Category: IGN

The Fantastic Four are coming to Marvel Rivals, its developer has confirmed.

In a first-look image, below, we see Marvel Rivals’ take on Mister Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch, and Thing, as well as the robot H.E.R.B.I.E. The superhero team are sitting in the Fantasticar, and we also see the Baxter Building in the background.

Ubisoft’s PC woes have continued into 2025, with the generally much-loved Assassin’s Creed Origins suffering a review-bomb campaign on Steam after a Windows PC update rendered it unplayable for some.

In November, Microsoft confirmed that Windows 11 version 24H2 accidentally killed Ubisoft games such as Star Wars Outlaws, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and more. The issue was so bad that Microsoft updated its support website to reveal it has placed a temporary block on Windows 11 for users with those games installed.

“After installing Windows 11, version 24H2, you might encounter issues with some Ubisoft games,” Microsoft said at the time. “These games might become unresponsive while starting, loading or during active gameplay.

“In some cases, users might receive a black screen. The affected games are Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Assassin’s Creed Origins, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Star Wars Outlaws, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

“To safeguard your Windows update experience, we have applied a compatibility hold on devices with these games installed. These devices will not be offered to install Windows 11, version 24H2 via the Windows Update release channel.”

Ubisoft released an update to fix the problem in Star Wars Outlaws and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, but Microsoft and Ubisoft are both still working to sort out the Assassin’s Creed games, and frustration has finally spilled over into Steam user reviews.

Negative reviews for Assassin’s Creed Origins ramped up mid-December before hitting a peak as we crossed into 2025, with the game’s recent user review rating dropping to ‘Mixed.’ Overall reviews for the game remain ‘Very Positive.’

Pretty much all the recent negative reviews complain about the Windows update making Assassin’s Creed Origins unplayable. Until a resolution is found, Ubisoft told customers not to manually update to version 24H2 using the Windows 11 Installation Assistant or the media creation tool. If the game stops responding, you’ll need to use Task Manager to close the application.

Ubisoft’s Windows problems have hit the company at a particularly troubling time. The company is reportedly in buyout talks with Chinese megacorp Tencent after a torrid 2024 in which it closed studios, shut down games, and made mass layoffs. The company’s next big game, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, was delayed into 2025 and Star Wars Outlaws failed to meet sales expectations.

Ubisoft’s shares fell to their lowest level in the last decade in September after it made a series of dramatic announcements around the performance of its games. As well as delaying Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Ubisoft announced a return to Steam after a period of PC launch exclusivity on the Epic Games Store, with Star Wars Outlaws recently releasing on Valve’s platform.

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.

Hideo Kojima has revealed the ongoing video game actors strike has affected production on his Xbox game as well as his upcoming action espionage title for Sony.

In a tweet, Kojima said that Kojima Productions was forced to suspend actor scanning and filming for the Xbox-published OD during the second half of 2024 after the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) video game actors’ strike began in July.

Similarly, casting for Physint, Kojima’s hotly anticipated return to the “action espionage” genre, was suspended due to the strike. Kojima added that he hopes to resume production in 2025.

SAG-AFTRA video game voice actors accuse gaming companies of refusing to meet their demands on artificial intelligence. Negotiations over a new contract began in October 2022 and SAG-AFTRA members approved the strike in September 2023. Check out IGN’s feature, What the SAG-AFTRA Video Game Actors Strike Means for Gamers, for more.

What this means for both OD and Physint remains to be seen, with both games without an official release window. Both are video game / movie hybrids, with Nope and Get Out Director Jordan Peele collaborating with Kojima on OD. Physint was announced during a Sony State of Play broadcast, suggesting it may release on PlayStation 6.

Meanwhile, Kojima is working on Death Stranding 2, which is out at some point in 2025, and the live-action Death Stranding film with A24. In his tweet, Kojima teased “other adaptations” are underway, without saying any more.

OD and Physint aren’t the only video games affected by the SAG-AFTRA strike. Last month, Activision confirmed it had recast some members of the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 cast after fans noticed much-loved Zombies characters with new voices in-game. Activision said at the time: “We respect the personal choice of these performers. Out of respect for all parties, we won’t add new commentary about the ongoing negotiations with SAG-AFTRA. We look forward to a mutually beneficial outcome as soon as possible.”

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is not subject to the strike because it was in development before July 25, 2024, when the strike began. However, as suggested by Activision’s statement, the voice actors may have decided against signing new contracts in solidarity with striking union members. IGN has asked SAG-AFTRA for comment.

Photo by Wiktor Szymanowicz/Anadolu via Getty Images.

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.

Grand Theft Auto 6 is projected to make an eye-watering $3 billion in its first year on sale.

Rockstar’s hotly anticipated open-world crime caper is currently due out fall 2025 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, with no word on a PC release for now.

A new report by the Financial Times, based on analysis by video game research group DFC Intelligence, predicts GTA 6 will exceed $1 billion in pre-orders before it even launches. Surprising no-one, GTA 6 is expected to be the biggest entertainment launch of 2025, ahead of any movie or competing video game.

DFC predicted total revenue from GTA 6’s first 12 months on sale will reach $3.2 billion. To put that into context, 2024’s highest-grossing movie, Inside Out 2, made just shy of $1.7 billion at the global box office. In 2013, it took Grand Theft Auto 5 just three days to surpass $1 billion in sales — the fastest to that figure in entertainment history.

Strauss Zelnick, boss of Rockstar parent company Take-Two, told the Financial Times: “I never claim victory before it occurs. That said, I think Rockstar Games will once again deliver something absolutely phenomenal… Certainly the anticipation is high.”

The huge projected revenue of GTA 6 is up against similarly huge development costs, which the Financial Times estimates from the high hundreds of millions to as much as $2 billion. There’s a lot riding on GTA 6, then, but not just for Take-Two and Rockstar. In March last year, Circana analyst Mat Piscatella predicted Rockstar’s surefire hit would spark “renewed interest” in video games, before going one step further: “There’s probably never been a more important thing to ever release in the industry, so no pressure.”

GTA 6 is the kind of game that will sell consoles. Sony’s PS5 Pro will no doubt benefit greatly from interest in GTA 6, too. Let’s remember: GTA 6 is not coming out on PC at launch; to play you must own a PlayStation or an Xbox. Beyond the point of sale, GTA 6’s GTA Online equivalent will surely come packed with microtransactions as the current GTA Online does. Microsoft and Sony will get their cut of any money spent there, too.

As the Financial Times points out, the almost guaranteed success of GTA 6 comes amid one of the toughest periods for the video game industry in recent memory. More than 33,000 people have lost their jobs since 2022, with huge layoffs at the likes of Microsoft and Sony. Indeed, Take-Two itself has suffered layoffs and studio closures.

All eyes are on Rockstar for a firm GTA 6 release date, or, as some are predicting, a delay into 2026. While you wait to find out, IGN has much more on GTA 6 to check out, including an ex-Rockstar dev who says the studio probably won’t be able to decide whether GTA 6 is delayed until May 2025, the boss of Take-Two’s coy response on whether GTA 6 is coming to PC, and the expert opinion on whether the PS5 Pro will run GTA 6 at 60 frames per second.

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.

Half-Life 3 rumor and speculation is in overdrive after the voice actor behind G-Man issued a cryptic tweet teasing some sort of news for 2025.

In full G-Man mode, Mike Shapiro tweeted a narrated video in which he marked the end of 2024 by teasing “unexpected surprises” for this year, alongside the tags #Valve, #Halflife, #GMan, and #2025.

“Another year already,” Shapiro said in the tweet. “Good to see and hear from some many of you. May the next quarter century deliver as many unexpected surprises, hmm, as did the millennium’s first. Then again time is fluid like music. See you in the new year!”

#Valve #Halflife #GMan #2025 pic.twitter.com/mdT5hlxKJT

— Mike Shapiro (@mikeshapiroland) December 31, 2024

That’s pretty vague, but as many fans have pointed out, this is Shapiro’s first non-reply tweet since he congratulated Valve on the success of VR exclusive Half-Life: Alyx back in December 2020. A Shapiro tweet, then, is a rare thing indeed. But does this latest one mean anything?

Half-Life 2 recently turned 20 years old, and still there’s no official Half-Life 3 announcement from Valve despite the story ending on a cliffhanger with 2007’s Episode 2. In 2020, a making-of for Half-Life: Alyx revealed a swathe of games developed and shelved by Valve between the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Valve’s latest VR game. That list included details on a version of Half-Life 3 that was in development for around a year.

Geoff Keighley’s The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx revealed that at least five Half-Life games were canceled between Episode 2 and Alyx, along with a number of other projects — the most notable of which was referred to within Valve as Half-Life 3.

In November, to mark Half-Life 2’s 20th anniversary, Valve opened up about its development in a documentary that revealed never-before-seen work-in-progress footage, a brand-new Ice Gun, and a raft of new concept art. You can see the gameplay segment from the documentary in the video below.

Among the details shown in the video, Episode 3 would have been set in the Arctic, and it would have focused on Alyx as a companion character. Aside from the Ice Gun, the footage shows a blob-like enemy that could split into multiple parts. According to the documentary, the team had completed a “collection of playable levels in no particular order” and expected to be able to release the game within a year or two.

Valve has plenty on its plate already, of course, including ongoing support of Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, Steam itself, the Steam Deck, and new game Deadlock. Could it also be working on Half-Life 3 alongside all those other projects?

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.

The boss of Black Myth: Wukong developer Game Science has pointed the finger at the Xbox Series S over the lack of an Xbox version of the game.

In a post on Chinese social media website Weibo, Game Science co-founder and CEO Feng Ji celebrated PC and PlayStation 5 action game Black Myth: Wukong’s Game of the Year win at the 2024 Steam awards, and in doing so lamented the lack of an Xbox version of the game, which he blamed on optimization trouble with the Xbox Series S.

“The only thing missing is the Xbox,” he said, per machine learning translation, “which somehow feels a bit wrong, but that 10GB of shared memory — without years of optimisation experience — is really hard to make work.”

That’s a reference to the Xbox Series S’ power relative to the Xbox Series X. The Series S has 4TF of GPU compute compared to the Xbox Series X’s 12.2TF, but the killer is the drop in memory allocation, from 16GB down to 10GB.

Microsoft’s Xbox release policy means publishers and developers must release their games across Xbox Series X and S. They are unable to release a game for Xbox Series X only, for example. This has caused difficulty for some studios in the past, perhaps most notably Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian. Baldur’s Gate 3 was originally released on PC and PS5 only, with the Xbox version delayed due to issues with the Xbox Series S specifically struggling to perform splitscreen co-op. In the past, Xbox had committed to parity between Xbox Series S and X for all games, but it ultimately made an exception for Baldur’s Gate 3 so the game could launch later in 2023.

In 2023, Remedy communications director Thomas Puha talked openly about the challenge the studio faced getting Alan Wake 2 running well on the Xbox Series S, saying the console’s GPU “is an issue” and “having less memory is a pretty big problem.” Before then, a VFX artist who had worked on an Xbox Series X and S game said in a now-deleted tweet that “many developers have been sitting in meetings for the past year desperately trying to get Series S launch requirements dropped”.

“Studios have been through one development cycle where Series S turned out to be an albatross around the neck of production, and now that games are firmly being developed with new consoles in mind, teams do not want to repeat the process,” the developer said.

In interviews with press including IGN, Xbox boss Phil Spencer has deflected questions about whether Xbox Series S is holding developers back, and rejected calls for developers to be allowed to release their games on Xbox Series X only. In an interview with Eurogamer, Spencer said: “Having an entry-level price point for a sub-$300 console is a good thing for the industry. I think it’s important. The Switch has been able to do that, in terms of kind of the traditional plug-into-my-television consoles. I think it’s important. So, we’re committed.”

The situation with Black Myth: Wukong, however, is further muddled by Microsoft’s insistence that the game’s delay on Xbox has nothing to do with development issues. In a number of statements issued to IGN, Microsoft has suggested an exclusivity deal with Sony was the cause of the delay.

“As we have said before, we’re excited for the launch of Black Myth Wukong on Xbox Series X and S and are working with Game Science to bring the game to our platforms,” Microsoft has told IGN.

“We’d prefer not to comment on the deals made by our partners with other platform holders but we can confirm that the delay is not due to Xbox platform limitations that have been raised to us.”

Black Myth: Wukong launched on August 19 and sold an eye-watering 18 million copies in just two weeks across PC and PS5, reportedly making over $700 million in revenue in the process. That was enough to put Black Myth: Wukong up there with Grand Theft Auto 5 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 as one of the fastest-selling games of all time, and is an astonishing return for a game that had a reported budget of $70 million over six years of development. It did so well that Sony pointed to Black Myth: Wukong as making a significant contribution to revenue during its last financial quarter, making up for the Concord disaster.

DLC is set to follow. In September, Game Science investor Hero Games confirmed plans to release an Elden Ring-style expansion for Black Myth: Wukong ahead of any sequel.

IGN’s Black Myth: Wukong review returned an 8/10. We said: “Despite some frustrating technical issues, Black Myth: Wukong is a great action game with fantastic combat, exciting bosses, tantalizing secrets, and a beautiful world.”

While you’re here, IGN has plenty more Black Myth: Wukong guides to help you out, including Essential Tips and Tricks, Things Black Myth: Wukong Doesn’t Tell You, and our Boss List and Guides.

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.

In 2017, Brendan Greene (aka “PlayerUnknown”) pioneered the Battle Royale genre of games with the early access release of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The game has since gone on to become a massive hit, spawning countless more games like it, including some of the most successful games of all time.

Next year, 2025, Greene wants to pioneer something new. He wants to make a metaverse. No, not the one you’re thinking of. Greene doesn’t think those count as actual metaverses.

“I hesitate to talk about this, because it’s just such a dirty word, but I want to build a metaverse because I don’t think anyone else is,” he tells IGN. “I think everyone’s building IP bubbles that might talk to each other at some stage in the future, maybe if we’re lucky, but it’s not the metaverse. See, the Metaverse is a 3D internet. You should be able to create your own worlds and just have them all operating on the same protocol, like HTTP. So a world is a page, and that’s what I’m trying to do with Artemis.”

Artemis, aka Greene’s metaverse, is actually the third of three games he’s currently cooking up at his studio, PlayerUnknown Productions. The first two are testing grounds for the technology Greene eventually wants to use to build his metaverse. They’ll each be games in their own right, but their real purpose is to work out the kinks in Greene’s most ambitious ideas before they hit primetime in Artemis.

Final Chapter Prologue

The first game, Prologue, is already being tested by players in Greene’s Discord (in an early format Greene refers to as “Preface”) and is planned for a wider release in 2025. It’s a fairly basic survival game, Greene says, with a simple loop of trying to reach an objective while dealing with typical survival mechanics. There’s weather, hunger, crafting, discoverable loot, and other such elements to deal with, but the real meat of Prologue is its terrain generation tech. That’s what Prologue is really about: testing high-tech terrain generation at a small scale, before implementing it more broadly in Artemis.

Greene calls the terrain generation tech used by his studio “Melba,” and it’s basically a world generation machine. Melba uses machine learning, and is trained on NASA data of real-world Earth terrain. With that information, Melba is able to spit out entire maps, or even worlds, that have realistic geological features, and is able to do so either randomly or based on instructions, such as a request for a world with tons of mountains. These worlds are then filled with textures, assets, and other elements designed by actual artists, and are able to be customized in a similar fashion to have more forests, rivers, or whatever other elements are desired.

“There’s a new terrain every time you press play,” Greene explains. “The seed system gives us, I think 4.2 billion possible maps, but maybe millions of those would be interesting, I’m not sure yet…But this kind of tech is really cool because we’re seeing it shaped day to day with the artists. They’re going, ‘Let’s try this, let’s update the masks we use for the river to this so we generate that slightly differently.’ And they’re learning how to use this tech along with us, which is just great to see.

“It’s more an emergent space to test our terrain tech, and we’re going to work with the community to try to figure out: how can we make this test interesting? How can we make this game mode fun? What can we add to it that’s systemic, and then will help us moving forward going into game two, and three, and building these bigger systems using the foundations we built in Prologue?”

Building the World Machine

Prologue is just game one. Game two, which is currently unnamed, will come once the terrain tech is solidified. For Game Two, Greene wants a world that’s “500 million square kilometers, earth scale” to test a different sort of tech ahead of the release of Artemis: gameplay with a whole awful lot of characters all in one space together.

Greene won’t say much about this one. He tells me about his end goal for Artemis, which is to fit not thousands, but millions of players in a space together and have everything still work. In Game Two, Greene will test that via both multiplayer gameplay as well as AI character interaction. “You’ll be controlling an army, basically,” is all I can really get out of him. Game Two will focus on multiplayer while “controlling lots of assets”…which, when combined with Melba, will lead to the massive, multiplayer metaverse that Greene is dreaming up for Artemis.

“The metaverse has to have millions of people, and server client-side, you’ll never get that. You’ll maybe get a few thousand, maybe 10,000 if you’re lucky, but it’s attacking the problem at the wrong end, which is to solve the simulation locally, which we’ve done with Preface and then you can scale to hundreds of thousands, millions of people, hopefully.”

As for what all those millions of people will be doing in Greene’s metaverse…that’s largely up to them, he says. He compares it at one point to a Star Trek Holodeck, and then later to Minecraft Survival. In the tradition of the latter, Artemis will have a sort of basic game experience everyone can play, but then those users will be able to go off and make their own worlds, freely mod them, share them with others, and essentially treat them like “3D webpages” and experiment, build, and create totally new things within these spaces. He says he’s already seeing some of the beginnings of that within his Discord community as they tool around with and mod the early release of Prologue.

“The internet was empty when it first started, and it was just the way of sharing data, and I look at this the same,” he says. “This is probably going to be empty for the first few years, but then eventually you’ll start to see the possibility of what you can do with this kind of world generator that it’s like a multiverse of worlds.”

Critically, Greene wants Artemis to eventually be like the open internet in the sense that no one can really control what’s on it, not even him. I ask him how content moderation will work in that case, and while Greene believes Artemis will need moderation, he wants that power to stay in the hands of the users.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about this and what I want to do within this multiverse of digital spaces, you give the power to the community, that if someone acts like an asshole then they’re locked out of spaces. And it comes down to identity. We have to solve the identity problem because anonymity online kind of breaks the social construct. But if on our network or on our system, it’s tough for you to reenter it or to create an identity twice, you could still be anonymous, but at least there will be consequence to action.”

Greene also suggests that instead of outright banning people who cause issues, one path might be to turn miscreants into “ghosts” that can’t interact with anyone. They can see everything happening and browse the world, but they are incapable of speaking or otherwise engaging with anything in it. “If you look at Covid, there were 12 people that generated something like 96% of the misinformation that was online. [Author’s note: The actual number was 65% of disinformation posts on Facebook, and 72% of all anti-vaccine content.]…If you shut out this small group of people that really actively try to upset the information space and deliver propaganda, then you’ve solved the problem kind of holistically…I think that the future will be local. Everything will be local. You will have your identity locally and you will share it as you see fit, and it won’t be stored by people across the world. At least I hope.”

I press Greene on this – what if people are doing illegal things in this metaverse? What about copyright violations, or worse, everything Roblox has been accused of? At what point does he become responsible? Greene admits he doesn’t have an answer yet.

“That’s where we’re going to have to figure it out. As I said, I want to build games with the community, rather than for them, and I think with their help and finding out what tools they need to better do this, then we can figure out how to do this in a way better way for everyone. Thankfully we have good AI regulation in the EU as well so there are checks and balances there already, at least this side of the planet to help with this, right? I mean, let’s see how long they last, but at least there are people smarter than me thinking about it already. So I’m happy to follow guidance, and work with the community to figure this out because it’s important to get right.”

Long Road Ahead

Greene’s vision is incredibly technically complex, and he mentions several times that he doesn’t expect we’ll see its final form – Artemis – for ten, maybe even 15 years. He’s already highlighted a number of the challenges ahead of the team, but I ask him about another one he hasn’t yet mentioned: is Artemis going to be PC-only? No, he says. It’ll be on everything, eventually.

“It has to. I mean, the device is just an access point to the world. It has to be. Kids in Africa on their mobile phones have to be able to access it the same as gaming PCs on the West Coast. The experience of the world might be slightly different, but because it’s not a game, that’s okay. It just has to run on every device.”

And there’s another technological issue I need to raise with Greene: NFTs. Previously, it’s been reported that Artemis will implement them, but Greene says that was a misunderstanding stemming from an interview he did with Hit Points back in 2022.

“[Nathan Brown] asked me about blockchain because it was the hype thing at the time,” Greene says. “And I explained that blockchain, I thought, was an interesting financial instrument, as a layer within a digital world. But that was it. I said maybe some future iteration of blockchain or hashgraph or that tech is interesting. Ultimately it’s a digital ledger and if we can use a digital ledger, we’ll find the best one and use it. But that’s really it. The next day after I did that interview, [headlines were] ‘PUBG Guy Making Blockchain Game’, and that’s not what I said. It’s an interesting tech and I think it can be used if it’s useful, but otherwise we’ll use what is the best at the time.”

So he’s not currently thinking about NFTs in Artemis, then?

“No, not even thinking about it. Our concern is about getting the engine to a state that we can make things in it and then as I said, Game Two, we’ll test ideas then, but really now not even thought about it. More just getting some fun games made.”

Between the length of time Greene needs to build Artemis and the sheer amount of questions still looming about its final form, Greene and his studio have a difficult road ahead. He’ll need time and personpower, which also means money, and the games industry is currently going through a funding drought amid layoffs, closures, and project cancellations. Greene says his project is fine, having gotten funding for Prologue early on and used it thoughtfully thus far. But that doesn’t mean Artemis is guaranteed. He says they’ll still need people to buy Prologue so they can sustain development long-term.

Still, Greene isn’t daunted by the fact that he’s basically claiming he wants to build an entire second internet in a time of mass game and tech instability. In the same way that PUBG started out as a fairly barebones game but became a smash hit that launched a genre, he believes his new vision can grow to something massive with the help of a creative community. And maybe, he suggests, a successful Artemis could even help prevent the current games industry situation from happening again.

“Games are driven a lot by data points on Excel spreadsheets rather than making fun games and it’s a little depressing,” he says. “So that’s why I want to stick to my vision because I think we need a platform like this. We need a platform where people can just create and not worry that you’ve got an exec team shooting it.

“I want to find the next PlayerUnknown. I was really lucky to have been given this chance and providing people with a platform that can help do that, why wouldn’t I do that? And yes, it’s a big vision, but I’ve got a good team of industry professionals and they don’t think it’s that crazy. So yeah, I’m filled with confidence.”

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.

Sony has announced the PlayStation Plus monthly games for January 2025 will be Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered, and The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe.

As detailed on PlayStation.Blog, all three of these games will be available on January 7 for PlayStation Plus members, with Suicide Squad arriving on PS5, Need for Speed racing to PS4, and Stanley Parable dropping on PS5 and PS4.

The big addition here is Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, especially after developer Rocksteady just recently confirmed it will be pulling the plug on new content after Season 4 arrives this month. Despite that, there is a lot to look forward to, including a playable Deathstroke, an offline mode, and all the previous seasonal content.

In our Suicide Squad; Kill the Justice League review, we said it is “a repetitive and bland looter-shooter that, despite an engaging story, never stays fun for long enough.”

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered is the updated 2020 version of the game that was first released in 2010. This remastered edition has enhanced visuals, cross-platform multiplayer, asynchronous competition powered by Autolog, all the DLC, and more.

In our Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered review, we said that, while it isn’t the “most exciting remaster,” Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered is “still one of the best modern arcade racers around – and now it looks even better.”

Lastly, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is the “expanded re-imagining” of 2013’s The Stanley Parable, complete with new content, choices, and secrets. There is also improved visuals, accessibility features, and much more.

In our The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe review, we said, “The Stanley Parable still holds up a decade later, and the Ultra Deluxe version essentially adds a whole new game’s worth of additional content to stumble upon.”

For more, check out December’s PlayStation Plus monthly games before they go away on January 6 and why Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was one of our biggest disappointments of 2024.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on TikTok.

Happy new year! Welcome to 2025, and congratulations for living through yet another complete rotation around the giant firey gas ball we call the sun. The start of a new year is as good a time as any to take a look at what games are currently on the horizon, so here are the biggest game releases of 2025 that we know about right now!

January 2025

We are only hours away from 2025, so now is the time to score some last-minute holiday deals. Here are the best deals for Tuesday, December 31.

Reynatis Deluxe Edition for $40.80