Category: Gaming

So, Xbox owns Activision-Blizzard now, right? So why are Call of Duty and Diablo not on Game Pass yet? That’s been a question on many people’s minds lately now that Xbox’s massive acquisition has finally closed. And today, Xbox head Phil Spencer showed up on the Official Xbox Podcast to try and answer it.

During the podcast, Spencer was questioned about the recent news that we wouldn’t see a massive drop of Activision-Blizzard games on Game Pass immediately after the deal finalized, as many had expected. As it was pointed out, a major flood of Game Pass newcomers happened when Xbox acquired Zenimax. Twenty Bethesda games dropped onto the service just days after, including some of the company’s biggest franchises.

Where, then, are all the Activision Blizzard games? Why is this different?

Per Spencer: they’re coming. Eventually. But the regulatory challenges surrounding this acquisition made it a bit trickier to navigate than the Zenimax deal, and adding games to Game Pass isn’t as simple as flipping a switch to put them on there.

“The truth of the matter is with Activision/Blizzard/King that the regulatory process took so long, and frankly there was a lot of uncertainty in that process up until really a week before we closed, or the week of, when the CMA finally came down to their decision, that we weren’t able to get in and work with mostly Activision-Blizzard in this case, on that back catalog work,” Spencer says.

“So now that the deal is closed, we’re starting that work, but there is work. And…the Twitter handle did put out something that talked about 2024, I think that’s accurate. I would love it if there was some kind of secret celebration drop that was coming in the next couple of weeks, there’s not.”

Spencer went on to acknowledge that the lack of a celebratory, sudden drop was “a little bit of a downer” but reassured that the games are coming, eventually, including Diablo 4 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. In the same interview, he also reiterated “100% parity” for Call of Duty across all platforms, including PlayStation, in keeping with Xbox’s 10-year deal with Sony.

Xbox’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard officially closed last week, with Xbox paying $69 billion to fully absorb the giant gaming publisher after over a year of legal and regulatory battles in multiple countries.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Xbox’s Activision Blizzard merger is finally done, but that doesn’t mean that Phil Spencer is suddenly ready to reverse course and make Call of Duty an Xbox exclusive. Speaking on the Official Xbox Podcast, Spencer reiterated that the platform’s goal is “100 percent parity” on content across all platforms.

“The players on PlayStation and in the future on Nintendo… I want you to feel 100 percent part of the community. I don’t want you to feel like there’s content you’re missing out on, skins you’re missing out on, timing you’re missing out on. That’s not the goal,” Spencer said. “The goal is 100 percent parity across all platforms as much as we can for launch and content.”

That means no exclusive betas, skins, or other content will be reserved for Xbox players. This follows a 10-year deal with Sony to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation platforms.

Spencer clarified that there may be technological issues that separate individual platforms — an apparent nod to the Switch. However, from a content perspective, Spencer says that Xbox’s ultimate goal is to make everyone feel like they’re part of the “Call of Duty nation” no matter what platform they’re on. He also subtly criticized PlayStation’s previous exclusivity deals with the franchise.

“We have no goal of trying to use Call of Duty to try and get you to buy an Xbox console,” Spencer said. “We’ve been on the other side of some of those skins and times… Even this beta, it wasn’t on Xbox the first week. I don’t think that helps the community, I don’t think it helps the game.”

The battle over Call of Duty

Call of Duty was at the center of the battle over the Activision Blizzard merger that raged through most of 2023, with outgoing PlayStation president Jim Ryan claiming that he believed Xbox intended to use Call of Duty to “disadvantage PlayStation in terms of the availability or the manner in which the game is made available on PlayStation consoles, and to drive PlayStation gamers to the Xbox platforms, specifically Game Pass.”

Xbox, for its part, has been steadfast in saying that Call of Duty will not be made exclusive on any one platform.

Spencer touched on numerous other topics during the interviews, including why Activision Blizzard games won’t be available on Game Pass in 2023 and whether or not Xbox has done a good job of revisiting franchises.

For now it’s business as usual Activision prepares to launch Modern Warfare III. The beta kicked off on October 12 and ended on October 16, with the release date set for November 10. You can read our initial review impressions right here.

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.

With a ridiculous on-the-nose title like Wizard with a Gun, you know exactly what you’re getting into. You’re a wizard, and you have a gun. But the gun is also your wand, so even though you’re shooting all manner of creatures, it’s magical shooting. This silly premise has a lot going for it, opening the door for plenty of unique combat scenarios in its sandbox world. But despite a great opening, Wizard with a Gun starts losing momentum once it becomes clear that it just doesn’t feel finished. Pulling off spell combos and crafting new bullets can be a lot of fun with a friend in co-op, and there is a good amount to explore for fans of survival sandboxes, but balance issues and the lack of a proper ending leave it feeling like it’s missing an Early Access label. As my friends and I kept saying, “it’s got good bones,” but the robes on top of them don’t take long to wear thin.

Wizard with a Gun immediately gets you to the shooting and the wizarding, with a campaign that’s easy to understand on its face: With only five minutes left before the world ends, you have to keep turning back the clock in order to defeat chaos and save all existence. How you choose to use each five-minute chunk is up to you, be it gathering resources for a complex but rewarding crafting system, or maybe facing off against a mini boss to gather gears that allow you to unlock more areas to explore. At any point you can choose to escape to the Tower, where you can spend as much time as you want doing research to gather more bullets — I mean spells — for your many guns, or decorate your headquarters using recipes you get through exploration (although there isn’t much to gain for doing so). Then, once you’re ready, you reset the clock and venture back out.

You can run through the campaign solo or with one partner, and the co-op is super easy to set up. You just start a save file in multiplayer mode, and a friend can hop in and out. While they won’t join your game with any items, it’s easy to stash some of your own in the Tower for them to use — you’ll have plenty, too, as there are four types of guns available to find at various levels of power, and you can carry up to six at a time. Because progression is tied to your guns and upgrades, you can easily jump back and forth into each other’s save files, or just use the same save file when playing alone to progress on your own.

The most fun I had was with a friend, largely because the overall experience differs wildly from playing solo. While Wizard with a Gun attempts to make the map more difficult when you’re playing in co-op, that mostly comes down to more enemies: Instead of one chaos monster spawning, you’ll get two. It’s an intuitive way to balance having multiple players, but there are a lot potentially unintended side effects. For one, when you defeat a chaos enemy, you can then reduce the overall chaos, which means you get more time added to the countdown to the end of the world. This works well when you’re by yourself since you’ll get an extra 30 seconds every so often, but when there are two of you, you get way more added time. There were expeditions where my friend and I had nearly doubled the available time, which let us gather a ton of resources and get to the boss at the end of each area much faster than it felt like we should have.

Foes seemed to take and deal the same amount of damage whether I had a partner or not, and which enemies pop up in higher numbers during co-op didn’t seem to be consistent across the different enemy types. That meant I had to run back to the Tower more often solo because many encounters were significantly more difficult. That’s especially true of bosses, since they essentially take double damage when you’re with a friend. Plus, they can usually only attack one of you at a time, which is a reprieve you obviously don’t get in solo mode. The result is that neither mode feels balanced properly, with enemies that are too difficult by yourself and too easy when you’re with a partner.

The balance problems are even more apparent when it comes to the spells. You start off with a basic damage bullet, but you can unlock multiple research stations that give you access to more bullet types. There are the obvious ones, like burning, poison, and ice, but the more you upgrade, the more humorous and fun they become. Each research station is tied to a certain type of bullet, so one can upgrade your ice bullets to do more damage, for example — but you can also unlock more interesting options like freezing bullets that encase an enemy in a block of ice, or a drill that can deal more damage once they’re frozen. Move on over to the physics station and you can get force bullets that knock enemies around, or an upgrade to get ones that summon boulders that fall from the sky and block movement. There are bullets that can revive your friend immediately, or cool ones that can make enemies either your friend or terrified of you.

You can also craft powders, which are basically bullet attachments that generate other effects for devastating combos. Some just increase damage, but others might leave a trail that can boost the efficacy of your bullets. Put a water trail on a cold bullet and it will increase how quickly you can freeze an enemy. Put an oil trail on a fire bullet and watch everything go up in flames. One of Wizard with a Gun’s great joys is trying out different combos and seeing what happens. And because each of the map’s three areas has a different biome (there’s a burning desert, a poisonous swamp, and a frozen waste), you’ll want to change out your bullets and try different combos to combat enemy immunities.

However, you might not actually want to try new things, because there’s one bullet tree that trumps all the others, and it works in just about any environment: lightning. There are two kinds, general shock bullets and ones that call down lightning strikes for massive damage. The long cooldowns might initially deter you from using them, but as one of my friends soon pieced together, if you put lighting strikes on each of your guns, you can get around the cooldown by switching between them. So while it took me close to 25 hours to finish Wizard with a Gun as I moved between the different bullet types and upgraded multiple research stations, he got through the entire campaign in less than 10 hours just by spamming lightning abilities.

The bullet types are just horribly uneven, whether it’s due to how much damage they deal, how many of them it takes to instill an effect, or how early they’re introduced in the campaign. It makes sense to lock more powerful bullet types behind weaker abilities in their research trees, but you can get lightning strikes before you even beat the first boss, which is only after maybe an hour or two. Even when you decide to switch to some of the more interesting types, you may find they have very limited uses or don’t work as advertised. Charming bullets theoretically make enemies friendly, but I found that it took too many bullets to try and turn just one, which is an impossible task when you’re getting bombarded on multiple sides.

There’s also the Order bullet, which only deals damage to chaos enemy types, but just barely. Even with a few upgrades, it only made a difference when fighting the lower-level ones, and anything it could do, another bullet type could do it better. So many of the spell types have the potential to be exciting, and I get that not every option can be damage-heavy and powerful, but more work could have been put into making sure you actually want to try out different combinations. At a certain point, I was unlocking research trees for the sake of completion, not because they were interesting.

Another thing I did just for the sake of it is figure out the story. You know that the world has ended and chaos is running rampant, but you don’t know where everybody went or why. There’s a good amount of environmental storytelling that you can unlock by scanning parts of the world, along with NPCs that give you a bit of obtuse and poetic dialogue about what happened, but little of it felt worth listening to or learning about. As you unlock areas in the Tower by finding more gates, you’ll come across tomes that discuss the bosses and how they became trapped, too. There’s even one guy that’s literally trapped in a block of amber, but the details of these things don’t necessarily matter. You can stop and read every piece of lore if you want, but it doesn’t do much besides slow down the flow of gameplay.

Plus, it’s tough to think about if any of it really matters when getting to the end and defeating the final boss is an extremely anticlimactic affair. Usually, I would avoid talking about the ending of a game to avoid spoilers, but Wizard with a Gun’s is, frankly, incomplete. Some of the bosses, like the barbarian Kolanna, have a set attack pattern you have to navigate, or a specific weakness you can exploit. But the final boss doesn’t utilize much strategy at all. You can spam whatever weapons you have and take them down. Then once you defeat them, there’s a little dialogue, a congratulations, and the credits roll. That’s it.

There’s still a lot more to do in Wizard with a Gun since you can continue playing after the campaign to unlock everything, but when you work so hard to get through four unique, sometimes very difficult bosses, only to get to a final boss far less interesting than any of them and the news that you have to wait for future updates to see more of the story, I started to wonder if I should’ve waited for those additions in the first place.

The developers at Nintendo had thousands of ideas for the latest Mario game, many of which made it into Super Mario Bros. Wonder through the game’s world-shifting Wonder Flowers. But some ideas didn’t: including sound director Koji Kondo’s whacky idea for an “eight-heads-tall, life-sized, live-action Mario.”

This wild idea for Mario was mentioned in an Ask the Developer interview published by Nintendo today for Super Mario Bros. Wonder, in which the development team shared insights from the creation of Mario’s latest adventure. In the interview, they talked about the process of coming up with the Wonder effects.

Originally, they had everyone on staff writing game ideas on sticky notes, ending up with over 2,000 ideas to sift through. Later, after Wonder Flowers were created, they went back to these sticky notes for ideas on different Wonder Effects, and used many of the suggestions they found.

But one idea that didn’t make it was Kondo’s, as he explains:

“I shared the idea of an eight-heads-tall, life-sized, live-action Mario humming along with the background music as he goes along,” Kondo said. “When he jumps, he says to himself, ‘Boing!’ …The idea was never used, though…I felt I had to take the lead in going to the extreme.”

Kondo’s giant Mario idea isn’t too far off Mario’s usual size-changing abilities, but what really makes it is the idea of a Mario doing all his own music and sound effects. It’s even sillier when you consider that if Kondo’s idea had been used, all these sounds would have been done by new Mario voice actor Kevin Afghani. It was recently announced that Afghani has replaced long-time Mario voice Charles Martinet after Martinet’s retirement from the role.

The interview with the team comes just ahead of the release of Super Mario Bros. Wonder at the end of this week. We ran a final preview covering our early impressions of the game last week, and while our preview is spoiler-free, be warned that spoilers have leaked online elsewhere already.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

In back-to-back developer blogs published today, Nintendo answered a variety of questions about the upcoming 2D platformer Super Mario Bros. Wonder, including repeatedly confirming that it was not influenced by The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

Despite receiving a significant graphical overhaul compared to New Super Mario Bros., developers working on Super Mario Bros. Wonder revealed today that they didn’t have much insight into the goings-on of the motion picture, since they were being developed concurrently.

When asked if the facial expressions and character animations were influenced by the Universal Pictures blockbuster, developer Masanobu Sato said, “We’re often asked about the film’s influence on the game, but we didn’t hear anything about the film’s content during development. I think Tezuka-san and Kondo-san were the only members here who knew the details.”

Fellow developer Takashi Tezuka elaborated, adding: “During development, we didn’t know when the movie would be released, but we were sure some people would play the game because they watched the movie. This is why we were conscious of creating a game that wouldn’t disappoint them. So for this game, we dedicated ample budget and time to create the characters with even more care and attention and in greater detail.”

They also cited the Switch’s more powerful technology compared to the hardware used for the past two New Super Mario Bros. games, and the evolution of their 3D models and how amusingly lots of details they built won’t be seen since their game is entirely in 2D.

The blog posts covered a variety of other aspects of the development process as well, from the graphical redesign of various characters to the origins of Elephant Mario. With the imminent release of Super Mario Bros. Wonder, you can check out our final preview, which praised the very models and animations Nintendo’s developers worked so hard on.

Travis Northup is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @TieGuyTravis and read his games coverage here.

Diablo IV fans will have to wait just a tiny bit longer to dig into Season of Blood, which is scheduled to launch today. Blizzard says that technical issues have forced it to delay the new vampire-driven season’s release by “a few hours.”

“We have encountered some technical issues with our current build and will be delaying Season of Blood’s start time by a few hours to remedy these issues,” a Diablo IV representative wrote. “Once we have more information, we’ll update you right away. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate the feedback you have provided and your patience.”

Season of Blood introduces vampires to Blizzard’s popular dungeon crawler along with a host of fundamental changes to its mechanics. Its release conincides with its planned launch on Steam.

Diablo IV has had its share of problems since releasing back in June. While its initial launch was well-received by fans, it has been criticized for its handling of class balance, unique items, and monetization. As a result, Blizzard has been working basically around the clock to try and address fan feedback in order to placate the comunity.

We will update this article once Season of Blood is officially live.

Developing…

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.

This article features mild spoilers for Assassin’s Creed Mirage, though nothing players won’t become aware of beyond the opening hours of the game.

A dataminer has found what they claim is a cut post-credits scene in Assassin’s Creed Mirage that sets up an even more complicated twist coming to the already convoluted Assassin’s Creed meta story.

As reported by Eurogamer, YouTuber and dataminer Sliderv2 uploaded a video of what they claim to be a cut tease for Assassin’s Creed Hexe, the upcoming spooky-looking entry seemingly connected to witchcraft.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage, like most games in the franchise, features some minor connections to the meta story that links the historic events of each game to a vaguely connected modern-day plot.

The alleged post-credits scene hints at something completely different, however, as while Assassin’s Creed has so far only explored these two eras, the past and the present, it teases stories taking place in the distant future.

A conversation takes place between two Animus Operators (the Animus being the machine that sends people’s consciousness back in time), in which they refer to our 21st century as “ancient history”.

Present day Assassin leader William Miles, who appears in a handful of games, is referenced by one of the voices as an Assassin mentor: “One of the last before the Great Shift.” In response, the other said: “The Shift was 21st century. Ancient history.”

What makes the cutscene even more complicated, and a little eerie, is that it shows Basim’s eagle Enkidu flying from what appears to be Mirage’s normal map into the desert to a technological tower of some kind, suggesting the game may not be set in the distant past after all.

You can read about Assassin Creed’s Mirage meta story and have its ending explained here, and therefore how this cut plot twist might affect things, but we won’t spoil that for everyone. Of course, as this scene was cut, it could mean Ubisoft decided against this plot point altogether and it won’t feature in upcoming games at all.

Assassin’s Creed appears to be going through a great shift of its own though. Upcoming entries like the aforementioned Hexe and feudal Japan-set Assassin’s Creed Red will be sheltered under the Assassin’s Creed Infinity umbrella, a new platform acting as the series’ hub.

Details are still slim about all three of these projects, but one employee listed the highly anticipated Red as a 2024 game.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage launched October 5 as a smaller-scale entry that returns players to the series’ roots through slower-paced, stealth-based gameplay, veering away from the role-playing game foundations of Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla.

Its map isn’t anywhere near the size of those of its predecessors for one, and it only takes around 20 to 30 hours to complete compared to the several dozens of hours of previous games.

In our 8/10 review, IGN said: “Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s back-to-basics approach is a successful first step in returning to the stealthy style that launched this series.”

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

Skull Island: Rise of Kong is out today, October 17, and the $39.99 action adventure has already been called “the worst game of 2023”.

Skull Island: Rise of Kong was developed by IguanaBee, the Chilean studio behind 2020’s G.I. Joe: Operation Blackout and Headsnatchers, and is published by Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl‘s GameMill Entertainment under licence from DeVito ArtWorks, which controls the King Kong / Skull Island universe.

Announcing its release date, GameMill described Skull Island: Rise of Kong as an “exhilarating, third-person action-adventure game [that] lets you become Kong on a journey of vengeance as you fight to claim your rightful place as King of Skull Island”.

The truth of Skull Island, however, is quite different. It’s already gone viral on social media for all the wrong reasons, with one tweet showing a cutscene with visuals you’d expect three generations ago viewed nearly seven million times.

Another tweet showing rudimentary action gameplay has had over a quarter of a million views.

There’s plenty more:

In the game, Kong sets out to avenge the death of his parents by the saurian terror Gaw. “Traverse the mysterious island and uncover its secrets across a variety of treacherous environments, discovering the power coursing through its exotic flora and fauna,” GameMill said. “Conquer waves of primal beasts, defeat unique bosses, and rise above all who stand in Kong’s way to being King!”

Exacerbating the issue is the fact Skull Island: Rise of Kong is the first new King Kong game in 18 years, and follows Ubisoft’s fondly remembered Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie, which came out in 2005.

As you’d expect, the memes are in full force:

Skull Island: Rise of Kong rekindles memories of 2017’s Life of Black Tiger, which was at the time called the worst PlayStation 4 game ever. It raises questions about the quality control — or lack of — employed by the console platform holders Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, when such an obviously poor quality game is approved for release on their supposedly curated storefronts.

IGN has asked GameMill for comment.

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

Lies of P has sold one million copies since going on sale last month, publisher Neowiz has said.

Round8 Studio’s well-received soulslike launched on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, PC via Steam, and Mac via the Mac App Store on September 18. It reimagines the classic fairy tale of Pinocchio in the Bloodborne style.

IGN’s Lies of P review returned an 8/10. We said: “Lies of P might not branch out particularly far from its soulslike inspiration, but it plays the part extremely well.” Lies of P has a “very positive” user review rating on Steam too.

“This incredible milestone for Lies of P proves the potential of Korean console games on the global stage,” said Seungchul Kim, co-CEO of Neowiz. “The Lies of P project was a challenging endeavor for Neowiz and Round8 Studio and we take great pride in what we achieved with this title.”

Given the success of Lies of P, thoughts turn to the possibility of DLC and a sequel. Earlier this month, IGN reported on a job listing for a quest planner role for a Lies of P DLC, with one of the bullet points on the listing directly stating that the DLC is in development. At the time, Neowiz told IGN it did not have an official statement regarding upcoming DLC for Lies of P, however, the studio said it “will be providing a roadmap of the contents planned for Lies of P as soon as it is ready”.

Spoilers of Lies of P are ahead

Lies of P includes a clear hint at either upcoming DLC or a sequel. A post-credits scene shows the ruby shoes worn by Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. An unnamed character says: “When I return, I will find her. For sure. Another key of ours. Dorothy.”

In today’s announcement Jiwon Choi, Director for Lies of P, teased more to come: “The reception has been incredible so far, and we are beyond thankful that over one million players have already embarked on their journey through Krat. Likewise, we are excited for what the future holds for Lies of P, and can’t wait to share more when the time is right.”

If you’re currently playing through the game, be sure to check out IGN’s Lies of P walkthrough.

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

After an illustrious career spanning more than 60 years, Michael Caine is ready to bid goodbye. The 90-year-old actor confirming that he intends to retire in the wake of the real of The Great Escaper, which will be his final film.

Caine, who has been frequent collaborator with director Christopher Nolan, feels he has nothing else to accomplish.

“I keep saying I’m going to retire. Well, I am now,” Caine told BBC Radio 4’s Today show. “I’ve figured, I’ve had a picture where I’ve played the lead and it’s got incredible reviews. The only parts I’m likely to get now are old men…And I thought, well I might as well leave with all this — what have I got to do to beat this?”

Caine bids farewell to an illustrious career

Caine has been hinting for sometime now that he plans to retire. He previously told the Telegraph, “I am bloody 90 now, and I can’t walk properly and all that. I sort of am retired already.”

Caine’s career stretches back to 1956’s A Hill in Korea, and in the years that followed would include The Italian Job, The Muppet Christmas Carol, Children of Men and numerous Christopher Nolan films. Caine famously played Alfred Pennyworth in Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, lending the role a fatherly gravitas as Bruce Wayne’s mentor and conscience. Caine didn’t appear in Oppenheimer, ending an eight-year streak of appearances in Nolan’s films.

Arguably his greatest role is 1975’s The Man Who Would Be King, where he co-starred alongside Sean Connery as an ex-soldier on a journey to Kafiristan. Caine has been nominated for an Oscar six times, his first win being for 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters. He also won Best Supporting Actor for his role in 1999’s The Cider House Rules.

Caine’s final movie is The Great Escaper, a biographical drama based on the true story of an 89-year-old British World War II veteran. It released in the United Kingdom on October 6.

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.