Category: Video Games

Embark Studios just launched Season 8 of free-to-download shooter The Finals, introducing new, revamped destruction and improvements to competitive play. But it also added a standard competitive multiplayer feature that — at least at launch — won’t be available on Xbox Series S.

Season 8 introduces quality of life features to “enhance player experience and help strengthen their competitive skills,” including the beta version of the Instant Replay feature — aka a kill cam.

Here’s the official blurb:

A major addition aimed at boosting competitive clarity and supporting skill development. Players can now replay intense gameplay moments linked directly to their opponent’s point of view, making it easier to identify the exact source of eliminations. Instant Replay has been a significant but fulfilling development challenge and is currently in BETA with ongoing improvements.

It’s interesting to note the disclaimer Embark Studios added to the announcement: “this feature will not be compatible with Xbox Series S, PlayStation 4 and certain PC builds at launch.)”

Killcam is a pretty standard FPS feature at this point, indeed it has been a part of, for example, Call of Duty for years. And usually it is available across all platforms the game is on. Again, with Call of Duty, the killcam exists on Xbox Series S, PS4, and all PC builds the game itself can run on.

So it’s surprising to see it miss out for The Finals on these platforms. Clearly, there is a performance issue the developer is still working on, and it mentions this is a problem “at launch,” so hopefully some point soon killcam will be added to all platforms.

In a blog post, Embark Studios explained the challenge it faces adding the Instant Replay feature, calling it “mind-bending tech.”

To be honest, at first and second glance, this was an impossible task. But at Embark we take a challenge seriously. Prototypes for this feature date back to the early days of the project, before The Finals even had a name, trying to prove it possible. What you will see in Season 8 is the result of all that hard work. We had to calculate everything that matters: player movement, environmental destruction, object interactions in a level of data fidelity that’s hard to pull off in a Dynamism Shooter. Then take all that info and quickly reconstruct the moment.

It’s not enabled for everyone by default (especially on systems under 16 GB RAM), but you can toggle it on manually. If you’ve got the horsepower, turn it on, try it, and tell us what you think. We’ll be gathering feedback, polishing performance, and expanding integration throughout the season.

Activision has outlined the steps it’s taking to combat Call of Duty cheating on PC, while stressing that there’s no easy solution to the problem.

Call of Duty has a reputation for cheating (it comes with the territory of being such a hugely popular shooter and having a free-to-download battle royale). Cheating is more prevalent on PC (Activision recently confirmed as much, to the point where it said if you believe you’ve died unfairly to a console player, it’s much more likely that they’ve used ‘intel advantage’ than cheats). So, some console players head straight into Call of Duty’s settings to turn off crossplay across the board, just to take the potential for PC cheaters ruining their day out of the equation. Earlier this year, Activision added new console-only crossplay options for regular multiplayer, although PC players who do not cheat said they were being unfairly punished.

Activision, as IGN has reported, has spent millions of dollars in the battle against Call of Duty cheat makers, cheat sellers, and cheat users, with a number of recent high-profile successes. In March, Phantom Overlay announced it was shutting down, with fans reacting in disbelief that such a prominent Call of Duty cheat provider could fall by the wayside. Also in March, IGN reported on four cheat providers that were shut down ahead of the hotly anticipated return of Verdansk to Warzone.

In the run up to Black Ops 7’s November launch, Activision is, like EA for Battlefield 6, employing extra steps to help stop cheating on PC. When Black Ops 7 launches on November 14, PC players will be required to enable both Secure Boot and TPM 2.0. “These hardware-based features will give us a stronger, more trusted foundation for detecting and blocking certain cheats before they can take root,” Activision said in a new blog post.

Other security features will be tested during the Black Ops 7 beta to see how they perform. “These tools are designed to identify and remove cheaters faster, and we’ll be closely monitoring how they respond in real matches,” Activision said. “The full force of our protections will be reserved for launch, when all systems come online together.”

But Activision, as so many other video game companies have done, qualified this work by saying the war on cheaters is a never-ending one.

“We also want to be clear: there’s no one-and-done solution to solving the challenge of cheating. Every major game faces this issue, and cheaters are constantly looking for new ways to exploit systems.

“What matters, and where we’ve seen real improvement, is how quickly we adapt. In Black Ops 6, detections are faster, mitigations are stronger, and enforcement is cutting deeper into the networks that try to harm fair play. With Black Ops 7, hardware protections like Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 will add another layer of defense.”

Elsewhere, Call of Duty will now tell players directly in-game if they’re placed into shadow ban status for Warzone and Multiplayer.

“More than 75% of the LMM [Limited Matchmaking] pool is made up of users who have been brought into the system through parties, so this notification is important to clarify account status,” Activision explained.

“As a reminder, being placed in Limited Matchmaking doesn’t signal that an account is a confirmed cheater. It means an alarm was raised that requires examination.”

Last month, Battlefield 6 developers lamented the need for security measures such as Secure Boot. Speaking to Eurogamer, Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl said: “The fact is I wish we didn’t have to do things like Secure Boot.”

He continued: “It does prevent some players from playing the game. Some people’s PCs can’t handle it and they can’t play; that really sucks. I wish everyone could play the game with low friction and not have to do these sorts of things.”

Still, Buhl sounds pleased with the effectiveness of the likes of Secure Boot, which are “some of the strongest tools in our toolbox to stop cheating.”

“We were pretty happy with how the anti-cheat performed. Obviously I’ll say we can never be perfect, anti-cheat is always a cat-and-mouse game where we’re constantly going back and forth and keeping on top of what the cheaters are doing. But from the beginning this was something we put a high priority on, so when we launch this game we have a really strong anti-cheat program in place.”

Buhl continued: “Again, nothing makes cheating impossible, but enabling Secure Boot and having kernel-level access makes it so much harder to cheat and so much easier for us to find and stop cheating.”

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.

After ghosting fans in 2024 by cancelling FM25, Football Manager is finally back in the game. FM26 has a confirmed release date of November 4, 2025, and yes, you can already preorder it.

If obsessing over player stats on your commute sounds like heaven, FM26 Touch also lands on Switch December 4, while FM26 Mobile arrives on Netflix, meaning you can now play Football Manager on the same app you binge Squid Game (yay?).

Where to Preorder Football Manager 26

While some had suggested Nintendo might abandon amiibo with Nintendo Switch 2, that’s not been the case.

In fact, there are some fresh ones in 2025 from Donkey Kong Bananza and Street Fighter 6, but there are also fresh figurines from The Legend of Zelda.

Better yet, not only does Amazon have Sidon, Riju, and Tulin in stock, but they’re all discounted for a limited time right now.

Amazon Amiibo Sale: Save $10 for a Limited Time

Each of these amiibo figures would set you back $29.99 when they first released, but Amazon has discounted three of the figures to $19.99. That’s a saving of 33% each, and $10 off per amiibo.