007 First Light may now be acting as a signpost at a fork in the road for the James Bond franchise. Developer IO Interactive self-published the title, which is a bit of an anomaly for a game license from such a monolithic IP. 007 First Light received rave reviews and appears to be an immediate financial success, selling 1.5 million copies in its first 24 hours on the market. IOI's deal was inked before Amazon purchased the Bond franchise, though, and how the property owner handles future gaming installments may set the tone for the franchise at large. View the full article
Xbox and Undead Labs have announced that State of Decay 3 will be launching on PS5, Xbox Series consoles, and PC in 2027. The new trailer showcased the usual selection of zombie locales, with a much higher level of visual fidelity than we’ve seen from previous titles. In April, developer Undead Labs announced that a series of alpha playtests for State of Decay 3 would start in May, promising “four-player co-op, some new base building and resource strategics, and a whole lot of combat.” Read More... View the full article
Xbox Game Studios unveiled Halo: Campaign Evolved, a remake of the original Halo game, for launch on July 28, 2026. The game also includes three new missions set one year before the events of the Ring in the first Halo game. The company made the announcement at the Xbox Showcase during Summer Game Fest week in Los Angeles. It’s been a long time for Xbox fans to wait since the 2021 launch of Halo Infinite. While the remake of the original Halo: Combat Evolved from 2001 will make fans happy, Microsoft is still figuring out the future of the Halo franchise. Master Chief at Xbox Showcase 2026. Source: GamesBeat/Dean Takahashi The new missions appear to star Sergeant Major Avery Junior Johnson, one of the comic Halo side characters, always cracking jokes. It’s set on a planet with a lot of “freaky” Covenant enemies, with three new missions and a remake of Halo. The post Microsoft shows Halo: Campaign Evolved for debut on July 28 appeared first on GamesBeat. View the full article
Xbox opened its summer games showcase with several familiar, popular franchises. One of those was Fable, which has been in the works at Playground Games for quite some time. Today it got a new trailer depicting one of its villains, as well as a release date: February 27, 2027. It launches day one on Xbox Game Pass, as well as Xbox Series X/S, Xbox Cloud, Steam and PlayStation 5. The trailer depicts Isabel, Hero of Wraithmarsh (who appears to be played by Hayley Atwell) as she describes her backstory and her belief that she is the only hero the world needs. It also shows clips of the player characters of Albion fighting her multiple times, cementing her as one of the games antagonists. The post Fable launches day one on Xbox Game Pass on February 27, 2027 appeared first on GamesBeat. View the full article
Xbox has finally announced an actual release date for Fable. Playground Games’ long-awaited reboot of the Lionhead series has been pushed back a number of times, and has never had a specific date attached to it. This has now changed, with the latest trailer at today’s Xbox Games Showcase announcing that the game is planned to release on February 23, 2027. Read More... View the full article
Xbox has revealed a new trailer for Halo: Campaign Evolved, as well as the game’s release date. As announced during the Xbox Games Showcase, Halo: Campaign Evolved will be released on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on July 28, 2026. Players who pre-order the Premium or Collector’s Editions can play the game starting on July 23 thanks to five days early access. [Hidden Content] Read More... View the full article
Atlus has shared a new trailer for Persona 4 Revival, and announced its release date. As shown during the Xbox Games Showcase, the Persona 4 Revival trailer revealed that the game will be released on February 18, 2027. It will also be available on day one on Xbox Game Pass, according to Xbox. Read More... View the full article
The Horizonfranchise has its next big release right around the corner, as NCSoft has announced that Horizon: Steel Frontiers is coming in the first half of 2027. NCSoft's MMORPG spin on the Horizon franchise has been kept under wraps since its reveal, while fans still await news of a potential third mainline entry to the series. View the full article
Call of Duty: Warzone has finally brought back Battle Royale Solos, but at the cost of ****** Ops Royale Solos. Recent seasons of Call of Duty: Warzone haven't featured a solo way to play the regular Battle Royale mode, but it's here now as part of the recent Season 4 update. View the full article
The Xbox Games Showcase is the last major event of Summer Game Fest 2026, along with a special showcase to highlight Gears of War: E-Day. Here's every major reveal throughout the livestream, updated with each big trailer and announcement. View the full article
Xbox has revealed the release date for Gears of War: E-Day, and confirmed that it will no longer be coming to PS5. Today’s Xbox Games Showcase opened with gameplay from the upcoming game, along with confirmation that it will be released on October 6, and will be on Game Pass on day one. Xbox CEO also confirmed that the game will be an Xbox console exclusive, meaning it will be coming to PC, but not PS5 as previously announced. Read More... View the full article
NTE: Neverness to Everness has officially revealed two brand-new characters set to join the playable roster during the Version 1.2 update. Shinku and Iroi were both confirmed to be releasing as S-Class characters in NTE, with each character's element also confirmed. View the full article
Hot Wheels Infinite Rush was revealed at Summer Game Fest on Friday and now we can exclusively reveal some extended gameplay from the upcoming racer. As you can see in the player above, Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is slated to include tons of new elements not found in its predecessors including a Drift Stunt Challenge, Stuntman Challenge, and Destroy Everything! Challenge, where players get to utterly wreck everything that possibly can within a set timeframe. Ahead of the gameplay reveal at IGN Live 2026, I sat down with Michele Caletti, Development and Creative Director at Milestone - the studio behind the game, who told me that Hot Wheels Infinite Rush has a lot that fans of previous Hot Wheels Games will recognize, but marks a whole new world for the popular series. “It’s not at all Hot Wheels Unleashed 3,” Caletta says. “It's a completely different thing.We wanted to keep some of the positive aspects that were very well recognized because basically Hot Wheels 1 and 2 are proper racing games with nuance, with content, with quality through and through. We built a community. So making Infinite Rush has been a very big challenge because we wanted to preserve the good, but we wanted to change a lot.” Perhaps the biggest new element in Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is a series of freely explorable islands which allow players to hunt for a slew of discoverable items. “There are going to be four big islands,” Caletti says. “You can freely explore, go around. [They are] different one from the other. You can find challenges, races, secrets, [and] collectibles. You don't select the next challenge or next race from a menu, but basically you go around, have a look and find things along the way in the classic open world pattern. “This is a huge change because you can easily find yourself spending hours going around trying to catch the last secret, trying to find some new challenge that you've spotted. And it's completely different from the game loop perspective and from the way you perceive the game.” In addition to the islands, Caletti says there’s a second major shift the development team implemented while building the game. “The second huge change is the artistic vision placement,” Caletti says. “The other Hot Wheels games were based on the mantra of ‘Hot Wheels cars in real life-size, in toy form, in the real world, where you race in the back yard [or] in the kitchen.’ [With Hot Wheels Infinite Rush] we wanted to experiment with something very different. “You'll still be a toy car, but you're going to race in a world made like a diorama. So there are islands themed like cities, like resorts. Everything is in the scale of the car yet it's somehow toy form. Everything is clearly made in plastic [so] there's a significant shift. The things we've been able to create from the artistic perspective is very, very different. “On top, there are smaller changes,” Caletti says. “Here we have gone a step further in terms of differentiating the vehicles and creating four big classes with peculiar mechanics, their own vehicles, challenges, and race mechanics. Being able to zip around [the islands] opens up a different variety of challenges. Everything is somehow familiar and yet everything is different because of the scale factor.” Beyond the new islands, mechanics, and scale that Hot Wheels Infinite Rush brings to the storied franchise, Caletti says that he’s excited for some of the more social elements the game will feature. “I’d be very happy if [players] start interacting with each other online,” Caletti says. “Discussing how to catch all the secret items or the hidden items or the items that seem very hard to pick around the world. In other racing games, there's the discussion where to find all the cars, where to try to find all the secrets and to smash all the items. I'd like players to do the same with this game.” For more IGN Live, check out all of the cool things you can see when the event wraps up later today. Michael Peyton is the Senior Editorial Director of Events & Entertainment at IGN, leading entertainment content and coverage of tentpole events including IGN Live, San Diego Comic ****, gamescom, and IGN Fan Fest. He's spent 20 years working in the games and entertainment industry, and his adventures have taken him everywhere from the Oscars to Japan to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Follow him on Bluesky @MichaelPeyton View the full article
Big updates are arriving soon to Aether & Iron, and it seems like there could be even more in the future. As you can see in the new trailer above, a new roadside garage, new missions, and a new dice mini game are coming soon to the 1930s-set Decopunk narrative RPG. Ahead of the reveal, which debuted exclusively at IGN Live 2026, I sat down with the team at Seismic Squirrel to chat about why these new updates might not be the last new material we see from the game and what players might expect in terms of future lore. “Our game is built off the graveyard of darlings,” says Aether & Iron’s Narrative Tyler Whitney. “When we were building this, narratively, it was a lot more ambitious [with regard to] the scope of how big things would be. And the more that we built out the game, the more we realized that we had to trim narratively things down in order to fit what the team was capable of. And what was left on the cutting room floor is a lot more of New York history that I wanted to put forward.” “At one point our Production Supervisor, Josh [Enz], came in and killed two-thirds of the game,” says Creative Director Duane Stinnett. “So what we released is about 33% of what we originally scoped. But you get a better experience than if we had tried to stretch it across so much more. So it ends up working out for the best.” When I asked Whitney if leaving two thirds of the game on the cutting room floor meant that potential sequels to Aether & Iron were a possibility, he said he’s open to it. “Look, you can't confirm anything,” Whitney says. “We would love the opportunity. We have a massive backlog of material. I wrote a big wiki for everything. The amount of world building that was written internally compared to what made the game is a depressingly small percentage. So if people love the game, if people want to see more, we have so much more to share.” Key to the unique appeal of Aether & Iron are the retro floating cars (powered by the titular Aether) which are used in combat, racing, and act as a central pillar of the game. I asked Whitney and Stinnett how they balanced the chaotic fantasy of 1930s flying cars with the rigid demands of a turn-based tactical strategy game. “It was a very painful process,” Stinnett says. “The game was initially prototyped as a fully free-roaming 3D game. We went through so many iterations looking at how other titles handled turn-based three-dimensional flight with depth, and honestly nothing was clicking. It just didn't feel right.” “With turn-based tactical combat, one problem that we kept running into was like, ‘Okay, how do we make them feel like flying cars?’” Whitney says. “What difference does it make? And so we really tried to figure out ways to [to make] the combat feel unique. And I think that's what goes a long way in making the story feel interesting and compelling.” “We finally landed on an isometric view where the vehicles are bound to these glowing blue ‘Aether roads,’” Stinnett says. “In earlier builds, they hovered over normal cobblestones, but it just looked like they were driving normally; there was no sense of vertigo or depth. Now, the roads are made of a gaseous, translucent blue mist. You can see right through them into the empty air below. It allowed us to keep the combat grounded enough to make tactical sense, but players can still jump in, split lanes, and utilize car momentum to slam wreckage into enemy lines.” And while the cars in Aether & Iron might at first glance appear to be based on real ones from the 1930s, the team confirms that the vehicles in the game were actually built from the ground up by the team at Seismic Squirrel. “It’s really an amalgamation of existing vehicles that were heightened and adapted to fit the narrative in whatever context they lived in the world and in the narrative,” Stinnett says. “We would've had to get clearances to use real cars because [some of those] car companies still exist to this day. So [the vehicles in Aether & Iron] are sort of amalgamations of existing cars. “So for the Lowers, which is the lowest segment of society, the working class industrial section, a lot of the cars are retrofitted to fly, but they were ground cars originally. So you take a ******* Model T or something, it's all rusted out and you retrofit it with lifters and that's how people get around. And then by the time you get to the top of the city, everything's sort of like 1930s built from the ground up to fly.” Although the vehicles were designed from scratch, there was still plenty of inspiration behind Aether & Iron that the creators leaned into when building the game. “One of the games that I first fell in love with was BioShock on my Xbox 360,” Whitney says. “I fell in love with the world so much that I bought the books and made up stories in my head for what happened. And then Gangs New York and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, two movies that were instrumental in my upbringing, definitely find home in [our game] because of [their] romanticism. I think that's something that followed us through into Aether & Iron.” Aether & Iron is available now on Steam. Michael Peyton is the Senior Editorial Director of Events & Entertainment at IGN, leading entertainment content and coverage of tentpole events including IGN Live, San Diego Comic ****, gamescom, and IGN Fan Fest. He's spent 20 years working in the games and entertainment industry, and his adventures have taken him everywhere from the Oscars to Japan to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Follow him on Bluesky @MichaelPeyton View the full article
Fields of Mistria has locked down a 1.0 release date: August 5, 2026. While the end of its early access ******* is a significant milestone for the Stardew Valley-like farming sim, the 1.0 launch will not mark the end of Fields of Mistria's development. View the full article
For a limited time, PC users are able to claim an entire video game trilogy from VICTORIA Games completely free of charge, with the added benefit that every game is 100% DRM-free. No digital rights management features, or copy-protection software, means PC users can copy, transfer, back up, and download these games to their pleasure with no funny business. View the full article
When Mark Rosewater found out about Magic: The Gathering’s Universes Beyond initiative, he immediately knew he wanted to design a Marvel Comics set. The Magic: The Gathering head designer first learned about Wizards of the Coast’s third-party IP licensing initiative in a meeting with WotC vice president of Magic design Aaron Forsythe. “The very first thing I said to him was, ‘dibs on Marvel,’” Rosewater said in an interview with GamesBeat during the Summer Game Fest Play Days demonstrations in Los Angeles this week. At SGF: Play Days, where Wizards of the Coast was showcasing Magic’s new Marvel Super Heroes set, GamesBeat sat down with Rosewater to discuss the philosophy behind the set, its warm reception from the Magic community thus far, and Rosewater’s passion for Marvel and the super hero genre at large. Rosewater and his team have been working on the Marvel Super Heroes set for four years, and his excitement about the crossover set’s June 26 release was on full display during the interview. “I’m a giant Marvel fan. Obviously, I like Magic. So, this was a really fun set to work on, because I brought my two loves together in one thing,” Rosewater said. Although Marvel’s IP holders at Disney gave Rosewater and his team freedom to design around a wide range of characters, locations, and other elements of the Marvel universe, the Marvel Super Heroes set is broadly built around the concept of the Avengers super hero team, with significant typal set mechanics revolving around the Hero and Villain creature types. Rosewater noted that he had designed potential cards for Marvel characters that didn’t make it into the Super Heroes set, including a Rocket Raccoon card that could show up in a future expansion. He noted that Marvel superfans could likely get a sense of the nature of future Marvel expansions from the characters and story elements withheld from the upcoming set. “We clearly spent time and energy before we started sort of chopping everything up — so we were aware when we made this, and we knew what was coming,” Rosewater said. “And so, the things that are missing here, maybe they’re missing for a reason.” In addition to prominent Marvel characters like Iron Man and Captain America, Magic: The Gathering’s Marvel Super Heroes set includes a number of characters that Rosewater described as “deep cuts,” such as Reptil, a dinosaur-themed hero originally popularized through the “The Super Hero Squad” animated television series, and the fan-favorite Squirrel Girl. “One of the cool things is, you don’t need to know all the depth of the Marvel universe to enjoy things from the Marvel universe — and you know what? A guy that turns into dinosaurs made a really fun Magic card,” Rosewater said. “And Reptil, to me, is the poster child of, you don’t even need to know who he is to appreciate the character and the card.” In Magic’s Marvel Super Heroes set, every creature with a rarity of uncommon or higher is legendary and thus legal for use as a commander in the game’s Commander format, which Rosewater said was an intentional feature to allow players to build around all of their favorite characters. However, he flagged that his team had managed to sneak even more deep-cut characters such as the villain Volcana into the set as commons by featuring them in the art and flavor text of otherwise generically named cards. Volcana, for example, is featured on the card Volcanic Villain, pictured to the right. I had the opportunity to draft a few packs of Marvel Super Heroes during my interview with Rosewater. While I’m at it, here are a few more images of common-rarity cards from the new set that haven’t yet been shared anywhere, as far as I am aware: Decoy Ploy, Stark Industries Executive, Raft Security Officer, Super Suit, Vibranium Energy Daggers, S.H.I.E.L.D. Spy Kit, and Ant Man’s Army. I know that’s what you all are really here for. Rosewater and his team are working on additional Marvel expansions, so there is much more to come in the future for Marvel Comics fans looking to rip packs and slam cardboard featuring their favorite heroes. And there is hope on the horizon for fans of other fictional super hero worlds who enjoy playing Magic: Rosewater is a DC Comics fan, too. “I’m a huge DC fan — I would love that,” he said. “I probably need to go back down to say, ‘dibs on DC.’” The post Magic: The Gathering’s new Marvel set is a love letter to the super hero genre | new cards revealed appeared first on GamesBeat. View the full article
Xbox Games Showcase is back for another year, and this one promises a great deal from Microsoft. The showcase kicks off on Sunday, June 7 at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm *** time, and we’ll have live updates below, bringing you all the announcements as they happen. It will be followed immediately by a Gears of War: E-Day Direct, which will deliver a deep dive on the next game in the action series. So, what can we expect from Xbox Games Showcase itself? Microsoft has a number of big first-party games due out in what remains of 2026 and into 2027 that are still without release dates, so you’d expect those to be announced today. For example, Halo: Campaign Evolved, which we’re sure to get another look at during the show, will probably get a release date. A Gears of War E-Day release date is a sure bet, but will Microsoft also confirm a PS5 version? There’s been a lot of talk about Microsoft potentially returning to Xbox exclusives since new CEO Asha Sharma took over, so it will be interesting to see if any games at the showcase skip Sony’s console. I’m also hoping for firm release dates for inXile Entertainment’s Clockwork Revolution, Undead Labs’ State of Decay 3, and Rare’s recently delayed Fable. Meanwhile, we know we’ll get a look at the DMZ mode in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 during the show. Now, let’s speculate a little. We know Bethesda is working on a number of new games, but will any turn up at Xbox Games Showcase? How about that Fallout 3 Remaster? Could The Elder Scrolls 6 finally show off gameplay? Despite the fact TES6 was announced aeons ago, it showing up here somehow feels like wishful thinking. One thing we know won’t be at Xbox Games Showcase is Project Helix, Microsoft’s next-generation console. This one’s all about the games, the company has confirmed. And, just like during Sony’s State of Play showcase, don’t expect GTA 6 to pop up at Xbox Games Showcase. Rockstar, as we all know, will do its own thing when it’s good and ready. It’s worth noting that Xbox Games Showcase trailers will continue to display rival platforms, including PlayStation 5, but this may be the last time Microsoft does so. “Seeing the feedback on logos. It was a miss, and I own it,” Sharma said last month. “We are talking about how we adjust for future Xbox shows.” While you wait to find out what Xbox has in store, let us know what you’re hoping to see in the comments below! And be sure to come back here in time for Xbox Games Showcase itself, and we’ll have everything announced as it happens. Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at *****@*****.tld. View the full article
While it may not have been the best-kept secret leading up to Summer Games Fest 2025, Cronos: The New Dawn is getting an official expansion pack titled Cronos: Lazarus, launching later this year. Cronos: The New Dawn launched in September of last year to great reviews, proving that Bloober Team has a lot in the tank following an excellent remake of Silent Hill 2. View the full article
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