“Power up your holidays”.
Two new unlisted Switch 2 lifestyle commercials for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond have been spotted on Nintendo’s official YouTube page. They’re titled “Power Up Your Holidays”, so we’ll seemingly be seeing them in the lead up to the Christmas season.
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Multiple projects are in development.
If you haven’t been keeping a close eye on the Tales Of series, Bandai Namco is reviving Tales of Xillia as a remaster next week. So, what about Tales of Xillia 2?
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Update: Game surpasses one million sales as Joker arrives.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds has already got a huge cast of characters and apparently Sega might not be done just yet.
Speaking to Polygon at the Brasil Game Show recently, the series producer Takashi Iizuka mentioned how DLC could potentially stretch beyond a year. It all depends on how much attention the game is getting from fans and the feedback the team is receiving.
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It’s really quite interesting how, in a time where big budget live service games are doing anything they can to get you to continue playing (and importantly spend money on) them, the sort of spiritual opposite of this to rise out of this are games where you just hang out with a few buds doing silly nonsense that don’t cost very much. Lethal Company, Peak, you know the kinds of games I mean, and yesterday a new one I quite like the look of arrived: RV There Yet?
Move!
There’s been quite a lot of talk recently about the lack of voiceover work in Pokemon Legends: Z-A, and I can understand why. Game Freak has made some pretty decent strides with its cutscenes, depicting characters that animate realistically right down to their facial expressions and mouth movements. Yet they don’t actually talk. It’s weird in practice to see such well-constructed scenes play out in near total silence, but that’s actually not my biggest gripe with the residents of Lumiose City.
If you go into a real-life busy city centre in the middle of the day, one thing you’ll notice is that most people will probably be walking somewhere. Whether they’re darting from shop to shop, slowly ambling along in chattering groups, or even taking a few steps backwards to pick up the sausage that’s slipped out of their hotdog bun, everybody’s moving. Heck, it’s the reason why cities are often described as ‘bustling’ – it literally means ‘full of activity’.
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Magic: The Gathering’s next big collaboration brings PlayStation’s biggest worlds to the table, with Secret Lair drops inspired by God of War, The Last of Us, Horizon, and Sucker Punch’s Ghost duology. It follows June’s record-breaking Final Fantasy set, marking yet another major gaming crossover with Magic.
Fresh off the launch of Ghost of Yotei, we caught up with Jason Connell, Creative Director at Sucker Punch, along with Wizards of the Coast’s Jacob Covey, Steve Sunu, and Annie Sardelis, to learn how Jin Sakai’s world was reimagined in card form.
They shared how brushstroke met blade, and how Sucker Punch’s involvement went far beyond a simple seal of approval. And even more excitingly, IGN has also got an exclusive first look at Ghost of Yotei’s Atsu card, joining the upcoming PlayStation superdrop.
“Part of the fun of working with game studios is the mutual fandom between us—there’s usually a Magic fan or three on their side and a group of fans for their game on our team,” WOTC Art Director, Jacob Covey, explains.
When it comes to Sucker Punch, there are even a few tournament games being played within the development team.
“It’s about 10-12 folks who play monthly, mostly Commander format,” Jason Connell explains. “A few people who regularly come into the office have decks at their desks just in case the mood ever strikes.”
As for making it happen, the conversation began a while ago, and it was Wizards who wanted to work on a PlayStation collaboration.
“Ben Jafari [a manager at WOTC] worked hard to not only make this happen between many different studios at once, but to do it on the same timeline,” Covey reveals.
“We knew we wanted to work with these iconic PlayStation properties, so it was difficult to narrow it down to just a handful.”
That initial discussion then fed down to the team at Sucker Punch, Connell said, and it was clear that the two Ghost titles would make for ideal fits.
“Across both the Sucker Punch and PlayStation side, it was pretty clear that Ghost could be a really great fit as one of the featured franchises, though, so it came together pretty naturally once they reached out. We were definitely excited by the idea.”
The rub? Ghost of Yotei hadn’t been revealed to the public yet.
“Our conversations with Wizards of the Coast began before Yotei had been announced, which we admit was probably frustrating from the Wizards’ side since we had to be so cryptic,” he recalls.
“We just kept saying we had a great idea for a secret card, but then saying we couldn’t elaborate yet, and thankfully, they were such great partners that they rebuilt the schedule to accommodate us delivering the information and art for Atsu after we announced the game last year, even though the rest of the cards had been locked in by that point.”
“We knew the drop would be coming right around Yotei’s launch, so it felt like a perfect fit to try to get her included, and we’re grateful it worked out.
As for card designs, the Sucker Punch part of the Secret Lair drop incorporates Jin Sakai and Atsu, the two protagonists of both games.
“On the art side, Sucker Punch was very trusting and also involved in helping us remain true to their carefully constructed universe, full of its own untold stories,” said Covey.
“We aim to be authentically rooted in the Ghost universe while giving it our unique spin, focusing on how the characters and settings relate to the Magic ecosystem and gameplay.”
“We had some great early conversations with the Wizards team, including an initial kickoff where we just explained the key points of Ghost of Tsushima and sent over some materials from the game,” Connell adds.
“We explained what we felt was important to capture, even discussed some specific artist names and our overall style. It was really interesting getting a glimpse into their process, meeting artists and writers and directors who oversaw all of the different pieces that go into making a card.
“Once we had the basics set up, it was a super collaborative process. While the actual writing and artist selection happened on the Wizards side, we had a ton of input and chances to provide feedback and went through multiple rounds making sure everyone was happy with the overall look and mechanics for the cards.”
One of the ways Wizards and Sucker Punch helped bring Jin Sakai to Magic: The Gathering was to lean into the duality of his fighting styles in Ghost of Tsushima, where he’s torn between samurai combat and the stealthier ‘Ghost’ path.
“Jin Sakai is about a warrior torn between two identities — the honorable samurai and the shadowy Ghost,” Connell explains.
“Wizards of the Coast did a great job capturing this in the card with the Standoff ability, which represents his swordsmanship, while Ghost highlights his stealth and ability to strike fear into his opponents. The rest of the Secret Lair cards that Wizards of The Coast curated for this drop helped show his journey to support that theme: tools of conflict, sacrifice, and shifting control that echo Jin’s struggle between tradition and survival.”
“From the start, I wanted to capture two ways of approaching encounters in Ghost of Tsushima,” explains WOTC Senior Game Designer, Annie Sardelis.
“I combined elements of how Magic has classically expressed a lone fighter’s skills by only giving that bonus to a single attacker. Since double strike and “can’t be blocked” are phrases we’ve seen time and again on Magic cards, I added the words to help my coworkers become familiar with what I was going for. Flavor words, like flavor text, can help give creative definition to rules text, and we ended up keeping them.”
Aside from Ghost of Tsushima and Yotei, there are sets focused on God of War’s Greek and Norse tales, as well as Horizon Forbidden West and two sets for The Last of Us.
Despite the mix of gods and robot dinosaurs, however, it was the gritty post-apocalyptic tale from Naughty Dog that gave Sardelis the biggest challenge.
“The hardest challenge I signed myself up for are the four “Survivors” Partners from The Last of Us series,” she explains.
“I thought it was important to represent all the playable characters in the story, but I also wanted your Commander games to feature the infected. It was tricky to find out how to generate the Fungus Zombie tokens on characters that canonically fight against them!”
“Any player can make infected tokens with Ellie, Brick Master and Abby, Merciless Soldier riffs on cards like “Hunted Dragon” to create an increasing number of tokens. Once that was figured out, the rest of the pieces were designed to complement a token/sacrifice strategy- hopefully in a way that inspires mixing and matching between the two drops!”
As for Commander, it’s Magic’s most popular format, and I wanted to know which of the new PlayStation cards would make an ideal choice to helm a 100-card deck.
“If you’re sitting across from me, I think you can expect me to have an Aloy, Savior of Meridian deck or Jin Sakai, Ghost of Tsushima deck somewhere on me,” WOTC Senior Product Designer, Steve Sunu, says.
“Annie Sardelis really hit it out of the park for all these designs, Aloy and Jin specifically feel like the designs were created just for a player like me. Annie’s an incredible designer, and we were so lucky to have her lend her talent to these new-to-Magic designs.”
Magic: The Gathering’s Secret Lair x PlayStation Drop launches on October 27, 9 AM PT, at the official Secret Lair website.
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.
This article also includes contributions from Robert Anderson, Senior Commerce Editor for IGN.
You might be currently wondering where the latest Helldivers 2 patch is, seeing as it hasn’t turned up yet, and to explain its absence developer Arrowhead have taken to the game’s Witter account with a post going into some details about it. Apparently it was originally planned for Tuesday, i.e. yesterday, October 21st, but a “last-minute certification issue caused a delay.”
Borderlands 4 looks like a big hit in the U.S. at least, where it has outperformed Borderlands 3 in terms of money made.
U.S. video game data company Circana said Gearbox’s looter shooter was the best-selling premium video game of September, debuting as the third best-selling game of 2025 so far. It was September’s best-seller on both the Xbox and aggregated PC storefront charts.
Most importantly for publisher 2K Games, Borderlands 4 generated the highest launch month dollar sales of any title in the franchise’s history, nearly 30% higher than the previous best, Borderlands 3.
It’s worth noting this stat isn’t about unit sales, rather revenue generated. Borderlands 4 launched at $69.99 (eventually, after a weird kerfuffle online about whether it would jump to $80), with the Deluxe Edition priced $99.99 and the Super Deluxe Edition at $129.99. At its launch in September 2019, Borderlands 3 cost $59.99 for the standard edition, $79.99 for the Deluxe Edition, and $99.99 for the Super Deluxe Edition. It’s also worth noting that Borderlands 3 was a PC exclusive to the Epic Games Store for six months after its release, whereas Borderlands 4 launched across PC via Steam as well as consoles.
So, we don’t have hard sales figures yet (2K Games has made no announcement so far). But according to Circana, Borderlands 4 was the first Borderlands title to launch as the best-selling game of its release month, so there’s that.
There were encouraging signs for Borderlands 4 when it came out last month. It set a peak concurrent player number record for the franchise on Steam (neither Sony nor Microsoft make player numbers public). But it has suffered from performance issues that have contributed to its ‘mixed’ Steam review rating on Valve’s platform. Gearbox has issued a series of patches since launch, but fans are waiting for the Borderlands 4 ‘Day 30 Update,’ which is due out later this week.
NBA 2K26, by the way, is 2025’s best-selling game year-to-date, ahead of Capcom’s Monster Hunter: Wilds. Helldivers 2 was the fourth best-selling game of September on Xbox platforms, after debuting third during its August launch month. Helldivers 2 ranked as the sixth best-selling game overall in September and was 19th for the 2025 year-to-date period.
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.
Earlier this year, Palworld developer Pocketpair used its newfound success to start a publishing arm. This, I think, is generally a net good, even if I have some feelings about the studio as a whole, which we’ll dig into shortly. Nobody has money in this industry except for the few who do, so when a few of the few who do decide to put some of that money into much smaller games, that is somewhat of a win. But heed this warning from Pocketpair’s communications director and publishing manager John Buckley: they won’t publish your game if you use generative AI.
But producer Kensuke Tanabe decided against it.
Nintendo is shortly launched Metroid Prime 1-3: A Visual Retrospective, a new art book looking at concept art for the original trilogy on GameCube and Wii (with a small section dedicated to Metroid Prime Remastered).
Speaking of the more recent Switch remaster, the book reveals that Retro Studios had originally proposed completely new cutscenes for the game. However, in a producer’s note, Kensuke Tanabe confirmed that he opted against this approach.
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