Traditionally, the great holiday shopping deals would end after Cyber Monday. That is apparently no longer true. Case in point: today only, Best Buy is offering the console versions of Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 for under $40 each. Specifically, you can get the PS5 or Xbox version of AC Shadows for $34.99, and Black Ops 7 for $39.99. Both deals go away at midnight, so grab them fast if you want them.
Today’s Best Game Deals
The Black Ops 7 deal is particularly good, because it’s on the steelbook cross-gen bundle editions of the game. That means you get a free steelbook case for the game with your purchase. And regardless of whether you buy the PS4 or PS5 version, it’ll work on both systems natively. The same is true of the Xbox version, with the Xbox One and Xbox Series X.
Unlike most similar sales we’ve seen recently, no other retailer is matching the prices, meaning they’re exclusive to Best Buy. These are by far the best deals we’ve seen so far on both of these 2025 games. In other words, I wouldn’t expect to see either game drop to a lower price this year.
The real question, of course, is whether the games are any good. If we’re talking about Assassin’s Cree Shadows, the answer is yes, absolutely. In our 8/10 review, critic Jarrett Green wrote, “Assassin’s Creed Shadows takes a flashing blade to the series’ established norms, trimming them to a more precise form in lieu of chopping them down outright. Combat is aggressive and requires more intentional parrying and skill management than in the past, and exploring the gorgeous provinces of Sengoku-period Japan is encouraged thanks to the revamped map that deemphasizes collecting icons and checking off lists.”
As for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, the answer is a little more complicated. While the campaign and Zombies modes are a little lackluster, the multiplayer remains strong. In our review of the latter mode, critic Seth Macy wrote, “Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’s multiplayer is a great time. The first crop of maps are excellent, taking into consideration the new wall run and wall jump mechanics and how that extra dimension of movement adds so much to the fun. The weapons are all solid with the exception of the SMGs, and even though none have really captured my imagination, they’re fun to use and fun to grind.”
Both of these deals are absolutely killer for games this new, as emphasized by the fact that even Amazon isn’t price matching them. But the sale ends at midnight, so pick up whichever one you want (or both) before the deep discount goes away.
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.
Lords of the Fallen publisher CI Games has just announced and released a surprise final update to its 2023 game — mere hours ahead of its sequel getting a fresh airing at tonight’s Game Awards.
Today’s new Version 2.5 release caps off a lengthy journey for the action role-player, which launched to mixed reviews but has since turned around its player sentiment via a series of major post-launch patches.
Lords of the Fallen’s previous major 2.0 update was once believed to be its last — as was its 1.5 update before that. But, based on further fan feedback, CI Games has put together one final offering that reworks enemy and boss behavior and adds a new Veteran Mode for those seeking the game’s toughest challenge.
“We’ve prided ourselves on being a players-first studio, and we mean that,” CI Games’ creative strategist Ryan Hill told IGN today. “Version 2.0 in April was a huge milestone, but we weren’t finished… It became clear that players wanted a greater challenge from both enemies and bosses, so we went back in and pushed those systems further.
“Version 2.5 brings significant enhancements to Legacy Mode – new behaviours, new movesets, more aggression across the board – and introduces an entirely new difficulty option, Veteran Mode, for players craving an even steeper climb. We’re thrilled to offer this final major update free to all players as a genuine thank-you for their support, and as a small taste of what awaits them in Lords of the Fallen II next year.”
Familiar bosses now feature fresh behaviors, with even more difficult versions tuned for Veteran Mode. But with fresh challenges also come new rewards, including signature attack animations on boss weapons and a unique breastplate for those who take on Veteran Mode and conquer it.
CI Games previously promised “big news” on Lords of the Fallen II would be featured in tonight’s Game Awards 2025. Join us then, as IGN reports on all of the event’s reveals as they happen.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
As part of our ongoing month-long exclusive coverage of High on Life 2, the upcoming first-person shooter, I sat down with Squanch Games Chief Creative Officer Mikey Spano and Chief Design Officer Erich Meyr to discuss the art of making a comedy game sequel. Is it any easier to pull off than the comedy movie sequel, which doesn’t have a great overall track record. All that and more are covered in the interview you can watch in the video above or read in the transcript below.
High on Life 2 will be released on February 13, 2026 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S – including launching on day one into Xbox Game Pass.
IGN: I’ve got a hundred questions here, not literally 100, but there’s a lot I want to ask you guys. And I thought I’d kind of start here. And that is, I don’t know if you’d agree, but in my opinion, comedy sequels, at least in the movie side of entertainment, don’t have an awesome track record, so how do you approach doing a comedy game sequel to avoid some of the same pitfalls that comedy movie sequels seem to fall into?
Eric Meyer: I feel like a lot of movie sequels in general aren’t better than the first, right? But game sequels are usually like a refined version of the first game. And yeah, we definitely took a lot of great ideas that we couldn’t do in the first game and put them in this one, so hopefully we’ll overcome that.
Mikey Spano: Yeah, with the first one, I don’t think we really knew what it was until it was in the hands of reviewers and we were like, “Oh, this actually turned out pretty cool.” We were just so heads down on it, it was a new IP for us. So I think for this one, we had a good place to start, so we’re really hoping that it’s a plus up of the original. I mean, there’s definitely more jank in the original than this one, which is a lot of fun and keeps things funny, but I think we’ll still have plenty of just fun, weird, unexpected stuff, so I’m hoping people like it just as much as the first, if not more.
IGN: Mikey, can you speak a little more to that? Because I’ve never made a game, I don’t have the talent or skills for that, but I’ve talked to a million developers, reviewed, covered a million games. And I’ve heard that a lot where games are such a unique art form where often, they don’t really come together until the very end and then suddenly you’ve got a game. So can you kind of talk me through not the development of the first game, but more kind of the very end that you’re referencing there when it does come together, and then when it comes out and you start getting feedback from players and from reviewers? Did anything hit differently with players in the public than you thought it would, or did things surprise you versus what you’d intended or planned?
Mikey Spano: Yeah, definitely. I mean, there’s a lot of angles we can look at for High On Life in particular. We’re pretty open with our team about letting them put in stuff that they’re interested in. And then usually they’ll just reach out and say, “Hey, is this cool or does this work?” But towards the end, we have people we trust a lot that just can go in and do stuff if they want. So from a perspective of even just the dev that was working on directing the game, we saw stuff, or at least I can say I saw stuff that I didn’t even know was in the game, and I am in there.
I saw things in some streams where I’m like, “Where did that even come from? Oh my God, that’s awesome.” That kind of stuff was really surprising and fun and that was intentional on our part. And then there’s just a bunch of stuff that kind of breaks in funny ways or things that somebody approaches it a different way than I would’ve approached it or someone here would’ve approached it. And so you get this sort of emergent comedy that’s based on the players’ actions and not necessarily what we intended the players’ actions to be.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, in the first game, there was a bug where people were getting stuck in Applebee’s and that became an internet joke for a while. And we’re like, “Sure, we’ll own it. Yeah, you get stuck in Applebee’s forever.”
Mikey Spano: Yeah, the other thing we struggle with is, we call it dev eyes, where it’s like you’ve just been looking at the game for so long. All the jokes you’ve heard a thousand times, they might’ve been funny the first time. And so you never really know at the end, what’s going to land with people because for you, you’re so numb to this stuff. So you sort of give it to a friend to play or we’ll get some people in and we’ll watch them play and evaluate, “Oh, that’s surprising, this was their favorite part.” And it’s something we’ve seen so much, we weren’t even thinking about it.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. That happened with us with our demo, where we put in so many good jokes throughout it. And then the thing that resonated the most was taking Sheath and turning him into a gun and that whole bit, the whole joke of that bit. And I don’t think any of us expected that to be the biggest hit. We were like, “Oh no, it’s going to be this part or this part.” But I mean, the internet doesn’t lie, right? That was the part people watched the most.
IGN: What ultimately then, were the lessons that you took out of the first game when you’re talking about kind of more hitting the ground running here with High On Life 2? What are those lessons that you took from the first one that are helping this one?
Eric Meyer: I mean, we definitely knew the formula we wanted to do. We knew how a lot of jokes worked. We knew how we did an interactive gameplay with them, and we could take that and be like, “Let’s do that kind of thing here, that kind of thing here,” or, “Let’s one up that one.” So it gave us a really good platform to stand on as far as figuring out what all of our different moments would be, what our jokes would be, so that was really great. That helped us tremendously at the beginning.
And then also just, there was a whole can of worms around how do you handle having all these different guns and each one can be out and each one can have its own little comedy layer to a mission? And so we learned a lot of lessons from that and we’re able to just like every mission now, we’re like, “Yeah, we can focus on this gun here and we can do this here.” It really helped us understand how to just build our game.
Mikey Spano: Yeah, for sure. We had the foundation. I mean, in the first game, we kind of take for granted that we were figuring out the gameplay, too. It’s a first person shooter, but outside of knowing that it was a first person shooter, we had to figure out everything from the ground up, which is a lot harder than you would think. Starting with that foundation helped us game play-wise to really focus on the things that were working, try not to change those too much. And then the things that weren’t working, building on them, and then also just bringing in some new stuff that we wouldn’t have been able to bring into the first game because we were just figuring out the basics.
And that goes across comedy, too. I mean, we are always trying jokes that don’t land. We’re trying ways to tell the jokes that don’t always work. And we end up with the best, but a lot of that stuff didn’t work for one reason or another. And so we have that stuff left over for the next game that we can try again. And we’re never really starting from zero per se, with this sequel. I mean, conceptually, there’s a lot of stuff that’s from zero, but in terms of our systems and everything, we had a good starting point.
IGN: A lot of developers I know these days just pull a ton of telemetry from players when they’re playing. So when it’s out there in the wild, kind of building on what you guys are saying, did any particular telemetry jump out at you guys, like people watching a surprisingly high amount of the in-game TV or barely looking at it at all, then maybe you take that and you either double down on something or scale back on something for the sequel?
Eric Meyer: Yeah. I mean, this is a little bit anecdotal from just hearing it everywhere, not necessarily a more qualitative thing, but just the many people who love Tammy and the T-Rex from that. You especially go through Steam reviews or whatever and yeah, there’s certain things like that, that we did not expect to hit so strongly. And then yeah, I mean, just like any other game too, you kind of see where people fell off, like how many people played at the beginning. And for us, we were on Game Pass, so a lot of people tried the game, which was great. And we could see how far… Like any game, you have the curve of a lot of people get through the beginning and then you don’t have as many people who actually finish it, but even people who didn’t finish it still really enjoyed it. So it’s cool to see that.
Mikey Spano: Yeah, we kind of had a unique situation where we had so many players. We were not anticipating that, but I think we’re over 20 million players at this point on the game, which is insane. So pretty much every little area of the game was poked at in a way we didn’t expect and it was really fun to watch that happen. I mean, you’re stressed about, “Oh man, somebody found this bug,” or, “Somebody exploited this thing,” and you get stressed about it. But then you realize most people are out there just kind of having fun and laughing at it. And with 20 million people, there was quite a few variations of things people were hyper focused on or laughing about. I mean, some of my favorite stuff that came out of it is just the weird Hentai fan art of the guns, there’s just so much. We hit every facet of weird internet culture and I love it, I couldn’t be happier about it.
IGN: That’s awesome. I mean, on that note, I wanted to ask you guys about Game Pass because I think Game Pass has been in the news lately for at least maybe not players’ favorite reasons recently, but I think more broadly than that, and I even would say this from where I sit as somebody that covers Xbox and talks about Xbox on an Xbox podcast all the time, there’s a lot of confusion, I think, from players about the business side of how Game Pass works. Now, I’m not asking you guys to share the terms of your deal with Microsoft or anything like that.
But clearly the first game, as you’re talking about, Mikey, that was a huge success for you guys on the back of launching straight into Game Pass. So can you talk about what worked for you with that deal, what you got out of it, basically? Obviously, you mentioned 20 million players, but do you see Steam sales spike when it hits Game Pass or stuff like that? I don’t know if, again, without maybe opening up the company’s books or anything, which, I know you’re not going to do that, but can you kind of speak to the fallout, if you will, of being on Game Pass?
Mikey Spano: Yeah. I mean, I look at Game Pass as a way to get people who are curious about your game. It’s almost like a way to just demo games that are on Game Pass, where it reminds me of those old PlayStation Underground CDs you used to get in the mail. Game Pass to me is sort of that feeling. There’s so many games that I’m interested in, but it’s unlikely I’m going to buy every single one for a variety of reasons. So with Game Pass, it’s like I’ll check this game out. And typically I fall off. I have really bad ADD, so I’ll fall off after an hour or something. And I think with High On Life, we had a lot of people that love Rick and Morty or hated Rick and Morty, but either way they knew about the game for that reason and maybe they wanted to hate play it. And then they ended up actually liking it. And then you kind of build this buzz around, “Have you guys heard of this crazy game,” where somebody might not have taken the plunge and bought the full price game, so the online sentiment wouldn’t have been as big. It wouldn’t have been such a big conversation around the game.
I think that really helped us with marketing the game, especially as a new studio with a new IP and everything. Without Game Pass, we would’ve had very little visibility, so it was beneficial in that way. And I think there’s some ways now that Game Pass has evolved a little where they’re allowing people to come out simultaneously day one on PlayStation or come out on Steam. And that kind of stuff, we have no idea how that’s going to work out, but based on what happened with the first game, I’m thinking it’s going to be really big for us because we still get that conversation around the game from people playing Game Pass. But then people on PlayStation, they don’t have to wait a year and then kind of forget about it and then restart the conversation. I think Game Pass is going to be even better for us this time than it was for the first game.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, it’s hard. I mean, these days, there’s a lot of good games coming out all the time. I’m constantly shocked when I’m like, “Wait, what is this game that looks like everything I want from the game, but it came out two years ago?” And I follow news and everything, so getting a good amount of attention to your game is critical.
IGN: A big new feature of High On Life 2 is skateboarding. I’m a big first person shooter fan and I’ve played a million of them over the years, and I’m trying to think if I’ve ever played a first person shooter that has skateboarding in it. Where does the idea come from for that? How does that kind of come up and then hone in as a key new feature of the sequel?
Mikey Spano: Yeah, this is a really interesting one because this is something both Eric and I really wanted on the first game. We had a concept artist, Sean McNally, who, amazing concept artist. You can use his name in here if you want. He’s great, love the guy, very talented. We were kind of coming up, “What are some other things you can do with aliens and alien life forms?” And he had drawn this sort of pill bug that unfolded into a skateboard and we were like, “Ah, God, we got to get this-“
Eric Meyer: Yeah, it was so cool. We were like, “We could just throw this in as a thing you could temporarily have for a moment in a level or something.”
Mikey Spano: Yeah. And then in my head, it was like the boot in Mario 3 or something, where an enemy and you use it temporarily. And so when we started High On Life 2, we started kicking the conversation around again, “What if we had a power up that let you kind of skateboard?” And so it was meant to just be a little thing. And we started playing with it and the fun was there, but there was so much complexity that I got to the point as like… I grew up skateboarding, I love skateboarding, but I got to the point where I was like, “It’s just too risky, we can’t do it.” And then Eric was like, “I’m not letting go of this.”
Eric Meyer: In the first game when we were figuring out a traversal kit, at one point we had this sort of omnidirectional boost thing and it was kind of cool. It helped the momentum of the game, but it just didn’t have anything grounding it. We converted it into sort of a power slide, which was really fun the first game. It’s my favorite thing to do in that game. And then really, we talked about the skateboard in our creative meetings and we’re like, “Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s figure out some cool thing with a skateboard.” And at first I was like, “Well, it’ll just be power slide plus. You can slide now, but you can go for longer because you’re on a skateboard.” And then we did a whole bunch of refactoring our traversal kit.
We kind of really improved all of our movement and a lot of things, me and Carl Glave, who’s our programmer for all the traversal stuff. And then we were tagging the skateboard and as we kept going with it, we’re like, “Well, yeah, you should be able to go up a vert ramp. Yeah, of course. You should be able to do this, all the skateboarding things.” And we were looking at Tony Hawk and a bunch of different games like Session and Skate and stuff that are really technical skating games. And we were like, “Well, we can’t do all that technical stuff.” There’s not enough buttons. You got to shoot as well, you can’t just not do all that. But we started just refining and refining and reducing things, but also making it just a really smooth experience.
I really just wanted you to feel like you’re on a skateboard, it’s doing what you want to do while you’re shooting at guys, while you’re doing all these other things that are taking up most of your mental space, but you still get that feeling like you’re on a board and you can jump off ramps and go and wall ride and do all kinds of cool stuff with it. So we just kept kind of refining it and making it smoother and just more intuitive, and not super technical because that competed too much with the shooter aspect.
I think the hardest thing for a new mechanic like that is it’s risky, it’s unknown. We looked at a lot of different comps and a lot of other games had been doing kind of similar stuff to try to get some ideas and it really was just an accumulation of just hammering on it and iterating on it continuously and making some really good calls at different points to make it. There was a whole group effort deciding exactly what this needs to do and what it should not do. And that got us to a really good spot.
IGN: And a sequel’s boring if it’s not taking any creative risks.
Eric Meyer: Exactly.
Mikey Spano: Yeah. And I keep thinking, “Did we take enough creative risks on this game?” And I’m like, “Oh wait, we completely changed-“
Eric Meyer: Yeah, yeah. I mean, to me it’s like the Terminator 2, right? Everyone can agree Terminator 2 is a great sequel. Terminator one is great too, but 2, they’re like, “Well, we’re going to make a quicksilver Terminator,” which could have totally failed. Could have been like, “No, I want Arnold Schwarzenegger.” But they put something new in with what you already had and made an awesome new experience.
Mikey Spano: Yeah, for sure. The funny little anecdote, Eric mentioned Carl, Carl’s an amazing programmer that we have and he is very motion sick sensitive. I don’t know exactly the right phrasing for it, but he gets motion sick very easily. And so putting him on the skateboard is so cool, but he did such a good job with it. And I think a lot of the smoothness that you get from it comes from him just being like, “Oh, these numbers make me want to puke. Let me tweak that.”
Eric Meyer: Yeah, yeah. No, he made sure it’s motion sick friendly, which, in first person is insane.
Mikey Spano: Yeah, it’s crazy. I honestly thought it’d be a fun little power up. There’s no way I would want to play a whole game where I’m riding a skateboard and shooting. And I was so wrong, it’s so cool. It’s my favorite part of the game for sure.
IGN: Mikey, you said you grew up skating and there’s such… I mean, the artwork for both games, just High On Life in general has such great artwork.
Mikey Spano: Thank you.
IGN: A custom skate deck for High On Life 2 – maybe like a collector’s edition thing, limited. Are we going to do that?
Mikey Spano: I will say that we have our biz dev guy, Benny Moore, he comes from Limited Run, so he knows that space really well. And then we just hired somebody, I believe it’s merchandising director. I don’t know his name, but it’s another one that we know from Limited Run, Shaddy, and he’s amazing, too. And so he’s taking on a lot of really cool merchandising stuff for us. I can say I love skateboards, I love physical stuff. As you can see, my office is full of collectible stuff, so it’s a pretty safe bet that there’ll be some of my own life decks out there.
Eric Meyer: The hardest thing is going to be choosing which ones to use, because we have a bunch of decks in the game with awesome art on them and there’s a lot of ones that, I can’t pick a favorite. There’s a lot of really, really cool decks.
Mikey Spano: Yeah. For this game, I have a big group of weird, low brow art friends and I wanted to bring them on to do graffiti and signs and stuff like that for us. And it worked out really well that they were able to all do deck designs for us, too. So we have so many cool, weird, unexpected decks in the game that I want to see all of them turn into a physical deck at some point. And I love the idea of a voting system of, “All right, for this next run, here’s three. Which one do you guys want to see next?” And keep pitting them against each other. That could be really fun.
IGN: Pivoting back to the video game itself, the weapons, clearly the stars of High On Life and justifiably so. When you’re looking at adding new ones for the sequel, I’m curious, where do you start? Do you start with weapon function like, “Well, do we want a rocket launcher type? Do we want this chain gun, this kind of that?” Or do you start with a personality type and then figure out what gun function it should be? Or do you start with an actor in mind and then kind of build a gun around that? I’m really curious to the process because the guns are such a unique aspect of High On Life.
Mikey Spano: Yeah. Typically, I mentioned earlier, I’m super ADD, so I’m always doodling. Even in meetings and stuff, I’ll be doodling. So Eric and I will be talking about, “What’s a gun archetype we want that we don’t have yet?” And so while we’re talking, I’ll start usually just doodling a few things and I’ll show it to Eric and say, “What do you think about this functionality? Does this functionality seem cool?” And then he’ll give me some notes and maybe he’ll do a sketch and we just kind of go back and forth, honing in on a shotgun archetype. Gus is our shotgun archetype and=
Eric Meyer: Yeah, that’s how we figured out a lot of the first game’s guns.
Mikey Spano: Yeah, we’re a very visual based studio, we let the vibes lead our design. And then Eric and Nick, who is our technical director, but also our combat director for this game, he gets really into the weeds about how the functionality works and, “Let’s tune this number and let’s try this.” And all of that kind of goes back and forth and informs the general look of the gun. And usually when I’m sketching these guns up, I’m thinking about an actor like Sheath from the very beginning, I wanted to be Ralph Ineson. He’s been my white whale for years and we finally got him. And so that whole time, I knew that’s what I wanted him to look like. And for the caps from the first game, a lot of that look came from just Jim Henson.
And if you look at the really old, fat, weird Kermit the Frog, that’s Creature. There’s just a bunch. I have all this reference from the game where, believe it or not, Knifey is basically Elmo without a nose or hair. And that’s kind of where I started because I thought it would be a fun nod. I love leaning on cultural stuff that exists already, so I’m always putting little nods to everything. And trying to find more Muppets for this game didn’t really work out right away, so I just kind of went with what felt right. And luckily, Eric and Nick and I were able to come up with some archetypes that felt really good.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. When we kicked this game off, we locked ourselves in this rental office for a week. Me and Mikey and Alec Robbins, our native director, Nick, and Maddie, our producer, our EP, to just oversee everything. And we just broke down a bunch of stuff from the game. I just remember one of the things we did was we had a big whiteboard of just every gun archetype imaginable and then being like, “Okay, what would fit? What’s going to be the next things that would fit into our mix?” And then started playing with those and sort of integrating some of them into the story as we were talking about story as well. I don’t remember all the details.
Yeah. And on the first game, like I was saying earlier, we didn’t really know what it was, so I drew a million guns. So this game, before I even did anything, I was like, “What about this sheet that we had? Is there anything on here that’s a good starting point?” But I don’t think we ended up bringing any of that on. The bow and arrow was a new concept, I don’t think anything existed for that and Sheath was all new. Travis and Jan were pretty much all new. So even though we started with some of the older sketches, they changed enough that it was just pretty much from scratch.
IGN: Well, speaking of the voice actors for the weapons in High On Life, when you’re writing now the sequel, obviously, do you really even write lines for JB Smoove, or do you just give him some ideas and outlines and then just hit record in the VO booth?
Mikey Spano: I wish the latter was possible, but it’s just wrangling somebody who’s really good at ad-libbing when we have such a tight story. Especially in this game, we focused a lot more on a tight narrative. Alec and his team, Alec Robbins, our Narrative Director and effectively our head writer, him and his team just wrote so much amazing stuff that getting the actor into the booth and getting all of it read out, you’ve played the game so you interact with someone, they’re not just saying one thing, they’re saying a bunch of things. And each of those things has multiple permutations. And so there’s just really no way to get an actor in and say, “Go crazy.”
On the first game, it happened just out of necessity, given the structure of the game, but for this one, we wanted to do a better job and tighten things up. And so we do start pretty much everything written and then we’ll have them read the line the way it’s written and then, “All right, well, how would you say this line?” And then some of those are the ones that are the funniest and sometimes just reading it as is works better. But it’s very taxing on the voice actors to ask for ad lib, especially in that setting, so it can be really tricky. Sometimes it just happens on its own.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, we like to encourage it. And this time, I mean, this game has so much more dialogue than the first game that some of those record sessions were like, “We got to move. We can’t ad lib for an hour on this guy.” So yeah, it was a lot to get, especially with the guns. And Gus and Sweezy in particular, they’re around for the whole game, so they’re a lot of dialogue.
IGN: JB is such a master improviser, I just was curious. It’s interesting to hear that you almost had to just keep him on script.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, a lot of people go crazy in moments for sure, but you’re getting through so many lines, yeah, we kind of had to just let it go off the script first and foremost and then mess around.
IGN: You mentioned the whiteboard of weapon archetypes, that you lock yourself in a WeWork space for a week at the beginning of the project to start to hash out. Did you have any weapons or weapon ideas that had hit the cutting room floor? You’re talking about stuff that got cut from the first game. Was anything from the first game that made its way into this one in terms of the weapons?
Eric Meyer: I’m trying to remember. The first game, well, one thing we had in the first game, Sweezy, there was going to be two Sweezys at one point, right, Mikey? One of them died and became a ghost?
Mikey Spano: You had this ghost gun that you could summon, but it never really got traction. We’ve been wanting to do the dual pistols. I really wanted initially, Eric Andre and Hannibal Burris, just one gun that was overly confident and kind of funny, and then one that just talked to the other gun the whole time. And that was sort of the archetype we were talking about. And then as we got closer, I don’t remember who pitched it, but we were like, “It would just be funny if it was just a couple in a relationship and that you had-“
Eric Meyer: I think we were all watching Righteous Gemstones at the time.
Mikey Spano: I think that’s probably what it was.
Eric Meyer: And we were like, “Oh yeah, that relationship is like the…” I forget the character’s names, but it’s so funny. And so we’re like, “We should hone in on that.”
Mikey Spano: Yeah. And so then we kind of started with that as sort of the archetype. And then we had different actors in mind for the guns initially, and then we kind of just kept swapping actors around based on availability and what the game needed. And we ended up with Ken Marino, who’s amazing, so-
Eric Meyer: So good, such a good performance.
Mikey Spano: Yeah, he’s just so pro. He gets it, he just nails it. And Gabourey Sidibe, who, she played Mucks in our DLC, but now she plays Jan. And those two together are so funny, it’s fantastic. Those two guns, at first, I thought would be a fun little joke for a mission or something, but they’re probably the most memorable narrative-wise from the game.
Eric Meyer: I think so too, yeah. Because it’s two guns and they span over a couple missions, you get a lot of… Their story becomes actually a pretty prominent story in the whole game.
IGN: Was replacing Kenny in the game from the DLC and now in the sequel, easier than recasting Kenny? Because I mean, you’ve got the two new voice actors for Rick and Morty now who are just dead on perfect.
Mikey Spano: Yeah, we actually didn’t want to bring Kenny over for this game. We’re not done with Kenny in the universe, but he’s just not part of the story of this game. We will be recasting Kenny, of course, but assuming we continue to make High On Life, which I will fight tooth and nail to keep doing, we still want Kenny to be a part of this universe and he’s got a lot more to his story than what we saw in the first game and in DLC. I think our narrative wrapper was that Kenny just got dropped or something in the DLC, but I think that there’s more to that story than we let players know, and so we’ll be hopefully talking a little bit more about that in future game.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, this game takes place five years after the original, so we kind of alluded some of the things that happened in that time span, but that’s definitely an area that we’ll explore more in this game and in the future.
IGN: The last question I have for you guys is, you touched on it already with talking about how much more dialogue there is in this one, but scope-wise, for me, I really thought the first game was just the perfect… It didn’t overstay its welcome, but it wasn’t like a four-hour game by any stretch either. I just thought it really hit its mark super well. So are you aiming for a similar scope to the first game with this one or we go and… What’s the thought process there?
Eric Meyer: We’re a little bit larger for sure. We wanted to give a little more. This game especially has a much more kind of, I’d just say mature narrative. There’s more going on with it. We actually hit our themes a lot stronger at the end and everything, so we wanted to give it more time to feel like a good sequel. And then we actually have quite a bit more sort of side content you can do in this one.
In the first game we sort of have, you could go back to areas, you could bring in some more bases for a little fun vignettes. In this one, you kind of have these regions in the hub that you can actually go around and find cool stuff in and kind of dig into more and just skate, you can just skate over the whole place. So we definitely have a little more extra time for folks who want to mess around as well. We’re definitely shooting for a bit of a longer game than the first one, but by no means, this isn’t an RPG length game. We’re trying to keep it a nice narrative you can play.
Mikey Spano: For the first game, we didn’t really know how long it was going to be. And then it came out and we were like, “Okay, good. It was enough.” For me, as an older gamer, 10 hours is my favorite amount of time to put into a game. Past that, I get stressed. And so we didn’t want to get too far from 10 hours, but then at the same time, we had so much we wanted to do that things just kept growing. And honestly, I don’t know how long the game is. It could be 1,000 hours, it could be 11 hours. I really don’t know at this point.
We’ll know the day before it comes out, how long it really is. But I think it’s safe to say it’s a decent bit longer than the first game. Our initial desire was 25% more, but I actually think we’ve probably exceeded that by a bit. And then that’s not even thinking about all the new side content and just skating around, doing challenges and stuff like that, so there’s a lot there. And it’s not all narrative comedy. There’s a lot of the side stuff that’s just pure gameplay.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, just fun gameplay.
Mikey Spano: It hopefully doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Eric Meyer: On this one in particular, we try to make every level very unique. And you’re still using all your core mechanics, but there’s a lot of levels we’re not going to talk about until they release because they’re awesome surprises. And so hopefully that keeps. Especially, I know some games midway through, you’re kind of like, “All right,” I get it. So hopefully we can keep that pacing going for everyone.
Mikey Spano: Each act, if not each mission, could be its own game. All the guns, each time you get a new gun, everything changes. Each time you get to a new location, it’s a surprise. And we didn’t do a ton of retread this time other than sidetracking or side missions, I guess. It’s a lot, and I think people won’t get too exhausted with it just because the variety is so broad.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
Anyone looking to add some pizazz to their gaming setup doesn’t have to look far to find ways to do so. One of the best ways is to pick up a special edition controller. And fans of Genshin Impact can now preorder the great-looking PS5 DualSense Wireless Controller – Genshin Impact Limited Edition (see it on Amazon). It costs $84.99 and is set to release on February 25 in the U.S.
The new controller is coming in part to promote the recent release of Genshin Impact Version Luna III, “which features the new playable character Durin and fresh updates to the story in Nod-Krai.” Click the above link for full details about the update and patch notes.
As for the controller itself, Sony said in a blog post that its designers worked closely with HoYoverse to create the design. It features “design elements inspired by Genshin Impact’s beloved Traveler Twins and Paimon, celebrating years of adventure and companionship in Teyvat.” It has a white and gorgeous blue color scheme, with gold and blue etchings on the grips, touch pad, and D-pad. The face buttons also feature gold versions of the traditional PlayStation shapes.
Functionally, it will be identical to all other PS5 DualSense controllers. It has haptic feedback for vibrations, adaptive triggers that can put resistance on your pulls. It has a built in microphone and speaker, and the built-in battery can be charged via its USB-C port. It’s compatible with PS5, PC, Mac, and mobile devices.
Sony says, “Select markets across Asia, including Japan” will get the controller on January 21. Those in the rest of the world, including the U.S., will have to wait about a month as it releases on February 25 in those regions.
If you’d rather get a new PS5 controller sooner (in time for Christmas, perhaps), you can check out our running list of every PS5 controller available. You have plenty of colorful and fun designs to choose from.
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.
The trailer, below, shows one of the elves raising their speech level to 27 after suggesting Skyrim launch on Switch 2, with their overall character level progress working towards 20. Why pick 20 and 27 specifically? Because The Elder Scrolls 6 is coming out in 2027, some fans are now saying.
“This honestly might be the best piece of evidence we have for a release date,” one fan said. “Those are very specific numbers and I don’t think they would use those numbers by accident.” “My god we’ve gotten so desperate,” countered another.
They are oddly specific numbers though, and you’d like to think Bethesda knew what it was doing by choosing them, rather than rolling the dice and coming up with random numbers. This is The Elder Scrolls 6 we’re talking about — it’s one of the most anticipated video games currently in development. Fans want — need! — to know when it’s coming out, and so anything like this was always going to set them off.
But is 2027 a likely release year? Last month, Bethesda chief Todd Howard said The Elder Scrolls 6 wouldn’t be out for some time yet despite being announced over seven years ago. In an interview with GQ magazine to celebrate the release of Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition, Howard said The Elder Scrolls 6 is “still a long way off.” He added: “I’m preaching patience. I don’t want fans to feel anxious.”
In the GQ article, Howard once again admitted that it has taken too long to get The Elder Scrolls 6 out the door, but did tease a The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered-style shadowdrop — without confirming anything.
“I do like to have a break between them, where it isn’t like a ‘plus one’ sequel,” Howard said of making The Elder Scrolls games again. “I think it’s also good for an audience to have a break — The Elder Scrolls has been too long, let’s be clear. But we wanted to do something new with Starfield. We needed a creative reset.” Bethesda is currently playtesting The Elder Scrolls 6, Howard revealed.
“I like to just announce stuff and release it,” Howard continued. “My perfect version — and I’m not saying this is going to happen — is that it’s going to be a while and then, one day, the game will just appear.” The Oblivion Remastered shadowdrop was “a test run,” Howard teased. “It worked out well.”
As for what Bethesda has going on right now, hundreds of people are working on Fallout, Howard said, across Fallout 76 “and some other things we’re doing, but The Elder Scrolls 6 is the everyday thing.”
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.
In a lengthy thread on reddit that brands the port as a “disaster,” there are widespread complaints about input lag and the game’s locked 30 frames per second visuals. “There’s like a whole second between me flicking the stick and my character moving its head,” the post’s author wrote, describing the experience as worse than “online Smash Bros.”
Many have compared Skyrim’s Switch 2 port with that of the far more recent Cyberpunk 2077, which offers 40 frames per second on Nintendo’s new hardware while rendering considerably more detailed environments. And there has been criticism, too, of the fact the game hogs 53GB of space on the Switch 2’s relatively limited internal memory, compared to just 25GB on PC.
A separate reddit post with more than 2,400 upvotes showing a video of the game’s input delay can be seen below:
On Bethesda’s official support site, the publisher has listed a question that asks: “Why am I experiencing frame rate issues with The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim following the Anniversary Edition update on Nintendo Switch?”
“We are investigating reports of performance issues on Nintendo Switch with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim after the Anniversary Edition update,” is the official response. There’s no word on fixes yet, but the publisher said anyone experiencing issues could subscribe to the article for updates.
“In addition, you can provide feedback and information regarding on this topic via the Feedback form,” Bethesda concluded.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Anniversary Edition is being sold for $59.99. Alternatively, anyone who owns Skyrim Anniversary Edition on the original Switch can pay $19.99 to upgrade the game and play on both consoles.
Included for your money are Skyrim’s base game and the three official Expansions: Dawnguard; Dragonborn; and Hearthfire. Players on Switch 2 get experience enhanced resolution, improved load times, performance optimisation, Joy-Con 2 mouse support, motion controls, Amiibo support, and more versus the OG Switch version, taking advantage of the more powerful hardware.
This week, IGN talked with Bethesda Game Studios exec Todd Howard about the company’s future plans. Intriguinly, Howard said that while The Elder Scrolls 6 was still the next big new video game to be in the works, Fallout is the franchise the studio is doing the most in right now.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
Jonathan Blow has just “announced an announcement,” teasing he just may be getting on a plane today to join a “gaming industry event coming up.”
Blow — perhaps best known for 2008’s Braid and 2016’s The Witness — popped up on his YouTube channel with a brief video, revealing that a project that has likely taken “nine or 10 years to make” is “finally get[ting] out to people.” And while it’s probably not “a trailer for like an RPG where you fight monsters from hell” — “nothing wrong with that,” he hastily added — whatever it is seems likely to be showing up at 2025’s The Game Awards.
“We’ve been working hard on projects for a very long time. We have a wide variety of things that we’ve been developing. They’re very complicated. Sometimes they take a while to come to fruition. Do we give up? No, we do not. We keep going, and we get them done because ultimately, even if something took nine years or 10 years to make, if you work hard for a long time, you can produce something that is tremendously good, much better than you ever expected in the beginning, and then you can finally get it out to people.
“I’m speaking in generalities right now,” Blow teased. “I cannot actually say anything specific because this is not the announcement, okay? This is the announcement of the announcement, and therefore, I cannot relay any actual facts that are being reserved for the actual announcement. But I am announcing that this announcement will occur sometime soon. Maybe very soon. Maybe, you know, I don’t know if there’s any gaming industry events coming up this week where stuff about upcoming projects might get shown. I don’t know, if there’s something like that, you might keep an eye out, right? You might just want to look, and you might see, you know, a trailer for like an RPG where you fight monsters from hell.”
“That’s probably not what we’re announcing,” he hastily added. “Nothing wrong with that, but that’s not what we’re announcing. You might see some other things. So, that is the announcement of the announcement. If there’s any game industry events, such as something happening in Los Angeles — which I wouldn’t even know about because I have to get on a plane tomorrow morning to go to some show — if there’s something like that, some Game Awards. I don’t think we’re getting an award tomorrow, but if there’s something like that that also has information in it besides like awards, then just keep your eyes peeled…”
“Yeah. Just keep an eye out, because at such a place — if I were to make an actual announcement that conveyed the actual facts that I wanted to provide that people often ask about — that would be a good place to do it, to have the actual announcement that we are announcing today. All right. Thank you.”
Wondering what the new game could be? Well, according to one commenter, the game is expected to be called Order of the Sinking Star. “The game has been called that for over a year, and there’s even a subreddit for it,” they pointed out.
Blow’s most recent game, The Witness, secured an impressive 10/10 from us. In IGN’s The Witness review, we called it “a beautiful, powerful, and cleverly designed puzzle game with a wealth of mysteries to unravel.”
We’ve been keeping tabs on what’s been confirmed to make an appearance so far, what’s been teased, and some of the pie-in-the-sky dream games we know deep down in our brains won’t be there, but our heart tells us there might just be a chance. Don’t worry, we’re not going to be quite as far-fetched as to say GTA 6 will be at The Game Awards, nor The Witcher 4, which CD Projekt Red has already confirmed won’t be. But that’s enough of that. For more, check out our round-up of what you can expect from The Game Awards 2025.
Photo by EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP via Getty Images.
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.
Another day, another leak ahead of The Game Awards 2025 — which is set to feature a look at what’s next for Tomb Raider heroine Lara Croft.
Ahead of time, cover artwork has leaked for Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, what looks to be a full remake of the franchise’s original game. There are stills from a new trailer, too, showing Lara Croft in action.
Croft’s design here appears to be a blend of the character’s ‘classic’ design with her look from the franchise’s more recent reboot trilogy, which showcased her origins. It’s presumed that this remake will fully position the series’ first Tomb Raider adventure as taking place after that trilogy, as had always been suggested.
Se habría filtrado “Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis”, el remake del primer juego con algunas imágenes, portada incluida.
After the images leaked online last night via video game forum ResetEra, fans quickly noted that Croft’s box art pose perfectly matches that seen in The Game Awards’ official social media teaser for tonight, where she is stood atop a rock, with one arm outstretched, iconic dual pistols raised.
Indeed, Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics has been working now for several years on its next chapter of the franchise. Here’s hoping we get some word of that tonight too.
Alongside all this, we know there’s a live-action Tomb Raider series in the works at Amazon in partnership with Story Kitchen, starring Game of Thrones’ Sophie Turner as Lara Croft. The show will, per Story Kitchen, “reinvent the franchise on a massive scale” and will interconnect “live-action television series and video games into a unified storytelling universe.” How will it all connect? What else is in the works? We may well find out more tonight.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
Games Workshop has revived the Siege of Terra: End of Ruin special edition book after scalpers descended upon its pre-orders, forcing Warhammer.com itself offline.
Siege of Terra: End of Ruin is an anthology of short stories set during the aftermath of the Siege of Terra and the Horus Heresy. For the uninitiated, the Horus Heresy is the Space Marine civil war that took place 10,000 years before the current Warhammer 40,000 setting. It is the foundation of 40K’s grimdark universe, and reveals how the carrion Emperor ended up on the Golden Throne.
Siege of Terra: End of Ruin was a hugely exciting release for 40K lore fans, but its special edition is even more enticing. It features a leather-effect cover with gold foil details, gilt page edges, and a metal emblem of a ruined Imperial eagle.
Games Workshop had signaled the special edition would be available “strictly while stocks last,” and that it would go on sale at 10am UK time on June 10. It also told fans it planned to use a queue system “to ensure fair distribution.” Unfortunately, this queue system caused chaos, with fans desperate to pre-order the book unable to make progress. Amid frantic messages of complaint across social media, Discords, and subreddits, Warhammer.com suddenly… stopped. It was offline, and no-one knew why.
Eventually, Games Workshop issued a statement on the debacle — a rare event in of itself — to say it had brought Warhammer.com offline because it had noticed scalpers were bypassing its systems. “Scalpers attempted to use bots to bypass our normal safeguards,” Games Workshop said. “Our eagle-eyed Tech Priests caught this happening in real-time, so we pulled Warhammer.com offline.”
At the time, Games Workshop promised Siege of Terra: End of Ruin would return, but half a year went by without any news. Now, Games Workshop has announced plans to sell the special edition once again — but with one key chance that has already got real fans excited.
In a post on Warhammer Community, Games Workshop said the special edition of Era of Ruin is being made available this coming weekend as a “guaranteed stock run.” Order it between Saturday and 8am UK time on Christmas Eve, and “you’ll be on the list to receive a copy of this sumptuous edition capping off the Siege of Terra series.”
This means the special edition is a “guaranteed stock product,” with Games Workshop printing the books based on demand. As a result, production and delivery can take up to 180 days.
Reaction to the news among fans is hugely positive, with some declaring it a win for real fans of the Warhammer 40,000 setting and a big L for scalpers. “Era of Ruinin’ Scalps,” declared one fan on the Black Library subreddit. “It’s the best decision they could make,” said another. “The secondhand market is 95% scalpers.” Another fan added: “Print on demand, what sweet words to read!” “Do I need this book? Absolutely not. Will I be purchasing so they see how positive this move is? Absolutely,” declared another fan.
Some are now hoping Games Workshop uses this release method for all its special editions going forward. “I’m totally cool with waiting a bit of time to get my copy if print on demand is an option moving forward,” said one hopeful. “It’s about freaking time. I’ve been saying this for five years. It’s about time they did something sensible,” added another.
“This is REALLY great news, HUGE win by GW and BL. And here I thought we weren’t going to have anything for Christmas, this is the best present. And I hope they see the potential of this kind of order, it could literally change everything. Really really pleasantly surprised.”
Games Workshop has suffered pre-order problems for years now, and special edition book launches are often plagued by scalpers who go on to sell the products at hugely inflated prices. Fans are now crossing their fingers this new method of selling books actually gets them into the hands of real fans.
Image credit: Games Workshop.
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.
If you hadn’t already heard, there’s a weird, spiky monolith in the Mojave Desert. Adorned with a massive eye-like orb and a legion of demonic creatures, it’s a hint at something due to be revealed as part of The Game Awards 2025. And, following the registration of a few new trademarks, it seems like we already have the answer as to what it is: a brand new game from Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios called “Divinity”.
If you are one of the millions of players who first learned of Larian through the gargantuan success of Baldur’s Gate 3, then the word Divinity may not mean much to you. Fans of the studio, however, will tell you that BG3’s success is rooted in Divinity, a series of six games that Larian worked on almost exclusively between 2002 and 2017. If this monolith and trademark leak really do point towards Divinity, then the Belgian studio is returning to its original fantasy universe… and likely bringing a whole new fanbase along with it.
If such a currently-very-much-hypothetical game would mark your first foray into the Divinity universe, then you may want a quick primer on what to expect. Let us be your guide to Divinity, and be the first to (very pre-emptively) say…
Welcome to Rivellon
Much like how Baldur’s Gate takes place in the Dungeons & Dragons setting of the Forgotten Realms, Divinity has its own rich, original setting: the world of Rivellon. There are broad similarities between the two; both are rooted in Tolkienesque fantasy tropes, with classically styled medieval landscapes and locations. There are multiple races; like in D&D, you can expect to meet humans, elves, dwarves, lizard-like beings, and the living dead. Magic is commonplace in Rivellon, although sorcery is considered more dangerous and is more heavily regulated there than it is on D&D’s Sword Coast.
Like Baldur’s Gate, Divinity also features a number of more esoteric elements, from steampunk to sci-fi and beyond, that make its world a little quirkier than the lands explored in more traditional fantasy like The Lord of the Rings. Rivellon can also often be a very silly place, and the influence of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels has frequently been felt in Divinity’s writing. In fact, Terry’s daughter, Rhianna Pratchett, even wrote a tie-in novella for the second game. But that’s not to say Rivellon is frivolous – there’s a deep vein of fascinating lore that has been mined over the series’ six installments.
In short, Rivellon is the stage for stories similar to those you enjoyed in Baldur’s Gate 3, but is beholden only to Larian’s rules, rather than those set by the owners of Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards of the Coast.
What is Divinity?
Divinity is an RPG series, but its evolution has been far from usual. Take a quick look at each of the six games, and you’ll find at least four different approaches. Divine Divinity, the very first game in the series, and its sequel, Beyond Divinity, are Diablo-influenced action RPGs. Divinity 2: Ego Draconis, meanwhile, is a third-person RPG that feels a little closer to the likes of Dragon Age and The Witcher. Divinity: Dragon Commander is a slightly Total War-flavoured strategy game, and the Original Sin duology – the most recent games in the series – are classic-style RPGs that bear the most resemblance to Baldur’s Gate 3. Larian has experimented wildly over the years, and so there’s no clear indication as to what format the next game in the series will use (although considering the success of Baldur’s Gate 3, the sensible bet would be on something similar).
Another unusual element is its approach to the timeline. While Rivellon does have a coherent history and storylines that are threaded across the series, each game is set years (sometimes even centuries) apart, meaning each one is something of a standalone experience. Similar to how Baldur’s Gate 3 demands no experience of the series but has plenty of nods to the two earlier games, you can play Divinity: Original Sin 2 without any experience of its predecessors. I suspect any future game in the series would continue this tradition, especially since Larian now has a legion of new fans who are unfamiliar with the studio’s previous work. If the leaked trademark is to be believed, this new project is simply called “Divinity” – a name that has likely been chosen since it comes with no suggestion that you need to have played multiple other games.
What Does “Divinity” Mean?
Divinity’s name is drawn from its foundational lore. Thousands of years before the events of Divine Divinity, the first game in the series, Rivellon’s ruling body, the Council of Seven, sacrificed themselves to defend the realm from evil wizards. The “Divine Order” was established in remembrance and assigned to pass on their knowledge to the next generations.
By the events of Divine Divinity, a prophecy tells of a messiah who will protect Rivellon from the next existential threat, a demon called Chaos. That messiah, it turns out, is you, and you ascend to become Lucian the Divine – a character that goes on to make appearances in Divinity 2: Ego Draconis and Divinity: Original Sin 2. The concept of the Divine is frequently explored in the stories, although it’s not the central focus of each and every game.
How Similar is Divinity to Baldur’s Gate 3?
Since the series has changed so much over its lifetime, most of the Divinity series is actually pretty different from what Larian created with Baldur’s Gate 3. However, the Original Sin duology is very clearly the blueprint for BG3. These are isometric RPGs set across multiple regions, with tactical turn-based combat and a similar “hands-off” approach to quest design.
While both are worth playing, Original Sin 2 is by far the most accomplished, both in terms of gameplay depth and narrative strength. It is where Larian pioneered the “origin story” characters that would later become the heroes of Baldur’s Gate 3, and Rivellon’s answer to the likes of Astarion, Gale, and Shadowheart are just as brilliantly written. It’s also the game in which the studio established “tags”, the system that provides character-specific dialogue options to help you better roleplay your specific race or class.
Perhaps the Original Sin duology’s most lauded system is its elemental effects – cast a rain spell to make something wet, and then use a lightning ability to conduct electricity through that sodden surface. Tip over an oil barrel to create a puddle, and then shoot a flaming arrow into it to create a blaze. Stab an enemy, freeze their blood, and watch them slip on their own icy innards. Much of this elemental interplay made it into Baldur’s Gate 3, but it’s much more pronounced in Original Sin. Expect at least a quarter of your battles to result in arena-wide bonfires.
How to Play the Divinity Games in Order
As previously mentioned, the timeline gaps that separate the Divinity games mean there are no strictly direct sequels, and you can more or less play them in any order you choose. If you’ve played Baldur’s Gate 3 and are looking to learn more about Divinity, I’d only truly recommend playing Original Sin 2, which is widely regarded as the best in the series. Initially a PC exclusive, it is now available on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and even iPad. But if you really do want to delve into the lore and explore the entire timeline, this is how you’d need to tackle the series:
Divinity: Dragon Commander (2013)
A grand strategy game set thousands of years prior to the events of the RPGs.
Divinity: Original Sin (2014)
A CRPG with turn-based combat, set 1000 years before the original game, focused on a pair of “Source Hunters” tracking down dangerous magic users.
Divine Divinity (2002)
A Diablo-like ARPG that chronicles the ascension of Lucian the Divine.
Beyond Divinity (2004)
The ARPG sequel to Divine Divinity, set 20 years later, tells the story of one of Lucian’s servants, who has been soulbound to an evil Death Knight.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 (2017)
A CRPG that’s a sequel to Original Sin in terms of game design, but takes place after the original two games and deals with an outbreak of “Voidwoken” monsters in Rivellon.
Divinity 2: Ego Draconis (2009)
A 3D action RPG set decades after Lucian’s ascension, during an era when the Divine’s adoptive son has become a tyrant, in which you play as a knight who can transform into a dragon.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.
