[Editor’s Note: If you’d like more in-depth hands-on impressions of Age of Imprisonment, check out our recent preview.]

It’s time to go back – way back – with Zelda in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment. Set in the ancient past, during the founding of Hyrule, this hack-and-slash action game will pit the Princess and her allies against massive armies in their war against the Demon King Ganondorf. After several trailers, multiple runs of their hands-on demo at Tokyo Game Show, and probably too much time going over footage frame-by-frame, I’ve come away with seven key changes from Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity that you should know before starting in Age of Imprisonment.

1) This is a True Prequel

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity had a fun story: reliving the war between The Champions and Calamity Ganon. Set 100 years before The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it was an opportunity to spend extended time with fan favorite characters like Urbosa and Daruk, and take control of the Divine Beasts in the war. The only problem? It split off into a separate side story, making it non-canon to BoTW. That’s just fine for folks who love a good filler episode, but for those of us invested in the complex and often contradictory overarching Zelda story, that was a bit of a bummer. Fortunately for us lore Hounds, Age of Imprisonment is confirmed to be canon to the Tears of the Kingdom story. That means our adventure with Zelda, Rauru, Queen Sonia will tell us exactly how this ancient war with Ganondorf played out.

2) Combat is Evolving

The hack-and-slash combat at the center of Hyrule Warriors is alive and well, and it’s evolving further thanks to all new Unique Skills. These special moves are tailored towards specific situations and let you execute an aerial attack, targeted toward leaping of flying enemies, and a straightforward thrust attack to use against charging enemies. As the name implies, these are unique to each character. Zelda, for example, can unleash a barrage of Light Arrows from her Bow of Light to bring down flyers, or use Piercing Light on charging enemies, blasting them with a beam of light fired from the tip of her sword. These are strong options that will reward making the correct decisions quickly in the heat of battle, and if used correctly will do immediate damage to the Weak-Point gauges of tougher enemies, setting you up for devastating Weak Point attacks.

3) Sync Strikes are your Ace in the Hole

Zelda won’t be fighting alone, and the way her allies factor into battles is evolving thanks to the new team-up attacks. This goes beyond the simple souped-up special attacks from musou games of old, as now the pairs of warriors employ unique tactics when paired together – to devastating effects. Two examples I saw in my hands-on demo were Zelda paired with Raru firing a powerful, aimable beam of pure light that tears through enemies, and Zelda with Mineru summoning Mineru’s hulking construct to use as an enemy-smashing battlemech. Whether it’s every pairing on just select compatible duos, it’s clear Zelda and company will have a massive array of moves to fight back against Ganondorf and his army.

4) New Hardware Means New Tricks

Age of Imprisonment is exclusive to the Nintendo Switch 2, which means it takes full advantage of the more powerful hardware. While I haven’t done a full stress test just yet to see how far I can push the action before the framerate breaks down, I was impressed in my hands-on demo with how well it looked and ran. Also, fighting thousands of bokoblins is more fun with a friend, and Age of Imprisonment makes that easier thanks to GameShare. The idea is pretty simple: if one player has a Switch 2 and a copy of Age of Imprisonment, then another player can be their co-op body by joining the session from their own Switch or Switch 2. Just keep in mind that the session belongs to the player doing the sharing, so once they stop playing the session ends for both players.

5) Zonai Devices

So much of what made Tears of the Kingdom special was the way you could find and use Zonai devices – ancient machine parts – to aid your adventure. You can do that here too, as demonstrated when I tried out a Flame Emitter. This let me fry my enemies with an aimable stream of fire when I held it. It could also be activated and dropped on the ground to burn everything around it. I’ve thrown time bombs into the mouth of a Frox, and watched in trailers as Zelda combined the wind from a sideways fan with a Shock Emitter to create a massive electric cyclone.

6) The World Above and Below

Our entire demo took place in the Depths, in the area just beyond Mineru’s Lab. I didn’t get to see a map, but I do know that Age of Calamity covered the entire overworld, and the Depths spans an area just as large. That potentially doubles where levels could take place, and that’s before factoring in the Sky Islands, places we know from prior trailers where we will be fighting. Taken together, there is a lot of potential variety for where levels will take place, and it’s fair to wonder just how big Zelda’s fight in the ancient past will be.

7) Zelda and Link

Zelda, despite her title role in the series, has almost always been relegated to, at best, a secondary character, and at worst an off-screen motivation for Link on his adventures. While she was the star of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, her largely non-combat role in a retro-style adventure stands in stark contrast to her place in Age of Imprisonment, wielding a sword as the lead character as the vanguard in battle. Link, meanwhile, is in the “present” many centuries after the Imprisoning War takes place. While we have seen a construct with a strikingly Link-like visage show up in trailers and character art, we know this will be rare, and for Hyrule Warriors first, a case of Zelda taking the lead while Link steps out of the spotlight.

Even these seven items barely scratch the surface when it comes to what’s new in The Legend of Zelda: Age of Imprisonment, like a Korok warrior joining the fray, or an all new cast of Champions to defend Hyrule alongside Zelda. Fortunately you won’t need to wait much longer to uncover all the secrets from the great war near the founding of Hyrule. The Legend of Zelda: Age of Imprisonment launches on November 6, exclusively for the Nintendo Switch 2.

I have some good news and some bad news. The good news: to celebrate the upcoming video game LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, LEGO has announced four new Batman LEGO sets, and each one comes with a code for in-game DLC. They’re all up for preorder now.

The bad news? They’re not coming out until March 1, 2026. But three of them are iterations of the Batmobile, and some of them may just end up in our list of the best Batman LEGO sets. Let’s take a look, and you can lock in whichever set(s) you want right now.

Featured in this article

As mentioned above, all of the sets are associated with the upcoming video game LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, which is scheduled to release sometime in 2026. Each of the Batmobile sets comes with a code for a gold variant of that vehicle in the game. The Batman Logo set gets you a gold variant of Batman himself.

LEGO DC Batman: Batman Logo

LEGO DC Batman: Batman v Superman Batmobile

LEGO DC Batman: The Batman Batmobile

LEGO DC Batman: Batman & Robin Batmobile

Bethesda’s long-awaited The Elder Scrolls 6 will include a character designed in memory of a much-missed fan, after a remarkable charity campaign that raised more than $85,000 for Make-A-Wish.

Led by the team behind top lore wiki The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP), the effort will see former member Loranna Pyrel immortalized in The Elder Scrolls 6, after having created a forum-based roleplay campaign series that was inspired by Bethesda’s games and went on to inspire the in-game work one of Ted Peterson, one of the series’ writers.

Fans had previously attempted to get Pyrel included in The Elder Scrolls 6 via a silent auction organized by Bethesda for Make-A-Wish — only to have their group bid pipped at the post by another, anonymous entry.

After that incident, Bethesda agreed to bend the rules and let the UESP gang get a second shot — if they matched the auction’s winning bid of $85,450. And match it they have now done, thanks to numerous donations from The Elder Scrolls creators, the UESP, and fellow fan resource The Imperial Library.

“It’s kind of unbelievable that we got this far,” the UESP wrote in a post on Instagram. “This whole thing started on an offhand comment about possibly teaming up, and then grew into this giant group effort. We’re looking forward to adding this character to TES6.

“We couldn’t think of a more appropriate way to honor Loranna’s contributions to both the Elder Scrolls community and the lore than a community charity fundraising effort like this while simultaneously making an addition the lore proper.”

We just finished up a meeting with Bethesda where we got to design a character for The Elder Scrolls 6. Honestly, a lot of us went into the meeting pretty nervous and even reserved, but now we’re all extremely excited for what’s in store. pic.twitter.com/8493WN6CBB

— UESP (@UESP_net) October 9, 2025

In a follow-up post on X today, the UESP revealed it had just finished a meeting with Bethesda about their Elder Scrolls 6 character, and said they had left “extremely excited for what’s in store.”

As for when The Elder Scrolls 6 might actually arrive, we’re less certain. Bethesda officially announced the game with a teaser trailer at E3 2018, an eye-watering seven years ago. Next, it confirmed The Elder Scrolls 6 had entered “early development” in August 2023, and “early builds” were available in March 2024. When the six year anniversary of the project’s announcement arrived in June last year, even Bethesda development chief Todd Howard paused to say, “oh wow, that has been a while.”

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

It would be easy to take a quick look at Crimson Desert and assume it’s another fantasy action game where you hack and slash your way through enemies with repeated presses of the attack button. And if you equip your protagonist, Kliff, with a sword, you can certainly do that. But tap two of your controller’s face buttons together and he’ll lunge, thrusting the blade directly forward. If you then press both the light and heavy attack buttons at the same time, he’ll transition into a powerful, magic-infused overhead slam, bringing his sword down in an arc of dizzying particle effects. There’s more than one way to swing a sword, basically – and that applies to everything in your combat arsenal.

Transition from aiming a bow into a dodge roll and you’ll trigger a brief window of medieval Matrix slow motion, perfect for scoring a headshot. Cast a spell at the apex of a jump and you’ll launch yourself into the air, riding the energy of the magic’s blast (do it twice more to climb even higher). And, in perhaps the most entertaining example, hold two face buttons in conjunction with shifting the direction of the left analogue stick to unleash a variety of increasingly amusing wrestling moves, from simple grapples to human hammer throws.

For this month’s IGN First, we spoke to the design team at Crimson Desert developer Pearl Abyss to learn how they crafted this deep, multi-layered combat system. The very first thing they said was both surprising and helped contextualize everything: one of the key inspirations for Crimson Desert’s combat was retro arcade games like Samurai Showdown, Final Fight, and King of Fighters. Suddenly, all those multi-button combos and linked moves make much more sense.

But those fighting game combos are not necessarily the thing that Pearl Abyss intended to replicate. The team cites the strong sense of impact that comes with each blow, both inflicted and received, as a key aspect they wanted to capture. That’s clear not just in the visuals, but in the crunchy audio – the sound design team directly references Capcom as an inspiration. But across the 10 different boss battles I’ve fought so far, plus plenty more skirmishes in the open world, it’s clear that there’s more to it than that. Fighting game characters have access to many, many different moves that can be chained together to create unique approaches and strategies. Open world action games, on the other hand, typically have a much more restrained move set – a dodge, attack, and counter, for instance. But despite being a fantasy open world game itself, Crimson Desert’s long list of combat moves seems to be gunning for the breadth of options that fighting games thrive on.

Kliff’s ever-expanding ability tree means there’s a multitude of ways to approach any fight. It’s not just ranged vs melee, but the more minute choices within those options. Will you weave kicks and suplexes into your swordfight? Channel lightning down your blade? Use whistling arrows to summon artillery strikes? The important takeaway here is that Pearl Abyss refuses to provide any real strict definition for Crimson Desert’s combat system – unlike something like Batman: Arkham, there’s no rhythm or pattern to follow. The combat team told me that they had no interest in creating a game where you have to respond to on-screen prompts by pressing specific buttons, the kind of system we’ve seen in games like Mad Max, Shadow of Mordor, and both Marvel’s Avengers and Spider-Man games. Instead, the studio aims to fulfill a player’s fantasies by allowing them to do whatever they want in any situation.

That arguably makes Crimson Desert’s approach to battle a bit loose, and for some, the distinct lack of rules or rhythm may be frustrating. There are no hard counters for particular enemies, for instance, nor any kind of strict rock, paper, scissors relationships between different attack or defence types. A particular weapon may be stronger against shielded enemies, for instance, but there’s no requirement for you to use it. The same applies to bosses – while they certainly have attack patterns that can be memorised and weaknesses that can be exploited, Pearl Abyss has no interest in demanding you pay attention to that. The team believes any method of attack should be valid (within reason – you can’t swing a 500-pound monster by its ankles, of course.)

This “there if you want it, but no worries if you don’t” approach extends out into the world itself. The BlackSpace engine that powers Crimson Desert is able to simulate elemental reactions, so water can either freeze or conduct electricity when struck by the correct spell, while wood will burn and smoulder when set alight. The combat team cites the modern Legend of Zelda games as inspiration for this, in which there’s constant interaction between you and the environment. But this is very much a system that you can master and exploit if you choose to, rather than a core component of combat. For instance, there won’t be a boss battle where you have to freeze water to hold your foe in place, or coax them into a metal grid you can then electrify with a lightning spell.

Kliff is not a wizard, and so his spells come courtesy of a bracelet that grants him simple mastery over fire, ice, and lightning. But new weapons and gear help expand his ability set further than the unlocks on your skill tree. There’s a spear, for instance, which opens up like a propeller and blasts enemies with bursts of wind like a deadly Airzooka, and a sword that summons an angry genie-like creature. The further you progress, though, the wilder the options become. Kliff is able to ride a number of mounts, which in the early hours are simple horses with no remarkable talents. But head into territory held by The Black Bears and you’ll be able to saddle up on a massive grizzly, which can swipe at foes with sharpened claws, effectively thinning out herds of barbarians.

Fast forward a few hours and things become stranger still. Your simple horse could be traded for a raptor. Yes, you can ride on the back of a literal dinosaur. If you prefer your scaly mounts to fly and breathe fire, then Crimson Desert also has that covered, too – fantasy’s most important creature is present and correct here, and in the game’s later hours you’ll be able to command Tristar the dragon, who’ll swoop in at your beck and call. But that’s not the wildest option. Dispelling any notion that this is a typical high fantasy video game, in Crimson Desert, you can pilot a mech. Yes, really.

The dwarven-engineered battle robot is a late-game treat that asks the question: What if a Bioshock Big Daddy and a Titanfall mech had a baby? Equipped with thrusters, machine guns, multi-target-lock homing rockets, and a wide-radius EMP blast, your sword-and-board-wielding enemies don’t stand a chance.