Gaming - Page 22

Creative Assembly and SEGA reveal new details on Alien Isolation 2, including screenshots and brief atmospheric footage.

Alien Isolation 2 made a presence at this year's Summer Game Fest, showcasing new eerie footage and setting the stage for another entry in the industry's most terrifying game of cat and mouse. The footage shows the game's protagonist investigating a crash landing, and eventually shows what looks to be our hero(ine) meeting their demise in a xenomorph kill animation.

SEGA has confirmed that Amanda Ripley will not star in Alien Isolation 2, and the sequel will instead feature a "brand new setting, story and protagonist" set in a "new adventure with the same deadly tension" that thrilled players in the first game.

UPDATE: Microsoft has officially confirmed that Gears of War E-Day will be an Xbox console exclusive.

With the recent comments from new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, it seems like exclusivity is back on the menu at Xbox...and now evidence and new reports suggest that Gears of War could remain exclusive to the Xbox platform.

While Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has "no love" for exclusive games, Xbox's new CEO Asha Sharma apparently feels otherwise. Sharma has repeatedly said that exclusive content is critical and vital, and fans are buzzing about the possibilities. While no exact details have been revealed yet, new reports suggest that new Gears of War games could remain exclusive to Xbox.

A new Star Trek game is in development, and it looks like it'll be unlike any other kind of interactive experience in the franchise.

Today at IGN Live 2026, Paramount Games made a surprise announcement: a new Star Trek game is on the way, and it's an atmospheric survival game with psychedelic, mind-bending visuals. It's called Star Trek Shadow Frontier, and the horror masters at Bloober Team (Silent Hill 2, Layers of Fear) are at the helm.

Shadow Frontier stars Bajoran femme fatale Ro Laren from The Next Generation as she explores a very monster of the week style mystery straight out of the original series. Michelle Forbes, who played Ro in the 90s TV series, returns for the video game.

Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis has had its PC system requirements revealed on Steam ahead of its February 12, 2027 launch. The listing also confirms the game will ship with Denuvo anti-tamper DRM. We have known about the game for a while, but a new trailer shown at Sony's State of Play and official requirements shared by Amazon Game Studios give us a clearer picture of what to expect.

The minimum specifications are reasonable for a 2027 release, requiring an Intel Core i5-8600 or AMD Ryzen 5 3600, 16GB of RAM, and either a GTX 1070 8GB, RTX 2060 Super, or AMD RX 5700. The recommended tier steps up to an Intel Core i7-9700K or AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, paired with an RTX 3080 or AMD RX 6800 XT. Both tiers require 80GB of storage.

One caveat worth flagging is that neither tier specifies a target resolution, graphics preset, or frame rate. Given that Legacy of Atlantis is built on Unreal Engine 5, an engine that leans heavily on upscaling, these specs likely assume DLSS or FSR rather than native rendering. That means the RTX 3080 and RX 6800 XT recommendations may not represent native 1080p or 1440p performance, and players on popular mainstream GPUs like the RTX 5060 could find things trickier than the specs suggest.

SEGA's new Virtua Fighter Crossroads marks the return of the franchise after 20 years, and the series has gotten a big revamp with innovative new designs.

The original Virtua Fighter made history as the first-ever 3D fighting game, and now SEGA is tapping into that pioneering spirit with the next game in the series. It's called Virtua Fighter Crossroads, with the title's first two letters stylized as the Roman numeral VI, an obvious nod to the game being the sixth installment in the franchise.

Crossroads marks a big evolution in how gamers will actually experience the combat, transforming what used to be just a stationary 2D view into a fully-fledged 3D environment (think of the transition between Tekken 3 and Tekken Force, and Crossroads' campaign mode is more like the latter). The combat in Virtua Fighter Crossroad's campaign takes a big cue from the Yakuza series of games, which makes sense because RGG Studio, the devs behind SEGA's best-selling gangster series, is also making Crossroads.

Square Enix has officially revealed new details about the third and final game in the FF7 Remake series at Summer Game Fest 2026, confirming the game's subtitle as Revelation.

Final Fantasy VII Revelation will launch Spring 2027, with a simultaneous cross-platform release on consoles and PC, including Xbox and even the Nintendo Switch 2. Square Enix says that Revelation will be the ultimate entry in the series, with the new hybrid battle design being "perfected" at the trilogy's end alongside new features like the FITS system.

"The central theme of this title is resolve. Cloud and his companions each confront their own destinies and find the resolve to march towards the final battle," game director Naoki Hamaguchi said on stage.

Both The Witcher and God of War are having quite a week. Sony just revealed God of War: Laufey at its State of Play on June 2, putting Santa Monica Studio back in the spotlight. And over at CD Projekt Red, the studio is gearing up to launch three Witcher games in six years. It turns out the two franchises now share more than just a good week's worth of headlines.

It looks like Jacqueline Kate Salsman, a former senior combat designer at Santa Monica Studio, has joined CDPR as an Expert Gameplay Designer and is currently working on The Witcher 4. The hire was spotted through her LinkedIn profile and is generating buzz for an obvious reason: combat has long been the soft underbelly of the Witcher series.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is rightly considered one of the greatest open-world games ever made. The world, the writing, and the side quests are all legendary and have gathered critical acclaim. However, ask any honest fan about the combat, and you'll get a polite grimace. Geralt's swordplay felt clunky and shallow compared to everything else the game did brilliantly. CDPR clearly knows this, and it looks like they're finally doing something about it.

SEGA is making a new gangster game, and has conscripted two of the most iconic OGs to make it happen.

SEGA dropped one of the biggest surprises at this year's Summer Game Fest, revealing that the likeness of iconic rapper Tupac Shakur will star in RGG Studio's new gangster drama Stranger Than Heaven. The game is a colorful and gritty period crime drama set across five time periods and locations in Japan, from 1915 in Fukuoka to 1965 in Tokyo.

At the SGF event, Snoop Dogg, who is already starring in Stranger Than Heaven, worked closely with Tupac Shakur's estate (run by industry music executive Tom Whalley) bring him into the game: "The Tupac estate and my son and myself, we work very closely together. So it just made sense to put him in this game, because his likeness and his spirit still lives on, I just felt like it was so connected to what we're doing."

Capcom has announced a new Resident Evil Code Veronica remake set to launch in 2027, and it could be out before March.

Resident Evil Veronica was announced at this year's Summer Game Fest, confirming recent rumors and reports. While Capcom didn't share specific details on the new project, the short 3-minute trailer showcased the graphical fidelity and prowess of the RE Engine, dramatically overhauling the original Dreamcast SD game to a 4K-ready thriller.

Capcom recently confirmed it had more unannounced projects to launch in its FY26 timeline, and Resident Evil Veronica is a big one. There's a chance that Veronica could slip outside of the fiscal, but if it doesn't, the game should launch between January and March 2027. This is a favored launch timing for Capcom and the company routinely releases big games during the early calendar year months.

Capcom's newly-published Q&A with investors shows the company is thinking about turning Pragmata into a fully-fledged franchise, and that there are multiple mystery games in the pipeline for this year.

Any games company that needs a crash course on maximizing game sales should pay close attention to Capcom. The Japanese publisher has enjoyed years of continued profit growth thanks to its exceptional new-to-catalog conversion process. Capcom is one of the most adept publishers in the industry at maintaining and carefully curating its catalog content, and as new games release, they are rotated into this sales-acceleration model, which is often driven by steep discounts across digital stores to move a high volume of units--over 59 million in FY25.

In a recent Q&A with investors, Capcom says that it has more games than Pragmata and Onimusha: Way of the Sword planned for this fiscal year. That makes sense, because the firm has to always keep the momentum of releases going year after year, and launching new titles is the first step before the games rotate into the lucrative, business-driving software catalog.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma plans to reset the business in the next 100 days, right-sizing investments, re-evaluating game exclusivity, and focusing on affordable content and hardware.

Asha Sharma just passed her first 100 days leading Xbox. In that time, Sharma has roused excitement around the brand, made some hefty promises about the future of consoles and even discussed the return of exclusivity, and made radical changes to Game Pass. But it's the next quarter that will bring the most change at Xbox.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg Technology, Sharma spoke about 'resetting' the future of Xbox, giving fans an idea of what to expect moving forward. It sounds like Xbox will change what it spends money on, including which games get greenlit, and start focusing more intently on "making affordable products" in the days of the RAMpocalypse.

After rocking Computex 2026 with the extremely impressive, and likely intensely expensive RTX Spark, NVIDIA's Jensen Huang has flown over to South Korea to meet the iconic League of Legends Esports team, T1.

It was only a day ago that Huang was spotted on the Computex 2026 showroom floor, meeting media, exhibitors, and companies while simultaneously digging through an editor's wallet for NTD banknotes to sign and hand out to showgirls. Notably, Huang returned the favor to the editor by repaying him with NTD$10,000, a signed NTD$1,000 note, and a signed wallet.

Keeping in the same lane as signatures, when Huang visited the T1 Esports team and met Faker, Doran, Oner, Peyz, and Keria, he gifted a signed GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card. Additionally, Huang held up a signed Faker jersey while declaring that South Korea is the birthplace of Esports and that he is a T1 fan. The meeting with the T1 team is ahead of Huang's visit to several South Korean companies, including Samsung, SK Group, LG, and others producing components powering AI, robotics, and data centers.

Valve has published an update on the highly anticipated Steam Machine, which will be the PC company's foray into the console space, but as a PC/console hybrid.

In the update, posted to the Steamworks Documentation website, Valve explains the upcoming PC/console hybrid will be powered by a discrete semi-custom AMD desktop-class CPU, which we know will be AMD Zen 4-based, and a semi-custom AMD RDNA 3 GPU. Valve will target 4K 60FPS in select titles on the Steam Machine, while developers must hit at least 1080p at 30FPS to receive a Steam Machine verification badge.

As for the Steam Machine's power, Valve hasn't released any performance metrics, and the device's performance hasn't been independently verified through extensive testing. However, Valve did give us a hint of what we can expect from Steam Machine performance, as the company wrote in the Steamworks Documentation update that the Steam Machine will be approximately six times more powerful than the Steam Deck.

After confirming that the Steam Machine and Steam Frame will launch this summer, the next question gamers want to know is how much Valve will charge for the PC that looks like a console.

Valve took to its official blog to announce that it's expanding the Verified program to include Steam Machine and Steam Frame, along with a confirmation that it will be shipping both "this summer". For those who don't know, the Steam Machine is a small-form-factor PC that runs SteamOS, a Valve-developed operating system optimized for gaming.

While this all sounds fantastic, the burning question is how much Valve plans to charge for the PC/console hybrid, especially given the company's target of 4K at 60FPS in most games. However, for a title to receive a Verified badge for the Steam Machine, it will need to run at a minimum of 1080p 30FPS on the Steam Machine hardware, which will be a semi-custom AMD RDNA 3 GPU paired with a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 processor.

A report out of Computex 2026 sparked concern this week after German publication HardwareLuxx cited AMD Corporate VP David McAfee as saying FSR 4.1 is "not planned" for RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics, with the decision leaning toward a firm no. This is an interesting stance from the company that recently expanded FSR 4.1 support to older GPUs, but then chooses to leave out select iGPUs.

The story was quickly picked up by VideoCardz and others, and for good reason. RDNA 3.5 covers a wide range of AMD silicon, including Strix Point, Strix Halo, Krackan Point, and upcoming refreshes like Gorgon Point and Gorgon Halo, all of which power gaming laptops, handheld PCs, and Copilot+ devices. Integrated GPUs like the Radeon 890M and Radeon 8060S fall into this family, and both can run the INT8 operations required by FSR 4.1.

That's what made the rumor sting. When AMD confirmed FSR 4.1 support for older Radeon GPUs in mid-May, it named the RX 7000 and RX 6000 series but made no mention of integrated graphics based on RDNA 3.5. Part of FSR 4.1's appeal was always its breadth. Unlike NVIDIA's DLSS, which is locked to GeForce hardware with dedicated Tensor cores, FSR is open and software-based, designed to run across a wide range of GPUs, including integrated ones.

Exclusivity is coming back to Xbox in some form as CEO Asha Sharma reiterates the importance of must-have content that's only available on one platform, but no specifics have been revealed yet.

Microsoft's break from game exclusivity has significantly benefited the Xbox business, boosting game sales and per-quarter revenues. But Xbox hardware is a different story, and de-anchoring exclusive software further weakened Microsoft's already-compromised presence in the console market. While previous management took a more aggressive approach to multi-platform, Xbox's new CEO Asha Sharma is open to exclusivity and wants to use it to help strengthen the platform as a whole.

"I think exclusivity is a tough topic. Look, we're the #2 publisher in the world, and in order to be a great publisher you must have your games reach large audiences to play. At the same time, we're increasingly becoming a platform, in order to be a platform, you must have exclusive content and services," the Xbox exec said in a recent interview with Bloomberg Technology.

Valve will ship its new Steam Machine console PC and Steam Frame VR headset this summer, the company today confirmed.

With the new $99 Steam Controller already out, Valve is preparing to launch its next hardware duo in the coming months. Both devices are set to launch sometime in summer 2026, Valve says, which is technically a span ranging between late June and late September.

"Today we are expanding the Verified program to include Steam Machine and Steam Frame, both of which are shipping this summer. As with Steam Deck Verified, the goal is to help customers understand the out-of-box experience for a given title on these new devices, and how smoothly a game will run with no user work or configuration required."

Today's PR fiasco with Amazon is a great lesson in industry politics, and why insulting a potentially lucrative business partner is probably a bad idea.

An Amazon gaming lead today found themselves in hot water when their statements fueled some pretty eye-catching headlines. In a recent interview with Polygon, Amazon Games general manager Jeff Gattis gave an 'um actually' explanation on the new 007 First Light game, saying that Amazon wasn't involved in that project and reminding everyone that new games in the series would theoretically be handled by MGM and Amazon Games.

It wasn't a good look, especially since 007 First Light is a hugely successful AAA release for the aging legacy property. It's been 14 years since the last dedicated James Bond game released, and First Light has become a platinum success shortly after launch with a strong 1.5 million sales in 24 hours. Gattis' implication that Amazon could technically take away James Bond from IO Interactive at a moment's notice simply isn't a great way to maintain a relationship with one of the most talented and proven third-person action sim developers in the industry.

FromSoftware has attached a release date and a price tag for its new Elden Ring Tarnished Edition re-release on Switch 2 while also promising all of the extra content will be available on other platforms as DLC.

The new Elden Ring Tarnished Edition will release on August 28, 2026 on Switch 2, Bandai Namco has confirmed.This Tarnished Edition re-release features a bunch of extra content that wasn't available on release, including the addition of two fresh playable character classes--the Heavy Knight and the Knight of Ides--as well as new skills, armor, and weapons.

The extra content will be available to all versions of Elden Ring, including the last-gen versions, for around $3.50 or thereabouts (possibly as high as $5 or so). That's a lot less than we'd expect, especially considering the addition of new classes that could change up gameplay quite a bit.

Kotaku recently spoke to a handful of video game industry analysts, and one of them had a succinct explanation on why console hardware prices are so out of hand right now.

Photo Credit:iFixit

Analysts have some bad news for gamers: Hardware prices aren't expected to drop anytime soon. If anything, the prices should rise, which is a difficult concept to grasp now that Sony is selling a $900 PS5 Pro. Kotaku spoke to six analysts and the consensus is that yes, consoles will get more expensive.