Battlefield 6 feels like a make-or-break moment for BF Studios.

The four-studio team that makes up the Battlefield-focused group (Ripple Effect, DICE, Criterion Games, and Motive Studio) has spent the duration of the project’s development working to ensure next month’s launch goes off without a hitch. It’s a years-long effort to dodge the notoriously troubled releases the franchise is known for without repeating past mistakes — or creating new ones.

We sat down with technical director Christian Buhl and senior console combat designer Matthew Nickerson earlier this week to learn more about how BF Studios worked to shock life back into the classic EA shooter series with Battlefield 6. Our conversation touched on how Ripple Effect helped lay the groundwork for what it feels is “the best Battlefield ever,” with a focus on consoles, fighting off cheaters, learning from Battlefield 2042, dealing with leaks, and more player feedback than ever before.

IGN: What can you tell me about the differences between Performance Mode and Fidelity Mode on PS5?

Christian Buhl: I think the short answer is, for performance mode, we wanted to make sure that we set high framerate targets for all of our platforms. We wanted to make sure we were at least 80 frames or above most of the time, and then we just dialed down different performance settings until we were confident that we could give you that experience.

Quality mode is basically just turning up all the quality features. Highest resolution textures, highest fidelity of visual features, and, yeah, that’s the primary difference there. We just kind of turned everything on but still made sure that we were hitting 60 frames per second. We didn’t want just, ‘Let’s turn on every visual feature and then you’ll get a great-looking single frame at a shitty framerate,’ right? We also tuned that so that we made sure we gave the best possible visual fidelity that still hit 60 frames per second.

Then, for performance, we said, ‘OK, let’s raise that even higher, lower quality to the point where we get even better frame rates.’ I don’t know if I could tell you exactly… we did tune it based on platform and based on what we would turn on and off to get there, so I don’t know that I necessarily remember all the exact settings that are enabled for each of those, but we wanted to give you one big dial where you could say, ‘I want the highest fidelity possible but still get super smooth framerates,’ or ‘I want the best performance possible.’

Matthew Nickerson: That’s a great summary. Yeah.

IGN: So, what are we looking at with the PS5 Pro? What is that comparison?

Christian Buhl: So, for PS5 Pro, the main thing is that we run everything at a higher resolution. I’ve got my own chart up, here. On Fidelity Mode, we run at [2160p] instead of 1440p, and on Performance Mode, we run at [1620p] instead of, I think, 1280p. Basically, you can run it at higher resolution and still hit the same quality, is the short answer. I believe PS5 Pro will also run at a higher framerate. It runs at higher resolution and at a higher frame rate when you put it into performance mode than the regular PS5 does.

IGN: I’m assuming the Xbox Series X is comparable to the PS5 performance and quality options, but looking at Xbox Series S, I know there are some fears that Battlefield 6 will have muddy visuals. How does the Series S compare? Is it a stable like 60FPS, and how does it look, in general, with the performance and quality modes in mind?

Christian Buhl: So, just to be clear, we only have one mode on Xbox Series S because it is a less powerful console. We don’t offer performance and quality as separate options, but it does run very solidly at 60 frames per second at 1080p. That was our goal with Xbox Series S: to make sure that it ran super solid at 60 frames per second at 1080p.

IGN: Were there any challenges or hurdles that you had to overcome when developing Battlefield 6 for the Series S, specifically? Were there any compromises made to ensure the game worked on this platform as well as others?

Christian Buhl: There were. It’s a less powerful system, obviously, than the Xbox Series X or the PS5. The biggest challenge for us, honestly, was memory. It has… what is it? Eight GB of memory? I think it’s eight or 10 GB of memory – much less than the other consoles, also less than our mid-spec PC. So, that was our biggest challenge: making sure that all of our levels could fit into the memory on the Series S.

We did have to tune some levels and make changes to make sure that happens, and obviously, also, we turned down some fidelity settings in Series S, both to hit our performance targets and to lower the amount of memory. Yeah, it was a challenge, but we also develop for multiple platform targets on PC. So, it’s not like it’s something we didn’t know how to do. It’s just… we have different targets, and we need to make sure that we work properly on all of them.

IGN: Crossplay has become a pretty standard feature across the industry, and Battlefield 6’s version of that is what I’ve seen described as ‘preferred crossplay.’ Can you just walk me through that feature on consoles? Is crossplay customizable at all, or is it pretty much just a toggle on/off?

Matthew Nickerson: Crossplay, generally, what we have on consoles is a simple toggle that’s actually in-game. Not every product that launches has that available to the player. Some players have to dig through option menus to actually turn off crossplay, like on the Xbox or something. We have it in-game, and it’s just a simple toggle on/off.

When it comes to preference input, we have just what it sounds like: If you’re a console player, we are looking for other console players in a set time frame, and then if we need to fill up the lobby more, we will look towards PC players. We’re very confident but also very keen to what crossplay means for Battlefield 6. We’ve gone the extra mile and put in a lot of effort in terms of balancing the inputs, understanding where the inputs lie [not just] in terms of relationship to general play styles but general performance of what they’re good at and maybe what they lack.

We’ve completely redone aim assist from our Battlefield 2042 version. We’ve added aim assist for what we call our ‘combat triangle’ now – and that’s infantry versus inventory, infantry versus vehicles, and vehicles versus vehicles – to give that cohesive experience if you are on controller, compared to, maybe, something that’s a little bit easier on keyboard and mouse. So [we’re] very dedicated to crossplay, and we’re trying to nail it across multiple vectors when it comes to crossplay. It’s just such an important aspect for us and for Battlefield 6.

IGN: Is crossplay default on or default off when the player loads in?

Matthew Nickerson: Default. Yes, it is indeed on.

IGN: You explained it as an on/off situation. I have seen calls for console-only crossplay. Is that something you guys see and consider? Is there any potential for console-only crossplay?

Matthew Nickerson: Console-only crossplay happens if you turn it off. When you flip that switch, then you get, basically, console-only crossplay, and that is, we don’t fill with PC players.

IGN: So, PlayStation players can play with Xbox players if crossplay is off, still?

Matthew Nickerson: Yeah.

IGN: Battlefield, Call of Duty, and a lot of the military simulator shooters out there have notoriously been affected by cheaters. Obviously, it’s a big talking point right now. What can you say to console players to reassure them that they won’t have to deal with cheaters on PC if they have crossplay turned on?

Christian Buhl: I guess what I can say is we are taking cheating extremely seriously. Obviously, cheating is much more prevalent on PC than on console, but we are taking a lot of effort, putting a lot of work into prioritizing fighting against cheaters. We’ve turned on secure boot. We’ve got Javelin, our new anti-cheat system, which is required in order to play.

So, we’re doing a lot on the PC side to clamp down on cheating as much as possible. We have a whole team within Battlefield dedicated to anti-cheat, which includes engineers, analysts who are reviewing things and banning players, and figuring out what the latest cheats are. We have another whole dedicated team at EA to anti-cheat that we work closely with. That’s what I can say. Now, we can never win against cheaters, right? Cheaters will always be there. It’s a never-ending cat-and-mouse game. I can’t promise that there will be zero cheaters if you’re playing against PC players. That’s just simply not possible, but I can say that we are being extremely aggressive. We see this as critical to the success of – to the health of – the game.

You don’t want to play a game and feel like a bunch of people on the other side are cheating. I hope console players feel confident enough in what we’re doing for cheating on the PC side that they don’t feel like they want to turn crossplay off just for that reason. If they do want to, that is an available option for them, but we think it’s super important for PC and console players to be confident that most of the people that they’re playing with or against are not cheating, and we’re putting a huge amount of effort into that.

IGN: The beta tests went over really well as far as I can see. I think it was a really reassuring moment for a lot of fans. What were some of the takeaways for the team from these tests, and how will they result in a better Battlefield experience at launch?

From a feedback standpoint for open beta, like you said, I think the general sentiment was very positive. It was very nice, number one, to have players – live players – outside of our Battlefield Labs and outside of our external and internal play test to play the game and to give feedback and to give different points of view on aspects that, maybe, we grew accustomed to as developers of this Battlefield 6.

What we handled was, and what I’ve been actively busy in, is a lot of input discussions. Where are we going to go with aim assist from a live standard product? Where are we going with weapon balancing? Where are we going with anything in terms of crossplay? Again, input discrepancies we… we ultimately want whatever platform, whatever input that you choose, to have the best Battlefield experience possible, and that rings true with our team, and that rings true with the product as a whole.

So, [there were] a lot of discussions about active tuning, a lot of discussions around changing up loadouts. You saw the discussion about bringing Recon’s respawn beacon and moving that to Assault, and that’s a byproduct of open beta. That’s an understanding of what players wanted, and that’s based on the active feedback that we got data-wise from the open beta. A lot of those discussions are still active and will continue to happen post-launch and as we move towards a live product.

Christian Buhl: I’ll say, Matthew touched on this a bit, but open beta was not the first time we started collecting data from players, right? We’ve been running BF Labs since the beginning of the year. Obviously, it was a much smaller player set, but it was just real players, right? We sent out massive amounts of information, of invites, and got a ton of real players to join. And so we’ve just been, ever since the first BF Labs event, ‘Put it out there. See what players like. See what they don’t like. See what they react to.’ That’s kind of been how we’ve been treating BF Labs, and then open beta was just the same thing at several orders of magnitude larger.

In a similar vein, we’ve, all along in BF Labs and open beta, been collecting performance data, stability and crash data, and we identify performance fixes or crashes that we need to fix. So, we’re using it to improve our launch, and our plan is for… obviously, all the qualitative feedback we got from open beta, we’re going to react to a bunch of that. Obviously, [we’re] not going to do everything every player asks for, but we’re hearing what people are asking for and trying to make the best decisions. But then we’re also improving our performance and stability, so there should be… you know. I’m thrilled that the open beta performed as well as it did from a framerate perspective. It should be even better for launch.

IGN: I think there were a few specific talking points that came out of the beta that I do want to touch on. There was a lot of talk about maps being too small. Obviously, there are more maps in the launch build of the game, but I am wondering if some of those maps that we saw, the team looked at that feedback and said, ‘Well, we’re going to rearrange some of these maps. We’re going to make these maps feel less cluttered, or maybe there’s more cover.’ Is that the kind of thing you guys looked at?

Christian Buhl: I don’t know if you know the specific answer to that question, Matthew, but I do know that, first of all, there was feedback. The maps were too small, and yeah, in hindsight, maybe we should have put one of the bigger maps into the beta so that we didn’t get that feedback. But we’ve always been planning on doing bigger maps, right? We recently tested some of the bigger maps in BF Labs, and there were a bunch of reasons we picked the maps we did for open beta, including, partly, the maps that were furthest along and most ready to show in open beta.

So, I don’t think we need to react to the maps-aren’t-big-enough feedback by making changes to the small maps. They’re just small maps. They’re different experiences, right? We do have those big maps, those big experiences. We did run them on BF Labs over the last, I believe, two weekends. So, we’ve gotten feedback on those and want to make sure that those are good for the large map experience. I do know that, on all the maps, we did collect feedback on… I mean, I can’t answer specific questions about specifically what we changed, but we did collect a bunch of feedback and make changes. I don’t know, Matthew, if you have any more specific examples.

Matthew Nickerson: We looked at maps via game mode. If an M-COM on a certain map was maybe a little bit too close or in an incorrect position that we deemed. There have been changes in that regard to more smooth out the overall gameplay experience when it came to maps supporting multiple modes. We want to really make sure that each map shines, and there are going to be choke points, there are going to be rough spots, there are going to be really sick holds that are going to happen, maybe, on the last push of Rush or something. But there have been active discussions and active changes when it comes to massaging things a little bit, M-COMs or moving points around when it came to certain feedback points that were very apparent. You know, ‘Hey, this little adjustment had to happen.’

IGN: One of the updates you guys had recently was that the server browser and things like that were going to be looked at in Portal. How has that gone? Is the server browser in Portal going to be ready at launch?

Matthew Nickerson: Just generally, the tests have gone well. We put out that Portal will have a server browser, and then there will be verified experiences also within the server browser.

Christian Buhl: I think to answer your question, generally, people are saying they want server browser. We know they want it. We want to give it to them. One of the challenges is, when people say, ‘I want server browser,’ it means different things to different people, right? So, we’re trying to figure out, ‘OK, what are the best ways we can give people, most people, what they want, and it is healthy for the game?’

I’m not a designer myself, so I can’t tell you exactly where we’re leading and heading with this, but we will have a server browser experience. We think it’s going to be something that most players are going to be happy with. So, if you want, you could just click a button and jump into a game. If you want, you can go look for a specific game in a specific server. We’re going to give people a lot of options.

Matthew Nickerson: There’s also customized search, as we saw between the two open betas. That coming online – that really helped improve match times massively and just overall quality of matches. There are going to be multiple options to see how players want to experience their Battlefield.

IGN: Can you talk about any of the highlights coming up for Labs testing? Can you talk about or tease any notable features or mechanics you guys are looking into?

Christian Buhl: I think we actually only have one Labs test scheduled, and I can’t say what that’s going to be. You’ll probably figure it out in a couple of days, but I guess all I could do is tease that I can’t say what it is that we’re testing.

IGN: The game has been in development for years. What are some of the challenges the team has had to overcome in the long road to Battlefield 6? This one, more than others in recent history, really feels like an important game in this series.

Christian Buhl: As you pointed out, we knew, have known, for a long time that we really had to nail this Battlefield. We learned a lot of lessons from 2042. The launch didn’t go well. The game wasn’t performance-stable. There were things we weren’t listening to players on that they wanted. I think the challenge has been to, well, first, to build a stable and performing game, to figure out a plan and a path for how we get information from players. That’s where BF Labs came from, right? We got to make sure that we’re putting the game in front of players, getting feedback from them. We put a ton of effort into stability and performance testing. We built huge farms of PCs and consoles so that we could test the game over and over. But I think overall, the biggest challenge has been just the scale and scope of the game work that we’re building.

In the past, Battlefield was built primarily by DICE, with assistance from Ripple Effect and Criterion and some other studios along the way, but this time, we’re building it as four studios all working together. We’re building it all across the world. It’s had some rough edges. It’s had some challenges, where we’ve messed up on things, but we’ve also been able to combine the expertise of, obviously, DICE with all their deep expertise in Battlefield. Studios, like Criterion and Motive, with their deep history of single-player games and the racing games and the wide-open worlds that they have there. Ripple Effect, with our Portal background.

We’ve been able to combine all these studios with different ideas and different expertise together. It’s been a huge challenge, but it’s also been just awesome to see that we’ve been able to bring four studios together to make a game that is way, way bigger and way better than any of us could have built on our own.

Matthew Nickerson: From the design side, a lot of it’s been testing your theories and improving them, and it’s been a lot of player-driven feedback. It was also a post-mortem look at 2042. What did we hit from crossplay, from aim assist, from weapon balance, from gunplay, and where do we move on from that? We obviously, again, learned a lot from 2042, as Christian said. What can we elevate? What did we do right, and what did we do wrong, and take a step back. But also, really player-driven feedback focus, to prove our theories that this is the direction that we want to go for Battlefield 6. Again, just really heavy play testing, at least from the design side.

Obviously, we play test multiple times a day. We have a very heavy emphasis on controller play testing now because that is a huge part of this crossplay puzzle and this piece that we really want to deliver on. So, no matter how familiar or unfamiliar you are with controller, because you’re a keyboard player or anything, at the end of the day, we really need that controller feedback, and that was integrating controller into everything that we do from the design side was definitely a huge change compared to 2042.

Christian Buhl: I mean, these controllers [motions to nearby controllers on a shelf] are here because I use them for play tests on my PC. I do mostly play testing on PC, but I use controller so that we make sure that we were experiencing input.

IGN: A lot of that info is reassuring for someone like me who was there for Battlefield 4 at launch. I do wonder if maybe you can get a bit more specific for those people who have seen Battlefield’s history and have seen troubled launches here and there. What can you say to reassure console players, specifically, who are worried about jumping in day one?

Christian Buhl: I could say we’ve been thinking about console and the console experience from the start of Battlefield 6. It has been a top-of-the-line thing. We have to build this game as if it was made primarily for console players. Obviously, we’re still also thinking about PC players, but in the past, frankly, Battlefield was built as a PC game and then ported to console, and it probably felt like that. That is not how this game was built. We built this from the beginning with the idea in mind that this is going to be on both console and PC. It has to feel and play like it is a console game that was built to be a console game.

Matthew Nickerson: We have a saying here in the office, in Ripple Effect when I joined the team, that I created, called ‘Secretly Console First.’ It’s a little moniker that kind of pokes fun. We don’t want to, obviously, tear down or destroy any of the legacy that Battlefield has, which is, first, a PC game, but we really have to care about console at the end of the day. We’ve been putting in the reps, putting in the work, just like Christian said. Console has been at the forefront of Battlefield 6 development since day one, and really, we’re honed and we are well-crafted in providing this product at the highest quality possible.

Christian Buhl: Actually, I think it was about two years ago, we checked to see how many people were playing with controllers on a daily basis for their play tests, and then we sent people controllers. We said, ‘Here, use the controller.’ We wanted people to use controllers as the default for their for their play tests. So, obviously, you might still be playing on PC, but you’re playing with a controller. That was a big part of our play testing push, is to get people using controllers.

IGN: I think Battlefield 6 has had a particularly interesting rollout for a Battlefield game. Specifically, I feel like there have been a lot of leaks, small and big. I’m wondering, how does the team, how does EA, feel about leaks like that? Did the team go to any lengths to try and tighten the lid?

Christian Buhl: I could talk about that a lot, actually. I could talk about that. I’ll start by saying we did not want leaks, but we also knew that the most important thing was to get player feedback through BF Labs, right? We had, actually, discussions, I think about a year or two ago… I guess it was maybe about two years ago, about how much we were going to do to prevent leaks versus how much we were going to do to get the game in front of players. We made a very deliberate decision that we were going to bias very heavily towards putting things in front of players and getting their feedback, even though we knew things would leak.

I remember, at one point, making a big presentation that said, ‘What will leak? Everything.’ Like, we just started with that assumption that things would leak. Now, to be clear, we didn’t want things to leak. We weren’t seeking leaks, but we knew that the most important thing was to get the game in front of players, get real feedback from players, get real telemetry, real data, and that had to come at any cost, including the fact that things would leak. So, that’s been our approach up until now, is like, ‘We don’t want leaks. We are doing some work to make it a little bit harder for people to leak things,’ but our priority has been: Get the game in front of players even though we know it will end up leaking.

IGN: The Call of Duty team appears to be backing away from including goofy skins for this year’s Black Ops 7. It’s, I feel like, all anyone can talk about, even in the Battlefield community because you guys have, conversely, doubled down on gritty realism. How does it feel for the team to see other shooters backtracking from the goofy aesthetic, while Battlefield sticks to its guns? Does it feel like this commitment to a more grounded shooter experience is paying off so far?

Christian Buhl: I think we’re really happy with where we are. We want to be a gritty, realistic shooter. Other games can and should be whatever they want to be, right? [laughs] Like we’re not, I don’t know… Fortnite is pretty goofy, and that game is pretty good. So, I think where we end up is we’re pretty happy with where we are. We are a gritty, grounded, realistic shooter. That’s what we intend to be, and that’s what the game is going to look like for a while.

Matthew Nickerson: From the design side, we are aware of what other products are doing, but we’re really focused on what works for Battlefield at the end of the day. We’re not chasing trends. We’re not chasing other products. I think a perfect example of the skins that we’re still committed to releasing is the Road to Battlefield 6 event that’s going on in 2042. Those are 30 premium skins that will give a player a taste of what is more to come when we talk about cosmetics in the Battlefield 6 product line. Generally, I think, from a design perspective, we’re doing us. We’re staying in our lane, doing us at the end of the day.

IGN: Auto-spotting is another topic I see brought up in the community. Is that being tweaked at all? Is it going to be like it was in the beta? How are you guys looking to address that feedback, if at all?

Matthew Nickerson: I can answer that because we just talked about it and just submitted fixes and changes for it – literally just last week. So, yeah, we definitely reduced the range and overall reduced the power. We found out a lot in open beta that it was obviously very strong, just like players said. Really, players ended up just shooting Doritos. Light environments, dark environments – they were just like, ‘Hey, aim at the Dorito. You’re going to hit something at the end of the day.’

We definitely don’t want that for Battlefield, so we’ve definitely reduced the duration, reduced the range – everything across the board to really hit that system and align it more appropriately with what we want. Again, we want the information. It’s important to ping players, but it’s got to be an active part of Battlefield. It can’t just be a fire-and-forget sweep across the whole thing [and] everyone’s lit up. That was very apparent in open beta, so we’ve made some considerable changes to the system. In terms of strength overall, we’ve definitely toned it down.

IGN: I think my favorite and a lot of my friends’ favorite joke to come out of the beta was the meme where a player spawns, they look up in the mountains, and they see an ocean of sniper glints. I’m curious what you guys think when you see a meme like that. Do you think, ‘Oh, my gosh, that’s so funny,’ or is it more in-depth, like, ‘We don’t want players to have that feeling.’

Christian Buhl: [laughs] I feel like it’s both. I saw those. I thought it was hilarious. Obviously, we needed to fix some things and tune some things, so it was funny to see players react in a humorous way to those things but also great to get that feedback and say, ‘We need to tune down snipers or we need to change the glints so it’s not like…’ you know? I saw those memes with the hillside just full of these giant glares, so I think it’s both.

Matthew Nickerson: Definitely from the design team, we loved sending those around, internally. They’re really, really funny, and they kind of magnify, ‘Hey, we still have work to do, but also…’ For example, with the sniper glint stuff, we knew it was too strong, so we stepped it back. We knew the bullet tracer effect was too strong, so we stepped it back.

My favorite one is just the guy that has a shotgun that turns into a multi-utility thing. He blows the guy in half, turns around, blows up the building with a shotgun, and holds it in awe of the power of the shotgun in Battlefield 6. At the end of the day, it keeps us honest. It keeps us, like, ‘Hey, we still have work to do. There are things that players are, maybe, not vibing with or are vibing with in different capacities.’ We’ve taken a look at the shotgun, also, to kind of address that. From a design standpoint and from the team, we love this stuff. The community is engaged; we are engaged.

IGN: I have to imagine it’s quite the balancing act, deciding when to take these funny things out or just tweak them. I have friends, who I played the beta with, who had never played Battlefield, and they couldn’t get into it until they discovered they could kill people with the defibrillators. Those fun moments like that, I’m sure, weave their way into the game all the time.

Matthew Nickerson: [laughs] Definitely.

Christian Buhl: One of the coolest parts about Battlefield is how open it is and how you can play it so many different ways. The destruction, obviously, opens up a lot of that. I remember, in one of our internal playtests, somebody posted a video where they looked in a room, a bunch of people are there, they ran into the next room, blew a hole in the wall, and then shot them from the back. You also could have just gone guns blazing into that room, right? It’s just so awesome in Battlefield how you can go do the same thing a bunch of different ways and play in a bunch of different ways. I love it.

Matthew Nickerson: There have been some really great clips from the beta, especially when it came to funny physics and interactions. A tank blowing up and then the whole top spinning. We’ve had discussions about, ‘Should we fix that? Maybe it looks a little bit unpolished,’ and we’ve decided on a lot of those to keep them just because they’re funny. It is classic Battlefield moments that you can’t get in any other product. We’re going to keep it. We’re going to preserve it.

IGN: Another talking point I’ve seen a lot about is open and locked classes. What do you guys think about that discussion, when you see so many people who want classes to have locked weapons and things like that?

Matthew Nickerson: It’s philosophy at the end of the day. We don’t really want to make a decision or really pigeonhole how you want to experience Battlefield. I know we’re supporting both open and closed weapon sets in Portal and in different game modes. We ran a giant telemetry, data collection test in open beta, and we posted those results.

I think it’s ongoing, and I think it’ll continually evolve, but again, from a design side, we don’t want to make a decision for the player base at the end of the day. We want to support both moving forward, and again, a key mantra for Battlefield 6 is, ‘Play Battlefield how you want to,’ so we’re making sure we support both open and closed systems. We just don’t want to make the decision for the player.

IGN: Is there anything else you want to say, before launch happens, about Battlefield 6, how we got here, what this game means, or what players can expect on consoles at launch?

Christian Buhl: I guess I’ll say we said internally, from the beginning, that our goal was to make the best Battlefield ever, and I think we did it. This Battlefield is amazing. It’s huge, the single-player is awesome, the multiplayer is amazing.

You’ve got a huge variety of maps and modes and weapons, and we built it from the beginning, as Matthew said, to be secretly console first. We made sure that this felt like a game that was built for console and not a PC game that was ported to console.

Matthew Nickerson: For me, and I think for the team in general, we’re just really excited for launch. We’re really excited about our unique version or vision for crossplay, when it comes to different backend systems or aim assist or anything. We do some things a little bit differently that, I think, works really well for Battlefield.

We’re really excited to collect more data on that and move that needle in terms of where we need to go next. I’m also excited about the post-launch content. We have such a robust post-launch lineup that is just… There are some really, really cool gems in there, and I’m really excited to see how that continually shakes up the game as more and more information comes from us about that. I’m excited about that. I’m excited about launch and excited about the future of Battlefield, for sure.

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).

This year’s highly-anticipated Pokémon Legends: Z-A isn’t out for another month, but already there’s word of DLC.

A teaser trailer revealed during today’s major Nintendo Direct revealed two new Mega Evolutions for Raichu. These will star in Pokémon Legends: Z-A: Mega Dimension, which will offer additional story content for the game and, presumably, the ability to Mega Evolve a Raichu for yourself.

Mega Raichu X and Mega Raichu Y both have their corresponding letters as part of their design, as part of their lightning bolt-shaped tail and as a set of antlers, respectively. Exactly what else will be a part of the new content is unknown, though dimension-travelling Hoopa also makes an appearance in the teaser.

Pre-orders for the add-on begin today on the Nintendo eShop, and will unlock apparel items in Pokémon Legends: Z-A when it launches on October 16, 2025. The expansion’s story content will then unlock at a later date.

For more, check out everything announced at the Nintendo Direct September 2025.

More to follow…

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Nintendo kicked off today’s September 2025 Nintendo Direct with confirmation that Illumination is back working on a new Super Mario Bros. Movie titled The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.

It’s confirmation that arrives after rumours swept the internet yesterday, revealing that Nintendo will indeed be partnering up with the Minions movie studio yet again to create a movie adaptation of the classic 2007 Wii platformer. It’s slated to arrive in the U.S. April 3, 2026, and in Japan April 24, 2026, with its first trailer revealing a small amount of footage before showing off its official title and logo.

Today’s announcement also revealed some of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’s cast. You can read up on everything announced during the September 2025 Nintendo Direct here.

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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).

Gearbox has issued a statement in response to claims Borderlands 4 uses spyware, amid renewed concern over parent company Take-Two’s terms of service.

After a similar furore bubbled up in June, the company reiterated that while it understands there have been “some concerns” about Take-Two’s terms of service, it stressed that “maintaining transparency and confidence with the community here is always our goal, and we wanted to address some of these concerns.”

“Take-Two does not use spyware in its games,” the statement began. “Take-Two’s Privacy Policy applies to all labels, studios, games, and services across all media and platform types such as console, PC, mobile app, and website. The Privacy Policy identifies the data activities that may be collected, but this does not mean that every example is collected in each game or service.”

Take-Two provides this information to ensure “transparency to players,” as well as to “comply with its legal obligations,” Gearbox insisted.

“For example, player and device identifiers are collected in part to ensure the game is compatible with each player’s media, platform or website browser type,” it continued. “It allows us to better understand how players play games, and to personalize the user experience (like having usernames show up!). Account credentials are collected from users who choose to create accounts with Take-Two and its labels.”

The statement also touched upon “abusive mods,” which seems to be a catch-all term for hacks, cheats, or exploits. Consequently, Take-Two’s terms of service “prohibit mods that allow users to gain an unfair advantage, negatively impact the ability of other users to enjoy the game as intended, or allow users to gain access to content that the user is not entitled to. We do this to protect the integrity of the game experience for all users. Take-Two generally does not seek to take action against mods that are single-player only, non-commercial, and respect the intellectual property (IP) rights of its labels and third parties.”

Despite these concerns, Borderlands 4 got off to a big start on Steam, with a higher peak concurrent player number than any other Borderlands game on Valve’s platform. However, Borderlands 4 is currently on a ‘mixed’ Steam review rating, and while some negative reviews revolve around the Take-Two terms of service issue, most have to do with poor PC performance.

If you are delving into Borderlands 4 don’t go without our updated hourly SHiFT codes list. We’ve also got a huge interactive map ready to go and a badass Borderlands 4 planner tool courtesy of our buds at Maxroll. Plus check out our expert players’ choices for which character to choose (no one agreed).

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.

Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet will be the studio’s biggest and “maybe” most expensive game ever, with creator Neil Druckmann hailing the new project as the “most ambitious game we’ve ever made.”

“What can I say and not say? I can tell you we’re in the thick of it. We’re making it, we’re playing it. We’re firing on all cylinders,” Druckmann told Variety in a new interview. “I’ve said this before, but I really mean it, I’m really feeling it right now: It’s the most ambitious game we’ve ever made. It’s the most expansive game we’ve ever made, maybe the most expensive, by the time we finish it.”

And with both The Last of Us and Uncharted getting live-action adaptations, Druckmann — who recently announced he will not be creatively involved in the upcoming Season 3 of HBO’s The Last of Us — was keen to stress that while he didn’t want to “put the cart in front of the horse” and is keen to ensure Intergalactic is “a fantastic video game first,” another Naughty Dog game could become a movie or a series if he has “the right partnership.”

“I’m sure if Intergalactic is successful, you will see it again,” he added. “Whether that will be our next game right after that, I can’t say, and I leave that door open.”

The cost of AAA video game development, including first-party Sony games, remains one of the hottest topics within the industry. Microsoft’s answer is to go multiplatform with its Xbox games, releasing them on rival consoles as well as PC. Sony is late to the party on this front, refusing, for the most part, to release its PlayStation games on PC at the same time. However, it has shown wriggle room on that front recently, with its live service games like Helldivers 2 coming out on PC at the same time as PS5. Helldivers 2 even ended up on Xbox in what was a first for Sony.

As former president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America Shawn Layden has previously said, when a video game’s costs exceed $200 million — as it sounds like Intergalactic will — “exclusivity is your Achilles’ heel.”

“It reduces your addressable market,” Layden said at the time, citing the success of Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2. “Particularly when you’re in the world of live service gaming or free-to-play. Another platform is just another way of opening the funnel, getting more people in. In a free-to-play world, as we know, 95% of those people will never spend a nickel. The business is all about conversion. You have to improve your odds by cracking the funnel open.”