In a break from tradition, Ubisoft have no plans for a second big Assassin’s Creed: Shadows DLC expansion

Assassin’s Creed Shadows probably won’t get a second major DLC expansion on the scale of Claws of Awaji, Ubisoft’s associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois has revealed. It’s a blow to fans who are accustomed to getting a couple of major expansions per Assassin’s Creed, and a boon to people who haven’t even played Shadows yet, let alone the 10-hour-long Claws of Awaji, and are getting dry heaves from FOMO. It’s me, I am people.

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Exclusive: Bloober Team Is Bringing Layers Of Fear To Switch 2 Next Month

The Final Masterpiece.

Well, here’s a welcome surprise! Hot off the back of Silent Hill 2 and Cronos: The New Dawn, Bloober Team has shared with us the next project that it’s working on for Switch 2, and it’s none other than an all-new Layers of Fear package.

Layers of Fear: Final Masterpiece Edition will arrive on Switch 2 on 19th December, bundling together Layers of Fear, Layers of Fear 2, every DLC expansion, and brand-new chapters into one spooky edition fully optimised for the new system.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Free Play Days – Hypnospace Outlaw, Let’s Build a Zoo, Biped 2, Hammerwatch 2 and The First Berserker: Khazan

Free Play Days – Hypnospace Outlaw, Let’s Build a Zoo, Biped 2, Hammerwatch 2 and The First Berserker: Khazan

It’s a great weekend to cozy up and discover your next favorite game with Free Play Days! Hammerwatch 2 and The First Berserker: Khazan are available this weekend for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Premium and Essential members to play from Thursday November 27 until Sunday, November 30.

Hypnospace Outlaw, Let’s Build a Zoo, Biped 2 are free for all Xbox members to try during this Free Play Days. (Xbox Game Pass Game Pass Ultimate, Premium and Essential membership not required).


How To Start Playing


Scroll down and find and install the games on each of the individual game details pages on Xbox.com. Clicking through will send you to the Microsoft Store, where you must be signed in to see the option to install with your Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Premium and Essential membership. To download on console, click on the Subscriptions tab in the Xbox Store and navigate down to the Free Play Days collection on your Xbox One or Xbox Series X|S.


Keep The Fun Going


Purchase the game and other editions at a limited time discount and continue playing while keeping your Gamerscore and achievements earned during the event! Please note that discounts, percentages, and title availability may vary by title and region.


Free Play Days (Game Pass Membership Required)


The First Berserker: Khazan

Nexon Korea Corporation


248


$59.99

$41.99

The First Berserker: Khazan
Optimized for Xbox Series X|S
The First Berserker: Khazan is a hardcore action role-playing game where the player becomes Khazan, the great general of the Pell Los Empire. Journey to the continent of Arad and discover the untold story. Master deep and immersive combat mechanics while you engage in strategic battles against a diverse array of foes and bosses. Overcome death and set out to reveal the incidents that led to Khazan’s downfall and seek vengeance on your enemies. The First Berserker: Khazan will be discounted 30% during 11/20 through 12/3.


Hammerwatch II

Maximum Entertainment


55


$24.99

$4.99

Hammerwatch 2
Optimized for Xbox Series X|S
Gather your heroes and journey beyond the dungeons of Castle Hammerwatch to explore a pixelated world like never before. Aid King Roland’s resistance while helping villagers along the way. Battle beasts, finish off hordes of the undead, and face the forces of evil in this epic ode to classic ARPG.


Free Play Days For All


Xbox Play Anywhere

Hypnospace Outlaw

No More Robots


235


$19.99

$5.99

Hypnospace Outlaw
Xbox Play Anywhere
Hypnospace Outlaw is a ’90s internet simulator in which you scour Hypnospace’ s wide variety of weird and wonderful websites to hunt down wrongdoers, while also keeping an eye on your inbox, avoiding viruses and adware, and downloading a plethora of apps that may or may not be useful. Grab your headband, enforcer, Hypnospace Outlaw is free now as part of Xbox Free Play Days, and you can grab the full game for 70% off!


Xbox Play Anywhere

Let’s Build a Zoo

No More Robots


201


$19.99

$6.99

Let’s Build a Zoo
Optimized for Xbox Series X|S, Smart Delivery, Xbox Play Anywhere
It’s time to build your own zoo – for free! Let out your wild side, and create your own animal empire with this cute, expansive management sim. Import and breed rare creatures, hire the right staff, keep your visitors happy, and deal with plenty of weird and wonderful events. Then try your hand at DNA Splicing, and stitch together over 300,000 different types of animal, ranging from the majestic Giraffephant to the peaceful PandOwl! Let’s Build a Zoo is free now as part of Xbox Free Play Days, and you can grab the full game & DLCs for up to 65% off!!


Biped 2

META Publishing

$19.99

Biped 2
Optimized for Xbox Series X|S, Smart Delivery
Biped 2 is the sequel to the exciting game about two charming bipedal robots, Aku and Sila, who have each other’s backs and embark on incredible adventures side by side. Dive into this groovy co-op action-adventure game, full of puzzles, friendship, support, and fun!


Don’t miss out on these exciting Free Play Days for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Premium and Essential members! Learn more about Free Play Days here and stay tuned to Xbox Wire to find out about future Free Play Days and all the latest Xbox gaming news.

The post Free Play Days – Hypnospace Outlaw, Let’s Build a Zoo, Biped 2, Hammerwatch 2 and The First Berserker: Khazan appeared first on Xbox Wire.

Arc Raiders Patch Notes Teased a ‘Very Hot Fix’ for Locked Room Exploits and Now Cheaters Are Getting Cooked

Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios released update 1.4.0 this week, and in the patch notes teased a “very hot fix for the locked room exploits.” It turns out they weren’t kidding.

Following the release of the patch, players — as they often do — jumped into the hugely successful extraction shooter to give this fix a proper test. They’ve been able to cheat their way into locked rooms as before, but what they now find inside… well, Embark called it a “very hot fix” for a reason.

As redditor Forward_Problem_7550 discovered, locked rooms now turn you into a fireball if you glitch inside. The clip below shows the trap in action.

Reaction to the change is positive, with most players getting a kick out of what Embark has done here. “Best part of this is the clowns doing the glitch lose all their stuff to someone who legitimately opens the door with a key. CLASSIC!” enthused A_Tortured_Crab. “It’s genuinely a really good fix,” added vedomedo. “Hopefully this is the mindset they keep going forward. Punish the exploiters and reward legit players.”

Now, some players are saying they’re more inclined to use their keys to enter locked rooms legitimately in the hope of finding “some dingus who hasn’t read the patch notes.”

Technically this isn’t a fix, as players can still use the exploit to enter locked rooms. But it is an eye-catching workaround, and will surely put off players from trying to cheat their way inside a room after they’ve been cooked once.

“Would’ve been better if they just didn’t say anything and rolled this out,” suggested Maverixk_. “Imagine all the door glitches finding this out and losing all of their s**t before word of mouth spread. Would’ve been hilarious.”

That’s not all the update did. It’s also patched the gun quick swap exploit. Full patch notes are below.

Arc Raiders Patch Notes 1.4.0:

Content and Bug Fixes

  • Exploit mitigation mechanisms have been added for all locked rooms across all maps.
  • Fixed the gun exploit that allowed you to shoot quicker than intended by swapping to a quick use item and back.
  • The exterior access to Spaceport’s Control Tower locked room has been blocked off.
  • Fixed the issue that sometimes caused low resolution textures in the Main Menu.
  • Fixed players being able to push each other by jumping on each other’s backs.
  • Fixed lighting artifacts that would sometimes occur upon entering maps.
  • Raider Voice now correctly respects the selected voice option after restarting the game.

If you’re hunting for the best offers this week, we’re actively rounding up the strongest Black Friday deals on video games, tech, and more. You can find all our top picks and price drops in our full Black Friday hub, or check out our relevant pages for PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox deals.

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.

Epic CEO wants Valve and Steam to stop requiring devs to disclose generative AI usage

A couple of weeks after arguing that generative AI shouldn’t be considered in videogame reviews, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney is calling for Steam and digital storefronts generally to stop requiring generative AI disclosures.

Sweeney’s argument is broadly that all videogames will use generative AI tools at some stage, so you and I might as well stop hearing about it. He thinks tagging things as made with generative AI is only necessary when there’s a formal need to prove legal authorship, or help buyers understand whether they have rights to a piece of digital art. There’s no sense letting regular old videogame players learn that stuff. It will only make us upset, and possibly less willing to play videogames with generative AI in them, like Fortnite.

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Someone Just Paid $42,500 For A Copy of Fortnite, a Free-To-Play Game

A pristine copy of Fortnite has just been sold for $42,500 — which seems a lot for a free-to-play game.

To be fair, this is a boxed version of Fortnite — something that also grants access to the game’s original Save the World mode, which Epic Games still requires you pay a small amount to access.

But there’s no suggestion this sealed copy of the world’s biggest battle royale will ever actually be played. Indeed, it has been sold encased in a box, and labelled with a 10 A++ rating from video game grading company Wata — its highest possible quality score.

Sold by Heritage Auctions, this copy of Fortnite is an Xbox One version from the game’s original 2017 print run. Only a limited number of physical copies were ever produced, and this edition dates back to when the game’s now-ubiquitous battle royale mode was just a side-offering.

As mentioned, it does include access to Save the World, which is worth… something. Epic Games has bundled the original Fortnite mode in numerous ways over the years, but currently sells access as part of a $18.49 add-on that includes 1,500 V-Bucks (which would separately cost $18) as well as an exclusive skin.

Even with this in mind, though, you’re still paying $42,482 over the odds.

These days, Fortnite is a very different beast — a metaverse of battle royale modes, user-generated maps, plus LEGO and music offerings. Oh, and it’s home to pretty much every media franchise that has ever licensed itself for a video game, as well as real-life popstars and now even Quentin Tarantino.

Earlier today, Tarantino fans got a first glimpse at the director’s new ‘Lost Chapter’ of Kill Bill, which stars an animated Uma Thurman and Fortnite’s Peely the banana, and will debut first within the game. Tell that to someone back in 2017, and I doubt they’d believe you.

Of course, video games attracting huge sums as collectible items is nothing new — and within the grand scheme of things, $42,500 pales in comparison to other auction prices. Back in 2021, a factory-sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. sold for a record-breaking $2 million, though there’s debate over whether the sale counted as an auction in the traditional sense. Officially, Guinness World Records recognizes a copy of Super Mario 64 sold for $1.56 million as the highest amount successfully bid for a video game to date. But who knows how much that copy of Fortnite will be worth in another 100 years?

If you’re hunting for the best offers this week, we’re actively rounding up the strongest Black Friday deals on video games, tech, and more. You can find all our top picks and price drops in our full Black Friday hub, or check out our relevant pages for PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox deals.

Image credit: Heritage Auctions/HA.com

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

“Essentially, War Sails is a large mod”: Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord devs on delaying leaving port and why custom naval battles were a late addition

Earlier this year, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord‘s War Sails naval expansion had its release pushed back from June 17th to November 26th. You can give it a go right now if you fancy, so it obviously made that second date. Prior to the DLC dropping, I chatted with Bannerlord senior producer Falk Engel about what went into the decision to ditch the initial summer date, and why custom naval battles were only confirmed to be arriving with its launch quite late in the day.

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Ubisoft No Longer Plans to Release a Second Assassin’s Creed Shadows Expansion

Ubisoft has confirmed it no longer plans to launch a second major Assassin’s Creed Shadows expansion, something that previously would have formed part of the game’s now-abandoned season pass.

Shadows’ first — and now, it seems, only — major expansion launched in September. The 10-hour Claws of Awaji had previously been described as the “first expansion” included in Shadows’ season pass, an offer that was formally scrapped a year ago when Ubisoft delayed the game’s launch from November 2024 to February 2025.

As an apology to fans for the game’s delay, Ubisoft said it instead would gift Claws of Awaji for free to all pre-order customers. But fans still assumed a second expansion would follow at some point, as has become custom for every other major Assassin’s Creed title over the past decade.

“As of now, at this moment for Year Two, there is no expansion on the size of Awaji that is planned,” associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois said in an interview with JorRaptor.

Lemay-Comtois caveated his answer by noting some exceptional examples in the past where Ubisoft had changed its plans to make more add-on content than it had originally envisioned (such as with the recent Saudi-funded DLC that arrived two years post-launch for Assassin’s Creed Mirage). But, currently, it seems clear that no second expansion is on the cards, and there’s no suggestion that Shadows’ post-launch plans will extend into a Year Three.

It’s an extremely surprising decision by Ubisoft, which followed up the launch of 2017’s Assassin’s Creed Origins with two expansions (The Hidden Ones and The Curse of the Pharaohs), 2018’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey with two expansions (Legacy of the First Blade and The Fate of Atlantis), and 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey with three expansions (Wrath of the Druids, The Siege of Paris, Dawn of Ragnarök) alongside numerous other smaller DLC drops. 2023’s smaller-scale Assassin’s Creed Mirage was itself originally planned as yet another Valhalla expansion, before it was ultimately released as a standalone game.

“We’re still working on content for post-launch and supporting it, but it’s not a full-on DLC the way a season pass would have had in the previous years,” Lemay-Comtois said, confirming at least that Ubisoft still had plans for smaller additions to Shadows within 2026.

“We’re trying to re-adjust for Year Two a little bit,” he continued. “There’s learning from Year One we can apply to Year Two. Any content we want to do in Year Two will probably be more sparse, not a drip-feed… but chunkier updates that shake things up a little more. I’m not announcing anything at this point but our strategy for Year One was to be quick and reactive, so it means smaller drops often, but for Year Two we don’t need to put fires out or anything, so it’s more what good, chunky little piece of meat… we can drop and have people come back and enjoy it.”

Digging into Lemay-Comtois’ comment, the suggestion here is that Ubisoft’s decision to change course on Shadows following its pre-release reception impacted the company’s plans for post-launch support, with priority placed on fighting immediate “fires.” And indeed, Shadows has enjoyed a series of recent patches that have added numerous fan-requested features, in a clear bid to turn sentiment around. Going into further detail, Lemay-Comtois also suggested Shadows had been a tougher game to develop technologically, further complicating plans to get post-launch content ready.

“I think with Shadows, we had a big jump in generations,” he continued. “The engine work that we had to do on Shadows took a lot of time and a lot of our resources. So the planning for the post launch was not really clear as soon as it would have been on another [game] where the technology was more stable and well known.

“We started fairly late on Shadows… because I remember during pre-launch we had the Season Pass,” he admitted. “And the situation changed when we pushed back on the release date. That plan changed quite a bit and then we had to kind of adapt to the situation. So because of the new tech, because of the new generation, because of the pushes we had in production, we chose an approach that was way more, let’s put our ear to the ground when the game launches… and react.”

For 2026, Lemay-Comtois suggested Shadows would receive updates “not to the size of a DLC or expansion, but like yesterday’s update plus,” referencing the free update that arrived this week that added a new story quest, the game’s Attack on Titan crossover, as well as a significant Isu Easter egg. “At minimum this size,” he emphasized, without stating whether these updates would continue to be provided for free or not.

“And whether or not this is the right way to go, or a good learning, I think it’s more of an experience we’re trying with Shadows, to keep things small and reactive and see how the community feels about it and reacts to it,” he concluded. “And the learnings that come out of that will be applied to whatever other projects we do next.”

Of course, it’s to be expected that Shadows’ lead developer Ubisoft Quebec is already planning its next major Assassin’s Creed project (and indeed, it was previously reported that the studio had begun early pre-production work last year on a now-scrapped entry set in the post-U.S. Civil War period). But the mention here of those projects is interesting, alongside confirmation of what sounds like smaller plans for Shadows in 2026 than fans have seen this year.

And then there’s what else fans expect is coming: a remake of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag reportedly waiting in the wings, as well as numerous other Assassin’s Creed projects that Ubisoft has already confirmed, including a multiplayer spin-off and the witchcraft-themed Assassin’s Creed: Hexe. Amongst all that, and coupled with Shadows’ delay drama, Ubisoft seems to have simply decided a second Shadows expansion isn’t necessary.

If you’re hunting for the best offers this week, we’re actively rounding up the strongest Black Friday deals on video games, tech, and more. You can find all our top picks and price drops in our full Black Friday hub, or check out our relevant pages for PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox deals.

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