The former PlayStation Vita exclusive and action RPG Freedom Wars Remastered is launching next week on the Switch eShop and if you’re planning on downloading this one, you might be interested to know the file size.
According to Nintendo’s official website, it will require around 4.6 GB of free space on your system. If you want a physical copy, the option right now is to import the Japanese release. This particular version of the game will also contain English language support.
The free-to-play MOBA Pokémon Unite is still adding new Pokémon and the next one joining the roster will be Galarian Rapidash.
This psychic/fairy-type evolves from a Galarian Ponyta and was originally introduced during the Pokémon Sword and Shield generation. This new pick in Unite is scheduled to join the fray on 23rd January 2025 – so later this month.
The first weekend of 20245 is here, which makes today a great time to check out the latest deals! Here are the best deals for Saturday, January 4.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak for $41.99
The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak is on sale this weekend at Amazon for $41.99. This entry in the long-running Trails series is a solid place to start, especially with Daybreak II due out next month. If you’re searching for your next RPG, this is a great option!
Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics for $34
You can score Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics for only $34 today at Amazon. This collection packs in seven different titles, including the beloved Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes. At last, you can play these classic titles on modern platforms.
EPOMAKER Shadow-X Gasket Mechanical Keyboard for $42.99
This EPOMAKER Shadow-X keyboard is perfect to switch up your setup with some color. The keyboard can be used either wirelessly or wired, with a 3,000mAh battery to support hours of use. Additionally, there’s even a color screen that displays settings, specs, and more at just a glance.
Belkin MagSafe 3-in-1 Charger Stand for $65.99
If you own an iPhone, Apple Watch, and a pair of Apple AirPods, this is the ultimate accessory for you. The Belkin MagSafe 3-in-1 Charger Stand can charge all of your devices wirelessly with one device. It’s perfect for placing on your nightstand, or even for bringing with you during a trip away from home. Say goodbye to the days of one cord per device.
Dragon Quest Illustrations: 30th Anniversary Edition for $23.82
Featuring 240 pages of artwork from Akira Toriyama, Dragon Quest Illustrations: 30th Anniversary Edition is the ultimate gift for any fan of the iconic RPG series. This book features over 500 different illustrations from Toriyama, stretching from Dragon Quest all the way to Dragon Quest XI.
Samsung 98″ TV for $1997.99
This Samsung 98-Inch Class 4K Crystal DU9000 Series TV has hit an all-time low this weekend, priced at $1997.99. Not everyone has room for a massive 98″ TV, but if you do, this is a solid option, especially for the price.
Apple Watch Series 10 for $359
Amazon has the Apple Watch Series 10 on sale for $359 this weekend, which nets you $70 off this extremely popular device. Series 10 marked Apple’s first wide-angle OLED display on Apple Watch, with the device itself being the thinnest watch yet. If you’re not an Apple Watch owner or someone who has an older model, this is the perfect time to score an upgrade.
Persona 5 Royal for $14.88
Walmart has digital Nintendo Switch copies of Persona 5 Royal available on sale for only $14.88. Acting as the definitive version of P5, Persona 5 Royal is one of the must-play RPG experiences of the last generation. This game offers well over 100 hours of content, making this an excellent deal.
With 2025 looming, Star Wars fans have a whole new year’s worth of content to look forward to. Unfortunately, 2025 isn’t shaping up to be the franchise’s biggest year. With no new movies on the docket and only one live-action series confirmed for release, the pickings are looking a little slim.
But that’s not to say there’s nothing exciting on the horizon. The release of Andor Season 2 alone is reason for Star Wars fans to celebrate like the Rebels dancing on Endor. Let’s take a closer look at what is coming in 2025, and the many Star Wars projects we hope to learn more about in the next 12 months.
Andor Returns for Season 2
This is the big one. The Star Wars slate may be a little sparse in 2025, but it’s hard to complain too much when we’re getting a sequel to what is widely regarded as the best Star Wars project Disney has released so far. That’s right, Andor Season 2 is finally dropping in April 2025.
Season 2 chronicles the second half of this deep, introspective origin story for Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor. If Season 1 was the story of how a young Cassian became radicalized and joined the fledgling Rebel Alliance, then Season 2 will show us the dangerous missions he undertook leading up to the events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Fittingly, with the series moving closer to the time period of Rogue One, we’ll see more familiar faces from that movie pop up in Season 2. Most notably, Alan Tudyk will reprise the role of K-2SO, as we learn how Cassian first met this eccentric Imperial assassin droid. We’re also looking forward to seeing Ben Mendelsohn don his cape once more as Death Star project manager Director Orson Krennic.
Fans can expect Season 2 to cover a lot of ground, with multiple time jumps unfolding over the course of the season and the final batch of episodes set in the days leading up to Rogue One. In other words, don’t expect a Season 3. But do expect a Star Wars story that continues to explore the ordinary men and women who lit the spark of rebellion in a time of great darkness.
More Star Wars: Visions
More Andor is great, but what about the animated side of things? With The Bad Batch wrapping up in 2024, the one Star Wars animated series confirmed to return in 2025 is Star Wars: Visions. Once again, fans will be treated to an anthology of animated shorts featuring various animation studios interpreting the mythology of Star Wars through their own, unique lens.
Season 3 is said to bring Visions back to its roots as an anime anthology, whereas Season 2 took more of a global approach. The studios involved in Season 3 include Cyberpunk Edgerunners’ Studio Trigger and Attack on Titan’s WIT Studio, along with David Production, Kamikaze Douga, ANIMA, Kinema Citrus Co., Polygon Pictures, Production I.G, and Project Studio Q.
Will There Be More Star Wars TV?
However much we’re looking forward to more of Star Wars: Andor and Star Wars: Visions, there’s no getting around the fact that 2025 is looking pretty thin on the Star Wars TV front compared to previous years. In 2024 alone we got two live-action shows in The Acolyte and Skeleton Crew and two animated series in The Bad Batch: Season 3 and Tales of the Empire. But in 2025, we only have one confirmed live-action series and one animated series, plus the final two episodes of Skeleton Crew.
Is there a chance Disney has more shows planned we don’t know about? Possibly, at least on the animated front. Don’t forget that we only learned about the existence of Tales of the Empire a month before it dropped on Disney+ in May 2024. It’s entirely possible that they could pull the same trick again in 2025, announcing another “Tales of” anthology series to follow up Tales of the Empire and Tales of the Jedi.
There’s also the question of whether Disney has any long-form Star Wars animated projects in development right now. With The Bad Batch wrapping up last year, we have to imagine that Dave Filoni and others have been hard at work crafting the next great Star Wars animated saga. We probably won’t see that series release in 2025, but it’s possible we’ll at least get an announcement and maybe even see some early footage. That could be one of the big announcements at Star Wars Celebration Japan in April.
But on the live-action front, don’t expect any big surprises in 2025. The Acolyte was officially canceled, and with The Mandalorian saga continuing on the big screen, we don’t even know if The Mandalorian: Season 4 is ever happening. That just leaves Ahsoka: Season 2, and that series isn’t returning until 2026 at least.
The End of the High Republic
If things are looking a little barren on the live-action Star Wars front right now, the same certainly can’t be said for the publishing side of things. Fans of the Star Wars books and comics will be eating very well in 2025, particularly those following Lucasfilm Publishing’s High Republic saga. For the past several years, these books and comics have been exploring the triumphs and tribulations of the Jedi hundreds of years before the Star Wars movies, and it all comes to an end soon.
Look for several major High Republic novels to be released in 2025, including Charles Soule’s The High Republic: Trials of the Jedi, Claudia Gray’s The High Republic: Into the Light, and Justina Ireland’s The High Republic: A Valiant Vow. Of these, Trials of the Jedi is the one most worth keeping an eye on, as it serves as the climax of the entire High Republic initiative. This novel will chronicle the final battle between the Jedi and the Nihil and the Nameless. Look for Trials of the Jedi to be released on June 17.
Not to be outdone, Marvel Comics has quite an ambitious Star Wars lineup planned for 2025. In 2024, most of Marvel’s ongoing Star Wars comics were exploring the period between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Now that those books have ended, Marvel is casting a wider net and branching out to multiple Star Wars eras in 2025.
Kicking things off, look for Marvel to wrap up the limited series Star Wars: The Battle of Jakku in January. This series has been busy fleshing out the final major battle between the dying Empire and the New Republic two years after Return of the Jedi, and we’ll see the climax unfold in writer Alex Segura and artist Jethro Morales and Leonard Kirk’s The Battle of Jakku: Last Stand.
From there, Marvel is veering in two wildly different directions with its newest ongoing Star Wars comics. First, writer Marc Guggenheim and artist Madibek Musabekov are heading to the Prequel era in Star Wars: Jedi Knights. Set before the events of The Phantom Menace, the series will follow numerous members of the Jedi Order, including Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, Mace Windu, and Shaak Ti. The series even focuses on Count Dooku before his defection from the Jedi Order.
Elsewhere, Marvel is venturing deep into the era of the Sequel Trilogy for Charles Soule and Luke Ross’ Star Wars: Legacy of Vader. Set in between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, the series explores Kylo Ren’s struggle as the newly crowned Supreme Leader of the First Order and his quest to recommit himself to the Dark Side following his battles with Rey and Luke Skywalker. Soule previously fleshed out Ben Solo’s Dark Side origins in 2020’s Star Wars: The Rise of Kylo Ren, so consider this a sequel of sorts.
We have to assume these aren’t the only new Star Wars comics Marvel will be launching in 2025, as the publisher has tended to publish four or five ongoing titles at any given time. Will Doctor Aphra get another solo series? Will we see other books fleshing out the blank canvas that is the post-Return of the Jedi era? Only time will tell on that front.
The Future of Star Wars Games
If 2025 is shaping up to be a relatively quiet year on the movie and TV front, it’s not looking any better in terms of video game releases. In fact, there are no Star Wars games confirmed for release in 2024.
About all fans have to look forward to at the moment is new DLC for Star Wars Outlaws. According to Ubisoft’s DLC roadmap, fans can expect a new story campaign called “A Pirate’s Fortune” to release in Spring 2025. This campaign focuses on fan-favorite pirate villain (or perhaps he’s more of an anti-hero) Hondo Ohnaka as he bumps into Kay Vess.
Ubisoft has yet to reveal what, if any, new Outlaws content is planned beyond “A Pirate’s Fortune.” Are there even more adventures planned for Kay and her motley crew, or do the lukewarm sales numbers spell doom for Outlaws’ ongoing future? We’ll have to wait for future announcements to learn more.
Beyond that, all we can do is hope that 2025 brings with it news about other upcoming Star Wars games. We know EA is developing a third game in the Star Wars Jedi series. But with there being four years between the release of 2019’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and 2023’s Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, it’s probably too much to hope the new game will actually release in 2025. At best, we might see early footage of the game and get a better idea of when in the Star Wars timeline it takes place.
We’re also crossing our fingers for news on the oft-delayed remake of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch confirmed in 2024 that the game is still in active development, despite rumors to the contrary. But what state is the game in right now, and when will we see footage of the remake in action? Hopefully, 2025 brings with it some good news on the KOTOR front.
And let’s not forget Quantic Dream’s Star Wars: Eclipse, another title that was announced and then seemingly vanished off the face of the Earth. Will 2025 be the year Eclipse finally rears its head again, or will it go the way of so many other canceled Star Wars projects?
What About the Star Wars Movies?
2025 won’t deliver any new Star Wars theatrical releases, which at this point is nothing new. On the theatrical side, the franchise has been dormant since the release of The Rise of Skywalker back in 2019. But that’s not to say Lucasfilm hasn’t announced plenty of new Star Wars movies in recent years. It’s worth looking at what’s currently in the pipeline and how likely we are to get an update in 2025.
The Mandalorian & Grogu
First, there’s the lone Star Wars movie that’s actually in production right now, The Mandalorian & Grogu. This big-screen spinoff of The Mandalorian continues the shared story of the two heroes after the events of The Mandalorian: Season 3. Co-creator Jon Favreau is directing the film, which is currently slated for release on May 22, 2026. With any luck, we should see a teaser trailer for the film at some point in 2025, possibly as early as Star Wars Celebration Japan.
Dave Filoni’s Mando-Verse Movie
Not to be outdone, Favreau’s partner Dave Filoni is directing his own live-action movie, one expected to tie together characters and threads from The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, The Book of Boba Fett, and other projects from that era. Don’t expect much news on this movie in the foreseeable future, however, as Filoni has to focus on Ahsoka: Season 2 first.
James Mangold’s Star Wars Movie
Logan director James Mangold is helming a movie set in the distant past of the Star Wars universe, revealing the origins of the Jedi Order and reportedly featuring a “Biblical” scope. Lucasfilm may announce a writer for the movie in 2025, but don’t expect more updates than that.
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s New Jedi Order Movie
Daisy Ridley is reprising the role of Rey Skywalker in a new movie set 15 years after the events of The Rise of Skywalker. Ms. Marvel’s Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is directing. Hopefully, we’ll see some updates about the film in 2025, but it’s unclear where in the pipeline it currently falls.
Simon Kinberg’s Star Wars Trilogy
X-Men producer Simon Kinberg has been tapped to oversee a new trilogy of Star Wars movies. Despite early rumors the trilogy will directly continue the Skywalker Saga, IGN was able to confirm it’s instead meant to focus on a new storyline. It’s still early days on this project, so we’re not expecting to hear much about Kinberg’s trilogy in 2025.
Taika Waititi’s Star Wars Movie
Thor: Ragnarok’s Taika Waititi is apparently still set to venture into the Star Wars universe, though it’s been years since we’ve gotten any substantive updates on this mysterious project. Will that finally change in 2025?
And that’s what you can expect from the Star Wars franchise in 2025. It’s a relatively quiet year, but there are still some very cool projects for fans to look forward to in the new year. What Star Wars story are you most excited to experience in 2025? Let us know by voting in our poll and posting down in the comments.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket byfollowing @jschedeen on BlueSky.
Reformatted and revised with a couple of new additions. Enjoy!
If you’re looking for a change of pace and some welcome distraction from everyday life, few mediums offer such engrossing, ongoing escapism as video games. Even the best books have an ending, but some games can go on almost indefinitely and come to form a calming part of our daily routines.
Sonic’s movie career started as a nightmare but quickly turned around when the team behind the original live-action movie changed his look. It’s now morphed into three entire films and following the release of Sonic 3 late last month, this series has just hit another big-screen milestone.
According to Box Office Mojo data (via Reddit), the Sonic 3 movie has now made an estimated $280 million worldwide – and combined with previous sales of the franchise (close to $320 million for Sonic in 2020 and $405 million for Sonic 2 in 2022) this apparently makes it a billion-dollar movie franchise!
2025 is just kicking off and various video game companies and industry figures have been sharing their plans for the year ahead.
As for the Japanese developer Inti Creates, it hopes to announce “several titles” this year. Unsurprisingly a major focus will be placed on its signature style “2D action games”. Here’s exactly what the CEO and president Takuya Aizu had to say about this in a new year message on social media:
2024 is now over and that means the “Year of Shadow” and all of the celebrations related to the “Ultimate Lifeform” are winding down.
Sega originally announced this annual campaign in April 2024 and followed it up with all sorts of announcements, merchandise, and toys. Sonic fans got new Shadow-themed LEGO, toys, comics, and promotional events.
At last, it’s time for the most exciting live competitive event of the year. No, I don’t mean the Super Bowl – it’s time for Awesome Games Done Quick, the annual charity speedrunning marathon that features a week of talented gamers showing off the wildest things they can do with video games.
Games Done Quick (GDQ) has been running for 15 years now, since 2010. The event is a live broadcast speedrunning marathon, during which speedrunners take turns showing off beating video games as fast as possible, and often in wacky and especially impressive ways. In recent years, the events have shown off increasingly ambitious performances, including blindfolded or one-handed runs, two players using a single controller, showcases of tricky arcade games, and even speedruns performed by dogs.
The annual event is held to raise money for the Prevent Cancer foundation, having previously raised a record high of $3,442,033 in 2022, and $2,539,832 just last year. And this year’s marathon has some pretty ridiculous runs on the docket. There’s a run of Crazy Taxi backed by a live band, someone playing Elden Ring with a saxophone, new Super Mario Bros. Wii run while simultaneously playing piano, a two-players-one-controller run of Breath of the Wild, loads of randomizer races, and it all wraps up with a Map Randomizer Race between some of the best Super Metroid runners out there. If you’ve never watched GDQ before, it’s really worth tuning in.
AGDQ 2025 kicks off at 9:00 AM PT on Sunday, January 5 with a run of Pikmin on Nintendo Switch, followed by Portal 2. In fact, Sunday’s full of bangers: Kirby’s Air Ride follows, there’s an Astro Bot run, then The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, a run infamous for appearing at GDQ every years and getting shorter each time as the community discovers new, run-changing skips.
If I keep going I’ll just list every single run in the entire event, so here’s a quick list of highlights you should definitely check out. Definitely peak at the official website for a look at the full schedule, because there’s tons of great runs I didn’t list here, and the timing will be subject to change constantly throughout the week.
Sunday
9:00 AM PT: Pikmin – All Parts
10:24 AM: Portal 2 – Single player No SLA
1:56 PM: Ori and the Blind Forest – Randomizer World Tour 11
3:30 PM: Astro Bot – Any%
6:19 PM: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker – Any%
9:14 PM: Alan Wake 2: Night Springs – All Episodes
10:01 PM: Alan Wake 2: The lake House – Any%
Monday
9:54 AM PT: UFO 50 – Various Games Showcase
10:51 AM: Super Meat Boy – Any%
11:37 AM: Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS – SMC Any% No Auto
3:00 PM: Metroid Prime – Any% Inbounds Race
4:42 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Any% 2 Players 1 Controller
6:45 PM: Horizon: Forbidden Rest – NG+ Story
Tuesday
7:47 AM PT: Unicorn Overlord – Any% Story
8:26 AM: Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana – All Story Bosses
1:43 PM: New Super Mario Bros. Wii – Any% While Playing Piano
3:30 PM: Donkey Kong Counry: Tropical Freeze – Any% Original Mode
5:07 PM: Fallout: New Vegas – All Romances
5:52 PM: Super Mario 64 – A-Button Challenge TAS Showcase
6:27 PM: Rocket League – Workshop Map Speedrun Showcase
7:24 PM: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Main Quest
At 8:24 PM PT, GDQ will kick off a block of games that have been affectionally referred to in past years as “Awful Games Done Quick” or the “Awful Block.” These are games that are silly, janky, broken, or otherwise of questionable quality, and always make for some hilarious speedruns. The first run, Superman 64, you’ve probably heard of before, but the rest you may have not. The Awful Block runs throughout the night on Wednesday into very early Thursday morning. Speaking from experience, I highly recommend having insomnia and staying up all night to watch it. The block concludes with Kevin Costner’s Waterworld at 3:11 AM on Thursday.
Thursday
10:55 AM PT: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – All Dungeons
3:00 PM: Lies of P – Any% Glitchless
5:02 PM: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare – Any%
6:55 PM: CHUNITHM LUMINOUS PLUS – Arcade Showcase
Friday
2:36 AM PT: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth – Any% Easy
9:21 AM: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City – Tightened Vice
3:00 PM: Tetris: The Grand Master – Multi Game Showcase
4:00 PM: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe – 48 Tracks (DLC) 200cc, No Items
5:45 PM: Kaizo Mario World 3 – 100%
6:52 PM: jubeat copious APPEND – Showcase
8:07 PM: Super Mario World – 96 Exit Race
Saturday
Seriously, just stop sleeping and watch the entire day Saturday. I want to list every game here. It starts with Peggle Extreme and Metal Gear Solid, for pete’s sake! There’s not a bad thing on the schedule! Fine, fine, my editor said I have to narrow it down:
6:57 AM PT: Pokemon Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire – Any% Race
10:32 AM: Elden Ring – DLC Lockout Bingo
12:52 PM: Elden Ring – Saxophone Controlled Boss Showcase
1:27 PM: Crazy Taxi with Live Backing Band – Crazy Box
2:30 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – No Logic Randomizer
6:35 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom – Any%
7:55 PM: Super Metroid – Map Randomizer Race
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.
As we rang in the new year earlier this week, thousands of people seemed to be celebrating in an admittedly unusual way: by playing Valve’s 2018 TCG Artifact.
Then, as quickly as they started, the 12,000-ish individuals all stopped playing at once on January 3, leaving the game as empty as it had been at the end of 2024.
So why, then, is SteamDB suggesting that a free-to-play card game that is, by all accounts, close to dead, seeing wild spikes in users over very specific two-day periods?
As spotted by Forbes, Artifact Classic’s (the original, now free-to-play version of Artifact) player count suddenly spiked on December 31, jumping from a measly ~200 concurrent players up to the 5,000s, before spiking to a height of over 12,000. Artifact remained at around 11,000 concurrents through the second, before its playercount absolutely tanked back down to ~150 at midnight on January 3rd. What’s strange is that something almost exactly like this happened earlier this month, too: on December 14, player counts shot up to around 14,000, hung out there for about two days, and dive bombed again into the hundreds on the 17th.
So what’s really going on here? The actual answer is that no one really knows. The most prevalent community theory seems to be that it’s bots, though why someone would train bots to play Artifact isn’t exactly clear. One person suggested someone was training an AI to play the game “for shits and giggles” which is perhaps as good an explanation as any. Another person suggested the spikes were due to scam bots increasing playtime in random games in order to make their Steam accounts look legitimate for other purposes.
Another theory pointed out by multiple members of the Artifact subreddit is that the spike in players is due to pirates. Because certain video games require Steam authentication, in order to pirate those games, pirates will use the AppID/SDK of a different, free-to-play game to fool Steam into thinking they have a real copy. In this case, it’s being suggested they’re using Artifact. That said, this theory doesn’t entirely hold up, due to the extremely sudden spikes and then drops in activity at very precise times.
So the actual answer behind Artifact’s mysterious player numbers remains a mystery for now. We did reach out to Valve for comment, but did not hear back in time for publication. What is clear at least is that despite the numbers, Artifact itself doesn’t seem to be garnering any meaningful, real-world interest eight years after launch and four years after Valve effectively called it quits, even though the game itself was pretty fun at first. At least the bots, if they are indeed bots, in Artifact don’t seem to be bothering legitimate players, unlike the on-and-off situation over in Team Fortress 2.
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.
