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Halo: Campaign Evolved is officially in the works, as Microsoft unveiled a remake of the first Halo game's main campaign for multiple platforms, including the PS5, in 2026. While the Halo franchise is finally arriving on PlayStation with Halo: Campaign Evolved, the remake of the first Halo title will not include any online PVP multiplayer modes, aside from campaign co-op for up to four players. View the full article

Koei Tecmo and Nintendo have also been gradually revealing more details on the gameplay and characters via social media. View the full article

The Silent Hill f star just created a new meme template by streaming her own game and reacting to its many horrors as any normal human should: with looks of horrorView the full article

Xbox is seeing growth in Japan, with cross-platform player engagement across its gaming ecosystem rising significantly throughout 2025. With Japan being one of the world's largest video game markets, this newly reported momentum offers an encouraging sign for Microsoft, standing in contrast to recent challenges that Xbox has faced. View the full article

Publisher WEMADE MAX and developer MADNGINE announced a new cinematic open world action RPG called Project TAL and based on Korean mythology. View the full article

In the wake of Monster Hunter Wilds's latest Festival of Accord: Dreamspell update, Capcom has re-introduced a previously available Support Hunter for a limited time once more for the duration of the event. Given how many players are still struggling to beat Omega Planetes for the first time or farm for its savage rewards, the limited event is a perfect opportunity to farm for any rewards you're still missing out on. View the full article

Hands-on | Even with the classic Halo feel intact, Combat Evolved has... evolvedView the full article

Halo, once the flagship Xbox exclusive, the video game Microsoft launched its first console with, has finally jumped ship. Microsoft has announced Halo: Campaign Evolved — a remake of the original game’s campaign — and it’s coming to PlayStation 5 day one. The Unreal Engine 5 remake of the Bungie-developed 2001 campaign is set for launch in 2026 on PC, Xbox Series X and S, and, crucially, PS5. It is the first new Halo game since 2021’s Halo Infinite, and the first Halo ever to release on a PlayStation console. IGN has played Halo: Campaign Evolved and has all the details right here, including first info on the new three-mission prequel story arc. And yes, if you were wondering, there’s crossplay, which means Xbox, PC, and PlayStation owners can play Halo co-op together for the first time. Halo: Campaign Evolved is the final nail in the coffin for the Xbox exclusive, then, although in truth the shooter series’ release on PlayStation does not come as any surprise. Xbox Game Studios is already one of the most prolific and successful publishers on PlayStation, and just this week Xbox president Sarah Bond called the idea of exclusive games “antiquated,” so Microsoft’s thinking on this is crystal clear. But what has prompted Microsoft’s multiplatform push? A recent Bloomberg report alleged that Microsoft is pushing Xbox studios to deliver a 30% margin — much higher than the industry average — and one of the ways studios can help bring in more money is by releasing their games on rival platforms, such as PlayStation and Nintendo Switch as well as PC. One prominent critic of the exclusive is former president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America Shawn Layden, who last year said that when a video game’s costs exceed $200 million, “exclusivity is your Achilles’ heel.” “It reduces your addressable market,” Layden told GamesBeat, before citing the success of Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2, which launched on PlayStation 5 and PC to explosive success. “Particularly when you’re in the world of live service gaming or free-to-play. Another platform is just another way of opening the funnel, getting more people in. In a free-to-play world, as we know, 95% of those people will never spend a nickel. The business is all about conversion. You have to improve your odds by cracking the funnel open. Helldivers 2 has shown that for PlayStation, coming out on PC at the same time. Again, you get that funnel wider. You get more people in.” Layden said single-player games have a similar audience consideration as multiplayer games, though not exactly the same. “For single-player games it’s not the same exigency,” he said. “But if you’re spending $250 million, you want to be able to sell it to as many people as possible, even if it’s just 10% more.” Layden’s comments echo those of former Xbox boss Peter Moore, who in a recent interview with IGN suggested Microsoft will be debating internally whether to release Xbox poster-child Halo on PlayStation. “If Microsoft says, wait, we're doing $250 million on our own platforms, but if we then took Halo as, let's call it a third-party, we could do a billion… You got to think long and hard about that, right?” Moore said. “I mean, you just got to go, yeah, should it be kept? It's a piece of intellectual property. It's ******* than just a game. And how do you leverage that? Those are the conversations that always happen with, how do you leverage it in everything that we would do?” Microsoft’s stance on exclusives has become one of the biggest talking points in the Xbox community, and that conversation will only grow louder now we know Halo has gone to PlayStation. Microsoft’s approach is in stark contrast to Nintendo and Sony’s. Nintendo has the most hardline policy on its games, releasing them on its consoles only. Sony has softened its approach in recent years, releasing the bulk of its games on PC after PlayStation (and in the case of Helldivers 2, eventually on Xbox). But Sony still refuses to launch its big single-player games on anything other than PlayStation day one (the latest example of this is Sucker Punch's Ghost of Yotei). Be sure to check out everything announced at Halo Studios’ Halo panel for more. 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

I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect when I sat down in front of an Xbox Series X to play an early demo of Halo: Campaign Evolved, the just-announced Unreal Engine 5 remake of the original-Xbox killer app (and yes, it’s a proper remake, not a remaster like Halo Anniversary was). And I’m honestly still not sure exactly how I feel about it after playing it. I definitely wanted to be blown away by the visuals, in the same way that the original Halo: Combat Evolved knocked my socks off back in 2001. Heck, we know Unreal Engine 5 is fully capable! I also didn’t want Halo Studios (nee 343 Industries) to mess with too much. Or did I? Would Halo 1 just feel old no matter what? And will PlayStation 5 gamers even care about this 25-year-old Xbox classic when it hits Sony’s consoles for the first time ever, day-and-date with Xbox and PC? So I went in with lots of questions, and I left with, well…some answers. Let me explain. I suppose we might as well start with the obvious: how it looks. Is my face properly melted? No. But maybe yours is? I’ll be curious to read the comments on this one. Anyway, Campaign Evolved does look very nice, no doubt. It certainly doesn’t look like it’s two decades old anymore. I played a chunk of the legendary Silent Cartographer mission from early in the campaign, and the skybox is beautiful, the water looks great, the trees look very nice, and the terrain texture looks sharp and clean. Once you get indoors, the alien architecture has a unique sheen to it that the original obviously never had. Meanwhile, the weapons all look exactly how you’d expect them to look in the modern era, and the Grunts, Jackals, Elites, and Hunters all look convincingly new rather than reskins of quarter-century-old creatures. Everything looks clean, but not in a soulless way. At least not to me. It works as a cohesive art-directed space in the new engine. I appreciate that VO from the principal actors (read: Steve Downes and Jen Taylor, at the very least) has been rerecorded, while mocap has all been redone for the rebuilt-from-scratch cutscenes. But let’s talk about my biggest concern coming into this demo: the classic Halo feel. Movement, aiming, jumping, vehicle controls – it’s all got to have that semi-floaty Halo feel to it, and I’m pleased to report that even in this very early state, Campaign Evolved is a good bit of the way there. No doubt they’ll continue to tweak it over the coming months – this release has no official release date beyond “2026,” by the way, but I’d be stunned if it’s not timed to release at or very near the 25th anniversary of Halo: Combat Evolved in November of next year – but there have been some gameplay modernizations implemented here that have been ported back from subsequent Halos into this remake, and while purists might bristle at it, most of these seem like they’re for the best for a 2026 first-person shooter release. Vehicles are boardable and destructible now. For starters, vehicles are boardable and destructible now, as they were in subsequent Halo games. That means a Ghost can no longer torment you endlessly, nor are you effectively invulnerable in a Scorpion tank. On a related note, a fourth player can now sit on the back of a Warthog. Oh, and though I didn’t get to try it out on The Silent Cartographer, the Wraith is drivable now, too, as it first became in Halo 2. Also, any weapons the bad guys wield, you can too. As such, the Energy Sword is now in your toolbelt if you take one off the corpse of a Gold Elite. Halo Studios says there will be eight weapons in Campaign Evolved that aren’t new to Halo but are usable for the first time in Master Chief’s first adventure. On the movement front, sprint has also been added. It’s not on a cooldown; you can run endlessly. I could see this one annoying the Halo 1 purists most of all, but not only do the developers say you can turn it off, but you can also just…not use it. I found it handy when running down the beach back towards my mission objective after wandering off to go stare at more of the new Unreal Engine 5-rendered spaces. What about co-op? After Halo Studios fumbled that in Halo Infinite, you’re probably wondering about it for the remake. Two-player split-screen is confirmed, though sadly it wasn’t available in my short preview build, and the development team also promises four-player online co-op with full cross-play and cross-progression support. As for proper competitive multiplayer, though? Unfortunately, the answer to that is right in the name of this remake: Campaign Evolved. There’s no multiplayer here, which is a shame because it’d sure be fun to see Blood Gulch or Sidewinder or Hang ‘Em High in Unreal Engine 5 with online cross-play support. I asked Halo Studios about this, and Executive Producer Damon Conn gave me an extremely media-trained answer, saying the team is “very focused on recreating the original campaign that started it all” and “[Halo] Infinite and [Master Chief Collection] provide really great experiences for multiplayer.” Sure…for Xbox and PC players. That doesn’t help new PS5 players fall in love with Halo’s glorious multiplayer, though. Presumably they didn’t want to pull any players away from MCC for this, and/or adding full multiplayer support would’ve likely meant the project couldn’t get done in time for the 25th anniversary. But it’s still disappointing. That led me to wonder about pricing. Would this be a full-price $70 release (or perhaps even $80 by the time it comes out, since Microsoft already tried to push to that price point this year)? Or will it be priced lower – particularly since it’s campaign-only? The Halo Studios team wouldn’t say when I asked them directly, so that remains to be seen. Personally, $50 feels right for this, but that’s just my opinion. I also think that $20 per month feels like the right price for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate… OK, so no multiplayer, but there is one significant addition I’m legitimately excited about: a new three-mission prequel campaign that revolves around Master Chief and Sergeant Johnson. This could be extremely cool, but unfortunately that’s literally all we know so far. In fact, Halo Studios wouldn’t even tell me if it’s accessible out of the box or if you have to complete the campaign in order to unlock it. I also asked if they’d be repurposing existing music from the Halo 1 soundtrack to score those missions, or if they might commission something new (dare I dream they reach out to Marty O’Donnell himself!), and they didn’t have an answer for me there either. Getting back to gameplay, I must say that I still had fun hooning across the beaches of The Silent Cartographer in a Warthog, my UNSC Marine buddies in the passenger and gunner seats helping to mow down Covenant bad guys while I attempted to turn them into hood ornaments with my front bumper. Just like old times. I also manned the gun turret at one point to test out the friendly AI and…it still needs work. In fact, someone on the development team acknowledged this later without me bringing it up, so it’s clearly something they’re aware of. Honestly, though, it’s not something I’m even worried about when there’s still (probably) upwards of a year of development time left. It’s the same with the framerate: no doubt some folks went straight to the comments to note any inconsistencies they saw (because I definitely noticed some), and while it is certainly important, it’s not something I’m sweating this far away from the end of the project. Oh, and I should also mention that Halo Studios is adding Skulls to Campaign Evolved. Lots of them, in fact. “Dozens” was the word they used, with an emphasis on this remake having the most Skulls of any Halo campaign ever. Replayability is clearly a focus for the studio here – which is understandable, given Halo’s strong history in that department as well as the lack of adversarial multiplayer – and hopefully the Skulls will spice things up for Xbox players running through this thing for the umpteenth time. Halo Studios says this remake having the most Skulls of any Halo campaign ever. On that note, I couldn’t help but wonder if PlayStation 5 players getting their first crack at Halo are really going to care about this in a way that turns a lot of them into new fans of the franchise. It’s a genuine question; I’ve got a lot of personal history with Halo, so I simply can’t answer this one. For someone with no nostalgia for Master Chief, will those players find Campaign Evolved as compelling as I found Combat Evolved? And if they do, then what? Will Halo Studios remake Halo 2 in Unreal Engine 5? And then 3? 4? 5? Reach? ODST? Infinite? Or will they just port The Master Chief Collection and Halo Infinite to PS5 to catch those players up? I asked the team about this and again got a very media-trained half-answer: “There is an opportunity for us to grow the fanbase,” Executive Producer Damon Conn told me. “We're bringing the most players, we believe, to Halo, ever. And so that growth is what we're truly interested in, and again, I hinted before this paves the way for future stories and Halos.” And so, as you can now see, I’m still left with many unanswered questions about this remake project. But to Halo Studios' credit, this early demo did answer a couple of key ones about how good it could look and how Halo-y it could feel. So far so good there. I’m very excited about the new three-mission prequel campaign featuring Sergeant Johnson, as it will be the first new single-player content in a Halo game in, by that point, five years. Can Campaign Evolved relight Halo’s spark? That’s the biggest question of all, and it’ll have to remain unanswered for a bit longer. Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan. View the full article

Plus new/old weapons, no multiplayer, level design tweaks, and... optional sprintView the full article

"Yes, we mean The Library"View the full article

This particular can of worms remains openView the full article

Nearly four years after the launch of Halo Infinite, Microsoft and Halo Studios have revealed the next major Halo release. Last year, Microsoft revealed that 343 Studios would be rebranding to Halo Studios and using Unreal Engine 5 for future projects. Earlier this week, a rumor suggested that the series would finally make the leap to PS5, following a number of multi-platform Xbox releases in recent years. View the full article

Not meView the full article

The Counter-Strike 2 community was sent into a tailspin when its in-game economy crashed, causing a loss of almost $2 billion of real-world money. Like many other live-service games, Counter-Strike 2 allows players to obtain a wide variety of cosmetic "skins" for their weapons. Typically doled out at random via randomized collections of rewards called "Cases," players can also trade and purchase skins from a wide variety of unofficial online marketplaces. View the full article

Honkai: Star Rail Version 3.7 update brings in the finale of the Amphoreous saga, the new playable character Cyrene, and more. View the full article

For the first time since it's launch in 2013, Old School RuneScape will receive a new skill. The iconic MMORPG has been operating two separate games (not counting the board game and TTRPG) for more than a decade: RuneScape 3, the uninterrupted evolution of the game since its incarnation in 2001; and Old School RuneScape, a version of the game mirroring its 2007 state, but evolving in its own way since its introduction. View the full article

This week on Steam's top-played charts, the two new releases going neck-and-neck are Battlefield 6—no surprise there—and a top-down extraction shooter about ducks. Specifically, it's about shooting ducks as a duck. Normally my friend group would be buzzing about the meme game of the week, but it feels like I don't know anyone outside the PCG team who's actually playing Escape From Duckov... Read more.View the full article

Diablo 4 is ending October with a bang by launching the Mother’s Blessing and Seasonal Splendor events at the exact same time. These two events both arrive in Diablo 4 on October 28, making it the perfect time to jump into Season 10. View the full article

The hybrid action RPG will combine dungeon exploration actions with a bakery management system and a rhythm mini-game. View the full article

You can stream "wherever you are" by reche from Digimon Story: Time Stranger on various digital music platforms now. View the full article

How do you complete The Brain Benders of Auntie's Choice in The Outer Worlds 2? When you reach Eden, your main aim is to infiltrate the Vox Relay to chase down De Vries. To accomplish this task, we recommend completing some side quests to make your journey to the base as easy as possible. As part of your The Outer Worlds 2 adventure, you'll meet Minister Milverstreet in Fairfield, and he'll promise to help get you into the Vox Relay if you persuade Vigilant Hogarth and the inhabitants of Westport to relocate to Fairfield. Be warned: you'll need to unlock particular Outer Worlds 2 skills and Outer Worlds 2 traits before you kick off the quest. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: The Outer Worlds 2 map - all planets and locations The Outer Worlds 2 The Saboteur of Paradise quest guide How to get double jump in The Outer Worlds 2 View the full article

Amid the live-service bombast of heavy-hitters such Diablo 4, Path of Exile, and PoE 2, Titan Quest 2 has so far been everything I wanted from a sequel to the classic 2006 ARPG. Grimlore Games has built a beautiful world that I love to be in, contributing massively to the fantasy of becoming a noble hero like the great tales of Greek mythology. Combat feels weighty and meaningful, the mastery system has me pondering builds in a manner unique among its peers, and the whole experience is condensed and completable, rather than a grind that sprawls into the endless horizon. It was just missing one thing: me. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Titan Quest 2 chapter two makes drops more exciting in the Greek fantasy ARPG Titan Quest 2 system requirements Titan Quest 2 roadmap plots out early access updates for the Greek fantasy ARPG View the full article

Speaking during Intel's Q3 2025 earnings call, Tan outlined the company's future plans for its client, server, and foundry businesses. On the client side, Intel will launch the Core Ultra 200S Plus Arrow Lake Refresh series in early 2026, followed by Nova Lake later in the year. Read Entire Article View the full article

Halo is looking for a fresh start, and today’s 2025 Halo Project Update livestream could give it just that. Nearly four years removed from the launch of Halo Infinite, gaming fans from every corner of the industry are looking to today’s Halo World Championship 2025 festivities for a sneak peek at the future of the flagship Xbox franchise. What exactly the developers at Halo Studios (formerly known as 343 Industries) have cooking remains to be seen, but judging by a tease shared late last month, it sounds like the Halo universe could soon head into uncharted territory. “Like last year we’ll be on the Main Stage to talk about it but this year we’ve also got a ‘deep dive’ panel planned for the Community Stage that you won’t want to miss,” Halo Studios said in a Halo Waypoint post last month. The Halo World Championship 2024 presentation served as fans’ introduction to Halo in Unreal Engine 5, setting the series up for a new direction. We’ll keep track of everything Microsoft and Halo Studios have to announce at the 2025 Halo Project Update stream here, so be sure to check in when the presentation begins at 1 p.m. PT / 4 p.m. ET for all of the latest news. Developing… Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe). View the full article