The majority of the mods, however, look to improve Delta’s PC performance. Some predate Konami’s recently deployed patch, which sought to address various scenarios that could inadvertently cause systems to crash. The publisher added that it was actively investigating and addressing all reported concerns.
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.
CD Projekt revealed the eye-catching stat in its latest financial results, confirming that not only did the action-RPG benefit from positioning itself as one of Nintendo Switch 2’s day-one launch games, but it also found success by making the game available as physical media.
“We believe that thanks to its high quality and Switch 2 exclusive enhancements, Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition is well positioned to benefit from the [Switch 2’s] growing user base,” said Michał Novakovski, joint CEO. “As of June, the vast majority of sales — which is around 70% — came from physical copies sold and that reflects the strength of our offering.”
Novakovski believes this is, in part, because “the entire game, along with its expansion, is fully contained on a 64 gigabyte cartridge, providing a plug and play experience which players find particularly attractive.” And that has certainly proven to be the case, with 75.4% of all Cyberpunk 2077’s Switch 2 sales being physical.
It comes as fans continue to debate the practice of publishers providing Game-Key Cards in Switch 2 boxed games instead of a physical cartridge. It’s proven to be a divisive practice among some users, not least because while it allows collectors to have a game’s box on their shelf, they’re essentially useless unless your console is connected to the internet.
The practice is so controversial, however, that Nintendo has launched a survey designed to poll the Switch 2 userbase on its thoughts surrounding digital and physical games, with questions designed to probe the reasons you might consider one option over another. Nintendo’s also interested in finding out if your attitude to digital downloads has shifted over time.
“Our developers truly made the most of the console’s features, offering new exclusive ways to play Cyberpunk 2077,” Novakovski added. “We showcased them in a series of hands on presentations attracting praise from the player community and gaming media. And although we clearly see that sales of the on the new console are currently dominated by Nintendo’s first party titles, we were very pleased with Cyberpunk being among the best selling third party games.”
“The Switch 2 might pack much better hardware than the original, but a game I’m still surprised to see running at all (much less pretty well) on a Nintendo system is Cyberpunk 2077,” we wrote in our Nintendo Switch 2 Cyberpunk 2007 review update. “I spent a few days with CD Projekt Red’s latest port to get a feel for how it runs, how it holds up, and how the Switch 2’s fancy new mouse controls work when applied to a high-octane FPS. The answer across the board is impressive, and if you haven’t had the pleasure of exploring Night City before, this seems like a solid way to do so.”
As for Nintendo’s handheld itself? The Nintendo Switch 2 debuted in June to become the fastest-selling hardware ever in the U.S., shooting spending on games to new records. Spending on hardware was up a whopping 249% year-over-year thanks to the console’s debut, reaching $978 million and greatly surpassing the previous monthly record from June 2008 of $608 million. In total, the Switch 2 sold 1.6 million units in the U.S. during its launch month, beating the PlayStation 4’s previous sales record of 1.1 million units in November of 2013.
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.
Labor Day weekend is a great time to get together with the family, sure, but it’s also a nice little three-day window to get some serious gaming in. Assuming you don’t already have a massive backlog of PC games to play, now is actually a pretty good time of year to find some video game deals. If you’re looking to pick up a new game before the weekend arrives, you’ve got options.
We’re in between major Steam sales at the moment, but another big PC games sale going on right now is the Humble Bundle Summer Sale. There are a ton of discounted games here at prices that will last through the weekend.
If you’re looking for something great under $10, I’ve got some recommendations for you. Each of these games I’ve listed are wonderful for different reasons, but every single one of them are worth playing for hours at a time.
PC Games Under $10
My first pick might not be for everyone, but it’s one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time. It’s hard to really go too into detail without ruining some of it, but it’s essentially a roguelike deck-building card game with a twist of psychological horror. If any of that sounds interesting to you, it’s best to just start playing without learning more. Going in cold is the best way to play this game.
Next on this list is what has become one of the best indie games of all time. I was genuinely surprised how much I liked Hollow Knight. I don’t usually like metroidvania games, but it has a sort of sad, dark charm that really drew me in. The gameplay is fun and the battles can get difficult, but the atmosphere of this game keeps you engaged at every turn. With the long-awaited Hollow Knight sequel releasing next week, now is a great time to jump into the original.
I don’t really feel the need to say much about The Witcher 3, because of course it’s worth playing. CD Projekt Red’s masterpiece is one of those rare games that I’ve ended up playing through multiple times. While it’s the Witcher books that ultimately birthed this franchise, it’s really this game that made it a household name. With The Witcher 4 somewhere on the horizon, its as good a time as any to start your Witcher 3 journey for the first time.
If you’re a PC gamer who also happens to be a Nintendo gamer, Bug Fables is one of those games that hits a very specific sweet spot. It’s a turn-based RPG that has an eerily similar look and feel as the original Paper Mario game. It’s a storybook adventure with puzzles and battles that has a fun overarching story. If you love games like Paper Mario and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, you’ll love Bug Fables.
My last recommendation is the cheapest and shortest game on this list. Gris is a beautiful platformer game with some fun puzzles and stunning artwork. This game tells a story of grief and loss, and these feelings unfold through an incredible use of color, music, and gameplay. You can play through the whole thing in a few hours, and it’s definitely worth paying $2.99 for what you’ll get from it. This is one of those games that hit me surprisingly hard.
See all PC games on sale for under $10
The games I’ve listed here are just some of my favorites, but there’s actually a lot more in the sale that are worth a look. Humble Bundle has a specific page for all of the deals under $10 right now and it includes things like the Batman: Arkham collection and Yakuza games.
With Battlefield 6’s open beta done and dusted and its October 10 release date in sight, developer DICE is prepping the shooter for launch across PC and console. But it is on PC specifically that EA’s anti-cheat efforts have raised eyebrows, and even caused some fans to miss out.
PC gamers who played the Battlefield 6 open beta might have run into the following on-screen warning: ‘Secure Boot is not enabled.’ Indeed, if you want to play Battlefield 6 on PC you have no choice but to enable Secure Boot. And based on the open beta, some had trouble with it.
Enabling Secure Boot involves tinkering with a part of a computer not all PC gamers will be instantly familiar with: the BIOS (check out IGN’s guide for more). There are things like TPM 2.0 (which must be turned on) to deal with, and you need to make sure your Windows disk is GPT and not MBR (not everyone will know what these are). All this before you can even enable Secure Boot — and then you may not be able to enable it anyway, which then means you need to refer to your manufacturer for guidance.
While this won’t be a problem for more experienced PC gamers, it will be an intimidating process for some. And according to DICE, it knows these anti-cheat measures will prevent some people from playing Battlefield 6 at all.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl lamented the situation. “The fact is I wish we didn’t have to do things like Secure Boot,” Buhl said.
“It does prevent some players from playing the game. Some people’s PCs can’t handle it and they can’t play; that really sucks. I wish everyone could play the game with low friction and not have to do these sorts of things.”
Still, Buhl sounds pleased with the effectiveness of the likes of Secure Boot, which are “some of the strongest tools in our toolbox to stop cheating.”
“We were pretty happy with how the anti-cheat performed. Obviously I’ll say we can never be perfect, anti-cheat is always a cat-and-mouse game where we’re constantly going back and forth and keeping on top of what the cheaters are doing. But from the beginning this was something we put a high priority on, so when we launch this game we have a really strong anti-cheat program in place.”
Buhl continued: “Again, nothing makes cheating impossible, but enabling Secure Boot and having kernel-level access makes it so much harder to cheat and so much easier for us to find and stop cheating.”
It’s no secret that cheating in competitive multiplayer games is a huge problem for publishers. Activision, for example, has spent millions trying to reverse the narrative for Call of Duty, and TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot are in place for Black Ops 7 on PC.
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.
Ver. 1.1.2. — which is now live across all platforms — deploys a number of fixes and improvements, addressing various scenarios where players could inadvertently cause their systems to crash.
“We’re grateful to have so many players enjoying the game and sharing valuable feedback and issue reports,” the publisher wrote.
Here’s the full Steam patch notes, which are similar to the updates rolled out across console:
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater Ver. 1.1.2. Patch Notes
This update includes the following improvements and fixes:
Resolved an issue where performing consecutive survival knife attacks to secure food could cause the game to crash under certain conditions.
Fixed an issue where removing the Crocodile Cap from the Survival Viewer while equipped could cause the game to crash under certain conditions.
Addressed crashes that could occur when collecting food near a hungry crocodile under certain conditions.
Corrected an issue where transitioning from a roll into a crawl could cause the character model to float in mid-air.
Fixed an issue where player movement could become restricted under certain conditions in areas where Intrusion View is used.
Resolved an issue where the game could crash under certain conditions while in Radio Window.
Konami also assuring players it was actively investigating and addressing all reported concerns.
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.
The PC and PS5 console-exclusive Lost Soul Aside only released today, August 29, but it’s already sitting on a ‘Mixed’ Steam review score from 300+ players, many of whom have reported issues with performance and optimization.
Developer Ultizero Games was quick to respond, assuring players in a statement that it had “received your feedback regarding the performance of certain cutscenes in the prologue of Lost Soul Aside,” and was “actively working on optimizations.”
“Currently, some of these cutscenes are pre-rendered 4K/30fps videos, which may cause occasional stuttering during playback,” the team explained. “We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and appreciate your understanding.
“The Lost Soul Aside team is actively working on optimizations, and future updates will address this to deliver a smoother gameplay experience. Thank you for your continued support and patience!”
Notably, no time frame was provided, so it’s unclear when, exactly, players can expect a fix. In the meantime, Steam continues to fill up with reviews from unhappy players.
“I’ve completed the prologue of Lost Soul Aside, and in its current state I can’t recommend this game,” said one player, while another added: “I thought movement looked jerky because of frame drops but the walking actually just looks like that lmao. Walking and the camera are so bad it’s honestly impressive.”
“I’m only three hours in but I’m really torn on this game,” commented another Steam reviewer. “On one hand, the visuals are top-notch and the combat is decent (a tier below Stellar Blade, imo). These were the two things that had been consistently teased and promised, and Yang Bing and his studio finally delivered on those aspects. Everything else is kind of a mess.”
Lost Soul Aside is a stylish single-player action-adventure RPG in which you battle dimensional invaders while trying to save your sister. It was initially expected to release in May but after roughly a decade in development, Lost Soul Aside was delayed three months from May 30 to August 29.
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.
From now until September 12, early adopters can sign up on iOS or PC to participate in the first closed beta, entitled the Nexus Bond Test and try out Honkai: Nexus Anima’s own blend of “creature collection with strategic adventure.” There’s no release date yet.
“In a world where unseen bonds between concepts like Light and Dark or Life and Death have ruptured, players will forge connections with companions known as Anima,” the description teases. “Each carries unique powers that can be combined in battle, setting the stage for fresh strategies and new stories in the Honkai universe.”
There’s also a 90-second long announcement video, which shows off the sun-dappled shores and leafy meadows, as well as some of the wonderfully cute characters you can expect to meet. You can check it out below:
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.
A server browser will be available in Battlefield 6 via Battlefield Portal, developer DICE has announced.
As DICE gets ready to “resume testing the latest updates and content” with its Battlefield Labs closed player tests, the team has revealed players will not only get to try out new maps not previously available in either closed or open betas, but they’ll also get “a first look at the Server Browser.”
As EA explains it, Battlefield Labs is an experimental environment where “the latest changes and work-in-progress ideas are tested with players in a closed and private space.” The content available will be in various stages of production, including items in alpha state, which may result in less polished and/or unstable builds. This allows DICE to balance and make adjustments much faster as it “shapes the future of the game with the community to shape the future of the game.”
This next collection of play sessions will focus primarily on hosting, where the team will “concentrate on the ease of setting up player-owned servers with predefined shortcodes, altering descriptions, selecting tags, and joining those experiences.” And as part of this, we’ve been given our first look at the Battlefield Portal user interface.
“Some of the most frequent questions from the community have been about Server Browser availability and functionality,” DICE explained in a community blog. “In an upcoming Battlefield Labs play session, we will enable an early implementation of this Portal functionality within the Community tab. At this stage, our main goal is to observe how it works in practice, with initial feedback focusing on accessibility and UI clarity.”
Players will be able to use the experience library to find a verified Conquest experience using a shortcode, after which players can then choose from a pre-filtered list of active servers, or host their own, where they’ll be able to alter descriptions, rotations, tags, and so on. Of course, this should still be treated as a work-in-progress for now, and DICE would like feedback from Battlefield Labs participants as they play.
The next batch of closed tests will also usher in new maps, Operation Firestorm and Mirak Valley, which are designed for combined arms combat and vehicles, including quad bikes, tanks, and aircraft.
We’re having a great time with what we’ve played so far, writing in our Battlefield 6 review-in-progress: “Right now, even in beta form, Battlefield 6 might be the most fun shooter I’ve played this year.”
Don’t forget that from now until October 7 — Battlefield 6’s launch day — EA has a “wave of content” planned for Battlefield 2042, including a free new pass “celebrating the legacy of Battlefield,” new hardware, and a reimagining of the fan favorite Iwo Jima map. As you progress through the ‘Road to Battlefield 6’ pass, you can expect 50 exclusive cross-rewards, including 20 for Battlefield 6 that will be ready for you on launch day, on which you can also expect big changes to player movement, maps, modes, and player counts.
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.
For those who enjoyed the base game’s blend of puzzle-solving and fisticuffs, this fresh DLC adds more of what you love — and takes a novel approach to tuning its difficulty, based on your experience with the Great Circle so far.
Speaking to IGN last week at Gamescom, creative director Axel Torvenius and lead game designer Zeke Virant explained how The Order of the Giants will smartly adapt its combat to suit both new and veteran players, due to the DLC’s addition within the base game’s narrative, branching off of its Rome location. And while the pair remained tight-lipped on word of an Indiana Jones sequel, discussion was still had about MachineGames’ intention for the overall narrative of the game — and how it’s sometimes best to leave players keen for more.
“The conventional way of doing DLC is to add something that stands after, or a miniature game on the side,” Torvenius begins, “but we didn’t really feel that that was the best for our game.” He pauses, smiles. “Though it would’ve been the easiest.
“I can tell you we had a lot of struggles or challenges with the technical side of things, making sure that people’s existing save states [work]. The systems we had in place did not fully support us just splicing in a lot of new content in the middle of the game. So there was a lot of hard work from engineers and programmers and also on the design side. It was not an easy thing to do, but we felt it was the best to do.”
For those who are yet to play Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, the idea is that Order of the Giants simply adds onto the game’s already generous Rome section, with additional areas outside and underneath the Vatican to explore. And for players who have finished the game already, who will likely be familiar with dipping back into previous areas to hunt down remaining side-missions and collectibles via their journal, the DLC simply acts as a huge new side-quest to pursue.
“The integration makes the experience the most seamless,” Torvenius continues, “and makes it feel like it’s really expanding on the existing content. There was a balance, because obviously the DLC is its own completely standalone adventure. So there are hooks and the red threads between the main storyline and the DLC, but the DLC story does not impact the main story, even if the DLC story will give you a deeper understanding of some elements. So it was absolutely not the easiest [way to do DLC], and maybe not the smartest, but the best.”
Obviously, though, players still finding their feet in the Vatican’s sunny courtyards will have a different experience approaching Order of the Giants’ content than those who have played another 40 hours, seen Indy’s journey to the end and buffed up their archeologist with all sorts of upgrades and bonuses. And it’s because of this, Virant says, that MachineGames was forced to get even smarter under the game’s hood.
“Players who are at the end of the game don’t need to worry about the difficulty [being too easy] as actually we have a new system in place where players are dynamically scaled based on how far they progressed,” Virant explains. “We know a lot of players are coming back from the endgame and would like to have a continuation of that difficulty, especially if they have health upgrades and a lot of abilities.
“We tried a few different things, but the one that was simplest and actually just what felt right was that if you’ve progressed to the Vatican but you haven’t gotten to Giza yet, we keep it on a first tier of difficulty. If you’ve gotten to Giza, then we adjust it up to a second tier. And then once you’ve gotten to Sukhothai, we adjust to a third tier. From there we [can tune] the different amount of combos enemies can use, different amounts of health and also how many will gang up on you at the same time.”
It’s a smart system, though one which need not come into play at all during the DLC’s first hour, as Indy kicks off his new adventure with some impressive-looking new adventuring and puzzle sections, set just outside the bounds of the base game’s existing area. It’s here that Indy meets Father Ricci, a priest obsessed with the legend of a secret chamber that houses a giant helmet – something that immediately sparks our hero’s interest. (Brilliantly, Father Ricci also has a pet parrot, Pio, who rather steals the show. Torvenius confirmed that while the parrot speaks, this is not another turn from the talented Troy Baker, and is instead another voice actress who provides the parrots’ voice and much of its chirping sounds.)
The DLC’s focus on the main game’s race of giants, otherwise known as the Nephilim Order, will likely pique the intrigue of fans who enjoyed piecing together their story during the Great Circle’s campaign. Sadly, the late Tony Todd, who played Locus, was not able to contribute to the DLC — though Torvenius said his presence “would have been amazing.”
“To some extent this was never really about telling the background story of Locus as a character,” he said. “Even though for me personally, I would’ve loved to play a game that was where you just play as Locus for 15 hours on all of his grand adventures. That would’ve been interesting. But this was more about deepening the story of the tribe of the giants and the Nephilim Order. And obviously Locus is part of that since he’s part of the race, but it’s more about the origins and the mystery of it and how it connects with the Vatican and the streets of Rome.”
When asked whether players will learn everything there is to know about the giants before the end of the DLC, or whether MachineGames was purposefully keeping some elements of their story secret, Torvenius remained coy. “Yes and no,” he replied. “I would say I think absolutely this will help for people that have played through the main game, and when they have played the DLC in addition to that, they will get a deeper understanding of the mystery around the Nephilim Order. But there are things that maybe are to some extent left unanswered, though the majority of it I think starts to paint a pretty good picture.”
Was this secrecy a desire to hold some story elements back for use in the future, I wondered, or simply a decision not to explain too much — the Midichlorians effect — of something that could otherwise remain a cool mystery? “In my mind, both as a consumer myself but also as a creator, I enjoy when maybe sometimes everything isn’t explored,” Torvenius responded. “Sometimes there will be still like a fog of war on the map that is best left unexplored.
“We have internally fleshed it out completely,” he continued, discussing the lore of the giants. “I could write a blurb that explains how everything is connected, but would that be fun?” Yes, I say, to which Torvenius laughs. “We are always working towards giving players the sensation they have figured it out and it should make sense when it’s all connected. But for me it’s always important to make sure you slowly get a bigger picture without saying too much.”
For Torvenius and Virant, Order of the Giants has been a challenging but enjoyable victory lap for one of 2024’s most widely-praised games. Development on Indiana Jones and the Great Circle began amid the height of Covid lockdowns, with the studio forced to collaborate via Microsoft Teams. For the DLC, however, its developers have been together throughout, able to build on what has come before, in the knowledge they’re working on something that is already beloved.
“The overall quality of the DLC is absolutely on par and in some instances higher than main game,” Torvenius concludes. “For people that love the Great Circle and the world of Indiana Jones that MachineGames built, this is more of that. It’s really for them. And if you haven’t played the base game, we are really hoping that this is a great opportunity for people wanting to play. It’s been a great adventure doing it, a lot of hard work, but it’s been fun to see. Sometimes you work on a game for many years and towards the end there can almost be a bit of fatigue, or you’re a bit exhausted. But when production really geared up on the DLC, people were still energized. I think that passion for Indiana Jones shines through, and we are extremely proud of it.”
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
A group of over 450 developers on the game Diablo at Blizzard have voted in favor of unionization with Communications Workers of America (CWA).
Per a press release, this new union consists of game developers, artists, designers, engineers, and support staff across the Diablo franchise, and has been formally recognized by parent company Microsoft.
“With every subsequent round of mass layoffs, I’ve witnessed the dread in my coworkers grow stronger because it feels like no amount of hard work is enough to protect us,” said Kelly Yeo, a game producer and a member of the organizing committee. “I am overjoyed that we have formed a union—this is just the first step for us joining a movement spreading across an industry that is tired of living in fear. We are ready to begin fighting for real change alongside our Diablo colleagues.”
Over 3,500 workers at Microsoft have organized with CWA to date.
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.
