Ubisoft has announced that this week's Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced update will be its "final major content update."

Last week, Ubisoft broke its months-long silence on Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced by revealing a forthcoming New Game Plus mode, and at the time I questioned whether that would be the only thing in the update. Now we have all the answers, with Ubisoft's patch notes detailing a higher difficulty mode, hidden community chests, new takedowns, new cosmetics, and a host of bug fixes. Not bad at all for the revamped pirate game's final sendoff.

The New Game Plus mode is pretty standard, letting you play through the main quest from the beginning with everything you picked up in your previous playthrough, and with an increasing world difficulty for every new playthrough. Same goes for Nightmare difficulty as the game's hardest challenge with the "deadliest" enemies. Specifically, all of your foes will deal 1.8x their normal damage, parries will be trickier to pull off, and crucially, the one-shot kill safety will be disabled, meaning any stray bullet will have the potential to take you out even if you're full health. Meanwhile, stealth will be more tilted in your enemies' favor, all ships will do more damage to your own, and even sea creatures like sharks and jellyfish will be more dangerous than before.

There isn't a whole lot of information on the new community chests, but Ubisoft says they'll be "more challenging" to find and will include "special community requested rewards."

In a nice little throwback to 2013's Black Flag, the final Resynced update will add new takedowns from the original game, including hidden blade, unarmed, single sword and gunblade takedowns. Why these weren't in the remake to start with, I have no idea, but better late than never. Rounding out the update are a bunch of new cosmetics including new outfits, new pet skins, and trinkets, which you can uncover by playing the New Game Plus mode, as well as a treasure chest full of bug fixes.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced version 1.0.8 releases on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on October 27.

Find out where Black Flag ranks on our list of the best Assassin's Creed games ever.

Despite being in limbo for years, the BioShock movie director Francis Lawrence says they're "close" to a breakthrough amid a leadership shake-up at Netflix.

"I hope so. You know, it's tricky on a couple fronts," Lawrence admitted to The Direct. "I'm definitely active in it. We are still working on it. It is a tough nut to crack that world and that story, especially because you are the character when you play the game, and so creating that character from scratch into that world that quite honestly, is pretty batshit in a most amazing way. It's tricky. So we're getting there, and we're getting close, which is great."

An adaptation of BioShock, which revolved around an underwater art-deco utopian society gone very, very wrong, would surely be a surefire hit for fans who have been desperate to see Rapture brought to life. But Lawrence warns that Netflix's current situation – the streamer fired head of film Dan Lin and chief content officer Bela Bajaria – could prove a roadblock.

"I would love nothing more than to be able to make that movie. So still working on it," Lawrence said. "And then, you have also just the Netflix of it all because Netflix right now has had regime changes and just all of that kind of nonsense that I don't like to have to deal with or have to. So we'll see. Hopefully we'll figure it out."

A BioShock movie was announced at Netflix back in 2022. Since then, there have been small bursts of updates – including producer Roy Lee revealing last year that the feature film would be based on the 2007 game.

Lee was quoted as saying earlier this year that Netflix and publishers Take-Two were "very anxious" to release the movie in line with "potential new incarnations of the game."

Lawrence also told GamesRadar+ this month that he was "dying" to make the BioShock movie, which has since been retooled with a smaller budget.

For more, check out the upcoming video game movies in the works, plus all the latest new PS5 games heading your way.

Shigeru Miyamoto says the most interesting thing about the original Super Mario Bros. is the fact that Mario doesn't actually fight Bowser in the 1985 platformer.

Last week, Miyamoto – who created the likes of The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, and Pikmin – received the Japanese Order of Culture from the Japanese government and is the first-ever game developer to win the award, which typically has been awarded to actors, musicians, and Nobel Prize laureates. Miyamoto is perhaps best known for his unique ideas in game design, with stories of his unorthodox methods during playtesting at Nintendo widely reported, so it's no surprise he has some unique opinions about his own titles.

Speaking at a press conference following his award, attended by Denfaminicogamer, Miyamoto details what he believes is the most intriguing aspect of the 1985 platformer that single-handedly changed the industry as we know it. But rather than its innovation in platforming through its scrolling screens and secrets, Miyamoto singles out the game's boss fights; namely, the fact that they really aren't fights at all.

Miyamoto notes that the developers were struggling with how to create a climactic battle, but eventually had the thought that since the game is about running to the right, why not make the bosses that way? So from there, Bowser's 'fights' – which consisted of jumping over him and a number of projectiles he shot to destroy the bridge from beneath him – were born.

And from there on out, Mario's fights with Bowser became more like actual fights, such as throwing his explosives at the clown car in Super Mario World or grabbing his tail and launching him into explosives in Super Mario 64. Although Miyamoto does neglect to mention that you can fight Bowser in Super Mario Bros., given that throwing enough fireballs at him will also kill him.

Nintendo mastermind Shigeru Miyamoto says AI "provides an opportunity to reflect on what's really important" in game dev, "which I think is a positive thing"

Alix Wilton Regan discussed the realities of filming high-octane action scenes as Lara Croft for Tomb Raider Legacy of Atlantis during her menstrual cycle.

Speaking as a guest on the GamesRadar G+RLS podcast, Alix addressed the confidence required to play the iconic hero while wearing skin-tight motion capture catsuits, shifting the conversation to a topic rarely, if ever, discussed by action stars in the gaming space: menstruation.

"Occasionally I’m on my period the week that we film," she shared candidly. "And you know, that’s okay. And then I was thinking about it and I was like, my God, of all of Lara's adventures, if we imagine her as a real woman. She’s also been on her period at points."

The Cyberpunk 2077 and Dragon Age actor didn't mince words regarding the awkwardness that often meets the subject in professional settings, pushing back directly against the stigma. "You can just imagine people going like, 'don't say the P-word.' And I’m like, well, guys, it's a natural bodily function of being a woman. It's what has gifted you humanity. So the correct answer is thank you."

She explained that at the times when her cycle leaves her feeling less than her best, she relies on physical anchors to tap into Lara’s legendary swagger. "On weeks where you do feel like, 'I'm on my period, or I'm not as confident, or I'm not feeling as sassy or as cool,' it's just something about Lara that gets you there.”

Lara's iconic weaponry certainly helps. “You put those dual pistols on, because on the PCAP stage, I get to put the holster on. And instantly you feel confident and you feel really grounded, which is why I ask for it in scenes, even when I'm not using it, because it adds weight and bulk to your thighs. So it lowers your center of gravity, which just kind of roots you to the earth, and it does make you feel more confident. It just makes me feel stronger, you know?"

Join us for a new episode of G+RLS every other Friday and let us know what you'd love to hear us talking about. We're available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Deezer, and Amazon Music.

Last week, it was reported that Microsoft's negotiations over the fate of Arkane Studios could be reaching an impasse as the deadline approached. The home of the Xbox brand has since confirmed the end date has been extended, allowing more time for a positive resolution.

Since summer, union representatives have been discussing what'll ultimately happen to Arkane in Xbox's grand restructuring with Microsoft. French law requires that any layoffs involving 1,000 or more people include an attempt to consider alternatives before letting people go.

As such, PlayStation's rival has to sit at the table with the makers of Dishonored and look at where the studio could go. Several options are being considered, presumably meaning the team could be sold to another publisher or media group.

Microsoft's been generally tight-lipped, but in a statement to PC Gamer, it was revealed that the timeline is growing longer. "We have extended the consultation period by one additional month as we explore options," a representative told the outlet, "including finding a partner to support the studio through the development work still ahead. This is a defined extension, and we remain committed to keeping the Works Council informed throughout the process."

The "development work still ahead" is on Marvel's Blade, a project that was announced in 2023. There are conflicting reports on its status, as a union rep told French outlet Le Monde it was nearing completion, whereas PC Gamer now says sources claim it still has years to go.

Regardless, any and all unreleased games become potential casualties amid the kind of layoffs Xbox is making. But at least it seems like everyone involved wants Blade to see the light of day.

Unfortunately, what comes after is still to be seen. Even if Arkane is bought, the likelihood remains that some jobs will be cut by the new owner. It's a sad situation. Watch this space.

Xbox COO and ex-Minecraft boss leaves Microsoft after just 3 months in the role

Cult classic indie game Katana Zero has pulled a Hollow Knight Silksong, sort of - the long, long awaited Katana Zero DLC is now sequel-sized, according to the game's lead developer Justin Stander.

Katana Zero first became a huge success more than seven years ago, thanks to its gorgeous pixel art and lightning speed action that felt like a mix between Hotline Miami's heart-thumping brutality and Sekiro's sword slashing parries. A cryptic story and banger soundtrack didn't hurt, either.

After several years, the promised Katana Zero DLC is still nowhere to be seen, but fret not. Justin Stander recently took to social media to tell folks he's "still working hard" on the project. It's just taking longer than expected because the DLC keeps ballooning in size… I wonder where I've heard that one before?

"We made it bigger. It's the size of a full sequel, plus a soundtrack of over 30+ new songs," Stander tweets. "More updates to come. Thanks for your continued support!"

One small but notable difference between this and Hollow Knight Silksong (which also started out as a modest expansion before expanding wildly) is that, for now, the Katana Zero DLC is still DLC, not a standalone sequel. This is far from the first time the project's multiplied in scope, however.

In 2020, the indie dev said the Katana Zero DLC had grown to three times its original size. As of last year, it was "nearly" as big as the base game. Now? It sounds like it could be even bigger.

Still no release date yet for Katana Zero's continuation, but we did receive a short and gorgeous trailer last year.

Be sure to check out the upcoming indie games for 2026 and beyond

I'm more of a Midna stan, but there's no denying Navi from Zelda: Ocarina of Time is the series' most iconic ethereal companion, with her lovably nagging pleas to "hey, listen" still ringing through the Zelda pantheon after all these years. The original vision for the li'l fairy, however, was very different from the glowing orb with wings we know and love today, and it's only because of the technical limitations of the Nintendo 64 that she looks the way she does.

Nintendo veteran and Ocarina of Time designer Yoshiaki Koizumi revealed as much in an Iwata Asks Q&A from 2011, but with the upcoming remake renewing interest in the original game, the Kit & Krysta YouTube channel dug it up and it caught our attention here. I mean, can you imagine an Ocarina of Time where Link's companion is anything but a faceless glowing ball? According to Koizumi, Navi was originally supposed to be a human-like figure.

"Usually, if you were to make a fairy, you would make a cute girl, but that wasn't possible with the Nintendo 64 system, so I just made a ball of light with wings," Koizumi says.

This initial direction makes sense, since the previous, 2D games had shown fairies as girlish creatures in the style of Tinkerbell. I'm 100% guessing here, but it sounds like a human-like model would've been too much detail to cram into such a tiny character and still have animations and AI look half-decent.

Koizumi was a key architect behind Ocarina of Time's Z-targeting system, which uses Navi as a cursor instead of a traditional on-screen marker. In the same interview, he says Navi was born simply because he didn't want to use a generic marker.

"I was a designer, so I didn't want to use such a simple marker. I wanted to make something else, so I came up with a fairy. After all, it was The Legend of Zelda," he says.

It's both funny and disturbing to imagine Nintendo conjuring a more realistic female-presenting Navi for the Ocarina of Time remake, but thankfully pre-release footage has confirmed she's the same iridescent sphere as before but with fewer edges. Still, it's wild to think that almost certainly wouldn't be the case if the N64 had a few extra bits in its processor.

Zelda: Ocarina of Time on N64 actually had a jump button early in development, 29 years before Nintendo's remake added one

Ahead of GTA 6, Rockstar veteran Obbe Vermeij marked the 25-year anniversary of Grand Theft Auto 3 with a lengthy retrospective examining its difficult development.

GTA 3 was a pioneering open-world game and a landmark release for Rockstar, but in a recent Twitter post, Vermeij says, "For most of development, GTA 3 was in a sorry state."

Vermeij says "it crashed frequently, the frame rate was terrible and the map was full of holes. Only in the last six months did everything come together. For the longest time, it looked like the frame rate was going to be 20 fps. Only in the final months did we manage to hit 30."

This sort of late assembly is pretty common in game development, particularly among large teams who may have siloed disciplines handling projects of larger scope. In the messy intersection of art and technology, the heart of a game may be hard to see until it's relatively close to release. For example, Bethesda boss Todd Howard said in 2023 that it took seven years for Starfield to become something that's actually fun to play.

Vermeij notes that the beginning of GTA 3 was messy, too. Rockstar North, then operating as DMA Design, had just been snapped up by Take-Two Interactive, "and a satellite office had opened in Edinburgh. Space Station Silicon Valley for the N64 had been finished in 1998, but there was no new project lined up. Leslie Benzies and Aaron Garbut started working on GTA 3. Unprompted. Meanwhile, the original GTA 1 and GTA 2 team had started work on GTA 2.5, set in Miami. It was called 2.5 because it used the 2.5D (isometric) perspective."

What would have been GTA 2.5 was canned in 2000, that Dundee office closed, and GTA 3 was finally officially greenlit by Take-Two and Rockstar, Vermeij adds. "Everything was written from scratch," he explains. "Only two people worked on both GTA 2 and GTA 3, and no code or art from GTA 2 was reused."

"The way we worked was organic. People would come up with ideas for missions and we'd just try them. If they were fun, they were in. The story was secondary. In fact, the opening plot involving Catalina trying to kill Claude was added well into development."

Back when GTA teams were still pretty small (and downright tiny by today's standards), Vermeij says, "Working on GTA 3 was a lot of fun. Every day there was something new going in. A new mission, radio station, car, pedestrian, building or whatever. The game was growing at an incredible rate. Other than the multiplayer mode we did some work on, I can’t remember a lot of wastage."

Contrast this with GTA 6, which Rockstar admits stalled during development due to conflicting, evolving, or unclear creative visions. GTA 6 hasn't actually been in full production for all of the 13 years since GTA 5, but it did eat up incomparably more labor hours than Rockstar's original breakout hits. With its new development pipeline now stress-tested, studio leadership says future games won't be as difficult or time-consuming to make as GTA 6.

Vermeij also touches on the studio's reputation for crunch – something Rockstar leadership and staff have worked to tackle out in the open in recent years. At least on GTA 3, Vermeij says, "Although everybody worked hard, I don't remember many people doing crazy hours. On the rare occasions I was in over the weekend, there were usually only one or two others. Even during crunch time, most people left the office around 9 or 10 in the evening. I always thought it was better to work eight focused hours than spend your life in the office."

What did all that work get them? Pre-release anxiety. GTA wasn't always the unstoppable hit-maker it is today, and GTA 3 presented a major and risky shift in gameplay. "Although we liked the game," Vermeij says, "it wasn't at all clear that it would be a hit. GTA 3 had a disappointing showing at E3 in May 2001. Most people weren't interested, and those who were thought it was too violent. It had an OK launch, but sales never tapered off."

"The thing I remember most is the camaraderie," he concludes. "In a small team, everybody relies on each other and everybody has a lot of input. Most of us were young and had only recently moved to Edinburgh. We went to the pub together. It felt like a group of friends who happened to be working on a project together."

Nowadays, Rockstar has thousands of devs on its payroll, with a studio larger than post-DMA Rockstar North purely dedicated to NPCs in GTA 6. Edinburgh is gonna need a bigger pub.

Rockstar is "at least 10 years ahead" of other games with GTA 6's NPC crowd technology, says dev behind 007: First Light's incredible crowds

Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Donkey Kong, says he has several projects in the works.

It's hard to name anyone in the games industry who is more influential than Miyamoto. Mario being the face of the industry would have given him that honor, but he also created Zelda, Pikmin, Donkey Kong, Nintendogs… the list goes on. This has culminated in Miyamoto receiving the Japanese Order of Culture, awarded by the Japanese government. This makes him the first-ever game developer to receive the award, with previous winners including Physics Nobel Prize laureates, actors, musicians, and mathematicians.

Speaking to Denfaminicogamer (via machine translation), Miyamoto was asked if this award could be seen as a culmination of his 49-year career and a chance for him to ride off into the sunset. Miyamoto notes that he doesn't know how long he'll be able to keep working for, but is determined to enjoy it while it lasts and pursue what he wants to do in the meantime.

On top of that, Miyamoto assured that he's still working on several projects. And while he's worked on a ton over the last 49 years, I don't really think this means games. Yes, Miyamoto is one of the most iconic game designers of all time, but if you look at his role within Nintendo over the last several years, he's been involved in multimedia roles far more prominently.

Miyamoto has been at the forefront of the Super Nintendo World theme park expansions at Universal Studios, as well as being a producer on both Super Mario Bros. movies and the upcoming The Legend of Zelda movie. And given there are rumors about Donkey Kong, Luigi's Mansion, and Star Fox films in the works, I'd say these are far more likely to be what he is busy with for now… that and spreading the good word of Pikmin.

Nintendo mastermind Shigeru Miyamoto says AI "provides an opportunity to reflect on what's really important" in game dev, "which I think is a positive thing"

Shigeru Miyamoto, mastermind of Nintendo and the creator of Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Donkey Kong, will receive one of Japan's most highly regarded cultural honors – and he's the first video game developer to do so, too.

The Order of Culture, established in 1937, is an award presented to men and women who have made substantial contributions to Japan's art, literature, science, and technology.

Notable recipients include everything from fashion designers to manga artists and biologists… and, yes, it's now going to Miyamoto. A new report from GameWatch (as translated by Automaton) confirms as much.

Miyamoto, who reportedly appeared "modest" during the announcement regarding the award, is "honored" to be receiving it, paying tribute to other devs he's worked alongside throughout his career at Nintendo – his 49-year career: "I am truly honored to receive such a prestigious award. As I have often said, these achievements were not the work of one person, but the result of collaboration with many others. I accept this honor on their behalf."

The Nintendo representative director and executive fellow will officially receive the award on Japan's Culture Day, November 3. He is one of eight recipients chosen by the Japanese government and, again, the first-ever game dev to be nominated for the Order of Culture.

It serves as a testament to the mark he and his franchises have made, from arcade machines in the 1980s to portable home consoles like the Switch 2 today.

Heck, it's ongoing. We've got The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake set to release on November 5 – a remake of the beloved 1998 gem that Miyamoto acted as both producer and supervisor on. There are countless projects he's influenced in one way or another that are still managing to pull millions of players worldwide.

This is one award I'd argue is very much deserved, and it's exciting to see it finally reach the games industry.

Shigeru Miyamoto dreams of Nintendo consoles becoming a rite of passage for everyone coming of age: "Which Nintendo would make you the happiest?"

The upcoming Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake sent shockwaves through the world when its trailer revealed the addition of a technological advancement straight from the arcade generation: a dedicated jump button. That's right, instead of just walking up to a ledge and trusting the honor system to prompt Link to automatically jump over to the appropriate platform, the Ocarina of Time remake will allow you to hit a specific button to jump. Technical achievement aside, it turns out this was actually a feature in the original N64 Ocarina of Time when it was early in development, but it was removed before release for whatever reason.

This was first revealed in an old Iwata Asks article from 2011 featuring a conversation between Nintendo veteran and Ocarina of Time designer Yoshiaki Koizumi and late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. Resurfaced by the Kit & Krysta YouTube channel, the back-and-forth touches on how Mario and Zelda games back then used to be "made as a pair," and it's here that Koizumi reveals this little-known fact about Ocarina of Time's early development.

"I do think they are often made in pairs," Koizumi says. "They both fell into the category of '3D open-world action games.' I didn't really see the difference between them."

Iwata responds: "If you were to state the difference, it would be how The Legend of Zelda is the one you don't press a button to jump in."

Koizumi counters. "Even when it comes to that, you had to press a button to jump when we first started making The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time," he says.

Finally, Iwata confirms, "at first, it didn't have autojump."

The exact reason for the switch to an auto-jump mechanic is never made explicitly clear, but Koizumi says the dev team was thinking about Ocarina of Time "the whole time" it was making Super Mario 64, which made them start "talking about decreasing the action element in The Legend of Zelda and increasing the puzzle elements."

My read on that is, during Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time's development, Nintendo felt like jumping better suited action gameplay and they wanted to tilt the balance a little more toward puzzle-solving, so they switched Link over to an auto-jump system to emphasize that side of things more. Clearly they've changed their minds in the intervening years, as, thank goodness, come November 5 you'll be able to jump to your heart's content in the remake.

Zelda Ocarina of Time remake has new sidequests, harder minigames, and subtle dungeon tweaks that suddenly have me a lot more interested.

In another totally jam-packed year of new video games, it feels like centuries since Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced released (it's really only been a few months), but completionists haven't stopped asking Ubisoft for a New Game Plus mode. Well, Ubisoft has rather casually confirmed the game's New Game Plus update is coming in an update "next week," silencing months of player requests in a 16-word tweet.

"Thank you everyone for your patience," reads a tweet from the official Assassin's Creed Twitter account, seemingly acknowledging the amount of time it's been since we've heard anything at all about Black Flag Resynced post-launch. "New Game+ is coming to Black Flag Resynced next week!"

I'll admit, even being the pirate game sicko I am and with Black Flag having been one of my most anticipated releases of the year, I fell off that game hard. Don't get me wrong, it's a gorgeous remake that manages to do the unlikely and actually improve on the original game, which has always been a 10/10 release for me. It's just that, for me, a remake is always going to have a hard time competing against brand-new games, and there have been some incredible ones this year from my presumptive GOTY The Blood of Dawnwalker to the best new horror game I've played in ages, Resident Evil Requiem.

But that's by the by. It's unclear if the Black Flag Resynced update containing the New Game Plus mode will have anything else bundled in, as again it's been a while since the game got any new content at all, but it's at least confirmed that you'll have a whole new way to play through the main campaign again.

We'll also be keeping an eye out for an exact release date, as so far it's just "next week," but either way it's certain we'll know more soon.

Here's how we ranked the best Assassin's Creed games ever.

Redundancies and restructuring have become sad themes of the industry of late. Just this week, BioWare was closed by EA, amid Xbox laying off 3,200 jobs across the entire division. One place that seems safer is Rockstar, which is gearing up to release the mammoth GTA 6, and at least one ex-dev there believes it's in better shape than most.

"I never heard the question of, we need to see if we need to downsize, or if we can afford it. Rockstar can afford it," Jérémy Hartvick, an open-world designer on Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA 6 who left Rockstar in 2020, tells the Kiwi Talkz podcast.

"The question is whether you can meet the expectations, and if you don't, then you might not last," he explains. "But otherwise it's not a question of money."

I should hope so, considering the kind of money-spinners Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 have proven to be. Both have shifted copies non-stop since launch, the former literally charted in the top five digital games for the PS5 in Europe in September of this year.

That's without getting into GTA Online and Red Dead Online, each with large, dedicated communities who provide yet more revenue through glorious microtransactions. There's no shortage of money flowing through Rockstar. For his own exit, Hartvick points towards a personal situation that required him to be closer to home, since he's from continental Europe and was living in Scotland to work at Rockstar North's Edinburgh office, and the intense amount of labour.

"The quantity of work made it more difficult to be present there," he says about his family. While he helped launch Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA 6 was still years away at that point - eight years, in hindsight - creating a situation where he wondered if he fancied that marathon, or something else.

It bears repeating, despite the job security through funding, Rockstar's currently in the middle of an employment tribunal after suddenly letting a number of staff go last year for allegedly spurious reasons. At the end of the day, it's still a corporation, just like EA, Activision, and any other major publisher.

GTA 6 could cost the US economy $1 billion due to an estimated 1.5 million workers calling in sick, economist says

Ubisoft continues to insist that Beyond Good & Evil 2 is real game that exists, despite the fact that it was announced more than 18 years ago and we haven't seen hide or hair of it this decade. A new report suggests that the reason it's taking so long is that the devs keep going back to the drawing board, most recently transitioning from a live-service Fortnite killer to a single-player first game.

That's according to French outlet Origami, which reports (via machine translation) that Beyond Good & Evil 2 was being developed as a "highly multiplayer and connected game" between 2019 and 2022, taking direct inspiration from Fortnite and Destiny. Players would create their own characters and take on activities that would be generated on the fly, with large group sessions that would be matchmade organically.

Over time, the plan shifted to something more "open-ended," to four-player team-based action and then to two-player co-op, the report continues. In its current form, Beyond Good & Evil 2 is apparently set to be a "solo-first" game with Marvel's Spider-Man-style combat and no mandatory internet requirements, but it still includes optional co-op.

But perhaps the most surprising detail in the report is that the game is apparently still in pre-production. This, the report claims, is part of a long-standing pattern in the project's development. Beyond Good & Evil 2 has apparently missed all of its internal creative milestones not because the devs are failing to make deadlines, but because the milestones themselves keep changing as the project continues to change shape. Never mind the finish line – the devs don't even really know what the starting line is meant to look like.

I can't help but think of what's now BioWare's final game amid all this. According to multiple reports, Dragon Age: The Veilguard bounced back and forth between being a live-service multiplayer title and a single-player RPG, and after years of development uncertainty it's no wonder the final product felt as uncertain and unfocused as it did.

Maybe Ubisoft's big restructure will be what Beyond Good & Evil 2 needs to finally see the light of day, since the new corporate organization is meant, in part, to offer a clearer creative vision for projects in development. But Skull & Bones offers the most recent example of Ubisoft finally pulling a game out of development hell and onto store shelves, and I think it's safe to say that's not the most thrilling precedent of success.

Here are all the upcoming Ubisoft games you need to know about.

Off the back of Insomniac's three Spider-Man games, the critical response to Marvel's Wolverine is decidedly mixed. That didn't stop people from picking up the mutant action game, however, as it topped the PlayStation 5 charts for September.

Sony's just released the top-selling digital games across the US, Canada and Europe on PlayStation systems for September. There are a few obvious pulls, such as the sports games FC 27 and the new NBA release, and Halloween: The Game, which came out just in time for the namesake holiday. Almost all of them have been trumped by Wolverine.

The X-Men's coolest character (don't at me) is comfortably atop the list for digital sales in the United States and Canada. It outdoes both FC 27 and NBA 2K27, an impressive feat given the gigantic install bases for those series.

In fourth, you have Michael Myers in Haddonfield for the asymmetrical multiplayer game Halloween, and The Blood of Dawnwalker, the new historical horror RPG from Rebel Wolves. Over on the European side of things, Wolvie is down to second, behind FC 27 - it's hard to top a major football game over this side of the pond. You've got the Premiership, the Bundesliga, LaLiga, and all the other big national leagues across the continent, each with a fervent fanbase.

The Blood of Dawnwalker and Halloween are in the next two spots, and then GTA 5 sits at fifth. The perennial. A truly unstoppable game since it first arrived back in 2013. At this rate, I'm not even sure GTA 6 will slow it down much. Yes, that's the newer, bigger, better game, but Grand Theft Auto 5 will be even cheaper, making it even more appealing to anyone who doesn't already have it.

Regardless, whatever you may think of Marvel's Wolverine, the game appears to have done fine business for all involved. Never count Logan out, even if his latest outing occasionally plays itself.

Marvel's Wolverine star Debra Wilson isn't sure why Insomniac used her likeness for Callisto: "I honestly love games where they don't look like me at all"

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!

In the wake of EA's closure of beloved RPG studio BioWare, two other EA studios are teaming up for an undisclosed project reported to be a revival of Star Wars: Battlefront 3.

It's been several years now since reports claimed Star Wars: Battlefront 3 had been shelved EA, but just this week rumors of a revival and team-up between Respawn and Dice surfaced. And now, those rumors are heavily substantiated as EA confirms it's "bringing together our Respawn and DICE studios to collaborate on a future project," and Variety reports that the game they're working on together is Star Wars: Battlefront 3.

Even as game devs mourn the sudden and unexpected death of BioWare, EA is already laying out its plans for some of its other studios and IP. In a joint memo sent to employees from EA execs Cam Weber and David Tinson, the company says it'll continue to "invest heavily" in Respawn's Apex Legends franchise over the next few years. It also says it's committed to delivering on Marvel’s Iron Man and the next Star Wars Jedi game, which it calls its "two huge launches coming up" in its action-adventure vertical.

No further details are being reported on the potential Star Wars: Battlefront 3 revival, but it's safe to assume it'll follow a similar format to the first two games in EA Dice's rebooted arcade-style shooter series, which is to say it'll probably be lots of fun to play alone and with friends and will likely offer very little depth in terms of mechanics, systems, and story.

Here are all of the upcoming Star Wars games we know about right now.

An economist reckons the long-awaited launch of GTA 6 could cost the US economy $1 billion due to an estimated 1.5 million workers taking the day off sick.

That comes from the International Business Times, which reports that an economics professor at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona offers a simple reason for his academic projection – notably not an official forecast. People need time to play Rockstar's long-awaited opus when it launches on November 19, and work is simply in the way. People have waited 13 years for GTA 6, so why waste time working when you can get stuck into it?

So what's behind the math? The short answer is that the average yearly output of a US worker is $70,000, so take that and the 1.5 million absences, and you get a short-term productive dip of around 2%.

Digging in further, the economics expert reckons that men aged 18 to 30 will make up the majority of workers pulling a sicky – and that the technology sector will be the hardest hit. Apparently, that part should come as little surprise, as it closely resembles the age and occupation of people who took time off to play GTA 5.

Furthermore, we can expect an impact on people who do turn up to work, as the need to talk about GTA 6 and stay up late to play it may reduce their performance.

Does any of this mean anything? Not really. The report goes on to say that even if this were to happen, the money lost from people not working will be made up by what Take-Two and Rockstar Games make from, you guessed it, releasing GTA 6.

Still, an amusing stat, and not one that various companies aren't seemingly ready for. We've now had a few cases of companies announcing they're shutting down when GTA 6 comes out because workers would likely call in sick anyway. Won't anyone think of the economy?

A fundamental Red Dead Redemption 2 system provided the basis for how GTA 6's NPCs work - but it was nearly cut because of an ambitious Rockstar studio head.

One of the most prominent members of the PS5 hacking scene claims to have created an exploit that'll work even on the latest 14.10 console firmware. With the release of GTA 6 looming and PS5 exploits coming out at a feverish pace, the question now is how long Sony and Rockstar will be able to prevent the long-awaited crime game from being pirated. It won't be possible with the current exploits, but given how quickly they're now coming, it feels almost inevitable.

Longtime PS5 hacker Gezine recently posted a clip on Twitter which demonstrates access to the console's debug menu on firmware version 14.10. The implication is that Gezine has discovered a new type of exploit that can jailbreak PS5s on current firmware, but the hacker has not released this method to the public.

Like other console makers, Sony typically requires players to install the latest firmware in order to be able to play new games. It's a key roadblock discouraging players from modding their consoles, since you need to keep updating to the latest firmware in order to play the latest releases, and that new system software will include back-end fixes correcting previously publicized jailbreak exploits.

We don't yet know what firmware the GTA 6 will require, but it's possible that it'll be 14.10 – which likely means that soon, it'll be possible to play GTA 6 and keep your jailbreak intact. It's also possible that another firmware version will be released before or alongside the game, but unless Sony is able to discover how this specific exploit was created, it'll likely remain in place until the jailbreak is released publicly.

While there are plenty of legitimate, legal reasons to jailbreak a game console – PS2 emulators with support for original discs are one notable example – the elephant in the room here, of course, is that many people want jailbroken PS5s that can play pirated copies of GTA 6. This, however, is the part that's not yet certain.

"Old way to dump executables does not seem to work at 14.xx," Gezine reports. In other words, there's no way to pirate games, GTA 6 or not, on the current firmware. Further piracy will likely require a new exploit for the console's hypervisor, a security measure which hackers have cracked in the past, but which has been secured as of the latest system software.

Sony is clearly keen to make sure these exploits stay under the radar and are quickly patched. HackerOne, a platform where companies can offer bounties to hackers reporting major security exploits to software companies, shows that PlayStation recently paid out a $50,000 bounty to a user who pointed out a major bug.

The nature of that bug has not yet been disclosed, but you can be sure that Sony will do everything it can to prevent anything from disrupting sales of GTA 6 next month. Even if that means offering mountains of cash to the hackers continuing to break the PS5 apart.

Unofficial PS5 pirate store with over 1,600 games taken down before being immediately replaced by a clone, with Pandora's box open following recent jailbreak.

You're probably aware by now that GTA 6 is indeed eligible for The Game Awards. Rockstar is getting the game out exactly one day before the deadline. It's safe to say the open-world crime adventure is a hefty favorite for several categories, but odds are against it beating Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's sweep from last year.

Sandfall's JRPG-inspired fantasy took home nine statues, across 13 nominations in total. Big numbers, and a benchmark most can only dream of. The new Grand Theft Auto can feasibly reach the same amount of nominations, making a tie possible, but I'll be honest - it's an uphill battle.

There are a bunch we can expect to see GTA 6 in. Game of the Year, Best Game Direction, Best Narrative, sound, visuals, and performance are all fair game. Those account for seven categories.

Then there's Games for Impact, championing releases with clear, forward-thinking ideas at their core. In theory, GTA 6 can be part of that lineup. Best Action and Best Action-Adventure are both possible, but I'd expect one or the other. We'll probably see GTA 6 pull a Clair Obscur by getting one of these and Game of the Year.

Obviously, Best Independent Game and Best Debut Indie Game are out. Clair Obscur may have managed to squeeze into these, but I think partnering with an entire city and its NBA team rules out Rockstar's sequel.

Out of all the other categories, that leaves Best Community Support, Innovation in Accessibility, and Players' Voice. It's difficult to say what Rockstar's odds are for any of them. The first depends on the post-launch community launch, the second is all about what's available in-game, and I can see players rallying for the third, if even just for the meme.

On supporting the playerbase, GTA 6 is up against Wardogs, Arc Raiders, and whatever other big live-service game you care to mention, and even Clair Obscur, because anything that's been updated regularly is possible. Baldur's Gate 3 took it last year, for instance.

I wouldn't count on GTA 6 tying Clair Obscur to be quite honest, but I wouldn't count out eating my lunch on that either. This is why I'm not a gambling man. Anyway, Silent Hill: Townfall for Game of the Year, just for the Scottish representation.

Not even Rockstar heads know everything that's in GTA 6 because devs will just add stuff – which is also how Red Dead Redemption 2 got its absurd horse testicle physics

Nintendo has revealed the The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake file size, and it's mercifully not going to hog a ton of your storage space, even if it is bigger than Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.

Twitter user Genki_JPN posted a photo of the download card for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake on Switch 2, which is now available in Japanese stores. While this doesn't reveal much beyond including some screenshots and artwork for the game, it does list the file size for the Switch 2 remake as 27GB.

For context, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64 shipped on a 32MB cartridge, meaning the 2026 remake is over 800 times larger than the original version in 1998.

Obviously, we live in the era of 200GB Call of Duty downloads, and given that two parts of fellow 90's remake Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Rebirth are the biggest games on Switch 2 at 90.4GB and 91.5GB respectively, it's a reasonably low file size for the new Zelda remake, which is a welcome surprise.

What is shocking, though, is that at 27GB, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake is now the biggest mainline Zelda game of the Switch era. Breath of the Wild Nintendo Switch 2 Edition was the previous record holder at 24GB, with Tears of the Kingdom Nintendo Switch 2 Edition at only 20GB, while the Link's Awakening remake and Echoes of Wisdom both land within the 5GB range. In fact, the only Zelda game that's larger overall is Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, at 43.5GB.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake borrows one of Breath of the Wild's most immersive features

GTA 6 features an advanced take on Red Dead Redemption 2's beloved NPC interaction system, though we might not have got it at all if one of Rockstar's leads hadn't changed their mind on sharing it with everyone else.

That comes from Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, who has posted a YouTube video after visiting Rockstar to see GTA 6. During that visit, Schreier mentions a conversation with Rockstar North boss Rob Nelson, in which he says that vice president of animation Mark Tennant came up with a prototype of Red Dead 2 Redemption 2's advanced NPC tech way back in 2014 or 2015.

The way it worked was simple – instead of pressing a button to point a gun at an NPC and have them react, you could press the same button to choose to greet or antagonize them.

While the idea is simple to explain, the execution is complex. As such, when Tennant showed the prototype to another technical lead at Rockstar, Phil Hooker, he didn't want the system shown to Nelson initially. As Schreier explains, Nelson is known as the guy who "wants to do the world" – even if it leads to a lot of extra work for the team.

Despite the concern, Nelson was eventually shown the prototype and was blown away. "This is incredible," Nelson reportedly said in reaction. "This will revolutionize the way our games and our worlds work."

Amusingly, it sounds like Hooker was proven right. Implementing the system did prove to be a lot of work for Rockstar, though you'd argue it was absolutely worth it. Not only is Red Dead Redemption 2's NPC system well-loved, but we're getting an evolved version of it in GTA 6.

We initially got an inkling that would be the case during a GTA 6 leak, though Rockstar's latest media rounds have further fleshed out the details.

"The NPC interaction system is one that is returning and evolved from Red Dead Redemption 2," Nelson confirmed to IGN. "In the past we’ve had systems where you can speak to NPCs. In RDR1 and GTA 5, there were basic systems for interacting, but the interactions were very simple.

"But with Red Dead Redemption 2, we were finally able to incorporate the ability to interact with NPCs as a more fleshed-out system. Traditionally, L2 was a binary action that immediately aimed your gun at someone or locked onto them for combat. But as the resolution has increased, the experiences we create have had to evolve alongside that – the fidelity of them, how you can exist in them, and what you can do in them."

While we need to wait and see what this means in full, the hint Nelson leaves us with comes down to the various ways NPCs can react to you in GTA 6's world. For example, it's normal for people to gather and chatter, though their behavior will influence how they feel about you eavesdropping. While some might be more inquisitive, others, to put it mildly, won't appreciate it at all.

"While we pushed this sort of interaction with NPCs as far as we could for Red Dead Redemption 2, with GTA 6 we are taking it much further," Nelson teases.

To think, this might be something we didn't get at all if someone at Rockstar had been put off by how much work it would entail.

Not even Rockstar heads know everything that's in GTA 6 because devs will just add stuff – which is also how Red Dead Redemption 2 got its absurd horse testicle physics.

Warner Bros.' nemesis system is easily the cleverest innovation from its Middle-earth open-world action adventure series, turning an otherwise fairly mindless orc slaughtering party into something much impactful and lifelike. And while Red Dead Redemption 2 certainly doesn't need to learn any lessons from Shadow of Mordor or Shadow of War, a new mod adds the nemesis system to Rockstar's open-world Western opus, and I have to say, it sounds like a wildly good time.

As showcased in a wonderful Rockstar-style trailer with narration from Sarah Kempton, the enRAGE mod (available via Nexus Mods) makes it so that "everyone you cross in the West can become your nemesis.

"Rob a man, beat him or insult him, and he may not forget. He gets a name, a temper, a life story and a grudge, and one day he comes looking for you," reads the mod's description.

For the uninitiated, in the Middle-earth games, the nemesis system organizes Sauron's army into a hierarchy where each soldier has their own name, rank, strengths and weaknesses, and even personality traits. Individual orcs can climb through the ranks by killing you, and they'll remember their fatal methods for your next encounters, bragging and mocking you for your previous failure. Likewise, they'll hold grudges against you if you fail to kill them, bearing battle-accurate scars and pursuing you with vigor. It's a lot more complex than just that, but that's the gist of it, and you can incorporate that same system in Red Dead Redemption 2 with this mod from nicklovin99.

"Every NPC gets a name, a temper and a mind shaped by a life lived before you rode in. They remember what you did and will cross your path again. Some will like you, some will fear you, some will want you dead. Outfits feud and go to war with or without you, changing the people you know," says the mod creator.

I have yet to test out this mod and thus can't vouch for it, but it is described as being in "early access" and prone to bugs, which the developer asks you to report so that one day this can be "a polished (native Red Dead) feeling mod." Still, even in its current state, it sounds incredibly ambitious.

"Greet a stranger and you learn his name. From then on he is a real person in the world: a temper (Hothead, Proud, Cold, Coward, Greedy, Loyal or Drifter), traits, quirks, a trade, a faith, a family and a life story dated back years before he met you. His temper decides how he fights, whether he backs down, whether he talks and whether he forgives. People you meet turn up again in the same towns with the same face and the same grudge."

According to the mod author, tensions can rise to the point of faction wars "with goals, front lines, roadblocks and battles you can hear in the distance. Kill a side's officers, burn its supplies or rob its treasury, and watch its war collapse."

My hat's off to mod writers with the know-how to weave such an incredibly complex system into an already intricate network of systems in a game as massive as Red Dead Redemption 2. I haven't seen enough to be satisfied that the whole thing is interwoven seamlessly, and it sounds like in its early access state it isn't all totally seamless, but my interest is piqued nonetheless.

Not even Rockstar heads know everything that's in GTA 6 because devs will just add stuff – which is also how Red Dead Redemption 2 got its absurd horse testicle physics

GTA 6 was made by an army of thousands of game developers who had to be coordinated by Rockstar Games, but some of the studio's best work is the result of individuals using the independence afforded to them to enact the kind of chaotic goodness that would make a tabletop dungeon master smirk. Case in point: horse scrotums in Red Dead Redemption 2.

The buried details of GTA 6's mammoth production line are examined in a new video from Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, who paused to share some information from a recent Rockstar visit that couldn't fit into a prior written report.

Rockstar North art director Aaron Garbut looks at the scope and granularity that Rockstar has to balance. "There's no one person that has this whole thing in their head," he says.

Schreier, seemingly sharing his own thoughts and no longer quoting Garbut, adds, "Grand Theft Auto 6 is a humongous game, like Rockstar's previous games, and I imagine that not even the top developers of this company know every single thing that's in the game."

This is important context because it directly connects to something that Garbut singles out: the kind of unhinged perfectionism and attention to detail that gets you video game horses with testicles that convincingly shrink based on the temperature.

Herein lies the thin but magical boundary between disorganized development and meaningful autonomy. It's not that the studio heads, discipline leads, direct reports, and overarching producers at Rockstar don't know what's in GTA 6, or that designers are regularly going rogue with no oversight. All of those roles exist precisely because no one person can know and be accountable for everything in this game. But under that structured network, there's still space for designers, artists, and others to have agency and make individual contributions in their corner.

"Garbut actually brought this up," Schreier says of the famous Red Dead 2 horses. "That was not something that was on some big list of features to make. It was not something that an art director told an artist. 'All right, we got to get those horse testicles in here. Better put in nights and weekends so you can get these horse testicles in here.' That was something that people or a person, on their own, autonomously, decided, 'I'm going to do this because I think it's a really cool detail and I have enough time to work on it.'"

Games like GTA 6 are partly the result of a lot of little things done well many times over within, and in service of, broader creative frameworks. Allowing space for surprises to manifest is how a lot of the magic happens in some of the most beloved games of all time, and this highlights one way that mismanaged or unhealthy development cycles actively hurt games (on top of, more importantly, people).

Great ideas that might've been found or implemented may never happen because people don't have the space, or the headspace, for them. If simply getting a game shipped is a buzzer-beating nightmare, refining and indulging in it gets that much harder. (Red Dead Redemption 2's development was notoriously filled with crunch periods, though some employees publicly pushed back on crunch accusations in 2018.)

We're still talking about the horses in Red Dead Redemption 2 because they reflect that game's extreme commitment to authenticity, zoology, and wonderfully unnecessary content. If those horse testicles were less realistic, nobody would care. But, demonstrably, the work of whoever is tragically not listed as Testicle Designer in the game's credits did improve the game and people's perception of it. Because after you find one of those little surprises, you start to look for more details, more fingerprints from individual developers making their mark despite being one of hundreds or thousands. The AAA games that actually justify their excess are full of stuff like this, and it sounds like GTA 6 will be too.

"For GTA to stay relevant it had to reinvent itself": Grand Theft Auto 4 got much darker because San Andreas took the "pop energy as far as it could go," says Rockstar's Dan Houser.

Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis' lead developers say that the moments that elicit the strongest emotional response in the original were non-negotiable to tamper with in the remake.

With Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, the developers are going down the Resident Evil and Final Fantasy 7 school of remaking a game. Rather than a near-1:1 remake like Metal Gear Solid Delta or The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, Legacy of Atlantis uses the setting and story of the 1996 classic and builds something unique from it. While this has garnered some criticism for adding modern AAA mechanics like crafting and skill trees, the developers believe they have gotten the important parts right.

"Imagine you just finished the first Tomb Raider, then you close your eyes and you imagine a playthrough in your head," Michał Kuk, creative director at Flying Wild Hog, tells Edge. "Your brain remembers the things that generated the most emotions for you." He explains, "These moments, locations, vistas, objects that stick in your memory, these are the things that have to be in the [remake] almost untouched."

As for what can be messed with, Jeff Adams, experience director at Crystal Dynamics, explains, "As we bring the level of realism up, there are some things from the original we struggle to justify."

He specifically points to "finding a med pack in a tomb that's been concealed for 10,000 years," as one of these points that don't really make sense in this game where you shoot dinosaurs with guns.

These are the best Tomb Raider games of all time.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake is stealing a very neat feature that Nintendo previously implemented in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom: a no-UI mode. Pro and Master UI modes were available at the recent hands-on preview event, and a few creators managed to get footage of them in action.

There are three options to modify the in-game interface in the menu. Standard is what you've likely seen in pre-release footage and has readouts detailing health, magic, and your currently equipped item, alongside a minimap and relevant situational information. It's in line with the original game, and pretty much what you'd expect from any third-person action-adventure title released since the late '90s.

Pro mode disables pretty much all of it. The screen is completely stripped of informational readouts, including even the health meter. You'll still see notices for when the game's being saved, as demonstrated in this footage from Stephen Totilo, as well as occasional in-world dialog pop-ups. The one piece of gameplay interface that will remain onscreen is the Z-targeting indicator, showing when you've locked onto enemies.

Master mode, then, disables even the target reticule. You can still lock onto monsters, but now the only indication you've done so will be Navi hovering over the enemy in question. You can see this mode briefly demonstrated at the 9:18 mark in this video from Zeltik.

Over the years, 3D Zelda games like Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword became notorious for excessive handholding and incessant guidance on every detail. Nintendo finally loosened the reins on players during the Breath of the Wild era, and I'm glad to see some of that spirit returning in the Ocarina of Time remake.

Sure, the original game might've given us Navi, the poster child for annoying tutorialization, but there's hope that even she'll be a little less annoying this time around. Will wonders never cease?

Zelda Ocarina of Time remake has new sidequests, harder minigames, and subtle dungeon tweaks that suddenly have me a lot more interested.

Dan Houser – former writer and creative director of the Grand Theft Auto series – says GTA 4 was so tonally different from what came before because Rockstar Games felt that doing the same old thing risked obsolescence.

GTA was riding high going into the Xbox 360 and PS3 era, with the trilogy of GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas all releasing to mass acclaim, selling millions, and becoming some of the most influential and beloved games of the era. San Andreas, in particular, felt like the natural culmination of the style established in GTA 3, so the idea of that continuing on more powerful hardware was certainly exciting. However, GTA 4 turned out to be a somber story, with a more realistic world and a far darker tone overall.

Speaking to IGN, Houser explains, "There was a belief that San Andreas had taken that kind of 'pop' energy as far as it could go." Given that San Andreas was so "massive" and "successful," Houser notes "that for GTA to stay relevant it had to reinvent itself."

While GTA 4 isn't quite as popular as the two games that surround it, Houser points out "it felt cohesive. The game, the art direction, the moody lighting, the nature of the missions, they all felt tonally consistent."

He notes that with the darker take on the series "we found a level of tonal consistency that we'd not had in the previous games," even if that could be seen as a risk given the success of the PS2 games.

Houser recalls that with Rockstar, "I think there was more [of] a perception that the risk was the opposite," he explains. "The risk was if you don't reinvent yourselves and don't do something new and fresh, you're going to become obsolete." GTA 5 then did become a bit more lighthearted and silly compared to 4 and proved to be a juggernaut both in sales and popularity, but Rockstar's more somber tone in hindsight feels somewhat like a precursor to the Red Dead Redemption games, so really I think both takes were for the best.

GTA: Vice City's writing was "awful," Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser says, but acting icon Ray Liotta "made it sound good"

With its exciting announcement of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, Nintendo also unveiled a stunning 40th Anniversary Edition of its Switch 2 console themed around the beloved series – and it sold out as quickly as it went up.

As fans, it's likely that none of us were surprised to see it sell out so quickly, right? Heck, I secured mine only after sitting through a massive online queue, undergoing various website crashes, and refreshing at the speed of light – an experience I was more than prepared for.

It seems that Nintendo itself, however, wasn't. Bill van Zyll, vice president and general manager of Nintendo in Latin America, tells Coelho no Japão as much during an interview.

"Well, if we expected it, we wouldn't be in that situation, right? At least not to this extent," he admits, referencing how the Zelda 40th Anniversary Edition Switch 2 sold out instantly.

"I will tell you that it's a global phenomenon. We have this issue absolutely everywhere. We apologize for that. That certainly is not the intent. We underestimated how well it would be received – and there's certainly some markets that stand out."

For example, the United States "did extremely well," according to the executive – but it's not alone, of course. "It's a global phenomenon where they're running out of product," he states once again. "The pre-sales are hitting their max, and certainly that's what happened to us in Brazil."

Nintendo is on it now that the company is aware. "We are working on replenishments of the special hardware and the software, but it'll take a little bit of time". Stress on that last bit, though. "Please be patient."

It's hard to be, I suppose, but it's even harder for me to imagine that Nintendo didn't expect the console's popularity. I'm reminded of the original Switch and its own Zelda-themed edition, which similarly flew off the shelf, so to speak. Same with the Animal Crossing: New Horizons one.

But still, "It caught us by surprise. We expected a positive response, but the magnitude… It's amazing."

Anything is possible, I guess. I'd suggest keeping an eye on retailers (and Nintendo's own store itself) over the lead up to the Ocarina of Time remake release on November 5 – and, of course, the special edition console's own October 29 launch.

Nintendo quietly drops new Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake trailers, casually giving us our first-ever look at Dark Link and more

Red Dead Redemption and Bully are some of Rockstar Games' most defining hits - outside of the juggernaut Grand Theft Auto series, of course - but those classics almost didn't happen, according to studio co-founder and former lead writer Dan Houser.

Speaking to IGN, the former Rockstar lead explains that all-new and original games have a much tougher time reaching the finish line than sequels.

"I think there were lots of moments where Red Dead nearly didn't happen. I think there were lots of moments when Bully nearly didn't happen, and lots of other moments when games that didn't happen could have," Houser says. "There are lots of happenstance moments, or one good build, or the game suddenly comes together, that save projects that are struggling."

Building any AAA game is a challenge in itself, but new franchises in particular "tend to struggle a lot, so it's almost more impressive when they get made than it is heartbreaking when they don't," Houser adds. 2010's Red Dead Redemption even faced a "lot of difficult periods" - though the cowboy classic made it through thanks to the "core people on the team [who] were really strong, held focus on what they were trying to do, and solved the problems."

Houser recalls that development on Red Dead Redemption was interesting because the team were discovering "what the problems were and figuring out solutions to slowly unpick what was interesting about an open-world cowboy game." In hindsight, what makes Red Dead interesting is "obvious," he says, "but in real-time you were left with nothing but holes you're slowly filling."

Rockstar's Bully never spawned a sequel, sadly. Though the same can't be said of the studio's western epic - Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the best-selling games of all time. For now, the developer seems to be entirely focused on GTA 6.

Rockstar's figured out the perfect GTA 6 advertisement – a bunch of supercars from Vice City speeding along the streets of Miami

Video games set in a galaxy far, far away are arguably more interesting nowadays than they've been for years. But what's changed? Lucasfilm Games executive Douglas Reilly says the company is now less restrictive with the Star Wars franchise and teases more upcoming games that could surprise fans.

This year alone, we've received two pretty surprising Star Wars games. There's Star Wars: Zero Company, an excellent turn-based tactics game that force pushes the XCOM formula into an entirely different sci-fi world. Then there's Star Wars: Galactic Racer, an arcade racing game from some of the developers behind Burnout. Both courted rave reviews.

Speaking to The Game Business Show, Reilly says those collaborations came from being "more flexible about, like, who we're willing to take pitches from and good ideas can come from a lot of different places."

Disney infamously signed a 10-year deal with EA that granted the publisher exclusive rights to make Star Wars video games. That deal expired in 2023, leaving the door open for smaller studios.

"You don't have to necessarily be a top five publisher to make a great Star Wars game," Reilly adds. "We have a high quality bar and we want to make sure they're excellent experiences and that means typically you work with more experienced teams than, you know, new teams who have no track record of making great things."

From here, the exec says "we're exploring all kinds of things [with] large and small partners that I think are going to continue to surprise folks who are like, 'Oh, they're doing a thing with them. That might be interesting to see how that turns out.'"

Currently, we know EA's Respawn is in development on a third game in the Star Wars Jedi franchise. Quantic Dream is still apparently working on Star Wars Eclipse, though that project hit a big hurdle earlier this summer as developers planned to strike.

Upcoming Star Wars games: Every new Star Wars game announced so far

The developers behind Castlevania: Belmont's Curse know their characters are hot, they've seen your thirsty fan art, and they agree - there should be some kind of award honoring the sexiest dad in games.

When asked if he's seen the "horny" fan art that's already been inspired by their newest game - in an interview with Fall Damage - lead designer Sandro Bordier acknowledges that "it has started, it has started already - like, man, have we seen some things."

Developer Evil Empire isn't totally surprised by the lewd drawings people have already made because, well, the developers aren't blind to how their characters look.

"Yes, like we know some characters are hot. It's a choice, actually. Like it's a vibe. We're pretty proud of it. Honestly, like, we were super happy with all the fan reactions regarding the characters that were revealed. Like we really put a lot of love from the team to design them in a way that would please fans," Bordier adds.

The devs are supposedly "super happy" with the waves of horny fan art of and the general non-horny response to many of the game's characters. Reactions to returning face Trevor Belmont have been particularly heated, however.

"Like Trevor especially, we didn't realise that it would be so well received," marketing director Bérenger Dupre adds. "There should be a Game Awards for hot dads." It might be too late for Hades (from Hades) or Kranky Kong (from Donkey Kong) or Marcus Fenix (from Gears of War), but it's never too late to right a wrong.

"It's always fun to see the fan art because we know how important and dear these characters are to the fans. And we are trying to make some new, fresh stories with them, so it's always quite stressful, and for now the reception is very, very emotional," Dupre adds.

GamesRadar's Castlevania: Belmont's Curse review was almost as excited as some of those fan artists: "With enigmatic puzzles, gothic atmosphere, a dramatic anime-esque storyline, and well-paced action, this is a hugely compelling Metroidvania and a triumphant return for the iconic franchise."

Castlevania: Belmont's Curse Metacritic score is only behind the beloved GBA trilogy, Dawn of Sorrow, and Symphony of the Night as the series' best

Rockstar Games' co-founder and former lead writer Dan Houser doesn't think his writing in GTA: Vice City was the best, but he reckons acting legend Ray Liotta is what really made the classic game's script shine.

Grand Theft Auto is no stranger to celebrity talent nowadays - just take a look at GTA 6's star-studded soundtrack - but Ray Liotta playing the main protagonist of GTA: Vice City was a big deal more than two decades ago.

In an interview with IGN, Houser was asked about what it was like working with the iconic Something Wild and Goodfellas actor, who gave a voice to Tommy Vercetti. "My writing's awful, and he [Ray Liotta] made it sound good [in Vice City]," Houser says.

"All good actors do that. The actor finds things that are not on the page. Acting is an unusual art form, but it is an art form. And when you see someone who's good at it, they're much better than someone who's just ok at it. When they're ok, they get what's in my head, on the character side. The best actors go a whole level above that, and he definitely did that," he adds.

Houser also describes how the seemingly random collaboration came about. Rockstar supposedly called Liotta's agent and offered "a chunk of money" for about four days worth of work. "We met him for dinner the night before and then did two days with them in New York," Houser explains. A couple of months later, Houser returned to LA closer to the game's full release to record more lines with him. "The first day he turned up and didn't seem into it, and the next day he came in and did about five hours and completely finished everything."

"He was fantastic at doing it," Houser continues. "I mean he brought a level of authenticity to Tommy that I think we'd have struggled with anyone else to find."

Rockstar wins without doing anything as Cyberleek retreats after meme coin crashes – GTA 6 leaker says "the leeks stop here" as if the game's not out in a month

According to a now-deleted listing on the Xbox Store, a remaster of 2004's Shrek 2: The Game is coming to modern platforms soon. Frequent remaster maestros Aspyr are behind this one, but now there's only really one question left: is it actually as ogrewhelmingly good as I remember?

Shrek 2: The Game originally swamped out on the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube, mixing beat 'em up action with some light puzzles, mini-games and button-prompt QTEs entirely playable in co-op. You could also control more than just our beloved, layered hero - Fiona, Donkey, Puss, and a bunch of other fairytale creatures were in the roster, too.

The deleted store page and leaked trailer suggest much of the shrektacular original remains intact, only this time there'll be support for 4K resolutions, improved textures, and enhanced UI. A new Photo Mode and Cheat Mode also seem to be part of the package.

No release date or pricing details for Shrek 2 Remastered yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it launch on PC, PS5 and Nintendo consoles alongside the Xbox version.

Developer Aspyr has done a good job of bringing back several old-school fan favorites that you might have forgotten about for years, but were still happy to see return regardless. Most recently, the studio remastered The Lord of the Rings: War in the North and numerous games in a galaxy far, far away - Star Wars: KOTOR, Bounty Hunter, The Force Unleashed, etc.

Shrek 2 was a fun little romp, especially with a few pals or siblings eager to make a mess in the swamp, if my dusty memories from two decades ago are to be trusted. GamesRadar's Shrek 2: The Game review from back in the day doesn't inspire much hope, saying it "only really has any merit in so far as it isn't quite as bad as some other games." Here's hoping the friendly AI aren't as useless as they were 22 years ago.

Dreamworks' juggernaut film franchise is preparing to make a big comeback soon, with or without this remaster. Shrek 5 belly flops into theatres next summer and marks the series' first big screen feature in 16 years. All four previously released films have grossed over $3 billion worldwide altogether, unadjusted for inflation.

Everyone is saying the same thing about the new Shrek 5 teaser – why does Fiona look like that?

I can't help but feel Nintendo is being a little too faithful with its upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake. I know I'm pretty isolated in that opinion, but with new info coming out of recent hands-on previews of the game, I've suddenly got reason to believe that Nintendo is looking out for my tastes, too.

The Ocarina of Time remake will feature some new side quests, as demonstrated by longtime Zelda YouTuber Zeltik. In Hyrule Castle Town, the guy at the potion shop will now be freaking out about a lurking bug when you first meet him, handing over an empty bottle for Link to catch it. Fulfill his request, and he'll let you keep the bottle and offer to fill it up with a healing red potion.

This certainly isn't the kind of multi-stage side quest that you'd expect to have in a modern action-adventure game – and certainly, it doesn't seem that there's a journal or anything where you can track side missions – but it does suggest that Nintendo has designs on offering some things to do that'll be fresh even for those of us who've played through Ocarina of Time a dozen times over.

There's also a new, harder version of the target shooting game where you have much less time to hit the targets, suggesting that we can expect some new challenge levels in the minigames, too. Zeltik's video also goes into depth on some minor, but meaningful, tweaks to the layout of the Forest Temple, suggesting that we won't be sleepwalking through the old dungeons, either.

I was ten years old when I first played Ocarina of Time on N64, and it set me on a path to loving video games so much that they'd eventually become my job. I should be the perfect audience for the remake, but I've honestly been a little disappointed with how safe Nintendo seemed to be playing it.

I know, I know, you can't mess too much with a stone-cold classic, but I already know Ocarina of Time forward and backward, and I'm afraid trundling through a remake offering little more than prettier graphics would ultimately feel a little empty. Offering a few little surprises around the edges, though? That suddenly makes the prospect of revisiting Hyrule a lot more exciting.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's Hyrule feels more alive than ever thanks to clever expansion and a dose of Breath of the Wild vibes.

There's a decent chance you've never noticed it, but most of Rockstar's titles – including the likes of Grand Theft Auto 4 and 5 and the Red Dead Redemption games – have a subtle but persistent graphical bug. Based on the early trailers and gameplay footage, it looked like GTA 6 would be no exception, but the game's most recent trailer shows no evidence of the issue at all.

The problem? Animation stutter. Both character animations and camera movements are sometimes unevenly paced, leading to a herky-jerky effect that can give these games an unintentional appearance of stop motion. If you notice it, it might seem like the game is dropping frames, but the real problem seems to be tied to the underlying RAGE engine that's been powering Rockstar's games since the GTA 4 days.

According to Digital Foundry, this issue has also been present in every GTA 6 trailer released up until this point, including the extended gameplay look. Except, that is, for the recently released launch trailer, which is completely clear of any apparent animation stutter. That's despite the fact that it uses extensive panning camera shots, where the stutter is typically most obvious.

It's possible that this trailer simply featured a curated selection of scenes without the animation stutter, but given that Rockstar made no effort to hide this issue in previous previews, that seems unlikely. The devs have, after all, made clear that they're still tweaking things up until the very last minute.

Could the stutter finally be fixed after decades of it plaguing the developer's games? I guess we'll find out in one month's time.

Still figuring out where to pre-order GTA 6? You know where to click.

Now that GTA 6 is a mere month away, Rockstar Games is upping its marketing to maximum velocity – which, of course, means driving around in Grand Theft Auto-inspired cars around Miami (in other words, Vice City).

Yes, you read that right. Folks in Florida have caught wind of some, erm, very obviously GTA-coded supercars. They're hard to miss, honestly, considering their colors. Just have a look over at Reddit, where you'll find an amusing clip of them all at a gas station in Miami, you know, just casually fillin' up the tank.

There's a Manana, Buccaneer, Tempesta, Cheetah, Coquette D10, and Emerus, as the fan behind the video posts.

And, just in case you're worried that it's generative AI, folks point out this isn't the only clip showcasing the colorful vehicles taking over the streets of Miami.

A separate thread confirms as much, with the cars seen driving around Florida, led by a Vice City Police Department car. It's entertaining to just sit back and which, if I do say so myself – especially with all the "normal" non-GTA 6 traffic proceeding around them as normal.

This might just be the most unique form of advertising Rockstar has employed yet… even when you pit it against all the wild "hints" fans spent months – no, years – theorizing about.

There's just something about seeing all the fleshed out, patterned GTA 6 cars cruisin' around real-life Vice City that you can't beat, I suppose, and I'm clearly not alone in thinking so. The replies see fans having fun with the whole thing, as they should.

One reads, "Man, they just handed their marketing director a blank cheque and told them to have fun, didn't they?" Another jests, "Is this the multimillion dollar advertisement campaign?" Further down, somebody simply declares, "Man, this is so sick."

So, there you have it. If you're a game developer hoping to advertise your next big title, just send out a bunch of fancy (extremely expensive) cars, I guess.

Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake doesn't even rate against GTA 6 and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 as the "biggest games of the year," Activision exec says

Any franchise that lasts a number of years always winds up with a few unrealized projects, whether from partnerships that fell through or ideas that simply just didn't come together. Assassin's Creed has a bunch of them, and details and footage of another one have emerged.

This particular game was called Assassin's Creed Destiny, and it was part of a collaboration between Ubisoft and Chinese conglomerate Tencent. You might be aware these industry giants are currently working on Assassin's Creed Jade, a mobile game first announced back in 2022.

They had a couple of other potential releases on the docket as well, and one of them was remarkably similar to Jade. In fact, according to details gleaned by MP1st, Assassin's Creed Destiny was also set in China, and during the same period, taking place around 206 BCE, nine years after the events of Jade.

It would've been a full, triple-A game on modern hardware, marking a grand return to Chinese history after Assassin's Creed Chronicles way back in 2015. Jade is still fulfilling that promise, but on a different scale. Destiny was being handled by TiMi group, and we now have a smattering of images and clips demonstrating what could've been.

This definitely looks like a full-on Assassin's Creed game. You've the player character skulking around a palace during the Qin Empire. Your mission is to prevent an invading army from stealing some form of treasure. Doing so gets bloodier and messier than anyone would like, but you spend the majority of your time in the shadows, taking out soldiers and other enemies.

It looks intriguing - the architectural layouts offer plenty of exploration and the swords and spears make combat feel weighty. There's a spinning blade, somewhat like an umbrella, that seems like it would've been very entertaining.

Destiny was only canceled last year, a casualty of restructuring at TiMi. It's unknown how far along the game ultimately was, or if any of its ideas live on in Jade. There's no release window for the mobile game yet, but at least we can now look at what could've been.

Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake doesn't even rate against GTA 6 and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 as the "biggest games of the year," Activision exec says

We're just under three weeks away from the launch of The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time remake, and one French retailer has just doubled the carrots on the end of the pre-order stick.

Game store Micromania has managed to get its hands on replica PAL-edition Ocarina of Time N64 boxes to sleeve its Switch 2 physical copies, sending players to attend its midnight launch event home with the classic black and gold design.

The slipcase fully houses the modern Nintendo Switch 2 box, and while it's not a full reproduction of the original cardboard that graced our collections all those years ago it's certainly going to take over a shelf.

That's not all, though.

It seems French Zelda fans are being spoilt this time around. While The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time pre-order bonuses are largely limited to that foil case in other regions, Micromania also has a free wallet and a set of three Spiritual Stones. That's a whole lot of loot to set you up for a return to Kokiri Forest. It makes US and UK pre-orders look pretty stingy by comparison. Ocarina of Time is rife with opportunities for pre-order bonuses, but at the moment we're just scouting for savings on the game itself, now that the Spiritual Stones have all been snapped up at Nintendo UK.

All isn't lost for some of us, though. EB Games is also jumping on the N64 slipcase bandwagon with the NTSC-U version available to Canadians who pre-order while supplies last. Still want that throwback midnight launch party? Best Buy's having its own release party, with fresh 40th Anniversary Legend of Zelda Switch 2 stock up for grabs as well.

We're also rounding up the latest God of War Laufey pre-orders as well as the Metro 2039 pre-orders that have just hit the shelves.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake just got two brand-new trailers from Nintendo showing off a bit of the revamped game's combat and more.

Although they're short, the trailers pack quite a punch – and that's an understatement. You can find them on Nintendo's Japanese YouTube channel, starting with a 30-second mashup of the game's combat.

The video begins with a movie-trailer-esque scene featuring Ganondorf playing an organ, then cuts to Link, Navi, and the villain's face before diving straight into some action-packed battles. That's not all, either. For the first time ever, we see Dark Link.

Around 16 or so seconds in, Link takes on the shadowy doppelgänger – and honestly, I can't stop rewatching it all.

That plus the other new trailer from the channel, where we see more of Link, Zelda, and the ocarina itself in action. We get a glimpse of various locations, the Master Sword, and, of course, the remake's stunning visuals. It's exciting, to say the least, and I'm not alone in thinking so.

A thread over on X proves as much.

Between the comments dubbing the Ocarina of Time remake "peak," there are folks praising everything from Dark Link to Ganon's Castle. Others wonder why Nintendo didn't post the trailers on its international channels, which, valid.

My favorite reply of all, though, sums everything up about my reaction to the new videos (and others' as well, it seems) perfectly: "Holy shit." Holy shit indeed, anon. Holy shit indeed.

Thankfully, we won't have to wait too much longer before we can take Ganondorf and the rest of Hyrule's formidable foes on for ourselves. The Ocarina of Time remake releases next month on November 5 for the Switch 2 – that's less than a month away now.

And, you know what that means? We've got a couple of weeks to play through the original game again so we suck just a little bit less in dungeons (maybe I'm projecting here, okay).

Interested in one of this year's biggest new games yourself? Have a read through our Ocarina of Time remake preview to see why we love it so far.

We might be getting GTA 6 in November, but that doesn't necessarily mean the game is finished. In fact, games of that scale are never really done; they're just shoved into the world and updated in real time. Rockstar isn't shy about this, openly admitting that alterations are still underway on the blockbuster release.

This comes from Jason Schreier of Bloomberg, who put together a report on the huge release. In a YouTube video expanding on his reporting, he mentioned that leadership told him there weren't any major reasons the game kept getting delayed; it simply wasn't ready yet. All the disparate parts weren't coalescing the way anyone wanted, and so on.

He provides a quote from Phil Hooker, Rockstar's director of technology, to support this point. "The game is never completely settled," Hooker says.

"We never have an exact blueprint," he continues. "Even within the last few months, we've changed things."

That may sound somewhat drastic, but it's very normal in the industry, even outside releases of the scale of a new Grand Theft Auto. Devs are frequently tinkering and making adjustments right up to launch day, and then immediately thereafter, hence Day One patches and the like.

Modern games are living documents, and with the sheer amount going on in GTA 6, I can only imagine all the minute adjustments happening right now. The 13-year gap since the last one has created unprecedented attention and expectation. Rockstar has claimed literal drones have floated around the studio's windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of Leonida.

We'll all get to see it in motion come November 19, good, bad, or indifferent. I'm sure it'll have been worth the wait.

After avoiding GTA 5 for 13 years, Trevor actor says he's excited for GTA 6 and might even stream it

Before The Last of Us, "nobody" was making games like it, according to its game director - although that's definitely not the case anymore.

Speaking to OPM way back in 2012, before the original release of The Last of Us, game director Bruce Straley explained how Naughty Dog arrived at what would become its magnum opus. "It pretty much fell in our laps, that no one else is doing character-driven survival action games," he says. "That's really what it came down to. And we love that genre - we love playing it, we love watching it, we're influenced by it."

The goal in the early 2010s, Straley says, was to find out "if we can do what we do with Uncharted with this other genre - nobody's doing that." Neil Druckmann - now studio head at Naughty Dog and previously writer and creative director on The Last of Us - explains that "when you look at film, or comics, or any other medium that deals with this content, it's all about the characters. It's all about the pressures of the world forcing them to make really difficult decisions, and you learn something about who we are as human beings."

According to Straley and Druckmann, that's something that games weren't really pushing. Clearly, the Resident Evil series had existed for a long time before Ellie and Joel got on the scene, but Druckmann argues "no one [was] approaching it from the character side. It's all campy, over-the-top violence."

Whether or not you agree with the idea that Naughty Dog was doing something entirely new, what's undeniable is that the impact The Last of Us had means it's certainly not the case that this is an underused genre. The Plague Tale and Dying Light series, as well as Days Gone, both certainly pay attention to character within their apocalyptic worlds.

Elsewhere, the new Tomb Raider trilogy, as well as God of War and Ragnarok, borrow heavily from Naughty Dog's design. And ironically, the Resident Evil remakes certainly seem to have learned some lessons from the games they originally inspired.

"We're not done with The Last of Us": Neil Druckmann confirms Naughty Dog has "a couple projects in the works," even if the TV show is ending

Castlevania: Belmont's Curse has released to critical acclaim, but there was a point in development where it was shaping up to be a very different game, and one I'd wager wouldn't have scored nearly as well with critics or fans of Konami's beloved series.

Talking to PCGamesN, Evil Empire head of business Ben Laulan reveals Castlevania: Belmont's Curse went through a lot of iteration before landing on the faster-paced evolution of the whippy action gameplay we all know and love.

"We had many different versions of the game," Laulan reveals. "We had much slower versions, more like a Dark Souls kind of vibe with even more heavy combat and slow rhythm. Then we realized it wasn't really Castlevania because it was too slow, too intense, and just too hard."

I could've told you that. I have a well-documented allergy to Dark Souls and Soulslikes, having tried repeatedly to get into the most beloved of them like Bloodborne and Elden Ring, but even removed from that obvious bias, FromSoftware's signature dodge-roll into big-swing mechanics have no place in a 2.5D action game like Belmont's Curse. I'm so, so glad Evil Empire reconsidered that direction. However, it seems they went so hard in the other direction that we almost got Dead Cells: Belmont's Curse.

"So we cranked up the speed, and then it was too much Dead Cells because it was too fast-paced, and the exploration wasn't there as much as it needs to be in Castlevania."

I can understand the Dead Cells influence given Evil Empire's experience supporting Motion Twin's roguelike darling post-launch, but I'm still encouraged to hear the developer was keen to avoid taking on any identity that isn't distinctly Castlevania. I have yet to play Belmont's Curse myself, but it sounds like it's a worthy return to the long-dormant series. Our own Castlevania: Belmont's Curse review awards it 4/5 stars.

"Beautiful and challenging, Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse offers a rich, gothic world of puzzles to solve and enemies to whip," writes social media editor Serena Cherry. "With a stunning blend of fast-paced traversal action and compelling storytelling, this game proudly honours the Belmont legacy in exciting new ways."

Castlevania: Belmont's Curse was born out of "a sense of urgency," producer says, and if we have to wait 10 years for the next game, "the whole thing is meaningless."

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake is generating a massive amount of buzz, but given the proximity of its November 5 release date to the launch of GTA 6. it's difficult not to compare the games. But according to Tyler Bahl, Activision's chief marketing officer, GTA and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 make up the real one-two punch of 2026.

"Well, no offense to Zelda, but I think these are the two biggest games of the year," Bahl tells The Game Business. There's no denying that GTA 6 is the biggest game of the year, but how do Zelda and Call of Duty compare?

Mat Piscatella of analyst group Circana notes that purchase intent for Modern Warfare 4 is sitting around 15%, meaning that the group figures about 15% of console and PC players in the US intend to pick up the game. For the Ocarina of Time remake, purchase intent is 10.4%, but remember – that's across all PC and console players, and the game is a Switch 2 exclusive.

"On a per potential player rate, the intent on Ocarina is far higher," Piscatella says.

Call of Duty remains a juggernaut, but it's one whose stature has certainly diminished over the years, and new releases don't carry the same weight they once did. Purchase intent on Modern Warfare 4 is down from Black Ops 7 last year, which in turn was considered enough of a disappointment to completely derail Xbox's Game Pass strategy.

So yes, Call of Duty is likely going to be bigger than Zelda. But if Modern Warfare 4 and Ocarina of Time are heavyweight boxers, then GTA 6 is Godzilla – a monster so massive that every other game is an ant by comparison. It doesn't matter if you're a little bigger than the other guy when you're both facing down a literal behemoth.

Even so, Bahl sees GTA 6's launch as a potential positive for Call of Duty. "I think, in a lot of ways, more people coming into the dashboards, more people taking the dust off their Xbox or PlayStation and starting to play again and loading up that experience is going to be more eyeballs for us," he says.

These are the best Call of Duty games.

Shigaku codes will give you more opportunities to rise to the top of the class, as you go about your day in this Japanese school life simulation. Of course, it's not all about homework and tests, as you'll also need to hone your fighting skills to deal with threats across the schoolyard.

The promos available unlock a large number of free rerolls, which is handy as you'll need to them to modify everything from your abilities to your appearance, and even your name, while also giving some cash to spend in this slice of life Roblox experience. If you're ready to attend class, then these are the codes for Shigaku and how to redeem them.

If you're looking for promos with a more general use in all experiences, then we've got the latest information on the Roblox promo codes.

All Shigaku codes

The following Shigaku codes are available to claim rewards:

• TenToes – 65x Rerolls new!
• GiveMePity – 100x Rerolls
• TwentyFourthScare – 25 Rerolls
• HowScaryIsTheTwentyFourth – 25 Rerolls
• IsThisReallyTheUpdate – 25 Rerolls
• WillShigakuGetScarier – 25 Rerolls
• IsThisSchoolUpToCode? – 25 Rerolls
• HALLOWEEN2026 – 150x Rerolls
• 2XROLLS – 150x Rerolls, x2 Rerolls on packs for 60 min
• JUSTTHESTART – 10x Rerolls
• LAPEACE – 10x Rerolls
• 40KFAVS – 100x Rerolls
• BUGFIXES – 3x Rerolls
• RELEASETHANKYOU – 25x Rerolls
• MOREMOREMORE – 25x Rerolls
• MYBADFIXESOTW – 25x Rerolls

There are plenty of codes for Shigaku that are currently active, with a majority of them providing rerolls in varying numbers so you can have more RNG attempts at modifying your character. At least one promo also gives you some cash, to top up your wallet for future purchases.

How to redeem Shigaku codes

To redeem Shigaku codes you need to join the dsafasfasdfasdf community from the main Roblox screen, which is what the game means when it says you must "join the (私学) Shigaku group."

With that done, hit the ... MENU icon on the left of the screen, then choose the SETTINGS option from the menu that pops up. In the next menu select the CODES tab, and then use the ENTER CODE text box to type in a promo before hitting the REDEEM button. Codes for Shigaku are not case sensitive, so just focus on the correct spelling.

Expired Shigaku codes

• 25KMEMBERS – 100x Rerolls, 500x Cash
• 35KLIKES – 100x Rerolls
• 1KLIKESANDDELAYSORRY – 25x Rerolls
• 2XROLLSFIXED – 50x Rerolls
• WEREBACK – 150x Rerolls
• LOCKERSFIXED – 1x Reroll
• MASTERMANIPULATOR – 9x Rerolls
• 30KLIKES – 25x Rerolls
• SORRY4DELAYTHATSONUS – 25x Rerolls

There are a number of expired Shigaku codes, as while some promos seem to stick around for a while there are others that only have a short shelf life. Make sure you go ahead and claim all of the active codes while you can, so you don't miss out on any rewards.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

I'm not a gambling man. But if I were, this year's Game of the Year winner at The Game Awards has a clear favorite. The cut-off for eligibility across all categories at the 2026 event has been announced, and it gives just enough time for GTA 6 to slide in.

Per official criteria from The Game Awards, the cutoff is Friday, November 20. Any and all candidates for the trophies must be publicly available for purchase by then. When does GTA 6 arrive? November 19.

That's convenient, isn't it? The rules around the awards have been etched in stone for years now, and it's probably a stretch to say Rockstar aimed to get the new Grand Theft Auto in time to definitely qualify, but it'll likely have been seen as a worthwhile bonus.

The Game Awards gets a lot of eyes within the industry. It has helped bolster a proper awards circuit that elevated the likes of Baldur's Gate 3 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 while they were cleaning up sales wise.

Given the amount of time and investment, I'm certain Take-Two and Rockstar would like GTA 6 to be topping every sales chart for months on end and racking up all the trophies and statues it can manage.

Looking at the field right now, Saros, Slay the Spire 2, and Resident Evil: Requiem are likely to be nominated from what's already out. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake is probably the one to watch for GTA 6, but who knows.

As I say, I don't gamble. But the fact Grand Theft Auto 6 will be in the mix definitely tilts the odds.

As if you needed another reminder of why GTA 6 took so long, it has a realistic sweat system that makes Jason and Lucia perspire based on how hard they dance

Redeem the latest Komorebi Prison codes if you're looking to reroll your characters traits or look. As with many Roblox games, you can only upgrade your skills, combat abilities, or even appearance with gacha-like reroll mechanics, and if you don't want to pay for them, then free rerolls from promos can be a way to get want you want without buying or parting with Robux.

Komorebi Prison is a Roblox RPG, and the first thing you're taught is how to hold your own in a fight. While a basic knowledge can get you so far, improved combat skills are essential for survival in this tough environment, so here are the latest Komorebi Prison codes you need for free rerolls.

If you're after other, more general rewards that you can use across all experiences, then we've got the current Roblox promo codes covered too.

All Komorebi Prison codes

There are the Komorebi Prison codes you can redeem right now:

• PETS - 40x Rerolls new!
• CARDS - 25x Rerolls new!
• DOG - 25x Rerolls new!
• SEVENFIVE - 25x Rerolls new!
• POLL - 15x Rerolls new!
• SMOOTHFIGHTS - 25x Rerolls
• CREEPYCODE - 25x Rerolls
• SHORTKINGS - 35x Rerolls
• WALLFIX - 25x Rerolls
• SPORTS - 30x Rerolls
• TWOK - 30x Rerolls
• HANMA - 30x Rerolls
• SUKUNA - 50x Rerolls
• NICE - 25x Rerolls
• QUICKPATCHFIX - 25x Rerolls
• GANGWARS - 25x Rerolls
• PARRYFIX - 25x Rerolls
• ELORESET - 25x Rerolls
• BASKETBALL - 50x Rerolls

All Komorebi Prison codes grant rerolls, but the amount can vary from code to code, so whether you get 25, 50, or even more depends on how generous the devs are feeling that day. To get exactly what you're after across both your combat styles and appearance, though, you will need a lot of rerolls, so keep checking back here for new codes.

How to redeem Komorebi Prison codes

To redeem Komorebi Prison codes, first open the menu that's tucked away on the left-hand side of the screen. Here, click the Codes button as shown in the image above. Click on it to open the Enter Code redemption box, enter a code from above, and hit Redeem Code to claim your rewards.

Komorebi Prison codes are not case-sensitive, so you only need to worry about getting the spelling right.

Expired Komorebi Prison codes

• TIMED - Rerolls
• BUGFIXES - Rerolls
• MILLIONVISITS - Rerolls
• CODE - Rerolls
• REROLLS - Rerolls
• WEAREBACK - Rerolls
• DAILYREWARDS - Rerolls
• SECRETCODE - Rerolls
• BIRTHDAY - Rerolls
• MYERS - Rerolls
• TREAT - Rerolls
• OR - Rerolls
• TRICK - Rerolls
• BOO - Rerolls
• HALLOWEEN - Rerolls
• UNBANNED - Rerolls
• LENTA - Rerolls
• ANTICHEAT - Rerolls
• TWENTYK - Rerolls
• MINIFIXLOL192293 - Rerolls
• MINIGAMES - Rerolls
• BUFFS - Rerolls
• NERFS - Rerolls
• ONETHOUSANDCCU - Rerolls
• UPDATE - Rerolls
• QUICKPATCH - Rerolls
• CELL - Rerolls
• PATCHES - Rerolls
• REBOOT - Rerolls
• GANGS - Rerolls
• LOYAL - Rerolls
• TASER - Rerolls
• UNDERGROUND - Rerolls
• DPAD - Rerolls
• KOMOREBI - Rerolls
• MILLION - Rerolls
• MOBILE - Rerolls
• SORRY - Rerolls
• FIXES - Rerolls
• JOBS - Rerolls
• PATCH2 - Rerolls
• PATCH - Rerolls
• SECRETXD - Rerolls
• LAUNCH - Rerolls

Since the game's launch, plenty of Komorebi Prison codes have come and gone, and those that care currently valid will follow suit in no time. Be sure to always redeem promos as soon as you see them to avoid missing out.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

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!

The GTA 6 launch trailer is here, formally ushering in the next era of Grand Theft Auto after more than a decade post-GTA 5.

Rockstar shared the new trailer earlier today, "featuring the debut of 'Flower in a Hurricane' from original score composers Justice feat. Tame Impala, SZA, and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard," and confirming that this song will appear on the official GTA 6 soundtrack album.

The short trailer sees the dual protagonists, Jason and Lucia, open up about their struggles. Jason notably sports long hair for much of the trailer; in the opening seconds, he discusses the obstacles he's faced after a less-than-glamorous military departure. Lucia is seen sporting a monitoring anklet during an intimate shower scene, and at one point wonders, "Are we gonna be OK" amid a storm of crime.

Rockstar was in a very helicopter mood with this trailer. One helicopter crashes behind an assault rifle-toting Jason, Lucia rides another through the streets with a grenade launcher in hand, and in a third sequence a chopper is shown carrying a chained load of (presumably stolen) cargo through the city like a wrecking ball, shattering a row of windows on another building. A once-again short-haired Jason emerges from a helicopter in the next shot, only to cut to him and Lucia jumping off a roof into some sort of hotel pool.

"Jason and Lucia have always known the deck is stacked against them," reads the video description. "But when an easy score goes wrong, they find themselves on the darkest side of the sunniest place in America, in the middle of a criminal conspiracy stretching across the state of Leonida — forced to rely on each other more than ever if they want to make it out alive."

The early response from Grand Theft Auto fans is unsurprisingly enormous, with millions piling into Rockstar's accounts across social media. The trailer crossed 1 million views on YouTube in about half an hour, if you can trust overwhelmed metrics. In the comments, GTA 6 hopefuls express disbelief at finally having a launch trailer in their hands. "I thought I would never live this moment," reads one top comment.

"We are really at the finish line!!!" says another fan.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is out November 19 on PS5 and Xbox Series X. The launch trailer was captured on PS5, with a clear PlayStation marketing push bookending it.

As if you needed another reminder of why GTA 6 took so long, it has a realistic sweat system that makes Jason and Lucia perspire based on how hard they dance.

Nintendo has revealed a new mechanic in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake that will feature secrets for Navi to find, and hopefully make the companion less annoying.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake looks to be a pretty faithful recreation of the N64 classic. While there are some major changes – like full voice-acted cutscenes for everyone except Link, a new boss rematch mode, and the addition of a jump button and a dash to Link's movement kit – the core of the adventure should remain pretty familiar to anyone who has played the game or its 3DS remake.

However, it looks like Nintendo will be throwing completionists a bone or two, with a new world element popping up in the game – one which may mercifully replace the constant rambling from Navi.

Mentioned in a preview of the game by TechRadar Gaming – and highlighted by Twitter user Genki_JPN – fairy messages manifest around the world as little scribble drawings of fairies, and by having Navi interact with them, they'll relay tips to you, such as mentioning that things can fall out of trees when they are shaken. While unconfirmed, the assumption is that these will be a way to cut down on Navi's interjections to help Link out, which has been a major complaint about the game since 1998.

While Navi is nowhere near as overbearing as Fi from Skyward Sword, there's a reason the constant refrain "Hey! Listen" is an iconic part of Zelda history. And if this is a way to cut down on that – all while making for a neat little extra to search for in the world – I'm down. Although I reckon this will mostly be for things that aren't critical, I'd have to assume Navi will still tell Link some crucial details about the world, but esoteric hints may no longer be a priority for her.

GamesRadar+ features editor Andrew Brown also went hands-on for a The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake preview, which you can read right here!