Love Elden Ring Nightreign, but getting a little bored of the same three-night cycle of bosses and repetitive Everdark sovereigns? Fret not, Nightfarer, because there may be a brand new, extra-hard game mode on the way that will shake up Nightreign’s regular playstyle.

This new mode, entitled Deep of Night, was found and shared by dataminers, and appears to be essentially a kind of “endless” mode with skill-based matchmaking. Unlike in regular Nightreign, you’re not able to choose the boss you target, and it will be picked for you at random instead. With each victory, your “Depth” rating increases, which in turn increases the difficulty, and Nightreign will generally try to pair you with other players that are at the same Depth as you as long as the wait time isn’t too long.

In total, the datamine suggests there will be five Depths with 999 ratings within each Depth, and killing bosses will increase your Depth. Losing runs will cause your Depth to revert back, but once you get into Depth 2 you’ll never be able to get back into Depth 1. It’s unclear if this applies to every Depth level, or if it’s just a way to keep experienced players from being stuck with new ones.

There are other major changes in Deep of Night, too. Some bosses are “magmafied”, which is just what it sounds like. They’re covered in magma. This probably makes them stronger – I certainly don’t want to touch them. There are also new weapon effects, and stronger weapons that come with better buffs, but also some drawbacks. Additionally, players will get access to three more relic slots on top of the existing three, with the three new slots only working in the Deep of Night. Like the new weapons, new relics were datamined also, with both stronger buffs and also sometimes counterbalancing drawbacks.

All in all this new mode sounds like it could be an interesting spin on Nightreign that keeps it fresh for a while yet. While Nightreign still has a bustling community, interest has slowed down in the months since launch, especially as the rotation of Everdark bosses has gotten a little more repetitive. FromSoftware did just announce the next new Everdark boss, Caligo, which will drop tomorrow evening.

From a frozen haze, the winged terror emerges.
Let flames rend these frost-laced shadows.

The Everdark Sovereign version of Fissure in the Fog will land on August 7, 2025 at 03:00 CEST | 18:00 PDT (6/8) | 10:00 JST. pic.twitter.com/PedcHLeDS2

— ELDEN RING (@ELDENRING) August 5, 2025

We gave Elden Ring Nightreign a 7/10 at launch, with our reviewer saying, “when Elden Ring Nightreign is played exactly as it was designed to be played, it’s one of the finest examples of a three-player co-op game around – but that’s harder to do than it should be, and playing solo is poorly balanced.” The game has since gotten a duos mode, and it had sold five million copies as of July.

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.

Hideo Kojima’s Xbox game project, OD, is still in development, despite Xbox’s recent cancellations of a number of projects both internal and external.

This comes from Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier, who posted on BlueSky that OD was ‘still in development’ as confirmed to him by a Microsoft spokesperson. He shared this on the heels of reporting that Xbox was stopping development on Avalanche Studios’ Contraband, a collaboration that was announced four years ago.

While OD’s status specifically wasn’t particularly in question, Xbox’s recent string of cancellations have led many to concern over any game we haven’t seen for more than a year or two. After a mass layoff last month that saw 9,100 jobs eliminated Microsoft-wide, we learned that multiple games had been canceled, including Everwild and Perfect Dark. A collaboration with Romero Games was also pulled.

Kojima’s admittedly been a bit quiet about OD lately, in a move that wouldn’t be taken as anything other than focused game development if the circumstances weren’t so concerning. He first announced an Xbox collaboration in November of 2022, then officially revealed OD along with several of its star cast members at The Game Awards 2023. We learned at the time Kojima was working with filmmaker Jordan Peele to create some sort of horror experience “no one has seen before.”

Since then, we haven’t heard much more about the status of OD, though Kojima did reassuringly give an interview late last month in which he mentioned he was still working on it.

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.

BioShock 4 has reportedly been in development for more than a decade at various studios under the 2K Games banner. But it has suffered yet another overhaul after it reportedly failed a review by executives and the head of its developer, Cloud Chamber, was ousted. Now, the fourth BioShock feels further away than ever. So, what’s going on?

In an interview with Strauss Zelnick, the boss of 2K parent company Take-Two, I asked the CEO flat out if BioShock 4 was in danger of being canceled. Zelnick was clear in his response: “It’s going to come out,” he promised. “That I can say hand on heart, without question.”

Zelnick sounds pretty confident, then. But it’s hard to get away from BioShock’s tumultuous — and lengthy — development. On this, Zelnick held his hands up, admitting BioShock 4 has had its troubles. But he also explained why it’s proving such a hard nut to crack.

“We don’t talk about how long our development cycles are,” Zelnick began. “We have had some ups and downs along the way. That is accurate. And we have had changes in studio leadership. That said, we have very big shoes to fill on BioShock because of the legacy of Ken Levine, the legacy of what has gone before, which has been so successful. And we need to make sure that this experience is true to the BioShock DNA on the one hand, and a massive step forward on the other hand. That’s always challenging. We think we’re up to the challenge, but it has not been seamless.”

This week, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier broke the news of BioShock 4’s overhaul, and offered some insight into its troubles. “The game’s narrative was identified as an area that was particularly in need of improvement and will be revamped in the coming months,” Schreier reported.

“In a recent all-hands meeting, Cloud Chamber staff were told that the company needs to become more agile and efficient, leading to worries that layoffs may follow,” Schreier continued.

There hasn’t been a new BioShock game since 2013’s BioShock Infinite (Ken Levine is still working under the 2K banner on Judas). But BioShock 4 is not alone in having a lengthy development cycle, and we’ve seen — very recently — some publishers cancel games that were in development for six, seven, or even eight years. Sony’s live service flop Concord, for example, was in the works for years before its disastrous release. Microsoft just canceled Rare’s Everwild, which was revealed six years ago.

It is clear from the outside looking in that triple-A video game development is getting longer, which is something Zelnick not only agrees with, but offered an explanation for.

“I think it’s a reflection of the fact that as entertainment businesses mature, consumers seek quality and everyone realizes that the consumer is highly demanding and properly so,” he said.

“The strategy of this company has always been to make the best entertainment, not necessarily the most entertainment. Of course, sometimes we’ve fallen short, but frankly a precious few times.

“And I think some of our competitors have realized maybe a little late in the day that consumers are not okay with okay. Good is the new bad, great is the new great. And our goal here is to make everything exceptional.”

Zelnick added that he didn’t mean to be critical of other video game companies “because this is really hard stuff, and you don’t want to criticize someone for sticking with their creative talent, supporting them and trying to get a great result.” But he did say that Take-Two “would like to fail fast if we’re going to fail.”

“And we have made some hard decisions relatively early on. But we too have occasionally canceled titles well into their development. So it’s hard. What we’re all doing is hard.”

2K Games issued the following statement to Bloomberg on BioShock 4:

We are working hard to set BioShock up for the best possible future. Right now, we have a good game, but we are committed to delivering a great one. We are working closely with leadership at the studio to define this path.

The question now is, when might we see BioShock 4 actually come out?

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.

Xbox has stopped development of Contrabrand to “evaluate the project’s future,” with a Bloomberg report saying the game is canceled entirely four years after its initial E3 announcement.

Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier first broke the news on Bluesky today, saying that “Xbox is canceling Contraband, announced in 2021 from Avalanche Studios (Just Cause), after four years of radio silence, sources tell Bloomberg News.”

This was followed by an official confirmation from Avalanche on its website, which reads as follows:

Over the past several years, Avalanche Studios Group and Xbox Game Studios Publishing have collaborated on Contraband. Active development has now stopped while we evaluate the project’s future. We’re thankful for the excitement we’ve seen fro mthe community since we announced and will give an update on what’s next as soon as we can.

Contraband was originally announced for Xbox and PC at E3 2021 with a teaser trailer. At the time, we knew it would be set in a 1970s smuggler’s paradise called Bayan, but we didn’t see any gameplay. Since then, we’ve seen nothing further of the game, nor heard any progress on its development. However, we did report that in 2022, management and employees clashed over a controversial hire and a lack of subsequent communication, a dispute that later inspired the studio to form an official union club and pressure the company toward signing a collective bargaining agreement.

Xbox, meanwhile, has been canceling projects left and right amid a mass layoff last month that saw 9,100 jobs eliminated Microsoft-wide, including hundreds in gaming. In the aftermath, we learned that games including Everwild and Perfect Dark had been canceled.

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.