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Codes for Detonate can be redeemed for regular and Lucky Spins, which unlock new abilities to use on the battlegroundView the full article

A random, unassuming Magic: The Gathering card from the Avatar The Last Airbender set has risen to a whopping $30 on the secondary market because it's apparently a lot rarer than it ought to be. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Tournament-winning MTG deck sets off price spikes of up to 1000% New Otter-based Infinite MTG combo sweeps into Standard The best Avatar MTG card is not Badgermole but a surprise boomerang View the full article

No one tell Geoff Keighley we already know when he gets revealed at The Game AwardsView the full article

At long last, Leon S. Kennedy has been confirmed to appear in Resident Evil: Requiem — via a leaked image on the PlayStation Store. The reveal of new cover art for the game featuring Leon finally puts to bed one of this year's biggest gaming mysteries — something developer Capcom has itself refused to address — just days ahead of Requiem's appearance at The Game Awards. Presumably we'll see Leon announced officially there. This morning, Resident Evil fans began spotting the new cover art appearing on PlayStation 5 consoles in the pre-download screen for owners of the standard (non-Deluxe) version of the game. IGN has now verified this ourselves, and can confirm the image is legitimate. Leon is real. The game's cover shows a stubbled and haggard-looking Leon looming over Requiem's other main protagonist, Grace Ashcroft. In his appearance, Leon looks most similar to his iconic look from Resident Evil 4, his floppy hair set off by a snazzy leather jacket, its collar lined with fur. Rumors have persisted for months over Leon's involvement in Resident Evil: Requiem, with Capcom specifically declining to answer IGN's questions over the character back at Gamescom in August. The game's developers have even suggested that Leon would be a poor fit as a protagonist for the game's quieter sections as he is now too grizzled to be scared. But through all of this, Capcom left itself with just enough wiggle room for Leon to still be lurking somewhere — presumably during Requiem's more action-packed sequences. Here's a better look at Resident Evil: Requiem's new box art, with Leon's look shown in more detail: Despite Capcom's secrecy, persistent leaks pointed to Leon's presence in Requiem, while the game's story itself seems like it's built around the character's return. Requiem returns the franchise to its roots in Raccoon City, where Leon was once a rookie cop, and its "overarching narrative" that was begun 30 years ago, as of next year. An early trailer for the game even showed the remnants of his former Raccoon City Police Department, hinting at his involvement. Still, amid frenzied speculation, Capcom has been keen to keep fan expectations in check. Last month, Requiem producer Masato Kumazawa has finally confirmed that "yes, there are going to be some characters from the past series to come in" but said that fans shouldn't "over-expect or hype it." Throughout all this, Capcom had kept the secret the quiet — up until today, just 80 days from the game's February 27, 2026 launch date, and little more than 48 hours from its big splash at The Game Awards this Thursday — where gameplay featuring Leon is now all but certain to be fully revealed. Despite Leon's involvement now being confirmed, Requiem still has plenty of secrets left in store. Earlier this week, a GameStop listing referenced yet another unrevealed character, Rosemary Winters, who fans have suggested will play a more minor role. And what will become of these characters, as Requiem seemingly ties a bow on the stories of the franchise so far? Will Leon get to retire and hang his jacket up in peace? Time will tell. Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social View the full article

Digital platform D&D Beyond shared a reflective update on December 8, promising changes to both the website and its philosophy in the coming year. D&D's new executive producer, Brian Perry, lists a number of quality-of-life tweaks coming to the platform. He also admits "In the past, we haven't been clear about our mission or priorities-or shown up to the table to talk with you, our players". "That's going to change." Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: DnD Tiefling 5e - the full species guide D&D's new Cartographer subclass sucks, but can multiclassing fix it? How to build Nick Wilde from Zootopia in DnD 5E View the full article

Final Fantasy 16 reportedly cost around $58.3 million to makeView the full article

Oh no, it's going to pull me back in isn't it? War Thunder is finally adding infantry combat to its roster of war games in a future update. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Starter decks are, I'd argue, the best introduction to a new trading card game. You don't need to fuss over singles or worry that your deck's construction is sub-par. All you need to do is sit back, relax, and enjoy the adventure of learning how to play. Heck, Star Wars Unlimited's Twilight of the Republic starter set even comes with two decks, so you can easily convince a friend to join you on your galactic journey. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Get a Star Wars Unlimited Twilight of the Republic booster box for under $40 in this ****** Friday ***** Star Wars Unlimited bans Force Throw after newest set turns it into powerhouse Padmé and Palpatine face off in two new Star Wars Unlimited starter decks View the full article

A new weekly boss has been leaked for Genshin Impact 6.3, and their presence will give players the fight they’ve desired to engage in for years. HoYoverse’****** RPG has just recently entered Version 6.2, an important patch that expands the Archon Quests in Nod-Krai and adds Durin to the playable roster. While the game goes through the current patch, there have already been a lot of leaks about the next one, such as the Genshin Impact 6.3 character banners. View the full article

Swen Vincke isn't sure these stats would've been useful to the teamView the full article

Despite his endless movie reviews telling a different story, he says, "just watching Blu-rays at home is boring"View the full article

A listing on GameStop may have accidentally revealed a second playable character in Resident Evil Requiem. The listing for the PC version’s Deluxe Edition – which has since been edited to remove the section in question – lists its bonus content, including new skins for an as-yet unannounced character. According to the listing, the Deluxe Edition includes The Sanctuary, an Expansion Pass which adds two new story scenarios and “a major Mercenaries mode update”. Read More... View the full article

A lovely blast from the past of 2015, Nuclear Throne from the revived Vlambeer has update #100 out now with some major additions and improvements. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Final Fantasy's Cloud has one of the most recognizable weapons in gaming history, but the Final Fantasy 7 Remake team actually considered resizing his iconic Buster Sword to make it more realistic before deciding to stick with the original design. In a new interview alongside Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 director Guillaume Broche, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi opened up about the decision, admitting that while rescaling Cloud's sword did come up, "it was just too iconic" to change. "While making Remake, there was this aspect of the weight and how Cloud swings it around with one hand that sort of felt like it would weaken the sense of realism, you know?" Hamaguchi said, according to a translation by a Final Fantasy fan account on X/Twitter (thanks, GR+). "So at the time, when we were making Remake, there was some discussion about whether we should give Cloud a more realistic version of the Buster Sword," Hamaguchi added. "But it was just too iconic, and if we'd made it just a regular old sword, players wouldn't accept it." He closed, stressing: "In the end we stayed faithful to the OG. A whole new generation of people fell in love with it, so I think it was the right call." As for the latest on Final Fantasy Remake Part 3? Well, in the same interview, Hamaguchi teased that the "core game experience is almost complete," and while he "really want everyone to play it as soon as possible," the team has now moved on to "refining and polishing." Curiously, he also warned the team "never intended to make all three parts feel like the same game." "As the director, I feel a very strong sense of the game’s final form," the director said. "Honestly, I really want everyone to play it as soon as possible, but of course, since it’s a game, it needs to be carefully crafted before it can be delivered to players. "Once we go through this phase properly, we’ll be able to present it in a form we’re satisfied with. So I ask everyone to wait just a little longer, and we’ll be able to share more information soon." Interestingly, he also teased that "Highwind" will be an important keyword for the third instalment. "As for the third part, introducing new gameplay experiences and a new scale is key to successfully delivering the project to players. 'Highwind' is certainly an important keyword here, there's no doubt about that," he teased. Meanwhile, Briana White, the actress who portrays Aerith in Final Fantasy 7, has called on fans to stop tagging voice artists in spicy material featuring their characters. Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky. View the full article

Battlefield 6 developer DICE has released a brand-new update for its smash-hit first-person shooter, bringing tons of new content, bug fixes, improvements, and balance adjustments to the latest entry in the series. The update is available to download now on all supported platforms, which include PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, but Battlefield 6fans should be aware that the new content included in today's Winter Offensive patch won't be live in-game until 12 PM UTC. View the full article

Wargaming announced its World of Tanks Modern Armor is inviting players on PlayStation and Xbox to step into Winter Fest 2025, the biggest event of the year. Running from December 9, 2025, through January 5, 2026, it expands the game’s winter universe with a full slate of activities, including daily gifts from the 2025 Winter Calendar, special store offerings, two thematic event modes, seasonal rewards, and much more. .memberful-global-teaser-content p:last-child{ -webkit-mask-image: linear-gradient(180deg, #000 0%, transparent); mask-image: linear-gradient(180deg, #000 0%, transparent); } Read This Article Free Get instant access by joining the GB MAX Access tier — it’s free to sign up and unlock premium content.Join Now to Start ReadingAlready a member? Sign in The post World of Tanks launches Modern Armor holiday event appeared first on GamesBeat. View the full article

The developer team at Discord released a new engineering blog post yesterday (December 8th) detailing lots of fixes, along with some Linux improvements. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

With the first release of Hytale finally approaching, the developers are still working through getting it running on Linux and macOS. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Capcom plans to build Mega Man, ****** May Cry and Ace Attorney up to the status of “core IPs” like its more popular series. That’s according to Capcom president and COO Haruhiro Tsujimoto, who recently discussed the company’s growth strategies as part of a new 86-page corporate report. In the report, Tsujimoto identified Resident Evil, Monster Hunter and Street Fighter as Capcom’s three biggest franchises, describing them as the company’s ‘core IPs’. Read More... View the full article

Developer team EMINOMA have officially rebranded Team Fortress 2 Classic into Team Fortress 2 Classified, and they've set a release date for January 30th. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Framework Computer BV have announced a nice big expansion of their sponsorship program with many open source events and Linux distributions benefiting from it. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

Tonda Ros, the creator of Blue Prince, is nearing the end of a triumphant year. His game released to critical acclaim and, more recently, accolades. It won Best Indie Game at the Golden Joystick Awards and was nominated for Game of the Year and Best Storytelling. And it’s been nominated for Best Independent Game and Best Debut Indie Game at The Game Awards 2025. A recent collaboration with iam8bit has resulted in Blue Prince merch — a dream for any small indie title. And Ros is on the cusp of finishing and releasing the final update to Blue Prince, which will include a color assist mode, control remapping, the long-awaited minigame Dirigiblocks, and (my personal favorite change) the addition of a cat to Mount Holly. I spoke to Ros last month, after the Golden Joystick nominations had taken place but before The Game Awards list was out. Like many of my colleagues, my brain had been eaten alive by Blue Prince earlier this year when I played it ahead of launch. I’ve ruined a perfectly good journal scribbling attempted puzzle solutions and wild conspiracy theories about what’s happening in Mount Holly, and how I might peel it apart like an egg to get at whatever was inside. I was thrilled beyond measure at Blue Prince’s fantastic victory lap of a final puzzle, but also driven absolutely bonkers by the fact that neither it nor any other puzzle in the game sufficiently answers every single last question Blue Prince asks. Like Lady Clara, I was left for months wondering, Does It Never End? Tonda Ros still won’t tell me whether it does or not. For me, it has — I’ve put down Blue Prince happy with my experience. For Ros personally, Blue Prince has not yet ended. But it will, eventually. He has many more, very different adventures ahead of him. Here’s the transcript of our full interview, very lightly edited for length and clarity. Though we don’t spoil any of Blue Prince outright, we do nod to some of the late-game themes throughout our conversation, so proceed at your own risk: IGN: I loved your game. Thank you for eating away over 100 hours of my life earlier this year. Tonda Ros: I'll say thanks. And I apologize too. I knew specifically for press that it would be like... there's so many games to cover, right? So it's always scary to give someone a very big meal because you are taking away some attention inadvertently from others, which kind of... I don't know. That's a weird thing to try to wrap your head around. IGN: It's the problem of the universe, right? I mean, there's too much art. There's too many things. There's too many books I want to read, too many games I want to play. Ros: I know. It's like pick two mediums, and the rest you're going to have to be content with casually enjoying and appreciating it. But to really, really appreciate a medium, there's too much content to really sink your teeth in. So I think you have to pick at least two at a time and maybe throughout your life, you can have your book era and then your game era. But yeah, it's something I struggle with too. IGN: I wanted to ask you what you were up to now. This thing took eight years of your life, and it's out now and you don't need to constantly be patching things or whatever. What era are you in? What are you doing? Ros: I mean, honestly, it's still the Blue Prince era. I was always told there's a year of upkeep, even if you're fully done at the time of launch. And I was like, "Okay." I had been told that by enough people that I appreciated that that was true, even though I didn't really understand. But it is definitely consuming everything. I guess I care about every single little detail, which is I wish I could just let go. Iam8bit is releasing some cool products based on Blue Prince. So much of my time is just spent hyper-fixating on the details of the replica of the key and stuff to try to make sure it's right. So a whole bunch of stuff like that. And then we just did the Mac port, so that was taking a lot of my time. I'm in there playtesting that nonstop to try to make sure that that is as accurate to the experience as it possibly can be. And likewise as we're working on various updates as they go. So I mean honestly, even though Blue Prince is out, I'm still fully focused on that, and that's not even counting the final Blue Prince update, which has been tied up in all these other things that have consumed me, we'll say. I'm probably still another year out from being onto my next era, but I am looking forward to finally moving on. IGN: It feels like there's something weirdly poetic here about a game that is at least in part about this obsession and not quite being able to put the mystery down. We're all trying to decide if all the secrets have been found, and you have not been able to put down the game either for different reasons. Ros: No, I was living it. I think my experience making it is it pretty much echoes the player's journey because in the beginning the project was very grockable. I could fathom the scope of it very easily and then throughout the whole project, the intricate web of systems and interconnected things just spiraled out of control. And I think near the end, I was as lost as anyone was, and I was like, "I think at some point I just have to release this because this is starting to get away from me." I often joke that the house has a mind of its own. So even if I'm trying to implement new features or fix some quirks of the house, the house just won't let me. And at a certain point, I was just like, "I'm just going to have to respect what Mt. Holly is." And if she won't let me do something, I'm just going to be like, "Okay, that's the way you want to be, I'm just going to let you exist as an entity unto yourself." And I think that was it getting out of- it's spiraling out of control is just me saying, "This will probably just consume the rest of my life if I don't arbitrarily stop this at some point." IGN: What do you make of the reaction to it? I mean it's obviously been very positive, but I feel like Blue Prince has taken off in a way that games of this genre don't normally get to see. Ros: Yeah, yeah. Super crazy. I would love to try to figure out- If I could separate myself from my own work, it's like, what set of circumstances has led to this? Because I think a lot of things in life, it's like the right place, the right time, the right appetite. There was a good window there where they just wanted to get into something like this that they hadn't. And that's not to say there weren't games like this, but they just for whatever reason hadn't come across their plate before. So I think for a lot of people it was even more of a fresh experience than it should have been. If maybe they had been playing a lot of the games in the genre, you could identify that this isn't super crazy. Maybe meshed together, it was pretty original. But yeah, I had always considered it pretty niche. In playtesting, I had a pretty good sense of the type of people that would like it. And I also knew that not all puzzle fans will like it because the strategy and very difficult board game aspect, it's not a game that's easy at all. And so I thought that that would probably further limit the audience. So yeah, to see the reception and to see it blow up has just been... I just feel really lucky. IGN: I think the one criticism I see come up over and over are the people who are really into the puzzles but who just bristle against the rogue-like elements or the randomness of them, especially when you know the answer to a puzzle, and you just need that specific room and you just can't get it. What do you make of that? Ros: I knew that was coming, and that's why I'm surprised the game was as popular as it was given that, because I had seen that in play testing. And I knew that there was some people that they just have to have more control, and it's hard for them to let go a little bit of the control and be in a system. But I just wanted to make a game the way I like it. And I like when I'm in a system, even if it's a hostile system, part of the fun is figuring out a way to tame the beast and to navigate around those challenges. And it is very board game-coded in that way. And a lot of times in board games you're going to be in situations where you're going to have to work with the cards that you do draw to try to create a strategy. And that's fun with a lot of my favorite types of board games, is you have to use these things to develop a strategy on your own. So there's a level of player input and creativity, which I just absolutely love, but I don't think that's for everyone and certainly a lot of people from the puzzle community. I think puzzle games in general have historically been linear experiences, and so a big departure like this is going to ruffle some traditional feathers for sure. IGN: There were some discussions of player-antagonistic design this year around Blue Prince and some other games too, about what is the enjoyment and joy you get out of playing something that it feels like it's constantly fighting you in some way. Ros: Yeah. I think that's something that's largely been ironed out of a lot of games. I mean, I think if you at least go back to the '80s and '90s, things were a lot more, let's say, less smooth and less- more friction and more failure. Certainly in the game over era, just getting game overs and restarting was just a core component. And a lot of things were Ghosts 'n Goblins. We're just going to replay this, we're going to replay this. We're just going to get better and better with our skill. And obviously I think as people optimized player journey, I think the emphasis started being about polishing and making the player journey a lot less turbulent. And that's certainly not the types of games I like. I like to get challenged both mechanically but also challenged in terms of my own taste. Maybe if I'm used to playing a certain type of game, I'm totally okay with someone subverting genre norms or technical things to try something new even if it fails. I think it's cool to see someone try something that's not the default line. IGN: I feel like I know the answer to this already, but I got to ask. So to your knowledge, have players found everything? Is there anything left? Does it never end? Ros: I don't think I'm ever going to answer that. IGN: Yeah. I had to try. Ros: I think people are suspicious that I am reluctant to answer that. All I can say is that it's designed for a single player to be able to experience everything in the game. IGN: I feel like if you've gotten deep enough into Blue Prince, it's pretty easy to understand why you don't want to answer that question. Ros: Yep, yep. And it's probably just my personality type. I feel like I probably wouldn't want to answer that question for anything I make because answering that question definitively will close a bit of the magic off in some ways, I think. I think that as long as there's a chance that there's more to discover, then there will be the hope of players or let's say the exploration. It's like in the frontier. When there's unexplored territory, then adventurers can still dream. Even if they never go to those territories, there's still the imagination of what exists in the woods that have never been explored. And then with Google Maps and stuff, and now the land masses are all explored. Some of that magic and imagination is at least curbed. IGN: This is maybe some of the same question. But would you ever consider adding more to Blue Prince? I mean, you said this is going to be the final update that you're working on. Is that just totally against the spirit of it? Ros: Yeah, I mean, I don't know the spirit of it, but for me, I do love complete games. And I do love when something is definitively done. So I had tried my best to get everything into the game at launch because that was something I just really wanted. I didn't want to eternally be updating this. Well, all I can say is that there is a definitive amount of stuff in the game that is planned, and some of it had to get sacrificed in order to increase stability and to work on some of the functioning systems to have a smoother experience for everyone. There were a couple cinematics and cutscenes that were in the process of being created, but I was just like, "If I focus on these, I'm not going to be able to focus on any of the remaining bugs or gameplay stuff." And that's just a fact of it being my very first game and being such a small team of just me and a few people helping me. That I had to understand my own limitations and being like, okay, even though artistically I wish this could be a fully complete experience at launch and get all these cutscenes and gameplay elements, but I did manage to get everything gameplay-wise into the game with the exception of one arcade game, which was just, it's just a standalone mini-game and it really- It's completely separate from the rest of Blue Prince. So that was an easy one to sequester off because it's like this was just like, I don't even know why I wanted to do a mini-game within a game for my very first game. But some of these ideas I get, I'm just like, "Oh, I really would love to try this." And at some point, it had woven itself too much in the thread for me to completely remove it, at least with the time I had. When there's unexplored territory, then adventurers can still dream. IGN: What about other language translations? I'm obviously very aware of the fact that translating this is a minefield because of the way the puzzles work, but I know that that was one of the things that was criticized about it at launch, is that there's really no way to play it if you don't speak English. Ros: And I think how difficult it is really appeals to me because it's almost like a historic undertaking of localization, and it appeals to me because I feel like it would be such a cool challenge to do. Now, probably the number of localizers and the number of specific- It's not even just localizers or translators. You actually need people from these individual cultures that excel in wordplay. And so getting together this dream team and tackling this is like, it's something I've thought a lot about and something that really appeals to me as a challenge. Now, the trade-off is it would probably take years of my life, at least one year per language to do. And so you get into this really weird thing of I would be giving up future games in order to make Blue Prince more accessible. And that's a crazy balance scale that I'm not sure how to proceed with. Let's say it's something I'm very interested in that has a lot of trade-offs creatively with how much time I have just in my life to make other games. How much time do I want to give to this? But it's appealing, we'll say. It's appealing in a lot of ways. Not just to let Blue Prince be able to be experienced by more people, but it is- If you haven't played the game fully, you might not quite understand how impossible of an undertaking it is. But I'll say it is absurdly difficult. IGN: I guess thinking about that and moving on from Blue Prince, what's next? This was your first game. Are you going to make another one? Do you want to do something else? Ros: Yes. It'll always be something else. I can say I will never make a sequel to my work because I love creating something standalone and then going on to something completely different. It will likely not even be in the same exact genres. I will probably be mixing it up. You'll start to see overlap. You'll start to see overlaps with some of my interests. So it will be familiar, and hopefully I'll inadvertently have things that really worked with Blue Prince that I'll carry on in terms of at least technicals. But yeah, we'll see. I'm hesitant to do another 3D game because for my first game, 3D was so difficult. I really wish I did a 2D game. I probably could have done it in five years instead of eight. But yeah, I think it'll be something totally different. IGN: You modeled that whole ruin underground, and it's driving people crazy because it's 3D models, and they can't get over there. Ros: I know. A lot of the cutscenes show a lot of things too that we 3D modeled and created. And for me, it's like I think a lot of other people, you'd have the temptation just because you've done the effort, that you want to fully get as much value as possible. But some of my ideas are like, I'll just come up with an idea and it's like, "Okay, this is going to take three months to do." And the funny thing is, I probably wouldn't make that decision in the first year of making the game. It's like all your decisions about time are contextual to the project. So it's like, "Oh man, I have to spend 20 days adjusting text alignment." Right? That sounds really ridiculous in your first three months of the project. I'm going to spend 20 days aligning text. But once you're eight years in, you don't even blink at that type of stuff. It's like, oh, I did a change, and now I have to rescale every picture in the whole game. This will probably take me a month. And I'm like, "Okay, let's do that." And so all these decisions are all contextual. But I don't really shy away from that because it's like if I come up with an idea, I usually don't let time be the reason I don't do it, because I think a lot of other games are on temporal budgets, not just monetarily, but they're on temporal budgets and they have to release. And that prevents a lot of high effort ideas from manifesting. And I didn't really have the same urgency to release. My decision to release was just I actually can't keep any of this in my head anymore. First off, I couldn't stop working on the game for even a week because I would forget too much about the way things interconnect and stuff. So I pretty much had to never take a break and just always keep it in my head. And so that just was like, the time was up. It had just dated to completion. IGN: There was an anecdote that was told to us in the Press Discord that I really wanted to ask you about. And that was that at some point in development, every once in a while if you had enough hallways in a straight line, there might be a shadowy figure at the end of the corridor or something. Is that real? Ros: I have heard this, and I think this is a cool rumor that's come out, and I'm not 100% sure. I'm not sure or 100% sure, but there was a cat in the game, and I think I can say that because the cat is planned for the final update because he was a part of the game. So there were playtesting iterations that had the cat, and the cat could be seen walking around the house. So it might've been someone mistaking the cat for a larger shadowy figure, perhaps conflating it with an Alzara thing. Part of the cool thing I've realized is- So I watched a lot of people play the game. I had my playtesters record sessions. And one of the things, you're always told how faulty human memory is. And it's one thing to hear that and then obviously to catch yourself being like, "I'm so sure I'm right. I remember it this way." And then if it's something that you can actually go back and look to, you realize, "I can't believe my brain just fabricated the way this occurred so vividly, so vividly." And what I realized watching people play the game is they would make wild incorrect assumptions based on what they remembered perceiving on previous days, and they would be so sure, and I'm like, "We have recordings here. I would be able to show you that what you remember was completely false." Even though they're 100% confident. And I think for whatever reason, the way Blue Prince is set up, it really is able to play on that, because it's a game about making assumptions based on your experiences in previous iterations of this house. And I think that it does play into the idea of the house having a personality and a mind of its own, because at some point you start questioning whether things in the house are changing, and oftentimes they aren't. But it's just that your perspective that they're changing is correct. So I love that story. Whether it was ever true or not, I'll leave it a bit mysterious. But I do think that to me, it exemplifies perhaps people's false memories that start to manifest that give rise to these rumors and probably is replicated in real-life mysteries and haunted houses. That it's not that people are even fabricating these stories, but that they grow out of perhaps not even apparitions that happened in the present, but apparitions that happened in memories. IGN: So Blue Prince has been nominated for some Golden Joysticks, which is awesome. And we're in awards discussions just generally right now. It’s being discussed that a lot of these game awards programs don't have a puzzle genre category even though they have action and adventure and all this other stuff. What do you make of that? Do you feel like Blue Prince challenges that a little bit? Do you think there should be one or shouldn't be? Ros: I mean, I love puzzle games a lot, and I think that there's enough of the big genres, we'll call them. Obviously there's a lot of very distinct little genres, and I feel like it's probably just math of how many players are playing certain things because if you look at- I don't know, some of the other ones that get representation. Multiplayer is obviously the biggest umbrella of all time. So I think there's a certain number of, in my opinion, there's a certain scale of umbrella that if you were representing things smaller than the puzzle genre and not puzzle genre, then I would say puzzle games certainly should have a place. But I'm okay if there's just not enough players for puzzles. I think it logistically makes sense that maybe they don't get representation until more people play, and hopefully games like Blue Prince that are super popular will be shifting those numbers. So that maybe we'll rise to the occasion. But I don't know the logistics. Maybe it is just a oversight and getting ignored. In which case, then I would advocate for its inclusion 100%. [Author’s note: Following this interview, Ros reached back out to add some additional commentary to his response to this question.] When I think back to my own childhood, and the games that were most formative for me, it was the puzzle games and puzzle books that played the most beneficial role in my development. They fostered my love of problem solving and engineering, and opened up the recreational world of mathematics, logic, and word play. I think it's fair to say these games and books had as large a role in my education as any class I attended in school, so I feel pretty strongly promoting the genre, and supporting media that helps to shine a spotlight on these types of thinky games. If including a puzzle category in awards shows will help more kids discover these types of games, then I think it's something that we absolutely should advocate for. [The rest of our original interview continues below:] IGN: Okay, one last question, and I’ll do a silly one. What do you make of the term Metroidbrainia? Ros: Okay, so if you play Blue Prince, you probably know I'm all about words and etymology. So for me, I love it because I just love how liquid language is, and I love when terms are created. So I think that being able to look at a word and seeing its etymological history, and that one has such a rich one, because if you even go and look at Metroid, it is itself a combination of Android and Metropolis. And so I think that if you could dissect this down and then you can go to Castlevania, and this was castle and Transylvania, and so it's almost like a family tree of words. And so I think that it's funny. I know that the term is, it's a little contentious in its acceptance, but I think it's funny because all of the words that are feeding into this are also sort of portmanteau combinations of sub-words. Even Transylvania has roots of, I think it's forest and people. And so it's funny because they're all coalescing into Metroidbrainia, and Metroidbrainia will likewise probably be used as a root of another word further on. So I think the more you're able to look at a word and the more rich history it has in its DNA, the more interesting it is to me. So I personally love it for that. Maybe phonetically it's not as aesthetically beautiful to hear out loud as some other terms. But I do love what a rich history it has of games of perhaps cinema with maybe Metropolis being part of that idea for Metroid. I don't actually know how they came up with that term, but I have read that it does come from Metropolis and Android, or Metro and Android might be subway-related. But yeah, I love words, and I love the roots and I love the history of words, and I love how all these things can combine in different ways. And then I love that words’ meanings change from year to year, and the definitions shift. And I love the human instinct of trying to fight for definitions because that's the one you know, not realizing that every word you're using used to mean something else, and that it's all liquid. And that we're all in generational positions fighting for our own meaning, because language is a river that's always moving forward. Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected]. View the full article

Sorry, puzzle geeks. Don't expect a Blue Prince 2 any time soon. Or, ever, really. That's what we learned from speaking with Blue Prince creator Tonda Ros last month. We asked him loads of questions and you can read our full interview right here, but one big mystery we wanted to clear up was if he'd ever make a sequel to Blue Prince. And, no, he won't. No sequel to Blue Prince, nor to any other game he makes in the future. But he is going to make something else. "I can say I will never make a sequel to my work because I love creating something standalone and then going on to something completely different," he said. "It will likely not even be in the same exact genres. I will probably be mixing it up. You'll start to see overlap. You'll start to see overlaps with some of my interests. So it will be familiar, and hopefully I'll inadvertently have things that really worked with Blue Prince that I'll carry on in terms of at least technicals. But yeah, we'll see. I'm hesitant to do another 3D game because for my first game, 3D was so difficult. I really wish I did a 2D game. I probably could have done it in five years instead of eight. But yeah, I think it'll be something totally different." This might be disappointing to hear for Blue Prince fans, especially for those still mulling over the game's remaining unsolved mysteries and wishing there was some sort of answer to them. It also sounds like, from our interview, he won't be doing any more major content updates to Blue Prince after the upcoming so-called "final update." "I do love complete games," he said. "And I do love when something is definitively done. So I had tried my best to get everything into the game at launch because that was something I just really wanted. I didn't want to eternally be updating this." Whatever it is Ros is working on next, it will be a while before we see it. He says he still expects to be working on Blue Prince in small ways for the next year, finishing the final update, bug fixes, and such. And given that Blue Prince took about eight years to create, he'll need a lot more time on top of that to create something brand new. At least Blue Prince fans have already completed a serious exercise in patience by finishing the game at all. You can read our full interview with Ros here, and check out our review where we gave Blue Prince a 9/10. As our reviewer wrote: "If The Witness, Portal, and Myst are already emblazoned on the Mount Rushmore of first-person puzzle games, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Blue Prince carved alongside them soon enough." Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected]. View the full article

Oh dear. Goonswarm Games are shutting down after Running With Scissors cancelled POSTAL: Bullet Paradise due to the use of generative AI. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article

While I was off running around the woods for the weekend, Netflix announced their intention to acquire Warner Bros. but now Paramount want to fight. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article