The Sony PSVR2 Headset is the best VR headset for PS5 owners, but it has always been an expensive purchase. Thankfully, Sony announced just yesterday that the company would be dropping the recommended retail price of the headset down to $399.99. This price cut brings it more in line with the Meta Quest 3 competitor, which is currently $499 for the Quest 3 and $299 for the Quest 3S.
If you’re hoping to pick up the PlayStation VR2 headset for yourself at this new price, now you can! Retailers have already started adopting the price cut and you can purchase the PSVR2 Horizon Call of the Mountain Bundle for just $399.99 at Amazon, Target, and Best Buy. The bundle had previously sold out at Amazon, but is now back in stock.
The Best PlayStation VR2 Deal Today
Along with the headset, this bundle also comes with a copy of Horizon Call of the Mountain which we gave a 7 out of 10 in our review. This game is exclusive to PlayStation, but that doesn’t mean you can only use the headset with your PS5. Sony released a PSVR2 PC adapter just last year that allows you to connect the headset to your PC and play SteamVR games. This has elevated the PlayStation VR2 headset to be one of the best VR headsets for PC gamers. You can check out our guide on how to connect it to PC for more info.
Xbox has just announced a number of indie games dropping on Xbox Game Pass in the first half of March 2025, including Enter the Gungeon, Monster Train, and several more.
Up first is Monster Train, which is out today on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, PC, and Standard across cloud, console, and PC. Monster Train has been on Game Pass in the past, but returns today. Per Microsoft’s description, “Monster Train brings a new strategic layer to roguelike deckbuilding, with three vertical playing fields to defend. Hell has frozen over and only you can protect the final burning pyre from the forces of heaven and restore the inferno.”
Xbox also lists the ever-popular Balatro in its lineup, which dropped on Xbox Game Pass last week following the ID@Xbox showcase. The release came alongside another “Friends of Jimbo” update adding cosmetic changes based on Bugsnax, Civilization, Assassin’s Creed, Slay the Princess, Dead by Daylight, and Fallout to the game.
More games follow in quick succession. Tomorrow, March 5, we’ll see Galacticare drop on Xbox Series X and S for Game Pass Standard users, having already been available on Ultimate. Then on March 6, we get One Lonely Outpost on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass for cloud, console, and PC users.
Next week on March 11, we’ll see indie darling Enter the Gungeon return to Game Pass Standard, PC, and Ultimate for cloud, console, and PC. As Xbox describes it, “Enter the Gungeon is a gunfight dungeon crawler following a band of misfits seeking to shoot, loot, dodge, roll and table-flip their way to personal absolution by reaching the legendary Gungeon’s ultimate treasure: the gun that can kill the past.”
Two days later on March 13, Mullet Madjack will join Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass for cloud, PC, and Xbox Series consoles. Then the following week, on March 18, a preview of 33 Immortals will drop on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. 33 Immortals “is a co-op action-roguelike for 33 players. Play as a damned soul, and rebel against God’s final judgment. Dive straight into epic, 33-player co-op battles with instant “pick-up and raid” matchmaking. Cooperate with your allies to survive against hordes of monsters and massive, challenging bosses. Expand your arsenal and equip powerful new relics to permanently upgrade your soul.” The full game will be available for purchase.
Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass, Game Pass Standard
Mullet Madjack (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X|S) – March 13
Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
33 Immortals (Game Preview) (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X|S) – March 18
Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
As always, as new games hit Game Pass, existing games leave the service. You can save up to 20% off your purchase with your membership to keep these games in your library.
Games leaving Xbox Game Pass on March 15:
Evil West (Cloud, Console, and PC)
Yakuza 5 Remastered (Cloud, Console, and PC)
Yakuza 6: The Song of Life (Cloud, Console, and PC)
Solar Ash (Cloud, Console, and PC)
SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated (Cloud, Console, and PC)
Lies of P (Cloud, Console, and PC)
No More Heroes 3 (Cloud, Console, and PC)
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
The year is young, but 2025 is already shaping up to be a big year for excellent video games. An increasing list of big games is set to release this year for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC. In March, we’ll see new entries in franchises like Assassin’s Creed, WWE 2K, MLB The Show, and many more. Below, you’ll find release dates for all the biggest games and expansions that have been announced for the rest of the year and beyond. Let’s get right down to it.
If you’re someone who likes to preorder your games, you can click the links on the platform of your choice to make sure it arrives on launch day.
March 2025 – Video Game Release Dates
March finallly sees the release of the often-delayed Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the installment that finally delivers what fans have been pining for for over a decade: an ancient Japan setting. Too bad Ghost of Tsushima got there first, but this game still looks awesome. Also out this month is a remaster of the JRPG Xenoblade Chronicles X, plus MLB The Show 25, remasters of the first two Suikodens, Split Fiction, and more.
Age of Mythology: Retold – March 4 – (PS5)
Carmen Sandiego – March 4 – (PS5, Xbox, Switch, PC)
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 (long inhale) Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, and the social network formerly known as Twitter.
When Pokemon TCG Pocket first launched, the meta quickly came to be dominated by a very small handful of decks. One of those, centered around Misty and water-type Pokemon, came to be hated early on due to its potential to overpower opponents early on based entirely on how well some coin flips went.
Now, three expansions later, you would think other cards would have swooped in to replace or counter Misty decks. But instead, Pokemon TCG Pocket’s latest expansion just added a new card that makes Misty decks stronger than ever, and a lot of players are kind of over it.
For context, it’s not that Misty decks are necessarily the most powerful in the game. It’s that the luck-based nature of Misty makes losing to them feel very, very bad. Misty is a Supporter card, with the unique ability to allow the user to pick a water-type Pokemon, and flip a coin until they land on tails. They then attach a water-type energy to that Pokemon for every heads they flipped. This could result in a player attaching 0 water-type energy, effectively wasting a deck spot on the card and a supporter card play. Or they could attach 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 energy, or more, if luck is on their side that day. A well-flipped Misty could allow a player to win on turn one in certain situations, before the opponent even has a chance to make a move. Or, in more common scenarios, the user gets enough bonus energy to bring extremely powerful cards online before their opponent can build a meaningful defense.
All that’s fine and dandy, but what’s made Misty worse are the numerous cards in subsequent expansions that have made it even more powerful. Mythical Island added Vaporean, which has an ability allowing players to essentially move all that bonus energy freely around between their water-types. Space-Time Smackdown brought Manaphy in, which adds even more water energy to the board. Both expansions saw new, powerful water-type Pokemon that can make use of that energy, such as Palkia ex and Gyarados ex. As a result, water decks have been at the top of the meta consistently for multiple expansions in a row.
And now, with Triumphant Light, there’s another card out there making Misty decks even more hellish: Irida. Irida, like Misty, is a Supporter card, but its effect is that it can heal 40 damage from each Pokemon that has any water-type energy attached. Up to this point, grass-type decks have been the healing experts. But with Irida, water-type decks can make significant comebacks as long as they’ve collected and spread out enough energy…and between Misty, Manaphy, and Vaporeon, they’re very likely to do so.
For what it’s worth, some Pokemon TCG experts are offering a pretty logical explanation for Irida. In TCG Pocket, decks are limited to 20 cards That means if you want to add something like Irida, you need to take something else out. Water decks are simply swimming in good cards – at a certain point, players must weigh whether or not it’s actually worth removing Misty for a card like Irida. Some players are speculating that developer DeNA added Irida in an effort to crowd Misty out and force players to make tough choices about which Supporters to include. But that doesn’t mean plenty of wise deckbuilders haven’t found ways to include both.
As the player above points out, Pokemon TCG Pocket is gearing up for a regularly-scheduled event, where rewards will be doled out for going on win streaks in the game’s online competitive mode. The best reward, a gold profile badge, will be given out for winning five matches in a row. This is surprisingly difficult to do, and even moreso when many decks you’ll be facing can sweep you away within the first few turns if they flip coins correctly, and have backups like Irida to save them even if the flips go bad for them.
Expect to see a lot of water decks during this event and for a long time to come. In fact, at this point, it may just be worth playing one yourself if you’re not already.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Since launch, PC players of Monster Hunter Wilds have been tinkering with the game, working to optimize their performance and settings. As it turns out, some even dug all the way into the config files and found a typo, which they subsequently tested to see if that could bump up their numbers.
As discovered on Steam over the weekend (thanks, Kotaku), inside the config file of Monster Hunter Wilds, there’s a line where “Resolution” is spelled “Resoltuion”. According to the original Steam poster, fixing the misspelled word gave them a “perfomance boost,” though they also said it made their processor temperature “jump significantly,” from 50 degrees Celsius to 70.
A Reddit thread spun up too, where the original poster claimed to get a mild performance bump from around 120 FPS with Frame Gen to around 140. “Again, maybe a coincidence but I have no idea,” the OP said. “Needs more testing. I’m just happy to gain FPS somehow.”
Now, several repliers have commented with some words of caution and reason: adjusting this variable could be doing something completely different. “Renaming could just be setting whatever it is to a default which is lower than whatever it was, hence the perfomance increase,” one Reddit commenter said.
Another user said it’s a placebo. The executable contains the same typo, so it actually refers to a specific node. “By ‘fixing’ the typo, that makes the game not find this one specific config key/value, so perhaps [its] defaulting to some other value,” the responder said.
There are, of course, posts disputing the placebo effect. Without official confirmation from Capcom, this does seem like a red herring. And it’s best to advise caution when diving into the config files or other parts of the critical game files.
Players’ avid search for what fixing the typo does, however, indicates the fervor with which Monster Hunter Wilds players are hunting for performance bumps. The PC optimization has been a point of discussion for Monster Hunter Wilds players, up to the point that even social posts about an upcoming fix for a progression-breaking bug are garnering responses asking for optimization fixes.
PC players continue to flood into Monster Hunter Wilds though, as Capcom’s latest has been a record-breaking entry for both the series and the Steam storefront. With this much popularity, hopefully we see some fine-tuning in the weeks and months ahead, typo or not. A title update for Monster Hunter Wilds is expected in April, which is due to add a new endgame area to gather, as well as more monster hunting action for players to embark on.
IGN’s Monster Hunter Wilds review returned an 8/10. We said: “Monster Hunter Wilds continues to smooth off the rougher corners of the series in smart ways, making for some extremely fun fights but also lacking any real challenge.”
Monster Hunter Wilds has a patch arriving soon, addressing a known but fairly important issue with its story progression.
As noted over the weekend by the Monster Hunter Status account on X/Twitter, players encountered an issue where a certain NPC didn’t appear. Without the NPC there, this disabled story progression for Main Mission: Chapter 5-2 “A World Turned Upside Down.”
The main Monster Hunter account followed up with an update this morning, and confirmed a patch addressing the known progression blcokers will be deployed tomorrow morning, March 4. The update will briefly drop players from their online sessions when it goes live, but they will be able to jump back in after updating.
It’s a fast turnaround for a very frustrating bug, which is good to see. Hopefully anyone stalled out by the random disappearing NPC will be able to find them now.
IGN’s Monster Hunter Wilds review returned an 8/10. We said: “Monster Hunter Wilds continues to smooth off the rougher corners of the series in smart ways, making for some extremely fun fights but also lacking any real challenge.”
Monster Hunter Wilds players have likely spent the weekend diving into the many hunts and activities. PC modders have also been busy, addressing one of the early frustrations with Wilds: Character Edit Vouchers.
It’s a community fix that PC players would have seen coming, since modders have also tinkered with the same particular point of frustration in past Monster Hunter games. It’s a fairly straightforward mod, simply allowing the player to not have to worry about having edit vouchers on-hand before heading back to the character creation screen. While minor edits like hair and makeup are freely available, anything extensive does usually require a paid Voucher, and this mod sidesteps the requirement.
Judging by past games, Monster Hunter Wilds will likely see some popularity in the modding scene. Most of the time, modders take aim at cosmetics, user interface, drop rates, or performance, and the latter will probably be a key point.
IGN’s Monster Hunter Wilds review returned an 8/10. We said: “Monster Hunter Wilds continues to smooth off the rougher corners of the series in smart ways, making for some extremely fun fights but also lacking any real challenge.”
Call of Duty cheat provider, Phantom Overlay, is reportedly shutting down.
In a statement posted to Telegram, the cheat provider declined to comment on why it was closing down “immediately,” adding: “This is not an exit scam and no external entity could ever compel me to exit scam my customers. I’ll keep everything updated, safe, and online for 32 days longer.”
The reason Phantom Overlay is committed to staying online for 32 days is to ensure people with a 30-day key “get their full money’s worth.” The cheat creator also said they would partially refund lifetime keys, too.
Crucially, many other cheat providers piggyback off Phantom Overlay’s systems, so this shock closure could have a broader impact on the cheating ecosystem.
“I can’t believe it!!” commented one gamer on X, formerly known as Twitter (thanks, Dexerto). “Does this mean the Season 3 cheat update is really gonna work?!”
Other commenters were less convinced, with one stating: “They’re just rebranding. They have the same provider under multiple names/brands. The cheaters won’t stop.”
It did, however, assure players it now routinely bans cheaters due to increased “velocity” from several Ricochet Anti-Cheat systems, in addition to the over 19,000 accounts it recently removed.
The apparent prevalence of cheaters is considered by some to be ruining competitive multiplayer, and Activision had come under fire for failing to address the problem. Things got so bad that last month, with the release of Season 2, Activision let console Ranked players disable crossplay with PC players.
Cheating is not unique to Call of Duty, of course, but it has become more problematic for Activision ever since it released free-to-download battle royale Warzone in 2020. But despite investing millions of dollars developing its anti-cheat technology — as well as pursuing cheat makers in the courts, with a number of recent high-profile successes — fans remain sceptical of the Ricochet system.
In related news, earlier today, we reported it looks like we’ll finally find out more about the return of Call of Duty Warzone‘s much-loved Verdansk map on March 10.
Vikki Blake is a reporter, critic, columnist, and consultant. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
Video Games Deluxe has a history of working with Rockstar on a number of games, including the 2017 re-releases of L.A. Noire, L.A. Noire: The VR Case Files, and most recently on upgrades to Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition for iOS and Android, Netflix, and modern consoles.
“After working together closely over many years, we are excited to have Video Games Deluxe join the team as Rockstar Australia,” said Rockstar Games Head of Publishing, Jennifer Kolbe.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Now, however, players visiting the Call of Duty shop get a pop-up that reads: “The Verdansk Collection,” and a countdown that looks set to explore a week today, on March 10, 2025 (thanks, InsiderGaming).
Accompanying the pop-up is a simple, tri-color sketch that shows an alpine scene of snow, pine trees, a dam, and a crashed plane — a familiar sight for anyone who spent time in Warzone’s original sandbox before it was superceded by Verdansk ’84 in Season 3, and then replaced completely by Caldera in 2021. Right now, the only way to revisit it is to playCall of Duty Warzone Mobile.
Call of Duty Black Ops 6 Season 2 is now live. It adds five Multiplayer maps — Bounty, Dealership, Lifeline, Bullet, and Grind — the return of the fan-favorite Gun Game mode, and new weapons and operators. And don’t forget the super expensive Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover event.
Warzone, however, received less content than originally planned as the team works to address some of the more severe issues currently afflicting the game, including gameplay tuning, bug fixes, and quality-of-life improvements.
Vikki Blake is a reporter, critic, columnist, and consultant. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
