As the gaming world watches and waits, Stardew Valley creator Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone says he's feeling the pressure to ensure that the follow-up, Haunted Chocolatier, meets everyone's expectations.

Speaking to GQ in a wide-ranging interview, Barone touches on how the creative process differs this time around and that it hasn't been an easy adjustment. While he had all the time in the world to create Stardew Valley, the fans that game has amassed over the years are now eagerly awaiting Haunted Chocolatier.

"I've been struggling with that," he says, "because I really want to recapture that feeling that I had when I was making Stardew Valley. Back then, there was no audience, there was no precedent. Everyone's watching me, and if I don't do things a certain way, it might disappoint millions of people."

Further reflecting on Stardew Valley, Barone says it was initially a "dumb little project" he used to get better at programming while he "couldn't find a job." Now? A phenomenon.

"It's kind of hard to fathom just how many people have played it, and the impact it's had," he says. "It was not part of the plan."

Regardless, now five years since its initial announcement, Haunted Chocolatier is slowly taking shape at a pace Barone is setting for himself. Pressure or not. Thankfully, it looks to be shaping up nicely. Elsewhere in the interview, Barone describes it as a game for Stardew Valley players who yearn for the mines, which sounds quite ideal and worth the wait.

ConcernedApe says sorry Haunted Chocolatier is taking so long: "I won't compromise on the quality of the game by rushing it or releasing it too early."

One of Rockstar's narrative leads says that GTA 6's Vice City setting is the ideal place to check in on a popular recurring theme within Grand Theft Auto: T he American Dream.

Rockstar has made its approach to real-world influences quite clear of late. The team behind GTA 6 will comment on wider trends that won't go out of date when the game ships, which is also why more specific events or people prove riskier.

One topic that Rockstar's senior vice president of narrative name-checked, though, is the American Dream and how it looks and feels today compared to years gone by.

"Some would say the American Dream collapsed a long time ago," Humphries tells Love Magazine in its latest edition, now on sale. "With GTA 4 we told an immigrant's story that was supposed to be a kind of hollow commentary on the illusion of America as a land of opportunity, and then we sort of doubled down on that with the cynicism of GTA 5."

Considering that GTA 5 released in 2013, where does that leave us as we near the end of 2026? For Humphries, the dream is diluted into something less grand, yet it still remains out of reach for many.

"Maybe the American Dream is more modest now," he muses. "It's a house for your family and your loans are paid off instead of wild success – but maybe today, that is just as out of reach for the average person.

"Miami and Southern Florida are a particular front line for this battle between astronomical wealth and unbounded ambition, creating a pressure cooker for all kinds of insanity."

It's easy to see what might be shaping Humphries' thinking. The cost of living is rising while keeping employment feels shaky. You can see this in the gaming industry itself, where layoffs remain rampant as the cost of developing games continues to surge.

A misplaced sense of optimism that the spending highs of COVID-19 certainly didn't get this off to a good start, though a willingness to spend has further dwindled thanks to the likes of AI and tariffs making most things you come across costlier than ever. And no doubt, the pinch is being felt in the US.

So yeah, to Humphries' point, I suppose being a homeowner with little debt to worry about does feel like a dream right now.

Rockstar has a whole team of GTA 6 writers dedicated to pedestrian dialogue: "There are no shortcuts when it comes to building a world like this"

Insulation Roll in Arc Raiders is a new crafting resource material added as part of the Frozen Trail update, and while it has no use on its own terms, it's used for high level crafting recipes and materials. However, as an Epic-level item with no clear location to search in its description, finding Insulation Roll isn't easy to do. Fortunately having located it myself, I'll lay out where to look in Arc Raiders to find it.

Arc Raiders Insulation Roll locations

I found an Insulation Roll in the Railyard in Pendola Pass, the snowy map added as part of the Arc Raiders Frozen Trail update, specifically inside the train carriages, resting on the seats and countertops out in the open. However, as an Epic Rarity item, it is not guaranteed to show up, and this was only on one occurrence out of several.

Others online have reported seeing it in all the High-Level Loot locations in Pendola Pass, usually in containers associated with high value items like Security Breach lockers. Though I can't personally confirm that yet, there does seem to be broad consensus on this: Insulation Rolls are highly rare items that appear to be somewhat location-neutral, hence why no specific kind of environment is highlighted in the description to narrow down the search.

Out hunting robots? Find out how to profit even more via the Arc Raiders Trophy Display project! Or alternatively, check out where to find the various Arc Raiders blueprints so you can build anything and everything.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

The former Burnout developers behind Star Wars: Galactic Racer reckon it's important to challenge players, because they're going to tune out otherwise.

Star Wars: Galactic Racer is a tough game. Intentionally so, with Fuse Games CEO Matt Webster saying "we are asking way more out of players" this time around compared to the Burnout games that a majority of the team used to develop, because "modern gamers can manage a greater amount of cognitive load."

Not only is the racing extremely fast, but you have a slate of aggressive racers trying to ram you off the track, and the slightest hesitation on a turn can cause you to launch into a corner and explode. And given that you only have a finite amount of crashes before you're forced to forfeit, it's likely that some may take a significant amount of time before they even reach act 2.

Speaking to GamesRadar+, Webster explains plainly: "Games should challenge players." With the Burnout series, he says, "we used to throw rewards at you – dopamine hits of reward, reward, car, car, car! Eventually, if that's just one note, then you start to tune it out."

He adds, "But this game should challenge you. We wanted to front that up so you feel like, 'a hard fought fifth place – yeah I'll take it.'"

Webster describes a need for what he calls "light and shade," calling the segments where you play as Shade when you reach a new planet an "important aspect." He says: "You've got the light and shade between the super high intensity racing and the lower intensity immersion in Star Wars."

How former Burnout devs came full circle for Star Wars: Galactic Racer to bring the edge back into racing games: "'Arcade' is not the absence of depth."

Dead Space creator Glen Schofield's 2022 survival horror game The Callisto Protocol might have been met with lukewarm reviews, but the director says this came after he was "forced to ship the game" three months earlier than expected, prompting him and the other devs to release a whopping 86 patches after launch.

In a new interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Schofield discusses The Callisto Protocol's troubled development, noting that the devs at Striking Distance Studios had been working on the game for around six months when the COVID-19 pandemic kicked off, which was "a real pain in the ass," to put it lightly.

As well as struggling with remote work – with Zoom meetings replacing the ability to speak to devs face to face in the studio – there were also apparently some management issues with publisher Krafton. Specifically, Schofield alleges, he'd previously been promised three extra months to work on The Callisto Protocol to make up for the disruption that COVID had caused, which would have seen the game launch in March 2023. However, it's claimed that the publisher then decided it wanted it to launch in December 2022 regardless.

"I was forced to ship the game. I'm mad at myself, there's no doubt. I was so stunned by that decision, because we had fucking COVID," he states. "A million people died in America. I lost one of my best friends. Every single month, four to six people in my company were getting sick. There were times our small team in Spain was shut down; it goes through a small place like that and you lose your rendering team for a while. The main thing you're concerned about, not that you aren't normally, is the health of your team. Making a game just became secondary because this is about life. This is about humanity."

As you'd imagine, all this saw parts of The Callisto Protocol change from what Schofield originally had in mind, with certain levels, bosses, and enemies removed from the game altogether.

And, alas, The Callisto Protocol wasn't the success that Striking Distance Studios or Krafton were hoping it would be. "They thought Callisto was a complete failure," Schofield says of Krafton. "What they didn't know while all they were doing was complaining, we were doing patches. I waited until I finished all the DLC and put out 86 patches. That was a lot of fucking work. Every day you're going in, you're making changes. Some are little, others are massive. That was all to get it back to where it needed to be."

After all that, it's not exactly a shock that Krafton wasn't interested in a Callisto Protocol sequel, either. Schofield says it would have been a bigger game – about a whole plague rather than an outbreak – set in a "giant junkyard" of spacecraft docked in a massive space station. "We had a lot of drawings and a lot of some of the stuff that didn't get in the first game was going to be in this one," he reveals. Unfortunately, it seems we'll probably never see this vision brought to life.

While you're here, be sure to take a look at our roundup of new games coming this year and beyond.

Stop us if you've heard this before, but the No Man's Sky team has yet again been cookin' up a new release for its 2016 survival game – and this time, it's a mobile launch.

That's right, No Man's Sky is indeed coming to iOS over a decade after its initial release, with Hello Games planning an October 28 launch – but it hasn't come easy.

Sean Murrary says as much in a new letter regarding the exciting mobile launch, explaining that the developers first considered porting it over after bringing No Man's Sky to Mac in 2023. "Someone on the team said, 'I reckon I could get this running on an iPhone,'" as he recalls.

"I honestly didn't believe it until I played it myself for the first time," Murray continues. "A little like when we brought the game to VR or Nintendo Switch players, it started with a seemingly impossible technical challenge we wanted to disprove." And boy, did they do just that.

Witnessing No Man's Sky's universe generation working on a mobile phone remains a core memory for the studio lead – and how could it not?

"There was something magical about seeing that universe being generated on a tiny device," as he puts it.

Considering technical limitations, though, how will it work? Well, Murray assures "this is not No Man's Sky Lite."

It boasts the "full universe to explore," including the Cosmos update and every other major patch Hello Games has dropped over the years: "It even includes our most ambitious updates like Voyagers from last year."

The game won't have multiplayer or settlements day one, though, much like it didn't on the Switch at first – but it's all coming.

It'll be available on every iOS device from the iPhone 11 and third-generation iPad Air up. Hello Games hasn't cut corners here, either. Murray details how the studio has "rebuilt touch controls from the ground up to make No Man's Sky feel totally at home on mobile" and "put tons of work into battery life and thermodynamics."

And, if you can believe it, the file size of the mobile No Man's Sky is under 5GB – you hardly need any space on your phone, it seems. Pre-orders are live today, too, but you don't need to commit if you're not sure just yet. "In an effort to welcome as many new Travellers to the universe as possible, it'll be free to try at launch."

I personally can't wait to see how it runs on mobile devices myself, honestly… but knowing Hello Games, it'll be good.

Searching for more to look forward to this year and beyond? Browse through our roundup of the best new games coming to wishlist.

From the moment developer Fuse Games was founded in January 2023, the intent for the studio was to make a Star Wars racing game. CEO Matt Webster tells me that roughly three weeks into the studio's life, the team were on a plane to visit Lucasfilm Games and pitch the idea – "Galactic Racer".

As a studio founded by former Criterion Games developers (Criterion Games previously helmed the Burnout series and later worked on EA's 2015 Star Wars Battlefront and its sequel), fusing the team's arcade racing pedigree and previous experience working on Star Wars titles, as Fuse's creative director Kieran Crimmins says, was "a no-brainer"). While 'Burnout but Star Wars' is certainly an intriguing pitch on its own (I was absolutely hooked on the concept from its first reveal in December 2025), the team at Fuse wasn't content with just going back to familiar territory when you need to stand out amongst a galaxy of games.

Burnt out

With series like Forza Horizon and Gran Turismo dominating the triple-A racing space, the focus has shifted from arcade action to realism and scale that makes the most of modern hardware. More cars, more tracks, vast open worlds, and endless rewards, for anyone and everyone. Even Mario Kart, one of the last mainstream bastions for arcade racing, followed suit with Mario Kart World's core feature being an open world.

With their heritage and expertise from the arcade racing of the 2000s, the developers at Fuse Games were never going to follow the crowd when making Star Wars: Galactic Racer. "I think these guys at Fuse could've absolutely made just a killer arcade racing game," says Craig Derrick, executive producer at Lucasfilm Games. "But there was always the intention, I think from the very beginning, of "how do we push the genre forward?"

It's not the first time the founders of Fuse have pioneered the genre either, with their previous work at Criterion Games partly shaping modern racing games too. 2008's Burnout Paradise – while not the first open-world racing game – undoubtedly went on to influence the first entries in the Forza Horizon and The Crew series, thanks to a map that lacked defined tracks and acted more as a driving playground.

Crimmins describes this post-Burnout Paradise shift as a "sea change" but feels that there hasn't quite been another one in the racing genre since, despite there being plenty of polished racers across the triple-A and indie space. Specifically, he believes that consequences are "sorely missing" in big racing games, with Webster adding that some feel a bit toothless: "I think there's been a bit of a burnishing off of, I suppose, the edge in [racing games]. You put a car in the wall and what's going to happen? And if it's nothing, then it just falls a little bit flat from an emotional perspective."

Rogue One

So, looking to make waves by bringing back consequence with Galactic Racer and after a lot of prototyping, the team at Fuse Games determined that the runs-based, roguelike-inspired format was the way to go. As I noted in my Star Wars: Galactic Racer review, I couldn't believe that this racing-roguelike hybrid had never been attempted before by a mainstream studio because it's a natural fit.

Applying a runs-based structure to an arcade racer fights against "a bunch of racing game conventions", explains Webster. As well as facing little to no consequences, players are also conditioned to win all the time in a lot of modern racing games, which is something that the roguelike mechanics in Star Wars: Galactic Racer vehemently oppose. "This game should challenge you, and we wanted to front that up, so you feel like 'a hard-fought fifth place? Yeah, I'll take it'," Webster says.

Hurtling around Galactic Racer's circuits and inevitably obliterating your speeder means winning your first few events is unlikely, and it's an oddly refreshing humbling experience. Those crashes are also where Burnout's DNA shines through most in Galactic Racer. It also feels like classic Star Wars, which makes sense as Webster says that, in a full-circle moment, they were inspired by The Phantom Menace back in the day.

"When we were making Burnout, the podracing sequence in Episode One was a massive influence in terms of the drama and the excitement and the sheer speed and power, and the visceral nature of those crashes was a big inspiration," he says. Bringing those back in a true Star Wars setting with a roguelike structure means each crash serves as a "learning moment" too, and, indeed, I quickly learned that survival is the priority, not victory.

Bring balance

However, Galactic Racer was once a lot more punishing. Going over previous iterations of the wrecking out loop, Webster and Crimmins share that there was a version where you could crash only once instead of three times, and another where you had to finish in the top three every time – the latter lives on as the Eliminator event. Webster also says that Galactic Racer asks a lot from its players in terms of cognitive load.

But it also went the other way, as Crimmins explains there was a version that was much more straightforward. "It felt like it lost all its teeth, and now it feels trivial, and my decisions don't matter," he says. "Getting that balance right is incredibly important to give you that emotional high when you do win but also give you that impetus to move forward when you don't."

That's a doubly difficult balance to strike when a chunk of your audience might also just be in it for Star Wars with little to no experience with racing games. As Derrick explains, that meant making the game accessible without pulling back from what Fuse wanted to do, with the game's narrative and Shade's journey being crucial.

"We onboard you through a fun racing story," Derrick says. "Then we put you in the paddock, and now you have a place where you've decreased the pace for just a minute, so that you can kind of get a sense of the world and feel where your place is. And then we start to amp it up and then push the challenge. Then it's rewarding because it's not punitive."

Despite Galactic Racer being challenging at times, making an accessible and true arcade racer was core to Webster's philosophy. "'Arcade' is not the absence of depth. It's how the game presents itself to you, making it super approachable," he says. "I can get in, have an amazing experience really quickly, but it wants me to carry on. And I think that's really what we've done [with Galactic Racer] is embrace that and modernize it in a way that keeps its heart but also begins to add some contemporary game aspects."

Those peaks and troughs of intensity, difficulty, and strategy from the runs-based format are what make Star Wars: Galactic Racer so engaging to me. Rather than being a dopamine stream of first-place finishes and prizes that eventually ring hollow, or getting bogged down in realistic simulation, it forces you to get used to fighting for every position and taking great risks in a way that most modern racing games don't. For that reason, Galactic Racer could represent another sea change for the genre.

Galactic Racer is easily one of the best Star Wars games if you're feeling the Force. And its runs-based twist means it's also one of the best racing games you can play right now!

Valor Mortis is an easy game to like, and an even easier game to fantasize about kicking down a flight of stairs. It's a perfectly functional Soulslike based around swordplay and parrying, which is about as novel in 2026 as having a pause screen. It's also got terrible scripted parkour sequences that will make you wish you could snap off the lead character's legs. It even has a frikkin' sewer level.

Yet, it keeps nearly winning me back. Its combat can be exhilarating, the pulpy writing charming, and its puppydoggish "look ma! I'm making my first Soulslike! I am, I am!" enthusiasm is contagious. How can you hate a game that has a boss fight against a sentient windmill? Well, that boss fight being a finicky slog certainly helps…

You died

You're William, a loyal soldier of Napoleon Bonaparte with such low life expectancy that William dies on the battlefield before the game even starts. William somehow recovers from that setback, rising from the grave with a classic case of videogame protagonist amnesia. He's now in a nightmarish version of Europe where everyone has succumbed to a horrible plague that makes them want to draw swords and turn William into a shish kebab.

William may not remember what's happened to him but you'll be able to get by on muscle memory if you've played anything even vaguely Souls-y before. Brutal combat that's all about parrying blows and striking at the perfect moment. No map screen. Shortcuts steadily unlocked. If you die you get one chance to get your level-up currency back, yada yada yada.

If you don't like learning to parry then go play something else (also, my deepest sympathies, gaming in 2026 must be miserable for you). Valor Mortis demands precise sword-tennis right from the start, with even rank-and-file enemies taking multiple parries to finally break their guard. If you bounced off Sekiro and Ominusha: Way of the Sword, I'd recommend running away screaming from this.

You also have a gun and the power to shoot flames from your fingers, and it's nice to see these treated not as mere bonuses but as valid strategies. I finally got through the game's first boss when I realized that I wanted him on fire as much as possible. And once you get the blunderbuss, it's great fun cutting swordsmen off by just blasting them in the face, Indiana Jones-style.

Still, being able to shoot fire from your hands is a videogame idea so ancient it might actually predate man discovering fire. The other powers you gain aren't that imaginative either. The ability to stop time is used for seen-it-all-before-puzzles, like freezing a cog in place so you can get through a gate before it drops.

Another power creates platforms and walls you can run on, but only in predetermined areas. The final power is a shield which deflects attacks, which rewards you spending the last twenty hours of mastering the parry with the power to, er, no longer have to worry about it as much. Eh?

Witch is Familiar

Valor Mortis is made by the developers of Ghostrunner, the fun but also incredibly infuriating parkour game. That makes this the first time in human history a studio has pivoted to making a Soulslike and actually made a game that's less frustrating. But, as it goes on, Valor Mortis increasingly plays like it wants to be Ghostrunner 3.

Wall-running and swinging off poles works fine for a while. It's even somewhat liberating to play as someone so acrobatic in a genre that usually roots you stubbornly to the ground. But Valor Mortis occasionally demands perfect parkour from you in scripted set-pieces. This was around the point I debated throwing my gaming laptop into a roaring fire.

These feel like irritating memory tests rather than fun platforming challenges, and seem to forget I have access to a sprint button. Occasionally I'd leap on a platform only to be insta-killed because tsk tsk the game had plans to dramatically destroy that platform before I reached it, and my naughty sprinting ahead had spoiled the fun. Instant death for you.

A pity, because Valor Mortis does have a few nasty surprises (complimentary). I love how the 'dog' enemies are actually human soldiers who've horrifically twisted themselves into a canine shape. They then chase you, barking like bloodthirsty hounds. That's a stroke of evil genius. Please get it the hell away from me.

And there's a reason parrying is gaming's verb of choice at the moment. It feels great and jammy as hell to pull off, and that's still true here. The first person camera gives it a brutal you-are-there immediacy that a traditional third-person camera could only dream of.

The game's best boss fights, brutal parry-offs where you're only a few minor mistakes away from the grave, are immensely satisfying, even if a slightly wobbly power curve meant that the first boss was by far the most trouble I had.

Fair warning that jank currently runs through it like a French blade through a whiny British videogame critic (er, hopefully not?). Crashes to desktop, a framerate that's all over the place, and one boss suddenly not attacking me presumably because they're aware I'm on a tight review deadline – thanks again, The Orphan! I played this on a PC that ran Gears of War: E-Day without a hitch, so I'd recommend seeing how the launch day patch holds up across PC and console, which we're told addresses many of these issues.

As William explores, he occasionally hears the voice of Napoleon Bonaparte in his head, offering some unsolicited combat philosophy. Alas, Napoleon's hilariously banal insights wouldn't make the cut for an office motivational poster, let alone the battlefield. This is meant to be one of the greatest military strategists of all time? I'd be amazed if this chump could win a game of tiddlywinks.

Fortunately, other characters are a lot more fun. Like the mad scientist who keeps sending you out on deadly research expeditions, and whose understanding of ethics is up there with the Umbrella corporation. One village is praying to a mysterious deity, and learning whether she's a God, a myth, or a real person is one of the game's best reveals. Shockingly, several unseen children might just steal the entire show. They narrate and guide you through a destroyed city, covering the walls in adorably crap drawings of the monsters you've faced. Awww.

Valor Mortis is not without its charms. For the most part it's a perfectly playable Soulslike with combat that's satisfying to master. But I've seen all its tricks before, executed better, and a shift to first-person isn't enough to make this truly stand apart. Soulslike imitators really need to learn that FromSoftware didn't get where they are today by copying someone else's homework.

Valor Mortis was reviewed on PC, with code provided by the publisher.

In the mood for more-tis? Check out our best Soulslike games ranking, and games like Dark Souls recommendations!

Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii is touting his new game which he claims took him about 30 minutes to make using generative AI.

Despite being one of the most prolific game creators of all time, the Dragon Quest creator has fallen head over heels for the slop machine like your elderly uncle on Facebook. Developers like Hideo Kojima have spoken critically about using it as a replacement for creative aspects of game development, but Square Enix is working with Google on a chatbot for Dragon Quest 10, and Horii has generally been very positive about the tech, claiming it can make JRPG characters "feel even more human" and claiming that the tech known for hallucinating info "hardly ever makes things up."

And now, Horii has released a new 'game' titled Interrogation Room Komiya (via VGC). The developer went to Twitter recalling the development of his 1983 adventure game The Portopia Serial Murder Case – a game which he wrote, programmed and created art for all by himself – while now, he can just write some words into the machine, allowing him to make something in about 30 minutes.

Of course, the question is whether Horii's enthusiasm for the tech will carry over into Dragon Quest 12, which has been in what could be described as development hell, given that the entire concept was reworked and development was restarted. The game is confirmed to have artwork and characters from Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama and series composer Koichi Sugiyama, both of whom have passed away since the 12th entry was announced.

I'm a creature-collecting sicko, and going hands-on with Dragon Quest Monsters: The Withered World made me realize how much I've been missing out on this spin-off.

Good news if you yearn for the mines in Stardew Valley – creator Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone says his long-awaited follow-up game Haunted Chocolatier is for you.

In a new interview with GQ, Barone doubles down on an explanation he previously gave of Haunted Chocolatier – even though "it is still what I call a town game," we can expect this one to be "more of an action RPG."

He's previously spoken about it having "a greater focus on combat," and he now elaborates: "The main focus is more about adventuring, finding equipment and getting more powerful. There are monsters, there are boss fights."

It's the Stardew Valley comparison he makes that really speaks to me, though, and it sounds like Barone and myself have had a very similar experience with his first game. "It's for the people in Stardew Valley that go into the mines," he says. "That's what I do, honestly."

There's still absolutely no word on when we can expect Haunted Chocolatier to launch. Back in August, he apologized that the game is taking so long, but said: "I won't compromise on the quality of the game by rushing it or releasing it too early. Then all my time would be wasted, anyway."

This is a sentiment he's doubled down on now, too, saying: "No one's playing the game until I'm ready to show it. If you have a turkey in the oven. You're not going to pull it out halfway and have the guests taste it, right? It needs to be done." So, no Haunted Chocolatier food poisoning for us.

Haunted Chocolatier is "way bigger than Stardew Valley," says ConcernedApe: "Everything is cranked up."

If you've been taking on the Locust horde in Gears of War: E-Day lately, you might have noticed some disruption in online play. The servers have been subject to DDoS attacks, but The Coalition is on the case and normal service is expected to resume in the near future.

The developer posted about the incidents on social media. "Earlier today, some players experienced intermittent disconnects, login issues, or other service disruptions in Gears of War: E-Day," a post on Twitter says. "These issues were due to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting our online services."

Repairs are underway, and the tweet notes the devs are keeping an eye on things. "Our teams are continuing to monitor and mitigate this activity," the post continues. "We’ll provide updates if there are any significant changes."

The tweet ends by thanking fans for being patient and understanding. It's unclear how much damage the attackers caused or how badly the systems were impacted, but it was likely fairly noticeable and widespread if it necessitated an official response.

This is a frustrating turn since the game only came out last week, on October 6, and it's the big return for one of Xbox's flagship series. Many have likely already finished the campaign, and are now getting stuck right into the multiplayer - or they glossed over the single-player elements in favor of blasting and chainsawing others online.

Now, those plans have been delayed. In the responses, some users are noting they've been waiting a number of hours for servers to stabilize again, indicating it's been stop-start the last while. You can probably expect that to persist throughout today, before The Coalition managed to completely firewall the DDoS culprits.

Nobody said taking on the Locust would be easy. Sometimes it just takes a little more patience than you'd like. Remain steadfast.

Gears of War E-Day sold just 62k copies on Xbox versus 1.7 million Game Pass players, analyst estimates: "The $70 premium SKU is – functionally – dead on Xbox"

After months of decline, Arc Raiders has seen an enormous resurgence in players thanks to its new Frozen Trail update and recent free trial, but while things are suddenly looking a lot healthier for Embark's shooter, one dev knows it "won't last."

Although Arc Raiders was undoubtedly a massive hit when it launched last year and maintained an extremely strong player count on Steam for months, as with any live service game, things eventually began to dwindle. Until recently, the game hadn't seen a concurrent player count on PC above 100,000 since May, with numbers dropping as low as the low 30,000s in September.

Things changed since October 8 and the release of the big Frozen Trail update, though. That Steam concurrent number flew past 125,000 on the first day of the patch, and this past weekend, went even higher, reaching 185,443 yesterday according to SteamDB. That's still a ways off its all-time record of 481,966, but an enormous improvement on what we've been used to seeing these days. In fact, it's not seen numbers that high since March. But despite it all, even one dev knows this is fleeting, too.

Sharing a screenshot of Arc Raiders' concurrent player count on Steam when it hit 150,000 again, Embark full-stack engineer Leon San José Larsson writes on Twitter: "It won't last forever, of course, but it's great seeing so many people back again after almost a year." As one player suggests that perhaps the number could go higher when Embark implements PvE – it's testing a matchmaking toggle for this for a week starting tomorrow – the dev says: "One can always hope."

It might sound a bit pessimistic, but truthfully, he's not wrong. It's only natural for the player count in live-service games to decline over time as people decide they've had their fill and move on to new things. Big updates like Frozen Trail, as well as things like free weekends, will cause a surge in interest but ultimately just restart the cycle; that doesn't mean a game is dead, either, however.

Palworld dev and Pocketpair Publishing boss John "Bucky" Buckley has been shrugging off the "dead game" comments aimed at the hit survival game for years, but as it continues to hold steady interest, it's clear he has a point.

Will PvE mode split Arc Raiders in two? "It's very possible," says executive producer.

GTA 6 is evidently still suffering from quite significant leaks left, right, and center, with 25 minutes of new gameplay going live last week – but I'm not sure Rockstar is currently worrying about the whole of its latest Grand Theft Auto entry going live early.

Following the cryptocurrency-fueled GTA 6 leak that was supposedly spurred by demands for digital rights, more physical copies, and such, with claims to be "raising funds for a secret project" (via crypto, of course), things went silent… for a bit, anyway.

The leaker behind it, as well as its associated crypto coin, Cyberleek, returned with more footage on October 8, though, and threats to release the entirety of GTA 6 over the weekend.

As per said threats, Cyberleek once again demanded "physical disks and a public apology," stating that the full build of the game would go live once their cryptocurrency market cap hits $30 million.

The thing is, however, that doesn't currently look like it's happening. A quick look at the coin's standing on OpenSea shows it's been steadily dropping from a peak of $7.6 million yesterday. Right now, it's at only $2.7 million.

While it appears to perhaps be trending slightly upward again, it did so (very minimally) a few times while on its way down from that $7.6 million figure, too – so I'm not sure it's enough to prove the coin is heading toward the number Cyberleek is hoping for.

As per their own message, again, the cryptocurrency needs to reach $30 million before "the build goes out, full story mode, played to the end, credits and all."

So, will that happen? Although I'm not sure, I'm also not certain it really matters. Something tells me Cyberleek will resurface with some sort of new leak regardless to keep its crypto coin (and name) relevant in the public eye, which has happened now a couple of times.

When that might be – should it even happen – remains a mystery, as does whether or not Cyberleek will successfully avoid the wrath of Rockstar Games.

Rockstar has a whole team of GTA 6 writers dedicated to pedestrian dialogue: "There are no shortcuts when it comes to building a world like this"

Rockstar Games created an entire team dedicated to what some might consider "background noise" for GTA 6.

The tidbit comes from GTA 6 developers who recently spoke to Love magazine about the open-world epic. Rockstar's senior vice president of narrative, Rupert Humphries, says there's "an amazing team of writers and creatives" focused on creating the "'background noise' that makes the city and the world come to life."

According to Humphries, that includes a "specific team of pedestrian dialogue writers in LA and then a team of advertising and comedy writers across New York, LA, and London." He adds: "It's a team from all sorts of backgrounds and walks of life, but we all share a sense of humor and a desire to have a bit of fun with the ridiculousness of humans and the media and advertising. And none of us see it as background! It's all part of the tapestry of the game and creates the experience of living in this wild world."

Open world writing director, James Horton, says the studio apparently "dreamed a lot bigger this time around," building entire teams for details that might be after thoughts in other open-world games.

"There are no shortcuts when it comes to building a world like this: it's a question of giving the right people the resources they need to build something that's not only vast and varied as a whole, but where every part rings true no matter how small it is, or how closely you look at it," Horton explains. "It needs to wash over you when you're sprinting down the busiest street in the city, hearing snatches of a hundred different conversations as you go; and it needs to be totally convincing if you decide to stop and pay close attention to any one of those conversations."

Horton even argues that, in some ways, there's "no background" in GTA 6. The difference between "background" and "foreground" simply depends on whatever the player is paying attention to at any given moment. Focus on a random NPC, and you might find a character with their own interesting inner life. "No one you meet is an extra; they're not only full characters, everyone you meet is the main character in their own story," Horton continues.

GTA 6 radio stations revealed, Rockstar says "for the first time" in Grand Theft Auto history there are also in-game podcasts

The notorious GTA 6 leaker known only by their online moniker Cyberleek is back with a new threat. Should their memecoin's market cap hit $30 million, Cyberleek says they'll release a start-to-finish playable build of Rockstar Games' long-awaited open worlder.

Cyberleek's threat, posted to their website and reposted elsewhere online, also gives parent company Take-Two an ultimatum of sorts. The leaker says Take-Two can make this whole fiasco go away by printing physical GTA 6 discs and issuing a public apology.

"Here's the deal, nice and clean. CYBERLEEK hits 30 million marketcap, the build goes out — full story mode, played to the end, credits and all," the leaker writes on their website. "Don't believe it has full story mode? Ask for what you want to see, and it gets provided. Take-Two gets one way out: physical disks and a public apology. They can take it at any moment. Or they can gamble that CL is bluffing. Everyone knows which one they'll pick."

This isn't the first time Cyberleek's made demands around physical games. An older manifesto railed against practices such as digital pre-orders, "fake" single-player DLC and code-in-a-box physical editions - though game preservation group Stop Killing Games disagreed with the leaker's methods: "Using illegal means to make a point is unacceptable to us and does nothing to protect our right to keep using what we paid for."

The latest drama comes days after Cyberleek released roughly 24-minutes of new GTA 6 footage showing everything from a first-person mode to a nude Jason and in-game racing events. An even more recent leak supposedly features gameplay from a topless Lucia's perspective.

GTA 6's history with leakage goes back years, though the Cyberleek saga only kicked off in earnest earlier this summer when the hacker - or hacking group - shed light on the game's map well before its Netflix blowout. Many thought the drama would've ended when Cyberleek squeezed $250,000 out of their crypto scheme before going radio silent for weeks.

Rockstar previously addressed the leaks and called them "heartbreaking for our team," while warning that any leaked footage might contain spoilers.

GTA 6 shows Jason nude, and fans are wondering if Rockstar will go full Red Dead Redemption 2: "Those horse balls physics gotta go somewhere"

Risk of Rain 2's Hallowed Concepts DLC is another hit for one of the best roguelikes around. Years after a shaky start, Gearbox seems to be doing a much better job with the genre icon.

The Borderlands maker bought Risk of Rain 2 back in 2022, as the original developers soon went to work at Valve. The beloved roguelike then found itself in troubled waters. Gearbox's first major update to the game post-buyout, Seekers of the Storm, was hugely divisive with series fans, but the publisher has since turned things around with last year's Alloyed Collective and this week's Hallowed Concepts.

Risk of Rain 2's newest expansion is already a hit on Steam, with 84% of user reviews giving it the thumbs up on the platform.

"Hallowed Concepts blows every other DLC out of the water," one positive review reads. "The DLC is so fresh and does so much to reinvigorate the lategame that it feels like the devs read my mind… There's so much intentional and clever design in how these new systems are implemented and overlay themselves on top of the core game. So much of the new content is geared towards making the lategame matter again… It's lovely. Truly."

"Easily the best DLC from the new team. Seekers was fine after it got patched from launch, Alloyed Collective was also fine, but this blows the others out of the water. I'd say it's on-par with Void. Not to mention the free update it came with was huge, adding 4 new skills and challenges for them (even if Acrid's is cruel). Good job," another says.

Hallowed Concept isn't totally flawless, however. The negative reviews that do exist draw attention to the expansion's bugs, and not the creepy crawly kind. "Great expansion, fun items and bosses, but in one day, two runs died to bosses spawning outside of the map and becoming impossible to attack, until that's fixed I cannot recommend this expansion, but otherwise amazing," a negative review says.

Regardless, it's a good step forward for the roguelike icon.

Risk of Rain 2, now under Borderlands house Gearbox, vows to take "full responsibility" for AI art it calls a "mistake" – "We are sending the designer to the Void Fields as punishment"

One of the big criticisms leveled against Starfield at launch was its lack of seamless planetary landing. Spacefarers can essentially pick a landing zone and go through a glorified loading screen to reach their destination, but they couldn't fly into a planet's atmosphere and land directly themselves a la No Man's Sky.

A Starfield modder is now working to change that, and their results are already super impressive. Frederik Wessberg today posted a clip of the "Seamless Landings" mod that's still in-progress, showing how a Starfield ship can go from the void of space to the surface of a planet "without any loading screens."

"I've worked on this thing for roughly half a year at this point, and finally it's starting to look and feel ready enough for me to show it to you," Wessberg writes in the video's description. "I'm bringing Seamless Landings on planets and moons without any loading screens to Starfield."

Wessberg explains that the seamless landing works whether you're flying the ship manually or putting letting autopilot do the work, so you can leave the captain's seat and enjoy the view stress-free.

"You can even land on water! If you ever wondered how it would look if you were allowed to select a spot in the ocean in vanilla Starfield, here's your chance to see that for yourself," he adds. "And during your trip to the surface, you'll be flying through real 3D layers of volumetric clouds, driven by climate data and weather systems, thunderstorms and lightning, auroras around the poles, airglow above the night-side horizon, physically-based atmospheric scattering based on the actual atmospheric composition the game data provides."

Wessberg initially thought the mod would be a "fun, small project," but quickly ran into some trouble because "planet rendering in space in vanilla Starfield is very limited: A planet is represented by a texture, maybe a moving cloud layer, and maybe an atmosphere." Trying to land on a planet would essentially be akin to landing on a "flat texture."

To get the job done, Wessberg "had to completely reimplement Starfield's planet rendering in space in 3D," but "thankfully, Starfield is actually amazingly physically accurate, and in many ways a true space simulator - it just doesn't ever reveal this to the player."

Starfield's seamless landing mod will be completely free on NexusMods when it's eventually ready.

"I don’t think Starfield was anywhere near successful enough to do a Starfield 2," former Bethesda dev says

A former Naughty Dog veteran who worked on The Last of Us and Uncharted 4 is more excited about the idea of shorter games rather than "monolithic" blockbusters like GTA 6 or The Elder Scrolls 6.

Matt Radford was a visual effects artist on some of Naughty Dog's biggest hits before opening his own studio called 5th Corner, and he recently spoke about the merits of shorter games in an interview with Kiwi Talkz (embedded below).

"I'm 38 years old," Radford says. "And I think that there's also something intimidating to me about a GTA 6 or, you know, another Elder Scrolls. I, personally, am really looking for shorter experiences that are focused [and] that I have a great time with. That excites me probably more."

Part of his reasoning is the time available to him and other players. A game that runs for upwards of 50 hours can be a huge time sink that's simply not feasible for a huge portion of people to complete, while shorter campaigns can be enjoyed in a weekend or two.

"Even The Last of Us 2, I thought, was so long… I really loved those earlier Uncharted games when they were like 6 to 8 hours," he adds.

The other part of the equation is the ballooning budgets of video game development. Modern AAA games can cost over $200 or $300 million to produce, but those costs might be able to come down if studios focused on tighter experiences.

"GTA 6 is gonna be awesome, I'm sure," he continues. "And I think collectively as an industry we want it to succeed. No gamer will be happy if it failed because it would not be a good sign for the business."

GTA 6 shows Jason nude, and fans are wondering if Rockstar will go full Red Dead Redemption 2: "Those horse balls physics gotta go somewhere"

Sonic Racing: Crossworlds already has a pretty hectic lineup of characters, but Sega's Year Two DLC roadmap takes things one step further. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake series, Persona, Godzilla, Hello Kitty, Bayonetta, Evangelion, the Dreamcast itself, and much more are all coming to the well-liked kart racer before the end of 2027.

Sonic's most recent and surprisingly great take on kart racing is no stranger to bonkers crossovers. The game's first year of post-launch content welcomed everybody from Spongebob Squarepants and Minecraft Steve to Yakuza's Ichiban Kasuga, but Sega's one-upped itself with Year Two.

Year Two includes free content drops throughout 2027, alongside a paid Season Two Pass with exclusive goodies. The free content starts with monster-spanking icon Bayonetta joining the roster, alongside a kart inspired by McLaren and Persona 3's Aigis coming between November and March of next year.

The paid Season Two kicks off with a Godzilla collaboration on day one (November 3), bringing karts based on popular kaiju and a track that features our beloved, radioactive 'zilla causing chaos throughout a city. Evangelion is up next with playable characters Asuka Shikinami Langley and Rei Ayanami, plus new karts and a track.

Sometime after, we can look forward to playing as Hello Kitty and Kuromi in a course that's inspired by the wider Sanrio universe (if you have a favorite friend, there's a good chance they've been hidden somewhere in the background of the track.)

Taking a break from crossovers, the Segaland pack goes back in time with a course that pays tribute to Sega's entire history, arcade classics and home consoles included. Sega's also introducing three karts based on classic arcade cabinets (Outrun, After Burner, and Super Megalo) and three karts based on its consoles (Genesis, Saturn, and Dreamcast), alongside a bonus Super Shadow racer for owners of both Season Passes.

And, finally, the Year Two Season Pass ends with two big hitters. A Final Fantasy 7 Remake collaboration is on the way, but all Sega had to show was Cloud's Buster Sword sitting alongside a generic ring from the Sonic series. No word on what this collab includes, exactly. The other pack comes from the Reload Revival Royal pack, which presumably features characters and/or stages from all three modern Persona games.

Despite Sega's Mario Kart World shade, rival racer Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds has "fallen short" of expectations, and compared to Nintendo's sales I can see why

We live in a heavy world right now, with stressors like AI, layoffs, and political crises seemingly around every corner with no signs of slowing down, which is why, even in the spooky month of October, I'm leaning into the cozy gaming space more than ever. Animal Crossing is still my go-to home away from home, but I'm always on the lookout for some place else to escape the real world.

"We wanted our game to feel like The Lord of the Rings x Animal Crossing," reads the caption on a YouTube short for new indie Kickstarter smash hit, Humblets. I'm intrigued.

"Have you ever wanted to become a rock?", asks developer Berry Bite in another video. Uh, sure?

"Sheep petting!!" says the dev in another short. Getting warmer.

"Card battles!" "Cozy meals!" "Plants wiggle!" OK, I'm thoroughly sold.

"We don't use AI!"... say more.

"Every part of our indie game is hand-made," says Berry Bite. "And we commission human artists for every single card. We'd rather support real passion than prompt a machine."

Take. My. Money.

Actually, with more than $135,000 in crowdfunding at the time of writing, Berry Bite probably doesn't need my money, but I'm compelled to back this ridiculously charming indie game nonetheless.

There's a lot going on here, with Lord of the Rings and D&D influences in its enchanting world, Minecraft building mechanics, cooking and fishing inspired by Animal Crossing, card collecting and battles, and even Zelda: Breath of the Wild DNA in its gliding and campfire cooking system, but having watched every gameplay video I could find, it all seems like a miraculously cohesive package all centered around "relaxed exploration, collection, and crafting."

It sounds like there's a deep level of customization in Humblets that'll let you personalize your avatar, your mobile campsite and tent, and thank goodness, your adorable pet companion you get assigned via a personality test and who helps you find and collect resources as you explore the world.

The only thing I'm somewhat hesitant about is Humblets' procedurally generated world. I'm generally a proc-gen skeptic, but find it a useful tool in generating massive amounts of playable space and variety in games like Hades, Diablo, and Minecraft where you need that sense of scale, but I find its less useful in something like a cozy game where it's more about moment-to-moment discovery in a smaller, well, cozier space. Berry Bite says the proc-gen world is mixed with "hand-crafted landmarks," but I'd definitely rather have everything be handmade. That said, everything else about Humblets has created enough goodwill for me that I'm happy to look past that element of the game.

Humblets has an estimated alpha delivery date of October 2027, and it's set to fully launch on Nintendo Switch 1 and 2, PS5, and Xbox Series X.

If you want cozy board games for Fall, some of my all-time favorites just got major discounts

The original driving system in Grand Theft Auto was led by veteran programmer Pat Kerr, who's credited as saving the game's cars by Rockstar veteran Obbe Vermeij. Some 30 years later, Kerr's revisited that pioneering vehicle tech in a new demo you can play for yourself.

"In the early days of GTA1 development, the driving just wasn’t fun," Vermeij recalls. "Then Pat Kerr, who is handy with physics but wasn’t even on the team, dropped in some driving code that fixed it. He’s now published a playable demo using those same ideas. It’s remarkable how much it feels like GTA1—especially the handbrake (space)."

That demo, recreated in JavaScript, shows a "slightly prettier, 'remastered' form, for anyone who is interested in seeing or playing" the bones of Grand Theft Auto. With GTA 6 promising fabulously detailed and simulated cars ripping through the streets of fictional Florida, things have obviously changed quite a bit, but this is where the series' titular auto component got started.

"One weekend in late August 1996, I wrote a 2D physics simulation which later became the basis of the vehicle system in the eventually popular game 'Grand Theft Auto' aka 'GTA,'" Kerr says casually, stressing that this work is independent and not associated with Rockstar, Take-Two, or GTA.

"At the core of the system is a simple classical 2D rigid body dynamics simulation," Kerr explains. "From what I can tell, this approach was not yet common in games at the time (with some notable exceptions), and most game vehicles were done using basic high-school ‘point physics’ (F = ma), with any rotational component being handled by various wonky 'hacks.' Using proper rigid-body physics (including torques) handles rotation more coherently.

"On top of that core, I then added a 'novel' vehicle simulation layer, based on a simple, approximate, and technically incorrect model of how tyres behave. It was basically a semi-educated guess on my part and, although I knew it wasn't really physically accurate, it nevertheless seemed to be 'good enough' for my purposes at the time."

Here's my somewhat simpler analysis of this driving system demo: I like the way turning feels. More seriously, the movement arm attached to your vehicle is a helpful way to visualize what's happening physically when turns impact your acceleration, and the red trail indicating the bite of your tires on turns or handbrake maneuvers likewise helps demonstrate these effects. If you played a lot of the original GTA (which, as a reminder, looks like this), this will probably feel familiar.

GTA 6 driving is "the best parts" of GTA 4 but with "the accessibility of GTA 5," says Rockstar boss.

Gears of War: E-Day sales topped 230,000 across Xbox and Steam following an October 1 launch, according to estimates from analyst firm Alinea.

Market analysis head Rhys Elliott reports the Xbox player base is larger than it appears, even if premium sales were dominated by Steam. An estimated 62,000 people bought the game outright on Xbox consoles, with 168,000 buyers on Steam.

SteamDB ownership estimates, which are always fallible and are especially volatile shortly after launch, support this figure, estimating 171,000 to 195,000 owners at the time of writing.

How did a new, highly rated entry in a flagship series sell just 62,000 copies on Xbox in launch week? (Our Gears of War: E-Day review also awards it high marks.) Elliott notes that while Xbox Game Pass is "cannibalising much of the premium revenue," with some 1.7 million estimated players playing E-Day through the subscription service, over 722,000 Game Pass subs also paid for E-Day's premium upgrade.

"So '230K copies' undersells the paying audience," Elliott writes. "Including the 722K upgrades, nearly 950K people actually paid something for E-Day." This brings the game's total estimated sales revenue to around $37 million.

Nevertheless, "The $70 premium SKU is – functionally – dead on Xbox," Elliott argues.

I've reached out to Microsoft for comment on these figures, which remain unconfirmed estimates, and its expectations for E-Day.

As Circana games analyst Mat Piscatella points out online (not in direct response to Alinea's report, but certainly in its orbit), "it isn't straight cannibalism if a person paying for Game Pass plays an offered game through the service."

Many game developers, including several who've worked with or under Microsoft, have criticized the effects Game Pass can have on full-fat sales or the value of games. This year, Microsoft removed new Call of Duty games from the service's day-one offerings, though it stopped short of admitting it was losing too much money on the deal as Game Pass growth failed to meet expectations despite a significant bump from CoD.

However, the assumption that, in a world without Xbox Game Pass, the sales of games like Gears of War: E-Day would be directly boosted by however large their Game Pass audience was doesn't hold up.

"Not every person who plays a game via a sub service would buy that game were it not included in that service," Piscatella notes. We don't, and can't, know exactly how many Game Pass players, or even Game Pass premium upgraders, would've paid full price in this case, but it certainly wouldn't be all of them. We also can't separate the value of any Game Pass subscriptions purchased by people enticed by E-Day – that is, the value-add.

E-Day was once on track to become another multiplatform Xbox game before Microsoft shelved a reportedly near-finished PS5 port to prioritize its home console, even if that means limiting its audience.

Gears of War: E-Day studio reportedly fears post-launch layoffs, "wouldn't put it past" Microsoft to withhold bonuses.

It is absolutely no surprise to anyone in the market for a new gaming console that prices have risen rather sharply in the last year-and-change, but fresh insights from a trusted industry analyst put some context into just how bad things have gotten.

The ongoing RAM shortages, coupled with tariff-driven increases in hardware prices, have driven each of the three big console manufacturers; Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo; to drive up console prices numerous times in less than two years. If you want a brand-new PS5 Pro, you're looking at $900, while the disc version of the Xbox Series X is now priced at $800. Meanwhile, Nintendo's second Switch 2 price hike means you'll need to drop $500 on the base model of the current-gen system.

Circana's Mat Piscatella, citing data from the company's US retail tracking system, says these price increases have, unsurprisingly, resulted in slowed sales for both Sony and Microsoft. Specifically, "For 2026 YTD ending August, Xbox hardware unit sales are down 33% versus a year ago in the US, while PlayStation hardware units are 25% lower," says Piscatella on Bluesky. "Xbox YTD US hardware unit sales are at an all-time low, while PlayStation is at lowest point since 2013."

Looking at year-to-date console price changes in averages and percentages, Piscatella says "the average price a consumer has paid for a new Xbox console in 2026 YTD ending August is $529, 26% higher than a year ago, while the average PlayStation console has sold for $597, 20% higher than last year.

"Both prices are at all-time US highs. Price sensitivity is becoming a real problem."

Perhaps the release of the Big Video Game in November will help ease at least some of these declines.But this will also depend on product availability given the RAM and component crisis. And pricing, of course.The US hardware market has not been in a more precarious position since the early 80s.

— @matpiscatella.bsky.social (@matpiscatella.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-10-09T18:15:04.217Z

"Price sensitivity is becoming a real problem" just might be the most broadly relatable sentence possible living in the US in 2026, but Piscatella shares a small glimmer of hope in a certain video game that rhymes with Grand Theft Auto Fix. "Perhaps the release of the Big Video Game in November will help ease at least some of these declines," Piscatella says, clearly alluding to GTA 6, but even that is a big uncertainty. "This will also depend on product availability given the RAM and component crisis. And pricing, of course," says Piscatella, concluding with a dramatic contextualization of the current environment:

"The US hardware market has not been in a more precarious position since the early 80s."

Of course, Piscatella seems to be referencing the historic video game crash that happened from 1983 to 1985 and saw revenue attributed to US home video game sales fall 97% from about $3.2 billion in 1983 to $100 million in 1985. We haven't quite reached that level of catastrophe yet, and there's hope component shortages and tariff-related costs will eventually stabilize and ease some of the pressure on the console market, but going into the holiday season, console shoppers shouldn't expect substantial relief outside of big sales like Black Friday.

"Supply has been consistently available" - Acer's CEO says it's "impossible" for the memory shortage to last until 2030, but that average PC prices will still increase by 5-20% by the end of 2026

How long it takes to beat Star Wars Galactic Racer varies a lot, but rolling the credit can certainly be done in under 30 hours. The reason for the variation is its runs-based structure, so how long it takes you to beat ultimately depends on your skill and the number of tours you do. With that in mind, I've laid out some estimations for how long it might take you to beat Star Wars Galactic Racer as well as how each Act is structured so you know what lies ahead.

How long is Galactic Racer?

Star Wars Galactic Racer should take you roughly 20-30 hours to complete all three Acts and roll the credits.

That's obviously quite a broad range but, as I've said, it's down to how many tours you do. If you're a gifted racer, you might get through each Act in only a few attempts, which will mean you might even complete the game in under 20 hours. Conversely, if you have some absolute stinkers, you'll be closer to or exceeding 30 hours. Using the best Star Wars Galactic Racer speeder and my Galactic Racer tips might help you win more races, but you've still got to make good choices on every tour all the way through to Derven Acos to move onto the next act.

If you're looking to unlock and even upgrade everything in the campaign, such as Galactic Racer Favors, you can add several more hours onto your completion time. You'll be relying on random chance for some unlocks so this can take a while. Factor in all the Scenarios, Arcade time trials, and multiplayer and you're easily looking at spending 50+ hours in Star Wars Galactic Racer. I rolled the credits after about 27 hours but have continued playing for another 20 or so due to all the non-campaign extras.

How many Acts are in Galactic Racer?

As mentioned, Star Wars Galactic Racer has three Acts. I won't go into the story specifics to avoid spoilers but here's how they look structurally:

• Act 1: Jakku > Lantaana > Ando Prime > Derven Acos Qualifier event
  • Every planet besides Derven Acos has four regular events for a total of 13 events in a single Act 1 tour.
• Act 2: Sentinel I > Jakku > Crait > Ando Prime > Derven Acos Galactic Gauntlet and final race
  • Every planet besides Derven Acos has four regular events for a total of 18 events in a single Act 2 tour.
• Act 3: Lantaana > Sentinel I > Ando Prime > Jakku > Crait > Derven Acos Galactic Gauntlet and final race
  • Every planet besides Derven Acos has four regular events and ends with a Podracing Challenge, for a total of 27 events in a single Act 3 tour.

If you've got a Prime subscription, you can stream Star Wars Galactic Racer on Amazon Luna.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Arc Raiders' Frozen Trail update is the talk of the town, but an even bigger change could be on the horizon. From October 13 through October 20, developer Embark will test something that some players have wanted from day one: a pure PvE mode. Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal tells me this test is an essential step toward answering a question that even the devs have had since launch, even if it ends up splitting the game in two one day.

Originally, Arc Raiders was a pure PvE game about fighting giant robots. It only pivoted to a PvPvE mix very late in development. The devs also ditched the free-to-play structure and put everything they had into the extraction shooter basket, and miraculously, it paid off. As a result, going back to pure PvE feels like a huge risk.

"Naturally, we were a bit like, 'Are we gonna open this door? What does that mean?'" Grøndal says. "We had that question ongoing for a long time, maybe even too long, to be fair."

An Arc Raiders PvE mode is just a limited test for now, but Grøndal suggests there's potential for much more. I asked if he can imagine a world where Arc Raiders is essentially split into two games – the game we've known, and a pure PvE version – and he reckons "it's very possible."

"I mean, the community is already split along those lines," he continues. "If the game eventually will represent that? Quite possibly. I think it's important to respect how the players want to enjoy the game, even if it doesn't necessarily fully gel with what we thought the game was initially or how we designed the game to be initially. It's possible. Of course, it creates some challenges on our end. We need to figure out what we really mean by that."

For all the demand for it, there are also concerns around what a PvE mode could do to Arc Raiders and how it will feel to play. Will it ruin the game's tension? Will it undermine that beloved camaraderie when you aren't choosing to be friendly? Will it warp the economy or split the player base?

"I mean, all of these are valid risks, right?" Grøndal responds. "Which is one of the reasons why we wanted to run a test which is somewhat limited around some of the higher-end stuff. It will affect, or it has a chance of affecting, the overall experience. This is also why we wanted to just get it out there, look at the data, look at what the feedback says, and then really figure out what the best way forward is.

"I think there's a lot of valid concerns, and internally at the studio, that has been expressed, both sides of that coin. It's not like everyone was high-fiving Aleks when we introduced this idea to do this test. That's not the case. There were some real concerns there too. But at the end of the day, I really feel like we need to answer this question, at least to ourselves, and of course also to the players."

Arc Raiders Frozen Trail patch notes are full of sentences that players have dreamed of for a year: "You can now open the map while downed."

Marvel Rivals developer NetEase is taking extra care to make sure it doesn't leak anything about Avengers Doomsday as it plans a crossover with the MCU film.

2026 has been a big year for the Marvel Rivals team as the developers have been celebrating the four Avengers MCU themes with new cosmetics and modes throughout the year on the Path to Doomsday. This kicked off in April with an Avengers themed event that had a 6v1 asymmetrical mode in which you team up against a single Loki, while this week marks the Infinity War event which will introduce a 2v2 mode in which two teams of 6 players can battle with the Infinity Stones in round robin bouts. Then later this month a PVE mode based on Endgame will drop, in which 50 players have a scrap with Thanos and his army.

Naturally, this is all set to culminate with Avengers Doomsday in December, but all of Marvel Studios barring 2018 Tom Holland and Mark Ruffalo take spoilers very seriously. But for Rivals to have Doomsday-themed content, it'll need some insider info.

Speaking to FRVR, Marvel Rivals game director Guangyun Chen assured "We are doing everything we can to prevent any leaks for this important event." Unfortunately, this is somewhat undercut by supposed leaks for Marvel Rivals season 11 which pegs Nightcrawler and Dr Doom – both of which are set to play a big role in Doomsday – as the new characters set to be added next season. Not to mention Season 10's Gorr the God Butcher was leaked ahead of time too.

Granted, I don't know that Marvel Rivals' crossover will necessitate too many full-blown spoilers about the upcoming movie, least of all the "surprising ending" Joe Russo is hyping up. I'd be shocked if the film's ending – which features Beast transforming into Frasier Crane in a Dragon Ball Z-like sequence in which he one shots Doom – will be crucial to the new season. But let's hope no leaks happen, just to be safe.

Marvel Rivals hasn't managed to beat Overwatch's stats yet, but Disney boasts it's still "attracted 40 million players worldwide."

Video games have gotten large, and quite expensive, both to make and buy. Some might argue, myself included, they are generally a bit too big for their own good, and the bloating budgets aren't helpful for the industry. Former Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios CEO Shawn Layden agrees, and he believes if publishers focus on smaller releases, it'll help everyone.

He provided his views during an appearance on the Expansion Pass podcast. "I've been involved with plenty of games that are 80, 90, 100 hours of gameplay," he starts. "And I'll be the first one to say they're not all quality hours. You know, some of that is running across the desert to get the red key to open the red door when you come back."

He believes development more broadly should circle around to projects that are contained and captivating. "So I would rather see a world where we have good 20 to 25 hour games that are just action-packed like a John Woo film that you just, you can't put down the controller," he adds.

One need only see how many games, especially in the triple-A space, have sandboxes to see his point. Your Assassin's Creeds and Final Fantasy games and the likes of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - they all require a considerable amount of time and energy to complete, and there's a certain amount of faff in each.

I say that with love, too. The first two installments of the Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy are among my favorites of this decade thus far, and the same for all three of Insomniac's Spider-Man games. But they all have their share of side-quests or cookie cutter design I didn't enjoy.

Layden believes some part of the roots here lay in rental culture in the '90s, where devs would try and make sure a game couldn't be beaten in one weekend if you rented it. My mind immediately jumped to the stampede level of The Lion King on the SNES and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive for a prime example of making sure you'd be a repeat customer.

Such bloat became a design tenet. "Keep it tight and keep it banging, that's where I like to see it go," he says. "If we can make those smaller scale games and have an idea that what we're building to is that kind of template, I think a lot of the costs associated with game development will start to, if not decrease, at least stop increasing."

Estimates place the costs of Battlefield 6, Hideo Kojima's Physint, GTA 6, and many more well into hundreds of millions. When you look at widespread layoffs, one certainly appears to beget to the other. Hopefully, as the industry rights itself, it'll re-approach some of these structural ideas and aim for something more sustainable.

Sony is still selling tons of the discs it plans to kill off: Marvel's Wolverine launch sales were reportedly 35% physical, showing a huge appetite for a non-digital future

The GTA 6 Wanted Levels have received a significant overhaul, meaning they won't just be conveying how much trouble you're in with the law by the number of stars you've racked up. The stars will also take on different appearances in GTA 6, so you can tell if the local police are simply investigating a crime or have your details and are actively hunting you down. Add in the new Heat system that reveals exactly what information the cops have and there's a lot to take in, so let me explain how that and the Wanted Levels in GTA 6 will work.

We've also got details of the GTA 6 side activities you can take part in, plus the radio stations and songs revealed so far from the GTA 6 soundtrack.

GTA 6 Wanted Level explained

The GTA 6 Wanted Level meter has been increased to six stars, allowing for great nuances between the different measures of threat from the cops, so don't expect them to come after you guns blazing as soon as you get your initial star. For the first time in the series, these wanted stars will also take on different appearances to indicate various statuses, and by cross-referencing footage from the Extended Look with preview coverage I believe they mean the following:

1. Black and White Stars: The cops are investigating a crime but don't know who you are, so avoid drawing attention to yourself and you can slip away.
2. Gray Stars: The cops are investigating a crime and know information about who you are, based on the Heat icons underneath (see below) so are actively searching for you.
3. White Stars: The cops are actively pursuing you and have you in sight.
4. Red Stars: You have evaded the cops, but they still have information on you based on the Heat icons (see below) so you need to lose those before they identify you again.

At higher star Wanted Levels it looks like your minimap becomes obscured with red and blue flashing lights, so you can't use it to track the movements of any cops around you. Instead, you'll need to use your eyes to spot any police threats and lay low to avoid them.

GTA 6 Heat system explained

In addition to your Wanted Level stars, the GTA 6 Heat system uses a selection of red icons displayed in the top-right corner of the screen to indicate what clues the cops are using to track you down, supplied by eye witnesses to your actions or from the police's own observations. We've seen six of these so far, which I've marked above as follows:

1. Security camera footage
2. Accomplice
3. Clothing
4. Face
5. Weapon
6. Vehicle

Losing the cops will be harder the more of these Heat markers you have active, so where possible you should take preventative actions such as wearing a mask or face covering and avoiding or taking out security cameras. Once they're there, actions such as hiding weapons or changing clothes will lose that Heat, and the effect appears to be instant – after the car chase escape in the Extended Look, the red Vehicle Heat icon disappears the moment Lucia steps out of Raul's car.

If you have the Accomplice Heat marker, you can lose it by splitting up Jason and Lucia to go their separate ways. However, if either one of them gets caught during this time then you still get Busted by the cops, so you can't sacrifice your partner in order to make a quick escape yourself.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

There are many lingering questions about GTA 6, and a significant amount of them center around Jason's nude body. After it was confirmed we get to see the protagonist in his birthday suit, the collective audience for Rockstar's upcoming crime sandbox have been pondering the finer details of his naked self – and making a few memes.

It all stems from a preview by IGN that notes they got to see Jason fully unclothed for a shower scene. The moment was used to demonstrate how you can flip perspectives between Jason and Lucia at will for differing points of view of the same scenes.

People gravitated toward this, prompting the outlet to run another piece mentioning that no, they hadn't seen anything more risqué than Jason's torso. The kind of discreet camera-work you'd expect in Hollywood was employed here to keep everything a little more safe for work. I mean, this was a professional preview event, what would you expect?

But still, inquiring minds have started to ponder, specifically about if Rockstar could be reusing a certain bit of tech from Red Dead Redemption 2. "I wonder if Jason's balls shrink when the water is cold like the RDR2 horse balls," asks GTA GFX on Twitter.

Or, as a Redditor puts it: "Those horse balls physics gotta go somewhere." I mean, if it happens in one game, why not the other?

"Rockstar really said, 'If we’re building the most immersive open world ever, we're committing to everything,'" another account says. Being with the characters during truly intimate moments like this is pretty immersive. Another leak does contain a significant amount of fully nude Jason, in all his glory.

But there's no guarantee of whether that'll make it into the released game. There are a lot of jokes about what we'll see below Jason's waistline, but I'd have to concur with some others – full-frontal is probably unlikely for either hero.

It's rare enough we see it in film or television, and I can only imagine the headache it'd cause when seeking certification. That doesn't mean it definitively won't be included, I just wouldn't expect it, or at least much of it if there's any. But we'll find out for real in just over one month.

GTA 6 radio stations revealed, Rockstar says "for the first time" in Grand Theft Auto history there are also in-game podcasts.

Dragon's Dogma 2 : Dark Arisen is out, and true to the developers words, it's proving a lot harder than the original version of the RPG.

Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen's lead dev said the friction is key to the experience, and promised that the new expansion of Capcom's 2024 RPG has been designed to "offer battles with an even greater sense of tension and challenge than the main game." Ahead of launch, Capcom said the new Lost Rites dungeons are to be challenged at level 20, while Forsaken Dominion – the main questline featured in the new region of Norgan – is recommended for level 40.

I started Lost Rites and Forsaken Dominion at level 80 and got absolutely decimated countless times.

And I'm glad to report it's not just a skill issue on my part, as one glance at the Dragon's Dogma 2 subreddit shows that Arisen all over the globe are getting battered. One post accuses returning Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen director Kento Kinoshita of being a liar, saying, "Bro said something like level 50 is a good starting point for this DLC and i went in on my lvl275 character," adding, "Bro this shit is still hard I'm getting 4 shot by random mobs and the trailer dragon is currently fucking me up severely."

Elsewhere on the subreddit, there are a number of meme posts and videos recounting how the snowy tundra of Norgan is beating them down mercilessly, with others sharing tales about how they hoarded relics only for a snow ogre to steal them all.

That being said, these aren't really complaints. Everyone seems super pleased to be getting their butts kicked by Dragon's Dogma 2 after a two-and-a-half year wait. One players says "the new DLC is everything I wanted," praising enemies that are much smarter and harder than before. It went down a treat with reviews, too, as Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen nabbed a higher score than the first game's DLC.

Dragon's Dogma 2 update finally gives the RPG the performance boost it desperately needed, and it's so good that it's even lowered the PC system requirements.

I recall many things from my 140-hour initial playthrough of The Witcher 3, but taking in the scenery is not one of them. Between monster contracts, heartbreaking questlines like The Bloody Baron, and far too many games of Gwent, the position of the sun in the sky was never of concern to me.

But The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered has put all that on its head. I wanted to hone in on a specific quest for this first instalment of October's RPG Club, exploring how White Orchard's griffin-slaying contract feels with the new combat and reworked skill tree now in play thanks to the new update. So tell me why I've just spent almost five hours treating The Witcher 3 like an open world photo op, seeking out the best sunsets in town?

Quest Log

Heavens above

Aside from all the half-naked bodies (which have always been there in this dream sequence), the first thing I notice upon starting a new save is how jaw-droppingly vivid, colorful, and vibrant it is.

Shadows are richer, the contrast between Geralt's bare chest and the marbled oak furniture behind him starker than Yennefer's state of undress. I walk out onto the balcony and can almost feel the sun's golden warmth pouring over Kaer Morhen, setting aflame the emerald and sage and every other fancy word you can think of to say "green" in its lush surrounding wilderness.

It boggles the mind. I'm playing The Witcher 3 on my six year-old gaming laptop. Yes, I updated my graphics card drivers especially for this occasion, but I was prepared to miss out on the best of the remaster's visual upgrades given the age of my rig. Turns out that even without ray-tracing and occlusive lighting, The Witcher 3 has never looked more magical.

When I'm let loose in White Orchard, I try to stay on track. Well, as on track as you're supposed to be in a game like this; White Orchard is the starter town for a reason, offering a snapshot of the game's many systems and mission types in one handy place as Geralt sets out to find Yennefer with witcher mentor, Vesesmir. Wraith in the Well is a great introduction to the planning that goes into each monster hunt. For a taste of The Continent's political landscape, Twisted Firestarter sees me tracking down an arsonist who burned down the local forge after the blacksmith supplied arms to invading Nilfgaardian forces. Elsewhere, I help a sweet old dear get her prized frying pan back from the home of a dead man. You know, just normal things.

I have to admit that since it has been some time since I last played The Witcher 3, some of the combat enhancements might be lost on me. If anything, I find myself running into more bugs than before – Geralt refused to dive to fetch some herbs once, forcing me to reload, while he petulantly decided that dodging is for losers and massively showed me up in a brawl outside a tavern. But at least I can stop and snap some pretty pictures in Photo Mode when I'm not reloading to fix said bugs.

To griffin-ity

By the time I get around to the griffin-slaying contract, I've reached Level 3 and completed all nearby side quests. It took a bit of time; White Orchard is not for level grinding, since there's a whole game and two DLC (soon to be three when Songs of the Past launches next year) to do that in. But it does mean that I can start exploring the reworked skill tree nice and early – thank god.

I have no shame in admitting that my first Witcher 3 build was utter chaos. I had no idea what I was doing, assigning random mutagens here, mismatching them with other-colored abilities there, never properly upgrading skills after they were first unlocked. But CDPR has made it far more visually intuitive, doing away with the need to blow all your points in a specific category before you can unlock higher-tier skills.

They branch out more naturally now – I'm going for an Igni build at this early stage, since few things can shrug off a bunch of sparks in their faces, which smoothly branches out into the Aard ability tree to let me skip the lower levels outright. It's a far smarter, more user-friendly rework compared to the original – though given how much I struggled with Cyberpunk 2077 at first, maybe I've just gotten used to the developer's flair after all.

Going up against the griffin is easy, if a little daunting. You never feel truly ready in The Witcher 3; some high-level enemies go down surprisingly fast with the right oils rubbed on your silver sword, while others (cough Detlaff cough) give me far more stress than I'd care to rehash here.

It also doesn't help that after fetching herbs and finding the abandoned griffin's lair – RIP griffin wife – all I want to do is take photographs of everything. I'm so consumed with documenting my new Witcher 3 journey like a photojournalist, taking time framing each shot just so, that when Vesemir hands me a crossbow, I panic. Uh, how do I use this again?!

After downing three accidental potions and casting Igni at my horse (sorry Roach), I finally work out how to equip the blasted thing. It's pretty useless, if I'm honest; I'll stick to using the Igni special attack, a stream of continuous fire that reaches a surprising distance, to stun the beast and bring it crashing down to earth for some melee attacks.

It's on toward Vizima now that the brute has been slain, and time to meet Yennefer. But not before I snap another juicy shot of Geralt and his winged prize. I'm sure that there's more I'll appreciate about the remaster update later down the line – I haven't even experienced the new missions that came with the next gen update, after all – but for now, I'm quite happy playing The Witcher 3 in a state of awe and wonder. Each new sunset brings another exciting rush to snap a picture before it's too late, even if Geralt's hair looks startlingly blue or blonde in certain lighting. CD Projekt Red's bold enhancements of The Witcher 3's color palette has turned it into a true fantasy for me, and at this rate, it'll take me a very long time to leave Velen.

So it's just as well that next week, another member of the GamesRadar+ team will take you on an adventure into one of their favorite sections of this big, beautiful game! Until then, I'll see you on The Path.

Gears of War E-Day might be restricted to PC and Xbox, but that doesn't mean you can't consider playing it with your friends on those platforms. Even better, the latest instalment includes that near-lost, increasingly rare mechanic that is couch co-op, so charge those controllers, get comfy, and lock in for the Gears of War E-Day co-op campaign.

Is the Gears of War E-Day campaign co-op?

Yes! The Gears of War E-Day campaign does have co-op, both online and local. You can continue your journey from any chapter you've already started, or your most recent save, and friends will be launched straight in with you.

All multiplayer and single-player campaign options are reached from the same screen. To invite friends to join you in the Gears of War E-Day campaign online, launch the campaign from the main menu, and you'll automatically be assigned to play as Marcus Fenix. Scroll across and click on any of the buttons beneath the three remaining characters to open your friends list. Choose the friend you want to play with to send an invite.

If you want to play the Gears E-Day campaign in couch co-op, press the menu button on the second player's Xbox controller add select the player's account or log-in as a guest.

I've missed couch co-op in most modern games, so it's nice to see it as one of the Gears of War E-Day campaign co-op options. Whether you're playing alone or with a friend, make sure you've got the best Gears of War E-Day mods for your weapons, armor, and tactical equipment, and prepare yourself by checking out the average Gears of War E-Day campaign length.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Whether you're thinking about checking off the campaign before tackling Horde Siege or you want a break from the multiplayer mode, you're here to answer the question of the Gears of War E-Day campaign length.

Based on a few playthroughs, we've got the approximate answer below, and while it's longer than any other Gears campaign so far, it's far from a long game, meaning you'll have plenty of time to complete it once or more and get into Horde Siege, too.

What's the Gears of War E-Day campaign length?

Based on a few playthroughs, the approximate total playtime for the Gears of War E-Day campaign is:

• Story Campaign: 11-13 hours.
• Standard Playthrough (Story + major side quests): 13-15 hours.
• 100% Completion: 15+ hours.

As you can see, even with finding all collectibles and completing side quests, you'll be able to complete Gears of War E-Day in less than 20 hours, making it a very reasonably sized game. Previous Gears of War campaigns usually last under 10 hours, with Gears 5 - the longest before E-Day - tipping the scales slightly over that amount. This makes E-Day the longest Gears game by far, but it never feels too long thanks to an engaging and moving story from start to end.

Even if you're not a completionist, I certainly recommend looking around for Hardcases, which is made much easier by using the clever Tac-Com mechanic, as these contain Gears of War E-Day mods for your weapons and armor. You'll also be able to get mods from completing side quests, too, so keep an eye out for yellow icons, indicating a nearby side quest.

You could also speed things up a bit by bringing in a friend to help you through the Gears of War E-Day co-op campaign.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Video games have that unique ability to make you feel reflected in a way that nothing else can, so it needs to include the things that we feel self-conscious about. Otherwise, it just becomes a perpetual youth simulator, or beauty simulator, in a way that I don't think is actually constructive for kind of mental health or just how diverse we all are.

The power of a great character creator is that it can make or break a game, especially a game where you consistently see your character in cutscenes or in conversations.

That's the topic for this week's episode of G+RLS, where Heather Wald, Rosalie Newcombe, and I discuss all the character creators we've loved of late, and what's still to be improved to truly reflect the diversity of humankind. From Dragon's Dogma 2 to the character representation in Lost Records: Bloom and Rage, there's certainly a few surprises that pop up in between.

You can watch the brand-new episode above, and do let me know what you think are the best character creators, especially if it's not one we've mentioned!

If you're new here, G+RLS is the GamesRadar+ podcast that tells the stories of women who game and the games they play. We release a new episode every other Friday, alternating between team chats on the games industry and interviews with creators, developers, voice actors, and more.

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

You can also watch episode 7 on YouTube below!

The Witcher 3 Remastered is impressing fans all over again following CD Projekt Red's new patch targeting the revamped RPG's visuals and more.

In case you missed it, The Witcher 3 Remastered saw the release of patch 5.01 yesterday – an update that does everything from fix boats moving "uncontrollably" to adding Bloom, Light Shafts, and Depth of Field as options to the game's settings on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.

You may not think much of those if you're on PC, but console users are practically convinced they're playing something different with how much of a difference there is. The PC tweaks are nothing to scoff at, either.

Over on Reddit, one player explains how they were "worried that the update wouldn't solve my problems with the game," but it turned out better than they thought: "I didn't expect it will look this good."

Comments show fellow fans agree, with an especially amusing reply saying, "Mine is so improved that I've been just slowly moving around on my horse too just taking in the scenery." Valid, honestly.

Other threads elsewhere echo this sentiment, with a side-by-side comparison on Twitter showing how much better The Witcher 3 Remastered looks after patch 5.01.

"CDPR released an update for The Witcher 3 Remastered that massively improves the visuals," it reads. "They fixed the brightness and color tonemapping and the shadows look way punchier now. It honestly looks like a proper remaster now."

The top response is similar: "That's so good!!! The remaster really felt off to me compared to the beautiful contrast of the original game."

Put simply, patch 5.01 is finally putting the "Remastered" in The Witcher 3 Remastered – and retaining the original RPG's beauty to boot. As another post comparing the post-update game states, colors "are now far more accurate to the intended art style" than they were prior to the patch.

And, honestly, I'm in agreement here. Sure, it's already the top-scoring game of 2026 on Metacritic – but there's always room for improvement, and CD Projekt Red knows it.

The Witcher 3 Remastered leads to new Steam player peak of nearly 140,000 as CD Projekt Red celebrates its 11-year-old RPG's resurgence: "Much love."

After dipping his toes into gaming with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Daredevil star Charlie Cox says he's working on an upcoming Sega game.

After over 20 years of acting, Cox finally made his game debut in 2025's Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as lead character Gustave. And despite only spending four hours working on the French JRPG (or J'RPG if you will), the game blew up and unexpectedly became one of his most beloved roles in the long acting career. On top of that, the Cox noted that the game "has seemingly opened a new avenue for my professional work" as he confirmed he was working on another game earlier this year.

At New York Comic Con 2026, Cox spoke to IGN (below) and revealed a little more about his upcoming game, explaining, "I did another one, it doesn't have a name yet," and revealing that "I did a Sega one." He adds: "It hasn't come out yet but it was fun to do."

Cox continues, "It's hard. It's a whole different job," explaining, "I had to do, like, 40 hours," which is obviously a bit more intensive than his four hours on Clair Obscur.

With it not even having a name, naturally details are scarce, but Cox shares an amusing anecdote that maybe shines a bit more light on the game. "I showed up for the first day, and I was like, 'Hi guys, nice to meet you! How are you?' And all of them went, '...oh, he's English.'" He adds, "they wanted him to be American, but like, now I've got to do 40 hours of lines I've not prepared in an accent."

It being so early that it doesn't have a name yet means it's probably something we don't even know about; which is to say RPG fans hoping for Cox to bless Persona 6 with a performance are probably out of luck. Given how much RGG Studio loves casting celebrity actors, I can imagine the studio casting Cox in an upcoming game. With Cox having an American accent in Daredevil, a TV show where he plays a lawyer, I'd maybe have to speculate that perhaps a return of the Judgment series could be in the cards?

A year later, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Daredevil star Charlie Cox has finally played the hit J'RPG: "I'm not very good at it."

To streamline killing enemies as quickly as possible, you're going to need the best Gears of War E-Day weapon builds, so you'll need to find the best mods. As soon as you enter Act 2 Chapter 2, the E-Day map opens up to you, and you're relatively free to explore as you wish.

In doing so, you'll discover weapon mods and upgrade caches, and I'm sure you'll immediately want to know the best Gears of War E-Day weapon mods to hunt down as soon as possible, just as I did. Since weapons mods and extra slots are obtained from Hardcases found around the map and for completing side quests, it can be hard to know where to start, so, here are the best weapon builds and where to find the mods and slots you'll need to craft them.

Best Longshot build

The best Longshot build consists of:

• Full Metal Jacket
  • Default
• Skeleton Frame
  • In a hardcase to the south of Monroe Library
• Forged Barrel
  • In a Hardcase under the Gears Statues in Act 2 Chapter 3
• Mod slots
  • In a Hardcase near the bloody fountain in Act 2 Chapter 2
  • TBC

The Longshot is a one-hit kill sniper rifle that excels at both wiping out enemy snipers and more nearby foes with the Forged Barrel. There's no need to use any scope on this as the default is perfectly suitable for any use. Since you need to reload after every bullet, accuracy is key here, which we've got with this build, but if and when I find a mod that increases mag capacity, I'll be adding that, too.

Best Prototype Lancer build

The best Prototype Lancer build consists of:

• Full Metal Jacket
  • Default
• Chainsaw Autoloader
  • Obtained during the 'Gear Up' campaign mission early in the campaign
• Holo Sight
  • In a Hardcase on the first floor, across the street from Carter's Place
• Cover Brace
  • Found in the Hardcase to the west of the Courthouse
• Extra mod slots
  • Found in the Hardcase to the west of the Courthouse
  • TBC

The iconic chainsaw gun is back and there are some excellent mods to stick on the Proto Lancer as soon as you have them - not least the Chainsaw Autoloader, which has great synergy with the Full Metal Jacket mod. From here, Holo Sight is essential given it's toggle zoom, meaning you only have to use it when you need it. Plus, since you'll almost always be using your Proto Lancer from behind cover, the Cover Brace is another no-brainer, leading to the perfect full build ones you've unlocked all three slots.

Best Snub build

The best Snub build consists of:

• Full Metal Jacket
  • Default
• Aim Stabilizer
  • In a Hardcase to the south of the Bank of Tyrus.
• Extended Mag
  • Default
• Extra mod slots
  • TBC
  • TBC

You're unlikely to get much use out of your Snub, but it can come in handy in short-range combat or when you're out of bullets, so don't overlook these mods. For the best build, you're just going to need to make it more accurate and with a larger mag capacity, with the Aim Stabilizer and Extended Mag, of course with the default Full Metal Jacket in there as well.

Best armor mods

These are the best armor mods to equip:

• Hardened Cover
  • In a Hardcase outside Amberstone Storage
• Rock Steady
  • In a Hardcase outside Amberstone Storage
• Proximity Regen
  • In a Hardcase under the flyover at the south of the Chapter 2 map (where a very dark cutscene takes place, but no spoilers)

When you get your armor slots, the build above gives you increased resistance against incoming fire while behind cover, but also allows you to automatically regain health when killing enemies at close range. Rock Steady, meanwhile, improves your accuracy when firing, so it's a great all-round build.

Since you're searching Hardcases and completing side quests to collect these mods, prepare yourself by checking out our guide to the Gears of War E-Day campaign length. We've also got a guide to getting your friends involved with Gears of War E-Day co-op, so don't forget to let them in on the best mods, too.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth takes a lot of flak for the amount of mini-games it has that distract you from the main objective. Queen's Blood, Fort Condor, Chocobo Racing, Galactic Survivors, Pirate's Rampage, Queen's Blood... oh, god, Queen's Blood. (I suck at Queen's Blood because I lack the attention span to learn.)

Anyway, I don't much care for all of Final Fantasy Rebirth's mini-games, but I'm not upset that they exist. Even in the rare occasion I'm forced to interact with them, it's usually a nice, brief break from the main quest that makes me slow down and appreciate the depth of the game's world. That's just me, and there are plenty of JRPG fans who are vocally against the amount of mini-games in Rebirth, and indeed, the conversation has grown loud enough that it's officially become capital-D Discourse. Final Fantasy 7 Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi, who also helmed Rebirth, isn't having any of it.

"I often see debates about whether it's better to have more minigames or fewer," says Hamaguchi in the latest issue of Edge Magazine. "However, I don't think that discussion really gets to the heart of the matter. What I consider first is what kind of gaming experience is best suited to a particular title. In that sense, the overarching policy that 'the FF7 remakes would offer a gaming experience as rich in minigames as the original' was my decision as director, and I believe that responsibility is mine to bear."

Not only is Hamaguchi taking direct ownership of the decision to stay true to the spirit of the original game with a ton of goofy mini-games, he's also saying people who focus on the amount of mini-games are missing the whole point. It's about quality and quantity, he seems to suggest.

"I believe we should continuously improve aspects such as whether the game is easy to engage with and whether players can enjoy it without unnecessary stress," says Hamaguchi. "We prioritised ensuring that players engage with the minigames because they want to, rather than feeling like they're being made to play them. I believe that how we can deliver that gaming experience is more important than whether to increase or reduce the number of minigames."

The mini-games in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth are definitely, for the most part, thoroughly fleshed out compared to their 1997 counterparts, but for the most part they're entirely optional. Or at least, the ones that require a lot of concentration or skill aren't necessary to the critical path, from what I remember. I don't know, I think I'm picking up what Hamaguchi is putting down here. When there are bigger issues to discuss like Square Enix's "inevitable" embrace of multiplatform availability and the lack of a true physical disc version of Revelation, whether or not there are too many mini-games seems pretty inconsequential.

Final Fantasy 7 Revelation lead explains that making each game in the RPG trilogy a "complete experience" was "non-negotiable" from the beginning

Tracks of the Beast is a potentially dangerous Arc Raiders mission that brings you into contact with the Bully and Skulker ARCs. You don't have to fight them, but there are some optional objectives you can complete if you do.

Once you complete the Exploring Pendoloa Pass quest, you’ll be given this, which asks you to find a train station and ping a Bully and a Skulker. If you can manage to do it all in one round, there are even optional tasks for you to tackle which grant you bonus rewards. If you’re ready for a possible fight or two with these new ARC units, here’s how to finish this.

How to complete Tracks of the Beast

Here are all the tasks you must complete in one round for the Tracks of the Beast quests in Arc Raiders:

• On Pendola Pass, head to the Northern Tracks
• Find the destroyed station at the end of the tracks
• Ping a Bully
• Ping a Skulker
• (Optional) Destroy 3 Skulkers
• (Optional) Deliver a Skulker Targeter

If you don’t have enough time to complete the last two optional tasks, don’t worry. You can still claim the normal rewards, but it’s nice to gain some bonus rewards if you can find enough Skulkers on the map.

Where to find the Northern Tracks and the destroyed station

Your first step in this lengthy quest is to find the Northern tracks. It’s not an area explicitly mentioned on the Pendola Pass map, but it’s essentially the northern region of the map where you see train tracks. I just so happened to spawn there when completing this quest, so it didn’t take much searching for us to track down the Northern tracks.

Once you make it to the general area, your quest should update to tell you to find the destroyed station at the end of the tracks. It doesn’t literally mean the end of the tracks, which is out of bounds.

Simply walk to Almatera Station in the northwestern region of Pendola Pass. As soon as you reach the station, that quest task should tick off its box.

Where to find a Bully and Skulker

Although you can find the new Bully and Skulker ARC units anywhere on this map, you’ll likely find a lurking Bully roaming near the station. Bullies are easy to hear, as they’re almost the size of a Leaper but more like faster, more aggressive Bastion.

The Bully is a large ground enemy that’ll easily close the distance between you and it if it spots you. Run around the station until you hear loud mechanical sounds of it walking around, then creep up to it to ping it. You don’t even have to destroy or damage it to complete this quest, so now spend the rest of the match trying to find a Skulker.

Skulkers, on the other hand, are much smaller. They’re ground enemies that move around the ground like a Pop with legs, but they’re a lot more aggressive once they take position and begin firing. As it was late in the match, I ended up finding the scrap remains of a Skulker, but that still counted for the quest when I pinged it.

If you decide to take on the optional tasks, the Skulkers lurk more out in the open than you’d think. They just like to crawl low and act elusive before they target you, and they blend in well with the snow. Start by searching all around the train station, then head out into the rest of the map if you’re having no luck.

To easily take them down, wait for their turret to pop out of the center, then shoot at that. It looks like a weak spot, making it easier to take down compared to just shooting its outer shell. Make sure to loot them and take at least one Skulk Targeter from their remains to bring back for the optional task.

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The Home To Roost quest in Arc Raiders takes place on Blue Gate and you'll need a Blue Gate Confiscation Room Key to finish it. Like Exploring Pendoloa Pass this is a multi-step quest where no one part of it is hard, there's just a lot of it all stacked up to get through. While you're here you can also try to look for the Ruined Homestead for the Outpost project.

How to complete Home To Roost

These are all the tasks you must complete to finish the Home To Roost quest in Arc Raiders:

1. Reach the back of the Blue Gate tunnels
2. Scan any Android at the back of the tunnels
3. Reach the MANTIKOR locker room
4. Search for any clues in the locker room
5. Read the last vehicle’s weighing logs
6. Enter the Confiscation Room
7. Transmit MANTIKOR security’s last recordings to Shani

Let's work through all that in more detail below.

Scan an Android at the back of the Blue Gate tunnels

Head straight for the Traffic Tunnel at the back of the Checkpoint in Blue Gate. Once you’re in the tunnels, head to the very back and avoid or take down any lurking ARC units along the way.

There isn’t one specific spot for this quest; it can be any Android you see at the back of the tunnels. We’ve pointed out just one of the many Androids in the tunnels. Interact with the Android to scan it, then it's time to find the MANTIKOR locker room.

Search for clues in the MANTIKOR locker room

From where you just scanned an Android, turn around and head to the Security Wing section of the tunnels. You’ll eventually come across the large MANTIKOR logo above a locked door. Don’t go in there yet. Instead, go through the passage to the right and up the stairs.

Be careful of any ARC units like the Shredders, which I ran into here. Once you’re up the stairs, turn right, and you should find a door you can breach. Breach the door to the locker room, then interact with the mural on the wall to search for clues.

Read the last vehicle’s weighing logs

To read the last vehicle’s weighing logs, go back down the stairs into the tunnels, and right across from the platform you’re standing on is the vehicle weighing station.

Head over to the side closest to the wall, and interact with the computer to read the logs. With that done, you can finally enter the Confiscation room.

Enter the Confiscation room and transmit the last recordings

The only way to enter the Confiscation room is if you already have a Blue Gate Confiscation Room Key. This is an entirely random drop, and it’s pretty rare to find. You should hope that you already have one, or you’re playing with a friend who has the proper key.

When you have the key, you can unlock the door under the MANTIKOR logo from earlier and enter the Confiscation room. You’ll find the correct box to interact with on top of the shelf in the connected room. Climb on top of the metal shelf and interact with the box to transmit the security recordings.

With that done, you can finally return to Speranza and collect your rewards for completing the Home To Roost quest in Arc Raiders!

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This walkthrough will help you complete the Exploring Pendola Pass quest in Arc Raiders step by step. It's a collection a few basic tasks that can quickly become overwhelming as you freeze your butt off outside and get absolutely decimated by the new Bully enemy. Save yourself the pain and use what I've learned to clear it all quick and easy. The Arc Raiders Sizing Things Up quest also takes place here, so there's some scope for multitasking.

How to complete Exploring Pendola Pass in Arc Raiders

There are four tasks to complete in the Exploring Pendola Pass quest. Luckily, they don’t all have to be done in one round, or in any order:

1. Destroy 20 ARC enemies
2. Search the control room at the Cielo Sereno Observatory for power
3. Use 1 Wire to patch into the antenna on top of the tallest tower in the Railyard
4. Search 3 containers inside the Commissary Supermarket

Destroying 20 ARC enemies is the easiest of them all, especially since it can be done on any map and generally completed ambiently as you play. The tougher tasks are the three others, so let’s tackle those.

Where to find the Cielo Sereno Observatory control room

The Cielo Sereno Observatory is on the eastern edge of Pendola Pass. Enter the building, then head up the stairs into the middle section of the observatory. There, you should find the control room that looks over the valley below.

You should see a box on the console that allows you to interact with it. Inspect the tech, and you can now move on to the next task.

Patch the antenna on the tallest tower in the Railyard

For this task you’ll not only need one Wire, but a Zipline as well. You can easily find a Wire on the map if you didn’t bring one, but you're obviously better off bringing a Zipline with you.

Head to the eastern side of the Railyard, and climb up the building. There will be a ladder outside that takes you to the building’s roof. Once you’re up, you’ll reach the base of the tallest Railyard tower.

Now, pull out your Zipline and make sure to place it at the very top. Take the Zipline up, then use the one Wire you brought to interact with the antenna and patch it.

It’s time to take care of the fourth and final task of the Exploring Pendola Pass quest.

Search 3 containers in the Commissary Supermarket

This task may be even easier than taking down 20 ARC enemies since all you have to do is loot through containers in the Commissary Supermarket. Make sure you’re inside the building, then open any type of container.

Do this three times, and you’ll have completed not only this task, but the entire quest! Head back to Speranza to claim your reward.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Clean Hands is one of the first new Arc Raider quests in the Frozen Trail update. It requires you to climb a tower at Pendola Pass, the new map, and deliver a sundial. This map is treacherous, with frigid winds that will eat away at your health, making quests like this difficult to complete. Luckily, I'm here to help, so here’s how you can complete the Clean Hands quest in Arc Raiders.

Where to find the Nomad Camp underneath the Railyard

Your first step to completing the Clean Hands quest in Arc Raiders is to drop into Pendola Pass and head straight for the Railyard. The quest asks you to find the Nomad Camp underneath the Railyard, which is quite easy to do as soon as you come to the Railyard from the western side. Upon walking through those tunnels, your quest should update.

Next, you must search for the polluted item in the Nomad camp. This item is easy to find; simply walk up onto the platforms and search the bag on the ground beside the green barrels and the container wrapped in a blue tarp.

An Equatorial Sundial will drop after searching the bag, so make sure to pick that up and place it in your safe pocket just in case. Now, you’ll need to head west to the Old Town to bring the Equatorial Sundial to the top of the church.

Where to use the Equatorial Sundial at the church in Old Town

You’ll find the church near the very center of Old Town, and once inside, head to the very back to spot a set of winding stairs. Walk up the stairs until you find a zipline, then take the zipline up to the top of the tower.

From here, you should see an interaction spot that’ll let you hold up your Equatorial Sundial. Hold your interaction until it completes, and that’s all there is to the Clean Hands quest! Just make sure to keep the Equatorial Sundial in your safe pocket since you need to bring it back to Speranza as well.

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Arc Raiders' Frozen Trail update wasn't exactly a make-or-break moment for a game that's already a massive commercial success, but it was a big bet by developer Embark Studios, which committed to releasing larger updates after long periods of relative inactivity. Based on early numbers following Frozen Trail's launch, that gamble is paying off.

As we so often have to, we're working off of Steam numbers for a multiplatform game, so we can only approximate trends here. But SteamDB shows a pretty clear spike for Arc Raiders.

As of October 8, the game has seen a 24-hour Steam peak of 131,388 concurrent players, which is the type of excitement Arc Raiders hasn't seen since April. It hasn't been above 100,000 CCU since May, even, and it has spent several months in the 30,000 to 50,000 range as Embark focused on cutting through the noise with one big knife rather than the dozen small razors it rolled out post-launch.

Obviously, Frozen Trail isn't the only driving factor here. I spoke to executive producer Aleksander Grøndal about the concerted push around this launch, and he said the studio does see it almost as a relaunch in some ways. Nominally, it's a 2.0 moment for the game. To roll out the red carpet, Embark has also given players until October 12 to play the game for free, and it's currently on sale for 50% off to boot.

Sales and giveaways consistently push a lot of players toward games, so Frozen Trail has definitely had some help rocketing Arc Raiders up the Steam charts. This turnout doesn't even touch Arc Raiders' surprisingly explosive launch – nor did anyone really expect it to match those absurd numbers – but it's a pretty strong response, especially since this was a Thursday update. Come Friday night and into the weekend, we may see that 24-hour peak climb higher.

In our chat, Grøndal also examined the discourse around Arc Raiders' player count, which has become a mainstay of many discussions for live service games. "Of course, it's not something that you look at and go, 'Oh, that feels great,'" he says. "That's not what I'm saying. But at the same time, you have to stick to your guns a bit when you make a decision. This is what we're going to do, and you have to believe that's the right approach. And, of course, we hope that works out."

I'd also point you to our discussion with Palworld liaison and Pocketpair comms lead John Buckley, who (fairly) argued that many players misinterpret Steam player numbers. These figures can be useful and interesting as an expression of player appetite, but it can also be easy to overrate them.

Arc Raiders Frozen Trail patch notes are full of sentences that players have dreamed of for a year: "You can now open the map while downed."

Crimson Desert's critic reviews may have been harsher than its user reviews because normal players not working on a deadline had more time to venture off the golden path and enjoy the game's rich world and systems, according to Lybee Park, CEO of developer Pearl Abyss' Europe branch.

Park spoke to The Game Business about Crimson Desert's reception, focusing on the launch period back when it was a different, meaningfully worse game that has since received approximately eight bazillion updates.

Interviewer Christopher Dring says "the critical reception was a little bit more mixed, right? It wasn't terrible, but it was a little bit lower." Crimson Desert's critical reception was, indeed, not terrible: it sits at 77 on Metacritic against an 8.7 user score. On Steam, Crimson Desert Enhanced, an improved version of the game that's replaced the old one less than a year after launch, has 83% positive lifetime user reviews and, as it happens, 77% positive recent reviews. (Our Crimson Desert Review awarded the game 4 out of 5 stars.)

It's not unusual for critical and user reviews to differ, and this is far from the biggest gap I've seen for a game. If you look at some of the best-rated releases of 2026, a lot of them have slightly lower user scores than critic scores, with exceptions like Resident Evil Requiem, which just has even more glowing user scores. Fewer still show score gaps larger than one point – one being Mixtape, a game which was trendy to hate online but still found a very receptive audience of confirmed buyers on stores like Steam, where reviews put it at 87% positive to Metacritic's 5.9 user score, or on the PlayStation Store, where it has 4.6 out of 5 stars.

When a critic may play dozens of times more games per year than the average gamer (who, surveys have found, only buys two or three new games annually), it's easy for tastes and expectations to shift and vary. Park speculates on where Crimson Desert's review gap may have come from.

"I can have my personal opinion, right?" she begins. "I do believe both parties have fair points, especially for critics. They had to play the build that is not the exact same version of the launched game. And, also, they had limited time, and usually the classical approach when they review the game is following the main quest line."

The main quest is not where Crimson Desert is at its strongest, Park implies. The other folks at Pearl Abyss clearly agree: the central story was deemed so erratic that it was actually directly patched with the release of the Enhanced version. We regularly see post-launch updates targeting game balance, resource economies, quality-of-life issues, UI navigation, performance, bugs, and many other elements, but games rarely rewrite their stories in this way.

"But Crimson Desert, our unique charm is spread all over our in-game world," Park adds. "All those tiny details that are hidden, all [the] freedom you can actually explore even further, beyond the common expectations. All of those unique bits and interesting, new, fresh bits, I don't think critics had a fair chance to explore and experience while it was the reviewing period."

I don't do nearly as many reviews as some game journalists, but I've been at this for 13 years so I have done a few dozen, and I can tell you that I don't play review games the same way I play my for-fun games. That's usually because I don't have time to. Thank the stars I didn't play Unicorn Overlord for review. Could I have spent 240 hours slow-rolling and savoring a 45-hour strategy RPG if I was on a deadline? Of course not, and my experience with the game would've been changed as a result.

But reviewers will generally work to see as much of a game as they can beyond just rolling credits. Especially with a sprawling open-world experience like Crimson Desert, there will be a need and a drive to poke around, though that drive can vary as much as opinions. I don't know anybody who reviewed The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild by sprinting straight to Ganon as soon as they possibly could, unless that was for an experiment after they beat the game the conventional way.

And it is important to note, as Park does, that day-one patches can instantly render reviews somewhat outdated. I've had serious frustrations with games resolved by a patch within days or hours of my review going live. Yet reviewers can only criticize the game in their hands, not an imagined, better version of it. Even if players never encounter the same issues, reviewers are still right to criticize those if they run into them.

Really, the words hanging over this are "the reviewing period" – the time between the delivery of review keys and the opening of review embargoes. This is one place where you will find dramatic differences. How much time you get for a review can vary hugely between games, and the less time you have to play a game, even assuming days or weeks of inordinately long play sessions, the less realistic your experience can be. A lot of media outlets have gotten better about giving reviewers more time to play at a healthy pace which also allows for a more authentic experience, but there's still undeniably incentive to be ready for embargo.

We can fully dissect the levers of online criticism some other time. My point is, Pearl Abyss set the reviewing period for Crimson Desert. I don't wholly agree with Park's assessment that Crimson Desert's critical scores may have been lower because critics only saw the rainbow and not the pot of gold at the end. (I think Crimson Desert's reception was fair, and I think a game's ability to encourage and reward exploration is an important factor.) But I definitely agree that longer review periods are better for everyone.

Crimson Desert DLC Charting the Unknown delayed 2 weeks as Pearl Abyss seeks "a more polished and stable gameplay experience."

The big Arc Raiders Frozen Trail update is finally here, dropping a truckload of wintry content on players and, importantly, unloading the biggest patch notes since the start of the game. We're all going to be busy with the new map, skills, guns, gadgets, and Arc for a good while, but the 2.0 Frozen Trail update is full of tiny yet exciting changes, many of which have been requested by players for nearly a full year.

You can read the full patch notes here. I want to focus on some easily missed lines that punch above their weight. Here's an easy crowd pleaser: "Max Stash Size increased by 2 new levels (328 Max without Expedition bonuses)." With tons of new items coming into the game, I wouldn't be surprised if Embark is all but forced to further increase stash size in the future.

This may be a contentious change because it's technically a nerf to a popular strategy, but the Queen and Matriarch have had their loot reallocated once again. "Moved higher tier loot from the armor pieces of the legs to the legs pieces for Queen and Matriarch," developer Embark says.

In other words, you can't just prune leg armor to plunder easy cores any longer. Instead, you'll seemingly have to sever legs entirely or stick around for the kill, which, really, is probably how it always should've worked. Destroying legs at the joint should be more rewarding than simply peeling them, but until now you'd get literally nothing from the leg frame. My inner loot goblin isn't happy, but this just makes sense to me. However, I still think a dead Queen or Matriarch should drop way more loot than a reactor that only one person gets to loot. We'll see how it plays out.

Another point of contention will be the handling of the Anvil hand cannon, which has been pushed to blue rarity as it was "outperforming weapons both within and above its own level of rarity." Once again, this makes sense to me. With an Anvil, a Renegade, and enough ammo, you can kill a machine god.

I'm a bigger fan of the little animations that Embark's added with Frozen Trail. "Added animations to show the player interacting with their map and inventory," the patch notes read. Additionally, there's now a "mouth animation for when players are talking in proximity chat." Other "contextual" character animations include "brushing dust after sliding" and heaving "when running out of breath for a while." Anything that makes my raider feel more like a fallible container of meat struggling in a cyborg apocalypse is welcome.

Here's Embark finally tackling something that always bothered me: "Adjusted how character sounds are occluded by walls and obstacles for more natural audio positioning." My hope is that this will improve Arc Raiders' directional audio, which could get wonky in firefights in some buildings.

The gameplay section of the patch is where the real gold lies. We've got "more contextual Ping information for ARC and various objects." When looting, you can "drop loot to the ground directly from containers." While crawling around, "you can now open the map while downed." If your backpack looks fabulous but has an extremely visible light source, you can now toggle it off to "go full stealth mode."

One of the new movement changes could interact with the updated skill tree, which pushes agility more heavily, in interesting ways: "Added Scrambling. Sprinting at steep slopes will allow you to scramble up them for a short time." Sandwiched between added wall run and mantling maneuvers, this might actually make a noticeable difference.

Embark mentions the dynamic loot zones it's testing in new map Pendola Pass, designed to make scavenging less repetitive match over match by changing loot hotspots. The exciting part here is what executive producer Aleksander Grøndal told me in a recent interview: assuming initial feedback and implementation for dynamic loot zones goes well, "it will be fairly straightforward for us to go back and reapply that to the existing maps as well." Even as a map event, I'd love to see old zones find a little more variety.

Arc Raiders lead says Steam player count discourse doesn't feel great, but Embark "accepted the fact that we would have less players."

A lot of change is going on in the annals of Xbox right now. The games division of Microsoft is in the midst of 3,200 layoffs and a complete restructuring, and that includes in senior management. Mojang, the company overseeing Minecraft, now has a new boss, but their background isn't strictly in game development.

Asha Sharma, CEO of Xbox, has announced that Maria Angelidou-Smith is taking on the role of Mojang CEO, replacing Kayleen Walters, who's now president of XP. That's apparently another wing of Xbox dedicated to how "how people experience our franchises beyond the games themselves" - in other words, TV and movie adaptations and licensing agreements and what not.

Considering the success of A Minecraft Movie, and the fact she's a named producer on the sequel, it makes sense for Walters to move into that role. It's mentioned Minecraft garnered over 250 licensees in her time there.

Angelidou-Smith is no stranger to positions like this, but more in social media than video games. From 2014 to 2022, she was with Meta, looking after various aspects of Facebook, firstly in app monetization, and then in the realm of Facebook Groups, Dating and the like.

Then, after stints in other industries, she took on the job of chief product officer at Reddit in November of last year. And now she's in charge of Minecraft.

"Mojang already has an exceptional game development team that knows Minecraft and its players deeply," Sharma writes in an internal memo shared by The Hollywood Reporter. "We wanted someone who has built products for communities at enormous scale, who is deeply technical, and who understands how creators, product, technology and monetization come together."

Sharma says Angelidou-Smith's "first order of business" is "to learn from the teams and communities that make Minecraft so special."

If you're somewhat cynical of this move, I don't blame you. This certainly looks like Microsoft's targeted someone who's more concerned about user retention, advertising, and monetization than community moderation and access.

Minecraft is a juggernaut that's resisted many of the more concerning practices you can find in something like Roblox. There's no explicit suggestion Microsoft wants to push that direction, but this changeover leaves the possibility open. We'll see what the future holds.

Former Halo art director claps back at founding Xbox member for implying 343 Industries had a "laziness" problem: "It isn't accurate"

Finding Celeste's childhood drawings in Arc Raiders will take you to three locations in Riven Tides, which is no mean feat given how dangerous the area is. Especially when you don't have a clear idea where you're going or what you're looking for. I've found all the drawing locations already though, so I can point you in the right direction and minimize the wandering about to make it all a lot easier.

Find young Celeste's room in Hotel Panorama Azzuro

The whole objective kicks off with you having to find young Celeste's room in Hotel Panorama Azzuro. That's marked on the map above, and you'll want room 213 specifically. If you take the stairs on the outside of the building, room 213 will be the first one you see when you go inside on the second floor.

Once inside, head to the cabinet by the window to inspect the map, which will add two new objectives: 'find the drawing on the roof of the third Customs House' and 'find the drawing at the Quay'.

Where to find the drawing on the roof of the third Customs House

The third Customs House is marked on the map above - the second building down going north to south of the stack of four. When you get there, head up to the roof and find this metal panel in the corner. There will be a picture you can examine to finish this objective.

Where to find the drawing at the Quay

The Quay is marked on the map above, and is one of the more obscure locations that only shows up when you zoom right in. Head to the point shown and look for two large cable spools.

There's a drawing you can inspect on one of the legs of the spool nearest the sea. Examine that and you're done. All that's left now is to extract and head back to Lance to turn the mission in for your rewards: a Lance's Mixtape backpack charm and three Sterilized Bandages.

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Star Wars: Galactic Racer studio lead Matt Webster says the new roguelite racer is way more complex than other racers by the same team.

Star Wars: Galactic Racer is out now, and finally brings the series back to racing after a 24 year gap since the PS2's Racer Revenge. And perhaps more crucially, it's developed by the team at Fuse Games, which was born from multiple members of Criterion Games, making Galactic Racer as much of a homage to Star Wars: Episode 1 Racer as it is to Burnout 3 and Burnout Revenge.

And while working with a well known and mostly family-friendly IP like Star Wars could've led the devs to perhaps tone things down a little, Galactic Racer is pretty tough. You're moving at super high speeds and even brushing a wall can cause your speeder to blow up. And in the game's campaign, you only have three chances to blow up before you're eliminated and need to restart a run.

Talking to GamesRadar+ guides editor Will Sawyer – who also wrote our Star Wars: Galactic Racer review – Fuse Games CEO Webster spoke about the complexity of the racer, saying, "One of the things that's really interesting for me is that modern gamers can manage a greater amount of cognitive load."

He explains, "We are asking way more out of players in this game than I think we've ever done in a racing game with multiple boost things, pressing more than one face button at a time, switching up the abilities, and thinking strategically and tactically at the same time whilst traveling at 700 kilometers an hour and your eyes are on stalks. It's quite amazing."

Naturally, Galactic Racer has gone down a treat with many, becoming one of the highest-rated Star Wars games ever, and that's undoubtedly down to the racing pedigree of Fuse Games… and Ben Quadinaros, obviously.

Star Wars Galactic Racer introduces "the best Glup Shitto ever," an annoying little dude who'll blow up your vehicle for fun, and fans love him: "George Lucas would shed a tear."

As a massive horror fan, I was on the hunt for Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival Easter Eggs as soon as I loaded up the game. And, to my Cenobite-obsessed delight, I've found 13 references that made me do a double-take while messing about with the Lament Configuration.

Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is, of course, set in the Hellraiser universe, which has given us some of the best horror movies of all time and is a staple in '80s horror media, period. So of course there were always going to be nods to the iconic franchise for us to dig into here. However, in between my time gushing over Pinhead voice actor Doug Bradley's being in this title and wincing at all the virtual gore on my screen, I was shocked to find obscure nods to other '80s horror movies, the Hellraiser comics getting some love, and even tributes to iconic metal bands as well.

Some of the easter eggs I found are really hidden, and some aren't so cut and dry. I'm sure I may have missed a few as well, so feel free to share any you may have found in the comments below. But for now, here are all the spooky references and easter eggs that are in the new game, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival. Warning: spoilers ahead!

1. Mattress with chains at the beginning of the game

In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it kind of moment, at the very start of the game when you enter Hell for the first time, a mattress is quickly thrown in front of you before it is pulled away with chains. Now, this moment is way too much of a curveball not to be a shout-out to the first two Hellraiser movies. Mattresses being like a gateway to hell are massive things in the franchise in general, but seeing one so soon and without context has to be an easter egg in my opinion. In Hellraiser 2 specifically, Julia is resurrected via a mattress (which the game later replicates with Sunny), so that just further cements my thoughts on this one. Is this Julia's mattress? We don't know, but it is definitely a movie nod if ever there was one.

2. A man with wires on his face like the Doctor in Hellraiser 2

When you first escape Bruno, near the place where you get a gun for the first time in the game, in the hallway you will find the dead body of a detective whose death has some very similar characteristics to Dr. Philip Channard's fate when he is taken over by Leviathan in Hellraiser 2. In the movie, before he's turned into a Cenobite, one of the most memorable moments is seeing wires cut into his face. In the game, the dead body has a contraption on his head with wires cutting into his face in the exact same manner. We do see this model used again later in the game, so it isn't limited to this one scene, but it is a clear homage to one of the best practical-effects moments in an '80s movie. It is also one of the only nods to Channard, who personally would have loved all of Bruno's gruesome handiwork.

3. Shopkeeper being an Eremite

When you meet the shopkeeper for the second time, you will find a document next to her that reveals that she is an eremite. Eremites are basically demons who guard all the puzzle boxes that lead to Hell, and they are also beings who try to entice souls into Leviathan's domain. Eremites are half-human, half-Cenobite beings who can look human at first, but their true form tends to be a bit more horrific. We saw that back in the first Hellraiser movie, with the homeless figure turning into a skeletal winged monster to get the Lament Configuration at the end of that film. We did only get a name for these creatures in the Hellraiser comics, though, so this is a nice nod to that side of the franchise as well. I will say that the shopkeeper behaves quite odd for an Eremite since they don't seem to be operating under Leviathan's will, but they do enjoy messing with Aiden's head about his relationship with Sunny and his true desires, so the essence of the original source material is still there.

4. Orno is mentioned

In the same note that reveals that the shopkeeper is an Eremite, we also get mention of the Cenobite Orno. Now, Orno is basically all of the Eremites' parent and is the Cenobite who is tasked with creating new puzzles in Hell. It's a bit complicated, but in order to reproduce with humans and make Eremites, Orno embeds his essence into his "Raw Material", a tortured human husk he uses to create the insides of the puzzle boxes, which he then returns to the real world in order to act as a surrogate to impregnate people with his own Cenobite genes…delightful. Only years later when they've grown does he send them a puzzle box, activating them like sleeper agents. Orno doesn't turn up in the Hellraiser movies and is really only a figure in Epic Comics, but seeing his name pop up is a neat little easter egg for longtime fans of the franchise.

5. Ozzy Osborne's grave

In the graveyard section of the game, after you escape the club, you can stumble upon a gravestone that reads "Here lies our prince of darkness who raised hell then went back to his mother". Under the tombstone, you will see Ozzy's iconic glasses as well as two bat statues, and for some extra flair, candles sporting the iconic Black Sabbath purple color decorate the grave as well. Ozzy Osbourne died in 2025, so seeing this very sweet homage to him in the game was surprisingly touching. Also, a fun fact: Ozzy wrote a song called Hellraiser with Zakk Wylde and Lemmy Kilmister back in the '90s, so he has got ties to the franchise directly. Basically, this is a top-tier tribute and Easter egg, friends.

6. Motörhead's Lemmy's hat

Next to Ozzy's gravestone, you will also see Motörhead bassist and lead vocalist Lemmy Kilmister's iconic cowboy hat. As I mentioned in the Ozzy Osbourne Easter Egg, Lemmy co-wrote the Hellraiser song. However, Motörhead did do a version of the song for the movie Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth. Lemmy also played poker with Pinhead in that song's music video, and it was directed by Clive Barker too, which is just the cherry on top of the cool horror cake. So yeah, finding a version of Lemmy's hat next to the Ozzy easter egg is very cool, and one I highly suggest all fans keep an eye out for when they are in the graveyard sections of the game.

7. The occult magazine, Damballa

When you return to the club after acquiring the Hell chain ability, you will see a magazine on a chair called Damballa. Now, I will say a lot of books and magazines in this game are just stock assets; however, in the realm of '80s horror movie lore, this find made me do a double take. Damballa is a voodoo spirit that, in the horror movie Child's Play, is the reason why Chucky was able to transfer his soul into a doll. Damballa doesn't have any Hellraiser ties directly, but the game offers an '80s movie mode, and since Hellraiser 2 came out in 1988 (the same year as Child's Play), I'm pretty sure this is a fun easter egg paying homage to horror movies in general of that time. Later on in the game, we see a cabin that looks kind of similar to Evil Dead, and a boat on a lake that may be a Friday the 13th nod, but those are all very vague "could be" references. The Damballa mention is the best case for an '80s horror movie easter egg out of the whole bunch.

8. Cultist note called 'Hell on Earth'

In the game, you will find a note called "Hell on Earth", which discusses the cult's plans to bring the Cenobites to Earth. In the note, the writer does complain that they want to descend into Hell instead of bringing it to Earth, simply because they want to "bathe in Leviathan's shadow". Pretty standard bad guy stuff, but the Easter Egg here lies in the note's name, which is the same as the third Hellraiser movie, Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth. It's not a deep Easter egg that needs lore unpacking to get the most out of it, but it is a fun little nod.

9. Yellow floating balloon

OK, so I will admit that whether this is an easter egg or not is probably a stretch, but considering all the other subtle nods to '80s horror media that isn't purely Hellraiser-related, I do think it is worth highlighting a potential IT reference I found. In the swamp section, when you are approaching the cabin after the graveyard section in the game, you will be able to spot a very out-of-place yellow balloon. If you are a long-time Stephen King fan like myself, then you know that the balloon that Pennywise gives Georgie is actually yellow in the '90s IT miniseries. The red balloon for the IT franchise was only made popular after the recent movies; before then, Tim Curry's portrayal of Pennywise holding up that yellow balloon in the gutter haunted my nightmares. There are no other IT signifiers in the game, but a random balloon in a swamp is a suspicious choice to include; also, considering we have had a Chucky reference and that IT was written in 1986, this may be another '80s horror homage.

10. All the Steam achievements are references

Almost all the Steam achievements are references to something. Be that Hellraiser quotes spanning from all the movies, other horror movie nods, Resident Evil 4 references, and there is even an achievement named after a line from Lord of the Rings. I'd be here for ages listing them all, so I highly recommend checking them out for yourself. However, I will share some of my personal favorite Easter eggs that I found:

• The achievement "Only Nightmares Last Forever," which is a line from the more obscure and straight-to-video Hellraiser: Deader movie
• The achievement "A waste of good suffering," a classic line from the first Hellraiser movie
• The two achievements "What Are You Selling?" and "What are you buying?" which are nods to the merchant in Resident Evil 4
• The achievement "What's in the Box," which is a line from the iconic thriller movie Seven
• The achievement "No life in the void, only death," which is a line Sauron says during The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
• The achievement "Burn, oh such a limited imagination," which is a line from Hellraiser 3
• The achievement "Unlimited Power," which is, of course, a reference to the Star Wars line said by Palpatine in Episode 3 – Revenge of the Sith

11. Blade tentacles from Hellraiser 2

The general aesthetic of the Labyrinth takes cues from all the Hellraiser movies, so there aren't a lot of Easter Eggs to be spotted in Hell. However, in some sections you will encounter hallways filled with tentacles with surgical blades coming out of them, which is very clear Hellraiser 2 imagery. When Channard turns into the Cenobite "the Doctor" in that movie, he sports said tentacles with blades, and it is very specific to his character. While the other Cenobites tend to stick to hooks and chains, these blades do make Channard stand out in the franchise, so seeing the blade tentacles in the game is clearly a nod to that iconic villain. Even though The Doctor perished at the end of Hellraiser 2, it's nice to see that some twisted part of him stuck around in Hell to make it a more terrifying and horrific place…right?

12. Red Dragon painting

In Marlowe's mansion, there is a very clear interpretation of the Red Dragon painting by William Blake. If you are a Silence of the Lambs fan, chances are you know about this painting through the prequel. The 1981 novel Red Dragon by Thomas Harris often references the painting directly. In the book, the main villain (who isn't Hannibal but a serial killer nicknamed the "Tooth Fairy") believes that each person he murders will bring him closer to ascending into the red dragon, which is very similar to Marlowe's train of thought, if you ask me. Marlowe's crusade is to kill and mutilate his followers for Leviathan, so that he may eventually walk among the Cenobites. The painting that we see in the game isn't an exact replica of the Red Dragon, but it is very clearly a version of the painting that stood out enough for me to do a double take. Also, thematically, the story of the Red Dragon and Marlowe's own wishes are pretty undeniable. On another note, it's very cool to see another '80s horror nod with this one too.

13. Jesus Wept reference from Hellraiser 1

Probably the most iconic scene and line from the first Hellraiser movie is at the end of said film, where Frank Cotton's body is pulled by Pinhead's chains, and his entire skin is stretched out. In that gruesome moment, he says the line "Jesus Wept". In the game, depending on what choice you make, you will see a scene that is pretty similar to this moment. However, I will say Aiden doesn't say the iconic line and isn't as stretched as Frank is. It isn't an exact one-to-one replica of the scene, but it is a very clear nod toward it that will make film fans crack a smile at the very least.

Next read our Hellraiser: Revival review for more details on this new horror.

It's a real pity what's become of Dragon Age. Once a pillar of BioWare alongside Mass Effect, the series is now in the nether regions of the zeitgeist, thanks in no small part to the commercial failure of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. The long-gestating sequel suffered a number of issues, and one of the central creators behind the whole franchise suggests a few reasons as to why.

In a new YouTube video (below), Mark Darrah, a lead developer across every installment of the fantasy RPG series (who announced his departure from BioWare in late 2020), broke down why and how The Veilguard wound up failing. Right off the top, he points toward stretched senior staff.

"The project ran without its most senior leadership when I was on Anthem, from 2017 until 2019," he explains. Next, then, were a number of delays, where the goalposts weren't moved far enough away to adequately get the game into a shippable state.

"The game spent a lot of time really close to its perceived release date," Darrah says. "The game changed release dates a lot of times, and the consequence of that is that the team always was quite close to its current release date."

Despite Dragon Age 4 "slipping a tonne," the deadline was always pushed in "little steps" rather than given considerable room to breathe. This created a situation where the team couldn't take an eagle's eye view of the project.

"There was never a time when the project was way in the future," Darrah recalls, "and things could be brought back, looked back, burned down, and looked at in a brand new light."

These issues sprang from, and were exacerbated by, the need for BioWare to fit into EA's annualization approach. Essentially, EA wanted to publish something from the studio every year. When your remit is chunky role-playing games, you can see how this would be difficult.

At one point, he says, BioWare's slate had Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect: Andromeda, Anthem, and Dragon Age 4 coming out yearly from 2013 onward. This didn't happen, and delays on each formed a domino effect that led, in part, to The Veilguard arriving in late 2024, to a muted response.

Now the future's uncertain for the studio and the series. Mass Effect 5 is apparently happening, but we've heard next to nothing for years now. Hopefully one day we see Dragon Age make a roaring return – just don't expect it any time soon.

Ex-Dragon Age lead settles the score on Origins' most controversial sequence: The Fade is "filler" and "not very good content."