Fans of Star Wars: Unlimited have reason to celebrate this week as Amazon rolls out a series of discounts across multiple sets in the fast-growing trading card game. Not every expansion has boosters or bundles that have gotten the price-cut treatment, but for those looking to stock up on boosters or grab a starter kit, there are some standout Star Wars deals worth jumping on before they vanish.

For example, the Twilight of the Republic Booster Display Box, featuring 24 packs steeped in Clone Wars-era drama, has seen one of the biggest drops, plunging 52% down to just $57.98 (was $119.76). Each pack contains 16 cards, including guaranteed rares, a leader, and a base/token card, making it a prime choice for competitive deck builders or collectors chasing those foil highlights.

For those after something a little more beginner-friendly, the Twilight of the Republic Two-Player Starter Set has dipped to $27.54 (was $34.99), complete with two fully built decks, playmats, counters, and a quickstart rulebook.

If the Outer Rim calls louder than Coruscant, the Shadows of the Galaxy Two-Player Starter Set (headlined by The Mandalorian and Moff Gideon) is now $25.36 (down from $34.99), offering the same ready-to-play convenience with exclusive cards you won’t find in boosters. Single Shadows of the Galaxy booster packs are also available for $8.95 (was $10.99), perfect for topping off a deck with Mandalorian-era firepower.

The deals don’t stop there because the Legends of the Force set, only released last month and packed with Jedi, Sith, and iconic Force-users from across the saga, has had its own 24-pack display box dropped down to $88.00, a 27% cut from its original $119.76 price tag.

There’s also Legends of the Force’s Prerelease Box on sale, including six boosters and exclusive promos for $29.95 instead of $38.95.

Spark of Rebellion is on sale, too, though the 24-pack display box is still sitting at over $105 (although better than its original $119.76 price). Altogether, though, the current markdowns on Twilight of the Republic, Shadows of the Galaxy, and Legends of the Force make for a good case to anyone looking to expand their collection without paying full retail.

Since this sale’s dropped, some other items in the Star Wars: Unlimited range have sold out already, so it seems to be only a matter of time before stock sells out and any replenishments are put back at their original MSRP. If you’ve been holding off on building your next Star Wars: Unlimited deck, this looks to be the perfect time to drop some Galactic Credits.

Ben Williams – IGN freelance contributor with over 10 years of experience covering gaming, tech, film, TV, and anime. Follow him on Twitter/X @BenLevelTen.

2025 has already been a productive year for Phasmophobia maker Kinetic Games, not least because though it’s only August, we’ve already seen a major overhaul of the in-game journal, the release of the (terrifying) reworked Bleasedale Farmhouse, and now a revamp for the fan-favorite Grafton Farmhouse map has just gone live.

As we dive into the final half of the year — and get ever closer to spooky season — we sat down for a chat with art director Corey J. Dixon to talk about what’s new, when Phasmophobia will finally feel finished, the possibility of Phasmophobia 2, and what it’s like working with Blumhouse Films on a movie adaptation.

IGN: Tell us about the reworked maps. Why rework them at all?

Corey J. Dixon: [Creator] Dan [Knight] wanted Phas[mophobia] to be the best thing it could be. And with the amount of asset packs that he had to use to create the game, there was a feeling of it not being his own thing. The design and the game and everything else inside of it was his baby — and it was successful because of that — but anyone could recreate Tanglewood. They just needed to buy the asset. So Dan was like: ‘I want to make this the best puzzle horror game I can. Let’s rework the maps.’

I joined Kinetic Games about nine months after Phas came out, so it’s just over four years now. Back then, there were only three of us. It was me, Dan, Ben [Lavender], and I was doing all the art myself. My first job was slowly replacing all the art assets, [and] we’re still going four years later. But there’s a lot more people now.

IGN: Why was Grafton next on the list to get a revamp?

Corey J. Dixon: We do what we feel is best for players. Asylum was the most repetitive map. It was absolutely huge before. I’d had chats with Dan where he’s like, ‘Oh yeah, it took me so long, like I was just copy-pasting rooms because I’d made it so big,’ and it just wasn’t that enjoyable to make. That was the first target — we felt that that was the most repetitive, and could have the biggest uplift.

So we did that one first, and then the farmhouses. There are two farmhouse maps, but they were almost identical. We had so many players who couldn’t even tell the difference between Bleasdale and Grafton because they were the same asset pack. So we had the conversation, and I suggested that we should really spread them apart. Let’s make one of them this kind of ornate, mansion-y, bigger map, and then take the other one in the opposite direction. Let’s ruin it, destroy loads of it — give it that abandoned ghosthunting experience that a lot of people do in real life. I think it’s worked — they feel completely different now.

IGN: Do you have plans to rework anything else?

Corey J. Dixon: Earlier this year, we announced we would be doing Tanglewood, and that’s a fan-favorite map. Everyone absolutely loves Tanglewood. So we’ll have to make sure we maintain a balance of, you know, giving it a fresh coat of paint, but not changing too much, because we know how much players absolutely adore it. But I’m pretty sure we’ll find that balance.

IGN: How do you manage demand from players who want smaller maps with those who want much bigger ones?

Corey J. Dixon: It’s a combination of things, the first mainly being the community. We’ve got statistics on what maps people play. We know that people play small maps, and we hear people talk about small maps all the time. That’s a massive factor. We want to update and add things that players want to play. We understand there is a community of players that do like the larger maps, but the bigger the map, the longer it takes to make or redo. So, for us, if we’re going to do, for example, three maps in a year, and if we [chose] a large map, that might mean we only get to do one or maybe two a year. So players are missing out because we’re doing something that takes much longer.

It’s kind of weighing up what the benefit is for the community versus how long it takes. We would like to rework all of the base game maps eventually — it’s just how long that takes, and in what order.

IGN: Have you ever considered expanding beyond four-player co-op?

Corey J. Dixon: A lot of the community have asked for that, especially on the big maps! Yeah, more players means you’ll find the ghost and identify it quicker. But it’s not really something we’re looking into. The whole game is locked in around four players. And it’s a 10-year project. Now, for Dan, he’s [already] worked on the game that long, and the code base is kind of locked in, there’s a lot of linking, intertwining systems, and it all kind of works together. So even if we wanted to do that, it would be an absolutely huge project.

IGN: You’ve also recently revealed that the next new map coming to Phasmo is Nell’s Diner. Tell us about it.

Corey J. Dixon: We planned for a new, small map this year and, again, looked at the community. People suggest things all the time. We have a massive list that has all of the things the community has suggested, so we reference that and see what we think, what we think would work or not.

We need to make sure that small maps make sense, because the way that the game plays, you’re restricted in what kind of maps you can do. A lot of people have suggested a theater or an amusement park, and while those would be absolutely amazing art tasks — they’d be so fun to make, gameplay-wise — they’d be really difficult. Massive open spaces mean you don’t have ghost rooms, and you need to have things on the floor or things for the ghost to interact with. So a diner just kind of made sense. You can split it up into these nice little chunks — you’ve got the dining area, the counter, the kitchen, the staff areas at the back, and then some toilets. It’s a perfect little, small map.

It’s also a familiar thing. People love the house maps because they play Phas in a familiar environment, which is just a house that doesn’t look creepy or abandoned. They stop playing [for the night] and walk around their house at night and go, ‘Oh my God. This is so similar. This is my house, and I’m scared of looking around at night.’ And a diner is very familiar for a lot of people.

The theming is super unique. We’ve never done a retro American style or really embraced the culture of it all. Shout out to the art team!

IGN: Is that because you have a bigger team now? One of the criticisms we see is about the pace of development, which has felt sluggish at times.

Corey J. Dixon: Oh, yeah. Definitely. If you compare our updates this year to last year — I think last year was just the console update, and then we did [new map] Point Hope. This year, we’ve already done the Bleasdale update. Grafton. The Chronicle update — which was a huge shake-up of the gameplay — came out a couple of months ago, and we’re still on track with our roadmap. We did Easter, we’ve got the Halloween holiday, and then Nell’s Diner as well.

IGN: You recently said the diner was a chance to use a little environmental storytelling, too?

Corey J. Dixon: We’re trying to push that as much as possible. Phas doesn’t have a story, per se, but even back when I did the asylum map, I tried to add a bit of storytelling there about, like, maybe there’s an origin story there for one of the ghosts, or maybe it’s just a crazed lunatic.

We’re trying to let players think about what happened here without being too hand-holding. We’ve dropped these little bits and pieces around, and people absolutely love it. We did some stuff in Bleasdale that even referenced Grafton. [Our community] absolutely loves it. So we’re just trying to push that Phas is not just a ghost-hunting game with these environments that look pretty but don’t mean anything. It’s a living, breathing world. We’ve got a lore update coming at some point that’s just going to push the storytelling in the game as far as we can.

IGN: Does this mean we’re closer to a 1.0 release? Phasmophobia’s been in early access since its 2020 debut.

Corey J. Dixon: We definitely have plans for 1.0, probably in line with our Horror 2.0 update [slated for 2026] is where we feel the game is feature-complete. It doesn’t mean we’ll stop working on it — we still want map reworks and new maps and stuff in the future, so there’ll be more stuff for the game. But I think once the Horror 2.0 has been redone, which is the next thing we work on after the [2025’s] Player Update, the game will feel finished. Once that’s in, I think it will be in a good spot.

It’s really difficult to know [when it may be finished]. Our community is constantly putting out, ‘Oh, it should have this!’ so we can look at that and just keep doing it! We’d love to work on it until we’re really happy with it. We haven’t set a date or an update that’s like: we’re done. I think we’ll just know: there’ll be that company-wide feeling that this project is done now, we’ve made it the best it can be, which is what Dan wanted Day One. I think we’ll know when we hit that milestone — I don’t think we can plan for that.

IGN: How do you keep the horror sequences fresh (and scary) for veteran players while keeping the gameplay loop simple enough for new ghosthunters?

Corey J. Dixon: We just try and maintain a balance. Like with the Chronicle update, we wanted to make it make sense. Before, something would be dropped on the floor, and you take a photo and go to the person you’re selling them to, and say: ‘I promised the ghost threw this! It wasn’t me!’ So that was the main goal of the update: let’s make the evidence system make sense, right?

People come up with crazy ideas, and some of them are great. Going back to the first anniversary, and we did a mini update where we redid the journal, because that was a big pain point for players. And people were posting designs on Reddit. It meant that when we came to do it, we had tons of reference, and we knew what players wanted feature-wise, and we just had to make it kind of look pretty, and we haven’t touched it since. The community’s great, it’s almost like you don’t need anyone [on the development team] with a brain now. We could just be developers that don’t have any thought, and we just follow the Reddit thread and just churn out stuff, because there’s so many good ideas on there!

When we got to the gameplay design of the Chronicle Update, it was just about maintaining that interest for new players, but having it complicated enough so that experienced players would enjoy it as well. With the unique and duplicate system, you can go in and take whatever photos, videos, and sounds you want, and not worry about the unique and duplicates, and you’ll still get a pretty good payout.

But veteran players with thousands of hours [in the game] — they know every nook and cranny. They can kind of curate their own really difficult game mode in custom difficulty, and they can go for a perfect investigation, and they can make each game the hardest they want it to be, and then end up with these huge payouts. The custom update is kind of ‘play your way.’ We noticed so many people were making their own little challenges, and we were like, let’s just put it in the game. Let’s just spend the time and put it in. We did a few updates to get the rewards right, but now it’s super solid. It’s rewarding when it needs to be, and it’s less rewarding when it doesn’t. I’m really happy with how that turned out.

IGN: Given how much Phasmophobia has changed since its launch half a decade ago, have you ever considered starting from scratch with a sequel?

Corey J. Dixon: I wouldn’t write it off. It would be a fun challenge to see if we could do another one. There are a lot of things that I know we would change as a company if we went into Phas fresh. There’s definitely things we would all probably say, ‘Oh, let’s not do that!’ Or ‘that would be awesome. We should do that instead.’ So, yeah, you never know. It’s definitely not off the cards.

IGN: What about a Nintendo Switch 2 version?

Corey J. Dixon: We want what’s best for the game, and if the opportunity arises, we’d love to. But there’s no news or anything I can share.

IGN: Before we go — the Blumhouse movie adaptation. How can Phasmophobia’s genre-defining gameplay translate to a movie?

Corey J. Dixon: We’ve got a really good partnership with Blumhouse. It’s brilliant. It will be a Phasmophobia film, it won’t just be a ghost hunting film — we’re going to make sure it’s a film that fans want to watch, and we’re going to work with them really closely. They’re really willing to work with us, and, obviously, we want to work with them. So yeah, we’ve got a really good partnership, and I think fans are going to love it when it comes.

Phasmophobia’s Grafton Farmhouse reworked map is now live across all platforms, including PC via Steam, PS5, PS VR2, and Xbox Series X and S.

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.

Monster Hunter Wilds’ crucial update 1.021 goes live tomorrow, August 13, and ahead of that Capcom has released early patch notes alongside a message to the community apologizing for the state of the game.

Director Yuya Tokuda confirmed update 1.021 expands the endgame, adds 9★ Monsters and Talismans, and makes improvements to weapon balance, quality of life changes, and optimizations.

Of particular interest to PC players will be Capcom’s effort to improve “stability.” Monster Hunter Wilds has a ‘mixed’ user review rating on Steam for all reviews, but recent reviews are ‘mostly negative.’

Despite reviewing well initially, Monster Hunter Wilds’ endgame content is sorely lacking compared to past games, so the many fans who play Monster Hunter over time, with friends, are struggling. It’s also suffering from severe performance issues on PC that have yet to be fully resolved. Despite new content and seasons, fans remain unsatisfied with the state of the game, to the point where some are taking things too far and apparently harassing and threatening individual Capcom team members over it.

Last month, Capcom said it would release the endgame content expansion much sooner than expected after Monster Hunter Wilds experienced “soft sales.”

Tokuda began his message to the community by apologizing for the time it’s taking to make improvements to the game, but insisted Capcom is committed to the cause. To that end, Title Update 3 is scheduled for release at the end of September, and Title Update 4 is due out this winter. “For our fourth title update this winter, on top of new monsters, we are also considering additional weapon-related end-game features,” Capcom said.

Developer Remedy believes the release of its first self-published game and Control spin-off, FBC: Firebreak, “succeeded technically,” but acknowledged it “underperformed” on Steam, admitting that “commercially, we were unsatisfied.”

In a statement to investors, the studio reiterated Firebreak topped 1 million players. However, the majority of those players were on console — via PS Plus and Xbox Game Pass subscription — even though PC was “planned as the primary consumer sales channel.”

“The game’s initial onboarding experience and mission structure resulted in high early player drop-offs and an influx of negative reviews,” the financial statement said. “As players spent more time in the game and we released updates improving the game, sentiment in reviews turned more positive.

“Commercially, we were unsatisfied with the launch-phase consumer sales of FBC: Firebreak. Thus far, FBC: Firebreak’s commercial performance has largely been driven by the Xbox and PlayStation subscription service agreements. A considerable portion of the revenues from these agreements will still be recognized throughout the contract period.”

Remedy promised big changes last month. The pledge came after Remedy posted a candid statement shortly after Firebreak’s launch, acknowledging “not everything had gone well.”

The studio did, however, note that FBC: Firebreak was designed to evolves over time, and believes it’s a solid game “despite the rocky launch.” A larger “Major Update” scheduled for late September will be the next key step for FBC: Firebreak, which Remedy “expects to drive interest in the title.” It said it remains “committed to continuing to work on FBC: Firebreak, engaging with the community, and expanding the game.”

In its financial results for the first half of 2025 and the second quarter, Remedy reported a revenue boost during both periods, following increases in game sales and royalties. The quarter once again operated at a loss — although at $580,000, this was not as sharp as last year’s $3.7 million loss — and across the first six months of the year, revenue was up 43.4% to $35.1 million.

As for other games? The studio confirmed Control 2′s development is “on track” and meeting milestones as the focus is now on “gameplay, environments, and missions.” The Max Payne 1 & 2 remake project remains in full production as “collaboration with Rockstar Games remains close and productive.”

“FBC: Firebreak is a compelling co-op shooter that, despite its good looks, doesn’t have the depth to keep things interesting long-term,” we wrote in IGN’s FBC: Firebreak review, awarding it 6/10.

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.