Category: IGN

The newly-rebranded Overwatch just benefited from its best weekend player count “in over a year” across all platforms, developer Blizzard has said, as the game’s new Season 1 officially goes live today.

Players have flocked back to Overwatch following last week’s big Spotlight reveal event that confirmed the sequel was ditching its “2”, adding a host of new heroes, and telling a fresh interconnected narrative over the next year.

An early access launch for new hero Anran also helped draw players in, while the company has quickly addressed calls from fans and the game’s English-language voice actress for tweaks to the character’s design.

As reported earlier this week, Overwatch had a particularly strong weekend on Steam — where the game recorded its best player count since launch. Last week’s announcements continued with confirmation of an upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 port of the game, scheduled for release sometime within its new Season 2.

Here’s everything that’s live today, alongside the launch of Season 1:

Overwatch Season 1 — February 10

● Five New Heroes at Launch: Jump in to experience five new heroes right now, with five more coming throughout 2026 (one per season).

○ Domina (Tank), a long-range, zone-control Stalwart Tank hero and vice president of the Vishkar Corporation.

○ Emre (Damage), a fast-paced, run-and-gun Specialist Damage hero with cybernetic upgrades.

○ Mizuki (Support), a versatile Survivor Support hero aligned with the Hashimoto clan.

○ Anran (Damage), a fire-wielding Flanker Damage hero, Overwatch recruit, and Wuyang’s older sister.

○ Jetpack Cat (Support), a permanently flying feline, acting as a Tactician Support hero with quick reflexes and Hero towing abilities

● The Reign of Talon: For the first time, Overwatch is telling a fully connected narrative across an entire year, following Talon’s rise under new leadership. Follow along on this new story with our latest cinematic, as well as ongoing motion comics, animated Hero trailers, short stories, and more.

● Conquest Meta Event: Conquest is a five-week faction-based event where players align with Overwatch or Talon, completing missions and earning rewards along the way.

● Gameplay, Competitive, and Systems Updates: Season 1 includes new role sub-roles and passives for all Heroes, a competitive year reset with rewards and rarity titles, Stadium updates, a full UI/UX refresh, and new systems like Praise.

● The Overwatch x Hello Kitty and Friends collaboration is available now, introducing colorful, Hello Kitty and Friends-inspired skins plus themed extras like name cards, sprays, emotes, and more. Available now through February 24, the crossover introduces skins for…

○ Juno as Hello Kitty

○ Widowmaker as Kuromi

○ Mercy as Pompompurrin

○ Lucio as Keroppi

○ D.Va as My Melody

○ Kiriko as Cinnamoroll

● Skins and Cosmetics: Season 1 includes faction-themed skins, new themed bundles, a Mercy Celestial Guardian Mythic, Juno’s Star Shooter Mythic Weapon, and a Lootbox pool refresh including skins from the past six seasons.

After all that, Overwatch’s new Season 2 will introduce a fresh hero, mythics and a celebration of the game’s 10-year anniversary later this spring. Another hero joins in Season 3, due this summer, alongside the Japan Night map and more mythics. Later this summer, Season 4 drops yet another new hero and includes activity tied to BlizzCon and the Overwatch World Cup.

Catch up with everything else announced last week at Blizzard’s Overwatch Spotlight event right here.

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that mixtapes (or Spotify playlists now) were an important part of those crucial, formative teenage years. I’m also sure that I’m definitely not alone in the shared experience of putting together the perfect playlist to share with my friends or a significant other. Simply put, those playlists tell a story. And while the ones from my teenage years may seem like nothing more than whatever cool metalcore bands I was into and in at the time, te memories created from those long lost CD-Rs and iTunes playlists still stick with me years later.

The importance of music during that formative but extremely awkward time is how we expressed ourselves and built an identity. The subgenres and scenes were as important to me as anything during those teenage years playing in garage bands, getting sunburned at the Warped Tour, and sifting through thousands of MP3s on my beat-up laptop in order to build that week’s lineup of songs.

In video game form, Mixtape does – at least so far – an excellent job at invoking the feeling of needing that perfect soundtrack for day-to-day life. From the start of the demo, I was skating in a picturesque northwestern town during golden hour while listening to Devo’s “That’s Good”. The vibe check was passed immediately when the protagonist, Stacey, breaks the fourth wall and explains the importance of good headphones and a good playlist. Mixtape’s presentation is a hybrid of a traditional point-and-click adventure similar to Life is Strange, mixed with abrupt but natural fourth-wall breaks for exposition and what the characters are feeling in that moment. While this isn’t a new thing, very few games have managed to pull it off like Mixtape does, and it has yet to overstay its welcome.

From the few chapters I’ve played, Mixtape seems best described as a blend of a video game and a stylish TV show. The camera work and intentionally low frame rate animation on the characters lend a charm to it, and the dialogue, while a bit campy, never took me out of the moment. Stacey, Slater, and Cassandra are very much your typical teenage archetypes in the best way possible. While they weren’t annoying or overbearing like some rebellious teen-fronted games tend to be, the trio are definitely written in an unrealistic way that works perfectly for the story Mixtape is trying to tell. It’s obvious that these three are meant to be stereotypical in a way that evokes a feeling of nostalgia from the player. There were a few moments where I found myself saying “been there before,” and for a story that’s clearly trying to invoke a specific feeling of anemoia (nostalgia for a time that never existed) with the player, it nails that.

Let’s talk about Mixtape’s namesake. The music here, while not necessarily anything that would have landed on one of the thousands of CD-Rs I made as a teen, is outstanding. In the little bit of the campaign I played, the needle drops included a mix of songs ranging from Devo to Silverchair, which show the potential diversity of Mixtape’s final soundtrack, and I’m glad the developers at Beethoven & Dinosaur didn’t go with your run of the mill “safe” selection of hits from the ‘90s. It’s obvious that the team is digging deep with the music selection in order to not only tell its story about music snobs hoping to craft the perfect mixtape in order to get a job as a music supervisor, but also tell the story about the final day of three teens’ high school years.

Of course, vibes and music aren’t everything when it comes to video games, and the gameplay is where Mixtape started to feel a little flat. While there were a few moments in the demo that required a bit more interactivity than finding something highlighted on screen, such as escaping from the police in a shopping cart, throwing toilet paper at Stacey’s principals house, and positioning Stacey and Slater into various poses in a photo booth, the select chapters I played felt like they were missing the welcome bit of interactivity that other point-and-click adventures offer. While the best moments had a decent amount of gameplay, a few chapters felt like I was watching a (very polished) interactive show rather than playing a video game. That being said, Mixtape’s gameplay isn’t necessarily the selling point here, because every time I found myself thinking about it, something cool would happen on screen, the needle would drop, and I would be pulled right back into Stacey Rockford’s story.

After playing 30 minutes of Mixtape, I can clearly see the direction Beethoven & Dinosaur is looking to take with this ‘90s-set teenage adventure. The visuals are striking, its sense of nostalgia and warmth are unlike anything I’ve seen recently, and the needle drops definitely made me want to play more than what the demo allowed me. Is it going to be everyone’s favorite thing? Probably not, but that’s the fun of making the perfect mixtape, isn’t it?

It Takes Two and Split Fiction director Josef Fares has posted the first photo from the set of developer Hazelight Studios’ next project.

The image shows Fares, dressed in a cosy-looking sweater, in front of three actors in performance capture suits. Clearly, work has now begun on Fares’ next game — and intriguingly, he seems to be doing his best to disguise who the actors are.

With his arm outstretched and thumb raised, Fares is successfully blocking most of all three actors’ faces — and this appears to be by design. “Next game in the making,” Fares captioned the post, with a thumbs up emoji. “We’re back in the kitchen, cookin’ up something really delicious,” the official Hazelight Studios social media account responded, adding: “Now with Strategic Arm Placement Tech.”

✌️We’re back in the kitchen, cookin’ up something really delicious! 🥘

Now with Strategic Arm Placement Tech®️

— Hazelight Studios (@HazelightGames) February 10, 2026

Fans of Fares’ games have commented on the post to say they are suitably uncertain who the actors involved might be — though many more have noted the fact that Fares is using this first sneak peek to showcase three actors being visible. Could this signify a three-player game, after the studio’s recent focus on titles featuring a pair of prominent characters?

“Three-player Hazelight Game?” wondered one fan, Spenny99. “It Takes Three?????” questioned Jcbartlett25. “It Takes Three lookin great Mr. Fares,” added hotpicklepizza.

Co-op adventure Split Fiction launched last year to rave reviews, and went on to sell more than 4 million copies. Its story focuses on a pair of writers, Zoe and Mio, who become trapped in their interweaving sci-fi and fantasy narratives.

“An expertly crafted co-op adventure that pinballs from one genre extreme to another, Split Fiction is a rollercoaster of constantly refreshed gameplay ideas and styles – and one that’s very hard to walk away from,” IGN wrote in our Split Fiction review, awarding the game 9/10.

Fares’ previous game It Takes Two also proved popular, with its story focused on a husband and wife who plan to get a divorce. We called it “a beautiful, breakneck-paced, co-op adventure that’s bubbling over with creativity,” in IGN’s It Takes Two review, which also returned a 9/10.

Before that, Fares previously released prison escape adventure A Way Out, starring two convicts, and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, starring… two sons. Should Fares actually be making a three-player game, it would indeed be a break from the norm.

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Take one look at Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, the upcoming RPG from ZA/UM, and you can immediately see the similarities between it and the studio’s previous game, Disco Elysium. It’s an isometric game with a striking art style, featuring dialogue-heavy gameplay where conversations are displayed vertically on the right-hand side of the screen.

Take a closer look and there are even more similarities. There’s a “Conditioning” system that replicates many of the functions of Disco Elysium’s unique Thought Cabinet. Its story aims to be deeply political and introspective. And then there’s the skills system, which manifests as a sentient inner monologue, commenting on your choices and the world around you.

For some Disco Elysium fans, this overlap may feel uneasy. In 2022, game director Robert Kurvitz and art director Aleksander Rostov – creatives key to the look, feel, and vision of the celebrated RPG – were among a number of staff who left the studio in an “involuntary” manner. ZA/UM claimed they were fired for misconduct, while Kurvitz and Rostov accused the company’s majority shareholders of fraud. Many fans believe those fired to be victims of corporate conspiracy. Those same fans may now be concerned to see the studio building a Disco Elysium successor based on such similar design foundations without the involvement of those original creatives.

In a recent interview, IGN discussed these concerns with Jim Ashilevi, writer and VO director at ZA/UM, and asked why the studio didn’t consider finding a new direction for Zero Parades.

“I think it would have made sense for us to go in a completely different direction if the entire team was comprised of new talent,” Ashilevi said. “But since such a large number of the key players that built Disco Elysium are here to build Zero Parades, it just didn’t make sense for us to just disregard that part of our experience as amateur game makers and start learning new ways of telling stories.”

ZA/UM’s head of studio, Allen Murray, estimates that around 35% of the studio’s current staff roster is made up of people who worked on either the original version of Disco Elysium or the expanded “Final Cut” release. The studio’s total staff numbers around 90.

“We’re still the same people,” Ashilevi continued. “We still have the same interests. The stuff that interests us in the world of video games, but also in other media – in film and literature and theater – that hasn’t changed. Hopefully it has evolved, but I think we’re still basically the same people.

“We’re just going by our gut, basically, and we’re following our own obsessions,” he said. “And a lot of that was present in Disco Elysium. It will be present in Zero Parades as well, largely due to the fact that those are the same people who were there to build that cool world.”

In a previous interview with members of ZA/UM, which took place just prior to Gamescom 2025, IGN asked Ashilevi and lead technical artist Nicolas Pirot how they felt about fans who may be feeling cautious about a new ZA/UM RPG following the departures of Kurvitz, Rostov, and others.

“I understand why some people might have reservations,” said Pirot. “It’s not up to me to tell them what to think or what to experience. I think what we are trying to do is tell an incredible story. And I think all we can do is hope that, when Zero Parades is ready, that people like it enough to participate and to see who we are as a group.”

“We are here to write more stories,” Ashilevi added. “That’s all we’re here for. And if that upsets people or makes them feel cautious, fair. But there is a new game coming out soon and I hope you check it out. And if you don’t like it, that’s fine. That’s completely fine.”

ZA/UM intends to launch Zero Parades this year. An espionage RPG themed around power struggles and failure, the team hopes it will stand distinct from Disco Elysium without “fully re-inventing the wheel.”

Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.

Blizzard has said that its Warcraft-themed collectible card game Hearthstone is still not available on consoles because the team needs “a level of investment… to make that happen.”

That’s according to executive producer Nathan Lyons-Smith, who recently revealed that because of the 12-year-old game’s aging code — estimated to be 16 years old — any port to console must be done “right” and only when the team finds “the right time to do it.”

“There’s a level of investment that we need to make that happen, primarily in terms of UI and UX, and making sure that it’s very natural to go and play a card game on those platforms,” Lyons-Smith said, as reported by Eurogamer. “I know it’s possible — Duels of the Planeswalkers for Magic [The Gathering], many years ago now, was absolutely delightful with the controller — so I know we can do it.

“I asked an engineer who’d been on the project a long time, and he estimates the code is 16 years old,” Lyons-Smith continued, “and the team was 15 people 16 years ago. And so there’s more of an effort to go: ‘I want to make sure when we go that it’s awesome.’ That it doesn’t just feel like, yeah, they ported it here, and you can play…

“I want to make sure that when we go, we’re going to go, and it’s going to feel awesome for players that love that form factor, whether they’re leaning back on the couch or sitting on the couch with their handheld.”

Hearthstone originally launched in 2014 on PC, with a mobile and tablet version following very shortly after. Over the years there have been numerous calls for the game to launch on consoles — and particularly Nintendo Switch, for handheld play. But Blizzard has never gotten around to it.

Game director Tyler Bielman added: “If we’re going to bring it specifically to that living room big screen platform, we would want to make sure that the full experience is optimized for that mode that you’re in.”

Now, of course, with Blizzard owned by Xbox and parent company Microsoft, there could be more pressure than ever to bring the hugely-successful card game to console players. However, with Xbox’s high-level goal of enabling gamers to play “anywhere,” the Hearthstone team acknowledged an expectation to go “as wide as we could” to reach as many players as possible, regardless of platform.

“In the future, as we explore console and handheld, we’d probably go as wide as we could,” Lyons-Smith added. “Certainly, we have a different owner now than we did three years ago, and they’re more invested in Xbox and ‘anything’s an Xbox’. Their high-level goal [being] games playable anywhere.”

Hearthstone’s Cataclysm-themed expansion is set to launch on March 17, marking the return of Colossal cards and introducing a brand new story.

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 will welcome a “large-scale” expansion later this year.

Addressing fans in a video celebrating the open-world adventure game’s first anniversary, series producer Ryozo Tsujimoto teased that this expansion will be similar to Monster Hunter World‘s Iceborne add-on, but was otherwise coy about the details. He did, however, stress that this will be the “final update” for the monster hunting game.

“We are currently at work on a large-scale expansion similar to Monster Hunter World: Iceborne and Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak for Monster Hunter: Wilds,” Tsujimoto said. “We plan to share more information with you this summer.”

We also learned a little more about the update dropping on February 18, too, including details of Arch-Tempered Arkveld, 10-star Arc-Tempered monsters, a special collaboration with Monster Hunter Stories 3 — a spin-off series that releases next month — plus an anniversary event where all previous awards and quests will be “re-available.”

Players who log in during the anniversary event will receive a free item pack, and each previous seasonal event will return for a weekly rotation. “Almost all” previously released event quests will be made permanent from February 18.

“We have been implementing improvements to game stability and performance since Title Update 4,” Tsujimoto added, “and this update will introduce even further improvements.” Again, we’re told to expect more details closer to the time, so Capcom suggests you monitor its social media accounts for updates.

“While this marks the end of major content updates, the team is currently hard at work on a large-scale expansion to Monster Hunter Wilds,” the team added. “We look forward to sharing the first reveal of the expansion this summer.”

Monster Hunter Wilds has had something of a bumpy ride of late. Title Update 4 arrived at the end of last year and ushered in a long list of gameplay and balance changes, as well as CPU/GPU improvements, load reduction, and the optimization of “PC-specific processes and addition of options and presets to reduce processing load.”

A development roadmap, detailed in December, mentioned plans to address the myriad issues impacting the PC version. However, just last month, one player believed they had discovered that PC performance was dictated by the number of DLCs a user has. Capcom looked into it and concluded they were right, calling it “an unintended bug” that would be resolved with Patch 1.040.03.01.

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.

Here’s almost seven minutes of Black Myth: Wukong follow-up Black Myth: Zhong Kui. Well, kind of.

While developer Game Science has dropped the new in-engine trailer and labelled it as pertaining to the highly-anticipated sequel, it also features a “non-canon” disclaimer which suggests everything you see here could have no bearing whatsoever on the final game or its story, and has only been released by the team to celebrate Chinese New Year and welcome in the Year of the Horse.

But while you won’t see any gameplay or combat per se, the “non-canon, for entertainment purposes only” trailer nonetheless shows in-engine footage and gives us our best look yet at what to expect from the sequel, particularly in terms of how it looks and sounds. Let me take you through it.

It starts out normally enough as a young woman moves around an al fresco kitchen preparing a meal. Look a little closer, though, and you’ll realize that the figure that passes her near the beginning isn’t quite human, and the guy who opens the gigantic oyster-stroke-mussell shell reveals not a mollusc but, well, a little grey-faced man, uh, thing. She then prepares a slab of meat with blinking eyeballs embedded in it.

There’s more — much more — but it’s such a delight, I’d recommend watching it yourself. Just remember that it’s more of a tech demo and is unlikely to impact the eventual storyline of Black Myth: Zhong Kui, much like the spin-off story Game Science similarly released at Chinese New Year last year.

Black Myth: Wukong developer Game Science revealed sequel Black Myth: Zhong Kui at Opening Night Live 2025 last August. “Set against the backdrop of the classic Chinese folktale ‘Zhong Kui Banishing Evil,’ Black Myth: Zhong Kui is a single-player action role-playing game rooted in ancient Chinese fantasy,” GameScience said.

“The game will deliver distinctive experiences and gameplay features that push our limits, while also bringing fresh ideas and necessary changes to address past flaws and regrets.” As yet, there’s no release window, let alone a firm date.

Predecessor Black Myth: Wukong is the record-breaking action game that launched across PC and PlayStation 5 in 2024, selling 10 million copies in just three days. The Xbox Series X and S versions launched in August 2025. It returned a Great 8/10 in IGN’s Black Myth: Wukong review, in which we wrote: “Despite some frustrating technical issues, Black Myth: Wukong is a great action game with fantastic combat, exciting bosses, tantalizing secrets, and a beautiful world.”

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.

Less than a month after the launch of its free-to-play 2v2 tag-team fighting game, 2XKO, Riot Games is scaling back its development team.

Admitting the news was “difficult to share,” producer Tom Cannon said that despite securing a “passionate core audience,” the new game “hasn’t reached the level needed to support a team of this size long term.”

“With a smaller, focused team, we’re going to dig in and make key improvements to the game, including some of the things we’ve already heard you asking for. We’ll share some of our plans soon,” Cannon added. “Our plans for the 2026 Competitive Series are unchanged. We remain committed to partnering with tournament organizers and local communities. Our focus will continue to be on supporting the events and organizers that already power the [fighting game community].”

Cannon stressed that the team that built 2XKO “poured years of creativity, care, and belief into this game. Taking creative risks like this is hard, and the work they did is real and meaningful.”

“We’re committed to supporting impacted Rioters through this transition — including helping them explore opportunities within Riot where possible, and providing a minimum of 6 months of notice pay and severance where it’s not,” he explained.

Cannon closed on promising more information would come in time, and thanked players for playing 2XKO and “caring enough to ask hard questions.”

Riot has also confirmed to IGN that the cuts will affect approximately 80 roles globally, representing less than half of the total team. Figures are not final, however, as some staff may find roles elsewhere within the company.

IGN thought 2XKO was ‘Great.’ It returned an 8/10 in our review in which we wrote: “2XKO has found a way to distill what’s fun about tag fighters while mitigating a lot of the pain points that typically come with the territory.” It was announced back in The Game Awards 2025.

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.

Control and Alan Wake developer Remedy Entertainment has named Jean-Charles Gaudechon as its new CEO.

The company’s board of directors announced the news with a post on its website today. Co-founder Markus Mäki will continue to serve as interim CEO until the leadership change takes effect March 1, 2026.

“I’m excited and honored to join Remedy at a pivotal time,” Gaudechon said in a statement. “The studio has a unique creative identity and a strong pipeline. My commitment is to protect what makes it special, deliver exceptional games, and scale Remedy in a way that builds lasting value.”

Mäki took over as interim CEO after former Remedy CEO, Tero Virtala, resigned from his position in October 2025. It was a sudden shakeup that arrived after the studio’s summer multiplayer FPS and its first self-published game, FBC: Firebreak, failed to impress on a commercial and critical level (we gave it a 6/10). Virtala was with Remedy for just over nine years, leaving the Espoo, Finland-based game company to search for a long-term replacement.

We now know Gaudechon has been picked to fill the role. His experience in the industry has seen him serve at EA as a studio head and executive producer over titles like Battlefield Heroes, as well as a general manager and executive producer for Eve Online developer CCP Games. Now, he’ll oversee a company he says “has the voice and the ambition to be a pillar of the industry’s future.”

“We will stay close to players, earn their time and trust, and strengthen our independence in how we build and publish our games, while continuing to work closely with the partners who have supported us along the way,” the soon-to-be CEO added. “I will be moving to Finland with my family and I’m incredibly excited about getting to work directly with the team at the studio.”

Meanwhile, fans of Remedy’s work are looking forward to its mind-bending sequel, Control: Resonant. Announced at the 2025 Game Awards, the follow-up is expected to launch sometime this year for PC and consoles. Max Payne 1 and 2 remakes are also in development and expected to launch at an unspecified point in the future.

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).