With the truly shocking confirmation that, alongside the new console, Nintendo is busy assembling a follow-up entry to the best-selling game on Switch, it’s got us thinking about what we really want from a new Mario Kart.
In all honesty, we’ve been thinking about this for years, arguably since before we knew that Mario Kart 8 would be getting a Deluxe reprieve and assumed the new hotness on Switch would be totally new. Don’t get us wrong — Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is an astonishing product, and we’re huge fans of the enormous Booster Course Pass DLC, but we’ve been playing the same game in some form for over a decade now and we’re jonesing for a fresh take.
No Man’s Sky Worlds Part II Update Brings New Planets, Life and Stories to Discover
Sean Murray, Founder, Hello Games
Summary
Worlds Part II introduces billions of new stars and planets to No Man’s Sky, each teeming with new life to discover.
New gameplay, missions and lore tie up loose ends from long-unanswered narrative strands.
Worlds Part II arrives on Xbox and Xbox Game Pass today, and is free for existing players.
Today, I’m super proud to announce that Worlds Part II is coming No Man’s Sky today, is free to download for all existing Xbox and Game Pass players today, and is one of the biggest updates we’ve ever released.
Across the universe we’ve introduced billions of new star systems, home to trillions of wholly new planets have been generated with new terrain technology. Enormous and foreboding Gas Giant planets can be seen for the first time, ten times bigger than our biggest planet, providing dramatic new environments to explore.
Innovative water technology has enabled us to spawn all-new water planets with new biomes and oceans that are kilometres deep. Deep sea gameplay has been introduced, and there’s a huge variety of new life to be discovered in the depths.
Water now responds to players as they travel through them and ripples and foams as spaceships skirt above them. Water surfaces are now more realistic and reflect the ever-changing cloud systems above and the glorious expanse of the night skies.
A new lightning system makes the seas and oceans look so different with new caustics, light shafts and the deeper you explore the darker it gets. In fact, every element of our lighting has been rewritten. Even on dry land, shadows show more details, light flickers through leaves, caves are dark and immersive
New terrain technology enables the creation of huge mountain ranges and deep canyons never possible before. All this technology combines to create that feeling of wonder in an infinite universe as you gaze up at a mountain peak miles above you, or stared down into the abyss of a dizzyingly cavernous gorge.
Every planet is different and no one has seen it before you, not even us, for us that’s what makes No Man’s Sky unique and why the emotions of exploring our universe just hit differently.
As the team continues work on our next big game, Light No Fire, we learn new things, develop new tech and can’t resist sharing that with our No Man’s Sky players.
To accompany all this new technology and variety, there’s a whole host of new gameplay, lore and missions to dig into. There is a mission strand which explores the mystery of the Gas Giants and links up some narrative threads which have been left teasingly unanswered for a long time.
There’s a new expedition which is like a guided tour through the best of what Worlds Part II has to offer, with a generous suite of rewards including a new starship which is part living ship, and part jet fighter!
To celebrate the release of Worlds Part II, we’re running another Twitch Drops campaign from Thursday 30th January to Monday 3rd February. Tune in to your favourite No Man’s Sky streamers on Twitch to unlock exclusive ships, multi-tools, pets and more just by watching them play.
Worlds Part II takes the No Man’s Sky universe to a whole new level. It is way beyond what I ever thought possible when we first sat down to code our crazy little universe. Nine years later and this update is another step in the journey of this game that we truly love.
No Man’s Sky comes complete with all 29 major updates up to and including Worlds Part I.
Inspired by the adventure and imagination that we love from classic science-fiction, No Man’s Sky presents you with a galaxy to explore, filled with unique planets and lifeforms, and constant danger and action.
In No Man’s Sky, every star is the light of a distant sun, each orbited by planets filled with life, and you can go to any of them you choose. Fly smoothly from deep space to planetary surfaces, with no loading screens, and no limits. In this infinite procedurally generated universe, you’ll discover places and creatures that no other players have seen before – and perhaps never will again.
Embark on an epic voyage
At the centre of the galaxy lies a irresistible pulse which draws you on a journey towards it to learn the true nature of the cosmos. But, facing hostile creatures and fierce pirates, you’ll know that death comes at a cost, and survival will be down to the choices you make over how you upgrade your ship, your weapon and suit.
Find your own destiny
Your voyage through No Man’s Sky is up to you. Will you be a fighter, preying on the weak and taking their riches, or taking out pirates for their bounties? Power is yours if you upgrade your ship for speed and weaponry.
Or a trader? Find rich resources on forgotten worlds and exploit them for the highest prices. Invest in more cargo space and you’ll reap huge rewards.
Or perhaps an explorer? Go beyond the known frontier and discover places and things that no one has ever seen before. Upgrade your engines to jump ever farther, and strengthen your suit for survival in toxic environments that would kill the unwary.
Share your journey
The galaxy is a living, breathing place. Trade convoys travel between stars, factions vie for territory, pirates hunt the unwary, and the police are ever watching. Every other player lives in the same galaxy, and you can choose to share your discoveries with them on a map that spans known space. Perhaps you will see the results of their actions as well as your own…
Hey everyone, we’re just one day away from bringing the latest epic chapter in the Marvel’s Spider-Man franchise to PC, where you’ll battle as Spider-Men, Peter Parker and Miles Morales, against a rogue’s gallery of iconic Marvel Super Villains, including the monstrous Venom and the ruthless Kraven the Hunter.
With the game launching soon, I’m excited to share more about the awesome new PC-enhanced features the team at Nixxes has been working on.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, created by Insomniac in collaboration with Marvel, is a technological and graphical showcase utilizing tools like ray-tracing to bring the city of Marvel’s New York to life. On PC, you’ll encounter a variety of new ray-tracing options with individual quality settings to finetune performance and fidelity across a broad range of hardware configurations.
Ray-traced reflections quickly catch your eye in the skyscraper-filled city of Marvel’s New York as you swing along its many glass surfaces. Meanwhile, we’re offering ray-traced interiors, shadows, and ambient occlusion options that add an additional layer of believability with realistic shadows and increased depth to the game.
If you have a high-performance PC with Super Hero-tier hardware, you can take advantage of our increased raytracing geometry detail setting. This enables the use of higher quality meshes for raytracing, resulting in more detailed and realistic reflections. You can also use the raytracing object range slider to increase the range at which objects are considered for raytracing. Furthermore, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on PC includes NVIDIA DLSS Ray Reconstruction1, which improves raytracing quality on supported hardware. Let me introduce you to Menno Bil, Graphics Programmer at Nixxes, to tell you more about this feature:
“NVIDIA DLSS Ray Reconstruction aims to achieve more detailed raytracing features by combining two separate temporal processes in a frame: denoising of the raytracing features and upscaling of the entire frame. By combining these steps, ray reconstruction keeps more useful information over multiple frames to add small details in raytracing effects that can otherwise be lost.
In Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on PC with ray reconstruction enabled, we see more detailed ray-traced reflections and better-defined ray-traced shadows, especially when viewing raytracing effects at steep angles. We also see improvements in the ray-traced interiors and less ghosting and noise in the ray-traced ambient occlusion.
We’ve included two models of NVIDIA’s Ray Reconstruction, the original model introduced in DLSS 3.5, and a newly improved model designed for RTX 40 series GPUs and newer. This new model results in an overall more temporally stable image, further improving the visual quality of raytracing.”
– Menno Bil, Graphics Programmer, Nixxes
Players with ultra-wide monitors can enjoy full support for ultra-wide aspect ratios such as 21:9, 32:9 and even 48:9 when using triple monitor setups. Our team of engineers and artists worked hard on ensuring all cinematics in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 are adapted to be fully viewable in aspect ratios up to 32:9.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on PC also supports various performance-enhancing technologies, including NVIDIA DLSS 3 and AMD FSR 3.1 upscaling and frame generation.* Intel XeSS upscaling is also supported.1
With options like raytracing and ultra-wide support, we want to give players the chance to make full use of their high-end PC gaming rigs. However, at Nixxes we also take pride in making PC games scale down to prior generation hardware. To cater to this, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on PC offers a wide range of graphics settings and presets, including options without ray-tracing, like dynamic resolution scaling. Check out an overview of the recommended specifications for a variety of graphics presets below.
Minimum
Recommended
High
High Ray Tracing
Very High Ray Tracing
Ultimate Ray Tracing
Avg. Performance
720P @ 30 FPS
1080P @ 60 FPS
1440P @ 60 FPS
1440p @ 60 FPS
1440p @ 60 FPS
4K @ 60 FPS
Graphics Presets
Very Low
Medium
High
High Ray Tracing High
High Ray Tracing Very High
Very High Ray Tracing Ultimate
GPU
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 AMD Radeon RX 5700
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 AMD Radeon RX 6800
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
CPU
Intel Core i3-8100 AMD Ryzen 3 3100
Intel Core i5-8400 AMD Ryzen 5 3600
Intel Core i5-11400 AMD Ryzen 5 5600
Intel Core i5-11600K AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
Intel Core i7-12700K AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
Intel Core i9-12900K AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
RAM
16 GB
16 GB
16 GB
16 GB
16 GB
32 GB
OS
Windows 10/11 64-bit (version 1909 or higher)
Windows 10/11 64-bit (version 1909 or higher)
Windows 10/11 64-bit (version 1909 or higher)
Windows 10/11 64-bit (version 1909 or higher)
Windows 10/11 64-bit (version 1909 or higher)
Windows 10/11 64-bit (version 1909 or higher)
SSD Storage
140 GB
140 GB
140 GB
140 GB
140 GB
140 GB
Two editions of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 will be available when it launches on PC on January 30, including the Standard Edition and Digital Deluxe Edition (DDE). Players will also have the option to upgrade to the DDE content if they already own the Standard Edition.
Download the image
Upon purchase, the previously announced Pre-Purchase offer will be made available to all players as PC Purchase Perks. This includes:
Arachknight Suit early unlock for Peter with three color variants
Shadow-Spider Suit early unlock for Miles with three color variants
Web Grabber gadget early unlock
+3 Skill Points
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Players will receive two early unlock suits: the Spider-Man 2099 Black Suit and the Miles Morales 2099 Suit, plus additional benefits like trophies and friend management if they opt to connect to a PlayStation Network account. A PlayStation Network account is optional to play Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on PC.
Download the image
Our friends at Insomniac are also excited to collaborate with NetEase Games and Marvel Games to bring Peter Parker’s Advanced Suit 2.0 from Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 to Marvel Rivals. To celebrate Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’s upcoming PC release, Marvel Rivals players can purchase this suit in-game starting 6PM PST on January 29. Check out the Advanced Suit 2.0 in action.
Nixxes and Insomniac, along with our partners at PlayStation and collaborators at Marvel Games, are excited for everyone to experience Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on PC!
While supplies last, Gamestop is offering the excellent Super Mario RPG remake for Nintendo Switch for only $24.99. Pro members can get it even cheaper at $22.49. You can get free shipping on orders over $79 or choose in-store pickup, otherwise pay a $6.99 shipping fee. This game is a brand new and sealed physical copy so you can sell or trade it off when you’re done with it.
Note that this is part of a greater Gamestop Sale Event that’s discounting other games at the lowest prices we’ve seen, like Dragon Age: Veilguard for only $24.99.
Super Mario RPG for $24.99
Super Mario RPG is a remake of the 1996 SNES classic. It was one of the best games to grace the console back then amidst a sea of other incredible titles, and Nintendo did a great job of staying faithful to the game’s charm and fun factor. A whole slew of improvements have been implemented to bring this game up to modern day standards, including updated visuals, music, gameplay mechanics, and several small yet welcome quality-of-life UI improvements.
In our Super Mario RPG review, Tom Marks wrote that “Super Mario RPG is considered a classic for a reason, and this wonderfully faithful remake makes it easy for anyone who missed it in the SNES era to see why. It’s unabashedly odd, reveling in the unexpected with writing that constantly had me bursting out laughing at jokes I’d heard a dozen times before. Its turn-based combat is fairly simple outside of its very clever boss fights, but it’s also ultra satisfying to keep your timing string going even when you’re plowing through pushovers. And while the updated graphics are equal parts pretty and sort of unambitious when it comes to interpreting the original’s style (with some unfortunate menu lag), the new takes on its excellent music are truly exceptional. Super Mario RPG already held up pretty well if you didn’t mind a bit of dust on its different systems, but now there’s no excuse not to see why Mario’s most unexpected adventure is still so beloved.”
Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn’t hunting for deals for other people at work, he’s hunting for deals for himself during his free time.
You’ll have to bear with me for this one, because the press release we received for Demeo X Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked contains about an 86/14 split between scrambled hypeguff and actual tangible information. In brief, it’s a VR collaboration between D&D traffickers Wizards Of The Coast and Demeo studio Resolution Games that aims to simulate a tactical co-op tabletop experience without any of the boring bits, like seeing your mates’ genuine reactions to things or having your frigid digitised soul warmed at the hearth of human kinship. Here is – in a sense of the word so loose I fear imminent smiting by a bellicose scribe god for typing it – a trailer:
2025 has already kicked off with a few different video game sales at various retailers, and as we make our way into February, the discounts just keep dropping. GameStop currently has a selection of games on sale for Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch that are down to just $24.99, including Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Super Mario RPG, Starfield, and more.
Below you can see some of our favorite picks from this sale, but to see the full list of available discounted options head to GameStop’s sale page here.
Select Games on Sale for $25 at GameStop
If you want to check out even more game deals but have a preferred platform you play on, it’s worth having a look through our individual roundups of the best PlayStation deals, the best Xbox deals, and the best Nintendo Switch deals. In each of these we’ve highlighted some of the best game deals we’ve come across for each console alongside discounts on hardware and accessories.
If you’d prefer to have an overall look at the best discounts from each platform, check out our roundup of the best video game deals. And if you’re curious when the next big sale event is to save even more on games, have a look at our breakdown of the best times to buy video games. There, we’ve explained some of the biggest sale events of the year for games so you can plan ahead.
Another great place to look for gaming discounts is in our Daily Deals roundup, which features excellent discounts on the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster Collection and Sonic X Shadow Generations. It’s not just for gaming deals, though. Daily Deals also highlights discounts that have caught our eye across tech, physical media, and more, so you can see our favorite deals of the moment in one convenient roundup.
Hannah Hoolihan is a freelancer who writes with the guides and commerce teams here at IGN.
If you have been holding off picking up last year’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind until a boxed edition punched its way into view, you’re in luck! Today, Digital Eclipse has announced just that, with a Standard and Deluxe edition available to pre-order right now.
According to the publisher’s announcement on BlueSky, both boxed copies are set to release on 30th May and can currently be found on the Atari website.
Hello! Today we are releasing one of our biggest updates for No Man’s Sky. We can’t wait for you to see what we’ve been working on.
Last year, we released No Man’s Sky Worlds Part I (5.0) for PS4, PS5, and PS VR2 players, and it was one of our most successful to date. We’ve been planning the changes in Worlds Part II for a long time, and the wait is finally over.
One of the biggest reasons people play No Man’s Sky is for that sense of adventure and discovery, that feeling of flying to a planet, and landing to explore, knowing no one has ever been there before. With Worlds Part II, we added billions of new star systems and trillions of new planets to the universe. This allows us to push the boundaries of our engine and technology without changing the things people love about the game already. If you settled on your home planet with a beautiful base that you lovingly crafted, that is safe – but now there are new worlds to explore with a level of variety no one has seen before.
Going to these new systems travelers will notice new terrain, new biomes, new flora, and new fauna. There’s a new terrain system that I’ve been working on for a while now. There are huge mountains to climb, oceans that are kilometers deep to discover, and caverns and canyons at a scale that wasn’t possible before.
In these systems you may even find enormous Gas Giants. These huge worlds can be ten times bigger than any other planet you have explored previously. Gas Giants and deep oceans both require high-level technology to explore. Gas storms, deep sea pressure, and anomalies bring new hazards and challenges to No Man’s Sky.
Water gameplay has much added depth too, including improvements to our submarine, The Nautilus, as well as improvements to fishing and deep sea diving systems. New ocean tech allows water to react physically to the world around it. Dimples appear when it rains and wake appears as ships fly over the surface, and creatures and players can wade through creating waves.
Our lighting system has been completely rewritten. Shadows show more details, sunlight and ambient occlusion are sharper, and sunlight sparkling through leaves and metals looks crisp and beautiful. Starry night skies and wispy clouds reflect in the water of lakes and oceans.
A lot of this new technology comes from learnings and hard work on our next big fantasy game, Light No Fire, which is keeping our small team incredibly busy.
As well as new solar systems and new technology Worlds Part II brings a lot of new adventures. This update introduces a large strand of new quests and lore connecting up some of the storylines and mysteries we have been building to for a long time. Those who relish unearthing the collective knowledge of the No Man’s Sky universe have a lot to dig into.
There is also a whole new expedition to accompany this major update which deliberately serves as a guided tour to some of the best new additions to Worlds Part II. The rewards for completing this awe-inspiring journey are really special too. Not least is a brand new spacecraft which is a cross between a living ship and a jet fighter. It’s pretty wild!
The Worlds Part II update is a signal to the PlayStation community that 2025 is going to be a very exciting year for No Man’s Sky. Whether you play on PS5, PS4, or PS VR2, there’s a lot to look forward to from this tiny but still energised team. We’re so thrilled to be able to keep working on this game we all love so much.
Games Workshop has brought missing-in-action Warhammer 40,000 animation Astartes 2 back from the dead with an incredible teaser trailer that has wowed fans of the hobby. However, there’s a catch: nothing in the teaser will be in the new animation.
Astartes 2 is Games Workshop’s follow-up to the fan-made original Astartes animation, created by Syama Pedersen. It is widely accepted as the greatest Warhammer 40,000 animation ever made, official or unofficial, only perhaps bettered by Amazon’s recently released and excellent Space Marine 2 animation for the Secret Level anthology series.
But fans hadn’t heard a peep out of Games Workshop on Astartes 2 for years, leading some to wonder whether the company had quietly cancelled it. Fast forward to today, January 29, and the surprise reveal of the teaser trailer, which is a feast for Warhammer 40,000 fans.
It’s not even February yet and the Ws for 2025 won’t stop coming! Astartes is back, Brothers! pic.twitter.com/sYhu5LjwiC
The teaser suggests an animation on a scale never-before-seen from Warhammer 40,000 at this quality level, with melee combat, shooting, vehicle combat, and even spaceship battles all showcased. We see a number of different Space Marine chapters in battle across varied environments, and multiple enemy races, including Tyranids, Orks, and Tau.
It certainly hypes up Astartes 2, but it turns out nothing in the teaser will be in the animation itself when it finally launches in 2026 exclusively on Games Workshop’s subscription-only Warhammer+ streamer. According to a post on the Warhammer Community website:
“This teaser trailer is not actually clips from the new animation, instead showing a compilation of shots that represent the former lives of the characters that will appear in the show. There’s a pretty unsubtle hint at the end as to the nature of the final story… We’ll leave you to speculate and start putting the pieces together yourselves.”
So, while the teaser is certainly cool, that’s all it really is for now. We still haven’t seen anything of Astartes 2, and the lack of a disclaimer on the trailer probably won’t do it any favors in the long term. A fan who catches this teaser would reasonably expect what it shows to appear in Astartes 2; most won’t see the Warhammer Community post.
Still, it’s hard not to get excited as a fan and speculate about what it all means. It looks like the characters in the trailer end up in an Inquisition-led Deathwatch Terminator squad, based on the final image. But that’s about all I’ve managed to glean from it so far.
Meanwhile, I’ve already seen Space Marine 2 fans look jealously upon the Astartes 2 teaser and hope for some or all of it to make its way across to the game. Capes are an early shout. Saber is continuing to update the game, so perhaps it’s time for the developers to take some inspiration from Astartes once again.
Image credit: Games Workshop.
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.
Has any genus of graphics card been as dramatically storied as the GeForce XX80s? The RTX 3080 was a thing of beauty, only to be tarnished by the worst wheeler-dealing spree (and crypto mining misappropriation) in PC component history. Then the RTX 4080 rocked up with its laughable £1269 / $1199 price tag, a miscalculation so severe that the RTX 4080 Super looked good – despite hardly being any faster – simply for not repeating it. For the new RTX 5080’s sake, you almost want it to be boring.
It isn’t. But then, neither is it a blood-boiler like the RTX 4080, nor a largely aspirational show-off piece like the RTX 5090. By maintaining the 4080 Super’s course correction on price while tooling up on compelling DLSS 4 improvements, the RTX 5080 is an agreeable GPU from the off. Particularly, if you’ve got the 4K monitor to take full advantage of it.
