Nintendo will be making an appearance at this year’s Gamescom, and it looks like the company’s full line-up of games has been revealed (thanks, Games Wirtschaft). It’s a doozy, folks.
Battlefield 6 developer DICE has said it’s working on a “substantial” increase in server capacity for the Battlefield 6 Open Beta, after the early access launch was met with huge Steam concurrents and equally huge queues.
At time of this article’s publication, the Battlefield 6 open beta had over 300,000 concurrent players on Steam alone, making it the third most-played game on Valve’s platform behind only Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2. We don’t have concurrent player figures from Sony or Microsoft, so the open beta’s true concurrent figure will be much higher.
But not all those players are actually playing. Those with early access were met with huge queues (we’ve seen 250,000 in screenshots posted to social media) as the servers hit max capacity. In response, DICE issued a statement to say it was working to improve matters:
“The team is now working on a substantial increase in server capacity, which will reduce your time in the queue,” DICE said. “Thank you for your continued patience as we work to get as many of you into the game as soon as possible.
“We’re looking forward to seeing you experience Battlefield 6, and we appreciate your patience!”
That statement followed a message in which DICE explained why it was using queues in the first place.
“We will use queues to protect the player experience but expect this impact to be minimal,” DICE insisted.
“You may encounter this during high peak moments, such as the start of servers going live. The team is working constantly to reduce any queue that takes place.”
Holy sh*t 🤣 More than 270.000 players are waiting in server queue!
The suggestion here is that the open beta is peaking now as the early access kicks off, but the queues will ease. Given the open beta has gone live in early access form ahead of the U.S. waking up, it seems likely the player count will grow in the coming hours, and again when the open beta goes live for all this weekend.
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.
Some dataminers digging into Elden Ring Nightreign‘s files following the arrival of its Duos update claim to have uncovered some details about an endless mode.
As reported by PC Gamer, said new mode is allegedly called ‘Deep of Night’, and will see you grouped with similarly skiller nighfarers to fight your way up through the ranks of a new rating system that players reckon could work similarly to Armored Core 6’s rankings.
If you’re trying to play the Battlefield 6 Open Beta on PC, you might have run into a problem: ‘Secure Boot is not enabled.’
You are not alone. PC gamers hoping to play DICE’s latest now open beta early access is live have no choice but to enable Secure Boot on their PC. And a cursory glance at social media, subreddits and IGN’s own comments suggest some are having trouble with it.
To be clear, EA has published a user guide for how to enable Secure Boot on PC, and promoted that guide across social media. It’s a guide I myself had to use to boot the Battlefield 6 Open Beta. But it certainly requires a degree of confidence, as it involves tinkering with a part of a computer not all PC gamers will be instantly familiar with: the BIOS.
There are things like TPM 2.0 (which must be turned on) to deal with, and you need to make sure your Windows disk is GPT and not MBR (not everyone will know what these are). All this before you can even enable Secure Boot — and then you may not be able to enable it anyway, which then means you need to refer to your manufacturer for guidance (gulp!).
Yes, this won’t be a problem for more experienced PC gamers, but it will be an intimidating process for many others. And if you think this is something isolated to Battlefield 6, you’d be wrong. Just yesterday, Activision announced the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will require the exact same thing: Secure Boot enabled.
So, what’s all this in aid of? Strengthening game security using built-in Windows PC features. It’s no secret that cheating in competitive multiplayer games is a huge problem for publishers. Activision has spent millions trying to reverse the narrative for Call of Duty. EA will be mindful of Battlefield 6 getting overrun at launch. It seems TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot are the new reality for PC gamers.
Here’s Activision’s explanation, from a blog post published yesterday:
TPM 2.0 (Trusted Platform Module) is an industry-standard, hardware-based security feature built onto CPUs or motherboards that verifies the PC’s boot process has not been tampered with. Secure Boot makes sure a PC can only load trusted software when Windows starts.
When Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 releases later this year, TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot will be required to play on PC. “These hardware-level protections are a key part of our anti-cheat efforts, and we’re asking all players to get compliant now,” Activision warned.
Back to Battlefield 6, and the open beta Secure Boot process has certainly caused some people to panic, and others to find themselves with additional problems they didn’t have before. Early indications suggest there’s huge interest in the Battlefield 6 open beta, so it will be interesting to see how this one develops over the course of the weekend.
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.
Alongside EVO 2025 this weekend, Capcom announced it would be releasing a free title update for the Capcom Fighting Collection 2 next week on 7th August 2025.
It will add multiple quality of life upgrades, new artwork, remix tracks from Cap-JAMS, and four characters to Street Fighter Alpha 3 UPPER including Maki, Yun, Eagle, and Ingrid. Below are the games included in this collection. They all support online play and rollback netcode.
Pokémon Legends: Z-A is easily one of the most anticipated Switch (and Switch 2) releases of this year, and although trainers will have to wait until October to get their hands on it, it seems there will be a few ways to sample the new entry before then.
In case you missed it, there’s apparently going to be a “playable” public demo of the Switch 2 Edition. It will be available next week at the Pokémon World Championships 2025 – taking place in Anaheim, California between 15th – 17th August, 2025.
Grow a Garden has quickly become one of the biggest games of 2025. The Roblox farming simulator first launched back in March and has seen rapid success thanks to various updates and events since then. The overwhelming interest in this Roblox game has shown no signs of slowing down, and the latest cooking-themed event has only fueled it further.
Now that the game has entered further into the mainstream, we’re already starting to see unofficial merch become available. A third-party seller on Amazon called VatanFari has a variety of Grow a Garden plushies for sale based on the pets from the game. The product pages for these plushies claim to be “drawing inspiration” from the Grow a Garden universe.
Grow a Garden Plushies at Amazon
There are a ton of pets available in Grow a Garden, but only a select few are available in plushie form so far. There’s the more traditional animals like a Chicken and a Racoon as well as rarer options such as the Disco Bee. Despite the lack of choices, however, the Chicken Zombie that was part of a limited-time giveaway is included here as well.
All of the Grow a Garden-inspired plushies are available in a 10-inch size and cost around $18. The exception is the Chicken Zombie one that sits at 12-inches thanks to the little jockey. It’s also quite a bit more expensive at $30.
As far as I can tell, there isn’t any “official” merch yet available for Grow a Garden. For now third-party sellers on sites like Amazon or Etsy appear to be ramping up offerings as the latest Roblox sensation continues to take root.
Is VatanFari a trustworthy seller?
One of the dangers of buying from third-party sellers on Amazon is that the products might not end up being of the highest quality. That being said, VatanFari appears to have a decent track record of reviews on some of its other offerings. And plushies are a pretty low-risk item to order from Amazon. All of the options available from this brand offer Amazon’s 30-day refund/replacement window that you can take advantage of.
I don’t think I’ve ever messed around with a game’s settings menu as much as The House of the Dead 2: Remake. And, unfortunately, try as I might, I could never get the game to feel ‘good’. Much like its predecessor on the Switch, Forever Entertainment’s latest arcade revamp is limited to just two control schemes: analogue stick and gyro. Neither is an ideal way to play.
But let’s start with the positives. This is a remarkably faithful remake of the 1998 original, maintaining everything that makes the experience so memorable — including wacky boss battles and god-awful voice acting — while providing an extensive overhaul of the visuals. It’s a blast watching zombies’ limbs and guts go flying with each successful shot, and the way the enemy design has been revamped feels both fresh and respectful at the same time.
More than four years after it’s release, Guilty Gear Strive is still going strong, with perhaps its most prolific DLC character yet, Lucy from Cyberpunk, releasing on August 21 as the final part of Character Pass 4. But that’s not the only exciting thing going on in the world of Guilty Gear. During the finals of Strive at Evo, there was a trailer announcing a mysterious new chapter called Guilty Gear Strive 2.00, with two silhouhettes of characters that clearly indicate that longtime favorites Robo-Ky and Jam Kuradoberi are going to be making their way into Strive’s ever growing roster.
To get some details on Strive’s future, I caught up with Ken Miyauchi at the show so I could pick his brain on all of these points and more.
So at finals for EVO 2025, you guys revealed Guilty Gear Strive 2.00. Can you tell us a little bit about what’s going to be in that version?
Ken Miyauchi, Producer on Guilty Gear Strive: Yes, we just announced a teaser trailer of something showing the version 2.00. We are not really particularly explaining what’s in 2.00, but there’s a reason behind why we show the number 2.00. We want to provide new, more exciting content toward Guilty Gear Strive and I’m expecting to show more details in the near future.
We also saw two silhouettes of characters that are going to be coming to Guilty Gear Strive 2.00. It seems like it’s going to be Jam and Robo-Ky. Can you talk a little bit about those two characters?
Miyauchi: So yeah, we are showing that we are still working on developing more additional characters. Of course, Lucy is coming out in August 21st, but we are still continuing developing more character updates and those are going to be the two characters that we are currently working on. So please stay tuned.
What can you tell us about Lucy and what her play style is going to be? Obviously she uses strings from Cyberpunk, but can you give us a little taste of what she is going to be like in Strive?
Miyauchi: Yeah, I think people are watching the trailers and trying to find out what she’s doing and one of the biggest core mechanics that a lot of players might be very excited to see is her Quickhack move, which is really directly inspired from the Cyberpunk 2077 game mechanic. So we made it visually look very like the Cyberpunk 2077 Quickhack. And she has very, very unique moves that go along with that Quickhack. So the way she fights is going to be very unique, even compared to the entire Guilty Gear Strive cast. So yeah, I hope everyone enjoys her when she’s out.
Another thing that’s coming to Guilty Gear Strive is going to be the ranked mode. What can you tell us about how the ranked mode will be in Guilty Gear Strive and how it’s going to be different from the regular tower format?
Miyauchi: So yeah, I explained this in our own website column, Developer’s Backyard. So if you want to find out more details about the rules of how you earn points and how you get ranks and what kind of variety of ranks you have, you can check that out. And so it’s pretty much a regular standard rank match system that we’ve been also doing, and I think all other fighting games were also doing. We have battle points that you climb up together whenever you win a match and depending on your battle points, you will have higher ranks, and you get to the top, which is the rank called Vanquisher. You’ll get into a rating match, almost like a master rank kind of, a rating match. So people who are playing really competitively can keep grinding to compete in the rating ranking and try to aim to the top of the ranking. And there is of course rewards to it. So I hope everyone who plays regularly will enjoy playing this mode.
In Ranked Match we also have several features that people would be excited. I mean, I hope they appreciate is that we also have the Wi-Fi indicator and also if there’s a bad ping match-up goals, you will be able to vote a no contest. So those kinds of features will also be included. So I hope you find out how you can use those features.
So you’re also looking to make adjustments to things like RISC, Wild Assault, and I believe Guard Crush is another thing. Can you tell us a little bit about specifically what kind of changes you’re looking to make about those mechanics?
Miyauchi: So yeah, we also announced that we are working on the battle balance patch and that’s also coming out along with the Lucy character update. And so we are kind of trying to see the game balance and trying to incorporate a lot of player’s feedback regarding how Guilty Gear Strive is currently playing. And we think there needs to be some tone downs on several, how do I say… the game mechanics, general game mechanics, the tools that everyone has access to.
We think there needs to be some tone downs on several game mechanics, or tools that everyone has access to.
And so there are lots of toning downs, but at the same time we also want to focus on the character uniqueness and making sure that characters can play how they would like to be played. And I think we had a lot of feedback from players that the current version of Guilty Gear Strive is in favor of those characters who have more access to those game mechanics. So not too much relying into the game mechanics and that’s the direction of how we are balancing out for this patch.
So Arc System Works recently announced Marvel Tokon, and I think a lot of people are wondering, is there anyone from the Strive team that moved over to Marvel Tokon, or what is Strive’s relationship with that game?
Miyauchi: Well, I wish I can say anything about Marvel Tokon, but unfortunately I don’t have a right to, and I honestly don’t know much about Marvel Tokon because that’s really a high-end secure project that’s also internally in Arc System Works.
So no knowledge of Strive developers working on Marvel Tokon then?
Miyauchi: Well, we do have, it’s a small company, so we do have a chat or discussion going on between teams. But yeah, that’s everything that I can say.
Fair enough. So with each new update of Guilty Gear Strive, it feels like you’re kind of going down a list and just kind of knocking off different features from 3v3 to now ranked mode. Are there any other kind of features that you want to add to Strive that are still on the list?
Miyauchi: So we have a lot of things that we would like to do, which is also something that a lot of players has been asking for and I can’t share any details about it for now, but I’m hoping if I will be able to show that off in the next version of 2.00.
Do you ever see Guilty Gear changing direction from being a fighting game series or even just a spin-off to do something other than fighting games? Obviously Guilty Gear 2: Overture was an action adventure. Is there any kind of future for Guilty Gear that’s not a 2D fighter, do you think?
Miyauchi: Well, I don’t have any projected plan or anything that I can share for now, but as a producer I’m always interested to expand Guilty Gear as an IP to open to different genres so that people who are not fighting games would also get into the IP. So yeah, if I have a chance I would like to try on some different kind of genre. But yeah, I don’t have anything to share right now.
Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit
