Gaming

Techland's new Dying Light Retouched update will be out on all platforms on June 26, complete with visual boosts and more.

The Dying Light franchise turned 10 years old this year, and to celebrate, the developers over at Techland put together some extra bonuses for their community. One big addition is Dying Light Retouched, a new game patch that adds a higher level of detail to the last-gen classic.

The free Retouched update isn't a remaster, but Techland did say it was a significant amount of manual work to make the adjustments. These enhancements include 8K Ultra shadow quality, tweaked lighting, boosting LOD from 260% to 340%, increased texture quality, and improved physics-based rendering.

Microsoft is planning a significant round of layoffs in the Xbox games division, sources tell Bloomberg's Jason Schreier.

New layoffs are set to happen at Xbox. New reports indicate that Microsoft will conduct another large layoff in the Xbox games unit next week as part of a company-wide restructuring. These layoffs will be on top of the 6,000 job eliminations that Microsoft made last month.

Today's news marks the fourth round of layoffs at Xbox in the last 18 months. To stem costs and help equalize margins, Xbox management has laid off thousands of workers over the last year and a half across all of its operating groups (Activision Blizzard King, ZeniMax Media, and Xbox Game Studios).

Meta formally announces a special edition Xbox-themed Quest 3S virtual reality headset as Microsoft further expands beyond consoles.

Microsoft wants to bring Xbox services to all devices that can play them, including VR headsets. But there's just one problem: Making hardware is expensive, and Xbox VR was nixed a while back. That's the impetus behind today's hardware reveal, the Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition.

Rather than make its own VR headsets, Microsoft teamed up with Meta to make an Xbox-branded Quest 3 headset. The bundle is Xbox only in name and color palette--it's still just a Quest 3S--but it does come with a custom Xbox controller and 3 months of Xbox Game Pass for $399. The headset is now available over on Meta's website.

The Nintendo Switch 2 has made its way into the hands of millions of gamers and a portion of those gamers are taking to social media to complain about the screen in handheld mode, specifically how blurry it is.

Following these complaints, tech experts such as Digital Foundry and now Monitors Unboxed put the Switch 2 under the spotlight and ran a series of tests to determine what was causing this reportedly blurry display, and the results were shocking.

The Nintendo Switch 2 blurry screen complaints are justified and measurable, with the Switch 2 display having an extremely slow response time for an LCD IPS display, measuring at a very slow 33.3ms (GtG) in Monitors Unboxed testing. For comparison, a typical LCD IPS panel has an average of 6.3ms response times.

War Thunder is a free-to-play online military simulator that enables players to engage in simulated combat in air, land, and sea. The game is renowned for its attention to detail and has gained quite an audience, some of whom are former military personnel who seemingly still have access to restricted information.

Why does this matter? Because one War Thunder forum user was just banned after leaking a page of an AV-8B flight manual, which marks the ninth known case of classified or, at the very least, restricted information being released to the public via the War Thunder forums in an attempt to influence the technical levels of the game. The user uploaded a section from a NATOPS manual for the AV-8B and TAV-8B, Harrier, which are used by the United States Navy and Marine Corps.

The manual is marked with "Distribution Statement C," meaning it's restricted to government personnel only and not suited for public release. Why did this user leak this information? To win an argument, of course. The user wanted to prove they were right in a technical discussion about the vehicles and to hopefully influence the way the game is designed.

A trusted leaker has revealed some new details about Sony's and Microsoft's next-generation consoles. The leaker writes that Microsoft and Sony will use the same GPU technology for their upcoming consoles.

That leaker is KeplerL2, who posted to the NeoGAF forums and wrote that PS6 and the next Xbox are using the "same GPU architecture." Notably, Kepler stated earlier this year that both the PS6 and next Xbox are scheduled to use AMD's UDNA GPU architecture and that both consoles are slated for release in 2027. As for UDNA, that GPU architecture is currently codenamed "gfx13" and is the next GPU architecture after RDNA 4, which is the architecture in the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9060 discrete PC graphics cards.

For reference, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles use GPUs based on the RDNA 2 architecture, and Kepler writes that UDNA architecture should provide a leap of about 20% faster performance per compute unit in traditional rasterized rendering, and twice as fast in ray tracing and AI operations. Moreover, Kepler writes that these new consoles will increase HDMI bandwidth to 80 Gbps, which could enable higher refresh rates at 4K, or even 8K gaming.

No, Nintendo hasn't decided to start bringing its back catalog of games to PC, that will probably never happen. Instead, Mario Kart 64 has just received a PC port from the team at Harbour Masters, which was created using the same disassembly and recompilation template seen with previous native PC ports for Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.

The game's original code is decompiled and recompiled in a PC-friendly codebase and language without containing any of the original game's assets. Harbour Masters calls the release Spaghetti Kart, requiring a ROM of Mario Kart 64 to work. As this is not an emulation of the Nintendo 64 hardware, the game benefits from modern PC gaming features.

This includes rendering the game at higher resolutions, with Ultrawide support, and with performance that can hit 120 FPS. It also means texture packs, new audio, and other remastered assets can easily be added to the game. This PC port includes a course editor and the ability to tweak several settings not present in the original N64 release.

An early build of Concord was uploaded over the weekend, and now reports are claiming the build dates back to November 14, 2023, nine months before the game was released to its tragic reception and ultimate demise.

For those who have never heard of Concord, or vaguely remember hearing the name within the gaming market, Concord was a flash in the pan that cost Sony reportedly $400 million in development, but was eventually pulled from marketplaces and refunds issued to those who purchased it.

The game was developed by Firewalk Studios, which has since closed, and debuted with a $40 price tag. It attracted less than 1,500 players concurrently, and due to it being a team-based shooter attempting to compete with Overwatch, Sony was forced to take down the live servers and essentially delete the game.

Microsoft has confirmed that it will return to Gamescom this year, but we're still not sure what exactly will be shown at the event.

Now that Microsoft has grown to a gigantic Roman Empire-like entity in the games industry, it's no surprise that the company will be attending major video games trade shows. That's the case for Gamescom 2025, with Microsoft recently announcing it will attend the show in Cologne, Germany later in the fall.

Xbox's presence at Gamescom will run from August 20 to 24, and Microsoft's bustling stable of games publishers and developers will be in attendance. Blizzard says it'll be at the show with World of Warcraft in tow, offering "five days of non-stop community celebrations." Blizzard confirms it will reveal new details about World of Warcraft's eleventh expansion, known as Midnight.

You can now buy Nintendo Switch 2 motherboards from Chinese resellers directly from the production line for just $124 on local marketplaces like Goofish.

The Chinese resellers have shown images of a panelized PCB design, which is a manufacturing technique where multiple individual PCBs are arranged onto a single PCB during production. In the later stages, manufacturers and assemblers like Foxconn, separate or depanelize them.

The PCB that can now be purchased is identical to those in the official retail version of the Nintendo Switch 2 -- including the same market stamps which are usually applied during verification. Chinese marketplace variants are just missing some of the metallic shielding layers for important components, but that's about as close as we'll see to the official motherboards inside of the Nintendo Switch 2.

MindsEye did so poorly that it is reportedly triggering layoffs at the studio that made it, Build a Rocket Boy.

The meteoric pendulum swing of MindsEye is an example of flash-in-the-pan excitement constructed on hollow hype. The game was built up by former Rockstar Games mastermind Leslie Benzies and a slick marketing campaign hoping to capitalize on past glories. Skepticism won out in the long run, though, because MindsEye launched with a plethora of bugs and glitches, and was promptly publicly lambasted on social media. MindsEye is now the worst-reviewed game of 2025 and will ultimately be remembered for a tarnished legacy.

Now sources tell IGN's Wesley Yin-Poole that MindsEye developer Build a Rocket Boy is preparing layoffs to stem the losses.

Microsoft's new Xbox app update will combine all your PC games into one aggregated library, and it's currently being tested by Xbox Insiders.

Xbox is converging with Windows, and to streamline this union, Microsoft is making the Xbox PC app a one-stop shop for launching games. The app will now show games that are installed from other stores besides Windows and Xbox, similar to how Lenovo's Legion Space and ASUS Armoury Crate launchers operate.

This means users can browse and launch PC games from the Xbox app regardless of where they are purchased. Battle.net and Steam games libraries will show up within the Xbox app, alongside content libraries from other major PC storefronts. This is the same "Xbox experience" found in the new Xbox Ally X handheld, a device built around bringing an Xbox console UI to Windows PC handhelds.

Elden Ring Nightreign's breakout sales performance helped the game achieve a spot in the top 10 best-earning games of May 2025.

FromSoftware's new Elden Ring game Nightreign is a bit unconventional. It's an online-oriented game with 3-player PVE co-op action with eight playable classes, all wrapped up with Elden Ring lore, items, and gameplay mechanics. The result is a unique experiment that attempts to capture the global scavenger hunt craze that Elden Ring kicked off in 2022.

Nightreign's live focus didn't deter fans. According to the latest data estimates from analyst firm Newzoo, Elden Ring Nightreign managed to become the fourth best-earning game of May 2025 by revenue. The data shows that Nightreign's sales revenue on PC holds more weight than other platforms. The top five looks like this: Fortnite clocks in at #1, EA Sports FC 25 at #2, Call of Duty at #3, Nightreign is #4, and NBA 2K25 is #5.

Funcom has revealed in a new press release that Dune: Awakening sales have surpassed 1,000,000 copies, making it the fastest-selling Funcom game to date.

The new MMO survival crafting RPG, Dune: Awakening, was launched on June 10, and since then, it has been received really well by gamers, with the Steam Store listing for the game landing on a "Very Positive" average for All Reviews.

Developer Funcom is celebrating the title's success with a new press release that states Dune: Awakening reached a peak concurrent player count of over 189,000 players, eclipsing the peak concurrent player count of Conan Exiles, which was 54,403 players.

Gearbox Software recently released the official story trailer for Borderlands 4, and now the CEO of the development studio, Randy Pitchford, has teased how in-depth the character classes are in the upcoming game.

Speaking at Borderlands Fan Fest, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford and chief creative officer Randy Varnell discussed what players can expect out of building their characters up in Borderlands 4, with Pitchford saying that character classes are so in-depth that even if four players took the same characters and action skill into a fight they would find they have enough variation in their skill set that they'd be able to take on different roles in the fight. More specifically, Pitchford said, "You'll find more skills per character than in Borderlands 3 and 2 added together."

Borderlands 2 characters each had three skill trees with 10 skills in each tree, with Borderlands 3 upping that to 4 skill trees per character and 18 to 20 skills in each tree. Adding those together, players get an intense amount of possible variation between skills, enabling players to explore specific builds with their character to see what works best with their playstyle. The problem Borderlands 4 will need to make sure they have overcome with extensive skill options is making each of those skills feel not only unique, but also useful.

Every once in a while, a new indie game hits the scene and gains massive popularity, and I believe we have found another instance with the release of PEAK, a new physics-based climbing simulator that has already passed the 24-hour player count for both Marvel Rivals and Call of Duty.

PEAK is developed by Landcrab and published by Aggro Crab and Landfall, which recently confirmed that its title, which was released on June 17, 2025, has already surpassed more than 1 million copies sold, per a post on the Landfall X account. PEAK peaked at 102,799 concurrent players on 22 June 2025, marking a monumental achievement for the developer and publisher.

When asked whether the game was going to come to consoles, Landfall responded and said it was "too early to say," but that it will "hopefully" be released on consoles. So, why has this game gained so much attention? A part of the reason behind PEAK's success is that it's a very streamer-friendly game, as many viewers enjoy watching a livestreamer attempt to climb a mountain and then fall off at their first mistake, only to have to start the climb all over again.

Polish studio Rebel Wolves recently debuted a new 20-minute gameplay overview of their upcoming title, The Blood of Dawnwalker, a new single-player open-world dark fantasy action-RPG where players step into the shoes of a vampire.

The 20-minute gameplay overview can be watched above. It focuses heavily on gameplay and has minimal cutscenes, with viewers being introduced to the protagonist of the title, Coen, as he explores a town, encounters enemies, uses skills, variations of combat, and his transformation into a vampire.

Rebel Wolves is using Unreal Engine 5 to develop The Blood of Dawnwalker, and the studio is led by Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, who was the game director for the critically acclaimed Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and head of production/secondary game director for Cyberpunk 2077.

Recently revealed gameplay footage for Blood of Dawnwalker, a new action RPG from former Witcher 3 developers, showcases the game's interesting four-way sword combat system.

Polish game studio Rebel Wolves took the lid off of their new game Blood of Dawnwalker, highlighting the game's visceral and gritty combat. From the looks of the new pre-beta gameplay footage, Dawnwalker's combat sequences are more tactile and impactful, adding a sense of weight to the omni-directional attack-and-block system.

The combat sequence reveals Blood of Dawnwalker will have ability-based debuffs like acrid dust, which stuns enemies in place. Successfully pulling off combat actions like attacking, blocking, or parrying will add an ability charge that can be spent to execute strategy-based skills like acrid dust, a DoT searing blood spell, and even a spin strike that can decapitate opponents.

Borderlands 4, the upcoming action-adventure RPG developed by Gearbox Studios, has received its official story trailer

The new story trailer released on the Gearbox YouTube channel gives players a closer look at the big bad for Borderlands 4, the Timekeeper. The trailer shows how the Timekeeper has implanted the player with a Bolt, a spine-grafted cybernetic device that he uses to "dominate the populace" of Kairos, trapping them to the planet. Additionally, the Timekeeper and his Order reign dominant on the planet of Kairos, ruling from a fortress city called Dominion City.

Players will start with very humble beginnings and begin their journey across Kairos to kindle the flames of a revolution against the Timekeeper and his Commanders. The inhabitants of Kairos have already begun rising up against the overlord, and you, the player, are set to be the final spark to ignite a full-scale revolt.

Xbox was rumored to be working with open-source Xbox 360 emulator Xenia to bring original Xbox and Xbox 360 titles to the next-generation Xbox console. But now those rumors have been put to rest.

The rumors came from YouTuber and leaker Extas1s, who claimed Microsoft entered into a partnership with Xenia to begin work on bringing original Xbox and Xbox 360 titles to PC and handheld devices such as the Xbox ROG Ally. More specifically, the leaker stated these games would be coming to PC and handheld devices via a new advanced emulator that would increase in-game performance and graphical fidelity.

Shortly after the media picked up the rumors from Extas1s, multiple industry experts, including Xenia themselves chimed in, with Jez Corden, the executive editor for Windows Central, and known Microsoft/Xbox insider with a solid reputation writing, "Xbox is gunning to bring Xbox games to more devices, this particular scenario isn't a thing at the moment."