Category: IGN

Rockstar has some particularly grand hopes for Grand Theft Auto 6, with the developer referring to its upcoming project as “the largest game launch in history.”

The company’s claim — which few are likely to argue with — was published as part of a job advertisment viewable via Rockstar’s website. In it, the developer says it is seeking a lead software engineer to ensure everything goes smoothly when GTA 6 finally arrives next year.

Rockstar’s lucky candidate will work with “some of the most talented people in the industry”, the company said, to help develop the data platform behind the upcoming behemoth.

“With the continued growth of Grand Theft Auto Online and the upcoming release of Grand Theft Auto 6, the successful candidate will lead both the evolution and operation of the data platform supporting what will be the largest game launch in history,” Rockstar wrote, “ensuring it scales to deliver an exceptional experience for millions of players worldwide.”

At the time of writing, the most recent version of the job ad (first spotted on social media by TheGTABase) no longer includes this paragraph, though IGN was able to view an older, archived version of the page to verify it was previously present.

It’s unclear whether Rockstar is referring to GTA 6 as being the largest game launch in terms of how lucrative it will be, or how many players are likely to be flocking into the game during its first few days. Analyst firm Ampere previously estimated that GTA 6’s likely impact on the gaming industry will be worth $2.7 billion.

Currently set to launch in just eight months’ time, GTA 6 will mark the first new entry in Rockstar’s best-selling series in over a decade. There’s plenty of pent up demand for a fresh Grand Theft Auto, then, since GTA 5 originally launched back for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2013.

A recent trailer showed off much more of GTA 6, including its dual protagonists Jason and Lucia, and finally set a May 26, 2026 release date. Still, though, there’s much about the game that’s being kept under wraps.

So far, Rockstar has not shared any details of GTA 6’s version of GTA Online, which presumably this job applicant will be working on if they are leading development of its data platform. Whether the new version of GTA Online launches day and date with the main GTA 6 campaign remains to be seen, however — and that’s if there are no further delays to the project overall.

Whenever GTA 6 does arrive, it’s fair to say that no other game developer will want to launch their project anywhere near Rockstar’s release. Indeed, earlier this month, Ghost of Yotei director Nate Fox said his team at Sucker Punch celebrated GTA 6’s previous delay out of this year, giving their game a clear run at the holidays. “We’re all still hungover, multi-month hangover,” Fox said. “That was a great day.”

Could GTA 6’s launch slip again? Strauss Zelnick, boss of Rockstar parent company Take-Two, previously told IGN that “historically when we set a specific date, generally speaking, we’ve been very good about reaching it.” Here’s hoping Rockstar fills that job fast.

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

The latest September Nintendo Direct had some very exciting announcements, from a release date for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond to Super Mario Galaxy + Super Mario Galaxy 2 getting a bundle release for Switch. Zelda fans were even treated to a new trailer and release date for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, and the good news is it’s now available to preorder for Switch 2.

It can be found at various retailers, which we’ve included below, for $69.99 and is set to be released in a couple of months on November 6 (see it here at Amazon). If you’re itching to add it to your library, now is your chance at the links below.

Preorder Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment

It’s actually happened! After months of worrying speculation, we finally got a release date for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond during the recent Nintendo Direct. It’s confirmed for December 4, 2025 (phew!), and already up for preorder at Amazon.

But if you tuned into the Nintendo Direct, you may have noticed a couple of extra key details. Firstly, Samus on a bike (huh?), and secondly, Samus on a bike as an amiibo that you can buy (no way!).

After a preview session where I was able to play the first half an hour of LEGO Voyagers, the mandatory-two-player, what-if-Hazelight-made-a-LEGO-game adventure from developer Light Brick Studios and arthouse publisher Annapurna Interactive, I wrote, “LEGO Voyagers might already be my favorite LEGO game ever.”

Keyword: might.

One less-than-ideal thing happened between my initial preview and my 14-year-old daughter and I completing the full version of LEGO Voyagers – where we tumbled, built, and played our way through to the end credits in same-screen co-op: it ended all too quickly. Though we enjoyed it the whole way through – it left us disappointingly unfulfilled because it ended just as it seemed like it should be hitting its stride.

Short But Sweet

You see, we rolled credits after just three and a half hours – even less than the slim five hours the publisher told us to expect. I’ve never been one to knock a game just for being short. Heck, Playdead’s Inside is still probably the greatest game I’ve ever personally reviewed at IGN, and it, like LEGO Voyagers, is a dialogue-free adventure that ended in less than four hours.

But while Inside left my jaw on the floor in astonishment at the incredible masterpiece I’d just experienced, LEGO Voyagers left both my and my daughter’s jaws on the floor for an entirely different reason: We both said, “Wait, that’s it?” To be fair, this is a $25 game and not everything has to be a Silksong. But it did leave both of us wanting more in a, “No really, we actually thought there’d be more than this,” kind of way.

I’m getting that gripe out of the way up front to set expectations, because outside of the all-too-soon end of the campaign, I love almost everything else about LEGO Voyagers. I’ll start with the tone, which is quite different from Traveller’s Tales’ more whimsical licensed LEGO games and the slapstick-with-heart LEGO movies. Voyagers is instead playfully curious – delightfully so – right down to who you play as and how you move. You and your co-op partner are just nameless, voiceless 1×1 bricks – one red and one blue, both with a single, mildly expressive eyeball attached to one side – and you simply roll your way around the LEGO-built world with fairly believable physics bouncing you around the play spaces. And though it obviously makes no logical sense, you can jump by pressing A (on an Xbox controller) and snap yourself onto any nearby peg with B. Pressing Y rotates your orientation by 90 degrees when you’re in that B-button snap mode.

Actually, though, your avatars are not entirely voiceless. Your 1×1 bricks can make adorable little noises if you press the X button, which can occasionally be used to harmonize in certain spots but is more likely intended to get your co-op partner’s attention when playing online. (On that note, kudos to Annapurna for following Hazelight’s lead and offering a Friend’s Pass that allows you to play with a friend online using only one copy of Voyagers.)

Our adorable 1×1 bricks instantly make for likeable protagonists in an almost Pixar-ish kind of way. I appreciate the little touches, like how the blue one starts with a beach bucket on its “head.” The music – which doesn’t always play but makes an impact when it does – plays a big part in establishing Voyagers’s playful vibe, too. It’s mellow but varied, humming along in the background in a way that’s additive rather than just being forgettable noise. Most, if not all of it, would go on your “Chill” or yoga playlist and not anywhere else, but it totally works here.

Bricks That Shine

I also want to commend the authentic art direction and visual identity of Voyagers, which is decidedly less cartoony compared to the licensed LEGO games. It goes for a sort-of realism, with every piece in the diorama-like worlds looking like the shiny plastic its real-life counterpart is – complete with the LEGO wordmark stamped into every brick. The soft daytime lighting baked into many scenes has a warmth and serenity to it that gives it a relaxing, mellow, and playfully curious tone, and the use of light and shadow helped draw me in immediately. That these sets sometimes have water flowing through them or surrounding them only adds to the believability of these being actually constructed LEGO sets that you’re observing from above as an omniscient participant.

Furthering that easy-going atmosphere is the complete and total lack of any penalty for death whatsoever; when – not if – you tumble off the edge of a scene or miss a jump and plunge off the side, you’ll instantly reappear right where you last were prior to your mistake. It’s completely low stakes and encourages goofing off, so when you snap yourself onto your co-op partner and roll both of you off a ledge, or fling them off a bridge you’re supposed to be holding down for them to cross, they can’t even be too mad about it until the fifth or sixth time you pull the same trick.

There’s never any direction given, but intuitively we immediately understood that your goal in a game like this is to get from point A to point B. In the early part of the campaign, that’s accomplished by simply picking up loose bricks from around the scene and working together to assemble them into makeshift bridges to cross gaps. In true LEGO spirit, there’s no single right way to build your path forward: You could build a super-clean structure that a civil engineer would approve of, or cobble together a hodgepodge of pieces with no regard for aesthetics or efficiency but which gets the job done nonetheless. We tended toward the latter, and had a great time doing it. (Side note: a Photo Mode would’ve been a nice addition as a way to capture the digital memory of what you create and share it with friends and family – and the act of working together to solve whatever obstacle is in front of you is really enjoyable. But simple screenshots sufficed.)

Those puzzles ramp up a bit as the campaign progresses, though as I mentioned it felt like there’s a lot more room for it to grow into that it leaves unexplored. A favorite scene of ours had us driving a big dump truck of sorts around an industrial yard where train tracks are made. The locomotive we rode in on had to stop due to a gap in the tracks, so we got out, hopped in the truck with one of us steering while the other (effectively) worked the pedals. We roamed around, collecting raw materials into the truck bed before taking them to the foundry to be forged into usable track pieces, then satisfyingly snapped the new track into place and continued onwards. It’s still simple, but with a few more steps involved than just assembling a bridge or stairway.

We also had fun with a series of minigames near the end of the story that I won’t spoil here, except to note that they’re particularly finicky physics-based challenges that might be quite tricky for younger gamers that are likely to be drawn to Voyagers and its E-for-Everyone ESRB rating. Fortunately, none of these tricky tasks are required in order to progress – but we did have fun earning the Achievements that came along with completing them.

Play Time

Though puzzles make up the meat of the gameplay, there’s also a bit of freedom to play around in many scenes. My daughter and I found ourselves racing to be the first to “pop” every flower we came across by rolling over it (and there are a ton of them throughout the entire campaign) even though there are no actual rewards for doing so. There are also fun little “breaks” you can take, such as by each hopping on a teeter-totter or sitting next to each other on a bench. They’re absolutely not required, but they make for fun little pit stops along the golden path (and another idea that those of us who played Split Fiction earlier this year might recognize).

If I were to levy one more complaint against LEGO Voyagers, it’s that neither my daughter nor myself quite got what the meaning of the completely wordless story was supposed to be. In the opening moments, the 1×1 brick avatars watch a rocket launch go awry. They spend the next handful of hours trying to get to the rocket facility…and I suppose you’ll see what happens. But if there was a moral to the tale here in the way you might expect from watching Wall-E or playing a game like Tunic, both of us missed it.

Gearbox has confirmed it’s “exploring” how to add a field of view (FOV) slider to Borderlands 4 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S after complaints from console players.

When Borderlands 4 launched last week, console players were shocked to discover not only a lack of a FOV slider in-game, but no motion blur toggle, either. The PC version of Borderlands 4 has settings for both.

The lack of a FOV slider is the biggest issue right now with Borderlands 4 on console, if anecdotal evidence across the internet is anything to go by, with some complaining that not being able to tweak the FOV value is causing them to experience motion sickness.

Gearbox chief Randy Pitchford responded to the complaints to suggest fairness might have something to do with the lack of a FOV slider, although all that comment did was confuse fans given the PC version has it and there’s crossplay at launch.

Now, Gearbox has confirmed it’s working on the problem, saying in a statement published on social media:

“Vault Hunters! We have heard your feedback on FOV (Field of View) sliders on console. The team is currently exploring how to bring these sliders to both Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 versions. We will continue to read your feedback and prioritize game updates with your experience in mind. Thanks all!”

There are suggestions the console version of Borderlands 4 lacks a FOV slider in order to maintain certain performance levels. By increasing the FOV, you’re putting the hardware under more strain and potentially impacting things like framerate.

Whatever the issue, Borderlands 4 got off to a big start on Steam, where it hit just over 300,000 concurrent player numbers on Sunday. No other Borderlands game has come close to that in terms of concurrent player numbers on Valve’s platform. The true number will of course be much higher when you add console players.

While Borderlands 4 got off to a big start in terms of player numbers, it’s not entirely plain sailing for Gearbox. The release was marred by complaints about PC performance that have resulted in a ‘mixed’ user review rating on Steam. Gearbox has issued an update to address the PC version of Borderlands 4 specifically, although without patch notes.

If you are delving into Borderlands 4 don’t go without updated hourly SHiFT codes list. We’ve also got a huge interactive map ready to go and a badass Borderlands 4 planner tool courtesy of our buds at Maxroll. Plus check out our expert players’ choices for which character to choose (no one agreed).

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.

The Final Fantasy series’ iconic victory fanfare has been a staple feature for the majority of the long-running RPG franchise since the very first entry in 1987. However, series composer Nobuo Uematsu recently revealed that a music programmer’s accidental discovery was what enabled him to give Final Fantasy’s battle themes and fanfare a truly punchy, driving drumbeat for the very first time.

At a recent sold-out event reported on by GameWatch, Uematsu talked in detail about Final Fantasy III’s score and its development. With a soundtrack that incorporated a wider variety of tunes including comical pieces, Uematsu credits Final Fantasy III as a turning point in which he established his approach to composing music for RPGs.

Uematsu emphasized that there was a stark difference in Final Fantasy III’s music quality compared to Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy II, even though they were composed using the same equipment and for the same console (the Famicom / NES). Although most games only used four of the NES’s audio channels, Uematsu revealed that Final Fantasy III made heavy use of a particular drum sound on the fifth channel, which was discovered completely by accident during development.

Deltarune Chapter 5 will release in the second half of 2026, developer Toby Fox has said on Undertale’s 10-year anniversary.

In mid-June — after a three-year wait between previous chapter releases of Deltarune — Fox promised a faster turnaround on the next episode of the saga, and revealed Chapter 5 was set for a 2026 release.

Now, in a new update to celebrate Undertale’s 10th birthday, Fox has admitted that after “factoring [in] the localization and testing,” he “doesn’t think that the game will be released in the first half of 2026.”

“That’s not a surprise, right?” Fox wrote. “From last time’s updates, you guys have access to exactly how long each step of the development took. Anyway, we don’t have any external factors surrounding the release date this time. We’ll release it when it’s done, and we will continue to update you guys on the progress of its completion. Thanks!”

Fox also took the opportunity to describe exactly where in the development cycle Deltarune Chapter 5 is, revealing that the “early parts” are complete, albeit needing a little polish. The last “40%-or-so” is in a “rough first pass state, and the last 10% is in a prototyping state.”

“Probably around 85% of cutscenes have been created up to a first draft state, however, of those at least 20% or so will require more polish,” Fox said, adding that regular enemies are mostly done, with at least one programmer already working on the regular enemy bullet patterns of Chapter 6. The “direction of the boss battles” has been decided, and boss attacks have already been planned and completed. The next step is to “arrange the attacks and make adjustments to them if necessary to fit the atmosphere of the battle.”

“With Chapter 3 & 4, there were some creative ‘hurdles’ which made developing parts of the game difficult. How to do the Boards of Chapter 3, how to design the events in Noelle’s house, etc.,” Fox added. “Once we got past those hurdles and expanded the team, everything went much more smoothly. Chapter 5 was not without hurdles! But… we already passed all of the obvious ones, so there’s little to get in our way now! We just need to keep making the game.” Only one “main deadline” has been outlined for the rest of 2025, and that’s to kick off translation by the end of the year.

The good news is that anyone new to Deltarune still has time to catch up. We thought what we’ve played thus far is ‘Amazing,’ awarding it 9/10, writing: “Even though the journey is only halfway to completion, Deltarune’s incredible story is already bursting with hilarious charm, unforgettable characters, and an iconic soundtrack that make it worth investing your time in.” A “sequel” of sorts to beloved indie RPG Undertale, it has released chapter by chapter starting in 2018, with Chapter 2 releasing in 2021 and the two most recent chapters dropping alongside the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2 earlier this year.

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.

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World 1-1. We’ve all run, jumped, and brick-bashed our way through that familiar first stage. It seems so simple and second-nature to us now, but in this modern age of iterative entertainment, it is almost impossible to convey the magnitude of the leap Super Mario Bros. represented compared to everything that came before it. That cabinet, that game, might as well have descended from outer space. Its art, music, smoothness, and most of all, its level design were light-years beyond.

World 1-1 introduced game design principles and a geometry of motion so perfectly calculated that it endures as one of the great works of the art form to this very day. But how was this miracle performed? Well, let us tell you, with the help of its creator, Shigeru Miyamoto.

The closest things to the opening level of the plumber’s first solo adventure up to that point were the stiff-but-serviceable screen-flipping Pitfall! and the gorgeous but terrible side-scrolling Pac-Land. Both were early essays on game design: Pitfall! presented a two-layered jungle with plenty of enemies and obstacles to jump over, but its flip-screen progression, huge non-linear map, strict time limit, and unintuitive treasure placement made it feel more like a puzzle to solve than a world to explore. Pac-Land was simply beautiful to behold and scrolled fairly cleanly in one direction, but the layout of the levels was haphazard and frustrating, and the controls felt maddening.

In comparison, Mario was like exploring a realized, unified, and diverse world. Every step revealed new threats and sights. Leap over enemies or land on them? What’s in those question blocks? There’s a Starman?! Wait, hidden lives? A secret underground treasure room with its own music?! Wait, there’s a FIRE FLOWER?! You can hold B to run or blast turtles with pyrotechnics?! What even is this game????? But in order for all of this madness to be built, it first needed solid foundations, and that’s where World 1-1 really comes into its own — teaching you the basics in the most elegant manner possible.

Super Mario Bros. isn’t nearly as big as it feels. In fact, World 1-1 measures only about 15 screens, including the underground room. It feels much bigger because over two or three screens, the tone of the terrain changes, from the intro section to leaping over pipes to platforming to pits. And yet within that tiny space, you have every power-up in the game, a hidden multi-coin block, a pair of traversable pipes, an invisible 1-UP, two enemy varieties, and a secret fireworks display.

But perhaps the biggest secret of 1-1 is that it’s a school. And the course is Mario 101. In a 2015 interview with Eurogamer, Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka talked about the extraordinary degree of thought that went into the design, beginning with World 1-1’s iconic opening: a tiny Mario facing an empty plane. Then the team considered how to teach the player several skills at once: how to avoid enemies, how to destroy enemies, how question blocks work, and how to tell an enemy Goomba from a helpful mushroom. All three are accomplished within the first steps of this opening level.

“If a suspicious enemy appears,” states Miyamoto, “the player will need to jump over it.” Running forward into the first Goomba just kills you, a lesson a player need only learn once before discovering they’re much safer in the air. Then moving forward, the player discovers some low bricks and question blocks.

“If we have a question block, they might just try to tap that as well,” continues Miyamoto. “If they see a coin, it will make them happy and they’ll want to try again.” Tapping the second block releases a mushroom that slides away, then bounces off a pipe to come hurtling at the character. The low ceiling makes it very hard to avoid, and the mushroom hits Mario, but instead of damaging him, it transforms him into Super Mario. In a matter of seconds, you’ve learned how both rewards and dangers work through the rest of Super Mario Bros.

“We kept simulating what the player would do”, Miyamoto explains. “So even within that one section, the player would understand the general concept of what Mario is supposed to be and what the game is about.” Even small details mattered. The opening screen’s first enemy was supposed to be a Koopa Troopa, but teaching the player the jump and kick movement necessary to overcome one worked less well at the beginning than they’d hoped. So they invented the simple-to-stomp Goomba (late in the game design process, according to Tetzuka) to help players understand the basics first.

Another valuable lesson, holding B to run before a long jump, is taught safely by two gaps later in 1-1. Pointing at this area, Miyamoto says, “Here we are preparing the player for the B-Dash”. He notes that the first gap is a pit with a filled-in bottom, a safe place to experiment and learn about long jumps without risking lives. This jump is followed immediately by a nearly-identical variant, a pit where, if the player falls, they will die, but by applying the skills they’ve just learned, they will easily survive. “By doing that, we wanted the player to naturally and gradually understand what they’re doing”, he continues. “The first course was designed for that purpose: so they can learn what the game is all about.”

Miyamoto further explains that the tutorial nature of early stages usually comes only after the team has crafted more sophisticated levels, so the creators know what skills the players need to develop. “Usually when we have a really fun course, they tend to be the later levels”, Miyamoto confirms. “World 2-1, World 2-2, we create those first and then afterwards come back and create World 1-1. There’s a lot of testing whilst the game is being built. I don’t give them (players) any explanation and just watch them play and see how they do it, and most of the time I think they’ll play a certain way or enjoy a certain part, and they end up not doing that. I think ‘That’s not what I intended!’ So I have to go back and use that as feedback”.

The intricately crafted layout creates a satisfying illusion of choice and a constant curve of advancement. Miyamoto sums it up perfectly: “Once the player realizes what they need to do, it becomes their game.”

The level layout is tuned to match Mario’s famous momentum, allowing a skilled player to perform precise jumps, slides, and combinations. An experienced Mario jockey can run forward at the beginning 1-1, squash a Goomba while hitting the first mushroom block, sprint forward, hit a coin block, reverse direction, jump up, catch the mushroom before it hits the ground, and hit the other coin. The team wisely mapped run and fireball to the same button, creating a slight degree of real-world physical dexterity challenge to trading momentum for projectiles. Likewise, the need to hold B to run and press A to jump made long jumps just slightly and satisfyingly more difficult.

Then there’s the music. Unlike most software development teams, the Mario team’s composer, Koji Kondo, was embedded with the developers. The famous Mario theme was composed and edited over and over as the level layout changed to match the pace of the design, and from then on, those few bars of digitized score would never leave our brains again.

And all of this magic was achieved using only the most limited of tools back in 1985. To really understand why Super Mario Bros. works so well, you first need to understand how the NES renders graphics. The animated characters that move around the screen, such as Mario, are sprites, detailed and mobile clusters of pixels. The NES can only handle a few sprites onscreen at a time, so most of the rest of the world, including the ground, platforms, hills, and backgrounds, is made up of tiles and 8×8 blocks. Most of the objects you see in Super Mario Bros. are composed of these chunks. The question blocks, walls, and bricks are all made up of four combined 8×8 tiles, creating distinct 16×16 squares. It’s similar to the process used to build levels in Mario Maker, only more granular. These little tiles were the tools that Shigeru Miyamoto and team worked with to build a masterpiece.

Super Mario Bros is an early NES game, created before advanced memory map chips stretched its graphical capabilities. That meant that to achieve their vision, the Mario team had to push the hardware to the absolute limits of its capabilities. The entirety of Super Mario Bros.’ source code is 40K. That means the entire game, including graphics, fits on about thirteen closely-typed pages. Crammed into that space are 32 distinct worlds, eight boss battles, a second quest, myriad secrets, and a memorable cast of characters.

That restriction meant the design team had to make every bit count, and that led to all kinds of clever tricks to save space. Ever noticed the clouds and the bushes are just the same palette-swapped tiles? Or that the blocks in 1-2 are just recolored blocks from 1-1? Both tricks (and many others) were used to compress space and make room for more features.

Add together the level design, gorgeous visuals, perfect controls, and iconic music, and you have a game that transcends the tropes of older action games. Super Mario Bros. took levels and made them worlds. And Mario just went on from there. World 1-1 to 1-2. An underground kingdom. Then later, forests. Castles. Bridges. Under oceans. Worlds upon worlds.

But none would exist without that very first. Hell, it’s arguable that video games as they exist now wouldn’t be a thing if it weren’t for World 1-1. From the most meagre of pixelated tools, Miyamoto and the team at Nintendo crafted a miracle, and one that’s still as fun to play today as it was 40 years ago.

Jared Petty likes writing about how wonderful and silly video games are. You can find him at Bluesky as Bluesky as pettycommajared.