This all comes courtesy of an update to the game’s official Japanese website, which states (via Google Translate) that the Switch 2 version “Introduces the new ‘Tag Rule,’ a 2-on-2 battle, and the ‘Climax Rule,’ where the winner is decided in five turns”. Until we get the official English translation, we’d imagine that those names might be a little different, but look! New game modes!
Funcom asked us to “let them cook,” and going on last night’s Dune: Awakening showcase, the developers did. With just a few days to go before early access players get their “head start,” Funcom put on a livestream showing off Dune: Awakening’s mid-to-endgame, and a wide tour of the Hagga Basin “to emphasize the size and variety players can expect,” including the “lush O’odham, the forbidding Hagga Rift, the tall spires and imposing rock formations of Jabal Eifrit, to name just a few.”
Inspired by Denis Villeneuve and Legendary Entertainment’s blockbuster films, Dune: Awakening lets players explore Arrakis in an open-world game for the first time ever. Up until now, even beta players have only seen around 25% of Hagga Basin, so the stream showcased “these huge and diverse landscapes” in all their glory.
“Before even considering the vast dunes and dangers of the Deep Desert, players will experience a full-scale survival game,” Funcom teased.
“They will rise through the ranks of the Atreides or Harkonnen; build powerful strongholds; brave Imperial Testing Stations; craft advanced schematics; explore and harvest in a variety of vehicles, and much, much more.” Furthermore, the “Landsraad feature allows anyone to contribute in the effort to impact their entire faction, whether they prefer PvE or PvP.”
Dune: Awakening is an open-world survival MMO set on the most dangerous planet in the universe. You’ll learn to survive the desert by learning the ways of the Fremen, and expand your potential through combat, spice, building, and trade. It’s set to release on June 10, 2025, on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X and S after a three-week delay to fix issues identified during its beta testing. Players with an “early start,” however, get to play five days early from June 5.
“As a longtime fan of Dune, it also just feels so good to explore and learn more about a world that I’m quite fond of, and Funcom has clearly put a ton of effort into worldbuilding and lore, even despite taking quite a bit of creative liberty by placing Awakening within a parallel reality and canon than the books/movies,” we wrote in IGN’s Dune: Awakening closed beta impressions preview.
“There are little details that have a massive impact on gameplay. I won’t go into spoilers, but this kind of attention to detail touches just about every aspect of the world, including the factions and characters you meet along the way, which should be a treat for any fan of the setting.”
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.
Cyberpunk 2077‘s sequel has shed its Project Orion codename and will now be known as… Cyberpunk 2. CD Projekt revealed the name change in their latest earnings results, according to which the new Cyberpunk RPG has just entered pre-production – roughly defined, the point in a game’s gestation when designers, artists, programmers and so forth meet to flesh out the concept, but before they’ve actually started making anything that’s supposed to form part of the finished game. There are now 96 people working on the thing, versus 422 for The Witcher 4, 49 on multiplayer Witcher spin-off Project Sirius, and 19 for an unannounced original game, Project Hadar.
The grousing, dilettante reader will object that this is scant material for a news post, especially given that CD Projekt are offering no guarantees that “Cyberpunk 2” will be the project’s final name – as they commented to the Verge, Cyberpunk 2 “just means it’s another game in the Cyberpunk universe.” But the dextrous maven of online news-mongering will notice that “Cyberpunk 2” is, in fact, an extremely compact and subtle piece of worldbuilding.
I’ve never been so happy to see a spike trap as I was in Debugging Hero. At the start of each combat encounter, the demo for this roguelite hack n’ slash hands you several numeric cards and lets you pause the game to view both your and your enemies’ stats: health, damage, and durability. You then drag the cards on to the relevant stat to modify it, then unpause to continue real-time combat.
It’s a cute gimmick, letting you knock down high health enemies to a manageable number, or kill weak ones outright, or heal yourself. But it felt a tad shallow to carry a whole game, even one with dodges and parries in its real-time combat. Then, I entered a room with a trap tile that thrust sharpened spikes upwards at timed intervals, and realised I could manipulate the timer. I tuned it right down, and raucously chortled like a portly racoon at the bakery bins as it pneumatically skewered my idiot attackers.
In 2023 EA opened a new studio named Cliffhanger Games, led by former Monolith head Kevin Stephens, and announced a new third-person, singleplayer game starring Marvel’s Black Panther. They’ve now cancelled that game and shut down that studio, IGN report.
According to EA Entertainment president Laura Miele, via an email sent to employees, this has been done to “sharpen our focus and put our creative energy behind the most significant growth opportunities.”
Heavy Riffs, Heavy Hits – Kramer and DOOM: The Dark Ages Team Up to Launch Custom Guitars
Jenny MillerSenior Manager, Xbox Global Brand Partnerships
Get ready to shred through Hell. Kramer Guitars, the iconic brand known for its raw power and rock ‘n’ roll attitude, has teamed up with Bethesda’s DOOM: The Dark Ages to unleash three limited-edition, custom-designed guitars inspired by the brutal and legendary world of DOOM.
In celebration of the launch of DOOM: The Dark Ages, Xbox and Bethesda are giving fans a once-in-a-lifetime chance to own a piece of metal history. Three custom Kramer guitars, each uniquely crafted to reflect the gritty, medieval aesthetic of the new instalment of DOOM, will be up for grabs in an exclusive giveaway, launching today.
Designed by renowned artist and illustrator, Luke Preece, each guitar’s design was designed and mapped out digitally, before being stencilled onto each guitar and hand painted. The unique designs were carefully applied with multiple layers of paint across several weeks, and each focus on one of the powerful weapons in your arsenal: The Atlan, Serrat The Dragon, and The DOOM Slayer himself.
“DOOM and metal go hand in hand,” explains Preece. “The Kramer brand has such a vast history with heavy music – just like DOOM has with video games – and so collaborating with Kramer is a perfect fit. I actually played guitar for many years before being a full-time illustrator. If I could go back and tell my younger self that I would be working on this, I’m sure he wouldn’t believe it.”
Fans in the US, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands can enter the giveaway starting today by liking and commenting #DOOMGuitarSweepstakes on the announce video hosted on the @xboxuk, @xboxDACH, @xboxfrance, and @xbox_nederland Instagram accounts, for a chance to win one of the three guitars, as well as a selection of limited edition DOOM: The Dark Ages prizes. The winners will be selected at random and announced on June 30, 2025. Check out the full rules, terms and conditions here.
FromSoftware games have always had a very distinct visual style, So much so, that it’s usually pretty easy to predict when that iconic “FromSoftware” logo is about to pop up after a sudden fade to black, even in an announced game trailer for an upcoming FromSoft game. This is thanks to the many talented artists at the studio, and during my time at their office, I got a chance to sit down with one of them, Concept and Environmental Artist Saori Mizuno, to talk about her inspirations, the art direction she was given for Elden Ring Nightreign, and how it differed from her work on previous FromSoft games.
IGN: So generally, what was different about working on Nightreign versus the base Elden Ring game, or and anything prior that you have worked on with FromSoftware?
Saori Mizuno – Concept Artist on Elden Ring: Nightreign: In general, for Nightreign, we would receive an order for a design and then if it was myself in charge of that particular concept, then I would iterate on that image that I had, that interpretation of the design and then I would align and collaborate with the other designers and eventually produce the final design. I think one aspect that changed a lot on Nightreign’s design process is that we had a lot of back and forth, a lot of brainstorming in person, actually speaking about these designs rather than just getting text-based feedback.
Interviewer:
Can you talk a little bit about the setting of Nightreign and how you approach making it feel distinct from the base Elden Ring game, despite it being a spinoff that uses a lot of the same assets?
We didn’t want to make it feel too different from Elden Ring, as it used that as a base for the design and the setting. But one specific direction we did get early on was to create something that first feels and looks familiar and gradually transforms into the unfamiliar and into the unknown. So that was a nice sort of policy or a direction that we had to approach with the design.
Elden Ring had this sort of very gorgeous painterly feel to a lot of the environments, but we wanted Nightreign to feel like at a glance beautiful, but if you look a little bit deeper, there’s something sinister and there’s something darker there. Elden Ring, maybe there’s a lot of bright colors in the scenery and in the sky box and such, but we wanted there also, the player to feel a sense of darkness there as well. So that was another aspect of the design that differed slightly from Elden Ring.
“We didnt want to make it feel too different from Elden Ring.”
One of the locations that really stuck out to me was the Roundtable Hold, which is such a familiar location in the base Elden Ring, and it has such an interesting twist in Nightreign. Can you talk a little bit about what went into the new design for the Roundtable Hold and what were some of the inspirations behind some of those changes?
With Nightreign’s new kind of speedier, high-tempo gameplay, we wanted the Roundtable this time in particular to feel like somewhere you could relax and take your time and sort of cool off after that intense three day/night cycle. So we wanted it to feel, from a design perspective, more cozy and more welcoming, more at home. One inspiration was the Fire Link Shrine from Dark Souls 1, where you feel sort of more embraced by the atmosphere. You feel like you are coming home after these hardships, after a hard fought battle, and safe more importantly than anything.
So from a design perspective, we used techniques such as gentle lighting, a feeling of the surrounding environs as well as the Roundtable Hold itself. And also while a lot of the place is in ruins, we didn’t want it to feel completely destroyed and desolate. We wanted it to feel like it was a safe place to come home to and that the player could relax and take their time there.
Another impetus for the design of the Roundtable Hold in Nightreign was this feeling of early morning, so a sort of daybreak, dawn, the player setting off on a new adventure. So that came into some of the lighting and architecture choices that changed in Nightreign, and we wanted the player to be aware of this. We wanted them to be conscious of this when setting out on this new adventure.
So when the player hits day three, they’re transported to this brand new location that is really unlike any other in Elden Ring. One that is predominantly white, mixed in with a very colorful sky box full of orange, blue and purple kind of all mixing together. What’s the story behind this environment and what were some of the inspirations that went into that work? If you need a visual representation, I have this one.
So one of the first requests we got from the director regarding this environment was that it should feel like a sense of finality and we should get this feeling of buildup before a storm. And that we should also feel like the impression you got from the sky box is that the sky is falling, this calamity is coming to an end. So it’s the boss at the end of the third day, so we wanted the player to feel this tightness in their chest like they’re getting ready to embark on something greater than themselves and hopefully this culminates and comes through in the design.
To add to that, looking again at the colors and the composition of the sky, we wanted it to feel like something was about to be born from that chaos, from that chaotic scene. Again, the boss culminates at the end of that third-day struggle. We wanted the player to feel this from the use of color and the use of these design elements. And some of the inspirations we took from that were from real-life cosmic events. So something we can’t quite understand, something that’s very distant and abstracted from regular human perception and we wanted it to feel just as abstract and just as grandiose even within the world of Nightreign.
Just speaking personally, what’s something that you yourself are very proud of that you’ve worked on in Nightreign?
Personally, one of my favorite areas is actually the area we just talked about, the environment that you enter just before facing that boss at the end of the third day. One of the keywords we found while exploring the design for this environment was this concept of shedding skin. And so this was something that really resonated with me and stuck with me. This idea of personifying the surroundings and the building into something that was once living and has now since been petrified or gone through these ages of time and gone through this whole process. And we wanted players to feel this sense of age, this old fantasy feel from this particular set piece.
One of the things that surprised us about Nightreign was the environmental variety, despite it being a much smaller and more condensed kind of world. Was it difficult to achieve this kind of variety in such a small, confined space?
So generally with these kind of emergent map changes and these kind of terrain effects and events, we wanted it to feel like something immediately fresh and exciting, just at a glance. So the player will know there’s been an impactful change to the map and to the scenery and they’ll have an immediate idea of what they need to do to progress. So for instance, the volcano, the crater that appears, you’d need to sort of dig deeper into it. Or for the snowfield terrain change, you’d need to sort of climb right up to the top of it, this sort of thing. We wanted this to be immediately effective and change the way the players approach and behave in the map just by changing that sense of space.
And then personally as a designer, who are some of your favorite artists, either classic or contemporary, and are there any people that you can point to as being particularly influential on your work?
One of my personal favorite traditional artists, or classical artists is Zdzisław Beksiński. I took a lot of inspiration from his various expressions when designing my work. Also with the concept of Nightreign and battling the Night Lords after these repeated plays, I felt like this is inherent to the game design. And so I wanted this feeling to come through in the designs I created as well. And one sense I got from that was from watching the film Spirited Away from Hayao Miyazaki. This feeling of being unable to go home, unable to escape from a dream. This sort of feeling I wanted to kind of harness while designing these worlds and tried to get that through to the player as they play through the game.
Even when designing Limveld, that initial map, that initial environment on the first day, I wanted it to feel beautiful. Like from an outward glance, it looks beautiful and inviting, but pretty quickly you feel like something’s off or something’s not quite right. So I think that is a part of the inspiration that we definitely got across in the design of Nightreign.
So switching to video games really quick, can you just talk about what are some of your favorite video games that may have inspired your work as well?
I enjoy Diablo II and other such multiplayer games. I enjoy open world survival games where you have to sort of start from scratch and build your own house and things like that world. I like a variety of indies and I’ve also had a fondness for a Legend of Zelda since childhood, games like Majora’s Mask, which kind of are obviously really fun to play, but they sort of have this… again, this sense of repeat play and this kind of sense of darkness to them as well. I think that’s stuck with me since childhood. So yeah.
And then a final question. A lot of designers and artists like to make their own personal imprints on a game. Are there any secrets or Easter eggs that you managed to sneak in yourself into the game? Or is there maybe anything that you hope players will see and enjoy as they play?
Yes. I don’t think you’d call this a sort of a signature as an artist, but one important thing that I paid attention to while designing Nightreign was this sort of all encompassing theme of the night and how we go about expressing that. We obviously tried various things and various methods and Limveld is ultimately a place that you keep coming back to as a player. So we thought one way we could express that was these changes throughout the three-day structure and what players can notice as their journey progresses. What keeps them coming back and what keeps them interested.
And so to talk a bit more about that theme of night, we had to explore what night meant to us as designers, like as a base concept. So of course, night brings with it some negative connotations, like the dark and fear and the unknown, things like this. So we wanted at first when the player jumps into this world to feel those kind of negative feelings conveyed quite directly and have that sense of anxiety and that sense of fear of the unknown.
“We had to explore what night meant to us as designers, like as a base concept.”
So we conveyed this straight up with things like the imposed time limit and the encroaching circle of rain, things like this. But we found that night is, we didn’t want it to be fully negative. Again, once the players get used to that cycle and they get used to what they’re seeing, we wanted it to be more than that. We wanted players to kind of begin to almost yearn for the night and sort of look forward to this encroaching darkness and maybe even feel a sense of comfort from it, from getting used to this rhythm and these aspects. So as the game progresses and the player is kind of getting used to these things, that’s definitely an aspect of the design that we wanted to incorporate and be a part of that player experience.
More and more videos of people getting their Switch 2s early are popping up online, and the latest is probably the biggest and best look we’ve had at the system and its UI.
We’re excited to invite all Xbox Insiders on Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC to join the Rematch – Final Beta starting today, May 28. Limited space is available so join now to secure your spot for the playtest!
About the Game:
Rematch offers a fresh take on football with third-person, skill-based gameplay where every move—tackle, dribble, aim, and shoot—puts you at the center of the action. With no player stats, success depends entirely on your skill and teamwork. Rematch blends credible football mechanics with an arcade twist, delivering fast-paced, uninterrupted matches. Designed for online multiplayer, it features competitive modes, seasonal content, and deep tactical play that’s easy to pick up but hard to master.
Start: Wednesday, May 28, 5 AM PT (8 AM ET / 12 PM UTC)
End: Saturday, May 31, 5 AM PT (8 AM ET / 12 PM UTC)
How to Participate:
Sign-in on your Xbox Series X|S console or Windows PC and launch the Xbox Insider Hub app (or install the Xbox Insider Hub from the Store first if necessary)
Navigate to Previews > Rematch Beta
Select Join
Wait for the registration to complete and be directed to the Store and install REMATCH – Closed Beta
NOTE: Limited space is available and offered first-come first-served.
NOTE: This playtest is only available on Xbox Series X|S consoles and Windows PC.
How to Provide Feedback:
If you experience any issues while playing Rematch, don’t forget to use “Report a problem” so we can investigate:
Hold down the home button on your Xbox controller.
Select Report a problem.
Select the Games category and Rematch subcategory.
Fill out the form with the appropriate details to help our investigation.
For more information: follow us on X/Twitter at @XboxInsider and this blog for announcements and more. And feel free to interact with the community on the Xbox Insider SubReddit.
Electronic Arts is canceling its planned Black Panther game and shutting down developer Cliffhanger Games, IGN has learned.
In an email sent to staff from EA Entertainment president Laura Miele, Miele said that these changes, alongside other recent cancellations and layoffs, are being done to “sharpen our focus and put our creative energy behind the most significant growth opportunities.”
In addition to closing Cliffhanger and canceling Black Panther, EA is also laying off some individuals on both its mobile and central teams. When asked for an exact number of individuals impacted, EA declined to comment. IGN understands the total number of affected individuals in this wave is less than the roughly 300 roles cut last month across Respawn and EA’s Fan Care teams – but cannot confirm by how much.
“These decisions are hard,” Miele wrote. “They affect people we’ve worked with, learned from, and shared real moments with. We’re doing everything we can to support them — including finding opportunities within EA, where we’ve had success helping people land in new roles.”
As with past rounds of layoffs, EA is endeavoring to place affected individuals in other roles across the company. The company has made use of this placement program with each round of layoffs in recent years, an effort that remains possible despite the constant team cuts likely due to EA seemingly drastically increasing headcount on other teams at the same time. Per Game File’s reporting, EA employed 800 more people as of March of this year than it did the same time in 2024.
To that end, Miele’s email continues, the company is focusing on a small handful of franchises going forward: Battlefield, The Sims, Skate, and Apex Legends. Miele also reassures EA will continue to invest in its Iron Man game at Motive and the third Star Wars: Jedi game, as well as it maintain its mobile business despite today’s cuts, while Bioware works on the next Mass Effect. Additionally, last year, CEO Andrew Wilson announced the company would be “moving away from development of future licensed IP that we do not believe will be successful in our changing industry.”
The email doesn’t mention EA Sports, but this is due to Miele running EA Entertainment, while EA Sports is a separate division. IGN understands that the sports division is unaffected by these changes for now.
Meanwhile, EA recently implemented mandatory return-to-office for all workers, a move that some employees told IGN has left many currently remote workers with concerns about what will happen to their roles long-term.
When asked for comment on the exact number impacted, the reasons for these repeated cuts, or if more cuts are expected in the near future, EA referred IGN back to Miele’s email. Marvel has not yet responded to IGN’s request for comment.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.