We interrupt our regular schedule of weaponising hamsters and grizzling about GTA 6 with a word from the world of film – a film being a curious subspecies of video game that plays itself, consists partly of human souls preserved in gelatin and silver halide, and can only be ‘failed’ by skipping the post-credits scene. Whatever will the mad labcoats dream up next?
More specifically, it’s time for an insight from Gore Verbinski, director of the Pirates of the Caribbean films. He thinks the much-gobflapped adoption of Epic’s Unreal Engine by visual effect teams is a blight upon the face of Hollywood. He thinks it’s an insult to the dignity of helicopters. OK, he doesn’t go quite that hard.
Crimson Desert has gone gold, locking in its global release date of March 19, 2026. That’s across PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and Mac.
Developer Pearl Abyss described going gold as a “major development milestone” for the open-world action-adventure game. It thanked fans for their continued support, acknowledging what it called “strong anticipation” that has built up over the course of the last year.
Here’s the official blurb on Crimson Desert:
Set in the vast continent of Pywel, Crimson Desert is an open-world action-adventure game that follows the journey of protagonist Kliff and his Greymane companions. The title has been praised for its realistic, high-fidelity graphics, dynamic combat, and the freedom and interactivity of its open world, delivering a heightened sense of immersion and intensity.
Speaking on the Gaming Interviews YouTube channel, Pearl Abyss’ Will Powers said that describing the size of Crimson Desert’s world in terms of numbers doesn’t do it justice, because doing so fails to capture the scope and scale of the game. But he did go as far as to compare it to two of the biggest open world games around.
“I don’t think numbers really do it justice because, how big is that in terms of scope and scale?” he said. “But what we can say is that the world’s at least twice as big as the open world, the playable area, of Skyrim. It’s larger than the map of Red Dead Redemption 2.”
Powers went on to insist that the size of Crimson Desert’s open world won’t determine its quality. Rather, what you actually do in it is the key factor.
“The continent of Pywel is absolutely massive, but size doesn’t really matter if there’s nothing to do,” he said. “Open-world games are about doing things, having activities, having distractions. So we wanted to create a world that’s not only massive, but is also incredibly interactive.”
Unlike Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption 2, in Crimson Desert you can fly around on a dragon, so despite the size of its world, you’ll be able to get about quickly. And don’t expect RPG elements in terms of decision-making and choice and consequence as it relates to your character, either. The sheer amount of things to do in the world will facilitate the role-playing part of Crimson Desert, which players will form through “head canon.”
“You choose the type of character you want to play as in terms of your progression within the systems in the game,” Powers explained. “And then through head canon you’re having this very different experience than other players because of the scope and scale of the game. You’ll be distracted by something, you’ll go on this quest line, you’ll have an experience that’ll be radically different than someone else, even though they’re playing the same game and the same canonical storyline that you both are going through.”
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.
Last week, EA followed through on plans outlined in 2025 by shutting down the servers of Bioware’s Anthem. Pretty much since the shooter’s fate was set in stone, there’s been the natural chatter about whether it could potentially be kept online or revived down the road in some fashion. At this early stage, there’s been no huge re-emergence, but that doesn’t mean folks aren’t experimenting to see what such a thing might involve.
Developer Headcannon, which perhaps most notably developed Sonic Mania alongside Christian Whitehead and PagodaWest Games, has announced the release date for its new game, Rubato. The experimental 2D title will hit the Switch eShop on 20th March 2026, and there’s a free demo you can check out right now.
It’s not been smooth sailing for Headcannon, however, as the developer recently released a blog post detailing “a rough few years”, stating that all it wants to do is “make some damn games”. It cites “corporate bureaucracy” as one of its headaches, along with personal difficulties and the cost of living.
Hi Pilots, We’re Turtle Juice, a small indie studio based in the interior of Brazil. Being far from the industry hubs has its challenges, but it’s also our advantage; it drives us to innovate, work harder, and prove that great games can come from anywhere. As a tight-knit team of 23 developers we believe we’ve managed to achieve that with our newest game – Mechborn.
Mechborn is a roguelike deckbuilder inspired by classic ’90s mech anime and Greek mythology. Earth and its colonies are under siege by Kaiju, and humanity’s last hope lies with the Mechborn: elite pilots capable of surviving Mech-Synchronization. But there’s more to Mechborn than just the pilots and mech you take into battle. I want to briefly showcase the systems and mechanics that define every run, every decision and every moment of tension you’ll face each run.
Your Mech is your deck
The core idea behind Mechborn is simple: your mech is your deck. Every mech is built from four parts: Head, Torso, Arms, and Legs. With each part adding cards to your starting deck.
This means deckbuilding begins before your first battle. Swapping out a part doesn’t just change stats, it fundamentally changes how your deck plays. On top of that, each mech comes in three distinct models: Original, Spartan, and Olympian – each with its own mechanical identity. Maybe you lean into mobility, heavy offense or focus on equipping a full matching set to gain a powerful HP bonus – the decision is up to you.
A new way to play cards: the conveyor belt
One of the biggest departures from traditional deckbuilders is our Conveyor Belt combat system.
Instead of drawing a hand every turn, you start combat with seven cards laid out in your belt. When you play a card, a new one enters from the left, pushing the rest along. This transforms combat into a game of positioning and timing, not just card value.
Many cards care about where they sit on your belt. Some activate stronger effects when adjacent to specific card types. Others gain power the longer they remain unplayed. Support cards can “charge” upcoming attacks, while defensive tools may need to be positioned several turns in advance to be effective.
The result is a combat system where planning ahead matters just as much as reacting in the moment.
Pilots change everything
Pilots add a second strategic layer on top of your deck. Each pilot comes with four unique skills that charge as you play cards. These aren’t passive bonuses, but rather powerful, active abilities that can completely alter a fight when used at the right moment.
Some pilots specialize in repositioning cards on the Conveyor Belt. Others manipulate costs, freeze enemies in their tracks or turn defensive setups into offensive opportunities. Certain Mech – Pilot combinations unlock playstyles that simply aren’t possible otherwise.
Choosing a pilot isn’t just flavor, it’s a commitment to how you want your run to unfold.
Adaptive exploration: no fixed routes
Outside of combat, we wanted exploration to feel just as flexible and reactive. That’s where Adaptive Exploration comes in.
There are no fixed paths in Mechborn. You can move freely in any direction across each continent, choosing how aggressively you push forward or when to retreat and regroup. Encounters, events, vendors and factions all shift between runs, meaning the same route can play out very differently depending on your decisions.
You might rush to a vendor to upgrade key cards, hunt down an ancient research lab to unlock powerful Infusers or side with a faction to influence how future encounters evolve. Clearing territories zone by zone helps push back the Kaiju advance, but every move costs fuel. Run out and you could find yourself stranded in hostile territory.
Exploration is a constant balance of risk, reward and long-term planning.
Designed for replayability
Every system in Mechborn feeds into replayability. Dynamic maps. Multiple mechs and pilots. Hundreds of cards. Ever-changing encounters. No two runs are meant to feel the same and mastery comes from experimentation, not memorization.
The path ahead
With Mechborn, we want players to experience the thrill of commanding god-forged mechs, experimenting with pilot abilities, and carving their own path through a Kaiju-ravaged world. From deckbuilding to combat, exploration to boss encounters, every run is a new challenge – one that rewards creativity, adaptability and strategic thinking.
Mechborn is coming to PlayStation 5 late 2026. We can’t wait for you to step into the cockpit, craft your ultimate mech-deck and see how far your skills can take you.
IGN can exclusively reveal two new Frozen-themed Disney Lorcana cards from the upcoming Winterspell expansion that have exciting implications for both the lore and gameplay of the TCG, and they are Anna – Soothing Sister and the Do You Want to Build a Snowman? song card.
Disney Lorcana’s Winterspell expansion will be released at local game stores and Disney Stores on February 13 and everywhere else on February 20, and one of the Legendary cards players will be searching for is Frozen’s Anna – Soothing Sister.
To learn more about these cool (we had to do it!) cards, we spoke with members of the Disney Lorcana team.
“Anna – Soothing Sister is the first Disney Lorcana card with a 0 ink shift cost,” Lukas Litzsinger, Winterspell Game Design Lead, said. “This means that you can put together some truly impressive turns where you play another card, or two, from your hand in addition to shifting Anna. She can truly swing the momentum of the game in your favor. But that sort of power does come with a condition: a card has to have left a player’s discard this turn. Thankfully, there are several good options included in Winterspell for this to occur, including on her shift base.
“Her second ability, Warm Heart, likewise has synergy with cards in your discard. This gives players a strong direction when building the deck: not only do you want to have a card leave your discard for her shift ability, but you also want to get characters in your discard with high lore value.”
“In Winterspell, we tell the story of a vine that’s growing out of control and sucking up flood ink,” Jenna Giuffrida, co-lead on narrative design for Winterspell, shared with us. “In an effort to quell its growth, the Illumineers of the realm summon powerful glimmers to help deal with it. One of them, an Elsa glimmer, accidentally freezes the whole realm in her attempt to stop the vine.
“Just as Elsa’s costume demonstrates her role as the powerful force of nature that caused the storm and froze the vine, Anna’s costume reflects the ways she balances her sister. When Elsa is in need of comfort (and thawing out, so to speak), she turns to Anna for empathy and hope, so you can see some of that in the spring theming of her character card.”
As for Do You Want to Build a Snowman?, this song brings together the sisters in a really wonderful way, but it was tough for the team as they really wanted to get it right.
“We get to see both these glimmers come together in Do You Want To Build a Snowman? and really feel the tension in the moment–Anna isn’t as upset with Elsa as perhaps she fears,” Giuffrida said. “We also knew it would be a missed opportunity in this gloriously snowy set not to provide fans with such an iconic and recognizable song card.”
“This was a difficult card for us to get right,” Litzsinger added. “We went through many iterations of what it meant to build a snowman in our game, but the breakthrough came when we took a step back and realized that it wasn’t actually about building a snowman. It was about asking someone else if they wanted to help you build a snowman. This led to a card effect where you ask that question, and also gave us a new template: you get to ask your opponent YES! or NO! and the card does something different depending on their response. We worked closely with Darla Kennerud and our editing team to make this new template happen, and the card is all the more charming for it.”
These cards are only two of the many that fans will soon be able to chase that will continue to build the Lorcana universe even larger, and the Lorcana team has been busy teasing exciting new details about Winterspell and beyond. Alongside these Frozen characters, Winterspell will also feature fan-favorite characters from Pocahontas, Angel from Lilo & Stitch: The Series, and Darkwing Duck.
Furthermore, the two Iconic cards of this set will be Moana – Curious Explorer and Pocahontas – Peacekeeper, and they will both sport a “Papercut Style” that evokes paper snowflake decorations.
Following Winterspell, Glimmers from Toy Story, The Incredibles, and Brave will join the roster in Wilds Unknown when it is released in game stores on the Ravensburger Play Hub on May 8 and everywhere else on May 15.
Lastly, Summer will bring the Attack of the Vine! set, and that will feature glimmers of Monsters, Inc.’s Mike Wazowski and James P. Sullivan.
Providing most of their workings and rationale, Angie also believes Expedition 33 has secured more Players’ Choice awards than anything else — The Last of Part II received 115, Elden Ring 97, Baldur’s Gate III has 89, while Sandfall’s record-breaking JRPG has 125 — but interestingly, when Game of the Year wins are calculated by the percentage of total awards given out during the release year, Clair Obscur takes the bronze. Though it has scooped 70% of all the awards given out this year, Street Fighter II received 80% back in 2005, and 1998’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time did even better at 87%.
Not all award years are equal, of course — the number of awards will depend upon the number of outlets/organizations publishing a Game of the Year winner (Clair Obscur was IGN’s 2025 game of the year), and this list includes awards given not just by gaming press, but also newspapers, radios, podcasts, and more — but it’s nonetheless a testament to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s impact. Hop on over to ResetEra for the full list (thanks, GamesRadar).
While accepting the Game of the Year award at last month’s The Game Awards, Sandfall shadow-dropped new DLC and Patch 1.5.0, which introduces new location Verso’s Drafts and some truly challenging boss fights.
IGN’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 review returned a 9/10. We said: “Wearing its inspirations on its sleeve, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 paints itself into the pantheon of great RPGs with a brilliant combat system and a gripping, harrowing story.” Here’s a Handy Guide for Beginners if you’re looking to give it a try, too.
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.
Luke Ross, creator of the R.E.A.L. VR mods for games such as Elden Ring, Days Gone, and Far Cry, reportedly earns $20,000 a month through Patreon, which acts as a paywall for his work.
Ross extended his VR conversion framework to support Cyberpunk 2077 in February 2022. A few months later, he contacted CD Projekt to ask if the Polish studio was interested in turning the mod into an official port. It declined, Ross told IGN.
Then, on January 9, 2026, Patreon alerted Ross to CD Projekt’s DMCA notice for the removal of the mod, which it had already taken down. “I had absolutely no say in the matter, because as is the norm in these cases (at least for Patreon), the Patreon team had already complied with the request and taken down my mod of their own initiative, making it inaccessible,” Ross said.
Ross then got in touch with CD Projekt to, as he put it, “negotiate a mutually beneficial solution.” CD Projekt then replied to say Ross needed to comply with its terms of service. “No negotiation, no comments on my proposals, no interest for instance in knowing how many of their users would be affected by the sudden removal.”
The situation hit the headlines this week when Jan Rosner, VP, Business Development at CD Projekt Red, tweeted to say the company issued the DMCA strike because Cyberpunk VR was a paid mod, which violates its fan content guidelines.
“We never allow monetization of our IP without our direct permission and/or an agreement in place,” Rosner said. “We were in touch with Luke last week and informed him that he needs to make it free for everyone (with optional donations) or remove it.
“We are big fans of mods to our games — some of the work out there has been nothing short of amazing, including Luke’s mod for Cyberpunk 2077. We’d be happy to see it return as a free release. However, making a profit from our IP, in any form, always requires permission from CD Projekt Red.”
Ross responded to Rosner’s tweet to take issue with his work being characterized as fan content. Rather, Ross insisted, it is independent software and thus does not infringe on CD Projekt’s IP rights.
“I’m sorry but I don’t believe you are within your rights in demanding that my software needs to be free,” Ross said. “It is not ‘derivative work’ or ‘fan content’: it supports a large number of games which were built upon different engines, and it contains absolutely zero code or assets from your IP. Saying that it infringes your IP rights is equivalent to maintaining for example that RivaTuner violates game publishers’ copyrights because it intercepts the images the game is drawing on screen and it processes them in order to overlay its statistics.”
IGN followed up to ask Ross if he has plans to make the Cyberpunk VR mod free, thus complying with CD Projekt’s terms of service. Responding, Ross said that while he wouldn’t rule out doing so, it would be a lot of work.
“I do not rule out releasing the mod free for everyone,” he said. “But it would take time, because my software supports 40+ games and various completely different engines, which makes creating a version that specifically supports only Cyberpunk 2077 a non-trivial task. Also, the people who have voluntarily given their money to me in order to support my development efforts for the framework might not be happy about seeing the mod being given away all of a sudden to everyone just because I’ve been bullied into it.”
At this point, Ross said that making the mod free had become a moot point because people were now pirating it — and publishing abusive comments directed at him.
“Anyway, it’s kind of become a moot point, because following to the unexpected DMCA strike, after the mod was forcibly removed from my Patreon, people afraid of losing VR support for their favorite games have started pirating and illegally exchanging the mod all over the Internet, brazenly saying that since I was not complying with CDPR’s ToS, my work is now fair game and I should be punished by having it stolen. So in a sense CDPR already got what they wanted,” he said.
The following is a snippet of the response to the DMCA strike and Ross’ comments about it.
“Ehhh, without the game the mod is useless. I’m glad some people have found ways to pirate his shitty mods, he deserves it,” one person said on social media.
“I’m currently working on transferring this guy’s mod files to my PC. I’ll look through and do some tweaking, and then I’ll release his VR mod for Cyberpunk for free,” said another.
“What really bugs me is that instead of just releasing it for free and continuing development with donations, which Take-Two already allows and which would almost definitely still bring in the same money from the VR community, he chose to kill the mod entirely once he couldn’t sell it anymore,” added another. “That’s the part I don’t respect. He already made his money, he had options, and he still chose the nuclear one. End result is players lose the only real Cyberpunk VR experience, VR modding takes another hit, and publishers get painted as villains again even though this outcome was kind of obvious.”
The following is a comment posted on Ross’ Patreon page:
“Upon reading more about this case: they gave you a way to keep it alive, and you decided to be a greedy little bish about it so I’m cancelling my Patreon subscription to you and giving all your mods to anyone I know for free from now on (also there’s places online to find all your mods immediately after release for free, I was choosing to pay you, but now you’re being a dickhead so I’ll just steal your mods from now on and tell everyone where to find them).
“You’ve made 20k a month for years, for modding these games — they’re asking you to make ONE OF THEM free — for a game which is largely done updating and would be version locked.
“Really gross by CD Project Red, and by you — shows where your priorities are you greedy little proud man.”
It seems unlikely that CD Projekt will back down here, which leaves Ross with a decision to make: ditch the Cyberpunk 2077 VR mod for good, or release it for free, as CD Projekt requests.
Ross restated to IGN that he is open to finding “creative solutions,” and that his work to make AAA games playable in VR fills a void, but he has yet to confirm plans to release the Cyberpunk 2077 VR mod for free.
“I do not modify the content of the games, or try to sell an experience which is in competition with what the IP creators are producing,” he continued. “To play in VR you always need to own the original game, and the only thing that changes is that the experience is more immersive, visceral and memorable, which can only benefit the IP owners. In the end, when gamers are playing for example Cyberpunk in VR, they are not playing my mod. They are playing Cyberpunk, and loving it. How this could ever hurt the publisher and trigger free-or-kill reactions still baffles me.”
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.
Ah, no, not that one. That, I assume, has been the reaction of folks who’ve gone to pre-order the Marathon reboot on Steam, and immediately been informed that Destiny 2 is sneaking its way back onto their machines. Thankfully, Bungie have now fixed whatever issue was causing the latter to take pre-purchases of the former as a cue to re-install itself.
