PATCH NOTES v05.08.2026 – Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios released some fresh game statistics, showing how modding has kept BG3's playerbase engaged and thriving to the tune of one billion mods downloaded in just three years – encroaching upon a position held fast by Skyrim for years.

What's going on this week with Baldur's Gate 3?

• Larian Studios released a series of infographics on X that give insight into player choice and actions
• Stats reveal 500 million game mods have been downloaded through the Baldur's Gate 3 internal modding client and 509.4 million more through Nexus Mods

Why is this happening now?

• Mods help players make games their own, keeping games like Baldur's Gate 3 relevant for longer
• The infographics were posted in keeping with Larian's trend, releasing statistics to mark milestones in the RPG's life cycle

Community Update

Baldur's Gate 3 has been blinding success since it launched out of Early Access, and after the last of its mammoth post-launch updates was deployed in April 2025, fans have turned to mods to inspire repeat playthroughs. The internal modding client – offering new classes, party size limit removal, and a higher level cap to experiment with – was added to the game as part of September 2024's Patch 7 as Larian started the process of leaving the game in players hands to pursue its next big project (later revealed as a new Divinity game).

According to the latest statistics released by Larian to celebrate BG3's birthday, the game has seen 500 million mods downloaded internally while 13,000 others have been uploaded to the mod library. It's safe to say that the developer's hopes that the community would carry the game's future on its own has paid off, with studio lead Swen Vinke responding with shock to a remark on X that the number of mods downloaded between the game's client and Nexus Mods put together brings us to over "one billion" in total.

Meta Shift

• Freedom to mod is the future of legacy RPGs, but it's also the genre's past

This is a funny one. Baldur's Gate 3 going from strength to strength with such a lively and active player base, evident by over a billion mods being downloaded since the client launched in 2024, sounds jawdropping. But it also echoes the journey of RPGs like The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (as well as The Sims and Minecraft) over the years.

Skyrim is still the most heavily-modded game of all time, having racked up six billion downloads on Nexus Mods by the time Larian launched its internal Baldur's Gate 3 modding client in 2024. That's to be expected, since Bethesda's RPG enjoyed a 13-year head start. But with BG3 being a more recent release, we're seeing those numbers stack up in real time – and now, we're actively paying attention to the game that might actually unseat Skyrim.

Games that not only permit community mods but embrace them have a proven track record of success over time. Seeing Baldur's Gate 3 achieving a cool one billion mod downloads in just three years, one of which went by without an internal modding client at all, crystallizes the power of passing the reins on to players. Which was, as it turns out, Swen Vincke's hope for it all along.

Patch Notes summary

Since leaving active development on Baldur's Gate 3, Larian's latest batch of statistics spotlights how popular mods have been and points to one of many reasons why the game has sustained a thriving playerbase. Steam player counts still point to healthy numbers being maintained long past its final major update, with mods being downloaded both internally and via platforms like Nexus Mods speaking to the continued excitement around the three-year-old RPG.

I've yet to see a single week without Baldur's Gate 3 making headlines for one reason or another since 2023, and useful as these stat drops are in keeping that momentum going, it's clear that BG3 fans are the ones keeping this fantasy alive.

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For the first time in a decade, I'm playing a farming sim that isn't Stardew Valley. It's called Fields of Mistria, and since picking it up for $14 on my Steam Deck two weeks ago, I've spent 34 hours building a new life – and, er, ignoring my real one – in the titular town of Mistria. There are familiar comforts. I farm, fish, raise livestock, try my hand at artisanal crafts, and brave monster-infested mines; befriending townsfolk by forcing eggs upon them.

But Fields of Mistria's RPG roots run deep. While in-game days are still measured by strict 2AM bedtimes and limited stamina, you're otherwise free to spend your time however suits, with no deadlines on quests or townsfolk requests. Combined with the fact that there's so much to do – with many trainable skills to achieve the overarching goal of raising Mistria's reputation – Fields of Mistria lays out an easy-going vibe and sticks to it, offering a world I can't resist slowing down for.

All-season chill

Previously, I've bounced off slice-of-life games like Tales of the Shire and Palia because there wasn't enough to do. That's ironic, given the genre is largely about intentionally slowing down and living life day-by-day, but without enough of a motivator – a museum to stock, or getting to know a villager I'm smitten with – I can't buy in. The reverse is also true. With Stardew Valley, for example, restoring the community center becomes such a singular goal that it takes over my playthrough. It's a productivity trap: there needs to be a strong foundation for me to want to build tens of hours upon, but too much busywork risks upending the casual fantasy I come to games like Stardew Valley for.

In Fields of Mistria, everything is worthwhile. Smithing, carpentry, and cooking can all be as profitable as farming, and while that means money is easily made, there's no shortage of places to spend it. Some expenses are practical (stone and wood are crucial for Mistria's various building projects, but pricey) and if you don't like smithing, you can buy improved tools from the local blacksmith instead of making your own.

With so much to do and no time pressure to rush me through it, I've been able to lean into Fields of Mistria's easy-living fantasy. Because gold isn't the be-all and end-all here, it's alright to spend on little things – like two lattes at the Saturday Market (one for me and one for my future wife Juniper), or a fancy bookshelf from the next stall over. Sure, some mornings I'll beeline to the mine to further my quest to reach the bottom, but that's because I want to. Just as often, I'll take a day to mind the farm, laying the paved path and picket fence I've been plotting out all week, or decorating my cottage to maximize its rustic coziness.

The only other game I've played where every avenue feels so meaningful is Old School RuneScape (OSRS). Like Fields of Mistria, OSRS is unique in the sense that no single pathway is a 'correct' use of your time. Some players dedicate their accounts solely to leveling non-combat skills – my vice is spending too much on my house – and like Mistria, there is so much to be done that I never feel like I'm wasting my time. So what if I want to stick a film on and chop trees instead of fighting bosses? That's woodcutting XP, baby!

Slowly playing Fields of Mistria makes for a cozier world, but it also creates a better game. I've just reached my second spring, and because I didn't prioritize hoovering up all season-specific museum donations the year prior, there's plenty left to do. Besides the museum, there are still unfulfilled requests from last spring to complete, competitions to win, and a certain bathhouse owner to woo.

I'll get to it all eventually. But by approaching Fields of Mistria as I would the best RPGs – playing not to complete them, but to stoke immersion – I'm settling in for the long haul, and recommend you do the same. If you're jumping into Mistria for the first time now that it's fully released, be sure to take things easy. Walk for the sake of it. Pop by the inn on Friday night. So much work has gone into making Fields of Mistria feel like a living, breathing world, and it would be a shame to let it pass you by.

We've ranked the best farming games, and you'll see at least one familiar face on there

As Marvel superheroes go, Spider-Man has suffered a lot more than most. Aside from losing Tony Stark and Aunt May in the MCU, the death of Uncle Ben is often the catalyst that's used to kickstart Peter Parker's entire hero's journey. But through it all, Spider-Man has always remained true to himself, unwaveringly optimistic in the face of loss.

That's his whole schtick really, this resilience that helps carry Spidey through his darkest moments. But Spider-Man: Brand New Day pushes the limits of that more than ever before, not through the death of another loved one but because of an even crueller twist that our hero might never recover from.

At the end of the previous film, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange made everyone forget who Peter Parker is. This spell was needed to help save the day, but that hasn't made it any easier for Peter, who's been forced to live the last four years in solitude.

By the time Brand New Day begins, MJ has moved on with a new boyfriend, still unable to remember that Peter was once the love of her life. Peter remembers, though, haunted by the knowledge that they can never be together again. Or can they?

When Jean Grey discovers Spider-Man's true identity, she threatens to take control of MJ's mind and use her against him, as she has so many other people already. Terrified for MJ's safety, Peter races across town and whisks her away somewhere safe.

Once it seems like the coast is clear, the pair discuss what's going on. Spider-Man tries to explain why MJ is being targeted without giving away who he really is, but talk inevitably turns to their history together. It's as if MJ is on the cusp of remembering, something Peter and we feel when she pulls up the bottom of his mask to take a closer look at him.

In a scene reminiscent of that iconic upside-down snog from 2002's Spider-Man, the pair smooch and embrace. True love's kiss seems to have broken the spell at last and Peter couldn't be happier. That is, until MJ starts describing herself in the third person as they embrace…

Web of deceit

Yep, it turns out Jean has been controlling MJ this entire time just to mess with him, even going so far as to kiss him knowing how much it will hurt.

It's one thing to possess the woman Peter loves, but it's another thing entirely to trick him in such a way. Realising that MJ doesn't remember him after all, that he's no better off than he was four years ago when the spell was first cast, is devastating for Peter in ways Marvel rarely attempts. And to top it all off, Jean then rubs salt in the wound by revealing Peter is never in MJ's thoughts at all.

The scene ends with Jean forcing MJ to jump off the roof, but it's the deceit that hurts most. Spider-Man was always going to catch her in time, but the impact of this cruel twist can't be undone in quite the same way.

During a brief moment of respite, MJ later finds a letter that Peter wrote but never gave to her, one which explains the spell's impact in full and his undying love for her. She quickly confronts him, upset that he didn't give the letter to her himself years earlier.

Peter explains that he was only trying to protect MJ before going on to admit that he still loves her, that she's still everything to him and always will be. But MJ is unable to say any of this back to Peter. She understands why the girl in the letter loved him so much, but she is no longer that girl.

"I don’t love you," says MJ, adding, "I don't even know you."

What Jean did earlier was incredibly sadistic, but the words that come out of MJ's mouth now are even more gut-wrenching – and that's because they're actually true. She really doesn't love him anymore. Sure, the spell's to blame, but the impact is very much the same. Peter is heartbroken beyond measure, experiencing a new kind of loss that tears him apart at the seams.

Poetry in emotion

Both of these scenes hit incredibly hard for us too. After watching this pair fall for each other these past nine years, seeing MJ reject Peter like this is really tough to see. Any breakup would be bad enough, but this is even worse because of how unfair it feels. They should be together, yet they can't be, all because Peter had to make a sacrifice for the greater good.

Such emotional storytelling is still a rarity in the MCU. Some moments have hit hard, of course, but most of them usually revolve around the concept of death. Yondu's funeral, Vision's love persevering, Spidey's own "death" at the end of Avengers: Infinity War… Death is par for the course when it comes to superheroes who risk their lives every day, so these recurring themes are to be expected. What isn't expected is just how gut-wrenching this film's emotional beats are with nary a death in sight.

The circumstances might be fantastical, but the feelings involved are rooted in feelings of loss and rejection that anyone watching can relate to. It helps that Tom Holland has never been better as Spider-Man than he is in these moments, and Zendaya continues to be pitch-perfect too in her delivery, firm in her feeling with a hint of melancholy that comes with knowing the pain her words will cause.

Loss and how Peter keeps fighting despite it remains the driving force, but in unexpected ways that avoid recycling past stories in favour of something new. More than Aunt May's death, more even than Peter saying goodbye to MJ at the end of No Way Home, it's in the pain of these evolving relationship dynamics where Brand New Day sets itself apart as Spidey's most mature MCU outing yet.

What remains to be seen is whether Peter can weather the storm long enough for MJ to return to him. The end of the film hints that this might be possible, especially when we see her holding the same necklace Peter gifted her in Spider-Man: Far From Home. Still, true love might not be enough to break the spell, especially with Doomsday and Secret Wars looming on the horizon.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is out now. For more, check out the breakdown of the Spider-Man: Brand New Day ending and our ranking of the best Spider-Man movies.

Big Walk is a multiplayer puzzle game. It's an open-world co-op game where you explore an island and successfully complete challenges with friends using in-game proximity voice chat. It is a "friendslop" game, insomuch as that means a relatively low-lift game that you play with friends featuring sometimes-wacky physics. Big Walk is a new game from House House, creator of the infamously beloved Untitled Goose Game.

Big Walk is a COVID game.

Let me explain. Big Walk isn't about illness or pandemics, unless I've really misunderstood something, but it is thematically and mechanically a direct result of COVID. There's a direct line between the two, and it's not even subtext. You don't even have to take my word for it.

"End of 2020 was when we wrapped up Goose Game and we'd been obviously cooped up in our house under lockdowns and not spending time with each other," says House House developer Nico Disseldorp when I ask why the team decided to stake its future on a game where you walk around an unnamed island for indeterminate reasons. "We'd gone from working on a video game, standing behind each other and pointing at the computer and hanging out every day to only really spending time with each other in video games. And that was the time in the week where we felt most connected to each other."

"So we said," continues Disseldorp, "'Well, let's make one of these video games that we can play together. It'll be fun for us, and we'll get to spend time with each other inside the video game we're making, but let's make one where it's all about the feeling of togetherness. So rather than we're going to be hanging out together while doing something else, it's like the video game will be about hanging out together, and we'll figure out what that means as we go along.'"

Walker-talker man

You could more broadly associate the rise of "friendslop" games with post-COVID development, and people certainly have. It doesn't exactly take a genius to answer the question of: why are so many video games where you just sort of hang out and complete tasks with friends, regardless of distance, coming out and resonating? Why, perhaps it was the sudden and stark isolation of quarantine and distancing that went on for months and years, starving people of social interaction globally!

Trying to talk about Big Walk's mechanics and how they grow out of this fertile soil is difficult in part because it's a puzzle game. If I say too much, I've basically given away the puzzle. But it's also difficult in precisely the way that makes it a COVID game. More than anything else, Big Walk is about learning to communicate effectively and collaborate despite numerous obstacles deliberately frustrating or even entirely preventing both.

Because the various items and puzzles have no names or designations, any given group of players has to start from scratch on describing, expressing, and instructing. How do you indicate "yes" from a distance if someone can't hear you? What does "no" look like? What do you call the little… gourd-looking key items? (Every session I've ever played ended up calling these "babies," by the way. Your mileage may vary.) This is, you'll be shocked to learn, entirely deliberate on the part of the developer.

"We've kind of left a lot of built-in ambiguity – lots of the items, the characters, lots of the spaces in the world, they're deliberately a bit difficult to describe," says Disseldorp, "and that's part of the game is for you to figure out what language you want to use with your friends."

"This isn't a game where you can just not describe them," adds Disseldorp. "There's so much teamwork that you will need to kind of build that shared language. But through doing that, you take ownership and build a shared understanding of the game together."

Art is reflective of the time in which it was made, regardless of intent, but I'd argue that Big Walk is absolutely intentional. If you work together, regardless of how isolating the distance and difficulty to communicate or how big the problem (or walk), you can come to a solution together. There is, I think, a lesson somewhere in there.

Big Walk is currently available on PC, PS5, and Nintendo Switch 2. If you're looking for something in a similar vein, be sure to check out our ranking of the best co-op games.

Christmas has come early this year, as after being shown behind closed doors at CinemaCon in April, the first trailer for the upcoming action sequel Violent Night 2 is here.

David Harbour is back as the potty-mouthed, all-fighting Santa Claus we met four years ago when he saved a family from a deadly home invasion in the 2022 original. However, as you can see in the new clip below, ol Nick's actions have come back to bite him as he finds himself on the naughty list. Now living as a regular human without powers, Santa begins working at a local mall. But when a criminal organization led by Jared Harris targets the building, he must use the power of Christmas, aka his fighting fists, to protect his new community.

Lucky for Santa, he has new friends by his side, including Anaconda's Daniela Melchior, King Bach and Sopranos star Joe Pantoliano. But the big reveal comes right at the end of the trailer, where we get our first look at Kristen Bell as Mrs. Claus.

We sat down with director Tommy Wirkola and producer Kelly McCormick to break down the trailer and discuss their approach to the sequel, including how the team kicked the action up a notch and why Bell is the perfect person to play Harbour's better half.

Bigger sets and a badder Santa

Right away we can see that Violent Night 2 is on a much bigger scale than the first movie. "It feels like a bigger world, more of a bigger character canvas, and I would say also kind of a bigger story," explains Wirkola. However, the director says with that comes the challenge of wanting to "give people what they want and liked about the first one without overdoing it, and also at the same time giving them new stuff and expanding on the myth." However, the director says he "knew pretty early on we wanted the setting of the mall."

The sequel was shot on location in and around a real mall in Winnipeg, Canada. McCormick reveals that the mall was being renovated at the time, but was still half open with some stores still functioning. "We filled a lot of the empty places with product placement, and we were able to use the two-story mall to kind of create this Christmas-like world." McCormick says this worked in their favour, as they were able to turn the top level into Santa's Village, but still managed to keep on budget.

Wirkola was able to include scenes about Santa's "backstory and Viking history" that were cut the first time around. Wirkola also says that after the 2022 film hit screens, he and Harbour checked in with fans online and saw that viewers wanted to know more about Santa's origins, so they implemented just that.

The team also managed to slip in a few Easter eggs, some of which you can spot in the trailer. During the fight in the kitchen, the two assailants look rather like the burglars from Home Alone, and Santa's new position at the mall reminds us a lot of Elf and Bad Santa. The oven scene also harkens back to Hansel and Gretel, a fairytale which Wirkola has adapted in the past. However, the director says that one was not his idea: "I blame the writers for that."

Meet the new Mrs Claus

One way in which the sequel expands on Santa's backstory is by introducing his wife. We are used to seeing Mrs. Claus presented as an older, homely woman who is often waiting at home in the North Pole, baking cookies and looking after the elves. However, from the first trailer we can see that Kristen Bell's Mrs. Claus flips that stereotype on its head. Santa's long-lost wife steps into frame looking strong and capable, with a hammer in hand, ready to help her husband kick some ass.

After voicing our favourite Norwegian Disney princess in the Frozen franchise, it makes sense that the Violent Night team would want Bell to play their Viking queen. But McCormick reveals that the casting kind of came out of nowhere.

"I don't even know how it happened," says McCormick. "She's a huge fan of the franchise, which we didn't know at the time. And she and David Harbour are really old, dear friends, so I think that had something to do with it." This is the first live-action movie Bell has appeared in in some years, which McCormick says is due to family commitments. So the team had just a few days to shoot Bell's scenes. But even though Bell only appears in part of the movie, McCormick says "she has such an impact on the movie," adding, "She's just so perfect as our Mrs. Claus. I feel really lucky to have her."

"She is so perfect in the role, and she's a great partner for David's Santa. In the little time we have with them on screen, we really get a sense of their relationship, their history, and they really played well off each other," adds Wirkola. "She brought so much humanity and humor, and the moment she shows up, you just love that character… She's a great fighter."

Santa goes full John Wick

It's not just Mrs. Claus who is bringing the heat, though, as without his powers, Harbour's Santa has no choice but to put 'em up and fight the bad guys rather than using his magical nose twinkle. This gave Wirkola and McCormick, best known for producing action hits like Nobody, Bullet Train, and Atomic Blonde, the chance to extend the franchise's fighting scenes.

"Instead, he uses his brawn and more Christmas decorations, which is really what the whole movie has always been about. Like, how can you weaponize Christmas decorations?" says McCormick. Wirkola adds, "We had a lot of fun coming up with set pieces and kind of giving him big challenges without him having the reliance on his Santa magic."

However, powerless Santa gives the audience a chance to get to know Harbour's antihero on a human level. "It also was an opportunity to explore the emotional side," adds McCormick. "Who are you when your powers are taken away? If you're Santa Claus, who are you if there's no more Christmas? I think a lot of us feel like our identity is so wrapped into what we do, that I think it'll be really relatable."

Wirkola echoes that the sequel will really get down to what Christmas really means for Santa. "Christmas can mean so many different things for so many people, but he has to figure out what it means for him or what it meant for him when all this began."

However, don't expect Violent Night's Santa to turn into a jolly, ho, ho, ho-ing bundle of joy by the end of the sequel, as Wirkola isn't finished with the franchise yet. Although the director doesn't want to "jinx" himself, the filmmaker can see space for a potential third movie. "There's still a lot of mystery around his character, and especially around him and Santa Claus and the workshop and how that works and all that stuff," says the Dead Snow helmer. "So yeah, I mean, if we're lucky enough to make another one, it feels like we, at one point, need to address the North Pole."

Violent Night 2 hits screens on December 4, 2026. For more, check out our guide to movie release dates and keep up with new movies on the way in 2026 and beyond.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day has arrived, and maybe you're being completely and totally normal about it. Or, maybe you're like me, and the potential storylines that could come next for Spider-Man 5 and beyond are keeping you up at night à la the Charlie Day red-string meme from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Because Spider-Man: Brand New Day picks up the pieces from No Way Home quite nicely and also leaves several open paths for what could happen next to Tom Holland's Spider-Man, I've dusted off my comic book collection and put together a list of potential plot theories for Spidey's future in the MCU. Some are a little far-fetched, and others make a whole lot of sense (to me, anyway). From Peter teaming up with another Spider-Man, who isn't Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield, to what could happen in Jake Schrier's upcoming X-Men movie... I've speculated about it all below.

But be warned: there are major spoilers below. When you're done, check out our list of 43 Spider-Man: Brand New Day Easter eggs.

Ned Leeds becomes the Hobgoblin

Hear me out: this is set up in Spider-Man: No Way Home as a potential future storyline, and then made all the more valid following Ned's graduation from MIT in Brand New Day.

In Spider-Man: No Way Home, Tobey Maguire's Peter 2 tells Ned that his best friend died in his arms after trying to kill him. This is in reference to the events of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3, which saw Peter's best friend Harry Osborn decide to avenge his father's death and become the second iteration of the Green Goblin (to which Andrew Garfield's Peter 3 nods, as a similar storyline followed in The Amazing Spider-Man 2). Ned then looks at Tom Holland's Peter and promises that he will never, ever, turn into a villain and try to kill his best friend.

Two things to note here: 1) After Doctor Strange's spell, Peter isn't Ned's best friend anymore, and 2) in the comics, Ned Leeds is revealed to be the Hobgoblin, a wannabe Green Goblin who manages to get his hands on Norman Osborn's Goblin Formula and tech with the intention of killing Spider-Man.

Would there need to be a Norman Osborn or Oscorp on Earth-616 to make this work? Well, the big evil tech corporation job that MJ turned down in Brand New Day sure did sound a bit like Oscorp... so there is that possibility. But no, we wouldn't necessarily need existing Goblin tech for Ned to become the Hobgoblin, because he's smart enough to develop the tech himself. The Spidey Tracker that Ned invents is next-level surveillance tech that is even able to track Spidey on another planet. That alone tells me that ol' Ned could whip up some seriously scary technology with the right (or wrong) resources.

Miles Morales is the Spider-Man tracked "off-planet"

In that brief post-credits scene, we see a close-up of Ned's Spidey Tracker. The tracker shows Spidey on a planet that goes far beyond the moon of Earth-616, and registers his status as "off-planet." There are two reasons why I think this could very well be Miles Morales, and, once again, the first occurs in Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Towards the end of No Way Home, Electro (Jamie Foxx) finally sees the Spidey from his universe, Andrew Garfield, unmasked. In a sweet and funny moment, Electro says, "You're from Queens, you got that suit, you help poor people... I just thought you was gonna be black." Garfield's Spidey immediately apologizes, to which Electro says, "There's gotta be a black Spider-Man out there somewhere." Because this is the movie that cracked open the multiverse, this scene alone meant a live-action Miles movie was absolutely possible.

The second reason is the simple fact that Kevin Feige recently confirmed that they were working on a live-action Miles Morales movie.

It's also possible that this interplanetary Spider-Man could be Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield (though Garfield laughed and said he had absolutely no idea when asked about this by ScreenRant). It could also, perhaps, be the planet Battleworld... which is where all the heroes of Earth-616 are sent to fight to the death by the Beyonder, and is the central location of the Avengers: Secret Wars comics... which serve as the basis for the upcoming movie of the same name... but the planet is supposed to be much further out than what we see on the Spidey Tracker, so anything is possible, really.

Peter Parker encounters the alien symbiote in Avengers: Secret Wars

Whether Tom Holland wants to admit it on a podcast or not, Avengers: Secret Wars is the comic book arc that introduces the alien symbiote that gives Spidey his iconic black suit and eventually attaches itself to Eddie Brock, who indeed becomes Venom. In Secret Wars #8, Peter Parker encounters the alien symbiote, which drops into his hand and spreads over his entire body, turning his costume black and white. It isn't until The Amazing Spider-Man #300 that the symbiote returns and attaches itself to scorned journalist Eddie Brock while he's sitting in a church asking God to forgive him for being awful to Spider-Man (much like that popularly memed scene from Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 that sees Topher Grace sitting in the pews asking God to kill Spider-Man, though not as funny).

While the black suit and the introduction of Venom are an important part of Secret Wars, the overall arc sees the Avengers, Fantastic Four, and more trapped on a planet known as Battleworld, where they're forced to fight the villains of that planet essentially to the death. It'll be the most ambitious MCU adaptation for sure (but I do really want to see Holland's Spidey in that suit).

Spider-Man is indirectly responsible for the creation of anti-mutant technology

Peter is sort of directly responsible... though the inhibitor wasn't made with ill intentions. In the comics, an anti-mutant device known as an inhibitor collar pops up in X-Men #141. The collar, created by mutant-killing military scientist Bolivar Trask, was placed around the neck of any mutant who was wrongfully thrown into the South Bronx Mutant Containment Center as part of the passing of an unjust law known as the Mutant Registration Act. The inhibitor collar prevents mutants and any super-powered beings from using their powers.

In Brand New Day, Peter develops the technology with the intention to control his own rapidly changing powers, while also knowing that it can be used on just about any being with powers. He attempts to attach it to the Hulk, but no dice. He successfully attaches it to Jean Grey, whom he turns over to Bill Metzger under the guise of 'doing the right thing.' We see Bill and his cronies use it as a way to subdue Jean in order to experiment on her, and we never see it again after Spidey is shot and Jean is rescued. We also never see Bill again, either.

It's important to note that the Department of Damage Control was using tech from captured/defeated villains, such as Shocker, to develop weaponry that can take down super-powered beings. You might recall that they used Shocker's arm console to develop guns that have the power to dissolve Peter's artificial webbing. It's likely that Bill and his cronies took the inhibitor technology and are hiding out somewhere... and that this will all be revisited in the upcoming standalone X-Men movie.

Spider-Man teams up with the X-Men

Think of it this way: if Peter was able to invent the inhibitor, the X-Men might need his help in order to destroy or reverse it. There's also the fact that Spider-Man and the X-Men have teamed up several times throughout comic book history, including one specific arc where Spider-Man and Jean Grey work together at the X-Mansion to mentor young mutants.

But there's also a chance (hear me out) that Spider-Man could be teaming up with the X-Men to take down Dark Phoenix... which is the supervillain Jean Grey turns into after being overwhelmed by her own powers and manipulated by Mastermind. The ending of Brand New Day does imply that Jean is on a bus headed upstate to the X-Men mansion (which also implies that the X-Men haven't even been formed as a team yet) and is therefore about to learn how to use her powers correctly and for good. But because we've already seen just how powerful she is and what evil she's capable of right off the bat, it wouldn't surprise me if the MCU decided to go ahead and adapt the Dark Phoenix Saga.

Dark Phoenix aside, Jean has always been morally gray in the comics (from killing Rogue to making Cyclops kill Professor X), but introducing a founding member of the X-Men into the MCU as a supervillain was a choice... and one they might decide to go a bit deeper with.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is in theaters now. For more on the MCU, here's our guide to how to watch all the Marvel movies in order.

PATCH NOTES v04.08.2026 – Ubisoft and Insomniac Games are enjoying a healthy boost to player counts across Assassin's Creed and Spider-Man games off the back of cinema blockbusters, with numbers so staggering it points to an exciting new normal for the relationship between how games and movies help one another extend experiences.

What's going on this week in gaming?

• 2018's Assassin's Creed Odyssey's active player count is surging
• Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered returns to Steam's Top 10 best-selling games list

Why is this happening now?

• Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has reignited interest in the Ancient Greek time period
• Spider-Man: Brand New Day secures second-biggest opening weekend in box office history

The Hollywood Patch is live

• The last week has been a reminder that sometimes the box office can deliver just as meaningful of a live video game update as its developers

It's unusual to see such vast spikes in sales and player counts of older games like Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Marvel's Spider-Man, and in this case, blockbuster movies are the driving forces. It highlights a shift in the way that people are interacting with big adaptations, as they search for ways to stay in these worlds once the credits roll.

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has become a monocultural moment, dominating cinemas and conversation for weeks. It's also sending players straight back to Assassin's Creed Odyssey, with analysts estimating that the 2018 release has seen a 90% player engagement jump in the 10 days following the film's release.

AC Odyssey features a lot of the same mythology as Nolan's latest despite not actually being about Homer's Odyssey at all, and with RPGs having a bit of a moment in the 2020s, it makes sense that vast open-world games that feature similar themes, settings, or characters as a major film can receive a second wind by association.

A similar trend is emerging out of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, though this time via direct brand synergy. The film has reportedly brought in $927 million across its opening weekend, success which has inspired Marvel's Spider-Man and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 to launch back into Steam's top 10 best-sellers. For Sony and PlayStation, it's proof that a great movie can be as effective as a big game update.

Meta Shift

Both The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day demonstrate how successful movies can help revitalize older games of a similar or shared IP. Assassin's Creed Odyssey has immediately become a go-to game to play after watching The Odyssey, featuring many mythological elements seen in the film's epic poem source material, while sales of the Marvel's Spider-Man games have benefitted from a timely Steam sale in line with Brand New Day's launch.

The trend of film-game crossover speaks to more than just the enduring success of select franchises. We've seen a general increase in licensed game adaptations (or brand new instalments) of movie IPs as of late, with 007 First Light and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle being two notable new games that center on icons of the big screen. There's even an untitled John Wick game also in the works from Saber Interactive!

Paired with Halloween: The Game and Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, two licensed upcoming horror games launching in 2026 that feature some of the most famous names in the biz, the potential for symbiotic success as film IPs cross over to gaming is stronger than ever.

But will it work the other way? I'll be interested to see how the new Zelda movie affects sales of games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, for example, and the same can be said of the numerous other upcoming video game movies out there. Me and my colleagues on the GamesRadar+ team often find ourselves on a bit of an IP kick after a fresh release, be it film or gaming. That's just how fandom works, and gone are the days where movie prestige outpaced that of video games.

Patch Notes summary

Ancient Greek-set Assassin's Creed Odyssey has seen a 90% increase in active players as Christopher Nolan's take on The Odyssey storms theaters. At the same time, the Marvel's Spider-Man games have soared into the Top 10 Best-sellers list on Steam, bolstered by an attractive discount to celebrate Spider-Man: Brand New Day's opening weekend.

It's clear that fans are seeking to extend their experiences of both film and video games by helping themselves to both. It just goes to show how the power of an excellent IP can bring years-old games back out of retirement – even if you might have to dust off an old console or take advantage of a Steam sale to make it happen.

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Rumors were rife that Spider-Man: Brand New Day would finally bridge a divide that fans have been waiting decades to heal between the MCU and the former Fox X-Men, as speculation swirled around Sadie Sink playing a familiar red-headed hero.

Yet, even as the Sadie Sink reveal played out in the cinema, I stifled a small squeal as Peter's facial recognition from his AI-sidekick EV revealed her to be none other than Jean Grey. Sure, we'd had a brief post-credit scene after The Marvels when Monica Rambeau wakes up in an alternative universe with Beast looking after her, and the mayhem of cameos in Doctor Strange: The Multiverse of Madness (which the less said about the better), but nothing longer-lasting than a brief dopamine fix of seeing a surprise character cameo.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day collides two universes with such ease that you wonder if they always co-existed together. Director Destin Daniel Cretton has ensured that first and foremost this feels like a quintessential Spider-Man film, reminiscent more of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield's maturer take on the web-headed hero than the vigorous, quippy teenage version that Tom Holland has become known for. As much as the slow-motion swings, on-the-fly jokes, and identity crisis about who he is behind the mask feel inherently Spider-Man, Brand New Day also doubles as a great X-Men film.

No inhibitions

After an immense period of isolation following the trauma of losing Aunt May and having his identity wiped from the memory of everyone he's ever loved, Peter's spidey-senses become more unreliable. Blackouts, headaches, and destructive behaviour follow as his mutation develops and interrupts his friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man routine. His body's physical reaction to the burnout that comes from never switching off causes his DNA to mutate to become more spider than human, as his arachnid hormones spike. Similar to the plot of many of the X-Men films, Peter now has to decide whether to embrace this darker, less inhibited version of his powers, or to suppress them, control them in an effort to go back to 'normal.' Or as normal as a man who can crawl around the ceiling in a lycra onesie can be.

To begin with, Peter attempts to fix the problem in a Tony Stark-like way by building an inhibitor that will decrease his spider hormones and control his DNA from mutating any further. Despite warnings from Bruce Banner about the dangers of this technology – which could be used to control any enhanced individual (and may be setting up a future X-Men movie) – Peter builds his own means of genetic silencing to cure the parts of his abilities that he doesn't like, namely its self-destructive, primal animalistic side.

The inhibitor is reminiscent of Agents of Shield, where a device was used to control Daisy, aka Quake's, powers to prevent her from imploding the Earth. As opposed to simply copying the plot of X-Men with a serum that cures enhanced individuals, this scientific approach feels far more suited to the former aspiring MIT student.

Back in the Fox days, Magneto's biggest concern was humans creating cures for mutants to not only muzzle their powers but get rid of them entirely, out of fear and prejudice. It comes up time and time again in the X-Men prequels, too, that the biggest threat to mutants (apart from the in-fighting about whether to trust or fear humans) is experimentation on them to create a cure or inhibitor that would stop them from simply existing as themselves.

Mutant mayhem

In the Avengers universe, Peter wouldn't be called a mutant, just superhuman, as he wasn't born with a genetic mutation. But, of course, just like Jean, he is a mutant. Half spider, half human, an individual who is special with powers that other people don’t understand and can fear and want to control. Part of the reason that Jean seamlessly slots into this world is that she’s almost a mirror to Peter.

Peter has to go on his own journey to realise that Jean, as powerful and dangerous as she is, is being exploited simply because she's different. To begin with, this ignorance of the suffering that mutants can face (Mysterio incident aside, he's always been celebrated as one of Earth's Mightiest Heroes) leads Peter to trust the suave director of Damage Control and use his universal inhibitor as a means to stop the supposed baddie, Jean.

Instead, in true X-Men style, the department experiments on Jean in the hopes of manipulating her powers to replicate them and turn regular individuals into telepathic weapons of destruction. In the MCU, we've briefly seen experimentation on Bucky, but this weaponising of superpowers, whatever the cost, is a trope predominantly seen in the X-Men universe.

In the end, Peter learns to embrace what makes him special, as it's a gift, not a curse – a relatable message that comes through time and time again in the X-Men comics and films. Jean feels fully integrated into this universe, an equal and mirror to Peter's own suffering, as they both have to learn to live after immense trauma. And come to terms with the darker, more unyielding depths of their powers that trigger after the devastating loss of people they love.

Alone together

Brand New Day pulls off a rare feat to be able to merge two existing franchises in a way that feels seamless and reminiscent of the crossovers in earlier Avengers movies. Jean also fits in with Peter, as she's a young mutant who is trying to come to terms with who she is outside of her powers and how she navigates this profound responsibility alone. All of which Peter can instinctively relate to, in a way other heroes might not.

The gradual introduction to characters from the wider Marvel canon also helps establish the dynamics and structures of this world ahead of Avengers: Doomsday. A major part of Marvel's shortcomings in the Multiverse Saga has been how disconnected the universe has become. So, it was a welcome change to see echoes of The Infinity Saga's approach to universe-building in Brand New Day. Naturally, Yelena would be concerned with 'big potato stuff' as part of the New Avengers, but is on hand to offer advice to the 'sad' Spider-Man when he stumbles across a potato that's slightly bigger than the 'small, baby' problems he's meant to be solving.

The film also naturally sets up the next film in the MCU slate, Avengers: Doomsday, as it starts to bring different heroes together – Yelena, Peter, Jean and Frank, aka The Punisher – as well as introducing a new technology that most likely will appear again in the future. If we learnt anything from Ultron, it's that even the smartest heroes, when desperate, will utilise questionable inventions to try and protect the Earth from alien invaders, such as the incoming storm with Doctor Doom.

Ultimately, Brand New Day should be used as the blueprint for future MCU crossovers as it merges multiple existing worlds, familiar storylines and characters to show how they co-exist together in one universe. In fact, they may be the only people who can truly understand the isolation, burden, and trauma that comes with being an enhanced individual in a society that fears anyone who is different.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is out now. For more, check out the breakdown of the Spider-Man: Brand New Day ending and our ranking of the best Spider-Man movies.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is out, and we still don't know who Eman Esfandi is playing (aside from being MJ's new boyfriend, of course). Some fans believe they've figured it out, but given the new influx of wild fan theories... I'm not so sure.

Warning: Mild spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day below!

The common belief seems to be that Esfandi is playing Paul Rabin, who made his first appearance in Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 6 #1. One fan says that the open captions screenings of Spider-Man: Brand New Day list the actor's character name as Paul, though Esfandi is only listed as "The Boyfriend" in the movie's credits. Until we have public proof of this, however, all we can do is speculate.

In the comics, Peter and Mary Jane encounter Paul after entering his universe while fighting a villain known as the Emissary. Long story short, Mary Jane ends up accidentally sending Peter back to Earth-616 and ends up stuck with Paul for four whole years... and they end up adopting two children. Could Esfandi's new character be Paul?

Well, some other fans think MJ's new boyfriend is either Tarantula, or Boomerang. There's really no basis for either theory other than the characters have similar facial features to Esfandi, but one fan pointed out that there'd be some funny irony in MJ dating a "knock-off" version of Peter, seeing as Tarantula is more or less just that (though much scarier looking in appearance). Another theory, though not as popular, is that Esfandi is playing Harry Osborn (and that the job MJ turns down was indeed a position at OsCorp).

We're not sure if Marvel will go to Sadie Sink-levels of secrecy to keep the identity of Esfandi's character on the low... but a Paul confirmation could be coming our way sooner or later.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is in theaters now. For more, check out our breakdowns of the Spider-Man: Brand New Day ending and Spider-Man: Brand New Day post-credits scene.

My physical movie collection is my baby. I covet my shelves of videotapes, DVDs, and Blu-rays just as much as my game collection. Not only do I love having a piece of media that I physically hold in my hands, but owning one of my favorite movies on DVD or Blu-ray means I can always get access to that film without having to rely on a good internet connection or whether it's even available on a streaming service to begin with.

Should Netflix ever decide it no longer wants to host Spielberg's 1975 blockbuster Jaws, it's okay, as I own multiple copies of my favorite film that's forever made me too terrified to swim in the ocean. Yet cultivating this collection hasn't been an easy feat. I have made a lot of mistakes in my over 15 years of collecting Blu-rays alone, from over-spending to accidentally grabbing bootleg releases of films that are no longer in print. But the cool thing about making mistakes is that I share what I learned with a new generation of physical media enthusiasts.

I've laid out my top tips in total below for those of you who may be suffering from streaming fatigue and are starting a new physical collecting journey. Just remember that while you can invest in a new swanky Blu-ray player to play your growing collection, any disc-edition PS5 can run both standard and 4K UHD discs. If you've already got the Sony console in tow, sticking with it can help save you some cash, which you can put towards more Blu-rays. Or DVDs, I won't judge.

1 - You don't need to own every single Blu-ray release in existence

Before you go buying up every Blu-ray that you find, my number one tip is to try and narrow down what type of films you want to collect and watch. This is always the most realistic approach to collecting any form of physical media. Not everyone has an unlimited budget, and so narrowing the types of movies or TV you want to own physically can really help make building your collection a more realistic and approachable endeavour.

For example, I focus primarily on collecting Blu-rays and films of the horror and anime genre - with general film and TV shows being secondary. In my living room right now, I have shelves dedicated purely to horror and purely to anime, and it helps keep me focused whenever I'm in my local second-hand store or browsing films online as to what to grab. Just the other week I stumbled into CEX (a chain of second-hand media and gaming stores in the UK) and immediately went to the anime section and picked up a second-hand copy of the Magic Knight Rayearth: The Complete Series boxset by All the Anime.

I'm really happy with my latest acquisition as I not only got it for far cheaper than its MSRP, but it's one that's frequently sold out at retailers online, including All The Anime's own online storefront. Yet, had I gone to CEX without that 'anime' focus, I may not have immediately spotted the boxset. Not to mention, without that focus, I could have spent far more than would be healthy for my bank account to endure. I really don't like making that mistake, and neither do my savings.

2 - Pre-ordering new 4K Blu-ray releases can help avoid disappointment

Some 4K UHD Blu-ray releases can be highly sought after, particularly if they come with a whole bunch of physical goodies. With that in mind, I highly recommend pre-ordering any that you have your eye on to avoid disappointment and having to hand over your hard-earned cash to re-sellers on eBay down the line.

This is a tip that isn't always manageable, especially if you've got a limited budget or if a film drops weeks before payday. However, it's your best bet to avoid dealing with some serious FOMO. Had I not bothered to pre-order the Dogma 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, I'd have been kicking myself as it remained out of stock for a while at UK retailers like Zavvi, where I predominantly pick up the latest 4K releases.

However, I knew I had to grab it as soon as possible, as not only is it one of my all-time favorite films, but it had been out of print for years due to rights issues. That gave me an inclination that it would sell out fast, which nicely rolls into my next bit of advice.

3 - Always do a little bit of research before you buy

Not all Blu-ray releases are created equal. Just because a film or TV series is getting a new physical release doesn't mean it's going to be produced with the utmost care and quality like the rest of your collection, so research is always vital.

For example, I'm a huge fan of the Dragon Ball anime franchise, and yet I don't own the series physically besides some of the movies. Why? Because the Blu-ray releases often don't look fantastic, and I'd rather wait until another company comes along and gives the series what it's due. The way the episodes of Dragon Ball Z are remastered often looks blurry and gives me a bit of motion sickness. As a result, to this day I still don't own one of my favorite series physically, but I'm glad I did research beforehand so I didn't waste my cash.

Research can help in other ways too. As I mentioned above, being familiar with the fact that Dogma was out of print for so long was partially what spurred me to ensure I grabbed its recent re-release. Taking your time to read up about upcoming Blu-ray releases, how they're made, and what's included with the film can help ensure you have a collection that you're proud of, and one you hopefully haven't spent more to build than you needed to.

4 - Never be afraid to shop second-hand

I wouldn't have as big a collection of DVDs, Blu-ray, and 4K Blu-rays had it not been for thrift stores, eBay, and other second-hand retailers. While I get it's always a nice serotonin boost to unwrap the cellophane of your movie for the first time, buying pre-owned Blu-rays can open up your collection to a whole new world of possibilities.

For one, it can make collecting physical media far more budget-friendly. There have been so many instances where I've stumbled in a local second hand store only to find a film I didn't yet own for £1-2, which was, at the time, sitting online at Amazon for at least £10. Sure, every time I've done this, the cases aren't always in the most immaculate condition, but saving cash (which I can put towards even more movies) can be far better in the long run.

Being open to adding second-hand Blu-rays to your growing collection can not only be better financially, but it can be a great way of finding gems or movies you wouldn't have otherwise known to watch. Plus, nothing beats having a rummage to find your next favorite movie.

5 - Familiarize yourself with the best US and UK Blu-ray retailers

This tip is a biggie, as without it I'd not have the collection I do today. There's a myriad of US and UK retailers that stock Blu-rays and 4K UHD releases, but not all of them will have the same bountiful spread of new releases, nor will they have the same kind of sales that can help fill up your shelves.

If you're based in the US, I've gathered a list of the top online stores for picking up the latest Blu-ray releases down below:

• Amazon: regular discounts across a wide range of Blu-ray releases
• Criterion: a huge variety of Blu-ray types presented perfectly for cineaphiles
• Walmart: provides super-low, budget-friendly prices on a range of blu-rays
• Zavvi: a huge range of limited edition 4K releases at competitive prices

When it comes to the UK, my personal favorites are Zavvi and HMV. Zavvi is well-known for supplying some of the snazziest limited edition releases, and it's where I instinctively went to grab my steelbook copy of the Jaws: 50th Anniversary Edition 4K UHD Blu-ray at launch. How many Jaws copies is too many?

HMV is also dependable for providing sales and discounts that cover a wide range of Blu-rays and 4K releases. Each payday I regularly check back in to see what I can grab, and even as I type these very words, the online store is currently running a 2 for £18 Collector's Blu-ray deal. I've gathered the two retailers, and a few more of my favorite places to shop here in the UK, down below:

• Amazon: regular discounts on a plethora of Blu-rays and film
• HMV: the best place for Blu-ray sales and offers
• Zavvi: great prices for limited edition Blu-ray releases

FAQ

• View all Blu-ray deals at Amazon

Already got plenty to watch? Check out our guides to the best gaming TVs, the best gaming chairs, and the best gaming headsets to help transform your gaming and movie-watching setup.

Mistfall Hunter's big idea is to mix the Soulslike with the extraction shooter. And while it's not the game's only idea, it's pretty darn close. There's a tense and moreish experience to be had here, but one that currently struggles to stand out from its influences. Though I suppose having a user interface that's about as friendly as a swarm of angry wasps is one way to stand out…

If your least-favorite part of Dark Souls was being able to lock onto your enemy, then boy is Mistfall Hunter the game for you. Everyone else will probably spend their first hour with it inventing new curse words as they attack empty areas right next to monsters over and over. Otherwise, Soulslike veterans will mostly feel right at home. Choose your class between warrior, mage, archer, and more, then dive into a world of brutal combat, limited heals, awkward jumping and flavor text on items you have no time to read because something is busy killing you.

After a preparation phase I'll moan about later, you take a boat ride to one of two areas for some monster-slaying and loot-snatchin'. You've got limited time to explore before the gyldenmist, a gold-plated take on Fortnite's deadly storm, closes in. You might not even live to see that, as the map is full of rank-and-file monsters, elite beasts, and some very nasty bosses.

Treasure is everywhere, as are simple missions that are assigned to you by the cocky crow who also serves as the game's not-always-welcome narrator. You want to kill enough enemies to rack up experience points, find the best loot possible, maybe tackle a mission or two, and then escape alive so it wasn't all for nothing.

Complicating matters is that there are other players somewhere on this map with you. Spot each other, and you might just jump up and down (the universal multiplayer language for 'please don't hurt me') and break out the wave emotes. But it's far more likely you'll engage in a brutal fight to the death, considering how high the rewards are for killing another player. Even if it turns out they were carrying nothing but crap, you'll still get a good chunk of XP for it. Mistfall Hunter clearly isn't trying to be the next Arc Raiders. It incentivizes you to play mean.

You rang?

This is most clear during escapes. After a few minutes, you can use set points on the map to summon a sentient bell monster (but of course). Successfully beat the bell black and blue, and you can ring a bell of your own over its corpse that turns it into an escape route. Naturally, ringing a bell isn't exactly quiet behaviour. You might as well be yelling "Hear ye, hear ye! I'm escaping!"

An escape point can also only be used once. So if you and another player decide not to kill each other, well, one of you is still going to have to stay behind and wait several in-game minutes until that summon point can be used again. Unspoken camaraderie can quickly turn into brutal backstabs in seconds and I love it. It means successfully escaping is always a tense affair that has never once felt routine.

Leveling up gives you more skills to choose from and talent points you can refine them with. I chose the stealth class and can switch between a dagger and a pair of far more lethal swords. I can also turn invisible. Game-breaking? Not at all, thanks to about a million caveats. My invisibility only works for a limited time, has a horrible cooldown, and disappears if I climb a ladder, open a door, or so much as look at the game funny.

Oh, and turning invisible must be incredibly exciting, because my heart goes wild. If there's an invisible player nearby, you'll hear a booming heartbeat getting louder and louder the closer they are. It's a clever way of balancing invisibility without nerfing it completely.

I also get the ability to summon a swarm of crows, and once I sink a talent point into it, my murder of crows will also stun anyone unlucky enough to be caught in the swarm. Outstanding. It's great to see a skill tree full of clever toys I actually want to unlock and play with, which isn't always a given in this kind of game. It also means that even a disastrous run won't leave you completely empty-handed, as experience for kills isn't lost.

Hallowgrove, the opening area, is nicely varied, with different enemy types in each region, and lots of hiding spots and smartly hidden treasures. But, it's also all very seen-it-all-before. Grunts are just FromSoftware leftovers, right down to the way their corpses ragdoll upon defeat. Considering Elden Ring and its better imitators love getting creative with enemy design, it's disappointing. I play the best Soulslike games because I'm excited and terrified to see what lurks around every corner. That diminishes way too quickly here.

Re-quest log

The hub area is an absolute mess. Imagine Dark Souls 2's Majula, if it were bought out by Amazon. Shops, auction houses, blacksmiths, wineries, storage, a mystical tree, a mystical pool, a goddess statue, a… oh Christ, what is this for again? All the good work Arc Raiders did stuffing all this nonsense onto a few menu screens has been forgotten. It's a chore to explore, a relentless pack of exclamation mark icons screaming for your attention.

Navigating all this on PS5 is no picnic, either. Translating tons of PC inputs onto a DualSense can't have been fun, but there's a sloppiness to it that frustrates. 'Press the touchpad to open the map!' it says, but it won't let me open said map because it thinks I'm using the command for 'never show this tooltip again' that's also on the touchpad. There's a lot of 'hold R2 and up on the d-pad simultaneously' which will be familiar to anyone who broke their fingers trying to play Baldur's Gate 3 on this machine.

At least Baldur's Gate 3 rewarded that finger-snapping nonsense with a stellar RPG. Mistfall Hunter is drowning in currencies, marketplaces, daily rewards, seasons, events, etc. You could argue this is all expected in our extraction games and it's certainly not launching content light. But, it's overwhelming and drowns out what little narrative there is. Mistfall is clearly more invested in the cynical hooks, like daily log-in bonuses, than in immersing you in its world or story.

Actions that should be simple are ridiculously convoluted. You can down a glass of wine before entering the fray to buff yourself (don't try that at home, kids). So you have to talk to the wine lady, confirm you want a standard glass, choose what buffs you want, confirm those are the buffs you want, and skip a cutscene of her pouring said glass. Every. Single. Time. "Why haven't you selected your glass of wine first?" asks the game when I try to just play it and skip this nonsense. It's enough to make one burn down a vineyard.

There's currently two areas to explore. The opening map that you do solo, and a far deadlier prison that you have to explore as a trio. There's also deadlier variants of both maps, but I'd say they were both struggling to hold my interest after about a dozen hours of play. The story and its world doesn't have enough to hook me in, leaving the extraction loop to do all the heavy lifting.

That might be enough if you love extraction games and want to try a Soulslike take on it. The foundations are strong and with regular updates and a massive UI overhaul (let a girl dream), this could become something special. For the moment Mistfall Hunter is fun enough, but a bit of a Mist Opportunity.

Mistfall Hunter was played on PS5, with a code provided by the publisher.

Check out our best online games recommendations for more to play!

With GTA 6 close on the horizon, the gaming industry is set to have a new standard thrust upon it with all the grace of tossing a molotov cocktail at your own carefully assembled traffic jam. It's not the first time Rockstar Games has shaken the medium by its shoulders. Arguably, they've been doing so since the very first Grand Theft Auto gave us an unprecedented amount of top-down criminal freedom.

Though, perhaps, it wasn't until the rightfully legendary Grand Theft Auto 3 crystallized the open world genre on PS2 that a standard was truly set, one the developer has committed to one-upping time and time again. By the end of the PS2 generation, it had been redefined again. Then, onto the next one. Here, we take a trip through each era of Grand Theft Auto, exploring what's defined each, and how they've pushed open world gaming forward. We're poised to see how GTA 6 will do it again.

1997-1999: It's in their DMA

Games released: Grand Theft Auto, GTA: London 1969, GTA 2

Back in 1997, when Rockstar North was still known as DMA Design, it released a PS1 game called Grand Theft Auto, and a gaming legend was born.

This top-down crime-'em-up was spread across three locations: Liberty City; Vice City; and San Andreas. Yup, all three have been GTA canon from the beginning. You may not be surprised to learn that the series, and its reliance on crime and violence, caused controversy from the very beginning. There was much red-faced bluster about the first game in the House Of Lords, and many people wanted the game banned from sale (which never happened).

1999 saw the release of two new games. Grand Theft Auto: London 1969 was an expansion pack developed by Rockstar Canada, and was set in – you guessed it – London. Over here, the expansion got a bigger, standalone release (bet you can't guess why). You could tell that it was set in the UK, because when you were arrested, the screen would shout NICKED at you instead of BUSTED. Alas, the series never returned to London or any other real-world setting.

The fully fledged sequel was released in the same year as the cockney-flavoured expansion pack for the first game. GTA2 introduced many things that carried through to the rest of the series in one way or another, such as a health bar, manual saving, side-missions, vehicle modding, and – for better or for worse – a large number of things to collect hidden throughout the city. A solid foundation for future games to build on.

2001-2004: 3D or not 3D?

Games released: GTA 3, GTA: Vice City, GTA: San Andreas

2001's GTA 3 was the final game to be developed under the name DMA Design (with help from Rockstar's New York division) but that, of course, is not the most notable thing about it. This was the first game in the series in full 3D, making the open world gameplay more enticing than ever.

The protagonist causing havoc in Liberty City was mute, but the NPCs weren't. The fully-voiced story boasted high-profile actors in the cast, including Kyle MacLachlan and Michael Madsen. It must've been costly to develop, but it paid off; GTA 3 was the best-selling game of the year.

The next game in the series arrived just one year later. The legendary GTA: Vice City was also the best selling game of its year, and it's little surprise, really. Not only was it riding on the phenomenal success of the previous game, the excellently curated licensed soundtrack and neon-happy visual design practically screamed 1980s at players. Another all-star cast certainly didn't hurt, with actors including Gary Busey, Dennis Hopper… and the late Ray Liotta as Tommy Vercetti.

In 2004 came the big one (literally); in terms of map size, GTA: San Andreas was much bigger than anything that had come before, over twice as big as Liberty City and Vice City put together. Despite this, there were – unlike in the previous two games – no loading screens while exploring the open world. Some still treasure it as the best GTA, and it was certainly met with a warm welcome on release. As is tradition for the series by now, it outsold all other games that year. It introduced stealth, hopping over walls, and the ability to swim. It was the first game in the series to feature character customisation via haircuts and the like, and RPG-style skill improvement.

2005-2009: Time to pocket the profits

Games released: GTA: Liberty City Stories, GTA: Vice City Stories, GTA: Chinatown Wars

Spin-off GTA: Liberty City Stories was released as a PSP exclusive in 2005. It was ported to PS2 in 2006, but the latter version was actually missing some really cool features from the original handheld release, namely the multiplayer mode and the ability to create custom soundtracks from your own music. (Now that's something we wish the series still had.)

2006 then saw GTA: Vice City Stories for PSP (also later ported to PS2). Although the Stories games and their recycled maps were filling a gap before the next 'proper' GTA, they were still pretty good, and retained some of the stars of the games that they drew from.

GTA: Chinatown Wars in 2009 never made the jump from DS/PSP to PS2, which is a shame, because it's absolutely brilliant. Using a similar top-down view to the original games, it had a retro feel while being a much sharper experience than those 1990s titles.

2008-2010: Relax at the Niko cafe

Games released: GTA 4, The Lost And Damned, The Ballad of Gay Tony

As the first GTA designed from the ground up for a new generation of consoles, GTA 4 wowed the industry when it launched for PS3 in 2008.

Liberty City looked better than ever, and the game featured a number of improvements and features that would return in the next entry in the series. These include the importance and functions of your phone, TV programmes that you can watch in the protagonist's home, the ability to make decisions at certain points during the story, and (a small but very neat thing) the ability to hail a cab and just sit in the back, enjoying the ride.

Two expansions, The Lost And Damned and The Ballad Of Gay Tony, were released individually for Xbox 360 in 2009, but in a single standalone package for PS3 in 2010. The Lost And Damned gained notoriety for briefly showing a man's 'unholstered pistol' (ahem) in a cutscene.

2013-Present: Five is live (service)

Games released: GTA 5, GTA Online

GTA 5 was released in 2013. And 2014. And, er, also in 2022. We're pretty sure that Rockstar is done making new versions though, if only because it's run out of PlayStation consoles to make it for. The game’s certainly stood the test of time; the PS5 story mode is essentially identical to the original PS3 one – yet despite this, it very much feels like a current-gen experience.

We don't have the space or the time to list everything the latest instalment introduced and improved, but multiple playable characters, the biggest map in the series to date, an optional first-person perspective, and complex heist missions are certainly worth mentioning. Then, of course, there is GTA Online.

Grand Theft Auto Online, which launched a month after the offline component in 2013, initially suffered from severe technical issues and arguably limited content. It soon recovered, however, and Rockstar has been constantly improving and adding to it ever since. The repeated rereleases saw some casualties along the way, though; PS3 updates were stopped in 2015, and PS3 servers were shut down completely in 2021.

The game as it stands today is crammed with content, so much so that a standalone version was released earlier this year. It has a full story with expansions, players can race with one another, set up businesses, take part in multiplayer heists, enjoy stunt races, and more. Up to 30 people can play together, yet much of it can still be enjoyed as a solo experience.

Is Rockstar's dedication to GTA Online updates a sign of how important online features will be to the next game? Even if it's not, each instalment has offered something new, and there's no reason to think GTA 6 will be any different.

But which one should you play while waiting for GTA 6? Our best GTA games ranking has the answer!

Splatoon must surely rank as one of Nintendo's most unlikely hits. If you doubt that, try relaying a story about a favourite multiplayer moment and consider how ludicrous you must sound to a casual observer. Our moment of triumph, for example, came during the final Splatfest, a contest designed to crown the global favourite of the two Squid Sisters, the game's resident idol duo.

It happened at Moray Towers, a parking lot spread across two elevated structures, with ramps zigzagging down towards a central zone liberally coated in lurid neon ink. Wearing our pink T-shirt with pride, paired with a fashionable snorkel and a pair of turquoise trainers, our time came in the final 30 seconds of battle, as we swam up a wall carrying a washing-machine drum, passing unseen behind an opponent too busy gazing down his scope at our hapless teammates below to notice us sloshing our colours onto the ground behind his perch. We finished with no kills and six deaths, yet rarely have we felt so responsible for turning certain defeat into narrow victory at the 11th hour.

This was, for all intents and purposes, Splatoon's last hurrah: a 48-hour celebration marking the end of Nintendo's support for the game. It came more than a year after the very first Splatfest, during which time Splatoon has managed to retain a robust playerbase. Plenty of online games have lasted longer, of course, but rarely with the odds stacked so heavily against them. Splatoon arrived in May 2015 with a range of handicaps that would've sunk lesser games. It was, simply, one heck of a gamble. Here was a company known for leaning on established brands choosing to ignore them all in favour of something completely new: an online-focused multiplayer game in a genre in which it had little to no experience, and on an ailing console to boot.

Not long after its launch, Splatoon was widely declared to have been a success. But the real acid test was still to come. It may have had a slender (albeit enjoyable) singleplayer component, but this was a game designed primarily to be played online, and as such couldn't reasonably be judged within its first few weeks. The months to come would be more telling.

And the numbers didn't lie: Nintendo's financial results, published in April, showed that Splatoon had sold to more than one in three Wii U owners. Perhaps more significantly, the number of Splatfest participants had risen – particularly in Japan. The 13th Japanese Splatfest might not have seemed the kind of debate to provoke fierce competition, offering a choice between tuna mayonnaise and red salmon to determine the nation's preferred flavour of rice ball. And yet almost 800,000 players took part – more than half the installed base.

Paint the town

If Splatoon's vibrant presentation and accessibility were what made it appealing in the first place, Nintendo needed ways to hold players' attention. It achieved that simply by regularly providing tangible reasons to keep coming back. It's worth remembering the multiplayer offering seemed miserly at launch, with just five maps and a single game type, the default Turf War mode, available on day one (the King Of The Hill-like Splat Zones would unlock once enough players had reached level ten, which was achieved a mere two days after launch).

Tower Control came later, a thrilling tug-of-war with each team attempting to push a moveable structure deeper into their opponents' territory. Last up was Rainmaker, which had a similar back-and-forth feel to Tower Control, but resembled a running play in gridiron, albeit with the quarterback carrying a weaponised football. Though these three were the ranked options, each was built with accessibility at its core – they can be understood with minimal instruction, with a glance at the overhead map on the GamePad screen making it instantly obvious where your attention should be focused.

The number of stages steadily swelled from five to 16, with each new map adding purposeful variety. Moray Towers was a snipers' haven; Port Mackerel's multi-laned layout led to MOBA-like incursions; Flounder Heights added verticality via an apartment complex; the expansive Kelp Dome felt rather like being invited to vandalise the Eden Project. With later maps, Splatoon's designers began to add more unique features, like Piranha Pit's conveyors, Museum D'Alfonsino's rotating platforms and Mahi Mahi Resort's receding water level. Ancho-V Games, a level set inside the studio of a fictional game developer, featured fan-propelled platforms.

Some would argue that these gimmicks detracted from the game's immediacy, but no one could quibble over getting 11 maps over eight months for no extra outlay, even before considering the new wardrobe options and creative new weapon types. From gatling guns to buckets and bamboo pipes, Nintendo kept giving its players more ways to customise their Inkling and to tailor loadouts to better fit individual playstyles.

Post-launch support is hardly unprecedented, but for a company with a relatively poor reputation when it comes to online gaming, and with precious little experience of handling the expectations of an online shooter community, Nintendo surprised many in how well it kept up its end of the bargain. Free extra content was only part of the equation; Splatfests were another. A tangible sense of spectacle and ceremony surrounded these tri-weekly events, with the Splatoon community encouraged to swear fealty to their chosen side.

Nintendo clearly communicated upcoming events for players through its online channels and within the game itself. In the days leading up to each Splatfest, the plaza hub would fill with other players wearing their team's colours, adding to the sense of anticipation. Then, on the big day, night would fall, Miiverse posts would be displayed as flashy banners stacked high and wide, and the Squid Sisters would leave their studio to perform on stages either side of the lobby – beyond which, matches would be played under darkened skies. From a presentational point of view, Nintendo nailed both the sensation of friendly rivalry and the kind of big-match build-up that would have even Sky Sports taking notes. In the gaps between new stock arrivals at the plaza's various stores, Splatfests offered a further incentive to log in again.

Not to mention putting an additional map in the rotation. One of Nintendo's canniest tricks of recent years was to make a random selection of three feel like a special treat. Yet the perceived weakness of having only two maps available in each game mode at any given time (and limiting ranked matches to a specific game mode) played to Splatoon's strengths. On hardware with a comparatively small installed base, these restrictions ensured waits were kept to a minimum: even now, it rarely takes more than a minute from loading Splatoon up before you're in a game. It's a decision typical of a company that's always sought to curb downtime, and even on the occasions you find yourself idling in a lobby, you've got a choice of simple GamePad minigames with which to busy your thumbs.

If these choices invariably led to occasions where you'd find yourself on the same map several times in succession, they encouraged most players to dip in and out of Splatoon rather than play for hours on end. And by refreshing the maps every four hours, it avoided the fate of many other online shooters where a handful of maps would dominate the voting process. It was clear Nintendo didn't expect people to play Splatoon for long sessions when co-director Tsubasa Sakaguchi expressed his surprise at how quickly players had hit the early level cap of 20. Three months after launch that was raised to 50, with ranking up dependent on wins as well as points scored. It's a testament to Splatoon's longevity that even with Nintendo exponentially slowing progress, you'll still encounter players who've hit the new cap.

The restrictions undoubtedly turned some players off. And there's an argument that Nintendo's hasty abandonment of Wii U helped give Splatoon a bit of a free run, certainly for those Wii U owners who didn't also own other hardware. With gaps between new releases getting wider, a game that gave players something different every time they logged in was obviously a good reason to keep the console plugged in.

Feel-good ink

As such, it's hard to say what lessons other online games could learn from Splatoon. Some of the choices Nintendo made may have suited the game, but wouldn't fly elsewhere: imagine if EA took voice chat out of the next Battlefield, or Activision waited three months after Call Of Duty's launch before adding an option to create private matches for friends. Which isn't to say that other companies shouldn't take note.

Everything Nintendo added after Splatoon's launch was in service of a consistent, focused central vision. While it did respond to user feedback, making minor adjustments to stages and rebalancing weapons, it did so in ways that never compromised the core. Every new weapon or map felt like it had a place in that world. There was nothing to massively unbalance the game, and Amiibo aside, there were no microtransactions to worry about.

These sometimes unorthodox choices have ensured that Splatoon still feels immediate and welcoming, and that isn't always true of competitive multiplayer games. Even so, it's a minor miracle that Splatoon remained on trend for a year on such unfashionable hardware – and no surprise that the series remained fresh long into the Nintendo Switch era.

This Splatoon retrospective was first published in issue 298 of Edge Magazine. To get more like this delivered straight to your doorstep (or digital device) consider subscribing to Edge.

When I heard Owlcat Games turned 10 in June, I was surprised. Not because of its age, but lack of. Within a decade the developer has already become a household name for CRPG fans, thanks to its sprawling isometric games set in the Pathfinder universe and 2023's excellent Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader.

Looking further afield, Owlcat is set to launch its debut third-person RPG, The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, in 2027; while upcoming CRPG Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy already looks promising. That's on top of getting into publishing. "We're kind of speedrunning this," jokes Andrey Tsvetkov, head of publishing at Owlcat. "We managed to ship three games in 10 years, while some studios worked on a single project in that time."

Joining me to reflect on Owlcat's first decade and the future ahead, Tsvetkov says the studio owes a great deal to its fans. He's being surprisingly literal: the longer we chat, the more it becomes clear that Owlcat Games' relationship with players, and authenticity to its craft, are the studio's greatest assets.

Taking initiative

Through the 2000s and early 2010s, the RPG genre seemed to be moving in one direction. Increasingly dominated by third-person action RPGs, from Fallout and The Elder Scrolls at Bethesda to BioWare's Dragon Age and Mass Effect, it seemed CRPGs had settled away from the spotlight. Then veteran developer Obsidian Entertainment crowdfunded RPG Pillars of Eternity in 2015, saving itself from dire finances with a return to '90s-style isometric RPGs.

"It showed us that the market didn't move away from these kinds of products," says Tsvetkov. "Everyone was talking about multiplayer back then, and suddenly Pillars of Eternity became a great hit [...] The core team of ours always dreamed of making this kind of game, and that was a good opportunity to do so. So it inspired us to start working on the concept of a game like this – and it turned out to be Pathfinder: Kingmaker."

Pathfinder: Kingmaker was made through crowd-funding, with 18,351 backers raising $909K – far more than the original $500K target. Raising funds for a sequel, 2021's Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, more than 35,000 backers pledged two million dollars. Having found an audience Owlcat funded its last titles internally, but continues to work with fans from early stages, with pre-release builds for Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader and its follow-up Dark Heresy helping to shape their vision.

Tsvetkov points to the inception of Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader as an example. "We were thinking of what kind of story we wanted to tell, what might be the next studio we'd work on, and more than half of the studio explicitly told us [they] want it to be Warhammer. 'We just want to work with Warhammer!'

So we approached Games Workshop and found common ground really fast, and started working on an RPG based on the Warhammer universe. It wasn't to achieve some target, or to expand the community, or whatever. We just wanted to make a Warhammer game."

That passion, says Tsvetkov, is a large part of why Owlcat has been able to release games so quickly.

"There is a list of things that the creative team would like to do, and we try to chase them [...] We're not working on a single game for five or six years. One of the key reasons is because the creative team behind our games wants to try different things before we get too old, before we retire and live somewhere peacefully and quietly. We want to try different things, so for us, it's an opportunity. We built the studio in a way that we can work on several projects at once. Some of them are in the full production schedule stage right now. Some are in early pre-production, just concepts we've been doing, but it allows us to bring more creative ideas to life – and that really drives people in the studio."

Developers at the studio are ambitious, yes, but Tsvetkov argues that the team's sincerity is its greatest strength. "Most of the team who are working on the Warhammer games collect miniatures themselves. They know the lore at the level as the best lore masters. I don't want to say anything bad about Games Workshop, but at some of those meetings, we were on the same level of knowledge for Warhammer lore as those guys. That's a compliment!

"We tend not to work with things we don't actually love," he adds. "We don't enjoy ourselves."

Other worlds than these

Owlcat's RPGs have an old-school level of depth, but Tsvetkov doesn't feel the studio is beholden to its ancestors. The team holds quarterly meetings to assess whether "old design ideas" are still relevant, can be improved, or hold them back in any way. "We shouldn't, as we say, become like a bronze statue," he explains. "A studio is a living, breathing organism. We have to make sure there's room for new ideas to grow."

"We don't want to repeat ourselves, right? We know that players already know, like the original Baldur's Gate one or two. They played Icewind Dale, they played Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland, etc. They played through all of these games, and they have all this experience with them. They [don't want] repetition. They want something new."

With veteran studios – think Obsidian, Larian – still around and making games, Tsetkov believes striving to be original is crucial to standing out in a crowded genre. He again points to community as a "core" strength. "They act as game ambassadors who spread the word [...] The further we go with this kind of competition, the bigger the community's role. If you have a community supporting you, you can be sure that you [can] survive the harsh reality of game development."

Owlcat is already a mainstay in the CRPG space, but it's seemingly on the cusp of breaking through to the mainstream. Think of how The Witcher 3, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and Baldur's Gate 3 put their respective developers on the map for broader audiences. With a now-sizable audience backing Owlcat, Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy could blow the floodgates open. As could The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, which is Owlcat's third-person debut and likely to strike a chord with starved Mass Effect fans. Tsvetkov is modest about the possibility, but admits there's a lot the team would still like to push forwards.

"We're working on a new project that is unannounced, and it will be quite different from what we've done in the CRPG genre before," he says. "We still have room for experiments."

As Owlcat looks ahead, it remains open to tackling other familiar worlds – not just Pathfinder and Warhammer. "There are still a lot of things that we would like to do with some universe that we love," Tsetkov says, adding there are "ongoing conversations with various IP owners that might result in something interesting."

While the studio will continue to make RPGs set in familiar worlds, its "top creative leaders" also want to make a wholly original setting – eventually. The idea sounds distant, but some things are more certain. "We like to do the things that we love to do," Tsetkov says. "So we won't be quitting the CRPG genre."

Still drinking your coffee? Last week's Saturday Read was on the future of MMOs

In the run-up to GTA 6, we've been spending plenty of time revisiting the best GTA games. Just as important as each sprawling new city to explore is who you play as. Every protagonist is a criminal, but with their own motivations, style, and equipment, the results can be very different. But, which one resonates with you the most?

You might have your own answer in mind, but for scientific purposes we've created this personality quiz to properly determine the Grand Theft Auto protagonist you're the most like. Though, we can't be held responsible for the results. Whether you're bound to become the next '80s criminal mastermind like Tommy Vercetti, or are more grounded like Niko Bellic, who you align with can say a lot about you.

We've focused on the main games in this quiz, with proper protagonists that aren't completely interchangeable (though there is one nod to the true classics in here). Each protagonist , whether it's the trio from GTA 5, or from an earlier gaming generation, has been mapped to each response, so no answer is purely binary. Which means there's no wrong answers, either. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time, but do do this quiz. If you're looking for more, we've got loads on our GamesRadar+ quiz collection page. Let us know who you get in the comments below!

Can't wait? Check out our games like GTA recommendations for what to play before GTA 6 comes out.

Sweary, ultra-violent, and with a deeply traumatic backstory, Frank Castle has always been an R-rated Marvel character. And every time we've seen Jon Bernthal's version of the vigilante on screen, this has been reinforced as he punches his way through Hell's Kitchen in a blood-soaked rampage.

I've got to admit then that when I heard he was making the big screen jump to a Spider-Man movie, I was pretty confused. How was Punisher going to work alongside our friendly neighborhood superhero? And how much was Disney going to have to dilute the brutal character to squeeze him into a PG-13?

It seemed to be a strange mesh, and the cynic in me wondered why they were even bothering if the result would be an unrecognizable version of Frank. Of course, the Punisher and Spider-Man have shared plenty of comic book pages together, and they both call New York City home, but it was still a big surprise how well Bernthal's character works in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

Familiar but different

The way that Destin Daniel Cretton uses the Punisher in Brand New Day is extremely clever. We first see Benthal's antihero zooming through New York in pursuit of a target. Peter Parker swings in and tries to reason with him. "You can't just shoot yourself out of every situation; innocent people get hurt," he shouts at him, before knocking him out of his van. Frank yells, "Mother…" before Peter webs his mouth shut.

It's a really fun introduction and one that proves that Spider-Man has no interest in curbing who the Punisher is. His speech is just as swear-filled as always – in fact, I stopped counting the number of variations of "shit" he uses by about halfway through the movie. He's still going to use firepower to react to every situation and worry about the casualties later.

Cretton keeps Frank acting this way throughout the whole movie. He's constantly negotiating with Peter on his strategy, and his impulsive approach to crimefighting actually becomes a huge plot point during the film's conclusion. Acting before thinking, he shoots towards Roosevelt Island, hitting Peter rather than Jean Grey, putting Spidey in hospital.

Another of the Punisher's key attributes in all of his on-screen appearances so far has been his tendency to head off alone. We see this throughout Brand New Day, even when Peter tries to force himself back into his orbit, sending MJ to his hideout to try and keep her safe. But just as it stays true to who Frank is, Peter brings out a side to him that we've not seen so far – and that is so enjoyable to watch.

Every scene that Spidey star Tom Holland and Bernthal share together as their superhero counterparts is filled with bickering. A long-running gag about Peter saving Frank's life on Staten Island (surely the MCU's new Budapest) finds its way into each squabble. The pair are like fractious siblings, hitting each other where it hurts as they fail to see eye-to-eye on just about anything.

The chemistry between them clearly comes from a long working relationship. Not only are Bernthal and Holland in another of the summer's big blockbusters together in The Odyssey, but they've actually known each other since 2017. They shared the screen in an Irish movie called Pilgrimage during a period where they were both auditioning for their respective Marvel characters, and even recorded each other's Marvel audition tapes. It feels like fate then that the pair are back together on screen in these roles a decade later.

A new side

Aside from the fun that Bernthal brings to the screen in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, it also feels like this is the most interesting version of the character we've seen yet. At the very least, it's his best MCU appearance to date. So far, Frank has felt like a bit of an afterthought in Daredevil: Born Again, brought in to deliver some punches before he flits off into the night once again.

Even more frustrating was his standalone Disney Plus special, The Punisher: One Last Kill, which rehashed past trauma for Frank as he walked around New York City having hallucinations. No new ground was trodden, and he didn't end up anywhere new at the end of that standalone special.

By taking the character away from his usual storytelling surroundings, Brand New Day doesn't fall into these same traps. Bernthal is able to bring a lot of emotion back to Frank because he meets Peter in a similar state of trauma. Peter is alone by choice, but Frank isn't. The ghosts of his family continue to haunt him. As he tells the webslinger with tears in his eyes that if his loved ones were still breathing, he wouldn't abandon them, it changes something in Peter's mentality towards MJ and Ned. It's a beautiful scene and one that probably only Frank could have brought out in Peter.

Such emotional heft continues into the film's final act. As Frank sits on Peter's bedside, it feels like we've finally found a character that he can care deeply about – and show it. Filled with regret, it feels like part of Frank really has changed.

The Punisher isn't exactly the character we've come to know over the past decade on screen in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, but he isn't far off. Fewer swear words and a bit less blood don't take away the core of who Frank Castle is. In fact, over the course of two and a half hours, Cretton brings the character to a place that's more interesting than we've seen in years and one filled with infinite possibilities of where he could go next.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is out in theaters now. For more on the Marvel movie, check out our Spider-Man: Brand New Day review and our guide to how to watch the Marvel movies in order.

Peter Parker is not having a good time. Five years ago, the No Way Home ending erased him from the memories of his loved ones, leaving him completely isolated. Fast forward to Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and Spidey is still all on his lonesome, burned out, and operating from a run-down apartment.

It's so bad, in fact, that Peter's own body betrays him: his arachnid DNA begins to overwhelm him, transforming his powers in ways he can't control. His helpful AI assistant EV warns him that his illness is a consequence of unresolved trauma, but still Peter doesn't stop. Instead, he decides to build a device that will restrict his powers.

Through it all, though, he makes attempts to reconnect to his best pal Ned and his once-girlfriend MJ, though they have no idea who he is. It's obvious that having his support system around again would be a huge help, but Doctor Strange's spell still holds – and that's actually a very good thing for the MCU. Spoilers follow for Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

Memory lane

Going into Brand New Day, I expected the spell to be reversed at some point in the film. Surely Peter wouldn't have to keep going on alone? Except, even after MJ finds the letter Peter wrote about their shared past, she doesn't get her memories of her onetime love back. She even tells Peter that she doesn't know him or love him, in an especially brutal moment for the webslinger. It's not until the very final moments of the film that Ned possibly seems to remember Peter, though there's a tiny bit of doubt: muscle memory might have carried him through the handshake, and MJ already told him Spider-Man's real name is Peter.

But the film is so much stronger for allowing Peter to remain forgotten. For one thing, it hugely strengthens Peter's character arc. Instead of a quick fix to his isolation, he has to make the choice to reach out to others. If the spell were reversed and his friends magically remembered him, Peter wouldn't have to learn how important it is to have someone to lean on.

Plus, it allows for the film to have a lot of fun with Peter's secret identity. Now that the world has forgotten him, Peter Parker can go back to being anonymous, which means he keeps his mask on in the bathhouse with Yelena Belova, and he refuses to take it off in front of MJ and the Punisher. It's good old-fashioned superhero hijinks, and something I'd been missing after Mysterio exposed Peter's identity back in Spider-Man: Far From Home.

Most importantly, though, it introduces something the MCU has been sorely lacking: real consequences.

Nothing lasts forever

It's difficult to get emotionally invested in the MCU when nothing seems to last. Loki died heroically in Avengers: Infinity War, then (an alternate version of him) returned in his own solo show. Vision also died tragically in Infinity War and reappeared as a figment of Wanda's fake reality in WandaVision – and is now returning again in VisionQuest, since White Vision escaped with the synthezoid's memories. Steve Rogers laid down his shield and went back in time to live out the life he'd missed out on, but is coming back for Avengers: Doomsday. And, most egregiously of all, Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man made a huge sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame… and now Downey Jr. is returning to the MCU as Doctor Doom. Does nothing matter anymore? When anything can be reversed, the stakes are non-existent.

In contrast, Peter struggles for the entire movie with the reality of Doctor Strange's spell. Sacrifice finally means something, and the stakes are finally real. It makes the ending of No Way Home even stronger, too: Peter really was willing to give up everything to save everyone, as any good superhero should be.

It would be a shame if Ned apparently remembering his old best friend also stretches to MJ – her and Peter's situation echoes Peter Quill and Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy 3, another rare example of consequences actually sticking. Gamora doesn't magically remember Quill or decide to rekindle their relationship (even though, again, Gamora was killed off in Infinity War and returns anyway), and the same goes for MJ and Peter Parker.

Gamora admitting "I bet we were fun" to Quill was one of that film's most moving moments, just as MJ telling Peter she doesn't love him was one of Brand New Day's most crushing. Having the courage to leave these unhappy plot twists without an easy solution only deepens both films' emotional weight and reinforces that the choices these heroes make actually matter. And, it opens the door for Peter and MJ to rediscover their love organically, as we see them connecting and growing closer when Spidey hides MJ on Punisher's boat.

Future projects may yet reverse Doctor Strange's spell, but, for now, it's seriously refreshing to see an MCU project that is unafraid to explore lasting consequences – even if it does make Peter Parker's life harder.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is out in theaters now. For more, read our Spider-Man: Brand New Day review and check out our guide on how to watch the Marvel movies in order.

Square Enix's Final Fantasy 14 is finally making its way onto the Nintendo Switch 2, but if you want to install the beloved MMO, you'll need to free up a massive 117GB worth of space. That's almost half of the console's 256GB onboard storage, but as has been the case since the handheld's inception, you can invest in a Switch 2 SD card to prepare for the RPG and other storage-demanding games like it.

The best microSD Express Cards are available in capacities from 128GB up to 1TB, and while more expensive than the previous generation's cards, they have remained free of the pricing woes plaguing SSDs, or so I thought. While doing my usual check of some Switch 2 cards for possible deal coverage, I noticed that the once $199.99 1TB PNY microSD Express card is now listed for as high as $371.99 at Amazon, and it's entirely sold out on the UK storefront.

That's a $172 increase since when I originally reviewed it in March earlier this year, and now I'm worried that SD cards are now going the way of the best SSDs for gaming and being affected by the RAMpocalypse. I had hoped they'd be spared from the current gaming storage pricing hellscape, but the evidence is pointing to the contrary.

There was a chance that this escalation was just an Amazon US anomaly. Yet a quick glance at the official US PNY online store reveals that not to be the case. That very card with the P-SDU1TBP31EXP-GE SKU is listed with the same $371.99 (PNY) price tag, a sum that's depressingly not that far behind the current $499 price of the Nintendo Switch 2 console. According to my CamelCamelCamel price checker, its 512GB card hasn't stuck at its $113.99 MSRP either. It shot up to $146.16 on February 6, earlier this year, so even the smaller capacity cards aren't safe from fluctuating pricing.

Of course, if it were only PNY cards being affected, it wouldn't be as big of a deal. Yet, a quick scan of the few storage brands with microSD Express Cards that provide as much as 1TB extra space reveals they too are being affected. The Lexar 1TB Play PRO Micro SD Express Card, the very first 1TB model to hit the market, launched for $199.99 / £199.99. As you've likely guessed, it's not sitting at Amazon US for $200, and instead is available for $349.99 (Amazon). That's a $150 price increase since it became available late last year, and another disheartening sign that the eye-watering SSD prices we've been witnessing over the past year have now got their claws into these Switch 2's already limited storage options.

I'm not the only one who has noticed these changes. 19 days ago, Reddit user dairy_free_bacon shared a screenshot from the GameStop storefront on r/Switch2 subreddit stating, "Anyone else notice that 1tb sd cards went up by $100??" They explained that they had previously bought the GameStop-branded 1TB microSD Express card for $199, and it's now listed for $299.99 instead, the price that it still sticks to today.

The comments of this post were ablaze with the reasoning behind this dramatic increase, and plenty of Switch 2 owners seem to have come to the same conclusion I have - that the RAMpocalypse has claimed another victim. User pikachuyann replied to the post stating, "The "RAM price crisis" doesn't affect only RAM, but all sorts of storage too," and I believe they're bang on the money, though I'm definitely not happy about it.

You see, microSD Express Cards don't function like older SD Cards. These newer, speedier Switch 2 accessories have hung up the standard UHS-I interface that powered your older Switch's storage and utilize a PCIe interface with an NVMe protocol instead, much like the solid-state drives you pop into your gaming PC. That's how they manage to provide lightning-fast speeds up to 890MB/s read & up to 810MB/s write like that of the 1TB PNY microSD Express Card I picked out earlier, compared to up to 100MB/s of alternatives like the $189.99 (Amazon) 1TB Amazon Basics microSDXC card.

If the storage crisis has already got M.2 SSDs in its midst, it makes entire sense why microSD Express Cards would also be affected. The correlation feels even more accurate when you remember that Sony announced during March of this year that it was suspending orders of its CFexpress memory cards and SD memory cards "due to the global shortage of semiconductors (memory) and other factors." When I originally covered that news, prices of Switch 2 SD cards were unaffected, but it seems the dwindling supply of DRAM and NAND storage may have finally taken its toll.

As of writing, you can still grab the officially licenced cards from Samsung and SanDisk that even feature some Super Mario art and provide an extra 256GB, which is plenty for Final Fantasy 14 when it launches on August 4, 2026. However, if you wanted to pick up 1TB just to be extra cautious for any patch updates and other Switch 2 releases, you're going to have to pay a pretty price, and I fully expect them to get even more expensive in the months to come.

As an alternative, I recommend sticking with a 256GB or 512GB model. Their prices have also been up and down, you can generally find brands sticking to their MSRP in most instances, especially if you grab options like the Samsung 256GB microSD Express card, which has even experienced discounts during sales events like Amazon's Prime Day. While you always receive a little less than stipulated, the combined 512GB is plenty for Final Fantasy 14, and further upcoming releases like Pokemon Pokopia's Bubbly Basin DLC and Fire Emblem Fortune's Weave.

I'd just grab any Switch 2 SD card sooner rather than later. As we've discovered, no storage is seemingly safe from the ongoing RAM Storage Crisis, even that of the lower-end capacity cards. Though I'll keep my fingers crossed that they won't go the way of the 1TB models and that of the Nintendo Switch 2, which is receiving a price increase of its own this coming September.

If you're settled for storage, check out our guides to the best Nintendo Switch 2 controllers, the best Nintendo Switch headsets, and the best Nintendo Switch 2 cases instead.

As Grand Theft Auto 6 slowly begins to emerge on the horizon like a portent of civilizational doom, and players endlessly speculate about what to expect from its multiplayer component, I find myself thinking back to what I consider to be the golden age of GTA Online – the late 2010s and early 2020s. Even back then, years after its release, endless post-launch updates adding science fiction weapons and flying supercars had long since robbed the multiplayer component of its crime sandbox of any claim to realism. Not when you could watch the hapless LSPD going up against players armed with Tron bikes and ray guns.

Perhaps this was why the playerbase ended up stumbling upon the perfect absurdist parody in response to this eternal escalation, one that would forever change the face of one of the largest online games in history.

Aliens among us

The "Alien Gang War," as it would come to be known, was not particularly complex at first. Such things never are. Teams of players would pile into panel vans, all dressed in neon green bodysuits, before driving around town until they found a suitable target based on… Well, it was never entirely clear, but comic timing was probably the most significant element.

With their prey decided, the van would come to a screeching halt, and between three and three thousand goons in cheap Halloween costumes would pile out and attack the offender with baseball bats and pool cues, before leaping back into their getaway car and squealing away.

Juvenile? Sure. Bullying? Maybe a little. But on a visual level it was always hilarious, a bunch of neon green mascots enacting frenetic street justice with broken bottles and hammers, ignoring the fact that there were actual ray guns and lasers available in GTA Online. Even players with heavy-duty firepower were generally taken aback by the sheer number of martians sprinting at them, and it only took a single whiffle bat to the skull to knock a target down and allow the rest of the crew to promptly beat them into the tarmac.

This all went on for months as a kind of background story, never really becoming too significant, but then the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic kicked in and things started to change.

As we all remember, lockdown forced many onto their computers for the hope of any sort of social life. This influx of people supercharged the extra-terrestrial conflict, driving Gang War participants well into the millions, and the community ended up producing a counter-force to the growing green menace: the Purple Aliens.

This led to all kinds of Green versus Purple skirmishes, with the former generally standing for chaos in all forms, while the purples usually just tried to obstruct them wherever possible. It was an obviously unwinnable conflict that was still deeply entertaining, even if the Green team reliably had about three times the numbers. Plus it didn't help that a lot of people seemed slightly uncertain what was even going on, but didn't see why that should stop them from getting involved.

And two factions were only the start of it all. Now other players would introduce themselves as human defenders of Earth, out to slaughter both sides, or war reporters documenting events from the peripheries, claiming the role of tritagonists in an ever-developing science fiction saga that had already put Rebel Moon to shame.

Beam me up, knock 'em down

Eventually the lack of a clear end goal or victory state for either side meant that it just petered out, but some players still try to bring back the Alien Wars from time to time, or simply fly the flag for their chosen team by digging out the bodysuit and battering a few people on a Sunday afternoon.

Me included! I'll admit I'm not above the occasional couple of hours spent in spandex while jumping people in dark alleyways, or as I sometimes think of it, "the mean meme green team bean and flee the scene scheme".

But what I hope is that this phenomenon – or something like it – re-emerges in GTA6, especially if it can happen organically without Rockstar's meddling and oversight. In many ways the Green vs Purple conflict was exactly what GTA needed back then, stripping back all the cloying, monetized elements and focusing on consequence-free fuckabouts with very little barrier to entry.

Meanwhile, such a thing never really could get a foothold in Red Dead Online, which ended up being the sensible, well-behaved sibling, less interested in wacky chaos than taciturn hat-tipping and herb gathering. If GTA 6 Online reels me in, it's because it'll have provided that same sort of playground for violent, team-building nonsense that its predecessor did.

Secure your copy of Rockstar's latest with this handy guide to GTA 6 pre-orders

The Countdown to GTA 6 has been activated. It's difficult to believe, but on November 19 you'll finally be able to leave Los Santos behind for a new sandbox to explore. Rockstar Games has booked you a ticket to the fictional US state of Leonida, the Florida-inspired region which also happens to include the neon-lit metropolis of Vice City. Mark the date on your calendars, because there's no stopping Grand Theft Auto 6 from landing this November now.

GamesRadar+ has launched Countdown to GTA 6 as a destination for all of the biggest news and updates on the upcoming PS5 and Xbox Series X release. We're also going to be celebrating the 13th anniversary of Grand Theft Auto 5, returning to the chaos simulator that is GTA Online, and looking back across the entire franchise – exploring the impact and legacy of a series which truly changed the world.

You'll find new Grand Theft Auto articles every week on GamesRadar+ as we countdown to what is undoubtedly the biggest entertainment release of the decade. This is a moment worth celebrating, and we want to do it together with you. So be sure to keep our Countdown to GTA 6 bookmarked and we'll see you out there on the road to release.

Countdown to GTA 6

Rockstar Games is yet to confirm an official release time for GTA 6. Right now, we're assuming that it'll be available globally from midnight local time. So until we have more concrete information, our Countdown to GTA 6 timer is set to 00:00 EST on November 19.

GTA 6: Essentials

Secure Your Pre-Order

The Latest GTA 6 Trailer

Essential GTA 6 Guides

The 10 Best GTA 6 Screenshots

Dive Deeper Into GTA 6

GamesRadar+'s Countdown to GTA 6 brings you new GTA 6, GTA Online, and Grand Theft Auto franchise coverage every week now that we're on the road to release.

It's typically difficult to predict when GTA 6 news is going to land. Developer Rockstar Games is historically secretive and tends to operate on its own schedule. But with around 110 days to go until GTA 6 lands on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X, that's almost certainly about to change.

The next 100 days are going to be critical. There's an exceptionally limited amount of information out there in the wild – we don't yet have a clear sense of how the latest Grand Theft Auto will play or the major gameplay innovations that Rockstar has developed. With that in mind, below you'll find my predictions for the 5 major beats that we should all expect to see on the road to GTA 6's release.

5. GTA 6 gameplay showcase

• Confidence: 95%
• Guesstimate: August

Rockstar previously indicated that the marketing for GTA 6 would kick into high gear over the summer, and with just one month left before the fall you should expect that a big reveal is on the horizon. Whether it's labeled GTA Trailer 3 or something else entirely, I predict that we'll get a detailed gameplay showcase in August ahead of Gamescom.

There's so much that Rockstar could reveal, but I suspect that a first look at raw in-game action would focus on core game elements such as character-switching between the two protagonists, Jason and Lucia, and focus on the new systems and mechanics that'll feed expansive cycles of crime and chaos across Vice City.

4. A Living World Deep-Dive

• Confidence: 80%
• Guesstimate: September

Given that it's been 13 years since the release of Grand Theft Auto 5 and eight since Red Dead Redemption 2, it's now that much of a stretch to believe that Rockstar has a bit of a point to prove. The studio is known for pushing the boundaries of what is possible within open-world sandboxes, and I think that it's likely we'll get a dedicated showcase that covers the living world of Leonida.

GTA publisher Take-Two has a shareholder meeting on September 17, so what better way to generate some good vibes than with a focus on dynamic NPCs, evolving neighborhoods, wildlife density, and graphical fidelity. This seems like a no-brainer to me.

3. GTA Online 2.0 reveal

• Confidence: 50%
• Guesstimate: October

GTA Online remains one of the most popular multiplayer games, with reports suggesting that it still receives millions of active users a week. In my heart, I do believe that Rockstar will want to keep the focus on the core GTA 6 campaign for as long as possible; why risk pulling attention away from Jason and Lucia's adventure?

But with so many GTA Online users spread across PS4 and Xbox One (not to mention PC, where GTA 6 remains unannounced with no release date) it seems only fair that the developer will let its online playerbase know what to expect. The cost of the PS5 and Xbox Series X only continues to rise, so clearing up the future of GTA Online feels more necessary now than ever.

2. GTA 6 previews

• Confidence: 60%
• Guesstimate: October

Will Rockstar let anybody play GTA 6 before it's released? As the Editor-in-Chief of GamesRadar+, I would certainly hope so – I'm as desperate to play a new Grand Theft Auto as I am to share that experience with all of you. Even if Rockstar does deploy gameplay and living world showcases, there will no doubt be millions of unanswered questions that could be addressed by letting members of the press, content creators, and the GTA community go hands-on.

It's common for studios to put previews of their upcoming video games out there (Rockstar included), but then there's nothing about this marketing campaign that's been conventional. And, given how much of the game leaked in 2022, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Rockstar keeps this one close to the chest.

1. A Final GTA 6 story Trailer

• Confidence: 95%
• Guesstimate: November

If GTA 5 and RDR 2 are any indication, then the last few miles on the road to release will feature a GTA 6 story trailer that is wholly focused on the relationship between Jason and Lucia, and the criminal conspiracy that they get dragged into after a heist gone wrong.

Rockstar has always sought to showcase the filmic quality of its productions, and with GTA 6 being purpose-built for PS5 and Xbox Series X, I expect that to be especially true this time around. Grand Theft Auto is one of the biggest entertainment properties in the world and Rockstar won't want to miss an opportunity to remind the masses that GTA 6 is far more than a chaos simulator.

What comes next?

If 100 days takes us to November 8, 2026, then the 101st day will see the marketing campaign kick into high gear ahead of the November 19 release date. Expect GTA 6 to be plastered everywhere in physical and digital spaces, especially as pre-load for PS5 and Xbox Series X is set to begin on November 12 for those of you with a GTA 6 pre-order locked in.

While you wait for GTA 6, why not check out our rankings of the best GTA games and the greatest Rockstar games of all-time.

• Halo: Campaign Evolved is perfect if you want a well-paced FPS packed with memorable levels that can be comfortably completed in a single weekend, either solo or with friends.

Let me give you a 60-second pitch for why you should play Halo: Campaign Evolved this weekend. I still remember the first time I played Halo, back when it was called Combat Evolved and the infamous "Duke" controller was too big for my little-kid hands – it was an extraordinary experience that set a new benchmark for first-person shooters on console.

Whether you're looking to indulge in a little nostalgia or looking to discover Halo for the very first time, Halo: Campaign Evolved is a must play; a well-crafted remake that retains the spirit of the 2001 original and introduces plenty of modern flourishes.

Why play it today?

• Halo: Combat Evolved changed the way a generation of players thought about first-person shooters.

Almost 25 years later, it's certainly true that there are elements of Halo: Campaign Evolved that are a little on the tired side – developer Halo Studios was intent on building a faithful remake, and didn't want to stray far from the foundations that plenty of other prominent shooters have expanded since. Elements of Halo's debut adventure that were once revolutionary are now quite perfunctory, such is its wide influence.

Still, Halo: Campaign Evolved is still an absolute riot for newcomers and returning players alike. There's a quality to its mission design, world scale, and enemy intelligence that's astounding. Seeing this game rebuilt so lovingly in Unreal Engine 5 is well worth the price of admission – and the introduction of console campaign-crossplay means there's more utility here than with Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

Time commitment:

If you're wondering how long it's going to take to beat Halo: Campaign Evolved, you're looking at around 10-14 hours for the main campaign. That means it's perfect for couch co-op sessions with a friend or online co-op with a group over either a long weekend or three evenings after work.

Play Halo: Campaign Evolved if you love:

Skip Halo: Campaign Evolved if you want:

One thing to know:

Halo: Campaign Evolved does actually contain some brand new content that is exclusive to this version of the original Master Chief adventure. Halo Studios has delivered three new prologue missions, set about a year before the events of Combat Evolved – a brand new adventure for Chief to go on alongside Sergeant Johnson.

A moment you'll remember:

There's a magic to the moment Master Chief steps onto Installation 04 for the first time. After evacuating the UNSC Pillar of Autumn, Chief is given a minute to breathe. Looking up at the curving Halo ring felt revolutionary back in 2001, and today it still generates a real feeling of genuine awe.

The final verdict:

• Read our full Halo: Campaign Evolved review to learn more.

You should play Halo: Campaign Evolved because it remains a true masterclass in FPS level design, with gunplay and enemy AI that revolutionized a genre. A lot has changed in 25 years, but Master Chief's debut adventure has lost none of its power. Campaign Evolved is every bit as enjoyable as Combat Evolved was back in 2001.

So, where can you play it?

Halo: Campaign Evolved is available now for for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X. You can also download the game as part of Game Pass Ultimate.

If you don't have a Game Pass subscription, the Halo: Campaign Evolved standard edition costs $49.99, while the premium edition is $69.99.

How to get started with Halo: Campaign Evolved:

If you're looking to get a better sense of where to start with Halo: Campaign Evolved this weekend, here's four essential guides to assist with your journey onto Installation 04.

Have your say:

If you're looking for a cheaper alternative to Halo: Campaign Evolved, both Titanfall 2 and Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus feature in our best FPS games ranking and are regularly on sale across all major platforms.

My local game store is closing down. News of its closure was, ruefully, the thing that motivated me to pay one last overdue visit. I picked over its second-hand PS4 games like a vulture, while the last remaining, slightly-mishapen Bowser plushie stared at me with accusatory eyes that seemed to ask: why are you only visiting this place now that it is dying?

Despite growing up spending all my pocket money on second hand video game cartridges and discs, doing this now – after years spent buying digitally – feels forced, like a consolatory pat on physical media's coffin. A defeated admission that we had it better then.

There’s a desperation to it, isn’t there? Clinging onto hard copies as if they’re tiny mountain grips that will keep games tangible in an inevitable digital landslide. The pursuit of permanence now appears futile, like trying to fix a chain on a snowflake.

But it was us who moved toward digital gaming willingly. We chose to make full game sales "around 80%" digital on PlayStation and "over 90%" digital on Xbox according to games analyst Daniel Ahmad. We demonstrated that we no longer need game discs or the stores that sell them. And yet the impending loss of physical games and game stores feels like a step forward for tech that’s dragging us along with it in surrender.

The cost of convenience

When it comes to video games, I’d give anything to go back to the physical world. My shelves are bare. I buy my games from a machine. Two clicks of a button and voila, the game is downloading. It’s a transaction that bears no humanity or shared sense of occasion, especially when compared to buying a game in the 00’s.

Looking back on memories of visiting my local game store brings a sharp awareness of what we have sacrificed for convenience. The thrill of finding a game you wanted for ages on the shelf and soaking in every detail of the box art. The lively in-store conversations debating which game titles were superior that month. Discovering new games through staff recommendations, or making new friends with other customers when you both reach for the only second hand copy of PaRappa the Rapper in the bargain bin.

Back then, going to the video game store for a new game was a quest in itself. A journey that required enough initiative and determination to traipse into every second hand game store in town, in pursuit of the cheapest copy of Shadow of the Colossus. That effort meant something, as did holding the game in your hands for the first time. It felt like a reward that has been earned.

When I was a teen, the clerks working in video game stores were the first adults I met who took games seriously. They didn’t scoff at them or admonish them as a waste of time. They were like guiding figures, chatting to them in the store and hearing their recommendations for other games was validating. Maybe I wasn’t so weird for being way more interested in video games than TV or movies, like the other grown ups in my life at the time would have me believe.

I remember my first midnight in-store game release, queueing up in the brisk cold on 11/11/11 to get my hands on a copy of Skyrim. Talking excitedly with other gamers while we waited in line. It felt like a magical shared experience where the game store became a safe haven for an othered passion.

Downloading a game, on the other hand, offers no human interaction. No shared excitement. Just another numbingly convenient, instantly gratifying, solitary moment between me and my machine.

This is why Sony killing PlayStation discs is not just "the latest attack on our diminishing rights" – it’s an erosion of the choice to live in an offline world.

Choice paralysis

When discs die, so do the stores that sell them. As does the shared human interaction and sense of occasion of buying a physical game in real life. We’re going to miss these moments when the next game like Hollow Knight Silksong releases and immediately crashes the Steam and Nintendo eShop, or a PSN outage removes access to our libraries and all we can do is wait, helplessly dependent on digital.

I understand that technically, digital distribution of video games is an improvement in terms of accessibility, production costs, waste management, and availability. But emotionally, it feels like a downgrade.

It might seem silly to feel attached to old gaming discs and the stores that sell them, but these plastic cases are a physical representation of the digital worlds that moved me. Gazing at their box art is like staring at an old photo, it has the power to unlock a million memories. It makes an experience that has only ever existed on a screen feel a little more grounded in reality.

In the 00’s, a screen was once a source of escape from everything. But now that everything is confined to the screen, the escape route has become a claustrophobic tunnel with no end in sight. Collectively, we all chose the digital future. So why didn't it feel like a choice?

Perhaps because PlayStation removing the option to physically own a game is not something we would ever actually choose. Yes, it's the sensible course of business action when you look at the stats of digital vs. physical sales. But in a disc-less world we are unable to trade or resell, unable to borrow from a friend, unable to buy a game in a real life store and own it for life.

We have been railroaded on to the digital path, where all roads lead to reliance on publisher-owned storefronts.

I fear we are passing a point of no return in the games industry. I keep asking myself the same question, one which also rattled through my brain when I stared at the “closing down sale” poster in my local game store: What can I do?

Can the world where we walk into a game store, talk to staff and buy a new game on disc still be saved? Or is it time to let go of those we're still holding onto? Maybe we can't stop the industry from changing, but we can support real game discs and real game stores before the choice disappears entirely.

Escape to a simpler time with the best PS2 games ever

D&D World of Warcraft isn't trying to be like the MMO. Yes, that may sound counterintuitive. The book – which was just announced at Gen Con 2026 – takes us back to Azeroth with all the familiar classes and species you'd expect, after all. But it's not interested in slavishly recreating the video game. That isn't ever going to work, so principal game designer James Wyatt took a different approach.

"So much of what I love about WoW is really intangible," Wyatt tells me when we sit down for an exclusive deep dive into D&D World of Warcraft. "That's very hard to put into a book, and the process of doing something like this is not about translating mechanics on a one-to-one basis. It's about evoking the feel of playing one of these characters of this class and this species, even fighting this boss in a dungeon."

The promos we've seen so far are exciting, but avoiding that temptation to just play the hits is what tips me into 'fully seated.' You're never going to capture everything that makes WoW so beloved on pen and paper, and it's a fool's errand to try. But you can nail how it feels, as well as straying off the beaten path.

"This is your chance to explore Azeroth as you never have before," Wyatt promises.

From Teldrassil to Darkshore

While the crossover will be launching with 11 new species for us to play, six brand-new subclasses alongside three updated ones, a chance to explore major locations from across Azeroth, and seven dungeons drawn from the video game's most beloved raids, this isn't the best bit for Wyatt.

"It's the stuff you can't do in the MMO that I'm most excited about," he says. "My Night Elf character can have a completely different origin story than any Night Elf character in World of Warcraft, because they all have the same origin story [in the MMO]. I can choose any background from the D&D Player's Handbook. I can be a Night Elf sailor. What does that even mean? Turns out I ran the ferry from Teldrassil to Darkshore until Darkshore blew up. That is my origin story. So, just opening up the possibilities is the most exciting part."

Not that revisiting classic dungeons isn't exciting, of course. In terms of size, these are "more than mini and less than maxi." These range from two pages long for Onyxia's Lair to around six pages for the rest, and each one comes armed with everything a Dungeon Master needs to lead their party into the dark – a map, boss stat blocks, encounter tables, treasures, inhabitants, and inspiration for why adventurers might go there in the first place.

Long-time fans won't have any trouble recognizing these famous settings. Aside from Wrath of the Lich King's Azjol Nerub, all of them are classic dungeons – including Blackfathom Deeps and Dead Mines. Actually, the problem was knowing where to stop.

"Our original list was a lot longer, and then we realized that we needed more space for each one than we originally planned," Wyatt admits.

Delving into the past

With all this talk of 'classic' dungeons, will the book take place during a specific time period? No, Wyatt tells me – and that's because it focuses on the themes that define WoW instead. This in turn dictated which dungeons made the cut.

"The adventures chapter starts off by talking about the main conflicts of Azeroth, which are the conflicts that have driven all the expansions of the game," says Wyatt. "In the same way that the Dungeon Master's Guide talks about choosing three conflicts to drive your campaign, that's the way we're presenting these. You could choose to build your campaign around the Burning Legion and the Dragon Flights and the Scourge, and so the dungeons were chosen to have some connection to those major themes."

With that in mind, some dungeons include sidebars that let you tweak its foes based on time period. The book's take on Blackfathom Deeps uses the Naga version, for example, but there's a section detailing how to tweak it for when Twilight's Hammer moves in.

While I'm sure navigating 20 years of in-game history like this was a headache, nothing compares to the tangled knot of jury-rigging D&D classes to fit WoW. This ended up being a unique challenge for Wyatt and the team, because there's no one-size-fits-all solution – some builds could be represented accurately with added Feats, while others required all-new subclasses. This is what made the project "really fun from a design perspective."

Something new, something old

To help you recreate WoW's distinctive classes, the book begins by recommending certain combos to reflect those ideas. (The Mage could be created using D&D's Evoker Wizard with a handful of specific Feats, say.) This isn't always what you might expect; if you want to create a Shaman, for example, you're pointed toward D&D's Barbarian class "which surprises people," Wyatt says with amusement.

New subclasses are then introduced if the build requires more work, like the Oath of the Ebon Blade for Paladins which represents a Death Knight. Some of these update previous ideas, such as the Warrior of Mystic Brews subclass for Monks that tweak the Drunken Master we saw in Xanathar's Guide to Everything. (The Barbarian's Path of the Elements does something similar but on a more radical scale – it's 90% new compared to its inspiration, Path of the Storm Warrior.) Others are entirely new, like the Paladin's Oath of the Holy.

You'll certainly have enough to fight using these builds. Wyatt explains that the bestiary is crammed with foes who fit the book's themes, from demons and dragons to representatives of the Horde and Alliance. That stretches to famous faces like Arthas the Lich King, Anduin, or Thrall.

Crucially, though, these adventures will be distinctly yours. Rather than sticking to the linear path laid out by the MMO, your shackles are off and your leash is cut.

"This is where you can interact with anything you can see, you can talk to anyone you meet, you can learn about the world first person in a whole new way," Wyatt says when I ask what he thinks will tempt WoW fans to try this D&D crossover. "It super excites me. I think it's gonna excite everybody."

D&D World of Warcraft has an early access launch on November 3, 2026. A full retail release follows on November 17.

It's been a busy Gen Con for D&D so far; alongside revealing a long-awaited Dark Sun revamp, a new imprint called D&D Icons resurrects Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and more with new books from legendary creators.

• Check the latest D&D products at Amazon

The rampant contraction, consolidation, and uncertainty in the games industry risks boxing out creators and denying opportunities for teams to develop and master their craft. A new generation of household names like Larian, Remedy, FromSoftware, CD Projekt Red, or Respawn may never be allowed to bloom today. At least, that's the concern of veteran game developer Xalavier Nelson Jr. of (mostly) Strange Scaffold fame.

Originally, I spoke to Nelson Jr. about how, in his view, generative AI won't solve the games industry's budget problems – one of many reasons a lot of game developers don't want to use gen AI. In short, AI didn't cause the unsustainable approach to game development afflicting many publishers, and worse games made cheaper with AI won't fix it. As Nelson Jr. puts it: "We are spending an unknown amount of money in an unknown amount of time to make a game of unknown quality to reach an unknown amount of people." And so far, AI has only added another budget problem: the AI-driven RAM drought has seen console (and Steam Machine) prices rise so high that these machines are no longer accessible to many.

Taking another step back, Nelson Jr. raises an increasingly evergreen point about the confounding combination of industry-wide disasters and endless good games, and it touches on how the effects of the past few years will linger.

Good games in bad conditions

"That's part of why everyone seems like they're losing their minds. It's because, every day, a game is coming from an unexpected place and having an impact on the industry and on players," observes Nelson Jr. "It seems like, without even trying, great games will continue to emerge." Just this week, I wrote about how two devs made a game in four months and watched in awe as it earned over $360,000 in 24 hours.

"The invisible damage of investors, executives, publishers, and even players waiting for great games to emerge from the ether is that the voices that could be producing those projects and refining their craft and making your next favorite game will never have the ability to practice their art such that they can bring that to you," he adds.

A huge problem, Nelson Jr. reasons, is that more and more successful games are coming from unexpected places. Now, this sounds like a good thing. People are finding success and good games are coming out. The actual problem is that the expected places, the bedrock of the industry and the spaces that once represented stability and legacy, are shrinking or dying. This contributes to that uncertainty, making a career in games more dangerous and stunting studios.

"We regularly celebrate the studios and the individual artists that have had a chance to refine their craft for decades at a time, not just in games, but beyond," Nelson Jr. argues. "When an artist gets that much time to figure out what they're doing and why and how to make it meaningful, great things occur. And it happens over and over again. We look at Remedy, we look at Larian. Every single time these studios talk about what they do and how they do it, people get excited. Then simultaneously, we create none of the conditions for another Remedy or Larian to occur.

"If you look at FromSoftware before [its] modern era, they would put out like three or four video games a year minimum. If you look at their time between releases, Dark Souls 3 to Sekiro to Elden Ring was three years each time. How fucking crazy is that? And how much of that is built on a team which has shipped dozens of games beforehand? You don't get the next FromSoftware without having a group of people, individually and together, exercise their craft."

Your first game

Likewise, CD Projekt Red didn't start with The Witcher 3. Larian didn't start with Baldur's Gate 3. But if any of these studios were just sprouting today, they'd be hard-pressed to ever get the chance to make their Elden Ring, Witcher 3, or Baldur's Gate 3. That might require a debut on the level of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which is a huge outlier. Which is not to reduce the scope of the games industry's culling to, horror of horrors, fewer games to play. The actual problem is that more people will not have the means or opportunity to build and sustain careers that enable games like that. Because games don't emerge from the ether. Ask Amazon, Xbox, Hasbro, or Embracer what happens when all you have is a bunch of money, control of some IP, and people who are worried about their livelihood.

For all the deserved concern in the air, video games are not going to up and vanish. But plenty of people will be forced out of game development, or forced to accept misery to stay in it. In Nelson Jr.'s view, an approach to games that is decidedly focused on people is probably the best way to help those people.

"I mourn the world where we are waiting for more studios like that to emerge because we haven't created the conditions for it to happen," he concludes. "It's like waiting at the door for a package you've never ordered. That's what the games industry has created in terms of not consistently supporting creators, and one of the only ways we can reverse that is by audiences paying attention to who makes the games that they are loving right now, and showing up for them as often as possible, and evangelizing those projects so that they can keep making them."

"I like finding a new, special, best-selling game on Steam that takes a hold of the zeitgeist as much as anyone. But when that story comes out of nowhere and I can't especially identify with a journey that the developer has gone on to build it, there is something missing. And I also know, because of the patterns in the games industry, I might not see them ever make a game again, and we have to change that."

"Our bosses would have stopped us," if PS2's Spider-Man was made today, says director: "There were several months of us telling our bosses 'Don't look at it yet! Don't look at it yet!'"

A few months after Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty launched alongside v2.0, I stepped into Night City for the very first time. The experience was baffling. If I wasn't puzzling over the different kinds of operating systems and playstyles, I was getting an eyeful of every townie's butt cheeks as they strutted about Watson looking like randomized Sims. I powered through the weirdness and learned to embrace it, going on to complete it three times in less than six months.

Anything I didn't understand was chalked up to being a newbie. The lack of handholding or mechanic explanations confounded me at first, but I reminded myself that I was playing a three-year-old RPG for the first time. Maybe developer CD Projekt Red saw no need to tutorialize it too much for the hordes of returning fans, I wondered?

Only now, on my fifth playthrough, has curiosity finally gotten the better of me. One YouTube rabbit hole later thanks to videos like this, I've been confronted with how incredibly different this game was at launch. Not just in terms of being far more stable and less prone to bugs and crashes these days, but in the evolution of some pretty interesting mechanics and systems that I honestly wish I'd gotten to experience for myself. Cyberpunk 2, take note please.

Threaddy to rock

I adore games that let me diva out. I want to be the most dripped-out baddie in the Badlands, so it makes sense that one of my biggest draws into the world of Cyberpunk 2077 was V's impressive wardrobe.

I made it my mission from day-one to traverse every nook and cranny of Night City in search of the coolest threads V could lay her chromed-out hands on, and for the most part, I succeeded. One thing I shrugged off on my hunt for sartorial supremacy was the fact that clothing items, much like weapons or cyberware, are color-coded into tier grades. In the end I'd just assumed it was a Night City classist thing; grey tier-one gear was simply the cheap bargain bin stuff I'd start out with, while orange tier 5 pieces might run me a few more eddies in exchange for looking like street punk royalty. It wasn't until I finally took it upon myself to research why clothing items are tiered despite only being cosmetics that I started to feel left out.

Surprise, surprise: the color-coded tier levels on clothing items in Cyberpunk 2077 are a vestige from a time when they did serve a greater purpose. Once upon a time, gear could be crafted out of tiered parts just like quickhacks, weapons, and grenades, granting V different buffs and armor values depending on the tier level. They even had mod slots!

This resulted in some truly, uh, interesting fashion choices as players sought to min-max the hell out of their gear (as you can see from the vintage screenshot above, circa-2021). Transmog didn't exist at all, so it was perfectly acceptable to slink into a stealthy thief gig dressed to the nines in stilettos, a polka dot bra, and a hideous fluorescent beanie.

Suddenly, it all made sense. I feel highly privileged to be playing a version of the game that looks and feels fantastic, but there's something fittingly absurd about mercs cutting about Corpo Plaza like a half-dressed Barbie doll found in a dumpster. Sometimes I feel bad for being the only fashionable person in Night City as it is; how could these commoners possibly compete with Queen V's perfectly coordinated red, black, and gold outfits? But in another life, I, too, was meant to be clad in mesh vests and office slacks. Maybe I'm the weird one for sticking out like a sore thumb after all.

This is not me championing for CDPR to bring back a transmog-less world in Cyberpunk 2077. I'd sooner zero myself than let Judy see me in stained sneakers. But I do wonder how it would have felt to play the game relying on my gear to actually power me up rather than adding yet more weight and importance to the ever-grindy path of cyberware leveling instead.

Chop shop

While I'm at it, why did nobody tell me that cyberware used to come with added steps, too? Higher-level tech could only be attained at specific ripperdocs in a pre-2.0 Night City, incentivizing players to travel far and wide in search of unique ways to buff their builds.

Much as I love being faithful to V's pseudo-pops Vik Vector, it makes so much sense to me now that this is how cyberware was supposed to work, considering how districts used to be level-locked. Watson, being the pre-Heist mission "tutorial town", is the perfect low-level training ground to get familiar with the games' mechanics before nudging the difficulty level up. You can still only buy or craft tier-appropriate items tied to your character level these days – with the exception of clothing of course – but once your V is strong enough, they can get any bit of cyberware et al from any ripper closest to them.

Removing the gated difficulty settings makes for a more realistic RPG experience, with varying enemy toughness largely a surprise that keeps you on your toes until you see a quadruple-segmented health bar, but it does take away some of the signposting that helps players know exactly how they are progressing. One of my biggest difficulties with Cyberpunk 2077 when I first started playing was having literally no idea how crafting worked, or what a Sandevistan was, or which of the many, many mission pop-ups I should be tackling first.

I understand why that sense of overwhelm is part and parcel of the overall experience, but I do think CDPR missed a trick by cutting the ripperdoc stock exclusivity factor alongside the zoned difficulties. Imagine getting a call from that one doc across town who has something awesome in stock – he can't talk about it on the phone, and can only hold it for you for a few in-game hours. Or what if specific rippers specialized in different areas, offering a huge range of skeleton or appendage upgrades that grant you an extra special bonus in return for seeing a true connoisseur? Some of the lore of the ripperdocs has been lost in the homogenization of their craft, and it's something I would love to see rectified in the sequel.

I tell you all this as I dig deeper into my fifth playthrough. I'm a stone-cold corpo with a chip on her shoulder to match the one in her neck, both tucked beneath layers of plush nanoweave and velvet, as she searches for fair competition in the game of threads. It's too easy to be the most chromed out queen this side of the Blackwall, let alone the best-dressed merc. Please, Cyberpunk 2: look to your past to give me a challenge. I'll be waiting at Embers with Hanako until then. She, at least, knows how to dress.

Wake up, samurai, there are plenty of other games like Cyberpunk 2077 for a dose of dystopian RPG mayhem!

Treyarch's original Spider-Man game lacked something. It was solidly made, and enjoyable enough to play, but failed to replicate the visceral thrill of hurtling through New York as a web-slinging superhero. It didn't capture the freedom, speed and fluidity of movement that makes Spider-Man so compelling.

Jamie Fristrom, one of Treyarch's first employees and a key member of the development team, had been away on his honeymoon when work started on Spider-Man, which was based around the first instalment of the Sam Raimi trilogy. Fristrom returned to the office to find that his colleagues had embarked down a different path to the one he envisaged.

Webs were essentially cosmetic and players could swing continuously from one to another, regardless of whether they attached to anything or not. They didn't respond to your momentum either, carrying you along at the same steady pace regardless of circumstance.

Fristrom felt that the web-swinging experience wasn't anywhere near dynamic or immersive enough. It also made Spider-Man too easy, depriving the game of the necessary speed and peril. "I was pretty disappointed by that, but I also knew that doing something more 'realistic', with physics and grappling hooks, where you actually attach to stuff, was probably not going to fly," he says. "But, during the development of that game, I did work late to cobble together my own ideas. About six months into production, I'd got something that I liked and I showed it around the team. They thought it was interesting and had potential."

That initial discussion with team members gave Fristrom the confidence to push his idea further. "I talked to the owners of Treyarch – my college buddies – and said, 'Here, look what I did.' They were like, 'Come on, Jamie, be reasonable. You can't change the core game mechanic halfway through!' It also wasn't quite there yet. You'd swing and you'd stick to a wall automatically, because Spider-Man was pretty sticky back then. That wasn't fun."

Treyarch decided to continue with the initial plan and put Fristrom's ideas to one side, at least temporarily. After the game was released in 2002, the development team went to watch Spider-Man in the cinema for the first time, an experience which changed everything. Spellbound by the film's sheer dynamism, they recognised that a more ambitious approach would be needed to ensure the sequel lived up to heightened expectations.

"Maybe we still didn't know what to do next, but we knew exactly where we were heading. Now we could do iteration after iteration. If you feel it strongly enough, getting there is just a matter of work. And we were excited enough that we didn't care how much work it would take," says Tomo Moriwaki, the game's creative director.

Soon after Spider-Man shipped, the next game was underway. Treyarch had two years to deliver Spider-Man 2 and spent the first six months of that in preproduction, refining Fristrom's prototype. "We had this period where we had one team working on gameplay and controls and character and how the camera would work, and then another team working on the tech," he explains.

"In today's world, with the kind of budgets that would be in place for a game like that now, it's unreasonable. Our bosses would have stopped us," says Moriwaki. "But, at the time, there was more distance between publisher and developer, and even the leaders of the development company. We were given a wider berth."

There was no guarantee that all this experimentation would deliver the results they wanted, causing a lot of anxiety. "There were several months of us telling our bosses, like, 'Don't look at it yet! Don't look at it yet!' That moment came where we couldn't hold them off anymore," recalls Fristrom. "That was a great day for us because they were all very impressed. They ran it all the way up the chain to the chief operating officer of Activision to show everybody what we'd done."

The new fluid style of web-swinging, in which Spider-Man would latch onto a building, lamppost, tree or other structure and pivot like a pendulum, was given resounding approval. The more attachment points that were added, the smoother the experience became. You could suddenly cover large distances much more quickly than before, in a way that felt liberating and much truer to the film. "Spider-Man becomes more like a ball that just moves through space and is influenced by the choices we make with the controller," says Moriwaki. "That shifted our thinking towards uninterrupted movement. We were on the hunt for animation transitions that took account of player velocity. If you were swinging at like 70 miles an hour, if you let go, you'd fly at that speed before starting to slow down."

This one fundamental change served as the catalyst for so many others that came together to make Spider-Man 2 far more engaging and memorable than its predecessor. Building a large open-world environment – a faithful recreation of Spider-Man's version of Manhattan that players could freely explore outside of missions – was one of the most significant, drawing inevitable comparisons with Grand Theft Auto.

Programmer Greg Taylor led the city's construction, which was a huge task. "It took longer than we expected. Greg definitely did get pretty stressed out," says Fristrom. "One of the things we had that GTA 3 didn't have was the verticality. On GTA, you're usually down on the road so you can't see that far. If you haven't loaded in distant neighbourhoods because you don't have the memory, or whatever, then it didn't matter that much.

"With Spider-Man, you could go up to the top of the Empire State Building and look around so we needed something. You couldn't just have a fog plane, like so many games did back then. Somebody came up with the idea of loading in these low-detail neighbourhoods that were basically just boxes. Always having those things in memory was pretty key, and then just having the nearby stuff loaded in high detail."

Eric Pavone and other designers populated Manhattan with activity to keep players occupied between missions. You can make deliveries for the pizzeria and take photographs for the Daily Bugle. There are various races to complete, hidden tokens to collect and crimes to stop, each earning you Hero Points that are used to buy upgrades like new attack moves or increased swing speed.

The most common type of challenges in Spider-Man 2, where you have to stop a crime or help a member of the public, were referred to as 'shenanigans' by the Treyarch team. Some had to be initiated by players, while others occurred at random, leaving you to choose whether or not to intervene. Time limits occasionally applied, like when a ship was sinking or a construction worker was about to fall from a ledge.

The lack of variety in shenanigan scenarios is one of the game's biggest drawbacks, forcing players to stop an armed carjacking, rescue a kid's lost balloon or retrieve a stolen purse from a mugger many times over. This was a by-product of the approach the team had taken and the scale of what they were trying to achieve. "Part of the problem is that, in hindsight, we were a prototype game long enough that we had to use whatever the results were," says Moriwaki. "We were just diligently going on, building all kinds of complex infrastructure for a system that we didn't know would work. Because of the way we were doing it, it had to work.

"Some of that stuff, like the armoured car robbery, was really complicated. It was already a huge logical difference to the way we scripted gameplay. It meant we were going to have to be responsible for itemising what we pulled into the scene, and also when we dumped it out. That required a difficult and complex memory management and streaming logic model."

Screen to controller

Matthew B Rhoades adapted the Spider-Man 2 screenplay to create the story. It covers the main plotline, the rise of Doctor Octopus and his fusion experiment that threatens to destroy New York, but other Marvel villains like Rhino, Mysterio and Shocker are drafted in to extend the gameplay. A highly sexualised Black Cat competes with Mary Jane Watson for Spider-Man's attentions as he struggles to reconcile his superhero responsibilities with his normal life as Peter Parker.

"We had to get approval and that wasn't automatic for us. We did a first round of just asking for a lot of different characters and a bunch of them came back 'no'. All the stuff that they said 'yes' to, we basically came up with a rationale for it," says Moriwaki. "We broke up the overall story into half a dozen pieces and then plopped the movie script's key points across that timeframe. We just found a place for it to fit in."

There was lots of extra content that the team wanted to include. Too much, as it turned out. "We were definitely behind schedule near the end. If the movie had come out when they originally said it was going to, I don't know what we would have done," says Jamie. "We got a three-month reprieve. That gave us time to bring more polish. Even with that, we had plans to do this whole sewer system with the Lizard boss, which ended up making it into the third game eventually."

Looking back, Moriwaki believes that the team were simply too close to the project, and too passionate about it, to recognise that their bold plans were getting out of hand. Eventually, Activision had to intervene, requesting that Treyarch narrow the scope of the game considerably to ensure that everything could be finished in time. Some painful sacrifices had to be made. "Spider-Man 2 must have more cut content than any game that had come out until that point," says Moriwaki. "The amount that was cut is staggering. There were some people on the project who had almost their entire work removed from the shipped game and that's terrible."

The control system used in Spider-Man was completely overhauled to make the sequel's gameplay as fluid and fast-paced as Treyarch wanted it to be. Amid all the excitement about what they'd created, there was an underlying concern that players might find the new controls too complex, potentially alienating a significant chunk of their audience.

Feedback from playtests was inconclusive. The team estimated that 10% of players might struggle but worried that the true figure could end up being even higher. "It's probably one of the most difficult core game mechanics that you can dump in somebody's lap and say, 'Here, learn this!'" says Jamie. "I was nervous as we were shipping the final thing. It was like, 'Will people just buy this and not be willing to figure out how to play it?' Most games with 3D swinging do fail, but I have a theory that the lure of Spider-Man means people are willing to get over that learning curve."

The new control system was much less intuitive than the previous one, but with the time and space to practise, which the open-world setting offered in abundance, its intricacies would gradually become second nature to most players, making Spider-Man 2 a far more rewarding experience. Treyarch's leap of faith paid off spectacularly. With the success of the film, which was the third-highest grossing of 2004, Spider-Man 2 was always destined to sell in huge numbers. Perhaps more significant was the overwhelmingly positive reception from players and critics, who praised the game for its vast scale, daring style and sheer fun factor. Sprinting, swinging, climbing and leaping around Manhattan was an absolute joy.

The developers reflect fondly on the process that led them there too. "I had an extremely good time and a ton of those people are still basically like family to me," says Tomo. "What we were able to discover, and accomplish, together was super-satisfying. It was a lot of work and, I think in hindsight, it was maybe at a somewhat unreasonable pace, but even that over-commitment just felt like mad science and experimentation.

"We developed a control scheme and a locomotion experience that could sustain an almost unlimited amount of exploration. We had no precedent for what we did and the way we did it gives me this clear example of why we take chances."

"In a lot of ways, I still feel like it was the peak of my career. Even over 20 years later, that's the coolest thing I've ever done, other than having kids!" laughs Jamie. "There's just something about Spider-Man 2 that's special and enduring.

"The fact that Spider-Man games keep coming out, and they keep paying homage to that swinging mechanic we developed, really makes me happy and proud still to this day. We changed gaming history in our own tiny way, right?"

Take a look at the best Spider-Man games for more web-head adventures!

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!

In Project Zomboid, it's rare to go out with a bang. Most of my characters in the zombie survival RPG have died with terminally short notice, be it a car crash, a bite I didn't notice until getting home, or a cooking mishap with comically flammable chicken (a story for another time).

But with the game's upcoming Build 42 finally launching this week – adding animals, basements, and more than I can mention in one breath – developer The Indie Stone has confirmed that saves will not carry over, spelling an end to the survivor I've kept alive in the update's beta branch. So why not go out in style?

Rather than go gently into that good branch, my friends and I were intent on giving our latest run a worthy send-off. Which was, unanimously, shorthand for driving into Louisville and taking as many zombies down with us as possible.

Highway to hell

This run in Project Zomboid has been unlike any other. For starters, my friend group survived an in-game month – no small feat, given we hid rotten worms in each other's beds and nearly burned down Rosewood with a stray molotov cocktail. But with our save based on an earlier version of Build 42's beta, it also offered a great taste of the update to come.

The rural town of Muldraugh has been my preferred starting point for over a decade. But a lot has changed. Cortman Medical, for example, has been transformed from a one-floor clinic to a fenced property, the clinic tucked to the side of a far larger mansion. The police station now spans multiple floors, including a basement with an evidence room and a morgue. Speaking of basements, we found our earliest ammo supplies in a doomsday prepper's basement – alongside several unlabeled tins of food that nobody was brave enough to eat.

But chief among the changes are animals. After finding a small farm on the outskirts of Muldraugh, we hunkered down with plans to build for long-term survival. There were already cows and chickens there when we arrived, and with animals being fairly intuitive to manage, we soon had a steady supply of eggs and milk, as well as a livestock trailer to rescue sheep and pigs from neighboring farms. Cortman became our armory, a nearby mechanic was restored to keep our cars in good condition, and when I wasn't picking corn or foraging for farming supplies, I was searching for basements to marvel at.

With so much to do, I didn't notice the passing of milestones we'd usually celebrate: a week without dying, or our first out-of-town supply run. Zomboid tends to slow down for me once my base is barricaded up and its cupboards stuffed with supplies, but in Build 42's beta it seemed there was as much ahead as behind. New skills like blacksmithing and woodwork promised plenty still to do once loot dried up, while huge chunks of the map remained unexplored.

But last week (July 24) The Indie Stone announced that Build 42 was coming to the main branch of Project Zomboid on July 29 – launching as an official update for those who weren't already braving its beta. Furthermore, the stable version will include additions not seen in its beta, including big overhauls for many towns. Knowing we'd jump into the flashier build as soon as it was available, we agreed that a guns-blazing trip into Louisville – an overrun city to the southwest – would be a fitting send-off for our latest adventure.

And it was! It took most of a day to drive from Muldraugh to Louisville, as the roads were choked with wrecked cars that made driving in a three-van convoy difficult. We stopped twice: first at a military checkpoint isolating Louisville from the rest of the state, where we had to leave our vehicles and fight through a horde to remove barricades from the roads, and again at the city's outskirts to sleep. The next day we travelled into Louisville proper, cutting loose from the cautious playstyle that Project Zomboid usually mandates to create as much chaos as possible – stuffing microwaves with metal cutlery to start fires, using emergency vehicle sirens to draw out hordes, and generally being post-apocalyptic nuisances.

When the inevitable happened, it was quick and bloody. Zombies chased me into a supply closet, and only after closing the door into pitch blackness did I realize it was occupied. Those last moments were lit by the muzzle flash of my panicked shots – say what you will about being eaten alive, at least Build 42's lighting overhaul makes it look good. My friends didn't fare any better, with one killed trying to rescue me and another while climbing a fence.

Sure, letting the save falter naturally would have given our characters a peaceful send-off. But loading into Project Zomboid, you're always given the same crystal-clear message. "This is how you died," not how you lived happily-ever-after. Build 42 certainly offers more reasons to live (and I can't wait to dig into them properly as the update is out now), but for these hardy survivors there are no nice farms upstate – only fire, dark closets, and lots of gnashing teeth.

Introducing my friends to Project Zomboid ended in disaster, but it's given me a newfound appreciation for the best zombie survival sim around

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced has been a massive (and much-needed) success for Ubisoft, even if that hasn't stopped the publisher from laying off a number of its devs. Looking at the player reactions, it's evident longtime fans of the series were ready for a return to the series' pre-RPG roots.

Understanding where open-world games are right now is impossible without studying what happened in the early 2010s. Skyrim proved density trumps raw size and that immersive sim elements are the key to immortality. GTA 5 became a new gold standard for modern-day sandboxes that many studios still haven't reached before GTA 6 arrives. Assassin's Creed, meanwhile, toyed with a bit of everything and began rowing towards beautiful worlds of deceptive depth and excess.

Even as someone who loves to get lost even in the largest of Ubisoft's sprawling maps, Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced feels like the most satisfying and leanest the series has been in a very long time. Mind you, clearing its upgrade of a pirate-infested Caribbean still takes tens and tens of hours, but coming from behemoths like Crimson Desert – which are obsessed with stuffing as many mechanics and systems as possible into a disjointed package – Edward Kenway's seafaring adventure hits a sweet spot I think we didn't fully appreciate back in 2013.

Land ahead

Assassin's Creed Black Flag's biggest trick when it came to its scope was – and still is, despite Resynced's notable additions – that most of its Caribbean map is just water. It sounds obvious, but even with points of interest emerging from time to time and entire fleets of Spaniards and Englishmen hunting down pirates, the vast majority of the map isn't the icon-filled nightmare we started getting with Assassin's Creed Unity. Even clearing Black Flag's biggest towns, such as Havana, doesn't take too long.

By building the game around the core premise of a pirate simulator and raiding forts and small outposts in remote isles during most secondary tasks, "cities" (they aren't big) are more of a fancy set dressing for a handful of shops and key locations. Of course, they're still fun to traverse and are put to good use by scripted story missions, yet they were far from becoming "black holes" surrounded by even more content grind. I must underline Black Flag Resynced isn't a small or mid-sized game, but I recommend booting up one of its later relatives, such as Odyssey, and comparing how each of them uses its square kilometers.

Less obvious (at least at first) is the fact you can't really fully explore any chunk of land bigger than an islet with a hidden treasure and two turtles. Assassin's Creed hadn't yet reached the "you can climb anything and walk in any direction" approach that made the rebooted saga so sprawling. Dense walls of vegetation and rocky formations are used to "enclose" handcrafted areas that are rarely bigger than they need to be. Stunning vistas abound, but they're no more than that: pretty backgrounds to look at. You can't climb every mountain. Sorry, Todd Howard.

True freedom

Even rebuilt in 2026, Black Flag avoids becoming an endless expanse as gargantuan and playful as Tears of the Kingdom or a Bethesda-style simulation like the upcoming Fable. It also escapes the gravitational pull of last year's Assassin's Creed Shadows, a lovely but eventually tiring Japan-set action RPG that feels like the end of an era. It's an interesting result, and with some remaining traits – such as the lingering deluge of cosmetics – still around, it almost feels like both developers and executives fighting against their worst impulses in an attempt to chart the series' future.

There's a way to make ridiculously detailed open worlds engaging – Rockstar Games and Bethesda Game Studios figured that out ages ago – but Ubisoft isn't interested in following those schools of design. As gorgeous and well-researched as these historical romps are, Assassin's Creed exists in a different sphere, one that's concerned with more immediate thrills and "snackable" stealth action. At some point, probably influenced by entirely different mainstream hits, it moved away from that in an attempt to produce massive games for everyone. As a proud Origins truther, I've been okay with those, but like many others, I've had my fill and would like to go back.

Of course, we still don't know how Assassin's Creed Codename Hexe will implement these learnings while also serving as the next big blockbuster for Ubisoft. Success aside, Black Flag Resynced is more of an experiment – but it's safe to say we'll be getting more remakes that could be more transformative. In any case, the larger message is clear: We still like to get lost in open worlds, we just don't want them to become second lives.

While the first two Plague Tale games had a lead character in Amicia de Rune, she wouldn't have got far without support. The friends and family she drew into her orbit not only filled in gaps in her skillset, they also underlined that she was a single element in a wider social drama. It's an analogy of sorts for these games as a whole. Examine their mechanics and systems closely and you'll note that the pieces are mostly standard-issue, albeit well-crafted, third-person stealth-adventure fare. But they are part of something bigger, slotting together with plot, script, location design, music and more to produce a harmonious ensemble.

Now here's Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy – a slightly unwieldy title which aims to emphasise that this is more spinoff than direct followup. With Amicia's tale told, we're given a new charge in the form of Sophia (one of the companion characters in A Plague Tale: Requiem) and sent back along the timeline to 1333, 15 years prior to the events of the previous games. As we sit down to play through a full chapter of Resonance we're thus faced with a change of personality, time and backstory, but most of all, it transpires, a change in how we play a Plague Tale game. With all these shifts, can everything still pull in the same direction?

Into the Macula

As far as the setting goes, the change could have been much more pronounced. The dark, mystical power known as the Macula that afflicted Amicia's brother Hugo and brought forth millions of ravenous rats exists everywhere in this universe, so plague tales could potentially pop up in any time and place. Indeed, a teaser at the end of Requiem suggested the possibility of a modern-day treatment of the fiction. Was there ever a plan to make that game instead? Asobo studio head and Resonance creative director David Dedeine responds with a simple "no" – the aim was merely to emphasise the transhistorical nature of the Macula. Not that he rules out a more future-facing project. "We hope one day we will do A Plague Tale 3," he says, underlining that Resonance is more sidestep than continuation. "And it might be the case that we see how the Macula would express itself in a contemporary world."

For now, though, we're planted firmly in medieval Europe, albeit no longer trudging around French forts, farmland and battlefields. Sophia, a life-hardened smuggler and pirate when we met her in Requiem, is in her early 20s here, yet already far from wet behind the ears. With a protégé named Leni in tow, she's on the run from the Venetian army, which has decimated the gang of plunderers she belongs to. Sophia is also bothered by visions relating to the Minotaur of Greek legend, which has led her to the island that was, supposedly, its place of residence. Much of the game will unfold here, it seems, giving it a tighter focus, although it's certainly not a monotonous location. Playing through what will be the fourth chapter in the final game, we wind our way through an enormous ruin, where Sophia and Leni must work through 'trials' left for visitors many hundreds of years before. Fortunately, Sophia has a curious metal orb which acts as a key of sorts to unlock various doors and mechanisms.

If this sounds like the plot of an Indiana Jones film, this chapter of Resonance does have something of that feel. There are even moments that recall The Last Crusade as we consult a diary containing sketches that point to clues in the environment. In game terms, this means a departure from Innocence and Requiem's sneaking and crafting routines that riffed on The Last Of Us, bringing us closer to the kind of adventure you might stumble across in Uncharted or Tomb Raider. It's a concerted change, with a character who's also more comfortable crossing cutlasses than skulking in shadows. "As a starting point, we wanted to move on from the pure stealth gameplay," Dedeine says. "What we have tried to do is really shift into something more action-driven." It's a different challenge in terms of expressing the overall Plague Tale DNA, he adds, in which the interactive elements become one with the narrative direction. "The dynamics between the characters cannot be the same, so you need to find different types of layers of story."

Once we've picked our way into the ruins, a cycle of puzzles, combat and exploration begins in earnest. If we stand in the rays of sunlight that beam through portholes in the great domed roofs, our orb refracts the light to reveal hidden painted symbols like a UV torch. It then acts as an interface when we insert it into a dais with a dial to input our findings. If these trials are largely matters of observation, others demand nerves of steel. Deeper into the level we find that the ancient trial-setters were particularly fond of spike traps, which still function rather too well for comfort. One trek across a long, pressure-padded floor with only a single safe path is surprisingly tense, the orb illuminating the correct route, except where your light source is blotted out by obstacles, leaving you to memorise a section and step forward blindly. The instant, fatal punishment for a mistake is liable to make you jump, infecting your next attempt with a touch of doubt.

Not all chapters will be stacked with puzzles and traps like this, explains lead level designer Valérian Robert. They're there because it's designed to be a trial, and "it has to be brutal, so you can die in a lot of different ways". It's a sign that, as in previous games, the makers of Resonance are working hard to marry action and tone. While progress isn't truly difficult, by the end of the chapter we're having to put some thought into solutions, and being impaled is a real possibility. Nor are Sophia and Leni quick to give up clues with their chatter, although they may chime in eventually. "We didn't want to backseat players," Robert says. "We wanted players to think by themselves, and maybe if they find it a bit too hard, they can have some help." Action-adventure games of this type can become boring if you don't have to do a great deal, Dedeine adds: "We realised pretty fast that when it was like this, you don't feel like you are [on] an actual adventure. The story and the background and the graphics are not enough to give you the breadth of the adventure."

Combat follows a similar ethos. Before we get into the level proper, we're offered a tutorial to bring us up to speed regarding what's expected, which thrusts us into some close-quarters duels. Sophia's weapon of choice is a scimitar, but using it is not merely a case of hacking enemies into submission. Landing successive blows sends enemies into a stun state – the ideal opportunity to pull off a charged dagger strike that will finish weaker ones or bite a chunk out of the life bars of those with stronger constitutions. Guarding and dodging are important for working openings, and the quickest route to a stun is to pull off a parry. There's some colour-coding here as well – yellow-tinged attacks can be parried but not blocked, while red ones must be dodged. Sophia's grapnel, meanwhile, is especially handy for yanking archers from elevated platforms or reeling in foes, while a hefty boot sends most assailants staggering.

With Venetian soldiers soon teeming around the ruins (to a man, they have English accents), it's not long before our first real fight – a quick and vicious affair. Well-practised thanks to her bandit background, Sophia fights like a cornered tiger as enemies gather around her. Her sword swings mean business, while incidental actions are pleasingly direct – a bottle on the ground can be grabbed and spiked at a soldier's head with a single button press. At the same time, she's far from invincible, and death can follow swiftly if you lose the duck-and-jab rhythm or get caught off guard by yellow or red attacks.

As with the puzzles, Dedeine tells us, "when you act correctly, it's easy, but if you are doing it wrong, you can be killed brutally, because that's the tone of the Plague Tale games in general." By the end of the chapter, we're asked to link all we've been taught together and, indeed, the speed with which you can end a group of soldiers is highly satisfying, but it's hardly guaranteed as you juggle several enemies at once. Pulling an archer down is easier said than done when there's a mob around you, especially when its leader is built like an ox and on a rampage with a heavy club.

Ancient combat

If not exactly realistic, there's a palpable sense of weight and aggression to these encounters. That could be crucial in order to maintain the thrill of fighting throughout the game, since the mechanics won't increase in intricacy a great deal. With a title of this scope, Dedeine says, "you don't have the space and the time to make a very deep combat game. We wanted to be sophisticated enough to be interesting and rewarding, but not too complex either in terms of skill or in terms of RPG [elements]." Still, we can expect Sophia to learn techniques that take her beyond brawling. "We introduce at specific moments some sort of supernatural powers," Dedeine says, avoiding any specifics. But even here, Sophia won't become a superhero. "We would have broken the universe's rules if we had gone too far," Dedeine says. "We had to find the right balance between what could be believable and the fun of killing five or six soldiers," Robert adds. "I think we nailed it."

Together, the combat, puzzles and traps, along with some light exploration and relic finding, are already a pleasing combination. The new direction clearly works. Still, once again, there is nothing revolutionary here – somewhat reductively, we might call it Tomb Raider meets God Of War in the Middle Ages. Some puzzles, such as a series involving rotating mirrors reflecting beams of light, could generously be called classics of the form, while responding to flashes of red and yellow in combat is hardly new territory. That's in addition to common genre tropes such as wall sidling, zip-lining and navigating crumbling platforms as we spelunk deeper into the ruins. In this sense, Resonance shares the family trait of leaning on tried-and-tested formulae. As ever with Plague Tale, though, that is literally only part of the story. The combat and puzzles are one arm of a narrative experience, selected to feel at home within this adventure. Around them is a suite of artistic flourishes that elevates the journey.

One thing that catches our attention as we push through the ancient construct is its scale. At one point we step into a huge amphitheatre whose central stage is sunk down perhaps hundreds of metres below. Within it stands a kaiju-sized sculpture of a proud soldier. With the wear and tear on this place, we're sometimes poking about where nobody intended us to go, ducking through cracks to get behind the scenes, only to emerge again facing another implausible feat of engineering. "The scale of the structures was one of the pillars [we decided on] at the very beginning of development," Robert says. "We wanted to demonstrate this whole civilisation, and how big and extraordinary it was. We wanted players to experience this kind of shock when they see the gigantic statues." The intention becomes clear as the level culminates around an enormous effigy of the Minotaur itself, its arms animated by unseen mechanisms as you solve the puzzle around it.

More subtly impressive is Sophia herself, in many ways the polar opposite as a character of Amicia's naïvete, vulnerability and sense of privilege. Dedeine: "When we created her in Requiem, I think the team fell in love with her initially, and it was obvious for us to push her further. Based on her past and the level of involvement she had, she was the perfect character to start the new approach." In the ruins, she is keen to push forward, as awestruck as we are, and even a little blasé about the danger. She's also well prepared for a scrap and not averse to using deadly force. "The biggest difference is Amicia was forced to confront violence to protect herself and her brother," says lead writer Carol-Ann Bañuls, "but Sophia was born into it." In terms of writing the character as a protagonist, there was already plenty to work with from Requiem, Bañuls continues: "We knew she was in control of her emotions [and] strong, so we just had to follow the thread of her story to understand where she came from. She kind of talked by herself. She was so well written in Requiem, it was the easiest thing to do in Resonance."

With Sophia – at least, when she's partnered by Leni – Resonance takes on a different tone to that of Amicia and Hugo's traumatic expeditions. There has always been back-and-forth conversation between characters in these games, but here it feels lighter as the women comment on mosaics and statues and the mechanisms they find. "In this level, Sophia and Leni are still discovering the island, so we wanted to keep [their perspective] close to the player's, this sense of discovery," Bañuls says. It reinforces the sense that we're involved in an Uncharted-style adventure, as the pair approach combat with something close to arrogance and aren't exactly wracked with guilt about offing their opponents.

We shouldn't expect this levity to carry right through the tale, however. One of the reasons for taking this spinoff approach to the new game, Dedeine says, is that the team wanted "to breathe a little bit" after the grime and darkness of Requiem. And yet the shadows couldn't be kept at bay for long. "The lore of the Macula – and appetite in the team for all the drama – actually came back into the story during development." Our demo chapter is one of the lightest tonally in the game, he adds, "but there are levels which are even darker, I would say, than the ones in Requiem. So we have more contrast." Despite their humorous banter early on, then, Sophia and Leni are no Nathan Drake and Sully, which suggests there are further layers to unveil. "[Sophia] is the kind of character you admire for her strength," Bañuls says, "but you fall in love with her when you start to see the cracks in the armour."

Balancing all these elements has been a challenge for Resonance's developers, it seems, with combat and traversal and character personalities and relationships all needing to meld together. "There is a lot of back and forth between the writing and the design as a whole," Robert says, even for the chapter we play, which he explains has undergone the least alteration from the original plan. For example, the introduction of music to a level may give an area a different flavour, so the dialogue needs to be changed to adapt. "We write with the controller in our hands at all times," Bañuls says. "You just have to replay and replay the map." As experienced as Asobo may have become in making these games, then, not everything can be predicted. "Sometimes you have a good surprise," Dedeine says. "Sometimes there are things that everyone was happy with and finally it doesn't work. You need to remove them."

Towards the end of our demo, it's Leni who feels that something isn't working, not least with Sophia herself. In a cutscene, Sophia is spellbound by a bizarre vision that almost leads to her stepping off a precipice, but Leni pulls her back at the last second. And, after a few too many deadly traps, the reality of their predicament starts to kick in, Leni wondering what on earth Sophia has dragged her into. Yet she doesn't know the half of it, and perhaps nor do we, as things are about to get stranger still. In another vision we segue back to ancient Greece and suddenly we're in control of none other than Minotaur slayer Theseus, about to enter a combat trial where we must fend off fellow soldiers in a free-for-all until it's time to begin some kind of ceremony.

When we ask about the ancient Greek part of the tale, our interviewees think for a while to decide what they're allowed to say at this stage – clearly this side of the game is crucial to the story's box of secrets. "With the Greek mythology, what motivated us to go in this direction was the fact that the story of the Minotaur and the mythology was the perfect setting for us to offer a new experience to the player," Bañuls finally says diplomatically. As for how closely they've followed the original myth, that's somewhat comparable to how they treated the real Great Plague in Innocence and Requiem. "We revisited the mythology and what was grounded in the reality," Dedeine says. "Why this myth has been told to the people, and what the reality was behind it." Artistic licence will be involved too, especially in linking the past back to Sophia. "What I can say is that the title of the game is connected to that," Dedeine offers. "There is a resonance between the main character and Theseus, and that's what the story will unveil."

Something else remains a mystery at this point, but here Dedeine can set us straight. "There are no rats," he announces. "Let's break [the news]. There are no rats in Resonance. They are gone." This feels like a shift away from one of the series' signature features, but it's easy to appreciate the rationale. "At the end of Requiem, we did lots of gameplay with the rats," Dedeine says, "and at some point, when you know that you are at the end of a mechanic, you need to stop it. Otherwise we would have bored everyone." There were never going to be rats in Resonance, then, and it does feel as though they belong with Amicia and her style of play. The presence of the Macula will be felt in another form, Dedeine teases, which he can't reveal yet. "There is another expression of what the rats were in Requiem and Innocence, and it's something different. Light and shadow are [still] important because it's the lore, but there is something, I would say, more interactive and interesting than what the rats were doing in terms of gameplay."

We can only guess for now, but whatever it is, we're optimistic based on what we've seen, heard and done in Resonance. For all the change, it is still all about the ensemble of features, all supporting one another, aiming to produce more than the sum of their parts. And in the spirit of celebrating the support acts, as we complete the final trial in our demo and Sophia and Leni head deeper into the ruin for more, we'll leave the last words to our companion. "The second trial. Let's hope it's as easy as the first," she quips sarcastically, recognising the difficulties they've overcome. Yes, and as enjoyable, too.

Want more creepy adventures? Check out our best horror games recommendations!

It's finally happening. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake series is coming to Final Fantasy 14.

Over the last decade, its addition felt like a question of when rather than if. Final Fantasy 14 is designed, in part, to be a theme park that pays tribute to the wider series, with references and nods aplenty. We've seen plenty of crossovers over the years – from Final Fantasy 16 and Nier to other franchises like Monster Hunter – and Final Fantasy 14's own producer and director Naoki 'Yoshi-P' Yoshida has spoken about the possibility before, saying the timing needed to be right.

So how did it finally happen, and why now, exactly? Speaking to Final Fantasy 7 Revelation boss Naoki Hamaguchi at Final Fantasy 14's Berlin leg of Fan Fest, it's one of the first questions I ask.

Hamaguchi tells me that discussions kicked off about a year ago during a conversation with Yoshi-P about the release dates for Evercold and Revelation, and it all went from there.

"Is there something we can do to use the fact that they're close together to bring some energy to the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole?" Hamaguchi tells us of the question he and Yoshi-P pondered. "That's really how things started."

Have you heard of . . .

Fast forward to today, and we have a better idea of what that collaboration looks like. Final Fantasy 14 is getting a Final Fantasy 7-themed raid called Beyond the Lifestream that involves the supervision of veterans of the OG JRPG – that being, writer Kazushige Nojima and the man responsible for Cloud's look, Tetsuya Nomura. Amusingly, Final Fantasy 14's version of the Gold Saucer is getting a revamp to look more like it does in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, complete with a typing game that'll get an FF7 theme to start.

Speaking to his own role in the collaboration, Hamaguchi says that, similar to Yoshi-P, he's there to guide the team's excitement into something realistic and achievable. "We have to be really careful that it's not impacting the [Final Fantasy] 14 patch release schedule," he says, "because then we're putting the cart before the horse."

As for what a successful collaboration looks like, Hamaguchi says Final Fantasy 7 fans jumping into Final Fantasy 14 and becoming Warriors of Light would be great, especially if Evercold and the crossover brought some of that momentum to the launch of Final Fantasy 7 Revelation itself. "I suppose the ultimate aim is to see that throughline of excitement and enjoyment," Hamaguchi adds.

There's certainly a solid sense of anticipation around both games already. Final Fantasy 14's Evercold reveal has certainly left some of the MMO heads on this very website feeling hopeful, and Hamaguchi tells me it's been "really wonderful" to see players pick up Final Fantasy Remake and Rebirth on PC, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch 2 following the reveal of Revelation.

Duty complete

Of course, excitement can lead to additional pressure. Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is the final entry in a trilogy that essentially splits one game into three. While I enjoyed what Rebirth offers in terms of combat and the open world, I ask Hamaguchi how the team is freshening up the game, especially in light of his recent comments about open-world fatigue.

Hamaguchi tells me there are two ways in which they're doing that. The first is adding a greater sense of exploration to the world map. Pointing to the Grasslands in Final Fantasy Rebirth, Hamaguchi says it's very large and expansive, but also very "flat."

The remedy is more verticality. Hamaguchi can't reveal everything, though he does say you can dive into the map from the Highwind, and your chocobo will also be able to fly, which Hamaguchi hopes will make "certain parts less frustrating."

Another way the Final Fantasy 7 Revelation team is keeping things fresh is by making sure the "goal and reward" of side content is clearer, especially following feedback from Rebirth.

"One of the things I think people got a little bit tired of – or maybe that's when they stepped away from the game – was on the world map, there is a lot of content," Hamaguchi says. "And sometimes you'd get rewards like materia if you finish that content. But for those people who just wanted to get those materia or rewards, they might feel like they have to do certain mini-games, even if they don't really want to."

To remedy this, Hamaguchi says that content in Final Fantasy 7 Revelation will match the reward to what you're doing – rewards that'll aid you in battle will be achieved through battle, a new Queen's Blood card will be earned through Queen's Blood, and so on. The hope is that the clarity will allow players to ignore the content they don't want to engage with.

Finding the right FITS

When it comes to combat, one of Final Fantasy 7 Revelation's standout new features is the FITS system – that being, Function Integrated Tactical Suitwear. It essentially acts as a new job system that allows the likes of Cloud and Tifa to play as something like a Black Mage as opposed to the brawlers people might typically typecast them as.

Despite the visual flair of a new outfit, Hamaguchi says the biggest influence on the new feature was the job system as a Final Fantasy staple overall, though he can't say there was "zero influence" taken from the likes of Final Fantasy X-2 or Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy 13.

The new feature hasn't been without its troubles, though, as Hamaguchi jokes that adding the FITS system reminded him about "how hard it is to develop games these days."

"When you look at some of the early Final Fantasy games that have job systems, you could put a lot in there," Hamaguchi says. And while the developers behind ongoing games like Final Fantasy 14 have done "fantastic work" in adding a variety of classes over the years, bringing something like 20-30 classes to a standalone title at launch would be "insanely difficult."

Hamaguchi also jokes that, while there are many open-world games out there, few allow your party to follow you around. "Even though we only have four FITS, we have a lot of characters, so it was quite a lot of work."

Another thing that makes Final Fantasy 7 Revelation stand out from the other two installments is a proper endgame. While players seeking a challenge in Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Rebirth are typically directed towards playing NewGame+, Revelation brings the challenge to your first playthrough, ready to tackle once you're powerful enough to do so.

Being the third entry in a trilogy, I ask Hamaguchi how the team is using that to shape how it's approaching the endgame and anticipated moments like fighting superbosses like Ruby and Emerald Weapon.

"Obviously, what we're making is an RPG," Hamaguchi answers. "And I think one of the things that's fun about RPGs is having the characters you've leveled, you've customized, and you've brought them up where they are, and using them to overcome difficult situations.

"So, say you had this fight against a Weapon, a giant enemy, or something that's really exciting or cool. And you go into it, and it's just a completely new mechanic or mini-game. I think there are quite a few players who would come away from that feeling quite disappointed that it wasn't a reflection of the effort that they put into building something up to that point.

"But the general goal for our team when we're thinking about making these Weapon fights is that we want to have the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series combat system at the base. What we've been building up over these three games. Perhaps there'll be some extra gadgets, some other things adding something new and unique to the Weapon battle, but we want to have that foundation there as well.

"So there may be some mini-games involved in parts of them, say at the beginning of one of the fights or something like that, to mix things up a little bit. But the core battle is really focused on the characters that you have come through the rest of the game with as an RPG."

On the case

While there are plenty of exciting developments within Final Fantasy 7 Revelation itself, those unfolding outside of the game and Square Enix are difficult to ignore. As Final Fantasy 7 Revelation nears completion, one of the more prominent conversations currently occurring across the industry is about physical media. Rockstar made headlines when it was revealed that GTA 6 would be a code-in-a-box at launch, though Sony's call to end PlayStation disc production in 2028 has swiftly dwarfed that in online chatter.

Given some of the conversations I've seen in Final Fantasy 7's fandom about whether Revelation will release on a physical disc, I ask Hamaguchi for his thoughts on the topic and whether there's any news he can share.

Hamaguchi starts by saying that some of his thoughts have been touched upon as part of Nintendo Switch 2's game-key cards – you can read about that here, as part of an interview we did with Hamaguchi last year. He then says that, as a developer and as a fan, it seems to be the trend that we're shifting away from physical to digital.

When it comes to his personal feelings, though, Hamaguchi says he's a fan of physical media, and events like Final Fantasy 14 Fen Fest are one of the many reasons why.

"I really think that people bringing up things, asking for autographs – I think that's lovely," he tells us. "I think it's a wonderful culture and it would be a shame to lose that. I want that to remain."

As for his personal prediction of where things go from here, Hamaguchi says he feels that "there will always be some kind of physical or packaged edition, even if download codes become the main way that games work."

"I feel like there will always be something," Hamaguchi says, "and I hope there will be."

Looking ahead to Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, Hamaguchi says the team is "still having internal discussions on what the exact SKU product lineup is going to be," so he can't say anything "definitive" at the time of writing. That said, he is trying his best to "allow us to have some kind of physical edition."

"Obviously, say, if you're talking to Nintendo, there's considerations about the storage limits on key cards and things like that, and then other platforms about how much you can put onto a disc," Hamaguchi explains. "Each platform and first-party have their own specific rules and regulations that we need to take into account, and think about what format is actually going to be best for the game.

"These are the discussions that we're having at this point in time. I do hope that we'll be able to come up with something that is as close as possible as to what players and fans are going to want, but you'll have to look forward to future announcements for that."

Given that Final Fantasy 7 marked the series' debut on disc, it's certainly odd to think of a different FF7 game going without. That said, Final Fantasy 7 launched on disc because the cartridge was no longer the best format for the game, and these days, given Square Enix's own strategy pivot, that would mean making the game as accessible as possible across multiple platforms. As the industry settles into a way of working that's more about getting the most out of average hardware rather than pushing hardware's limits further, it'll be interesting to see what compromises Final Fantasy 7 Revelation can manage.

Still, I remain cautiously optimistic for what Final Fantasy 7 Revelation brings. Rebirth improved on Remake in a big way that has me curious to see what part three of the trilogy has in store, and everything we've seen and heard so far hits the right notes.

"I want this guy to make Final Fantasy 17": Yoshi-P embarrasses Final Fantasy 7 Remake lead with the "highest praise you can get" from players live on stage at FF14 Fan Fest.

I loved Returnal. I loved my time demoing Saros' opening hours. But, I'm not made of money. I'm still getting used to new games launching for £70/$70 (let alone 80 bucks), and by 'getting used to' I mean 'not buying'. Years of my childhood spent a gaming generation behind, picking out discounted cartridges from behind glass at the pawnshop, or buying unloved discs for a fiver a pop has taught me one thing: the patient gamer gets the worm. But, that might be changing.

I finally snagged Saros last week for 40% off. It's still expensive, but it's the sort of deal I've been keeping an eye out for – my usual method for scooping up new releases I don't need day one. And yet, with PlayStation ending physical disc production, I'm struck by the cold realization this might be the last time I get my hands on a boxed discount like this for PS5. It's an ignoble end for a deal hunter like me.

Disc-overed at the scene

I like a digital deal as much as the next gamer, but there's no thrill of the hunt when it comes to snagging virtual discounts. Whether PlayStation or Xbox, each digital marketplace is a walled garden, where deals come and go like clockwork to the exact prices agreed upon in advance. There's no real competition to be had, no variables to consider. No satisfaction for snagging a particular good deal, just a deal – the deal you were told to be grateful for.

Countless times I've even been swayed into pre-orders by deals – combining storefront voucher codes with already-reduced retail pricing to knock a crucial few bucks off an already slashed release. Who can forget the highs of getting Super Mario Bros Wonder at launch for £37.49 from Currys? The earth-shattering frugality of it made the excellent platformer all the sweeter. It's basically the only way I will ever pre-order a game before release.

Rare is the new, physical game that doesn't have some price reduction as major retailers face off to secure their orders, and then over time reduce games further to reduce stock. In conversation with my friends – those who game constantly and those who only pick up one or two a year – we often discuss where we've snagged the best deals, which retailers to look to first to get a better offer. The local discounts at Argos! The big reductions at Smyths! I've written enough Black Friday and Prime Day gaming deals to see how heavy savings can be on Amazon across regions for relatively new games. I've regularly seen Star Wars Outlaws physical copies cheaper than it's ever been on the PlayStation store – and that's just one example.

And all of that's before I get started on second-hand and pre-owned shops where prices can spiral further. Fifteen quid for The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker with the Ocarina of Time bonus disc changed the trajectory of my life forever. Perusing the likes of CEX or other local shops formed the backbone of my own library when I was a cash-poor base Xbox 360 model owner, scooping up Devil May Cry 4, Fable 2, and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts for one crisp twenty note (an unwise chunk of my bank balance at the time – I never said I had good priorities).

These days, I'm rarely a collector. I personally don't really care if a game is on my shelf or in my digital library. I simply want to get a good price for my purchases, and encourage my friends to do the same. It's really the removal of purchase options that makes me concerned. I even worry that with less competition, we'll see digital deals get worse over time. At least on PC there are alternative shops to Steam, even if it has an incredibly large market share.

Giving consumers fewer ways to buy makes me feel disrespected. You will lose potential players as a result, even if it's in tough-to-track data – a player who buys a pre-owned game who might convert to buying the sequel new, new fans of a series or developer who only gave them a shot once they were cheap enough at their local. Streamlining an experience inherently removes avenues in. Market control is trumping the consumer experience.

It's not just the fact that gaming as a hobby is becoming more and more expensive to enjoy, it's that the ways in which you could make gaming more affordable for yourself are being obliterated. The AI industry is choking out component availability so hardware gets pricier over the course of a console generation rather than cheaper, completely inverting the traditional customer dynamic where the price of entry lowers and more users come in over time. Options to get discounts on new, physical games, and the pre-owned market are being crushed with hammers.

Even while indie gaming continues to offer some of the most affordable gaming and often incredible new experiences, the wider industry is also exerting tremendous pressure on those indie developers to remain sustainable. It feels like there's no way out of it, and it's those with less who are feeling it the hardest – players and creators alike.

For now, I guess I'll try to enjoy Saros, but it's a different kind of existential horror to the mysterious eclipse that's affecting me at the moment. If gaming had been like this when I was a kid, there's simply no way I would be playing today. There was nothing lesser in my experience playing the cheap, discounted scraps – there was a treasure-finding glee into uncovering the good stuff at a discount, even if that meant risking wasting pocket money on some absolute guff. Sorry-not-sorry if it affected a tiny margin on some Windows 95-era spreadsheets, I guess.

Stopping poorer gamers from deal hunting, young kids from counting up their money to see which pre-owned release they can afford, or prohibiting swapping, trading, and borrowing your favorites with your friends crushes a vital human element of gaming. It makes me worry about the future of the industry, but it makes me worry about those looking to find joy in a rancid economy all the more, whether that's playing games, or making joyous experiences you want to share with others. We all deserve better.

Check out the best PS5 games for what to play next!

Halo's greatest strength is simplicity. Super-soldier protagonist Master Chief is an immovable object, the Covenant's alien invaders an unstoppable force, and hitting them together like action figures has created 25 years of entertaining FPS hijinks. Returning to the first game via Halo: Campaign Evolved, little has changed – even when it has.

The remake features a prologue from developer Halo Studios, with three all-new missions that see Chief tear through a Covenant ship before the events of the original game. The prologue is Halo Studios' first original creation since the studio's rebrand from 343 Industries in 2024, which means we're effectively getting a glimpse into the series' future while fresher players are given the perfect introduction to Master Chief and Halo's setting.

Shipping it

Aboard the Covenant's vessel, you're thrown straight into the carnage. It's an excellent setting for an FPS, particularly one of Halo's straightforwardness. Squeezed into the ship are cramped service corridors, grand halls, and even a domed Earth-like desert biome – all unmistakably alien, but designed with perfunctory violence. Ornate balconies can be a vantage point for Jackal snipers or a haven for Chief to blast Brutes from a distance, and every door is a potential entry-point for more aliens – and just about the only place you can create a chokepoint, if you're quick enough to frag a gaggle of Grunts before they can disperse. Even in a linear shooting gallery like this, I always feel moments away from being overrun on all sides.

The developer also recognizes the importance of Master Chief's momentum, which is something I clocked while playing the original game's remade levels. Standing still is a surefire way of being pelted with grenades, leaving you to push forward as your only option – if only to pluck a plasma rifle from a dead brute, as limited ammo makes every weapon a disposable tool. I'm pinballed from gun to gun, drawn further out of position until I look back and realize I've completed most of the prologue this way. The original Halo campaigns were defined by their breathlessness, and it's bracing to see Halo Studios lean into the same dynamic so effectively.

As someone who has lapsed from the series since the Xbox 360 days, the new prologue also serves as a nice way into Halo at its simplest. A Star Wars-style crawl establishes humanity's war against the Covenant, while Master Chief is endearingly portrayed as both stoic hero and tongue-in-cheek action film caricature. "Chief – you ever get tired of being the strong, almost-silent type?", he's asked during a lull between shootouts. Long pause. "No."

By remaking the first Halo after a major development overhaul, Halo Studios seems to be looking back to find its way forward. Its originality in the prologue shows the developer certainly has the shooter chops to carry Halo forward – five minutes with the CE Magnum is enough to confirm that – but the bigger question is how this action will be framed going forward. Does the prologue's claustrophobic structure mean we'll see more traditional shooter levels in future Halo games, or will they build upon Halo Infinite's open-world experimentation?

Whatever the answer, I just hope the next game from Halo Studios is wholly original. After all: what's Halo if not moving forward?

Not sure where to start? Here's how to play the Halo games in order

If you're looking to play the Halo games in order, I've brought together this handy guide to break it all down for you.

Here, you can find all of the major Halo games and some off-shoots compiled below in two different orders. Starting with the release date order first, you can find a list that gives you an overview of the series as it originally launched, from its beginnings in 2001, right up to the latest new game in 2026 with the arrival of the remake, Halo: Campaign Evolved (which you can find out more about in our Halo: Campaign Evolved review).

For those of you looking to explore the series in narrative order, I've also detailed how to play the Halo games chronologically, with overviews of where each entry sits in the Halo timeline and if or how the events of the games connect story wise. Of course, alternatively, you can also explore the series by checking out our ranking of the best Halo games if you're after the highlights, too. But for an overview of how to play the Halo games in order, read on.

How to play the Halo games in release order

If you want to play the Halo games in release order, you can find a helpful list breaking down all of the games (including some major spin-offs) below, with the original launch years they came out in.

• Halo: Combat Evolved (2001)
• Halo 2 (2004)
• Halo 3 (2007)
• Halo Wars (2009)
• Halo 3: ODST (2009)
• Halo Reach (2010)
• Halo 4 (2012)
• Halo: Spartan Assault (2013)
• Halo: Spartan Strike (2015)
• Halo 5: Guardians (2015)
• Halo Wars 2 (2017)
• Halo Infinite (2021)
• Halo: Campaign Evolved (2026)

How to play the Halo games in chronological order

If you're instead looking to play the Halo games in chronological order, the list looks quite different. While, for example, Halo: Combat Evolved was technically the very first Halo game to release, later Halo games take you to earlier points in the Halo timeline of events. So, if you're looking to experience the narrative of the series chronologically, I'll break it down for you here.

With both a list so you can see the order at a glance, as well as a more detailed overview of the timeframes and how it ties into the overall narrative, you'll also find current platforms listed where you can still play these today.

• Halo Wars
• Halo: Campaign Evolved (prologue missions)
• Halo: Reach
• Halo: Combat Evolved
• Halo 2
• Halo 3: ODST
• Halo 3
• Halo: Spartan Assault
• Halo 4
• Halo Spartan: Strike
• Halo 5: Guardians
• Halo Wars 2
• Halo Infinite

1. Halo Wars (2531)

Halo Wars is the first real-time strategy game set in the Halo universe, and it's also technically the first game in the series narratively speaking. With the events of Halo Wars taking place some 21 years before Halo: Combat Evolved (and, of course, its remake, Halo: Campaign Evolved).

Taking place in the year 2531 during the tail-end of the Harvest campaign – which revolved around trying to reclaim the colonist world of Harvest that's been ravaged by the alien Covenant empire (who are determined to destroy humanity). You play as one of various leaders and take command of either UNSC military units who are part of the Red Team, or the Covenant, and get thrown into the conflict. The parasitic threat known as The Flood also factors into the campaign.

2. Halo: Campaign Evolved (2551 - Prologue missions)

For the most part, Halo: Campaign Evolved serves as a shiny new remake of Halo: Combat Evolved, but there are some new bonus prequel missions introduced that place it earlier in the timeline narratively.

Taking place a year before the main story of Campaign Evolved (and Combat Evolved) and prior to Halo: Reach, these Operation Meteorite missions explore a self-contained story featuring Master Chief and Sergeant Johnson teaming up to infiltrate and investigate a Covenant research vessel above the colony of Promise. It mostly establishes that Chief and Johnson were best pals before the events of Halo 1, but also introduces a new Prophet character, who may be more important in the inevitable Halo 2 remake.

So, if you do want to play the Halo games in order, it could be worth tucking into Campaign Evolved over Combat Evolved, or play it before you play the original if you're keen to try both. However, you won't be missing much by skipping these prequel missions and going straight to the next game.

3. Halo: Reach (2552)

Halo: Reach brings forward the Halo timeline from Wars, but is still a precursor to Halo: Combat Evolved. And rather than being an RTS like Wars, it's an FPS like the majority of the series.

Taking place a few weeks before the events of Combat Evolved in the year 2552, the game explores the Fall of Reach, a key human colony planet that served as one of the last bastions of military strength against the Covenant.

The campaign sees you playing as super solider Spartan B312 (aka Noble Six), a member of the elite Noble Team, who are sent to look into a distress beacon on the planet. It soon becomes apparent that the Covenant are on Reach and you'll get swept up in countless battles against the alien invaders as they continue their devastation from the Harvest campaign. Reach's ending then almost immediately leads into the start of Halo: Combat Evolved.

4. Halo: Combat Evolved (2552)

The FPS that kicked off the Halo Series, Combat Evolved (and its 2026 remake, Halo: Campaign Evolved), bring the events forward from Halo: Reach some weeks later. Still set within the same year of 2552, Combat Evolved follows Spartan John-117, better known as Master Chief, who begins the game in cryo sleep aboard the UNSC ship Pillar of Autumn after the Fall of Reach.

The Pillar of Autumn is quickly overrun by the pursuing Covenant, and Captain Jacob Keyes charges Master Chief with protecting the ship's AI Cortana from falling into the hands of alien forces. But after you crash onto an ancient, mysterious ringworld (aka a Halo) known as Installation 04, you'll soon find yourself fighting back against the Covenant forces that revere it and uncovering its true purpose.

5. Halo 2 (2552)

Also taking place in the year 2552, Halo 2 unfolds following the events of Combat Evolved. But rather than solely focusing on Master Chief, Halo 2 also explores a Sangheili warrior called Thel 'Vadam who holds the title of The Arbiter.

Playing as both characters at different points in the narrative (before their plotlines eventually converge), the game sees the Human-Covenant war escalate, with the aliens now invading Earth. Master Chief starts the fight aboard Cairo Station before eventually battling through the city of New Mombasa, which sets up what's to come in Halo 3: ODST. Meanwhile, the Arbiter contends with The Flood on another Halo known as Installation 05.

6. Halo 3: ODST (2552)

Halo 3: ODST actually takes place during Halo 2 and acts as a prequel of sorts to Halo 3. Taking on the role of an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper called Rookie, you set out to find out the motivations behind the Covenant's attack and invasion of the city of New Mombasa on Earth.

Shaking up the combat, ODST introduces some stealth as you try to survive against the overwhelming enemy forces. Structurally, it's also quite different to other games, featuring some open world exploration as you explore the ruined streets of New Mombasa at night looking for clues as to where your missing squad mates are, which lead into more linear missions that show the chaos of the Covenant's invasion. Overall, it builds up a more complete picture of the Battle for Earth prior to the events of Halo 3.

7. Halo 3 (2552)

Halo 3 then sees out the year 2552 with the return of Master Chief, who's back in the leading role. The Arbiter also makes another appearance, although now he's only playable in co-op multiplayer. Set a few weeks after the events of Halo 2, the third entry follows on from ODST to bring the original Halo trilogy to a close.

After crash landing into an African jungle, Master Chief sets out to finally finish the long fight against the Covenant. As you battle against enemy forces, you also work to uncover a secret that could turn the tide of the fight. But along the way, you'll also have to contend with the threat of The Flood, too. With Halo 3 officially wrapping up the Human-Covenant War, the game ends with Master Chief entering cryo sleep on the UNSC Forward Unto Dawn ship – which is left adrift in space – to await rescue.

8. Halo: Spartan Assault (2554)

Set between the events of Halo 3 and Halo 4 in the year 2554, Halo: Spartan Assault is an off-shoot entry in the series that plays as a twin-stick, top-down arcade-y shooter rather than the mainstay FPS format of the core trilogy. Originally released on PC and mobile before coming to Xbox 360 and Xbox One, it features over 30 campaign missions.

Its concept revolves around a training simulation tool for Spartans. As you try to progress your career as a prospective Spartan, you'll be drawn into key battles that take place within the timeline. As the games go, this is one of those off-shoot you don't really need to play to follow the overarching narrative of the main series.

9. Halo 4 (2557)

Picking up where Halo 3 left off, Halo 4 takes place less than a handful of years later, and follows Master Chief as he's awakened by Cortana on the Forward Unto Dawn ship – which is still adrift. Cortana, now several years old, is starting to suffer from rampancy, making her unstable.

The duo eventually find themselves on the Forerunner world known as Requiem, where soon enough, he finds himself facing the Covenant and another threat in the Forerunners (another advanced alien species) with the mighty Didact as their commander.

10. Halo Spartan: Strike (2557)

Just like Halo Spartan: Assault, Halo Spartan: Strike is another off-shoot twin-stick shooter set in the Halo universe. Narratively speaking, it does jump a little in terms of the timeline, with it including events that took place in 2552, but it's technically set in the year 2557. As another smaller experience that doesn't hold as much weight as the mainline games, this is another one you could miss without much trouble.

But if you want to experience it, this is where it sits within the timeline of events, and it kind of mirrors the concept of Assault in that it's another series of missions centered around a tactical simulation training tool that was originally developed for mobile.

11. Halo 5: Guardians (2558)

Halo 5: Guardians takes place in the year 2558 after the events of Halo 4, and puts you in the role of both Spartan Jameson Locke, who's a part of ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence), and Master Chief. When series hero Master Chief goes AWOL after going after Cortana with his Blue Team Spartan allies, you as Locke set out to bring him back with Fireteam Osiris.

Playing as both characters at different points throughout the campaign, our original Halo 5: Guardians review picked at its story, which doesn't feel as cohesive or impactful as its predecessor, with much of its events feeling more inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

12. Halo Wars 2 (2559)

Just like the first Halo Wars game, Halo Wars 2 takes the series back to the realms of strategy and sees the Spartan Red Team awaken from cryo sleep 28 years after the events of the first Wars game. Set in the year 2559, it takes place in the timeline following the events of Halo 5 and sees you play as a leader of your choice as you command your own army and take on a new threat in the Banished, a Brute-led faction born out of the Covenant.

With the option to play as either humanity, or the Banished in the story, you build up bases, take charge of troops and vehicles, and navigate battles in missions centered around the Ark – a Forerunner installation first seen in Halo 3

13. Halo Infinite (2560)

As the most recent game to release in the Halo series (outside of the Campaign Evolved Remake), Halo Infinite is also the latest entry in the timeline, with events unfolding in the year 2560. Taking place roughly 18 months after the events of Halo 5: Guardians, Infinite sees you assume the role of Master Chief as the war against the alien Banished faction has effectively been lost.

With Halo Infinite being set on a Halo ring known as Installation 07 (Zeta Halo) which is coming back online and poses another threat, Master Chief works to shut down the Halo. Cortana's actions from Halo 5 are largely glossed over and, while she features in the story, Master Chief instead finds himself paired with a new AI known as The Weapon. If you want a more in-depth explanation of the storyline, you can check out our Halo Infinite story explainer.

Looking for more recommendations? Check out our pick of the best FPS games.

Wingspan Pocket is like one of the apex predators it depicts; it swoops in, claws outstretched, and carries you away before you even know what's hit you. I love the original version, but after getting my hands on this travel-sized follow-up… well, a new board game rules the roost in this house.

Based on the mega-popular Wingspan, this smaller, nimbler variant is designed to be played in just 25 minutes or so. Because it's made up of cards and a few tokens, it also requires much less real estate. (The original board game had some spectacular plumage, but it ate up table space like a gannet.) However, the most crucial difference with Wingspan Pocket is that it's so much easier to play… but is arguably just as fun. I spend a lot of time testing the best board games so would like to think I've got a good idea of what works, and I've got a very good feeling from this. My family enjoys Winspan but can feel overwhelmed by it if we haven't played for a while, so I appreciate that this one streamlines the system into something much more manageable.

You're still collecting birds here, but you don't need an entire menagerie; you just have to get six. Once half a dozen are arranged in a flock on the table, that's it – game over. Players then get another turn until everyone has had an equal number of goes, and you tally up your score. This means you can be done in a fraction of the time.

The way you get birds is the same too, but has been similarly tidied up. Rather than relying on dice rolls to earn resources, each bird card has a random resource symbol printed on the back. These are laid out in a row of four decks you can draw from each turn, and they'll be used to pay for any feathered friends you'd like in your flock. It's so much more deliberate than the original, because even though you're still at the mercy of chance based on what's at the top of each deck, there are always four to choose from at any given time. Plus, there seem to be a lot of 'double' resources available, with certain bird abilities allowing you to swap or ignore specific values. Canny players have options as a result.

The key is when to strike. Actually, that's true of everything about Wingspan Pocket. You have limited space for birds so must balance how many points they'll earn you at the end with their abilities. In addition, those abilities can only be used when the bird card is locked into your flock… so get ready to make some tough, quick-fire decisions on what to use, and when. Should you deploy something that allows you to use a resource in place of anything else, even though the bird itself earns you fewer points when all is said and done? Or are you better off going for a bird with a higher score, but less interesting abilities? I've only just started scratching the surface of this board game, and there's already a lot to consider.

This extends to the fact that your match draws to a close when anyone has added six birds to their flock. It adds a ticking clock to proceedings, because you don't want to be caught out by the endgame without having done everything you want… and by the same token, it adds pressure to keep an eye on what your foes are doing in case they're planning to end the game early to stop you in your tracks.

Even if it all goes awry, this only adds to the "one more match" element of Wingspan Pocket. There's always some new tactic or approach you'll want to try, and that's catnip to me. I can see it being a great travel board game as a direct result, because it'll keep you amused across many evenings of play on vacation.

It reminds me of Catan On the Road, which sunk its hooks into me nice and early too. Both condense their inspiration into something much more bitesize, all without losing what made the originals special.

Just proceed with caution, though; if you're anything like me, Wingspan Pocket may sweep you off your feet too.

For something else to play on the go, don't miss the best card games. As for something you can enjoy with your loved ones, be sure to check out our guide to the best family board games.

• Browse today's best discounts on board games at Amazon

It's December 2006, and after months of eagerly scrubbing through trailers and poring over Official Nintendo Magazine, a brand new Zelda game is on the way. Not just that, it feels like the Zelda game, a gritty successor to Ocarina of Time's throne, bolstered with the incredible motion controls of the Wii. As December 8 rolled around, I queued up at midnight with my best pal, giddy with excitement, and sped home quickly as if the wind of Tulin was behind me.

We stayed up until five in the morning playing Twilight Princess, briefly slept, then went straight back to it. My poor younger brother didn't touch Wii Sports for at least a week. But, it wasn't the much-touted waggle controls that offered the biggest thrills, or the (at the time) incredible graphics. Instead it was Twilight Princess's commitment to tone, to crafting a lived-in world, and the tangible feeling that this space was really right in front of us – if we could just reach in and touch it.

Now 20 years later, it's that attention to detail, along with a mixture of reality and fantasy, that still makes Twilight Princess's dungeons the best the series has ever produced.

Got that dog

Twilight Princess feels quaint in hindsight when compared to BotW, but when it comes to solving puzzles this works in its favour. Each dungeon feels like a distinct part of this world, but it also feels absorbing. Scale works both ways, and spending more time in a small but richly detailed world gives you a real sense of your place in 3D space, especially with the immersive motion controls helping to bridge your suspension of disbelief.

For instance, the Goron Mines in Twilight Princess feel like a functioning part of that world. Heavy doors groan when they're heaved open, and bridges thud with a distinct weight when you fire your arrow to lower them. Breath of the Wild offers so much to do, but occasionally the sheer scope of that world makes smaller moments feel weightless. Twilight Princess makes each room feel consequential, and every solution to a puzzle feels like you've shifted something monumental in the world. You can imagine the Gorons down here smelting all day, which makes it more fun when you interact with elements that feel tangibly useful.

One standout example is Snowpeak Ruins, a dungeon that sneaks up on the player as you slowly realize this frosty new area you have discovered is your latest mystery to solve. Here, you also consistently interact with the Yeti couple Yeto and Yeta as you explore the grounds, further strengthening the belief this is a space that characters actually inhabit. So, when you unlock the fantastic Ball and Chain and start swinging wildly, the sense of power and relief is thoroughly earned. Not to mention, the Snowpeak boss uses both those interactions and your understanding of the space perfectly, turning your time bonding with the Yetis into an emotionally resonant fight instead of just another piece of Ganon fodder.

Speaking of the Ball and Chain, Twilight Princess has one of the best selections of items in any game, let alone a Zelda game. Unlocking the Spinner, and not only discovering a Beyblade-esque method of transport, but the function of those conspicuous jagged teeth in the wall of the Arbiter's Grounds, is immensely satisfying. It is phenomenal dungeon design to add a weapon that feels like a genuine part of this world, then offer both functional ways to use it in this established environment but also ways to attack enemies like the awesome fight against Stallord.

Perhaps it was the overcorrection after Wind Waker's reception, but Twilight Princess works so hard to establish a feeling of unease, of an oppressive and omnipresent sense of dread in the world. Link feels truly up against the world, and you want to help every character you meet in this slim cast. Nintendo consistently makes great dungeons for Zelda games (except for you Breath of the Wild), but in Twilight Princess the mixture of tone, a push for realism, and the immersive motion controls really help to elevate already stunning work.

Even on GameCube, stripped of those motion controls, Twilight Princess works on many levels to make every action feel important. Link's quest here feels uniquely intimate; the standout cast of characters offers support and genuine peril, and the unique selection of weapons works overtime to make you feel like you're interacting with a living and breathing world. As we look to the future, I hope even as Zelda continues to grow, we can reclaim the sense of consequence and importance that occur when we interact with a smaller, functional, and uniquely living world.

Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was so secret within Nintendo, most employees found out about it for the first time at its E3 reveal: "We popped off"

Nothing humbles a fan of first-person shooters faster than a hardcore Mil-Sim like Hell Let Loose: Vietnam.

Picture it. You're creeping under cover of the jungle canopy as helicopters whir overhead. Short sharp shocks of gunfire are your only real guide towards a forming frontline; squad orders are the other, as the voice of a squadron Commander crackles over the comms line to scramble Infantry units back through dense brush to reform fracturing formations. As enemies pour over the crest of a distant hill, your M16 rumbles as bodies crumble. And then, nothing. A bullet fired from an unknown location rips through your torso. Medics in the area ignore your pleas for help. The long walk back to the action begins again.

There was a time in my life where military simulation games were all I would play. Highly lethal gunplay meets minimal visibility and low hit detection across large open terrains? Count me in! The Operation Flashpoint and ARMA series were where I graduated to after growing a little tired of the more predictable cycles of Battlefield, Ghost Recon, and SOCOM. After a weekend of getting my ass kicked, I'm struggling to remember what attracted me to the brutality to begin with.

Run Through the Jungle

My friend group has started to migrate away from Battlefield 6, which has left me looking for a new shooter to play – ideally one that isn't of the Battle or Extraction persuasion. The Battlefield Studios effort really made me fall back in love with the idea of larger-scale, open-combat experiences so Hell Let Loose: Vietnam appealed.

Here's the thing, Hell Let Loose: Vietnam is an experience defined by the friction it generates. With 100 players populating exceptionally wide multiplayer arenas, the game is designed around dynamic frontlines and intense team communications. Every soldier has a role to play, and players buying into the fantasy of their assigned Command, Support, Infantry, or Specialized unit is the only way for such an unforgiving shooter to function appropriately.

Let's take respawning as an example of this game theory put into action. Despite being so focused on team dynamics, you are not able to spawn directly on squadmates in Hell Let Loose: Vietnam. Instead, you're able to dive back into the fray from a Garrison, created in tandem between Commanders and Specialists, or from an Outpost placed by a Squad Leader near objective points. If these fail to be established then you're forced to spawn far from the frontlines, back at a headquarters where you'll face a 10 minute walk back to any action. Once you return, you're as likely to get nailed from an unseen attacker as you are to establish a chokepoint to catch enemy soldiers pouring from trenches.

With this in mind, setting up Outposts or fortifying capture points to allow for faster redeployments into the fray is just as valuable – if not more so – than generating an unholy amount of kills and assists. Hell Let Loose: Vietnam reflects that in its unstable firing models, lack of discernible weapon feedback, and any real visual hit detection. The objective is to win the day as a group, not sit atop the leaderboard as an individual – killing enemy soldiers is simply a means to this end.

Whether this sounds even remotely appealing to you will determine whether Hell Let Loose: Vietnam is something you will enjoy. When it clicks, as 50 players come together to generate battlefield momentum, it's fairly spectacular – intense and rapid, capturing a tangible sense of large-scale action that Battlefield can only dream of delivering. When a round doesn't come together, it's a mess. A slow slog through open expanses where you're left to lament the shift in online gaming culture; wide adoption of microphones (at least on console) seems like a relic of a distant past, which is a problem for a multiplayer game foundationally built around quick-fire collaboration.

Hell Let Loose: Vietnam is a polished FPS with a well-defined identity, one which easily separates it from Battlefield, Call of Duty, and the waves of battle royale and extraction shooters dominating the charts. It's a challenging, uncompromising experience that isn't going to be for everybody. The brutality isn't a bug, it's a feature – the great differentiator that gives developer Expression Games a lane to dominate. I don't know that I necessarily have the patience for this sort of Mil-Sim any more but, then again, I still find myself eyeing the August 13 release date with an almost morbid curiosity.

Hell Let Loose: Vietnam is coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X on August 13. If you're looking for more on new games of 2026 and other recent shooters, here's some reads I recommend for you next:

It's a very risky time to release a multiplayer video game. The 'live service' scene has become inundated with hundreds of titles trying to replicate the success that a select few established games have found. The likes of Fortnite and Call of Duty still dominate the scene, making it seem impossible for newcomers like Concord or Highguard to break in. That's not to mention the number of legacy games that simply can't sustain themselves with the rising costs of development, including Destiny 2, which received its final update earlier this year.

So much of the video game industry is increasingly dangerous and volatile, but one genre has flourished for decades – MMORPGs. As live service games try to hold onto their share of committed players for longer, the developers of the best MMORPGs have had to find new ways to evolve.

To better understand how, I spoke to the leads of three of the longest-running modern MMOs – Final Fantasy 14, Elder Scrolls Online, and Warframe – to unpack how the genre has changed amidst the landscape of multiplayer games.

Building a world

The MMORPG genre began its rise to prominence in the '90s and many developers have tried to play in the massively multiplayer online space since, but precious few have had any real staying power. It's the games which cleanly carve out a niches, and then double down on serving that fanbases, which have any chance at survival. It's a challenge that Nick Giacomini, game director of The Elder Scrolls Online, is well acquainted with.

"The MMORPG genre isn't going away any time soon. MMORPGs are homes for players in a way that most genres just aren't. It's right there in the name: they're massive. The sheer scale of these games gives you a space to truly inhabit, while the community makes it feel alive," says Giacomini.

"That said, the genre is challenging right now, particularly for new games. Creating an MMORPG is a monumental undertaking, and few new MMOs have been able to break through. And on the one hand, the rise of live-service games has made this more challenging. There are so many incredible games to choose from right now, so why should players choose your game when they have so many amazing options?"

That's a sentiment echoed by Warframe creative director Rebecca Ford, who feels there is a new window of opportunity for MMOs. First launched in 2013, Warframe's slow and steady growth has proven it as one of the juggernauts of the genre, able to carry on where others haven't. It might simply be good timing, but the idea of a game that players can "regularly" come back to, as a sort of daily, weekly, or monthly habit, has become more and more attractive in recent years – especially as the cost of everything goes up.

"There's really no place for confidence in the current ecosystem; nothing is guaranteed. The younger generations of gamers have not been exposed to the dominant MMO era, yet the strongest MMOs still stand. 'Interest' in genres comes and goes, but typically, the interest cycles happen much faster because games and hardware were iterated on more quickly," says Ford.

"This means people stick with their comfort games for longer, and devs can work on the same IPs longer. In another life, Warframe would already be on 'Warframe 4', but the conditions of our evolution mean we did not need to sprout gills, so to speak, to evolve. Other genres have certainly impacted interest, as have development costs."

Legacy MMOs like Final Fantasy 14, Guild Wars, Runescape, World of Warcraft are now ingrained into the fabric of online gaming culture and have established, loyal fan bases. The sheer size and nature of the time commitment MMOs have may, in turn, be the secret to their success. Players have to commit to an MMO to some degree, after all.

"MMOs still have several characteristics that could contribute to longer lifespans. For example, unlike games that run on peer-to-peer connections, MMOs have massive servers containing a tremendous number of assets – not just item and character data, but also game systems like player housing and friend lists," says Final Fantasy 14 producer and director Naoki Yoshida.

"When an MMO becomes a hit success, that boosts the number of long-term players and helps stabilize operations, so I can see how those factors often lead to MMOs having longer lifespans. That said, there are still countless MMOs that rose and fell. In the end, all online services have a common principle: they need to have long-term stability and an entertaining experience in order to endure."

It's no coincidence that Final Fantasy 14, The Elder Scrolls Online, and Warframe are undergoing massive shifts in gameplay or ideas at the moment. In accordance, all three of these developers see some kind of symbiotic relationship with live-service titles. Giacomini notes that live service games are helping the MMO genre by "expanding and normalizing the space," while Yoshida says the "boundaries" between MMOs and other genres are becoming more "ambiguous." The influence live-service games have had may not be obvious or tangible, but it's there nonetheless.

"Today, live service games are mainstream. They've normalized the idea of games as a hobby, a place to hang out with friends, and a world that evolves over time. They've introduced MMO-lite concepts to millions of people who may have never considered themselves MMO players," notes Giacomini.

But the other crucial piece of success to the future of MMOs, stressed by all three of these developers, is a passionate community – but more importantly a community that the dev teams themselves can sort of "work" with. The studios behind Warframe, ESO, and FF14 have all opted for transparency, keeping very little to the chest in favour of constant communication with the playerbase, and an open dialogue on what said players want.

"Our players know exactly what they want. They are our 'boss' at the end of the day, and our game is only ever as good as our last update. From the very beginning, we've been transparent and flexible with them, almost every month for nearly 200 announcement-filled Devstreams," says Ford.

She adds: "If we announce a feature and players hate it, we are prepared to scrap it or work collaboratively with them to find the Goldilocks version that feels right for Warframe. We as creatives will always try to take big swings with new things and cross our fingers that they land well. But if we miss the mark, we are always willing to hear our players out and iterate on the idea into something we all love, as devs and players."

"A balancing act"

There's a fine line to tread between retaining the experience players love, but still being experimental and ambitious enough to try new ideas. With a lack of growth, even a successful MMO can grow stagnant, or fail to attract new players. Change is often a scary word in the realm of tech and games, something that connotes that you're losing something, especially daunting when it's a game you've sunk days, if not weeks and months, of your life into.

But a particular, and noticeable, shift in MMOs has been to accommodate a wider variety of players. But a particularly fascinating part of this is these long-running games having to essentially "age up" with their players. Giacomini assets that, as live-service and multiplayer games continue to appeal to young audiences and new players, longstanding MMOs have had to adjust for players whose lives have quintessentially changed across a decade or two.

"If your design ethos doesn't change over ten years, you're going to get left behind," he explains. "Players who started playing with us a decade ago are at a different stage in their lives now, and we have to evolve to provide them with what they're looking for today. Player expectations have also shifted based on what successful new games are bringing to the table. Trying to make sure that every moment players spend in our world feels worthwhile requires change."

"It's definitely a balancing act. If you push too much unwanted change, the game becomes unrecognizable, and you risk alienating your core players. But if you don't change enough, you become formulaic and risk boring them. MMORPGs feel very different today than when I first started playing over 20 years ago. They're recognizable but fundamentally evolved. And I think that kind of continuous evolution is what innovation is going to look like for successful games in the genre."

Speaking to these key creatives, they've all reached similar philosophies in different ways. Both Ford and Yoshida note that the support and deep involvement of their respective communities is the key piece that keeps these games moving. All three stress the need for 'rewarding' experiences, ensuring the time players invest in their game feels well-spent. The development of each of these games revolves around player feedback, but trying to integrate that with the idea of experimenting and finding things that will surprise even players who have spent 10 years on a game.

Ford points to FF14 as a prime example of a game that's adapting to the needs of players, saying it's great to "see them [the FF14 dev team] focus on what they're good at, like Raids, at large scale." But she also stresses the need for integral change. Ford says there's one crucial way MMOs need to keep experimenting.

"Get weird! Go left instead of right, but always, always be ready to work with your community, not for or against them. Nothing is ever set in stone. Game design trends will always be in flux, whether that be due to advancements in technology or changes to player habits due to things happening in the world or their personal lives," Ford says. "We kind of joke about this. You don't want to see the current Warframe leads – me and Pablo Alonso, our design director – try and make a PVP mode again. Even if players think they want it, we simply aren't good at it, so we can't innovate with hero shooter genre appeal, so we have to try other things!"

FF14 is in the midst of one of those moments, with upcoming expansion Evercold making some of the biggest, most sweeping changes the MMO has seen since its relaunch as A Realm Reborn in 2013. And while Yoshida notes that his approach to developing FF14 has undoubtedly changed over the past decade, in a way, that's secondary to how the studio tweaks the game as a whole. Because the community has become such an ingrained part of FF14's identity, it's more about knowing when to hold off on major changes, and when to push forward.

"For our upcoming expansion, Evercold, I chose to steer FF14 towards 'change' in pursuit of creating even more enjoyment and evolving further. I felt that, in terms of mindset and time, we were prepared to update the gaming experience to be more enjoyable and comfortable for our players and their lifestyles," Yoshida says. "Our lifestyle routines are constantly changing, and the rate of change only keeps accelerating. But making sudden changes to try and keep up with that pace can be harmful to our operations, like how making sharp turns while driving fast tends to lead to accidents. Making these judgment calls is a constant part of overseeing FF14."

However, Yoshida says his approach might be completely different if he was making something from scratch, adding, "Incidentally, if I were to develop a new online live service title from scratch, I'd be challenging myself to tackle completely new game designs and values."

But cutting through all the noise, there seems to be one universal truth to the success of MMOs – something that none of these teams have forgotten even as they try to shift and adjust to changing player expectations. And it's especially attractive in light of so many multiplayer games that lean into short bursts of excitement, battle passes, and an ever-changing experience.

"The industry is more crowded now, but the desire for a world you can live in and escape to is stronger than ever," says Giacomini. "And if MMORPGs can evolve to meet players where they are and ensure the time they invest here feels worthwhile, the genre will thrive for decades."

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Wondering what to watch before Spider-Man: Brand New Day? Then you've come to the right place. With so many Marvel movies and shows to keep track of, it can be hard to know what to brush up on before a new release.

But that's where we come in. Below, we've rounded up all the Marvel movies and shows to watch before Spider-Man: Brand New Day, so you can get up to speed before the next chapter of Peter Parker's adventures.

So, for all you need to know, head to the below. For even more, check out our guide to all the upcoming Marvel movies and shows.

The MCU Spider-Man trilogy

The most obvious three films to watch before Spider-Man: Brand New Day are the three that make up the MCU Spider-Man trilogy. Homecoming, Far From Home, and No Way Home tell the story of Tom Holland's Peter Parker so far. If you're pressed for time, No Way Home is the most important to (re)watch, since that film covers how and why the world forgets Peter Parker. But, if you have more spare time on your hands, you could also go back and watch Spidey's MCU introduction, which came in Captain America: Civil War, though we doubt it will be relevant for this movie.

Punisher: One Last Kill

Jon Bernthal's Frank Castle has a role in Brand New Day, and, for the latest on Punisher's antics in the MCU, his own standalone special is the place to go. One Last Kill focuses on Frank's mental health and his mission to avenge his family, as well as a new crime boss threatening his neighbourhood. It tees up a vigilante Punisher who has moved beyond his revenge mission, which could make his dynamic with Spidey very interesting in Brand New Day.

Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame

While Spidey does appear in both of these Avengers movies, these actually provide great background for Mark Ruffalo's Hulk, who looks to have a hefty role in the new movie. These Avengers films give context to Bruce Banner's struggle with his Hulk persona, as well as the Smart Hulk that allows him to keep his head when he goes green. For even more context, you can check out She-Hulk on Disney Plus, too. The show focuses on Bruce's cousin Jennifer Walters, but Bruce has a supporting role.

Daredevil

Spider-Man: Brand New Day's villain is a mystery, but some signs point towards the Hand. Netflix's Daredevil show is no longer MCU canon, but the Hand is the main villain of Daredevil season 2 – so it could be worth checking out this show's version of the group before Brand New Day. You can also find the Hand in Iron Fist, if you really want to do your homework.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day arrives on July 29 in the UK and July 31 in the US. In the meantime, check out our guide to the Marvel timeline for the story so far.

As soon as Kill Team: Exodite was announced, folks went nuts for its dinosaur riders. And you know what? That's fair. Space elves on the back of dragon-esque velociraptors is one hell of a sales pitch. However, this hides the most appealing thing about the box set.

Aeldari cavalry are all good and well, but the real gem is what they're sitting on – a kickass singleplayer or co-op campaign. This is far more in-depth than I'd expected, and while it's not going to dethrone Warhammer Quest: Darkwater, Kill Team: Exodite feels more like the best board games than I'd anticipated.

If you haven't been keeping up with the grimdark future, this is the latest installment for Warhammer 40K's smaller, leaner spinoff that brings back the eponymous Exodites – isolationist Aeldari who fled to "maiden worlds" before the collapse of their civilization. These guys are famous for riding dinosaurs (or "dragons," as they call them) into battle, so you're getting three here alongside a couple of what I like to think of as emotional support dinos. This Kill Team is being pitted against the Beast Snagga Boyz – Orks that love the thrill of the hunt.

As you might expect, this puts the two on a collision course. The Orks are keen to hunt those maiden worlds for their wildlife, while the Exodite Dragon Masters are honor-bound to protect those same planets. There's no chance of a peaceful solution here, so players must saddle up as dino-knights to see off the Orkish invaders across a sprawling campaign of missions. These greenskins are controlled by a clever matrix of behaviours, meaning you don't need anyone to control them.

Much like Armageddon, the launch box for Warhammer 40K's latest edition, Kill Team: Exodite does a great job of making you feel as though the weight of an entire world rests on your shoulders. A lot of time is spent building up the lore of the maiden world that the Orks have invaded, and the campaign itself features branching paths based on the approach you want to take or your success. This really puts you in the driver's seat and makes you feel in charge of this story.

However, unlike the previous box set, Kill Team: Terror on Devlan, your characters earn upgrades as they progress. This only helps enrich that sense of ownership.

Is it odd that Kill Team has focused on two singleplayer/co-op campaigns rather than its traditional competitive match-type? Yeah, a bit – and I'm now eager to see what the next 'season' holds, because we're due a head-to-head box set with a new Kill Zone to fight over. (I can't believe it's already been a year since we last got that with Kill Team: Tomb World.) But I shouldn't complain, because this fits a niche that 40K didn't really have – a legitimate singleplayer mode. We don't all have regular gaming groups or friends who like to play, after all, so this is a great way of getting matches in solo.

Plus, you do get some awesome dragon-riding space elves. So there's always that, if nothing else.

Looking for other recommendations? Don't miss our guide to the best tabletop RPGs. As for more Warhammer, the Ogor Mawtribes have won me over with how gross their mechanics are.

Blade Runner 2099 is almost here, and thanks to a bunch of recent news that just dropped during San Diego Comic-Con, excitement for the next outing in the sci-fi series is at an all-time high.

While Blade Runner started with Ridley Scott's 1982 movie, the upcoming show is a sequel to the second flick in the franchise, Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049. That movie came out all the way back in 2017, so yeah, it has been a good long bit of waiting for the follow-up for all of us Relpicant fans. Blade Runner 2099 was also announced all the way back in 2021, so seeing a bunch of recent updates arrive as part of the SDCC 2026 schedule was a welcome surprise, and I've gathered all the new details and information you need to know right here.

From the Blade Runner 2099 release date, plot details, casting news, and more, here is a complete breakdown on everything that you need to know about Amazon Prime's upcoming Blade Runner 2099 TV show.

Blade Runner 2099 release date speculation

Blade Runner 2099 will be released on Prime Video on November 25, 2026.

The news was revealed at San Diego Comic-Con 2026. During the panel, Amazon also mentioned Rings of Power season 3 (which also releases in November 2026), so it seems like the streamer was keen to highlight a big fall schedule.

Blade Runner 2099 plot

The official plot has been released for Blade Runner 2099, which is set 50 years after the previous movie. "Welcome to a future we no longer control," reads the tagline which teases how much the world has changed since that film. A war has taken place between the humans and the replicants, and the humans have lost.

Now the replicants are in charge and the humans are the second-class citizens. Hunter Schafer plays Cora, a human, opposite Michelle Yeoh's replicant Blade Runner named Olwen. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, showrunner confirmed that Cora and Olwen will be working together in the new show.

"Hunter is playing a human who is a fugitive and has spent her life running from Blade Runners," Silka Luisa said. "And now has to pretend to be one. In this struggle to survive and just trying to live day-to-day, she’s actually lost her humanity. So she’s a human who has lost her humanity. And the question for the series is: Once you’ve lost her humanity, can you regain it?"

Olwen and Cora will be working together and investigating the missing rogue replicants — and this being Blade Runner, don’t expect any of the answers they find to be simple or expected.

I'll keep you posted as soon as more news breaks, but for now you can check out our list of the best sci-fi movies to watch in the meantime.

Is there a Blade Runner 2099 trailer

The trailer for Blade Runner 2099 came our way during San Diego Comic-Con 2026, during the Prime Video panel. You can watch it for yourself above.

In the clip, we get our first look at futuristic LA as well as Schafer and Yeoh in action. So far, it looks stunning. It shows a grim post-war world where the humans are at the mercy of the replicants. I'm excited to see even more teasers in the future. Hopefully, we get more story details in the next trailer, but for now, the sci-fi vibe has been perfectly captured here.

Blade Runner 2099 cast

Currently, there have been quite a few Blade Runner 2099 casting announcements, the two biggest being Michelle Yeoh and Hunter Schafer as the two leading roles. However, many character details and names are undisclosed right now. I'm still waiting to see if we get any familiar characters being recast or mentioned, so watch this space.

Here is the confirmed Blade Runner 2099 cast list so far:

• Michelle Yeoh as Olwen
• Hunter Schafer as Cora
• Dimitri Abold
• Lewis Gribben
• Katelyn Rose Downey
• Daniel Rigby
• Johnny Harris
• Amy Lennox
• Sheila Atim
• Matthew Needham
• Tom Burke
• Maurizio Lombardi
• Hugo Hamlet

Is Blade Runner 2099 connected to the Blade Runner movies?

Good news: Blade Runner 2099 is indeed connected to the two Blade Runner movies, taking place in the same universe and 50 years after the events of the 2017 movie, Blade Runner 2017.

This means that the Blade Runner 2049 ending is canon for the series, so I'd highly recommend giving that a rewatch before you dive in. I won't get into spoilers here, but that film does set up a lot of context around the state of humanity as well as how Replicants are treated. I'm sure that the series will give newcomers who haven't seen the films some kind of context, but for the full picture, watching the movies for yourself is likely going to be the best route.

Also, Ridley Scott is an executive producer on the series, so we can rest easy knowing that he'll likely make sure canon is followed.

Additionally, according to producer Andrew Kosove, the new series will have "connective tissue and character and storylines that relate to the first two movies," but you won't need to know them to enjoy it.

Speaking at SDCC, showrunner Silka Luisa also teased the difference between the previous movies and Blade Runner 2099. "2019 was dark and rainy. 2049 was snowy and cold," she said. "Our show is a rebirth. It's the rebirth of a city, it's a rebirth of all of our characters, and so to me that felt like it should be hot and sticky and chaotic, and that's where we got the idea for the 'sunshine noir,' and so you're you're seeing Blade Runner, Ridley's Blade Runner, but through the lens of hard sunlight and deep shadow where you still have neons, and hopefully that feels like it's both familiar but completely different."

While we wait for more Blade Runner news, you can head over to our list of the best shows on Amazon Prime to stream right now. Or, look ahead with our round-up of the best new TV shows on the way.

Bethesda has rumbled back to life. Nearly three years after Starfield and with The Elder Scrolls 6 nowhere in sight, the positive reception to the announcement of the Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters is hardly surprising. With the help of Obsidian, between 2008 and 2011 Bethesda cemented itself as the rightful king of the open-world RPG, Fallout 3 and Skyrim bookending the kind of development run we'll probably never see again.

A long-awaited return to the Capitol and Mojave Wastelands is welcome, but while these remasters aren't quite too little, too late, they serve as a reminder of just how neglected one of the biggest and best RPG series has become.

This November will mark 11 years since Fallout 4, with Fallout 76's eighth anniversary falling just a couple of weeks before. And until last week, there was nothing to suggest another game was anywhere close to the horizon – based on Bethesda's previous release cadence, 2033 was a solid guess for a potential Fallout 5 release year. That's not far short of two full decades since the series' last traditional, single-player RPG launch – an unforgivable drought for a series that has over the past few years, been transformed into a mainstream, global franchise thanks to the critically-acclaimed Amazon Prime series.

In the last week, admittedly, the Fallout slate has filled up significantly. First up will be next year's "prequel story to Fallout 3" heading to Fallout 76. The Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas remasters seem likely to follow relatively soon after, potentially positioned around Fallout season 3 and the Fallout Shelter show. Fallout 5 is officially in pre-production, but could easily follow as many as five years after Elder Scrolls 6, which still feels a long way off. Obsidian's new Fallout project seems likely to plug that inter-franchise gap – perhaps some time in 2029 or the early 2030s.

Kick in the head

It's that last project that's currently most mysterious, but also the clearest indication of what Fallout and Xbox actually need: help from the wider ecosystem. Xbox and Zenimax are full of studios that could have, over the six years since the acquisition, been running wild in the franchise playgrounds that are currently open only to Bethesda. Clearly, the kind of AAA, open-world RPG that Todd Howard wants to make takes many years to complete, but I see no reason why no other studio has been allowed to do more than sniff in the direction of the Fallout and TES brands.

The possibilities are huge; a stealthy, Dark Brotherhood immersive sim made by Arkane Austin instead of shuttering it after Redfall; a Ghoul-led game using the State of Decay tech from Undead Labs, which just got sold off; an Age of Empires conversion from World's Edge, which has been diligently plugging away on DLC and remasters for that franchise. Xbox's affinity for beefy guys with guns across the Gears, Doom, and Halo series could have led to an amazing power armor shooter. There are certainly studios whose work doesn't mesh with Bethesda's oeuvre so neatly, but within the Xbox ecosystem, they're surprisingly few and far between. And all that is to say nothing of Obsidian, a studio that not only made one of the best Fallout games, but eventually took its fate into its own hands and made Avowed and The Outer Worlds as its own answers to The Elder Scrolls and Fallout.

That none of those studios have been given a Bethesda license is a mistake, but it's a mistake compounded by the fact that Bethesda isn't equipped to handle them at the pace that should be required. Its two most important IPs have been left to languish for more than a decade. Starfield is a primary cause for that, but so is Bethesda's size. The studio has remained deliberately small by the standards of a major studio, and at about 450 staff isn't capable of being a two-game studio, especially since switching between three different franchises means it can't pull off the kind of juggling act that the similarly-sized Insomniac - which has launched a whole suite of Marvel games over the time since Fallout 76 – has been able to achieve.

A hit of Jet

It's likely that the Fallout release cadence will pick up now. The remasters are the start of that process, and the Obsidian game and Fallout 76 expansion will help. But while Xbox's recent deluge of lay-offs have hit hard, the fact still stands that the publisher is sitting pretty on some of the industry's highest profile RPG brands and what remains of the studios that created them. With only the likes of CD Projekt Red as major competition, the question is whether new Xbox chief Asha Sharma will be able to do what predecessor Phil Spencer couldn't, even as the company haemorrhages staff. If CDPR is able to push out three major RPGs in quick succession, could the much larger Xbox be in a position to follow suit instead of squandering the opportunity? Or, is such a massive entity prone to slow manoeuvring, like trying to turn a Brotherhood of Steel zeppelin?

But, whether or not that all comes to pass, it doesn't change the fact that as a gaming series Fallout has been left behind by its creators for far too long, and no number of remasters will help speed up the ongoing wait for its next major iteration, especially as the years tick on.

The Elder Scrolls Online is struggling with "team bandwidth" after Xbox layoffs hit Bethesda and ZeniMax, leading devs to limit a store for in-game items.

PATCH NOTES: v24.09.2026 – Nintendo should have been taking a victory lap this week, following the release of Splatoon Raiders on July 23. At a time where discussion should have been focused entirely around the latest Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive, attention on the platform holder's activities has been divided between two ongoing legal battles.

What's going on with Nintendo this week?

• The first Splatoon spin-off launched as a Switch 2 exclusive
• A patent infringement lawsuit hit a new roadblock
• Request was made to dismiss a class-action lawsuit

Why is this happening now?

• The legal system works in weird and mysterious ways
• Nintendo has been embroiled in a dispute with Pocketpair for two years
• Two battles on the same week as Splatoon Raiders is bad timing

Meta Shift

This should have been a straightforward week for Nintendo. After a year of anticipation, Splatoon Raiders finally arrived, giving the Switch 2 one of its most compelling first-party exclusives. At any other time, this delightful spin-off – a confident shift away from the multiplayer focus that has otherwise defined the franchise – would have dominated the conversation for days.

Instead, Nintendo spent the Splatoon Raiders launch window fighting legal battles on multiple fronts. Attention was repeatedly diverted by fresh developments related to the ongoing legal dispute against Palworld developer Pocketpair, as well as a new court filing in a US class action lawsuit over the impact of tariffs.

While none of these stories are directly related, they do provide a window into one of the challenges Nintendo faces in 2026: launching platform-defining exclusives while simultaneously fighting to defend its business priorities in courtrooms all around the world.

Known Issue

• Another strange twist in the Palworld lawsuit

The biggest distraction from Splatoon Raiders' release week was undoubtedly from Japan, with a new development from a patent dispute adjacent to Nintendo and Palworld developer Pocketpair's ongoing legal battle. Nintendo has been attempting to patent the 'in-game monster-capturing system' popularized by Pokemon, which the Japanese Patent Office has rejected.

This decision has prompted Nintendo and the JPO to enter into a pretty extraordinary back-and-forth of counterarguments that, frankly, are well worth your time if you have it to spare. While this fight isn't at the center of the legal battle with Palworld, it certainly doesn't help Nintendo's case at all.

Patent disputes are difficult to follow at the best of times, but that's why this story was so essential – it illustrates just how complex these types of legal proceedings can become, and how entertaining it can be when they boil over in public.

• And then there was the tariff lawsuit

Just as players started to lock into arguments over whether it's even fair for Nintendo to test the strength of gameplay patents in this way (hint: enjoyers of Palworld 1.0 would say that it is not), a legal story with some spice emerged from the United States. This may have flown under your radar, but Nintendo is actually engaged in legal battles over tariffs.

Nintendo filed a lawsuit earlier this year over what it alleges was an "unlawful imposition of tariffs" by the US. This prompted two individuals to file a class action lawsuit against Nintendo; the pair claim that if Nintendo is owed refunds on collected tariffs, then so too should be consumers who purchased Nintendo products at increased prices.

Nintendo bit back hard, suggesting that players were "free to abstain from purchasing the product or seek out competing products" and that they got "exactly what they bargained for and paid for." Ouch.

Patch Notes Summary

• One company, three conversations

Nintendo spent the Switch era cultivating an image that it was consumer-first and software-focused. To see three separate conversations kickstart within days of each other – one about a platform exclusive, one around Japanese patent law, and the other around US consumer litigation – has created the impression that Nintendo's priorities are now being pulled in different directions.

Lawsuits and legal filings landing the same week as Splatoon Raiders is unfortunate – the courts work to their own schedules, not to the hype cycles we spend our lives following. But the diverting of attention in this way has been fascinating to witness.

Nintendo will have plenty of other moments to celebrate this year, with Fire Emblem Fortune's Weave, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and The Duskbloods all expected to land. Whether they will also converge with ongoing legal disputes remains to be seen, but one thing's for certain: Nintendo needs to pull the focus of players back to video games and away from the courts.

Still, regardless of all the legal drama that has (admittedly) been pretty entertaining to watch from afar, I'll be spending this weekend diving into Splatoon Raiders. What about you?

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I spent an evening this week virtually hanging out with two of my closest friends as we put on some VR headsets and met up on the charming links of Walkabout Mini Golf. As much as catching up with my friends (and smoking them at mini golf) was the main focus here, as a VR headset nerd, I was also enjoying the fact that all three of us were accessing VR in different ways.

My friend Olly was playing on PSVR 2, a simple connection job to his console, which was probably the most streamlined of us all. I was playing on the new, lightweight, and ultra high-fidelity Pimax Dream Air, a direct-to-PC wired headset which I'm currently testing for review.

My friend Stewart, the newest of us to VR gaming, has had some trouble getting Steam Link to work wirelessly on his Meta Quest 2 headset, so he was using a Link Cable to plug into his PC and play via Steam.

After a good couple of hours (and some comfortable wins for me, which I definitely didn't gloat about), Stewart's headset, the oldest of the three we were using, died.

"Did you not say you got an Elite headstrap with a battery attachment?" I asked him. He had, but he explained that because the Meta Quest 2 only has one USB-C port, he wasn't able to play via the Link Cable and charge simultaneously.

Little did Stewart know that he had stumbled upon a design flaw that also plagues the much newer Meta Quest 3 and 3S, and it's a big reason a lot of folks will need to choose their Meta Quest accessories very carefully.

My mind immediately drifted to the upcoming Steam Frame. From what we know about it so far, it's not taking the same sort of accessory-ready outlook as the Quest headsets. It also, as far as we know, can only work wirelessly. It has one solitary USB-C port too, which is for power delivery/charging, maybe a few accessories, and limited data transfer through USB 2.0 speeds. You're not going to be able to hook up a link cable to play on PC.

Thankfully, it's had a true wireless outlook from the beginning. Its USB dongle will do all the linking work you want it to (supposedly), and it can also run games natively, but should the selection of accessories for it start to grow, it could run into the same issues as the Quest devices where you have multiple peripherals fighting over a single USB port.

With such a diverse selection of accessories available for the Quest 2 during its tenure, you'd think the Quest 3 headsets would have seen an expansion to two different USB-C ports. This would allow for linking up to a PC, as well as the option to keep the thing charged while you're using it, or even a separate USB-C option like latency-free earbuds and headsets.

For those wondering, a USB Link cable will supply a small amount of charge to a Quest headset while you play, but not enough to keep it alive indefinitely. The solution in recent years has been fancier wires like the Syntech Link Cable, which throw a divider into the middle of the connection so you can plug that into a wall outlet and provide super-fast charging, but this is less than ideal since you're then tethered to a secondary point in your room as you play, which could limit movement.

Even with one of the fanciest link cables, you'll still be limited in terms of the other accessories you can use. If you want to use the PrismXR earbuds, for example, or anything else that'll need a USB-C port to work, you're going to be limited.

Depending on how you use your Quest headset, this could be a minor gripe or a continual plague on your VR downtime. Either way, with rumors beginning to swirl about the Quest 4 being a larger upgrade and departure from the Quest 3, maybe we'll see expandable connectivity in the next generation.

Upping your PC power in time for the Steam Frame? Check out the best CPU for gaming, the best RAM for gaming, and the best graphics cards.

Scanlines! It's a phrase often hurled around the retro gaming space, and one you'll find on your "an enthusiast said I'm playing old games wrong" bingo card. The issue is that while it is indeed a visual effect that can be enabled when using emulators and retro console remakes, they won't always make your shiny new screen look like an old CRT TV, and that could put you off using the effect.

As someone who specializes in connecting retro consoles to modern TVs and monitors while also being a CRT TV enthusiast, there is a big fat myth tied to scanlines. While using an overlay that adds horizontal black gaps can enhance definition and add pixel separation, you won't magically get the same visuals as a tube set. There's way more going on with your old idiot box than that, and understanding those old visuals will help set your expectations.

When testing the best retro consoles today or using the originals, I typically enable scanlines. Adding in horizontal black lines can come with caveats, but for the most part, it will add useful pixel separation that helps sprites and textures look less like blocky blobs on modern displays. But, to help you work out whether you actually care about using the effect, I want to dive into what scanlines actually are and the various ways systems today can mimic an old CRT.

What even is a scanline?

By definition, a "scanline" is a horizontal row of pixels drawn rapidly by an electron beam to make a full CRT TV picture. Yes, your old box would make up a full image within a split second by blasting electrons against a phosphor-coated screen, which made for a very rock 'n' roll way of generating frames.

Unless you've got some really high refresh rate eyeballs, you won't be able to see a CRT actively drawing horizontal lines. In fact, there's every chance that if you grab an old tube set right now and feed it a clean signal that matches its native resolution, you won't even see the distinctive black spaces that are dubbed "scanlines" today. That's because those gaps were more of a symptom rather than a feature, one that just so happened to add some extra pixel separation when gaming.

I own too many CRTs for my own good, ranging from a backbreaking 32-inch Aiwa set to an impossibly small 3.7-inch Sony Trinitron TV. Whether or not you can actually see distinct scanlines on each comes down to the resolution of a retro console, the cable type, and the display's own screen type, as all three can work to make the black space between rows less visible.

Standard Definition used to be, and still techniclly is, 480p, meaning 480 lines drawn horizontally using progressive scan. That's fancy speak for every one of those lines being drawn in order from top to bottom, but that means some trickery is required when using a 240p retro console like the NES, SNES or Sega Genesis.

The workaround involves the CRT filling its 480p screen with 240 rows of pixels by leaving every odd line blank. That results in a full image still being displayed on screen, but with distinctive black spaces between. That quirk is exactly what modern scanline effects attempt to replicate today, but there are other forces at play also messing with the look of raw pixels.

Behind the mask

When letting a CRT TV blast your eyeballs, scanlines likely won't be the first thing you see. If anything, you're more likely to notice the defined pixels that look like separate dots rather than a linear line of squares. What you're actually seeing is the image being drawn behind a metal plate, or "shadow mask", designed to guide electron beams directly to red, green, and blue phosphor dots.

Most consumer CRT TVs use a shadow mask, and it actually provides a distinct look that may distract you from scanlines altogether. The metal plate actually channels the electron beams into a triangle formation, or triad, that can reduce the visibility of direct, horizontal rows, portraying a more staggered pixel look.

Naturally, simply adding in horizontal black lines to retro console visuals on a modern LCD or OLED doesn't quite hit the same CRT notes as a shadow mask screen. Rather than getting that staggered triad color effect that adds pixel definition, you instead get a bolder horizontal effect that won't quite look like an old tube.

At the same time, not every CRT uses the same phosphor plate either. For instance, Sony Trinitron models are heralded for their Aperture Grille technology, which separates phosphors with tiny vertical wires. The idea is that the positioning will only allow the appropriate color through, rather than trying to block more light with a solid mask.

As a result, Trinitron CRT images are brighter, boast better color accuracy, and have enhanced sharpness thanks to the higher-pitch vertical dots. That is to say, there's less of a gap within each vertical stripe compared to using Shadow Mask triad clusters, and that in turn produces a pretty different look in terms of pixel separation.

Effectively, there's way more to making your classic games look like they're on a faux Cathode-Ray Tube. Scanlines are really just one part of a visual symphony that presents old sprites and textures the way their designers intended, rather than a bunch of scaled-up blocky pixels. Knowing that elements like CRT masking techniques, color bleeding, and phosphor positioning will provide different results will ultimately help you achieve the look you're looking for, whether that's based on something from memory or a collectively agreed gold standard.

Modern scanline techniques

It might feel like CRT TVs vanished from gaming setups aeons ago, but in reality, the screen type only properly retired in the late 2000s. That's the point where I noticed LCD panels properly take over the consumer market, and as someone who kept using old consoles with those displays, it became quickly apparent that they were missing a trick when it comes to classic visuals.

I was actually extremely late to the LCD part, having only picked up a budget 720p 28-inch LCD set in 2007 for my Xbox 360. It only took me a couple of months to realise that, while Bioshock looks phenomenal in "HD", consoles like my Sega Mega Drive looked a bit off even when using a clean RGB SCART input.

Naturally, the subpar upscaler in that supermarket brand LCD TV was committing more than just visual atrocities, but my immediate concerns were sparked by pixel separation. I really couldn't jam with Blaze in Streets of Rage looking like a bunch of blocks, and it kickstarted what would be a decade long quest to bring scanlines back to my setup.

I should note that for years, the only way to really inject scanlines back into my favorite games was by way of "modern" retro consoles. Yes, I did experiment with using standalone VGA scanline generators, like the SLG3000, but that was more designed for CRT arcade play rather than mimicking consumer sets. It wouldn't be until 2014 when the Hyperkin Retron 5 arrived on the scene that I'd first get a taste for scanline overlay effects as a feature baked into a system.

The approach with basic modern scanlines is pretty straightforward, as it simply requires adding an overlay of odd or even horizontal black lines over retro console images. That helps provide pixel separation and something that is reminiscent of old CRT TV visuals, and the Retron 5 was one of the first to provide that.

Since then, scanline overlays have matured, but basic implementations still come with the same caveats attached. Firstly, adding horizontal black lines alone isn't really enough to give proper CRT vibes, and scaling-related symptoms like uneven thickness and unadjustable intensity can be distracting. Darkening half the lines on screen also reduces overall image brightness, and depending on your screen, the remaining active pixels might look a bit too dim.

These are issues that still persist with systems like the Hyperkin Retron GX, and even scanlines with some layer of adjustability included in the likes of the Evercade Alpha still aren't super close to a real CRT. That's not to say we aren't seeing progress, though, as HDMI upscalers and FPGA consoles like the Analogue 3D are introducing more elaborate effects that leverage the latest screen tech and add more than just horizontal black lines.

Analogue's 4K N64 specifically proudly provides "display filters" rather than just basic scanlines. Rather than just slapping an overlay on top, the feature is a real-time processing option that weaves in accurate CRT effects that mimic every classic display type. The system includes everything from the look of a Sony Trinitron PVM and BVM sets to consumer-grade tube TVs that use Aperture Grille or Shadow Mask tech.

Better still, the Analogue 3D can now even leverage "advanced HDR" tricks to facilitate the same pixel brightness on new screens. That helps each phosphor look like it's actually firing from an electron gun rather than just being mimicked on an OLED or LCD, and the result is damn convincing.

Analogue isn't the only company going the extra mile with CRT effects, though, as I'm seeing more ways than ever to add more convincing scanlines and masking. The OSSC line doubler I use for most consoles has a wide array of dials for adding in scanlines in real time; the newer OSSC Pro can even enable Shadow Mask and Aperture Grille overlays.

If you'd bring the Analogue 3D's advanced CRT filters to your entire setup, Retrotink also has you covered with its 5X Pro and 4K upscalers. They will make your bank account weep, but on top of providing FPGA-powered upscaling with motion-adaptive deinterlacing, they can also produce the same look as a Sony Trinitron or classic consumer set using similar processing techniques.

I'm fully aware I've been exclusively talking about hardware solutions, but modern emulators can also provide excellent scanline and CRT effects. Frontends like RetroArch include preset shaders for retro console cores, with CRT Royale being a prime example of a shader that can do more than just horizontal lines. Almost every emulation suite today at least has basic filters built-in, so it's worth messing around with those if you exclusively run your own ROMs on a retro handheld or PC.

Sneaking scanlines into your entire setup

I've been routinely asked whether there's a magic solution for adding scanlines to an entire setup. The answer is yes, as I've tested a doohickey that adds CRT scanline effects using HDMI, and it's not as atrocious as you'd think. Naturally, you'll have to use an upscaler or an adapter if you're using retro consoles with analogue output, but once you've got that sorted, it will inject adjustable effects into the pipeline before the image reaches your modern screen.

Of course, the effect produced by the standalone HDMI scanline generator still suffers from those classic caveats mentioned above. However, it includes on-board dials and switches for everything from scanline thickness to aspect ratio and even RGB color adjustment. The cherry on top is being able to switch between odd and even black lines, which will really help get you closer to the look you're after.

Your mileage with a standalone HDMI scanline generator will vary depending on your system of choice and screen. I do think it's worth a look if you can grab one for cheap, though, as it hooked my HDMI-modded N64 up with some much-needed pixel separation (the console's raw signal is pretty messy).

My hope is that by understanding why players rave about scanlines in retro games, you'll have an easier time deciding whether you care about the effect. Simply playing games raw without any overlayers or processing effects added in is completely valid no matter what those pesky enthusiasts shout at you online. That said, if you are craving CRT vibes but don't want to find a real tube set, you'll now know exactly how to go about transforming your modern display into a faux 20+ year old television set.

Swing by the best retro controllers for modern versions of classic console pads.

Until I played Warframe, the MMO had always been a hard sell for me. The constant updates and endless narrative expansions as seen in World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 intimidate like nothing else in the video game world. I almost always crave the comfort of knowing I'm progressing towards a logical end point – at least when it comes to story-driven games – and the best MMOs, as a rule, seek to go on for eternity.

So despite my efforts, games like Black Desert Online, Fallout 76, and Genshin Impact lose me soon after I start, simply because I can't accept the potentially limitless experiences on offer. How am I supposed to feel satisfied with my progress if there's no end destination? Well, one game recently changed my mind.

Never too late to try again

I first tried Warframe over a decade ago on Xbox One but quickly bounced off it. This was a different time in my life, before I could appreciate single-player live service games like Diablo 4 and arguably Fortnite. Even the original Destiny didn't hold my attention, so maybe it was a sci-fi thing? No, that wasn't it – what futuristic FPS could compare to Titanfall back in the day? Or now, for that matter?

But when I went to TennoCon earlier this month, I saw Digital Extremes' long-running epic in a whole new light. The game's community is held in high regard, and it was almost immediately clear as to why. The fans attending the convention were enthusiastic, friendly and generous, praising cosplays and handing out stickers in the name of Warframe and Soulframe, the latter being Digital Extremes' latest work currently in early access on PC only.

As I breathed in the atmosphere, I knew I had to try Warframe again – so I installed the free-to-play title on my Xbox Series X when I got home and jumped in. I chose my first playable biomech warframe (Volt, if you're curious), and began exploring the numerous planets, enemies and loot all crying out for my undivided attention.

(War)frame of Mind

Unlike many of the new games I've been playing in recent years, Warframe is 100% a power fantasy. Right out of the gate, I was blasting foes to bits with firearms, cleaving through them with blades, and electrocuting them with my warframe's unique abilities.

It all felt wonderful. There was no immediate challenge like Elden Ring, or intrinsic sense of vulnerability like Resident Evil Requiem (the Grace sections, anyway). This isn't to say I don't enjoy FromSoftware and Capcom games – because I do – but the change of pace is refreshing in 2026.

As for the all-important narrative element that usually leaves me frustrated in an MMO, I was saved from my usual despair by simply not knowing what was happening. This tracked with what creative director Rebb Ford told GamesRadar+ when we interviewed her recently: "You will have no idea what's going on, and that's okay," she said with a smile, and she was right on the money. Luckily for me, the old adage of 'ignorance is bliss' rang true, because I was having too much fun dishing out damage to care who or what a Tenno was.

So why couldn't I stop worrying and learn how to love the MMO before? In truth, I don't entirely know, but the satisfyingly slick combat and traversal of Warframe certainly plays a part. Each time I begin a mission, I hurl my warframe head-first into the mayhem, shooting, slicing and ability-ing my way through the enemy hordes without a care for why I'm doing it. Yes, I have the guiding voice of Lotus, the game's matriarchal figure (and voiced by Rebb Ford), for support, but I don't pay too much mind to the why, merely the what..

And yet, my mind wanders from time to time. I think about Lotus, Teshin, and the other NPCs I've made contact with in Digital Extremes' universe, and I want to know their histories, motivations, hopes, and everything else about them. The thing is, I'm in no rush. Warframe has enough content to keep players occupied for a long time – between 114 and 1,556 hours according to How Long to Beat – so I'll find the answers when I'm ready.

My newfound appreciation for Warframe has doubled my excitement for action-RPG Soulframe, which I had the pleasure of dabbling in a few years back as part of an Alpha test. Now knowing what the developer is capable of in terms of gameplay and longevity, I can't wait to see it grow over (hopefully) a similar timeframe – only now, I intend to be there from launch day. And if I do end up taking a decade to fully commit to Soulframe, its predecessor (and creative director) has reassured me that it's okay to be late to the sci-fi party after all.

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I honestly think Hasbro getting the license to make Legend of Zelda toys is the best thing for fans.

Now, listen: I appreciate the concern about corporate giants scooping up IP so we're left with a monolithic industry run by big names. The company isn't perfect, either, so don't mistake this for blind loyalty. But Hasbro winning the license to make Legend of Zelda toys has me excited nonetheless – and it's all thanks to a galaxy far, far away.

As you probably know, Hasbro is a behemoth in the field – it has numerous companies under its belt, from the creators of Furby to D&D's Wizards of the Coast. One of these is an imprint called Hasbro Pulse, which focuses on high-quality action figures and replicas for adults based on Star Wars, Marvel, Transformers, and more. Hand-to-heart, I think it produces some of the best toys around – and it just got its paws on Legend of Zelda, as revealed by its first action figures based on the series. That means fans are in for one hell of a treat.

For starters, Pulse's action figures are absurdly detailed (often using face scans of the actor in question) with premium deco accompanying a host of accessories and multiple points of articulation for more realistic poses. However, they don't come with a premium price. The six-inch Star Wars Black Series range starts at around $27.99 per figure through Hasbro Pulse, for example, and you can usually get them for significantly less at the likes of Amazon after launch. The same has proven to be true for Legend of Zelda, and considering how good they look, I don't think $28 for Link or Zelda is bad.

Yes, Ganondorf is pricier at $43. But we saw the toy in person at SDCC so can confirm it's about two or three times the thickness of the others – so that higher cost does make sense in context.

What really excites me are the replicas, though. Hasbro Pulse is also responsible for a wealth of roleplay items such as lightsabers (including my all-time favorite, the Darth Vader Force FX Elite Lightsaber), helmets, and even masks from the Marvel universe. I've found the vast majority of these to be truly excellent thanks to a host of neat interactive features, quality build materials, and impressive weathering that makes them look as though they've been stolen from a movie set. If you take that care and apply it to the Legend of Zelda universe, we'll be truly cooking. We'd get Master Swords and Hylian Shields like this replica that made us weep with pure Zelda fandom joy, sure, but that also opens up the floor to Majora's Mask or accessories like the hookshot.

Crucially, both action figures and replicas will be much easier to get hold of than anything else we've had before. Existing Legend of Zelda toys are hard to pin down and often expensive due to being out of print. Hasbro's equivalent, on the other hand? Judging by how widely available its other products are, they'd be easy to find.

Of course, there's plenty of other Hasbro-related possibilities to get excited about. Hasbro is responsible for a wealth of board and card games including Magic: The Gathering, for instance, so a crossover seems inevitable. In much the same way, I'd be surprised if a Zelda supplement of some description didn't appear in the Hasbro-owned D&D down the line. But despite all that, it's the action figures or replicas that excite me most – and that's all thanks to how good Pulse's Star Wars gear is.

For more cool collectibles, don't miss the new Lego Star Trek Enterprise Bridge from the original series or the recently-revealed, playable Lego Donkey Kong Arcade set.

Marvel boss Kevin Feige says there's plenty more Spider-Man on the way.

"The good news is, Sony has the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse series, which are very popular and excellent, and Beyond the Universe is coming out next year," Feige said in an interview with Shanghai media outlet Watching Hollywood. "But yes, we definitely have plans, and I think a live-action Spider-Man movie has this destiny: to add Miles sometime after the Spider-Verse series ends. We've been thinking and discussing more Spider-Man adventures, regardless of agreements or contracts. My production partner, Amy Pascal, is already working on it, and we've had in-depth discussions about what the next two, three, four, and five Spider-Man movies might be about."

Fans have been demanding a live-action Miles Morales movie since Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was first released. It didn't seem like a possibility until Spider-Man: No Way Home introduced the possibility of more than one Spider-Man co-existing in the MCU, albeit living in different universes.

There's also a nod to Miles in No Way Home: In one scene, Electro (Jamie Foxx) finally sees the Spider-Man from his universe, Andrew Garfield, unmasked. In a funny but touching way (that was apparently improvised), Electro says, "You're from Queens, you got that suit, you help poor people... I just thought you was gonna be black." Garfield's Spidey apologizes, to which Electro says, "There's gotta be a black Spider-Man out there somewhere." Spidey's enthusiastic nod and smile in that moment led a lot of fans to believe that a Miles Morales movie was inevitable.

There are also some rumors that Stranger Things star Caleb McLaughlin has been cast, or at least is in the running, as Miles Morales due to the fact that he refuses to do the classic Spider-Man web-slinging pose at conventions. Other popular fan-casts include Miles Brown, who led the show Black-ish from 2014-2022, and Myles Truitt, who had a recurring role on Stranger Things season 4.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day arrives in theaters on July 31. In the meantime, get up to speed on the rest of Marvel Phase 6 with our guide to the other upcoming Marvel movies and shows.

From here on out, it feels like the rumors and speculation about next-gen consoles are only going to ramp up more. We know for sure the next PlayStation isn't going to give us the disc drive console gaming has become synonymous with, but what shape will the other hardware take? I for one, feel like it's about damn time stock console controllers come with back buttons as standard. They've become the norm on even budget PC controllers, so why not Sony and Microsoft's official ones?

Maybe this is just my hot take as a controller reviewer, but back buttons should really be a guarantee in 2026. Hell, by the time the next consoles roll out, we'll probably be in 2028, with over a decade of the controller market integrating them into our gaming peripherals.

But what's your take? For some gamers (me), back buttons have become a must-have feature, and one that's hard to go back to doing without. But I have heard other folks saying the opposite, that back buttons aren't a necessity, or are annoying and even get in the way of pressing the standard buttons on a gamepad.

Thankfully, a few pro controllers that have back buttons will have lockable switches on them so that if you don't want to use them, they're not going to get in the way, which could surely be a happy medium.

I feel like the reason for Sony and Microsoft not putting them in stock controllers until now has been all about pricing, which is bound to be a controversial topic in the next console generation.

The performative reasoning is probably "it would cost more to put them on controllers, so we don't want to do it", but I'm not sure that holds weight these days. You can look at the majority of the best TMR controllers these days, and despite their advanced thumbstick technology, loads of the ones designed for PC and Switch cost less than, or around the same as, a DualSense. Oh, and all but one of the top nine I've recommended on that list have back buttons.

The Hyperkin Competitor, a DualSense knock-off for Xbox that comes in cheaper than Sony's PS5 controller, has back buttons, and I can think of loads of others from GameSir, 8BitDo, Flydigi, PowerA, and EasySMX that offer back buttons for less than the cost of a DualSense, so I don't think Sony or Microsoft could possibly say they'd cost too much to integrate.

Money could well be the reason back buttons are reserved for the Elite Series 2 and the DualSense Edge, but it's got nothing to do with costs. Sony and Microsoft likely see the value and demand for controllers with extra functionality, but they know people are willing to pay more for them. Ie, they want to charge you a premium for it through their more expensive homemade pro controllers.

But as gaming continues to get more expensive, and the lines between PC and console gaming continue to blur, I'm not sure this is going to hold up anymore. With so many affordable third-party gamepads in the mix these days that offer more in terms of design, features, and customization than the stock PS5 and Xbox controller, people have so many reasons to look elsewhere.

The reasons for considering a PC versus a console are getting louder and louder, and more affordable controllers that don't need to be licensed to a console platform could be one of them.

The DualSense has had a pretty rough time on the shelves since 2020, with stick drift issues and longevity problems that have forced people to buy replacements - and expensive ones at that, seeing as it has a lofty $70-$100 price tag depending on the colorway. If the next PlayStation or Xbox will cost you the same as a Steam Machine (or more), then the next gamepads for those consoles need to be built to last. They at least need to offer enough of a bargain to get people on board who are burned by the decision to end physical media access.

For reference, the Official Switch 2 Pro Controller has two back buttons, and the official Steam Controller has four back buttons, grip sensor buttons, and trackpads for maximum utility.

If you can't tell, I really hope to see back buttons as standard on next-gen controllers. If anything, just to offer some value for money in what will surely be a generation where the concept of ownership of hardware and software will go under the microscope.

For more, take a look at the best Xbox Series X controllers, the best Switch 2 controllers, and the best PC racing wheels.