War 3, the game which chronicled the desperate last stand of Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago. It's fitting then that four-player co-op returns as The Coalition prepares to chronicle the origin of the most beloved bromance in video game history.

Gears of War: E-Day is set to launch on October 6, 2026, for PC and Xbox Series X. Players across both platforms will be able to explore the emergence of the Locust together, in either four-player online or two-player split-screen configurations. Creative director Matt Searcy tells me that taking E-Day in this direction wasn't without its technical challenges, but he believes it's the right move for what is undoubtedly the studio's most ambitious entry during its decade-long stewardship of the series.

"I'm not gonna lie, it's a huge investment," says Searcy. "We made the decision to support four player co-op to reflect an aspect of how the core Gears DNA feels. Our stories are almost always about a four-person squad, right?" He's not wrong, and yet it is exceptionally rare for Gears to look all that far beyond the perspective of the Fenix family. That's going to change in E-Day.

"We set a goal from the very beginning of development that we wanted you to be able to play as every single character. So in our campaign, you can pick any of the characters from the story – the story will be told entirely from that perspective, and you'll never leave their side." The characters Searcy is referring to here are, of course, the returning Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago, COG veterans of the Pendulum Wars, alongside the world-weary Mags Carter and rookie Lucas Reyes.

Together they form Bravo Squad, fighting to survive as the city of Kalona crumbles beneath the Locus Horde. "It's a very intimate approach to following a larger world event," Searcy adds. "And it's kind of like Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan, where you're following this group and they aren't always going to be in the right place at the right time."

For Gears of War: E-Day, which has a campaign set entirely in a single city location, making a game that can support up to four players has pushed The Coalition to rethink how it builds environments. "We have had modes that have supported four-player co-op in them in the past and clearly they work, so this was all about building the right spaces at the right sizes. You know, we build to make sure the game plays great in single-player, in two-player co-op, and then in three- and four-player co-op as well."

"We love single-player games, and Gears is built so that you can play it that way and have an amazing time. Our mechanics are designed in single-player, you'll have the squad there with you, and the game will play great if you're on your own. But we really believe in the co-op experience too, as you get to try different tactics and experiment with multiple things at once in our larger combat arenas – it's a lot of fun," says Searcy.

We'll see how the return to four-player co-op campaign works for ourselves come October 6, 2026. Although PlayStation owners won't be able to get in on the action, as Gears of War: E-Day is now an Xbox console exclusive – meaning you'll need a PC, Xbox Series X, or an active Game Pass subscription to be there for the day that Sera changed forever.

Gears of War: E-Day is now a console exclusive, making it one of the most anticipated upcoming Xbox Series X games of 2026.

Gears of War: E-Day is renovating the 20-year-old foundations that the franchise was built upon. The Coalition made the decision to start from scratch as it faced the daunting task of transitioning to Unreal Engine 5, opting to recreate every single system, mechanic, and art asset anew as it sought to tell the story of Emergence Day – the day that Sera crumbled, as the Locust emerged from beneath the ground and brought a civilization to its knees.

This means that big changes are coming to Gears of War: E-Day. While it's still going to be a heavy-footed, cover-based shooter made in the mold of the games that have come before it, The Coalition is pushing for greater mobility, more verticality, and slicker movement mechanics to bring a greater sense of urgency and anticipation to the gory combat. One unexpected change comes in how Active Reload is being handled.

"Active Reload has always been a massive part of Gears, it's an iconic feature," says creative director Matt Searcy. For those of you who need a refresh, the act of swapping a clip in Gears of War actually kickstarts a small minigame whereby hitting different spots of the reloading mechanism can change the speed in which you're able to get back into combat. "For E-Day, we've moved the Active Reload bar to the middle of the screen by default."

For players who have been with the series for two years, this is no doubt going to be one of those changes that sounds small but has the potential to have a seismic impact on the way that you play – especially if your brain has now been rewired to naturally draw your eyes to the top-right position of the screen when dealing with reloads. The Coalition is aware that some may not appreciate the change.

"You can change the Active Reload position to the top right if that's what you prefer," says Searcy, but explains that this change is borne out of internal playtesting. "We've noticed through our testing that the bar being in the middle of the screen is where people actually use Active Reload the most. It becomes part of their shooting experience."

That isn't the only change The Coalition is making. While prior Gears games would typically have three Active Reload states – regular, perfect, and failed; each with their own positives and pitfalls – E-Day will give certain weapons their own unique Active Reload effects. Searcy points to everybody's favorite shotgun as a great example: "Some weapons will have additional Active Reload mechanics. The Gnasher is back, and you can actually see every single shell being loaded into it. If you want to at any time, you can pull a trigger to stop your reload, keep the two or three shells that you loaded, and then use them on the enemy that's right in front of you – if you're willing to give up your Active bonus."

It's a fascinating change, and one that reflects The Coalition's willingness to rip up the rulebook as it attempts to create a Gears of War game that captures the vibe of the 2006 original whilst making an experience that feels ready for action in 2026. You'll be able to try the Active Reload changes for yourself come October 6, where Gears of War: E-Day lands on PC, Game Pass, and Xbox Series X.

Gears of War: E-Day is now a console exclusive, making it one of the most anticipated upcoming Xbox Series X games of 2026.

Grounded 2 is approaching a meaningful destination on its journey through early access. August 11 marks the launch of a massive new content update, with 'Into the Abyss' opening up the pond for exploration in Brookhollow Park. The community is also expanding, with PS5 players entering the action just as developers Obsidian Entertainment and Eidos Montreal push the survival game to version 0.5. It's going to be a big year for Grounded 2. To learn more about it, and to better understand the challenges of building such a complex project, we sat down with Obsidian legend and Grounded 2 game director Chris Parker.

We spoke this time last year to get into the reveal of Grounded 2. How have you found the last 12 months, as your game moved through the first stages of early access?

Chris Parker, game director: Getting Grounded 2 into early access was a hurdle. But we got it out there and the community has been totally behind it. They loved it, but they also played through all of the content quickly and have been asking when we were going to give them more. So for us on the development side, at both Obsidian and Eidos, our focus has been on getting this done. We've had three major updates since then.

Every time that we think we're done we can take a breath – just one breath, that's all you get, and then we keep going. At the same time, we're constantly processing all the community feedback, and trying with love to figure out how we do as much of it as we can, while recognizing that we can't possibly do all of it. And now we're on the cusp of releasing the largest content update that we've done. It's bigger than Garden, and to be launching on PlayStation 5 effectively makes this our second launch, right? We had the early access launch before, but this is like doing it all over again this summer.

Obsidian has always been very proud of its ability to co-develop Grounded 2 with Eidos, how have you found that collaboration throughout early access?

Chris Parker: I'm the one who has been working with Eidos the longest, because I launched the project with them back when it was in its infancy. They've always been great, but what's interesting about our relationship is that it's not just that we're professional or that we all care deeply about this franchise, but it's that we've learned to continually work together better, and to be stronger as a team over time.

There were a lot of times, getting into early access with the early access of the game, that we had some struggles. We would butt heads on some things, but we would ultimately figure out what the best solution for the game would be and move on. Those things occur less and less often now. What's far more likely to happen is that Eidos comes and pitches something to us, like the story for the pond, and I will just plus-one that with them. Then I'll suggest something and they get excited and plus-one that.

And then at some point, of course, we'll be out of scope and we have to pull it all back again. But it's because we built Grounded 2 into a good place together, everybody is super jazzed about it. We're ready to get in there and make this thing. Ultimately, we just keep getting better at doing this together.

Grounded 2 coming to PS5 feels like a pretty significant milestone?

Chris Parker: Releasing Grounded 2 on PlayStation 5 is huge for us. Obviously, we've been working on it for a while, it's coming out on August 11, and we didn't have the opportunity with Grounded 1 to do this with the PlayStation community. The PS4 and PS5 versions came out a year after 1.0 was released. So almost from day one, we knew that it would be truly amazing to expand the community and include PS5 users.

Getting here and being able to realize that ambition is awesome. Now we have our fingers crossed that PS5 players do want to come into the community, and that they are as genuinely interested in the development of this game as the existing community already is. I think they will, because the Grounded 2 community is super healthy, so we're just excited. It's going to be fun!

Xbox announced it's reinvesting in console exclusivity. Is this something you think about during development, or do you just want your game in as many hands as possible?

Chris Parker: As a game developer, what I want is for the most amount of players to love my game on their platform, whatever that might be. I'm going to put a lot of work into this thing, I'm going to put my heart into it – so I want you to love and enjoy it too. Ultimately, that's it. So there are other people above my pay grade that might have other opinions about what needs to happen with all that. It's not up to me. I'm just going to give it to as many people as I can. And for Grounded 2, I'm just super excited that this time around I get to pull PlayStation 5 players in with me. That's a great thing.

Grounded 2 has enjoyed a strong first year, but how are you thinking about that roadmap moving forward?

Chris Parker: From day one of this project, we had a pretty good idea of how big the park was going to be and a rough idea of how we were going to cut it. We had a solid idea of how many weapons there were going to be and how our weapon tiers were going to work. But the first hurdle was to distill all of that down to get the game into early access – a foundational level of all that stuff, just enough to build everything else on. So then the next steps were to add to the Garden. And I'll be honest with you, our original ambition for the Garden was too big, we had to scale them down a bit, and that content came out stronger as a result.

So yeah, we have ideas for the future, but the most important thing for us right now is the Into the Abyss update that's coming to PS5 and all other platforms on August 11. It's a huge content update with multiple biomes in it, there's a new buggy joining the group, we're bringing back swimming as a gameplay experience, and we're offering some other things that you can do while you're underwater too. We'll be talking about all that later.

How do you balance the need to release big content updates with the demands of a vocal, passionate community?

Chris Parker: A lot of the things that we focus on outside of the big content updates – new regions of the park, bosses, that sort of thing – are things for the community. They are actually more carefully planned, where we see things the community wants and try to deliver that. Custom Game is a good example of that, which is coming back in the 0.5 update. We always wanted to bring it back, but we were like, whatever, we'll bring it back whenever. And the community has been like, 'No, for real guys, we want Custom Game back; come on, give it to us!'

So we talked to Eidos, we did some finagling with the schedules, and we freed up resources to bring Custom Game back sooner. It won't be quite as robust as it was in Grounded 1 at first, but we are getting the big pieces in place and then we'll continue to add to it. So part of our roadmap is looking at something like Custom Game and understanding when we want to finish it, right? We want to do more with buggy progression; we got the first bit of it in with the 'Beat the Heat' update, but when are we going to finish it? So a lot of our roadmap is really about taking something that we have in the game, asking the community what they think about it, and us understanding if they want us to take it further.

Grounded 2 doesn't have a clear 1.0 release date, but it's expected to be on the 2027 gaming release calendar. The 'Into the Abyss' update is coming August 11 to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X.

Eight years and 68 updates later, the wasteland has never looked better. It's funny to think that few thought that Fallout 76 had a chance of surviving, let alone thriving, back when Bethesda Game Studios first announced its shared-world RPG – assumed to be too vastly out of step with the foundational Fallout experience to succeed.

And yet here we are, with Fallout 76 hosting one of the loveliest communities in all of gaming and providing safe haven for Fallout show fans looking for continuing adventures out in the wilds. Bethesda released a major new Fallout 76 update on June 2, Infestations, so we caught up with creative director Jon Rush and production director Bill LaCoste to get an update from the frontlines of Appalachia.

Talk to me about the Infestations update, what does it bring to Fallout 76?

Jon Rush, creative director: The wasteland is a dangerous place, and sometimes us wastelanders need to be reminded of that. Each update to the game that we've made since launch has kind of been the next chapter, and a lot of the focus has been different groups moving into Appalachia and setting up shop there. But the Super Mutants, the Scorched, and all of those misprogrammed robots are kind of getting tired of that – they want some of these places back. So Infestations unlocks close to 40 unique locations in the game that were once abandoned and are now full of action. Areas that have been taken over by these nefarious groups, and it's up to us Wastelanders to take them back and reclaim the wasteland.

It's still early days yet, but are players already shaping the way you're thinking about this update moving forward?

Jon Rush: You know, Bill and I largely consider ourselves to be pretty good players of our game. When we were playtesting Infestations with our team before release, they were a pretty good challenge. Little did we know, once it went live, people would be mowing through it much quicker than we ever did [Laughter]. So that has given us the next steps forward for making the feature better. So Infestation quests will get harder – much harder. And we have plans to continue improving that feature and expanding on it for the next patch and the one after that, and so on. Player feedback is so important.

This time last year we were talking about Gone Fission, which introduced fishing to Fallout 76. How do you avoid whiplash shifting between such different concepts?

Jon Rush: In the past, I've used the phrase: 'thickening the experience of Fallout 76.' What I mean by that is that we're always looking for ways to enrich existing features and playspaces in the game. Fishing did exactly that. 'Anywhere you can swim, you can fish!' is something you probably heard us say last year – that tells me, as a player, that I should be exploring the whole map again, just to see what kind of stuff can be pulled out of the water. In many ways, that fishing feature inspired what future features will look like, in that they are designed to thicken and enrich that experience.

How does that focus apply forward to what you delivered with Infestations?

Jon Rush: Despite how obviously different Infestations may seem from Gone Fission, they actually aren't that different. Both have experiences that can take place across the entire map, perhaps in places that you haven't ever been to or haven't been to in a while. So really, the main difference here is that there's no water and that the fish fight back [laughter]. So yeah, it's about hitting those same hallmarks of us wanting to enrich the existing play experience in a new way.

To deliver Gone Fission and Infestations in the space of a year, it highlights something that's so core to Fallout – its capacity to be quite whimsical in an otherwise bleak world.

Bill LaCoste, production director: It's all about getting that Fallout feel right. We're looking for a balance between these darker, more serious tones and more levity, humorous moments. It's the balance of these aspects wrapped under a blanket of retro-futuristic Americana that makes Fallout – that's the Fallout sweet spot! It's echoed in the games and in the show, and that's where the stories are most effective. And so as we expand Fallout 76, making new features and crafting new stories, that's something we're always very mindful of.

Given the importance of that Americana vibe, does it rule Fallout 76 from taking wastelanders further afield in future updates?

Jon Rush: Americana provides such a unique timbre to the game and to the tone that, if you removed that, a big part of it may no longer feel like Fallout anymore. That's not to say that there aren't numerous other stories happening in the world outside of the United States that take place in the Fallout universe, but in the way that we present our stories, that Americana element is a crucial element to our world.

Bill LaCoste: There's also this sense of players being able to think about what's happening across other parts of the world on their own, there's some mystique there and we like that. I don't know if there will ever be an expansion beyond America, but I think there's a lot of importance in keeping it that way – so that players can think about what is happening around the world and create their own stories, which the modding community can take advantage of too!

Jon Rush: I mean, let me give a special shout-out to Fallout London! It's great to see people picturing what's happening in other parts of the world at the same time, I think it's fantastic. That's a strength of Fallout – that it can be a spark which ignites all these stories in people's heads, and it's great to explore those.

Bethesda Game Studios released two major Fallout 76 updates since Fallout Season 2 concluded earlier this year, I assume the show has been a motivating force?

Jon Rush: It's been great. It emboldens the team to continue telling great Fallout stories. A strength of the show is that its creators are such huge fans of the IP and of the world, so the stories they're telling are genuinely Fallout in every way. People watch it and they want more of it, so they come to Fallout 3, 4, New Vegas, and 76 to get more of that storytelling. So it emboldens the team to see that kind of reaction. And our community has been so great – so welcoming to all of these new players into the game. I know that's something you wouldn't really expect to see in a wasteland, people being charitable and giving things to each other, but it's been really great.

Bill LaCoste: I think that the big question of 'how do I get more of this' that Jon just noted, it's like 'hey, we have these games that do this!' And I think some of those people are actually surprised when they come into the games, that they are so much like the show – with the same humor and style. Kilter Films and Amazon have done an amazing job with the detail, and with the way that the stories being told are exactly like the Fallout games.

It must be pretty energizing to see so much enthusiasm around the franchise?

Bill LaCoste: I've watched both seasons multiple times now, with other friends and family, and I just never get bored of it. That's a great feeling for us and the team, because we don't ever come into work not wanting to do something with the Fallout universe, to make it better, and to do something new for our fans to keep this world going.

Jon Rush: The Fallout show has brought in new fans of Fallout. It's also brought in new gamers, who can also then go and experience all of the games that everybody else is making! It's funny, I was at a restaurant one time and my phone case says 'Fallout' on the back, and I just put it on the table not even thinking about it. The waiter comes by and he's like, 'oh yeah, you like Fallout too?' So I asked him which game was his favorite, hoping that he would say 76 [laughter]. And he goes 'Wait, there's a game? I just watched the show!' And I'm like, 'Dude, there are multiple games, get in there!' He said he was going to download [Fallout 76] when he got home, and I said, 'yeah, good for you!'

Looking for something else to play? Check out the upcoming Xbox Series X games, or our pick of the best MMOs to play in 2026.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The future of Compulsion Games, Double Fine, and Ninja Theory are unclear. There are reports this week that Xbox is in discussion to shutter all three legendary studios, and rumors that the teams responsible for South of Midnight, Psychonauts, and Hellblade could buy back their independence. At a time where both first-party creative houses – PlayStation Studios and Xbox Game Studios – have shown little hesitation in closing development houses, the idea that these three could walk away seems unlikely. And while no two situations are alike, it isn't unheard of. Just look at Toys for Bob.

"Toys for Bob was acquired by Activision in 2005, and for many years we enjoyed a long and successful partnership," says studio head Paul Yan, who took on the role following the departure of founders Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford in 2020. It wasn't long before Yan was steering Toys for Bob through one of the most challenging periods in its 30 year history. "Covid hit, and the world turned upside down. There were many changes that happened as a result. One was a corporate mandate [at Activision] to support the large blockbuster IPs – Modern Warfare, Warzone, and Overwatch 2, to name just a few."

Before the studio was drawn into the Call of Duty ecosystem, it was doing industry-leading work – breathing new life into the mascots that fuelled the imaginations of an entire generation of millennials. It spearheaded the burgeoning Toys-to-Life genre with the Skylanders series, "an original IP inspired by Spyro" before being given the opportunity to go a step further.

As Yan explains: "We spent time meticulously handcrafting the first three classic Spyro games for the Reignited Trilogy, and we really got an understanding of the character during this period. And then we moved on to Crash Bandicoot, breathing new life into that series with a sequel, as well as an experimental multiplayer spin-off with Crash Team Rumble." It's a period of prolific creativity, where Toys for Bob was able to leverage its growing confidence and expertise into long-overdue platformers.

And then the world changed. "We learned a lot after we shifted into a support structure to assist other teams with various initiatives, games, feature-sets, and updates. We spread into a lot of territories that we weren't familiar with, or at least hadn't spent a lot of time with. We're very proud of the work that we did there, and of all of the collaboration. But if we're being honest with ourselves, we knew that we were just straying too far from the games that we're passionate about – that we're known for. So at that time, in the back of our mind, we knew we wanted to get back to them somehow."

Soon, Activision began to change too. In 2022, as Toys for Bob was supporting Infinity Ward to get Modern Warfare 2 out the door, Xbox announced its intention to acquire Activision Blizzard King for $68.7 billion. Former Xbox CEO Phil Spencer went on record to say that he was interested in Toys for Bob dusting off older Activision IP, but nothing changed. As the deal closed in 2023, Toys for Bob were locked into supporting development of Overwatch 2 and Modern Warfare 3. Then the Xbox layoffs hit. One of the Toys for Bob studios was shuttered. A month later, it was all change again – the studio secured its freedom.

"In 2023, Microsoft was in the process of acquiring Activision. This was a long, drawn out process which gave us a lot of time to soul search – to ask ourselves, well, how can we get back to the games we're passionate about making? So we got in front of leadership at both the Activision and Xbox level," says Yan. "We proposed a really bold plan. We asked that Toys for Bob would buy back its independence – taking creative, financial and organization control – to spin-off into a separate company. One where we could get back to the games we were known for, and preserve the tight-knit team and the long tenure that we had built up over the years."

There was a major caveat in the proposal. Toys for Bob needed the security of knowing that it would immediately receive funding for a project. So if Toys for Bob was going to spread its wings, it was going to do it with Spyro: the character that had first freed it from the trap of making Disney licensing games with Activision back in the early 00s.

"The other half of the proposal was that the first game we would develop out of the game would be a new title for Xbox, and that it would be based on a concept that we had been stewing on ever since 2018," says Yan. "We learned a lot about Spyro in this time, and we had ideas on where the series could go and how we could evolve the character. So fast forward a bit, and leadership was very supportive of the move and of the game pitch. And for the last two years we've been quietly working on exactly that title: Spyro: A Realm Beyond."

Built in Unreal Engine 5, in development for PC, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X, A Realm Beyond is in many ways a continuation of the iconic Insomniac era of games – with Toys for Bob leveraging everything it learned through remaking that trilogy and then pushing on beyond it. Given how eager Toys for Bob was to regain its independence, I was curious as to why the studio would draw such a hard line in the sand – that it would get what it wanted, only so long as Xbox funded the group as a third-party entity.

Granted anonymity to speak candidly about the situation, multiple staffers at Toys for Bob have told me that it would have been 'near suicidal' to reenter the market without a project in active development, and that the arrangement works for everybody involved: the studio regains control of its future and a degree of security; Xbox gets to revive a legacy IP the community is desperate to see return with little risk; and that this could all ultimately lead to a fruitful partnership between the two in the future.

When I spoke with Xbox's executive vice president and chief content officer last week, Matt Booty didn't wholly shut down the question of whether third-party studios could be entrusted to revive other IP that the publisher has in the vault in the future: "I think the answer is there are options to do all kinds of things, and we're certainly looking at those all the time."

I did ask Toys for Bob associate creative director Lou Studdert why the studio went all-in on Spyro, rather than, say, Banjo-Kazooie, and he was clear about the studio's priorities. "Spyro has a deep place in the studio's heart. Having worked through Skylands and the Reignited trilogy, we've always admired that small but mighty underdog story of the character taking on these overwhelming odds – we see ourselves in that a little bit. And, honestly, it was also a no-brainer."

Yan adds: "Going independent meant taking a massive, massive risk. It's taking a bet on ourselves, but we had confidence in making that move [...] Reignited sold over 11 million copies, so there's an audience that showed up for the series."

As my time with Toys for Bob drew to a close, I asked Yan whether there was ever a world where the studio would have pursued independence without the Spyro sequel in place. "The proposal that we had was complex, and that was part of the equation from the beginning. That in order for us to pursue this, we would go independent. Is there a possibility that could have happened in some other alternate timeline?"

"I can't speak to that, but I can say that those two things together are exactly what we proposed," he says. "That Toys for Bob would spin off and have control over the types of games we wanted to focus on, and that Spyro would be number one."

Spyro: A Realm Beyond is set to release in 2027, although it doesn't have a confirmed release date. Toys for Bob may be developing the title as an upcoming Xbox Series X game, but it's also set to launch for PC, PS5, and Nintendo Switch 2.

Modern Warfare 4 is the Call of Duty I have been waiting all generation to play. It's a slickly produced first-person shooter that truly feels as if it is pushing at the boundaries of what this series can achieve when it's firing on all cylinders.

Activision has finally allowed its vast network of video game studios (who keep the gears of this annualized machine turning) to cease support for the PS4 and Xbox One, and the results are astonishing. There's a fluidity to the movement systems; weight to the weapon handling; a density of detail to the visual and auditory design that's apparent from the first kill to the last. You love to see it.

Jack O'Hara, the co-studio head of Infinity Ward and game director of Modern Warfare 4, believes the decision to leave last-gen systems behind has had a transformative effect on ideation and execution. "The processing power of the PS4 was great in its time, but it was starting to get in the way when it came to certain innovations. Support was making the development of new features harder, because you have to account for the differences between platforms."

"Console generations have been living for longer and longer, so we got better and better at optimization, but it does reach a point where you might be optimizing more than you're making something new. So, once you reach that threshold, you have to make the call," O'Hara adds. It's an exceptionally reasonable argument that has led to compelling results.

I'm told that Infinity Ward has engineered a lot of technology to deliver better balanced firefights. "Every shot should tell the truth" is a phrase I have heard more than once. Basically, there's a stronger alignment between bullet trajectory, weapon motion, and operator stance. Target visibility has been refined as IW introduces solutions to longstanding issues with bloom and depth of field. Weapons now make micro-adjustments as you push into tight spaces and begin to peek corners. It's wonderfully immersive, and feels utterly fantastic.

There's a control and a stability to the way that Modern Warfare 4 plays that simply wasn't present in Sledgehammer Games' disastrous Modern Warfare 3. Infinity Ward has effectively picked up from where it left off with MW2 in 2022. The recoil patterns and damage profiles are familiar, so too is the snappy TTK – though IW promises it's slightly less severe this time around.

"We are dialing in on the details to make that TTK feel consistent and strong," says Jacky Reynolds, multiplayer design lead. "One thing I'm really stoked about is that we made the TTK slightly longer at further ranges. If you played MW2, you probably felt yourself getting beamed across the map a lot. You'll feel that a lot less in Modern Warfare 4." Fighting at range requires more precision aiming than before, but Call of Duty is as lethal as it's always been once you're within sprinting distance of an enemy.

Consecutive Black Ops releases means Call of Duty has been saddled with hyper-mobility for two years. While I was certainly a fan of the omni-movement system within certain contexts, I was worried its introduction had defined a new direction for the wider franchise. IW has leveraged elements of this system to generate more fluid transitions around maps, and to give you new ways to change angles or adapt to pressure. So while you can't sprint, slide, or dive in any lateral direction like you could in BO7, you can now take advantage of backwards slides, mantle cancels, and faster climbing.

Combat Ready

I'm impressed with what Modern Warfare 4 is shooting for. I was able to play two multiplayer maps, and they are very in-keeping with the traditional Infinity Ward style – largely designed around three distinct lanes, promoting constant engagement and shifting momentums. There are some nice tweaks elsewhere too. The Riot Shield being reclassified as 'Equipment' and degrading through repeated use. There's now two Prestige paths, and IW is also very proud of a new Apex Attachment system – a set of unlocks that drastically transform a weapon's lethality and adaptability. Absurd incentives for weapon progression meet a more robust Gunsmith, enhanced customization, and a redesigned Create-a-Class system. There are more maps, modes, weapons, killstreaks, skins, and so it goes on and on.

All told, Modern Warfare 4 recalls memories of Call of Duty at its finest, albeit with a slick new-gen set of refinements, evolutions, and improvements. Beyond multiplayer, Infinity Ward has a lush campaign offering, following the exploits of Task Force 141 in the western hemisphere and a team of ordinary soldiers battling on the frontlines of a Korean war, and a returning DMZ mode that seems primed to take the fight right to Arc Raiders and Marathon. It's still early days, but I can't shake this feeling that Modern Warfare 4 couldn't have come at a better time for Call of Duty.

The series had clearly reached a breaking point. Back-to-back instalments of Black Ops and Modern Warfare titles created fatigue. Overbearing integration between mainline games and Warzone sowed frustration. There's a general sense that Sledgehammer and Treyarch (with three and two contributions this generation, respectively) haven't done enough to push the series forward – problematic as Arc Raiders, Battlefield 6, and a resurgent Overwatch offer competition elsewhere. But there's a quality to Modern Warfare 4 that is undeniable, and I'm desperate to play more.

Modern Warfare 4 is set to release on October 23 for PC, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X. However, the new game for 2026 will no longer land day one on Xbox Game Pass.

It's time for Spyro to take flight once again. Developer Toys for Bob would never come outright and say it, but I get the sense that Spyro: A Realm Beyond is trying to pick up where Insomniac Games left the character in Year of the Dragon. It's not like the character has been left to gather dust since the year 2000, he has been on plenty of adventures of differing qualities, but there's something about the vivid colors and ambitious approach to play that's being presented here which recalls the glory days.

Toys for Bob studio head Paul Yan tells me that the team is "building A Realm Beyond from the ground up" as a brand new adventure, one that's built to offer a new entry point into the long running series and speak to "the longtime fans and legacy of who Spyro is." Actor Tom Kenny (best known for his work as SpongeBob SquarePants) is reprising his role as the titular dragon, having voiced the character in Ripto's Rage and Year of the Dragon, as well as Toys for Bob's 2018 Reignited Trilogy.

It's likely that the confident, slightly arrogant, persona that defined Spyro in the original trilogy will go through some changes for A Realm Beyond. As a new antagonist rises across a new and mysterious realm, an older and more boisterous Spyro will be there to meet them.

Associate creative director Lou Studdert can only talk around whether the hero is entering his teenage years: "You know, dragons age differently than people," he laughs. "You've noticed there are some slight adjustments made to reflect that Spyro is really coming into his own. You can see it on his crest, you can see that his wings have gotten significantly bigger… there's more to come on the narrative!"

With Spyro: A Realm Beyond set to release in 2027, it's too early to dig into all the details. What Toys for Bob is willing to talk about is one of the reasons behind Spyro's increased wingspan: "When we realized that we wanted him to fly, those small wings just weren't going to cut it," says Studdert.

It's been a long time since Spyro Reignited Trilogy, and even longer since the classic Insomniac trilogy first landed, so perhaps a little refresher is in order. Spyro's primary form of aerial traversal was a gentle glide from jumps, and in very rare instances, flight under time-pressure in specific mini-levels. Yan says "I always wondered what it would be like if these two experiences could somehow be collapsed into Spyro’s core ability kit," and that question has been at the very heart of A Realm Beyond's design since.

"We started prototyping this game with flight and with a more unique moveset in mind," Studdert adds. "As we started building it out, finding that fun, we then realized that we'd need a bigger sense of scale to support that moveset – and so the world is far more vertical and expansive." The associate creative director stops short of confirming whether A Realm Beyond will run across wider, interconnected spaces or a full open-world – more detail to come there soon, I'm told.

Taking Flight

For now, Toys for Bob is only willing to confirm that "taking to the skies and owning the airtime" is going to be a massive focus for this adventure, with Yan confirming that you'll be able to "experience the freedom of true dragon flight." The pair tell me that figuring out this fantasy is core to what Toys for Bob wants to achieve with this long-awaited sequel, giving you the freedom to take to the skies at a moment's notice, shifting from charges on the ground to graceful flight in the sky on a whim.

"We want a zen-like fluidity, we want chaining of moves and exploration – for you to really be interacting with the environment as this quadruped who is its own unique beast," says Studdert. "Honing in on that feeling, that experience, has been our north star. We want to push the sense of wonder, adventure, and awe that this franchise uniquely delivers."

The challenge that Toys for Bob faces with Spyro A Realm Beyond is in knowing how far to push the series without diluting what made it so special to begin with. The studio has exceptional knowledge of this universe, having steered the character through the Reignited trilogy remake (which Yan says sold over 11 million copies) and the beloved Skylanders spin-offs. "We felt this when we worked on Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time as well," says Studdert. "What we like to do when we start working on a new project, especially if it is an established IP, is to really hone in on what emotions it brings out."

"That tension is so real, right?" adds Yan. "I'm proud of the team. They are thinking that through very thoughtfully, and listening to the community as we do. Because you have these two extremes: If you stick too much to nostalgia, then you basically just rehash what's been done before; and on the other extreme, if you innovate too much then all of a sudden players don't recognize the series anymore."

"We learned a lot during the development of Reignited. We've carried a lot of those lessons forward into A Realm Beyond – and obviously they are very different projects, we aren't recreating classics this time. But we've built up a confidence in our instincts for what feels tonally right for this character," says Yan, adding, "and I can't wait for fans to see the direction we're taking the series in."

Spyro: A Realm Beyond is a key new game of 2027 where it's set to take flight on PC, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X.

Here's a truth about Gears of War that has persisted since 2006: The folks that love the series' particular style of skittish multiplayer really love it, and everyone else thinks it's a sweaty killing field. I was there for the Xbox Live outages on day one, and have played every instalment since – it's exceptionally rare to find a player who resides on neutral ground. The Marmite effect that Gears multiplayer has is a direct result of design decisions that were cemented into the foundations of the franchise; there has been no solution to the chaotic combination of overpowered shotguns and manipulated cover mechanics.

I suspect that The Coalition is looking to change all that with Gears of War: E-Day. The studio hasn't been afraid to signal that it's making massive alterations to core elements of the series, shifting the position of the Active Reload bar is just the tip of a blood-stained iceberg.

When The Coalition began production of E-Day in Unreal Engine 5, it made the unusual decision to start from an "empty harddrive", as creative director Matt Searcy puts it. Every animation, asset, mechanic, and system has been rebuilt from scratch – giving the studio the excuse it needed to modernize Gears' movement.

"Gears plays best in a city, and Kalona is the ultimate battlefield. Its density, tight streets, mixed with more open spaces let us rethink how a Gear moves through the world. And it created a greater stage for more scale and verticality in combat. Our soldiers are basically giant tanks in armor, they slam into cars while weaving through hails of bullets. We wanted to keep that heaviness but add more fluidity with how you move through the battlefield," says Matt Searcy, creative director.

These changes operate at different scales. Searcy tells me that a subtle change is that "the sprint camera no longer pushes in when you're on a run", with a wider view "helping with the player's ability to move through the world and use a lot more of the entire battlefield." It's easy to understand how having improved readability of combat spaces will impact PvP multiplayer – which Searcy says will comprise "a collection of 4v4 modes and all-new maps set in locations in and around the worn-torn city of Kalona."

The studio has largely demonstrated these changes to core systems and mechanics through the lens of the campaign, a prequel that charts Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago's budding bromance on the days following the first emergence of the Locust Horde.

You're now able to jump and slide, opening up new opportunities to escape enemies and discover flanking routes; new cover mechanics are designed to increase your mobility and lethality in equal measure. It's exceptionally likely that these additions and alterations will be present and accounted for in multiplayer – and that means change is coming to the upcoming Xbox Series X game.

Change Is Good

"We've completely rebuilt our cover and movement systems. There are smoother transitions with a bigger range of cover heights and shapes, including new low-ground cover," he continues. "From sprint you can now slide, which lets you quickly get under objects, slide around corners, and transition more smoothly into cover from a run."

The increased fluidity and mobility at the heart of Gears of War: E-Day's movement has the potential to fundamentally reshape the way we play multiplayer, particularly as Searcy confirms that you won't be able to wall cancel and bounce "the way you've done it in the past."

The creative director is keen to stress that "your relationship with cover, and how you move between it, is still the most important thing to us – cover is life in Gears of War" but it's clear that heightened fluidity will fundamentally alter familiar multiplayer rhythms. The ability to hit low cover and high mantle around more vertical spaces will open more tactical flanking routes, while the ability to more quickly slide under objects and around corners could increase the pace of combat dramatically.

There's also increased destruction, "more than we've ever put into a Gears game" which sees hiding points chip away more dynamically while under concentrated fire. Again, it's unclear if this will transition to multiplayer, but if it does we should be battling in more organic and shifting playspaces.

And then there's the addition of jump, a mechanic introduced to "make the battlefields feel like they have more options and ways to get to a flanking route," Searcy says. "Think of all of this as us taking that classic Gears formula and adding new layers of strategy and traversal to it."

The Coalition is yet to reveal its plans for Gears of War: E-Day multiplayer beyond stressing that Versus will remain "sweaty squad-based PvP" and that the studio plans to support a "seasonal roadmap of killer combat, most of which you can just earn by playing the game – completing in-game challenges, events, and achievements."

All of that sounds great, but it's the way these enhanced movement mechanics intersect with the classic Gears multiplayer experience that has gotten me truly excited. We won't need to wait all that much longer to find out for certain, as Xbox has confirmed that Gears of War: E-Day will run a multiplayer beta split across two weekends, starting on August 6.

Have Your Say: How are you feeling about Gears of War: E-Day now that Xbox Game Studios has announced that it'll be a console exclusive? Vote in our poll, and let us know what you think about the biggest Gears changes in the comments section below.

Minecraft Dungeons 2 is making a big change. When its predecessor launched in 2020, it was a compelling side-quest for Mojang – a dungeon crawler which sought to deliver a more accessible entry point to the ARPG genre than the likes of Diablo and Path of Exile. It was a fun experience, although its limited points of exploration made it something of a divergence from what we've come to expect from Minecraft games. So Mojang is making some changes for the new game of 2026.

"In Minecraft Dungeons, we had a simple game loop," says Mans Olson, creative director. "You played a mission through to the end, you got a reward, and then you went back to your camp. In Minecraft Dungeons 2, we have what we call an interconnected world."

Internonnected, but not fully open. Olson stresses that Mojang "is purposefully not calling it an open world" as the studio is still creating a curated-style of game. "It's more of a guided experience that we think works really well for Minecraft," he says, adding: "But you will be free to explore the overworld; Minecraft Dungeons 2 is a lot larger than the first game."

Design director Laura de Llorens tells me that "you can walk from one end of the world to the other" in the upcoming Xbox Series X game, as the team emphasises the importance of exploration – unique and rare items, along with powerful Talismans, can be found by digging into every corner of the map. Speaking of maps, there's been some other changes to the Minecraft Dungeons 2 UI to accommodate the shift in focus. "Up in the right-hand corner we have a little mini-map, and we also have a very beautiful world map as well."

Given the 'All-Ages' framing of Minecraft Dungeons 2, are there any concerns over players getting lost in this interconnected world? Thankfully, a click of the left-thumbstick will enable a 'Guiding Light' (that can be activated by any member of your party, at any time) which will "always assist you in finding the next step in your quest," says de Llorens.

Minecraft Dungeons 2 may not be an open-world game, but it is inching ever closer to reflecting its ARPG ambitions into the original Minecraft style with this new interconnected world. The game is an exceptionally fun time, as you can learn more about in my Minecraft Dungeons 2 hands-on preview.

Minecraft Dungeons 2 is out for PC, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X on September 29, 2026.

There's a lot of pressure bearing down upon Senua's weary shoulders. Ninja Theory announced a new saga at the Xbox Games Showcase, a premium action-adventure that's set to release in 2027. The decision to sacrifice the Hellblade moniker is an interesting one. It's perhaps a signal that Senua has outgrown her own origins, or that the franchise itself has gathered too much baggage.

Hellblade is known for its intimate storytelling, introspective action, and stunning production values. It's also become synonymous with a certain style of play – cinematic to a fault, sometimes puzzling and ponderous. Speaking with Xbox Wire, Ninja Theory studio head Dom Matthews said that he spent a lot of time exploring the reaction to Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 before his team embarked on its next adventure.

"The resounding feedback, frankly, was that people loved the presentation, the story, the tone, and the atmosphere that we achieved, but they’d just love to be able to engage with Senua at a deeper level, with more gameplay, with more agency."

This introspection has caused Ninja Theory to change the way that it likes to work. Rather than silo small teams across different projects, Matthews has pulled the entire group onto development of Senua – it's the first time a production has been approached this way since 2013's DmC: Devil May Cry. That's been necessary to widen the complexity and fluidity of combat, traversal, and puzzle-solving.

Senua is aiming to be a more rounded package, one shaped by myth and madness as the celtic warrior fights through a fractured vision of purgatory. To reach the afterlife, you'll need to contend with larger groups of enemies and denser playspaces than the series has dared to attempt in the past. "It’s all about taking Senua’s combat and liberating it, so players can really express themselves a lot more."

Say what you will about the combat in Hellblade and its sequel, but I always appreciated its ferocity. The challenge now is retaining that weight whilst increasing Senua's mobility. The combat set has been deepened as Senua faces off against multiple enemies, all occupying space on various verticalities. You'll acquire weapons from slayed monsters, such as short axes which can be thrown, or combine Senua's primary sword with something like a flaming torch for slick dual-wield action. Honestly, I can't remember the last time I was this excited to fight manifestations of destruction, fear, and pain.

It's clear from my first look at Senua that this isn't Ninja Theory returning to its combat-action game roots but I do get the sense that this will be a more balanced action-adventure experience – one that recalls the studio's fine work on Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. The speed in which she's able to traverse environments is clearly increased, and more dynamic too – and I'm not just referring to widened exploration as Senua clambers up and around mountaintops.

Another deft decision sees Ninja Theory resist the impulse to head into open world territories. Senua may feature a map that's twice the size of Hellblade 2, but it's still ostensibly a structured narrative across a larger, wider world. Matthews says that rewarding exploration is a key focus for the team, but that the game is ostensibly a "linear story told through a map built of interconnected locations."

Ninja Theory has always been a leader within Xbox Game Studios with its animation quality, leveraging a world-class motion capture setup at the heart of its headquarters, and there's a sublime quality to the slickness in which Senua is able to channel fluid sword attacks into sharp dashes, blocks, and parries. Feed in an array of special Focus Abilities, and we're looking at something that's ambitious in a different way to anything the studio has released in the eight years since its acquisition.

Senua's Saga

I mention the acquisition, only because I do get the uneasy sense that Senua could be a make or break moment for Ninja Theory. While there's no doubt that production timelines were disrupted by COVID-19, and that the studio has been given leeway to advance its technology and pursue internal experiments like Project Mara, the truth is that it has only shipped two games as a part of Xbox Game Studios – the ill-fated Bleeding Edge (2020) and divisive Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 (2024).

Ninja Theory brings prestige to the XGS portfolio. It's a beloved studio that's stacked with talent, a group wielding cutting-edge technology to create standout experiences. I do worry that this isn't enough in the current environment, at a time where new CEO Asha Sharma is signaling both a renewed focus on Xbox's 'industry-defining franchises' and a need to execute an internal restructure.

"We expanded our studio system when we needed a pipeline of content to meet multiple strategies across subscription, streaming, and devices," says Sharma. "In the process, we have found ourselves over extended as we executed on changing strategies in a landscape of more readily available content."

What does this sort of rhetoric ultimately mean for Ninja Theory and Senua's latest saga? It's natural that there's some fear here, given the fate of studios like Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks. It's impossible to know for certain of course, but it's difficult to ignore the nagging sense that the decision to realign this character with a more broadly approachable action-adventure frame comes at a critical time for the studio.

Senua is set to release in 2027 as a key upcoming Xbox Series X game. It won't, however, be a console exclusive – and is expected to launch on PC and PS5. For more on the key new games of 2026 and beyond from Xbox, be sure to check out our Summer Games Preview.

I thought I needed a break from action-RPGs. I've been a massive fan of crawling dungeons, hoovering up loot, and clicking enemies into oblivion ever since I discovered Diablo as a kid – the terrifying cover art is still seared into my memory to this very day. But after sinking countless hours into Diablo 4 and its expansions, Path of Exile 2 and its (frankly ridiculous) skill tree, and plenty more indie hits besides, I was ready to give myself some time away from the genre.

And then Minecraft Dungeons 2 came along. Listen, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that the spin-off is as densely populated, visually rich, or challenge oriented as the mass of video games that have gone after the genre crown in the last five years, but there's something delightfully refreshing about Mojang's approach. It's every bit a relaxing introduction to dungeon crawlers, as it is for experienced players to share their love of ARPGs with a new generation of players.

Supporting up-to four player co-op, in both couch and online compositions, there's an ease in which Minecraft Dungeons 2 introduces its action. Familiar mobs from the vanilla Minecraft experience swarm as you beat and bash your way through the horde; loot pours from enemies as they explode off the screen, with dungeons carefully lit for maximum awe as Mojang pours more focus than ever before into making blocky spaces worth exploring.

Exploration is a key focus for Minecraft Dungeons 2, with the sequel earning itself an interconnected overworld that's full of collectibles and hidden talismans to uncover – a new type of item with unique capabilities, scaling once equipped in tandem with your levelling to produce more power and panache. Creative director Måns Olson tells me that Mojang is "purposefully not calling it an open world" although is quick to highlight a richer playspace with more room to dive into the depths of dungeons.

Speaking of dungeons, Mojang has answered your calls for more varied biomes. Minecraft Dungeons 2 will finally let you venture into the Deep Dark, complete with mobs that are unique to the playspace. One such enemy is the Twisted Warden, a towering boss that requires all four fighters to work together in tandem to take it down. I should note that this battle revealed one aspect that Mojang hasn't been able to solve between Minecraft Dungeons and its sequel: It's still exceptionally difficult to track your character in battle once the going gets a little chaotic.

That's also true while traversing the dungeons themselves, particularly as the studio has introduced the ability to jump this time around. In combat, this means you now get a unique jump attack which plays off of the weapon-type you have equipped (enhanced further by certain rarity buffs), although in exploration it means you'll get some light platforming sections with distances that are tough to judge.

Small frustrations with character-tracking and pathfinding aside, there's plenty of neat quality-of-life improvements. Armor is now split across head, chest, legs, and arms as Mojang tries to bring Minecraft Dungeons 2 a little closer to the core Minecraft experience, while the introduction of a mini-inventory system feels like a real game changer. You can now press 'up' on the D-Pad to adjust your weapons, swap in new weapons, and mess around with items actively in-game, rather than pulling everybody into the pause menu. It's a nice touch, one that makes Minecraft Dungeons 2 feel more responsive.

Into the Depths

Minecraft Dungeons 2 is a real breath of fresh air. ARPGs have embraced complexity in the modern era, which is delightful – if you have the time to tumble down wiki rabbit holes and assess every minute details of the hundreds of items which fill your inventory. MD2 feels like the sort of title which has a pick-up-and-play simplicity that's missing in the market, even as design director Laura de Llorens stresses that you can make life more complicated if you want to. "We don't have set classes, but you can combine different items to create your own and make your own playstyle. So you'll be able to do plenty of min-maxing here, if that's what you like to engage in."

With a contiguous, interconnected world that's full of dungeons to delve into, a more responsive and layered combat system, widened opportunities to customize your character, and a visual experience with truly vibrant fidelity, it should come as no surprise that I'm pretty keen to dive into the game proper on September 29, 2026 – that's when Minecraft Dungeons 2 releases for PC, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X.

If there's any room for improvement, it's going to be in the way that Mojang identifies and tracks your character on screen, but with months to go until launch there's still time to refine its pathfinding systems. But if nothing else, it speaks volumes that I'm considering diving back into another ARPG right now after Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred decimated another 20 precious hours. Bring it on, Mojang.

Minecraft Dungeons 2 is set to release on September 29, 2026. It's a key upcoming Xbox Series X game, although it's also set to launch for PC, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2. You can learn more about the new Mojang game this week as part of the GamesRadar+ Summer Preview.

Gears of War: E-Day is the video game I have been waiting 10 years for The Coalition to create. It's hard to believe that the series has already been under the stewardship of this studio for a decade, following Epic Games' decision to sell the intellectual property to Xbox in 2014. But you know what they say, time flies when you're dragging a Chainsaw Bayonet through mutating flesh and malfunctioning circuitry.

In that time The Coalition has become a technical powerhouse, has led the Xbox Game Studios transition to Unreal Engine 5, and delivered some pretty entertaining third-person shooters too. Gears of War 4 was a faithful continuation, and Gears 5 a pretty bold experiment in stretching solid foundations across more open-ended environments. I'm a fan, but there have been missteps.

The Swarm never clicked as a forbiddable force that could rival the Locust, and the DeeBees exposed Gears of War's need for ultra-violence to truly sing. Naturally, the introduction of exploration, wider playspaces, and RPG-lite systems in Gears 5 divided the playerbase. And so The Coalition is doing what I always hoped it would – channeling its reverence for the franchise into making the familiar feel fresh again, all while taking us back to the earliest adventures of Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago.

That's what we're getting in Gears of War: E-Day. It's a shooter that wants to honor the legacy of what Gears of War achieved in 2006, all while developing an experience that feels fighting fit as a new game for 2026. Did it take the divisive nature of Gears 5 to push The Coalition in the direction it should arguably have taken right from the outset? The studio has a different perspective.

"We didn't make E-Day as a reaction to Gears 5," says Nicole Fawcette, with the studio brand director stressing she doesn't agree with commentary that suggests The Coalition strayed too far from the Gears formula in 2019. "We're making E-Day because we had an opportunity to make what we wanted to make. We wanted to take on Emergence Day, and to have players rediscover Marcus and Dom, as we made the pivot to a new engine. That's what we wanted to do, and it's exactly what we have done."

Back to the Beginning

Creative director Matt Searcy tells me that "E-day is a return to Gears of War's roots" and an attempt to recapture the vibes of the original trilogy. "The best way we could think to do that was to go back to Sera at its darkest hour: the day the Locust came out of the ground." Emergence Day is an untold story that's long been at the heart of the Gears of War universe, where a populace already beaten down by the Pendulum Wars is brought to its knees as cities crumble and civilization collapses. Searcy adds: "It's such a great place to reimagine the tone of what we think makes Gears great."

Vicious monsters, unbridled brutality, towering architecture, and layered playspaces littered with waist-high debris. Gears of War: E-Day is set entirely in the city of Kalona, following Bravo Squad across three days as it attempts to battle the Locust Horde back to hell. "We put you right into the chaos of E-Day – in the beginning there's no soldiers around, only people getting torn apart by Wretches. You'll experience the moment Marcus and Dom first pick up guns, pulling Snubs out of the trunk of an abandoned police car, before setting off into the city where all hell is breaking loose," says Searcy.

"We believe that Gears plays best in a city," adds art director Aryan Hanbeck, "and that Kalona is the ultimate battlefield." Hanbeck points to the more linear structure and consistent playspace as a big point of difference between E-Day and its predecessor. "Gears 5 was more of a globetrotting adventure, you went from desert to forest and so on. A big way that E-Day differs from Gears 5 (and other Gears games) is that this entire game is set in one location."

"This isn't an open-world game," says Searcy. "Something we learned from Gears 5 is that going out on vehicles doesn't mesh perfectly with Gears, and that the freedom to choose your mission and what you're doing doesn't vibe with Gears either." Searcy tells me that The Coalition is pushing for a tighter alignment between claustrophobic missions and larger combat arenas. "We have very classic mission design – especially on that first night, where you're fighting back-and-forth in the streets – and there are parts of the game where you get these larger arenas, where multiple city blocks open up to you."

These larger missions are described to me as being akin to Black Hawk Dawn. Where "you're on a single mission, you know where your objective is, but how you get there is up to you," says Searcy, who notes that you'll have opportunities to delve deeper into the carnage of the day by assisting civilians and other soldiers if you want to. That's all a part of The Coalition's attempt to channel more player choice into E-Day, something the studio wanted to retain from Gears 5.

"One thing that we learned from Gears 5 is that if we want to give players more choice, and to still feel natural to what Gears is, then we need to do it differently to just giving you a vehicle in an open world. I think Gears 5 was really cool, but if we wanted to hit that core Gears DNA we had to increase the density. We had to make every street corner a combat opportunity," he says.

I've seen more of Gears of War: E-Day than what was shown in the Xbox Games Showcase, and I'm mesmerised by what The Coalition is delivering here. The visual fidelity is out of this world, with E-Day positioning itself as a true late-gen system showcase for the Xbox Series X; Kalona seeming like the perfect playground for Gears' heavy combat, with more fluid movement and vertical playspaces only helping to advance the idea that The Coalition has higher aspirations than ever before.

Starting From Scratch

Putting The Matrix Awakens tech demo and Gears Reloaded remastering experiment to one side, Gears of War: E-Day is the first title from The Coalition to be built natively in Unreal Engine 5. This has given the studio cover to do what it should have done in 2014: rip up the foundations of the franchise in an effort to refine and innovate the mechanics and systems so central to the way that Gears plays.

"We started with an empty hard drive," says Searcy. There are no ported assets in E-Day. Every animation, sound, mechanic, and system has been rebuilt from scratch. We have built a game that feels like Gears but plays like new. Many of us have worked on Gears for over a decade; we know how the cover system works intimately, we understand the importance of it and have built the game around the same pillars that defined the original trilogy, but we approached E-Day like a new game built for 2026."

If there was any fear that Gears of War: E-Day would be a continuation of Gears 5 – albeit with a tighter focus – this dedication to starting afresh should put them to bed. E-Days will play quite unlike any Gears of War game before it, as The Coalition makes some much needed quality-of-life improvements to the way that you shift your weight around these utterly gorgeous combat arenas. "Kalona – with its dense, tight streets and more open spaces – let us rethink how a Gear moves through the world," says Searcy.

"We've completely rebuilt our cover and movement systems, with smoother transitions and a bigger range of cover heights and shapes," he adds. "Our soldiers are basically giant tanks in armor, they slam into cars while weaving through hails of bullets. We wanted to keep that heaviness, but add more fluidity with how you move through the battlefield." Gears of War: E-Day is making fundamental changes as it introduces denser playspaces. You can now dive into low cover and mantle into more vertical positions, introducing more tactical variety to play; the sprint camera no longer pulls into your shoulder, giving more awareness of the world around you, and E-Day will finally let you slide under and into cover for more fluid, kinetic encounters.

The Coalition isn't making changes on the margins for Gears of War: E-Day. It's engineering a series revival that can channel the spirit of the first adventure and still push for genuine evolution of the systems that defined a genre for 20 years. That's why E-Day has been chosen by Xbox Game Studios to lead the return to console exclusivity – a statement of intent that can remind the world of why Xbox was a platform that shouldn't, couldn't be ignored. "We couldn't be more excited to be an Xbox exclusive," Searcy tells me. "Gears and Xbox have been tied so tightly for 20 years now, and it's an honor and a privilege to be seen as a flagship title in this way."

Gears of War: E-Day is coming to PC and Xbox Series X on October 6, 2026. The latest game from The Coalition is one of the key upcoming Xbox games and we'll have more insights to share as part of our Summer Games Preview this week.

Tonight's hotly anticipated Summer Game Fest event was the annual Xbox Games Showcase, and boy, did it bring us some cool reveals – including one of Spyro: A Realm Beyond, a title we've waited nearly two decades for.

The last proper Spyro entry landed a whopping 18 years ago with The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon, but Activision and Toys for Bob are finally back with a new entry in the beloved series... one that sounds like it's shaping up to be the biggest we've ever seen – free-flying and all.

Speaking in a new interview with Xbox itself, Toys for Bob studio head Paul Yan seems to tease as much, first admitting that A Realm Beyond is just what the nostalgia doctor ordered.

Admitting that it'll be just as colorful and whimsical as predecessors, he says, "In Spyro: A Realm Beyond, the sense of discovery is absolutely core to this new adventure."

This whole "sense of discovery" that the lead mentions here is made all the better by one stand-out fact: you can fly freely about the skies as Spyro in A Realm Beyond. Yes, freely... and that's a lot for both the developers and fans.

As Yan describes, "For now, I can tell you that our biggest ambition in Spyro: A Realm Beyond is to give the player the freedom and fantasy of dragon flight – to be able to take the skies at a moment's notice and make interesting and active decisions to flow through the spaces as you charge on the ground and now soar through the air."

In fact, "This is such a significant addition to the game" that "we've built a whole world around that promise." That's... exciting, to say the least. It almost feels like the jump that the Super Mario series saw in Odyssey – but Spyro. I am so here for that.

If you're looking forward to soaring the skies as everyone's favorite little purple dragon like I am, it'll be available on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S – and, of course, Xbox Game Pass, too.

Searching for something else to wishlist? Here are the best new games coming this year and beyond to look forward to.

During tonight's Summer Game Fest event, the annual Xbox Games Showcase, we saw a new sneak peek of Fable and finally got word of its release date.

So, we know that Fable is coming February 23, 2027... but that's apparently not all that Playground Games and Xbox Game Studios had to reveal about the long-awaited RPG tonight.

We actually caught wind of the game's first DLC, believe it or not – just have a look at the trailer, and you'll see the short bit toward the end highlighting pre-order and Premium Edition bonuses.

In the little section noting all of the Premium Edition perks, you'll find that folks who buy it – the $99.99 version only, that is, and not the standard $69.99 copy – will get the "first post-launch expansion" for Fable... one that's evidently called Order of the Hero.

That sure sounds like a (potentially unintentional) Fable DLC reveal to me, although it admittedly doesn't tell us much about what the expansion will actually be about. It makes sense, I suppose, seeing as the game itself isn't out yet... and won't be for a good eight months or so.

The other listed Premium Edition goodies include two special cosmetic outfits, the digital artbook and soundtrack, and nine in-game gifts to help us out on our journeys, while a pre-order of the normal version comes with an amusing chicken suit and three freebie items.

This also means that those of us who opt for the normal edition will have to purchase Order of the Hero whenever it might come – but there's no word on how much that may cost.

Regardless, I'm just hopeful that Fable in its entirety is fun – we've been waiting a long, long time, after all.

Searching for something else to wishlist? Here are the best new games coming this year and beyond to look forward to.

It's Summer Game Fest time, which means that Microsoft is back for its annual Xbox Games Showcase with plenty of big reveals and sneak peeks... including the new Fable – a title that perhaps stands as one of the most highly anticipated RPGs ever.

That's right – we got a new look at Fable, as well as an actual release date. After facing a delay from Xbox just last month, the game felt further out of reach than ever... but 2027 is truly the year it's coming out, it appears, and there's not too long left to wait.

As per tonight's trailer from Playground Games, Fable is launching next year on February 23. In other words, eight months or so from now.

Not only that, but it'll be available on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S – and, of course, via Xbox Game Pass. Pre-orders are already open now as well, with an optional (and unsurprisingly more expensive) Premium Edition to boot.

For reference, the standard version appears to cost $69.99 while the Premium Edition is a whopping $99.99. So, a solid hundred bucks – but we do get two special cosmetic outfits, the digital artbook and soundtrack, nine in-game gifts to help us out on our journeys, and first post-launch expansion Order of the Hero.

Even the standard edition – if pre-ordered, that is – comes with a gift: the, erm, Chicken Suit Comsetic Ouftit. Yes, it looks exactly how you probably think it looks. A pre-order also boasts three helpful in-game gifts, which isn't a bad deal if you ask me... although the chicken drip is what truly completes it.

As for the cinematic visuals we see in the new trailer, I'd say that the more modern take on Albion is shaping up to be quite something. Everything still carries the vibe of the 2004 title that started it all, cartoon-y colors, focus on story, and all.

Here's hoping Fable manages to impress as much as its predecessors come February 23, 2027.

Searching for something else to wishlist? Here are the best new games coming this year and beyond to look forward to.

Fable will be delayed to February 2027, Xbox has announced. The RPG had previously been set for a fall 2026 launch, and chief content officer Matt Booty insists that it's coming along just fine – the company just wants to be sure that it has the best possible chance to find its audience.

"In order to plan our game launches through the holidays, in a way that works best for players, we're moving Fable to February 2027 so it can have the dedicated moment it deserves," Xbox says in a tweet. "We’re excited to be giving players a major new look at Fable, as well as our broader lineup, at XBOX Games Showcase on June 7."

Playground Games is "doing really well on Fable," Booty says in a podcast accompanying the announcement. "The game is in great shape. The team feels really good. We're excited about where the game is. We want to make sure that that game has a window all to its own, so we are going to move it from this fall to February. And again, we really just want it to have its own moment to shine."

This delay had been rumored for some time, but Xbox had repeatedly reiterated its plans to launch Fable this year. The announcement notes a number of major games scheduled to release this year, including notable Microsoft-published titles ranging from Gears of War: E-Day to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.

But the big name is, of course, GTA 6. As analyst Mat Piscatella reports on Bluesky, 34.7% of US console and PC players intend to buy the next Grand Theft Auto game. By comparison, just 5.5% of them intend to buy Fable. Certainly, there's a massive audience for a long-awaited follow-up to some of the best RPGs of all time, but with the current economy forcing gamers to make hard choices about where to spend their money, it's no surprise that Xbox wants to give Fable some breathing room.

Xbox wants Fable to have Diablo-level cutscenes as Matt Booty casually reveals Blizzard is helping out with the RPG reboot's cinematics.

Last month, Microsoft announced that it was dramatically lowering the price of Xbox Game Pass, as the company's gaming division tries to win back fans under the leadership of new CEO Asha Sharma. It seems the move is already starting to pay off – at least, that's how Sharma herself seems to feel according to a leaked internal memo.

"Growth slowed down and subscriber loss accelerated after the pricing and SKU changes last year," Sharma said in a note to Xbox employees last week, as reported by The Verge (paid article link). That would be when the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate reached a whopping $30 per month, which very much seemed to be the breaking point for many players.

Since then, the price has gone down to $23 per month, though that no longer gets you day one access to new Call of Duty games, and it's still up from the previous $20 monthly fee. Still, Sharma writes that "since our price reduction we have seen acquisitions grow and retention improve, which is a good first step."

Xbox certainly seems keen to improve the general vibe of the brand, which had gotten pretty dismal by the end of the era that Phil Spencer oversaw. Certainly, it doesn't seem to be making any effort to crack down on these internal memo leaks, which largely present a positive – but vague – plan for improvements at the division.

Sharma says in the memo that there's more work to be done, and Xbox will not solve its problems "in one moment or one launch." Instead, the team will "have to outwork the problem in front of us in our path to restore durable growth." Again, if you're looking for concrete plans and details about what that work will look like, well… you won't find it here.

She says that Xbox needs to make "hard choices about what we build, where we invest, and what kind of company we need to be going forward," all of which sounds a little ominous given the 15,000 employees Microsoft laid off over the past year.

For those of us on the outside of Microsoft, our first real look at what Xbox has in store under its new leadership will come as part of the Summer Game Fest schedule, which kicks off next week. Xbox has a lot to prove to win back fans, and I think some impressive looks at new games will do a lot more for the brand than whatever a statement like "outwork the problem" means.

If you're looking for Xbox Game Pass deals, you know where to click.

Forza Horizon 6 has sold 4.9 million copies since its global launch on May 19, a major accomplishment for an Xbox game in 2026, according to analyst Rhys Elliott.

The head of market analysis at game data tracker Alinea Analytics explains in a new installment of The Alinea Insight Newsletter that Forza Horizon 6 has earned developer Playground Games $325 million in about a week – with plenty of assistance from the 1.7 million players who opted to buy the racing game's early access on May 15. None of that would be too surprising for a highly desired, AAA game, however, if it weren't for how many of its sales came from the Xbox storefront.

Yes, we are a place in history where the fact that a game published by Xbox Game Studios is, in fact, selling well on Xbox is a big deal. New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is hyperaware of this – otherwise she wouldn't be scrambling to reduce Game Pass' subscription price, expand its tiers, and move into a new era for the company with the next-gen console Project Helix. Forza Horizon 6, then, might be the perfect transition.

"Our data shows that Xbox gamers across console, PC, and cloud [...] really showed up for Forza, accounting for 42% of copies sold (almost 2.1M) versus Steam's 2.8M," Elliott reports. "That's an unusually strong Xbox-side performance by any standard, but it's made even more impressive by over 3M people accessing Forza Horizon 6 via Game Pass on top of that 2.1M paid number."

Forza Horizon 6 is also generating a bit more of its total revenue on Xbox compared to Steam – 51% as opposed to 49% – due to Xbox's mostly Western audience treating itself to more expensive regional pricing.

But though it's receiving plenty of blessings in the form of big sales numbers and big regional price tags, Xbox still found a way to be its own worst enemy. Elliott says, "Game Pass is cannibalizing" some of Forza's revenue, and "both the Steam and Xbox versions would have sold better if it weren't for the day-one Game Pass inclusion, with 3M+ players accessing Forza Horizon 6 via subscription rather than purchasing it outright."

"The counterargument Microsoft might have pointed to is subscription lifetime value," the analyst continues, since 3 million players who decided to either begin or renew Game Pass subscriptions for Forza Horizon 6 make up for fewer direct sales with their promise of ongoing Game Pass payments.

"That's the kind of maths Microsoft had been doing internally until [former CEO Phil Spencer], and it's the same thinking that has justified day-and-date Game Pass releases for over five years now," Elliott says. "It's not the right call to make amid stagnating subscription growth, though."

So Game Pass might still need help to become a success. At least Forza Horizon 6 doesn't.

Yes, Fable is still coming to PS5 despite Xbox's plans to "reevaluate our approach to exclusivity," and Playground Games confirms the RPG isn't getting delayed, either.

Subnautica 2 has already sold over a million copies one hour into its Early Access launch, developer Unknown Worlds says.

Key leadership from the company had been booted from Subnautica 2 development until recently, when the winds changed in the ongoing legal drama with parent company Krafton, and now the game appears fully recovered and sporting a revenge body. Over on Twitter, the official Subnautica account shares, "Over 1 million Subnauts have already dived into Subnautica 2" with a little mind blown emoji that sums up how wild a milestone that is already. The team adds, "We can't thank you enough for your support!"

Unknown Worlds co-founder and Subnautica director Charlie Cleveland was suddenly ejected from the company in 2025 along with CEO Ted Gill and co-founder Max McGuire. At the time, Cleveland expressed "shock" at the dismissal while Krafton countered that Cleveland was speeding toward an Early Access release to receive a promised $250 million payout.

The current fate of that cash is still unknown, as Krafton recently told GamesRadar+, "the former executives' claim for damages or an earnout related to Subnautica 2, with further litigation [is] still pending" after a judge ordered the publisher to reinstate fired CEO Gill in March.

Anyway, Unknown Worlds has certainly made a couple of dollars in selling its astounding 1 million copies, likely made possible by huge pre-order numbers. Ahead of its launch, Subnautica 2 topped Steam's best-sellers chart, and landed on 5 million Steam wishlists.

No matter its origin, the sales indicate a huge change in fortune for Unknown Worlds. Not long ago, we wondered if we'd ever even get our hands on Subnautica 2 at all – now it's out for anyone to grab on Steam, the Epic Games Store, or Xbox.

And people are clamoring for the underwater sequel, in which you work alone or with friends in co-op to survive in a persnickety alien ocean. Not only did the game instantly debut to massive numbers on Steam – it's sitting at 463,021 concurrent players, according to SteamDB at the time of writing – but also, an hour after launch, it's probably even more popular than we know.

The Steam numbers were already impressive, and 1 million copies sold is also extremely impressive. But when you take into account that Subnautica 2 is also included in Xbox Game Pass, it becomes even wilder, since there's bound to be a number of people who are playing Subnautica 2 through their subscriptions. It's possible that Unknown Worlds has effectively moved well over 1 million copies, easy.

Now that Subnautica 2 is out, Valve's own Deadlock tops Steam's most wishlisted chart.

With Microsoft finally admitting your TV is not an Xbox, the time is absolutely right for Forza Horizon 6 to demonstrate what the Xbox brand always stood for: kick-ass gaming on a kick-ass console (and PC, alright). And for the most part, Forza Horizon 6 absolutely delivers that. This sleek, Japan-set open world arguably makes for the most 'AAA' racing game ever made, even pipping Gran Turismo 7 in terms of technical prowess. Playing on my Xbox Series X, I'd go so far as to say I've never seen a better racing game engine. While I have some reservations about elements of its play, which we'll get to, fundamentally this is a product that would fit nicely into anyone's game library. It's the best Forza Horizon game, and a quite remarkable feat of software production.

The most important part of any driving game is how the car moves, and Forza Horizon 6 is almost too smooth. Drive a real car after playing this for a few hours and you will conclude that the game is very little like real driving. Off-road, there are moments where it feels like the sublime early rally stages in Gran Turismo 3, with the car's wheels rolling convincingly over smoothly undulating dirt roads. But on tarmac, everything feels a little too sanitized. The closest modern comparison of feel would be Dirt 5: glorious trackside vegetation, plenty of physics objects to disturb, but all a bit 'nice' and inoffensive compared to the genre's best.

On default settings, the car handling actually owes more to 1995's Sega Rally than Forza Motorsport, as turning into a slide doesn't correct you – it immediately starts turning your whole car towards the direction you pressed. Even on 'Simulation' steering, correcting a slide doesn't feel right here. Now, I'm personally all for a driving game that knows it's a video game and eschews realism in favour of playability, but I am tired of hitting walls on the exit of corners because I tried to straighten up. The game therefore sits somewhere between arcade and simulation and never truly convinces on either front.

Rooting out

Since Forza Horizon 2, we've been able to straightline it through a field without worry, smashing through fences and armco barriers as if they're made of balsa wood. It was novel back then but, by this sixth entry, I can't help but feel the flimsiness is hurting the game. Even at low speed in a Mini Cooper, 90% of the trees here are no barrier at all. Heading straight for a forest of scary, towering timber? Don't sweat it. Just floor it and cut a swathe through the whole thing. I understand that destruction of physics objects is part of the skill system, and therefore a game in itself, but when I'm driving around one of the most convincing open worlds ever made, I can't help wishing it reacted more realistically. The same goes for traffic collisions too. They are, quite frankly, rubbish.

Nonetheless, developer Playground Games has perfected its skill system here. With the next race entry some 6km away, you start E-drifting by pulling the handbrake, grazing the rear of your car along the barrier, knocking individual segments off the flyover and down into the exquisitely-modelled valley below. You 'thread the needle' by passing through oncoming traffic – some civilian, others a mix of AI or real-world drivers, depending on your Game Pass subscription status. Keep the combo going and you win skill points to spend on your car's own skill tree, allowing you to level up your favorite ride. I did it all the way in several cars, including my Ferrari F50 which unlocked another, even better Ferrari F50. How cool is that?

While you're doing this, you might notice a rival racer with a camera icon above their Gamertag/Drivatar name. This means you can take a photo by pushing up on the d-pad, adding the car to the fictional Festival promo material, and essentially filling out an automotive Pokedex. Gotta snap 'em all. While you're at it, you can photograph tourist attractions in Japan, all the while boosting your Festival XP.

Forza Horizon 6 is superbly paced for the first 20 hours or so, as you complete races and smash bonus boards in free roam. As you fill stages of your progress bar, you get to take part in Horizon Rush events, which are familiar, one-off showpieces. The irony is not lost on me that the few times you don't get to choose your vehicle the game is at its best, as the experience becomes expertly curated, designed around fixed parameters – something games of this scale don't normally deliver.

The race against the giant mech is the clear standout, though the first Rush event is a superb test of pure driving skill. Sadly, these special events peak too soon, diminishing in spectacle until the last one is arguably only going to excite longtime fans. And even then they may feel disappointed.

A marathon, not a sprint

Trouble is, the XP bar you have to fill up in order to win the Golden Wristband (still only around 50% of full completion) takes much longer to fill than the others, and after 20 hours you may run out of things you really want to do. Having completed the vast majority of the Horizon Festival races, I was left to try to beat speed traps, ace danger sign jumps, take photos, and hunt bonus boards for a few hours before I could finally declare myself a Horizon Legend, which sounds varied and fun but started to grate. If you prefer to play games quickly to finish them and move on, the pacing in Forza Horizon 6 might frustrate you. But, without time constraints, you could easily spend weeks immersing yourself in this virtual Japan and deep diving into the side content before you ever get near Legends Island.

Case in point: your Home. After a while you get the opportunity to buy a property to act as your base of operations, but it's so much more than that. You get acres and acres of open land in which to build your dream track, able to go wild like it's your very own life-size Hot Wheels. You can share your creation with the world, download other people's, and you even gain credits when people play or like your creation. Someone's already made Mario Circuit from Super Mario Kart on the SNES, which got a Like from me. The potential for further gameplay here is essentially unlimited.

Then there's the online integration. Forza Horizon 6 is wonderful and feature-rich without inviting the world to play with you, and there's a dedicated 'Solo' mode where you don't need an active online subscription to play. But, when I did go online, loads of additional gameplay flowed in, refreshing and expanding the experience. There are races restricted to single vehicles, group activities like hunting petrol pump characters, and loads more. You can challenge anyone you meet in free roam to a quick race, or ask them to join you. There's even preset chat options mapped to the d-pad (which I bet gets translated into different languages like Phantasy Star Online did back in the day).

All this and I haven't even mentioned the 'Discover Japan' side of the single-player mode. This takes you on tourist trips to special locations, explaining the island's history and letting you try some classic cars on the way. There are expeditions to pick up rare cars and give them to your modding friend Yuji, who soups them up. He also deals with barn finds. There is quite a lot of dialogue between the characters, and while the script is solid enough, it doesn't quite hit home. It's all very family-friendly while also trying to channel modding culture cool, which doesn't quite gel. Similarly, the characters don't look anywhere near as convincing as the cars. It's funny to see your car cross the line in a blaze of pyrotechnic glory, only to glimpse your avatar's emotionless mug through the windshield.

I have to talk about the visuals in general, however, as they are exceptional. We've seen several great open world locations over the past few years, but Forza Horizon 6's recreation of Japan is simply superlative. Some of the views you get over the Danger Sign jumps are incredible. You feel a mile up in the air, looking down over a forest of 3D trees stretching away to the ocean in the distance.

On Xbox Series X, it does all of this at 4K, 30fps by default, or alternatively 'performance' mode uses lower, dynamic resolution scaling and slightly reduced effects to maintain a rock solid 60fps, which I would recommend. It's glorious. And all this with dynamic weather, day/night transitions, and even calendar-locked seasons too (unless you race online where you might get an early glimpse of another season).

Turn on, tune in

The festival radio stations offer a mix of rock, J-pop, dance music, and more. A few tracks do start to repeat and may jar if you don't like them, but a quick push of right on the d-pad cycles stations so there's always something cool to listen to. The quality of the audio is arguably just as impressive as the visual quality. It sounds super-deluxe.

Difficulty is often an area of concern in Forza, but Forza Horizon 6 recognizes when you're winning too easily and offers to raise the difficulty level in exchange for higher winnings. Even so, I did find some events way harder than others, particularly earlier buggy races where everyone else seemed to have twice as much grip as me. But then you will win by a mile on the next dirt race. That said – at last – this is a Forza game where one driver never dashes off into an unassailable lead. Imagine that! I only saw it once, and even then I was able to catch them. Amazing scenes.

I can't think of another racing game besides the previous Forza Horizon where there was so much to do, and never so convincingly. Every element feels polished. Rewinding the action works well, Photo Mode is glorious as always, some cars are ludicrously fast… you even see actual people in the Tokyo streets thanks to clever partitioning which means you can never crash into them. Oh, and for that matter, I've never seen so many people on-screen as there are at the Horizon festival itself. There are hundreds, if not a thousand people enjoying the music.

There's no faulting the software here. The problems are just design decisions that don't quite sit right. You've surely heard games described as 'vanilla', implying they're bland or unexciting. In ice-cream flavours, chocolate is better, amarena cherry cheesecake flavour is best. We know this. Forza Horizon 6 is like a premium tub of super-deluxe, Madagascan vanilla ice cream, made with real Jersey cream; it's delicious and absolutely worth the extra money, but it's still vanilla.

If there was a bit of personality on show from the rival drivers, more action in the racing to make it less of a procession, a little more resistance in the trackside obstacles and Flatout 4-style deformation tech for the crashes, this would likely be the best racing game ever made. As it is, while it plays the racing too safe to be essential for racing game aficionados, even they will undoubtedly take much enjoyment from the sheer high quality of this game. It is amazing.

Forza Horizon 6 was reviewed on Xbox Series X, with a code provided by the publisher.

Take a look at our best racing games list for more high-speed thrills!

Xbox Game Pass is now included, in truncated form, as part of Discord Nitro, and it seems like Microsoft is really getting serious about giving subscribers a good deal.

Discord and Xbox shared news of the companies' teaming up on May 11, in separate announcements on their respective websites. Microsoft promises more benefits to come for current Xbox Game Pass subscribers, too, as CEO Asha Sharma seemingly continues her humble quest to lower subscription prices in an industry where everything is unrepentantly getting more expensive.

Discord Nitro subscribers now have access to a new "starter edition" of Xbox Game Pass as part of Discord's fresh Nitro Rewards benefits program. Discord product manager Lu Zhang writes in the messaging platforms' announcement that the starter Xbox Game Pass includes "a library of 50+ PC and console games you can download and play anytime you want," plus 10 hours of cloud gaming. Its benefits sound similar to Xbox's preexisting, $9.99 a month Essential Game Pass tier, then.

But, since Discord Nitro also costs $9.99 monthly for its premium version of the platform and it includes that starter edition Game Pass, this subscription seems more worthwhile for Discord users. Zhang names "Fallout 4, Stardew Valley, DayZ, Deep Rock Galactic, Overcooked 2, Grounded" as part of the starter edition tier, with more to come. The product manager tells Discord users, "We're rolling these benefits out to members over the coming weeks, so if you don't see them yet, they're on the way. If you've been on the fence about Nitro, this is the update we'd want you to see."

As for how the other half lives, those already subscribed to Xbox Game Pass should expect to receive Nitro benefits "later this month," says Microsoft, including a monthly allowance of 250 Discord Orbs you can redeem for rewards in Discord's Shop.

These changes come right after new Xbox CEO Sharma said in a leaked internal memo that Game Pass was "too expensive for players" – Ultimate became $30 in 2025 – and emphasized that the service needed to become "a more flexible system." Shortly after this memo went out in April, Xbox announced it was dropping Ultimate's price to $22.99, and lowering PC Game Pass from $16.49 to $13.99 a month. So that takes care of Sharma's first point, that Xbox's game subscription service is too expensive.

Xbox and Discord's suddenly egalitarian partnership, then, addresses her second: Game Pass should be "more flexible." Microsoft's collaboration announcement even borrows this language, explaining, "We're teaming up again as we continue to make Game Pass more flexible for players."

The company adds, "We've been focused on meeting players where they already are and making gaming more social along the way." Considering Xbox's lousy sales numbers recently, that strategy sounds ideal.

Xbox CEO introduces new boot-up sound after executive overhaul, but it sounds pretty close to the current one.

Early reviews for Mixtape – the new game from The Artful Escape developer Beethoven and Dinosaur – place it as either the best game of 2026 so far, or still pretty good depending on what review aggregator you use.

Over on OpenCritic, Mixtape currently sits at a critic average of 94, which makes it the top game of 2026 by a margin of four points, taking over from Pokemon Pokopia. However, 20 critic reviews listed at the time of writing, the lowest score is a sole 8/10 amid a sea of nines and tens for the title. Regardless, it is an undoubtedly impressive debut for Mixtape, which is set to launch as a day one Xbox Game Pass launch like last year's top game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

But for whatever reason, over on Metacritic, Mixtape sits at an average Metascore of 85, placing it in 18th place (albeit, tied with four other games), with a few more 8/10's sprinkled in there. But despite the disparity in scores between sites, it's not a game that's catching negative reviews at all, with the two lowest scores – a 7/10 from Metro and a 3/5 from The Guardian – being the only ones categorised as "Mixed" by the website.

In the GamesRadar+ Mixtape review, US managing editor Rollin Bishop gave the game 4/5 stars and said "Mixtape is a nostalgic, vibes-based experience set to a shockingly solid soundtrack that's narratively important and also kind of a bop all its own. Teenage ennui permeates but never overwhelms while Stacy and her buds try to have one last wild night before it's splitsville in what's ultimately a short, meaningful game that's relatively light on mechanics."

Obviously, when both sites update with more reviews we'll be more likely to see where Mixtape really lands in terms of the highest-reviewed games of the year, but regardless of placement, the sheer amount of 10/10 scores it's been given if enough to put it on my radar. But unless it has funky tunes about cat poop, I can't see it beating Mewgenics as the actual best game of 2026 (for me, anyway).

Why not check our our list of 10 games like Life is Strange that are hella good?

The extent to which Stranger Than Heaven is or isn't a Yakuza or Like a Dragon game is unclear. Both share a setting and a Japanese crime family theming, but what is certain is that it's the shot in the arm RGG Studio's crime dramas desperately need. The action feels zoomed-in, grittier, following two equally desperate young men trying to make names for themselves after being smuggled into early 20th century Japan.

It's the intimacy that's impressing me so far, seeping into every aspect of Stranger Than Heaven. This is, after all, a game where protagonist Makoto Daito can pummel enemies with his fists then moments later become inspired musically by their rhythmic hammer attacks for a tune he can take back to the jazz bar. And, set across fifty years (and five time periods), we get to see Makoto and fellow stowaway Yu as they grow from boys to men and then, well, older men.

Partners in crime

Yakuza has told sweeping stories, sure – but often across multiple games (like the '80s set Yakuza 0 and '00s set first Yakuza). It's never quite been the point like it is in Stranger Than Heaven, even if Makoto and Yu's shifting relationship definitely owes a debt to Kiryu and Nishiki's, which also evolved across the decades, though mostly off-screen. Stranger Than Heaven almost feels like a response: what if it was the whole point?

What we've seen so far has them as close friends bound by circumstance, going their separate ways, then coming together again to utilize the ways in which their diverging lives have given them unique skills. Music becomes a constant factor in that, with Makoto becoming a music producer, not only using these club performances as a front for the criminal element he eventually becomes involved with (does the Tojo Clan ring any bells?), but as a source of genuine joy for Makoto and company. This is no disposable mini-game like it might appear in a Yakuza, but a huge part of their lives.

Intimacy also comes in the form of locked fists, bruises forming from heavy, brutal blows. Action is chaotic, but a noticeable departure from the over-the-top brawling in recent Yakuza. Stranger Than Heaven's combat system had been built from the ground-up, left and right arms and legs controlled independently, promising full beatdown control in which tumbling in the mud to bring down just one enemy has real weight – a far cry from Kiryu spinning bicycles to send several dudes flying at once.

It's almost a bit surprising to find the violence in a game from RGG Studio a bit shocking, so used have I become to the exaggerated, ridiculous action from its recent games. Stranger Than Heaven is really selling every punch, and it helps to bridge the gap between the studio's penchant for well-told crime stories with big stakes and the action we actually get to play out – there's a real commitment to updating the fidelity of interaction.

I'll admit to being a bit anxious about combat having not played it yet myself – I can imagine becoming a tangle of limbs – but assurances from producer Hiroyuki Sakomoto that it'll flow naturally seems to fit with the footage I've seen. "Makoto will respond to these inputs with a wide array of vivid, visceral actions, allowing an unprecedented sense of control," he says. Conceptually the limb-based inputs are only a stone's throw away from some fighting games. Weapons promise to pack even more of a punch.

Given Yakuza's original combat has its roots in Virtua Fighter, it's great to see those sensibilities pivot from arcade-like to something more up close and personal. Do I dare invoke the tangibility and intimacy of Shenmue? I do. Where Yakuza felt like Shenmue's more arcadey, RPG-like cousin, Stranger Than Heaven feels like it's targeting somewhere in-between. A refresh of the broth.

Surprisingly, Snoop Dogg's turn as Orpheus is really pulling it all together for me. The smuggler ends up assisting with Makoto and Yu's journey to Japan, and becomes an early quest-giver of sorts to help Yu get his bearings in the new country (Makoto is only half-Japanese, having an American father – which means he faces a degree of prejudice in both countries).

More than a GTA-like mission giver, even this early character is packing plenty of nuance in the gameplay footage from early on in Stranger Than Heaven. All these faces have their own story to tell, and they're ones that'll evolve over the course of Makoto and Yu's decades long friendship (long may it prosper, and definitely not make me cry).

Exploring different Japanese cities and districts across different time periods looks visually stunning, but, again, I'm loving how close to it all we get. Little feels abstracted as Makoto explores these areas with a tight over-the-shoulder camera. We're really in the muck, and there's a sense of both danger and opportunity around every street I've glimpsed. From alleys, to twisting types of elevation, these hint at being more than simple overworlds but exciting places to get lost in. And, yes, there might be some silly mini-games along the way.

But, for once, it doesn't feel like these side diversions are there simply because this is a game and that's what you do. No, whether it's Makoto getting excitedly hooked on a card game, or hearing the tell-tale jingle of musical inspiration from a street, we're right there with him, along for the ride. Don't get me wrong, I'll always adore how strange and over-the-top Yakuza can get – they're some of the best RPG games you can play as far as I'm concerned – but by breaking away from the format and getting more grounded, Stranger Than Heaven is finally getting me excited about what RGG Studio can do all over again.

Stranger Than Heaven will be releasing in Winter 2026 across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X, and will be on Xbox Game Pass.

Looking for more Japanese crime thrillers? Check out our best Yakuza games ranking!

There's been loads of speculation around whether subscription services, like Xbox Game Pass or PlayStation Plus Premium, cannibalize full game sales. At least in the case of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, one analyst reckons being included in a subscription catalogue actually helped it become a big sales success.

Sandfall Interactive recently announced that its debut game, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, sold over eight million copies in its first year alone. The feat is very impressive for a first-time studio making an original game in a genre that usually doesn't penetrate the mainstream unless it's attached to names like Final Fantasy, Persona, or Pokemon.

Circana's senior director and video game analyst Mat Piscatella says the game's abnormal sales success might have something to do with how it launched into Xbox Game Pass on day one and has stayed in the service ever since.

"Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is one great example of a game where its sales potential was likely increased because of its inclusion in a subscription service," he writes on Bluesky.

On the surface, having a game be available to millions of subscribers at no extra cost seems like an easy way to kneecap a game's sales, but there are certain situations where I think the opposite is true. Again, Clair Obscur is an original game made by a previously unknown developer - perhaps word of how damn good the game is wouldn't have travelled quite as far without the lower barrier to entry.

Sea of Thieves and Sea of Stars have also been big commercial hits despite debuting onto Game Pass, but it's not a sure fire way to sell millions of copies. Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke promised fans they'd never find Larian Studios games on subscription services because "direct from developer to players is the way."

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 gets a surprise update for the RPG's first anniversary and, my god, Monoco has braids now: "This expedition WILL be strutting around"

Microsoft is lowering the price of its Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription plan. Starting today, Game Pass Ultimate will be priced at $22.99 per month instead of $29.99 – a 23% decrease. The price of PC Game Pass is also being lowered from $16.49 to $13.99 a month.

There is a cost to Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass becoming more affordable. Xbox will no longer bring future Call of Duty games to the service on the day of their release, with new titles arriving into Game Pass Ultimate the following holiday season. Microsoft has confirmed that Call of Duty titles already available across the various Game Pass tiers will remain in place.

Speaking on the Xbox Wire, a Microsoft rep said this of the change: "Our players cover a wide breadth of geographies, preferences, and tastes, so while there isn't a single model that's best for everyone, this change responds to a lot of feedback we've gotten so far. We'll continue to listen and learn."

This reversal comes six months after Microsoft hiked up the price of Game Pass Ultimate by 50%, from its original $19.99 per month price point to $29.99. While Microsoft attempted to justify the increase with a variety of upgrades – increasing the library of available titles, improving the quality of Xbox Cloud Gaming, and introducing Fortnite Crew and Ubisoft Plus Classics – the move was received poorly by players.

The issue of Game Pass pricing has clearly been top of mind for Asha Sharma, the new Microsoft Gaming CEO. In an internal memo which was obtained by The Verge, Sharma reportedly reaffirmed that "Game Pass is central to gaming value on Xbox," whilst admitting that it had become too expensive: "It's also clear that the current model isn't the final one. Short term, Game Pass has become too expensive for players, so we need a better value equation."

The decision to no longer bring new Call of Duty titles into Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass from the day of release suggests that big changes are likely coming to the existing Xbox strategy. The ability to access new video games developed under the Xbox umbrella from the day of release has long been the biggest benefit of holding a Game Pass Ultimate subscription, and this shift raises uncertainty about how the model may change in the future under the new leadership team at Xbox.

When Microsoft completed its historic 75 billion dollar acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2023, it was widely believed that Call of Duty could power Game Pass to reach new heights. 2024's Black Ops 6 was the first title in the franchise to launch directly into Game Pass, followed by last year's Black Ops 7.

While Microsoft doesn't consistently report sales or subscription data to the public, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reported that "Game Pass set a new quarterly record for revenue and grew its PC subscriber base by over 30%" back in January 2025, whilst citing that "Black Ops 6 was the top-selling game on Xbox and PlayStation this quarter and saw more players in its launch quarter than any other paid release in the franchise's history."

This setup, it would appear, is no longer sustainable for Xbox, Game Pass, and the Call of Duty franchise. The news that Game Pass is becoming more affordable will no doubt be met well by the wider Xbox community, but it does expose a need for Asha Sharma to redefine the market position and value proposition of the Xbox brand as we look beyond the Xbox Games Showcase this June and towards the launch of Project Helix in the future.

Xbox Game Pass doesn't have many friends left. Once Microsoft made Game Pass Ultimate 50% more expensive in 2025, fans declared themselves betrayed, and even Xbox co-founder Laura Fryer was shocked by the company's apparent allegiance to "greed over gaming." Former Sony Interactive Entertainment America CEO Shawn Layden now thinks Xbox should just let the floundering subscription service die with dignity, but new Xbox lead Asha Sharma seems to want more time.

This tension between old and new gaming guards unfolded as a LinkedIn drama, as it was always destined to. Layden commented on a post by games industry researcher (and friend of GamesRadar+) Joost van Dreunen sharing that Sharma, in a leaked memo to Xbox staff, agreed, "Game Pass has become too expensive for players." Layden's solution is to smother it with a pillow.

He says about Xbox, proliferating the metaphor, "They are trying so hard to will this into health, despite unfavorable diagnostics and a grim prognosis. A clarifying post mortem would do the entire industry some good."

Former PlayStation head of strategy and development Gabriel Pessah adds, "I second that."

Then Sharma replies two days later, "I would love to chat sometime." It's her first LinkedIn comment in four months, which doesn't necessarily reveal the urgency or tone of her offer – maybe she just forgot her password three-and-a-half months ago – but it does suggest the Xbox lead and games industry newbie is serious about veterans' opinions.

And that, I think, is a good thing for consumers yearning for a time when life was simple and the Xbox Series X wasn't $650. In the leaked memo from Sharma to Xbox employees, the CEO acknowledged this, as she said about Game Pass, "We need a better value equation. Long term, we will evolve Game Pass into a more flexible system which will take time to test and learn around."

It remains to be seen, in a time when life is complicated and everything is an Xbox, if Game Pass is even worth a makeover. But it seems Sharma is going to find out.

You can discover the best Xbox Game Pass deals in April 2026 while we wait.

Last year, Xbox Game Pass got a massive, 50% price hike that made the top tier of the subscription service a whopping $30 per month. New Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma seems to recognize that's a problem, according to a leaked memo which suggests she's keen to offer a cheaper – or at least "more flexible" option for players.

"Game Pass is central to gaming value on Xbox," Sharma says in an internal memo to Xbox employees, which was obtained and published by The Verge. "It's also clear that the current model isn't the final one. Short term, Game Pass has become too expensive for players, so we need a better value equation. Long term, we will evolve Game Pass into a more flexible system which will take time to test and learn around."

The Verge additionally reports that part of the reason for the massive Game Pass price hike was the decision to include Call of Duty with the subscription. It's worth noting that the prices increased just one month before the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, so the timing certainly feels meaningful.

It would ultimately be a weak sales year for COD, though you could guess at a million different reasons why. Maybe Game Pass did eat into sales. Maybe there was lingering malaise over Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Maybe FPS fans were more on board for Battlefield 6. Or maybe people just didn't like Black Ops 7 all that much.

Microsoft attempted to justify the Game Pass price hike to consumers by citing additional day one releases, bonus Fortnite and Ubisoft subscriptions, and cloud gaming, but if Sharma's apparent comments are anything to go by, Xbox isn't fully satisfied with the results. Certainly, Xbox's most recent revenue reports haven't been particularly inspiring.

Xbox's popularity peaked in the middle of the Xbox 360 generation, and it's been losing ground to PlayStation ever since. At various points, I'm sure Microsoft bosses would've said that PlayStation isn't even their primary competition, but all the moves it's made to court new audiences – the Kinect, the entertainment box ambitions of Xbox One, and the push away from being a console brand in recent years – have served more to alienate the core audience than to bring in new fans.

Rebuilding that old brand value and community goodwill has clearly been a priority since the big executive shakeup earlier this year, which saw Sharma come in with big – but vague – promises about "the return of Xbox." The upcoming Project Helix console will likely be the most central factor in whether Microsoft can truly change the fortunes of its gaming division, but getting Game Pass prices under control wouldn't be so bad, either.

If you're trying to save some money now, here are the best Xbox Game Pass deals currently available.

Playground Games is finally ready to leave the Xbox One behind. Forza Horizon 5 arrived a year after the launch of Microsoft Gaming's new-gen home console – a compelling system showcase that remains one of the best Xbox Series X games. For as excellent as Horizon 5 is, I have long wondered what Playground could achieve were it able to circumvent the bottleneck created by needing to support decade-old hardware. With the release of Forza Horizon 6 on May 19, fantasy will become reality.

"I think you can't overstate it. It's a sea change," says design director Torben Ellert, as we discuss what the new-gen focus unlocks for the studio. "The interesting space that you get [to innovate] is from where you suddenly have headroom in systems that you didn't have previously."

One example Ellert gives is the introduction of Aftermarket and Treasure cars, two new ways to obtain vehicles in Forza Horizon 6 outside of the returning Autoshow and Barn Finds. Parked all around Japan are unique Aftermarket cars which, once discovered, can be purchased at a discount and immediately taken out for a test drive. Treasure Cars are rare spawns inspired by iconic Japanese vehicles, left hidden and abandoned across the map – if you find one, it can be restored and taken out into the world.

From my time with Horizon 6, this system of spawning vehicles into the open world is undoubtedly one of the best new additions to the series in years, due to the ways it naturally rewards exploration and helps expand your collection of cars without needing to sift through hundreds of cars in the Autoshow menus. "Aftermarket and Treasure cars are experiences that were afforded by the fact that there was some memory headroom that we could use to have those cars spawn in the world," says Ellert.

"And then there's Tokyo City, obviously," Ellert laughs. "The technical challenge of achieving that is still terrifying to me, and we've almost shipped this thing!"

Big Ambitions

Tokyo City is an absurdly ambitious proposition in Forza Horizon 6. It feels fantastic to cruise its bustling streets, and to head off-road to hunt for mascots and bonus boards hidden throughout the sprawl. Tokyo City is the largest urban environment to ever feature in a Forza Horizon game; art director Don Arceta tells me that it's some five times larger than Forza Horizon 5's Guanajuato. The space is split into distinct districts, each with their own feel and identity.

"Every location that we take on, we always try to push the visuals further along. And this time, because we've been able to focus more on current-gen systems, not having the Xbox One X version, has helped us focus in on our rendering and visual fidelity. There's a lot of new tools and a lot of new systems that we've had to put in place because of that," says Arceta, "but it's all been worth it."

With the full power of the Xbox Series X available, Arceta says that the scale of Japan – and the challenge of accurately bringing it to life – "helped us understand what we needed to push forward." He continues: "Japan has really dense foliage everywhere, and then there's a very dense urban area, which is our Tokyo City environment. Those two things were really challenging for us."

"But that was one of the things that drew us to do Japan this time, this desire to challenge ourselves. We believed, maybe naively, that we had enough experience to attack it this time," Arceta says, chuckling. "Once you get too comfortable, then I feel like you start to lose a little bit of that innovation." Ellert adds: "Japan has been on the short list of locations that we would have loved to do many times,, but this time I think the fear response was healthy – rather than just full-blown panic."

Gradual Evolution

Playground can point to countless other little touches that have been enabled by leaving Xbox One behind to focus its full attention on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X. There's all of these micro improvements to visual fidelity; I absolutely adored seeing the way water now kicks up from tires while you're racing in the rain, or how neon shimmers overhead while night driving in Tokyo City.

The studio is promising more focused post-launch support for Forza Horizon 6, designed to more fully complement the seasonal transitions. There's even some long-requested improvements coming to vehicle tuning and customization, such as the ability to paint liveries all across your windows. There are also more vibrant shared open-world activities, from joining Car Meets without loading screens to new Time Attack circuits and Drag Meets which feature in-world leaderboards that track times in real-time.

It's all very impressive, although it isn't merely the result of ditching support for the Xbox One. Ellert highlights that building something like Forza Horizon 6 is an "enormously collaborative experience", hundreds of fingerprints are all across its design – from new blood to "people who have worked on every horizon game that we've built." Ellert says a lot of the innovation that we'll see in Horizon 6 is also because of a "maturity of ideas" from a team who has been collaborating closely for years.

"Take the Customizable Garage and the Estate," says Ellert. The former is a new space included as part of each player house, a space large enough for multiple cars that you can freely decorate and then invite friends into; the Estate, on the other hand, is a mountain valley where you can build and decorate a massive space directly into the open world. "Those features exist because Horizon 5 had Event Lab."

"We're very iterative in the way that we build things. We introduced player houses and people loved that. We introduced Event Lab, and people loved that. Okay, so we can smash those things together, and now you can customize your garages."

Ellert says that Playground is always trying to make targeted improvements like this, searching for ways to answer player requests in ways that might surprise or delight – something which you'll see a lot of all throughout Forza Horizon 6. Iteration and gradual innovation, he says, is at the heart of the Horizon series. "We could try to do everything. But I often feel best about designs that extend a space until it becomes new, rather than just kind of throwing everything out and saying, okay, here's something you've never seen before. "

Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse has announced Vaunted, the debut title from Lost Lake Games founded by former StarCraft and Guild Wars devs.

During today's Xbox Partner Preview, we got new looks at the likes of Sega's Stranger Than Heaven, a big Stalker 2 update, and some more of Mass Effect-inspired The Expanse: Osiris Reborn – but we already knew about those. One of the surprise highlights from the showcase was the announcement of Hooded Horse's Vaunted, which evokes Sega's missing in action strategy series Valkyria Chronicles, taking it from the battlefields of fictional European countries and instead going the space western route. And, it's the debut game from Lost Lake Games – founded by ex-StarCraft and Guild Wars developers.

In a press release sent to GamesRadar+, the setting is described as "a galaxy where mercenaries and treasure hunters scrap over priceless imperial relics buried in far-flung ruins," where you'll take control of a trio of "dysfunctional frenemies" and build a squad of "dubious" companions. Notably, despite being focused on three heroes on the same mission, each one of the "unreliable storytellers" has their own version of events meaning you'll be able to replay chapters from a different perspective.

For those who haven't partaken in Sega's underrated strategy classics, the game works like a regular turn-based tactical RPG, except you'll be pretty much in full control of your characters during turns. Unlike the likes of XCOM and Fire Emblem, turns play out like a third-person shooter, albeit with the strategy and planning of a tactics game. That being said, it takes a unique version of the turn system too, as players get to control which character takes their turn when (although you will have to alternate with enemies).

So far, the game is only announced for PC, with a release on Steam, the Epic Games Store, and the Microsoft store coming in 2026. Plus, the game is set to arrive on PC Game Pass on day one.

Star Wars Zero Company will kill story characters, Fire Emblem-style.

No, it's not just you. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of those weird yet wonderful RPGs that, unless you've come prepared, seems to fight you at every turn. I'm not talking about the Tyger Claws running rampant on the streets of Japantown; rather, the mechanics themselves are a lot to wrap one's head around as a Night City newbie.

I first stepped into CD Projekt Red's thrilling open-world in 2024. A couple of weeks later, I ended up dropping it entirely for two months. There was nothing wrong with the game itself – I'd picked it up alongside then-new DLC Phantom Liberty, with Patch 2.1 very much intact – but something about it pushed back against my every attempt to fall in love.

Fast forward to 2026, and I called Cyberpunk 2077 the best RPG of all time, no exceptions. I thrive on a challenge, and that is precisely what Night City presented me with. It just so happens that challenging games are what Xbox Game Pass needs more of if Microsoft wants to justify that ever-climbing price tag – which is why I need you to give Cyberpunk, which is now on Game Pass, a shot.

Tinkering

Grind is life in some games, but a good game should not come with a reading list. No one should have to research the best builds for a given playstyle, or watch endless explainers to suss out an RPG system – not immediately, anyway. That's one area where, despite how much I love the overall experience, Cyberpunk 2077 falters.

I've mentioned in the past how Night City throwing you into the deep end resonates with the overwhelming muchness of life in the city. Everything is familiar yet alien in this dystopian future. If that just applied to worldbuilding itself, that would be one thing. But I had no idea how cyberware, crafting, Sandevistans, or the skill trees themselves truly worked or synergized until about halfway through the RPG. Nothing is explained, and very little is inferred. I pondered whether that is because so many returning players will have hopped back in (warily, most likely) following Cyberpunk's super buggy initial 2020 launch, but after reading up on how much of the game's systems have changed in the last 6 years, the lack of even basic signposting still strikes me as strange.

But therein lies the fun. For me, at least, having to prove myself to the game was incredibly satisfying. My two-month break was predominantly occupied by Gamescom 2024 prep, and once I'd cleared my plate of Work Games, I could return to a Fun Personal Challenge. That challenge was partly fueled by a refusal to have wasted £80 on a game I would never play, I'll admit. But it's also just how my brain works. I love to prove others wrong, and that includes myself.

Before long, I was able to lock into the game and stop fighting back. Instead, I used my damn brain for a change – and reminded myself how, since this is a CDPR game, it was bound to come with layers of lore-intensive systems to unpick. I had a similar issue with The Witcher 3's mutagen systems. If I could work out what to do with my many-colored monster samples, surely I could conquer a few bits of tech in Cyberpunk 2077?

Cyberhexed

The grind was worth it. I ended up playing four complete Cyberpunk playthroughs one after the other, utterly spellbound by the story, the place, and the characters I'd come to love so much. That makes it one of the best value for money games I've ever picked up, right alongside Baldur's Gate 3.

Cyberpunk 2077's launch on Game Pass has me excited for others to finally give it a go, too – especially if you're still paying for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate following the recent round of price hikes. With Cyberpunk joined by fellow grind-a-thon Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, dare I say that the subscription service actually sounds like pretty decent value again for meaty RPG fans?

Well, maybe. I'll admit right now that I dropped my own subscription down to the cheapest tier almost immediately, and since I already own Cyberpunk 2077, I have no intention of changing that. But I hope this move means that Microsoft is keen to bring longer, denser, more time-intensive experiences to Game Pass atop the slew of shorter entries, if only to reinforce why that extra $10 a month is necessary.

So fear not, fellow stubborn skeptics. Cyberpunk 2077 is extremely, eye-wateringly, mind-blowingly good, and it deserves your full attention – though don't be afraid to give maybe one or two guides a peek if you want to give yourself a cybernetic leg up in those punishing early hours.

Check out all these other games like Cyberpunk 2077 if you're hankering for some other futuristic tales.

Former Xbox and Sega boss Peter Moore says that he believes Microsoft hasn't taken advantage of owning Minecraft as it should.

Speaking to GamesBeat, Moore says, "When they acquired Mojang and Minecraft, it was purposely built, almost, for – how do we use AI to continuously evolve this?" He says this is mostly down to Minecraft's potential for user-generated content in the vein of something like Fortnite.

He explains, "UGC has always been an important part of keeping people engaged. Roblox is obviously a great example. You put creativity in the hands of the gamer, rather than telling the gamer what they’re going to do."

Moore admits, "Microsoft has maybe not taken full advantage of Minecraft." As for why that is, the former Xbox boss reckons that "maybe a bit of that is on the heels of Activision Blizzard and Bethesda. All of a sudden there were shinier objects that came along, with much bigger price tags attached."

He continues, "These are the moments, when Microsoft jumps in like that – where does Xbox fit all of a sudden? Where does the old business model fit?" And when it comes to the various high-profile acquisitions made by the company over the years, Moore adds, "You’re no longer a first party. I don’t think, once you start making the acquisitions that they did, because you can’t spend that kind of money and keep everything as an exclusive on your console. The math doesn’t math."

Minecraft does have an in-game store that allows fans to eventually join a partner program and release content into the Minecraft Marketplace, but it's not quite a platform in the same way Roblox or Fortnite are. But then again, Minecraft is literally the best-selling game of all-time, so I'm not entirely sure Microsoft are regretting owning the game too much right now.

Minecraft modders behind the sandbox game's most popular unofficial dimension unveil its sequel, flying mounts and all

For Seamus Blackley, who oversaw the creation of the Xbox console and brand in the late '90s and early '00s, the Xbox leadership shakeup has put the writing on the wall. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is all-in on generative AI, and in Blackley's estimation, that's why he's put an AI executive in charge of the gaming business.

Microsoft has made "an unprecedented monetary and strategic bet," Blackley told GamesBeat. "This is a company that's trying to recontextualize the way we think about technology in its entirety. They've decided that the lever point that's going to do that is generative AI models. They're looking to fit everything into a generative AI model."

There's an analogy Blackley kept coming back to over the course of the interview: "It's like the thing people say about having a hammer and everything is a nail. That's incredibly true of Microsoft right now. Everything is a gen AI problem. Games, of course, are a gen AI problem. This is why I say this makes perfect sense. If you're Satya, you have a hammer called gen AI and every single problem is a nail."

That's why Nadella has chosen to Asha Sharma, who previously headed Microsoft's CoreAI product, in charge of Xbox instead of "a games person," Blackley said. "In the world of Satya, everything is a gen AI problem, so you put a gen AI person in charge of games with a training model, with boot camps for her to train her like you train an AI model, to bring gen AI into a position to revolutionize games."

Sharma has no background in games, but she's not alone in that regard. Sega, Xbox, and EA veteran Peter Moore came into games from Reebok. EA boss Andrew Wilson came out of the web design and venture capital world of the dot-com boom. Even beloved former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé was a marketing executive for Procter & Gamble and Pizza Hut before he started kicking ass and taking names.

"The problem that we're discussing here, really, and the thing that's important to address, is that they were coming into games because they wanted to be in games," Blackley said. "Asha is coming into games because her boss believes that games are going to be driven by AI. It's a very different approach."

Blackley said that, at the time of the original Xbox's development, "We killed ourselves to maintain a very pure gaming message. 'This is purely for gamers. This is what it's about. We will not allow Microsoft to transform this into a Microsoft agenda device.' That was important because people didn't believe that Microsoft could make something cool. They didn't believe that Microsoft could make something fun. They just didn't believe it."

Xbox is already struggling to present a cohesive identity for the brand in the modern era, and Blackley doesn't seem to believe that an executive with no gaming experience – and one who comes from a background in Microsoft's biggest agenda – will have much luck turning that image problem around. In fact, he thinks she might just be the one "who slides Xbox gently into the night."

"But at the same time, I understand exactly why it is," Blackley concluded. "I know that, again, Satya is holding a hammer and everything is a nail. There's a nail with an Xbox logo on it. He's applying the AI person to it. He has to show shareholders and the press and the world that he is all in on this investment.

"He has to show them that he believes generative AI is going to fix games and make it profitable. He has to make this move. It doesn't matter what you think about it. I don't think he had any choice."

New Xbox CEO, a former Meta and Instacart exec brought in from Microsoft's AI division, says "we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop."

Looking for something to blast through this weekend with your Game Pass subscription? If you've got yourself some free time, and don't want to waste it all endlessly scrolling through the hundreds of video games available in the Game Pass library, let me jump in and help. Regardless of whether you're accessing Game Pass through your PC, Xbox Series X, the ROG Ally X, or the Xbox Cloud service, there's some nice new additions to the service that you need to have on your radar this weekend.

Xbox adds loads of new video games to Game Pass every month, so much so that it can be difficult to keep up with what's new and noteworthy. Which is why I'm here to help you cut through the noise to recommend games for you to play that are actually worth your time and attention. This week I'm focusing on three new to Game Pass titles that are available for you to play right now.

New to Game Pass games to play this weekend

Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2

When we released our Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 review back in 2024, we called it an "exceptional, larger than life shooter that raises the bar for all Warhammer adaptations." I stand by that assessment all this time later. Developer Saber Interactive and publisher: Focus Entertainment unleashed one of the best looking games in the Game Pass library, a ferocious third-person shooter that brings the Warhammer sandbox to life with stunning scale and outrageous visual fidelity.

It certainly doesn't hurt that the game is an utter delight to play as well. Whether you're a 40K fan or a shooter aficionado looking for a new single-player adventure, I really couldn't recommend Space Marine 2 enough. It has this hulking melee combat, chattering gunplay, and exceptionally grandiose scenarios for you to battle your way through. Warhammer 40K: Space Marine is about 72GB to download, and will only take around 10-12 hours to beat – so you could knock through it this weekend, especially if you use our beginner's guide to Space Marine 2.

Play Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2 on Game Pass Ultimate, Premium, and PC Game Pass now.

Grounded 2: The Toxic Tangle

Developer Obsidian Entertainment launched Grounded 2 into Early Access for PC and Xbox Series X last summer and this week saw the release of its first significant content update. The Toxic Tangle represents a fantastic opportunity to dive into this pint-sized adventure game, regardless of whether you're a newcomer to the series or have been out exploring the back garden since the beginning. And I should say, Grounded 2 is also great fun regardless of whether you're running solo or with friends.

The Grounded 2: Toxic Tangle content update will let you explore a new Community Garden biome, packed with earthly caverns and new creatures to combat. Naturally, the thing I'm most game for here is the new Ladybug Buggy mount with its water cannon attachment, which will make quick work of any aggressive insects and gritters out there trying to spoil your survival antics. Grounded 2 is around 30GB to install, and even supports crossplay co-op multiplayer.

Play Grounded 2 on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass now.

The Talos Principle 2

Looking to give your brain a bit of a workout this weekend? Well, then I'd suggest you walk away from Wordle and give The Talos Principle 2 a try. This is a thought-provoking puzzle game from developer Croteam and publisher Devolver Digital. It originally released back in 2023, and quite honestly has been drawing me back in ever since. It's a really neat first-person experience that will make some of you think back to the likes of Myst and The Witness, although The Talos Principle isn't quite as demanding.

In fact, it's possible to finish The Talos Principle without solving every puzzle – should you just be here for the delightful visual presentation and a world steeped in weird lore and mind-bending challenges. Although you probably will want to try and shoot for a degree of mastery here, especially as The Talos Principle 2 does such a fantastic job of introducing interesting new concepts gradually – be it gravity manipulation, mind transference, and so much more. The Talos Principle is around 100GB on Xbox Series X, but will offer between 20-40 hours of game time.

Play The Talos Principle on Game Pass Ultimate, Premium, and PC Game Pass now.

Get more from your weekend with GamesRadar+

Want more personalized recommendations from the video game experts at GamesRadar? Then you should check out our essential list detailing the very best games on Xbox Series X.

2026 is going to be an important year for Xbox Game Studios. The publisher has aligned its four biggest franchises to land within a single calendar year, with new installments to the Fable, Forza, Halo, and Gears franchises readying for release. This all comes as questions swirl around the burgeoning multiplatform strategy and Xbox's decision to cease development of Everwild and Perfect Dark last year.

Coming off the back of yesterday's Xbox Developer Direct, I sat down with Craig Duncan – the head of Xbox Game Studios. Duncan has a lot of great insights to share on the wider Xbox strategy. He led Rare for well over a decade, overseeing the launch of Sea of Thieves and other titles, before taking over as head of XGS in 2024 following the retirement of Alan Hartman.

We get into the reveals, dive into how Xbox determines which of its first-party titles to bring to PS5, and reflect on some of the hard lessons learned in 2025.

Xbox Developer Direct Feedback

GamesRadar+: If the Developer Direct demonstrated anything, it's that it is going to be a huge year for Xbox Game Studios. Fable and Forza Horizon 6 were in the showcase, but then you also have Halo: Campaign Evolved and Gears of War: E-Day set to release this year. What does the four tentpole Xbox franchises aligning like this say about XGS' ambitions and intentions in 2026?

Craig Duncan: All of those games have been in my world for the last two years, since coming into this role. It's been pretty incredible to see the shape of these games come together. And now we're in 2026, which is the 25th anniversary of Xbox, where we have our pillar franchises coming together and it's really exciting to finally be able to share more. One of the best things we get to do as game makers is share the passion and excitement for what we're building with the world.

It's great to have a moment like the Developer Direct to start the year, and I'm really happy that the teams – Playground and Double Fine, particularly – are able to actually share what they've been working on. And then as we go through the rest of the year, there will be other moments where we share more with what's going on with Gears, and obviously Halo had its announcement last year. I love that we have a portfolio that has everything from Forza to Fable, Halo to Kiln to Keeper, the Obsidian RPGs that we released last year to inXile's Clockwork Revolution. We have a fantastic portfolio.

GR+: This generation has really been defined by the quality of its RPGs. Playground has never built a fantasy-action RPG before. Was it a risk them taking on Fable?

Craig Duncan: When I think about Playground and their history with the Forza Horizon franchise, and their desire to take on Fable as a franchise, I think it's really about this relentless pursuit of excellence.

We all know what that means in Forza Horizon, we've all seen that franchise get bigger and bigger every year, but what does that mean for Fable? I have played a bunch of the game, I've messed around with the combat and the Living Population, and it's just mind blowing. I'm so excited that we talked about it in the Developer Direct, because it's something that people wouldn't expect.

GR+: In terms of Playground taking on the challenge of a new franchise, or just the way the Fable revival is building on the past?

Craig Duncan: There were some really special ideas in the original Fable trilogy, but what I think Playground has done is take some of these ideas and modernized them – my brain pops every time I think about the Living Population, how it works, and what it adds to the overall game; it's an incredible invention, and Fable is going to be an incredible RPG. It will be amazing to see what players do with it, and it'll be massively shareable. I love when we make things I'm excited to play as a player.

GR+: Which is probably a good time for us to pivot to Kiln. A quintessentially weird game from Double Fine. How does the studio fit into the Xbox Game Studios group?

Craig Duncan: I think it's always interesting how games start and how they turn into the games that we ultimately take to market. And sure, there are game ideas that never see the light of day – there are probably ideas that happen in the team that don't even make it to me, and that's fine as well. But all of our teams are different, whether it's Double Fine or Rare or World's Edge making Age of Empires. All of our teams are unique studios, and we want to encourage them to make things that are differentiated – that represent their ideas and their passions.

When I think about 'differentiated', Double Fine is definitely at the top of the list. Whether it's ideas that come from their Amnesia Fortnight, whether they have a creator like Lee [Petty] that's got a game he really wants to make – which is where Keeper came from – or whether it's just Tim [Schafer] saying, 'hey, Craig, next time you come to Double Fine do you want to play a multiplayer pottery party brawler?' And I have to say, 'I mean, I don't know what that is, but sure!' And then we just spend the whole time grinning ear-to-ear while we're playing it. I think we have something really special there.

GR+: With new Fable, Forza, Gears, and Halo games set to land this year, how do you see something like Kiln factoring into your plans and priorities?

Craig Duncan: My job, and the ambition of the organization, is: how do we get Kiln to as many players as we can? To help the ideas of the team reach as much success as they can? We are one of the biggest video game publishers in the world. So how do we make the ideas from our teams reach as many people as possible, with games of all different shapes and sizes? I think that's important.

GR+: We'll get to the number of games XGS is publishing in a minute, but I just wanted to touch back on the origins of Kiln. Live service games have become so dominant in the landscape, but you're saying that Double Fine pursuing multiplayer wasn't a mandate from Xbox but rather a good idea worth supporting?

Craig Duncan: For Kiln specifically, that's absolutely a Double Fine idea and a Double Fine creation. It really wasn't much different than what I just said, they called me up and asked if I wanted to come play a multiplayer party pottery brawler [laughs].

But we then get the benefit of going, okay, so this is an online game? And it's a game that – and I don't want to talk about the team's plans – you can expect to see what you see in online games, which is that there will probably be some sort of test or beta where we can have players in to make sure that it all works. Well, we have teams that we can lean on with that.

GR+: As in, how Double Fine could collaborate with other studios within Xbox?

Craig Duncan: One of the first things I said to Double Fine was, 'Hey, go speak to the Rare team, see what they experienced with Sea of Thieves, and work with them.' So our teams are connecting all of the time. Playground works super closely with Turn 10 on all of the ForzaTech, which underpins both Fable and Forza Horizon. The Coalition, who is doing Gears of War, works across all of our teams that use Unreal Engine 5. So to bring it back to Kiln: It was very much their idea, but it is probably something that maybe they couldn't have realized without us, but we can connect them to the teams that have some of the experience to help them really achieve their ambitions.

LESSONS LEARNED FROM 2025

GR+: By my count, Xbox Game Studios published six first-party games, one into Early Access, two from third-party studios, and six on PS5 in 2025. 2026 sounds similarly stacked. After a generation spent grappling with the narrative that 'Xbox has no games' is it gratifying to deliver such strong lineups?

Craig Duncan: When you were just reciting all of the things we did last year – and I said something similar to this in the note I sent out to the teams at the beginning of 2026 – I just feel so incredibly proud of everything we shipped last year.

I think we shipped 15 unique projects coming out of XGS. Some were single-platform, some were multi-platform… I think if you were to compare us to any studios group in the world in terms of our output, we ship more games in more places to a higher quality than XGS has ever done. So I feel very proud of that.

GR+: I'm not surprised! Although I will say that I thought Xbox's release calendar was a little congested. XGS releases three games in August and three in October, for example.

Craig Duncan: We had some moments where we were probably on top of ourselves. If I think back to October, we had Ninja Gaiden 4, The Outer Worlds 2, Keeper…

GR+: And then the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds and the Halo: Campaign Evolved announcement on top of all that.

Craig Duncan: Yeah [laughter]. Like, all of those games that I just mentioned are incredible games. We went into that period going, okay, we think they are all for different people. The weird but chill (as Tim describes it) Keeper is different to the hyper-fast combat in Ninja Gaiden 4, which is different to the wonderful world Obsidian brought to life in The Outer Worlds 2. They are different, but it's still a bunch of games releasing within a short window of time between each other.

GR+: Has this experience helped you recalibrate Xbox's release schedule for 2026?

Craig Duncan: I think that we ideally want to space things out and make sure games have their own, as we like to call it, oxygen in those moments. It's just super busy. Our own release schedule is one thing, but then you have everyone else's release schedule at the same time.

There are very few windows and there's more and more games, and more competition for a player's time. There's also movies, music, and all this other stuff as well that gets packed in. So the learning was this: let's not put stuff on top of our stuff, and I think we have done that. Let our games have a bit of oxygen, even though it's always busy and there's never really a free time to launch something.

GR+: Speaking of oxygen being taken out of the calendar, how are you feeling about the release of Grand Theft Auto 6 – which obviously got delayed to November. Is GTA 6 impacting Xbox's plans, or is it not something you're thinking about?

Craig Duncan: I mean, it's more that they're going to do what they're going to do. My job is to do what we should do for the best of our games. So yeah, we don't… there's always other games, and there's always other things we have to consider.

GR+: Xbox Game Studios made the decision to shut down The Initiative and its Perfect Dark reboot, and end development of Rare's Everwild in 2025. These titles spent almost seven years in the public consciousness, longer in development. Did Xbox learn any key lessons about how early it announces projects or how it tracks key production milestones after going through this difficult process?

Craig Duncan: Those things are really tough to do. If we make any changes to our business that affect people in their jobs, that is really tough. I just want to be honest and transparent with you – I wouldn't go into individual projects, just because there were people that worked on those games and put their heart and soul into them. But, as an overall portfolio, we're always looking at how everything is going. At whether everything is set up well. At whether we have got the right resources to go and deliver on our aspirations for all of our games.

And we made some difficult choices; some of that is the job of managing a games portfolio and a number of studios. All I would also say as well, is that it doesn't lessen anything from any of those people that did really great work on those games. Sometimes business decisions have to be made, which have wide reach and impact. We don't like doing that. So the lesson is: how do we make sure we don't have to do that? That's really the goal there.

Why More Xbox Games Are Going to PS5

GR+: Xbox ported six titles to PS5 in 2025, and there's plenty more set for 2026. How are you determining when to bring XGS games to other platforms?

Craig Duncan: As the guy that gets to run studios and help our game teams, I take a pretty simple view on this: we want our games to reach the most players that we can. I have been on this journey before…

You know, I was running Sea of Thieves at Rare when we took it to PS5, and as we migrated from Xbox to PC to PlayStation, we saw more players come in and we saw the community around the game grow. Forza Horizon 5, which launched on PS5 last year, did really, really well. It helped the community around that game grow – it gives everybody more people to play with. For me, this strategy is really about how we can have our games reach as many people as they can.

GR+: Something I've always been a little confused by is the consistency of that strategy. We see, for example, Fable and Kiln land day-and-date on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X, whereas the PlayStation port of Forza Horizon 6 is scheduled for after launch.

Craig Duncan: There's always development realities about when these projects start – how big a team is, and what plans we have at the start of development. Like you said, when a strategy changes, maybe you've got a plan that exists with a game and maybe you can adopt that, maybe you can't. So that's why. And to be clear, this is totally fair feedback. Sometimes we are inconsistent. You see some games in one place, some games in multiple places. Just know that we're going to work on that, and we're going to try and be more consistent with what we do.

But you know, for our game makers, if you're on the Fable team you just want as many people who love Fable to appreciate the great work that the team's doing. That's always our goal. It's rarely more complicated than that. It's like, how can we get this game to as many players as we can?

GR+: Would you like to see XGS get to a place where all of its first-party releases are landing across other platforms from day one?

Craig Duncan: My number one job is to help our teams be successful. If I think about my role, some of that is optionality about what we do and what we approach. You used the word 'port' before, and not to sort of pick you up on that word specifically, but wherever our games show up we want them to show up and be the best that they can be for that platform. So we want to take advantage of whatever features and nuances that the platform has.

So that may lead to a bit of optionality. Which is to say, if we're only in a position to release a game on a platform and not have it show up really well? Then I think we wouldn't do that. I think we would have a conversation internally and go, 'Hey, unless we can do it really well and do the right thing by those players, then…' and that's when you get into conversations of, well, maybe we can ship it afterwards.

Because teams are only a set size. We only have a certain amount of… ultimately, it all comes down to resource. Not everything is limitless. So we just want to do the best job, by each platform, by each game. So in that world, sometimes we'll maintain optionality. Some games we might go PC first, others we might go console first. Grounded 2 is a really good example of this, which we launched into Game Preview, Steam, and PC initially. So yeah, I think it won't always be the same.

GR+: We are running out of time, so my last question is about what place you believe Xbox Game Studios holds in the wider Xbox organization as it approaches its 25th anniversary, given how much has changed in that time?

Craig Duncan: We have a number of different studios that all have different capabilities, strengths, and creative forces. We have evolving games. We have big franchises. We have smaller studios. We have RPG houses like Obsidian and we have craftsman houses like Ninja Theory. When I think about that breadth, our XGS studios really can go and do anything. And when I think about our games showing up in different places, I think our set of studios could actually go do a bunch of different things on a bunch of different platforms, and just go create a variety of games and experiences for people. We always focus on creativity, always focus on craft. But I think that it's that eclectic mix of studios and teams that really is the strength of Xbox Game Studios, one that separates us from a lot of other studio groups.

GR+: Okay, and lastly lastly… do you think we will see more of State of Decay 3 this year?

Craig Duncan: I think the [PR] in this room will murder me if I give you the answer to that. So, here's what I'll say: I have done a number of visits to that studio in the last six to eight months. I have sat and played the game with the team a bunch of times. It's coming on really well. We're very excited about the franchise and its potential. So I will certainly see a lot more of it in the coming year… is that a good answer to your question? [laughter]

Discover the Xbox games that will be Big in 2026

With Xbox preparing for its biggest year of the console generation so far, we are previewing its most anticipated first-party games (and some key Game Pass releases) as part of our Big in 2026 Spotlight series. Join us every day this week for exclusive interviews, new previews, and fresh insights into all of the upcoming Xbox games you need to have on your radar.

"What does it mean to be a hero?" is the question at heart of Playground Games' Fable reboot. Choice and consequence will play a prominent part in the upcoming action-RPG, where a new morality system will help to define your place in the open-world. Rather than Fable 3's black-and-white extremes – which often presented dilemmas that were more obviously geared towards alignments of good versus evil – the Fable reboot is taking a different approach, one that directly ties into a new reputation system and the living population of 1000 unique NPCs who inhabit Albion.

"We've pursued a much more shades of gray approach to morality," says Ralph Fulton, general manager of Playground Games. "Where the things you do are the things you do, and if you do them enough (or if enough people see you doing them) you'll gain a reputation in that particular settlement or area of the world for doing that thing."

Actions have consequences

You are free to approach Fable however you want to, but you'll need to be aware that people are watching every one of your actions and choices. This is key to how the mortality system operates in Albion. Every NPC has their own beliefs, which means that each will react differently to what they know you've done.

"People will judge the things you've done and do so through the lens of their own unique personal worldview," Fulton says, "which I think is an approximation in a game system, right? But I think it is more probably representative of how morality exists in the world that we live in today. And it's also a super interesting, super fun, granular game system to play with."

"It is full of feedback loops [and] interesting outcomes as you move around different settlements, encounter different people, do different things, acquire reputations, and different combinations," Fulton adds. "There's tons of fun in it, and although the game doesn't judge you, the people of Albion will. The NPCs act as this kind of Greek chorus and tell you exactly what they think about the things that you've done. That is classic Fable. I think the fact that it works in this more nuanced morality system is a really great thing for our game."

In the original Fable trilogy, NPCs referred to you with a variety of titles that were earned based on your actions or alignment. Playground's take on morality moves away from the title system to account for the game's "witness system" and the personalities of Albion's inhabitants. "We've moved away from the title system, because how people refer to you, and how they talk about you within the game, is really just driven by what they think of the things they know you've done," says Fulton. "What they know you've done is kind of interesting in itself, right? So there's kind of a witnessing system in there, and people have to see you do a thing before you can start to earn that reputation."

"Which still preserves something that's really important in a game like this – the fact that you can do things in secret and not pay the cost for them," Fulton continues. "Which I think is a really interesting thing in an open world game as well. The people will really know you and refer to you based on what they know you've done and how they feel about it."

I can be your hero

When I first played Fable 2, its morality system was unlike anything I'd come across before; it made me feel like I was having a tangible impact on the world through my decisions. But a lot has changed since 2008, and we don't tend to see binary morality systems like it as often in the world of RPGs today. Instead we see games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt present scenarios that aren't so cut and dry on the morality scale – the result being more memorable, subjective choices. To see Fable go in the shades of gray direction is really speaking my language.

"We spent so much time talking about morality at the start of this project," says Fulton. "Talking a lot about morality and how it was represented in those original games, and that very sort of binary good, evil spectrum that those games had as their hallmark, right down to their cover art; their box art was that split between good and evil, present and future."

"We talked about how it felt like some games had moved on in a more sophisticated way to discuss morality," he adds. "And certainly, when we look at the world, there's no objective good, there's no objective evil. I think there's nothing you could do in the world that would unite everybody in the belief that it was good or evil, right? It's entirely subjective, and I think that's really interesting. It's certainly interesting as a game system, and that's what we've pursued."

We won't truly understand the depth of this system until we play Fable later this year, although Fulton is quick to tease that there are an "abundance of things which will give you reputations or start earning you reputations" as you begin to venture to different settlements, with each population of NPCs reacting to or judging your actions. Perhaps somebody will see you being generous or dishonest; maybe they'll catch you being a bigamist (yes, really) which can all contribute to a change in reputation.

Fulton says that Playground has also moved away from having looks or attractiveness weigh on your reputation (a factor of the original trilogy), with your actions shaping worldviews rather than how you dress. "We like to make sure that however you choose to dress, that's fine," he adds, "because I think customization is really about personalization, right? It should be role-play for the player."

Speaking of customization, the Fable reboot will let you decide who you want to be far more freely in the looks department, rather than sticking to set character models, which ties back into the original question that has me so excited for Playground's take on Albion: what does it mean to you to be a hero?

"We see it as our role to make sure that you can be the hero you want to be," Fulton says. "And that obviously goes to customizing how your character looks. We have the ability to choose which character you are. There are a bunch of heads that you can choose from. You can customize that character with clothing, with hair color, with skin tone, tattoos, scars, all manner of customization options. So there is a suite of options there for you to make sure that you can be the hero you want to be in Albion."

With Xbox preparing for its biggest year of the console generation so far, GR+ is exploring the publisher's most anticipated first-party games (and some key Game Pass releases) as part of our Big in 2026 Spotlight series. Join us every day this week for exclusive interviews, new previews, and fresh insights into all of the upcoming Xbox games you need to have on your radar.

Forza Horizon 6 takes the series to Japan, and while the gameplay reveal at today's Xbox Developer Direct was largely focused on real-life inspirations, there was also a strong undercurrent of pure anime throughout. The few seconds we saw of the nighttime Touge Battle mode looked like a straight-up adaptation of Initial D, and the whole thing ended on what appears to be a full-sized Gundam.

There was never any question that fans would turn an open-world racing game set in Japan into Initial D. The wildly popular anime and manga series is all about street racing, and is best known for its depictions of wildly dangerous one-on-one races down mountain roads in the dark of night, which helped to bring drift racing and Touge battles to the attention of mainstream audiences. Put a small car on a Japanese mountain road and it's like the Eurobeat starts playing on its own.

But Forza Horizon 6 has an explicit Touge Battle mode, Playground Games has confirmed. There aren't many details on what the mode entails, but the devs said in today's Direct that these will be "iconic nighttime races down Japanese mountain passes." As if the inspiration wasn't clear enough, the gameplay footage shown focuses on a Toyota AE86 – the iconic car at the center of the anime series.

Sure, a tribute to a beloved racing series in a Forza Horizon game makes sense, but the wild bit is the teaser at the very end of the gameplay breakdown. A car sits on an aged bit of road with cracked asphalt, and we zoom out to see what appear to be the feet of a full-sized Gundam striding up behind.

I'd guess this is the intro to a Showcase event, which we've seen in past series entries. These events typically have you, in a car, racing a train, plane, or other unusual vehicle, but a giant robot is certainly an escalation of the concept. The question on everyone's minds is, however, whether this is an officially licensed Gundam. The color scheme and general shape of the legs fits in with a variety of leading robots from the anime franchise, but it doesn't match any specific one – especially with those big wheels built into its feet.

Forza Horizon has always offered a pretty lighthearted take on racing, and it seems the sixth game will be no exception. My only real question is, with these anime references popping up in Forza Horizon 6's biggest marketing materials, what other Easter eggs are going to be hiding in the full game?

Forza Horizon 6 looks like the pinnacle of open-world racing games, and a vibe check from Playground sold me immediately: "It really is just about driving wherever you want and exploring."

Playground Games has made a lot of great video games in the last 16 years, but nothing as astonishingly pretty as Forza Horizon 6. The studio is presenting a vast and vertical playground, an open-world racing game that's working to capitalize on the stunning landscapes unlocked by shifting the Horizon Festival to Japan for the very first time. Design director Torben Ellert tells me that Playground has "created its largest, most diverse and seasonal map yet" – and after getting a first look at Forza Horizon 6 in action, I believe him.

"It's also the map with the most verticality, reflecting Japan's unique geography," he continues. "Drivability is key for a Forza Horizon game, so we focussed our map design on the driving experience – from iconic Touges, to city streets, and sweeping sea-side asphalt roads. We've also looked at how to facilitate traversal across-country, ensuring that more vegetation is smashable, and providing cut-throughs and shortcuts."

Easy Rider

Forza Horizon 6 arrives at its destination five years after its predecessor established itself as one of the best Xbox Series X games. So it's no surprise to hear that Playground is treating its success in the Mexico region as a foundation to expand further beyond. "Our approach is always to build on what we've learned in previous games, and push the envelope from there," says Ellert.

The design director points to the evolution between EventLab and Eventlab 2.0 in Forza Horizon 5 as a good example of this, with the toolset (which lets players create custom games and expressive races) "providing the baseline for the Estate and Garage features" coming to Forza Horizon 6.

There are eight player houses to unlock across Japan – each serving as fast travel points, and come equipped with a decoratable Garage which you can use to showcase your favorite cards. Forza Horizon 6 will also include a larger Estate, a piece of land you can acquire as you rise up the ranks which you can build just about anything on – including personalized racing tracks for use between you and your friends.

The same sort of iteration can be seen in the verticality which is built into Forza Horizon 6's open world at a baseline, where you're able to freely race around the tight winding roadways nestled in the mountains of Japan. "Forza Horizon 5: Hot Wheels allowed us to explore multi-layered roads," Ellert says of the 2022 expansion, going on to explain that the mass of player data collected from FH5 also helped the studio refine its approach to race creation.

"We observed a lot of players just driving in the open world and not really engaging with race events, which led us to design new open world features like Time Attack Circuits, Car Meets, Drag Meets, and LINK skills." All of this contributes to Playground wanting to "give players new experiences in the places they spend the most time." Ellert says that, in an effort to support this, "we've built a campaign that allows players to approach the game at whatever pace they prefer."

Car Meets are a key reflection of this philosophy. There are three locations in Forza Horizon 6 where permanent Car Meets can be found, seamless social hubs where you can meet up with other players, download their custom designs, and even purchase pink slips if you find a rival ride particularly enticing. Better still, these freeform hangs aren't official Horizon events – there's no colored wristband required for entry and they are always open for business, whether you're riding solo or with friends.

Wristbands are a key commodity once you do turn your attention to official events. You'll begin Forza Horizon 6 as a tourist in Japan who gets caught up in the car culture. "We made the 'Horizon Festival' portion of the campaign more progression driven," says Ellert. "As you complete Festival races, you earn points towards your next Wristband. When you unlock that Wristband, you must complete a Milestone Event, which then unlocks a new round of Festival Races and PR stunts. As these are structured and progression driven, we were able to apply car classes and themes to each event, so that as you rise through the ranks, you will take on events that require faster, more thrilling cars."

If the Horizon Festival isn't quite your speed, then Playground has you covered. The studio is introducing a new feature called the 'Collection Journal', an element which catalogues everything you see and do, whether you're racing, exploring, or tearing up the open world. Ellert tells me that "Collection is the core mechanic' to Playground's philosophy of letting players approach FH6 at whatever pace they prefer. "Anything you can see is something you can add to your Collection Journal. This can be pictures of cars or landmarks, mascots found, characters met, Touge Races completed, and more. And all of these collections progress you through the “Discover Japan” section of the campaign."

With more than 550 cars to race, crash, and collect. With a wider and more expressive customization system (including the ability to finally paint liveries on windows) than ever before. A seamless world with dramatic seasonal changes that pull focus onto freely exploring lush open landscapes and dense urban environments. A Tokyo city landscape five times larger than anything to feature in the series before, and a smattering of iconic Japanese locales recreated with true passion and precision. Take all of that into consideration, and you may be wondering what Forza Horizon 6 is, exactly. That's easy, according to Ellert: "It really is just about driving wherever you want and exploring."

With Xbox preparing for its biggest year of the console generation so far, we are exploring the publisher's most anticipated first-party games (and some key Game Pass releases) as part of our Big in 2026 Spotlight series. Join us every day this week for exclusive interviews, new previews, and fresh insights into all of the upcoming Xbox games you need to have on your radar.