Category: IGN

2XKO has been a staple of Evo for the last three years, but the finish line (or perhaps the true starting line, depending on how you look at it) is finally starting to come into view on the horizon. A closed beta has been announced for September 9, and after that, the servers will remain up all the way until launch, whenever that may be. The game has changed a lot since it’s first iteration, and even since its first appearance at Evo, and there are even more changes in store for the Closed Beta. To cover some of these changes, and to get a breakdown of the newest character, Vi, I talked with lead champion designer Alex Jaffe, after going hands-on with the latest build for myself.

You’re launching a closed beta on Sept. 9 and have announced that the servers will remain live until the game launches. First off, how does that feel? Can you sum up what you’re feeling at this significant milestone in 2XKO’s long life at this point?

Alex Jaffe, Lead Champion Designer on 2XKO: I appreciate you asking, because it’s very much an emotional thing for so many of us. We’ve been working on this game for a long time. I think people know. People have been waiting, right? We get it. We are the same way. We just want people to have the game. We just want them to play. And, years of my life, I have just been waiting for this moment, right? So when you make a game, you’re there to bring joy to people.

And so, we knew that we were heading towards the closed beta, but the day we announced it, I got to tell you, my spirit’s lifted in a way they haven’t in a while, because it just feels so real now. And, having people here at EVO playing it, everybody signing up for the beta, soon they’re going to have it home and they’re not going to have it taken away from them again. They’re going to have it. And they’re just going to keep on playing forever, hopefully. And I just cannot wait to have more and more people playing the game, and hopefully having a great time with it, and learning from them, and improving the game for all y’all, hopefully.

I’ll tell you what, as someone who played the Alpha Lab, and then had it taken away from them, I did feel like it was a major slight against me.

Jaffe: Absolutely. We’re just practicing a little bit of cruelty just for no good reason. No, I’m just kidding. No, we know there’s work to do, right? If you played Alpha Lab, hopefully you had a fun time with the game. But, there was a lot that was incomplete. And we have been grinding, we have been in the lab working on the game, so many little details, trying to add more content, but also, I was looking at the changes that our core rules team and our live balance team put in, just in Alpha Lab 2, and it’s just massive. So many problems are being fixed. So many good solutions to make more situations in the game more interesting, more fair. I’m just so proud of everyone on the team.

Well, let’s talk about those changes since Alpha Lab 2. What were some of the major pieces of feedback? I know you can’t go through every little bit. But what are some of the major bits of feedback that you got from Alpha Lab 2 that you’re addressing in this closed beta?

Jaffe: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll speak first about core roles, which is not my team, but it’s the team I work very closely with, of course, because I work on Champions. So one of the things we saw in Alpha Lab 1, we saw that the game was really long combos, a lot of pressure, just like it was hard to get your turn. It was hard to get agency and get to act. And again, you want to play the game. At the same time, a lot of it is about taking control and being able to style on your opponent. Finding that build or middle ground is what we’ve been working on. Alpha Lab 2, in some ways, we swung the other way, right? It was too hard to get your offense started, unless you knew very, very specific routes to get Oki, for example.

[Editors Note: Oki, or okizeme, is a term used to refer to the offensive options you can use while the opponent is getting up off the ground after a knockdown]

And, I know the combos were too short there, but there were ways in which people felt like there was maybe some overcorrection. And I think, we really hit a great sweet spot in this one. So some of the changes we made, we improved damage, so that rounds don’t go on so long. People were just like, “I want to get through the round. Finish the game, get into another one.” But, there was maybe too much healing, not enough damage, we have less gray health building. All these things to make sure that a round is fun, fast, and gets to the point. We also changed the way our knockdown system works, so that it’s possible to get really, really offensive mix-ups and set ups on your opponent. But they’re not freely available as a vortex where you combo into it over and over and mix up. We have our throws forward throws and air throws. They’re hard knockdowns. But, you don’t get a hard knockdown off of combos anymore. You do get these roll opportunities. You used to have rolls in there, but now, the rolls can be thrown to be punished. So roll doesn’t get you out of pressure.

So a lot of just somewhat subtle maybe to an unfamiliar player, but really, really central to someone who’s playing the game hard in terms of making sure that it’s fair and interesting. Oh, meter changes too, one more thing I want to mention. Pretty big. You start the round with one bar of meter, so you can just get going, and hit your super, and get right to the fun stuff. You don’t start with a full bar of your team meter anymore, which is your break. So you can’t break that first combo that your opponent’s doing to you, right? We want to make sure you get your combo in, you’re not just waiting for the second one. So it’s all a lot of tuning. It’s all subtle stuff. But I think it just results in more fun games that go quicker where there’s more back and forth between players.

Let’s talk about Vi. Vi Is the new character that you just introduced. And, I got to play with her. She’s super fun, very much my style of character. As someone who plays Giovanna in Guilty Gear Strive, I just love being able to quickly dash in and out. What is Vi’s kit, basically? What was the idea that you wanted to hit with this character?

Jaffe: Absolutely. Yeah. So Vi is a character that is really, really beloved, even before Arcane, right? League players love her. But Arcane really brought her into these upper echelons of iconic characters. And, obviously, we looked at her, her power is in her fists, right? And we knew that there was a good chance she would be somewhere in the boxer zone. Boxers are just a classic archetype in fighting games. But we wanted a new twist on it and we were just really looking at what we could do with her.

And for us, it was really about getting some of that technicality of boxers, where really precise movement, a lot of really interesting strings, but also, some of that just raw power fantasy of these Hextech gauntlets, right, just mashing your opponent with huge hits, hitting the ground, making blasts of energy, and tying those two things together, I think, weaving them together was the goal. And, it took a while to get there. We definitely went through many iterations on her before we found that perfect sweet spot. But we were super happy with… I think, what that lets you do is it lets you make a character that’s easy to get into, because you’re like, “Damn, she hits hard.” Right? Very much from the beginning, right? She’s smashing you to the ground, charging up that S1 punch, and hitting you for full stream.

But, the real core of her kit is her footwork, which is this dashing special you mentioned, where you can weave in and out and you can cancel it into different follow-ups. And these follow-ups have so much flexibility. You can charge one and then not charge the other, charge another, cancel charge one into any other S1 special, link that into another footwork, and you’ve got this really nice dance for combos and her pressure structure, I think, look just really beautiful and feel really expressive and great on the hands. Yeah, I’m super proud of her. It seems like people are having fun time with her out here.

One of the things I noticed about her is that she is so fast, blisteringly fast. It’s already a very fast game. Her mix-up or cross-up potential is super, super high. What would you say are some of her weaknesses though? It seemed like she might have some trouble getting in on somebody who’s trying to zone her out.

Jaffe: Yeah, absolutely. And we do have tools to deal with that, but the idea is, look in a game 2XKO, there’s a lot happening. There’s a lot of hit-boxes on the screen. Everybody has to have some way to… We talk about just get their **** started. You know what I mean? I’m sorry. But, yeah. So that means sometimes it means projectiles, right? You’re casting power across the screen. Sometimes it means, “Hey, I’ve got armor to go through.” Right? Like Darius’s reversal. And sometimes, it just means “I’m so fast that you can’t even prepare for my approach.” And that’s definitely Vi’s strong suit, it’s surprising movement, getting right in there, but she has to make it through whatever the battery of defenses. And, she does have some projectile invulnerability to do that. But yeah, it can be challenging. Even I was playing a set with someone today, and her footwork dash can go into a slide that crosses up. You saw that, right?

Yeah, yeah.

She just passes through. And I was playing with someone who was just mashing jab when I started to go into it. And, I’m screwed there, right? If your opponent knows what you’re doing predictably, there are really strong answers to Vi. You have to keep it flexible. You have to use some of her unorthodox air tools to change her movement up. You got to be using back and forth movement, not just all aggression. So definitely, she is a very strong character, but she’s fighting, in some ways, inherently an uphill battle against characters with bigger hit-boxes or with projectiles.

So the landscape of the tag-fighting genre has changed substantially in just the last year.

Jaffe: Oh, has it? What happened?

[Laughter]

I just wanted to get your thoughts on the genre and what it feels like. You used to be the new kid on the block, the only kid on the block.

Jaffe: Now we’re the old new kid on the block. I get it.

And now, all of a sudden, all these kids have moved in.

Jaffe: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

What’s that feel like?

Jaffe: Honestly, it’s exciting in a real way, because everybody on this team loves tag fighters, and there were a jerk of options for a while. And, we’re making this game because we think that this is one of the most mind-meltingly enjoyable experiences you could have on planet Earth. And so, we’re genuinely psyched that there are more options out there and that there are going to be more people playing tag fighters on account of multiple games coming out. And it’s really cool just seeing them, everyone’s taking very different takes on it.

The Tokon folks were super nice and welcomed us in to play this morning, me and another designer, Caroline. We only played and we had a great time. The game’s very different than ours. The pacing is different. The way team play works is very different. I think there’s both room to enjoy both of them, or just different audiences will like different ones. So I feel great about that. I haven’t got to play Invincible. Yeah, super excited to play that.

It’s super fun.

Jaffe: Yeah, and Hunter x Hunter is awesome. So it’s a wild time from there to be so few, to now, so many. But, I think, it’s inevitably going to bring a lot of people into this kind of peak experience. So we’re excited, and we want people to play our game, and enjoy it, and in general, to play tag games to enjoy them.

Coming back to the closed beta, do you have any sense of how long you want this closed beta to last? Or is it just a thing of when you feel like the game is ready, that’s when you’re going to flip the switch?

Jaffe: Yeah, it’s a great question. I don’t think I have a very satisfying answer there, for two reasons. One, because I personally don’t know exactly what the plans are at the top level in terms of how we do that, because I’m working on making the game. That’s my focus, right? And in particular, as running the champions team, it’s all about that character factory, making one amazing character after another to the extent we can. That’s our goal, right? So my eyes and my team’s eyes are firmly set on the next character, the one after that, and the one after that, just making them amazing. In terms of the process, what we’re going to learn from the closed beta, I’m sure that’s the goal, right? We want to see how the game does out there. We want to see how people enjoy it, what works and what doesn’t.

And, I’m sure I could say that the duration of it does depend on how confident we are with what we’ve got. So far, we’re loving what we have here, but it’ll be different once people have it at home. That said, I don’t actually even know exactly what the bounds of how short or how long that could be are. I’m sure somebody else does, but no matter what, we don’t want to wait too long, right, before expanding the game as much as we can, because we just want it out there, we want people playing it. And, how long it’ll be, I can’t say really. But, fingers crossed, not too long.

Final question. For anyone that played the first two Alpha Labs, maybe felt like they had a good feel of their character, are they going to jump into this new closed beta and be like, “Oh, this is way different”? What are some of the biggest changes to some of the other characters that are going into the closed beta?

Jaffe: Absolutely. Yeah. So we have a lot of changes on the rules side and some more strategic changes on the champion side, as well as some tuning. It’s actually cool because we’ve had our live balance team start coming online and start participating in the process of working on the Champions, because in some sense, we’re doing live balance on champions that have actually existed in the wild for a while, even though it’s only been in temporary tests. So they’re working on the champs and collaborating with the champion designers, like our live balance designer, Yohosiei, to just make them more pristine. And, some of the change is damage, whatever, recovery. But some of them are more significant. Darius?

Darius has a fireball now!

Jaffe: Darius got a projectile. It’s got a nice little ground projectile. It’s not the strongest thing in the world, but it has real strengths. He can use it to approach. He can combo off it sometimes, OTG (off the ground) with it. It just gives him more tools to play with to be a more full and expressive character so he can have more fun with him.

Illaoi, we’re very excited about a subtle change. Illaoi, she really relies on getting her tentacles out to start her game. Because once she’s got tentacles, she can pressure with them, she can combo with them, she can mix the opponent up with them. But, we wanted her to have that physicality, so she can’t just summon them. She has to hit you to generate tentacles. That said, it was really hard for her to start that game from far away, like we talked about. So we found a great compromise, which is her down S2 is now chargeable. Her down S2 is the move where she punches her totem into the ground and a tentacle comes up and it generates a tentacle for. Now, if you charge that, it will auto-track the opponent’s position. So they have to fear that low from anywhere on screen if they’re being patient and just sitting there. So it lets her express power from far, get the tentacle out and really get her game going.

Beyond that, just a lot of tuning changes. Yasuo has pretty different routes in a bunch of places. But most characters, Darius, or Braum, Jinx, their routes are pretty similar. Some changes around the way corner. But mostly, you might have to relearn a couple of things, especially at the advanced level, but you’re going to be able to get in there and play your character mostly as you used to. And, we’re making bigger swings right now. But as we get closer and closer to the whole complete version of the game, we’re going to slow down that rate of change, so that we’re not disrupting people’s muscle memory too much.

Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit

Love Elden Ring Nightreign, but getting a little bored of the same three-night cycle of bosses and repetitive Everdark sovereigns? Fret not, Nightfarer, because there may be a brand new, extra-hard game mode on the way that will shake up Nightreign’s regular playstyle.

This new mode, entitled Deep of Night, was found and shared by dataminers, and appears to be essentially a kind of “endless” mode with skill-based matchmaking. Unlike in regular Nightreign, you’re not able to choose the boss you target, and it will be picked for you at random instead. With each victory, your “Depth” rating increases, which in turn increases the difficulty, and Nightreign will generally try to pair you with other players that are at the same Depth as you as long as the wait time isn’t too long.

In total, the datamine suggests there will be five Depths with 999 ratings within each Depth, and killing bosses will increase your Depth. Losing runs will cause your Depth to revert back, but once you get into Depth 2 you’ll never be able to get back into Depth 1. It’s unclear if this applies to every Depth level, or if it’s just a way to keep experienced players from being stuck with new ones.

There are other major changes in Deep of Night, too. Some bosses are “magmafied”, which is just what it sounds like. They’re covered in magma. This probably makes them stronger – I certainly don’t want to touch them. There are also new weapon effects, and stronger weapons that come with better buffs, but also some drawbacks. Additionally, players will get access to three more relic slots on top of the existing three, with the three new slots only working in the Deep of Night. Like the new weapons, new relics were datamined also, with both stronger buffs and also sometimes counterbalancing drawbacks.

All in all this new mode sounds like it could be an interesting spin on Nightreign that keeps it fresh for a while yet. While Nightreign still has a bustling community, interest has slowed down in the months since launch, especially as the rotation of Everdark bosses has gotten a little more repetitive. FromSoftware did just announce the next new Everdark boss, Caligo, which will drop tomorrow evening.

From a frozen haze, the winged terror emerges.
Let flames rend these frost-laced shadows.

The Everdark Sovereign version of Fissure in the Fog will land on August 7, 2025 at 03:00 CEST | 18:00 PDT (6/8) | 10:00 JST. pic.twitter.com/PedcHLeDS2

— ELDEN RING (@ELDENRING) August 5, 2025

We gave Elden Ring Nightreign a 7/10 at launch, with our reviewer saying, “when Elden Ring Nightreign is played exactly as it was designed to be played, it’s one of the finest examples of a three-player co-op game around – but that’s harder to do than it should be, and playing solo is poorly balanced.” The game has since gotten a duos mode, and it had sold five million copies as of July.

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.

Hideo Kojima’s Xbox game project, OD, is still in development, despite Xbox’s recent cancellations of a number of projects both internal and external.

This comes from Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier, who posted on BlueSky that OD was ‘still in development’ as confirmed to him by a Microsoft spokesperson. He shared this on the heels of reporting that Xbox was stopping development on Avalanche Studios’ Contraband, a collaboration that was announced four years ago.

While OD’s status specifically wasn’t particularly in question, Xbox’s recent string of cancellations have led many to concern over any game we haven’t seen for more than a year or two. After a mass layoff last month that saw 9,100 jobs eliminated Microsoft-wide, we learned that multiple games had been canceled, including Everwild and Perfect Dark. A collaboration with Romero Games was also pulled.

Kojima’s admittedly been a bit quiet about OD lately, in a move that wouldn’t be taken as anything other than focused game development if the circumstances weren’t so concerning. He first announced an Xbox collaboration in November of 2022, then officially revealed OD along with several of its star cast members at The Game Awards 2023. We learned at the time Kojima was working with filmmaker Jordan Peele to create some sort of horror experience “no one has seen before.”

Since then, we haven’t heard much more about the status of OD, though Kojima did reassuringly give an interview late last month in which he mentioned he was still working on it.

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.

BioShock 4 has reportedly been in development for more than a decade at various studios under the 2K Games banner. But it has suffered yet another overhaul after it reportedly failed a review by executives and the head of its developer, Cloud Chamber, was ousted. Now, the fourth BioShock feels further away than ever. So, what’s going on?

In an interview with Strauss Zelnick, the boss of 2K parent company Take-Two, I asked the CEO flat out if BioShock 4 was in danger of being canceled. Zelnick was clear in his response: “It’s going to come out,” he promised. “That I can say hand on heart, without question.”

Zelnick sounds pretty confident, then. But it’s hard to get away from BioShock’s tumultuous — and lengthy — development. On this, Zelnick held his hands up, admitting BioShock 4 has had its troubles. But he also explained why it’s proving such a hard nut to crack.

“We don’t talk about how long our development cycles are,” Zelnick began. “We have had some ups and downs along the way. That is accurate. And we have had changes in studio leadership. That said, we have very big shoes to fill on BioShock because of the legacy of Ken Levine, the legacy of what has gone before, which has been so successful. And we need to make sure that this experience is true to the BioShock DNA on the one hand, and a massive step forward on the other hand. That’s always challenging. We think we’re up to the challenge, but it has not been seamless.”

This week, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier broke the news of BioShock 4’s overhaul, and offered some insight into its troubles. “The game’s narrative was identified as an area that was particularly in need of improvement and will be revamped in the coming months,” Schreier reported.

“In a recent all-hands meeting, Cloud Chamber staff were told that the company needs to become more agile and efficient, leading to worries that layoffs may follow,” Schreier continued.

There hasn’t been a new BioShock game since 2013’s BioShock Infinite (Ken Levine is still working under the 2K banner on Judas). But BioShock 4 is not alone in having a lengthy development cycle, and we’ve seen — very recently — some publishers cancel games that were in development for six, seven, or even eight years. Sony’s live service flop Concord, for example, was in the works for years before its disastrous release. Microsoft just canceled Rare’s Everwild, which was revealed six years ago.

It is clear from the outside looking in that triple-A video game development is getting longer, which is something Zelnick not only agrees with, but offered an explanation for.

“I think it’s a reflection of the fact that as entertainment businesses mature, consumers seek quality and everyone realizes that the consumer is highly demanding and properly so,” he said.

“The strategy of this company has always been to make the best entertainment, not necessarily the most entertainment. Of course, sometimes we’ve fallen short, but frankly a precious few times.

“And I think some of our competitors have realized maybe a little late in the day that consumers are not okay with okay. Good is the new bad, great is the new great. And our goal here is to make everything exceptional.”

Zelnick added that he didn’t mean to be critical of other video game companies “because this is really hard stuff, and you don’t want to criticize someone for sticking with their creative talent, supporting them and trying to get a great result.” But he did say that Take-Two “would like to fail fast if we’re going to fail.”

“And we have made some hard decisions relatively early on. But we too have occasionally canceled titles well into their development. So it’s hard. What we’re all doing is hard.”

2K Games issued the following statement to Bloomberg on BioShock 4:

We are working hard to set BioShock up for the best possible future. Right now, we have a good game, but we are committed to delivering a great one. We are working closely with leadership at the studio to define this path.

The question now is, when might we see BioShock 4 actually come out?

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.

Xbox has stopped development of Contrabrand to “evaluate the project’s future,” with a Bloomberg report saying the game is canceled entirely four years after its initial E3 announcement.

Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier first broke the news on Bluesky today, saying that “Xbox is canceling Contraband, announced in 2021 from Avalanche Studios (Just Cause), after four years of radio silence, sources tell Bloomberg News.”

This was followed by an official confirmation from Avalanche on its website, which reads as follows:

Over the past several years, Avalanche Studios Group and Xbox Game Studios Publishing have collaborated on Contraband. Active development has now stopped while we evaluate the project’s future. We’re thankful for the excitement we’ve seen fro mthe community since we announced and will give an update on what’s next as soon as we can.

Contraband was originally announced for Xbox and PC at E3 2021 with a teaser trailer. At the time, we knew it would be set in a 1970s smuggler’s paradise called Bayan, but we didn’t see any gameplay. Since then, we’ve seen nothing further of the game, nor heard any progress on its development. However, we did report that in 2022, management and employees clashed over a controversial hire and a lack of subsequent communication, a dispute that later inspired the studio to form an official union club and pressure the company toward signing a collective bargaining agreement.

Xbox, meanwhile, has been canceling projects left and right amid a mass layoff last month that saw 9,100 jobs eliminated Microsoft-wide, including hundreds in gaming. In the aftermath, we learned that games including Everwild and Perfect Dark had been canceled.

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.

Elden Ring Nightreign has been out for over two months now, which means players have had ample time to puzzle over and tease out every morsel of its lore. But there’s still one ultra-rare item in the game that most players have probably never seen before, but which some in the community believe still holds an enormous secret: the Cord End.

If you play Nightreign and, like me, had no idea what this even was until just now, here’s the rundown: the Cord End is a legendary consumable item that only appears in big and small churches in Nightreign from breaking boxes. Its drop percentage is ridiculously low – just 0.035% – meaning most players will likely never even run into it. Its listed use is cryptic: “Gain entry somewhere.” If you don’t know where that somewhere is, the item is totally useless to you.

But for those in the know (or those following our handy guide), it’s not too hard to find the secret door it opens. Hidden in a cliff wall in a ravine at the center of the map, there’s a sealed entrance that only opens if you have the Cord End on hand. Inside is a strange statue of a girl, and three Sacrificial Twigs, talismans that allow the wielder to die exactly one time without losing runes or levels. It’s an interesting reward, to be sure, but admittedly a little underwhelming given the ridiculous rarity of the Cord End required to get them.

Now, granted, it’s likely at least part of the Cord End’s mystery is in adding lore details to Elden Ring Nightreign via its description and the statue of the girl in the chamber it opens. We won’t cover that here, as the meaning behind it is pretty deep into endgame spoiler territory for Nightreign, but lore YouTuber VaatiVidya has a great breakdown of what the Cord End is from a lore perspective and why it matters.

But that all said, the lack of real mechanical payoff for such a rare find has players speculating that there’s something more to this secret door. For the last two months, the community has been testing out theories around the Cord End and the Sacrificial Twigs. With a lack of any new or recent clues, the secret hunting had largely slowed down, but a cryptic post on the Nightreign subreddit recently fired up everyone’s curiosity again, inspiring people to float new theories about how to do… something… with those twigs.

The biggest barrier to finding anything is the sheer rarity of the Cord End. Some players are reporting seeing their first one after hundreds of hours of play. So anyone who wants to test theories has to get extremely lucky in actually getting a Cord End to begin with, and then also getting the exact perfect other circumstances they’re looking for (specific bosses, certain locations appearing, certain characters in the party, and so forth) to test out whatever it is they want to test. So while it’s unlikely that there’s anything new to discover regarding the Cord End at this stage, there’s at least a whisper of possibility in the fact that so few people are in a position to make that discovery to begin with.

Is it a secret? Is it merely lore? Is it something we’ll be able to unlock in a future DLC, as some have theorized? Who knows! But what’s genuinely cool here is that an ultra rare item is still sparking this level of curiosity and discussion and mystery in the community months after the game’s release. Whether there’s anything deeper to the Cord End or not, its enticing rarity is sufficient to get me, at least, fired up… if I can ever get one to drop.

We gave Elden Ring Nightreign a 7/10, saying that “when Elden Ring Nightreign is played exactly as it was designed to be played, it’s one of the finest examples of a three-player co-op game around – but that’s harder to do than it should be, and playing solo is poorly balanced.” Nightreign recently saw the addition of a duos mode, and the game had sold five million copies as of July.

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.

Marshall Mathers III is no stranger to other names. You probably know him as Eminem, or Slim Shady, or as the latter half of hip-hop super duo Bad Meet Evil. Or, perhaps if you’re a little younger, you might know him as… ‘The Guy From Fortnite.’

Eminem’s involvement with Fortnite goes back several years, with a guest turn in 2023’s The Big Bang live event that saw him rapping over a post-apocalyptic skyline, before popping up in the game’s in-game shop as a skin.

Next, Eminem returned for the conclusion of 2024’s Chapter 2 Remix, this time holding a rap battle version of the battle royale’s memorable monster versus mech fight — one of the funniest things the game has done in some time. (That mini-season included Eminem’s hideout as an in-game location, and also featured an exotic minigun that rapped Eminem lyrics as you fired.)

Popular stars who have made appearances in Epic’s battle royale subsequently being referred to “as that guy from Fortnite” is not a new meme, but someone has now taken the (brave) step of referring to Eminem as such in front of his face.

Thankfully, judging by the video of this moment, the rapper took it humorously and laughed along.

Eminem cracked up when someone called him “The guy from Fortnite” 😭 pic.twitter.com/h15QpUo5cY

— The Eminem Bible (@Shadyind) August 7, 2025

Fortnite’s new season kicked off today with more characters from Halo, plus the Power Rangers battling a fresh insect invasion of the game’s beloved battle royale Island. No word on a fresh appearance by Eminem just yet — though his skin is rarely out of the item shop.

Earlier this week, Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney refuted a report that suggested the game’s mysterious upcoming Disney offering had been hampered by slow decision-making.

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

Since its debut, the Mafia series has steadily marched forward through the decades – the original is set in the 1930s, its sequel spans the ’40s and ’50s, and Mafia III unfolds during the late ’60s. If the next step was going to be the ’70s, or the ’80s – or both – I was certainly ready. Casino intrigue, shine boxes, borrowing huge kitchen knives from Martin Scorcese’s mother in the middle of the night – whatever it was, I was up for it. However, instead of moving closer to the end of the 20th century, Mafia: The Old Country takes us back to the beginning. And not just the beginning of the century, but to the formative era of the Mafia itself. Part mob drama and part Western, The Old Country may be a safe and conventional third-person action adventure on the surface, but it’s a moody and engaging one that makes great use of its uncommon setting and is brimming with old school atmosphere so heady you can practically smell the sun-dried tomatoes.

After experimenting with a more freeform open world structure in the divisive Mafia III, Mafia: The Old Country returns to the format of the original Mafia and Mafia II. That is, it’s linear and tightly story-driven, and the open world is largely just a vivid backdrop to move through between objectives, and during some missions. This has always worked well for the Mafia series, and The Old Country is no exception.

This approach gives The Old Country an effective sense of place and scale – immersing you in a rich and evocative Sicilian countryside – but without bloat. It’s a very detailed, varied, and convincing map, but there are no towers to scale or arbitrary icons to visit and clear. Your attention is simply required on the story, and the story alone. As a single-player sucker who inhales this kind of thing for its story, setting, and style, I was quickly hooked. If you’re the kind of person who might be tempted to use the Sicilian language option alongside subtitles in the language of your choice, you’re in the right place. If you’re the kind of person who pounds through cutscenes craving their next chance to slap the citizens of Steelport with a giant purple dildo, it’s possible the Mafia series may not be your speed.

Family Splatters

Beginning in 1904, The Old Country charts a chronicle in the life of young Sicilian Enzo Favara, who escapes a life of slavery in the region’s dangerous sulphur mines – run by the ruthless Spadaro crime family – to find himself working for their local adversaries, the Torrisi family. The story hits a lot of standard beats, and all the usual suspects are here. The fair and kindly mentor, and the loyal best friend with a habit of testing the patience of others around him. The stern and powerful Don and his cynical consigliere. The slimy and treacherous rival boss, and the forbidden love. There are some neat connections to the existing games in the series too, for fans who pay close attention.

So yes, it’s a fairly familiar and predictable 13-hour saga for anyone with a basic level of gangster movie literacy, but the writing is strong and the voice performances are stronger. The highlight is arguably Don Torrisi himself, whose English voice actor Johnny Santiago injects with a quiet, husky intensity that is as credibly intimidating as a man in his position would need to be. He stalks the screen as the kind of guy that men who kill for a living would actually take orders from.

Familiar too is the third-person action, as The Old Country plays like any typical cover shooter from the last decade or so. This was the case in 2020’s Mafia: Definitive Edition, and it’s the same again here, albeit with a wild west flavour thanks to the era-specific arsenal (like revolvers, repeaters, and various shotguns) and the fact that shootouts sometimes occur on horseback, and/or against fellas who look like they’ve just stumbled home off the set of a Sergio Leone picture after a full day of making Clint Eastwood look cool.

Even without engaging much with its rosary bead system of minor combat buffs (which I did regularly forget about), it’s not a massive challenge with the default, soft-locking aiming controls. However, I don’t play these sorts of games to be relentlessly punished. Some enemies will hunker down behind large objects and walls, and others will stoically stride towards you to be blown out of their boots. The AI isn’t always sharp (and it’s definitely a little janky to find yourself completely flanked but still have the time to stand up and clumsily blast a bloke who had you dead to rights at point blank range) but the shootouts are nonetheless serviceable.

The Old Country’s stealth doesn’t rewrite the rule book either, but it does strengthen the action overall. Stealth is sometimes required by the design of the mission at hand, but on other occasions it’s available as an option. There are a number of encounters throughout with environments that have been laid out for us to be able to sneak around and pick off all the enemies one by one, but also seamlessly pivot to hosting an out-and-out gunfight should you flub it and be spotted.

You can toss coins and bottles for distraction, but unfortunately only some bottles (that is, the ones arbitrarily marked). It’s always a bit of an immersion breaker when levels are decorated with inconsistent props. I’d vastly prefer to just be able to pick up any bottle. Failing that, just delete the bottles we can’t pick up during missions. Crucially, you can pick up and move bodies, and there are boxes to stash them in. The stealth is pretty standard, but with distractions and body hiding it does feel like a proper stealth system and not a tacked on afterthought.

Enzo can temporarily highlight nearby enemies in the environment, which is essentially a superpower that’s handwaved away as his impeccable instincts (it probably could’ve been more logically introduced during the underground intro as some kind of innate ability he honed after spending the bulk of his childhood in a dark sulfur mine, but no matter). At any rate, once you have a feel for where your enemies are and which way they’re headed, all that’s left is to sneak around, grab them, and either button-bash to strangle them or tap your knife attack to speed up the process. That said, I actually rarely used the latter. Not because I was feeling merciful, but because stabbing your victims costs you a block of “durability” off your knife (which needs to be sharpened with a whetstone if and when it “runs out” of… stabs). It’s not a gamebreaker, but I’m not really into the idea of not being able to stab a bloke simply because my knife is immediately no longer pointy enough to do so after slaying a few of his mates (and whetstones were a consumable I didn’t always have).

I mainly just strangled my enemies to avoid this issue, but it feels like a slightly unnecessary system – particularly when durability concerns disappear during The Old Country’s new one-on-one knife fights.

These knife fights are essentially boss encounters, presented as a one-on-one showdown with another man. They occur outside regular third-person action gameplay, and you’re locked into these battles until there’s a result (or your opponent is scripted to scarper). The attacks, parries, and dodges in knife fights are bespoke to this mode alone. They’re flashy and bloody, but a lot of the time I did just feel I was simply dodging and slashing my way to a cutscene, where a further complication or a switch in momentum will occur. Sometimes you’ll trigger an animation that makes you a passenger for a while, then Enzo’s health bar recharges while your enemy’s does not. I’m not sure what the thought was there. The knife fights look cool, and they’re not like anything in the series to date, but they do feel a little low stakes at times.

Red Dead Redenzione

As a linear adventure, The Old Country admittedly doesn’t share the same scope of Rockstar’s genre-defining Westerns – but it’s certainly adjacent to them in tone and atmosphere. There’s a certain undeniable swagger that comes with riding into town on horseback (and on the wrong side of the law), and The Old County captures this with similar effectiveness to the Red Dead series.

The early 1900s setting doesn’t just shine a spotlight on the early days of the Sicilian Mafia, it’s also a window back to the Edwardian era of automobiles – when cars began competing with horses as the primary method of transportation. Developer Hangar 13 has done an exceptional job in this department, especially with the sound.

These 120-year-old cars have primitive engines, whining chain drives, and open cabins with no sound deadening, and The Old Country has captured their raw and lumpy burbles immaculately. It definitely can’t be understated how much richness this adds to driving around the map. It’s not just engine sounds, either. When a gramophone is brought on a drunken car trip, be sure to listen as it misbehaves when you bounce around off road. There’s a lot of consideration here, and I respect that.

Yes, there’s a race mission – but it’s not been shoehorned in here to taunt those who are still haunted by the infamously tricky racing event in the original Mafia. Sicily was the home of the Targa Florio – established in 1906 and one of the oldest motor racing events in the world – so it makes perfect sense in context.

The Old Country’s riff on this race is sadly all too brief – it’s over in less than seven minutes – but it is one of the most memorable and thrilling missions. It certainly made me wish Enzo could’ve cut ties with the Cosa Nostra and raced around Europe full time. I don’t know what’s more dangerous: betraying your oath to the family or trying to tame an aircraft engine that’s had four tyres and a steering wheel strapped to it.

On the topic of engines, however, it should be noted that The Old Country shifts the Mafia series off its previous proprietary one and onto Unreal Engine 5. From my perspective, the impact isn’t a dramatically profound one – 2020’s Mafia: Definitive Edition remains a handsome looking game, and so is The Old Country. What I can say is that I haven’t experienced any of the minor bugs that occurred during my first playthrough of Mafia: Definitive Edition, and that I haven’t had to restart checkpoints to overcome unexpected jankiness (or fallen through the map) – at least on PC, as we weren’t provided access to the console versions ahead of launch, so we’ll have to wait and see how those run. But outside of the occasional framerate flutter and some light pop-in, my time with The Old Country has been quite robust.

Although, perhaps not quite as robust as the incredible array of food and produce on display throughout. Games rarely make me this hungry. A game may have never made me this hungry. I’m craving cannolis and cake. I’m wading through arancini ball recipes. I’m considering a vegetable garden to grow tomato varieties I can’t find.

I’ve officially turned into my dad, and The Old Country is the game that did it.

Battlefield 6 developer DICE has said it’s working on a “substantial” increase in server capacity for the Battlefield 6 Open Beta, after the early access launch was met with huge Steam concurrents and equally huge queues.

At time of this article’s publication, the Battlefield 6 open beta had over 300,000 concurrent players on Steam alone, making it the third most-played game on Valve’s platform behind only Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2. We don’t have concurrent player figures from Sony or Microsoft, so the open beta’s true concurrent figure will be much higher.

But not all those players are actually playing. Those with early access were met with huge queues (we’ve seen 250,000 in screenshots posted to social media) as the servers hit max capacity. In response, DICE issued a statement to say it was working to improve matters:

“The team is now working on a substantial increase in server capacity, which will reduce your time in the queue,” DICE said. “Thank you for your continued patience as we work to get as many of you into the game as soon as possible.

“We’re looking forward to seeing you experience Battlefield 6, and we appreciate your patience!”

That statement followed a message in which DICE explained why it was using queues in the first place.

“We will use queues to protect the player experience but expect this impact to be minimal,” DICE insisted.

“You may encounter this during high peak moments, such as the start of servers going live. The team is working constantly to reduce any queue that takes place.”

Holy sh*t 🤣
More than 270.000 players are waiting in server queue!

If you manage to join the Open Beta, you better don’t leave game. pic.twitter.com/x9lGfpyRAd

— Battlefield Bulletin (@BFBulletin) August 7, 2025

The suggestion here is that the open beta is peaking now as the early access kicks off, but the queues will ease. Given the open beta has gone live in early access form ahead of the U.S. waking up, it seems likely the player count will grow in the coming hours, and again when the open beta goes live for all this weekend.

We’ve got plenty more on Battlefield 6, including how it requires PC gamers to enable Secure Boot, how it was inspired by the much-loved Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and much more.

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’re trying to play the Battlefield 6 Open Beta on PC, you might have run into a problem: ‘Secure Boot is not enabled.’

You are not alone. PC gamers hoping to play DICE’s latest now open beta early access is live have no choice but to enable Secure Boot on their PC. And a cursory glance at social media, subreddits and IGN’s own comments suggest some are having trouble with it.