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Earlier this year, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord‘s War Sails naval expansion had its release pushed back from June 17th to November 26th. You can give it a go right now if you fancy, so it obviously made that second date. Prior to the DLC dropping, I chatted with Bannerlord senior producer Falk Engel about what went into the decision to ditch the initial summer date, and why custom naval battles were only confirmed to be arriving with its launch quite late in the day.
Ubisoft has confirmed it no longer plans to launch a second major Assassin’s Creed Shadows expansion, something that previously would have formed part of the game’s now-abandoned season pass.
Shadows’ first — and now, it seems, only — major expansion launched in September. The 10-hour Claws of Awaji had previously been described as the “first expansion” included in Shadows’ season pass, an offer that was formally scrapped a year ago when Ubisoft delayed the game’s launch from November 2024 to February 2025.
As an apology to fans for the game’s delay, Ubisoft said it instead would gift Claws of Awaji for free to all pre-order customers. But fans still assumed a second expansion would follow at some point, as has become custom for every other major Assassin’s Creed title over the past decade.
“As of now, at this moment for Year Two, there is no expansion on the size of Awaji that is planned,” associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois said in an interview with JorRaptor.
Lemay-Comtois caveated his answer by noting some exceptional examples in the past where Ubisoft had changed its plans to make more add-on content than it had originally envisioned (such as with the recent Saudi-funded DLC that arrived two years post-launch for Assassin’s Creed Mirage). But, currently, it seems clear that no second expansion is on the cards, and there’s no suggestion that Shadows’ post-launch plans will extend into a Year Three.
It’s an extremely surprising decision by Ubisoft, which followed up the launch of 2017’s Assassin’s Creed Origins with two expansions (The Hidden Ones and The Curse of the Pharaohs), 2018’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey with two expansions (Legacy of the First Blade and The Fate of Atlantis), and 2020’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey with three expansions (Wrath of the Druids, The Siege of Paris, Dawn of Ragnarök) alongside numerous other smaller DLC drops. 2023’s smaller-scale Assassin’s Creed Mirage was itself originally planned as yet another Valhalla expansion, before it was ultimately released as a standalone game.
“We’re still working on content for post-launch and supporting it, but it’s not a full-on DLC the way a season pass would have had in the previous years,” Lemay-Comtois said, confirming at least that Ubisoft still had plans for smaller additions to Shadows within 2026.
“We’re trying to re-adjust for Year Two a little bit,” he continued. “There’s learning from Year One we can apply to Year Two. Any content we want to do in Year Two will probably be more sparse, not a drip-feed… but chunkier updates that shake things up a little more. I’m not announcing anything at this point but our strategy for Year One was to be quick and reactive, so it means smaller drops often, but for Year Two we don’t need to put fires out or anything, so it’s more what good, chunky little piece of meat… we can drop and have people come back and enjoy it.”
Digging into Lemay-Comtois’ comment, the suggestion here is that Ubisoft’s decision to change course on Shadows following its pre-release reception impacted the company’s plans for post-launch support, with priority placed on fighting immediate “fires.” And indeed, Shadows has enjoyed a series of recent patches that have added numerous fan-requested features, in a clear bid to turn sentiment around. Going into further detail, Lemay-Comtois also suggested Shadows had been a tougher game to develop technologically, further complicating plans to get post-launch content ready.
“I think with Shadows, we had a big jump in generations,” he continued. “The engine work that we had to do on Shadows took a lot of time and a lot of our resources. So the planning for the post launch was not really clear as soon as it would have been on another [game] where the technology was more stable and well known.
“We started fairly late on Shadows… because I remember during pre-launch we had the Season Pass,” he admitted. “And the situation changed when we pushed back on the release date. That plan changed quite a bit and then we had to kind of adapt to the situation. So because of the new tech, because of the new generation, because of the pushes we had in production, we chose an approach that was way more, let’s put our ear to the ground when the game launches… and react.”
For 2026, Lemay-Comtois suggested Shadows would receive updates “not to the size of a DLC or expansion, but like yesterday’s update plus,” referencing the free update that arrived this week that added a new story quest, the game’s Attack on Titan crossover, as well as a significant Isu Easter egg. “At minimum this size,” he emphasized, without stating whether these updates would continue to be provided for free or not.
“And whether or not this is the right way to go, or a good learning, I think it’s more of an experience we’re trying with Shadows, to keep things small and reactive and see how the community feels about it and reacts to it,” he concluded. “And the learnings that come out of that will be applied to whatever other projects we do next.”
Of course, it’s to be expected that Shadows’ lead developer Ubisoft Quebec is already planning its next major Assassin’s Creed project (and indeed, it was previously reported that the studio had begun early pre-production work last year on a now-scrapped entry set in the post-U.S. Civil War period). But the mention here of those projects is interesting, alongside confirmation of what sounds like smaller plans for Shadows in 2026 than fans have seen this year.
And then there’s what else fans expect is coming: a remake of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag reportedly waiting in the wings, as well as numerous other Assassin’s Creed projects that Ubisoft has already confirmed, including a multiplayer spin-off and the witchcraft-themed Assassin’s Creed: Hexe. Amongst all that, and coupled with Shadows’ delay drama, Ubisoft seems to have simply decided a second Shadows expansion isn’t necessary.
If you’re hunting for the best offers this week, we’re actively rounding up the strongest Black Friday deals on video games, tech, and more. You can find all our top picks and price drops in our full Black Friday hub, or check out our relevant pages for PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox deals.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
You! Stop trying to break in! Also, while you’re at it, stop using quick use item swapping to shoot me faster than you’d otherwise be able to! All of that is yelled by Arc Raiders‘ latest patch, which sees devs Embark go after a number of pesky exploits and also make piggybacks much less effective.
Where does Kirby Air Riders rank?
Updated with Switch 2’s Star-Crossed World and Kirby Air Riders.
Kirby — one of the most famous faces (with little podgy arms and feet attached) in Nintendo’s stable of stars — has been wowing players with his impressive abilities and sheer versatility for decades now.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
We are thrilled to announce that Bootstrap Island is officially coming to PlayStation VR2 in 2026. This will be the most immersive version of Bootstrap Island yet, powered by the advanced features of PS VR2. Built exclusively for high fidelity hardware, it aims to deliver realism, tactile interactions, and a powerful sense of presence. And now we are bringing that vision to PS VR2.
Bootstrap Island is a realistic yet intense survival adventure inspired by Robinson Crusoe and other classic tales. After a brutal shipwreck, you awake as Daniel, a 17th-century survivor stranded on a deadly tropical island. To survive, you must learn fast and face wild beasts, powerful forces of nature, and the secrets hidden deep within the jungle.
There is no hand holding, no guidelines, and no second chances. Only your instinct, skill, and determination matter. Bootstrap Island is a ruthless roguelike where every decision carries consequences.
You will gather food and fresh water, hunt fish and wildlife, and prepare for the dangers of nightfall. When darkness arrives, the beasts attack. You will need to learn how to light fires and how to load and shoot a flintlock pistol because you will rely on it.
Animals are not the only threat. Rain, storms, sickness, quicksand, territorial animals, and poisonous fruits are constant dangers.
Bootstrap Island features a highly realistic, systems driven world where everything reacts. Day and night cycles, weather, fire, and liquids interact in complex and often unpredictable ways.
The island can be explored freely. Beaches, riverlands, jungle, and other biomes offer different resources. Every interaction encourages experimentation and instinctive problem solving. You just have to be creative.
Every death teaches you something valuable. You learn by doing, adapt your strategy, and unlock new items that help you survive longer in future runs. As you stay alive longer, you gain access to satchels for inventory, a building book for constructing shelters and defenses, and equipment such as a musket for stronger firepower. Medicine found in bottles helps you fight sickness. You will begin to notice subtle changes in the environment. Survival comes from knowledge, preparation, and experience.
Uncover the story of the survivor, the life before the shipwreck, and the uncertain future that awaits.
As you explore, you will discover who you are, why you were on the ship, and whether your presence on the island is a coincidence or something more meaningful. There are signs of other people. Whether they are hostile or friendly is something you will discover on your journey.
No two runs are ever the same. Each session reshuffles resources, events, weather patterns, and the types of creatures that hunt at night. The island is always changing. Items found in chests, territorial dangers, and weather conditions all shift from run to run. Adaptation is essential.
From the beginning, our goal for Bootstrap Island was to create a VR experience so believable that players forget the real world, with every interaction from lighting a fire to gathering resources feeling natural, grounded, and physically intuitive. To achieve this, the game is built on interconnected systems where fire, water, weather, physics, and animal behavior constantly influence one another, creating moments that feel alive and unplanned. For us, VR has always been more than technology; it is a medium capable of evoking presence, emotion, and wonder.
PS VR2 allows us to fully express this vision for the most realistic survival experience in VR through features such as foveated rendering for exceptional clarity and performance, headset vibration that intensifies dramatic moments like storms and near death encounters, and adaptive triggers with advanced haptics that create lifelike sensations including thunder strikes, bow tension and pistol recoil. Together, these capabilities make the PS VR2 release of Bootstrap Island the most immersive version of the game.
Bootstrap Island is developed by a small indie team at Maru VR, and although this is our first premium game, we have created more than 40 VR experiences over the past eight years to understand the medium and learn how to push its potential.
As the debate around the use of generative AI to build video games rages on, Tim Sweeney, boss of Fortnite developer Epic Games, has waded in to call on Valve to ditch its AI Generated Content Disclosure for Steam games.
Valve’s rules mean developers must disclose their use of AI-generated content on a game’s Steam store page. For example, the Steam page for Embark Studios’ Arc Raiders includes a note from the developer on how the game uses AI-generated content: “during the development process, we may use procedural- and AI-based tools to assist with content creation. In all such cases, the final product reflects the creativity and expression of our own development team.”
Activision’s Call of Duty also includes an AI disclosure: “our team uses generative AI tools to help develop some in game assets.”
Sweeney, though, believes there’s no point in having such disclosures because pretty much all video games will use AI. Responding to one X / Twitter user who called on Steam and all digital marketplaces to drop the “Made with AI” label because “it doesn’t matter any more,” Sweeney agreed, adding: “the AI tag is relevant to art exhibits for authorship disclosure, and to digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need to understand the rights situation. It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production.”
Sweeney’s tweet has sparked much debate about the rights and wrongs of Steam’s policy here. While Sweeney may be right to say the use of generative AI during video game development is becoming more prevalent, some say removing AI disclosures would make it harder for some customers to make informed purchasing decisions.
Activision was dragged into this debate recently when Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 players complained about AI-generated images they had found across the game, primarily focusing on calling card images with a Studio Ghibli-esque styling, following a trend of AI-Ghibli images from earlier this year. A member of U.S. Congress subsequently called Activision out, demanding tighter regulation to “prevent companies from using AI to eliminate jobs.”
I havent really looked at the Multiplayer and Zombie calling cards as closely and im willing to bet they’re using ai on those too but its only the Campaign and endgame calling cards that are this type of blatant Sora/Grok artstyle pic.twitter.com/5qmEXhoQkJ
— Kume (@Kumesicles) November 14, 2025
In the case of art — particularly art sold in premium bundles or battle passes — it seems reasonable to expect a generative AI disclosure to help inform customers about their purchasing decisions. But this is not backed up by law, and Valve is enforcing this policy because it believes it is the right thing to do. And it’s worth point out that using generative AI to make in-game art and selling it to gamers is of course different to the use of AI in, say, NPC behavior or animation work — something that has been a part of video game development for years.
The ever chatty Tim Sweeney then used shampoo to reinforce his point in a response to another tweet — although, as many have pointed out, letting customers know about shampoo isn’t quite the same thing as, say, letting them know they’ve replaced artists with AI-generated slop trained on their work.
Why stop at AI use? We could have mandatory disclosures for what shampoo brand the developer uses. Customers deserve to know lol.
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) November 27, 2025
It’s no surprise to see Sweeney take this position on AI, given Fortnite’s extensive use of the technology. Over the summer, Epic released AI Darth Vader into Fortnite and announced plans to let people create their own AI NPCs. The original Darth Vader was voiced by James Earl Jones, who died in September 2024 at the age of 93. The AI version of his voice, powered by Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash model and ElevenLabs’ Flash v2.5, was used with the Jones family’s permission. Within an hour of the feature going live, Fortnite players manipulated Vader into saying the kind of things very much associated with the Dark Side of the Force, including swearing. Epic soon patched it out.
Speaking to IGN in June, Sweeney predicted that small teams would soon be able to use AI prompts to make video games on the scale of Nintendo masterpiece The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. “AI characters giving you the possibility of infinite dialogue with a really simple setup for creators means small teams will be able to create games with immense amounts of characters and immense and interactive worlds,” he said. “What would it take for a 10-person team to build a game like Zelda Breath of the Wild in which the AI is just doing all the dialogue and you’re just writing some character synopsis? That’s totally going to be within reach over the next few years.”
If you’re hunting for the best offers this week, we’re actively rounding up the strongest Black Friday deals on video games, tech, and more. You can find all our top picks and price drops in our full Black Friday hub, or check out our relevant pages for PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox deals.
Wesley is Director, News at 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 director Choi Ji-won says the team is “working really hard” on Neowiz’s next game, promising: “I will not disappoint you all.”
Talking to GamesRadar+ after winning a Golden Joystick award for best expansion — “I’m so happy that I’m lost for words right now” — the director explained how the team approached Lies of P’s DLC Overture, saying, “we didn’t just view it as just pure expansion, but almost as a sequel and a brand new project.”
And now, looking ahead to the studio’s next project, Ji-won says “you can expect the most fun that we can achieve within the game.”
“Please stay tuned for it; we are working really hard, and I will not disappoint you at all,” the director added.
Lies of P developer Neowiz shadow-dropped DLC Overture during Summer Game Fest, introducing new locations, new enemies and bosses, new characters, weapons, and the controversial decision to add in two easier difficulty options. At that time, we also learned that Lies of P had topped 3 million copies sold.
We had a good time with Lies of P, awarding it 8/10, and Overture itself also secured a 8/10. “Even if it’s clearly dancing on the same old strings, Lies of P: Overture is an excellent expansion that adds a whole lot more to a game that was already great,” we wrote, although since then, the DLC has been patched to reduce monster difficulty in repeat playthroughs and “adjusted stats” for some of the field monsters you encounter in your first playthrough of Overture.
While Choi Ji-won failed to specify which game he’s talking about here, it seems likely that it is the Lies of P sequel he already confirmed was in the works in November 2023. At the time, Choi said: “Our highest priority is developing the DLC and working on our sequel. The dev team is putting in significant effort, brainstorming and exploring different aspects of the projects.”
If you’re hunting for the best offers this week, we’re actively rounding up the strongest Black Friday deals on video games, tech, and more. You can find all our top picks and price drops in our full Black Friday hub, or check out our relevant pages for PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox deals.
Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
Cyberpunk 2‘s dev team is set to grow substantially over the next couple of years, as CD Projekt ramp up development. While most of their ranks right now are on The Witcher 4, a game that’s at least made some public cameos even if it’s still sans release date, once 2027 rolls around, Cyberpunk 2 looks like it won’t be too far behind.
This info comes from the company’s latest financial report, covering the time running from July 1st to September 30th this year.
Valve have blocked card game Flick Solitaire from the Russian version of Steam, after federal censorship body Roskomnadzor contacted the platform holder to order its removal for “promoting non-traditional sexualities”.
In a letter, Valve have also reproached developers Flick Games for failing “to do your due diligence regarding where your game is allowed to be distributed, and to inform us of any territory where it cannot be”. Flick Solitaire is still available in Russia via the iOS and Android storefronts, however, despite Roskomnadzor sending similar notes to Apple and Google. As of writing, Valve appear to be the only platform who have caved to Russian state requests to censor the game.
The creator of Dragon Quest, Yuji Horii, believes Final Fantasy X was “ultimate perfection” when it released back in 2001.
In an interview with Game Informer, Horii talked about his experience developing Dragon Quest, which at the time was up against the Final Fantasy series as Square and Enix had yet to merge. While he didn’t really think of Final Fantasy as “competition” per se — while they’re both RPGs, their approaches to storytelling are quite different — he did acknowledge that he was “definitely paying attention to it.”
“Way back then, when Final Fantasy originally came out, I was definitely paying attention to it because it was something we needed to look out for,” Horii said, reflecting on how the games differ. “But there’s one key difference that I really saw back then: the protagonists in the Final Fantasy titles, they speak a lot. Whereas for Dragon Quest, the key objective for [the games], or the experience it offers for the player, is that the player becomes the protagonist themselves.
“In Final Fantasy, you kind of observe the protagonist, but you’re not necessarily becoming the protagonist in the games. So I thought that was a really interesting and stark difference between Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, but I didn’t necessarily see them as a rival back then.”
That may have changed when Final Fantasy X came along, however.
“Final Fantasy, again, [the protagonists] just talk a lot,” Horii added. “I do like Final Fantasy, though. When I first saw Final Fantasy X, I recall feeling this was the ultimate perfection of Final Fantasy.”
Don’t forget that Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake released at the end of October. We thought it was Amazing, awarding it 9/10, writing: “Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake beautifully concludes this trilogy, recapturing the retro magic of the originals while giving them a modern facelift.”
And as for the latest on Final Fantasy 7 Remake Part 3? Director Naoki Hamaguchi recently confirmed the upcoming game would “strike a balance” when it came to pacing and be “more concise,” but insisted didn’t mean he would cut any content from the game.
If you’re hunting for the best offers this week, we’re actively rounding up the strongest Black Friday deals on video games, tech, and more. You can find all our top picks and price drops in our full Black Friday hub, or check out our relevant pages for PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox deals.
Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
