All the games that have rushed their release dates out of November in response to Grand Theft Auto 6's November 19 launch have indirectly handed other big hitters like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake (out November 8) and World of Warcraft: Forever (out November 4) a remarkably open month. It can seem like Rockstar's done Nintendo and Blizzard a favor here, especially when these three games don't compete on the same platforms, but there's more to this month.

Ahead of the GTA 6 launch, I spoke to analyst Mat Piscatella, games lead at Circana. He's unsurprisingly confident that GTA 6, as the leader of the holiday rush, will help drive increased spending in the industry and, hopefully, bring in more players who will attract more investment which eventually leads to more good games. In this rush, he sizes up the November fear that's seen so many studios push up or delay their launches to avoid sitting next to Rockstar.

"I'm sure it's a little different for everyone who decided to move their game out, whether it was a feeling of direct competition or just not wanting to try to grab any air and have it all be suffocated away by Grand Theft Auto," Piscatella reasons. "I don't know, that's all an individual developer or publisher decision. But if I have a cozy sim or a first-person shooter or, I don't know, a puzzle platformer walking sim, I don't know why I would necessarily move my game for Grand Theft Auto. But hey, people are probably just scared of potentially running into this game. So we'll see.

"World of Warcraft: Forever is also coming out, and that's on PC where Grand Theft Auto isn't, so I'm sure those games are going to be just fine. The Switch 2 audience that isn't invested in PlayStation or Xbox at all, of course they're going to be very interested in Zelda, and even some Grand Theft Auto players are very interested in Zelda. We have about, according to our latest tracking, 15% of people who intend to buy Grand Theft Auto also intend to buy [the Ocarina of Time remake]. We have a lot of crossover there too. The thing's been built up so big, and absolutely warranted, but everyone just kind of moved and perhaps they didn't need to."

The interesting thing is that, despite enormous differences in tone, look, gameplay, audience, platform, and just about everything else, GTA 6 and the Ocarina of Time remake do have a fair bit in common when you zoom out. Piscatella notes that they both "lean more towards the more mature portions of the market in terms of age ranges," tap into nostalgia to varying degrees, and will lean toward "affluent folks" who can stomach today's console prices. How terrifying it is for GTA 5 to be so old that it can reasonably be called nostalgic.

"All that stuff's coming together to make it a great environment for this game to launch right now. Well, great given everything happening with pricing and supply constraints and the RAM crisis and everything else," Piscatella observes.

But has Rockstar actually helped Blizzard or Nintendo indirectly? "Maybe," Piscatella says. But "with Nintendo first-party games on Nintendo platforms, it's always an open window because that's primarily what those platforms are used for by folks." A new Zelda remaking one of the best-known games of all time was always going to hit hard. It just works out nicely that GTA 6 can top PS5 and Xbox Series X, Ocarina is the big Switch 2 title for November, and WoW: Forever could hardly ask for less competition on PC.

You can understandably argue that there's never really an open window given the volume of games coming out every year, the number of free-to-play games available, and the amount of time and money being poured into the same live services. All games face competition at all times. But games will dodge each other for a reason, and looking at core platforms and premium new releases, the stars have really aligned this November.

Piscatella notes that WoW: Forever is also a nostalgia play. "There's probably going to be some crossover there," he says. "It's come on real hot with the beta – wasn't really thinking about it before that beta, but the beta was so strong in terms of reaction and participation. It's a little bit of a dark horse in terms of its overall impact, but it could be something. It also has a pretty open-ish window, even though there's no open windows on PC anymore because of everything going on.

"But these three games? Great. Everything else in the market, we'll see. We'll see what happens for everything else that's come out in September and October, and everything that's going to be coming out in January, February that got pushed out. We'll see what the blast radius really is on this thing."

Nearly 1 in 3 gamers plan to buy GTA 6 in the US, analyst confirms: "A rare cultural and commercial moment"

After 28 long years, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is finally getting a jump button in the Switch 2 remake because Nintendo knew it'd feel "jarring" without one, even if the decision threw some devs from the OG since it was such a "convenient" design choice previously.

Speaking in a new installment of Nintendo's Ask the Developer interview, Ocarina of Time remake program director Hiroki Taguchi – who first joined the Zelda team to work on Breath of the Wild – notes that certain "adjustments" have been made "so that people who've played titles from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild onward won't find the experience jarring as they make their way through the adventure."

Director HokWai Ng adds to this, specifying that "that's also one of the reasons we removed auto-jump." Previously, Link couldn't jump on command – if push came to shove, he could muster up a hop if you pushed the control stick forward in specific places, and as Ng says, "the places where jumping was possible and where it wasn't were clearly defined."

Even so, that may not cut it for players who've gotten used to the more modern Zelda adventures where they can jump around as much as they please.

"So, for Link's jump, we carried over the controls from more recent titles in the series and made it possible to jump anywhere with a single button press," Ng adds.

Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma reckons that this addition "makes exploration much more exciting," but adding it was no small feat.

"Since there were places where we preferred players not to jump, the auto-jump system was, in some ways, convenient from a development standpoint," he admits.

"If you remove that restriction and make it possible to jump anywhere, you need to anticipate all kinds of player behavior and make corresponding adjustments to the environment. So, at first, we were like, 'Are we sure about this?'" he laughs. "So, even a single change can instantly increase the number of things that need to be reviewed."

The new jump ability was something that Nintendo had to consider when it came to all the terrain in the game – and how both Young and Adult versions of Link would traverse it.

Art director Aya Shida notes that since "the distance they can jump differs slightly between the two," it meant that "even when designing a single piece of terrain, it was challenging to find the right balance in terms of making gaps just the right distance to jump across."

This also meant a change to Ocarina of Time's returning Jump Attack. Taguchi notes that in the OG game, you could launch a Jump Attack using just one button, whereas the Switch 2 remake uses a Breath of the Wild-style "two-step approach." However, this didn't sit quite right with Aonuma.

"Trouble was, I was so used to the original game's controls that I just couldn't get the hang of it," Aonuma laughs. "When I told the team, 'This just doesn't feel as satisfying as the original Jump Attack,' they added a way to perform it with a single button press."

The devs are aware this is a matter of personal preference, though – fellow producer Hidemaro Fujibayashi notes that he was "more used to jumping first and then attacking," and that "in the end, we implemented both control schemes so that fans of the original game, as well as those who've played The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild but not The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, could have a comfortable experience. That said, neither control scheme gets in the way of the other."

It's a more flexible approach to modern improvements than the devs took with a different – now scrapped –quality-of-life improvement, though.

Aonuma noted how he first requested the devs to add Breath of the Wild-style warp points, but later asked them to be removed after he realized that they ruined the "important" moments of discovery during the exploration of the world.

Zelda dev responsible for Ocarina of Time's infamous Water Temple used the remake to atone for his sins: "I had some overdue homework."

Zelda series lead Eiji Aonuma has admitted that he wanted to use The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake to make the Water Temple a bit less obtuse.

In the 28 years since The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, one challenge has lived in infamy: the dreaded Water Temple. While the classic adventure game was universally praised, the Water Temple was the sole sticking point for many, with its somewhat obtuse design proving a huge challenge. However, to many people – myself included – the problem with the Water Temple was less about the challenge or dungeon design itself and more about the tedium of constantly pausing to equip or remove the Iron Boots to navigate the area.

As for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, Aonuma – whose role in the N64 classic was as the game's dungeon designer – explained that the Water Temple was a big motivator in Nintendo's Ask the Developer article about the game. "I had some overdue homework: I wanted to do something about the Water Temple I created 28 years ago," Aonuma says, explaining, "Since it became well known for its difficulty in the original game, I had the team make some adjustments in this version."

However, this is not the first time Aonuma spoke about wanting to change the Water Temple; in fact, in a 2011 Iwata Asks interview, Aonuma said, "I wanted to do something about the Water Temple" when discussing his motivation for making The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. He explained at the time, "Everyone talks about it, so it’s been a longstanding wish of mine these 13 years!" but clearly its version of the dreaded dungeon wasn't enough.

"When I designed the Water Temple all those years ago, I wanted to create an experience where simply being underwater was fun," Aonuma explains in 2026. He cites his love of freediving and finds it fascinating "how different everything feels" when you are submerged.

"I wanted to create a place where players could experience those sensations," Aonuma explains. The remake's director, HokWai Ng, explains that the remake makes item toggling easier, as well as changing "some of the walls that made it easy to lose your sense of direction to lattice-style structures," so hopefully this new version will finally satisfy Aonuma's desire to "fix" the temple.

Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake had a Breath of the Wild quality-of-life feature until the series producer made devs take it out because it ruined "important" moments

The Elder Scrolls 6 is indeed titled Sentinel, just as rumors previously predicted – and Bethesda Game Studios has picked its big 40th anniversary celebration to reveal it.

Yes, that's right – nearly 15 years after Skyrim, we finally know what the next Elder Scrolls game is called: Sentinel.

Todd Howard unveils the title alongside a short clip of sand (likely alluding to both the "sands of time," so to speak, and perhaps the literal sands of the Alik'r Desert, considering the whole "Sentinel" and Hammerfell thing) and an Elder Scroll, dubbing Bethesda's 40th birthday the "perfect time to tell you what The Elder Scrolls 6 is actually called."

It's incredible to witness as an Elder Scrolls fan (despite how short it is, of course), as Howard himself recently told us to "just pretend we didn't didn't announce it" in regard to the sixth Elder Scrolls, stating that The Elder Scrolls 6 is still "a while" off – which, to be fair, it could very well still be, as there's no release date or window yet.

Again, we don't get too much out of the teaser in Bethesda's 40th anniversary celebration video on YouTube – but it's enough to send theories soaring here shortly, I'm sure, between the scroll, the evident setting, and the quote.

Yep, a quote – from Yazar, Moth Priest of High Queen Iradne of Hammerfell: "The scroll offered only a shimer, a veil thinly lifted to my eyes. A future lost. A victory undone. Sands of time scattered by fate."

Perhaps even more eye-catching than the quote itself is the date attached to it: 4E 206. In other words, just five years after the events of Skyrim where we played as the Dovahkiin (or, erm, continue to play if you're still hooked over a decade on like I am). it spurs a whole lot of questions about The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel and its mysterious premise.

And, although I'm a tad disappointed that we might be playing in a post-Skyrim Tamriel (look, I want to see the Dwemer and Falmer in action, okay?), I'm thrilled we've got anything at all from Bethesda aside from the reveal trailer we saw in 2018 during that one very fateful E3 showcase.

This is one of the biggest new games underway, after all – I'll take whatever I can get, Bethesda. I mean whatever, too.

After 29 years, a lost Easter egg in Bethesda's forgotten Elder Scrolls spin-off has finally been uncovered

Developers behind The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake have confirmed speculation that the game's new art direction was inspired by puppet shows.

Nintendo dropped the first gameplay footage of the remake back in September as part of The Legend of Zelda 40th anniversary Nintendo Direct, which is where we got our first look at the game's divisive art style. Series producer Eiji Aonuma asserted "we didn't just aim for realistic graphics," but it was safe to say that it was certainly a shock, the same way the Star Fox remake's art direction was for many.

Someone with a vested interest in both series is Takaya Imamura, who designed the Star Fox crew and was the art director of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, birthing Tingle into the world. He speculated that the new art direction was influenced by puppet shows, which Shigeru Miyamoto is known to love (thanks to Star Fox). Despite being his personal opinion, this suggestion was taken as fact by many, but it turns out he was on the money.

In a new edition of Nintendo's Ask the Developer series, Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake art director Aya Shida notes that "for this game, we wanted to rebuild Hyrule as a rich, dense world that felt as though it could truly exist, while retaining the feel of the original. At the same time, we wanted its colorful and quirky characters to feel like a natural part of that world."

"To help the team understand what we were aiming for, early in development we used phrases like 'a puppet-show feel' and 'the analog feel of practical effects films' as keywords," Shida adds, confirming Imamura's speculation. She explains, "Neither puppet shows nor practical effects films reproduce reality exactly as it is," and that "We also felt that there was some overlap between these forms of expression and the distinctive nostalgia evoked by the original game."

Aonuma adds, "the current development team feels a certain sense of nostalgia" – despite some of them having never played the original – and that "their efforts to express that nostalgia led them to an analog, puppet-show-like feel." But this approach seems to have gotten the Aonuma seal of approval, as he notes, "As one of the original developers, that progression made sense to me."

Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake had a Breath of the Wild quality-of-life feature until the series producer made devs take it out because it ruined "important" moments

Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy lead Naoki Hamaguchi may be working towards what's shaping up to be the biggest and boldest installment yet, the grand finale of Revelation, but it turns out that, of the three, the first game was the hardest to make.

In an interview with French content creator mistermv, translated by Genki on Twitter (and verified by GamesRadar+), Hamaguchi is asked what the biggest development challenge of the trilogy has been, and he immediately points back to where it all began.

For a start, the development team was much smaller in the beginning. At first, Hamaguchi notes, the team was only comprised of 30 people – a number obviously eclipsed by the final credits on the game.

But more than that, Remake also had the challenge of setting up what would follow it. The start of the project meant deciding on the entire visual look and graphical quality for the Remake trilogy, for example, all while working to the pressure of pleasing the many massive FF7 fans, with the worry of the devs' efforts being insufficient in meeting players' lofty expectations.

On the other hand, Rebirth and Revelation were able to follow in the footsteps of the foundation built by Remake – while they may have been larger and more ambitious, as Hamaguchi puts it, they had a base to go on, and the team working on them had grown and evolved, too.

Hamaguchi and other FF leads have previously spoken about how creating the Final Fantasy 7 remake in the trilogy format has allowed the devs to take on feedback between installments, too, hopefully making each experience better than the last for players. For example, Hamaguchi is aware that many players felt that Rebirth had an overwhelming amount of content, and while Revelation "probably" has even more, the devs have made some key differences in signposting what side-content will earn you what rewards, and ultimately making it easier for players to decide what they care about pursuing.

Final Fantasy 7 Revelation has a hard mode you can select from the start, Naoki Hamaguchi says, but it "won't function in the exact same way as it did in Remake and Rebirth."

Stardew Valley creator Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone has been hard at work on the 1.7 update for some time now, teasing fans about what to expect – and it sounds like it'll bring much more than just two new marriage candidates to the table.

We already know we'll be able to romance Clint and Sandy come 1.7, and that we'll get a new farm type with the update. It sounds big enough as is, considering just those elements and the other social features ConcernedApe has teased – but it's not just big, y'all.

According to the mastermind developer, it might just be the biggest that Stardew Valley has ever seen… even bigger than 1.5 and 1.6, which boasted added regions, festivals, and more.

He reveals as much during a recent Stardew Valley Symphony of Seasons concert at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, as posted over on Reddit by an attending fan.

After recalling how incredible his farming sim's growth has been, he mentions the patch that's on everyone's mind. "We're working on the 1.7 update, which is looking to be the largest Stardew Valley update ever," he says. "It's jam-packed."

ConcernedApe doesn't stop there, either. In his own words, "Clint and Sandy are just the tip of the iceberg – there's so much more in the update." He even drops a release hint: "You guys are in for a real treat, and it'll probably come out sometime next year."

Next year is just a couple of months away at this point, which means we could get the new Stardew Valley update a whole lot sooner than expected (should the stars align, of course).

There are a good few months in 2027, though – you know, a whole 12 of 'em – so there's no telling just yet whether or not we'll get 1.7 toward the start of the year or the tail end. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed for the former, but ConcernedApe's a busy guy.

He's got Haunted Chocolatier to grapple with, too, which he previously admitted is "taking a long time" to get right – but getting things right is his priority.

Stardew Valley "3DVR" mod looks like a whole different game, is "fully playable" and compatible with all of your existing mods

Super Mario Bros. players have spent years trying to build the perfect speedrun. The race to be the first to achieve the perfect run has escalated dramatically over the past year, and the now-legendary Niftski has just set a new record that's just two frames away from the entire community's ultimate goal. The catch? He didn't actually want to do it – at least not when he did.

"My supporters donated $1,000 for me to do a Mario impression" for an entire Halloween stream, as Niftski explains in the description of his record run on YouTube. He dutifully completed the stream dressed in a Mario hat and fake mustache while doing what he recognizes as "the worst Mario impression of all time."

The entire video is an absolute delight as Niftski slowly recognizes that he's on world record pace while wearing a silly costume and doing a silly voice. "Finally, I just-a had to-a lock in," he says as he warps into level 4-1. The faux facial hair starts to bother him in 4-2, as he complains that "I want to shave-a this thing off because it's-a literally freaking uncomfortable as hell-a."

"I really hope this run dies, by the way," he says as he enters the game's final stages, still on pace for that record. By level 8-3, the penultimate stage, he's getting desperate. "Please have this-a run die," he begs, "I don't-a like it, I don't-a want to get this larping as Mario."

Yet he does indeed secure the world record while-a doing a Mario voice. "It made me not nervous at all," he recognizes, and that might've been the push he needed to set the new record. Still, there are two more frames to shave away before the perfect speedrun finally arrives, and I can only imagine what lengths Niftski might have to go to in order to calm his nerves again.

After 28 years, new Zelda: Ocarina of Time glitch completely changes 2 major boss fights, and speedrunners are scrambling to figure out the implications

It's impossible to overstate just how influential The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has been since it launched on the Nintendo 64 back in 1998. It defined what 3D action-adventure games would look and play like for decades – not just in the Zelda series, but across all video games. As it turns out, this was part of the reason series producer Eiji Aonuma wanted to create the upcoming Ocarina of Time remake: he wanted to be sure the younger developers on the Zelda team understood just how important it was.

"Many of the team members who work alongside me on Legend of Zelda games today have only experienced developing the more recent titles," Aonuma explains in a new Ask the Developer interview from Nintendo. "That led me to wonder, 'Do they truly understand just how significant The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was to the series as a whole?'"

Aonuma admits that, "of course, there are team members who vaguely know the game, and those who played it in their childhood days. But I started to wonder how they'd interpret The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as they go about developing future Legend of Zelda games."

In part two of the interview, several of those younger developers explain their own history with Ocarina of Time. Some did have childhood memories of the game, while others had no experience with the original. "I played the Nintendo 64 version for the first time after joining this project," art director Aya Shida explains, "and I was amazed that a game this polished had been created 28 years ago."

"By learning the game structure and development style behind the original The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time," Aonuma explains, "and by actually rebuilding it as a full remake, it may trigger new insights that they can carry forward into future development. If we could achieve that, I thought it would be incredibly valuable. That's what led us to the conclusion that now is the right time to revisit The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time once again."

I'm excited by that rationale. The Zelda series hit severely diminishing returns by following closely the blueprint that Ocarina of Time laid out, and while Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword are both great games, there's no denying that they had less of an impact than the N64 classic. Zelda wouldn't feel truly fresh again until Breath of the Wild revamped the entire format of the series, but I fear that more open-world games are going to quickly get stale.

Maybe a synthesis of fresh and familiar ideas from a new generation of Zelda devs is just what the series needs. While Aonuma first joined the Zelda team by assisting on Ocarina of Time, it sounds like he wasn't too precious about these younger devs making changes to his baby. In fact, he wanted them to be even more bold – at least at first.

"Looking at what they ultimately created," Aonuma explains, "I'm impressed by how rich an experience they were able to craft from a game that first came out 28 years ago. At the beginning of development, I remember thinking, 'They could be making more changes.' But as the project went on, it really came across just how deeply this development team cared about the original game, far more than we had imagined."

Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake had a Breath of the Wild quality-of-life feature until the series producer made devs take it out because it ruined "important" moments

Final Fantasy Resonance has been an undeniable hit for Square Enix, but it turns out that its producer's pitch initially faced some pushback from executives at the company who would have preferred the game to be a basic port.

Resonance is sort of like what Octopath Traveler 0 is to Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent, except for Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. Both titles have taken mobile games that came before them and adapted parts of their stories – in Octopath's case, also adding more narrative content – for a full console launch, removing mobile elements like microtransactions and gacha systems in the process.

Given that Final Fantasy Brave Exvius was previously shut down, Resonance is also helping keep its legacy alive, but beyond its ties to the mobile game, it's also a new HD-2D turn-based Final Fantasy experience that a lot of people have been craving for some time. Speaking to Bloomberg in an interview, producer Keisuke Nakashima reveals that his pitch in 2020, which suggested expanding the mobile game for a proper console adaptation, first faced resistance from Square Enix execs who were apparently more keen on the idea of pursuing a simple, cheaper port that'd be faster to make.

"I didn't want to go down that route," Nakashima says. "I wanted to create an original version for consoles that was a full-blown gameplay experience."

Nakashima recalls hearing some "really disappointing" feedback about Brave Evius during a press tour for the mobile game, where, despite plenty of people being interested in it, they expressed that they "didn't want to play it just because of the gacha elements." He explains: "That was another reason we wanted to make this a console game, to bring it to a wider audience."

It's certainly working for Square Enix, anyway – it reached the largest ever Steam player peak for the series' single-player games, and less than five days since launch, one analyst estimated that it'd sold 400k copies across PS5, Xbox Series X, and Steam, bringing in around $20 million in revenue. Hopefully those initially doubtful execs are happy now.

Final Fantasy 14 Evercold won't suffer from Dawntrail's pacing issues, Yoshi-P says, as the MMO commits to respecting your time.

F-Stop – the canceled Valve project that was the original Portal follow-up – has leaked online and is fully playable after being found in the massive Steam leak earlier this year.

Back in August 12TB of Steam data from 2003 and 2013 dropped online which featured a ton of builds of Valve titles like Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, and Counter Strike: Global Offensive. This data was apparently "hidden in plain sight, but with no protection whatsoever," and was easily accessible without hacking the whole time, proving to be a treasure trove for Valve fanatics, with early Portal 2 builds featuring bullet time being uncovered. And unless Half Life 2: Episode 3 is found anytime soon, the true holy grail of this leak may have been found.

As reported by Kotaku, users in the Valve Cut Content project’s Discord have managed to find the game's source code and map data, meaning that F-Stop is fully playable. YouTube user ToothpasteVixen uploaded the intro to the game – featuring earlier narration from a JK Simmons-less Cave Johnson – which will give you a good idea of the concept for those unaware, but to put it simply, it almost feels like an earlier take on the 2019 puzzle game Superliminal where taking photos allows you to manipulate the environment.

F-Stop was one of five projects coming from what Gabe Newell described as "Directed Design Experiments," where Valve's production was shut down for a few months which would have the company's teams participate in what is effectively a massive game jam. F-Stop was one of the standout projects from it, with Newell asking the team behind it to develop it into a prequel to Portal.

Ultimately, as per Portal 2 - the Final Hours, the project was canceled after playtesters didn't react entirely positively – namely, questioning why a Portal follow-up did not include the Portal Gun – but now, 15 years after the actual Portal 2 was released and with no sequel in sight, you can play a sort of new Portal experience.

Backrooms director posts from Valve's office again, and Portal movie speculation is intensifying.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's long-awaited Switch 2 remake might be bringing Nintendo's 1998 classic back to life with almost 28 years' worth of improvements, but the devs decided to reject one modern quality-of-life feature to avoid Link's classic adventure from losing some of its old magic.

Speaking in a new Nintendo Ask the Developer interview, Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma explains that during the development of the new remake, he suggested implementing a Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild-style quality-of-life feature that could have made traversing the world much quicker – fast-travel points.

"In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, there are many warp points that enable players to move quickly around the game's vast world," he begins. "In the original The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, you could get around a bit faster by spamming forward roll, so I think a lot of players spent their time doggedly rolling across Hyrule Field whenever they needed to be somewhere in a hurry. (Laughs)."

This is something that Aonuma initially felt "we needed to address" in the remake. "So I asked the team to add warp points that didn't exist in the original game, giving players access to shortcuts," he explains.

However, when the devs implemented this feature, the vibes were completely off, the producer continues. "When we actually tried playing the game with those warp points, we realized that we were missing out on the moments of discovery that came from stopping along the way and wondering, 'Wait, what's this?'" he reasons.

"Through this development process, we were reminded once again just how important those moments are to the very structure of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time," Aonuma says. "So even though I was the one who proposed adding warp points, they just weren't working for me in the end, so I got the team to take them all back out again. (Laughs)."

Even without the newly added fast-travel points, the Zelda devs have added another way to get around Hyrule quickly. Instead of doing his best Sonic impression and rolling around at the speed of sound, Link can now simply run. Oh, and he can jump now, too.

Google's new Zelda: Ocarina of Time Easter egg takes us back to 1998 just in time for Nintendo's remake, and it's perfectly nostalgic.

Final Fantasy 14 producer and director Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida knows one of Dawntrail's biggest issues at launch was the story's pacing, so the team is putting in the work to ensure that Evercold doesn't suffer the same fate.

Speaking to the media at Final Fantasy 14's Japanese leg of Fan Fest, Yoshida takes a question about what the team behind the MMO has learned from Dawntrail and how important it has been for Evercold's development.

"This time we are putting in serious consideration on the sense of tempo," Yoshida says, per a mod from the Final Fantasy 14 subreddit who was in attendance. "Back at Dawntrail we were being really careful in depicting new lands, new cultures, new encounters and this greatly slowed down the pacing on story progression. The fact that this did not align with players’ motivation of 'keep moving forward' shows shortcomings on my part as the director."

To remedy the pacing issues for Evercold, Yoshida says the team is moving some of the aforementioned focus to side quests, meaning you can enjoy that kind of thing if and when you want.

"This is actually connected to Final Fantasy 14's overall evolution, so we have to consider how precious players' time they have here," Yoshida adds. "After all, we will face the fact on how it's difficult for this to be relatable to players if the story doesn't progress at a brisk, fast-paced tempo, therefore we are placing a strong emphasis on this aspect this time."

I have been cautiously optimistic about Evercold since it was unveiled early this year, and this is another step in the right direction. While Dawntrail's story does eventually get good – doubly so in the post-expansion patches – it puts you in the position of having to defend it by telling your raid-brained pals to "stick with it, honestly," which is not an amazing place to be in games or other media like TV or film.

Dawntrail had other issues, sure, though Square Enix has shown enough consideration about that elsewhere. Of course, how this all works will remain to be seen. I've played Final Fantasy 14 for a long ol' time, and I've seen expansions launch with pacing issues – looking at you, Stormblood – that were remedied in later expansions. Hopefully Evercold sticks the landing in a way that hangs around for many expansions after.

Final Fantasy 14 theorists were right all along: Evercold's second job is the ranged Zephyr DPS that uses crossbows and a deadly pet bird.

Google is gearing up for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake as much as any of us, it seems, with a nostalgic little Easter egg.

For years now, Google has included some fun Easter eggs via its search engine. You can type "Minecraft" into your browser to play a bit of the iconic Mojang game. Or, input "do a barrel roll" and watch your screen flip around.

The latest Easter egg from Google offers no exception, acting as a silly (but very welcome) ode to Nintendo's beloved Zelda franchise – simply type in "The Legend of Zelda" or "Ocarina of Time" and see for yourself.

A Master Sword will appear, and should you click on it, you'll see it inserted – and then you'll be transported back to 1998, when Nintendo's original Ocarina of Time made its way into the wild, sort of like a pseudo-child Link or something.

The old Google font, bright primary colors, and exclamation mark intact, is there, along with the 90s search interface you might recall from way back when.

The whimsy is unparalleled, honestly.

I'm not the only one obsessed with it, either (seriously, you don't want to know how many times I've searched for Zelda today so far).

Over on X, comments see folks agreeing that it's a good bit of fun – and, uh, unsurprisingly wishing that Google's search engine still looked like it did in 1998. As one reads, "Can we just… keep it like that now? Forever." Another adds, "Can we get that Google back?"

Sadly, though, I think we're stuck as adult Link in 2026. This is all in honor of the Ocarina of Time remake anyway, which is set to release in just a few days on November 5.

It boasts everything that made us fall in love with the OG some 28 years ago while also bringing new features to the table, from sidequests to dungeon tweaks and Breath of the Wild's option to turn off the UI for more immersion (and difficulty).

Plus, breathe a sigh of relief – the jump button we've wanted for decades.

Not all Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake devs have played the N64 original, series producer says – but "it's thanks to these young people" it was made

As we enter GTA 6 territory, Fortnite's apparent answer to keeping players engaged is simple – break out the free stuff, stat. However, the shock is just how generous its latest offer is – but earning it is probably going to have a lot of players grinding for an entire month.

Fortnite's latest season, Treasure Hunters, kicked off yesterday, November 1, and as a shorter, month-long mini-season, it was always going to have its work out for it to compete for the spotlight when GTA 6 launches on November 19. Prior to its launch, I thought the plan here was its long-awaited One Piece collab, but as was highlighted shortly after the season went live, Epic Games had another trick up its sleeve.

Enter the Fortnite Pirate Shop Access tokens. Every time you open a chest this season to grab your regular loot – guns, healing items and the like – there's an extremely slim chance that you'll be greeted with a big, golden pop-up declaring, "You found Pirate Shop Access." This grants two special tokens – one for use during a window of time this year, and one in 2027 – which, when activated, allow you to claim almost everything in Fortnite's item shop for free for 14 consecutive days.

To be clear, that means you can log on for two weeks, and every single day, claim almost everything – that means skins, bundles, emotes… you name it – in the shop without spending a single V-Buck. And then, if that wasn't enough, you can return for a second two-week free period next year.

The way Fortnite's item shop works means that you won't be able to claim everything that's ever been added to the game with this, as cosmetics rotate in and out of the store each day. But, depending on how many items you already own and what's in the shop when you activate your tokens, players could genuinely net themselves hundreds, if not thousands of dollars' worth of cosmetics using this.

The only things users aren't allowed to claim for free are "real money offers" (items you can only buy with actual cash rather than V-Bucks) and Battle Pass levels; they can only grab "one free sidekick you do not already own." Owners also can't gift things to others for free, which, to be fair, makes sense since it could lead to a massive chunk of the player base clearing out the item shop for weeks on end if it was permitted.

And that part ties into the only major catch – the rarity. As you'd imagine, the Pirate Shop Access tokens are extremely hard to come by – Epic Games hasn't confirmed the actual odds, but a quick look on social media will show you players opening hundreds and thousands of chests without seeing that fateful pop-up. Given that we're only on day two of the season, we'll probably get a better idea of the stats as we go along, but it's safe to say that many are already fully committed to the grind – which, let's face it, is definitely what the devs were going for.

For anyone keen to try their luck, it seems like it might be easier to find Pirate Shop Access if you're playing with your friends. It's already been confirmed that if you're playing with others and someone else on your team opens one of the lucky chests, the reward will be granted to everyone in the squad (or duo or trio).

There are some other rare rewards this season which can be found in the same way – right now, you can also unlock a golden A$AP Rocky skin and pickaxe, a loading screen, vehicle, Jam Track, and more – but I think it's safe to say that the Pirate Shop Access is going to be the One Piece for most players this season.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says new multiplayer games flop because everyone's "already formed solid human networks in Fortnite, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, and Apex Legends."

The Nintendo Switch 2 is the talk of the town this week, not just because stock hunters are ready and waiting for its first special edition release but also while we count down the final days until its biggest release of the year so far.

Ocarina of Time remake is going to send everyone back to the '90s on November 5, but if you're not holding out for more Legend of Zelda Nintendo Switch 2 stock, Woot's getting upgraders there for $30 less this week. The Nintendo Switch 2 has dropped from $499 to $469 at the Amazon-owned retailer, but this one's going to move fast. I've previously only ever seen discounted refurbished units on these shelves and even they typically sell out before the day is done.

Woot has sold Nintendo Switch 2 handhelds cheaper than this in the past, but rarely in new condition and this is the first time I've seen it here since the September 1 price increase.

• Join GamesRadar+ Deals on WhatsApp for our top daily discounts

Refurbished handhelds swallow up this shelf space every now and then, with the most recent offering landing back in October. Combining an on-screen discount with an additional discount tied to its gaming event, customers could grab renewed devices for as little as $409.

That was a perfect storm of savings we see typically once or twice a year. If you're upgrading your handheld ahead of Ocarina of Time (while still spending as little as possible), Woot's current Nintendo Switch deal will get you there for $50 less than the hard-to-find special edition release.

The discount is our GamesRadar+ Deal of the Day for November 2, but judging by the speed at which renewed offers have flown off the shelves at Woot it's not expected to last much longer. Unless you're holding out to roll the dice on Black Friday Nintendo Switch deals, time is of the essence here.

Unfortunately, there's a sad side to this story. While previously enjoying a $10 discount on physical pre-orders, both Amazon and Walmart have now run out of stock on the textured foil Ocarina of Time remake cart. If you want that physical case, you're now looking at the full $69.99 at Best Buy.

• Ocarina of Time Remake (Digital) | $59.99 at Amazon

Taking Woot up on their offer? Check out the best Nintendo Switch 2 accessories to get started with, as well as the best Nintendo Switch 2 controllers and best Nintendo Switch headsets.

Non-Milsim Content in MW4 is a new kind of warning label that players can find attached to multiplayer game modes like Possession, but what does it actually mean for something in COD to be Milsim Content or not? If your familiarity with Call of Duty games and military shooters is more casual, you might not be familiar with this term, but here's what you can expect when it comes up in MW4 multiplayer.

What does Non-Milsim Content in MW4 mean?

Non-Milsim Content in MW4 is a warning label on certain game modes in multiplayer, and what it basically means is that this particular game mode isn't going to be very realistic to military combat. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is up to you.

Milsim is a gaming term that's shorthand for "Military Simulation", a reference to Call of Duty's declared genre, as well as similar games in the industry like Battlefield. Obviously you can argue about how realistic they actually are, but in this case the label "Non Milsim Content" is tied to multiplayer modes that specifically aren't interested in anything like actual realism. For example, the limited time Halloween "Possession" mode allows you to leap into the bodies of enemies you kill and control them, which clearly isn't grounded in any sort of realism.

You can still bring your own guns into Possession, even if there's a risk of them being commandeered by the enemy. To make sure you're as deadly as possible in any mode, check out the best MW4 Vel 46 build, the best MW4 M4 build, and the ultimate MW4 Han 86 build, to pick some of the game's most popular weapons!

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The Fortnite pirate shop token is currently the talk of the town, as it represents an incredible piece of plundered loot to tie in with the piracy-themed mini-season. If you're lucky enough to find this extremely rare token during Fortnite Treasure Hunters, then you'll be able to plunder the item shop by claiming almost everything available there for free during a two week period, making this one of the most valuable rewards ever! To bring you up to speed, I'll explain how to get a pirate shop token in Fortnite and how rare it actually is.

How to get a Fortnite pirate shop token

Currently, the only way to get a Fortnite pirate shop token is to keep opening chests in the game, as it is a random loot drop. It comes from standard chests, so you don't need to track down rare ones, and you'll know if you've found an item shop token as the chest will glow and shake for several seconds before exploding with a "YOU FOUND PIRATE SHOP ACCESS" message appearing across the screen.

If you're lucky enough to discover this you'll actually receive two items – PIRATE SHOP ACCESS (2026) and PIRATE SHOP ACCESS (2027). The first needs to be activated by December 15, 2026, while the second will become available next year, and once redeemed they allow you to claim anything sold for V-Bucks in the Fortnite Item Shop for free for 14 days. This excludes passes levels, gifting, and real money bundles, and you can only claim one free sidekick you don't own already, but otherwise you can absolutely stuff your locker with a huge amount of free cosmetics!

How rare is the pirate shop token in Fortnite?

Naturally for such a valuable reward, the Fortnite pirate shop token is incredibly rare and at the time of writing only one player has reportedly found it. You can increase your odds of discovering a token by playing with friends, as if one member of a duo, trio, or squad finds this elusive item then everyone else in the group will also receive it. Otherwise, all you can do is continue searching as many chests as possible and keeping everything crossed – good luck and happy hunting!

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

The closure of BioWare and cancellation of Mass Effect 5 that followed the EA buyout have understandably left countless longtime fans of the studio and RPG series distraught – so much so, in fact, some are expressing their disappointment physically.

You might already know about the Save Mass Effect petition, which has garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures worldwide and a plethora of strong supporters – including from fellow developers. It's safe to say that many folks are quite passionate about it, seeing as the wait between the fourth Mass Effect and Universe, as the fifth was confirmed to be called, has been nearly a decade in the making so far.

So passionate, it seems, that they're taking to EA's offices with spray paint in hand. As one person over on Reddit spotted in Madrid, Spain, "#SaveMassEffect" graffiti is visible on the stone walls and ground surrounding EA.

Commenters see fans questioning whether this is the way to go about reviving the RPG, but it's actually not the only instance of people voicing (so to speak) their thoughts directly at the publisher's offices.

As a separate post on Twitter highlights, some fans are placing physical tombstones outside of EA in memory of BioWare – and other studios – reading "RIP." Underneath, you'll spot a Mass Effect quote: "It had to be me. Someone else might have gotten it wrong."

It, admittedly, hits quite hard… and this example appears far more popular than the graffiti in Spain. As one comment reads, "Now this is good. We need more of this."

Will it catch the attention of EA, though? I suppose only time will tell. And, as it stands now, it doesn't seem too likely that another publisher or company could swoop in and buy BioWare in hopes of saving the Mass Effect team.

One former dev stated that "EA never actually sells anything" and we shouldn't expect a rekindling of Universe as "they just shut things down and sit on their licenses." I'm instantly reminded of American McGee's Alice, personally.

For the time being, I just hope that all affected devs are able to land on their feet. The fate of Mass Effect is certainly a sad one, but real people are struggling here as well amid all of the chaos – and that shouldn't be forgotten, either.

Mass Effect 5 studio reportedly toned down inclusivity with EA in mind "so as to not cause offense"

The Overwatch universe is practically bursting with potential for interesting stories and cool action set pieces, perhaps ones featuring a giant talking gorilla of some kind. Game director Aaron Keller isn't ruling out the possibility of more PvE content in the future, but trying to make another full campaign is a bigger ask.

Once upon a time, Overwatch 2 was supposed to launch with an in-depth, story-driven, co-op campaign set in the Overwatch universe. Blizzard Entertainment planned to have players upgrade and modify their favorite heroes over the course of the story mode, which was promising to dramatically move the game's world forward in ways that animated shorts couldn't.

Overwatch 2's campaign was eventually canceled and replaced with shorter, simpler, infrequent PvE missions that were also discontinued before the hero shooter's resurgence earlier this year.

Asked about the possible return of story missions while speaking to the press, Aaron Keller said previously released PvE events drove a lot of interest that quickly died down. "When you look at the campaign that we ran, I think that while there was a lot of excitement there, and it did drive the story forward, it didn't really get played the way that we wanted it to." (Thanks, TheGamer.)

PvE missions typically require hefty development resources too, the director explained, which were maybe better spent on cinematics and other narrative formats that can move the story forward without soaking up considerable dev time.

Still, it's not completely over for fans. "I would never discount it," Keller said while speaking about the potential return of playable narrative missions. Smaller experiences that don't impact the main competitive game too much seem like they'll have a better chance, at least.

As for another full campaign - like the one Blizzard tried to make and then scrapped - Keller explained it would be too big an undertaking that would probably require a totally separate team to make "a whole new game."

The Overwatch universe has so many fun characters and cool lore tidbits, I'd happily settle for an animated series instead. Blizzard's president previously teased Warcraft and Overwatch adaptations, too.

Overwatch devs know removing Sombra's Hack ability will "upset" players, but insist the reworked support hero will "be better for the game"

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

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

My favorite store on the Citadel!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two minutes of footage from an unannounced turn-based RPG recently spilled online, and yep, it very much looks like a remake of the very first Persona game.

A YouTube account aptly called 'P1REMAKE' only yesterday posted a little under two minutes of footage from what appears to be a Persona 1 remake. As expected, eagle-eyed fans quickly spotted the clip and soon spread it across several other social media platforms, with the footage since appearing on Reddit and X.

Of course, you should take all leaks with an unhealthily huge handful of salt no matter how convincing they look - especially in the age of generative-AI videos and such. At the same time, there are quite a few good reasons to let yourself be a little hopeful for this remake.

For one, the two-minute clip is longer and more elaborate than gen-AI videos typically are. Several series fans have also pointed out the video shows Eriko summoning her Persona in combat, while using the exact same animation as Persona 4 Revival's version of bestie Yukiko. Revival doesn't actually launch until next year, which makes the pose quite suspicious.

Then there's the fact that this type of leak isn't exactly new territory for Atlus' popular role-playing franchise. In 2023, footage from what ended up being called Persona 3 Reload leaked online and showed very similarly rough, clearly in-development scenes from the game's dungeons.

One other curiosity is the inclusion of Tatsuya, the protagonist from Persona 2 Innocent Sin, who doesn't actually show up in the series' first game. Some folks are speculating that the video might have been created as an internal proof-of-concept pitch for Sega and Atlus management, so Tatsuya would serve as a placeholder model in that case.

A Persona 1 remake isn't entirely unlikely with or without this potential leak, either. Persona series producer Kazuhisa Wada recently said remakes of the first two games are "probably eventually" happening at some point in the future.

Persona 4 Revival's new character isn't a Social Link after all, Atlus clarifies, but something else entirely: "We apologize for the confusion"

Skyblivion (the fan-made Oblivion remake that's being rebuilt inside of Skyrim) has been a long time coming, but we might need to wait a while longer for the conversion mod to see the light of day due to a new legal issue.

One of the ambitious project's lead modders, Rebelzize, today uploaded a video about the ongoing situation. "Recently, a former volunteer who contributed to Skyblivion's development departed the project. We want to be completely transparent with the community about what has happened since their departure," he explains in the description.

"After they left the project, we had several discussions regarding the continued use and maintenance of his work. The main disagreement centered on their objection to our decompilation of parts of their work — a necessary step our team took to maintain functionality and fix issues in systems already built into the project after access to the original source code repository was revoked," Rebelzize adds.

Rebelzize doesn't name the former modder in an effort to avoid creating an online "witch hunt," but they eventually sent the Skyblivion folks a series of legal threats demanding the real names and home addresses of several other volunteer team members - "something that we are simply not willing to share with somebody that we don't even know," Rebelzize says, calling the demands "disproportionate." The former modder is apparently looking to sue for damages worth upwards of €30,000.

"A 'take your ball and go home' approach like this fundamentally contradicts the collaborative, open spirit of the modding community that makes massive passion projects like this possible," Rebelzize continues. "To protect our volunteers from undue stress and ensure a clean break, in good faith we removed their code, rebuilding and improving the system from the ground up."

Despite removing their work from Skyblivion, the anonymous former volunteer has apparently "continued to intensify their threats." The Skyblivion team is now looking for help from anyone experienced in IP and GDPR law, pointing interested folks toward their official website.

Last year, it looked like a Skyblivion release date could be right around the corner. There's still no word on when we can expect the gorgeous fan-led revival, though.

The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel reveal reportedly coming soon, confirming a new Hammerfell setting as Bethesda shows off gameplay internally

After literal months of speculation and theories based on brief clues left in older trailers, Final Fantasy 14 purists have been proven right. The Evercold expansion's second new job is indeed a ranged physical DPS who uses quick-firing crossbows and a deadly pet bird in combat - and it's called Zephyr.

Announced at FF14 Fan Fest Japan, Zephyr is described as a take on a "pet job." But you're not carrying around any old bird. The Zephyr's avian familiar is called the Nephele, a winged predator who can coordinate attacks with you and provide support from above for the entire party. Good positioning is crucial for this one, it seems. You can see the Zephyr in action in the new trailer below.

Just like the incoming Bastion job, you'll only be able to play Zephyr using the new Evolved combat system that's aiming to streamline things a bit. The Zephyr's first job quest should pop up in Gridania with a starting level of 90 when patch 8.0 arrives.

Final Fantasy 14 Evercold also received a slight delay elsewhere during the FF14 Fan Fest. The MMO expansion is now planning to come out on February 23, 2027, though players who pre-order can enter the early access period starting on February 19, 2027. (Pre-orders open on November 4 with some extra goodies attached.)

We also got a peek at a ton of new areas coming with Evercold. There's the idyllic Sessrymnir, there's Skioblaonir which looks like a floating island of sorts, and then a montage teasing "More Locales From The Fourth." Needless to say, they're all gorgeous.

Final Fantasy 14's new typing minigame is already causing chaos as players struggle against bots and impossible words: "It just came out"

Final Fantasy 14: Evercold has received a short and swift four-week delay. Square Enix's MMORPG expansion was originally set to release in January of next year, but an update from Final Fantasy Fan Fest Japan has revealed that it's now due to come out during the packed month of February, 2027.

Final Fantasy 14 boss Naoki Yoshida - affectionately dubbed Yoshi-P by fans - revealed the news during FF14 Fan Fest Japan. Evercold's new release date is officially February 23, 2027 with an early access period beginning on February 19, 2027.

Of course, February is already packed with mammoth games - everything from Fable, God of War: Laufey, Persona 4 Revival, and Metro 2039 are seemingly taking shelter from GTA 6. Here's hoping you have a spare few dozen hours a week for all the incoming goodies.

Evercold pre-orders begin on November 4, which is funnily enough the official release date of Final Fantasy 14's biggest rival: World of Warcraft Forever. (I'm sure it's just coincidental.)

Pre-order bonuses include a Kottr minion that's part of the expansion's new, fluffy, feline race, as well as a pair of earrings and early access. You can check out all the different editions over on the official website - be warned, the Final Fantasy 13 mount might tempt you to put a dent in your wallet.

Evercold makes a ton of changes to the beloved, widely played online game. For one, a new Evolved system is promising to streamline ability hotbars and rejig the way jobs work. The game's also crossing over with the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series in a new Evercold raid.

Final Fantasy 14's new typing minigame is already causing chaos as players struggle against bots and impossible words: "It just came out"

Patrick Stewart was best known for his numerous roles across film and television, including franchise-defining parts of X-Men and Star Trek, but he also appeared in several video games over the years. His most notable video game role is certainly in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, where he played Emperor Uriel Septim VII, and he was apparently blown away by the detailed lore Bethesda had for his character.

In the wake of Stewart's death at the age of 86, fans have shared numerous memorable stories and anecdotes about the actor's life and career. One such story, which was spotlighted by Bluesky user shadowtodd, dates back to a documentary about the making of Oblivion, which was originally included on a bonus DVD in the game's original 2006 Collector's Edition.

In that documentary, a distressingly young-looking Todd Howard stands in front of a group of Bethesda developers and shows a photo of himself and his wife meeting Stewart. "Ken [Rolston, lead designer] had written a bunch of notes for Patrick Stewart on the character," Howard explained. "Very, very long. I thought it was embarrassingly long, actually."

It's important to remember here that, despite Stewart's stature, Uriel Septim's role in Oblivion is actually pretty small. (Spoilers, but he dies before the end of the tutorial area.) Nonetheless, extensive lore had already been built up around the character over the course of the previous three games, and despite Howard's misgivings it seems the team was keen for Stewart to see every detail.

"I had forwarded it all to Patrick," Howard said. "Patrick came in and said, 'I got the notes on the character.' I was sort of like [gestures nervously]. He's like, 'Never in my life doing any role have I gotten such detailed notes, and I loved it. I am really intrigued. This sounds really cool. You guys have given this a lot of thought. I can't wait to do it.'"

In another part of the documentary, which has been available in full on YouTube for years, we see the moment many of Bethesda's developers heard Stewart's lines for the first time. "He was selling the product like a reverend standing in front of his flock," Rolston noted, "which is exactly the tone I wanted."

Remember, ahead of Oblivion, Bethesda was only just beginning to emerge from years of making niche, fiddly PC games to develop something more mainstream. And even then, 'mainstream' was relative in those days – the documentary opens with Howard doing a bit of old-school handwringing about the perception that video games were still little more than kids' toys.

So you can understand why a room full of game developers raised on a steady diet of science fiction were so astounded hearing an actor as beloved as Patrick Stewart performing lines that they'd written. My favorite bit is when designer Mark Nelson reacts to the reading of "generals and kings have knelt at my command" from Stewart. "That's such a cheesy line that sounds good when he says it," Nelson remarked.

"There isn't another actor we could have picked who I'd be happier to write dialog for," Nelson explained. "Like, seriously, I geeked out over Star Trek for years. It was on while I was in college. Literally, all my friends [and] I would sit around and we'd watch Star Trek and drink beer and act like idiots. I don't have a picture of my wife in my wallet right now but I've got Patrick Stewart in my wallet."

To prove the point, Nelson pulled out his wallet and showed the weathered photo of Stewart he kept inside. "My wife will not be happy," he admitted.

Star Trek Online players gather to remember Patrick Stewart, with some hoping for a "permanent" tribute to Captain Picard from the MMO's devs: "You will be missed"

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

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

Quest Log

Trick or treat

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

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

Spoilers ahead

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

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

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

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

FromSoftware isn't having a great week. Right on the heels of delaying The Duskbloods out of 2026, it's now announced that the servers for Dark Souls 2 and 3 are temporarily going down on all platforms due to an "issue," and it's not going to tell you when they'll be back.

"Due to a server issue, the game servers for the following titles will be temporarily unavailable on all platforms," FromSoftware writes in a post on Twitter, listing Dark Souls 2 and 3.

"We will provide updates once we have information regarding the server restoration time," it adds. "We apologize for the inconvenience."

This was around eight hours ago – no update has been given since, and the lack of indication of how long it'd take in the place is concerning, to say the least. After all, Dark Souls fans have lived through months-long server outages before. Back in 2022, the PC servers for Dark Souls Remastered, Dark Souls 2, and Dark Souls 3 all went, well, dark for most part of the year following security concerns. They all came back online eventually, but it was pretty rough for anyone wanting to play them thanks to the co-op and invasion features being totally dead.

Hopefully this latest outage doesn't last as long, as there's also the added concern of it being across all platforms this time rather than just PC.

While FromSoftware offers no explanation as to what the server issue is, it notably comes around a week after numerous sites and online services were temporarily taken down in the wake of new PHP vulnerabilities being discovered. Whether that's played a role here isn't known – separate server maintenance for Dark Souls 2 only just came and went a couple of days ago.

Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki was always "fascinated" by the "weird" executives of other companies: "I use some of them as enemy characters in our games."

Activision has confirmed that it will be removing real-life news footage of the 2022 crush in Itaewon from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 following backlash.

On October 29, 2022, a crowd crush happened in the Itaewon neighborhood of Seoul, South Korea during Halloween festivities which drew over 100,000 people to the area. This crush resulted in the deaths of 160 people, and a further 196 people were injured during the event marking one of the deadliest disasters in the country's history.

Almost exactly four years on from the incident, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 has caused controversy by including a video of rescue efforts following the event as part of an in-universe news report at the end of the game's first mission. The footage contains people performing CPR, bodybags lining the streets and people being wheeled on a stretcher.

The bereaved families issued a statement earlier this week (via BBC News), saying, "We cannot help but be appalled that the chaotic and desperate scene, in which many citizens at the site performed CPR to save one another and victims lay on the freezing street, was used as it was to create a scene in a game." It adds, "Using such an event as material for a game made for entertainment is in itself highly inappropriate and senseless," and continues, "If the game developer has even a minimum of courtesy and empathy towards the victims, it should take corrective action without delay."

In a statement to BBC News, Activision confirms the use of the real-life footage, saying it was used "to establish the game's fictional narrative" but insists that the inclusion was "not intended to reference or trivialise the Itaewon disaster or any other real-world tragedy in any way, shape or form." Activision offers condolences to the families and victims of the incident and confirms the footage will be removed from Modern Warfare 4.

Activision and Infinity Ward have previously caused controversy by referencing real-life events in their games. 2019's Modern Warfare reboot was accused of attempting to rewrite history after having the US-led attacks on a highway between Kuwait and Iraq in 1991, dubbed the Highway of Death – which is the name it is referenced by in-game – mentioned as a Russian attack.

The 10.29 Itaewon Disaster Bereaved Families Association told the BBC that the group welcomed Activision's decision, but that the publisher has not reached out with a direct apology.

I'm always looking out for cozy Halloween games that channel the spooky vibes or autumnal aesthetic of the season. Crucially, though, I'm after those that don't fill me with any fear or sense of dread.

Yes, even though I'm a self-professed scaredy cat who can't handle the best horror games out there on account of the fright factor, I still love Halloween for its witchy, vampy feel, and its pumpkin-laden, bat-winged decorations (the candy helps, too). So, if you're anything like me and you're after some recommendations, I've decided to bring together these cozy Halloween games to help you get in the spirit of the spooky season without being at risk of raising your heart rate — or having to shy away from your PC or console because some gnarly monster is attacking you.

From some of my favorite indies that nail the creepy-but-cute style, to some games like Stardew Valley that are perfect for the season, and sims that capture the atmosphere and look without the scares, I've also included some story-driven adventures that are great for this time of year. So, read on as I help you get into the spooky mood with my pick of the best cozy Halloween games.

6. Night in the Woods

Every time Halloween comes a-knocking, I always want to return to Night in the Woods. Not only does the adventure game have the perfect autumnal aesthetic for this time of year, but it also has a slightly darker, spooky edge to it as you progress through the story (but don't worry, it never veers into scary territory). Playing as protagonist Mae, who returns to her hometown of Possum Springs after dropping out of College, you follow her coming-of-age journey as she tries to reconnect with family and friends, fit back into a home that's changed, and ultimately figure out her place in the world.

Driven by exploration in the rundown mining town, there's some mysteries for you to unravel, but at its heart is an experience centered around relatable characters who are all dealing with troubles of their own. I always appreciate how Night In the Woods explores Mae's struggles as a young adult, as well as mental health problems. It normalizes what is often stigmatized, and brings to life a memorable, atmospheric experience that will forever mean so much to me. If you've yet to try out Night in the Woods, Halloween is the perfect time to do just that.

5. Wylde Flowers

If there was ever a great way to get into the spirit of the spooky season, then assuming the role of witch running a farm is a sure fire way to do it. Wylde Flowers takes the delights of the best farming games and infuses them with magic, supernatural residents, intrigue, and cozy cottagecore vibes. As Tara, who moves to the delightful Fairhaven Island to be with her ailing grandmother, Hazel, you eventually take over the family farm.

But as you'll soon come to learn, there's more to Tara's family lineage and the Island than first meets the eye. You'll find your way to discovering a local coven who teach you the witchy ways of Grandma Hazel. From brewing potions in a cauldron that can help crops grow faster, to drawing up spells to do things like change the weather, or help out the locals who get caught up in a spot of bother, there's even a magical location to explore that's host to the likes of a book-loving werewolf and a tinkering goblin. With lots of charming characters and a great story, updates have brought more unlockable features to this cozy gem.

4. Cult of the Lamb

If you're looking for something for Halloween that channels the creepy-but-cute look and feel, I'll always recommend Cult of the Lamb. Playing as an adorable young sheep, you decide to break away from the stereotypical norms so often associated with the fluffy animals and become a leader with followers of your own. Yes, as the lead lamb, you grow and front your very own cult of cutesy critters.

As you set out to earn more powers by venturing through dungeons, you'll develop your cult with some base-building goodness, and maybe sacrifice a follower or two in the name of the lamb. Its darker edge is undercut by its humor, and it still manages to somehow be adorable and charming. Plus, if you're after a recommendation you can play with a pal or loved one, then you'll be happy to know it also supports local co-op, with one player taking on the role of the lamb, while the other controls a goat. Quite the dynamic duo.

3. Beacon Pines

Another adventure that taps into the creepy-cute vibe, Beacon Pines is a cozy game with a horror-leaning story that's very fitting for the Halloween season. With an autumnal feel overall, the adventure takes place within the pages of a mysterious storybook, and follows the journey of a little deer called Luka and his friends. Playing as both the reader of the story and Luka, you set out into the night to investigate some strange goings on in Beacon Pines, namely at an old abandoned warehouse in the woods.

Stumbling upon a weird cover-up at the warehouse that Luka and his friends get caught up in, you help to shape the narrative by filling the gaps of the pages as the reader. With charms that have engraved words, you can find new story paths to unlock more charms and events. With a creepy atmosphere and an emotional story, it spins a mystery you'll want to unravel.

2. Strange Antiquities

If you love detective games and have yet to give Strange Antiquities a go, then Halloween is a great time for this one. With a dark, cozy feel to it, you find yourself working in a shop full of oddities in the setting of Undermere – the candle-lit interior of the store really makes for the perfect the kind of atmosphere for this time of year. As you settle in to examine and identify strange artifacts, you'll try to meet the curious needs of your customers.

After receiving requests for a specific effect or particular occult object, it's then left up to you to puzzle out what would be right for the townsfolk who stop by. It really does feel like you're a detective, not only because you have to figure out what artifacts are and who they're best suited for, but because you'll also piece together clues to uncover more objects in the store – which holds plenty of secrets of its own. Building on the developer's previous game, Strange Horticulture (which you may also enjoy if you like this one), Strange Antiquities' has plenty of mystery and intrigue for the spooky season.

1. Wytchwood

Wytchwood is always at the top of mind when it comes to cozy games that have the perfect look, atmosphere, and setting for the Halloween season – complete with a great sense of humor. The crafting adventure takes place in a fairytale world filled with gothic fables. Brought to life in a wonderful storybook art style, you take on the role of the old witch of the woods who has her own cottage in a swamp... and wears a pot on her head like a helmet.

Tasked with venturing out into the strange land to claim souls on behalf of a goat (as you do), you collect and grow witchy ingredients like eye of the newt, meaty morsels, and even things like bottled despair. You'll work to craft spells in your grimoire and brew up enchantments to cast judgement on those you encounter. With a setting that's filled with fantastical characters, you can expect to solve puzzles, meet some monsters, and soak up its witchy, gothic vibes.

If you're after more spooky recommendations and do want some scares, consider checking out our pick of the best Halloween games.

The latest Call of Duty instalment has kicked off to a good start with players enjoying the updated DMZ mode, embarking on a new campaign, and arguing over TTK and SBMM, of course. We always want more, though, so if you - like me - are counting down to the release of MW4 Season 1, here's everything you need to know.

For the first half of Season 1, there are confirmed additions for DMZ and multiplayer, including new modes and events, new multiplayer maps, and a new location to visit in DMZ. So, for more details, here's the MW4 Season 1 roadmap so far. The new season of Warzone also arrives on the same day, so I've got the details for that below as well.

Warzone and MW4 Season 1 release date

The MW4 Season 1 release date is Friday, November 6, 2026, at 12AM ET / 5AM GMT, which is 9PM PT on Thursday, November 5, which is also when Warzone Season 1 drops.

This will be the first time that the latest game's Battle Pass becomes available, and, as such, there will be plenty of new weapons, blueprints, attachments, and operator skins to unlock. Of course there will also be new maps, modes, and events added as the season progresses, too. Here's the lowdown so far.

Don't forget that this is all only half the season as we barrel towards Season 1 Reloaded, and anything here that is labelled as 'in-season' is set to arrive after the Season 1 release date but before mid-season.

Season 1 content

This is all coming to MW4 in Season 1, for players of multiplayer, DMZ, and Warzone:

• New weapons and attachments
  • CSG-35 SMG (Battle Pass reward)
  • Cronen Osprey AR (Battle Pass reward)
  • Jak 12 shotgun (in-season, event reward)
  • ZLR Talonhawk melee weapon (in-season, event reward)
  • Hyeon Auto Apex attachment (in-season, event reward)
  • Kastov 545 Apex attachment (in-season, event reward)
  • M16 Burst attachment (in-season, event reward)
• New Operators
  • Blix (Battle Pass reward)
  • Zero (Blackcell reward)

Across both multiplayer and DMZ, we'll see the addition of a few new weapons, APEX attachments, blueprints, operators, and more thanks to the game's first Battle Pass and this season's events, including Wager Watch. The one I'm looking forward to most is perhaps the new ZLR Talonhawk melee weapon, which appears as though it should give a bit more range than my trusty knife.

Some of these new guns may even find their way into our list of the best MW4 weapons, so keep an eye on it once the season launches.

As Warzone becomes integrated with Modern Warfare 4, these weapons also become available in the free-to-play battle royale. As ever, you'll be able to access the new battle pass via Warzone if that's the only game you play, and you can play entirely for free by collecting just the free rewards, but keep in mind that that probably won't include all the weapons above.

New multiplayer content

Here's everything we know is coming to MW4 multiplayer in Season 1 so far:

• New multiplayer maps
  • Backstab (new)
  • Canyon (new)
  • Shoot House (returning)
  • Overflow (new, in-season)
  • Ministry (new, in-season)
  • and more...
• New multiplayer modes
  • Gauntlet 1v1
  • Dropzone
  • Grind
• New static Kill Block combo
• Wager Watch event

As ever, there's a lot of new content coming to multiplayer in Season 1, including some brand-new maps and a returning favorite from Modern Warfare 2 and 3: Shoot House. Perhaps the most interesting addition, though, is the Gauntlet 1v1 mode, which sees the Gauntlet 6v6 mode return from BO7, only this time in a thrilling 1v1 setup, presumably with much smaller maps.

New DMZ content

Here's what we know is coming to MW4 DMZ in Season 1 so far:

• New location
  • X01
• New boss threats
  • Tae-Hyun AKA 'Knuckle'
  • Chol-Min AKA 'The Wrench'
  • and more...
• Deep vault
• Additions to the 3D Printer
• Vendor (Blackcell only)

It may not seem like it, but there's a lot to get to grips with here, as a bunch of new navigation comes to the DMZ Forward Operating Base in the form of a vendor for Blackcell owners; Boss Boards, for keeping an eye on new bosses and any intel on them; a 3D printer, the use for which is still redacted at this point; and other ways to sort and perfect your loadout.

There are also new bosses and the new X01 location, which is teeming with incredibly tough opponents.

Season 1 brings even more chances to try and get that impressive MW4 Nuke killstreak, as well as the coolest MW4 mastery camos.

New Warzone content

While some of the content above, including weapons and operators, crosses over into Warzone, there's of course a load of new content coming exclusively to Warzone Season 1. Here's just a snapshot of what's on the way:

• New battle royale map: Hajin
• New Resurgence map: Zodiac
• Verdansk returns in-season
• Rebirth Island returns in-season
• Weather scenarios
• Interactable objects
• Rally Point mode
• Elite Perks
• Grabber Drone
• Zipline Launcher
• and more!

Warzone is getting perhaps one of its biggest overhauls yet with Season 1 as another brand-new main map is revealed, straight out of the MW4 campaign. That's not all, as there are new items, a new mode, a new resurgence map, and the feature I'm most excited about: weather scenarios.

If you're a big fan of Verdansk, as I know so many are, then fear not, as the fan-favorite map returns once again during the first half of Warzone Season 1, as does Rebirth Island. But who knows, the stunning Hajin could be your new favorite by then.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Infinity Ward has nerfed the controversial Possum ability in Modern Warfare 4 because people were using it for nefarious means too often.

Modern Warfare 4 has had a heavy focus on its DMZ mode, with Infinity Ward already tackling one of the biggest complaints about the mode on launch day: people hogging the UAV towers. However, another major community complaint about the mode has been down to one specific perk.

True to its name, the Possum perk lets players play dead after being downed in DMZ mode. However, many used this to get taken out only to immediately get back up and defeat the person who took them down, rather than just give themselves another chance to survive the game.

In the latest patch notes for Modern Warfare 4, Infinity Ward acknowledged the complaints with a statement about the perk: "The intention for Possum is to give a high-level operator a second chance. With the current iteration, Possum was being used as a combat mechanic instead of a survival mechanic."

Alongside this statement are the details of the perk's change, which now will disallow players from activating Possum while the team that killed them is nearby, or if the team is hanging out there for a long time, until 4 minutes pass.

The statement continues, "These tweaks are meant to prevent players from getting right back into the fight which they had just lost." Infinity Ward added, "We will be watching the use of Possum with this change to see if it has the desired effect," and that the range and duration of the new change can be returned going forward.

Check out our Modern Warfare 4 review here!

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

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

Glimmer of an idea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eiji Aonuma says he's giving the younger staff on the Zelda team guidance about the next mainline title in the series.

Despite effectively being a yearly franchise at this point through remakes, remasters, and spinoffs, all eyes are on what the core Zelda team has been up to for the last three years. While it's only been two years since the last mainline game in the series in Echoes of Wisdom (developed by Grezzo), and with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake right around the corner, many are waiting to see what the follow-up to Tears of the Kingdom will be as the next major entry in the series.

Speaking to AFP following his receiving one of France's top honors – a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters – Aonuma noted that some of the team on the Ocarina of Time remake haven't even played the N64 original, saying that "thanks to these young people" the remake came into being. And while he has been part of the franchise since the original Ocarina of Time was released, he doesn't seem to be leaving the series any time soon.

In his speech, Aonuma said, "I'm very interested to see what the younger staff will imagine" for the series' future, and that he's "extremely happy" to offer guidance and "think together" about what the next Zelda game will look like.

Currently, Nintendo has given no indication of when we can expect the next Zelda game or what it'll be, but since it'll be four years since the release of Tears of the Kingdom next May, I'm hoping we'll know more in the near future.

Zelda: Ocarina of Time designer wanted Navi to be a "cute girl," but "that wasn't possible" with the Nintendo 64

In what was starting to feel like an inevitability, FromSoftware has now confirmed that The Duskbloods has been delayed – it'll now be launching sometime in 2027.

Up to now, The Duskbloods was set to launch sometime in 2026, and, well, we're rapidly running out of 2026. Last month's Nintendo Direct came and went without a release date for the game, and we only have two months left of the year.

"While development of 'The Duskbloods' is at the final adjustment stage, we have made the decision to move the launch window to 2027," FromSoftware confirms in an announcement post on Twitter. "We apologize to players who have been kindly awaiting the release of this title and thank you for your patience and support."

In a follow-up post, FromSoft adds: "During the network test, we saw active interest in the core concepts of the game, including combat, strategic depth, and player expression. To further enhance these aspects, we have decided to move the launch, allowing time for final adjustments to game rules and balancing."

The aforementioned network test, which took place back in August, certainly wasn't the smoothest experience. The first test session ended up being canceled entirely after the servers became overwhelmed and fans got stuck on its title screen. Even when the doors were finally opened, players reported performance issues, and not everyone was a fan of the PvP experience to begin with. At least it treated us to our beloved Zork, though.

What feels a tad concerning about this delay, though, is the lack of release window provided. A vague promise of 2027 means that The Duskbloods could, in theory, be delayed for a full year or more depending on how much time FromSoftware determines it needs. Here's hoping that's not the case, but for now, it's clear that the devs have work to do.

FromSoftware's first-ever player romance builds on "the maidens in Elden Ring," says Hidetaka Miyazaki: "It's a transient, ephemeral love, which is maybe a motif I'm striving for."

2026 has been one of the busiest in terms of game releases; however, November is one of the quietest. Thanks to GTA 6's launch, a ton of titles have been avoiding the month like the plague, but there are still some standouts that haven't gone running to the digital hills that should be on your radar.

So, the rest of the GamesRadar+ team and I have decided to highlight all of them for you below in a handy round-up. From the big major Rockstar outing to a bunch of surprising Nintendo goodness, the good news is that there really is something for everyone here. I will also say that although they didn't make this particular list, there are also a bunch of upcoming indie games releasing in November, so I highly recommend checking out our full guide on all the new games for 2026 and (beyond) for a full picture.

But with all that out of the way, let's dive into the top 5 games you need to play this November, in no particular order.

The best games to play in November 2026

World of Warcraft Forever

Release date: November 4, 2026
Platforms: PC

World of Warcraft Forever aims to return to what made WoW so iconic two decades ago, while introducing new and expanded zones, new dungeons, raids, skills, talents, new playable race, over 1000 quests, updated visuals and way more that I've run out of breath for. If you are an RPG fan or a veteran of the MMO, then this should definitely be in your sightline and you can read more about the impending releases with our World of Warcraft: Forever Big Preview breakdown.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake

Release date: November 5, 2026
Platforms: Switch 2

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is getting a remake for the Switch 2 and as a Nintendo fan, this is a must-buy. The upcoming Switch 2 game is a full ground-up reimagining of the classic 1998 N64 action-adventure title, with modernized gameplay including a jump button (I know), updated graphics that have divided the internet, fully voice-acted cutscenes, and other new additions too. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is one of the best and most influential games ever made so needless to say, its remake is a big deal.

Guardians of the Galaxy Encore Edition

Release date: November 6, 2026
Platforms: Switch 2

Ok, it may only be a Switch 2 port but this superhero RPG deserves so much more love than it got at launch, so take this as your sign to dive into Star-Lord's adventure. Not only will Switch 2 players finally get to experience the clean story and snappy gameplay of Guardians of the Galaxy, but the Encore Edition also comes with an all new set of glam rock outfits for the Guardians, and the same kickass soundtrack. And, if you need some extra convincing to pick this one up (especially if you aren't a big Marvel fan) I suggest reading our Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy review to change your mind.

Pikmin 4 - Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Dandori Academy

Release date: November 12, 2026
Platforms: Switch 2

Switch 2 is getting another new game this month, and it's Pikmin 4! Now I have a personal soft spot for Pikmin, but for good reason. The iconic series has given us some of the best and cutest adventure puzzle games around, and I personally love all the recent co-op experiences I've had with them as well with my partner. Pikmin 4 is a dream already but the Switch 2 version comes with support for voice commands for our old pal Oatchi, graphical and gameplay upgrades, and even a new mode called Dandori Academy. Don't say you don't get nice things.

GTA 6

Release date: November 19, 2026
Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X/S

Does this one really need any introduction? Of course, this was always going to make our standouts list for the month. The Rockstar epic that we've been waiting 13 years for, GTA 6 is finally coming in November after a series of delays, bringing with it a brand new take on Miami, the first playable female hero, and so much more we're no doubt going to be talking about it for another 13 years to come. So far we have seen impressive trailers, had a bunch of pre-order and size information, and honestly, excitement and anticipation is skyhigh for everyone here at GamesRadar+ for this bad boy to finally drop.

For more releases, check out our round-ups of all the upcoming PS5 games, upcoming PC games, and upcoming Xbox games.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the road to new expansion Evercold, Square Enix has introduced a new minigame to Final Fantasy 14 in its ever-beloved virtual casino, the Gold Saucer – a typing battle that's already spurring all the chaos.

Keyboard Brawler, which is set to depart the Gold Saucer's lineup of silly little minigames as Evercold releases this January, is pretty simple. You progress through waves, in other words, "battles," by typing specific words that pop up to attack enemies.

Speed and accuracy are key (pardon the pun) here, as they are in most typing games, but folks are having to grapple with more than just their own hands, it would appear.

First, there are the impossible words – yes, I mean literally impossible if you've got a US or UK English keyboard, as there are words from languages like German that contain diacritical marks like the umlaut (impossible unless you use key commands to access them, of course, but that's not exactly convenient or realistic in the midst of a high-speed typing battle).

One player's screenshot on Reddit highlights the debacle.

It shows the word "doppelgänger," umlaut and all, with the bewildered poster asking, "What am I supposed to do about that?"

Over on X, others can be seen encountering the same word (and others with diacritical markers), too: "Who thought putting 'doppelgänger' in Keyboard Brawler was a good idea like what the hell?" What the hell, indeed, anon. What the hell, indeed. It'd be one thing if the impossible words were alone in setting fans back…

But, they're not. There's also, sadly, the issue of bots, cheaters, and plugins. As one thread highlights, the whole cheating problem has come on fast – Keyboard Brawler only came out a couple of days ago, after all.

"Who the hell is botting Keyboard Brawler lmao it just came out," the poster writes, baffled. "Or maybe they're just a really good touchtypist idk." Attached is a video of… well, yeah, probably, bots playing the minigame.

A quick look at all Keyboard Brawler discussions on social media shows this isn't an isolated case, either. Players are complaining about cheaters left, right, and center, unfortunately, but I suppose it's something I've come to expect as a hardened fan of the MMO myself.

Heck, how many people actually play the Slice is Right legitimately anymore with the, uh, plugin that I shall not be naming here…? Some Warriors of Light aren't new to cheating, to say the least.

Will Square Enix change anything about its limited-time Gold Saucer event, though? Perhaps, and I do hope they at least axe some of the words that English speakers genuinely can't type on native keyboards – fingers crossed.

Final Fantasy 14 devs say Evercold's new Evolved mode isn't massive power creep: "If you don't want to change, you don't have to"

In the wake of Dragon Age and Mass Effect studio BioWare getting shut down and Mass Effect 5 being canceled, co-founder and former general manager Greg Zeschuk says that most executives behind decisions like this have never actually made games before or "know how it works."

BioWare's closure was shocking news, but sadly, layoffs and disruption at EA weren't unexpected after it was announced that the publisher was going private in a $55 billion acquisition deal from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, and Silver Lake. Right from when plans for the deal were first revealed, devs at EA feared for the future, and unfortunately, it's taken less than three months since the deal closed for us to see an impact like this.

In a new interview with 80 Level, Zeschuk, who left BioWare in 2012, describes the acquisition as "the final nail in the coffin" for the Mass Effect studio. While he notes that he "had to break with it emotionally 15 years ago" when he left, he's still concerned about how the games industry treats developers at its core. Mass layoffs and studio closures sadly feel more common than ever, with major waves over the last few years alone, and these can lead to years of talent and experience being lost – experience that studios depend on.

However, he argues that the execs behind those decisions don't usually actually understand that part. "There's this weird belief that you can just kind of recreate great games with random people and AI," he suggests. "It doesn't work."

Pretend to be shocked, but yes, AI is reportedly being pushed at EA – anonymous devs recently noted that while AI tools aren't being mandated, "they'll make it impossible or very difficult for you to do your job without [them]." Managers have been reportedly telling employees that "'this is the future, you have to get onboard.'" Needless to say, you can understand why morale at the publisher is apparently "terrible" right now.

Going back to Zeschuk, he notes that, in general, those in charge on the business end of things very rarely have any actual game dev experience, hence their lack of understanding of how things work. "The other harsh reality of almost all these companies, the people that go down the business track never really come from the development track," he argues. "Because none of these people have ever made a game, like, never really sat and made one, like, from start to finish, even a small thing, they just don't know how it works."

This would align with the reported situation at EA, as anonymous sources have reportedly described execs at the company as out of touch not just with employees but with game development itself. It's not just EA, of course – Xbox fans were quick to question the hiring of new CEO Asha Sharma earlier this year, who'd not got any gaming experience, but instead previously served as Microsoft's president of its CoreAI product.

Back to BioWare and its IP, though, obviously a lot of fans are wondering where things go from here for Dragon Age and Mass Effect, with folks petitioning to save the latter. However, former BioWare staff haven't expressed much optimism about the idea of EA selling the franchise to another studio to take over what had already been started with Mass Effect 5.

Mass Effect 5 studio reportedly toned down inclusivity with EA in mind "so as to not cause offense."

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake is right around the corner now, and it's bound to win the hearts of both longtime fans and newcomers alike – especially since some of its developers were newcomers to the beloved game themselves.

Producer Eiji Aonuma, who served as game scenario director and dungeon designer on the original Ocarina of Time way back in 1998, reveals as much in a new interview with AFP, explaining that it's a good thing that some of the younger developers on the new remake have never actually played its predecessor.

It helps modernize things a bit, and adds much-needed fresh perspectives to the blend – the OG is nearly 30 years old, after all.

"It's thanks to these young people, by thinking about how to adapt the game in the best possible way, how to make it fun once you have the controls in your hands, that this remake came into being," Aonuma explains.

This makes sense, if you ask me, and it lines up with the positivity the Nintendo mastermind has previously expressed toward younger devs – like when he was made Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters at the French culture ministry.

While receiving the honor – which Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto previously received, too – Aonuma mentioned them, saying he's "very interested to see what the younger staff will imagine" for future titles and admitting he's "extremely happy" to offer guidance so they can all "think together" about the legendary game series' future entries.

I suppose the Ocarina of Time remake is just the beginning, then, of seeing newer devs' efforts come to fruition.

It seems as though it'll be one heck of a game, as well. It's got the sauce that made us fall in love with it some 28 years ago while also bringing new features to the table, from sidequests to dungeon tweaks and Breath of the Wild's option to turn off the UI for more immersion (and difficulty, if you can stomach it).

Plus, you know, the jump button we've wanted for decades – which apparently had actually existed early in development before.

As for what else the younger devs that Aonuma mentions have brought to the table for the Ocarina of Time remake – I suppose we'll just have to wait and see when it finally arrives early next month on November 5.

Zelda: Ocarina of Time designer wanted Navi to be a "cute girl," but "that wasn't possible" with the Nintendo 64

2014's Alien: Isolation remains one of the scariest, most anxiety inducing games I've ever played, in large part because of its intelligent, highly adaptive Xenomorph, which pursues you relentlessly in the cramped corridors of the main campaign. The thought of an even smarter, more aggressive stalker in Alien: Isolation 2 has haunted me since the sequel was announced a few months back, and now that assumption has been explicitly confirmed in detail by some of the lead developers working on the game. Yes, it's true, Alien: Isolation 2's Xenomorph will make the first game's alien seem like child's play, according to the developers.

One of the sequel's big evolutions from the first game are new outdoor environments. The first Alien: Isolation takes place entirely from within the Sevastopol space station, but the sequel will have some outdoor sequences where weather events like rain and hail will present their own unique challenges. And yes, the alien will follow you outside too and utilize changes in weather to its advantage.

According to art director Ana Sopikova, you'll be tangling with the Xenomorph in outside areas that are "maybe 10 times bigger" than the claustrophobic Sevastopol Station. That's not a huge surprise given the space station's intentionally tight explorable rooms, but I am anxiously curious to see how the Xenomorph moves in more open environments. "Now, it will be even more intelligent, it will react to the player better, it will react to all the new items, gadgets, and tools," says Sopikova.

Expanding on that, lead game designer James Green says "the creature's not going to stop hunting you when you go outdoors. It will use the fact that exteriors are exposed to hunt you more aggressively. It will use weather to hide its movements. It will have new things it can learn over the original game. It will change its behavior each encounter, so that every time you face the alien you can't just use the tricks you used the last time, whether that's interiors or exteriors."

I have a thoroughly documented affliction that compels me to play extremely scary games despite being a total wimp, but I genuinely wonder if the Alien: Isolation 2 devs are considering whether a game can be scary or stressful to a degree that might alienate some players (a former Creative Assembly writer has said the studio worried the first game was "too scary.") Capcom brought a perfect balance with Resident Evil Requiem's Grace and Leon sections, alternating breathless horror for cathartic action at just the right moments, whereas Resident Evil 7 is a little too much for me sometimes.

If Alien: Isolation 2 is as relentlessly tense as the first game but with an even more clever Xenomorph, I can't imagine I'll be able to play for longer than an hour-or-so at a time without a break. At the same time, it's really hard as a horror head to complain about a game being too scary, but I suppose I just did, preemptively anyway.

It's Halloween! What better way to celebrate than to play some of the best horror games ever made.

Here we are, a decade removed from the controversial launch of No Man's Sky, and developer Hello Games is still finding ways to improve its increasingly beloved space sandbox. No Man's Sky update 7.10, Forsaken, has just landed, marking the game's fifth major update in 2026 alone, and it makes good on a teaser that's haunted fans since well before launch.

Yes, you can now "fly directly to neighboring stars for the first time," as the trailer for Forsaken explains. Nearby stars will appear as brighter spots in the sky, and you can simply point your ship toward one to see the system's name and get a button prompt to warp to it. Previously, you had to open the galaxy map in order to chart your course to a new star system.

The ability to just warp directly to new star systems was seemingly teased at the end of the infamous E3 2014 trailer for No Man's Sky – the one that appeared at PlayStation's press conference and set impossibly high expectations for the game. That trailer also teased co-op, a feature that would be added to the game years after launch, and it seems the studio's commitment to making good on the game's pre-release promise is still going strong.

Of course, seamless warping is just one small part of the Forsaken update. You can check out the full patch notes for all the details, but other major additions include new Forsaken traders offering corvette modules in exchange for rare goods, an immersive HUD mode, and some Halloween-appropriate new spooky biological samples to seek out.

Arguably the biggest news, however, is that No Man's Sky is now available on mobile, which the devs once considered a "seemingly impossible technical challenge." The mobile version is well under 5GB, which is all the more impressive given just how big the game has gotten in the decade since its launch.

These are the best space games you can play today.

When does the Fortnite Treasure Hunters mini-season start is a question we now know the answer to, as it will get underway on November 1, 2026. The tagline for the fresh season is "The greatest adventure of all time" and you can expect things to get switched up, with a new map to explore, fresh faces to meet, and no doubt some updated mechanics to get to grips with.

Epic aren't known for resting on their laurels and are always planning the next stage of development in Fortnite, so there will certainly be more changes brought in during the course of the upcoming season and beyond. If you're looking ahead to the Fortnite Treasure Hunters mini-season and are wondering what changes it may bring us, then here's everything we know about it so far.

What will be the biggest changes made for the Fortnite Treasure Hunters mini-season?

Although Epic haven't officially confirmed much more than the name and tagline for the Fortnite Treasure Hunters mini-season, they have also released a number of teasers which give us a good idea of what's to come. The season is going to be themed around anime pirates, with One Piece being confirmed as a significant part of that.

As rounded up by HYPEX, we've so far seen that One Piece characters Luffy, Zoro, Nami, Usopp, Sanji, Ace, and Buggy will all feature, alongside A$AP Rocky, Charlotte, Cuddle Team Leader, Hatsune Miku, Hope, Jonesy, Kasane Teto, Lil Uzi Vert, and Oscar as part of a stacked line up!

There are also going to be six distinct pirate crews in Treasure Hunters, featuring Jones & Hope, Straw Hat Crew (One Piece), A$AP Rocky, Lil Uzi Vert, Kasane Teto & Hatsune Miku, plus a 6th unknown crew – perhaps that one will be ours? It's likely you'll be battling against these crews to secure the loot, as was revealed during the teaser – "You won't be the only one drawn to these shores. Hope you're ready for reality's greatest treasure hunt."

We've also got an early look at the Fortnite Treasure Hunters mini-season map in the post above, showing a more compact island with plenty of POIs within close proximity to each other. There are also lots of bays for ships to dock in, which ties to the overall piracy and treasure hunting theme.

How much will the Fortnite Treasure Hunters Battle Pass cost?

Fortnite is free to play, but buying the Battle Pass will get you lots of additional rewards. The Fortnite Treasure Hunters Battle Pass will be available for 800 V-Bucks, which means it will still be enough to purchase the smallest V-Bucks bundle in the Fortnite store, priced at $8.99 / £6.99 to get 800 V-Bucks. By completing the Battle Pass you can earn 800 V-Bucks back through unlocks, but you can no longer collect additional V-Bucks above that.

Usually it's possible to get a head start by buying the Battle Bundle upgrade, which would get you to Tier 25 on the Battle Pass instantly – however with this being a short mini-season, the pass may be smaller so this could work differently. Doing so previously would cost you 2,600 V-Bucks, which you can get for $22.99 / £17.49. You can also sign up to the Fortnite Crew subscription service, which costs $11.99 / £9.99 per month but gives you access to all of the Fortnite Passes including the Battle Pass, as well as awarding a bonus 800 V-Bucks every month and other exclusive rewards.

If you don't want to spend any money, you can always try to get free Fortnite V-Bucks for the Fortnite Treasure Hunters Battle Pass, but don't fall for online scams! If you choose to save up some V-Bucks, remember that you only need 800 of them to unlock the next Fortnite Battle Pass starting in November 2026.

And that's everything we know about the Fortnite Treasure Hunters mini-season for now, but keep checking back and we'll have more details as soon as they're revealed!

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Resident Evil series executive producer Jun Takeuchi says the series' overarching storyline could end within the next 10 years.

Speaking to Yahoo Japan (via machine translation), Takeuchi notes that with the upcoming Resident Evil Veronica, he thinks players will understand just how significant the game is to the plot of the series, as opposed to dismissing it as a side story.

This is in part due to some of the altered parts of the story featured in the remake; and while the Resident Evil remakes have generally been changing aspects as they go along, it's in service of eventually combining these remade classics with the most recent games in the series.

Takeuchi notes that even though the series overall plot was very much not planned from the start, and instead expanded as Capcom went along. On top of that, when planning for the Resident Evil 2 remake began, Capcom envisioned a 10-year plan for the storyline, with him teasing that there's a reason behind the order of the remakes – presumably why Capcom skipped to Resident Evil 4 when Code: Veronica and Zero were next in line.

With the release of Resident Evil: Requiem earlier this year, Takeuchi believes the first 10 years of Capcom's plan have come to an end and that, over the next 10 years, the series' conclusion will likely arrive.

However, he teases there will be multiple titles before then at least. Requiem's storyline did deal with an aging Leon and featured Grace Ashcroft as a potential character to carry on the series, so the seeds have definitely been planted. At least, with the story ending, Capcom will finally have to put Jill and Claire in a new game for once… Right?

You can check out our Resident Evil Requiem review if you're yet to play the horror game yourself, or our guide to Resident Evil Requiem's safe codes to help you through it.

Obtaining the MW4 Nuke killstreak is one of the game's more challenging goals, as it has been in series games before this one. It's a great way to show off your skills to both your team and opponents, and each year the hardiest of players fight to get the world's first nuke.

While that claim may have long gone for 2026's Modern Warfare 4, you can still work towards getting unlocking the nuke killstreak yourself, and the first step to that is knowing the conditions you actually have to meet. This killstreak cannot be unlocked by reaching any level and can never be equipped to your class. Instead, it can only ever be obtained by meeting certain match killstreak requirements, as you'll see below.

How to get the Nuke killstreak in MW4

To get the Nuke killstreak in MW4 2026, you need to get a 30 kills in a row without dying. You can die in the match, but your streak will start back at zero each time you do, and killstreak kills do not count, so you'll want to equip the best MW4 weapons you can.

This means that any kills you might get with the Wheelson, Heavy Artillery, or Gunship, for example, do not count towards your nuke - only those achieved with your primary or secondary weapon, melee weapon, or lethal throwables qualify. Get 30 of those in a row without dying though, and you'll get a notification on the middle of your screen that you can trigger the nuke.

To launch your Nuke, you might find you have to wait a few moments. Then press '4' on keyboard on right on your D-pad on any controller. You don't have to launch the Nuke right away, so you may as well see how many more kills you can get in first.

The nuke can be obtained in all multiplayer modes that allow for 30 or more kills in a row, so the likes of Search and Destroy aren't included.

If you can do this, then you're also well on your way to getting some of the best mastery camos in MW4 too, which is another great way to show off your skill.

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There's some good news and some bad news for Witchbrook fans today. Chucklefish's long-awaited magical school RPG finally has a release date set for next January… but that's also a delay from what was previously announced.

Witchbrook – a cozy life sim with Stardew Valley-esque visuals set in a seaside town with a magical college – was first teased over 10 years ago, if you can believe it, but it's felt tantalizingly close for the last couple of years thanks to some unfortunate delays. It was originally planned to arrive sometime during winter 2025, but got pushed back to 2026, and, well… it's now missed out on that window, too.

As announced during today's Nintendo Indie World Showcase, Witchbrook is now set to arrive on January 28, 2027. In addition to launching on PC, Xbox, Switch, and Switch 2 as previously revealed in a blog post shared on Steam, Chucklefish now confirms that Witchbrook will also arrive on PS5 at the same time as the other platforms, so no one is missing out at launch.

This blog post also confirms the US pricing for Witchbrook. It'll be $24.99 at launch, and Chucklefish also notes that physical copies – both standard and collector's editions – will be coming, too, but not until after the digital release. This is "to avoid impacting the release schedule, and to ensure they’re truly special for physical media collectors," the devs say.

"We have poured detail and care into every pixel, to create a truly handcrafted experience," the blog post says. "We can't wait to open Witchbrook College's grand doors to new students in January, and introduce you to the town and people of Mossport.

"Thank you for all of your support and patience, especially within the last year, while we took the additional time to make a game we're truly proud of. We hope you'll enjoy immersing yourself in our magical pixel art world as much as we've enjoyed making it."

That pair of aforementioned delays may have some feeling wary about getting too excited about the new date, but with an actual date listed this time rather than a more vague release window, it feels a lot more likely that this will be Witchbrook's final delay. Hopefully, anyway.

Witchbrook's taken 10 years because "Harry Potter meets Stardew Valley" got old and the devs wanted time to make "something more unique."

Update: New details have come to light since this article was published, so it has been updated accordingly.

Full story follows: Following the closure of BioWare and cancellation of Mass Effect 5 after the EA buyout, the RPG that never came to be has been heavy on fans' minds – and former developers' own, too.

Behind the scenes, though, things with the next Mass Effect were on shaky ground for some time, reportedly, as the massive $55 billion EA buyout by Saudi Arabia's private investment fund, Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, and private equity fund Silver Lake fell into place.

The acquisition allegedly spurred various changes in BioWare devs' plans, especially in how potentially sensitive topics were handled.

For example, BioWare's inclusivity – something the studio has been well known for since its early RPGs, from the original Dragon Age to Mass Effect – and its outspoken support for marginalized communities.

An unnamed dev who was working on Mass Effect: Universe, as the in-progress fifth entry was titled, explains as much in a statement to BFM (as translated from French by GamesRadar+ and machine using both DeepL and Google).

"I think the video proposals we presented to the new management weren't convincing," he alleges. "Especially since BioWare is known for its inclusive stories, which didn't help dispel the skepticism."

This "skepticism," as the dev goes on to describe, supposedly led the team to remove a flag "too similar to the LGBTQIA+ flag" from one of the presented videos, "so as not to cause offense" with its inclusion.

Speaking to Kotaku following the story's publication, the journalist clarifies that the move was reportedly "in anticipation of potential negative feedback" from EA. Additionally, "contrary to what is being said about this on social media, [the decision to remove the flag] was not [made] out of a desire to hide inclusive elements, but rather to anticipate negative feedback from conservative executives."

Regardless, it's a difficult thought to stomach, especially when, as the anonymous dev puts it, you consider BioWare's history as a strong supporter of folks whose voices aren't as well heard by the public, but it's sadly not all that surprising.

I'm instantly reminded of The Sims series myself, and how covers had to be changed for Saudi Arabian audiences so as to not include any LGBTQIA+ representation.

People were worrying about what the buyout might mean in that sense while it was underway, too, with EA staff sharing how they feared the new Saudi Arabian owners would police their games and how "projects just won't get signed because they don't align explicitly with what the Saudi government wants."

None of the process has been easy or simple, to say the least, and the future remains uncertain.

Here's hoping that everyone from BioWare is able to land on their feet following the studio's closure – and that somehow, some way, the Save Mass Effect movement results in change.

The leaked Mass Effect 5 trailer is being re-released by a veteran BioWare composer: "I want it to properly represent my musical vision"

As Final Fantasy Resonance has a strong start, and, like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, proves what an appetite JRPG fans have for turn-based games, one analyst suggests that Square Enix "knows what it's missed out on" after its "move towards more action-oriented Final Fantasy titles."

Square Enix's new turn-based, HD-2D release launched last week and quickly dethroned Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth as the series' single-player games' highest concurrent player peak on Steam. And, as you might expect, that's translated to a lot of money for Square Enix, too.

According to Alinea Analytics analyst Rhys Elliott, Resonance has now sold 400k copies across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, bringing in $20 million in revenue. That's obviously rather a lot, and Elliott suggests it reflects what JRPG fans actually want and that Square Enix is catering to it. It's also worth keeping in mind that this doesn't include what the game made on the Nintendo Switch 2.

"Given the strong positive reaction to – and early sales of – Resonance and last year's Expedition 33 (which is tracking way better than recent Final Fantasy games), it's clear that Square Enix has left a significant chunk of JRPG players behind during their move towards more action-oriented Final Fantasy titles," he suggests.

"While Square chased more Western trends, a Western company swept in and released Expedition 33, a game JRPG fans wanted for decades and even won game of the year at The Game Awards," he continues. "Square knows this, knows what it's missed out on, and it's seen Capcom succeed on Steam with its legacy franchises where Square Enix has arguably floundered."

Obviously, that isn't to say that Final Fantasy Resonance was made in response to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, as it was in the works well before Sandfall's reveal, let alone its wildly successful launch last year. However, the timing of another turn-based RPG gaining so much traction can't be ignored, and Elliott suggests that Square Enix may consider altering its strategy going forward.

"I can see Square Enix going down a new route, with many diverging paths, for Final Fantasy," he explains. "They've already outlined their plans to go fully multiplatform, smartly moving away from timed PlayStation exclusivity.

"I can also see the company balancing its MMO, high-fidelity remakes, and big-budget mainline Final Fantasy titles with more of these smaller 2D-HD original pixel games alongside the 2D-HD remakes," he continues. "There's still a gap for a turn-based JRPG big-budget Final Fantasy, though, and all the signals are pointing Square Enix in that direction. Just a matter of time, I reckon."

It's not just Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 developer Sandfall that the analyst suggests Square Enix takes notes from, though. After a particularly stellar year with the likes of Resident Evil Requiem, Pragmata, and Onimusha: Way of the Sword – showcasing success with new IP and old favorites alike – Elliott adds: "I'd take even more cues from Capcom, if I were them."

Final Fantasy 14 devs say Evercold's new Evolved mode isn't massive power creep: "If you don't want to change, you don't have to."

Cyberpunk 2077 just saw the release of update 2.5, a patch that accompanied the Edgerunners 2 debut on Netflix – and one that CD Projekt Red hoped would be very special.

Paweł Sasko, who is now working as Cyberpunk 2 associate director, reveals as much in an entry on the studio's official blog, explaining that the developers wanted the connection between all of Cyberpunk's media to feel "consistent" – which, yes, means Edgerunners and Cyberpunk 2077, as it "has always worked best when you can feel it's one consistent universe, a nexus of stories told from different perspectives."

He continues, referencing characters from both the RPG and its animated Netflix series: "V, Johnny, David, Lucy, the characters from our comics and now the new crew from Edgerunners 2 all experience the same world, but they see something different in it. I wanted the game to acknowledge that connection directly."

Not only that, but CD Projekt Red – and especially Sasko – wanted that acknowledgement to be great.

So great, in fact, that it (in the form of update 2.5, of course) would outshine the patch that accompanied the first season of Edgerunners four years back.

In Sasko's own words, "I wanted to create an update for the game that will be much more meaningful than the one we created for Edgerunners in 2022." That "one," as he says, was 1.6 – a patch aptly dubbed the Edgerunners Update, adding transmogs, cross-progression, and more.

This time around, update 2.5 has brought a new quest to the RPG that acts as a prequel to Edgerunners 2.

"Players will unlock a new quest that takes place before the events of the show, following the last job of Team King. It introduces King, Meshuga, Miguel, and Emily, and takes players into a part of Night City they have never properly explored before," Sasko describes – and, again, consistency between the show and game was key.

"From the beginning, believability and immersion were the most important for me. If these characters exist both in the game and in the show, they should feel like the same people," as he concludes. "That is why it was incredibly important to get the same voice actors from Edgerunners 2 into Cyberpunk 2077."

And so they did just that – and I'd argue that it's worked out quite nicely for CD Projekt Red, too.

Following Edgerunners 2 and update 2.5, the RPG did hit its highest Steam player count in three years, after all. It serves as a testament to the ever-growing quality of Cyberpunk 2077, I'd say, and, yes, how good the collaborative patch has been this time around.

CD Projekt Red just can't stop updating Cyberpunk 2077: "This world keeps giving us reasons to return to it."