Elden Ring Nightreign‘s Forsaken Hollows expansion arrives tomorrow, December 4th. Ahead of letting folks dive into Limveld’s big hole and try out the new nightfarer classes, FromSoft have lobbed out the customary big patch.
At the PlayStation Partner Awards 2025 Japan Asia held in Tokyo on December 3, Monster Hunter Wilds won the Grand Award and the User’s Choice Award.
In an interview held before the award ceremony, Ryozo Tsujimoto, the producer of this work, and Yuya Tokuda, the director, answered questions from local media. IGN Japan was in attendance.
When Monster Hunter Wilds was first released on February 28, some players left harsh feedback, but Tokuda said the team worked to improve the game by taking advantage of that feedback.
“Immediately after the release, we apologized for the inconvenience caused by the volume of content and the difficulty level. Despite this, we were delighted to receive various awards, including Users’ Choice awards. We would like to thank all the players who have given their opinions and spoken warm words even in this situation. The development team was able to turn everyone’s feedback into an asset and work on the update with all our strength, and I think the result was also the reason why players voted for us,” said Tokuda.
“Monster Hunter has the characteristics of a title that gets regular updates, but player opinions were very helpful during the update process, and in order to make Monster Hunter Wilds better, the fans’ voices gave us power. There are still updates left to come, so we will continue to do our best,” added Tsujimoto.
The Monster Hunter series celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. The franchise was a hit in Japan, and after the release of Monster Hunter: World in 2018, it grew into a literal monster title overseas. According to Tokuda, the Monster Hunter Wilds team were more aware than ever of being accepted by newcomers or those who had trouble beating the games.
“We analyzed what kind of places beginners were stuck in, including Monster Hunter: World. We have worked on these points in turn to make it easier for new users to clear hurdles such as being able to reach certain monsters or to craft certain types of armor. In addition, we have tried to adopt as many new elements as possible that are beneficial for both beginners and existing users, such as Focus Mode. This time, as a result of making the game easy to beat even for new players and players who could not clear it before, I think the difficulty curve was a little lacking for existing users,” said Tokuda.
Tokuda said the team has focused on creating more difficult content with each update.
“If you beat the game immediately after its release and stopped playing, I would appreciate it if you could pick it up again,” said Tokuda.
Monster Hunter Wilds still has updates to come, but Tsujimoto also talked a little about the future of the series.
“Of course, we don’t intend to stop the series here. We plan to continue, and we want to let more people play. In addition, I would like to think about things beyond the games so that we can further expand the potential of the Monster Hunter IP,” said Tsujimoto.
From Tsujimoto’s remarks, it seems we can continue to look forward to new games and more in the Monster Hunter series.
Tsujimoto was also asked where Monster Hunter stands within the overall catalog of Capcom IP, which he answered diplomatically.
“Capcom is a company with various IPs, and every IP is very important. I’m in charge of Monster Hunter now, that’s all I can comment on, but as Capcom, we want to expand all our IPs,” he said.
Capcom is scheduled to release Resident Evil Requiem, Onimusha Way of the Sword, and Pragmata in 2026.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
To successfully deliver presents to every child on Earth within a single Christmas eve, Santa Claus would need to travel in the region of half the speed of light – enough to vaporise the flesh and disintegrate the sleighs of mere mortals. He’d therefore appreciate the sheer go-fastness of the roguelite running game that’s blasting out of door #3.
It’s Haste!
Well that’s not suspicious at all!
11th March 2025 marked the 30th anniversary of Chrono Trigger. Square Enix marked the occasion by announcing that “various projects” would be coming our way over the next year, but so far, those projects have been limited to character popularity polls and planned orchestral concerts. Importantly, that’s not the remake that we all want to see and have been chatting about for years. But we’re still not ready to completely throw out all hope just yet.
You see, in the latest episode of the ‘KosoKoso Hōsō Kyoku‘ talk show livestream (translated by Automaton), Dragon Quest creator and Chrono Trigger supervisor Yuji Horii attempted to keep his lips sealed about where the series is heading — but in saying nothing, has he actually said everything?
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Legendary voice actress Jennifer Hale has been replaced as the voice of Samus in Metroid Prime 4, the new game’s credits have revealed.
Numerous actors have voiced Samus over the years, though Hale had been the artist behind most of the bounty hunter’s grunts and cries in Metroid Prime 1, 2 and 3 (with some additional work from a second artist, Vanessa Marshall).
Many fans had assumed Hale would return as Samus in Nintendo’s long-awaited new Prime game, but Nintendo Life has now reported on Metroid Prime 4’s credits, which list that Erin Yvette has taken on the role of Samus.
If you’re playing Metroid Prime 4 and think Samus’ grunts sound familiar, Yvette previously voiced Snow White in The Wolf Among Us, Alex in Oxenfree, and can currently be heard as Blonde Blazer in Dispatch.
The past few years have seen Nintendo replace many of its previous regular voice actors, including the veteran voice of Mario and Luigi, Charles Martinet. Princess Peach and Toad voice actress Samantha Kelly, meanwhile, discovered her 18-year tenure as the Super Mario characters was over on Nintendo Switch 2 launch day — when Mario Kart World released without her in it. Takashi Nagasako, who previously voiced Donkey Kong for 21 years, has also been replaced as of the Switch 2’s launch.
IGN recently caught up with Hale and discussed her past work as Samus, and questioned whether she had recorded any new material for Metroid Prime 4 over the course of its lengthy development.
“I don’t know,” Hale told IGN. “I have no recollection of recording it or signing a contract, so it could be no. When we work, this is the thing, everything’s under a code name, so they would’ve called it Sasquatch or Pineapple or Cookie Jar. And ‘okay, I’m going to do Cookie Jar.’ And then when you get to the session they’ll tell you, but it stays in your brain for so much shorter a time. It doesn’t stick as much.”
While Hale’s work as Samus is limited to the famously silent bounty hunter’s range of grunts, she said she still had a full voice for the character in her mind while performing the role.
“I like to have identified a character’s way of speaking before I do grunting for them, because how you grunt is different to how I grunt, to how anyone else grunts,” Hale explained. “It’s very specific. If you are a civilian and you’re grunting, you’re like… [makes surprised grunt noise] because it’s all surprising and it’s all new. If you’ve done it a million times, you’re like [makes short grunt noise], because you’ve gone under fire 1,800 times and you’re used to it.”
Hale has voiced a string of famous video game characters over the years, including Ratchet and Clank’s Rivet, Metal Gear Solid’s Naomi Hunter, and BioShock Infinite’s Rosalind Lutece. But it’s for her role in Mass Effect that she remains perhaps known. Speaking to IGN, Hale said she hadn’t been asked to return for Mass Effect 5 yet, but “would be there before they finish the sentence” if BioWare got in touch.
“Not all of Prime 4’s additions work, but this is still an excellent comeback,” IGN wrote in our Metroid Prime 4 review, scoring the game an 8/10.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
The $55 billion leveraged buyout which will see Saudi Arabia, Silver Lake and Jared Kushner become the new owners of EA will reportedly lead to the Saudi Public Investment Fund owning a whopping 93.4 percent of the game publishers. That’s assuming the deal goes through as planned.
Fern “Antireal” Hook, the artist who found her own designs and graphics in Bungie’s Marathon, has confirmed she has “resolved” the issue with the studio and its parent company Sony.
In a brief update posted to X/Twitter, Hook wrote: “The Marathon art issue has been resolved with Bungie and Sony Interactive Entertainment to my satisfaction.” She did not provide details of any settlement.
Destiny 2 developer Bungie found itself battling accusations of plagiarism back in May after Hook accused the studio of lifting aspects of her artwork for its upcoming extraction shooter, Marathon. In screenshots taken from Marathon’s alpha playtest accompanying the tweet, Hook alleged she could see distinct icons and graphics she designed, some of which were originally shared on social media years ago in 2017.
bungie is of course not obligated to hire me when making a game that draws overwhelmingly from the same design language i have refined for the last decade, but clearly my work was good enough to pillage for ideas and plaster all over their game without pay or attribution. pic.twitter.com/G3FbPtbPJD
— N² (@4nt1r34l) May 15, 2025
Shortly afterwards, Marathon game director Joe Ziegler and art director Joe Cross apologized on a painfully uncomfortable livestream that featured no Marathon art or footage at all, as the team was “still scrubbing all of our assets to make sure that we are being respectful of the situation.” The studio commenced an “immediate investigation,” eventually acknowledging that a “former Bungie artist” had indeed used Fern Hook’s work without compensation or credit.
And then, of course, Marathon was delayed into 2026 as Bungie worked to respond to feedback from playtests. Things went very quiet until Marathon reemerged in October, when Bungie announced the extraction shooter was ready for a limited, invite-only playtest for players in North America and Europe across PS5, Xbox Series X and S, and Steam.
The art issue continues to cast a shadow, though. Last month, the director of the Marathon reveal cinematic short expressed his disbelief that he felt forced to come out and defend the work as “not AI.”
Marathon has certainly endured a troubled development and has suffered multiple delays. The pressure is on for Marathon to succeed amid Destiny 2’s high-profile struggles. Earlier this month, parent company Sony said Bungie had failed to meet its sales and user engagement targets, resulting in a $200 million impairment charge.
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.
The Warhammer 40,000 setting contains some pretty advanced technology. Blackstone Fortresses can destroy entire solar systems. The Aeonic Orb contains the power of an entire sun. And — get this — the Speranza, a massive vessel the size of a continent, can actually manipulate a black hole and fire it. Ouch!
So yeah, the Warhammer 40,000 setting has galaxy crushing might under its belt. But, it seems, the various races of the 41st millennium still don’t know what’s going on inside a black hole. And that’s not just the Imperium of Man letting the side down, either. It seems no-one — not even the incredibly advanced Necrons — have managed to work it out.
Confirmation comes from one of the latest Warhammer 40,000 novels, Guy Hayley’s Archmagos. It stars the much-loved 10,000 year-old dominus of the Adeptus Mechanicus, Belisarius Cawl, who travels to a Necron tomb world trapped on the event horizon of a black hole. And so, Belisarius Cawl ends up talking about black holes in general, and it’s this bit that surprised me as I was reading the book.
Warning! Spoilers for Warhammer 40,000 novel Archmagos follow:
Early on in the book, Belisarius Cawl ruminates on the big knowledge gap the races of the Warhammer 40,000 universe have when it comes to black holes. During this metaphysical ponder, he speculates that humanity, even during what’s called the Dark Age of Technology (the largely unexplored time period in which humanity was at its technological zenith), had no idea how they work. And, most surprising of all, neither do the Necrons.
Necrons, for the uninitiated, are terrifying mechanical warriors who wiped out an entire race of star gods long before the Emperor was even conceived (if he was, indeed, conceived). They’re meant to be the most technologically advanced of all the xenos, and use weapons far beyond our understanding. And so I was somewhat surprised to learn that the physics at play inside a black hole are a mystery to the Necrons, as they are to us in the real world.
Here’s what Belisarius Cawl, “the galaxy’s pre-eminent mind,” as he puts it, has to say about black holes:
Nobody really knows what these things are, even me. If we were to fall within, would we be destroyed, or would we emerge in some other place? I have never come across a satisfactory answer from any species. I doubt our ancestors at the height of their technology understood them. Some ancient Necrontyr records I… came into posession of by completely legitimate means, say they believe them to be the graves of their mightiest star gods. Maybe that is true. Why not? If a star can birth something with the power of a god, then why wouldn’t an astronomical body like this harbor similar secrets?
There was something grounding about reading this section of the book, something that made the often bizarre and unknowable Warhammer 40,000 universe ever so slightly relatable. The human race today does not know what goes on inside a black hole. I mean, we have theories, but we’re largely stumped. A black hole could lead to a new universe. Some think a black hole could lead to a white hole. Personally, I love the black hole leads to a 4D representation of a magical bookshelf idea. The point is we just don’t know. And it felt comforting somehow to learn that even 40,000 years in the future, we still haven’t worked it out.
A glance online at my usual 40k hideouts threw up a debate over this. I know — shock horror! — Warhammer 40,000 fans have something to say about the realism of the sci-fi universe they love so much. Some are pointing out that the C’Tan — those star gods I mentioned earlier — are said to have been able to call black holes into being. So if the Necrons defeated the C’Tan and ripped off their tech, shouldn’t they have black holes all figured out?
And others are pointing out that the Necrons, as they’ve been described to us in prior Warhammer 40,000 novels, are able to use black holes pretty effortlessly. “But… we have literally entire cryptek branch of black hole science called Voidmancers, they can just make black hole with wave of a hand… wear them as capes… it’s just author who didn’t know anything about it,” declared Mastercio before quoting from a book. “So we have entire group of them being able to just channel black holes, but this book just say that they can’t… bullshit.”
But Belisarius Cawl is not saying that the races of the 41st millennium are unable to use a black hole or interact with one in various ways, just that they don’t really understand their inner workings — literally what’s going on inside of them.
Which leads me onto the next thought: in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, what is going on inside a black hole? Having a bit of fun here, perhaps Warhammer 40,000 black holes have something to do with the warp, the alternate dimension hellscape in which the Chaos gods rile each other up and demons plot to tear into realspace and end all life as we know it. Maybe if you were to actually venture into a Warhammer 40,000 black hole, you’d end up in Grandfather Nurgle’s garden for a spot of (probably very bad for you) tea. Or perhaps you’d find yourself the inadvertent star of a Slaaneshi sex show. The mind boggles.
As with most things Warhammer 40,000, not knowing the truth of a thing is all part of the fun. Belisarius Cawl’s drive-by lecture on the nature of black holes should be considered as reliable as 90% of the lore fans like me fuss over on a daily basis. That is to say, not very reliable at all. And Games Workshop, as is its want, could one day decide to contradict everything Cawl says here and show us that someone somewhere in the Warhammer 40,000 universe knows exactly how black holes work inside and out.
Perhaps Trazyn the Infinite has had a peek.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Square Enix’s new HD-2D RPG starring YOU.
It’s been a busy period for gaming recently, and Square Enix is back this week another role-playing release. Following on from the Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake in October, we’ve now got Octopath Traveler 0, which this time puts you in the shoes of your very own custom character.
This game is releasing on the Switch and Switch 2 on 4th December, and ahead of our own review going live later today, the very first critic review has now been shared online. It comes from the famous Japanese publication Famitsu. So, what did the critics at this outlet think?
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Go on, tell us!
We’ve finally made it, folks! This week marks the long-awaited arrival of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. After years of development, delays, and even a restart, Samus Aran’s next 3D outing is officially here for the Switch and Switch 2.
The critic reviews have also gone live ahead of the big release, and admittedly, the aggregate score has got a lot of people talking online. Prime 4 is currently sitting on 81/100 based on 74 critic reviews. At the time of writing, it’s got the same “top critic” score on OpenCritic.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
