Six years ago Nightdive Studios announced they were doing a remaster of sci-fi sequel System Shock 2, which they were calling System Shock 2: Enhanced Edition. But back then they were also busy working on a full-blown remake of the original System Shock. Turns out that first outing to Citadel Station took priority. But now that they’re done with that, the studio has finally revealed a release date for the sequel’s remaster, which they’ve sneakily renamed System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster.
Developer Rock Square Thunder (The Lightbringer) has revealed I Hate This Place, an upcoming open-world survival horror published by Broken Mirror Games, the brand-new horror label from Bloober Team.
Birthed via a partnership with Skybound Entertainment, I Hate This Place will be based on the Eisner award-nominated comic book created by writer Kyle Starks and artist Artyom Topilin. It sees you take on the role of Elena, who “unwittingly awakens a malevolent force” and must work to survive in an increasingly deadly world.
The game released on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S on March 20, and just before 4pm in Canada, Ubisoft took to social media to say it had crossed the 1 million player mark.
“It’s not even 4pm here in Canada and Assassin’s Creed Shadows has already passed 1 million players!” Ubisoft said.
“Thank YOU from the bottom of our hearts for joining this adventure in Feudal Japan. We are beyond excited to start this journey with you!”
While 1 million players on launch day is an impressive achievement, it’s difficult to gauge success when Ubisoft itself hasn’t offered a sales figure or indeed a sales target.
What we do know is that Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the top-selling video game globally on Steam right now. Valve’s chart sorts products by revenue, so we can say Ubisoft’s game is currently bringing in more money than any other on the platform.
We also have early days Steam concurrent figures. According to official stats from Valve’s platform, Assassin’s Creed Shadows hit a peak player concurrent figure of 41,412 on Steam on launch day. Assassin’s Creed Shadows released on a Thursday, so it is expected that that figure will grow as we head into the game’s first weekend on sale. We’ll have a better picture of its performance on Steam next week and in the weeks ahead. Neither Sony nor Microsoft make player numbers public.
For some context, BioWare’s single-player RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard launched on Steam on Thursday, October 31, 2024, and saw a peak of 70,414 players on Valve’s platform.
There is enormous pressure on Assassin’s Creed Shadows to do well for Ubisoft globally after a number of delays and the sales failure of last year’s Star Wars Outlaws. Indeed, Ubisoft has suffered a number of high-profile flops, layoffs, studio closures, and game cancellations in the run up to Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ release.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows has also endured a number of controversies, not least in Japan. Yesterday, IGN confirmed that Ubisoft had quietly released a day-one patch for Assassin’s Creed Shadows that made a number of important changes seemingly in response to concern from some Japanese politicians about in-game temples and shrines.
In a remarkable exchange this week, Japanese politician and member of the House of Councillors of Japan, Hiroyuki Kada, raised the issue of Assassin’s Creed Shadows in an official government meeting, and Shigeru Ishiba, the Prime Minister of Japan, responded.
On Steam at least, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is going down very well with players. It has a ‘very positive’ user review rating, with 82% of the near 4,000 user reviews marked as positive. IGN’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows review returned an 8/10. We said: “By sharpening the edges of its existing systems, Assassin’s Creed Shadows creates one of the best versions of the open-world style it’s been honing for the last decade.”
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
I have recently immersed myself in the pleasantly numb Monster Hunter Wilds loop of smashing Arkvelds to bits. They are, as far as I can tell, the most profitable creature to bully, and I now find myself skinny dipping in the gulf of meaning that lies between the regal, resentful, mildly sassy chains hanging from the creature’s armour set, and the deeply sad and laboured motions with which it swings its bodily inspiration for those chains.
I get the sense that the series’ solution to the uncomfortable implications of its lizard bashing has been, over the last few entries, to evil-fy its creature design to the point where it engenders less easy empathy. There’s a lot of ugly, bugly bastards in Wilds, is what I’m saying. Less deep, sad lizard eyes and more chittering chitin and fuck-you dragon stares. The Arkveld’s design is so threatening that it invites nothing if not: look mate, if four of us manage to take you down with scissors whittled from Original Recipe Chatacabra marrow, it’s your own fault here, ya bish.
Sonic the Hedgehog has been around for a long time now and if you’re having trouble keeping track of all the highlights in his career, don’t worry – Sega’s got you covered with its official timeline. This is all part of the Sonic Channel’s relaunch in Japan, which has now been going strong for 20 years.
Helping more people experience the “power of play”.
The Entertainment Software Association has this week announced a new “cross-industry effort” known as the Accessible Games Initiative and Nintendo of America will be one of the five founding members.
Split Fiction is getting a film adaptation, according to Variety, which reports a package is being put together in response to offers for the movie rights coming in from “multiple top Hollywood studios.”
Variety’s sources stated that Story Kitchen, a media company that specialises in film and TV adaptations of games and other non-traditional properties, is currently assembling the project’s writers, director, and cast into a package deal. The upcoming film adaptation of Hazelight Studios’ previous game, It Takes Two, was handled by the same team. Other Story Kitchen projects (formerly known as dj2 Entertainment) include the Sonic the Hedgehog films and Netflix’s Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft.
I don’t envy the work it takes to keep an annual series like MLB The Show going. There’s so much to do and perilously little time to do it in, whether that’s adding new features, fixing the things people didn’t like, or writing and producing an entire new season of The Negro Leagues. It’s especially hard when all that time and effort often gets distilled down to a single question: is it worth upgrading from last year? Thanks in large part to fundamental changes to the way the Road To The Show and Diamond Dynasty modes work, MLB The Show 25 answers that question with a resounding yes.
The actual Baseball hasn’t changed a lot this year, which I don’t mind, but there are some nice tweaks throughout. For starters, recent changes like two-way players, adjustments to shift rules, and the pitch clock are all fully incorporated at this point. There are some new quick time events that can happen when you are locked into controlling a single player, rather than the whole team, the most notable of which is the new swim move to avoid tags. I was a little nervous that it would make stealing bases too easy, but the prompt only seems to come up occasionally, and is rare enough to feel more like a treat than a clutch. Infielders now have a few different initial reactions that can have a big impact on how quickly they get to a ball, too. This mostly means that poor defenders play more like it now, so the net effect is worse defense, but I think it’s a worthwhile tradeoff that makes great defenders more valuable, particularly in Franchise mode.
There’s also a new ambush hitting feature where you can “cheat” towards inside or outside pitches, making it easier to hit on the side you choose and harder on the side you don’t. I like it in theory, though I’ve ultimately had more success staying neutral, and so I only rarely use it. Hitting overall still feels great, though something seems off about perfect contact. You still get the same satisfying crack of the bat, but it feels like the vast, vast majority of the time it results in a hard hit out or just a single, which is way too little payoff for what should be the best possible hits. Hopefully that gets adjusted over time.
Franchise, where you get to take control of your favorite team and right the wrongs of ownership (like adding a badly needed impact bat to my beloved Mariners), is pretty similar to last year. The custom game entry, which lets you auto-simulate games until high-leverage situations come up and you opt into taking control, remains one of my favorite features. The way you offer free agent contracts has been overhauled this year: You now prioritize a small selection of targets, and you accumulate interest from them as days pass. It does a great job simplifying the free agent process, and I like the strategy around deciding between joining the pursuit of marquee free agents vs rounding out my roster.
The core of The Show 25 remains as solid as ever.
All that is to say the core of The Show 25 remains as solid as ever, focusing on some small but appreciated updates over sweeping overhauls. And while they may not have fundamentally changed, Franchise and March to October both take advantage of new production elements, like player vs player comparisons. The new G.O.A.T. difficulty is as hard as it sounds, too, with fast pitches, aggressive breaks on balls, and a very small Plate Coverage Indicator. I will freely admit it’s much too hard for me, though I expect people who crave punishing challenges will enjoy this one.
Road to the Show
Road To The Show, where you take control of your own custom ballplayer as they lead up to and then eventually enter the Major League, is where you’ll find some of the larger changes year-over-year – and they do a fantastic job of reinvigorating the mode. Unlike previous years, where you participate in the combine before being drafted into the league, now you begin as an amateur all the way back in high school. It’s brief, but playing out the end of senior year and trying to impress scouts and recruiters while you chase a championship is a fun twist. Pinky Rogers, my two-way pitcher and first baseman, dominated the competition and found himself firmly in the crosshairs of two dozen big league clubs and, in another new addition to The Show, college scouts.
This led to a legitimately interesting choice: do I jump straight into pro ball and start working my way up, or do I go to college, time-skip to the end of senior year, and try to become a highly polished, highly drafted blue chip prospect? I opted for the student-athlete route, and accepted the offer to play for TCU, one of the eight real college teams to choose from. The authenticity was impressive, from recreations of each team’s home and away jerseys as I played through the college baseball playoffs to the distinct TINK as metal bats made contact with the ball. Choosing that route meant I arrived at the Minor Leagues with higher stats and could make the jump from AA to AAA much, much faster than in previous years, which is a big improvement from what has historically been a bit of a slog.
The other big change is to how players are upgraded. Previous iterations of The Show had a “use it to improve it” model, sort of like in an Elder Scrolls RPG, where success with specific actions, like hitting against left handed pitchers or throwing strikes with specific pitches, slowly raised those particular attributes. That’s now replaced by a token system, where you get points to allocate. It might sound like a subtle difference, but it massively changes how you develop as a player. Every good at bat, pitch, play in the field, or training session accumulates progress, which makes the pull of playing “just one more game” very difficult to resist. It’s a little tough to justify doing some of the longer or tougher training minigames, like the Inter-Squad game, when you can just as easily make progress doing simple ladder drills, but it’s a worthwhile tradeoff that has made Road To The Show hard for me to put down.
Storyline
One of the marquee features of The Show is the Negro League storyline, which returns for its third season. It remains one of the most impressive modes in any sports game, combining a mini documentary featurette about Negro League stars like “Cool Papa” Bell or Caleb “Turkey” Stearns with playable moments from their careers. It’s once again anchored with stories from Bob Kendrick, the magnetic president of the Negro League museum, and continues to stand out as an excellent overlap of history and gameplay.
That said, new stories aside, this mode is functionality identical to the previous two iterations, which puts it in a bit of an odd place. I praised the debut of the Negro League in my MLB The Show 23 review, but the lack of advancement over the last few years is disappointing. It’s still a mix of excellent vignettes and basic gameplay challenges (separated by long loading times), but the challenges themselves are often just to get some hits or strike a few people out, which is the same as the gameplay moments from Diamond Dynasty. I know they can do more unique and interesting things, like when your entire defense sat around you when you pitched as Satchel Paige in The Negro League season 1, and the fact that they don’t do that a lot more feels like a missed opportunity to make the gameplay side of this mode stand out.
The other piece that sticks out is the notable absence of an expansive storyline focused on an individual player like we had with Derek Jeter in The Show 24. That extensive look into The Captain wasn’t perfect, but the branching paths and rewards seemed like the next evolution of the Storylines model. It felt like we were just scratching the surface of what Storylines could be, especially when there is no shortage of incredible stories from the last century of baseball history, so The Show 25 not running with that momentum is a tough pill to swallow.
Diamond Dynasty
Diamond Dynasty, the live service corner of The Show where you gather players via card collecting to form your baseball team, is back with a few excellent changes of its own. First, Sets and Seasons, where cards were only usable during a specific timeframe before being retired in most modes, is officially over, and I am so glad for that. Some great cards are rewarded for grinding through multi-faceted programs, and it never seemed worth putting in the work for players that were going to be forced to the bench eventually. Now if you go through the effort to get the top tier Roger Clemens card from his program, for example, you get to keep it, earn XP to upgrade it, and let your favorites be cornerstones of your team. It’s a very, very good change.
The other big update is the inclusion of a new single-player mode called Diamond Quest, which is sort of like a roguelite-inspired board game. It sounds strange, but it’s honestly a pretty fun way to play. You roll a die each turn, and every space you cross can hide a gameplay challenge, a reward of some kind, or nothing at all. The objective is to get to the Stadium (or Stadiums), and win a three-inning game there with your squad. If you win, you get to keep the rewards you accumulated and get a chance at a high level card dropping. It’s fun, very replayable since the contents of the tiles are randomized, and pretty generous with its rewards. I particularly appreciate that you get to choose your difficulty for the Stadium games. Sometimes it’s nice to just take the easy win, while other times it’s worth the risk of losing what you picked up by aiming for a harder challenge, since that increases your odds of getting the best drops at the end.
In Remedy’s Control spin-off FBC: Firebreak, trios of gadget-toting humans from the Federal Bureau of Control descend to the shapeshifting halls of the Oldest House, fighting eldritch Hiss invaders and possessed objects such as swarming Post-It notes. Where Control cast you as the FBC’s newly appointed director, equipped with executive perks such as telekinesis, the folks who make up the Firebreak initiative are regular office shmucks brandishing comparatively straightforward guns and bludgeoning implements. They’re here years after Control’s denouement to do some clean-up, with the Oldest House still under lockdown while the FBC seek a proper, lasting solution to the Hiss menace.
