Capcom has confirmed that a Switch 2 update for Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen is in the works, though it has not committed to a date. The news follows the game’s launch earlier this month and a title update that has already rolled out on other platforms. For anyone new to the naming, Dark Arisen is the expanded version of Dragon’s Dogma 2, bundling the base game with additional content and the changes that came with it. That makes the Switch 2 release the most complete way to play, at least on paper, which is why the state of its post-launch support matters more than usual. The situation is straightforward but not ideal. Capcom has said an update for the Switch 2 version is presently in progress and will arrive at a future date, which is a deliberately vague commitment. In practice that means Switch 2 owners are waiting while players on other platforms...
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Vice City has long been treated as one of the high points of the Grand Theft Auto series, remembered for its sun-bleached 1980s setting, its soundtrack and its swagger. According to Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, however, the writing behind it was not the reason it worked. Houser has described that writing as “awful.” It is a striking thing to say about a game so many players hold up as a landmark, and it underlines how much of a title’s personality can come from the people performing it rather than the words on the page. His explanation points squarely at Ray Liotta. Houser credits the actor, who voiced the lead character Tommy, with introducing a degree of genuineness to the role. In other words, the performance gave the character a grounding that the script alone apparently did not provide. That is a familiar dynamic in acting. A line can read as flat or overwrought on...
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Marvel Rivals is a team-based hero shooter with a large and highly competitive audience, and with that audience comes a familiar problem. Online games built around fast team play tend to attract abusive chat, and the more popular a title becomes, the harder that behaviour is to contain. NetEase, the studio behind the game, has now signalled that it is taking the issue more seriously. The company says it has “further escalated our penalties for speech violations,” and promises more moderation going forward. It has also guaranteed what it calls considerably stricter consequences for players who cross the line. The wording is firm. NetEase has made clear it will not treat these behaviours as acceptable simply because they are unfortunately common, which frames toxicity as something to confront rather than tolerate as an ordinary part of online life. That last point matters, because the usual defence of toxic chat is that it has always...
Read MoreAnime based on a video game can struggle to feel like it belongs to the same world. Sets get simplified, landmarks disappear, and the result is recognisable in name only. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners avoided that fate, and a detail from its production helps explain why. The director of the series combed through Cyberpunk 2077 using a “virtual camera,” searching the game for the best Night City locations to bring into the anime. Rather than inventing a generic future city, the team evidently wanted to reuse the specific places players already knew. That approach is more painstaking than it sounds. A virtual camera lets a creator move freely through a digital environment, framing views that were never meant to be seen from those angles and hunting for compositions that would work as animation backgrounds. It is location scouting inside a game. Studio Trigger, the animation studio behind the project, also acquired a joystick alongside the camera,...
Read MoreCastlevania has always had a strong sense of style. From its gothic castles to its sharply drawn heroes and villains, the series has long understood that memorable character design is part of the appeal, not an afterthought. The team behind Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse appears to share that view. Evil Empire, the studio developing the game, has said it is proud of the cast’s hot characters. The comment comes after the developers noticed the volume of eager fan illustrations the game has inspired. In other words, the reaction they were hoping for is already happening. There is a playful confidence in owning that. Developers do not always embrace the more enthusiastic side of their fandom openly, but acknowledging it signals that the appeal is understood and intended rather than accidental. The teaser for the game even gestures at a mock award for hot dads, a joke that lands because Castlevania’s lineage is full of imposing,...
Read MoreThe games industry has no shortage of business roles, but few are as romantic as the person whose job is to find new talent. A former lead on Dying Light has taken on exactly that kind of position, joining the publishing division of Bloober Team. The stated ambition is striking: to find “the next Kojima.” That is a reference to Hideo Kojima, the director whose name has become shorthand for a certain kind of auteur-driven game, one with a strong personal vision and an unmistakable authorial stamp. The work sits within Broken Mirror Games, the horror label of Bloober Team. That framing matters. Bloober Team is known for horror, and a dedicated label suggests the company intends to publish games in that space rather than stray into unrelated genres. Dying Light, the game the new hire previously worked on, is a first-person survival title built around movement and scavenging in a dangerous city, so...
Read MoreWorld of Warcraft has spent two decades refining its systems, and one of the quieter consequences is that racial abilities have lost much of their weight. In the contemporary game they are so minor that they mainly seem aesthetic, chosen for flavour rather than power. World of Warcraft: Forever appears to be taking the opposite approach. According to the current teaser, Blizzard has implemented significant alterations to the game’s diverse racial skills, a change that could reshape how players think about their characters. The timing is notable. Forever’s beta phase is scheduled to conclude in just a couple of days, on October 21, yet that has not stopped the studio from making meaningful adjustments so late in the process. For anyone new to the concept, racial skills are abilities tied to a character’s race rather than their class. Race and class are chosen together at creation, and in earlier versions of the game those...
Read MoreHorror works best when it unsettles you before anything actually happens, and Silver Pines seems built around that idea. The game opens in a vacant diner with no one else in view, an ordinary setting made wrong by the simple fact of being empty. That opening is deliberate. A diner is a place that should be full of noise and people, so its silence reads as a warning. It is a classic horror technique, and it establishes the mood before the player has done anything at all. The atmosphere has been compared to Silent Hill, the long-running series known for fog, dread and psychological unease, with additional overtones of Alan Wake, the story about a writer whose fiction starts bleeding into reality. Blending those influences is a promising combination for anyone who likes their scares slow and strange. What sets Silver Pines apart on paper is its perspective. This is a 2D game, and...
Read MoreFew topics divide the games industry as sharply as artificial intelligence. The technology promises to speed up production and cut costs, while raising hard questions about creative work, originality and the people whose jobs sit in its path. Epic Games has found itself in the middle of that argument. The company is facing criticism again this week over its position on the subject. It appears to be shifting toward what is described as “AI-enhanced development,” a phrase that signals AI moving from an experiment into the ordinary workflow. Running alongside the criticism is the response of chief executive Tim Sweeney, who has been trying to convey that neither he nor his firm is troubled by it in the slightest. The posture is one of indifference to the backlash. That posture is a choice, and choices like this are often read as messages in themselves. Whether a company engages with criticism or brushes it aside...
Read MoreGrand Theft Auto VI is one of the most anticipated releases in gaming, and its marketing has unfolded almost entirely through trailers. Each one has become an event, picked apart frame by frame within hours and used to fuel years of speculation. A new collection brings the campaign together in one place. It gathers the first trailer, the second, and the release trailer for the game, which is set to arrive on November 19, 2026. For anyone who wants to watch the sequence in order, it is a convenient way to see how the messaging has evolved. The video is structured with simple timestamps. An introduction opens at the start, the first trailer begins within the opening seconds, the second follows at roughly one minute and twenty-eight seconds, and the release trailer sits around four minutes and ten seconds in. Watching them back to back reveals how a trailer campaign tells a story of...
Read MoreAsk a room full of players to name the scariest game they have ever played and a handful of titles come up again and again. Silent Hill is usually there, along with Resident Evil. Alien Isolation makes the list. One of the Fatal Frame games gets a mention, and the better-informed might add something like Siren. It is a crowded field, which makes Outlast’s success all the more remarkable. According to the current teaser, the game was turned down by publishers before it ever saw release, yet it has since reached sixty million players. A horror juggernaut that no one wanted has, by any measure, done just fine. The rejection is not hard to understand in hindsight. Outlast is brutally intense, built on helplessness rather than empowerment. Players cannot fight back in any meaningful way; they run, hide and survive, relying on a camcorder and its night vision to see through the dark. That...
Read MoreThe shift away from physical media has been one of the most divisive topics in console gaming for years, and PlayStation sits right at the centre of it. The latest voice to enter the conversation is Kutaragi, the creator of the original PlayStation, PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3, who has offered a measured view of a row that has split the community. According to the discussion, Kutaragi comprehends both perspectives of the debate. That even-handed position stands out in a conversation that tends to produce strong opinions on either side, with preservation-minded players on one hand and those who have embraced all-digital convenience on the other. What makes the current mood notable is how low it has fallen. The prevalent feeling regarding PlayStation among dedicated gamers is currently at a significant low, and the report points to a specific cause: the company’s choice to halt the production of disc-based versions of PlayStation titles beginning...
Read MoreAnother month, another batch of games heading to PlayStation’s subscription service, and October’s line-up is once again prompting the question subscribers ask every time: is it enough? Nine new titles are arriving to PS Plus Extra and Premium this month, spread across the two higher tiers of the service. Premium sits on top of the stack with access to the widest catalogue, while Extra offers a large rotating library of PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 games without the streaming and classic extras. Because the two tiers serve different appetites, a month’s value often depends on which one you pay for. Premium subscribers tend to look for older and more experimental software alongside the headline additions, while Extra members are usually watching for a big, recognisable game they had not yet bought at full price. On that front, the line-up appears to deliver. The writer singles out Mafia: The Old Country as a rather significant...
Read MoreEarning a Platinum trophy is a strange kind of achievement. It carries no material reward and exists outside the game itself, yet for a certain kind of player the completion percentage at the bottom of a profile is a record worth keeping. This ongoing series looks back at the games that finally pushed a Platinum over the line. Entry number 39 is Stray, and the date achieved was 23rd July 2022. The writer describes it as probably the only game they have ever speedran for a trophy, which says something about how a single dangling objective can reshape the way you play. Stray is an unusual candidate for that kind of behaviour. It is a game built around atmosphere as much as challenge, following a stray cat through a densely detailed, neon-lit world. Its appeal lies in mood, exploration and the small, tactile details of moving like an animal, rather than in the combat...
Read MoreThe release calendar does not slow down for long, and the week of the 19th to the 25th of October is shaping up to be a busy one for PlayStation owners. By the current count, more than 35 games are due across PS5 and PS Plus, which is a lot even by the standards of a crowded autumn. Leading the pack is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, easily the biggest name on the list. The modern warfare sub-series has been one of the franchise’s most reliable draws, and a new entry is always going to dominate the conversation in the week it arrives. If you would rather not wait for the official launch, the campaign can already be experienced in early access, which gives eager players a head start on the story before the wider release. It is not a solo act. Final Fantasy Resonance brings a very different flavour to the schedule,...
Read MoreConsole pricing has rarely been a comfortable subject, and the next generation looks set to make the conversation harder still. According to the latest discussion, all expectations of the PS6 debuting at an acceptable price point seem to be diminishing daily, and the reason is not anything Sony has done wrong. The culprit is the broader economy, and specifically the way artificial intelligence has reshaped demand for computing components. This is described as a challenging economy disrupted by AI’s dominance over computing parts. Data centres built to train and run AI models consume enormous quantities of memory, storage and silicon, and that appetite competes directly with the supply that consumer hardware depends on. When demand for a component outpaces supply, prices rise, and manufacturers prioritise the customers willing to pay the most. Consumer electronics sit far down that queue, which pushes up the cost of building a games console. A machine that might once...
Read MoreNot every game gets a second life, but a survival sim that launched on Xbox One is about to receive one this holiday season. A free upgrade for Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is on the way, and it is set to transform the experience on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S on December 8th. For the uninitiated, Ancestors is a survival game with an unusual premise. It casts the player not as a soldier or a hero but as an early hominid, tasked with surviving a hostile prehistoric world and, over time, guiding a lineage forward. It is often described as a creature transformation simulator, because progress is measured in evolutionary leaps rather than levels or loot. That structure makes it a natural fit for a technical overhaul. Survival games lean heavily on atmosphere, and atmosphere depends on dense environments, convincing lighting and believable wildlife. A version rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5 has...
Read MoreThe Xbox Series S has always been the odd one out in this console generation. A smaller, cheaper, all-digital machine, it occupies a position the industry had not really tested at this scale before, and it has been argued about since the day it was revealed. Ever since the Xbox Series S made its debut nearly six years prior, individuals have been theorising that it could impede the sector and eventually become overly challenging to develop for in the later phases of the console lifecycle. The concern was never really about the console itself. It was about the idea of a fixed lower specification that every game must also run on, and what that might mean for ambition elsewhere. Now that the generation is drawing toward its later stages, that argument can finally be judged against reality rather than prediction. The picture is more complicated than either side expected. Some games have clearly been...
Read MoreThe Call of Duty cycle has a rhythm to it, and we are right at the point where the first real signal arrives. The campaign for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is now officially accessible in early access for anyone who pre-ordered the game digitally, which means the earliest impressions are beginning to appear. Early access campaigns have become a familiar part of the modern release schedule. By opening the single-player portion ahead of the full launch, publishers give the most committed players something to do while building buzz before the multiplayer side goes live. It also means the first wave of reviews and impressions lands well before most people have their hands on the game. That creates an unusual situation for anyone trying to make a decision. The feedback arriving now comes from a specific group, and it reflects the experience of people who were invested enough to buy in advance. With...
Read MoreRemasters of licensed games from the early 2000s have become a surprisingly reliable corner of the industry, and the latest candidate has surfaced in an unexpected way. Ahead of an expected reveal at the ID@Xbox Showcase next week, online detectives have uncovered an official Xbox Store page for Shrek 2 Remastered. Store pages are frequently how unannounced games leak. They appear early, often with placeholder details, and the fact that this one is live suggests an announcement is close rather than hypothetical. The listing states that the game is set to arrive on Xbox Series X and S. The page also discloses that it is in the works by Aspyr Media. Aspyr has become a familiar name in the remaster space, known for bringing older titles to modern hardware, which gives this project a degree of credibility beyond a simple store listing. For anyone who missed it the first time, Shrek 2 was a...
Read MoreAnother week is behind us, and this one has felt longer than most. It has seemed like one of the most prolonged periods in recent months, which makes the arrival of the weekend all the more welcome. Whatever the last few days threw at you, the next two are yours to spend however you like. As always, this is the spot to share those plans with the rest of the Pure Xbox community. The idea is simple: tell everyone what you are playing, why you have chosen it, and whether it is living up to expectations. The thread is less about recommendations and more about the shared ritual of comparing notes with people who care about the same hobby. There is plenty to occupy a weekend at the moment. If you pre-ordered Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 digitally, you may already be preparing early for the campaign, which is available ahead of the...
Read MoreOctober on Switch 2 was already looking crowded, and it has just become a little busier. Peak, the indie climbing game from Aggro Crab and Landfall Games, arrives on the console on 22 October, turning months of speculation into something concrete. The hints had been building for a while. Both studios had suggested that something was in the works without ever spelling out what it was. For anyone who has been hoping for a console version since the game reached PC last year, the confirmation is welcome news. Climbing games occupy a curious space. They take an activity that is slow and deliberate in real life and turn it into a test of planning, timing and nerve. The best examples make a route feel like a conversation: you read the wall, commit to a line, and then live with the consequences when the next hold is further away than it looked. That structure suits...
Read MoreSome games sell themselves on tension, others on comfort. The Witch’s Bakery belongs firmly in the second camp, and it makes no apology for that. This is a story-driven adventure simulation from French studio Sunny Lab, published by Silver Lining Interactive, and it has arrived on Switch 2 with a warm, gently pitched premise. The aroma of freshly baked bread is the image the game leads with, and it is a smart choice. Food is one of the quickest ways to make a fictional world feel inhabited. It implies routine, care and time, the sort of details that turn a setting into a place you might want to spend an evening in. Cosy games have grown into a genre of their own, and the label covers a wide range. Some are essentially management games with soft edges, while others are closer to visual novels with a few systems attached. The most successful examples tend...
Read MoreZA/UM has confirmed that Zero Parades: Director’s Cut will come to Switch 2 on 3 November 2026. The announcement gives the console one of its more distinctive role-playing games of the year, and it brings a studio with a complicated reputation back into the conversation. ZA/UM is best known for Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, a game that built its following on dense, literary writing and a willingness to let conversation do the work usually handed to combat. Whatever one makes of the studio, that reputation follows its next project. Expectations are high, and they are not simple ones to manage. Zero Parades is a CRPG, a genre with a devoted audience and a steep learning curve. These games tend to favour character builds, dialogue trees and choices that resolve hours later. They ask for patience, but they reward it with a sense of authorship that few other genres can match. The Director’s Cut...
Read MoreIt has been almost thirteen years since Call of Duty last appeared on a Nintendo console. The game was Ghosts, it arrived on Wii U in 2013, and since then Nintendo players have watched every new entry pass them by. Modern Warfare 4 ends that wait, and the campaign is the first part of it worth examining. Bringing a series like this to Switch 2 is not a straightforward technical exercise. Call of Duty is built around spectacle: large environments, scripted set pieces and a level of visual detail that assumes a certain amount of headroom. The Switch 2 has less of that headroom than a gaming PC or the current rival consoles, and something has to give. That trade-off is where impressions become interesting. Resolution, frame rate, texture quality and loading times are the usual currency, and how a developer spends them reveals a set of priorities. A steadier frame rate can matter...
Read MoreTelltale Games has confirmed that The Wolf Among Us Remastered will not arrive on Switch as planned. In a statement shared on social media, the studio said the Switch version requires a little extra time and will now launch on a subsequent date. The PlayStation release, by contrast, is still set to debut on 29 October as scheduled. That split is the frustrating part for Nintendo players: the game is ready elsewhere, but the version they are waiting for has no new date attached to it yet. Delays of this kind are common, and a short one is rarely a cause for alarm. A little extra time could mean almost anything: final certification, performance tuning, bug fixing or simply a schedule that turned out to be tighter than expected. Telltale has not elaborated, and it is worth resisting the urge to fill the gap with guesses. The Wolf Among Us remains one of the...
Read MoreTalk of adapting Arc Raiders for television and film has turned to a familiar question: what can a screen version do that a game cannot? The answer being floated is all kinds of different stories, a phrase that says as much about the limits of the source material as it does about ambition. Games are built on systems. A good one generates moments that feel personal because they emerge from player decisions, physics and chance. That is also why they are hard to adapt. A system does not hand a writer a beginning, a middle and an end; it hands them a toolbox and a world. Extraction shooters make the problem especially clear. The genre is organised around risk, preparation and the possibility of losing everything on the way out. Those stakes are powerful when you are the one holding the controller. They are much harder to reproduce when the audience is watching someone...
Read MoreA remake of Ocarina of Time was always going to be picked over in fine detail. The game is one of the most discussed in the medium, and every change invites an argument about what should be preserved. The latest details suggest this project is not content to reproduce the original exactly: new sidequests, harder minigames and subtle dungeon tweaks are all part of the package. The sidequest additions are the most intriguing part. Ocarina of Time’s world is remembered for feeling denser than its size suggested, with secrets tucked into corners and characters who rewarded a second conversation. New sidequests could deepen that texture, or they could feel like extra content bolted onto a structure that did not need it. The difference usually comes down to integration. A good sidequest grows out of a place and its people; a bad one is a marker on a map with a reward attached. If the...
Read MoreTrue Detective season 5 has its leads, and they are not the pairing most people would have predicted. Nicolas Cage and Antonio Banderas are set to star, with Cage himself revealing the news at New York Comic Con. True Detective has always been an anthology, rebuilding its cast and its story with each season. That structure is part of why casting news lands so hard. There is no returning ensemble to steady the ship, so the actors are effectively the identity of the season before a single frame has been shown. The show built its reputation on a brooding tone, long conversations and a strong sense of place. It is the kind of series that asks its leads to sit in silence and let a scene breathe, which is not the first thing people associate with either of these actors. That contrast is exactly what makes the announcement interesting. Cage has spent his career...
Read MoreDiablo 4 players have a habit of turning small mysteries into full investigations, and the latest one has a punchline worthy of the series. After weeks of searching for a piece of missing armor, the community found it hiding in the game’s newest update. The trick, apparently, involves stroking a cow. On the surface it sounds like a joke, and it probably is meant to. Underneath, it is a neat piece of design. Secret content gives a living game a second layer, something for the most curious players to chase once the obvious objectives are done. It also creates the kind of moment that travels through forums and videos faster than any official announcement. Diablo has a long history with hidden bovine content. The series is famous for its secret cow level, a joke that hardened into a tradition across entries. A cow-related secret in Diablo 4 therefore fits a lineage, even if the...
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