Category: Video Games

Blizzard has said that its Warcraft-themed collectible card game Hearthstone is still not available on consoles because the team needs “a level of investment… to make that happen.”

That’s according to executive producer Nathan Lyons-Smith, who recently revealed that because of the 12-year-old game’s aging code — estimated to be 16 years old — any port to console must be done “right” and only when the team finds “the right time to do it.”

“There’s a level of investment that we need to make that happen, primarily in terms of UI and UX, and making sure that it’s very natural to go and play a card game on those platforms,” Lyons-Smith said, as reported by Eurogamer. “I know it’s possible — Duels of the Planeswalkers for Magic [The Gathering], many years ago now, was absolutely delightful with the controller — so I know we can do it.

“I asked an engineer who’d been on the project a long time, and he estimates the code is 16 years old,” Lyons-Smith continued, “and the team was 15 people 16 years ago. And so there’s more of an effort to go: ‘I want to make sure when we go that it’s awesome.’ That it doesn’t just feel like, yeah, they ported it here, and you can play…

“I want to make sure that when we go, we’re going to go, and it’s going to feel awesome for players that love that form factor, whether they’re leaning back on the couch or sitting on the couch with their handheld.”

Hearthstone originally launched in 2014 on PC, with a mobile and tablet version following very shortly after. Over the years there have been numerous calls for the game to launch on consoles — and particularly Nintendo Switch, for handheld play. But Blizzard has never gotten around to it.

Game director Tyler Bielman added: “If we’re going to bring it specifically to that living room big screen platform, we would want to make sure that the full experience is optimized for that mode that you’re in.”

Now, of course, with Blizzard owned by Xbox and parent company Microsoft, there could be more pressure than ever to bring the hugely-successful card game to console players. However, with Xbox’s high-level goal of enabling gamers to play “anywhere,” the Hearthstone team acknowledged an expectation to go “as wide as we could” to reach as many players as possible, regardless of platform.

“In the future, as we explore console and handheld, we’d probably go as wide as we could,” Lyons-Smith added. “Certainly, we have a different owner now than we did three years ago, and they’re more invested in Xbox and ‘anything’s an Xbox’. Their high-level goal [being] games playable anywhere.”

Hearthstone’s Cataclysm-themed expansion is set to launch on March 17, marking the return of Colossal cards and introducing a brand new story.

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.

Monster Hunter Wilds will welcome a “large-scale” expansion later this year.

Addressing fans in a video celebrating the open-world adventure game’s first anniversary, series producer Ryozo Tsujimoto teased that this expansion will be similar to Monster Hunter World‘s Iceborne add-on, but was otherwise coy about the details. He did, however, stress that this will be the “final update” for the monster hunting game.

“We are currently at work on a large-scale expansion similar to Monster Hunter World: Iceborne and Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak for Monster Hunter: Wilds,” Tsujimoto said. “We plan to share more information with you this summer.”

We also learned a little more about the update dropping on February 18, too, including details of Arch-Tempered Arkveld, 10-star Arc-Tempered monsters, a special collaboration with Monster Hunter Stories 3 — a spin-off series that releases next month — plus an anniversary event where all previous awards and quests will be “re-available.”

Players who log in during the anniversary event will receive a free item pack, and each previous seasonal event will return for a weekly rotation. “Almost all” previously released event quests will be made permanent from February 18.

“We have been implementing improvements to game stability and performance since Title Update 4,” Tsujimoto added, “and this update will introduce even further improvements.” Again, we’re told to expect more details closer to the time, so Capcom suggests you monitor its social media accounts for updates.

“While this marks the end of major content updates, the team is currently hard at work on a large-scale expansion to Monster Hunter Wilds,” the team added. “We look forward to sharing the first reveal of the expansion this summer.”

Monster Hunter Wilds has had something of a bumpy ride of late. Title Update 4 arrived at the end of last year and ushered in a long list of gameplay and balance changes, as well as CPU/GPU improvements, load reduction, and the optimization of “PC-specific processes and addition of options and presets to reduce processing load.”

A development roadmap, detailed in December, mentioned plans to address the myriad issues impacting the PC version. However, just last month, one player believed they had discovered that PC performance was dictated by the number of DLCs a user has. Capcom looked into it and concluded they were right, calling it “an unintended bug” that would be resolved with Patch 1.040.03.01.

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.

Here’s almost seven minutes of Black Myth: Wukong follow-up Black Myth: Zhong Kui. Well, kind of.

While developer Game Science has dropped the new in-engine trailer and labelled it as pertaining to the highly-anticipated sequel, it also features a “non-canon” disclaimer which suggests everything you see here could have no bearing whatsoever on the final game or its story, and has only been released by the team to celebrate Chinese New Year and welcome in the Year of the Horse.

But while you won’t see any gameplay or combat per se, the “non-canon, for entertainment purposes only” trailer nonetheless shows in-engine footage and gives us our best look yet at what to expect from the sequel, particularly in terms of how it looks and sounds. Let me take you through it.

It starts out normally enough as a young woman moves around an al fresco kitchen preparing a meal. Look a little closer, though, and you’ll realize that the figure that passes her near the beginning isn’t quite human, and the guy who opens the gigantic oyster-stroke-mussell shell reveals not a mollusc but, well, a little grey-faced man, uh, thing. She then prepares a slab of meat with blinking eyeballs embedded in it.

There’s more — much more — but it’s such a delight, I’d recommend watching it yourself. Just remember that it’s more of a tech demo and is unlikely to impact the eventual storyline of Black Myth: Zhong Kui, much like the spin-off story Game Science similarly released at Chinese New Year last year.

Black Myth: Wukong developer Game Science revealed sequel Black Myth: Zhong Kui at Opening Night Live 2025 last August. “Set against the backdrop of the classic Chinese folktale ‘Zhong Kui Banishing Evil,’ Black Myth: Zhong Kui is a single-player action role-playing game rooted in ancient Chinese fantasy,” GameScience said.

“The game will deliver distinctive experiences and gameplay features that push our limits, while also bringing fresh ideas and necessary changes to address past flaws and regrets.” As yet, there’s no release window, let alone a firm date.

Predecessor Black Myth: Wukong is the record-breaking action game that launched across PC and PlayStation 5 in 2024, selling 10 million copies in just three days. The Xbox Series X and S versions launched in August 2025. It returned a Great 8/10 in IGN’s Black Myth: Wukong review, in which we wrote: “Despite some frustrating technical issues, Black Myth: Wukong is a great action game with fantastic combat, exciting bosses, tantalizing secrets, and a beautiful world.”

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.

Less than a month after the launch of its free-to-play 2v2 tag-team fighting game, 2XKO, Riot Games is scaling back its development team.

Admitting the news was “difficult to share,” producer Tom Cannon said that despite securing a “passionate core audience,” the new game “hasn’t reached the level needed to support a team of this size long term.”

“With a smaller, focused team, we’re going to dig in and make key improvements to the game, including some of the things we’ve already heard you asking for. We’ll share some of our plans soon,” Cannon added. “Our plans for the 2026 Competitive Series are unchanged. We remain committed to partnering with tournament organizers and local communities. Our focus will continue to be on supporting the events and organizers that already power the [fighting game community].”

Cannon stressed that the team that built 2XKO “poured years of creativity, care, and belief into this game. Taking creative risks like this is hard, and the work they did is real and meaningful.”

“We’re committed to supporting impacted Rioters through this transition — including helping them explore opportunities within Riot where possible, and providing a minimum of 6 months of notice pay and severance where it’s not,” he explained.

Cannon closed on promising more information would come in time, and thanked players for playing 2XKO and “caring enough to ask hard questions.”

Riot has also confirmed to IGN that the cuts will affect approximately 80 roles globally, representing less than half of the total team. Figures are not final, however, as some staff may find roles elsewhere within the company.

IGN thought 2XKO was ‘Great.’ It returned an 8/10 in our review in which we wrote: “2XKO has found a way to distill what’s fun about tag fighters while mitigating a lot of the pain points that typically come with the territory.” It was announced back in The Game Awards 2025.

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.