If you’re looking to upgrade your gaming PC and want to keep your budget to under $1,500, then one deal stands out above all the rest. Walmart is offering the iBuypower Element Pro gaming PC equipped with an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU for just $1499 with free delivery. This was the best “high-end” gaming PC deal during Prime Day – better than anything I found on Amazon – and it’s still the best deal I’ve seen so far at this price point. The Radeon RX 9070 XT is an outstanding graphics card that can run the latest games (like Battlefield 6) in 4K.
iBuypower Element Pro Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming PC $1499
The iBuypower gaming PC is generously equipped across the board. It features an AMD Ryzen 9 7900X CPU, Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and 2TB M.2 SSD. The Ryzen 9 7900X processor has a max boost clock of 5.6GHz with 12 cores and 24 threads. This is an excellent CPU for both gaming and multi-tasking and you won’t need to upgrade from it for a long time. It’s cooled by a very robust 360mm all-in-one liquid cooling system and run off an 850W power supply.
The Radeon RX 9070 XT Received a 10/10 at IGN
We rated the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT a “perfect” 10/10. Even though it costs $150 less than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, the 9070 XT beats it out in several of the games we tested. In a few benchmarks, the results aren’t even close. The 9070 XT is also comparable in performance to the older $1,000 RX 7900 XTX but with better ray tracing and upscaling performance than its predecessor. It does lose out on VRAM (16GB vs 24GB), but that isn’t really an issue for gaming. By “4K ready” I mean that this gaming PC can run pretty much any game at 4K resolution and at framerates of 60fps or higher. Any video card that’s weaker and you’ll have to compromise in order to get playable framerates.
The Battlefield 6 Beta Runs This Weekend
Battlefield 6 is out in October and there’s one final open beta that runs August 14-17. It’s shaping up to be a solid game that goes back to its true roots . Check out our initial impressions of the beta and go ahead and try the game. Battlefield 6 has fairly lax requirements for a new release title; EA recommends at last a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT GPU to achieve 30fps at 1080p, although an RTX 4080 or more powerful GPU is recommended for gaming in 4K.
Check out more Alienware Back to School deals
Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn’t hunting for deals for other people at work, he’s hunting for deals for himself during his free time.
Everyone, we like to believe, has a made a secret list for every single console they’ve ever owned, of weird and/or experimental stuff they either want to, or wished they had, played. Sometimes you get round to them, sometimes you don’t. You know the sort of thing. For me, on GameCube specifically, things like Cubivore come to mind, and to a lesser extent Eternal Darkness and Geist. Yes, Geist! Which means “ghost” in German. Did you know that? Of course you did. Every Geisterjäger or Paranormal-Forscher worth their salz knows this stuff.
Now, Geist didn’t exactly set the world on fire when it came out, but to skip over it for its shortcomings — of which it has its fair share — is to do yourself out of a genuinely odd, unsettling and actually quite good game. And, you know what, 20 years down the line from when it originally released, it’s perhaps more intriguing than ever thanks to how differently it plays compared to many of its peers.
Hey friends! This week Tim, Brett, and Sid are back with exciting PlayStation Plus Game Catalog news for August, some early Battlefield 6 thoughts, and ideas for gaming-themed tattoos.
Stuff We Talked About
Next week’s release highlights:
Sword of the Sea | PS5 (PlayStation Plus Game Catalog)
Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution | PS5, PS4
Discounty | PS5
Herdling | PS5
Midnight Murder Club new update — Bring up five friends to play the new PvE mode Graveyard Shift and keep gameplay fresh with wildcards that shuffle the rules
PlayStation Plus Game Catalog August
Extra and Premium
Mortal Kombat 1 | PS5
Marvel’s Spider-Man | PS5, PS4
Sword of the Sea | PS5
Earth Defense Force 6 | PS5, PS4
Unicorn Overlord | PS5, PS4
Atelier Ryza 3 Alchemist of the End & the Secret Key | PS5, PS4
Indika | PS5
Harold Halibut | PS5
Coral Island | PS5
Premium
Resident Evil 2 | PS5, PS4
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis | PS5, PS4
Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, System Shock 2, Resident Evil 1 Director’s Cut, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
Gaming tattoos – the team shares gaming tattoos they have or would like to get, and ask listeners to write in with pics of their gaming tattoos
The Cast
Download the image
Sid Shuman – Senior Director of Content Communications, SIE
Brett Elston – Manager, Content Communications, SIE
Thanks to Dormilón for our rad theme song and show music.
[Editor’s note: PSN game release dates are subject to change without notice. Game details are gathered from press releases from their individual publishers and/or ESRB rating descriptions.]
I know a multiplayer shooter is really clicking when my buddies and I are all swapping stories at the end of the night. There was the time my Banshee was skyjacked over a pit in Halo Infinite, and I used my Grappleshot to quickly re-skyjack it, sending the would-be thief to their grave. Or when we were down to just my friend Geoff against four opposing players in a game of Valorant, and he channeled his inner John Wick to suddenly become a shotgun god and win it for us. After a week in the trenches, streets, and crumbling buildings of Battlefield 6’s first two beta weekends, one thing is clear: we are going to have a lot of stories to share.
The first thing I noticed as I loaded into the Conquest mode was just how much destruction was happening all around me. Buildings were coming apart, trees were shattering, and walls were crumbling as dirt and dust filled the air. It looks like a war movie, and stopping to let the smoke from a car explosion clear made the area I was in feel less like a playground for a shooting game, and more like, well, a battlefield. On more than one occasion, I found myself drawing the unwanted attention of an enemy tank, and the sheer volume of wreckage all around as it’s cannon opened fire left me feeling like Lord Beckett walking across his rapidly disintegrating ship at the end of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.
That destruction is not just there for the vibes, either. Blowing away the other team’s cover with the Assault class’s grenade launcher forces a satisfying reevaluation of their strategy, and knocking down walls to breach an objective or create new sight lines is a tactical delight. That’s not to say you will be kool-aid manning your way around everywhere you go. Unlike The Finals, where the walls are (affectionately) made out of dried breadsticks, here cement walls act like cement, and you’ll need that aforementioned grenade launcher, some rockets, or a trusty tank to fully take advantage of the map, elevating the importance of your equipment selection.
There are four classes to choose from in the Beta, though you have a lot more control over their kit than in previous Battlefield games. Anyone can equip any gun, so if you want to be a sniper rifle-packing Support medic, you can. I’m a little weary of the possibility of meta builds cropping up that would be a mistake not to use, but so far, the variety I’ve seen across both friends and foes seems in keeping with what I would expect in any other shooter like this. Each class also gets special perks with their signature gadget, weapon, and trait. For example, the Engineer takes reduced explosion damage and the Recon can hold their breath to steady their Sniper rifles, which provides a nice push to match your loadout with your class.
Fights reward a keen eye rather than just being the fastest on the draw.
People often gravitate towards assault classes, but Battlefield 6 continues the series’ history of making the support options viable, if not essential at times. Engineers are a necessity in bigger maps with vehicles, as their rockets hammer away at map-dominating tanks, and their blowtorch repairs friendly vehicles. Any class can raise the near-dead, which is a change from previous Battlefield games, but the long activation time is often a fast way to join your injured buddy, so the Support’s ability to instantly get the down-but-not-out to their feet using their defibrillator can turn the tide of a close skirmish. This is especially valuable in match types where your side has a limited pool of respawns to draw from.
The shooting itself errs on the easy side, which I think is the right fit for the massive number of players you can see in a given match. Weapons are very accurate, and the minimal recoil means they remain accurate through sustained fire, resulting in a relatively high skill floor, with even bottom-of-the-leaderboard players contributing a decent number of kills much of the time. That’s not to say that skilled play isn’t rewarded. I’ve been on both sides of a fight where one player shoots first, hits a body, and is taken down by a perfectly placed headshot in return.
The fast time-to-kill rewards a keen eye rather than just being the fastest on the draw, and the importance of decision making above almost anything else is a great differentiator compared to other military shooters. Do you take the slow route through back alleys to your objective, risking some potential ambushes on the way, or do you try and find the right time to spring across the wide open road, hoping a sniper isn’t watching or an armored vehicle isn’t on patrol? It’s supremely satisfying to set up an ambush inside a key building, shotgunning players that are foolish enough to run by without checking their corner.
The match types available in the beta don’t break any new ground, but I don’t mind, given how well they play. Conquest is the headliner, with 64 players mixed between infantry and vehicles, and wide open maps with control points to fight over and hold. Eliminating enemies or owning those points drains a limited supply of respawns on the other team, which means playing the objectives or looking for fights both contribute in satisfying ways. Breakthrough is similar, though with a more defined offense (which has those same limited respawns) and defense (with infinite reinforcement). There are more options like Rush, which is a bit like Counterstrike without rounds, or classic Team Deathmatch alongside a few others, but I haven’t been able to peel myself away from the joy of Conquest long enough to spend much time with them yet.
We are still in the beta period, but I’m already having an absolute blast with Battlefield 6’s multiplayer. The action is sublime, with a cinematic quality to the constantly raining debris that is enhanced by how legitimately effective it is to take strategic advantage of that destruction. The accurate guns and short time-to-kill mean anyone has a chance in a gunfight, but the other classes bring enough to the table to make focusing on keeping your team alive or your vehicles operating a viable way to contribute, even when direct combat isn’t your strength. I still need to spend more time with the various vehicles, which is a game unto itself, and I need to play the maps a lot more before I can really render any informed opinions on them (I’m looking at you, sniper-infested cliffs on Liberation Peak). It will also be interesting to see what, if anything, changes or is retuned for the official launch in October – but right now, even in beta form, Battlefield 6 might be the most fun shooter I’ve played this year.
Dell has a great deal on a current generation PC that will get you ready for upcoming games like Battlefield 6. Right now you can get an Alienware Aurora R16 gaming PC equipped with the GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card for as low as $2,149.99 with free delivery. That’s one of the best prices I’ve seen for an RTX 5080 prebuilt, which is impressive considering you would typically pay more for the Alienware brand. Although GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card prices are trending downwards, you still can’t find it for under $1,000, so you’d be hard pressed to build your own diy PC for cheaper.
Alienware Aurora RTX 5080 Gaming PC From $2,149.99
There are three tiers of this Alienware RTX 5080 gaming PC currently discounted. The base model costs $2,149.99 and is equipped with an Intel Core Ultra 7 265F CPU, GeForce RTX 5080 CPU, 16GB of DDR5-5600MHz RAM, and a 1TB M.2 SSD. The mid-line model upgrades the CPU to an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor (currently the most powerful Intel CPU available) and doubles the memory to 32GB for $2,599.99. The top-end model quadruples the memory to 64GB, and doubles the storage to 2TB SSD for $2,749.99.
The Core Ultra 7 265F is part of Intel’s newest Arrow Lake-S lineup released earlier this year and boasts a max turbo frequency of 5.3GHz with 20 cores and a 36MB L2 cache. This is a good all-around CPU for gaming, multi-tasking, and general workstation performance. For gaming, you won’t see much of an improvement upgrading to a Core Ultra 9, especially if you plan to play at high resolutions where the GPU makes much more of an impact. However for multi-tasking and workstation and creator tasks, the Core Ultra 9 is superior because it has significantly more cores.
The GeForce RTX 5080 GPU will run any game in 4K
The RTX 5080 is the second best Blackwell graphics card, surpassed only by the $2,000 RTX 5090. It’s about 5%-10% faster than the previous generation RTX 4080 Super, which is discontinued and no longer available. In games that support the new DLSS 4 with multi-frame generation exclusive to Blackwell cards, the gap widens. This is an outstanding card for playing even the latest games at 4K resolution with high settings and ray tracing enabled.
The Battlefield 6 Beta Runs This Weekend
Battlefield 6 is out in October and there’s one final open beta that runs August 14-17. It’s shaping up to be a solid game that goes back to its true roots . Check out our initial impressions of the beta and go ahead and try the game. Battlefield 6 has fairly lax requirements for a new release title; EA recommends at last a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT GPU to achieve 30fps at 1080p, although an RTX 4080 or more powerful GPU is recommended for gaming in 4K.
Check out more Alienware Back to School deals
Not everyone is the DIY type. If you’re in the market for a prebuilt gaming PC, Dell is one of the best brands we’d recommend. Nowadays, the best Alienware deals are competitive compared to the cost of building your own PC with equivalent specs. Alienware desktops and laptops feature solid build quality, top-of-the-line gaming performance, and excellent cooling (further improved on the newer models). Best of all, there are plenty of sales that happen throughout the year, so it’s not difficult to grab one of these computers at considerably less than their retail price.
Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn’t hunting for deals for other people at work, he’s hunting for deals for himself during his free time.
Last month, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers developer Leenzee Games promised fans that a number of performance and optimization issues plaguing the game since launch would be patched out promptly. Now, patch 1.5 does seem to address many of these issues, but with a strange cost: it also makes sweeping changes to many of the game’s enemies, dialogue, and story that have fans even more unhappy.
If you look at the patch notes for 1.5, they initially seem pretty inocuous. There’s some bug fixes, and a lot of good improvements such as a sped-up healing animation and the ability to dodge cancel out of the recovery animation. There’s also an “optimization” in there that the patch notes say is in preparation to allow players to respawn closer to bosses they’ve died to, which will be another welcome change when it lands.
But tucked in the lengthy patch notes are a couple oddities:
Added dialogs for some NPCs to complete some plots. We will further optimize the exhaustion animations in the future to improve the plot performance.
Fixed the faction bug in Chapter 4, adjusted the level design, and increased the performance effect of BVB.
Added some ‘Wuchang’ voice to complete the story, and added some NPC dialogues.
So what’s all that about? As documented on Twitter/X by Lance McDonald, the update has made significant changes to certain NPCs, bosses, and enemies to make it so they canonically do not die.
Looks like the latest update to WUCHANG which makes dodging way easier and healing way faster also sadly censors the game’s story a bit. A historically significant character no longer dies but runs away happily ever after, and you can no longer kill innocent farmer enemies.
Prior to the patch, you were able to target and kill certain human NPCs you encountered throughout the game. These characters were passive, uninteractable otherwise, and didn’t attack you, but you murdering them affected your character’s “madness” mechanic in a way that made for legitimately interesting gameplay. Now, that’s no longer true — the NPCs are untargetable and unkillable, effectively removing the ability to choose to interact with the madness mechanic in that specific way.
Additionally, this change also significantly impacts the game’s fourth chapter, which was previously quite chaotic and difficult to manage due to a number of human enemies trying to attack you. Now, a large portion of those enemies aren’t hostile at all, turning what was once a very challenging chapter into a bit of a cakewalk.
Oh wow, the entirety of chapter 4 is now insanely easy because 50% of the enemies are now non-hostile to the player and you can’t attack them during the rebellion outbreak. What a mess.
On top of this, multiple challenging bosses no longer “die” when you defeat them. Instead, they simply stand there, “exhausted,” or run away to live happily ever after, or claim the intense battle that just took place was all just a “trial.”
One of the most difficult and epic boss fights now ends with the boss no longer dying but instead saying “it was all just a trial! And actually the path you are on is good! Hahaha!” Holy wow https://t.co/SYYFhlUkXm
While the first two issues impact gameplay directly, the boss changes are being roundly criticized by players for how they impact the game’s story. Wuchang: Fallen Feathers heavily focuses on themes of death, and being able to accept the death of a loved one or a period in one’s life. Many of the enemies in Fallen Feathers are actively trying to thwart death, or prolong something that will inevitably come to a close. So in several of these cases, them not dying at all completely flies in the face of the game’s message of accepting death’s inevitability.
As of yet, developer Leenzee Games has not explained why these changes were made, or made any statement at all beyond the patch notes (IGN has reached out for comment). However, many players are correctly pointing out that the characters impacted by the changes seem to have something in common: they’re all humans who are affiliated with the Ming Dynasty in some way.
Fallen Feathers is historical fiction, and takes place in 1600s China at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the last dynasty ruled by the Han Chinese before the Qing took over. Though the story of the game originally used the ending of the Ming Dynasty to effectively frame its message about death and moving on, now, none of the Ming characters die or move on, rendering the premise ineffectual. As a result, a number of negative Steam reviews and posts on various social platforms are accusing Leenzee of self-censoring, allegedly due to feedback from a segment of largely Chinese players upset about the game’s treatment of the Ming characters.
“Improving game performance is welcoming,” reads one “not recommended” Steam review from August 13, by someone with 58 hours in the game. “But this must be the first time I’ve heard of story plot change post release. As far as I am aware. Plot change made the story completely different, and even make some of the characters motivation pointless. I don’t know what kind of pressure Leenzee got to go as far as changing the games plot. I’ve read that it was criticized by some gamers for not being historically accurate. But the story is ficiton is it not? I have decided to stop playing for now, and hope Leenzee undo the plot changes. Or at least make it possible to rollback to patch 1.4.”
IGN reviewed the release version of Wuchang: Fallen Feathers at launch and gave it an 8/10, calling it “yet another great soulslike to add to the ever-increasing pile, featuring excellent combat, wonderful level design, an incredible skill tree, and fearsome bosses.” So if you can find a way to play on the pre-patch version, it seems like that’s the way to go for now.
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.
Donkey Kong Bananza is absolutely packed with things to do and see. Fortunately, we here are Nintendo Life are on hand to help with our ultimate Donkey Kong Bananza Guide.
Battlefield 6 Brings the Noise – Play the Open Beta for Free This Weekend
There’s something about the noise of a Battlefield game. The soft, terrifying crack of a sniper rifle you can’t see. The rumble of a tank as it rounds a corner. The agonising creak of a building falling apart at the seams around your once-safe hiding place. EA’s series has always used noise not just to communicate the feeling of being in a true warzone, but as a mechanic all its own. The mark of a great Battlefield game is that, a few hours in, you’ll experience the dawning feeling that you’re no longer being subjected to the noise – you’re reading it.
It’s something of a metaphor for the game as a whole. A full-size Battlefield match is full of sound and fury – dozens of players, multiple objectives competing for your attention, loadouts to consider, squads to wrangle. Learning to work within all that noise, to navigate it, is the path to victory. After hours spent in its open beta, Battlefield 6 isn’t just bringing the noise, but looks to push it to new levels.
In many ways, this is a comforting return to familiarity: Battlefield 6 is set in the near-future, but near enough that it resembles a contemporary military game; it sees a return to class-based gameplay; it takes its cues from the shape of Battlefield 4 and the “tactical destruction” of Battlefield: Bad Company 2.
It all means that, when entering the enormous tug-of-war environments of Conquest mode, this feels like the gaming equivalent of a warm blanket. I know exactly where I should be, and what I should be doing, meaning I’m immediately putting my attention towards learning how maps work, and how the team can work together most effectively.
But just as you learn to read that noise, returning players will start to feel how subtle changes can make for big effects. Take what the developers are calling “kinaesthetic combat” – a term used to cover a raft of changes to how your character moves through the world. You’ll automatically lean around walls, crouch-run when under fire, and slide when approaching cover – it’s designed to feel right as well as benefit you, tiny, intuitive changes that add to a far smoother experience.
Drag-and-revive is a part of this, perhaps the biggest change to the make-up of a Battlefield game – Support class players are still the most effective way to get your teammates back up after you’re downed, but anyone can now help out. Approaching a downed player, you’ll now be able to grab them, pull them out of danger, and revive after a few seconds. It’s a fabulously risky proposition, often forcing you to run into danger in order to reap the rewards of saving someone else, and there’s an art to realising when you should or shouldn’t try it.
This approach – adding new details rather than wholesale shifts – feels as though it’s paying off handsomely, even pre-release. This is Battlefield as we remember it, but modernised. It still feels distinct enough from its genre peers to feel essential, without straying too far from the core of the experience we already loved. It’s going in loud, just as you’d hope.
Battlefield 6 is in open beta on Xbox Series X|S until 1am Pacific, Sunday, August 17 – and for this weekend, you can play it online with no Game Pass membership. The full game will launch on October 10.
Get to the frontline. Battlefield’s biggest Open Beta ever is going LIVE for two-weekends only, August 9-10 and 14-17. Wage war on multiple maps & modes, with progression challenges and rewards for every playstyle. Lock and load by pre-loading the Open Beta from August 4.
*Conditions & restrictions apply. See https://www.ea.com/games/battlefield/battlefield-6/game-disclaimers for details.
The ultimate all-out warfare experience. Fight in high-intensity infantry combat. Rip through the skies in aerial dogfights. Demolish your environment for a strategic advantage. Harness complete control over every action and movement using the Kinesthetic Combat System. In a war of tanks, fighter jets, and massive combat arsenals—the deadliest weapon is your squad.
MULTIPLAYER
Victory, however you envision it. Battlefield 6 has more ways to win than ever before. Seize glory in iconic, large-scale modes including Conquest, Breakthrough, and Rush. Jump into fast-paced action with King of the Hill, Domination, and Payload. Change the rules of war with the revamped and refined Battlefield Portal. Fight in iconic locations all over the world including Cairo, Brooklyn, Gibraltar and more.
GLOBAL SCALE CAMPAIGN
Campaign is back. Drive tanks across the Sahara. Storm the beaches of Gibraltar. Defend New York from invasion. Join an elite squad of Marine Raiders fighting relentlessly to save a world on the edge of collapse.
PORTAL
Redraw the lines of battle. Battlefield Portal is a massive sandbox where creators and players can push Battlefield to the limit. Take unprecedented control of your environment by moving, scaling, and duplicating objects. Create a completely unique game mode using NPC scripting and a customizable UI. Your creation can even rise the ranks to become an official Battlefield mode. Show ‘em what you’re made of.
THE NEW STANDARD OF FPS COMBAT
Battlefield’s new Kinesthetic Combat System makes you more connected to your soldier and environment than ever before. With overhauled gunplay and tactical movement, from crouch sprint to drag and revive, every shot and movement is more instinctual and precise.
ICONIC ALL-OUT WARFARE
Wage all-out war with infantry and vehicle combat, class-based squad play, and cutting edge audiovisual immersion. Where fighter jets, tanks, skydiving RPGS, heavy artillery, and high-intensity infantry combat become one. This is war that only happens in Battlefield.
TACTICAL DESTRUCTION
Destruction is your weapon. Make a vehicle a wrecking ball. Bury a squad under a ceiling. Demolish your surroundings for a strategic advantage. More reactive and precise than ever, audiovisual cues let you know exactly how close an object is to being destroyed. Master your environment, give your squad the edge.
*Conditions & restrictions apply. See https://www.ea.com/games/battlefield/battlefield-6/game-disclaimers for details.
Last week, we asked you to hop into your favorite game’s Photo Mode and pick a filter using #PSshare #PSBlog. Here are this week’s highlights using a stylized filter:
Dunaaa5shares a red-tinted sideeye from Cyberpunk 2077.
CarrotsCaptures shares Jin raising his katana in Ghost of Tsushima with a whited out background.
fwto_shares the red filtered atmosphere of a BT watcher from Death Stranding 2: On The Beach.
secondcaptureshares a movie poster style shot of Julianna from Deathproof.
KeenEyeVPshares a red-filtered shot of Naoe sneaking around a corner in Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
sedninshares a black and white polaroid style portrait of Eve from Stellar Blade.
Search #PSshare #PSBlog on Twitter or Instagram to see more entries to this week’s theme, or be inspired by other great games featuring Photo Mode. Want to be featured in the next Share of the Week?
THEME: Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II SUBMIT BY: 11:59 PM PT on August 20, 2025
Next week, overcome darkness in Senua’s Sage: Hellblade II. Share moments from Senua’s brutal journey for survival using #PSshare #PSBlog for a chance to be featured.
With so many great games coming down the pipeline, now’s a great time to hop on the Xbox Game Pass bandwagon. If some titles joining the catalog this year have caught your eye and you’re itching to join in on the fun, you can choose between one or three month Game Pass Ultimate membership options at Amazon. Unfortunately, there aren’t any discount deals available at the moment, but we’ll update this when a new one drops.
You can learn more about options for signing up, what’s coming soon to Game Pass this month, and the big releases still to come below.
While there aren’t any deals available at the moment, we’ve included where you can buy a one month Game Pass Ultimate membership above at Amazon. This will set you back $19.99. Amazon also has a three month Game Pass Ultimate membership option available for $59.99, if you want to stock up on a few months to get you started.
What’s Coming Soon to Xbox Game Pass?
Game Pass has a nice rotation of new titles to play every month. If you’re curious about what’s in store for August, we’ve got you covered. The Xbox Game Pass August Wave 1 lineup is:
Rain World(Cloud, Console, and PC) – August 5 Now with Game Pass Standard
Aliens: Fireteam Elite(Cloud, Console, and PC) – August 7 Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass, Game Pass Standard
9 Kings (Game Preview)(PC) – August 14 Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass
It’s important to note that the Game Pass Standard tier (available for $14.99/month) does not give users access to day one releases – that’s exclusive to the Game Pass Ultimate tier. If you’re looking to play big Xbox exclusives and other new games on the day they release, you’ll need to be subscribed to Game Pass Ultimate.
What Games Are Leaving Xbox Game Pass?
Unfortunately with new games joining the catalog it means a few must take their leave. Below, we’ve listed the games that’ll be leaving Xbox Game Pass on August 15.
The latest big release on the platform is Wuchang: Fallen Feathers. In our review, IGN’s Mitchell Saltzman said, “Wuchang: Fallen Feathers is yet another great soulslike to add to the ever-increasing pile, featuring excellent combat, wonderful level design, an incredible skill tree, and fearsome bosses. Just watch out for some steep difficulty dips and spikes, and a reliance on cheap-feeling “gotcha!” ambushes.”
If you’re looking for even more savings on all things Xbox, have a look at our roundup of the best Xbox deals. There, we’ve highlighted all of the latest and greatest discounts on the platform, from incredible game deals to fantastic offers on high-quality headphones. Or, if you’d rather see what’s going on with other platforms, check out our roundups of the best PlayStation deals, the best Nintendo Switch deals, and our overall roundup of the best video game deals.
Hannah Hoolihan is a freelance writer who works with the Guides and Commerce teams here at IGN.