Rainbow Six Siege is getting a Metal Gear Solid crossover, as Ubisoft is teasing that Solid Snake will appear as a new Operator in Year 11.
A 15-second clip for the tactical action game’s next roadmap lays it on thick, showing not just a faceless body wearing a familiar sneaking suit but a Metal Gear Solid 1-style Codec Call from none other than Splinter Cell star Sam Fisher. It’s the kind of crossover fans have dreamed about for decades, brought to life as Ubisoft teases a full reveal for the Year 11 roadmap that’s scheduled to take place next month, February 15, at 8 a.m. PT / 11 a.m. ET on the Rainbow Six Siege Twitch page.
It’s unclear if today’s tease is just for the Solid Snake Operator or if fans should instead expect a selection of skins from Konami as well, but judging by the fanfare surrounding the reveal, it looks like Ubisoft went all out for this latest collaboration. Either way, the Solid Snake teaser marks what is likely the most exciting Operator in the last 10 years.
There were some early signs that Rainbow Six Siege could soon meet the world of Metal Gear Solid. Reputable dataminer @Shiiny77 suggested a collaboration was in the cards for Year 11 Season 1 just last week, teasing that “it is not just a skin collaboration” like fans have seen in the past. Insider Gaming later said it was able to independently verify the leak as well.
“There is so much out of this collab and the season itself, its so packed,” @Shiiny77 added at the time.
Metal Gear Solid may be one of the wildest crossovers for Rainbow Six Siege so far, but it’s far from the first. Other recent collaborations have brought the Attack on Titan and The Boys universes into the fold with various cosmetics for existing Operators. Splinter Cell didn’t launch with the game when it first launched back in 2015, but Sam Fisher did go on to get his own Operator in the form of Specialist Zero in 2020.
We’ll learn more about what this official meeting between Solid Snake has in store February 15. In the meantime, Rainbow Six Siege recently received a massive 10-year update to become Rainbow Six Siege X. You can check out why we think it’s now an 8/10 in our review.
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).
When I first played Crimson Desert I had trouble working out what it wanted to be – Spider-Man? The Witcher? Dynasty Warriors? Dragon’s Dogma? Jedi Academy? The first of three new talkthrough videos from developers Pearl Abyss has helped concentrate the game in my mind. This is a grittier medieval fantasy take on The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, isn’t it! Those airborne ruins are a dead giveaway. All it’s missing is the elegance and feeling of completeness. OK, it doesn’t have a magic vehicle editor, either. That I know about. Without further ado, here’s the video.
Xbox has been having a hard time selling consoles lately, and it didn’t get any better over the 2025 holiday quarter. Microsoft has just reported its Q2 2026 earnings, including the news that hardware sales were down 32% year-over-year, after quarter upon quarter upon quarter of hardware declines.
Though we don’t have actual numbers to tell how much revenue is being lost out on here, we can get a sense of how grim this is for the hardware by looking at past quarters. Last quarter, Q1 of 2026, hardware declined 29% year-over-year. The quarter before that, Q4 of 2025, hardware was down 22%. The quarter before that? Down 6%. Before that? Down 29%. And before that, 29%, in Q1 of 2025, which was July – September of 2024. Going back even further through Microsoft’s earnings reports, the prior year quarters saw declines of 42% (woah) in Q4 of 2024 and 31% in Q3. In fact, you have to go all the way back to Q2 2024, which was October through December of 2023, to find the last time Xbox’s hardware revenue was better during that period than it was the year before – it was up a whopping 3% over the holiday quarter.
And yes, it was down 7% the quarter before that, 13% before that, down 30% before that, down 13% before that, and finally up 13% year-over-year in Q1 of 2023, or July – September of 2022, at which point the numbers start finally showing consistent improvement year-over-year, largely due to proximity to the launch of the Series S and X.
Now, look. It’s extremely normal for a six-year-old console to not be selling as well as it was in the first few years after launch. That’s to be expected. Early adopters tend to buy up consoles in large quantities at launch, distributers run out of stock, more is produced, people continue to buy until the vast majority of enthusiasts who want the console already have one, and then sales slow down as the console gets older. But it…usually takes a bit longer to get to that point! For comparison’s sake, we have evidence that neither the PlayStation 5 nor the Nintendo Switch have had this much trouble on this scale selling systems at this stage in their respective life cycles, and certainly not as far back as less than three years after launch. There’s maybe a reason why we have hard unit sales numbers of Switches and PS5s from Nintendo and PlayStation, but no official numbers whatsoever from Xbox on the Series S and X.
None of this is surprising to anyone who’s paying attention. We’ve been reading headlines about the strugglines of the Xbox Series consoles for the last several years now. In the U.S., Xbox console sales hit an all-time November low in 2025, after several years in a row of declining hardware sales in what is usually the busiest retail month with Black Friday.
These more recent struggles are likely tied as well to the two spikes in Xbox console prices just this year, which saw the least expensive Xbox rise to $400, and the most expensive to an unimaginable $800. Its recently-released ROG Ally launched last year at a whopping $1000. And because much of the high prices are tariff-related, the U.S. – Xbox’s biggest market – is primarily impacted here. According to Circana analyst Mat Piscatella speaking to us last December, the average price per Xbox unit in the U.S. has risen 30% year-over-year in 2025.
While the hardware declines were the most noteworthy figure from Microsoft’s earnings yesterday, it’s not like software was doing a whole lot better. Content and services revenue dropped 5% year-over-year, and overall gaming declines caused revenue in the More Personal Computing segment of Microsoft to drop 3% year-over-year. In the investor presentation, CFO Amy Hood said that the revenue drop was “driven by first-party content with impact across the platform,” suggesting that its first-party games (perhaps Call of Duty?) didn’t do as well as they expected them to.
All-in-all, another real rough one for Microsoft’s gaming department.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Hello you. Welcome to Quick Kits, a new series of PC hardware reviews for people who just want to know, with minimal preamble and probably zero bar charts, what a piece of gear is like to use. I’ll still be testing everything as if it were getting a full-length writeup, but shrink-raying the wordy parts should help us bring you more hardware advice, more often, and across a wider range of component and peripheral types.
I’ve got just the thing to get us started with, too: a three-month-old keyboard. You’re welcome.
With Crimson Desert just a handful of weeks from release, developer Pearl Abyss has released a 15-minute video showing everything from the story to the open world, alongside fresh gameplay.
This video shows main character Kliff and the continent of Pywel, which promises to be a seamless open world. Expect “sprawling wilderness, bustling cities, ancient ruins, and diverse regions, all set against a backdrop of escalating conflict and supernatural danger,” Pearl Abyss said.
Kliff is a warrior of the Greymanes, a faction from the northern region of Pailune. The story begins in the aftermath of a peace being shattered, and Kliff must reunite the Greymanes and reclaim their homeland. You end up discovering that the entire continent is involved.
The threat comes from the Abyss, a mysterious realm that’s sending fragments crashing into Pywel. Some want to exploit these fragments. You’re trying to restore balance to the Abyss and stop those who are exploiting it.
Crimson Desert’s huge open world has been a topic of debate recently. Pywel is divided into five distinct regions: Hernand; Pailune; Demeniss; Delesyia; and the Crimson Desert itself. The main quest revolves around Kliff’s journey, but you’re free to explore the world in any order, taking faction-driven quests, large-scale battles, fortress sieges and smaller, character-focused missions.
Pearl Abyss confirmed that as the story progresses, two additional playable characters become available, each with unique combat styles, skills and weapons. Exploration is a big part of the game — you travel on horseback, climb terrain, glide across distances, and later access advanced traversal options such as a missile-firing mech and a dragon. Pearl Abyss said the world is filled with hidden treasures, ancient mechanisms, puzzles and points of interest “designed to reward curiosity and discovery.” As for combat, expect to face enemy soldiers, sorcerers, beasts and machines.
Speaking on the Gaming Interviews YouTube channel, Pearl Abyss’ Will Powers said that describing the size of Crimson Desert’s world in terms of numbers doesn’t do it justice, because doing so fails to capture the scope and scale of the game. But he did go as far as to compare it to two of the biggest open world games around.
“I don’t think numbers really do it justice because, how big is that in terms of scope and scale?” he said. “But what we can say is that the world’s at least twice as big as the open world, the playable area, of Skyrim. It’s larger than the map of Red Dead Redemption 2.”
Powers went on to insist that the size of Crimson Desert’s open world won’t determine its quality. Rather, what you actually do in it is the key factor.
“The continent of Pywel is absolutely massive, but size doesn’t really matter if there’s nothing to do,” he said. “Open-world games are about doing things, having activities, having distractions. So we wanted to create a world that’s not only massive, but is also incredibly interactive.”
Unlike Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption 2, in Crimson Desert you can fly around on a dragon, so despite the size of its world, you’ll be able to get about quickly. And don’t expect RPG elements in terms of decision-making and choice and consequence as it relates to your character, either. The sheer amount of things to do in the world will facilitate the role-playing part of Crimson Desert, which players will form through “head canon.”
“You choose the type of character you want to play as in terms of your progression within the systems in the game,” Powers explained. “And then through head canon you’re having this very different experience than other players because of the scope and scale of the game. You’ll be distracted by something, you’ll go on this quest line, you’ll have an experience that’ll be radically different than someone else, even though they’re playing the same game and the same canonical storyline that you both are going through.”
Crimson Desert has gone gold, locking in its global release date of March 19, 2026. That’s across PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and Mac.
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.
Stardew Valley creator Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone has emerged from the giant Easter egg in which he makes games to “debunk a few myths and false assumptions” about Haunted Chocolatier, his forthcoming sticky-fingered life sim. The good news is that he’s been “very productive” lately, though he admits that he “shouldn’t have announced the game so early”, which suggests we’ve a ways to go yet before the first proper Haunted Chocolatier trailer or info blowout.
After being announced for Switch 2 way back in May 2025, SEGA has today revealed that Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. World Stage will mark the series’ long-awaited debut on a Nintendo system on 26th March.
For those who have missed the details up to this point, this Switch 2 release features full cross-play, so you can battle it out with pals on other consoles as well as rollback netcode support, balance updates, training tweaks, and new moves and combos to slip into your fighting style.
To make it to the top of Kami, the mountain at the heart of Cairn, you’ll need to develop skill and intuition for climbing and use all the tools at your disposal. There’s a lot in the game you’ll need to learn through experience, particularly as you reach the more treacherous challenges at higher altitudes. Here are a few tips that’ll help you reach greater heights and see fewer dangerous falls as you make your way to Cairn’s summit.
It’s all about planning, patience, and stamina
The climbing gym at the start of Cairn is a great way to get some training that will save you on Kami, and it’s worth trying all of its available walls to see what you’ll face ahead. The gym will teach you three things: to plan your route, climb slowly, and conserve your stamina.
You can check the wall ahead of you by angling the camera so that your protagonist, Aava, looks straight up, or by pressing L1 to get a zoomed-out view of the whole area. It’s always worth it to check your path so you don’t hit a point where you’re trapped or snagged and forced to climb back down, wasting energy and items.
Patience is a virtue in Cairn; you almost always want to climb slowly and carefully, even if you’re on what appears to be an easy stretch of wall. The trick to climbing successfully is picking good handholds and footholds. Aava’s limbs start to shake when one is getting tired, indicating that it’s in a bad position or her weight is distributed poorly. Stay in a position like that too long, and she’ll slip and fall. If you move too fast up the wall, you’re more likely to commit to bad holds without realizing it, only to find that Aava is tiring out and unable to move to a more solid position before falling. Going slow lets you be sure the holds you’re using are safe before moving on.
As you go up a wall, you also need to manage Aava’s stamina. When you’re in a solid position, you can hit Triangle to have Aava shake out a tired limb, regaining stamina for the next push. You can tell how much stamina Aava has by the color that flashes when you press Triangle. Green means you’ve recovered well, while yellow indicates caution, showing you that you need a better rest position soon or you’re going to be in trouble. Stamina recovery is essential to avoid falling, so stop frequently for a quick rest.
Through it all, pay close attention to Aava’s reactions and what she says. Slowly, regular breathing means she’s doing well through the climb, but when her breathing starts to quicken, it means she’s tiring out and getting worried. You’ll need to find a more natural, comfortable position so she can rest and recover stamina.
Drop pitons frequently
Pitons are essential, and you’ll want to get into the habit of putting them down at regular intervals on every wall. Clipping into a piton stops you from falling off the mountain, while also acting as a checkpoint so you can quickly return if you should slip. You can also use pitons to rest by hitting X to “off belay,” which fully restores Aava’s stamina. And when you off belay at a piton, you can access items in your backpack, giving you a chance to eat food or refill chalk.
You can place a piton by holding Up on the directional pad, but you’ll then have to hit X at the right moment as a slider moves across a bar to complete the placement. It’s essential to practice your piton timing — getting the right timing doesn’t just save you from breaking pitons, it can allow you to place one fast in an emergency when Aava’s about to fall. But don’t wait to hear Aava panicking before you set a piton. Train yourself to place them regularly when things are going well, so you’re not trying to place one in a panic to avoid a fall.
You’ll find lots of pitons on Kami, and Climbot can make one piton from two sets of piton scraps, so don’t worry too much about running out or wasting them. They’re essential to a successful climb.
All holds aren’t equal
Especially when you’re first starting out, you might wonder why Aava keeps getting tired or falling when you’re climbing a wall that seems like it’s full of holds. The answer is that some holds are smaller and tougher to use than others, and it’s not always immediately obvious looking at them that a grip isn’t great. Vertical cracks, for instance, seem like they should be useful for climbs, but they can tire you out quickly. Look for big ledges to stand on and hold with your hands to provide Aava with more comfortable positions where she can rest, and try not to use smaller holds for very long. Listen for Aava to remark about whether you’ve picked a good position to know that she’s comfortable — and restore stamina often.
When you climb slowly, you can test each hold before moving to the next to see how Aava handles it, and you’ll be able to tell if you should move Aava back down to a more stable position. You always want to watch for how Aava places her hand or foot, also; you’ll sometimes place a hand or foot on what you think is a grip, only for Aava to flatten that hand or foot against the rock, which means she’s braced but not holding anything. It’s usually a good idea to stop and reset that limb before moving on, because she’ll tire out quickly without a solid grip.
Don’t forget chalk
Chalk greatly improves your grip and can be essential to get over tough walls. You’ll almost always have chalk available, and it’s almost always a good idea to use it. You can quickly add chalk to your hands by holding Right on the directional pad, making your next 12 handholds extra grippy. Chalk is great for making bad holds a little easier to grip, and even makes it possible to move over rock that doesn’t have good holds so you can reach a better spot, as long as you’re quick about it. You should use chalk often, especially when holds are small or spread out — Climbot creates more whenever you compost trash, so you’ll always have a healthy supply.
Manually choose Aava’s limbs for extra control
Cairn’s developers suggest you use its automatic system for choosing which limb Aava moves every time you take a new foot- or handhold, but there will be lots of moments when you’ll want to move a foot and the game will suggest you move a hand or vice versa, and moving the wrong limb can sometimes be disastrous. You can choose which limb to move yourself by holding R1 and highlighting it using the right analog stick. Choosing limbs manually is essential when you’re trying to quickly leave a dangerous position to get to a safer one, but it’s also just good practice to make sure you have complete control of Aava and are making exactly the moves you want to.
Change your approach depending on the kind of rock you’re climbing
Most rock walls are gray and craggy, but you’ll sometimes see smooth, glossy brown rock mixed in across a wall. This rock is more slippery, with holds that are often smaller, and it’s too dense for you to place pitons into it, making it potentially dangerous. Check your route and watch for patches of brown rock so you can either climb around them or plan a smart route over them. Chalk and food boosts are great for dealing with these climbs as well.
Be sure to explore
Kami was once home to a people called the troglodytes, and while you’ll find very few of them left during your climb, you can still visit their homes, temples, and villages. Making your way into different caves and structures can help you find save points, vital supplies, and special items to make your climb easier. Troglodyte pitons are the greatest prize — they’re indestructible and can burrow into any kind of rock — but you might also find things like upgrades for your chalk bag, recipes for different kinds of food, and lots more. Exploring caves and troglodyte structures can also help you find alternative, often easier or safer routes up the mountain.
Ice can be easier to climb, but slower
Late in your ascent up Kami, you’ll start to come across ice walls. Aava is ready with ice axes and spikes for her feet, and these are automatically equipped whenever you aim a limb at ice. These walls can be easier to deal with than rock because you can make a handhold or foothold anywhere, but you’ll need to go more slowly and recover stamina more often as you climb, because overall, climbing ice takes more effort. Try to pick cracks in the ice to place your ice axes and shoes. If an axe or shoe bounces off the ice before settling, that’s a bad hold, and you should move it to a better one, because Aava will soon slip. If you’ve got no crack to dig into, you can create one by holding down Square and then releasing it, kicking your foot or slamming your axe into the ice. The effort drains your stamina faster, though, so be sure to take frequent breaks.Making your way to the top of Kami is a tough journey, but it’s also a rewarding one. Take your time and be careful and you’ll keep the climb from going from challenging to frustrating. You can start your ascent today — grab Cairn today at the PlayStation Store.
Magic: The Gathering has a busy 2026 planned, but the last set to be revealed was a crossover with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Yes, it marks our second trip to New York in less than a year, thanks to last year’s Spider-Man set (seriously, there are infinite dimensions we could travel to!), but the Heroes in a Half Shell are doing things a little differently.
Not only does it offer our first Universes Beyond Commander Deck since Final Fantasy, but there are some new product types, too. Here’s everything you can preorder, including more than a few sealed products that already have some tidy discounts.
MTG x TMNT Preorders in a Half Shell
As you can probably imagine, there are more products coming than you can shake a Bo Staff at launching on March 6, with pre-release a week prior from February 27 to March 5.
You can also grab the now-customary booster bundle, which includes a promo card, a series of nine Play Boosters, a storage box and a spindown life counter.
That’s dropped to $61.01 right now, making it an even more appealing gift option for a Turtle-loving Magic player in your life (there are dozens of us!).
We promised something new, and here it is: The Turtle Team-Up box, which offers co-op gameplay where “2-4 players battle for survival against an onslaught of villainous adversaries”.
It’s still $49.99 at Amazon, and includes four pre-built 60-card hero decks, one Enemy deck with 11 bosses, seventeen Event Cards, and four 14-card boosters.
Also new this time is a Pizza Bundle, which includes 9 Play Boosters, 1 Collector Booster, 25 non-foil Pizza lands (yes, really), five foil Pizza lands, 2 foil promo cards, and a spindown life counter. Amazon had this for $99.99, but they’re all gone – almost certainly because there’s a single Collector Booster inside.
Also out of stock is the Collector Boosters. As with any set, these are where you’ll find the high-value cards, and Amazon sold out fairly quick for both boosters and a box of them. Expect them to be expensive, though, with an MSRP of $37.99 each, or around $479.99 for the box.
As a reminder, Collector Boosters include alternate art treatments and foils, but they’re functionally the same cards. Buy them, or don’t, but don’t feel like you have to spend almost $500 for a box just to play this great card game.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is Getting a Commander Deck
Finally, Commander players can expect a return to precon decks… but just one. After being absent since Edge of Eternities, there’s a new precon coming, which is a five-color deck called Turtle Power!
It’s also interesting that after very few five-color decks in recent years, we’re now getting two in consecutive sets after Dance of the Elements from Lorwyn: Eclipsed.
UK Preorders
I can’t remember the last time a set came with a single Commander precon. In 2025 alone we’ve had sets with no precons (Spider-Man, Avatar), sets with two (Aetherdrift, Edge of Eternities), a set with four (Final Fantasy) and a set with five (Tarkir Dragonstorm).
Why just the one? I honestly can’t complain. Even at my age, picking my favorite turtle is serious business, so having the whole gang in one, 100-card boxed product means I don’t have to make any tough choices.
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.
