What's the most stunning revelation in this Gears of War prequel? Marcus Fenix used to have a jump button. Yes, the king of cover-based shooting, a man more rooted to the ground than a scarecrow, spent his youth jumping to some bits of cover. So E-Day contains at least one literal leap forward for the franchise. Shame it's trapped in a slog of a campaign that's otherwise anything but.

But before I moan about that, plenty of good news first. Gears has never felt better to play. These third-person cover shooters have always been a blast when they're working, and a miserable swearing fit when you dodge roll into certain death instead of snapping into cover like you wanted to. Again.

That nonsense has finally been excised, mostly, thanks to slightly more acrobatic characters and some wise button remapping. It's amazing what a difference sticking run on L3 and giving climb its own designated button makes.

Gears of War's biggest haters are liable to characterise its cover-shooting as a dull game of whack-a-mole. Perhaps on Normal difficulty, but Hardcore is where the experience sings. Here, staying in the same spot of cover is rightfully punished. You've got to keep gaining better ground, constantly weighing up the risks of lining up a sniper shot, a chainsaw insta-kill, or making a desperate dash for cover. It's a turn-based tactics shooter with a missing pause button. There's a reason that it translated so smoothly to a tactics spin-off.

E-Day introduces new weaponry that makes cowering in cover harder than ever. It loves a blast of acid, this game, either delivered from a massive evil frog or a new gun that shotguns it at you. Devastating, but a loving kiss on the cheek compared to the Goreshot, a grappling hook only interested in grappling your torso from your body. So gloriously over-the-top, it almost makes up for the insta-kill tedium from the elite enemy who wields it.

That stuff's good, but it's the renovations to the old guard that stand out. The spike trap now opens with a hugely satisfying thunk-thunk-thunk as its horrible insides prepare themselves for a good gouging. The explosive arrow-firing torque bow gets a great glow up—the sound design as it finds its target is wonderful, practically a doomsday drum roll, so good I still enjoy it even when a locust is aiming it at me. And if I'm ever called upon to assassinate God, this game's sublime sniper rifle is what I'm reaching for.

So if the gunplay's a treat and the core combat never better, what's the problem? Well, almost everything else, unfortunately.

Dis-may

E-Day is a prequel, referring to the fateful day when the locust got bored of living underground and burst free from the surface to say a very messy hello. This is covered in the opening cutscene of the original Gears of War. And if you're wondering what insights E-Day has that weren't covered in said cutscene, same here.

The game opens with Marcus Fenix and Dom 'boy isn't it great that my wife and kids are alive' Santiago. Instead of the cynical, traumatised, seen-it-all-before combat veteran of the original Gears, here Marcus is… a cynical, traumatised, seen-it-all-before combat veteran. Oh.

Discovering Marcus was once a flamboyant drag queen who was changed forever by E-Day into the man we know today was probably too much to hope for. But the fact he's essentially exactly the frikkin' same is the first alarm bell that this prequel is struggling to justify its own existence.

Once the locust arrive, E-Day tries cosplaying as Resident Evil for a bit, complete with a trip through the panicking city to the police station. Some of these horror moments work. The drone gets an excellent introduction, though not so much for the poor sap stuck in the interrogation room with it. Other attempts at horror atmosphere are hilariously clumsy. I find the blood-soaked helmet of a transit worker, and the game immediately shatters any sense of foreboding with text popping up saying 'Bloody Transit Worker's Helmet Found!' Er, hooray?

The game then has some dumb fun giving little origin stories to its iconography—chainsaws being attached to machine guns! Grenades being tossed in emergence holes! Problem is, by the start of Act 2, you have the weaponry, armor, and the squad. At which point E-Day just becomes standard Gears of War again. You explore the ruined city (not open-world, more wide-ish linear) with goals never more complicated than 'shoot those locusts' or 'survive this wave of locusts' or 'why haven't you shot those locusts yet?'

Gears 5 understood the value of variety. It had sections where you had to stealth around a mad scientist's factory to stealth kill infected robots. Or ride a skiff down an icy mountain. Or fight an enemy on the stage of a Hamilton-inspired musical which starts rotating at the worst moment possible (play Gears 5—it's one of the best 7/10s ever).

True, not all of Gears 5's ideas worked. But I wanted a sequel that improved upon them, not a regression that believes the only thing you should ever be doing in one of these games is endlessly pulling the trigger. It's just slightly remixed combat encounters all the way down. Battle a giant frog and several snipers! OK, now two frogs, one sniper, and several shotgunners! OK, OK, now three giant spiders that fire insta-kill rockets, and loads of grunts, and the last checkpoint was seven minutes back! …Hey, why are you suddenly aiming at me?

Is the shooting strong enough to sustain this? Yeah, just, though it does get exhausting. It's an action movie with everything ripped out that isn't bullets going into bastards. The 20+ hour campaign is also waaaaay too long considering how one-note it is (well, aside from two crap shooting-from-a-turret-inside-a-helicopter bits, but I was planning on being nice and not bringing those up).

Moderate improvements

New for E-Day are mod slots for your weapons and armour. Mods include less recoil, better scopes, faster chainsaw revving, etc. Not as useless and incremental as the crap you get in [insert whichever live service shooter you currently have the most beef with here], but it's borderline and hard to get excited about. Far better is the gizmo that can send out rippling shockwaves that stun enemies, perfect for a chainsawin'. I found a mod for it that also sets enemies on fire. Lovely.

You get these mods for completing sidequests or finding them in cases. But E-Day is so terrified of you missing anything that tiresome all-caps text saying HARD CASE NEARBY blazes across the screen. And the location of the case is immediately added to your map. Oh and if you activate whatever this game's version of Eagle Vision is called, we'll show you exactly where the case is. Ugh.

Gears 5—which I promise to stop swooning over soon—did all this so much more elegantly. You had a robot companion with abilities that were upgraded with currency you found through exploring. No map markers, screaming text, or other BS that belongs in the Ubisoft dark ages. You were actually incentivised to explore properly, with any world-building or character moments you encountered along the way a nice bonus.

E-Day's a less interesting place to explore regardless. A city in ruin is one of gaming's most overdone settings, so you really have to pull out the stops to make it interesting, like in The Last of Us 2, or the opening Leon section of Resident Evil Requiem. Otherwise, seen one ruined city block, seen 'em all, like in the second half of Resident Evil Requiem (at least E-Day is less grey and brown, shockingly).

Other frustrations just feel like they shouldn't be happening in the seventh game of a series. There's a special place in hell for games that put checkpoints before long dialogue exchanges that you can't skip through. Normal difficulty still isn't challenging enough. Opt for hardcore and you get the compelling challenge, but also have to swallow the occasional ocean of stale piss, with boss health bars are so overlong I'm amazed they fit on the screen.

And how can a game with such outstanding skull-popping, blood-geysering headshots still have such pitiful damage feedback against elite enemies? There's no satisfaction in emptying clip after clip into a monster, not feeling like you're having any impact whatsoever until it finally falls over. Do I actually love E-Day's sniper rifle, or is it the only gunshot against the more bullet-spongy cretins that feels like it has any kick?

A new enemy at least has the decency to have a nice big eye that it doesn't like being shot in, which means I actually feel the impact of my gunfire. This thing is called… actually, to try and describe it myself when I can let the game do that in the following screenshot would be like snatching the pen from Shakespeare. My apologies. Take it away, E-Day:

Thank you, Lucas. God this game is infuriating. Great shooting trapped in a horribly overstretched campaign, telling a story that clearly didn't long to be told. It feels more like Microsoft taking a page out of the Jack Donaghy playbook and tapping a sign saying 'make it 2007 again'. Here's hoping multiplayer's a triumph. Otherwise Marcus is gonna have to open Gears 6 with one Hell of a drag show to make up for this.

We'll publish the final, scored version of this review once I've had time to try out the multiplayer, which wasn't available pre-release.

"Xbox is not for sale," CEO Asha Sharma said in a new interview with the New York Times. "We will do whatever it takes to set the company up for success, and we will look at the right partnerships, the right operating model and everything needed to achieve that."

Sharma's statement would seem to refute prior reports that a sale of Xbox is being considered, but it does leave open the possibility of other movement in that direction, including spinning it off or entering into a joint venture with other partners. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also recently implied that some kind of major structural rework could be in store, saying that after "streamlining" Xbox—a euphemism for laying off thousands of people and closing, dumping, or merging numerous studios—"we have to invent the right sustainable business model that allows us to deliver gaming to more and more people." What that model will look like will presumably become clearer once the cuts are finished: Announcing the most recent cuts, Xbox CCO Matt Booty said the "reset" (another euphemism) that began in July is now about three-quarters complete.

WoW: Forever's been a great time so far, partially because the old-school design of it has forced me to actually group up with strangers. But there's just one problem: My working memory is shot from being a very tired millennial, and I can't possibly remember all these names.

Enter Grayvves' "I Remember" AddOn, which has now been ported over to WoW Forever. This lets you assign a quick note and a smiley, neutral, or frowny face to anyone you meet. Not as commitall as a friend request, but robust enough to make you seem like an attentive person with a good memory.

What do you mean, "it looks like a social credit system." I don't know what you're talking about.

I've been very much enjoying the World of Warcraft: Forever beta—and I will be the first to cop to the fact I think it's recapturing a lot of the essence of an oldschool MMO that we lost. Tongue in my cheek, I'll even join in with the "reject modernity" crowd. But, crucially, I'll be doing so as a joke.

I've noticed, skimming my hand across the surface of the discourse, a propensity for folks to be getting up in arms about which version of their favorite MMO was better and to do so loudly, passionately, and obnoxiously. These factions stand divided:

My heart lies with the Coalition, sure. I think Forever is one of the most exciting things to happen in the MMO space in years. I have a fondness for the old tab-targeting techniques of older MMOs and a resentment for the dodge roll, and I much prefer the slow-paced explorative nature of Forever to something like Retail, which has, I admit, temporarily lost me with its seasonal structure.

But I am also a lover of variety. My favourite games range from hopecore science fiction RPGs like Citizen Sleeper to basically every Soulslike I can get my hands on. I adore silly "friendslop" games and the hope-crushing simulator that is a MOBA, which Deadlock has pulled me kicking and screaming back into. Point being: I think there's a space for everyone.

Rose-tinted Warpaint

I don't think the design of retail World of Warcraft is inherently bad, it's just different. I think Midnight has got a lot of things right—player housing is an absolute win, the game's increasing alt friendliness suits what it has become, the lack of mandatory borrowed power chores is nice, and I like being able to rinse through my Delves and Preys and zip around on my flying mount. It's frictionless, easy, keyboard-smashing fun.

Sometimes I'm in the mood to mindlessly do a bunch of low-stakes content. That mood hasn't taken me lately, but I'm not naive enough to believe it'll never take me at all.

Similarly, I also enjoy how Forever shrugs off those systems in favour of their design opposites: No overstimulating heaps of new patch-specific systems to partake in, no chore lists full of faction grinds, no dungeon finder. You log in, and you plod along with your playlist of choice in a world filled with players, and you do some quests. Maybe you find a group to clean out RFC with. You meet an undead paladin called Glinda Smlinda around a campfire. That's it, that's the game.

The issue I have is when this preference is put forward as a matter of moral imperative—the idea that modern WoW is somehow this corrupt, anti-gamer monolith that must be wrangled back to the way things were. I will say it plain: This shit sucks, it's annoying and it's subtractive and it's exhausting.

From a personal perspective, it's pretty unhealthy to make an actual identity and personhood out of a videogame you play, and it's certainly not subversive or impactful to make yourself a staunch defender of the old ways online. Because the truth is, Blizzard couldn't give a toss if we like modern WoW or not—it's all umbrella'd under the same price point, we're all pulling from the same buffet.

The community taglines the company incorporates ("putting the 'war' back in 'Warcraft', for example")? That's kayfabe, to get you to spend money. It's not part of a culture shift, Blizzard's just doing what it's proven profitable to do after years of safe success with Classic and Season of Discovery. And it'll keep running Retail WoW because guess what, that's also been very profitable too! Folks still play it.

From a pettier perspective, and this is just my personal exhaustion: It's console wars. We're doing console war stuff. Except, rather than doing them with blocks of hardware that can at least be attributed to different experiences on the whole, we're arguing about different versions of the same video game. Why?

More to the point, Forever itself is kind of a counterargument to the idea that these versions of WoW have nothing to learn from each other. What's made it interesting is how it's reinterpreting oldschool MMO design with just a few sprinkles of convenience. I do not blame people for being in love with the past, but we can't be trapped in it forever, but saber-rattling and name-calling over it? We shouldn't do that to ourselves, or each other. We should (and I know this is a vain hope) be normal on the internet.

Speaking on the FRVR Podcast last week, former Bethesda writer and designer Kurt Kuhlmann was asked about the concept of "Dragon Breaks"—time getting all weird on account of magic and stuff⁠—in Elder Scrolls lore. The biggest Dragon Break as far as Elder Scrolls fans are concerned: "The Warp in the West," the series' post-facto determination that every ending of The Elder Scrolls Chapter 2: Daggerfall happened at the same time. On account of magic and stuff, you see.

I love this story: Simple serendipity, a workplace oopsie, accidentally setting in motion the continuity and story beats of a billion-dollar franchise. Kirkbride is memetically famous among Elder Scrolls fans as a boundary-pushing loremaster who added a lot of weird flavor to Morrowind, so his affinity for the timey-wimey, fucky-wucky potential of the Dragon Break absolutely scans.

As far as I can tell, it doesn't seem like the series timeline Kuhlmann mentioned was ever publicly available⁠—this must have been an internal lore bible sort of thing. While TES Arena and Daggerfall designer Ted Peterson would write the in-game book, "The Warp in the West," for Oblivion, Kirkbride and Kuhlmann appear to have introduced the concept in Morrowind with the books "Where Were You When the Dragon Broke" and "Dragon Break Re-Examined" respectively.

Kuhlmann noted in the podcast that he attempted to introduce more grounded, historiographic ambiguity with his treatment: What if the confusion was a matter of bias, transcription, and record-keeping, rather than metaphysical forces? Of course, Dragon Break Re-Examined also deliberately references events in Morrowind's future as the past, implying the skeptical book itself is yet another example of timey-wimey shenanigans⁠. An all-timer bit, for my money.

Elder Scrolls aside, the problem of preserving and representing RPG choice across multiple games in a series is something no studio has managed to fully "solve," if such a thing is even possible. I've always appreciated Bethesda's "fuck it, we ball" approach to the continuity with stuff like The Warp in the West. See also how Larian's Divinity: Original Sin 2 almost completely contradicts the story of Divinity 2: Ego Draconis (sans Original Sin) from eight years prior. I love RPGs so much, man.

The facts:

• Hideo Kojima's return to stealth-action, Physint, is no longer a PlayStation joint, and Microsoft picked up the ball.
• It still has big Hollywood talent, with Bill Skarsgård in the lead role.
• That's literally it.

What people are saying:

Alright, so what does that mean?

• Both Corden and Schreier's sources suggest Kojima Productions is working on a tighter budget with Microsoft than it was with Sony
• It's unclear how much had already been spent on Physint, and how much of the work on it is transferable—Kojima Productions presumably no longer has access to Sony's proprietary Decima Engine, for example.
• GamesRadar quoted a rumored budget for Death Stranding 2 "somewhere between $150-200 million."
• Insomniac's Spider-Man 2, with a leaked budget of $300 million, is widely agreed to have been an expensive gamble for PlayStation.
• Scooping Kojima was a PR victory for Xbox amid its unpopular, studio-killing "Reset," but its continued financial woes would give them incentive for doing it on the cheap.
• Whether Sony pulling out was a surprise as Kojima says, or preceded by months of negotiations, as alleged by Bloomberg, Kojima would not have been negotiating from a place of strength with Microsoft—his studio's health and employees' livelihoods were on the line.
• None of this strikes me as conducive to making a good videogame under healthy, happy working conditions.
• I really stuck on Schreier's phrasing, "certain A-list actors attached," regarding Physint. The game's first public image of its protagonist looks way more like Robert Pattinson than Bill Skarsgård. Maybe my hopes for Pattinson playing John Physint weren't just projection on my part...

Gears of War: E-Day is almost here, but that doesn't mean its developers have been spared in Microsoft's latest wave of layoffs as part of the Xbox "reset." While The Coalition, the studio currently working on the Gears of War series, was not mentioned by name in Matt Booty's "Continuing Our Reset" blog post, story director Juan Vaca announced on LinkedIn that he is now looking for work.

"I am part of this round of Microsoft layoffs and am open to new opportunities in games/film/tv," he wrote. "If your team needs a director/storyteller please reach out." It is perhaps especially galling given that Gears of War: E-Day went gold just days before the layoffs were announced, with a full release planned for Oct. 6.

It has felt increasingly like there is simply no amount of success, sales, acclaim, or back-breaking work you can demonstrate in the games industry to avoid some pencil pusher's job cut scythe. It's not just Microsoft's massive rounds of layoffs—take a studio like Star Wars Zero Company developer Bit Reactor, which furloughed most of its staff despite glowing reviews and over a million copies sold. This situation with Vaca echoes when, last year, a writer on Apex Legends was laid off just one day after a character she spent a year writing was unveiled.

For a primer on all the most reliable ways you can get laid off in the games industry, check out our guide on that very phenomenon. It is a sobering time to wish you could cheer on the medium's every step forward, given that the reward for doing the work seems to be a kick out the door.

The latest stage of Xbox's delicately named "reset" arrived last Tuesday—but its impact on World's Edge Studio, the developer now behind the Age of Empires series, was only briefly mentioned in Xbox CCO Matt Booty's announcement. On sites like resetera and LinkedIn, former employees of the RTS developer have shared that it was hit especially hard.

"What a morning," said former World's Edge creative director Adam Isgreen on resetera, posting under the verified account name Tempus Chaoti. "FYI World's Edge was not spared completely—just under half the studio was let go—myself included. Been fun, y'all!" This is in addition to the studio now answering to Activision alongside Sea of Thieves developer Rare.

Andrew Martz, former senior software engineer at World's Edge, posted on LinkedIn adding that "as part of that reorg, our next project was canceled and a large chunk of our studio was laid off. I was part of that layoff."

Isgreen also had more to say on LinkedIn, reflecting on his time working on the RTS series: "I didn't think I'd be working on RTS games again years after their first 'heyday,' but am I ever proud of what our studio team and partners were able to do with the series and juice the genre's return. I think the fans would agree (mostly!) that we delivered the goods for all of 'em."

While layoffs are always devastating to the affected workers, this latest round of calls from Xbox is especially baffling, and Microsoft's track record of destruction goes far beyond the games industry, it's still alarming how little regard for this medium's history has been shown in this "reset." This situation with World's Edge Studio echoes the company's treatment of id Software and countless other teams earlier this year.

The Elder Scrolls Online's developers have had a rough couple of years, starting with the scrapping of Project Blackbird in July 2025, which also led to 62 employees being laid off. Then, in July of this year, Xbox's reset tore into the studio's numbers, with a whopping 213 employees laid off from Zenimax Online. Overall, Zenimax Online's dev team dropped by roughly 60% in one year.

Which is a terrible blow, given I spoke to its development team back in January and was told it had rallied—and things were, for a while, really looking up. Refreshes to animations, a new seasonal structure, and a heaping help of experimental gameplay. Which made the aforementioned 2026 bloodbath both confusing and deeply disheartening.

I spoke with a few developers from the game to check in on how they were doing: "It is challenging," says game director Nick Giacomini, "something like this, it affects us. It affects all of us and the developers at a personal level. So we can't just pretend like it didn't happen and that it hasn't impacted us. We're human.

"At the same time, we still love this game. We love our players, and we love contributing to this and continuing to make it exciting, giving players something to look forward to. We're committed to doing so."

Giacomini himself dropped a letter to the community back in July, which echoed a lot of that same resolution—while also making the difficult choice to postpone a lot of the game's updates to 2027. "With what happened," Giacomini tells me, "That required us to take a look at schedules, see what's possible, and things needed to shift. And one of the underlying principles with that was that we didn't want to rush to just hit a date, right?

"We want [the] player experience to be as rewarding as possible to continue to surprise players and get them excited. And had we rushed it, would have put that at risk. So we wanted to give the team the space to be able to do it right, which necessarily meant pushing dates out for some things."

Giacomini says that, despite everything, the studio's not just in damage control mode: "I was just in a meeting earlier today about our plans for the end of 2027 and early 2028. So we're not just trying to figure out what to do now. We very much have an eye toward the future and how to continue to grow and excite players in this game."

Loremaster Michael Zenke views it as a means of honoring his colleagues who put in a ton of hard work already to getting ESO back on its feet: "Because ESO is here to stay, because it's not going anywhere, I personally feel like indebted to the people that we worked with, and want to make sure that the vision that they had goes out in the world and lands really successfully with the people that we love and appreciate on the community, and that's that's our long term thing that we're looking at right now."

Fortunately, Giacomini says the team has been buoyed by the community's support—and while some have been disappointed by the delays, no real ire's been directed at Zenimax Online itself: "I think our community is certainly one of the best—perhaps I'm a little bit biased—but it's one of the reasons that I love this game … We've had people reach out, we've had people post.

"We had a book that was made by our community, and it's now sitting in the office on a desk open right in the middle where everybody can see it … They wrote about what makes Elder Scrolls Online special to them, things that have stood out, and it is extraordinarily heartwarming. And it's just really it's been really incredible how they've supported us through this."

Looking forward

Mercifully, it's not like ESO's going to be completely dry before these delays—come September 28, the game'll be getting three new bits of content: The Nowhere Vault, an experimental set of puzzles, mazes, and jumping challenges put in a randomised order, The High Seas of Tamriel, an event that'll see you battling on ships and underwater, and perhaps the most interesting one: rumours.

A rumour is a special type of quest that's essentially a scavenger hunt—no quest markers, just hints. Associate game director Jason Barnes says it's designed to pull players out of a streamlined questing experience and into something a touch more immersive:

"We all have grown and up in MMOs, and I know probably [for] everyone here, our our time has changed dramatically over the years, but there was this sense of discovery and exploration [back then], and coming across something interesting where you don't really know the answer, no one's pointing to a direction and saying you have to go here or anything like that."

That's what rumours aim to do, as Barnes puts it: "You're not playing the UI; you're playing the actual game itself. Early testing and feedback has been very positive. Matter of fact, we've gotten feedback saying 'you need to make them harder, you need to make them more obscure'. So we're like, OK, cool, acknowledged."

A lot of these are hold-overs that were in the works before the layoffs of July this year, but still—it's nice to see ESO properly trying to experiment, something Giacomini is pretty key to the game's future. And those experiments have, in his mind, been successful:

"Night market is a great example … at first, players didn't quite know what to make of it. They came in and just got steamrolled right away. It was hard content, and so there were a lot of calls for like, 'Oh my god, this is so overtuned. What have you done!' But as time went by they started grouping up and they started enjoying it more … It's one of the few examples that I can think of where we didn't have to go to the drawing board."

Despite everything, there's some genuine excitement to be found still among Zenimax's developers: "I'm just really excited," says Zenke, "in general, that we are trying things. We've been making the game now for a very long time, and the way that we made the game and the best practices we developed are all really good … [But] I'm very excited about taking a hard look at like, 'Why do we do this this way? Why is this set up this way?'"

I'm not going to sit here and tell you, in this harsh and chaotic industry, that The Elder Scrolls Online is immune to future hardship—almost nothing surprises me anymore. But while it's clear that the one-two suckerpunch of layoffs and restructurings have hobbled Zenimax Online, it's still trying to keep ESO going. And in a genre that's on the ropes, I certainly hope this game can get back on solid ground without further earthquakes.

Earlier this week, Xbox laid off 268 people on top of the 1,600 jobs it cut earlier this year. It has shoved Obsidian into Bethesda, handed Halo to Activision, said Sayonara to Double Fine and Compulsion Games, and State of Decay developer Undead Labs, and is primed to close Hellblade developer Ninja Theory.

All of this is part of Xbox's "reset", under its new(ish) CEO Asha Sharma. Sharma has been the public face of the company's deeply controversial restructuring, defending it with statements like "great technology gets better when it gets simpler, not bigger" which, incidentally, is why aeroplanes always perform better when you rip one of the wings off.

But both Sharma and Xbox are ultimately part of a much larger organisation. So what does Microsoft's head honcho Satya Nadella think of all these cuts, closures, and cancellations? Well, he thinks that Xbox's "streamlining" is "great to see".

Speaking on the Sources Podcast with Alex Heath (via Kotaku), Nadella briefly touched upon the subject of the Xbox layoffs as part of a much wider-ranging interview, starting by gassing up all the intellectual property that Xbox has under its belt. "I feel fantastic about the IP we have right now," Nadella stated. "If I look at the studios, the IP portfolio we have, and our ability to then take that and produce great games going forward, I feel fantastic."

As for the radical studio reorgs and the cuts which have left thousands of people jobless, Nadella described the process as if Xbox was designing a new Formula 1 car. "There's some amount of streamlining the team is doing, and Asha is doing, which is great to see," he said.

Nadella then quickly turned to Microsoft's future plans for Xbox: "Then we have to invent the right sustainable business model that allows us to deliver gaming to more and more people. That has always been the goal, which is, we want to be a great publisher and a great platform provider to games across both PC and Xboxes." he told Heath. "And so that is sort of our goal. And I think Asha and the team have said that Xbox is going to get growth in the next fiscal year."

If I understand Nadella correctly here, the plan is to embark upon the most dramatic reorganisation of Microsoft's gaming division ever and then come up with the business model that it's going to pursue. Which, to extend my aeroplane metaphor, is a bit like ripping one of the wings off before saying "Right, how do we circumnavigate this 'globe' thing?"

But that doesn't mean Xbox is going to stop. Oh no. When the most recent layoffs were announced, Xbox's Chief Creator Officer Matt Booty said the company was "roughly three-quarters of the way through previously announced restructuring". Which means there's more yet to come.

Tom's Hardware and Respawn First recently reported on a fun new patent from those wiz kids at Microsoft, one that would dynamically pause your game to show you advertisements. Here are the big wham lines from the abstract of US 202610260258 A1, "Contextually Aware Management of Interactive Software Application Access:"

• "A content management system may suspend a user's interaction with the interactive software application based on the promoted content trigger event." (Emphasis mine)
• "A content management system may present the promoted audiovisual content to the user."
• "A content management system may establish a credit … the credit delays suspension of the user's interaction."

That's the sort of whimsical creativity that made me fall in love with games in the first place. In plain English: This is a system for showing advertisements during gameplay, one that pauses your game (suspends your interaction). Similar to ad-supported mobile games, Microsoft proposes a credit system where these tokens can be exchanged for more ad-free game time.

Microsoft explains that videogames do not lend themselves to regular commercial breaks in the same way as TV shows, necessitating a partially user-controlled, credit-based system for managing advertisement delivery. The other half of the equation: Having it monitor gameplay and avoid deploying ads during climactic or lean-forward moments. How thoughtful.

This sounds, quite frankly, god-awful. One of the worst case scenario arguments against always-online consoles and subscription-based gaming outlined in a patent. I'm not sure there is a game good enough, or an ad-supported Game Pass package cheap enough, that would make me subject myself to this. Forget the inconvenience⁠—the indignity of it all is enough to drive you to the brink.

The silver lining, if you're still rooting for Xbox⁠—it still holds some of my favorite studios hostage⁠—is that patents are not always put into practice. Seventeen years ago, Sony signaled intent to have us all stand up and shout "McDonalds" to make a vision of a burger go away, and that never happened.

The popular outrage against the patent may already be giving the planners at Microsoft pause. On the other hand: Xbox's CSO Matthew Ball is still a big believer in in-game ads. Meanwhile, The ailing titan EA has already rolled out EA Advertising, a new platform for "in-game integrations, creative partnerships, and scalable advertising capabilities." I love scalable advertising capabilities.

Listen, you can say what you want about Avowed—I wouldn't even blame you if you didn't like it, or much of what has come out of Obsidian's recent catalogue. There's even a tiny, selfish scrap of my gamer heart that's secretly very glad that Obsidian is working on a new Fallout game, again.

But this is pretty rich, given the grinder that Obsidian's been put through in the past few months. As a reminder, in July, 25% of Obsidian's staff was laid off during Xbox's ongoing, brutal "reset", totalling around 52 employees. When this happened, a sequel to Avowed was cancelled, along with multiple unannounced games. More recently, Obsidian's being folded into Bethesda.

Now, in fairness to Braff, it's entirely possible that this particular merging did not ruin Obsidian's ability to express itself. It's entirely possible that the post-bloodletting Obsidian we were left with in July and the one currently under Bethesda now are pretty much interchangeable.

However, the idea that Obsidian's creative identity has been respected by these moves overall is laughable—cancelling multiple projects is the opposite of that, actually. Making it work on a franchise it hasn't really touched in 16 years is the opposite of that, actually. And pushing it into a get-along t-shirt with Bethesda? I have a suspicion that time'll prove this move the opposite, too.

Not that things are great for anybody at the moment, but I'm not entirely sure how anyone in the videogame industry keeps their head together—Josh Daniels, one of the latest victims in Xbox's brutal series of resets, has been promoted and then laid off in the same week.

For some context, this forms part of the previously-announced 1,600 layoffs that'll be happening as Xbox's fiscal year whirls around. This is, of course, after a 1,600-person bloodbath that preceded it, leaving a sword dangling precariously over Microsoft's remaining videogame studios.

Daniels' absurd circumstances remind me of a report, which surfaced in July, that described a situation in which an anonymous source told Game Developer their layoffs "left colleagues scrambling to make sense of the situation using unofficial channels—many of which are overseen by union members and organizers."

Also in July, Bethesda developers were also reportedly told they had jobs until September right before the axe swung. What's clear is this: Nothing, absolutely nothing, signals safety in the videogame industry anymore. Even if you're promoted, you can get punted from a studio in the same week.

Alright, here's the problem—I'm not sure this really works for its intended purpose.

World of Warcraft has traditionally had roleplay servers, yes, and those servers do traditionally have people acting out their gameplay in-character: But there's a perception, which is being applied here by Blizzard, that this is their—our—main deal.

In my experience, most RP communities do have players who are still interested in… well, playing the game. Very few people log on exclusively for the purpose of writing with each other. They'll also do dungeons, raids, and so on—with a clear split between their in-character actions and game time. Basically, nobody's RP-walking in a dungeon on Argent Dawn EU. We're doing the damn dungeon.

I won't gripe about the "strict naming conventions and behaviour rules" because there's every chance they're reasonable, although the word "strict" does give me cause for alarm. Roleplay servers tend to work on informal manners without one real "one size fits all" model of in-character/out of character conduct.

What gives me actual pause are these clarifications by Blizzard:

• "Cross-ruleset grouping is not supported, so characters in different spaces will not be able to group together for those activities."
• "Players cannot freely hop between rulesets; to play under a different one, they’ll need to create a new character in that ruleset."

This seems like an overkill requirement for roleplayers—who, again, very rarely act in-character while they're doing dungeon runs and raids. While I can see separating "normal" ruleset players and roleplayer ruleset players out in the open world, where RP is likely to take place, there's no real reason to split them off from the rest of the community outside of that.

Roleplay servers in the retail game are where we congregate, sure—but they're actually populated by a lot of folks who don't roleplay, or just like to watch people RP. And I see no reason why, in Forever, we should be siloing off those groups from each other in all content.

A clear split between the other rulesets makes sense, but to a roleplay ruleset, I think a semi-permeable membrane would make sense. That way, I can still play with my non-RPer mates—something I do all the time in other MMOs of choice without having to make a separate character.

I swore I'd never become this evil

Anyway, this beta is not designed to be a competitive experience. For those not in the know, Blizzard will be wiping all of the WoW: Forever progress when the game launches in November.

But I am going to be treating it like one, because all of my morals have crumpled into a hole with a sign that says: "I want to be 3 levels higher than everybody in October for like two hours." I'm especially (on paper) against the idea of min-maxing in a beta, where your progress means absolutely nothing. And yet. And yet.

Here's the issue—I am currently an inch away from level 19. I have a bunch of quests I'd like to do, including finishing the new Ruins of Lordaeron dungeon. I am not doing this, however, because Blizzard will at some point be increasing the cap from level 20 to level 30.

But I also have a massive problem: I don't want to stop playing my Warrior. I'm hitting some absolutely meaty crits. So what is a lad to do? Well, while you can still do quests in the beta, there's nothing to say you actually have to turn them in, especially because Blizzard has increased your journal limit from 20 to 40.

If you're picking up what I'm putting down: I will be continuing to quest in level-appropriate zones through this new Azeroth, I just won't be turning anything in. I am going to, like some kind of maniac, flood my questing journal with 40 batches of EXP, then get the biggest dopamine hit of my life when that level cap is raised sometime next month.

Why am I doing this to myself? That's a very good question, and one I'm too busy grinding to answer.

World of Warcraft: Forever has a new two-name system, given it'll be taking place on one big megaserver—which has a few advantages, like making sure you can typically get your chosen first name without the sheer volume of players snapping it out from under you.

Naturally, being a bunch of silly geezers, WoW players have been using it to mercilessly run bits. Here's a quick list of some of my favourites that myself and my colleagues have seen, plus a gallery of images to reassure you that they are, in fact, real:

• Rotten Nutz
• Skonch Prime
• Minion Cuck
• Lancedalot Nowimdead (notably, an undead paladin).
• Huge Bulge
• Take Meds
• Zugzug Workwork
• Gotta Poo
• Girlwho Suggestsyaoi
• Ballbag Billy
• Po Tayto
• Supplement Bottle
• Looks Maxxer
• Floorpov Povfloor
• John Warcrimes

But beware: If you wish to join the ranks of these absurdly-named heroes, Blizzard has confirmed it'll be removing beta access from people who name themselves something terribly rude: "Character names must adhere to our naming policies, including in Beta. If you violate those policies that may result in the removal of beta access."

World of Warcraft: Forever's beta has been utterly rammed with server issues—issues that I'm pleased to say were fixed in relatively short order, and one I certainly don't resent anybody for. What does jump my eyebrows up my head is the fact that its developers are shocked that the game's popular.

For those not in the know, Forever's essentially Classic+. A version of the game as it was back in 2004, but with a bunch of changes made not to modernise it, but to make that old school vision better. Over 1,000 extra quests, new zones, redesigned talented trees, new racial abilities, and some major improvements to lighting.

It's pure, distilled liquid nostalgia. A fat, juicy worm for shmucks (like me) to chomp onto and be shocked when there's a hook in our mouth—a fact that apparently completely disarmed the beta's development team: "AHMAGERD, this game is 20 years old, how do you still suck at this!?!" Rhetorically asks Tom Ellis, senior game producer, on X:

"Heh, fair enough, short answer is, this is our BETA PTR environment stack, it's not a production stack by a long, long, long, long, long, long shot. Betas for WoW aren't usually huge meter movers so this environment just isn't that powerful. This led to the first problem you saw today."

From the dev's end, nothing was amiss when players were being booted out after a long queue time: "We were hitting the BGS metering system that protects their services from falling over under extreme load. Our tiny little REGIONAL [server] with its two connections that were trying to login A LOT of users, even though it was nowhere near capped on CPU, was completely screwing the math that system was using. We scaled that 2 to an 8 and immediately the flood gates opened once again."

Ellis adds that this is completely unprecedented: "First time anyone's seen it kick in when there wasn't an obvious CPU issue to go along with it. 20 years, always something new."

You can read the full post for the technical mumbo jumbo, but the point is, it's all working better now: "Right now things are incredibly smooth for the first few hours of a public beta, Classic teams watching and fixing anything blocking that comes up but we're otherwise pretty much done for the night, enjoy!"

Josh Greenfield, also a senior game designer, commented: "The craziest numbers I've seen in 17 years working at Blizzard and almost eight years on classic. We've got something really special here."

And you know what, I'm inclined to agree. Forever has me in a chokehold. I've both had rose-tinted goggles forcibly drilled into my face, and I've been genuinely impressed by the changes made already. Forever crawled out of an alternate universe where the modern MMO was never invented, and all the inconvenience and friction of the past was conserved, but not entirely left to burn you.

Sony's recent decision to cut ties with Kojima Productions's Physint is one of the more unexpected turns of 2026. Even with the industry's many struggles, and speculation that Death Stranding 2 didn't sell as well as Sony hoped, the PlayStation studio shutting the door on one of the industry's most famed and respected designers was a huge surprise.

While Kojima Productions would eventually find a new publisher for Physint in Microsoft, it took a frantic three months of pitching for that happen. This is partly because Kojima himself was similarly blindsided by Sony's decision, as the veteran designer revealed in the first interview he's given since switching publishers.

Speaking to IGN, Kojima revealed that in June, Sony contacted him saying they wanted to have a Zoom call, which he agreed to. It was during that call when Sony broke the bad news: "They said they can no longer fund development for Physint. I was shocked and I said 'What did you say?'" Kojima explained. "I couldn't quite process what they had said. I wasn't sure because I was in such shock."

Kojima told IGN that he understood "the situation in the industry as a whole", with many studios being shut down and projects being cancelled. But he genuinely believed Physint "was safe" from the industry's broader turbulence. "I was surprised, but not just surprised. We didn't understand the reason. I didn't have any anger or sadness; my first thought was 'What am I going to do with my studio?"'

Indeed, Kojima Productions' financials were such that it would have struggled to continue operating as it had with one of its two projects—the other being the horror game OD—deprived of funding. "I thought I might have to cut all the people working on Physint, right? Or our studio could end up collapsing because we'll run out of cashflow." Kojima specified that he has "borrowed money from the bank" to help fund Kojima Productions, and that "If they find out a project has been stopped or cancelled, we'd be in big trouble."

The reason for Sony's decision still seems to elude Kojima—or at least, if he does know the reason, he hasn't stated it explicitly. But there is an implication that his relationship with Sony has shifted, as people he knew at the company have left or retired. "I've been working with [Sony] for like 30 years… Mr Ken Kutaragi, Mr. Hirai, I was close with them. But it's not like that recently."

Nonetheless, Kojima reiterated that, despite Sony's decision, he doesn't view the company negatively. "Nothing could’ve prepared me for their decision to step away from the project. So I thought, 'What am I going to do from tomorrow?' But from my side, I love Sony. And I don't have any bad feelings against them."

Once Kojima got past the shock, his first thought was to protect his staff: "I can't really tell them the game has been cancelled. I didn't want to do the same thing we did for P.T. Of course, I didn't want to worry." As such, Kojima began thinking about pitching Physint to other companies.

Rather than pitching Physint as a single game, which he described as being "a very old-fashioned way of doing things", he decided to pitch it as a broader IP with multimedia potential: "I want to consider everything like movies, dramas, anime, TV, comics, music. Let's create a new IP with all of this included."

Kojima made such a pitch to various people, claiming that "everyone had positive reactions". But Kojima wanted a partner who could feasibly support such wide-ranging plans, which is why he took Physint to Xbox. "I approached Xbox and they were great. They could support us technically. And also we've been working on OD with them, so we already had a connection. I made a proper pitch of Physint to them. And then their first reaction was like: 'This pitch was fantastic. Never seen a pitch like this!' And that was how it started with Xbox.'"

It may seem odd for Xbox to be considered the safe option, given the company is in the middle of cutting thousands of jobs and recently parted ways with several studios of its own, including Double Fine and Compulsion Games. However, Microsoft clearly sees getting to publish Kojima's games as a feather in its cap, and it has previously safeguarded the designer's games from its own downsizing on more than one occasion.

I've been having a jolly old time with World of Warcraft: Forever—for the most part, it really does just feel like an alternate universe where the Cataclysm world revamp never happened and, instead, Blizzard simply funnelled more quests into the old world. There's still plenty here that's familiar, but there's just enough new stuff to do to smooth over the levelling and questing experience.

A questing experience that is otherwise unchanged. If anything, the oldschool-ness of it is actually elevated by the changes, reflecting some of WoW's best questing areas. It's as though every single zone has become The Barrens, flooded with lots of little tasks for your dopamine-starved brain nugget.

And let me tell you, I've been staggered at how much fun I'm having. Not just in a "nostalgic oldschool rose-tinted goggles" sort of way (although I'll concede that is part of it) but from a genuine perspective of someone playing a modern videogame. Because the quest design that captured an entire generation of MMO players back in the early 2000s? It holds up.

Not in terms of the "collect five bear arses" thing, but in terms of how it's all structured. See, in the good ol' days, WoW had questing hubs wherein you'd flood your journal with anywhere from five to fifteen tasks, some of which had their own branching storylines and quest chains.

You were then faced with a map and a decision of how to complete them—okay, clarification time, the quest markers on a map ARE new, but it's not like we didn't have quest helper AddOns back in the day. Anyway, keeping that decision-making interesting are what I'm gonna call the three layers of questing friction: Ordering, travel, and level variety.

'Ordering' is the most straightforward—simply put, the player has to decide what the most efficient way to do these quests is with limited information. Sometimes, you might finish your batch of quests, only to discover that if you'd turned in a different one first, you'd be able to be far more efficient. Womp womp.

'Travel' is the idea that quests shouldn't be within a convenient distance of each other all of the time. Sometimes, you should put a quest just far enough out of the way that the player is encouraged to go: Ugh, I might as well. The journey to these quests is often just as interesting as doing them, and you can put even more quests on the other side of that journey to make them feel worth it in a surprising way.

'Level variety' is the fact that quests should have a small variation in both enemy level and location—Zalazane in Durotar's a good example of this. He's a couple levels higher than everyone else (level 10, compared to level 8) and is a bit of a pain in the arse to kill. You either need to group up with folks, come back when you're a higher level, or develop some kind of cheese strat to make things easier. Or hey, maybe you're just a class that has an easier time soloing and you're fine. That's good too.

You'll notice that retail WoW has cast all three of these things aside entirely. Modern WoW questlines are often delivered in batches of two to three quests which are turned in as small parcels, usually while following a character through a linear narrative, so no ordering required. Travel is nixed because you have a flying mount—one that's become far faster with Skyriding. And level variety isn't a thing anymore because everything scales.

There is a reason why this approach was adopted, don't get me wrong—it's smooth, a nice little breadcrumb trail of dopamine shots to keep you blissed out in a "numbers go up" loop. But it's trading ease and comfort for satisfaction, because… I mean, look at this.

I think I speak for us all when I say: God. God yes. Ugh, that's the stuff.

What makes Forever so delicious to me is that it eases up on the friction a little bit by giving you more to do, but it still keeps that core satisfaction of coming up with your own routes. In my recent quests through Tirisfal Glades, I had one quest send me way far afield, up a mountain, and across a lake. And I still chose to do it, because I was already halfway there and my hearthstone was almost off cooldown.

The level variety thing also encourages you to group up more often, too—sure, you could come back and knock Zalazane over later. Or you could ask if anyone wants to kill the guy now. Grouping in this case isn't a strict requirement, like in the case of an "elite" quest, but it saves you time in the long run.

Vanilla WoW was by no means perfect—sometimes all that friction gave you ropeburn, feeling more accidental than deliberate. But that's kind of the exercise that Forever's attempting, here. Rather than tearing out the old world entirely in favour of more modern quest design, there's been a considered effort to polish out the friction just a smidge. Plugging holes and gaps in a zone's quest design while keeping the overall structure the same.

And in the same vein as my love of tab-target MMOs, I think it's nice to see this oldschool technique be given a second swing. You can improve an old formula to bring it up to date without ruining what made it special, and gosh, I think Blizzard really might be achieving that here.

I've been getting stuck into World of Warcraft: Forever's beta—though I'm a little less levelled up than I'd like to be. Initially, I just chalked this up to launch-day queue problems, but as it turns out, there's a little more to it than that.

See, I live in the UK, and Blizzard rarely does beta testing with EU-region players in mind. Forever's no different, the servers appear to be located solely in the US. Which isn't too much trouble, mind, I can deal with playing on 100+ ping for a beta test. What I can't deal with is logging in, having 300 ping, suddenly spiking to 2000 world MS, and then disconnecting.

The solution? A VPN. The moment I set my VPN to a US region, I received a cosy 100 ping and zero disconnection issues. As I quested through Durotar during EU times, I was able to corroborate the fix with plenty of other EU players who were experiencing the exact same thing with the exact same solution.

The EU WoW Forever beta forums are on fire with (understandable, though perhaps overexpressed) outrage: "We shouldn’t need a VPN service just to get a playable connection to a game we already paid €60 for," writes one player. "Can confirm VPN fixes it, I have <100ms ping on VPN and basically don’t feel lag. But obviously, [I] shouldn’t have to do that," adds another.

If this were, say, simply a closed-invite beta, I wouldn't even blink at this issue. But the fact of the matter is that Blizzard has used the beta to sell the Skyborne Epic Pack, it's pretty rough. Here's the store page for the EU: While the pack is keen to mention beta access, I can't find any mention of the beta's server locations on the page—just a notification of the dates it's taking place.

On the other hand, this is clearly some sort of network issue that Blizzard will doubtless fix. VPNs aren't magic, they can't make the internet go faster. What they can do is reroute your internet connection in a way that can skip routing issues—as is the case with me, and other EU-based players.

From what I can see, these connection problems aren't a known issue on the forums. As such, I've reached out to Blizzard for comment, and will update this article if I receive a response.

Hideo Kojima took to his social media channels earlier today to announce Bill Skarsgård as the new lead for his upcoming stealth-action game, Physint. He also reaffirmed some of the game's casting announcements from before it changed hands from PlayStation to Xbox after a seemingly messy split with Sony. Physint's top-billed cast are:

• Bill Skarsgård
• Charlee Fraser
• Don Lee
• Minami Hambe

Alongside the casting announcement, Kojima shared a new poster for Physint featuring Skarsgård, Fraser, and the new tagline "The Next Cold War Begins." Tucked away at the bottom is, perhaps, the most exciting news for me personally: Third-billed on production behind Hideo Kojima and Hideo Kojima is the GOAT, Yoji Shinkawa, on "character and mechanical design."

The longtime Kojima collaborator and Metal Gear character artist also worked at Kojima Productions on Death Stranding, but it's comforting to get confirmation he was unaffected by the recent production dust-up.

Speaking of Physint's continuity, Fraser, Lee, and Hamabe had all been confirmed in a prior Kojima Productions announcement about Physint's cast. Skarsgård as leading man John Physint (working name) is the only new casting info⁠—though, like with Shinkawa, it's probably worth clarifying after everything that's happened.

I was initially disappointed. Based on John Physint's shadowy appearance in the game's first teaser, I was hoping Kojima would spring for Robert Pattinson in the role. He's a known gamer on a bit of an all-time career hot-streak, and feels like a perfect fit for Kojima's oeuvre. Skarsgård was pretty great in Robert Eggers' 2024 Nosferatu, though, and I can only hope he brings a similarly unsettling, sexual energy to Physint.

Kojima seems to be spinning up marketing for the game again now that Microsoft has scooped it from Sony. The PlayStation parent company reportedly cut Kojima off for going over budget and missing deadlines. There's been no definitive word, but it's hard to imagine that Kojima will be allowed to keep using Sony and Guerilla Games' proprietary Decima engine (which also powered Death Stranding) now that he's left the fold, potentially delaying this game that already felt like it was years away.

Kojima's other big upcoming project, O.D.—also published by Xbox⁠—looks much closer to release. Its "Knock" trailer from last year makes it look like a return to some of the ideas explored in Kojima's legendary demo for the canceled Silent Hills, P.T.

World of Warcraft: Forever's beta arrives today, but the dataminers are way ahead of us, having ferreted out all sorts of new details. WoW Forever's still around a month and a half from launch day, so this should be considered a work in progress, but it's still interesting.

As datamined by WoWHead, Forever will be bringing all sorts of unique set bonuses to the game as an incentive to actually go out and farm. The Postmaster set, a level 56 kit, now nets owners Return to Sender, which gives you a free spell reflect after falling to 25% health. The Necropile's Raiment, meanwhile, has a chance to steal life from spellcasting, and the Bloodmail's Regalia can bleed enemies that attack you.

Even low-level armor sets have cool bonuses now, like the Defias Leather set, which, at four pieces, has a chance to make your melee attacks bleed the target on a 5% proc chance. The Embrace of the Viper five-set bonus seems wild, too, giving you a chance to just outright stun your targets for 1 second.

I think it's neat as heck and a good sign that Blizzard intends to keep up this whole horizontal development thing. The fact that even lower-level gear is being treated as more than just a stop-gap makes me more excited for the entire exercise.

The max level dungeon sets are interesting as well—like the Warlock's Dread/Deathmist raiments, which have a chance to fear attackers when they strike you on a 60 second cooldown. Raid sets, which should come from the new raids added to Forever and have bespoke set bonuses, are also cool.

For example, the feral tanking set, Grovekeeper's Rage, lets you cast Rebirth while in bear form. And a lot of these sets provide damage bonuses against certain creature types, like a rogue set that adds attack power versus humanoids, or the warlock's Demonheart Raiment, which gives spellpower against demons.

And while not all of these datamined sets are made equal, they're also not made finished, so I anticipate a few of them getting a heck of a lot more interesting when the full game comes out in November.

Microsoft, at this point, drips gore from head to toe. The megacorp has made a hobby of shuttering studios and laying off thousands of devs, in attempt after attempt to right the listing ship of its games business. No luck yet, on that front.

You might wonder how Playground's upcoming Fable reboot, in the works for a decade now, has evaded its parent company's reign of terror. In a chat with The Guardian, Playground co-founder and Fable director Ralph Fulton offered up a pretty simple explanation: Fable's just that important.

"I genuinely think Fable is an important game," said Fulton. "What has protected us over a long development cycle is that so many people within Xbox view Fable as vital to the DNA of the platform." That is to say, Fable is a potent Xbox brand, like Halo or Gears of War, and that's protected it from the chop.

It fits the pattern of Microsoft's studio closures. Though the end of studios like Arkane Austin (rest in peace), Tango Gameworks (before it was picked up by Krafton) and others felt brutal, they didn't strike at the heart of that amorphous thing you might call the Xbox brand. It did not claim the life of any character you might see plastered on a banner or standee at a Microsoft Gamescom booth.

Honestly? I might not have instinctually put Fable in that bracket, but I can see why you might, and in that light I can believe that Xbox execs would be timid about hurting it. Fulton, mind you, doesn't just think Fable's importance starts and stops at Xbox: "I would go a step further and say it’s important to video games as a whole. It offers a combination of elements that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else." Ironically, I suspect that wider importance matters less to games industry execs.

World of Warcraft: Forever's an interesting pitch—instead of no changes, it's an all-changes version of vanilla WoW. Updated talent trees, new quests, essentially an envisioning of the OG game where, save for the new sky elves, all of the fresh additions are horizontal. New dungeons and raids all packaged within that original level 60 cap in good ol' Azeroth.

But given Blizzard just did Season of Discovery, at least one question was brewing in my mind—would the developer add some of the wilder class designs, like healing mages and shaman tanks, as optional skill trees or playstyles?

Sadly not, says senior game designer Josh Greenfield in a recent GameSpot interview: "[Season of Discovery] was always meant to be ephemeral, and it allowed us to take some risks that we probably wouldn't really take in a 'forever' game. A lot of the changes, I think, in spirit—a lot of the lessons we learned—are carried over. But some of the more out there things that weren't originally in original WoW, we toned them back a little bit."

I already had a feeling, given a lot of the preemptively put together talent calculators—but these were assembled from a beta version of the game, gathered together in snippets at Blizzcon. By no means were its prophesied talents final. However, what I did see had me leaning in the way of playing it safe.

Aside from a few very cool additions and redesigned specs, a lot of the changes were simply bringing class design elements from modern WoW back into its vanilla age. Take combat rogues, for instance, which enjoy an equivalent of the outlaw rogue's central trick, lowering all of their cooldowns by a few seconds when they use a finishing more.

That's not to say that there's no experimentation in Forever's future, mind. Greenfield continues: "It's one of those things—it's in the name, it's forever, we can do a lot of things over years, but we wanted to start from a place where the soul of the class is very coded and original WoW-centric.

"But there's still meaningful changes and really exciting ways to play your class … But some of the Warlock tank, Shaman tank, not quite yet? But never say never, y'know." It's a bit of a shame, given Forever is sort of meant to be Blizzard's replacement for a WoW 2, but I can at least understand why the studio's starting off a little less experimental than it could've. And that's not to say the boat isn't being rocked at all.

It's been a meme for eight years—where's the sword, Blizzard? At the end of World of Warcraft: Legion, the big bad Sargeras tried to punch a big, corruptive sword into the heart of Azeroth. For years—eight years and nine months, to be exact—it's been a big, hanging question mark over the game's lore.

Especially given that, up until the Worldsoul Saga, Blizzard has been a little scattershot with its expansion ideas. The current trilogy is the company's first real, proper attempt at a multi-expansion storyline, à la Final Fantasy 14's 10-year epic that carried it from A Realm Reborn to Endwalker.

Which is why I'm a little bummed out, man. In an interview with WoWHead, associate game director Paul Kubit says that in the Midnight: What's Next recap, a screenshot of Azeroth's worldsoul with a jagged spike pointed towards it? Yeah, that's the sword. No—really, Kubit said "Yeah, yeah. That's the sword." Look:

"Yeah, yeah. That's the Sword. Eagle-eyed viewers have identified that, and yeah, we've been thinking about the Sword and it should become very apparent to people as you play through Eclipse that we haven't forgotten about the Sword. This is not something that is going away. Also, how tragically close it came to the Worldsoul is a testament to how close he came, but also maybe the power of the Worldsoul herself."

I'm bothered, somewhat, because on paper this is a super cool detail—look at that thing. It came literally feet away from punching into the centre of the world, which would've corrupted the entire planet with fel magic. Per WoW cosmology, it would've also stopped the void lords from turning it into a Dark Titan, which was kind of Sargeras' whole deal. But it also would've killed everybody, so—too many eggs for that omelette.

I'm imagining a world in which I dropped into this zone for the first time, saw that sword-tip inches away from Azeroth's soul, and went: Oh, crap. We were this close to the end of the world.

I'll keep things vague for spoiler reasons, but Final Fantasy 14—which keeps story elements under wraps before the patch or expansion they're due comes out—is really good at this. At several points in its winding 10-year story, a vista or an environment pulls double duty as part of the narrative: Like an impossible glimmering city under the ocean, or a heartachingly gorgeous faery landscape in a dying world.

But WoW doesn't do this. It tests patches for weeks on the PTR with preview cutscenes and, as mentioned above, it reveals huge overarching narrative beats during interviews and press conferences—which robs Blizzard of a pretty solid tool in its arsenal: Letting the environment show you the story.

Rather than having an "oh, shit!" moment when I saw this sword while in Midnight's final raid, and slowly piecing it together, I have instead been told in a quote by a director that I will, in a handful of months, see exactly what he said I'd see. And, listen—even though I've been impressed by some elements of Midnight's story, it's not exactly gripped my heart like FF14's did. And as long as we live in a world where big reveals like this aren't treated with much sanctity, it's probably gonna stay that way.

World of Warcraft: Forever, in case you missed the wild news that came out of BlizzCon over the weekend, is essentially Classic+. A reimagining of vanilla WoW with updated talent trees, new raids and dungeons, more horizontal progression, and some shiny, glossic graphics thrown over the top of the whole thing.

Given it's aping a more friction-filled time in history, you might be wondering if it'll be offering a Hardcore mode: The answer, per the "What's Next" panel, is a resounding yes. Production director Clayton Stone, who was the associate production director on Classic itself, took to the stage to profess his love of the hardcore mode:

"Hardcore represented a turning point for us as a team. We had tried a few things before it, and as [Ian Hazzikostas] covered, we have absolutely tried new things since. But hardcore represented the moment when Blizzard and the community came together, and showed not only why World of Warcraft is one of the greatest games ever made, but why that original adventure still holds so much promise for where we could go in the future.

"Which," he continues, "Is why I am also so proud to announce that Hardcore will be coming to WoW Forever as well."

While this isn't all too surprising on the face of it—Classic Hardcore proved to be incredibly popular—it will be interesting. One of the reasons why Hardocre mode became so popular was because, well, Classic is a "solved" game at this point. Chances are if you're going for a hardcore run, you already know every nook and cranny of Azeroth, which is 20 years old at this point. And if you don't, you can open a guide somewhere to maximise your chances.

But Forever will be adding new dungeons and raids, new quests—surprise encounters around every corner that could kill a Hardcore run deader than dirt. Which is likely why it's not coming out on the game's launch this November—instead reserved for the winter season.

That'll give more time for Hardcore aficionados to map out every inch of Forever's alternate-reality Azeroth and plan the best strats. And we know how WoW players love their min-maxing.

World of Warcraft has a long-standing tradition of datamining and min-maxing. So it should come as no surprise that, despite only just being shown at Blizzcon, World of Warcraft: Forever now already has online talent calculators available, assembled from a delightful tapestry of streams and ravenous info-gatherers.

There's the old reliable that is WoWHead, but I want to shout out Reddit user Baldwinbuilds for their version, which not only collects all of the currently-known info about the Classic revamp's talents, but also has a handy button that tells you exactly how they were changed. It's a tremendous bit of work.

I've had a skim through, and assembled a list of some of the wildest additions—now, keep in mind, WoW Forever's not coming until November, so all of these are likely to change between now and its debut. But it still gives you an idea of the sorts of design philosophies that Blizzard's gearing up to apply:

• Arms warriors get a new ability called Searing Strike, which does an 80% extra damage against Giants, Dragonkin, and mounted targets—knocking them off their steed to boot.
• Retribution paladins have an interesting talent called Holy Twist. This debuffs an enemy whenever you replace your current seal on them with an echo, which then re-triggers it on your next melee attack. Basically, you'll be cycling through your seals.
• Survival hunters seem to be dual wielders now with Predator's Edge, which increases your offhand damage by 10% per point, along with a bunch of new abilities that make your Mongoose Bite more effective.
• Combat rogues borrow some tricks from retail's outlaw with Relentless Blades, which reduces their cooldowns whenever they use a finisher. This is a pretty big change, given it changes the flow of combat rogues completely.
• Shamans get Totemic Projection, a huge quality of life buff, letting them take their totems with them on the move—as well as Call of the Elements, which lets you drop a full set of totems in one cast.

Other than that, it's a lot of popular snags from retail. Mages, for instance, get talents like Hot Streak, Arcane Blast, and Ice Lance, destruction warlocks get immolation, restoration shamans get Water Shield and druid healers get Wild Growth, and so on. Honestly, while it's early days, I'm surprised Blizzard hasn't gotten weirder.

But the Blizzcon demos only went up to level 38, and these are by no means finished. Searing Strike, in particular, feels like a stand-out to me, given how weirdly niche it is. And given how Blizzard's already bragged about Forever's unique, hyper-specific gear items, I'm looking forward to seeing how the studio experiments.

World of Warcraft: Forever looks—well, pretty interesting, all told. Rather than just being a Season of Discovery-style reimagining of Classic, Forever promises to be a full-on remake of classic-era WoW. Reimagined class trees, new raids, and $30 elves. Don't think about the $30 elves too hard.

But it does beg the question, why is Blizzard doing this rather than, say, developing WoW 2? It worked out swimmingly for ArenaNet's Guild Wars series, after all. Speaking to IGN, Forever's principal designer Kris Zierhut says: "I think one of the things that's singularly great about WoW is we have this game and this world and this design that has been continuously developed for the last 25 years.

"And we keep making it better. We made the graphics better, we made the rendering better, we made the lighting better; all that new stuff we showed on stage today."

That is, in fairness, true—and true of retail, as well. Part of the reason why Classic works as a concept is because modern WoW is almost straight-up a different game—new models, animations, completely reimagined class designs, and a visual aesthetic that still holds up. Forever looks to be taking full advantage of retail's steady march of progress.

Zierhut says as much: "We've also made the way the engine draws things move more efficiently. The way the server runs, handling players and moving them around, and all the things that handle spells and combat, all of that's been made more efficient and better over the years. We have this incredible engine and server infrastructure driving the game that is second to none. Why would you throw that away and start over?"

I maintain that a WoW 2 wouldn't be superfluous. With all of that progress comes a lot of technical debt (see: player housing getting borked by fixing an elevator in a 13-year old raid), as well as a ton of design choices. A direct sequel's a chance to start over and challenge basic assumptions about the game's design—the Guild Wars series becoming an increasingly action-focused game, for instance.

There's also a second argument—and this, I feel more torn on—that Forever is trying to re-capture an outdated design. On the one hand, the cynic in me understands that modern MMOs are a hell of a lot different for good reason. We datamine new information about new patches weeks ahead of when they come out, we optimise everything down to the last, minute detail. We hug these games so hard that we wring all mystery out of them.

On the other hand, there has been a yearning, a rumbling. Our own Lincoln Carpenter said as much in our MMO column: "It's hard to argue that the MMOs of today aren't better designed than their older iterations. And yet, it's the moments when I step off the treadmill where they still feel the most magical." If Forever offers an alt-history not just of WoW, but of modern MMO design in general? Then I'm on board.

Warcraft 3: Reforged got a hefty 3.0 patch alongside its new Forsaken Kingdom expansion, but not all of the changes are for the better. Amid bugfixes and new features, Reforged now requires an internet connection to play, even in singleplayer, and it also removed the game's local area network (LAN) functionality. Blizzard did not provide a reason for these changes in the patch notes.

Blizzard does mention that LAN support and offline play are still offered by the legacy Warcraft 3 client included with purchase of Reforged. The company has a Battle.net support page with instructions on how to install this legacy client.

But it's still a frustrating, confounding change: Reforged was an embattled remaster that had to claw back support from the fanbase. The Forsaken Kingdom expansion and 3.0 patch were the perfect opportunity to complete a redemption arc and lock in Reforged as the definitive version of the 2002 RTS. But as much as things have improved, it's taken a stumble in its victory lap.

Always-online requirements have been a sore spot in gaming since they first started cropping up in the 2010s, and depending on where you live, reliable high-speed internet isn't always a guarantee. Even in the big city, outages aren't unheard of, and always-online requirements for singleplayer games remain an odious imposition on players.

The LAN removal makes even less sense to me: LAN party and tournament play have always struck me as an essential part of Warcraft 3's legacy. Why concede this ground to the original game when the remaster's reputation has been so contested since its release? You can check out the full Warcraft 3: Reforged patch notes over on the Blizzard forums. More positive changes include a new graphics mode and a doubling of the unit selection cap from 12 to 24.

As noted by MMORPG.com, World of Warcraft: Forever is coming with a peculiar economic proposition: Most of the new fork of the MMO is included in your normal WoW subscription (rad), but the new Skyborne Elf race (and its corresponding starter zone experience) is gated behind a separate, $30 purchase (sad).

While "$30 elf" might be a somewhat uncharitable characterization, there's not much else that really lights my fire in the $29.99 "Skyborne Hero Pack." In addition to the titular elves, it comes with a mount, cosmetics, housing decorations, and early name reservation.

Compared to the bleeding edge of Overwatch, League of Legends, and Diablo premium cosmetic pricing, this is just keeping pace. But with many of the best new games on Steam coming in at $20 or less, I'm feeling sticker shock.

$30, for my money, is the cost of an expansion pack under normal economic conditions, though WoW's most recent retailed for $50 MSRP. Speaking to my WoW consultant and on-the-ground BlizzCon contact, PCG contributor Tyler Colp, he wagered that any new classes coming down the line in Forever will likely be similarly monetized, and argued that this sort of monetization is less in the spirit of classic WoW than the rest of the Forever project.

Looking at it from the outside, getting so much of the rest of Forever with a normal WoW subscription strikes me as an excellent bargain, but it only throws the $30 elf into even sharper relief as a consequence. Personally, I'd be more amenable to a $15 elf as a matter of principle, but I've been out of the MMO/live service game for some time. Do you think this is a fair market value for an elf? Sound off in the comments.

As was revealed in today's Blizzcon opening ceremony, Overwatch's newest hero is on the way: Doctrine, a vampire with a cyborg arm and mechanical bats. He was debuted via a story trailer that reveals a connection to Doomfist, the game's resident punch man.

A hero trial is active now, in case you want to try him out, and it will remain live through the weekend. While his exact release date has not been announced, the game is keeping up a rapid pace for the addition of new heroes—D. Mon released just last month on August 11.

That's not all Blizzard teased, though. Reworks are on the way for two of the game's prickliest characters, Sombra and Roadhog, both of whom have already received countless tweaks since they joined the game. Precise details weren't shared during the opening ceremony, but Sombra's going to become a support and Roadhog should be less "frustrating" to deal with.

The new act of the game's year-long story will bring a new map as well—Grímsvötn—and the next Overwatch Spotlight teasing what's to follow is scheduled for Feb. 2027. The last time one of those happened, five heroes were revealed and released all in one go. Time will tell if something that huge is set to happen again.

You can keep up with the rest of today's Blizzcon news via our live blog.

For the first time since its Frozen Throne expansion in 2003, Warcraft 3 is getting a new campaign. Or got one, more accurately: Blizzard just announced at BlizzCon that it's dropping the expansion today.

In a pre-brief before BlizzCon's opening ceremony, we learned that Warcraft 3: Forsaken Kingdom is a two-part campaign for Warcraft 3: Reforged, the 2020 remaster of the 2002 RTS. It begins with a prologue covering the story of Arthas, the primary antagonist in World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

The main portion of the campaign following that prologue regards the Undercity, the capital of the undead Forsaken Kingdom, where we'll find the likes of Sylvanas, Putress, and the Scarlet Crusade.

Alongside the new expansion, Warcraft 3 Reforged is getting a free 3.0 update. Forsaken Kingdom is available now for $30 on Battle.net.

Reforged was not a popular remaster of Warcraft 3 when it first launched in 2020, but a new update and surprise expansion could go a long way toward rehabilitating the project. 2026 is now firmly the year of the surprise expansion to an old game: Forsaken Kingdom joins Thief Remastered: The Tarnished Mirror, Quake: Dawn of the Machine, and The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past in this strange new category.

At today's Blizzcon opening ceremony, it was announced that Hearthstone will receive a third post-launch class—the game's first since the Death Knight released in 2022. It's none other than the Monk, a class with origins you can trace all the way back to Warcraft 3's pandaren brewmaster.

Represented by the playable Chen Stormstout, the Monk will get a full reveal next year. While not World of Warcraft's most popular class, it is perhaps its silliest, which fits Hearthstone's cartoonish sensibilities to a T. After this point, the Evoker will be the only class from Blizzard's titan MMO that isn't represented in card game form (unless you count the Night Elf Mohawk).

The expansion coming in the meantime, Reign of the Black Empire, is another old god-themed extravaganza, complete with bouncy electronic grooves all over the trailer. No goofy lyrics this time around, but what can you do?

It also comes with a new keyword, "assemble," which allows players to merge cards for ludicrous combos. It sounds like the sort of shenanigan-magnet Hearthstone is known for.

Reign of the Black Empire will land on Oct. 10, with the Monk class arriving March 2027. Follow the rest of today's Blizzcon news on our liveblog.

The biggest surprise of BlizzCon might be Diablo 5, which Blizzard announced will release in spring 2029, six years after the 2023 launch of Diablo 4.

The sequel will take place about a century after the events of Diablo 4. Sanctuary is no longer on the verge of apocalypse in Diablo 5: It's been fully apolcalpyted. The Lord of Terror—aka Diablo himself, absent in Diablo 4—is back, and he won.

"The heroes are gone, Sanctuary has fallen, and Diablo has won," declared Diablo 4 director Joe Shely. "For the first time, you won't be fighting to stop Diablo from taking Sanctuary. You'll enter a world where he already has. There are no towns or safe places waiting to protect you."

There's not a ton to go on in the trailer, but it is, fittingly, dark and grim: Everything's on fire, grubby peasant guys proselytize on behalf of the victorious demons, and angels are getting crucified. After the title drop, we get a brief view of the titular Diablo himself, out of focus and wreathed in fire.

2029 is still a ways off, but it's nevertheless surprising to hear news of a new numbered Diablo sequel. Given Diablo 4's live servicey shape, I expected another expansion roadmap rather than a full-blown sequel.

For comparison, there was a 12 year wait between Diablos 2 and 3, and an 11-year gap between the initial launches of 3 and 4, both about double the projected wait between 4 and 5.

Development times have been trending longer in the industry, not shorter, and I'm curious how Diablo players will respond to what would usually be regarded as pretty great news—do you think Blizzard should have stuck with D4 as a platform instead of already starting on a sequel? Sound off in the comments.

Regarding Diablo 4, Blizzard did announce that the Amazon class is coming, and talked about the next season, an anniversary celebration looking back at Diablo's past, but didn't announce a new expansion.

At BlizzCon 2026, Blizzard president Johanna Faries took to the stage to announce that a Diablo animated series is in production with Netflix.

The announcement was light on details, and did not come with a trailer or release window, but Faries did note "great discussions being had" regarding adaptations of Overwatch and Warcraft. Faries also allowed that Blizzard's other properties could see similar treatments.

“After decades of bringing entire universes to life through our games, we’re partnering with some creative powerhouses to tell even more stories beyond gaming across new screens," Blizzard wrote in a press release about the project. "A new animated series set in the world of ‘Diablo’ is in development with Netflix. More details will be shared in the future, but this is only the beginning, with even more taking shape across our universes.”

It feels like the early 2020s gold rush of streaming TV videogame adaptations is cooling down—RIP, Halo show. But we also know what's worked really well. Netflix's animated adaptations of Cyberpunk and League of Legends, Edgerunners and Arkane respectively, are huge and much-beloved, with reaches well beyond their respective playerbases.

An animated adaptation from the same outfit behind these other hit gaming adaptations strikes me as a slam dunk. We'll have to wait and see if the goliath partnership is able to land the plane.

The rumors were true: A new StarCraft game is incoming. It's just called "StarCraft," it's an open world shooter, and Blizzard doesn't plan to release it until 2030.

The game was revealed at BlizzCon with a cinematic trailer, but no gameplay was shown, which isn't surprising given how far off it is.

The trailer showcases the training and gearing up of a Terran Dominion Space Marine, with an inspirational speech about killing Zerg over the montage. It ends with our anonymous hero doing battle with the Zerg, then a cut to his broken and bloody armor getting cleaned and repaired without him back on a Dominion ship.

This isn't the first time Blizzard has attempted an action-forward StarCraft spinoff. StarCraft Ghost was a legendary, Duke Nukem Forever-tier bit of vaporware that Blizzard teased, demoed, and reworked for much of the 2000s. Its titular Ghost, Nova, eventually got the consolation prize of being a secondary character in StarCraft 2 and the protagonist of a few tie-in novels. This new shooter appears to borrow little, if anything, from that earlier effort by Blizzard.

There was some speculation before the show that Blizzard might announce a new StarCraft RTS, but there's no sign of such a project, if it exists. It'll be interesting to see how fans react, as well as the esports scene. Excited for new StarCraft anything? Disappointed that it's not an RTS?

Earlier this week, it broke that Sony had dropped Physint, a videogame being developed by Hideo Kojima. Which is weird, given that Kojima's a bit of an auteur—his games are weird and ambitious in scope, but they're often viewed fondly, and the man made Metal Gear Solid, for crying out loud.

Physint was meant to be a return to "tactical espionage action", a prodigal return to what he's known for—it seems wild to drop it, something Xbox decided to capitalise on, snapping up the project instantly. It's since broken, in a Bloomberg report, that Sony might've simply ran out of patience.

And in fairness—as much fairness as you can give to a videogame giant in our current industry—some of these reasons do track, though, through the salt-pinched lens of anonymous sources: "[Physint] missed deadlines and was on track to be well over budget despite being years away from release," the report states.

There was also the point of "Kojima’s previous two games, Death Stranding and its sequel, which didn’t meet PlayStation’s revenue expectations." Also potentially fair, though you've gotta wonder if "revenue expectations" are worth dropping someone like Kojima over—surely you're in it for the prestige brand, or whatever people who wear suits and talk about growth in the next quarter call it.

The report also states, however, that "PlayStation was reluctant to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in another game that wouldn’t remain permanently exclusive to the company’s own hardware," which is audacious enough to make my eyebrows damn well jump off my head.

At the very least, it'll likely pour gasoline on a steadily-building ire from a gaming public that's just been told Sony won't be doing physical game disks anymore. But Sony's juke away from PC ports does seem incredibly stubborn and bone-headed. Especially since it's already cost the company Hideo Kojima's next game—to its direct competitor, no less.

Blizzard Entertainment's union—in conjunction with the Communications Workers of America (CWA)—has just signed a landmark contract with the studio to, among other things, force it to "discuss, evaluate, and bargain" any time it wants to introduce generative AI in the workplace.

As explained on the CWA website, this contract has been in the works for two years and impacts around 1900 workers from across the studio, including those working on World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, QA, Overwatch, and Diablo. The contract itself does a lot of good for these people, who are living in an era of uncertainty thanks to Xbox's 'reset' that has impacted over 1600 jobs and is soon to jeopardise 1600 more.

That good includes: "wage increases, grievance procedures, a three-day in-office hybrid workweek, 'just cause' protections, remote work, and disability accommodations". Most notably, however, is a stipulation that Blizzard needs to run any AI usage by the workplace first.

"The contracts now require Blizzard to discuss, evaluate, and bargain over the usage of artificial intelligence in the workplace," reads the announcement. Essentially, this means that Microsoft cannot simply top-down enforce AI usage as it's been known to do in the past in its software development divisions.

Regarding the hanging sword of Xbox's 2027 deadline for future layoffs, union workers will also be protected if it comes to it: "In an industry first, the new union contracts give workers the right to be 'recalled' into open positions across any Blizzard bargaining unit for 14 months from the date of their layoff announcement. Workers have also secured an extra 4 weeks of severance for union workers regardless of their tenure."

On the victory, QA worker and bargaining committee member Simon Hedrick says: "I believe that the positive change we have won will ripple out and help make the games industry as a whole a better place for workers and players alike. This contract is the start of something greater, and I urge everyone to remember: when we fight together, we win together."

It's a major victory for a studio that, like most others under Xbox's umbrella, has a vague and impending sense of doom following it. In a sane world, I'd say Blizzard makes enough bank to be safe, that's just not the kind of industry we live in. You can get valued at $68.7 billion by Microsoft and still lose.

Physint has been hyped as Kojima Productions' return to "tactical espionage action" or, in other words, Hideo Kojima's return to making stealth action games in the style of Metal Gear Solid. It's been a PlayStation exclusive since its reveal in 2024, but things have changed dramatically: after Sony tried to cancel the project entirely in June this year, Kojima has found refuge with Microsoft.

"In mid-June of this year, we unexpectedly received notice from PlayStation Studios that they would cancel the Physint project," Hideo Kojima wrote on X.

"Physint is an important project both to me personally and to Kojima Productions. Determined to keep the project alive, we have spent the last three months searching tirelessly for a new partner. In the course of seeking advice and pursuing negotiations with people across many fields, we found in Xbox a partner with whom we share a common vision for the future, and we have decided to team up with them once again.

"Please rest assured that development of Physint, our genre-defining action-espionage title, is ongoing and will continue moving forward."

In an exceedingly rare turn of events, Sony has even released its own statement, though it's unlikely to paper over the fact that the company tried to cancel a Hideo Kojima game.

"After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to step away from collaborating with Kojima Productions on its project Physint," the official PlayStation X account posted. "We continue to have great admiration for Hideo Kojima's vision for the game.

"Our relationship remains strong after three decades of industry-leading, genre-defining creative cooperation, and we look forward to continued close collaboration with Hideo Kojima and his award-winning independent studio in the future."

Xbox boss Asha Sharma, obviously chuffed, offers a more restrained missive: "Physint and OD!", she wrote. "Proud to build both with @HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN in Japan. A big moment for Xbox."

In a seperate Xbox press release it's revealed that the relationship will "extend beyond games", with film and TV collaborations in the pipeline.

The change is unlikely to be entirely smooth: whether Physint will continue to use the Decima Engine—built by Guerrilla Games and owned by Sony—is yet to be seen. Physint also promises to be fairly unconventional: despite being marketed as "'tactical espionage action game", Kojima has also said the project will be "both a game and a movie at the same time". So Metal Gear Solid 4, then?

Physint doesn't have a release date but, as of last year, it was expected to release within six years. It'll follow OD, another Kojima Xbox exclusive, which according to Kojima himself, people at big companies told him he was "crazy" for making.

Double Fine has ducked out of the way of Microsoft's falling axe, going independent after the new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced layoffs totalling 3,200 people earlier this year. The studio itself has had a bit of a troubled discography after the win of Psychonauts 2, with neither 2025's Keeper or 2026's Kiln doing much to move the needle.

Tim Schafer pretty much pins his studio's voluntary exile from Microsoft on Sharma in a conversation with Bloomberg, saying that the storm clouds first started gathering when she visited the studio in "listening mode"—but it was clear that, when she started talking about shifting Xbox's vision, it was bad news.

"We had a mutually beneficial mission," says Schafer, "Which is just to put great games on Game Pass, and then their mission changed. I can't imagine any amount of profitability—unless we had a breakout, Minecraft hit that year—would've saved us."

You're reading this article because Double Fine didn't do that, though Schafer doesn't seem to have any major hard feelings about it: "The games industry is full of terrible things, and I can't change most of them. It's like I'm a captain of a little fishing boat. And it's like worrying about whether the ocean is fair. Not much I can do about it. Just keep this little boat afloat, keep trying to see if that's a reef, or is that a bunch of fish? Is that money over there?"

As a matter of fact, Schafer seems galvanised by the whole process: "You're like, 'Wait a second, we're not going out like this.' Some people said: 'I'm checking out, this is one too many battles for me.' But for the rest of us, it's like a creative awakening."

That's not to say Double Fine came out unscathed. Just a few months after its departure, Schafer laid off 23 people to ensure "the survival of our studio". Mind, the attempt to keep those people employed for the three months beforehand—leaving the decision to let them go to fall squarely on Schafer's head—at least seems preferable to the brutal sweeping cuts from Microsoft.

That feeling of personal responsibility is expressed to Bloomberg in some lively terms: "No one puts Double Fine out of business except for me. Asha's not going to shoot my dog. I'm going to shoot it. But I'm not going to shoot it because it's going to do great. A lot of people want to walk the dog."

I'm not so sure about that last bit. While we rather quite liked Keeper, giving it a sterling 90 in our Keeper review, Kiln had an all-time peak of 193 players on SteamDB. There is, at the time of writing—and I swear I am not kidding—exactly one person playing it on Steam. Now, that's not indicative of the wider numbers, Kiln was a game pass joint, but still—Schafer stays optimistic.

"We never actively tried to make a game we thought was going to lose money. I think people would say, 'Oh, Keeper looks like this art house thing that no one expects to be a hit.' But to me it's the kind of game that someone who doesn't play games would love. I really think there's a mass market appeal to Keeper. If we could just get to those people, we could have them catch Lighthouse Fever."

Watching videogame studios try and bob and weave around Grand Theft Auto 6's launch—especially when it was up in the air when exactly it'd come out—is a little like watching a flock of Marios (is that the correct plural noun? A mama mia of Marios?) all trying to dodge the same whomp.

As was the case with the new Fable game, which got punted over into 2027 to avoid debuting among an absolutely rammed lineup. And while Xbox was playing coy about which game it was trying to avoid back then, we've now got some soft, tongue-in-cheek confirmation that it probably was Grand Theft Auto 6, yeah.

Speaking to IGN at Gamescom 2026, Fable's director Ralph Fulton says: "I think the rationale behind moving us out of October, the date that we were in previously, is pretty apparent to everybody. I feel great about that. I mean, I was really looking forward to shipping this game this year. I didn't want to have to do another January 1 speech to the team about ‘this is the year we ship Fable,’ which I'm now going to have to do.

"But the rationale for it is absolutely sound. I'm glad that we're avoiding that chaotic window.” For what it's worth, the window itself includes a ton of non-GTA stuff. This summer's been a touch dry on big new releases, but in the wider videogame industry you've got Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Blood of Dawnwalker, two Star Wars games, Marvel's Wolverine, Control Resonant, Gears of War: E-Day, and Phantom Blade Zero all before the year's even out.

But even Fulton cops that, yeah, the big one's the main reason: "We don't run scared of other big games. We're a big game ourselves. We hold ourselves to high standards. I'm happy to go toe-to-toe with a bunch of other games. There's just one that I'm happy to avoid entirely." Fair enough.

Microsoft has dabbled in dubious DRM over the years, having previously announced then unannounced disc-based DRM for the Xbox One back in 2013. Sony scored some free public praise on that blunder. Yet it seems like the pendulum has finally swung the other way. Sony has announced it is ending support for physical games entirely, while Microsoft will let users add physical games to their digital games library.

Microsoft says, "Players have spent decades building their Xbox libraries. Some games were purchased on disc. Some were purchased digitally" It says its "goal is to make it easier for those libraries to move forward with players" and "this is part of our broader commitment to game preservation."

This program will begin to roll out for Xbox Insiders starting August 31 and will start with a few thousand titles. Effectively, the disc can be 'claimed' on an account, giving you access even when your disc is not in the disc tray. Interestingly, this also gives you access to the game via Xbox Play Anywhere and Xbox Cloud Gaming, which means you can play it from your phone or PC, complete with cloud saves.

The physical game will still function as normal, even after it has been added to your account. That means you can technically lend it to a friend. The license to add the game to your digital library is revocable, so if someone accidentally adds it to their account, you can remove it if you have the physical disc. This means it shouldn't have an effect on the preowned games market, as anyone who buys an already digitally claimed game can simply revoke the license.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced this new feature via their X account, and has since received almost 200,000 likes and over 24 million views as of the time of writing. This is to say the announcement seems to be going down well.

And Microsoft is in desperate need of that good PR. Just last month, it announced it would be laying off 3,200 people and dumping four studios in what it calls "the most significant restructure in Xbox history." This is before mentioning the criticism Microsoft was already getting from the BDS movement for ties to the Israeli government and military.

But one question does go unanswered here, and that is whether or not Xbox will continue supporting discs in the next generation. As I noted in my conversation with game preservation group DoesItPlay, consoles going all-in on digital games feels like more of a hot topic than our long disc-free PCs. Microsoft and Sony own the platform, and the stores to buy games on it.

Sony removing a disc drive means that the only way players can buy its games legally is through its own storefront. This gives Sony ultimate control over pricing, ownership, and DRM, and it's easy to understand why Microsoft might want to take a bigger cut of the pie too, especially with the rising prices of hardware.

And Microsoft saying this allows players to 'move forward' certainly signals the all-digital future alarm bell to this writer.

Still, with the next generation of both consoles anticipated to launch around the end of next year (or maybe even the year after), we know roughly when we'll get our answer.

Last week, the Communications Workers of America and the Bethesda Game Studios OneBGS union took part in the Save Our Devs rally across the United States and Canada (and on Twitch) "to call out layoffs and corporate greed across the industry and to demand fair first contracts across Microsoft’s gaming studios." Speaking to Kotaku, Bethesda artist Alex Nguyen talked about how things changed after Bethesda was acquired by the tech giant.

"Since we’ve been under Microsoft… it feels like something has changed. We didn’t have layoffs before, and now all of a sudden we have yearly layoffs," he told Kotaku, saying teams were feeling the effects of cuts which eroded institutional knowledge. “If only five people knew how this thing worked and you let all five of them go, that’s a morale killer because it’s like we already knew this, and now we have to learn it again.”

According to that article, Nguyen pointed out that fixer-uppers like Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online don't get a chance to bloom into successful fan favorites without sufficient labor and time. He also noted that there used to be a shared sense of long-term commitment among the staff at Zenimax and Bethesda—a commitment being smothered by Microsoft's current corporate tactics.

“That’s why a lot of people had such a long tenure here," Nguyen told Kotaku. "And they were like, ‘yeah, this is the place I’m gonna retire at,’ or ‘this is the place where I’m gonna finish out,’ or ‘I love being here because I want to stay in the industry for a long time.’ That was basically one of the benefits of being at Bethesda or a Zenimax studio in general.”

Last year, ex-Xbox head Phil Spencer said that "nurturing and protecting creative teams that want to go take risks" was of the utmost importance less than two years after Xbox's acquisition of Blizzard called for 1,900 layoffs. Current Xbox head Asha Sharma has sung a similar tune so far, suggesting that Xbox ought to be entertaining over a billion people each day while also announcing the "reset" necessitating 3,200 job cuts in the very same blog post. It's plain to see why workers might balk at conditions that continue to raise the bar for achievement while more and more developers lose their livelihoods.

Aw dang we cropped out my favorite sign from the Minnesota rally

— @mouseatreides.bsky.social (@mouseatreides.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-08-23T16:43:09.232Z

One tragedy about the fall of Arkane Austin—aside from Microsoft's seeming unwillingness to give studios a chance beyond the next quarter—is the pervasive feeling that the studio, whose devs were previously known for their immersive sims, was forced to make something way outside of their wheelhouse. Redfall was a live service shooter, and a pretty cruddy one at that.

So it might be buoying news to hear that Dishonored co-creator Harvey Smith and seasoned Arkane vet Ben Horne's new studio isn't going to try and chase down trends. In an interview with The Game Business, Horne and Smith were asked if they thought the immersive sim (which Black Pony Immersive has been strangely careful to talk around), is a dead or dying genre.

"If you look back through those games," says Smith, "There are a lot of titles that people still talk about 10 or 20 years later. They have a lot of cultural cachet. And there are a few, if you look at BioShock or Deus Ex or Dishonored, that make a lot of money."

Part of the issue, as many developers have outlined, is the general ballooning budgets in the industry itself: "If you look at Dishonored, for instance, the budget that we were working with was… I wouldn't say tiny, many triple-I developers would envy that budget, but it was very reasonable. And our [return on investment] was four or five times the total spend."

For Horne's part, one of the mission statements of Black Pony Immersive is to get away from tend chasing—which Arkane was clearly and famously bad at—and just make stuff its developers would like to play:

"The industry is growing in such a way that there are a large amount of players with a really varied appetite. We don't really know what turn the industry might take, and we're probably not going to be very good at trend chasing. And so, our best shot is to rally around a creative vision that excites us as developers. It excites the audience that we know wants to play this kind-of game. That's the best chance of making something great."

Smith concurs, outlining the (understandably cynical) perspective that, hey, he's heard a lot of these promises from big executives before: "Very well-paid people say things to me, going way back now, like, 'First-person games don't sell,' or, 'RPGs are a niche market,' 'If you're not working on a free-to-play game now, in five years you'll be out of a job,' 'MMOs are the future,' 'In the future, games will have live motion video sections with Hollywood actors in them."

If we skim through that list, we can see a lot of nonsense. First-person games have continued to sell, one of the most successful games of the decade was an RPG based on Dungeons & Dragons, and live-service free to play games have been an absolute trashfire for some publishers, even with deep wallets. And while Hollywood actors are in videogames now, they're not in live action.

"I've heard smart, good people," Smith continues, "friends of mine in executive positions, say these things over the years, and sometimes they're right. But what Ben said, going back to what you love with a strong vision, that often comes through for us, so that's what we have got to do."

Redfall is one of the biggest industry disasters in recent memory—coming from Arkane Austin, a studio known for an all-time classic in Prey, the game was panned both critically and commercially. Even we, at PC Gamer, dubbed it the "first Arkane game we don't like".

It also served as the death knell for the studio as, one year later, studio owner Microsoft announced it'd be shutting Arkane Austin down. The narrative paints itself, especially given Microsoft's utterly brutal behaviour in following years. The big bad M forced Arkane Austin, king of the immersive sim, to make a crummy live-service glob.

And that's sort of the truth—it is, after all, why the studio founder left—but it's not entirely Microsoft's fault. The studio director at the time, Harvey Smith, tells The Game Business in a recent interview that it wasn't just corporate which became swept up by the live service fugue.

"Arkane is very specialized, but the industry is growing, and there’s always more mouths to feed. And it’s great when you can reach a wider audience. We got swept up in the games-as-a-service thing, and I had the foolish chutzpah to assume that it always works out for us."

Smith describes a sort of naive optimism that Arkane could nail the same live service successes elsewhere in the industry: "We can do this. Let’s take what we love, and mix it with [games-as-a-service]. And do different mechanics by day and night. And have character classes.

"Then in the middle of all that, Covid happened. We also had the great resignation where everybody went remote and started changing jobs." Later in the chat, Smith describes a deeply chaotic development cycle, plagued by all sorts of baffling occurrences: "There were fires. The government announced aliens at some point. There was a swarm of murder hornets coming toward Texas. We had an ice storm that put power and water out for like two weeks for some people. It was crazy. That development cycle."

And, listen—I think it's clear in hindsight that Smith was wrong to be optimistic, but it's also clear that he did genuinely care about Redfall, even if it came out a mess. So much so, in fact, that Smith reveals he pleaded with Microsoft to allow himself and other employees to come back into the office and finish the game's 1.4 patch.

"We finished the game and it was very poorly received. We then worked on it for a year. We patched thousands of bugs. We then got laid off, but we had in the pipe version 1.4. It was the one that fixed tons of stuff. So, we went to Microsoft and said, ‘I know we don’t work here anymore, but can we please release this?’

"And to their credit, they did not say no. They let six or seven of us sign forms that we could come back in the building. After being fired, we released 1.4, which I think if we had that on day one, it wouldn’t have set the world on fire, but it was a much, much better game."

Ben Horne, who was the production director at the time, chimes in: "It feels like an achievement unlocked for me in my career, to release something after I’ve been fired and the studio closed down."

Patch 1.4 wouldn't necessarily save Redfall from obscurity. PC Contributor Rick Lane went back to it, writing: "still isn't the game it needs to be, or the one Arkane Austin could have made. Nonetheless, I think the update shows that Arkane could have redeemed it in the long run." The tragedy, I suppose, is that we'll never know whether 1.5, 1.6, or 1.7 would've finally turned it into Smith and Horne's vision.

It's been nearly seven years since the release of the Xbox Elite Series 2, which means we're well overdue for a new one. It sure looks like that's set to happen soon, as one Redditor just posted the motherlode of information on the unreleased pad—then their account mysteriously vanished and the thread was partially wiped with it.

The internet tends not to 'lose' things, so you can view all the leaked images on this thread from The Verge's Tom Warren. Warren also notes that the original poster says they bought the controller for $200 on OfferUp, a marketplace for buying things in your local area. The poster says, in a comment still live on the thread, that they live in Seattle. Seattle being the home of, you guessed it, Microsoft. The company's Redmond HQ is located just next door in Redmond, Washington.

Lots of people live in Seattle and they don't all work at Microsoft. So what else do we have to go on as to the veracity of this particular thread?

First off, the Redditor's new pad looks suspiciously similar to one we saw back in May. It has the same shape, trigger locks, rear paddle mounting, and battery bay. All of which look to be pretty neat features for the Series 3 pad, if not miles apart from the Series 2 pad. The face buttons, ABXY, are perhaps a little larger. A couple of us here reckon the new Elite Series 3 resembles the Razer Wolverine V3 Pro in overall shape, which isn't a bad thing. That's our pick for the best high-end controller right now.

A screen sits between the bumpers along the top of the Series 3 pad, likely some sort of mono OLED display. These tend to be pretty useful for this sorta application, as the self-emitting pixels draw very little power. In the leaked photos, this display shows an aka.ms URL, made using Microsoft's own shortening service. They also show a very basic game running on the screen in a later comment.

Some other redditors in the thread have followed various versions of the URL in the pics and claim to have landed on documents pertaining to the controller's use and how to connect it via a dedicated connection for cloud gaming—that's a feature we've seen with the Amazon Luna Controller and Google Stadia Controller (rip). This was also a feature tipped in that original leak from May.

The comments from the original poster have not been removed, and from these we can gather a few more tidbits of information. They show the paddles and d-pad removed from the pad, with the latter having a simpler but similar rocking design to the previous model. They confirm that the triggers become clicky once set to the shortest option via the rear adjusters. We also catch a glimpse of the battery, which clearly states "PROTOTYPE NOT FOR SALE" on it. Oops.

The Elite Series 3 even includes a travel case, as has been included with both previous generations of Elite controller, albeit a slimmer version. I would guess that means this thing is pretty far down the road for development. Providing it is real and not some elaborate 3D-printed project, this may suggest we see the controller arrive before the year's out.

What we don't know about the Series 3 is whether the sticks are using Hall effect or TMR (Tunnel Magnetoresistance) technology. This helps banish stick drift for the most part, and it's something I value more than most other features these days. The Elite Series 2 famously lacks any such tech, instead using older potentiometers on account of its age, but we can only assume the Series 3 will. It would be wild not to.

We also don't know how it will work in action, as the redditor says it doesn't work on either Xbox or PC right now. Some suggest it will be locked to a dev account, which does seem likely if it's the real deal.

The redditor succinctly sums up the controller in one reply, noting it "feels like a Xbox Series X controller but pro and more clicky." If that sounds like your sorta thing, and I have to admit, it is mine, then this might be something to keep an eye out for in the near future. That said, as someone who has owned a couple of Elite controllers over the years, I've started to look elsewhere these days. You don't have to spend Elite money for an elite controller anymore—the GameSir G7 Pro proves that.

PC gamers may have watched physical game discs disappear years ago, but there's a battleground happening over in console land right now. A big one. And it might only be getting more contentious as time ticks on.

With Sony ending support for physical discs in the near future, and the heads of Ubisoft and Take Two seemingly not caring very much, you might think the end of physical game media is not far off. Yet there exists a growing movement to push back against this trend. I had a chance to chat to Clemens Istel, the owner of game preservation site Does It Play, about this movement.

He tells me, "Customer rights are almost non-existent in the gaming space, and companies have proven time and time again that honest communication is not their strong suit."

Does It Play is both a physical games media advocacy group and a database dedicated to documenting which games can be played without a download or offline. Istel is also part of the team behind Stop Killing Games. Just last month, we documented Does It Play's reporting, showing that 34% of physical PS5 games and 50% of tested Xbox Series X games don't fully work without a download first.

There are a handful of central reasons one might wish for physical discs to stay around. With games going through so many updates after release, a disc provides a clean way to preserve version 1.0 for future gamers to play and experience. It also means that storefront holders can't have a monopoly over pricing. If you wish to buy a game on PS5, for example, you can buy it directly from Sony, or through any number of second-hand or new physical marketplaces. This gives companies less control over the direct price long-term.

"Less options for people is always a bad thing. Especially if the only option is a future in which your purchased goods can just be taken away or altered whenever somebody else pleases," says Istel.

"For the most part, [over] all these years, it felt like there was an unwritten agreement between companies and players. They provide cool experiences, we buy cool experiences. But in recent years, this symbiosis [has] more and more turned into a one-sided form of exploitation." He continues, "Lobby groups and lawyers attacked preservation efforts, a growing minority of games are released unfinished, even hardware now has online dependencies."

Istel points out that the last two Xbox generations can't be set up offline without a Microsoft account, and notes that some games are fully available on disc and still have hard-coded online checks before you can play. "The next step is killing physical media, the last thing you actually had some form of ownership over."

Istel argues that gaming companies have a "stranglehold on players", and that's what Does It Play, and movements like Stop Killing Games have come out of. Istel believes that Sony knew what consumers wanted when it famously made fun of Microsoft's introduction of DRM back in 2013, but it now has "Zero understanding for what their customers want. All that's left is a hyper-arrogant 'take it or leave it' attitude, as far as we can tell."

But Istel says it's not just console players who are affected by this. I'm told the Sony situation is just one step. "It sets another precedent and pushes the distribution further towards the idea of streaming, as recently suggested by Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick. Once we reach that point, all hope for customers to ever have control over a product is gone."

Though Istel believes the perspective on game ownership has "only gotten worse" over the years, PC gaming does offer one "glimpse of hope" with the "emergence of more DRM-free stores on PC."

The likes of game marketplace GOG sell many games DRM-free, which means you can download offline backups, play without an internet connection, and can install and play games on multiple computers without any limits. It gives more freedom over bought games, and means losing connection to servers, or servers going down, can't remove your access to the game— assuming it's downloaded already.

PC gaming shifted to digital a long time ago, and even before that, many PC games had physical restrictions in the forms of CD keys, but Istel believes digital DRM is not the same: "Digital DRM that requires you to go online makes you dependent on a third party, while a CD key gives you everything in your own hands to access the game.

"The former will eventually lead to the game becoming inaccessible. At the very least, there needs to be an end of life plan to keep the game working after official support ends."

Still, even if Sony does officially end disc support with the PS6, Istel doesn't think physical media will entirely go with it. He told me, "I firmly believe that physical media will stay, but it will probably never be mainstream again."

Though PC gaming went mostly digital a long time ago, Sony being the creators of the hardware and software on a PS5 gives it ownership over the device to an extent that isn't possible on PC. If you don't like Windows, you can swap to Linux. If you don't like Steam (for whatever reason), you can make do with half a dozen different digital storefronts. And that makes this specific fight so important for console owners. There's no alternative to Sony whilst owning a Sony device.

And, as such, it's a little strange to watch from the comfort of my own rig, given how relatively healthy the digital gaming market is on PC. Steam, its biggest storefront, may not be DRM-free, but the option is there to actually own games for those who want it. As consoles are unlikely to adopt third-party storefronts, that makes physical game discs the final line of defense for actually owning games, and an altogether different ball game compared to our PCs.

Good news for the Bethesda RPG-starved: The Elder Scrolls 6 is significantly more corporeal now than it was eight years ago, when Todd Howard appeared at E3 (RIP) to announce it with nothing but a logo, a mountain range, and some rousing music. A couple months after Xbox CCO Matt Booty said the game "looks amazing," CEO Asha Sharma went to Bethesda to watch a "live playthrough" that she has now called "incredible."

This praise may come as a shock to the approximately zero people who expected the head of Xbox to publicly say the publisher's one guaranteed upcoming blockbuster looked like doggy doo doo. (Xbox's CEO also notably did not address the hundreds of flags placed outside the office by the Bethesda Game Studios union, each representing a worker from the studio laid off in Xbox's recent, brutal cuts).

Sharma praised the "scale and grandeur" but said "the story is even greater," which feels like a borderline preposterous statement to make after a brief live demo of an RPG destined to be dozens of hours long. Her tweet offers no actual new information about the game, but does reaffirm that the head of Xbox is going to rizz up Xbox games whenever the opportunity arises.

But wait... does her tweet actually contain a tiny scrap of new information about The Elder Scrolls 6? That depends on what you make of the eight asterisks that follow the name and colon. Do they merely symbolize a placeholder for the title, or do they represent a cryptic clue that whatever the game's subtitle is, it's exactly eight letters?

PC Gamer's Elder Scrolls loremaster Jody Macgregor took his best guess as to where TES6 will be located back in 2018, with High Rock and Hammerfell the two leading theories. With those in mind, we've got a few of our best guesses at the title in a poll for your approval.

If you're not up on your Elder Scrolls lore, allow Jody to explain the meaning behind a few of these candidates:

• Dominion: The Aldmeri Dominion was heavily foreshadowed as a future threat in Skyrim, and the name Dominion nicely mirrors Oblivion.
• Sentinel: The rumored codename for The Elder Scrolls 6 is Guardian, a synonym for the name of this city (capital of a kingdom of the same name) on The Iliac Bay.
• High Rock: As teased in Starfield, a strong candidate for TES6's setting.
• Redguard: While already used as the subtitle of a spinoff, the name of the people who inhabit the area it's set in would fit here as well.
• Evermore: A city in High Rock close to the border of Hammerfell, it would make a convenient starting location and its name sounds cool.
• Balfiera: These islands in the Iliac Bay might be part of The Elder Scrolls 6, but as a videogame name it doesn't look great on the page.

That's all we've got until the next cryptic clue comes down the pike. If you've got your own idea, let us know below.