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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The main reason many of us will rock up on D&D World of Warcraft's shores are the dungeons, though, and I'm happy to report these deliver the goods.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• See the latest D&D books at Amazon

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

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

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

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

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

Which is why I'm now scratching my head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what was the solution?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's happening with GTA 6 this week?

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

Why is this happening now?

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

Meta Shift

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patch Notes summary

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

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

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

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

My favorite store on the Citadel!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DRM-free

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's get physical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preservation as a business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Towerful of Mice is set during Keira Metz's storyline in Velen, and with a recommended level of six, is one of The Witcher 3's earliest ghost stories. Cobble together a haunted tower, frightened locals, and love persevering, and you're left with a traditional Gothic horror set in brackish Velen.

Our destination, Fyke Isle, is wreathed in fog. Sailing towards it, dark woods on either bank of a thin river, there are just two bright spots in the night – Geralt's bobbing white bun, and flashes of a pale drowner as it flits between the trees. I've completed A Towerful of Mice once before, but rather unhelpfully, the only part I remember is getting there via boat. Everything else is a mystery, but the basic premise is this: superstitious locals have asked sorceress-in-hiding Keira Metz to lift a curse from Fyke Isle. In turn, Keira asks Geralt for help – if only to keep the locals on-side while mage hunters scour the land.

Quest Log

Trick or treat

In the basement, ghostly peasants wonder why the room is packed with caged rats. Two flights of creaky stairs above, the nobleman's daughter pleads with her father to assist the locals. An unseen voice alerts them to the angry mob downstairs and their wispy shades disappear, but in the modern-day, a skeleton lies beneath a chair the nobleman was sitting in. By now, Fyke Isle's dread sits heavily: I'm jumping at every creaky floorboard and darting rat, and climbing up the tower feels as if I'm being drawn towards an unseen horror.

In that regard, A Towerful of Mice has more in common with classic ghost stories The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House than The Witcher. It's a testament to how rapidly CD Projekt Red can knit and swaddle us into a story. The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077's quests thrust agonizing decisions upon players, but their consequences are only so monumental because we've been made to care so quickly.

Spoilers ahead

Like many of The Witcher 3's quests, A Towerful of Mice's violence hides heartbreak. In a hidden laboratory at the top of the tower, the ghost of the nobleman's daughter, Anabelle, reveals herself. Speaking to Geralt, she recalls taking a paralyzing potion – made to look like poison – to avoid dying at the mob's hands. The mob leaves, but when Anabelle awakens much later, she's still paralyzed – and being eaten alive by rats. She died thinking her lover, Graham, abandoned her (he was part of the mob, albeit trying to stop it), and suggests the curse will be lifted if Geralt brings her remains for Graham to bury.

The story adds up, but something smells rotten. And while I don't remember how A Towerful of Mice goes, 160 hours spent in The Witcher 3 is enough for me to trust my gut. I turn down Anabelle, who then asks if Geralt will instead bring Graham to seek her forgiveness. That seems fair – assuming Graham is willing – so I row back across the river and find him in a small fishing village. Still traumatized by that night, Graham is eager to help put Anabelle to rest and returns to Fyke Isle with Geralt.

Back in the tower's laboratory, Anabelle is revealed in her true form: a jawless Plague Maiden with sunken skin and a tendrilled tongue. To lift the curse, Graham has to prove he still loves Anabelle by kissing her. And while Geralt's professionalism has been a comfort throughout the quest, it doesn't help me when the cutscene's camera moves to follow Graham – moonlight shining on his neck makes it seem exposed in the darkness, and watching him draw closer to Anabelle feels like watching fingers inch towards a bear trap.

In a final Gothic flourish, true love wins out. Sort of. For a moment, Anabelle is a young woman again – then she's gone, and Graham is dead on the floor. The curse is lifted, quest complete, yet there's no celebration. Fyke Isle is still unbearably sad. But for an hour, it was real.

It's amazing to think that World of Warcraft has been around since 2004 yet here we are with a whole new version of the game launching imminently. World of Warcraft: Forever is shaping up to be the WoW you know and love from the original launch days but with some significant quality of life additions that make it feel much more modern and up-to-date. WoW: Forever has already been affectionately referred to as World of Warcraft Classic+ by fans thanks to this combination and it's a potent mix for long-time players. It's nostalgic while improving upon the regular format.

Having spent dozens of hours with WoW Forever and being very excited to play more, I've had plenty of time to consider the differences between WoW: Forever and traditional WoW (which is better known as Retail or Vanilla). With so many different variants of World of Warcraft out there, it's important to know what will appeal to you most. Fortunately, the same subscription covers all types of the MMO so you can always switch around and see for yourself. Here are the 8 ways in which I've found WoW: Forever to be most different from Retail.

8. There's no flying

Having your own flying mount in World of Warcraft is fantastic. It's liberating and means you can move far faster than other methods, but you see far less of the world. It can feel quite clinical simply flying between locations without taking in the journey. Even Holly Longdale, WoW executive producer & vice president, admits that "when you're flying over it, [...] it loses something". Forever has no flying mounts so exploration actually feels adventurous again. Some tweaks have been made to make things safer such as a new boat from Auberdine to Stormwind, but it still feels more mindful and epic than before. It takes a slight mental shift as you need to plan for a 10 minute journey or more, but it's much more satisfying than WoW has felt in a long time.

7. It's a smaller world (but no less exciting)

There are no expansion packs in World of Warcraft: Forever. The world is smaller yet also bigger because of the aforementioned travel changes. The many expansion packs of WoW Retail have meant everyone's spread out so you don't come across as many other players. By reducing the world size in Forever and taking out flying mounts, it actually feels bigger when you're playing. There are no more individual servers either so players simply pick a ruleset and then are placed in the same world. There are also new zones such as Mount Hyjal, Zephras Isle, and Riverglades so there are still new things to explore.

6. Every new item of gear feels huge

World of Warcraft has suffered from something known as gear creep in recent years. New gear drops rapidly with substantial stat boosts. That sounds great but, over time, it means you don't feel excited by a new item of equipment as you end up swapping them out regularly for better stuff. It all feels soulless. Wow: Forever has changed that. Like WoW Classic, better gear is relatively rare but a huge win. You'll cling onto your gear for longer which means when it drops or when you buy it, you'll feel more attached to it. At low levels, even gaining some bags is a gamechanger. It all means you have more attachment to every part of your character.

5. People actually talk and group up

Remember when MMOs required cooperation? Retail is an experience that can almost entirely be soloed which isn't really very MMOish. WoW: Forever's beta saw people team up and actually enjoy themselves again. You can still solo a lot of content, but thanks to the reduced world size and the step away from separate servers, there are players everywhere. Whether that means a bustling general chat (sometimes not so good), or simply finding people to group up with, it means you're finally no longer alone. During the beta, I had players resurrect me just because they could. It's been a nice reminder of the human side of the game.

4. It's a more cohesive experience

Forever has over 1,000 new quests and many of them link different elements of the game better than before. There are quests which guide you towards learning new professions and tradeskills, while others set you up with a bag or some simple but effective weaponry. As you level, you're more accurately encouraged to travel to new zones to level up. It all links together better than before and makes it a more welcoming and also more cohesive experience. If you're interested in Warcraft lore, the more cohesive path is particularly attractive. For newbies, it simply makes it easier to know what to do next.

3. Gaining levels is slower but more satisfying

I've managed to hit the level cap in Retail in about 10 hours. Forever is very different from that. As an efficient player, it took me about 10 hours to hit level 15 with others hitting level 20 in that time. Those timelines change depending on how you play, but it's still clear that Forever is a slower process. That's a good thing as it means you can take in more of the game and become more embroiled in this sprawling world, rather than just speedrun your way to the 'end'. It also means that later levels feel truly earned. Each 'ding' feels like a big win rather than soulless. It's all part of Forever's bid to ensure you claim ownership of your character and it's more than 'just' an avatar.

2. It's more about the journey than the destination

Forever is a calmer experience than Retail. Yes, calmer. That's not something you expect to hear about World of Warcraft, but Forever feels less about the rush to hit the level cap and more about the journey along the way. Exploration is the new focus here as well as getting to know other people. It reminds me of the old days of when WoW first launched. It's exciting and surprisingly fresh for a game you've likely played before. Even little details like the campfire that allows you to gain buffs as a group encourages you to sit and take in the world. It actually feels like a relaxing game at times.

1. There's a permanent level 60 cap

In a bold move, Blizzard has announced that Forever has a permanent level 60 cap. It won't see any expansion packs or an increase in levels. Instead, progression at the level cap will be horizontal rather than vertical which is a bold move in an industry dominated by vertical progression. For me, as a non-hardcore raider, I suspect it means I'll be enjoying the journey a lot and rolling new characters but that's not much different to how I've played over the years. Such a permanent level cap ties in well with the slower pace and the more cohesive world that means you gain genuine attachment to your character rather than simply look to the next level or gear upgrade.

Check out our best open world games, best RPGs rankings, and our games like World of Warcraft recommendations for more to play now, and keep an eye on our upcoming RPGs calendar for what's on the horizon!

Avengers: Doomsday is positioned as Marvel's biggest movie ever. A major event in MCU history that will surpass even Endgame, with characters from multiple worlds coming together for an epic showdown with a returning Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom. Everyone from the Fox-era X-Men to the Fantastic Four will be there, proving the crossover invitations reached every corner of the multiverse.

But before there was Doomsday, there was Spider-Man: No Way Home. That film brought together different eras of Marvel just like Doomsday, except it focused strictly on Peter Parker – even as it unleashed the multiversal mayhem that has come to define this phase of the MCU.

No Way Home was Marvel's first blowout success post-Endgame, grossing almost $2 billion amid the COVID pandemic (Far From Home, the first Marvel movie released after Endgame, grossed $1.1 billion, in comparison). Obviously, Spider-Man himself is a huge draw. Just look at the mega-success of this year's Spider-Man: Brand New Day for all the evidence you need. But it wasn't only the promise of three cross-timeline Spideys uniting that made No Way Home a success – it was its focused, character-driven storyline.

Ready Peter 1

While the film brings together three different Peter Parkers from three different film franchises, its focus remains squarely on Tom Holland's Peter. No Way Home picks up in the aftermath of Quentin Beck exposing Peter's identity at the end of Far From Home. The MCU is often sorely lacking in consequences, but this is one plot wrinkle that actually stuck: Peter's life – and by extension, the lives of his friends and family – is suffering from the world believing him to be a murderer.

It's not the fate of the world but something as seemingly mundane as rejected college applications that kickstarts the whole plot, too. Peter seeks Doctor Strange's help after he, Ned Leeds, and MJ are rejected from MIT, then inadvertently corrupts the sorcerer's spell out of concern his loved ones might forget him (in some bleak foreshadowing). It's this corrupted spell that opens the multiversal door to a rogues' gallery of iconic Spider-Man villains, beginning with Alfred Molina's Doctor Octopus.

Even then, though, the film doesn't merely pit Holland's Peter against a bunch of villains he's never met. Instead, the focus shifts to Peter's attempts to redeem each baddie, so that, when they return to their rightful universes, they might not end up dead. Things seem to be going well, until Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin throws the plan into chaos by rallying his fellow villains, escaping, and, in the process, mortally wounding Aunt May. Before she dies, she imparts those famous words to Peter: "With great power, there must also come great responsibility." This sends Peter down a dark, grief-fuelled spiral (and who could blame him?), and it's at this point in the film that the other Peters arrive – long after this emotional, character-driven story has been firmly established.

Multiverse of madness

It's undeniably fun to see Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield back as Peter Parker. No Way Home does revel in it, too, yet the first meeting between the three Peters is a sombre one. Peter 2 (Maguire) and Peter 3 (Garfield) share their own losses with Peter 1, helping him to come to terms with the death of Aunt May. It's genuinely heart-warming to watch the trio bond in this way and become true friends, rather than arbitrarily pitting them against each other as seems to be happening in the Avengers vs. X-Men showdown glimpsed in the Doomsday trailer.

Even the final battle – traditionally the weakest part of a Marvel movie – is grounded in emotion over spectacle. Both Maguire and Garfield's versions of Peter Parker get to have a moment with their own villains: Maguire with Doctor Octopus and Garfield with Jamie Foxx's Electro. And who could forget the moving moment when Garfield's Peter catches MJ and saves her, after what happened to Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man 2?

Then, the trio comes together to stop Green Goblin, with Maguire and Garfield's Spideys stopping Holland's from killing him in his blind rage. All that multiversal chaos comes down to a fistfight, and it's so much better than a massive battle.

The film culminates with its most emotional moment yet, when Peter 1 and Strange are forced to erase all memory of Holland's Peter Parker from his loved ones. It's a gut-punch when Holland's Peter walks away from Ned and MJ and chooses an isolated life in a tiny apartment, which rolls into Brand New Day. Without No Way Home's story, which put Holland's Peter at its heart at every turn, making us care deeply for this incarnation of the wall-crawler and his troubles, it's unlikely Brand New Day – a very grounded, street-level story focusing even more heavily on Peter's state of mind – would have soared to its record-breaking heights at the box office.

Doomsday approaches

Hopefully, Avengers: Doomsday can learn from its multiversal predecessor. The multiverse gives huge opportunities, but it's a character-focused storyline, rather than a crossover that's busy smashing action figures together, that will make the film great.

The Marvel Phase 6 film is bringing together a fascinating mix of characters, and it would be a massive waste if this cast didn't get to have any real, emotional moments with each other when there is so much potential in Downey Jr.'s return following Iron Man's sacrifice, or the comeback of Steve Rogers after his bittersweet goodbye.

So, while No Way Home surely appears on the Doomsday watchlist for its multiversal aspect, it's the character-driven story that Doomsday should be emulating.

Spider-Man: No Way Home is available to stream now on Disney Plus, ahead of the release of Avengers: Doomsday on December 18.

Look ahead with our list of upcoming Marvel movies and check out how to watch the Marvel movies in order ahead of your next rewatch. See you next week as we revisit Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

A constant barrage of great game releases often means some great games fly under my radar. There's a world where Romancing Saga 3: Destinies United – a 3D remake of the 1995 JRPG – completely flies past me and I'm worse for it. After a brief hands-on with a game I had little interest in playing, I walked away eagerly anticipating meeting back up with my weird little party of freaks.

I'm not someone familiar with the Saga franchise, I've always happily observed it from the outside, forever content to enjoy this one from the sidelines. That was until a recent preview event at New York Comic Con where I played a very combat focused section of the game. I was swiftly thrown into the deep end with my ragtag party of our fearless leader Khalid, a fairy with a giant spear named Peony, a masked super-hero like figure, and my favorite, a bushy browed snowman named Flurry.

Glimmer of an idea

This turn-based RPG mostly plays out how you expect modern games to feel. You walk up to an enemy in the overworld, whack them before they can whack you to get the advantage, and shift into a turn-based system. While it seems like a straightforward system I've seen time and time again, it turns out Romancing Saga 3 hides one neat little trick up its sleeve.

The Glimmer system provides a way for me to improvise my way through combat encounters. A lightbulb symbol next to an attack denotes the chance to turn it into something greater. For instance, glimmering Peony's Spear Attack sees my fairy ally improvising on the jab, turning it into a Giant Swing, a brand new attack that now sits alongside all of her other abilities.

Certain spells and attacks can only be glimmered based on the weapon the character is holding, and while I don't have time to swap weapons out in my demo, it's clear there's plenty of room for experimentation with its battle system.

The Glimmer System promotes pulling the lever on the slot machine. Do I go for the tried and true way to success by exploiting enemies weaknesses, or do I let it all ride on black? Of course, you have a limited number of ability slots, so it won't last forever. But, the chase of finding something new and exciting with every roll of the dice fires every dopamine receptor in my brain. What if I kept pushing my luck?

Suddenly, my combat encounters become just as much about fleshing out everyone's ability slots with new and interesting moves as they do felling foes. Multi-hit attacks, area of effect explosions, and thunder kicks galore as my party becomes more powerful. Lightbulb after lightbulb pops up as I keep exploring every option at my disposal without being forced to hold back.

It instills a sense of discovery in mundane combat encounters. I don't know how long that sensation will last over the course of the full game, but in the moment it turns ordinary battles into something thrilling. Of course, a catchy battle theme with a horn section giving it their all certainly helps.

Sifting through the menus allows me to change out my party's formation. This changes various attributes. For instance, Speculation puts the group in a v-shaped formation giving the front three units increased melee capabilities. Whirlwind formation, on the other hand, increases the speed of all units, giving them the ability to act faster in the turn order. These predetermined formations feel easy to understand at a glance and make experimentation feel more approachable.

After progressing through the dungeon I eventually find the boss, Gwayne, a larger than life dragon who's not going to simply give up once the party arrives. I start raining down attacks left and right, searching for Gwayne's weaknesses as I put all of my newfound abilities, collected and honed throughout the dungeon, to the test.

As the slugfest carries on, the overdrive meter at the bottom of the screen tantalizingly fills up. Once full to the brim, I use it to unleash a United Attack, a unique ability that chains multiple party member's attacks together for massive damage. Everytime I think I have Romancing Saga 3 figured out, it tosses a tiny new wrinkle into the mix.

Using all of the tools at my disposal, I have Gwayne on the ropes. Just as I gear up for the final few blows… My demo ends. While I don't get to vanquish the dragon this time around, I'm excited to regroup with my newfound party of weirdos and hopefully find a few more along the way when Romancing Saga: Destinies United launches February 16, 2027.

Romance isn't dead, and neither are role-playing games. Check out our best RPGs, best JRPGs, and best ARPGs rankings for what to play next, and keep an eye on our upcoming RPGs calendar for more!

With well over 5,000 hours clocked in Final Fantasy 14 and a good few hundred in The Elder Scrolls Online, I'm certainly no stranger to the MMO genre. I've endured many a dungeon, healed through various hardcore raids and trials, and witnessed just about all the cringe-y cat girl roleplaying one could stomach – but somehow, some way, I've not so much as touched World of Warcraft – before WoW: Forever came into the picture, that is.

For years, I resisted Azeroth's allure, as much as I yearned to take up the staff as a Night Elf and experience all the wild chaos Druid had to offer. It all boiled down to FOMO, you see… I was just four years old when World of Warcraft launched, after all, and a plethora of expansions, world changes, and updates (and, ahem, lots of missed pets and mounts I'd have liked to collect) followed, leaving me in the dust.

Or, at least, feeling like I was. I felt the same way about World of Warcraft Classic – as though I had missed a train that I simply had never been ready to board. World of Warcraft: Forever promised to remedy that, introducing me to Blizzard's genre-defining universe as it would perhaps feel if it launched today rather than in 2004 while still maintaining everything that made it such a beloved name in the MMO space in the first place.

And, it's done just that. I've happily been hooked on the WoW: Forever Beta for a month now, learning the ropes as a shameless Skyborne Druid who has never set foot in Azeroth in all her two-plus decades of gaming before… and, guys, I'm loving it so far. The janky 2000s-coded combat, the punny dialogue, the cartoonish animations, and the old-school whimsy of it all. I'm finally sold on the magic that Blizzard's boasted for decades.

It's never too late

Lore implications be damned, I'm doing it all as one of the controversial Skyborne, Blizzard's new elf race (that, yes, will set you back at least $30). Character creation is simple but charming, the sort of experience I'd expect out of an "old" roleplaying game. I choose a periwinkle-blue shade for my skin and a pale pink hair color, tweak my ridiculously luscious eyebrows a bit, and set off into Azeroth as Wisteria, my pointy-eared Druid.

And, I'm confused. Everything is new to me, and there's certainly not the amount of direction and hand-holding I'm used to as a veteran of Final Fantasy 14's Eorzea. Menus are dated, I have to mess about with the interface to get my HUD how I want it to be, and boy, is the sound loud in here. When I finish adjusting things and getting a hang of it all, however, I realize I actually sort of… like it? It scratches this weird nostalgia-induced itch I can't quite put my finger on.

Sure, I never played World of Warcraft, but I remember spending hours on my blocky white PC in Wizard101 – a magical little MMO in its own right – and somehow, WoW: Forever is sending me right back into the shoes of that enamored little girl (very) slowly casting spells over and over again. The visuals help here, too, perfectly capturing the cozy vibes of every ol' enchanting adventure game and RPG I grew up with.

As for the gameplay itself, there's a whole lot of exploring, questing, and, sigh, floating back over to my body as a defeated ghost. It's rewarding in such a simple way, though – one that manages to keep me grinding. Seeing the world alive with other players is just the cherry on top of the cake, even if you don't always get anything out of helping others out.

I enjoy partying up and tackling challenges with my pals, too, thanking the Light that quest drops are a bit more fair and evenly distributed than I've heard they were for OG players back in the day. I also don't feel overwhelmed at all by the leveling up or spell-learning, as it's spaced well enough that I'm able to get the hang of how to deal damage and heal more efficiently (the mana management is admittedly a bit brutal, though).

I'm officially locked into World of Warcraft's tight grips now thanks to Forever, with the whimsical throwback to simpler times that it offers, and I can finally say that I get it – I get why Blizzard's managed to amass such a dedicated decades-old player base, and I'm fully convinced it'll only grow come World of Warcraft: Forever's November 4 release if my experience with the Beta serves as any proof. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some post-questing junk to sell.

Check out our best open world games, best RPGs rankings, and our games like World of Warcraft recommendations for more to play now, and keep an eye on our upcoming RPGs calendar for what's on the horizon!

Phantom Blade Zero is the best action RPG I've played all year. The staggering variety of imaginative weapons available to wuxia hero Soul, all painstakingly animated via authentic martial arts choreography, is what really sets the game apart. This is not a Soulslike. You lose nothing upon death, enemies never respawn, stamina is plentiful, there are no RPG stats, and you will restart at phase two of a boss if you clear phase one. Yet Phantom Blade Zero solves two of my biggest complaints with most Soulslikes, one of which still bothers me whenever I sit down to play Elden Ring on a new character.

The weapon emporium is open

Nothing bums me out faster than barely surviving a tough boss fight and then eagerly sprinting to the blacksmith to forge their weapon, only to learn it has almost the exact same move set as the longsword I found in a bin 40 hours ago. This instrument of death feared across the lands is, actually, a normal sword with better stats. If I'm lucky, it may have a special charged attack – often one so slow that I can only use it against most enemies by giving 14 days advance notice.

Weapons in Phantom Blade Zero – the main ones that you swing all the time, and the sub-weapons you break out for special occasions – all feel distinct, and almost every major boss drops one (there are a lot of bosses). There are a lot of swords in this game too, and it feels great to swing them, to hear steel clash like colliding icebergs. There are also twinned daggers that attack on their own, gauntlets that pulverize the very air, great swords that trade your health for damage, chained axes that would be the envy of Kratos, and literal instruments whose plucked strings send searing arcs of energy tearing through enemies. Swords extend, spirits surround you, bludgeons spin like food processors (dude processors, if you will), and fire roars at your request.

Now for the best part. You're perfectly capable of using all of these weapons all the time. Elden Ring is full of unique dispensers of death, but its weapon upgrade system is so laborious that you're often stuck with a handful of weapons until you get very late in the game and materials become buyable. Even then, you can only max out a few weapons each playthrough. The question is not, "Do I like this new sword more?" Instead, you wonder, "Can I upgrade this to the same level as ol' reliable?" Don't take me to a buffet and then give me a plate the size of my fist. I wanna pig out! I wanna try it all, and Phantom Blade Zero lets me.

When you upgrade a weapon in Phantom Blade Zero, you dump materials into it to boost its attack power and unlock additional bonuses and attacks. One-handed, two-handed, and dual-wielded weapons have their own upgrade materials, as do different archetypes of sub-weapons. This encourages you to use, say, a one-handed sword and a dual weapon so that you can upgrade them both maximally, whereas two different one-handed swords would compete for materials.

If you ever want to change weapons, you can just downgrade your current one to refund all the stones and XP that went into it. It's so easy. It doesn't cost anything until you hit level 10, and even then it only requires a coupon I've found dozens of. It's such a simple and elegant system. Finding upgrade materials doesn't enhance one weapon – it increases the effective level of all your weapons.

It's hard to overstate how much this one change improves the flow of a playthrough. Every new boss weapon is exciting because I know I can immediately use it. There are no stats or stones to hold me back. I change weapons all the time in Phantom Blade Zero – not because I get bored, but because I want everything.

The best games of 2026 so far, with plenty still to come.

The team at Magic: The Gathering didn't think crafting an entirely original Marvel character was on the cards, but it's funny how collaborations work sometimes. As it turns out, the newest Universes Beyond set 'Darkhold Destiny' was the perfect place for a new character to be born, and one that Marvel had been trying to make on their own, but couldn't quite figure out.

While there is an extensive roster of Marvel characters that play in the dark magic space this new expansion is set in, principal game designer Dillon Deveney kept searching for the right character.

"I kept running into this narrative hole," he says. "This creative space where I kept coming back to this one thing. I was like, 'Maybe this character could be what I'm looking for.' And then I tried and I was like, 'That's not right.' And then I tried another character and then I felt like I was just forcing them into something. I was like, 'I'd rather just make the coolest card for you because you already have such a bespoke thing.' But mechanically, creatively, we need this thing that seemingly doesn't exist."

It becomes tricky when you're balancing mechanics and a narrative throughline in the best card games. Even though Marvel heroes have an incredibly broad range of powers, a card can only have so many abilities without breaking everything.

"From a card design standpoint, really what you want to figure out is what's the coolest thing about the character," says head designer Mark Rosewater. "Because you don't get to do infinite things. Like good card design is really about one major thing."

So with this problem in mind the team went and pitched the problem to Marvel, in hopes that they would accept this vision for a brand new character in the Marvel universe. Deveney tells me "I pitched it to them all and was like, 'Hey, here's kind of the thing we need to solve for. This is a potential solution we had. We were curious if you would be open to this.' And then the Marvel team was like 'You know, we've been trying to figure out a character that's kind of like this for a while. We aren't really satisfied. We haven't found anything that really kind of makes sense. We would love to do this. We can help each other out.'"

Of course, heroes aren't always born overnight. So after a lot of ideation, the team felt like they had some solid pitches to bring to Marvel.

"The final character you see is like one of a hundred things we potentially talked about. We came up with five pitches that we brought back to the official pitch," says Deveney.

The back and forth from Marvel on the entirety of the Darkhold Destiny set felt like a "Yes, and situation," Deveny tells me – constantly bringing ideas to the table and Marvel giving the team the flexibility to adapt these characters to Magic, rather than taking what's already there.

Rosewater mentions that "I think early on we were a little afraid to change them at all. But what we really learned is, no, what they want is to adapt it to what you're doing. You know, make the best Magic version of our Marvel characters, much like the MCU or the cartoon. Every single version of Marvel isn't identical. They sort of make it their own. And that's been the big lesson, is letting us sort of make it more our own."

A massive piece to this puzzle comes from the artwork of each character. Marvel heroes have iconic features and changing them too much might lose the qualities intrinsic to their design. That's the space art director Meredith Mulroney plays around in.

"One of the greatest compliments they [Marvel] said was, 'You are so thoughtful about how you create characters.' Like, that's how we do it in Magic. We really spend that much time going through the details, are people going to relate to this this way because it's something special that you give the world? This character will be somebody's favorite and everybody has a favorite character out there, whatever they read, whatever they watch, and you're giving a new favorite to someone in the world."

While many parts were malleable, there would be some notes from Marvel on certain hard lines. Deveney points out that "they would give us notes of like, 'Hey, it's important that the wings on Thor's helmet be like this so his silhouette is like this kind of strong, but the cape, yeah, do whatever you want with the cape and stuff like that."

It's easy to get lost in years and years of Marvel lore. Especially when the team is a massive fan of the properties. Striking the balance of having lifetime histories with Marvel while also making it approachable for new fans is a tall order.

"The age-old guidance is that every comic book is someone's very first comic book. I think that's also true for magic. Every set is someone's first Magic set. So we're never trying to design something that completely alienates you if you've never played before," says Deveney. He goes on to say that "if you know stuff, you'll definitely go, 'Oh, wow.' It's enhancing it, but it is not restrictive."

Magic The Gathering's Darkhold Destiny set launches on April 9, 2027. There are still plenty of cards to be revealed, including the brand new wholly original Magic: The Gathering Marvel character themselves.

If this has you in the mood for all things spooky, horror RPG Vaesen gets "epic" new campaign just in time for Halloween - or see our guide to the best Halloween board games. As for all things Magic, we're currently preparing for this year's Black Friday MTG deals.

• See the latest offers on Darkhold Destiny at Amazon

The clipped-wing Dodo aeroplane, sporadically stealable from the rear runway of Francis International Airport, neatly embodies the Rockstar Games of 2001. Although Grand Theft Auto 3 will always be able to stand on its own merits as an uncommonly bleak videogame nasty that also shaped the whole sandbox crime genre, even in its day it felt somehow incomplete, as if its creator was reaching for something just beyond its grasp. Similarly, the Dodo can soar dozens of feet off the ground, but it quickly and inevitably reaches the limit of its engine power and slumps back down to earth. There is a sense of a living, reactive city in GTA 3, but at the same time it feels limited, locked off, as though you're never given full access to the dynamic urban reality it implies. On the scant few occasions that you can enter one of Liberty City's buildings, for example, there isn't anyone or anything in there, and you reach the end of the game with a sense that there is much more in Rockstar's crime series that remains to be explored.

In GTA: Vice City, released a mere 13 months after GTA 3, you are not constrained to the Dodo. From the seat of a helicopter, a seaplane or a fully outfitted Apache attack chopper, you can fly high and free. In just over a year, Rockstar's ability to build sprawling and explorable 3D cities appears to have come on leaps and bounds.

There are other telling mechanical additions. Expanding on the comparatively austere GTA 3, in Vice City you can ride motorbikes, buy property, change your clothes, and discover unmarked ambient side missions such as robbing a pharmacy or beating up gang members to earn the 'good citizen' cash bonus.

Rockstar's sunkissed, heat-vapour-saturated pastel caricature of Miami is a sight to behold, but, more importantly, you can explore its interiors too. Between the Malibu Club, the Pole Position, the shopping malls and the Pizza Stack restaurants – not to mention the various hotels, apartments and places of business that you acquire as you progress through the main story – this aptly named metropolis of iniquity is packed with places to go, NPCs to meet, and small but immersion-enhancing interactions. Today, we take all of this for granted. Customisable characters, optional sidequests and small, tertiary mechanics that help to boost verisimilitude have come to be regarded as the mere rudiments of the open-world genre. But way back in 2002 – especially on a console, and outside of the fantasy-RPG realm – a game where this amount of effort was put into pure worldbuilding, and where you could have a perfectly rewarding time simply basking in the atmosphere, still felt exceptional.

Nevertheless, two and a half decades on, some of the changes and enhancements made between GTA 3 and Vice City might sound superficial, or even faintly ridiculous. In the same way that you might chuckle at the size of the earliest mobile phones or recall with a certain irony the 'magic' of wireless Internet, it's funny to imagine a world where the ability to crouch in a Grand Theft Auto game, or to jump out of a moving car if it was on fire, felt like a novelty. Vice City emerged in an era when the conventions of the 3D open-world game – especially the 3D open-world crime game – were still far from codified, when the mechanical language of the subgenre was unfinished. Seen from that perspective, Rockstar's vision for the game starts to feel cavalier, like it's trying to tap X repeatedly to sprint before it can walk. There's no swimming, climbing walls or moving while crouching in Vice City, but there are celebrity voiceovers, a fully licensed soundtrack, and a recognisable representation of the mansion (and climactic shootout) from Scarface.

You might get the sense that presentation was more important to 2002 Rockstar than pragmatism, as though the studio was channelling its creative energy towards superficial goals (aping big-budget movies; showing off a pseudo-cinematic production quality) in lieu of honing or pushing the playing experience. Certainly, the driving, the shooting and the level designs that are supposed to form the game's centre remain largely unchanged from GTA 3. Or you could even go back to Grand Theft Auto, from 1997; the tasks that you receive in the top-down original version of Liberty City almost always involve driving somewhere, killing a bunch of people, picking something up and driving back, and that's also what you do for most of your time in Vice City. It looks gorgeous, and there's plenty to see and explore, but the game can be seen more as an incremental advance than a full-bodied sequel – understandable when you consider that it started life as a GTA 3 add-on.

However, the magic of Vice City – and of videogames in general – lies in more than mechanics, mission design or any other tangibles of the form. Even though Vice City may have fundamentally the same structure and systems as GTA 3, True Crime, Mafia and many comparable crime capers that emerged during the '00s, it nevertheless feels like the standout because of its aesthetic approach. The stinking, smoky, weather-beaten concrete brutalism of Liberty City – and the moral squalor that it symbolises – is replaced wholesale with sunshine, vibrancy and an airier, freer, much more feel-good tone.

Prior to Vice City, the sensory thrills of GTA had been rooted largely in depravity, the transgressive excitement that comes from simulating actions and behaviours that are too dark, immoral and illegal for you ever to consider in reality. They're by no means fully grown up, but in Vice City, Rockstar's virtual fantasies appear more mature. In addition to killing cops with rocket launchers, flinging cars off of ramps and driving a tank through traffic, you're encouraged, surreptitiously or otherwise, towards more plausible and contemplative pleasures. When you reminisce about Vice City today, alongside all the ultraviolence and automotive pyrotechnics, you're also likely to fondly recall the first time you went inside the Malibu Club, or the party mission aboard Colonel Cortez's yacht, or cruising down Ocean Beach in a convertible Stinger while listening to Broken Wings. With GTA 3, Rockstar succeeded in creating a 3D open playground; with Vice City, it started to develop and more finely shape what would eventually become its trademark – a rounded, reactive, and much more enveloping open world.

Vice City's landscape is more than a racing track, and you're invited to regard its citizenry as more than digital toys for you to smash up in variously creative ways. But while it is a broader and deeper game than GTA 3 – and also represents a crucial development in the history of open-world maps, and how they've become progressively larger – it is still very carefully contained. There are exceptions, but in the latter half of the game in particular, when you're set loose to purchase assets and front companies, the majority of the side missions feel as if they are still connected to the central spine of the narrative. It's up to you which businesses you want to buy and which of their accompanying mission chains you want to follow, but all of them are ultimately connected to Tommy Vercetti's core goal of constructing his criminal empire. Even today, this kind of design feels like a rarity. If there is a consistent problem with sandbox and open-world games, it's that they offer too much in the way of meaningless 'content', expecting you to be enthralled by completing banal sidequests in the name of sheer running time. But in Vice City – for the most part, at least – you have a reasonable understanding of why your character is doing the things he's doing. The effect is incomplete, and naturally primitive compared to much later games such as Cyberpunk 2077, but in Vice City you can see that Rockstar is trying to unify the free-flowing, player-driven open world with cogent, coherent storytelling.

This effort – to make the game feel simultaneously large and comprehensible, reactive to you as a player but nonetheless directed and choreographed by the designers, so that there is dramatic thrust behind everything you do – is ultimately reflected in the map itself, every part of which has its own identifying characteristic: the Ammu-Nation and helipad in Downtown, the multi-storey car park and hotels in Ocean Beach, the airport and the rocket-launcher pickup near Little Havana.

Rather than simply being big, Rockstar's interpretation of Miami is dense. Whether interactive or purely visual, each street contains a point of interest, and the missions are designed so that you're bound to visit every district. Again, it makes the game feel remarkably modern. If the open worlds of today struggle with one particular problem – that there's a lot more map than there are engaging or worthwhile things to do on it – Rockstar, as early as 2002, seems to have appreciated the value of details and meaningful minutiae over size.

Twenty-four years ago, Vice City's appeal might have laid in its new vehicles, its encompassing '80s soundtrack and its enormous cast of celebrity voices. One of the reasons we fell in love with it was because it felt 'bigger' than GTA 3, and perhaps any other game of the era. In hindsight, though, and in the context of more than two decades of sandbox and open-world giants, it's a pleasure to play because of how focused and contained it feels, and how for each inch of the experience there is the detectable authorial hand of its creator steering us along.

Our GTA 6 guide details everything you need to know about the story, gameplay, and world so far! Or, check out our best GTA games list for what to play while you wait!

I loved my dozens of hours hands-on with World of Warcraft Forever so much that I'm itching to dive into the full game. As a long term World of Warcraft veteran (a polite way of calling myself old), I've seen the game go through a lot of changes and iterations, and I'm confident WoW: Forever is shaping up to be the best new version yet. It feels good to return to something so familiar yet somehow so fresh.

Right now, World of Warcraft's community is split between the 'main' experience (also known as Retail by its players) and World of Warcraft Classic – the version for those who preferred the less cluttered earlier days of the game, and my personal favorite option. WoW: Forever is taking the nostalgia of WoW Classic with many of the quality of life additions that Retail brings, and it looks to be an incredibly compelling combination. There's a lot to love here, but I've picked out the eight things that are the true highlights of WoW: Forever and exactly why the legendary MMO is going nowhere any time soon. If you haven't played for a while and you're on the fence ahead of the game's launch on November 4, these eight factors could be exactly what swing you back in favor.

8. Crafters feel like they're playing a new game

Love to make your own equipment and items? WoW: Forever has made that so much more fun. There are a huge number of new crafted items, but they're also far more relevant again. One standout feature is being able to place campfires down and share buffs with anyone who joins you. It creates a sense of community which is something Forever is really pushing. It's actually worth taking a moment to sit down with others, shoot the breeze, and just take a moment to relax in-game. Those buffs can boost your stats making leveling afterwards simpler so it's a win-win situation.

7. It's combining nostalgia with a hefty dash of innovation

You know what the first thing I did in WoW: Forever beta was? I rolled a Night Elf Hunter and checked out Teldrassil, the opening zone for Night Elves. Something I've done over dozens of times since the original's beta in 2004. That's the beauty of Forever. You can just enjoy the nostalgia of the original while also taking in the quality of life improvements that have been much needed in recent years. Or you can roll a Skyborne character and feel like you're playing a whole new game. Variety is the spice of life, but so is comfort and feeling like you're in your happy place. Forever merges those two feelings well so you won't want to leave.

6. There are over 1,000 new quests to explore

World of Warcraft has always needed more quests. Right from the start, this was quickly realized by the development team. Fortunately, we have another 1,000 or more to try out. Some are small, some are big, all are an utter delight to see. During my time with the beta, I found a lot of the new quests bridge knowledge gaps. Some encourage you to learn trade skills or entice you into moving onto a new zone, others might kit you out with new gear which make a significant difference to your progress and leveling experience. You can feel the dots being connected properly with certain areas feeling more well rounded than before.

5. WoW: Forever servers are incredibly simple to understand

MMO veterans of all kinds know the frustration of discovering their friends are all on different servers and they have to commit to one, potentially missing out on some extra social time and definitely requiring them to pick which friends to play with. Servers have been significantly simplified with WoW: Forever. There are no more realms to pick from. Instead, you pick a rule set. Want the standard experience? Pick Normal. If you want PvP, there's a PvP server, while roleplayers can stick to the RP server. Hardcore with its permadeath mode will be added later in the game's lifespan. It's a small sounding step, but one that's just made everyone's life easier. Make sure to choose Alliance or Horde, though. That isn't changing.

4. There are new race/class combos to entice you

WoW: Forever adds a new race with the Skyborne elves packing in a huge new starting zone, but I think the more interesting addition is the new race/class combos. You can now play as an Undead Paladin or an Orc Mage. You can also roll a Human Hunter, Gnome Priest, or Dwarf Shaman. These are all much-requested combinations which expand the variety for both Horde and Alliance, and prove to be a lot of fun too. Undead Paladin is my personal highlight because it's such a quirky mix. It's another example of something about Forever which is going to mean you stick around it for a long time to come.

3. The game looks beautiful all over again

Bounced off World of Warcraft because it never looked pretty enough? That changes with WoW: Forever. It isn't the perfect visual upgrade, but there are some great improvements here. Notably, lighting, fog, and water are all far better looking than ever before. I remember when the game looked beautiful, but it's been a while. It's lovely to see Forever bring back those visual delights. Seeing shadows reflect the day and night cycle, and the water glistening is yet to get old. Zephras Isle, the Skyborne starting zone, looks particularly luscious.

2. There's a huge amount of variety for WoW fans now

There's a WoW for everyone at this point. At heart, these may all have overlapping qualities but it's fantastic value for money given one subscription pays for all modes. There's Retail, and Forever, but also Classic with its wide number of types. You can play pure Classic with its level cap of 60 (something I suspect will be now in direct competition with Forever), Classic Anniversary which unlocks expansion packs sequentially, and then there's Classic Hardcore for those who want to suffer permadeath. (I'm that person, it's me.) With Forever, there's now something for every mood which conveys the sense that WoW will never truly die.

1. It'll make you talk to people

Remember when MMOs required you to talk with strangers? And actually team up with them to achieve things? Over the years, World of Warcraft has become more antisocial. In Retail, it's very easy to hit the level cap without ever speaking to someone if you don't want to. That has benefits, but isn't really in-keeping with the MMO spirit. WoW: Forever gives you a reason to talk. It can still be soloed, so you're not dependent on others, but there's a noticeable shift towards encouraging you to converse with others, team up for more than just dungeons or raids, and actually get to know people. It's a delight to see, and something I hope will last.

Check out our best open world games, best RPGs rankings, and our games like World of Warcraft recommendations for more to play now, and keep an eye on our upcoming RPGs calendar for what's on the horizon!

The latest brace of VisionQuest episodes have dropped on Disney Plus, and they take us back to a controversial MCU location. Episodes 5 and 6 also see the return of the very first MCU villain, as the danger escalates for Vision's makeshift family.

If you've been following along, you'll know that VisionQuest is a show packed with fun MCU references and callbacks. If you think about it, Vision is like a living hard drive, so it makes sense that his mind space would be loaded with nods to the MCU's past. Below, you'll find all the Easter eggs we spotted in episodes 5 and 6 – let us know in the comments if you find any others!

Be warned: there are spoilers for VisionQuest episodes 5 and 6 from here on out, so make sure you've seen the latest episodes before reading on, or risk having some delightful surprises ruined. Once you're done, head over to our VisionQuest release schedule so you know when to tune in next week, and give our spoiler-free, full-season VisionQuest review a read for our verdict on the Disney Plus show.

VisionQuest episode 5 Easter eggs

Technical difficulties – With Ultron in control of Vision's body, error messages on the screens around Vision's mind space read "Sorry, we are experiencing technical difficulties." This echoes the "Please stand by" message that ushered in the WandaVision credits each week.

Ultron's biography – Ultron is reading his own biography at one stage, simply titled 'I, Ultron'. The cover notes it's a 'Sokovia Times bestseller' – not surprising given Sokovia must feature heavily…

Robotic beer – In the pub where Ultron secretly meets Jocasta, there are some fun nods to the nature of their quantum date, including a beer mat that reads "Robotic beer".

VisionQuest episode 6 Easter eggs

Madripoor – Vision and co. head to Madripoor in episode 6, lured there by Paladin. The fictional island nation in Southeast Asia is a hive of scum and villainy, and a haven for organized crime. Sam and Bucky last went there in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, where – notoriously – Sharon Carter is revealed to be the underworld ruler, Power Broker.

E.D.I.T.H.'s high schooler – E.D.I.T.H. mentions she once had a boss who was in high school. This, of course, is Peter Parker, who came into possession of the E.D.I.T.H. glasses in Spider-Man: Far From Home – a posthumous gift from Tony Stark.

Weapons manufacturer – Jocasta refers to Tony Stark – the man who bought up her employer, Markridge Biotech, and put her out of the job – as a 'goddamn weapons manufacturer'. It's a timely callback to Tony's former life, as a ghost of Stark's past also pops up this week…

Raza Hamidmi al-Wazar: 18 years after his appearance in Iron Man, Ten Rings terrorist Raza Al-Wazar returns to the MCU in VisionQuest episode 6. In Iron Man, al-Wazar captures Tony Stark after being tipped off by Obadiah Stane. Almost two decades later, al-Wazar is now picking up the Client's bounty and attempting to bring in Vision.

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

The PlayStation 2 has just turned 26, and it has me feeling sentimental. As the custodian of my older brother's console since 2018, it's been sitting on my TV stand for years now. But I rarely actually play it, despite having an AVI to HDMI adapter – one of the cheapest and best ways to play PS2 games in 2026. Sure, I'll fire it up a few times a year to relive a childhood favorite, but the retro console still requires a lot of effort to set it up on modern hardware. Even then, the results are varied at best, but there are some stand-outs that I don't see talked about as often as others.

While our list of the best PS2 games ranks the most legendary titles of the console's generation, I want to dig into why some feel better to play than others. A lot of this is down to the DualShock controller's obvious lack of dexterity – especially where ports to modern tech are available. I wish I could still play through Quantic Dream's incredible thriller Fahrenheit on PS2, for example, but its clunky handling makes the PC port much easier to recommend today. But there are other options that I absolutely would not play elsewhere – trust me, I've tested out a lifetime's worth of PS2 games to find out. Having gone through all my CD-ROM albums on a mission of will, patience, and rediscovery, these are 10 PS2 games that still live in my head rent free . Happy birthday, PlayStation 2!

10. Silent Hill 2

Best For: Old-school horror hounds
Release date: September 25, 2001

Few games feel as emblematic of the PS2 as Silent Hill 2. The second installation of the survival horror franchise was when Konami really sold us on its brand of tense, layered, creeping psychological terror. It's at the bottom of my list because fixed camera angles are really, really finicky to recommend in 2026 – they're not everyone's cup of tea, mine included. But even with the excellent Silent Hill 2 Remake having launched in 2024, there's something special about playing it on the original hardware.

The scuzzy early '00s tone of both the graphics and the incredible soundtrack make for an even grittier, darker experience, and with the game being not quite as punishing as others in terms of enemy density, avoiding unnecessary combat is very much doable. It might not be one I played in its entirety, but Silent Hill 2 is still a fantastic game to play on PS2 even 25 years later. In fact, the PS2 version even managed to top our list of the best Silent Hill games of all time…it's just that good.

9. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

Best for: Open world action
Release date: October 29, 2002

San Andreas might be newer and less clunky, but I was surprised by how deceptively smooth my journey back to GTA Vice City was in 2026. If any game was a reminder of how good a PS2 game could look, even in its relative infancy, this one is it. Not to mention the radio stations are still some of the best ones in any video game out there.

I'm especially impressed by the shooting mechanics. Even without the fluidity of modern console controllers, the DualShock makes driving and heisting far more effortless here than it felt testing out 50 Cent Bulletproof (please don't put yourself through that mess), and shooting feels far smoother than memory serves. My main sticking point with Vice City is that you really do need a decent adapter to amp up the visuals; I needed to tinker with my TV settings a lot to get the contrast and white balance just right, but once that was sorted, I barely noticed the PS2's odd quirks while replaying Tommy Vercetti's 2001 adventure.

8. Resident Evil: Dead Aim

Best for: Fans of unserious deep cuts
Release date: February 13, 2003

When it comes to the best Resident Evil games to play on the PS2 in 2026, I choose violence over conformity. By that, I mean you should play kitschy spin-off Resident Evil: Dead Aim over the iconic Resident Evil 4 any day. The latter is in much better condition elsewhere, with both the 2005 original and Resident Evil 4 Remake available on Steam, while Dead Aim is a PS2 exclusive that series die-hards simply have to hunt down.

Look, I'll be honest: it's short. It's messy. It's got a budget Leon and Ada (sorry, I mean Bruce and Fong Ling) on a zombie-infested cruise ship, pursued all the while by a stiletto-clad lady Tyrant who once was a beauty-obsessed Umbrella executive named Morpheus. But it's also got fun, snappy gameplay for an easy to pick-up-and-play survival horror snack you can polish off in a weekend afternoon. It's by far my favorite among the Resident Evil spin-offs for sheer fact that it's so bizarre, you really have to play it to believe it. And since you can only play it on PS2…. Well, I've proven my point.

7. Persona 4

Best for: Longer JRPG sessions
Release date: July 10, 2008

It's finally getting a remake, but Persona 4 still feels good to play on PS2. The JRPG series is beloved for its inventive merging of social sim-meets-turn-based combat, with a flashy anime art style that holds up to this day even on older hardware. The catch is that, of course, it's not quite as sharp and clean as its newer-gen brethren – which is a bit of a downer, if you're all about modern flourish.

Don't get me wrong: I am too, but there's a time and a place for it. I was torn between suggesting Persona 3 or 4, and ultimately, my decision came down to how much I adored Persona 3 Reloaded. Given how brilliant it was, I'm fully prepared to eat my words come Persona 4 Revival's launch next year. But until that fateful day, I stand by the fact that if you're going to play the original game at all in 2026, I'd skip Persona 4 Golden and go right back to the trippy game's roots on PS2.

6. Spider-Man 2

Best for: Classic superhero antics
Release date: June 28, 2004

Don't shoot the messenger – I know Spider-Man 2 is one of the most beloved PS2 games of the early '00s, but I don't rate it quite as highly as some others might. True, its acrobatic web traversal laid the groundwork for all the Marvel's Spider-Man games from Insomniac that would come decades later – but being good for its time doesn't mean it feels objectively good right now.

Maybe I am just uncoordinated. Maybe I am simply impatient. But I'd much rather pay Marvel's Spider-Man than set up my PS2 for the pleasure of landing splat on my spidey face in lower resolution. That said, legacy does count for something, and I simply could not bring myself to place this still extremely playable game any lower on this list for the sheer fact that no collection of iconic PS2 games could ever be complete without it.

5. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds

Best for: TV show superfans
Release date: August 26, 2003

It is heartbreaking that I only got my hands on a copy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds for PS2 a couple of years ago, because it's one hell(mouth) of a good time. I love the TV show more than I love most other things in this world, so even if it was awful, I'd probably still be a fan of Chaos Bleeds for the sheer fact that so much of the original cast reprise their roles in it. But I am relieved to announce that it's also a brilliant PS2 game to collect and play right now in 2026 for other, less subjective reasons.

Playing through the revolving cast of characters means varied combat throughout, ranging from melee to magic and vampiric (when controlling Spike) as you tackle a range of dynamic levels. There's a little bit of something for everyone, from beat-'em-up action to platforming and beyond, and I only want to throw my controller at the TV once or twice because of dodgy enemy hitboxes. My own skill issues aside, Chaos Bleeds has so many playful quirks and such a genuinely engaging structure that I'd challenge anyone, Buffy fan or not, to have an objectively bad time playing it on PS2 today.

4. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

Best for: Play with friends
Release date: November 9, 2004

Can I be honest with you? Movie co-release game adaptation Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events might be my favorite PS2 game of all time. Maybe it's because I grew up playing it with my siblings, each of us taking turns to control one of the three Baudelaire orphans. Maybe it's because I miss the days of movie-PS2 tie-ins and long for their return. Or maybe it's a bit of both on top of the fact that this is a genuinely excellent video game that still runs beautifully on its original hardware.

Replaying Unfortunate Events only last year, I was struck by how accurate my memories of the gameplay itself had been. Each orphan has a special ability – either a utility tool, a weapon-adjacent tool, or something to aid traversal – as you solve puzzles in three distinct locations across the first three books, as seen in the 2004 film. It's not kid's stuff, either; from a timed platforming challenge in a library to fighting off hordes of bitey rats, the game is as dark as the source material and much more mature than you might think. I had to pull up guides for this one, that's how much of a head scratcher A Series of Unfortunate Events can be, so consider this a plea for any other '90s kid to seek out a copy and see if you can do much better.

3. Hitman: Blood Money

Best for: Inventive action sandbox
Release date: May 26, 2006

As the definitive installment of the stealth-action franchise on PS2, Hitman: Blood Money is (in my opinion) one of the slickest games you can play on the retro console to this day. I remember watching my brother play it when I was a kid – both of us far younger than the PEGI 18 guideline – and how it looked like a movie to me back then. Blood Money is no longer the peak of visual fidelity in 2026, but it's still incredibly impressive.

Tightening up all aspects of past series iterations, Blood Money takes the inventive sandbox-style assassination gameplay of Hitman: Contracts and refines it. Pushing people off ledges, masking environmental traps and kills as accidents, and a new notoriety system all came into play for the first time in Blood Money. It's still one of the defining moments in the Hitman canon, a formative point in time that paved the way for all to come later down the line, and I don't think any PS2 game collection is complete without it.

2. The Simpsons Hit & Run

Best for: Quick-play chaos
Release date: September 16, 2003

The Simpsons Hit & Run is more than just reskinned GTA – it was many people's first taste of racing action games. Everyone who still owns a PS2 refuses to part with their copy of it for very good reason; Even if Hit & Run is ripe for a remake, it's unlikely to capture the heart and soul of what makes it sing on PS2.

The cartoon IP is a huge boon, having launched during The Simpsons' hey-day, but it's also straight-up fun. Simple controls and customization tools mean that Hit & Run sits comfortably between a pared-back racing game and the carjacking mayhem of Rockstar's finest. I was never the biggest Simpsons fan, but it's bright and silly enough to make even the most stoic gamers out there crack a smile and relax a bit. There's nothing quite like this gem, even with the likes of Star Wars Galactic Racer out there today, and I'm sure every other PS2 owner can testify to its enduring nostalgic brilliance.

1. James Bond 007: Nightfire

Best for: Competitive FPS coach co-op
Release date: November 18, 2002

There was only ever going to be one front-runner for my favorite PS2 game that still runs like a dream in 2026, and that crown goes to 007 Nightfire. Specifically, the co-op mode – though anyone else who adores the Pierce Brosnan era of the films will find loads to love in the main campaign, too.

Nightfire is an FPS with a very simple mission: shoot all your enemies. Loading into quick-play local multiplayer matches is as simple as it is surprisingly dense in terms of customizability; Your player two can either be on your team or your enemy's, with a long list of characters to choose from. The maps are distinct and each have their own unique quirks – I will always favor the cable car antics of Skyrail over the dark recesses of Fort Knox any day – and while you can choose which guns might spawn on the map, you'll have to restart if you realize that everyone, including the bot enemies, is respawning with the one-hit-kill Golden Gun each time they get ganked. As a 24-year old game, Nightfire definitely shows its age though slightly stickier tank controls. But when you're rocking the heat-seeking missile launcher, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Vorp! With a simple sci-fi sound effect, BioWare tore apart the gleaming hull of the Normandy SR-1, scattered a great deal of what came before to the void, and split its burgeoning action-RPG series clean in two. Save files from 2007's Mass Effect might have brought with them an XP bonus or credit dump as well as the player's established continuity, but rarely before or since has the reset button been pressed so swiftly, or so heart-wrenchingly.

It was exactly what the series needed. One-time Xbox 360 exclusive Mass Effect had been a bright spot of promise for the console, buffed to a lens-flare-spilling sheen by being billed as a franchise that would move beyond binary morality and deliver a meaningful, ongoing space opera – one that wasn't Star Wars for a change. (Many studios now promise episodic gaming, but BioWare was crafting series-spanning narrative arcs long before that buzz-phrase was coined.) The opening part of the trilogy was certainly grandiose and epic in scope, yet somehow austere, a feeling compounded by a glut of anodyne shootouts and awkward driving filling the time away from its much-admired conversation wheel. It wasn't Star Wars, but nor had it found an identity among all its copious lore. As a concept piece, a pilot, it was tantalising enough, but more of the same would not do, especially when the world was then drowning in third-person cover shooters thanks to 2006's punchy, hyperviolent Gears of War.

Oh the horrors

And so millions watched the SR-1's malady in horror, took brief control of malleable returning protagonist Commander Shepard for a spot of eye-searingly beautiful Dead Space homage heroism, and then shaped a 4-billion-credit rebirth. This wasn't just a sequel, it was a reinvention, and BioWare made sure everyone knew it.

Even if the point hadn't been hammered home, returning players would have noticed from Shepard's first woozy steps across a Cerberus lab. The Commander, once stately and tank-like under the sticks, now moved with a fluidity uncommon in the recently deceased, sliding into cover across Teflon floors on Vaseline-smothered boots. Even your starting pistol could dominate early combat spaces with a snap, crackle, and mechhead pop that flash-vaporised expectations of another 20-plus hours of drab, feedbacklight gunplay.

But the real revelation would come when you fired up the power wheel for the first time and unleashed one of the new biotic or tech abilities. Mass Effect's array of buffs, debuffs, and crowd-control powers had hewed close to BioWare's RPG roots, though yoinking enemies out of cover and into the path of a sniper rifle was quite the trick in 2007. The sight of Shepard dashing across no man's land in a haze of roiling blue fire to explode into the enemy and shove a shotgun up their nostrils, however, promised a very different kind of combat interstitial between conversations. If Mass Effect games were Luc Besson movies, the original had been Lucy, all big ideas but little convincing peril, and 2 was The Fifth Element: an intergalactic excuse for daft, glorious carnage.

Daft, not stupid. Players didn't even have to wait for the introduction of creepy new Reaper lackeys, the Collectors, before they started having to manage enemy damage, with a separate bar each for tracking shields, barriers, armour and health. Of all the combat system's renovations, this was perhaps the most crucial, a gentle subversion of the RPG's long-in-the-tooth type-based attacks that meant the series could jettison the notion of a tough fight as one where health bars are hidden behind multiple blocks of blue shield and bullet-sponge powers. Mass Effect 2 wouldn't ask you to face ice monsters that were weak to fire, but shields did melt away under the sustained pressure of an SMG, while biotic power Reave stopped health regenerating so you could put down tough organics such as the Krogan or nightmare-imp newcomers, the Vorcha. And you'd have to control space as well as damage output, since enemies were as aggressive as you, flanking, setting up kill boxes, invading your personal space or flushing you out with flamethrowers.

BioWare could afford to bury the needle north of hectic, because any Shepard, regardless of gender or class, had a secret superpower: the ability to freeze time. While others have made entire games out of frozen moments, here they elegantly and invisibly support tactical play, as you let the stale air in your lungs seep from your lips, read the situation, and adapt. Yes, Shepard may have been able to make enemies hilariously pinwheel in slow motion through the air, then biotically dash them to oblivion – kudos to whoever worked out how to really get some use out of Unreal Engine 3's physics simulations – but on the higher difficulties, Mass Effect 2 became as much the thinking man's cover shooter as a heady power fantasy.

Whizz bang pop

The shooting brought the game in line with the best of its peers, but the series' newfound sense of personal drama is what makes it unforgettable today. BioWare's genius was to add a generous extra glug of soap opera to its po-faced space opera mix, producing something all its own as a result. Where else in games can you assemble a team that consists of a dying part-monk, part-hitman seeking absolution in your noble suicide mission, a none-too-stable tatted-up psychopath who looks like Natalie Portman circa V for Vendetta, and an unflappable sentient machine construct housing 1,183 digital minds, much less bicker with or seduce half that crew? You may have to put the old band back together, but damn if you haven't pulled in an orchestra's worth of exotic new instruments along the way.

Indeed, the reason Mass Effect 2 still stands as the high point of the series is that it is fundamentally a game about people, not concepts. Every Shepard is different, and so will their interactions be, but those are simply the filling between layers of rich character drama. Every principal cast member has something to say. Miranda has to deal with the pressures of being engineered for perfection, putting up an all-too-human wall of ice after years of dealing with a pushy father. Garrus and damp squib Jacob are takes on feeling ineffective in their work, though the former gets a chewy revenge subplot, too. The list is too long to recount here, and loyalty missions double down on the character development – success in the final act, where the entire galaxy is threatened, is dependent on solving personal crises, changing inner universes.

Forget fetch quests, strip mining and moon caches – helping Jack get some closure after her time as Subject Zero at the hands of Cerberus felt like it mattered. It is these stories, these little moments of pathos and reconciliation, where BioWare finally grounds its big questions about life. Gradually, you begin to feel as if it might be a tragedy to lose this universe, this diversity of damaged characters trying to find their way in the uncaring vacuum, to the Reapers. In providing robust inner lives for its alien-packed cast, BioWare finally found the window on humanity it had been seeking.

Shepard's uneasy alliance with Cerberus is the smouldering fuse that regularly threatens to detonate all of these volatile personalities, but it is also an excuse to let the player deviate from the virtuous Paragon path if they so wish. Anecdotal evidence suggests that when given the choice, many will opt for video game good over video game evil. But so often in games, the evil path is simply the stupid one where you act like a dick to others for no good reason. Human civilisation is founded on social imperatives, so it's little surprise many struggle to shrug off their conditioning without incentive. By casting Shepard not as the white knight of humanity trying to earn our place in the stars but as an agent of a pro-human terrorist group that cares more about results than ramifications, the Renegade options finally made a little more narrative sense.

Which isn't to say Mass Effect 2 delivered nuanced morality – that takes more tallying up good and bad actions on separate scales – but it did at least make roleplaying meatier. Would you taser an engineer to sabotage the gunship of a telegraphed later boss to make the fight easier? Or are you the sort of person who leaps in to defend a Quarian from racial harassment at the hands of a pompous Volus and a bent cop? You might feasibly be both, assuming you're not gaming the system to max out one type of conversation-wheel option. Getting the player involved in everyday strife as well as world-ending crises lent the series an intimacy it had lacked. Anyone can be a hero when the only criterion is that all the bad men are dead at the end, but how you played Mass Effect 2 had the power to say something about you as a person.

It's easy to forget, in the wake of Mass Effect 3's reductionistic endings, how much Mass Effect 2 felt like a realisation of the series' promise to respect your choices. Entire missions winked into existence or out of it based on your Mass Effect playthrough, old faces appeared in unexpected places, and you could alter the texture of the galaxy, even if the artifice involved meant the core structure had to be much the same. To replay Mass Effect 2 now is not just a chance to pursue new combat options and morality; it is a reminder of what the most ambitious ongoing saga in video games set out to achieve, and how choice-centred the universe it provided was, even when it fell short.

Perhaps most importantly, it is proof that just because something's a sequel, that doesn't mean it can't be a total reinvention, at least given a studio at the height of its powers and a silly sound effect.

This Mass Effect 2 article was first published in issue 273 of Edge Magazine. To get more like this delivered straight to your doorstep (or digital device) consider subscribing to Edge.

My fiancee is in mourning for the canceled Mass Effect 5. She's been besotted with BioWare's sci-fi darling for only 6 years, but during that time, it's become a part of her. I even agreed to play the trilogy for the first time in 2022 so that she could live vicariously through me, experiencing the RPG with fresh eyes, intervening only to ensure I didn't kill Wrex at the end of the first game ("I will literally never forgive you for it!").

But as much as I loved every moment of my time as Commander Shepard, there's naturally a little more emotional distance between myself and Mass Effect. Professional curiosity also meant that my genuine sadness at the follow-up's cancelation – and the disbanding of one of the most prolific, talented developer teams in the history of video games – was chased by a desire to theorize. What would Mass Effect 5 have looked like, and how would it have gotten around the player's choice element that cemented Mass Effect 3 as one of the most satisfying conclusions to an RPG series I've ever seen?

A prequel seemed logical to me. Mass Effect: D-Day, perhaps, going right back to the First Contact War or the discovery of the Charon Relay. We could witness the moment humanity decided to leave Earth and colonize the planet, introducing alien races to the global population for the very first time and seeing the running theme of interspecies politics take root. But the leaked Mass Effect Universe trailer suggests BioWare was heading in the exact opposite direction on the spacetime continuum, and I find the prospect equally as tantalizing.

Name's Bond: Space Bond

Mass Effect Universe would have been one hell of a sexy space RPG. Gone are the militaristic uniforms of the Normandy's crew, the clunky cover shooter dynamics so emblematic of the original Mass Effect's contemporary. One look at the flashy action hero melee breaking out in the sleek alien night club, and Universe makes it clear: we're not in 2007 any more, Toto.

The trailer is only two minutes long, comprising pre-production assets as per a notice at the very start, but it's enough to have my full attention. In it, we get a brief rundown of who would have been our player character: an ex-soldier mercenary who turned his back on the spoils of war to do things on his own terms.

There's a James Bond quality about him as he flirts with an asari in the dimly-lit bar; he talks himself up, but just enough to titillate, stopping short of arrogance or braggery. Everything is looking rather steamy until the asari in question pulls an Uno reverse. His job is to put out fires, he says, but hers is to start them. A turian squares up behind the hero, indicating the brawl about to break out, when a familiar voice comes from behind the asari. It's Liara – Commander Shepard's asari companion-turned-criminal mastermind, who becomes the Shadow Broker in the Mass Effect trilogy – and she's on our side.

This, to me, is the biggest wow moment of the whole trailer. Not just because it's good to see Liara return after a brief cameo in Mass Effect Andromeda, but because of how much information her presence gives us about the game that never was.

Welcome back, Broker

As an asari, Liara's typical life span would be about 1,000 years. She's just over a hundred years old when Shepherd meets her in Mass Effect, incredibly young in the grand scheme of things.

But the leaked Mass Effect Universe trailer depicts her with visible signs of aging. She has actual wrinkles, for a start, and her voice is a touch deeper. Asari don't show their age physically until they reach 700 years old or so, indicating that Universe would have taken place many hundreds of years after Mass Effect 3 – closer to Andromeda on the timeline, itself set over 600 years later, though potentially sometime before, after, or even during.

By pitching us even further into the future with an ageing, 800 year-old-plus asari Shadow Broker as our companion (or at the very least, as an ally) BioWare seemed to have solved two problems at once. If it was intended to be set between Mass Effect 3 and Andromeda, Universe could have given us more exposition as to the immediate aftermath of the trilogy while making a stronger connection between it and the standalone title (especially since Liara is given that cursory nod in the latter). Set it one to two hundreds years after the fact, it could have brought up the question of Liara's successor; as the Matriarch draws closer to the end of her life, who will become the next Shadow Broker?

My guess is that Mass Effect Universe would have seen us, the player, as part of Liara's crew, possibly being groomed to take over her role as information warlord of the galaxy. An existing professional relationship is clearly established at the bar – "We know. That's why we're here," she says when the other asari's minions surround the protagonist – before the fight breaks out. And what better way to bring players back into the world of Mass Effect than seeing one of Shepard's beloved friends being a badass in her honor?

I would have loved to see Universe take us full circle, the companion becoming the big boss as we take on merc contracts across the galaxy in the name of the Shadow Broker. But with the game canceled, all of this is pure speculation. Unless the stars align, pigs fly up to dance among them, and EA sees fit to sell the IP on to a studio who actually wants to give it a shot, it's potentially useless speculation at that. Mass Effect Universe is no longer in development at the time of writing, but I am still thankful for this intriguing glimpse of what could have been.

As a more mature, high-octane, modern vision of the best sci-fi RPG of all time, Mass Effect Universe had the power to make the series make sense again in the 2020s. The fact that this trailer exists at all is a testament to the fact that BioWare did have a clear vision. It did have something to show for all these years of hard work. And I'm glad, at the very least, we had an opportunity to witness it for ourselves.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition is just one of the best RPGs of all time, and there's plenty more to choose from.

• With a reworked skill tree and stunning new visuals, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered is the definitive way to play the RPG in 2026.

To answer the question I've seen all over the Internet: yes, The Witcher 3 Remastered really is that good. When I first learned of the remaster's existence at Gamescom Opening Night Live 2026, I admit I was a little dubious. We'd gotten a snazzy update back in 2022 when the complete edition launched on current gen hardware, and after more My Chemical Romance album re-releases than I can count, I had to ask myself if The Witcher 3 really needed another facelift.

Well, here's your confirmation that the remaster is absolutely worth it. Not only is it absolutely free for all owners of the base game, this gorgeous update improves visual fidelity (lighting, colors, the works) as well as combat, Signs, and the notoriously complicated skill tree that has confounded many of us for years. There's a reason the GamesRadar+ RPG Club chose it for this month's topic; The Witcher 3 is still the best RPG of all time, and a total must-play in 2026.

Why play it today?

• The Witcher 3 Remastered's combat reworks make Sign and bomb-based builds noticeably more powerful and dynamic.

The combat enhancements are what I'm loving most about the new Witcher 3 remaster. I've always been an Igni diehard, but this is the first time I have built my entire character around both it and Yrden.

The remaster doesn't add all-new skills or alternate Sign forms, necessarily, but has reworked how strong each Sign is in tandem with both your current level and any other active abilities. The Firestream form of Igni, which releases a torrent of fire instead of a single short blast, feels even stronger now with the Melt Armor ability activated alongside it, while it has never been more satisfying to watch Supercharged Glyphs whittle enemy health down when they stand on a Yrden Sign.

The reworked skill tree makes it easier to understand how damage scaling works by removing the tedium and guesswork of the original version's "spend X to get Y" machinations. I never used to pay attention to how the different armor sets adapted to my playstyle, but I can feel the difference now depending on my gear; Sign damage output is noticeably bolstered when wearing the School of the Griffin armor, while activating some of the Manticore School genes alongside it means each of my bombs packs a devastating wallop. I love pairing Igni and Yrden with my beloved Grapeshot, a bomb that literally explodes some enemies in a single hit!

The combined effect makes for a meatier, more thoughtful combat system that has me being more inventive with my Signs and bombs rather than desperately hunting down swords all the time... Though I'm still partial to a pretty blade, especially now that we can transmog weapons in The Witcher 3.

Time commitment:

As is custom for the best open world RPGs, a typical playthrough of The Witcher 3 Remastered will take anywhere from 80 to 140+ hours to complete depending upon your playstyle and whether you have both DLCs. My first playthrough took around 135 hours, encompassing the base game, Hearts of Stone, and Blood and Wine, and I definitely left some stones unturned.

A true completionist run might take you a good 10-20 hours or more on top of that, especially if you love a bit of Gwent and the racing challenges. But since I am all about the missions, monster contracts, and treasure hunts, I don't tend to bother with the competing elements too much.

Play The Witcher 3 Remastered if you love...

Skip The Witcher 3 Remastered if you want:

One thing to know:

The Witcher 3 Remastered is a little bit buggy for some, with performance issues on PC causing some bizarre asset dropout (check out them bug eyes). Developer CDPR is on the case, however, with one hotfix already rolled out and another exclusively patching settings toggles for Series S players. I've not experienced anything game-breaking myself in over 50 hours of play so far (aside from the decade-old one where Geralt stubbornly refuses to dive underwater sometimes and I need to save and reload) so it's still worth checking the update out for yourself if you already have it on a current get console.

A moment you'll remember:

Finding Henry Cavill's Geralt armor set from The Witcher Netflix TV show in a Level 15 mission called In The Eternal Fire's Shadow. Added to the game in 2022, the (relatively) new secondary quest sees Geralt exploring an abandoned mine where plague victims were locked up and left to die some three hundred years prior. It's now haunted by the miserable spirits of those left to rot, making for some truly spine-chilling moments that feel even more frightening in the remaster edition's reworked fidelity, and features one of the toughest bosses in the whole game: The ghost of a fellow School of the Wolf witcher.

The final verdict:

11 years since The Witcher 3 took the world by storm, the Remastered Edition makes it feel brand new. In our The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered review, we even call it "an exceptional update that refines the rough edges to make a great RPG even better." It's easy to see why so many of us are still enamored with it to its day, with a heady blend of weighty narrative choices and malleable, exciting combat dynamics that make each player's Geralt feel entirely their own. I don't think I'll be able to pull myself away from The Path anytime soon, and at this rate, I'd be happy to call The Witcher 3 my game of the year all over again in 2026.

So, where can you play it?

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered is out now on Switch 2, PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X. You can buy it new here, though current owners of the Complete Edition can simply download the update for free on current gen consoles.

Check out how I ranked the 7 best Witcher games, and yes, I included Gwent in there.

If there's one thing the GamesRadar+ RPG Club has taught me, it's that you've never seen it all. Just when you think you know an RPG inside out, it goes ahead and surprises you 10 years later. See, I thought I'd experienced every original side quest and monster contract in The Witcher 3 – given my many, many playthroughs – but the remastered re-release turned out to prove me wrong. On the shores of Skellige, after completing a particular contract at a particular time, a series of rather unfortunate events landed me in a pokey prison. Having no recollection of getting caught up in this mess before, I had no idea how I was going to get the White Wolf out of this one.

But the very fact that I couldn't wait to find out, and felt fresh excitement in an adventure I've spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours with, speaks to the magic of CD Projekt Red's sweeping fantasy adventure. It's not only teeming with things to see, do, and discover, but it directly reacts to the order in which you do things, and a decision to complete a contract at a certain time made me stumble my way into a missable quest that now refuses to leave my mind.

Quest Log

Wraiths and fog

It all begins with the haunting of a lighthouse out on one of the far islets of Skellige. The contract, The Phantom of Eldberg, is pretty standard for an experienced Witcher like me: investigate the area and find out why wraiths are attached to the location. It's all going well, having found the person responsible for tying the ghostly apparitions to the lighthouse. With a trophy in hand, I return back to a quaint little tavern to get my payment from a local called Jorund.

Only, the tavern is housing some hostile patrons who are none too happy at my being there, and with civil tensions at their peak with the passing of the king, things take a drastic turn. Before I know it, I'm in a bout of fistcuffs that quickly evolves into a clashing of blades. Poor Jorund pays the ultimate price, and as a stranger in a strange land, I'm quickly hoisted into a prison in the compound of Madman Lugos. What a day for poor Geralt.

I'd done this contract before, but it'd never ended like this. On previous runs, I handed in my wraith trophy and Jorund sat happily in the tavern, living to see another day. But, as I discovered, it's all about when you do this contract. Completing it before you do the King's Gambit kicks off a missable quest chain that I had apparently always managed to skip… probably due to my affinity for the Possession quest, or because I'd simply never picked up the contract early enough.

Regardless of the reason, I love the fact that The Witcher 3 constantly takes stock of what I choose you to do, and when I choose to do it. It puts real tangible weight behind my decisions in this world – something I live for in RPGs. And on this occasion, the game rewards me with a wild quest called The Cave of Dreams. If you've experienced this before, you know what I'm in for, but by all of the howling winds does it feel extra magical to witness it through the lens of the remastered edition's enhanced graphics.

Naturally there will be spoilers ahead for the Cave of Dreams.

Face your fears

Indebted to Lugos for letting me out of my pokey prison, I'm tasked with helping out his son, Blueboy Lugos, who's ventured to a cave with some companions to overcome a challenge of legend. Tales tell that anyone who enters the cave will face their fears, which are brought on by taking a mixture of hallucinogenic herbs before you delve into its depths. I'm already drawn to the concept, eager to see what the often implacable monster slayer Geralt's innermost fears will conjure.

At once, things start to get surreal. The cave comes alive with a giant, glittering razorback whale swimming through the air above the heads of the White Wolf, Blueboy, and his crew. It's a sight to behold, as are the school of fish that decorate the cave roof further in. Damn. It sure does look incredibly pretty. Pure camera mode fodder.

The events that actually unfold during the quest are what make it so memorable, though. Through every section of the cave, a character's fear comes to life. For warrior Uve Jabberjaw, it's the deceased king. Having previously insulted the monarch, Uve drastically cut out his own tongue as penance, and the past event clearly still haunts him. Then, in a more chilling turn, Blueboy faces his own father, whose anger and disappointment sets him literally aflame.

When I finally reach the scene of Geralt's fear, I stop to take it in: I'm looking at Kaer Morhen covered in a blanket of white snow. The nightmares that have plagued the witcher throughout the story make manifest here, with the imposing figure of Eredin, King of the Wild Hunt, materializing. It hits hard, not because Geralt is afraid of Eredin, but because he fears for the person the king continues to threaten: Ciri. The short confrontation gets to the heart of what makes The Witcher 3's story so memorable. It's about found family, protecting those you love, and never giving up the fight to keep them safe, and it once again reiterates how deeply Geralt cares for his ward.

If I ever needed further proof as to why The Witcher 3 continues to endure as one of the best RPGs going, well, this quest and the way I finally stumbled upon it is further proof. Now, excuse me while I go and see what else awaits me in the Remaster.

Marvel had a tough choice to make after Avengers: Endgame. It could continue playing the hits, relying on nostalgia and familiar faces to coast until the next event movie, or it could introduce a new generation of heroes to freshen up the MCU.

To its credit, Marvel Studios opted for the second option – but it didn't work out exactly as anyone hoped.

As great as it was seeing diverse faces run around the cinematic universe, Ms. Marvel, Echo, and the Eternals all failed to live up to what came before. It says a lot that Kevin Feige has course-corrected for Avengers: Doomsday, bringing back the likes of Thor, Steve Rogers, and several legacy X-Men characters to be front and center instead of placing considerable trust in the new guard.

With a few exceptions, that is. Florence Pugh's Yelena has, of course, shone since her Black Widow debut. But no one quite held their own like Simu Liu's Shang-Chi.

Released in 2021, when Tony Stark's Endgame sacrifice was still fresh in the memory, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings may have been a wordy title, but was refreshingly simple in how it cemented its hero as a major player in the MCU thanks to a potent mix of killer fight scenes and sparkling wit.

Shang-Chi doesn't waste time getting moving. In the opening minutes, the ancient Ten Rings – weapons of immense power – are established and, in the present day, the group that shares the same name attacks Shang-Chi on a bus, standing out as one of Marvel's best individual action sequences.

From there, Shang-Chi leads us on a lightning-quick journey, bouncing from kinetic set-piece to kinetic set-piece as he becomes wrapped up in a family drama that adds a more personal touch that has largely been absent in Marvel's recent films. It also adds a splash of mysticism and mystery to the MCU, something that has been sorely missing, making the universe feel a lot deeper and richer before it became distracted by the multiverse.

Yes, the final act is way too CGI-heavy, and Trevor Slattery's long-overdue return is tonally jarring, but Shang-Chi soars when it should stumble. Coming out of COVID, everyone expected this to fail. In the end, it won audiences over with charm and style to the tune of over $430 million.

A hard-hitting newcomer

Now, on to Doomsday. Shang-Chi going AWOL in the MCU in the past half-decade has undoubtedly been one of Marvel's biggest misfires, failing to capitalize on the momentum of the character while director Destin Daniel Cretton went on to break box office records helming Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

That won't be the case in Doomsday. Carrying on from Bruce Banner and Captain Marvel contacting him in the Shang-Chi post-credits, the new holder of the Ten Rings is seemingly going to be treated as a big deal.

The Doomsday trailer even teases just how much Shang-Chi will be getting involved, pitting him in a mouthwatering clash against Channing Tatum's card-dealing Gambit.

It's a great case, too, for a simple superhero maxim: who would win in a fight? Already, we can't wait to see the martial artist and the mutant butt heads as the multiverse collapses around them.

Even better, it immediately elevates Shang-Chi into an Avengers-level hero without feeling like he's been shoehorned in. He belongs alongside the X-Men, the Avengers, and anyone else who might accompany them in the fight against Robert Downey Jr.'s Doctor Doom. That's high praise indeed.

So, before you head into Doomsday this December, make sure you're familiar with Shang-Chi. If you missed it the first time round, you're in for a spectacle filled with the sort of action scenes that clearly marked Destin Daniel Cretton out as a perfect fit for Spidey, as well as platforming Shang-Chi as someone who could hang with the best of them. If you are back for more, it's time to get reacquainted with the holder of the Ten Rings. He just might be more important than you think in a few months' time.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is available to stream now on Disney Plus, ahead of the release of Avengers: Doomsday on December 18.

Look ahead with our list of upcoming Marvel movies and check out how to watch the Marvel movies in order ahead of your next rewatch. See you next week as we revisit Spider-Man: No Way Home.

The latest DCU movie, Clayface, might be very standalone – but it still features some interesting connections to the wider DC universe.

Below, we've rounded up the 17 biggest Clayface Easter eggs and DC references in the film, including some references to Batman. There's quite a lot tucked away in the background of the film, so it's well worth watching with your eyes peeled.

Of course, that means there are Clayface spoilers ahead, so turn back now if you're not up to date. If you've seen the film, then head below for everything we spotted. And, for even more, read our spoiler-free Clayface review.

Clayface Easter eggs and DC references

The Narrows

Both Matt Hagen and Dr. Caitlyn are from the Narrows, an area of Gotham City you might recognize from the comics, or Batman Begins. It's one of the most dangerous areas of Gotham.

Imperial Pictures

At the start of the film, Matt is making a movie for a studio that looks to be very much based on Warner Bros. (it even has that iconic water tower). The studio name is Imperial Pictures, which hails from 'Feat of Clay,' the two-part Batman: The Animated Series episode that introduces Matt Hagen as a struggling actor and is a huge inspiration for the movie. In the Animated Series, Imperial Pictures also shares a lot in common with Warner Bros.

Wayne Community Center

The place where Matt mentors student actors is named the Wayne Community Center. We didn't spot this one ourselves, but it's revealed in the film's production notes. This, of course, is a reference to Batman – AKA Bruce Wayne.

Tim Burton's Batman

It's (almost) impossible to spot in the film, but the production notes reveal that two props from Tim Burton's 1989 Batman are reused in Clayface. One is a coffee table used by Jack Nicholson's Joker, seen in Matt's penthouse apartment, and the other is a chair used when Matt undergoes a consultation for plastic surgery, which comes from the set where Nicholson's Joker also had surgery.

DA's office

When Matt takes Markos Szabo to court after his horrific disfigurement, we hear a reference to the DA's office. Gotham's most famous District Attorney is one Harvey Dent, AKA Two-Face.

Ace Chemicals

It's not explicitly labeled as Ace Chemicals, but a building with burning chimneys can be seen through Matt's penthouse window after his disfigurement as he watches the Oscars. This bears a strong resemblance to the chemical plant, which is where the Joker fell into a vat of acid and was permanently disfigured in The Killing Joke graphic novel (adopted as his de facto origin), in a thematic parallel to Matt's own fate.

One Bad Day

The actor who wins the Oscar Matt was nominated for triumphs for a role in a film titled One Bad Day. This is a concept the Joker refers to in The Killing Joke to explain his philosophy that a single bad day could drive anyone to madness – which is what happened to him after he was disfigured by the Ace Chemicals acid. Matt has his own bad day when he is attacked by Szabo and his friends betray him.

The GCPD

The Gotham City Police Department figures in the storyline via Caitlyn's fiancé, John Borrelli, who is an honest cop in the notoriously corrupt police force, much like Jim Gordon.

Missing posters

The GCPD and the streets of Gotham are plastered with missing posters. While none seem to feature significant names, they are a reminder that Gotham is a hotbed of criminal activity, and they could be setting up a future storyline.

Coast City

DC's answer to LA, Coast City, is where Matt Hagen works as a rising star actor. In the comics, it's home to Green Lantern Hal Jordan and is the site of the Edwards Air Force Base, where Hal was stationed.

Amusement Mile

Caitlyn walks past a large, neon sign advertising Amusement Mile, which is emblazoned with the grinning visage of a clown. Amusement Mile is a fairground strip in the comics, and, as the clown suggests, a haunt of the Joker's and Harley Quinn's.

Building names

The film's production notes identify two Easter eggs related to building names: the Moldoff Building is named after Sheldon Moldoff, a Golden Age era Batman artist, and Kane's Candy Store, named after Batman's co-creator Bob Kane.

Jitters Coffee

Jitters Coffee, a brand seen in Superman, can be seen again in Clayface. "I went to see James Gunn's Superman in the cinema. I really loved it, and I knew nothing that I was going to be involved in this movie," Max Minghella, who plays John Borrelli, told us. "And then, quite quickly after I saw that film in the cinema, I was on set holding a Jitters Coffee cup, which is featured in Superman. And I do think it was one of the most surreal moments of my life, because I was like, 'I just went to see this film, and there was this prop in the movie, and now I'm holding that prop,' but it felt like it was yesterday. And I thought, 'Wow, the magic of movies.' I never get over it. It's just a kid in a candy shop, it's so fun."

Club Vesuvius

The nightclub Matt attacks at the end of the film borrows its name from Club Vesuvius in the comics, which is owned by Johnny Sabatino.

Gotham Gazette

A Gotham Gazette newspaper can be spotted in the film. In the comics, it counts Vicki Vale – frequent love interest of Bruce Wayne's – among its employees.

Gotham Knights and Gotham Goliaths

Background actors wearing Gotham Knights and Gotham Goliaths merchandise are seen in the film. These are the names of sports teams found in the pages of DC comics.

Special thanks

Batman creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger are credited with special thanks, along with Batman: The Animated Series masterminds Bruce Timm and Paul Dini, and Marv Wolfman, who wrote part 1 of the 'Feat of Clay' episodes which introduced Matt Hagen as a disfigured actor in the show.

Clayface is in theaters now. For more, check out our guide to all the upcoming DC movies and TV shows.

Grand Theft Auto is not a roleplaying game. Even with its sprawling open world and all the painstaking technical details that have gone into protagonists Lucia and Jason's story, GTA 6 will never be among those we call the best RPGs. Some systems in the latest entry might hew close, but the way Jason and Lucia evolve are closer to being a sim than an RPG proper. More than that, there's a fundamental difference between how Rockstar and developers like CD Projekt Red view their respective games.

After adding full mod support to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered, the Polish developer surprised Cyberpunk 2077 fans by announcing a similar built-in client to the Night City adventure. Patch 2.5 comes with all the bells and whistles that speak to a truly flexible, personalized RPG experience – and it's the furthest thing away from what Rockstar has said about GTA 6 so far.

Yours, mine, ours

Patch 2.5, in its broadest strokes, is an RPG replayer's ultimate fantasy. Delivered in co-development with Virtuos Studios, the update brings new clothing items as well as long-awaited cyberware customization (courtesy of new NPC vendors called Glamdocs), and the opportunity to finally dual-wield any pistol or revolver combination.

There's also some "cozy" new missions to engage with as V learns more about the founding of Night City, and of course, plenty of connective tissue between the video game and Netflix's new season of spin-off anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. Top it off with full mod support, and I can fully understand why CDPR skipped straight past a patch 2.4 update; This really is a two-in-one deal.

Speaking on the latest Redstreams, associate game director Pawel Sasko sounded incredibly enthusiastic about what this patch means for replayability. The team is fully supportive of fans getting creative to make their next playthrough more unique than ever. CDPR even welcomes story mods among the plethora of ways you can reshape the experience to suit your needs, something Rockstar has reiterated its vocal opposition to in its recent fair use reminder.

It's an outlier in that regard. A healthy modding community and a robust customization system are the hallmarks of almost every successful game or franchise of the last two decades. Cyberpunk 2077 (and The Witcher 3, by extension) is following the example set out by Skyrim, Baldur's Gate 3, Mass Effect, The Sims 4 (until recently), and countless others. It's a surefire way to keep players engaged and interested in a title long past its release year, offering countless ways to experience the same story through brand new eyes. But it seems that Rockstar thinks the Grand Theft Auto name is more than enough to justify bucking this particular trend.

Forgive the ice-cold take, but fostering a strong sense of community should be paramount to every game developer. When I see RPG developers like CDPR and Larian Studios going out of their way to not only engage with their communities but deliver long-awaited quality-of-life additions, it makes me look more critically at those who refuse to. Respect should go both ways. If Rockstar wants to keep its legions of loyal followers, why not adapt to their needs instead of give them a hiding before the game is even out?

Lone wolves

Then again, Rockstar is no stranger to doing things differently. Where some devs embrace the changing tides that dictate our ever-shortening attention spans, Rockstar can just buy the ocean from under Poseidon. After all, it ended up acquiring GTA Online mod developer FiveM, a team it once threatened with legal action, in order to at least profit off of its roleplaying servers.

This is a team that plays by very different rules, so if you're hoping that Rockstar might slacken its leash on modding once GTA 6 has been out for some time, I wouldn't hold my breath.

GTA 6 isn't an RPG, as any genre purist will rush to tell you. Neither in its format nor in the attitude with which it was created. Rockstar is selling a product, not a community – and that's fine by me. But, I wonder how many will agree when it's time for the next iteration of GTA Online to get the GTA 6 treatment.

While GTA 5's mode has always been an outlier, online communities in 2026 than they were in 2013. In the meantime, I'll take hot pink mantis blades, dual-wielding Jackie's golden pistols, and having cats in all of V's Night City apartments before Rockstar's precious new baby. Call me when Jason gets a gorilla arms mod (and don't tell Mommy on me).

Check out these games like GTA if you just can't wait for GTA 6!

Dreamcast is rarely thought of as the start of anything. It was the full stop on Sega's reign as a hardware company, the console that died as PlayStation 2 thrived. But it was also, Rockstar says, the birthplace of the era's defining PlayStation game. You know, the one your mum heard was about killing prostitutes: Grand Theft Auto 3.

The story goes like this: GTA's developer, DMA Design, had just opened a new office in Edinburgh after a decade in Dundee. Change crackled in the air. The '90s were ending, and all around DMA the game industry was transitioning to three dimensions. The young team behind an early 3D game named Body Harvest believed they were ready to do the same with GTA.

Yet the studio's old guard was unconvinced. The team had already experimented with tilting the camera a little in GTA 2, but weren't sure it was possible to go further. A simulated city, navigated at breakneck speeds in whatever direction the player chose? Surely not in 3D.

"We had a bit of pushback from them," recalls Rockstar North co-studio head and art director Aaron Garbut. "So we did a tech demo of a city environment on the Dreamcast with cars driving around and characters walking the streets. We got it working over a period of weeks to the point where you could steal a car and drive it about, then we got it in front of Sam."

Sam Houser was the executive producer of Take-Two's new publishing label in New York, which had rather audaciously named itself Rockstar Games. He'd been a backer of GTA since its earliest days, egging its team on as they embraced player criminality and transgression. Now he was more than keen for the series to take its next revolutionary step.

"Sam has always been the voice of the player," Garbut says. "He has always encouraged us to go further, to take risks, to make every game our best yet and never to settle. He has also given us the support, the room, and the flexibility we've needed over the years to get things where they need to be. He's still that person for the team now."

The GTA 3 team were galvanised by the Dreamcast demo, basic though it was. It became a source of inspiration and a focal point for their ambitions. "We knew what we were doing in 3D and were young, arrogant, and naïve enough to feel like it was easy and exciting," Garbut says. "We just knew how far we could take things. We could see the impact of an urban environment in 3D and were filled with ideas first and foremost about how we could bring it alive. That was our initial focus – building the toys and playset, making a world that functioned as well as we could make it, a living, breathing city."

From the previous games came the premise: the arresting idea of being an antihero, a criminal who worked for even worse criminals. GTA had always had multiple mission-givers, albeit at the other end of a phone. And its developers had already invented Wanted levels, not to mention their antidote, the Pay And Spray shop. The formula was there.

Electric dreams

But the GTA 3 team consciously rejected the arcade-like elements that had come before – in particular, the running point total for destruction that Garbut describes as "pinball scoring". In an immersive 3D world, those abstract touches no longer seemed to fit. Conversely, DMA leaned into the natural sense of cinema and emotional connection that came with a 3D camera. "We didn't really approach it like a sequel," Garbut says. "We weren't slavishly looking at how the earlier GTAs had done things. We worked in broad strokes and without referring too much to them."

Some of GTA 3's greatest development challenges were the fundamentals we take for granted in open worlds today. As Garbut points out, DMA didn't have any contemporaries working with densely populated urban environments.

"The density was the difference," he says. "There were simpler games – driving games set in urban worlds but without too much interaction – that were designed to traverse at speed." Though Garbut doesn't name any, 1999's Driver springs to mind.

"Then there were denser games like Zelda that did amazing things but spread it out or split it across empty spaces and denser dungeons," he continues. "We didn't split things into nice manageable, loadable chunks, we didn't spread it out with empty areas, we didn't design it to only work at speed or to explore in detail on foot in small areas. We were trying to offer it all in one experience, and to make it feel as alive as possible."

Chop shop

Players of the time were gobsmacked by the way GTA 3's world was constantly streamed into being, just outside their vision. Well, except for the rare occasions when a wall only appeared in time to tear the bonnet from their Banshee. It's a system that Garbut clearly remains deeply proud of, all these years later.

"The art team broke the world apart by hand in the best way to squeeze all we could into memory while getting it off the drive fast enough," he says. "The code team built an elegant streaming system and we got as granular as writing the files to the DVD in specific orders to keep areas of the world together physically on the disk. It's a testament to the talent and ingenuity of the team that we made this work."

The decision represented a huge risk, but in the end the results spoke for themselves – Liberty City rendered at great distances, across moody bays and packed urban thoroughfares, and did so seamlessly, without long loading screens. "Getting it right effectively removed a lot of limitations for scale and detail," Garbut says. "We could build what we wanted as long as the area around the player would fit in memory and we could get it off the DVD drive fast enough."

If GTA 3 was a living world, then DMA Design was the hospital crash team tasked with keeping it breathing, against the odds. "You have to ensure the system can cope with a random pileup round the corner exploding at the same time you are also trying to run an intense mission," Garbut says. "It's all about managing the chaos and the competing systems rather than just focussing on what you see. Keeping the world alive and allowing real interaction with it is one of the big challenges with open world games."

New car smell

The making of GTA 3 established the methodology that Rockstar North, as the developer is known now, still uses today. The studio always begins with the place and then, once it's fit to live in, moves up one layer to the toys. In GTA 3's case, the toys were the cars – the aspect of the game players would spend more time with than anything else.

"Seeing the world come alive through these vehicles, that's when I remember starting to feel things come together," Garbut says. "Every so often a build comes along with a feature you've been discussing or planning forever – it's normally rough and only there when you squint a bit. But it's there. Everything shifts, the world you had been working in changes and now this new thing has made it better or worse. On some projects at some points, it feels like that happens every day. GTA 3 could be like that."

With the addition of cars, GTA 3 changed overwhelmingly for the better. The team imbued their vehicles with physics that were both buoyant and dramatic, making even downtime in Liberty City gripping.

"This was a long time ago so seeing cars behave physically was not the norm," Garbut says. "I remember spending a good few hours skidding the car around and watching its suspension bounce on kerbs. Seeing that in our world, then seeing the variation in tuning with trucks, sports cars, and the like, it was inspiring. We had the toys we needed."

Garbut evidently adores the process of making games, and in particular these moments of punctuation that spark ever more extraordinary feats – the single flaming car which triggers a cascade of explosions that eventually ends in the downing of a police helicopter.

"The work of one team changes, motivates, and pushes the next team to take it and run with it," he says. "It's a lovely whirlwind of creativity."

For Garbut's art team, the sprawling 3D city was a canvas on which to paint their vision of New York. This city wasn't the real-life home of Rockstar's producers in the US, but a semi-fictional place pieced together from afar.

"At this point I'd only been there a couple of times," Garbut says. "There was no internet in the studio at first, there was no Google Maps. I just had a little box of 35mm photos a couple of us had taken on a trip there."

Old York

Instead, DMA's reference material came from old films and television. Liberty City mimicked not the glamour but the gloomy mundanity of urban life – soggy streets, grey concrete, dark water, and litter. It was an approach that played to the strengths of PS2's limited fidelity, capturing mood rather than detail.

"We wanted to lean into the grime, the rain, the weather," Garbut says. "We had also made a call to add a dynamic weather system and time of day, and this helped leverage that. It felt right for the kind of story we had, the kind of characters we had, and the way we felt New York had to be from growing up watching it on screen."

It seems very likely that the whole GTA series owes its cartoonish satire – the warped prism through which it has long viewed America – to this literal and critical distance. While success has brought LA and New York within easy reach of Rockstar North's developers, the studio has carefully cultivated its unique perspective in Edinburgh.

"Right from GTA 3 our focus was always on creating the impression of the place we were building over the reality," Garbut says. "Back then there was far less connection in the world digitally – the sheer volume of content and accessibility these days has blurred the line so much that I don't really feel like a cultural outsider in the same way any more, but what it did I think was force us to rely on the US we knew from television and film. It was more about an exaggerated impression, the feeling of the place. It gave us more choices and more control in some ways, and I think it served us well."

Rockstar's storytelling has come a long way since the release of GTA 3, to the point where writer Dan Houser's departure last year felt like a serious blow to the company. But even Liberty City's Scorsese-style drama, while broad and daft, served an important purpose.

"It's quite simple compared to how we work these days," Garbut says. "It's lacking any real refinement, but there's a charm to it and a consistency. I'm proud of what it did. It let us figure out a lot of things, it taught us what we could do better and with Vice City we were already on the path to do that. There were certain choices – a silent main character, for example – that we moved away from quickly, but we have always been good I think at re-evaluating and moving forward."

Concrete tower

The story of Claude and Catalina was a blueprint. So, Garbut says, was GTA 3 as a whole. There's little in GTA Online today that can't somehow be traced back to this strange, grey game. Its foundations were so firm, in fact, that its sequel was released to critical acclaim just one year later. You might argue that Vice City is the most successful reskin of all time, though that description does a disservice to the power with which Garbut's art team evoked the '80s, using pitch-perfect costumes and coloured lighting.

"We are building on the path we started on GTA 3," he says. "We are building on that game and evolving it every day, to this day. We carry all that experience and expertise, the stuff that is impossible to replicate that is down to working together forever, to knowing the people you work with and what they know, what each person brings and how to get the best from them."

Long before Rockstar North was a household name, Garbut went to art college. There he studied fine art, and learned that drawing, painting and sculpting was all about 'roughing it in' – getting the basic structure right so that the artist can refine over the top. He sees GTA 3 in those terms.

"The 'squint a bit and it looks kind of finished' sort of idea," he says. "It's how I've always approached both building our game worlds and the games themselves. GTA 3 was as resolved as we could make it at the time, but for today's standards it's simple and rough. Things have come so incredibly far, the detail and depth and sophistication, the interplay of the complex systems we build these days. Squint a bit, though, and it's still the foundation we have built on and I love it for that."

Our GTA 6 guide details everything you need to know about the story, gameplay, and world so far! Or, check out our best GTA games list for what to play while you wait!

Pack your bags and get ready to hop in the Normandy; the Mass Effect TV show is on the way. That's right, despite the recent (and devastating news) that EA has shut down BioWare and canceled Mass Effect 5, the upcoming Amazon adaptation of the famed video game franchise is reportedly still going ahead, and already there are plenty of details to start digging our sci-fi teeth into.

The original Mass Effect trilogy follows Commander Shepard on a brutal mission to save the galaxy and is counted among the best RPGs of all time. The story and fully realized worldbuilding are downright iconic, so when Amazon announced in 2021 that it had snagged the rights to bring it to our small screens, I've been paying close attention to every bit of news surrounding the upcoming TV show. So, if you are a massive Mass Effect fan like me who is dying to learn more, or a Fallout TV series enjoyer who is curious about Amazon's next game adaptation, then you've come to the right place.

Below is everything you need to know about Mass Effect's streaming debut. From release date predictions, updates on its production status, plot details, and more, I've made sure to scan every bit of information out there into a handy guide right here.

Mass Effect TV show release date speculation

Mass Effect is still very much underway; however, since filming hasn't kicked off yet, we are going to have to wait a while for a release date.

The show is still in the pre-production phase, and despite a previous Production Weekly list hinting at a Q4 2026 production start, there has been no new update on the Amazon adaptation actually moving out of the writers' room at this point in time.

Considering how much time will also be needed in post-production with special effects needed to bring the sci-fi story to life, I personally don't see Mass Effect releasing before 2028 at the earliest. This time frame also makes sense when we remember that the team working on Fallout will also be on Mass Effect.

Fallout season 3 is looking at a 2027 release window, so I doubt we will get Mass Effect before then. However, these are just my own speculative thoughts for now; I'll keep you posted as soon as I hear more.

Mass Effect TV show plot details: Will it adapt the games?

The Mass Effect TV show won't be a straight adaptation of the iconic video games; instead, we are getting a fresh story that takes place after the original trilogy. And personally, I have mixed feelings about that fact.

If you haven't played Mass Effect before, the game trilogy follows the human Spectre Commander Shepard, who has to stop a deadly synthetic race called the Reapers, who are hell-bent on erasing all organic life from the galaxy in a mass extinction event. In typical RPG fashion, your choices dictate how certain chains of events unfold, as well as what ending you ultimately see as well.

In a 2025 blog post by Mass Effect boss Mike Gamble, this plot direction was discussed: "The writers' room is going strong, and we’ve got a lot figured out about how it fits within the Mass Effect canon, and where it sits in respect to the new game," he writes. "The show will explore a brand-new story within the universe’s timeline, and will be set after the original trilogy. It won’t be a retread of Commander Shepard’s story – because after all … that’s YOUR story, isn’t it?"

We all know that since this post, the new game (aka Mass Effect 5) has now sadly been canceled due to EA's closure of BioWare; however, it does seem like the fact that the show is not telling Commander Shepard's story is still very much the plan. On one hand, this is a safe bet for RPG adaptations, considering players' choices created different canon endings and story paths. Amazon's Fallout series, for example, is brilliant and didn't follow a set story from the games; instead, it built a new plot set in the universe, and it worked masterfully.

However, the original Mass Effect trilogy has one of the best overarching storylines in gaming history: the high stakes of "the end of the galaxy and all organic life" if Shepard fails is the gut-punching action you want to see rather than the aftermath. Hopefully the new series manages to create a plot as action-packed and serious as the original trilogy, and I'm very much keeping an eye out for every new story-related update to see what direction it looks like the show is heading in. Watch this space!

Who is working on the Mass Effect TV show?

There are a lot of big names working on Amazon's Mass Effect TV series behind the scenes. Firstly, in terms of writers, we have Fast & Furious 9 scribe Daniel Casey on board. Star Trek: Beyond and Mindhunter writer Doug Jung is also set to join the production as a showrunner.

Looking at producers, Mass Effect boss Mike Gamble is executive producing the adaptation, along with the likes of former Marvel Studios producer Ari Arad and Karim Zreik. Basically, we have some big heavyweights who are seasoned professionals in creating popular franchises.

There is some more good news on the crew front, as Casey revealed via social media that the team who worked on Amazon's Fallout TV series will be on board to help bring the Mass Effect series to life.

Considering Fallout season 3 is looking to premiere in 2027, this also backs up my thoughts that Mass Effect won't be with us until 2028 at the earliest. However, I'm willing to wait if it means that the team who brought New Vegas to life will be in charge of giving us the likes of a Reaper-attacked Eden Prime as well.

Mass Effect TV show cast speculation

So far, no cast list has been shared, which makes sense considering we aren't in the production phase yet. However, a few stars have already expressed interest in the series in the past, so maybe they are in Amazon's sights.

Back in 2021, we did ask Henry Cavill if he would be interested in the Mass Effect series back when it was first announced. Cavill expressed his love for the games as well as his willingness to be part of the project. He is now on board working on Amazon's Warhammer series, but who knows, maybe he will swing by the Citadel in the future as well.

I'll keep an eye out for any more casting rumors and announcements. If production does pick up after the release of Fallout season 3 in 2027, as I suspect, we should be getting news on actors joining the Mass Effect fold very soon.

If you want more RPG goodness while you wait for Mass Effect, check out our list of the best BioWare games of all time. Or look ahead with our roundup of all the upcoming video game movies on the way next.

Clayface is nearly upon us... and it's a straight-up body horror that tells the origin story of the beloved Batman supervillain. A standalone movie about one of the most infamous baddies in Batman's rogues' gallery is especially exciting... as this means we're just that much closer to meeting Batman in the DCU proper.

The movie, directed by James Watkins from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, follows Hollywood actor Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), who goes from the absolute height of his acting career to getting his face cut up by a Gotham mob boss. After failed reconstructive surgeries, he approaches Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie) in order to undergo an experimental procedure that restores his face... but ultimately turns him into something else entirely.

But who is Matt Hagen? Did we originally meet him in DC Comics? Well, yes, but the movie took most of its inspiration from an episode of Batman: The Animated Series... Don't worry, we explain below (and without any spoilers to boot).

Who is Matt Hagen?

There have been several iterations of Clayface (eight to be exact), with the character Basil Karlo, a B-list movie actor, making his first appearance as the shapeshifting villain all the way back in Detective Comics #40 circa 1940. Matt Hagen was introduced in Detective Comics #268 circa 1962 as not an actor, but a treasure hunter who becomes Clayface after stumbling into a radioactive pool of protoplasm.

Matt Hagen is reimagined in Batman: The Animated Series season 1 episodes 4 and 5, titled 'Feats of Clay.' It's important to note that it's this iteration of Clayface that the new live-action movie is based on... not the treasure-hunting Matthew Hagen we meet in the comics (which has indeed been confirmed by Mike Flanagan). In BTAS, Matt is a successful actor whose face becomes permanently disfigured in a car accident.

Desperate, he buys a 'miracle' chemical cream called Renuyu from corrupt businessman and Gotham mobster Rolan Daggett (who is an enemy of the Wayne family in the comics). The cream restores his face, but also gives him the ability to change it to that of anyone he comes into contact with. A fight with Daggett and his henchmen results in them holding Matt down and pouring an entire vat of Renuyu down his throat, which mutates his body and turns him into Clayface.

In the movie, it's an experimental cell regeneration procedure gone wrong that turns Matt into Clayface... though it does give him the same abilities: shape-shifting, regeneration, and superhuman strength. The film also takes place before Creature Commandos season 1, which sees an animated Clayface (in his full nasty, goopy, and toothy form) link up with Princess Ilana Rostovic and impersonate Professor Aisla MacPherson. At the end of the season, Clayface is taken to Arkham Asylum. Both projects are canon to the DCU, which means our friend Matt Hagen begins his true supervillain arc sometime after the events of Clayface.

It's worth noting that we do see Batman for just a second in Creature Commandos, which tells us that the Caped Crusader is likely very aware of Clayface, if he hasn't battled him already. DCU co-CEO James Gunn has already commented that we'll see Matt Hagen again in other DCU projects.

Clayface hits theaters on October 23. For more, check out our list of all the upcoming DC movies and shows you need to know about.

Playing Stranger Than Heaven, I see obscured police officer reflections through the well lit high-fashion storefront windows. They shout "Where the hell did he go? You're not gettin' away with murder! Just give up!" as an unknown man covered in dirt and grime emerges into a back alley, clearly on the run. A loud foghorn blares in the distance, signaling a ship departure and the man stumbles through the alleyway in the direction of the horn. This mystery man donning a ratty blonde wig and big pink bow in his hair slowly makes his way through the alley as jazz music swells to fill every crack in the brick lined walls.

He approaches the quiet and foggy docks only to catch more police officers lying in wait. The only way onto the boat is through them, and so they duke it out. Back up against the ocean with nowhere else to run, a seemingly impossible opening presents itself and the man makes a break for it, leaping into the ocean to chase after the boat, to leave America behind, and start again. Those are my opening moments with Stranger Than Heaven's protagonist Makoto Daito, Yakuza developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio's latest project, a game that finds ways to blend familiar ideas of found family with new and ambitious storytelling structures.

Finding home

Stranger Than Heaven posits the question of what it means to belong in this world, to have a sense of home. Daito is of blended American and Japanese heritage, ceaselessly wrestling with not being enough of either nationality to find acceptance amongst his peers. This thread carries through the early hours of my hands-on, eventually coalescing into a powerful moment shared between Daito and a companion, where he is welcomed home for the first time in his life. He sits there, pondering the words over a drink, quietly muttering "welcome home" to himself, realizing it's the first time he's ever felt like he belongs.

This somber moment of reflection helps paint the larger picture of Stranger Than Heaven's bigger ideas of self identity, taking the concepts often found in Yakuza that deal in identity as it relates to group roles and dynamics and pairing it down to focus on an individual. Putting the emphasis on the life of Makoto Daito through multiple different eras of his life and the ever-changing landscape of Japan, we get to see a whole life lived.

1915 Kokura, Kyushu island's castle town, is the first of many stops in my preview. While this section sees high-stakes action in the form of a warehouse raid to free a kidnapped love interest, it's also juxtaposed with comedic relief. International smuggler and Makoto's mentor Orpheus (Snoop Dogg) takes time to teach Makoto how to roll a cigarette, which acts as a moment of levity while also showing how to create an item that boosts both attack and defense.

Kokura in this era is a large town with small village vibes. Numerous storefronts line the dirt roads I walk. I visit an apothecary to stock up on healing medicine, I drink straight from a water faucet in the ground to sober up after having one too many drinks, and of course, I pick a fight or two.

Combat is drastically different from anything RGG Studio has done before. Attacks are mapped to the shoulder buttons and triggers, meaning the left and right bumpers swing each matching fist while the triggers control my kicks. It's a system that takes some getting used to, especially as I attempt to weave in more complicated inputs like grabs and parries.

Stranger Than Heaven's combat feels more akin to the flow of a fighting game rather than a traditional beat 'em up. I find myself getting better with each fight, becoming more confident in each swing. I can feel Makoto getting more knowledgeable through the eras as well.

"Once you start using the same weapon, for example, Daito will start to learn a lot of skills based on that weapon," says director Mikinobu Abe. "So, it's more like you can customize Daito's life to your preference of what weapon you want him to master. If you want to use a knife throughout the 50 years of his life, of course Makoto himself will get good at the weapon, and that triggers making him do more move sets and more combos."

Later, Abe makes an announcement that there is a dangerous samurai near the river, advising against fighting him too early. So, naturally, I head straight for the katana wielding madman by the river.

Under the moonlight we clash steel. I learn to parry his seemingly never-ending combo strings. Constantly switching between my left and right arm to block his multi-directional strikes, trading heavy blows back and forth, I finally stagger him. This provides my opening to get a few good hits in. Using both triggers I grab and toss him to the ground and begin slamming him with everything I have until he rises to his feet again.

We swap hits back and forth again until he knocks me onto my back. Slashing down at me I roll out of the way so it misses me by a hair. It's like a choreographed action movie sequence, but one that feels natural and intuitive to unfurl during play. Plenty of other side activities I encounter have this same sense of flair, space between missions always have a sense of absurdity and danger.

Jumping ahead 14 years to 1929 Kure, Hiroshima, Daito is older, a little more established, and growing in confidence. As I approach alongside a trolleycar while walking Kure, Daito hops up and grabs the side, hanging off of it as it carries me down the street. Despite it being my first time in Kure, it's clear Daito has been around the block a few times. The way he enters shops, takes part in the underground fight clubs, and enters his home presents a more mature version of the man I knew nearly fifteen years prior.

There's a liveliness to Kure in the daytime. People dining in the streets, old men playing Menko along the river, and hooligans looking for a street brawl. I spend most of my time in an underground fight club, defeating a rotating cast of difficult enemies for pocket change and bragging rights as I master challenges under special conditions ("no weapons", for instance).

Make some noise

Fast-forward to 1943 Minami, Osaka and things have changed quite a bit again. The low hum and bright glow of neon signs seep color onto the streets below. I hop into the first building I see, a small theater venue looking to put on a performance. At this moment I learn about Makoto's involvement in show business, and how deep those systems go.

Everything in Stranger Than Heaven feeds into a system that allows Makoto to gather music inspiration. Colorful bubbles populate the screen during combat, when Daito hears a small tune from a nearby radio, or the sound of dice rattling in a cup before being thrown. The world is filled with little bits and bobs for Makoto to grab. Focusing one of those bubbles and clicking a button lets you hone in and obtain the inspiration for later use.

After collecting a few different inspirations from local storefront radios I make my way to where this all comes together, my base of operations – marked with a house icon on the map – going upstairs to where the upright piano is. Here I talk to pianist Takashi to begin composing music. Each song has different moods that can be tweaked and changed to alter the way it sounds. Taking a piano backing that's tagged as relaxing and swapping it for a more intense sound changes how people respond to it when played live.

After changing out the instrumentation of the song I head over to a nearby desk where I begin selecting ticket prices, hiring musicians and singers, and customizing the stage lighting and attire in order to ensure the show is profitable. It's reminiscent of the Yakuza 0 cabaret minigame, but blown up to be much more detailed.

Music plays a massive role in Stranger Than Heaven, not just as a tool for Makoto to make money, but as a way of connecting to people. "He finds the joy that music is something that needs no explanation with a race or a language barrier," says Abe. "And that was something that was really important for Makoto to progress, having motivation within his life, as well as something that he could connect with people."

There's still so much more to uncover in Stranger Than Heaven, but after this relatively small slice of the game, I'm excited to see what's waiting for Makoto Daito through the rest of his life.

Wondering what heavenly gaming experiences will tide you over while you wait for Stranger Than Heaven? Look no further than our best Yakuza games or best ARPGs rankings for what to play next!

VisionQuest is packed with mysteries, but we've just learned more about the enigmatic bounty hunter Paladin.

In episode 3, we find out that the shadowy figure has clashed with three significant Marvel characters – though you have to do a bit of decoding to figure out exactly who the bounty hunter is talking about.

Below, we've broken down exactly who Paladin and the Handler are referencing, which, naturally, means there are spoilers ahead for VisionQuest episode 3! For more on the show, check out our spoiler-free VisionQuest review.

Paladin's history with Daredevil and more in VisionQuest

In the episode, Paladin – the fearsome bounty hunter on Vision's trail – is revealed to have tangled with some significant Marvel characters.

In a conversation with his Handler, she references the time Paladin "pulled a fistful of shrapnel from that IED out of your gut" in Brooklyn. Paladin responds: "Just a punishing disagreement with an old friend." He is, of course, referring to Frank Castle, AKA the Punisher, whose modus operandi certainly includes IEDs.

Next, the Handler asks about "the bite marks from that thing halfway between a man and a wolf," to which Paladin responds: "A perfectly reasonable fella by day." This is Jack Russell, AKA Werewolf by Night.

And finally, the Handler asks: "Remember the concussion you got from that steel fiber billy club to the noggin?" Paladin says: "If you can't take the heat, get out of Hell's Kitchen." That's in reference to Daredevil, whose regular haunt is Hell's Kitchen, New York City.

So, it sounds like Paladin certainly has a colorful past, which has led to him clashing with some formidable Marvel foes. But, with the way Paladin has been able to shake off his injuries and is still alive to tell his tales, it looks like Vision has his work cut out for him if he wants to survive being the bounty hunter's target.

VisionQuest continues weekly on Disney Plus. You can keep up to date with our VisionQuest release schedule. For more, check out our guide to all the upcoming Marvel movies and TV shows.

After four episodes, VisionQuest has already addressed several of the show's many mysteries, but the biggest question of all remains unanswered: who is The Client?

Paladin's mysterious patron remains in the shadows, for now. All we know is that he/she/it wants Vision for some unknown purpose and reason, and they're happy for Paladin to do whatever it takes to deliver on the contract.

So who is The Client? We have our theories, of course, which we'll dive into below. But first, a word of warning: if you're not up to date with VisionQuest episodes 3 and 4, turn back now as there are spoilers ahead. Still with us? Then take a trip down theory lane…

Who is The Client in VisionQuest? The top suspects

Ultron

Ultron may have softened up somewhat during his time in Vision's noggin, but as the end of episode 4 proves, he can still be uncompromisingly ruthless when it comes to it. Would it be a surprise if Ultron is The Client? Not especially. Though given that freedom is his ultimate goal, which he's now achieved by hijacking Vision's body, what need is there for his contract with Paladin? One key piece of evidence pointing to Ultron being The Client is that he's already been contacting Paladin via email/carrier pigeon, but this information was revealed so early in the run of the season that it might just be proof of the opposite.

Dr. Jospehine Carrington

As revealed in VisionQuest episode 4, the Butcherbird serial killer is, in fact. Dr. Josephine Carrington (aka Jocasta). Carrington was one of the key people responsible for the creation of a stable synthetic consciousness, or artificial general intelligence, at Markridge Biotech. Is it possible she hired Paladin? There's a slim chance, perhaps as a safety net should she fail. Though given Jocasta and Paladin come to blows in episode 3, this seems very unlikely at this stage.

Billy Maximoff

We know that Wanda and Vision's magical son, Billy Maximoff (aka Wiccan), is searching for his twin brother, Tommy, so it stands to reason that he'd also be on the hunt for his father as well. Whether he'd need to hire someone like Paladin to track him down, particularly when he's a powerful magic user himself, is another question. Though Paladin's already proven a far more successful tracker than Billy, as his Handler found Tommy in no time at all, so maybe Billy does need outside help after all. That said, we don't yet know if Billy is actually in VisionQuest, but some Marvel fans think they've already spotted him.

Wanda Maximoff

This feels even more unlikely than Billy, as showrunner Terry Matalas has said that while Wanda's shadow will loom large over VisionQuest, the Scarlet Witch won't be in the show. That said, the last time we saw Wanda, she was crushed under a mountain. If she's alive, it's possible that a weakened Wanda might need outside help to track down Vision, particularly one who tried to kill her the last time they came face to face. Unlikely, then, but not impossible.

Jim Hammond

We already know that the first synthezoid, Jim Hammond, will figure into VisionQuest's story somehow, as a picture of the original Human Torch can be seen hanging in the lounge of Vision's mind space. We don't yet know how his artificial life came to an end in the MCU but… what if it didn't? Perhaps he's still out there, and perhaps he has business with Vision. Perhaps he no longer has a physical form, which may explain why he needs Paladin's help. Or perhaps we're barking up the wrong artificial tree.

VisionQuest episodes 1-4 are streaming now on Disney Plus. Never miss an episode with our VisionQuest release schedule or dive into our VisionQuest episodes 3-4 Easter eggs guide.

Two new episodes of VisionQuest have just landed on Disney Plus as we find out what's next for our favorite dysfunctional family of AIs. Episodes 3 and 4 up the ante in every way as new characters are introduced while Vision, Tommy, and Ultron try and work out their father/son woes.

Alongside the VisionQuest plot moving along nicely, there are loads of little references to the wider world of the MCU as well. These include nods to other major Marvel characters as well as some intriguing comic book details. For all of the big moments that we spotted, read on below for our complete guide (and let us know in the comments if you find any others).

Of course, we will be getting into spoilers from here on out, so make sure you're up to date by checking our VisionQuest release schedule. While you're at it, have a read of our VisionQuest review too for our verdict on the Disney Plus show.

VisionQuest episode 3 Easter eggs

Ten Rings Syndicate: When the Paladin is speaking to his Handler, she asks if she should send a "gift basket to the Ten Rings Syndicate" for providing Adamantium chest armor. The Ten Rings led a cell in the original Iron Man movie as well as featuring heavily in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

The Brooklyn job: The rest of the conversation features some other fun Easter eggs. They refer to the "Brooklyn job" which left him pulling "a fistful of shrapnel from that IED out of your gut". This is a reference to a past encounter with The Punisher as he describes it as "just a punishing disagreement with an old friend."

Werewolf By Night: At another point in the conversation, the Handler mentions "the bite marks from that thing half-way between a man and a wolf", to which the Paladin quips he was a "perfectly reasonable fella by day." This is clearly a little nod to Jack Russell, the protagonist of Werewolf by Night, played by Gael Garcia Bernal.

Daredevil: Finally, Hell's Kitchen gets a direct call-out. The Handler reminds him of the concussion he got from a "steel fibre billy club to the noggin," referring to Daredevil's signature weapon. The Paladin replies to this, "If you can’t take the heat, get out of Hell's Kitchen". In the Marvel comics, the Paladin first debuted in the Daredevil comics, and his suit shares many common elements with Charlie Cox's antihero. This all makes these nods especially fun.

Tony's death: F.R.I.D.A.Y. gives us another insight into one of the most heartbreaking moments in the MCU. She references Tony Stark's death in Avengers: Endgame, lamenting that she couldn't save him. "Half the world came back that day, and I lost half of mine," she tells the other AIs. Heartbreaking.

Sitcom callbacks: WandaVision lingers in the background of the entire show. In this episode, we see Tommy and Vision watching sitcoms when they're holed up in their motel room.

Book about the Snap: When Tommy is talking to Vision about Wanda, he says he remembers reading about her in that book about the Snap. He might be referring to Ant-Man's book, 'Look Out for the Little Guy!' which details the blip and the battle against Thanos.

Love persevering: Vision's infamous grief line is starting to feel a bit like Spider-Man's great responsibility dialogue. It's mentioned against in this episode when J.A.R.V.I.S. gets a funeral. "With grief comes something new, an inner fire," the AIs say. Sounds familiar.

Speed: When Tommy saves Vision at the end, he tells him that he has "the very essence of speed," nodding to his powers and his superhero name.

VisionQuest episode 4 Easter eggs

Exorcism: Ultron tries to expel the Butcherbird from the Mind Place with a fun Exorcism nod. "The power of code compels you," he tells her.

Battle of Sokovia: This episode takes place on the anniversary of the Battle of Sokovia. The key conflict from Avengers: Age of Ultron is being discussed on the news in the background of this episode, and is on the front page of Ultron's newspaper. This was Ultron's big fight with the Avengers.

Stark Industries: We find out how Stark had such advanced AI technology in this episode, as it's revealed that the AI company that is being targeted by the Butcherbird sold their technology to Stark.

Edwin Jarvis: We also find out that all of the AIs and their human likenesses are actually based on real people. Jarvis was a character in Agent Carter, where he was the Stark family's butler.

Alison Hogan: We also find out that F.R.I.D.A.Y. is based on Howard Stark's "Girl Friday", who was also known as Alison Hogan. She was the person who "kept his office" and seems like she was a loyal assistant. She's certainly got an interesting surname... We'd bet she's a relation of Tony Stark's beloved head of security, Happy Hogan.

Dr Phineas Horton: We've already had a nod to the Human Torch (Jim Hammond) in the show so far, but now we've had a Phineas Horton name-drop. This character was the creator of Jim Hammond in the Marvel comics.

Markridge Biotech: The name of Dr. Josephine Carrington's former company is a nod to the 12 Monkeys TV show, which prominently featured the 'Markridge Group' – a biotech and defense outfit. VisionQuest showrunner Terry Matalas previously developed the 12 Monkeys series.

No Strings: When Ultron breaks free and takes over Vision's body at the end, he quips that, "There's no strings on me." This is a reference to Ultron's famous quote taken from Pinocchio in Avengers: Age of Ultron.

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

I'm probably going to get a lot of hate for this one, but tiny gaming controllers just don't cut it for me. If your algorithm is tuned well to you, you'll probably have heard about the new Xbox Nano controller that Microsoft is launching. I'll be the first to tell you this little thing is absolutely adorable; it's definitely more portable than your bog-standard Xbox Series X controller, and at only $49.99 / £44.99, it's pretty easy on your wallet too.

It's for those reasons that I hate to say it, but it's almost certainly going to suck.

Hi, I'm Duncan. I review controllers for a living, and I'm here to tell you that while cute, tiny gaming hardware is adorable, it's almost never usable for players like me. I love to look at the CRKD Atom+; I love the idea of carrying around the most portable mobile controller in my back pocket, and I love the cozy vibes of playing on a nostalgic handheld in bed at night, but they're all so uncomfortable for me I just struggle to see the point anymore.

The Nano controller Xbox is launching is in that category for me: adorable to look at, amazing and convenient on paper, but something I'd use once, remember the hand cramp it gave me, and then avoid using for the rest of time as it decayed in a drawer while laughing at my wallet.

To be clear, I'm not telling you Xbox will have made a bad gaming peripheral here, or that the new Nano controller won't be worth your time, but I am issuing a word of caution because if you're reading this and you're over the age of 12, you're probably not going to enjoy using it. This thing isn't being made for me or you; probably, it's most likely designed for kids to carry around, or for gaming households that want to be able to have Switch-like gaming sessions that involve the whole family without forking out hundreds on new controllers for each player.

For that reason, I love to see Microsoft coming out with this. Xbox is in a sorry state and has been for a while, and adding more charm, more brand loyalty, and just a bit more whimsy for fans to hold onto is exactly why new CEO Asha Sharma is doing a pretty decent job of turning the ship around - or at least steadying it. It's just a shame new releases like this come a week or two after mass workforce layoffs - those aren't quite so tiny, or cute as the new controller.

I've been testing portable controllers, full-sized gamepads, and everything in between for years, and I can tell you that while every new, tiny controller gets me slightly giddy and filled with childlike wonder, using them is always a different story. I have pretty big hands - nothing freaky or out of the ordinary, but I'm comfortably in the large-hand gang. Wrapping my hands around a Joy-Con controller, for example, is not a pleasant experience. Even holding a Switch or Asus ROG Ally X is a pretty uncomfortable and hand-cramp-inducing affair, so tiny controllers like the Nano Controller, the new VoidJoy GC-P01, the CRKD Atom, or anything that hasn't had a bit more ergonomic oomph thrown at it, actively take me out of whatever game I'm trying to play.

Hell, even Razer's new genius foldable mobile controller, the Prio, which is a feat of engineering, had me so excited. Then I tried using it, and even though it wasn't designed to be the ELO Vagabond, it was still pretty hard to enjoy playing with. These things are not made to be amazing ways to play, and I try to grant them that leeway; they're built to be convenient. But I think there's a line that's crossed with each of them that can be seen even back with the original Backbone One.

In trying to be portable, convenient, and a "quick fix" for gaming on the go, ergonomics, comfort, and usability fly out the window. One of the reasons controllers are either good or bad is that they can be so comfortable they make you forget you're holding one, or so bad they prevent you from enjoying whatever virtual game you're running and jumping around in.

Where this changes, and the new Xbox Nano controller will likely find a market of its own, is with younger players, and that's great! Younger kids will be catered for with the opposite perspective. Expecting a 7-year-old to hold a heavy-duty pro pad like the Nacon Revolution X Unlimited is asking for it to get broken, and it's way too big for them to wrap their wee hands around, so something like the Nano controller is ideal. This is the year 2026; it's okay for us to have Mama bear, Papa bear, and Baby bear controller sizes.

Similarly, I have plenty of guy friends who are trying to get their female partners interested in gaming for the first time, and bigger controllers with tonnes of buttons can be downright intimidating for them. Coordination around a gamepad is already difficult enough to develop at first if you've not been used to it from an early age, so a smaller controller with fewer buttons is probably a much better jumping-off point, or will at least be a more accessible option should people want it. I'll let the hosts of our G+RLS podcast (which you should definitely listen to; be the judge, though).

So if I'm aware of all this, why am I bothering to tell you that the Xbox Nano controller will suck?

Because something happens when we adult gamers get a hit of nostalgia from seeing cutesy gaming memorabilia, and it's our wallets that pay the price. Essentially, I'm giving you tough love here. The Xbox Nano controller isn't for you or me, and that's alright. Just don't go buying it expecting it to be a revolutionary or enjoyable way for any adult to play games because it probably won't be. On the other hand, if you have younger gamers in your life, it's definitely one to keep around.

Want more controller buying tips? Check out the best PC controller, the best PS5 controller, and the best TMR controllers.

The concept of overwhelming pleasure has always fascinated me. Craving sensation is primal and civilization has built much to better that, from fine dining to VR gaming. This deeply human pursuit is a core part of both Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, and my favorite Warhammer 40,000 faction.

Thrill seekers

Saber Interactive's new horror game explores sensation from the off, beginning with a BDSM-tinged sex scene before introducing the franchise's iconic Hell Priest Pinhead and his cohort of fellow Cenobites, who tear the protagonist's partner Sunny to shreds. The violence is gruesome, but the recipient doesn't seem to object, even if our protagonist Aidan does.

Aidan soon finds himself breaking free from a torture den before arriving at a sex club, both of which belong to a Cenobite-worshipping cult called the Scarlet Church. As our hero is about to leave this world behind, the disembodied voice of Sunny calls out, luring Aidan back in the name of liberating her. Here, I start to see connections to Warhammer 40K.

The Emperor's Children legion are a group of Space Marines – enhanced human beings who are now full-time thrill seekers in the name of the Chaos deity Slaanesh, pursuing pleasure and sensation above all else, and their origins may sound familiar.

The superhuman soldiers found themselves in a temple of hedonism, surrounded by creatures known as the Laer in the throes of ecstasy, when a siren song called to their hearts. Much like Aidan, they responded with violence as a natural instinct, while the whisperer in their ears pulled them further along the pathway to something beyond their comprehension.

Stepping into Hellraiser: Revival's Labyrinth, Aidan could just as easily be one of the Emperor's Children. The otherworldly sights before me are fear-inducing but also alluring. The leather-wrapped enemies that lash out when I interrupt their enjoyment respond just as the Laer might, using violence as both a defense mechanism and conduit to sensation.

Even back in the human realm, the home of Scarlet Church feels ripped from the pages of Warhammer 40,000's grimdark universe. Mutilated corpses hang from ceilings and painted canvases stand proudly upon easels, matching the imagery from the Horus Heresy novel Fulgrim and its Emperor's Children spaceship featuring similar levels of violence and artistry. We even see an apparently high-ranking member of Revival's cult carrying out a sort of surgery on a living person, much like the Emperor's Children character Fabius Bile is infamous for.

It's impossible for me to delve into Hellraiser without thinking of Warhammer. Both the Cenobites and worshippers of Slaanesh represent an obsession that has seen them go beyond the accepted limits of society, and the result is as harrowing as it is intoxicating. I turn the corners of Revival's in-game world with the same cautious curiosity as I do the pages of Fulgrim, enraptured by the sights both stories have to show me.

Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival review: "Pinhead's return is glorious – this is a true love letter to the original movies"

"The Marleys were dead, to begin with." Once Gonzo has recited those words, you know that it's the holidays. Re-watching The Muppets Christmas Carol every year and watching a young Michael Caine grumpily frolic around with felt-covered puppets has become a family tradition, and there are only 66 days until I get to do it all over again.

Another tradition amongst my loved ones is being disappointed by the lack of Christmas Carol merchandise that we're able to gift each other, but the Disney Store has heard our pleas. The US storefront has rolled out a ton of new Muppets Christmas Carol goodies, including a new Loungefly backpack starring Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat, a series of plushies, and a light-up decoration for the tree with Kermit and Miss Piggy dressed in their best Mr and Mrs Cratchit garb. There's even a blind box that gives you the chance to grab one of six themed Muppets tree ornaments, because of course there is.

This new powder of collectibles is available to order now as part of 'Disney Store Private Access', a membership that allows fans access to merch ahead of the general public. There's no fee to sign up, and I highly recommend you do, as these are bound to sell out fast once they're available to all Muppets fans on October 26. Honestly, had they been available at Disney UK, I'd order every single item, as I know for a fact that a tiny plush Robert and Jacob Marley would go down well this holiday season, no matter who I gifted them to.

• View all The Muppets merchandise at the Disney Store

Looking for gifts for the 2026 holiday season? Check out our best retro gifts, best PS5 gifts, and the best Xbox gifts.

PATCH NOTES v19.10.2026 – As the latest Resident Evil film gets turned back into a video game and early Edgerunners 2 reviews suggest great things ahead, video game worlds have become the stars of the best adaptations – and it's a blueprint for the future.

What's going on this week in gaming?

• Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 reviews are in and largely positive.
• Zack Cregger's acclaimed Resident Evil movie has come full circle after a fan turned it into a classic PS1 survival horror game.

Why is this happening now?

• Game adaptations are more successful when they build on the source game's universes instead of delivering exact retellings.

Meta Shift

• Edgerunners 2 and Resident Evil prove that game worlds, not characters, offer the best opportunities for adaptation.

Turning a beloved video game into a film or TV show has always been challenging, but Zach Cregger's Resident Evil and Edgerunners season 2 proves it can be done if the respect is mutual. By taking the respective circumstances or settings of the source material – Cyberpunk 2077's Night City and Resident Evil's Raccoon City – and shaping them around new characters, both adaptations retain the spirit of the games while telling a new story.

It's a departure from what we usually see when we think of a game being adapted into a show or film. 2026's Return to Silent Hill beat-for-beat rehashes legendary survival horror game Silent Hill 2, but its 18% score on Rotten Tomatoes proves something was lost in translation. Paul W.S Anderson's slew of Resident Evil spin-off flicks acquired cult status for how famously silly they are, though lined up with more recent adaptations like Return to Raccoon City, are looked back on more kindly these days. The Witcher TV series saw moderate success due to actor Henry Cavill's genuine love of the games and book series, but audiences have been divided since his departure from his role as Geralt of Rivia.

A large part of this is down to audience expectation versus reality. Video games bring us some of the most powerful characters in entertainment, and we get to know them through a specific lens and perspective. Recasting those characters and giving them new faces, voices, or storylines as they cross over to new mediums is tricky because there is already something to compare it to.

The makers of Edgerunners 2 and Resident Evil 2026 understand this. Both feature locations, iconography, and situations that will be familiar to fans of the video games – Edgerunners even features the same HUD players see in Cyberpunk 2077 when calling someone on the holophone – but never to the detriment of new viewers.

Writing new characters into well-defined, preordained worlds also sets firm parameters for the action that can take place there without risking a retcon of canon events as seen in source games. It creates a believable place to tell relevant stories, which has proven a magical combination for Edgerunners and Resident Evil. I hope the directors of the Zelda movie and God of War movie adaptations are taking notes!

Feedback Loop

• The success of Edgerunners and Zack Cregger's Resident Evil reinforces the power of intertextuality.

By writing new stories in familiar worlds, Edgerunners and Resident Evil are adding to a canon universe and have been accepted as a part of it – both by gamers and game developers alike.

To incorporate Edgerunners into the game's own canon, Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red added new items, music, and mission chains that reference characters and events from the anime. Resident Evil was already self-referential, but as a movie about the experience of playing survival horror video games, it now has an extra layer of metatextual irony after being turned back into a PS1-era fixed camera-angled video game. These are just two examples of the different ways games and their adaptations can find confluence with one another when they aren't fighting to breathe the same air. It proves that adapting games into film and TV shows doesn't have to be hard when directors adapt the right things, adding value and layers instead of reshaping what was already there.

Patch Notes summary

Continued hype around the Resident Evil movie and Edgerunners 2's promising reviews are setting a new benchmark for game adaptations in 2026. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each medium and avoiding debates around story reinterpretation, these adaptations are proof that game worlds are far more flexible than the characters that inhabit them.

Related stories:

Cleverly, Invisible Inc is a balance of contrasts, a yin-yang structure of opposing forces that combine in harmony. As a turn-based strategy game, it wants you to take as long as you need to make your decisions, yet also demands precision timing. It wants to retain an element of risk in every act, but removes the genre's characteristic percentages and dice rolls. It wants you to have all the info you need to make your next move, while ensuring every mission is an unknowable challenge. It wants Roguelike replayability, without the brevity or abruptness of most Roguelike campaigns.

The foundation for all this is a focus on stealth. Invisible, a hi-tech private espionage outfit in the late 21st century, finds itself hunted by a group of powerful companies. You control its remaining agents as they infiltrate a series of corporate facilities to acquire info, money, and equipment. Keep surviving and gathering resources long enough, and you get a chance to enter the enemy's HQ and take their systems offline. Until then, you spend your time sneaking around offices, labs, and bank vaults, avoiding guard patrols and hacking security systems to meet various objectives.

The first contrast is between the familiar and the new. You start with two characters (you can rescue further operatives along the way) whose movements around grid-based locations are governed by AP, or action points. Following basic stealth protocols, you stay in cover, look ahead before you advance, and only engage guards as a last resort. But there's already another crucial resource to consider: power. You won't get far unless you remotely disable security cameras, drones, and laser grids, or access locked workstations and safes. And you can't do that if you don't maintain your power supply by activating replenishment programs or leeching from on-site terminals.

When it comes to the rules and flow of play, Invisible Inc revolves around simultaneous extremes of transparency and opacity, or information that is either remarkably abundant or completely absent. First there's what you don't know. When you start one of the procedurally generated missions, the facility's layout is a mystery. You teleport into an empty square room with one or more doors; beyond that, somewhere there's your main objective, and somewhere there's the exit. Guards could be anywhere, either about to walk in on you or patrolling deeper into the complex. You'll have to figure it all out as you move.

As for what you do know, the rule is that once you can see something, intel on it is instant and comprehensive. This is a carryover from Klei Entertainment's previous game, Mark of the Ninja, where line of sight immediately clarifies the status of objects and enemies. Here, in a turn-based world, the concept goes a step further. If a guard is visible, you can read about any armor or special abilities he has, and perceive his exact cone of vision. Use an action point, and you can even check the path of his next move. With this knowledge, your fragile but resourceful characters can assume control. Walk through a guard's peripheral vision on your way to cover, for example, and his attention will turn to that spot, giving you a window to sneak up and rifle through his pockets or escape unseen.

The simple and predictable nature of the AI is part of the game's drive to eliminate ambiguity. Even combat, when it does occur, is strictly binary. Either you have a weapon that can knock out or kill a particular guard, or you don't, and if you attack, the result is guaranteed. You never have to second-guess what the enemy will do and you never have to think about probabilities. You merely have to choose from the many possibilities laid out in front of you. Surprises only occur when you blunder forward blindly, or fail to consider what you've been told.

The bells are ringing

This absolute transparency, coupled with the contemplative nature of turn-based play, suggests cool, methodical advancement. But again that's only the half of it. The other half is urgency, pressure and panic, and it mostly comes from a single cause: the alarm level. The big twist in Invisible Inc is that while you arrive in each facility undetected, the enemy security network becomes more alert to your presence after every turn, and introduces new threats at certain thresholds – extra cameras, increased firewalls, more guards. Also, any time you get spotted, hack a booby-trapped system or use lethal force, the level jumps up even more. The longer you hang around and the more mistakes you make, the harder it is to get anything done.

The most precious commodity thus isn't AP or power, but turns themselves. While you don't have to worry whether or not an action will succeed, you must consider its efficiency. Any decision can have a vital fallout in terms of time that will alter how the mission unfolds. Do you split your team up to cover more ground, or keep them together to gang up on threats? Do you spend valuable turns sneaking around a guard, or knock him out? If you knock him out, do you drag him with you and keep him pinned down, or rush on knowing he'll soon recover and start searching for you? Do you use a large chunk of power to neutralise a camera instantly, or conserve some and do it more gradually? Do you hack a safe or facility map protected by a daemon program that could disrupt your own systems? In each case, your worst enemy might be indecisiveness, but you can't afford to be inflexible either, as conditions are in constant flux.

Choosing when to do something often becomes as important as choosing what to do, especially towards the end of a mission. The only essential requirement to keep the game alive is to reach the exit with at least one character, but if you're going to survive long-term and prepare sufficiently for the challenging endgame, it's best to get everyone out, complete your objective, and steal plenty of loot. The temptation, then, is always to look in every room and empty every safe, risking staying longer than necessary to extract maximum gains from each mission. But as firewalls increase and the guards close in, there's a point where it's smarter to cut and run.

Perhaps you have an agent crouched in a dead end, far from the exit, waiting to loot a well-protected safe. You need your power to recharge a little more to hack the lock, yet every turn you stay put the facility bolsters its defences, and your escape route becomes increasingly deadly. Maybe the rest of your squad is already at the exit, caught between hanging around to help the straggler or getting out now. Having come this far, is it worth another couple of turns to open that safe, or will it ruin everything? Few games make doing nothing feel so daring.

Crucially, the balance in Invisible Inc between stasis and timing, knowledge and ignorance, predictability and risk, is so fine that almost every mission escalates with the suspense of a good heist movie. They all play out differently, due to the random layouts. A large room with a concentration of intersecting patrols is a different proposition to a series of small rooms with stationary guards, for example. Or simple factors such as the position of the exit in relation to the main objective can dramatically change the route you have to navigate. But since you'll try to extract maximum resources regardless, you consistently push to the limit, and invariably end up running for the exit with half-a-dozen enemies homing in on your position.

These hair's-breadth victories reflect the game's final congruent dualism: the combination of Roguelike structure with the feel of a conventional one-and-done adventure. By default it teaches you how to play through its Beginner difficulty, and you could easily finish the six-hour campaign on your first attempt. Klei's gamble is that you'll want to repeat the process again and again, each time ratcheting up the challenge and going deeper into the tactical intricacies. As you do, you'll unlock different starting characters and hacking programs, each of which brings its own unique opportunities and challenges. You won't see anything drastically different in the missions themselves (although a substantial DLC package does change things up), but experimenting with different parameters keeps the experience endlessly fresh.

The game's use of permadeath is also carefully tempered, even when you get to the highly taxing Expert and Expert Plus difficulty levels. Being spotted is a problem, but there's usually a way out. And because you have multiple agents at your disposal, losing one isn't the end of the world. If a character is taken down, you may be able to resuscitate them or drag them to the exit, once the coast clears. Or, if all else fails, there's a limited-use rewind feature that enables you to take whole turns again. Sometimes you lose everyone nonetheless, and it can be hard to take when you're close to the end of a run, but at least permadeath isn't sudden death. You always have time to weigh up your options, experiment with the game's systems, and fashion last-ditch plans.

When you do succeed, perhaps inevitably it's a matter of walking a tightrope between opposites – action and inaction, attack and defence, spending and saving, safety and risk. Every decision is potentially important, and victory is rarely so emphatic that it couldn't have turned to defeat. Somehow this feels like a reflection of the game's design. Invisible Inc never asks anything of you that it hasn't already done itself.

This Invisible Inc article was first published in issue 354 of Edge Magazine. To get more like this delivered straight to your doorstep (or digital device) consider subscribing to Edge.

Broken Mirror Games is barely a year old, but the Bloober Team publishing division has already managed the once unthinkable. Onyx: The Dark Grip is set to be one of the first Nintendo-exclusive horror games in over a decade, proving that the Nintendo Switch 2 really is a console for all - even us horror hounds.

Sitting down with Bloober Team CEO Piotr Babieno and Broken Mirror's new executive director Tymon Smektała, I have just one question. How on Earth did they pull off getting a game like this past Nintendo?

Through the fog

Smektała might be new to Broken Mirror, but after 13 years at Techland and having gotten to know him well over his last three as Dying Light franchise director, take it from me: the guy really knows, loves, lives, and breathes his horror. Which means he's keenly aware that Onyx: The Dark Grip being a Switch 2-exclusive, handheld-only experience is a very, very big deal.

"Nintendo doesn't work with just anyone," Smektała says. "Generally, Japanese companies are companies that you have to build trust with, and you have to prove that you are worthy of that trust. The fact that we have managed to convince Nintendo to to support a game like this – to feature it in a Nintendo Direct and allow us to make that game for Nintendo Switch as an exclusive – speaks of the fact that Bloober Team is being noticed and realized and validated as the people to go to when it comes to horror."

He's right on the money. Few studios have pulled off a reputational 180 as well as Bloober Team. The studio had been around for years, but Silent Hill 2 Remake was the catalyst for that success. The gorgeously faithful yet beautifully modernized survival horror was met with staggering praise, impressing even those who balked when Konami first revealed the Polish studio's involvement, to become one of the most important remakes in the genre to-date. For all the studio's slip ups in the past, the proof was there on-screen: Konami was right to trust Bloober Team, and now, so do we all.

But Konami's seal of approval seemed to extend beyond the publisher, bleeding into the Japanese market itself. Onyx: The Dark Grip is to be one of the first third-party Nintendo-exclusive horror games since 2014, hot on the heels of this month's asymmetrical co-op Beyond the Dark: Nightwatch.

Developed by Broken Mirror, published in-house under Bloober Team, and built entirely for the Switch 2's handheld mode, stunning 2.5D psych-horror Onyx casts the player as both a God and the person possessed by it. "The reason we are doing this for Nintendo is because I'm a Nintendo fan," Babieno grins, "so I'm making my dreams come true in some way."

But Sincere as Babieno is about his love for Nintendo systems, I suspect there's more to the deal than that. Smektała reaffirms my hunch when I ask about which horror niches the pair would like to see make a resurgence. Another Broken Mirror game, Saw: Genesis, fulfils one of them – social horror in the vein of Repo and Lethal Company, harnessing "the power of technology, the power of online, the power of connecting people" to deliver "a game experience that will try to play with social interactions." The other element is the interactive experience of a game itself.

"I think it would be very very interesting to find ways to trick the player, make him doubt what he's seeing on screen, make him doubt how he interacts with the device as we do with Onyx: The Dark Grip," says Smektała. "Kind of by accident, the games that we have already announced [at Broken Mirror Games] are doing that already."

Feel the fear

Onyx: The Dark Grip is Broken Mirror's chance to "put horror literally back into players' hands", according to Babieno, reinforcing how integral the hardware itself is to the experience. "I think that breaking the fourth wall is very important because new hardware, new opportunities, are giving us something we didn't have before."

With stricter ratings boards in Japan compared to those in the West and an image built around fun for all ages, Nintendo's relationship with horror games is infamously complicated. There has not been a true third-party Nintendo-exclusive horror game since 2014's Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water on the Wii U (until it got remastered onto other platforms). Getting an upcoming horror game like Onyx, even one built so intrinsically around Nintendo hardware, is monumental to say the least.

"It wasn't easy for Nintendo to deal with horror," admits Babieno. But the family friendliness ascribed to Nintendo consoles has, historically, had some wiggle room. "Eternal Darkness and Resident Evil 4 were very important to me," Babieno reflects on how instrumental Nintendo consoles have been to horror in the past.

"I would like to bring those amazing times of GameCube back, but in a new way – and I believe that Nintendo fans always like to play something exclusive to them."

Western developer, Eastern sensibilities

But did Bloober Team's success with Konami have a role to play here, too? "Definitely," agrees Babieno, and it's all to do with how Bloober conducts itself as a business.

"For us, it was never a one-shot. It was never that we would like to create a game, and that's it. It's [about] the long run, and so we would like to build not just the next successful title, but a successful and very stable company."

Putting stability and reliability above one-and-done projects speaks to a business mindset that Babieno describes as more of "a Japanese approach than a Western approach," an alignment of values in terms of how Bloober Team grows and sustains its business not around the bottom line, but around a healthy, robust image. Beliefs that Bloober, and Broken Mirror, in turn, share with Japanese companies like Nintendo and Konami.

"We are a publicly traded company, so business is very important," he says. "But I think that even more important is to keep knowledge inside of the company. If we would like to build the company for decades, not just for the next few years, we need to build the DNA of the company and the team.

"So we always are making decisions by thinking, 'okay, are we able to do this without cutting staff in the future?' Because if we need to cut anyone, maybe it doesn't make sense. Maybe we are able to do this in a different way. Maybe we don't need to make this particular title. It's always the question of how it will impact the whole team."

As Smektała and Babieno join forces to chart the future of Bloober and Broken Mirror, the pair exude a comforting confidence. It extends to protecting not only their image and those of the companies they work with, but the people involved in creating the games themselves. "We are not just responsible for those 200, almost 270 people inside of the company, but also their families," says Babieno.

"And I really like what Satoru Iwata said years ago: that if we let go 5% of our team, 95% will live with the fear that it could happen to them in the future. So we are never thinking about how to make our financial parameters a little bit better, but how to create a better future. I think that this is much more important."

Check out all the other upcoming Switch 2 games you need to keep an eye on in 2026 and beyond

Whoever came up with pre-painted Warhammer terrain, take a bow; you're a goddamn hero.

After going hands on with the set, I think it's going to make a lot of gamers very happy. Yes, it looks amazing… but the time it'll save you is so much more valuable, and this is one hell of a time-consuming hobby. No matter whether you're putting together a 10-man Kill Team or forging an entire Warhammer 40K army from scratch, it's a marathon. While I think most of us would love to create a battlefield with the same level of care, there are only so many hours in a day – and scenery often seems to hit the bottom of our collective to-do list as a result. Warhammer 40,000 Battlefields: Armageddon is designed to bypass all that by providing fully painted terrain out of the box, and the result is impressive.

The idea here is simple; speedrun a full Warhammer 40K board with as little effort as possible. To that end, Warhammer 40,000 Battlefields: Armageddon pieces arrive painted on the sprue, so all you need to do is clip them out and slot them together (they don't even require glue). Don't get me wrong, I think Warhammer's claim that you can create a battlefield in minutes is generous. There's a lot crammed in this box, so constructing it all will take an hour or two at best. However, that's a fraction of what it'd take to make and paint everything by hand.

Plus, it'll look good straight from the box. While I can see some being put off by the grainy style (an unavoidable side-effect of UV printing, where paint is sprayed on and dried instantly using ultra-violet light), I think that actually works with 40K's grungy aesthetic. There's a literal grittiness to this scenery.

It's fairly low-key too. It fits the grim darkness of the far future without drawing too much attention to itself. Your models are likely to pop against this backdrop, which is only right; they're the real stars of the show.

Crucially, it's more accurate than I'd expected. While some less-noticeable details get lost, the things your eyes are drawn to look fantastic. There's a precision and neatness here that I don't think many of us would manage without dedicating hours to the cause.

Is it perfect? No. My biggest issue stems from the sprue connectors. You have to clip them off, and that obviously leaves a nubbin of gray plastic behind. But even then, many of those connections are hidden on the finished product (with the exception of rounded pieces), and the grungy nature of this terrain obscures them unless you look up close.

Listen, I enjoy cobbling together battlefields. Hand-crafting boards out of foam or 3D-printed materials and painting it all up is my jam, but even I get worn down painting the fiddly details of yet another ruined building. Warhammer 40,000 Battlefields: Armageddon lets you bypass all that effort and get a good-looking table ready with the minimum of effort.

I'll be very interested to see where the idea goes next; it's got so much potential. A pre-painted Kill Team or Age of Sigmar board? Yes please.

Speaking of Age of Sigmar, the Khazalite Holds army makes the old feel new again... but is that a good thing?

• See today's best Warhammer 40K deals at Amazon

Once again, the GamesRadar+ RPG Club demands blood as we set out to explore standout missions in The Witcher 3 Remastered. Which perhaps makes it all the more appropriate that, when asked to write about my favorite mission in The Witcher 3, my mind immediately went to classically-eccentric side quest "The Oxenfurt Drunk".

Well, actually my first thought went to The Bloody Baron storyline, but everybody writes about the Bloody Baron, and how much is there really left to say about it at this point? But there's a small side quest I love almost as much, partly because it does so much to make me realize the thing I want to see most in Witcher 4.

Quest Log

Shots, shots, crossbow shots!

An optional Witcher Contract found and set in the titular town, The Oxenfurt Drunk has Geralt find the killer behind multiple victims drained of all their blood - gee, I wonder what esoteric horror could be behind this! The twist is he discovers in the wake of a bit of corpse-prodding autopsy that every victim was well over the limit to drive and horse and cart, leading to the realization that this particular vampire has a penchant for blood with a high alcohol content. I won't make the Bloody Mary joke if you don't.

Twenty minutes later, Geralt is drunkenly staggering around crime scenes with a dozen vodkas inside him, trying to lure out the Ripper-Tippler with a series of bawdy tavern songs and a coquettishly exposed neckline. It feels like the kind of atrociously bad idea that a D&D party would come up with, and I mean that as an honest compliment.

So yeah, it's a fun little quest – the Contracts are reliably the best part of Witcher 3, to my mind – but it also shows the one place where I think the game had so much more room to flex. Namely, in all the investigation and intelligence that makes Geralt far more than some burly hired goon.

Research and Bedevilment

If Witcher 4 is going to shake up any part of the formula – or even introduce an optional difficulty mode – as we wave in Ciri as the new hero, my greatest wish would be for something that really gamifies the intellectual side of monster hunting.

As it goes now, the usual pattern is that Geralt finds some yellow glowing tracks and follows them until there's a tuft of fur, a mangled corpse, or a Resident Evil-style lab note. Then he stares at the clues before telling the audience he's deduced that the monster is a Lesser Striped Whifflepog or whatever, at which point the Pokedex entry for the Whifflepog appears in the Bestiary as if summoned by voice command, telling you exactly what tinctures, oils and spells are needed to kick its head in most effectively.

And that's all genuinely fine, but a bit uninvolving, especially for a sequence of events that happens so frequently across the game. Speaking as somebody who loves investigative detective games and piecing clues together, I'd much rather have deduced all these things myself, allowing for the thrill of getting it right, and the potential fear of getting it wrong. Rather than tell me what I'm about to fight, give me the full bestiary from the start, some giant old tome I can flick through between fights or even fill out myself with additional player-written notes, an ever-evolving monster hunter's journal.

Then, when I find the crime scene, I can examine the clues around me and make some educated decisions, without Geralt just blurting the answer like a God of War NPC. Hmm, a nighttime attacker, a city dweller, medium-sized claws, a blood drinker… To the indexed glossary, batman! Now the Bestiary can tell me what's needed to kill a Katakan Vampire, assuming that's actually what it is and I haven't pulled the wrong conclusion from the data.

And at the same time, the unique alcoholism of this particular vamp is something I can consider accordingly as an additional element that wouldn't be in the book, but can be folded into my strategies nonetheless. Maybe I could work out the strategy to wander drunkenly around the town instead of Geralt, or perhaps lace a wine bottle with blood and leave it out in plain view, ideally under a big anvil hanging by a tenuous string.

Perhaps I'm expecting too much, but Baldur's Gate 3 really opened the door for this kind of immersive gameplay, and I don't get the sense that the creators of Cyberpunk 2077 seem very workshy.

The Monster Manual

To me, this deductive skillset is the very thing that makes Geralt a witcher, far more than any silver sword or toxin immunity. It's the space where an off-the-peg burly warrior brute becomes something more, an educated hunter who knows how to exploit weaknesses and analyze nuanced information. And with Ciri being new to The Path in The Witcher 4, her having less experience would facilitate a more involved, methodical research process. Geralt materializes in the series with most of this knowledge memorized, but Ciri is still using reference material.

Witcher 3 was always great at showing off Geralt's intellect, but clearly wasn't comfortable about the idea of gamifying it too hard, perhaps for fear of alienating or confusing the audience. And yes, it is arguably a lot to ask from them. But in a post-Elden Ring world, I don't think people are fearful of having to read between lines or make deductions, and even if not, there'll be a billion online guides to hand if it's all proving too perplexing. So if another Oxenfurt Drunk shows up in Witcher 4, I'll be excited to make that revelation myself – even if I show up prepared to fight half a dozen goblins instead.

Pre-MCU, if you polled most fans on the best superhero movies, there's a reasonable chance that X2 would be in the top 3. The 2003 sequel is a seismic step up from its predecessor, fully delivering on the promise of Marvel's mutants on screen with a true ensemble comic book movie that blurs the lines between its heroes and villains. And it could prove the perfect model for integrating Doctor Doom alongside the Avengers in Avengers: Doomsday.

X2, for the uninitiated or those in need of a refresher, is the follow-up to 2000's messy, but undeniably important, X-Men. Following an attack on the White House by acrobatic teleporter Nightcrawler – a sequence that still thrills to this day – tensions between mutantkind and the rest of the world are at an all-time high. Enter Colonel William Stryker (Brian Cox), a military scientist who has a history with Wolverine, and leads an attack on Xavier's mansion, kidnapping Professor X and Cyclops.

Stryker, it turns out, has a plan to kill every living mutant using his telepathic son, Jason, and his own version of Cerebro. With a shared enemy to take care of, the X-Men forge an alliance of necessity with Magneto and the Brotherhood of Mutants, teaming up to infiltrate Stryker's arctic Akali Lake base. Expertly juggling its large ensemble, it also manages to lay some tantalizing groundwork for the Dark Phoenix Saga – a story the X-Men movies would go on to squander on two separate occasions.

New mutants

23 years later, X2 still impresses. Without access to anything-goes VFX tools and the gargantuan budget levels of modern-day superhero tentpoles, it's a far more intimate and personal comic book blockbuster than anything you'll see nowadays, where world/universe-ending stakes are the norm. But this works in its favor; there's a lot of rich character work and knotty drama here among the memorable spectacle.

Nightcrawler alone remains one of the coolest comic book characters ever brought to the screen, his powerset perfectly suited to dazzling in live action. The attack on Xavier's mansion allows Wolverine to let rip in supremely satisfying fashion, followed by a brutal showdown with Lady Deathstrike that betters any of the awkward adamantium-clawed action in Deadpool & Wolverine. And Magneto's ingenious escape from his plastic prison is a spectacularly well-staged sequence that's better for its simplicity.

Before Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame proved that the MCU could deftly juggle two dozen main characters in a single movie – albeit with 18 films worth of setup – X2 set the standard for ensemble superhero storytelling. Surprisingly few characters feel shortchanged here (Rogue among them, in part a consequence of her central role in the first movie), with around half a dozen interconnected story threads dovetailing at Alkali Lake. Even the film's Dark Phoenix sequel tease doesn't feel egregious, because you've had such a full meal up to that point already.

Universes collide

So why is X2 on Marvel's essential (re)watchlist ahead of Avengers: Doomsday? The simple answer is that the OG X-Men are set to play a crucial part in proceedings. Notably, Alan Cumming's Nightcrawler – who didn't appear in the first X-Men – is also set to return in Doomsday, alongside OG mutants Professor X, Magneto, Mystique, Cyclops, and Beast.

But I'd argue there's much Doomsday could draw from X2. Without as much of a build-up this time, Doomsday needs to establish its stakes and new threat, Doctor Doom, far quicker than the last Avengers-level mega-event, something X2 excels at. Likewise, X2 is a masterclass in establishing a villain with human motivations and deep connections to existing heroes – something Marvel will need to replicate with Doom if he's to work.

The use of Magneto in X2 could also prove something of template for Doom. In X2, Magneto eventually teams up with the X-Men to take down Stryker, as he's a threat to all mutantkind. The enemy of my enemy proverb literalized. Doom, in all likelihood, will need to spend a significant chunk of Doomsday working alongside the Avengers in an effort to stop the incursions threatening the multiverse, before being revealed as the one orchestrating the chaos.

Either way, as a still-superlative example of ensemble superhero storytelling, there's much Avengers: Doomsday could learn from X2, and plenty to recommend about the movie, even after 18 years of the MCU. And perhaps one day, following a pair of infamous misfires, Marvel's own fresh-faced X-Men lineup will finally make good on the promise of Jean Grey's Dark Phoenix.

X-Men 2 is available to stream now on Disney Plus, ahead of the release of Avengers: Doomsday on December 18.

Look ahead with our list of upcoming Marvel movies and check out how to watch the Marvel movies in order ahead of your next rewatch. See you next week as we revisit Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

Resident Evil Veronica is the official title for the long-rumored remake of Resident Evil: Code Veronica.

Announced as part of a very memorable surprise reveal during the Summer Game Fest 2026 showcase, Resident Evil Veronica will bring back the cult classic 2000 release with a modern makeover. With Capcom confirming the upcoming horror game will be arriving in 2027, the developer is setting out to "preserve the essence of the original game", but just like the many excellent Resi remakes we've seen over the years, you can expect shiny new and improved graphics, plenty of gameplay enhancements, and more.

There's a lot of excitement surrounding the new game, with the remake quickly racking up two million Steam wishlists within a month of its reveal. That's not so surprising given Capcom's winning streak in 2026, with its new sci-fi IP Pragmata and Resident Evil Requiem, which has already earned its place (along with many other Resi games) as one of the best survival horror games around right now. So whether you can hardly wait to join Claire and Chris Redfield or you're curious to learn more about their sibling team-up, read on as I break down everything you need to know about Resident Evil Veronica.

Resident Evil Veronica release date speculation

The Resident Evil Veronica release date is currently set for sometime in 2027.

The surprise announcement of Code Veronica's return came with the news of the 2027 launch window, but we're still awaiting an exact release date to be confirmed. The line-up of upcoming games dropping in early 2027 is already quite stacked, with the likes of Stranger Than Heaven, Fable, and Exodus, and more all releasing within the first four months of the year.

I'm curious to see if Resident Evil Veronica will add another release to a very busy period, but it would be fitting if it was released later in 2027 for the spooky season. I'll be keeping an eye out for updates from Capcom.

Resident Evil Veronica platforms confirmed

Capcom confirmed the Resident Evil Veronica platforms in the initial reveal trailer, with the remake set to land on PC, PS5, Switch 2, and Xbox Series X.

With lots of Resi goodness landing on the Switch 2 in 2026, it's great to see Veronica complete the set and join the likes of Resident Evil 2 Remake, Resident Evil 3 Remake, and Resident Evil 4 Remake along with Resident Evil 7, Resident Evil Village, and Requiem. Better still, it appears Veronica will be launching on all platforms simultaneously in 2027.

Resident Evil Veronica trailer

Resident Evil Veronica story

Resident Evil Veronica's story is set to be something of a reimagining of the original game's storyline that promises to deliver a "chilling new entry in survival horror".

Claire Redfield, who appeared in Resident Evil 2 Remake alongside Leon Kennedy, is one of two leading protagonists, with Veronica taking place three months after the biological disaster she survived her way through in Raccoon City. As we see a nod to in the initial reveal trailer when the older woman says, "I hate to say, but your brother is, well, quite odd", Claire has traveled to France in search of her sibling, Chris Redfield. But things take a turn when Umbrella steps in (those dastardly fiends!).

Umbrella captures Claire and brings her to the mysterious, remote Rockfort Island. And because she can't get a moment's peace, this island has also been hit by another biological disaster. With no cozy family reunion on the cards, Claire now finds herself in another fight for survival in classic Resi fashion.

The original game became something of a cult classic for some of its goofier aspects and memorable moments, of which fans have been fondly remembering since the remake was officially confirmed. It also features Resident Evil 1 and 5 baddie Albert Wesker back in his evil villain throne for one of the most iconic instalments in the franchise.

With a Wesker clone named Zeno having appeared in Resident Evil Requiem, I have a feeling Capcom is building out the connective tissue between Code Veronica, as the most popular among the Resident Evil spin-offs, and Resident Evil 5 – which could well be the next mainline Resi game to get the remake treatment.

Either way, it's clear that Capcom is aiming to keep the essence of the Code Veronica alive, and I can't wait to see how they bring this story into the modern era and put a fresh spin on it.

Resident Evil Veronica gameplay

Resident Evil Veronica's gameplay will be modernized to bring it in line with some of the latest Resident Evil games in the series. While we've yet to see any gameplay in action, or see what changes it will include, we expect it to be like other remakes in the Resident Evil timeline, with all of the survival horror goodness that comes with.

And while the reveal trailer was in first-person to keep us guessing, a producer has confirmed Veronica will be a third-person experience.

In the original, which was broken up into chapters, there were more playable characters during certain sections. While Claire still took center stage for the most part, there was also Steve Burnside, a prisoner on Rockfort Island, and Chris Redfield, who we haven't seen since Resident Evil Village. We're guessing this will once again be the case in Resident Evil Veronica.

For more Resi goodness, check out our ranking of the best Resident Evil games, or explore the Resident Evil movie.

The Street Fighter movie has hurricane-kicked its way onto screens, and brought with it a World Warrior tournament full of Easter eggs, famous fighters, and special moves.

It might not be quite as extensive a list as our breakdown of the Super Mario Galaxy Movie Easter eggs, but the Street Fighter movie is nothing if not a love letter to the games, and features an expansive roster of familiar fighters, tonnes of special moves pulled directly from Street Fighter II (and beyond), and even several stages recreated from the games.

So head below to see what we spotted, and let us know in the comments if you clocked anything we missed! Once you're done here, be sure to check out our Street Fighter movie review, and our deep dive into the Street Fighter movie ending.

Every fighter from the games in the Street Fighter movie

The Street Fighter movie features a massive line-up of characters from the games. Not all of them can be found on the character select screen, but most have featured in numerous Street Fighter games since the series debuted in 1987.

Most, if not all, are also rocking their iconic outfits, making this – aesthetically, at least – one of the more authentic video game adaptations ever. The full list of combatants in the Street Fighter movie in alphabetical order is as follows:

• Akuma
• Balrog
• Blanka
• Cammy
• Chun-Li
• Dan Hibiki
• Dhalsim
• Don Sauvage
• E. Honda
• Gouken
• Guile
• Joe
• Juli
• Ken
• M. Bison
• Ryu
• Sagat
• Vega
• Zangief

Special moves from the games featured in the Street Fighter movie

There are plenty of iconic special moves from the Street Fighter games that appear in the Street Fighter movie, many of which have been recreated frame for frame. You can check many of them out in Paramount's own Street Fighter game moves video, but there are many others we spotted as well:

• Ryu - Hadouken, Hurricane Kick, Dragon Punch
• Ken - Axe Kick, Hell Wheel, Dragonlash Kick, Chinbuster
• Chun-Li - Lightning Kick, Spinning Bird Kick, Falling Crane, Hazanshu
• E. Honda - Hundred Hand Slap, Sumo Headbutt, Oicho Throw, Power Stomp
• Zangief - Russian Suplex, Cyclone Lariat
• Dhalsim - Yoga Mummy, Karma Kick, Yoga Mountain
• Balrog - Crazy Rush, Buffalo Headbutt
• Guile - Flash Kick
• Blanka – Electric Thunder
• M. Bison - Psycho Crusher
• Akuma - Empyrean's End

Stages from the games that appear in the Street Fighter movie

Stage recreations are fewer and further between in the Street Fighter movie, as much of the fighting takes place in the World Warrior tournament arena in Metrolao City, instead of fights taking place across the globe. However, there are still some fun callbacks to several familiar stages, including:

• Ayutthaya Ruins, Thailand – the setting of Ryu and Sagat's 1987 fight for the inaugural World Warrior tournament championship
• Car bonus stage – Ken is seen dismantling a car with his feet and fists during an early montage
• Bathhouse/Kapukon Yu – Ryu and E. Honda fight in a sauna room for a place in the second World Warrior tournament, a callback to E. Honda's iconic bathhouse stage

Street Fighter movie Easter Eggs

Ryu vs Sagat – In the games, Ryu defeats Sagat to become the winner of the inaugural World Warrior tournament. This exact same pairing and outcome unfolds in animated flashback form in the Street Fighter movie.

"Round 1: fight!" – The iconic Street Fighter II starting announcement is heard over the Street Fighter movie's title card.

M. Bison laugh – M. Bison actor David Dastmalchian recreates the 'M. Bison says yes' gif that has almost certainly popped up in your group chat at some point.

Chaos Games poster – Outside Ryu's warehouse apartment, there are several posters for the 'Chaos Games'. Could this be a deep cut reference to crossover fighting game SVC Chaos: SNK vs. Capcom?

Street Fighter II intro – The iconic Street Fighter II title screen, featuring two men fighting in the shadow of a skyscraper, is recreated in the Street Fighter movie. Bonus Easter egg: the two men fighting are none other than Talk To Me and Bring Her Back directors Danny and Michael Philippou!

Street Fighter II anime callbacks – There are several references to 1994's Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie. Most notably: Chun-Li stepping into the shower in the live-action Street Fighter movie echoes an infamous scene in the anime, while Chun-Li later disfiguring masked fighter Vega also echoes the result of their face-off in the anime.

"For me, it's Tuesday" – This M. Bison moment is a callback/straight lift of a legendary line from the otherwise terrible 1994 live-action movie. There, Raul Julia's M. Bison says: "For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday."

Street Fighter themes – The themes for both Street Fighter and Street Fighter II are part of the movie's score, among countless needle drops.

Creator cameos – Several creators, influencers, and esports players can be spotted in Bison's prison during the Blanka vs Ryu fight, including Justin Wong and Maximilian Dood.

"You lose" – M. Bison's (anticlimactic) final line is, of course, a nod to the Street Fighter II announcer's blunt statement when the player loses a fight. We can still sense the disappointment in his voice.

Street Fighter is out in theaters now. For more, check out our list of upcoming video game movies, and our ranking of the best fighting games.

At the risk of repeating myself, Ghost of Yotei is perhaps my favorite video game of 2025. I absolutely inhaled the entire game before it was even released, got the Platinum trophy (my very first) soon after, and generally spent dozens upon dozens of hours wandering the beautiful vistas of Yotei as Atsu. Despite all of this, the recent Ghost of Yotei DLC has done absolutely nothing for me – except remind me why I loved Ghost of Yotei in the first place.

When Ghost of Yotei Complete Edition was first announced back in August, the idea of an entirely new narrative expansion – Ghost of Yotei: Echoes of Sekigahara – on top of a combat survival mode was incredibly enticing. Again, GOTY 2025, right? More of that can only be a good thing… right?

Or so I thought, anyway. Actually playing through Echoes of Sekigahara, however, has been straightforward to the point of being meaningless. This is likely partly due to the simple fact that I left absolutely nothing on the original bone, so all I have now is what's been added, and Echoes of Sekigahara is more of an appendix to the existing game than anything else.

Memory hole

While it's a new narrative, it's not much of a continuation. By design, the entire DLC is effectively intended to look back rather than look forward. The location of Ashoro Foothills is a messy wasteland overrun with the remains of the Viper's followers – the first of the Yotei Six that Atsu immediately takes out in the main game, and therefore not a real boss here – as they scramble to find a new leader.

Echoes of Sekigahara is also tied to the return of Nagato, someone from Atsu's past, as she relives some of the pivotal Battle of Sekigahara and her and Nagato's influence on it. For a new expansion, it's decidedly obsessed with the past in a way that makes the whole endeavor feel a bit moot. The big battle happened years ago, the Vipers are a shell of their former selves without a real figurehead, and mechanically there are new enemies, armor sets, dyes, and so on, but it all just comes down to being more of the same.

Not that the same is bad, even. Playing through the newly opened wilds, I'm having to come to terms with the fact that my muscle memory isn't what it once was. While I'd matched blades with the best that the base Ghost of Yotei game had to offer, that was months and months ago, and my reflexes are now sluggish and my aim is not quite as pinpoint. Age is a terrible thing.

Playing through the DLC may not exactly be the exciting adventure full of twists and turns that I'd hoped for, but relearning all of these skills and the ways in which they combine into beautiful, complex actions and animations has been as, if not more, thrilling. Atsu squaring up to a standoff, wolf at her side, to nearly entirely rout a group of bandits before even having to get into standard combat is as sick as it ever was, and I'm continuously getting better at it. Maybe that's good enough.

Maybe simply being reminded of how cool it is to be Atsu – and how good it feels to cut fools down when they deserve it – in a new place with some new toys makes it all worthwhile. I'm certainly enjoying myself, but not in a way that the Ghost of Yotei DLC is actually adding to that experience, which is a shame given how often each incremental upgrade and reveal in the main story felt like a bolt of lightning – or, perhaps more fittingly, like the sudden strike of a katana during one of the game's many duels.

Even if Ghost of Yotei isn't your thing, be sure to check out our ranking of the best open world games to find something you might enjoy.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's remake, releasing November 5, overwhelmed me when I went hands-on during an official preview event. Link's enormous blue eyes are striking examples of how a remake can speak to our memory while conveying the level of modernization at play. But this was only the beginning.

Kokiri Forest has been rebuilt to feel more lived in and fleshed out. The walls of the area, while just as restrictive as in 1998, present a more natural boundary, making me appreciate the protective nature of Link's childhood home as I watch him jump across floating platforms on command (local boy learns to jump after 28 years and I'm so happy about it).

Hyrule Field takes the remake to another level, with Lon Lon Ranch sitting more naturally among rolling hills. Approaching the high walls around Hyrule Castle Town, I notice a desolate structure by the moat, hinting at a once-lively past.

Castle Town itself is a riot of color, with familiar NPCs sporting their glow-ups proudly. Link is able to enter more buildings here, pouring yet more depth into the remake's mixture of old and new. As an Ocarina of Time veteran, I savor the foreshadowing present when I see an NPC slumped on the ground in the back alley. And all the while I'm watched over by the stoic grace of the Temple of Time – perhaps the most iconic structure in Nintendo's repertoire.

More is more

As the session skips ahead to the Forest Temple, Adult Link enters the creepy mansion concealed within the Sacred Forest Meadow, letting us explore the first of the more mature dungeons within Ocarina of Time's remake. The four poes who split up to hide the flames needed to progress are all unique in their appearance, with different faces and shapes in addition to their individual color schemes.

The stonework of the underground areas add a sense of history to the area, while the pool tiles remind me of the splendor of Tomb Raider 3's Croft Manor, inviting my mind to wonder what came before. The area has given me a Resident Evil vibe since playing back in the day – here, it's stronger than ever.

Other more modern elements are straight out of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In addition to the way Hyrule Field is introduced with the same sweeping camera, the in-game menus all feel right out of the 2017 title.

Holding down the R button on the Switch 2 Pro Controller brings up the same style of equipment screen as Breath of the Wild, showing a line of items available to rotate through at your leisure. Similarly, the loading screens and on-screen text when starting a new quest all abide by the principles of the Switch game.

To newcomers, this will likely serve only as a collection of useful design choices, but to a long-time Zelda fan like myself, it's a visual indicator to treat Ocarina of Time's remake differently to its source material. It tells me to embrace the constant, over-the-shoulder camera that has replaced the original's occasional fixed angles, making some secrets easier to find. Enjoy swapping items on the go, switching from the Hookshot to Din's Fire in the heat of battle against two cartoonish-yet-intimidating Stalfos.

This is not to say the remake demands we reject tradition and embrace modernity entirely, as that would defeat the purpose of its existence. Instead take this as a friendly heads-up to go into Nintendo's reimagining with the desire for smoother, more user-friendly edges than the N64 adventure served up. This may seem obvious, but fans of the classic title aren't getting the exact same experience again here, and that's a good thing.

1998's Ocarina of Time is still available to play in multiple ways, and I'm thankful to Hylia it is. But the Switch 2 remake brings a welcome update that adapts the classic to keep up with the demands of the contemporary gaming space, and I've never been happier to see something I love get such a treatment.

There's still plenty of time to play more, so take a look at our best Zelda games ranking or best RPGs list for some suggestions!

Another New York Comic Con is in the books – specifically, the 20th anniversary of the annual pop culture convention – and it was a packed weekend of fan culture, jaw-dropping cosplay, and of course, big announcements from the worlds of movies, TV, comics, video games, and more.

In fact, there are so many things going on at the same time that even if you were at the convention, you likely missed out on a good chunk of it… While official attendance numbers haven't been revealed for this year's convention as of this writing, past years stretched to 250,000 attendees, dwarfing even the legendary San Diego Comic-Con. And thanks to a new reservation system introduced this year, if you didn't put in your request for some of the bigger panels ASAP, well, you're more out of luck than Dungeon Crawler Carl when Princess Donut goes rogue.

Most of you, though, likely weren't in New York, or perhaps (spitballing here) had "other things to do with your lives." So in the interest of getting you caught up quickly, here are the biggest announcements from New York Comic Con 2026, including two intriguing announcements from Marvel TV, an extension of the world of Avatar, and more.

Marvel's Zodiac

No, we won't finally be learning what Captain America's horoscope is ("Signs all point to you being able to do this all day"), but instead the 2028-debuting Zodiac is a live-action international spy thriller set inside the Marvel Cinematic Universe… And notably, debuting some time after the currently scheduled release date of Avengers: Secret Wars, meaning it takes place in whatever the post-Battleworld MCU looks like.

As for who is in the show, who is writing the show, or any other details? Well, we don't know for sure, but an eye-opening logo provided included at least two clues. The first? The "A" in the logo is styled like the logo for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and given Marvel TV chief Brad Winderbaum recently binged the series, and Phil Coulson himself, Clark Gregg, reposted the announcement, it seems plausible that some AoS characters may return. And the "O" in the logo is a reference to "The Great Wheel," a conglomeration of spy organizations from Marvel's Secret Warriors comic. Speculate away, Marvel spies.

Marvel Zombies specials

While the Zodiac announcement had been in the Hollywood trades well before the panel, the big surprise was not one, not two, but three different Marvel Zombies specials, each arriving on subsequent Halloweens (or thereabouts). The first in 2027 is Marvel Zombies: The Winter Soldier. The second in 2028 is Marvel Zombies: The Fist of Khonshu. And the third in the impossible-to-imagine future of 2029 is Marvel Zombies: The Last Guardian.

While no further details were shared other than it'll be a return to the gory, envelope-pushing world of the previous animated series (will it take place after the events of the original, or before that Twilight Zone-esque rug-pull Marvel Zombies ending?), we can certainly intuit a few things from the titles. The first special almost definitely focuses on Bucky Barnes, the second on Moon Knight (or more likely the Blade Knight introduced in the 2023 series), and the third on the last member of the Guardians of the Galaxy standing. Who that is, Winderbaum wouldn't say on stage. But our money is on Groot, only because that's the funniest/saddest option.

Avatar Kuruk: Wave of Chaos

Fans of Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra are absolutely eating now, thanks to the recently released Avatar Aang movie and now the Seven Havens sequel series currently streaming on Paramount Plus. And that doesn't seem like it'll be stopping any time soon, thanks to the announcement that Seven Havens, already planned for two seasons (or "Books") has been extended to four seasons.

But the bigger surprise? Another Avatar spinoff is in the works, focusing on Avatar Kuruk, who was briefly introduced in the original animated series. Here, Kuruk is a 14-year-old wild child who decides to learn bending on his own, journeying around the world in what's described as a more comedic take on the franchise. It's voice-directed by Janet Varney (aka the voice of Korra), and created by Bryan Konietzko (aka, the co-creator of Avatar), and other than that we don't know much… Other than yip yip, let's go, the more Avatar the better!

The Exorcist: Martyrs trailer

After a wobbly few years, Blumhouse went hard at its annual New York Comic Con panel, laying out nine movies coming up in 2027, announcing the director for the live-action adaptation of the hit comic book Something is Killing the Children (that would be Craig Zobel), and even a partnership with YouTube legend MatPat, which is not just a theory.

But all of that was overshadowed by Mike Flanagan's upcoming The Exorcist: Martyrs trailer. The horror legend has had a busy few months with the recent release of Carrie on Prime Video, and the upcoming release of DC's Clayface (which he wrote). But the first look at the Exorcist sequel/reinvention is the thing that left jaws on the floor. Starring Scarlett Johansson, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and more, the spine-tingling trailer builds the horror, ends with a killer last line, and is making the wait until the movie releases on March 12 so unbearable we might just vomit up pea soup.

Absolute Justice

Hey, remember how New York Comic Con is ostensibly supposed to be about comics? There were, indeed, plenty of announcements and reveals from publishers, including a line of Blumhouse comics from IDW's Dark imprint, Marvel teasing more about their Star Wars crossover that is somehow in continuity, and more. But by far the biggest bomb was dropped by DC Comics, which is basically doing a victory lap at this point thanks to surging sales and critical acclaim: Absolute Justice.

The highly anticipated five-issue series will debut in April of 2027, and will be written by Jason Aaron with art by Juan Ferrayra, the current team on the best-selling Absolute Superman. For the first time, the title will bring together DC's reimagined characters, including the game-changing Absolute Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, Flash, and Green Lantern to fight back against an array of villains, including a body horror Brainiac. How will these thus far disparate titles weave together? We'll just have to wait until April to find out.

In addition, at the annual Jim Lee and Friends panel, the DC chief brought on Warner Bros. Animation execs and the Absolute Batman team of Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta to present a very early look at the upcoming animated version of the comic book series. While strictly telling everyone in the room not to film or take pictures, they did show off the development art Dragotta has been working on for the adaptation… And an animation test, taking a sequence from an early issue of the comic with Batman fighting the Black Mask's gang and translating it to a mix of 2D and 3D animation. In two words, even at this early stage, having been in the room where it happened? Absolutely stunning.

For the full list of news and announcements from Marvel's New York Comic Con panel, head to our Marvel TV and Animation panel liveblog.

"Our goal is to make TV shows that have an annual cadence, that feel like longer-form character studies, like truly great television shows," Brad Winderbaum, the head of Marvel Television, told me on the eve of Daredevil: Born Again season 2's release. I thought he was referring to The Man Without Fear's show – the third season was filming at the time – but I was very, very wrong.

At Marvel's New York Comic Con panel, Daredevil himself, Charlie Cox, backed by Krysten Ritter (Jessica Jones) and a returning Finn Jones (Iron Fist), confirmed that the next season will be the show's last. The audience was not happy. Asked what we can expect from the final episodes, Cox emphatically said: "All I can say is, the #SaveDaredevil campaign will be gearing up for Round Two." A round of cheers followed, but probably too little, too late.

Cox later told GamesRadar+ that the cancellation was not a huge surprise and the cast had a "good sense" the news was coming. However, reports previously revealed that showrunner Dario Scardapane exited the series during post-production, and internet rumours have also claimed the series' ending has been reshot to be more definitive. Surely, the show was meant to go on? I mean, why reintroduce all The Defenders not to use them?

VisionQuest also made up a significant part of the NYCC panel, with the cast stressing that this is the final part of the WandaVision trilogy. Yet, rather than just being a closing chapter to one of Marvel's most successful small-screen ventures, VisionQuest feels like the end of an entire era. Marvel has spent five years pumping out live-action limited series that tied into the big-screen productions, and now, there are no more coming. Marvel's Disney Plus experiment, it seems, has run its course.

"With the Captain America series, with Hawkeye, it really felt like the movies were in your home, and it was a great way to launch Marvel on [Disney Plus]," Winderbaum told me. "We learned, as time went on, the shared universe started to feel like an obligation to people, and that cost us a sense of discovery, especially on the television side.

"It doesn't matter if you can jump in and watch Moon Knight without knowing anything else. There was a sense, because of the preceding decade of the shared universe and the films, that you had to watch everything. It was, frankly, a bit of a misconception, but an understandable one based on the way we were releasing material."

That Daredevil, VisionQuest, and, lest we forget, the cancelled Wonder Man, were conceived before Marvel Television's rebranding in 2024 is telling. The studio's production philosophy has seemingly changed, and with little else on the horizon, Winderbaum appears to be taking the opportunity to clear the decks and start over.

Brave new world

So, what does the future of Marvel Television look like? At the NYCC panel, Winderbaum revealed the answer: Zodiac. Previously alluded to in Wonder Man's cancellation announcement, the new series was confirmed at NYCC, turning many fans' heads.

In the comics, Zodiac is a villainous crime syndicate whose members use Zodiac signs as names. "It's a globetrotting, international espionage show about secrets and lies and betrayals and secret acts of loyalty and an insane cast of characters," Winderbaum told Collider when teasing the series, refusing to elaborate as he wants everyone to watch unspoiled. It's wild that Marvel's only confirmed live-action Disney Plus show after Daredevil is one that centers on characters who wouldn't make the B-list. Only four years ago, the studio released Moon Knight, Ms Marvel, and She-Hulk in a single year.

Considering everything Winderbaum has said about his approach to TV, the pivot toward essentially unknown characters makes sense. He wants ongoing, yearly character studies that don't feel like homework for the wider MCU. What better way to do that than tell an entirely separate story about characters who won't be going anywhere near Spider-Man? The series can go deep without any baggage, and the movies can once again be completely separate beasts from the TV shows, with no need to watch anything prior.

Intriguingly, Zodiac's logo seems to reference S.H.I.E.L.D., the counterterrorism organisation that helped kickstart The Avengers Initiative and had its own show, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which ran for seven seasons. The series was not a colossal ratings hit, but had an enduring fanbase, and frankly, sounds exactly like the sort of TV show Winderbaum wants to make. In other words, Marvel Television's future may look surprisingly like its past. (Though, unlike some speculators, I suspect Zodiac will have zero real ties to the Agents series, to avoid the former series being "homework" for this one.)

Of course, this says nothing of Marvel's animation output. Your Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man season 2, X-Men '97 season 3, and the next three years of Marvel Zombies were all teased during the NYCC panel. Animation is much lower stakes than the live-action series – they have no bearing on the wider MCU – and all three shows have been warmly received by fans. There's no need for a cull. And the budgets are much, much smaller than live-action, which probably helps (though this is House of Mouse money we're talking).

It certainly seems, then, that the NYCC panel was a surprising eulogy for the way Marvel used to work and a brief, telling tease for the future. Zodiac marks a new dawn for live-action Marvel Television. And excitingly, we have very little idea what to expect.

VisionQuest is currently streaming on Disney Plus. Daredevil: Born Again season 3 is expected to release March 2027. For more, check out our guide to all the upcoming Marvel movies and shows, and our list of all the most exciting new TV shows heading your way.