Category: Video Games

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 Patch 5 Release Date Confirmed, New Screenshot Shows a Blood Raven Holding (Stealing?) Something Players Haven’t Seen in the Game So Far

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 publisher Focus Entertainment has confirmed a December 10 release date for the hotly anticipated Patch 5 and Dark Angels Chapter Pack, and released a new screenshot showing something players haven’t seen in the game yet.

Focus has said Patch 5 makes the recently released Neo-Volkite Pistol (the one players were using to recreate Ghostbusters) available in PvP, adds a new PvE Operation called Obelisk, the new Tzaangor Enlightened Majoris enemy, and the aforementioned Dark Angels Chapter Pack, which includes a unique armor set and banner for the Bulwark Class.

In a tweet, Focus released four new screenshots (below) showing off the new content, but there’s one image in particular that’s set tongues wagging within the community.

This image, below, shows a Blood Raven (the chapter created for Relic Entertainment’s Dawn of War series) holding what looks like a chalice in one hand and a pistol in the other, while staring down at a potential enemy. Whatever it is, the object is not currently in the game, at least not in a form that can be held by the player.

What could this chalice represent? Current theories include a raid-style mechanic for the new Operation (perhaps it needs to be held by a player for a certain amount of time). This would make sense in the context of what we know about the Operation from Focus itself. As a reminder, here’s what the publisher has said:

Called Obelisk, you’ll be sent to Demerium and your mission is to rotate a replica of the obelisk to disrupt the flow of energy protecting the Aurora device. This operation takes place in parallel to the final events of the campaign.

To reach the console control of the obelisk, you’ll have to make it through a tomb plunged into darkness. To make your progression even tougher, the Chaos forces see a new addition to their roster: the Tzaangor Enlightened, a new Majoris enemy! They will now appear in every PvE Operation with Chaos.

Perhaps the chalice the Blood Raven is holding in the image is used to light the way to the console, but this is purely speculation on my part. Either way, it looks like we’re seeing the Space Marine from the perspective of a downed enemy, which suggests it’s been obtained during a firefight or perhaps even stolen from something.

December 10, by the way, is also the release date of Amazon’s Secret Level anthology series, which includes a Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 animation that acts as a sequel to the events of the game. Check out IGN’s Secret Level review for more.

In September, Saber Chief Creative Officer Tim Willits told IGN how the breakout success of Space Marine 2 had “changed everything” for the company. Eagle-eyed fans have spotted the Space Marine chapter now all-but confirmed to get a cosmetic pack after the Dark Angels, too.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Sony Signed an Exclusivity Deal for GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas Because It Was ‘Worried’ About Xbox, Former Exec Reveals

Sony’s original PlayStation exclusivity deal for Grand Theft Auto 3 and the following two games in the series was in part a reaction to concern about Microsoft’s launch of the Xbox, a former executive has revealed.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, former PlayStation Europe boss Chris Deering (who was recently criticized for saying laid off developers should “drive an Uber” or “go to the beach for a year”) admitted Sony was concerned about the November 2001 launch of the original Xbox, and sought exclusivity deals with third-party publishers to bolster the appeal of the PlayStation 2.

“We were worried when we saw Xbox coming,” Deering said. “We knew exclusivity was the name of the game in a lot of fields, like Sky TV with sports. Just as Christmas was approaching when Xbox would launch, a few of us went out to our favourite third-party publishers and developers, and we asked them, ‘How would you like a special deal if you keep your next-generation game on PlayStation exclusive for a two-year period?’ And one of the deals we made was with Take-Two for the next three Grand Theft Auto games. At the time, it wasn’t clear that Grand Theft Auto 3 was going to be as huge as it was, because it used to be a top-down game.

“It was very lucky for us. And actually lucky for them, because they got a discount on the royalty they paid. Those deals aren’t uncommon in industries with platforms. Including today with things like social media.”

As a result of this deal, Grand Theft Auto 3 released in October 2001 as a PS2 exclusive, a month before the original Xbox came out. The game released in May 2002 on PC, and then, two years after the PlayStation launch and after this exclusivity deal ended, in November 2003 for the Xbox.

As Deering mentioned, Sony’s Grand Theft Auto exclusivity deal was for three games, so included Vice City, which came out in October 2002 for the PS2 first, and San Andreas, which released in October 2004 for the PS2 first. Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City hit Xbox together as a pack late 2003, with San Andreas launching in June 2005.

The deal worked out perfectly for both Sony and Rockstar parent company Take-Two, as Deering suggests. Indeed, San Andreas ended up the best-selling PS2 game of all time, Vice City the third best, and Grand Theft Auto 3 the fifth best. Only Gran Turismo came close the the sales the Grand Theft Auto games posted on PS2.

The exclusivity deal also helped cement Grand Theft Auto as a PlayStation-first series, and while Grand Theft Auto 4 and Grand Theft Auto 5 launched on PlayStation and Xbox at the same time, Rockstar’s open-world crime epic is still strongly associated with Sony’s consoles, even now. In fact, a number of Grand Theft Auto games made IGN’s Top 100 Best PlayStation Games of All Time list.

But what about the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6? It’s due out on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S at the same time in the fall of 2025, but marketing deals with either Sony or Microsoft have yet to be announced, if they exist at all.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Indiana Jones And The Great Circle review: a grand adventure that keeps faith with the movies

Every fascist in this game has a cold. The Hitlerites and blackshirts of Indiana Jones And The Great Circle sneeze and cough as they patrol the dig sites of Gizeh, or the marble corridors of the Vatican. Although this is the Machine Games’ clever way of letting you know where your enemies are at all times, it is also mildly funny, as if all the Nazis have been secretly kissing each other, spreading the same rhinovirus from Italy to Egypt to Nepal and beyond. More than that, it’s a stubborn reminder that, despite the many hours of perfectly motion-captured cinematics that accompany all this, you are still playing a video game. A snotty tissue that separates the Indy of taut two-hour cinema and the Indy of a sweeping first-person punch ’em up that will take days to complete. All this is to say, you will notice the difference. But that might not matter; they’re both still Indiana Jones.

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Atari Hopes To Add Switch Touch Controls To RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic In The Future

Keep your arms inside the ride, for now.

Atari’s RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic came speeding onto Switch this week and, honestly, it’s an all-round good time. In our review, we praised the game’s endless creative freedom and its ability to bring hours of rollercoaster-building fun, but there was one small omission in the Switch port that left us scratching our heads: where the heck are the touch controls?

The new control scheme has had some good thought put into it, and we had no issues with the button inputs when playing on the big screen. But given that the 2016 original boasted touchscreen functionality on its smart device launch platforms and, you know, the Switch has a touchscreen, it does feel like a strange feature to not make the cut.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

‘We Never Expected Things to Go This Big During Early Access’ — Path of Exile 2 Dev Braces Itself for Over 1 Million Concurrent Players

The developer of Path of Exile 2 has warned players to brace themselves for server queues this weekend, with over one million concurrent players expected to hit the Early Access launch.

In a video message, Grinding Gear Games co-founder Jonathan Rogers spoke about anticipation for the action role-playing sequel surpassing the studio’s expectations, and expressed concern that its backend services could buckle under the weight of the Early Access release.

Path of Exile 2’s global release times set the launch for 11am PT today, December 6, and it’s at this point that the floodgates will open. Path of Exile 2 is already the top-selling game on Steam by revenue, suggesting Rogers’ concern is well-placed. Whether the game is up to the task of coping with what’s coming, however, remains to be seen, with sales still increasing, Rogers said.

“We’ve just reached one million Early Access redemptions,” Rogers revealed in the video message. “The support you have all shown for Path of Exile 2 Early Access is far beyond anything we could have ever predicted. However we want to be upfront with you all and let you know there may very well be queues over the weekend.

“There are probably going to be some queues during the launch weekend. Before our announcement, when we were ordering capacity, we really didn’t expect to have more than a million people online at the same time.

“We’ve already ordered way more cloud capacity, and those servers will be coming online very soon, but I do have some concerns about issues with the backend. We quite frankly don’t know what our backend services are going to be able to handle as we go above a million users.

“We’ve added more database shards, scaling everything we have up as far as it will go. But we’re really not sure what kind of limits we might hit. We never expected things to go this big during EA [Early Access].

“So I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you guys so much for believing in this project. If we do run into server issues at launch, just know that we’re going to be working as hard as we can to solve them.”

Path of Exile 2 is GGG’s hotly anticipated free-to-play action role-playing sequel set years after the original game. Players return to the world of Wraeclast and seek to end a spreading corruption, with six character classes, each with two Ascendancy Classes, available to play at the launch of Early Access later this week. There’s co-op for up to six players, but you can play solo. Check out IGN’s Path of Exile 2 preview, where we gave the Mercenary class a whirl and got a first look at the endgame, for more.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Marvel Rivals Launches to Huge Steam Concurrents

Marvel Rivals enjoyed an immediate huge launch, with over 440,000 concurrent players on Steam alone.

NetEase’s free-to-play Marvel-themed hero shooter saw a peak concurrent player count of 444,286 on Valve’s platform. But the true concurrent figure will be much higher given Marvel Rivals launched on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S also (Sony and Microsoft do not make player numbers public).

It seems to be going down well on Steam, too, with a ‘mostly positive’ user review rating from over 5,700 reviews (76% of the reviews are positive). Check out IGN’s Marvel Rivals Review in Progress to find out what we think.

For NetEase, it will be hoping not only to keep Marvel Rivals’ player count as high as possible for as long as possible (something that’s proved particularly tricky for live service games of late), but to make enough money from players to meet the company’s internal revenue projections. To that end, Marvel Rivals sells a battle pass and premium skins. But is it paying off? The game is currently third in Steam’s top-sellers list, which is sorted by revenue, behind only the pricey Steam Deck and Grinding Gear Games’ Path of Exile 2. This suggests Marvel Rivals is already convincing players to open their wallets.

Marvel Rivals launched alongside Season 0, dubbed Dooms’ Rise. This month-long kick-off season starts with a total of 33 heroes, all available to play for free, eight maps for Quick Match and Competitive modes, a Conquest map, and a Practice Range. Dooms’ Rise serves as the opening chapter “for the chaos caused by each of Doctor Dooms’ time experiments colliding and unleashing the Timestream Entanglement,” NetEase said.

There’s a Twitch Drops event for Season 0, as you’d expect from a live service game of this type, an ‘Entangled Moments’ seasonal event to unlock spray rewards, gallery card rewards, and stories for completing tasks, and a global launch gift: a special code for a free Iron Man costume.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Random: Did Street Fighter 6’s Next DLC Just Reference Sakurai’s Famous Smash Quote? Some Fans Think So

Capcom’s fighter welcomes “good girl” Mai early next year.

During the development of Smash Ultimate‘s DLC, game director Masahiro Sakurai revealed he couldn’t add Mai Shiranui from SNK’s fighting series because Smash was for the “good boys and girls”.

While Mai unfortunately missed out on joining Nintendo’s all-star brawler, one game she will make a cameo in is Capcom’s Street Fighter 6. A new DLC trailer dropped today and many fans are convinced there’s dialogue in it that is a reference to Sakurai’s famous comment about the SNK and Fatal Fury character.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Random: Nintendo And Acquire Brainstormed “Over” 100 Subtitles For Mario & Luigi: Brothership

What do you think of the final name?

Nintendo is known to workshop all sorts of ideas and game titles, and this was the same case with Mario & Luigi: Brothership.

In the third chapter of the latest ‘Ask the Developer’ series, the development team revealed how Nintendo and Aquire had brainstormed “over 100 options” for the game’s title. And if you couldn’t already work it out, it incorporates the theme of brotherhood and references ShipShape Island.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Square Enix Provides Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake Global Sales Update

Two million units have now been shipped and downloaded.

There have already been a handful of stories about the sales success of Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake in countries like Japan, and now Square Enix has shared an update about how the game is performing globally.

Since launching on 14th November 2024 across multiple platforms including the Nintendo Switch, two million units of this remake have already been shipped and downloaded worldwide. Square Enix shared a graphic alongside this and thanked everyone for joining the adventure so far:

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

League of Legends Developer Riot Games Announces Project K, a Physical TCG Based in the League IP

Riot Games has announced Project K, the developer’s take on the physical TCG genre and a competitor to Magic: The Gathering. It’s based in the League of Legends IP and revolves around playing with friends in-person.

Riot said Project K is made by a “small” development team within the company led by game director Dave Guskin and executive producer Chengran Chai. It’s not publishing the game itself; rather, it’s found a publishing partner in China for an initial launch there in early 2025. A global launch is planned, however, and Riot is on the hunt for a publishing partner for the U.S. and other countries.

Riot said Project K is not a physical version of its existing digital collectible card game Legends of Luneterra, but “it does inherit some of the rich champion design philosophies of lore,” and also benefits from art drawn from other League IP games. Riot added that it wants to create “a thriving community with a competitive ecosystem,” and hopes for national and even global tournaments.

Project K appears to be Rune Battlegrounds, which was teased earlier this year by Riot’s team in China. A trailer showed off popular League characters such as Darius, Ahri, and Miss Fortune. At the time, Riot said it had no plans for a global release, but those plans have now changed.

It’s a busy time for League, which has just wrapped up Netflix animated show Arcane with the release of Season 2. As well as continued work on the hugely popular MOBA, League of Legends, it’s working on a League fighting game called 2XKO, and has a digital card game called Legends of Runeterra. There’s a League MMO in the works, too, although Riot has indicated it will be some time before it’s ready to show it off.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.