Single-player, story-based DLC that gives me an excuse to return to an impeccable single-player, story-based adventure that I adored the first time around? Unlike an out-of-his-depth Marcus Brody, MachineGames really knows how to speak my language. The Order of Giants is a roughly four-hour side quest for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle that’s heavy on puzzles and features a string of tremendously atmospheric caves, catacombs, and canals to explore through the belly of Rome. After not having visited The Great Circle for many months, I was quickly hooked all over again. Even if it’s just for an afternoon, The Order of Giants is an effective refresher on most of the things I love about MachineGames’ take on the finest fascist-hater to ever find himself under a fedora. However, I have to concede that its presentation as a belated quest from early in The Great Circle’s story does make it feel noticeably less special and crucial to play than a more overtly separate adventure could have been, and the final fight falls a little flat.
Slipping The Order of Giants directly into what’s basically the first act of The Great Circle’s story obviously spoke to the MachineGames team in an irresistible way and, to a degree, I can see the elegance of blending it into the existing game in this fashion. Accessing the mission actually happens from within the Vatican level itself – it isn’t an individual mode or level you can directly hop into via the main menu. It’s an interesting approach, since it makes The Order of Giants feel like a segment that was left on the cutting room floor. If you’re playing for the first time it’ll just be there from the outset, and for returning players it’s a little like watching a familiar film with a lengthy deleted scene re-inserted. It’s a neat and tidy solution, but it does have the unfortunate side effect of making the DLC feel a little inessential overall. That is, it wasn’t here initially, and it doesn’t change anything now that it is – whether you play it or not.
Troy Baker’s performance as Indy remains hard to fault, and the music is again outstandingly faithful to the films.
While The Order of Giants kicks off within the existing Vatican level, the mission quickly distinguishes itself by placing Indy into a previously unseen interior – and subsequently whisking him out of the Vatican entirely, and into Rome. Troy Baker’s performance as Indy remains hard to fault, and the music is again outstandingly faithful to the films. There are some really stunning underground locations throughout The Order of Giants, and I regularly found myself poring over the details of its crusty catacombs.
The action, meanwhile, is typical of The Great Circle itself: a mix of light first-person platforming, some puzzle solving, and some scattered stealth and brawling against Italian soldiers and a group of mysterious and violent red-robed cult members. This isn’t the sort of DLC that adds a radically different new layer of combat, so don’t expect them to display any new tricks.
The puzzles, though, are absolutely the highlight. I liked two of them in particular more than any in The Great Circle itself. One is a well-crafted water puzzle, and the other is essentially a giant marble maze you need to solve without losing your flaming ball and starting over. There is one particular text-based brainteaser where the link to the physical puzzle pieces seemed a little obtuse initially, but shortly afterwards made me feel like a mild idiot for not figuring it out sooner. Sometimes that’s the best kind of puzzle.
There aren’t any dramatic action sequences in The Order of Giants akin to the fighter plane skyjack in The Great Circle – or tobogganing down the Himalayas on a huge, Nazi battleship. It’s a slower-paced affair overall, but I don’t mind this since it’s seemed to have resulted in a pumped-up amount of puzzles to mull over. It does crescendo to a slightly unexpected miniboss fight in a very neat location, but it’s not a particularly inventive battle – it’s just run, ranged attack, run, ranged attack, run, etcetera. It probably went on a little long considering how repetitive it ended up being, wrapping up just as I’d started wondering whether what I was doing was even the right thing.
Square Enix has announced Octopath Traveler 0 will have town building placement limitations for some consoles when it launches for PC, Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X | S this December.
Details about hardware restrictions were revealed alongside full platform specifications for the Octopath Traveler prequel. It comes with information about what resolution and FPS PC and consoles can achieve, while warning players with older hardware that their HD-2D RPG experience may come with a few noticeable differences.
PS5, Xbox Series X | S, and up-to-date PCs will support a maximum Town Building Placement Limit of 500. Those who play on Switch 2 and PS4, however, will see that building placement decreased to 400.
Town sizes in Octopath Traveler 0 shrink even more if you play on the original Switch, with Square Enix sharing that Nintendo’s first hybrid console will feature a maximum of just 250. That’s just half of what players on PS5 and Xbox Series X | S will see. It’s unclear how noticeable these town size differences will be for players when they play for themselves.
In terms of resolution and FPS, PS5 and Xbox Series X, of course, lead the pack with support for up to 3840 x 2160 and 120 FPS, with PC players able to select their preferred performance settings depending on their setup. Xbox Series S supports 120 FPS at 1920 x 1080, with PS4 and Switch 2 both featuring up to 1920 x 1080 at 60 FPS. Finally, Octopath Traveler 0 played on the original Switch will have a maximum resolution of 1280 x 720 with support of up to 30 FPS.
While Switch 2 players will have the option to play the Octopath Traveler prequel on the go, they should know Square Enix recently revealed the physical version of the experience will only be available as a Game-Key Card. Switch 1 owners, on the other hand, can pick up an actual physical card but will not have an option to upgrade to a Switch 2 version.
Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
Arguably, the biggest is Monster Hunter Wilds, which sees more than half of its MSRP sliced off with an Insect Glaive, bringing Capcom’s creature-slaying title down to just $29.99 on Xbox Series X.
This Woot Deal Is Great for 2025 Game Releases
In our review of Wilds, Tom Marks said “Monster Hunter Wilds continues to smooth off the rougher corners of the series in smart ways, making for some extremely fun fights but also lacking any real challenge.”
While Monster Hunter has already sold out on Xbox, there are other deals, too.
Reviewer Mitchell Saltzman gave the retro-styled adventure 8 out of 10 in his review, saying “Shredder’s Revenge more than lives up to the legacy of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade games that inspired it.”
“Its fun, yet simple gameplay, excellent coop for up to six players online, and charming pixel-based art style will surely have 90s kids riding the wave of nostalgia all the way to its end.”
Switch gamers can enjoy Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection at a 64% discount, which includes no fewer than FOURTEEN classic games from the series earliest, well, days. It’s just $17.99 now.
Finally, not only is Avowed discounted, but it’s the slick Premium Edition Steelbook version. So, not only do you get a fun fantasy RPG with flexible combat, but you also get a great-looking case, a map, additional skins, and digital versions of the soundtrack and artbook. It’s now $39.99.
Lloyd Coombes is an experienced freelancer in tech, gaming and fitness seen at Polygon, Eurogamer, Macworld, TechRadar and many more. He’s a big fan of Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games, much to his wife’s dismay.
Aside from a confused, misguided mish-mash of different and poorly executed ideas that take turns setting up rakes for itself to step on, Lost Soul Aside is an enjoyable character action game. I’ve had a blast in battles and boss fights, but too often in between them I had to slog through a repetitive story plagued with unmemorable characters, levels peppered with awkward platforming, and puzzles that would make the shape-matching challenges you’d give to a toddler look like rocket science, all disguised in a deceptively flashy package.
Originality is fleeting in games, a medium where ideas and innovations blur the line between craft, technology, business, and art. That’s especially true in the ever-wider tent of high-budget fantasy action games with flashy combos and light RPG elements. And normally, that’s not an issue; even a competent take on a character action game inspired by the likes of Bayonetta or Devil May Cry is probably going to provide some fluffy, inoffensive fun – and to its credit, Lost Soul Aside is more than competent as an action game. But in clearly borrowing and worsening ideas from multiple recent Final Fantasy games in particular, it’s not attempting an idea of its own that didn’t work out; it’s doing something badly that begs comparison to games that got the same ideas right, some of them nearly a decade ago.
That’s what drove me up the wall during my playthrough. I feel like I’ve been playing the product of boardroom meetings held a week after Final Fantasy XV or VII Remake came out where the discussion was on how to capitalize on their success, rather than a passion project made by a team paying homage to those games. From a we-have-Noctis-at-home main character (named Kaser), to the story’s setup feeling awfully familiar, to the structure and scale of each level resembling a pared-down Final Fantasy VII Remake, with all of it peppered with uninteresting extra puzzles and platforming challenges, I found something new to sigh at around every corner – and trust me, that’s not because I was swooning over the bad-boy protagonist.
Sound familiar? If it doesn’t you should play Final Fantasy 7 instead.
Set in a sci-fi/fantasy world where a mysterious alien energy has been harnessed to fuel an all-powerful empire, Lost Soul Aside opens with a premonition that humanity is soon to face its darkest days and that a savior will rise to the occasion. Then, you’re thrust into an opening segment where you’re introduced to an underground resistance organization run from a poor neighborhood in the capital city as they carry out an open act of defiance against the empire – sound familiar? If it doesn’t you should play Final Fantasy 7 instead, because it’s done better there and this retelling doesn’t do anything interesting or original with it.
Doled out through occasionally dazzling, action-packed cutscenes but mostly in significantly less impressive, awkward dialogue sequences, the story is highly repetitive. Every opportunity for a twist or tonal shift is squandered in favor of a straightforward, black-and-white tale that doesn’t feel like it’s about anything other than wanting to be like other RPGs. Lost Soul Aside doesn’t use its roughly 16-hour runtime efficiently enough for any characters to grow. Instead, it flings proper noun after proper noun at you, hoping that one of its many side characters will make an impression. But this story’s rhythm moves too quickly for anybody to exist beyond cartoonish caricature at best. Being generous, maybe their memorable characteristics were lost in the English translation, but maybe they were never there to begin with.
Its individual story moments come in a similarly offbeat meter, with awkward animations and mostly flat voice acting filling in its hours’ worth of basic, over-the-shoulder dialogue segments. All of it is delivered by characters who often fall into unflattering RPG cliches (like a scantily clad woman who looks and acts like a teenager but is actually hundreds of years old or a gruff, emo protagonist who’d fit in with a boyband and has a mysterious backstory and a penchant for kicking ass) without playing with or evolving these ideas in any discernible way.
With a better localization, more lively voice direction, or a stronger commitment to the bit, Lost Soul Aside could perhaps have nailed the same B-movie-like campy charm worn so well by the action games that so clearly inspired its better parts. Instead, it’s somehow both half-hearted and overserious. Kaser and his dragon-like sidekick Lord Arena eventually share a few moments that bent the edges of my lips into a smirk, but it takes so long for the pair to hit their stride that I was mostly checked out from the story and there only for the action by the time their dynamic clicked.
Lost Soul Aside’s combat system is the star of the show.
Combat in Lost Soul Aside acts as a palette cleanser for the uninteresting story. Kaser hacks and slashes through enemies with stylish flair, using the genre-standard light and heavy attack buttons. Mixing the two together with different timing and order will open up new combos, and you can unlock even more using skill points to fill out branches on a skill tree. With a choice between four different weapons – sword, greatsword, poleblade, and scythe – each has its own skill path and playstyle. And switching them on the fly mid-combo opens up an expressive, varied tree of attacks catered to a range of playstyles. The polearm, for example, works well at long range, where the greatsword is best for dealing satisfying, heavy blows. My favorite was the standard sword, though; an all-around, quick, agile weapon with solid ranged and melee attacks, it’s remained my go-to for cutting up legions of invading Voidrax beings during the duration of my playthrough.
Supplemented by additional mechanics like the combo-extending Burst Pursuit that allows you to throw out big finishers after a combo or the Witch Time-like perfect dodge that nets you a different, powerful attack for each weapon, requisite – though cleverly restrained – parry, and the Arena powers that let you throw out big, area-of-effect attacks that work well for resetting the battlefield, Lost Soul Aside’s combat system is the star of the show. Even against largely unmemorable enemies, I’m really enjoying experimenting with new combinations and powers as Kaser and Arena’s flashy animations dazzled during longer sequences.
The boss fights that cap off parts of each level make for even more stylish encounters. While bigger opponents play with scale, throwing out massive, arena-sweeping attacks, others are more nimble duels to the finish against human-sized opponents. Nearly every fight culminates in an exciting finale. Dosed with just the right amount of toothy challenge, each battle provided the right kind of brain-tickling, thrilling showdown as I dodged and weaved between attacks before wailing on their stagger meter to deal a special Sync Finisher on my dazed opponent.
I did find an odd pain point in some of these fights, though: There’s not enough feedback when Kaser takes damage from some smaller swings. So as I’m wailing away at a bad guy seemingly doing well, I’ll glance down at my health bar and it’s significantly lower than I thought it would be because I didn’t know that I’d taken any damage in the first place. Thankfully, Kaser and Arena are talky enough that you’ll hear about it once your health is really low, and those barks stand out against the otherwise-repetitive battle chatter.
Unfortunately, Lost Soul Aside isn’t a pure boss-rush combat gauntlet, and the rest of the gameplay between each fight isn’t nearly as compelling. Most of the levels are made up of a linear, boring series of corridors with occasional “open” areas that add an extra platforming “challenge” or two to the mix. Sure, there might be a basic puzzle or treasure chest around a corner (though I used almost none of the crafting materials accumulated during my playthrough because the rewards didn’t improve my stats enough to bother with), but nothing I’ve seen so far has really come close to justifying its existence beyond drab padding between battles. Its high-fidelity, visually detailed spaces mask simple, homogenous non-combat challenges and empty chambers that toss a few unrewarding pickups your way, seemingly just to break things up.
That makes sense, considering most of the level progression and exploration is marked by boring and simple paths where you mostly just walk forward until the next fight, broken up with a simple puzzle here or there. It was nothing offensive…. until the platforming reared its ugly head. At multiple points during Lost Soul Aside I found myself jumping through platforming segments that could make even the Plinko and Chuckster levels that make up the dregs of Super Mario Sunshine look like a blast. Plagued with imprecise running and walking, floaty jumps with laggy-feeling animations, poor feedback, a claustrophobic field of view, and a barely visible shadow, I am truly shocked at the low-quality platforming I endured to get from fight to fight. Some of it was optional, but I still had to do a lot to complete any given level. Thankfully, I could find ways to cheese certain annoying segments, but don’t expect to see anyone at GDQ showing off Lost Soul Aside speedrunning techniques; these are tourniquets used to slow fatal bleeding, not expressive tools indicative of a mechanically deep platformer.
It’s another week, and that means it’s time to take a look at the Magic: The Gathering Crashers and Climbers as we close in on the release of Spider-Man less than two months since Edge of Eternities.
This time around, our climbers are a nice eclectic mix of cards from sets from 2024 and 2025, as well as a rapidly climbing space dragon. Intrigued? You should be. Let’s go!
Climbing
Let’s start with the space dragon, then, with Nova Hellkite available for just a few cents the other day and now reaching almost $3 in market value in climbing.
Why the climb? Well, as TCGPlayer points out, the card featured in a mono-red deck that won the Magic Spotlight Series: Planetary Rotation, and it’ll likely keep doing well until it’s rotated out of standard eventually.
That same deck also featured our second climber, the Razorkin Needlehead from Duskmourn, House of Horror (a set that doesn’t get enough live in my humble opinion).
This creepy customer has first strike on your turn and deals 1 damage when your opponent draws a card, meaning you’re constantly pinging them for damage with a card that costs two red to cast.
It’s now up to over $8, having been less than $3 not long ago.
Next up, a bit of an ‘odd couple’. Temur Battlecrier is, as we say in the UK, ‘cheap as chips’. It’s a three-cost card that lowers the cost of your spells if you have some big creatures out, but its value is on the up thanks to an appearance in an MTGO Standard Challenge.
It pairs with Outcaster Trailblazer, which is likely to see a spike as a result. This other half of the dynamic duo gives you mana when it enters, triggers the four power requirement of Temur Battlecrier to make spells cheaper, and as you bring in additional cards with four or more power, you get a card to draw, too.
If you want to put this combo together, Outcast Trailblazer will cost you under a dollar right now, but expect it to climb.
Finally, for our climbers this week, Seize the Spotlight is seeing what could be described as a meteoric rise.
The sorcery, which can allow you to take control of opponents’ cards or draw and create treasure, was $4 not long ago but is now around $9 and could climb further.
Crashing
As we approach the end of Edge of Eternities, cards from this year’s sets are starting to drop in value.
The first one that’s worth mentioning is the Mythic rarity Ugin, Eye of the Storms from Tarkir: Dragonstorm.
This powerful colorless Planeswalker has a lot to like, and it’s dropping from over $30 to just over $20 at the time of writing.
Sticking with dragons, I wanted to point out Atarka, World Render. She’s a 6/4 dragon that was my first ever Commander, but she’s now just 35 cents.
Given there’s always some fun to be had with dragons, that’s a low cost to give them double strike.
Icetill Explorer from Edge of Eternities is finally dropping, having been over $20 in recent weeks, and you can grab it for just $12 right now.
Ragost, Deft Gastronaut was the talk of the town not long ago, but he’s down to just $5 now if you want the slick borderless art version.
Finally, he’s still causing carnage in standard, but at least Vivi Ornitier is now just under $35.
Lloyd Coombes is an experienced freelancer in tech, gaming and fitness seen at Polygon, Eurogamer, Macworld, TechRadar and many more. He’s a big fan of Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games, much to his wife’s dismay.
Fans of the Pokémon Trading Card Game once again have a new reason to keep an eye on Amazon and Walmart, with it being the best place to score packs of White Flare and Black Bolt.
The Booster Bundles have been trending slightly downward in price, likely with attention being turned to the upcoming Mega Evolution set & the recently announced Phantasml Flames, offering collectors and players an opportunity to pick them up for less than at most other retailers.
Each bundle includes six booster packs from its respective expansion, with the chance to pull cards like Zekrom ex among Black Bolt’s most valuable cards, or Reshiram ex in as one of White Flare’s most high-priced chase cards, plus the exclusive Black White Rare Victini that appears across both sets.
Of course, the official MSRP for these bundles is only $26.94, though finding them at that price is nearly impossible now that they’ve officially hit shelves. Best Buy is technically the only retailer still listing at MSRP, but availability has been restricted to in-store purchases and tends to vanish quickly.
At the moment, Amazon has the edge with the White Flare Booster Bundle priced at $45.01 and the Black Bolt Booster Bundle at $48.90. Over on TCGplayer, while both bundles are hovering in the $40-$48 range (which could make them the cheapest, depending on the listing), sellers for the current listings have added shipping costs, which you’ll have to cover.
Walmart sits in a similar bracket, with listings ranging between $47.85 and $48.87 depending on which bundle you’re after, with limited units left at the time of writing.
The reason demand is so high comes down to the sets themselves. Black Bolt and White Flare together feature all 156 Pokémon from the Unova Pokédex, a callback to the beloved fifth generation of games, Pokémon Black and White. Filled with alternate art cards and multiple foil variants, these expansions have been must-haves for completionists.
Even as more fans are looking ahead to the late September Mega Evolution set and the fall release of Phantasmal Flames, the allure of all there is to collect in White Flare & Black Bolt still has plenty to keep your decks and collectable binders buzzing.
For those who missed out at MSRP, Amazon’ & Walmart’s current discounts still represent the most affordable way to secure these Unova-themed packs before demand pushes prices even higher. These are sure to sell quickly once more keen collectors hear about these, so be sure to grab them whilst you can if you want them.
Ben Williams – IGN freelance contributor with over 10 years of experience covering gaming, tech, film, TV, and anime. Follow him on Twitter/X @BenLevelTen.
Get your first look at developer Chronospace’s revamped War Mechanic, a single-player alternate-history “what if the Manhattan Project had been sabotaged?” action-adventure game where you must survive, pilot your combat car, deal with NPCs that have their own agendas, and build up your base.
The reworked War Mechanic brings in Narrative Designers Jacek Komuda and Maciej Jurewicz (The Witcher 1 and 2) as players take on the role of Jack Wallace, a mechanic stranded on the war-torn Nordook Island. “Bringing in veteran storytellers let a young team grow up fast,” said Co-Producer Rafał Lewkowicz. “The vision is the same—now it’s precise, readable, and worth fighting for.” On the island, you’ll rebuild your base, modify your guns and equipment, salvage parts and materials with your multi-torch, set up automated defense systems.
“The re-reveal isn’t a reset; it’s a refocus,” said Co-Producer Rafał Pelc. “We aligned everything to narrative—richer lore, character-driven quests, and exploration that actually matters.” Visually, Chronospace says, “War Mechanic now boasts a visual overhaul with photorealistic assets, haunting environments, and creatively designed robots and bosses that feel as alive as the world they inhabit. Combined with a redesigned UI and immersive systems-driven gameplay loop, War Mechanic balances player agency with a gripping narrative.”
Wishlist War Mechanic on Steam if you’re interested.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
Details surrounding Cyberpunk 2 are scarce, but fans of Cyberpunk 2077 can rest assured that the game’s biggest star is down to return if given the opportunity.
Speaking with IGN while promoting his upcoming movie Good Fortune, Keanu Reeves said that he wants to be part of the sequel to CD Projekt’s 2020 game.
“Absolutely. I’d love to play Johnny Silverhand again,” Reeves said when asked if he’d be interested in revisiting his legendary rockstar terrorist character in Cyberpunk 2.
Reeves’s love-affair with the Cyberpunk community began with his viral “you’re breathtaking” moment at E3 2019. Reeves, on-stage to announce the release date of Cyberpunk 2077, was interrupted by a fan who shouted out “you’re breathtaking!” Reeves’ response was to double-down with his own “you’re breathtaking… you’re all breathtaking!” Cue wholesome memes across the internet forever more. You can see the iconic gamer moment in the video below.
The question is, could Reeves actually play Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2 even if he wanted to? In other words, could Johnny Silverhand return in the sequel, given the events of Cyberpunk 2077?
Warning! Spoilers for Cyberpunk 2077 follow:
While many players believe Cyberpunk 2077 provided a suitable ending for Johnny and V’s story, depending on which ending of the game CD Projekt makes canon for Cyberpunk 2, the door may be left open for Reeves’ return. Could Johnny return in cameo form perhaps, having downloaded himself into someone or something else? Canon ending dependent, could V end up becoming Johnny Silverhand in mind and body for Cyberpunk 2? Or perhaps it would be better to let Johnny and V rest and go for a fresh start with the sequel.
There are many unanswered questions when it comes to Cyberpunk 2, but in May Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith teased some previously unknown details. Pondsmith, who worked closely with CD Projekt on the 30 million-selling Cyberpunk 2077 and was involved in promoting the game ahead of its 2020 launch, was asked about the scope of his involvement with Orion at the Digital Dragons 2025 conference.
Responding, Pondsmith admitted he wasn’t as involved this time around, but said he does review scripts and had been to CD Projekt to check out the ongoing work.
“Last week I was wandering around talking to different departments, and seeing what they had, ‘Oh look, this is the new cyberware, what do you think?’ ‘Oh yeah, that’s pretty good, that works here.’”
And then, the morsel on the sequel: that it features a brand new city in addition to the Night City we know from Cyberpunk 2077. Pondsmith described this new city as “like Chicago gone wrong.”
“I spent a lot of time talking to one of the environment guys, and he was explaining how the new place in Orion, because there’s another city we visit — I’m not telling you any more than that but there’s another city we visit. And Night City is still there. But I remember looking at it and going, yeah I understand the feel you’re going for this, and this really does work. And it doesn’t feel like Blade Runner, it feels more like Chicago gone wrong. I said, ‘Yeah, I can see this working.’”
It’s worth pointing out that Pondsmith’s comments do not necessarily suggest the Cyberpunk sequel will feature a future Chicago, rather a city that has the feel of a dystopian version of the city. It may well be a take on future Chicago, but that isn’t confirmed based on these comments. There is also some debate about whether Cyberpunk 2 will expand upon the Night City that’s in Cyberpunk 2077 or feature a new version, and the extent to which it is playable.
Also back in May, CD Projekt revealed that a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 is officially in pre-production and will be called Cyberpunk 2. The studio also said that nearly 100 developers were already working on the game, which was previously referred to by the codename “Project Orion.” That number had grown to 116 by the end of July.
CD Projekt co-CEO Michał Nowakowski also seemed to confirm rumors that the sequel won’t be out until at least 2030 by stating that the studio’s “journey from pre-production to final release takes four to five years on average.”
Image credit Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
Michael Peyton is the Senior Editorial Director of Events & Entertainment at IGN, leading entertainment content and coverage of tentpole events including IGN Live, San Diego Comic Con, gamescom, and IGN Fan Fest. He’s spent 20 years working in the games and entertainment industry, and his adventures have taken him everywhere from the Oscars to Japan to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Follow him on Bluesky @MichaelPeyton
Gearbox development chief Randy Pitchford has said the inbound Borderlands 4 Day 1 patch “does a lot,” amid concern about the performance of the looter shooter.
Pitchford responded to concern about Borderlands 4’s pre-release performance on PC from some users on X / Twitter, confirming not only that there’s a Day 1 patch on the way, but that it sounds pretty much essential to play the game.
Borderlands 4 has an official release date of September 12 across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, with the Nintendo Switch 2 launch following shortly after. Fans will be keen to jump in as soon as possible, making the Day 1 patch an early hoop to jump through.
Despite the Day 1 patch, playing Borderlands 4 on older hardware won’t miraculously unlock “buttery smooth performance,” Pitchford added. It should be expected that Borderlands 4 is “unplayable” if you’re trying to use a PC below min-spec, he said, and, generally, playing new AAA games on older hardware won’t achieve impressive results.
Here’s the comment in full:
The Day 1 patch does a lot! That said, the expectation for using a below min-spec machine should be that the game is unplayable. That the game runs at all on your system is a miracle. That you can get 55 – 60 fps out of heavy combat is actually incredible given how the engine and what’s going on under the hood. Your specification doesn’t indicate if you’re on SDD or HDD, but that could also explain some of the hitching. It’s a big, bold, new, seamless world and I’m sorry to say that older hardware may not provide buttery smooth performance for the latest gen AAA games, as has always been the case since the dawn of PC gaming.
A significant portion of the PC gaming audience play on low-end hardware. Indeed, just last month the developers of Battlefield 6 told Eurogamer they saw a “substantial number” of open beta players on or around the minimum recommended specs, with a number of users even playing below the minimum spec.
While you wait for Borderlands 4 to launch, be sure to check out IGN’s recent interview with narrative director Sam Winkler, lead writer Taylor Clark, and managing director of narrative properties Lin Joyce to learn more about why the team decided to create a more grounded story this time around.
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.
MachineGames seemingly hasn’t finished with its Wolfenstein series just yet.
While it’s been over half a decade since we last punched a Nazi in Wolfenstein: Youngblood, studio head Jerk Gustafsson has hinted the team would very much like to go back to the Wolfenstein universe to tie up BJ Blazkowicz’s story.
While both Youngblood and the 2019 VR title Cyberpilot touched on the wider Blazkowicz family’s fortunes, we haven’t actually played as series stalwart Blazkowicz since 2017’s The New Colossus. And it’s BJ’s story that seems to intrigue Gustafsson most — in fact, it seems Blazkowicz’s story was always meant to be told in three parts.
In a new interview with Noclip, Gustafsson said the team had “always seen [BJ’s story] as a trilogy,” adding: “That journey for BJ, even during those first weeks at [id Software], when we mapped out New Order — we still had the plan for at least [BJ], what would happen in the second one and what would happen in the third one.
“I think that’s important to say, because — at least, I hope — we’re not done with Wolfenstein yet. We have a story to tell,” he added (thanks, PC Gamer).
The last Wolfenstein game was 2019’s Wolftenstein: Youngblood, Set in 1980, 19 years after BJ Blazkowicz ignited the second American Revolution, it introduced the next Blazkowicz generation to the fight against the Nazis. In IGN’s review, we awarded it a middling 6.5, calling it “aggressively okay.”
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.
