Game Infliction, Author at Game Infliction

MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls Interview

MARVEL legends, assemble! Coming to PlayStation 5 in 2026, MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls is a 4v4 team-based fighting game created in partnership with Arc System Works — renowned for Guilty Gear and Dragon Ball Fighter Z — PlayStation Studios, and MARVEL Games.

The game has captured the attention of both fighting game enthusiasts and MARVEL fans alike. We spoke with Arc System Works Producer Takeshi Yamanaka, Game Director and Lead Battle Designer Kazutoshi Sekine, and SIE PlayStation Studios XDEV Senior Producer Reed Baird about the game’s standout features, unique elements, and the debut of Spider-Man and Ghost Rider as playable characters at Tokyo Game Show 2025.

Takeshi Yamanaka
Producer, Arc System Works

Kazutoshi Sekine
Game Director & Lead Battle Designer, Arc System Works

Reed Baird
Senior Producer, SIE PlayStation Studios XDEV

From Japan to the world – a tribute to MARVEL and its fans

PS Blog: How was the title MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls chosen?

Yamanaka: A beam of light flashes between the characters when they’re swapped, and we interpreted that light as a “soul,” which inspired the inclusion of “Fighting Souls” in the title. However, “MARVEL Fighting Souls” alone didn’t capture the Japanese identity we wanted to convey, especially when one of the project’s goals was to deliver something special from Japan to a global audience. That’s why we added the Japanese word “Tōkon,” which means fighting spirit.

With heroes and villains able to join forces, is the game meant to be an epic yet chaotic crossover of MARVEL characters?

Yamanaka: I can’t reveal specifics just yet, but each character has their own detailed lore and backstory. As for why heroes and villains can team up, we’ll have more to share in future updates.

What was most important to you when bringing MARVEL characters into a fighting game?

Yamanaka: We made sure to respect each character by retaining their iconic elements that fans know and love. At the same time, our goal was to showcase our unique Japanese perspective and the Arc System Works identity within the designs. MARVEL Games responded most strongly to Iron Man and Storm. With Storm, I believe we were able to deliver the vision they were hoping to see from Japanese creators.

What did you prioritize in terms of presentation?

Sekine: We gave the character select screen a fresh, distinctive look, drawing on both American comics and Japanese shōnen manga for inspiration. Matches that conclude with a stage transition or a super move are presented in a manga panel style, creating a unique effect unlike anything before.

Spider-Man and Ghost Rider were made playable for the first time. What was the concept behind Spider-Man’s design?

Sekine: Our intention with Spider-Man was to faithfully capture his defining traits while making him truly enjoyable to play. We wanted to make him easy to pick up, reflecting his role as the “friendly neighborhood” hero. We fine-tuned the way he plays, and I wanted to make sure we include Spidey Sense*, which has never appeared in a fighting game before.

*In this game, Spidey Sense allows Spider-Man to evade attacks and throws while automatically striking back.

What about Ghost Rider?

Sekine: Ghost Rider’s standout mechanic is the “Vengeance Gauge,” designed to resemble a tachometer. When the gauge overheats, Ghost Rider becomes vulnerable, but when it hits the red zone, his abilities grow stronger. This system encourages Ghost Rider — typically a long-range fighter — to move in close. Managing the gauge is tricky, but the exhilaration of entering the red zone perfectly captures his fiery spirit.

Reed: That kind of mechanic is exactly what makes Arc System Works stand out. Storm, which you mentioned earlier, also fights in ways we’ve never seen before, which is very exciting.

How has the feedback been from past demos and the closed beta test (CBT)?

Yamanaka: We’ve received a lot of feedback, and I didn’t expect it to be so overwhelmingly positive. Of course, we also received constructive criticism, and we will use that to make meaningful improvements.

Sekine: At EVO, the demo stations were always packed, which spoke volumes about how beloved MARVEL is and showed how well this game is meeting those expectations. The players’ passion is what keeps us going.

Yamanaka: A father stood by as his kids played, their faces glowing with big smiles. As a creator, seeing people enjoy the games I worked on is profoundly rewarding.

Lastly, do you have any words for fans looking forward to the game? Are there other details you’d like them to look for?

Reed: I hope playing this game will become a cherished memory for players. I still remember being deeply moved by fighting games when I was a kid. We’ve poured a lot of love into this project, and with the theme of “from Japan to the world” in mind, we hope to reach fans all over the world.

Yamanaka: We put considerable thought into the role of music in fighting games, so I’d love for players to pay attention to the soundtrack. Listen closely to how the music shifts as the battle unfolds.

Sekine: The CBT proved that battles run smoothly online, and the stage designs are a highlight in their own right. Our aim is to present MARVEL in a new light while also evolving the team-based fighting genre. The game is full of hidden treasures, and we can’t wait for players to discover them.

‘We’re Taking Your Concerns Very Seriously but There Are No Easy Solutions’ — Arrowhead Explains Why the Helldivers 2 Installation Size Is So Big on PC

Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Studios still doesn’t have a solution for the shooter’s groaning installation size on PC — but it is working on it.

In an update posted to Steam earlier today, Arrowhead’s deputy technical director, Brendan Armstrong, penned the first in a series of posts in which the engineering team talks about the “technical health” of the game, as well as the “technical challenges we’re working through.”

Admitting that the installation size “seems to be a hot topic right now” — at 150GB, Helldivers 2 takes up three times the space on PC than it does on console — the developer revealed that one of the reasons the PC size is so much bigger is because of data duplication and mechanical hard drives.

“The main issue with a mechanical HDD is seek time,” Armstrong explained. “An HDD stores data on a spinning platter, and a physical arm with a read head has to move across the platter to find and retrieve data. The time it takes for this arm to ‘seek’ or move to the correct location is a significant performance bottleneck.

“Imagine a large game level with various objects — trees, rocks, buildings, props. If the data for these objects is scattered all over the hard drive, the read head has to physically jump around the disk, which adds a lot of time to the loading process.”

This, the director added, is why Arrowhead deliberately duplicates certain data files like a common tree texture or a sound effect and “place copies of them in physically close proximity to where they would be needed in the game.”

“Much of the data in the PC version of Helldivers 2 is duplicated. The practice of duplicating data to reduce loading times is a game development technique that is primarily used to optimize games for older storage media, particularly mechanical HDDs and optical discs like DVDs,” the director explained. “This practice is largely unnecessary for games deployed on Solid State Drives (SSDs) which is why the console versions of Helldivers 2 do not do this.”

That said, the post admits that with the advent of SSDs — which store data on flash memory chips that have no moving parts — seek time is virtually nonexistent, but as long as mechanical HDDs are part of the minimum spec PC requirements, it has to be included. Steam user surveys are “unable to give us data on mechanical HDD use in the overall gamer population,” but Arrowhead’s “best estimates” put it at around 12% of all PC gamers.

“Until we can more accurately determine the number of mechanical HDDs that Helldivers 2 is installed on, it is difficult to know how many players will be impacted by reducing the amount of data duplication,” the post said. “Even if that number is small, keep in mind that the load time for each player dropping into a mission is determined by the slowest member of the squad.”

While Arrowhead grapples with this issue and tries to get better data on how many of their players use mechanical HDDs, the team said it’s made “some small gains in the next update” by sweeping for unused assets and “obvious problems,” but admits we “will not likely notice them because the new stuff we’ve added will eat those gains.”

In the longer term, the team will make improvements to the engine to ensure the game doesn’t waste RAM loading common data that isn’t needed.

“Beyond that, the remaining work is a bigger, riskier, more speculative project where we apply some kind of compression to the game data and potentially replicate some of the de-duplication we do on consoles,” the post concludes. “We don’t yet know if the impacts to load-times could make these approaches infeasible.

“We’re taking your concerns very seriously but there are no easy solutions. Until we live in a world where we know that most of our PC players are using SSD drives, sacrificing some extra hard drive space is necessary to ensure we’re all able to load into missions in a reasonable amount of time. We’ve clearly reached the limits of how much duplicated data is acceptable so smarter solutions and compromises are now required. We are very carefully weighing up the costs and tradeoffs of the options we have, and we’ll be sure to find a better balance between loading times and installation size soon.”

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 God of War 20th Anniversary DualSense PS5 Controller Is Up for Preorder

Sony has been on a roll lately with custom designed PS5 DualSense controllers. We’ve seen limited-edition controllers with themes based on Ghost of Yotei, Astro Bot, Death Stranding 2, and more. The next one to release is now available to preorder at Amazon. It’s a God of War-themed PS5 controller that’s made to celebrate the series’ 20th anniversary. The God of War 20th Anniversary Limited Edition controller costs $84.99 and will release on October 23, 2025.

God of War 20th Anniversary DualSense PS5 Controller

Get it at Amazon

The design itself is elegantly understated. It’s a white controller, with a jagged red stripe starting on the right trigger and going down the front of the device, past the face buttons and onto the grip. It’s an instantly recognizable design, as the stripe matches the Omega tattoo on Kratos’ face. The white body of the controller also echoes Kratos’ skin, which is white because the Oracle cursed him to wear the ashes of his dead family forever (fun times!).

The face buttons are white, with all-red symbols (circle, triangle, square, and cross), and the D-pad is white with tiny red arrows on each direction. The touchpad is also white. Unlike most other PS5 controller colors, the inside of the grips and the area around the thumbsticks is also white. On the back of it there’s a God of War 20th Anniversary logo.

The original God of War launched in 2005 for PlayStation 2. Since then, our boy Kratos has appeared in a whole lot of games across nearly every piece of PlayStation hardware released in the meantime. He’s killed gods on PS3, PS4, and PS5, as well as the handheld platforms PSP and PS Vita. He’s killed gods in Greek mythology and Norse mythology. No mythology is safe.

Chris Reed is a commerce editor and deals expert for IGN. He also runs IGN’s board game and LEGO coverage. You can follow him on Bluesky.

Peak co-devs Aggro Crab unleash co-op forklifty mayhem with Crashout Crew, which’ll have a demo soon

Ok, so if you’re one of those high-vis types who can be driven up the wall by health and safety code violations, you might want to look away. Crashout Crew, a co-op chaos-generator all about forklifts, has been revealed by Peak co-developers Aggro Crab, with sights set on a 2026 release preceded by a Steam demo this month.

I told you to look away, high-vis types! Why are you already running to management with a written demand that all heavy machinery can’t be drifted around at top speed and slammed into boxes?

The modders behind a Baldur’s Gate 3 custom campaign dubbed Path to Menzoberranzan have put out their first progress update in a few months, having gone silent just after getting their first build working around June. The reason for that quiet spell, according to the group, has been a “wild” summer in which they’ve had to revamp their development pipeline to better fit the scale they’re aiming for with the mod.

They’ve also teased full reveals of three characters who’ll be playing roles in what the Path to Menzoberranzan team have thus far pitched as a custom adventure through some returning locations from previous games in the series to the Drow city that serves as the mod’s namesake.

Few games have given us as many iconic one-liners as NetherRealm’s fighting franchise, Mortal Kombat, but this week we’ve learned that the voice behind one of the most famous — “Toasty!” — is leaving the studio.

Audio director Dan Forden worked at Midway and its successor NetherRealm Studios since 1989, most famously on the Mortal Kombat franchise. It’s his voice we hear cry “Toasty!” in falsetto when we pull off an impressive uppercut. First appearing in 1993’s Mortal Kombat II, Toasty went on to become one of the most recognizable lines of dialogue in all video games.

Now, however, Forden is leaving NetherRealm, writing in a heartfelt message on social media that he was “really proud of what [the studio] accomplished.”

“Wednesday was my last day at NetherRealm. We made a lot of fun stuff over the years. I’m really proud of what we accomplished as well as how much fun we had making that stuff,” Forden wrote on Instagram. “There are so many smart, talented people there — look for more great things to emerge over the next several years. I love the little touches that people left around the studio like this little Toasty homage on the bathroom mirror.

“I wouldn’t have lasted 37 years in the industry if fans weren’t out there playing the games we made. Thanks to all of you for supporting what we’ve done. Live long and… Toasty!”

Asked in the comments why he was leaving now, Forden explained: “I figured I’d been around long enough. Want to reclaim that time for my own interests.”

Forden’s exit comes at an uncertain time for NetherRealm, which is owned by Warner Bros. In May, the studio confirmed what Mortal Kombat 1 fans feared after the launch of the Definitive Edition: no new DLC characters or story chapters would be released for the game.

In August, development chief Ed Boon said Mortal Kombat 1 had sold over 6.2 million copies. Its predecessor, Mortal Kombat 11, became the best-selling game in the franchise by passing Mortal Kombat X’s nearly 11 million units sold worldwide soon after launch. By 2022, Mortal Kombat 11 had sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. Clearly, Mortal Kombat 1 has underperformed compared to previous games in the series.

NetherRealm has said it shifted to “focus to the next project in order to make it as great as we possibly can,” but it has yet to say what it is. Current speculation points to Injustice 3, a continuation of NetherRealm’s DC fighting game series.

As for what else is happening in the Mortal Kombat world? Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection, developed by Digital Eclipse and published by Atari, launches at the end of October. Movie sequel Mortal Kombat II has been delayed from October 24, 2025, to May 15, 2026. It’s thought Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema believe the movie — which stars Karl Urban alongside Adeline Rudolph, Jessica McNamee, Josh Lawson, Ludi Lin, Mehcad Brooks, Tati Gabrielle, Lewis Tan, and more — will perform better at the summer box office given the wild fan response to the trailer.

Image credit: Atari / YouTube.

Borderlands 4’s first major balancing patch is out now, delivering beefy vault hunter buffage across the board

Borderlands 4‘s first round of vault hunter balancing tweaks has arrived, with Gearbox having waited until they’d had a chance to try getting some of the looter shooter‘s technical gremlins under control and observed the state of play balance-wise before whipping out the ol’ nerf/buff cannon.

That approach has meant some arguably overpowered early builds haven’t been coded out of existence as quickly as players might have imagined, with the developers seeming keen to avoid knee-jerk reactions when it comes to vault hunter changes in particular. I assume the fact they’ve had a DLC robo-cowboy to help keep post-happy exec Randy Pitchford occupied has probably helped maintain that lack of sudden and potentially ill-fated moves.

Rock Band 4 is being delisted from both the Xbox and PlayStation digital stores this weekend due to expiring lusic licenses, developer Harmonix has confirmed.

The news was posted across the game’s official Discord channel and its subreddit. The warning has come with just days to act, and arrives on the eve of the game’s 10th anniversary.

“On Sunday, October 5, 2025, Rock Band 4 turns 10,” reads the team’s statement. “What a ride it’s been.”

“With this milestone comes one big change: the original licenses for the core soundtrack are expiring. Because of that, Rock Band 4 will be removed from the PlayStation and Xbox digital stores. If you already own the game, nothing changes — you’ll keep full access and still be able to download the game and songs to any new, compatible devices. The same applies to Downloadable Content (DLC): songs will come down as they hit the 10-year mark, but anything you’ve purchased will remain in your library.

“We’re so grateful for the passion this community has shown. From the team, it’s been a special experience to serve you with Rivals challenges, a super deep DLC library and a best in class band sim. If you’ve been meaning to grab a few last songs, now’s the time.”

As of Sunday, Rock Band 4 and the Rock Band 4 DLC songs that were specifically released on its launch day will no longer be available to purchase. It has been clarified on Discord that DLC tracks from prior Rock Band games (released before Rock Band 4) are not being delisted “yet”, but the team “will be figuring those out over the coming months.”

Rock Band’s unique approach to DLC has resulted in the ability for owners to carry their libraries of songs (plus exports of the tracklists of past Rock Band games) across three generations of console hardware. The approach has seen thousands of pieces of bespoke DLC released for the series since 2007, almost all of which can be played within Rock Band 4.

The last DLC of the Rock Band 4 era was released in January 2024, after eight years of weekly content. The news that the axe is now looming for all Rock Band content, however, marks a sad moment in the history of the 18-year-old series.

Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can track him down on Bluesky @mrlukereilly to ask him things about stuff.

Atlus Rules Out Persona 3 Reload Switch Port

It would have delayed the launch.

Persona 3 Reload is en route to the Switch 2 later this month, and for anyone wondering about the chances of this remake getting a release on the original Switch, it’s probably not going to happen.

If this wasn’t already clear after the Switch 2 announcement in July, the Persona team has now confirmed this in a recent interview with Japanese outlet 4Gamer, while also providing some reasoning behind the decision.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Pokémon GO Celebrates Pokémon Legends: Z-A Release With New Event

The new game launches later this month.

We’ve already been overloaded with a bunch of new games for Switch and Switch 2 in recent weeks, and soon Pokémon will be joining the fun with Pokémon Legends: Z-A.