With Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian now off doing their own thing and making multiple games that aren’t Baldur’s Gate 4, BG IP owners Wizards of the Coast have just revealed something that might help fill that void. They’ve agreed to a publishing deal that’ll see relatively new studio Giant Skull create a new game set in the D&D universe.
Fallout: London might have launched buggier than a holiday at a nature reserve dedicated to cockroaches and coders, but since that point Team FOLON’s put a lot of effort into making sure people can enjoy the pretty damn good game it’s created. While you’ll have to wait a bit longer for some Londony DLC, you can now play some of the mod in VR.
Hard to believe it’s already June. But a new month means a new batch of PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, Switch 2(!), PC, and even VR games is heading our way. This month sees the release of the next iteration of Nintendo’s incredibly popular hardware, plus a bunch of games (and ports) for launch. And if you’re not into the new hybrid console, you can pick up Death Stranding 2: On the Beach for PS5, plus a bunch of other games. Read on to see release dates for all the biggest games and expansions coming out in May and beyond. Let’s have a look.
If you’re someone who likes to preorder your games, you can click the links on the platform of your choice to make sure it arrives on launch day.
The big release in June is obviously the Nintendo Switch 2, the Mario company’s first new hardware in seven years. It’s getting a new Mario Kart installment at launch, plus a ton of ports of big games like Cyberpunk, Hitman, Hogwarts, and more. Anyone not planning on spending $450+ on a new console this month can pick up a new Five Nights at Freddy’s, a new Death Stranding, and more.
For more release date fun, check out our ongoing list of 4K UHD and Blu-ray release dates.
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.
Survive together, kids.
Konami and Unity are teaming up to bring Survival Kids back as a Switch 2 launch title on 5th June 2025. But besides the trailer during the Nintendo Switch 2-focused Direct back in April, we haven’t heard much else about the game.
However, in an interview with Stephen Totilo over at Game File (paid), the game’s producer — Andy Dennison at Unity Games — has revealed that you’ll be able to play this co-op adventure with two other friends via GameShare locally at 30fps. Yep. No need to buy multiple copies of the game.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
This Sunday, June 8, it’s time for another huge double feature. The Xbox Games Showcase 2025 kicks off at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern / 6pm UK, immediately followed by The Outer Worlds 2 Direct – a deep-dive into the upcoming sequel to Obsidian Entertainment’s award-winning sci-fi RPG.
These shows are always an exciting moment for all of us at Xbox, offering a look at brand-new games and updates from across our first-party studios and our incredible partners across the globe. We hope you can join us to watch live. With that in mind, here are all the details you need to know ahead of Sunday:
What time does Xbox Games Showcase begin? The Showcase will take place on Sunday, June 8, beginning at:
What time does The Outer Worlds 2 Direct begin? Immediately following the Xbox Games Showcase.
How do I watch the Xbox Games Showcase and The Outer Worlds 2 Direct? The Xbox Games Showcase and The Outer Worlds 2 Direct will be streamed live on official channels, including the below:
We’re giving you even more ways to watch this year’s Xbox Games Showcase by streaming the entire event live on TikTok starting at 1 PM EDT / 10 AM PDT / 6PM BST on June 8. Ethan Rothamel returns to lead the livestream with his signature mix of sharp Xbox insight and fan-favorite commentary. This year, he’s joined by TikTok creator Senpapi Gabe, whose passion for video games and community driven commentary has made him a standout voice on the platform. The duo will guide viewers through every reveal, surprise and moment as it happens – all in real time.
The show will also be streamed simultaneously on regional Xbox and Bethesda channels around the globe, as well as on Steam. It will also air on China’s Bilibili platform.
Please note the /Xbox, /Bethesda and /ObsidianEnt streams on YouTube will be in 4K at 60fps, while all other channels will be 1080p / 60fps.
Is the event available in languages other than English? The Xbox Games Showcase and The Outer Worlds 2 Direct will be streamed live on YouTube.com/Xbox with English captions, and our other live languages will be available via regional Xbox channels.
The languages we will support live on our Xbox channels are: English, Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Castilian Spanish, Mexican Spanish and Turkish. Following the broadcast, we will add additional languages including Afrikaans, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Canadian French, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Malay, Norwegian, Persian (Farsi), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. The easiest way to find your preferred language is to go to your region’s Xbox page, or by viewing on the official Xbox YouTube channel at YouTube.com/Xbox and clicking the gear icon in the lower right corner.
Is Xbox Games Showcase and The Outer Worlds 2 Direct going to be Accessible to those with low/no hearing or low/no vision? There will be a version of the show with Audio Descriptions (AD) in English on the Xbox YouTube channel, American Sign Language (ASL) on Xbox’s YouTube channel and the /XboxASL Twitch channel, and British Sign Language (BSL) on Xbox On’s YouTube channel at YouTube.com/XboxOn.
I’m not going to be able to watch, where can I find out what was announced? As the broadcast runs, we’ll be publishing detailed blog posts for key announcements right here on Xbox Wire (with localized versions in Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, LATAM Spanish, and Japanese to follow).
A full show recap will be published on Xbox Wire immediately following the end of Xbox Games Showcase, and a separate recap for The Outer Worlds 2 Direct will go live after the double feature ends. Plus, stay tuned to Xbox Wire in the days following the show for more exclusive articles about games from the show.
Will Xbox be releasing post-show content? Starting from Sunday, June 8, the Official Xbox Podcast will be airing a series of special episodes offering updates and deeper dives into announcements featured during Xbox Games Showcase. These shows will be published on Xbox’s YouTube channel and podcast services. Stay tuned for more exciting post-show content on the Xbox YouTube channel and our social media platforms, where we’ll dive-deep into some of your favorite games.
Notes for co-streamers and creators: We at Xbox greatly appreciate any co-stream efforts and aim to ensure you have a smooth experience if you choose to do so. However, due to forces beyond our control, we cannot guarantee that glitches or disruptions by bots and other automated software won’t interfere with your co-stream.
For those planning to create full post-show breakdowns of the Xbox Games Showcase and/or The Outer Worlds 2 Direct in the form of video-on-demand coverage, we recommend you do not use any audio containing copyrighted music to avoid any action by automated bots, and to also consult the terms of service for your service provider.
We can’t wait for you to join us for the Xbox Games Showcase, followed by The Outer Worlds 2 Direct on Sunday, June 8.
The post How to Watch the Xbox Games Showcase and The Outer Worlds 2 Direct on Sunday appeared first on Xbox Wire.
Last month, we went to the heavens, hell, and everything in between. Which game spoke to you the most? Some of the big new releases included Doom: The Dark Ages, Elden Ring Nightreign, F1 25, and The Midnight Walk.
How does it work? At the end of every month, PlayStation Blog will open a poll where you can vote for the best new game released that month. After the polls close we will tally your votes, and announce the winner on our social channels and PlayStation.Blog.
What is the voting criteria? That’s up to you! If you were only able to recommend one new release to a friend that month, which would it be? Note: re-released games don’t qualify, but remakes do. We define remakes as ambitious, larger-scale rebuilds such as Resident Evil 4 (2023) and Final Fantasy VII Remake.
How are nominees decided? The PlayStation Blog editorial team will gather a list of that month’s most noteworthy releases and use it to seed the poll.
Reports that modders unlocked a secret multiplayer mode in Stellar Blade aren’t quite as they seem, claims the player who first posted a split-screen gameplay video that’s going viral across social media.
While overnight reports popped up that Stellar Blade developer Shift Up had built a defunct multiplayer mode directly into the game, the modder who discovered it and shared a two-player gameplay clip of Stellar Blade in Discord has insisted this is not the case.
“I woke up to everyone posting clips that I shared in a Discord completely out of context, I avoided tweeting these for a reason,” PhantomSomnus wrote on X/Twitter. PhantomSomnus then explained that “split-screen mode is built into Unreal Engine, [Stellar Blade developer] Shift Up did not create it.”
That’s how PhantomSomnus managed to load a second Eve into their game. The split-screen multiplayer in the video was not developed by Shift Up, it was made by PhantomSomnus using Unreal Engine’s native local multiplayer support. “The reason why I set up split-screen was to see if I could get any of it to work, but as you can see I failed,” PhantomSomnus explained in a post on Reddit.
O modder @phantomSomnus encontrou nos arquivos de Stellar Blade referências a multiplayer.
E neste vídeo, com uma 2ª Eve spawnada, a tela surpresamente se divide em duas, como se o jogo estivesse preparado para um modo co-op local (dois controles)#StellarBlade #StellarBladePC https://t.co/QIeiu5lKSI pic.twitter.com/rp7oudcnV2— Stellar Blade Brasil (@StellarBladeBR) June 1, 2025
“There ARE signs of multiplayer in the game,” PhantomSomnus said, “but they’re online only.” A previous post of theirs includes a screenshot depicting what they found when digging around the demo’s backend. The “old scrapped/unused multiplayer PVP mode,” as Somnus calls it, no longer works, but they did discover “some menus left over.”
Does this mean be any kind of multiplayer update or mod in the future for Stellar Blade? “Very unlikely,” PhantomSomnus said.
The PC version of Stellar Blade launches via Steam on June 11 along with a raft of PC-specific features, including AI upscaling via Nvidia DLSS 4 and AMD FSR 3, an unlocked framerate, Japanese and Chinese voiceover, ultrawide display support, higher resolution environment textures, and DualSense support for haptic feedback and trigger effects. It was originally region locked in 100+ countries, but is now available to pre-order on PC in “over 250 regions.”
IGN’s Stellar Blade review returned a 7/10. We said: “Stellar Blade is great in all of the most important ways for an action game, but dull characters, a lackluster story, and several frustrating elements of its RPG mechanics prevent it from soaring along with the best of the genre.”
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.
Elden Ring Nightreign‘s latest patch, version 1.01.1, makes the co-op RPG somewhat easier for single player Nightreigners. It boosts the number of runes awarded for Nightreign solo expeditions, and gives you one free automatic revive per boss battle. A great day indeed for people who wish the game’s multiplayer were still more in-game covenant than feature.
By strange coincidence, the odds that I will actually play Nightreign have now gone up 1.011 times. I was pretty disenchanted by Nic’s review, in which he summarised the game’s Extended Fromverse battle royale bum-rushing as “a stripped-off part of FromSoft’s creative identity with little appeal absent the whole”. If they can significantly decrease the reliance on jolly cooperation I’ll be much more interested – I had similar feelings about Helldivers 2 – though this still feels like a game I’m comfortable skipping.
FromSoftware has released Elden Ring Nightreign patch 1.01.1, the game’s first since launch, and with it made single-player mode a lot easier.
Update 1.01.1, available now across PC via Steam, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X and S, adds the effect “Automatic Revival Upon Defeat,” which allows revival once per night boss battle to solo expeditions, and increases the amount of runes gained for solo expeditions.
That will come as some relief to players who had found solo mode a brutal experience. As explained in IGN’s Elden Ring Nightreign review: “Let’s get the most important caveat out of the way first: if you are hoping to tackle Nightreign entirely solo, and are anything less than a hardcore Elden Ring player that actively seeks out ways to make that already difficult game even more challenging, Nightreign isn’t for you. Yes, there is technically a single-player option, but it is so poorly balanced that I would be shocked if it isn’t patched and adjusted within the first month of release. And this is coming from someone who lives and breathes these types of games.”
Elsewhere, the update increases the number of high-rarity Relics that can be obtained as a reward when reaching Day 3 during Expeditions, and increases the probability of obtaining high-rarity Relics from Scenic Flat stones purchased at the Small Jar Bazaar. The patch notes, published by Bandai Namco, are in full below.
Over the weekend, FromSoftware acknowledged matchmaking issues on Elden Ring Nightreign, and offered suggestions to players affected. There had already been some negative reaction, mostly due to Nightreign’s lack of duos co-op, lack of voice chat, and other archaic mechanics. That age-old multiplayer struggle to find enough friends to make up a coordinated three-player group is very much a part of the Elden Ring Nightreign experience, too.
Last week, producer Yasuhiro Kitao took to social media to comment on Elden Ring Nightreign’s early sales success (2 million units in its first day). “Nightreign has some peculiar aspects to its game design and is different from our recent titles in various ways,” Kitao said. “Nonetheless, many of you have bravely jumped into this world, and for that we’re immensely grateful.
“As with Demon’s Souls or Sekiro, it may be confounding at first, but just like those games, Nightreign offers its own challenges and experiences. Once you overcome the initial hurdle, it’ll surely provide a sense of accomplishment that’s also its very own.
“We hope you enjoy it.”
We’ve got plenty of Nightreign tips and tricks to help you take down all the eight Nightlord Bosses, and if you’re wondering how to unlock the two locked Nightfarer Classes, check out How to Unlock the Revenant and How to Unlock the Duchess, plus How to Change Characters.
The version number of this update shown at the lower right corner of the Title Screen will be as follows:
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.
Ubisoft’s unannounced but widely-expected Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag remake has been referenced again, this time by a collectible statue maker.
PureArts, which makes figurines and busts of countless video game characters, recently held a livestream showing off a range of new Assassin’s Creed merchandise.
Here, PureArts representatives strongly hinted that the remake would surface in the not-too-distant future, and noted that “there is something going on.”
During the livestream, Assassin’s Creed fans noted the absence of Black Flag hero Edward Kenway from PureArts’ latest range, prompting a presenter to acknowledge the situation and state that the company was holding off launching a new version of Edward Kenway right now for a specific reason (thanks, Insider Gaming).
“Assassin’s Creed fans out there, you should be aware there is something going on with Edward,” the presenter stated.
“Has that been announced?” their co-presenter asked.
“I think so,” the presenter confirmed. (It has not.) “I’m pretty sure I saw rumours about it,” they continued. “No I definitely saw an article about this. So I mean, if you’re not a true Assassin’s Creed fan it’s not my fault… There’s going to be something going on with Edward and our PVC 1/8th scale Edward statue will reflect that accordingly. Am I saying that well?”
Something big is definitely happening regarding the Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Remake. 🏴☠️🔥
The people at Pure Arts unveiled a new collection of figures, but the EDWARD one was missing. 🧐
When asked, they said this: 🗣💬
Via @TheRAFITI69#AssassinsCreed #Ubisoft pic.twitter.com/RloVJfWAd5
— Zephryss⛩️ (@TheRealZephryss) March 29, 2025
While Ubisoft is yet to confirm its Black Flag remake officially, multiple reports charting the game’s development have surfaced over the past couple of years. The project is allegedly being worked on by Skull and Bones studio Ubisoft Singapore (remember that Skull and Bones itself started life as a Black Flag spin-off), and will ultimately offer more than just a simple remaster.
Indeed, fans expect the game to boast all of the visual fidelity found in the recent Assassin’s Creed Shadows, as well as expanded wildlife and combat systems.
The suggestion by PureArts that its new Edward statue would “reflect” Black Flag’s launch also suggests the fan-favorite character might get something of a new look. IGN has contacted Ubisoft for more.
With no all-new Assassin’s Creed game set for the end of this year, fans believe the Black Flag remake would be well positioned to arrive in time for the holidays.
In the meantime, Assassin’s Creed Shadows is set to continue its first year of post-launch content with the arrival of its first major expansion, Claws of Awaji, likely due this September.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
