Category: IGN

EA is preparing to launch an ambitious new social app that it is says will use its existing technology to mix real-life and virtual sports.

Announced during today’s Investor Day, the new app functions similarly to existing sports apps from companies like ESPN, featuring news, scores, stats, and highlights. The main hook, Chief Experiences Officer David Tinson says, is its tie-ins with EA’s various sports games, including the possibility of unlocking prizes like Ultimate Team cards based on the sizzle reel.

Behaviour Interactive is canceling Project T, a four-person co-op title set in the world of Dead by Daylight.

The studio announced the news with a post on its X/Twitter today, saying that it came to the decision after hearing feedback from those who participated in its Insiders Program. Project T had begun testing with insiders earlier this year.

“Following the playtest in July, we ran through internal risk assessment from a product and commercial perspective,” Behaviour said in the statement, which you can read in full below. “While a number of players expressed appreciation for what they played, unfortunately, the outcome of this deep analysis yielded unsatisfactory overall results.”

pic.twitter.com/TfIpAk06Mm

— Behaviour Interactive (@Behaviour) September 17, 2024

Behaviour revealed a behind-the-scenes look at Project T back in May, but little was known about the horror action-shooter otherwise. It was to be set in a region called The Backwater, and Behaviour promised it would expand the world of Dead by Daylight with “new characters, gameplay, and settings – as well as a few familiar elements for those in the know.”

It was being developed by Midwinter Entertainment, but had never set a release window, with the FAQ on its website saying it was still “currently in the very early stages of development.” “It is not our goal to use the Insider Program to finetune a nearly complete game, but rather to create it alongside you at a stage where your feedback can matter most,” it added.

No further details were revealed regarding other projects at the studio, although Dead by Daylight continues to get new content. It added a Castlevania chapter late last month, and teased a number of other big additions during its 8th anniversary stream in May.

Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Most sequels to successful games are safe, conservative iterations on the ideas of the original, but not here: Frostpunk 2 is a bold follow-up that takes an almost entirely different approach to its city-building strategy. It’s set in the same bleak, iced-over world where people struggle to survive, but it’s refreshing that we’re not retreading the same frozen ground. Everything from how you place buildings to how you manage resources and heat your city is a new spin, and its political system is a creative way to interact with the people of New London that does a great job of conveying a sense of quid-pro-quo negotiation in a representative democracy. The zoomed-out perspective does mean that we lose a lot of the feeling of intimacy that made the first game truly stand out, but there’s no shortage of morally questionable decisions to make as you’re building your society.

A frosty atmosphere is strong, thanks to bone-chilling weather effects and dramatic music that swells as tension in your city increases. Coming from a replay of the first Frostpunk, I was initially missing the ability to see people walking in the streets. That said, they do pop up with comments on your actions and an announcer on the loudspeaker gives occasionally amusing remarks on current events, so it doesn’t feel like a ghost town. The map itself is obviously fairly uniform because it’s covered in white snow and ice, but there are features like mountains and cliffs to give each area its own look, and as you build it becomes much more colorful thanks to intricate districts and the automatically created power lines which pulse red when tension runs high.

The five-chapter Story mode serves as something of a tutorial for the sandbox Utopia Builder mode, though aside from a few short cutscenes there isn’t a whole lot of plot driving it. There’s little here beyond a direct bridge between the events of the first game and this one as you take over the city of New London, with the vast majority of story coming in brief, affecting vignettes about life in the frozen wastes. There’s a lot to cover as you learn to place and expand multi-tile districts for housing, food production, resource/fuel extraction, industry, and logistics, each with its own set of upgrade buildings, plus single-tile hub buildings with adjacency bonuses.

It’s an interesting city-building puzzle with a couple of questionable quirks: The frostbreaking system, which requires you to first clear out batches of tiles before you can build on them, makes sense in the fiction but feels like busywork that just slows down how quickly you can act on a plan. It’s also frustrating that you can’t reposition any single tile without demolishing the entire district and starting over, but at least you get all of your resources back so all it costs you is time.

When you zoom out to the vast and even more barren Frostlands map, the main features are the very Game of Thrones-inspired clockwork icons for your colony and outposts. Your scouts discover these as you send them on dispatch missions to explore and bring home many of the resources and population you’ll need to keep your colony going. It’s much more built out than the original’s version of the Frostlands, in that you must connect the resources you find there with roads to bring back a steady stream of them, then found and upgrade more outposts and even full satellite colonies to keep New London going. It’s very much a side activity, but the rewards there are so crucial to building your population that I was motivated to check it frequently and keep the resources coming.

The main thing that bothered me here is that you can’t see your factions at the bottom of the screen when you’re not in your main city, so if things start going wrong as you’re off building your resource operation it can get out of hand before you notice. I’d also have loved to be able to zoom out further, since the Frostland maps can get huge and scanning for where my scouts just finished a mission takes too long.

The challenge of feeding your colonies’ central generator’s need for fuel and keeping the city supplied with heat, food, and materials is fairly conventional and straightforward for supply chain games, though in a few major ways it does become more complicated at times. For one thing, massive Whiteout storms hit every so often and shut down the entire Frostlands map, disrupting supply chains and leaving you to subsist on your stockpiles for months at a time. That means you can’t just produce enough to keep the lights on – you need to overproduce as hard as you can to avoid having your people freeze to death by the hundreds.

Speaking of freezing, I did hit a couple of bugs with the interface, such as where I had to click on certain dialogue choices a bunch of times before they’d register. Sometimes the buttons on the UI would overlap and clicking it would register on the button underneath instead of the one that was more visible on top. It’s also a little annoying that it locks up for several seconds during an autosave, but there was nothing severe. It’s worth noting though, that – as with most games of this type – the higher your population goes, the more performance is prone to decline.

Arguably the centerpieces of Frostpunk 2, though, are its faction and government systems. This is where you must strike a balance between opposing groups of citizens by keeping promises around how they’d like to see you run the place. You don’t lose by having your colony wiped out (it would be quite a challenge to get the population down to zero) – instead, you have to worry about your people losing trust in you or the tension level rising to the point where they boot you out of office. It’s all too easy for a shortage of any of the resources to send you into a downward spiral where everybody’s mad at everybody else and society collapses.

My first time through I made the rookie mistake of assuming I could blow off one faction entirely if I kept the others happy, and at first it seemed to work. You can research whatever technologies you like with the push of a button (and a small fee) but passing laws – often needed to actually enact what you’ve unlocked through research – can only be done through the Council, which is made of 100 representatives of your city’s factions. Frostpunk 2 has a fun way of displaying the votes, where members’ seats light up as they cast theirs, and any vote you don’t lock down in advance is a roll of the dice. Bribing – or rather persuading – a faction to vote your way is a matter of making promises to do something on their behalf. Most of the time they want you to research a specific tech or pass a law that aligns with that faction’s worldview, but sometimes they’ll take cold, hard cash (ironically called heatstamps). Even so, factions won’t negotiate at all if a proposal is against their worldview, so some votes are still nailbiters.

I had a lot of fun with the fact that, if you play your cards right, you can often be rewarded for doing what you’re planning on doing anyway. The interface helpfully tells you which version of each research item (most have different options that might, for instance, cost less to build and boost production but pollute more or create tension) is supported by which faction. Armed with that information, you can go to them and see if they’ll ask you for it, and if they do you’ll build extra trust when you research it. Similarly, it’s always hilarious to promise a bothersome faction they get to choose the next law that’ll be voted on in order to get their relationship bar out of the red, only to then whip votes against it and see them get nothing out of it.

So I could usually pass any law I wanted with a supermajority of support, ignoring the extremists who were upset when I pushed through policies like Free Essentials to feed the people or Accept All Outsiders to boost my population, whether they could work or not (hitting population numbers is one of the main goals). However, there’s a catch: until you unlock some of the heavier-handed and authoritarian policies, that approach leaves you vulnerable to protests that shut down production in your districts, injure bystanders and destroy equipment, and of course raise tension through the roof. That means you’ll have to come back to the table and negotiate, which can be difficult to do while riots are slowing everything to a crawl. You do get more tools to deal with dissenters as you go, up to and including rounding them up and leaving them to freeze to death in outdoor prisons (I eventually won the story campaign by finally deporting the troublemaking faction to their own colony) but many of those cause tension to rise and trust to fall when used. There’s no easy answer, which makes it a compelling problem to solve.

My first run of the Story mode took about 15 hours, including a restart when I figured out exactly how bad my initial decisions had been. I’ve since put in another 20 in the Utopia Builder sandbox mode with objectives like founding multiple colonies with 10,000 residents or building tall with 50,000 in your home base, and there’s a promising amount of replay potential in Frostpunk 2. Not only are there six major factions (and their radicalized offshoots) to mix and match – and seven different Frostlands maps to play on – but there are different paths you can take by leaning into different philosophies that unlock different radical ideas. Doing a run on a higher difficulty than Officer – the one recommended for Frostpunk veterans – would certainly require spending more time getting to know the factions’ preferences than I did on my first successful run to avoid angering them unnecessarily.

I can’t help but feel that we’ve lost something important, though, in expanding from the small-scale perspective of the first game to a multi-colony big picture – one where you can only see your people when you hit a button to do a close-up to observe a handful of them milling around. For instance, seeing a message pop up that 93 children died in a mine collapse doesn’t really hit the same when it soon vanishes without obvious repercussions. It was a lot easier for me to think of those kids as just stats on a spreadsheet when they never even had names that I can view in the graveyard, like I could in Frostpunk. Frostpunk 2 is just too big for that.

“Back up a second,” you might say. “What were 93 children doing in a mine in the first place?” Well I’m glad you asked. In one of my smarter decisions as Steward of New London – one that was enabled by my choice to go with an apprenticeship system instead of mandatory schooling for children because it increased my workforce – I opted to send them in to gather coal that was inaccessible to full-grown adults. The other option was to blast the way clear, but that would’ve given me less coal. No one could’ve foreseen anything going wrong with that plan!

Forstpunk 2 is always throwing decisions like that at you and then serving up consequences, often making me feel a little dirty for picking the one that gave me the boost the spreadsheet said I needed despite the human cost. So while it might not land the punches as effectively, it certainly takes a lot of swings, and those add up.

As a lifelong Zelda fan, I’m always hesitant when other developers set out to make a game so clearly inspired by Nintendo’s acclaimed action-adventure series. I find that the puzzle design never quite reaches Zelda’s incredibly lofty bar, and I’m usually left wishing I was just playing Ocarina of Time or A Link Between Worlds instead. But The Plucky Squire breaks that trend, with a combination of clever brain teasers, simple but effective swordplay, and a courageous silent protagonist that would feel right at home in Hyrule. The adventure is held back by an overly wordy script and some serious pacing issues in its final act, but this debut game from developer All Possible Futures is still a journey worth taking.

The Plucky Squire’s elevator pitch is brilliant: You play as Jot, the hero of a children’s book who learns early on that he is, in fact, just the hero of a children’s book. This leads to a surprisingly meta story where Jot leaps between the 2D pages of his picture book and the 3D real world around it, which is represented by the childhood bedroom of a young Plucky Squire superfan named Sam who collects all of Jot’s stories and merchandise. That unique premise paves the way for The Plucky Squire’s inspired puzzle design.

While within the story’s beautifully animated depictions of beaches, villages, and mountaintops, Jot can manipulate the book’s text to alter his reality and get past obstacles. Need a closed gate to swing open? Jot can literally pick the word “Open” off the page from another sentence in the book and swap it into the prose lying in front of the shut gate. It plays out like a (substantially) lighter version of Baba Is You’s rule manipulation, and it’s a blast to experiment with different combinations of nouns and adjectives to see how the world reacts, like turning a tiny frog into a giant frog for no reason other than wanting to see if it would work. (Spoilers: It did.) It’s not the most flexible system – each scenario with this concept only includes a handful of eligible words Jot can interchange – but it’s still a really impressive mechanic the developers use in several smart ways throughout the adventure. Through the power of language, I filled a drained moat with water, turned sturdy columns into crumbling ones in order to topple them onto an enemy blocking my path, and a whole lot more.

Wordplay is just one smart way The Plucky Squire takes advantage of its storybook setting. Jot can also pop out of the book and turn from an adorable hand-drawn 2D character into a fully 3D version of himself that’s reminiscent of the toyetic look of the Link’s Awakening remake and the upcoming Echoes of Wisdom. When outside of the book, Jot can play God and directly manipulate the world within, with powers like tilting the book on its side to slide blocks around or even flipping back to an earlier page to grab a word or item that he needs on the current one. Backtracking through pages to find The Plucky Squire’s optional hidden collectibles also resulted in some cool “aha!” moments, and I could see myself going back to snag the ones I missed. The book’s myriad uses forced me to zoom out and think bigger about the tools at my disposal, and The Plucky Squire hits some awesome puzzle-solving highs within these segments.

The only issue is how many hints The Plucky Squire constantly throws at you. Before I was set loose on most puzzles, Jot’s endearing companions Violet, Thrash, and Moonbeard have a whole conversation about what you need to do. This inclusion is even more confusing when you take into account The Plucky Squire’s well-implemented optional hint system, where a recurring character that’s pretty much always around will tell you exactly what you need to do next if you ask for help. It’s frustrating that the developers lay out too much information through mandatory dialogue rather than leaving it to the hint system so experienced players can try to piece it all together without hand-holding.

In fact, chattiness is a problem throughout the entirety of The Plucky Squire. Characters are always stopping to have lengthy conversations about what to do next, and while it’s all well-written dialogue, I found myself wanting to mash through these extensive sequences to get back to the action. The incessant over-explanation of Jot’s mission to take down the evil Humgrump is one way The Plucky Squire feels aimed squarely at a younger audience, but the witty humor and lighthearted tone just barely save it from becoming a major drawback.

The outside world goes well beyond the pages as Jot explores Sam’s bedroom to find new abilities to interact with his book. These exploration sections are a wonderful change of pace from the puzzling nature of the storybook, and Sam’s bedroom is a delight to run around. Like you’d expect from a young boy’s room, toys and LEGO bricks are littered everywhere, and Jot platforms across playing cards and building blocks to find his next upgrade. In these sections, Jot can hop in and out of sticky notes and children’s drawings, which makes the whole thing feel like a creative take on A Link Between Worlds’ wall-merging mechanic. There are a few minor technical issues in the real world – I noticed some shadows flickering in and out and I had one hard crash – but for the most part The Plucky Squire looked and ran great on PlayStation 5.

Combat works the same whether Jot is in or out of the book. He can swing his sword, throw it at enemies like a boomerang, and make use of powerful jump attacks and spin attacks. These moves can all be upgraded at shops that pop up across the land of Mojo, where you spend currency that’s mostly found – fittingly – by cutting grass. The swordplay is simple, fun, and rarely challenging, but for a game mostly focused on puzzles, I don’t mind that the fights are basic bouts to rip through on your way to the next big riddle.

The Plucky Squire is also continuously working to shake things up. There are plenty of 2D platforming segments within the book’s pages, and sometimes the book turns vertically to give things a fresh perspective. But The Plucky Squire really flexes its creative muscles within the minigame segments that crop up regularly throughout Jot’s journey. There are homages to things like Punch-Out!!, rhythm games, shmups, and more that I won’t spoil here. Whether you’re uppercutting a honey badger or fighting off aliens while flying around inside a toy box, every minigame here is so charming and fun to play, and I loved seeing how the developers shook up the art style and character designs for each one.

With great pacing between the storybook, real world, and minigames for the first five hours of the roughly eight-hour campaign, it’s jarring when The Plucky Squire completely loses its stride in the final act. First, Jot loses all his abilities, and you’re forced to go through a very generic stealth section to recover all the powers you already spent the entire game gathering. It’d be like if Metroid ripped all of Samus’ upgrades away moments before the final boss and forced you to gather the Morph Ball and Grapple Beam a second time. What’s worse, this section takes place in an entirely monochrome world, sucking all the joy and color out of Sam’s bedroom and turning it into a dull trudge over tired ground. This section doesn’t take all too long, but it’s followed up with The Plucky Squire’s final dungeon, which is a repetitive march through samey rooms along with a rhythm stealth minigame I had to repeat three separate times. After facing a final boss that also goes on a phase too long, I was ready to be done before the credits even started rolling. It’s a shame, because The Plucky Squire is so delightful for most of its runtime, but that last third unfortunately leaves behind a sour aftertaste.

Today, Maxis dropped a ton of The Sims-related information spanning the games, the upcoming film, content creators, and more. While some fans may have been scouring the updates for news on next-gen Sims release Project Rene, there wasn’t much to go on…except that there will be another invite-only playtest of the game coming this fall.

Per Maxis, Project Rene will hold a “small, invite-only playtest” in the fall, “giving an early look at a multiplayer experience that explores joining friends and other players at a shared location.” Interested individuals can sign up to participate in the playtest here.

This is the second publicized public playtest Project Rene has held since its announcement, having previously had a similar small, closed playtest focused on furniture customization way back in 2022.

Project Rene was first announced in October of 2022 as the “next generation” of The Sims. Maxis has held off on referring to it as The Sims 5, and has said it expects the game to continue co-existing alongside The Sims 4 rather than replacing it. We’ve seen very, very little of the game since, though we know it allows for furniture customization on a level of detail previously impossible in the franchise, and that it will support cooperative multiplayer.

In the same update, Maxis announced a number of other The Sims-related news bits. These included confirmation of a previously-reported The Sims film directed by Kate Herron, and the introduction of The Sims 4 Creator Kits allowing content creators to craft and publish in-game assets in partnership with the studio.

We recently updated our review of The Sims 4 to reflect the state of the game in 2024, and gave the now free-to-play game an 8/10 thanks to its strong community and frequent updates.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Microsoft has announced the Xbox Game Pass September 2024 Wave 2 lineup, taking subscribers up to the end of this month.

Just three games are listed as coming during September’s second wave in Microsoft’s Xbox Wire post, two of which are PC-only strategy games that launch day one on Game Pass, the other a turn-based strategy game released last year.

Wargroove 2 (Cloud, Console, and PC) hits Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass on September 19; PC strategy game Frostpunk 2 releases as a day one title straight into Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass on September 20; and Ara: History Untold on PC launches straight into Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass on September 24.

Wargroove 2 is Chucklefish’s Advance Wars-style strategy sequel released in 2023. IGN’s Wargroove 2 review returned an 8/10. We said: “Wargroove 2 is still one of the best tributes to Advance Wars out there, and bigger than its predecessor in every way, even though otherwise not much has changed.”

Frostpunk 2 is the hotly anticipated city-building survival sequel from 11 But Studios. Check out IGN’s Frostpunk 2 hands-on preview to find out more about what to expect. And Ara: History Untold is Oxide Games’ new turn-based grand strategy Civ-like, published by Xbox Game Studios.

September 2024 Wave 2 is the first Game Pass update from Microsoft’s since its controversial introduction of its new Standard Tier, which does not include a number of first-party games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Starfield, and Diablo 4.

Microsoft announced the revised Game Pass tiers in July and as of September 12 the changes went into effect. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate has risen from $16.99 to $19.99 a month and still includes all the typical benefits, but the Xbox Game Pass Standard tier is quite different from its predecessor.

It replaces Game Pass for Console (though those already subscribed don’t have to upgrade) and includes significantly fewer benefits. Subscribers no longer gain access to day one titles or access to EA Play, Xbox Cloud Gaming, perks, Quests, and discounts on games in the Game Pass library. Microsoft said players would also be denied access to “specific entries to the Game Pass Ultimate library,” and that list has now been revealed to be fairly extensive.

Xbox Game Pass September 2024 Wave 2 Lineup

• Wargroove 2 (Cloud, Console, and PC) – September 19 Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• Frostpunk 2 (PC) – September 20 Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
• Ara: History Untold (PC) – September 24 Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass

None of the three September 2024 Wave 2 games are included in Xbox Game Pass Standard / Game Pass for Console. Game Pass subscribers don’t get the upcoming Starfield expansion, Shattered Space, either upon its September 30 release date. Instead they can save 10%.

Game Pass members do, however, get six hero skins and an instant one-time grant of 30 Mythic prisms to spend on Mythic unlocks in Blizzard’s free-to-play hero shooter Overwatch 2.

Microsoft is heavily rumored to be set to reveal a number of Final Fantasy games coming to Xbox consoles and Game Pass during its Tokyo Game Show 2024 broadcast, which is set for Thursday, September 26 at 7pm JST / 3am Pacific / 6am Eastern / 11am UK. Perhaps September will be fleshed out somewhat following the conclusion of the show.

Microsoft also confirmed the games leaving Game Pass later this month.

Leaving Game Pass September 30:

• Gotham Knights (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Let’s Build a Zoo (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Loop Hero (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• My Time At Portia (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• PAW Patrol Grand Prix (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Pheonix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• The Walking Dead: The Complete First Season (PC)
• The Walking Dead: Season Two (PC)
• Valheim (Cloud, Console, and PC)

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.

EA Sports has confirmed the launch timing for FC 25 across its early access and global release dates on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, PC, and Nintendo Switch.

FC 25’s popular Companion & Web App launches on September 19, letting fans start their Ultimate Team club on the web, and a refreshed Companion App then launches on September 20. Ultimate Team 24 players get “a little something extra,” EA Sports teased.

If you pre-ordered the Ultimate Edition of FC 25 then you’ll get the early access launch. This kicks off midnight local time on September 20 on console, and from 5am UK time on September 20 on PC. As is standard for EA Sports’ FC series and the FIFA games before it, EA Play members get up to 10 hours of FC 25 via the trial from the early access launch. EA Play Pro (PC only) members, however, get unlimited access.

EA Sports said the early access period includes Team of the Week 1, Rush Objectives, Player of the Month SBCs, Special Evolutions, World Tour, and Squad Foundations releases. You’ll also have the opportunity to earn Season Points in the new FC Season.

The worldwide launch then follows from midnight local time on September 27 on console, and from 5am UK time on September 27 on PC. Check below for all the details.

EA FC 25 early unlock release times for PS5, Xbox Series X and S, PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch:

• Los Angeles: 12am, September 20
• Austin: 12am, September 20
• Bogota: 12am, September 20
• New York: 12am, September 20
• Brasilia: 12am, September 20
• London: 12am, September 20
• Paris: 12am, September 20
• Cape Town: 12am, September 20
• Cairo: 12am, September 20
• Moscow: 12am, September 20
• Riyadh: 12am, September 20
• Muscat: 12am, September 20
• Beijing: 12am, September 20
• Singapore: 12am, September 20
• Seoul: 12am, September 20
• Tokyo: 12am, September 20
• Sydney: 12am, September 20
• Auckland: 12am, September 20

EA FC 25 early unlock release times for PC:

• Los Angeles: 9pm, September 19
• Austin: 11pm, September 19
• Bogota: 11pm, September 19
• New York: 12am, September 20
• Brasilia: 1am, September 20
• London: 5am, September 20
• Paris: 6am, September 20
• Cape Town: 6am, September 20
• Cairo: 7am, September 20
• Moscow: 7am, September 20
• Riyadh: 7am, September 20
• Muscat: 8am, September 20
• Beijing: 12pm, September 20
• Singapore: 12pm, September 20
• Seoul: 1pm, September 20
• Tokyo: 1pm, September 20
• Sydney: 2pm, September 20
• Auckland: 4pm, September 20

EA FC 25 global release times for PS5, Xbox Series X and S, PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch:

• Los Angeles: 12am, September 27
• Austin: 12am, September 27
• Bogota: 12am, September 27
• New York: 12am, September 27
• Brasilia: 12am, September 27
• London: 12am, September 27
• Paris: 12am, September 27
• Cape Town: 12am, September 27
• Cairo: 12am, September 27
• Moscow: 12am, September 27
• Riyadh: 12am, September 27
• Muscat: 12am, September 27
• Beijing: 12am, September 27
• Singapore: 12am, September 27
• Seoul: 12am, September 27
• Tokyo: 12am, September 27
• Sydney: 12am, September 27
• Auckland: 12am, September 27

EA FC 25 global release times for PC:

• Los Angeles: 9pm, September 26
• Austin: 11pm, September 26
• Bogota: 11pm, September 26
• New York: 12am, September 27
• Brasilia: 1am, September 27
• London: 5am, September 27
• Paris: 6am, September 27
• Cape Town: 6am, September 27
• Cairo: 7am, September 27
• Moscow: 7am, September 27
• Riyadh: 7am, September 27
• Muscat: 8am, September 27
• Beijing: 12pm, September 27
• Singapore: 12pm, September 27
• Seoul: 1pm, September 27
• Tokyo: 1pm, September 27
• Sydney: 2pm, September 27
• Auckland: 4pm, September 27

EA FC 25 has a number of graphics options never before seen in the series, or its predecessor FIFA. The headline is the addition of ray tracing for the first time in either FC or FIFA, the latter of which was EA Sports’ football video game series before the company’s high-profile split from the world football governing body in 2022.

Alongside ray tracing comes a new graphics mode for FC 25, which gives players the choice between Enhanced Visuals or Favour Resolution. Enhanced Visuals features augmented lighting and graphic details in upscaled 4K resolution, whereas Favour Resolution features standard lighting in native 4K. It’s worth noting both graphical options offer 60 frames per second during gameplay to retain responsiveness.

In another first, FC 25 will show time progression during a match. For more, check out IGN’s roundup of all the changes FC 25 makes.

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.

Sony is investigating PlayStation 5 technical issues in Final Fantasy 16 and more caused by the latest firmware update 24.06-10.00.00.

Myriad users reported issues including entire portions of the screen being overcome with black squares, crashing when loading a save file or fast travelling, and more. Similar bugs are appearing in Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws, Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky, Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding, and more according to users on Reddit.

Sony appears aware of the issues, however, and is actively seeking a solution to at least those found in Final Fantasy 16. Square Enix confirmed it was working with the PlayStation maker to address the issues introduced through the firmware update in an X/Twitter post.

“Following the recent release of the PlayStation 5 system update, there have been reports of the game crashing and graphical issues,” Square Enix said. “We are currently working with Sony Interactive Entertainment to investigate, and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused. Please await our further updates.”

Sony has yet to make a statement itself regarding the issues and just how widespread they are, but IGN has reached out for comment. The firmware did bring a handful of intended changes, including a Welcome Hub, Party Share, and more.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is the most-played Warhammer 40,000 game ever on Steam and has seen over two million players since launch, but there’s one issue that gives players the fear: the dreaded ‘joining server’ bug.

Space Marine 2 inexplicably launched without private PvE lobbies, which forces players who are engaged with the endgame co-op Operations mode to brave its frustrating matchmaking.

It is possible to join a group of two other randoms as a solo player in this three-player co-op mode, and doing so seems to work well enough. Similarly, if you can get together with two friends to create a full three-player group, you’re fine… mostly.

Things break down, though, when you’re trying to play with one other friend, and need another random to fill in the group. My experience doing this has been littered with wasted time and matchmaking woes, with Space Marine 2 stubbornly refusing to add another human player to our group. Instead, we get a random class bot to fill in the role.

Playing Operations mode on the harder difficulties, which you need to do to obtain the rewards that unlock the higher-tier weapons and perks, is almost impossible without three human players of the appropriate level all tearing through the mission. Space Marine 2 can be a brutally difficult game that throws loads of rock hard enemies at you. There’s no room for poor AI here.

Me when joining my friend’s server on Space Marines 2: pic.twitter.com/s2ObHkBOv1

— Jacky (Comms Closed) (@jackpesaurus) September 16, 2024

My friend and I came up with an awkward solution to this problem this week: have one of us matchmake into a group of randoms and then vote to kick one of the other players. Once that player was kicked, it was a race to join the group and fill the spot before another random was brought in, brute forcing my friend and I into a three-person group. Not ideal, really, but it worked.

Even with this method in hand, there remains a constant fear that the ‘joining server’ bug will ruin all your hard work as victorious Space Marines load back into the Battle Barge hub area. We’ve had occasions where the game has essentially crashed doing this, casting out rewards to the warp in the process. When an Operation can run around 45 minutes, it is soul-destroying to suffer this bug.

Last week, publisher Focus Entertainment said Space Marine 2’s first update would make server improvements and crash fixes. Hopefully it sorts out these matchmaking problems, too.

IGN has reported on the upcoming addition of class matching for co-op, after players found themselves locked in a class standoff ahead of Operations mode missions. Meanwhile, we also have details on what fans can expect from Space Marine 2’s seasonal post-launch content model. Season 2 runs from October until the end of 2024, and includes a new Operations map, a new enemy, a harder difficulty level, a new weapon, and various other improvements. We also have a story on the probable enemy faction for the inevitable Space Marine 3.

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.

Final Fantasy 16 is finally almost here on PC and developer Square Enix has shared exactly when players can start playing the role-playing game.

Square Enix confirmed the launch times for each region in an X/Twitter post, below, across its September 17 release date. Both previously released expansions for Final Fantasy 16, Echoes of the Fallen and The Rising Tide, will be released simultaneously but cost extra.

The RPG has plenty of content on its own, however, as players are thrust into a world where powerful elemental monsters (dare we say summons) live within select vessels known as Dominants, and players, as protagonist Clive Rosfield, must join forces with or take down each and every one.

Not long to go.

Read to discover when Final Fantasy XVI launches on PC in your region. #FF16 pic.twitter.com/y03TqZoVyF

— FINAL FANTASY XVI (@finalfantasyxvi) September 4, 2024

Final Fantasy 16 PC Release Times

• Los Angeles – 7am PDT
• New York – 10am PDT
• Brasília – 11am BRT
• London – 3pm BST
• Berlin – 4pm CEST
• Hong Kong – 10pm HKT
• Tokyo – 11pm JST
• Sydney – 12 midnight AEST (September 18)
• Wellington – 2am NZST (September 18)

Final Fantasy 16 arrives on PC after lots if conflicting information from Square Enix and a plea from producer Naoki Yoshida asking players not to make offensive mods. The original reveal trailer claimed blatantly the game is “also available on PC,” and while Square Enix mysteriously scrapped this claim soon after, its status as a PlayStation 5 exclusive was brought into question again in November 2022 when an advertisement for the PS5’s DualSense controller said Final Fantasy 16 would only be a “PS5 exclusive for six months.”

Yoshida himself then denied a PC version existed at all. “Nobody said a word about a PC version releasing,” he said, incorrectly. “Why is it like a PC version is releasing six months later? Don’t worry about that, buy a PS5. Sorry, I went overboard. We did our best, so please look forward to it.”

Yoshida then admitted in February 2023 it’s true that “Final Fantasy 16 is a six-month limited time exclusive on the PS5” but “the PC version will not come out in half a year.” This is because the team wouldn’t be able to start development until the PS5 version launched in June that year.

Finally, however, the role-playing game was announced for PC in August 2024, with the aforementioned September 17 release date. This came after Final Fantasy 16 failed to meet the expectations of Square Enix alongside other PlayStation exclusives including Foamstars and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, prompting a shift to an aggressive multiplatform strategy going forward.

Yoshida made clear in August that Square Enix would be doubling down on Xbox releases following this change in strategy, while Final Fantasy 16 director Hiroshi Takai said future games in the franchise would likely come to PC on launch.

In our 9/10 review of the PS5 version, IGN said: “Final Fantasy 16 is certainly a departure from what fans may expect out of a Final Fantasy game, but its excellent story, characters, and world building are right up there with the best the series has to offer.”

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.