For the first time in the franchise’s history, Fable is coming to PlayStation 5 in Autumn 2026. Today we’re excited to reveal the most detailed look yet at our fresh take on Albion – a world that’s familiar in spirit, but newly reimagined for modern RPG players.
Fable is not a remake or a sequel. It’s a new beginning for the franchise, designed to capture the heart and humor that defined the original trilogy while bringing contemporary storytelling, world design, and player agency to the forefront. Fans of the classic games will recognize the series’ signature blend of choice and consequence, dry British wit, and playful moral chaos – yes, chickens included.
In Fable’s fairytale land of Albion, heroism is less about spotless morality and more about navigating the ripple effects of your decisions. The game embraces the small, messy, often hilarious choices that shape who you become. Even the tiniest actions can snowball into stories that townsfolk remember, judge, and gossip about.
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Today we showcase an early narrative setup: the pursuit of a mysterious stranger who has frozen an entire village. In the game, you assume the role of hero – and your resulting journey winds through dark forests, picturesque villages and rolling fairytale countryside – blending fantasy, comedy, combat and consequence.
For the first time, Albion is fully open world. Rather than being a backdrop, the world itself participates in the story. NPCs have routines, relationships, and evolving opinions. They react not just to major plot choices but to your smallest actions. Some decisions change conversation paths; others can reshape portions of the world itself, leaving physical evidence of your journey for hours to come.
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Combat is built around a new style weaving philosophy, which allows players to fluidly blend melee, ranged, and magic to create their preferred fighting identity. Classic Fable creatures make a return, alongside new threats that fit the tone of a world balancing fairytale charm with modern action RPG depth.
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Fable still embraces its hallmark self-awareness — its ability to poke fun at hero tropes, the world, and sometimes the player. It’s this mixture of sincerity and silliness that gives Albion its unmistakable personality, and the reboot aims to preserve that spirit while giving it room to grow for new players.
That makes the PS5 launch particularly meaningful. Fable has always been defined by player expression – by the ways different people interpret heroism, mischief, kindness or chaos. Launching on PS5 opens the world of Albion up to an entirely new community of players, expanding the range of stories, decisions, and unlikely heroes that will take shape.
With today’s reveal, we’ve shown just a fraction of what’s coming in Autumn 2026. More details about characters, quests, and gameplay features will arrive in the months ahead, but for now, there’s just one thing to know: Fable is back, reinvented for modern audiences, and ready to welcome new adventurers.
If you’re excited to carve out your own legend in Albion, you can wishlist Fable today at PlayStation Store. Fairytale ending not guaranteed.
The highly anticipated next expansion for Pokémon TCG’s Mega Evolution series, Ascended Heroes, is (as per usual) increasingly hard to get hold of right now. Preorders are unavailable at most major retailers, and if you missed The Pokémon Center’s latest drop, then you’re hard out of luck. Well, not entirely.
Trusted resale marketplace TCGplayer has just launched its selection of Ascended Heroes sealed products (see here), giving plenty of fans another opportunity to secure the new cards, albeit at a significantly higher price than MSRP.
I’ll leave a link to everything that’s now available in TCGplayer’s presale, ready for the January 30, 2026, release. But, if that’s not of interest to you, then we can swiftly move on to discussing the latest market price data on display for Ascended Heroes’ sealed products.
Just to note, while Ascended Heroes will certainly be available from January 30, several products will be part of a staggered release instead. To get you up to speed, here’s when to expect everything:
January 30, 2026
Booster Collection (2 Pack)—Erika/Larry
Tech Sticker Collection
February 20, 2026
Elite Trainer Box
Pokémon Center Elite Trainer Box
Mini Tins
First Partners Deluxe Pin Collection
Premium Poster Collection—Mega Lucario or Mega Gardevoir
April 24, 2026
Booster Bundle
Mega Meganium ex Box, Mega Emboar ex Box, or Mega Feraligatr ex Box
With that out of the way, let’s dig into the latest market price data on everything available right now at TCGplayer, whether it’s actually worth the increased cost versus MSRP, and how it compares to the other sets from Mega Evolution so far.
Let’s kick things off with the Elite Trainer Box, set to release on February 20, 2026. MSRP is $49.99, but the current market price at TCGplayer is listed at $118.01. That’s around a 135% markup, but not as significantly higher compared to Phantasmal Flames last year.
While that averaged around $150-$200 in the build up to its launch, Ascended Heroes is sitting closer to $120, at least for now. That’s… somewhat positive! At least in my eyes. Having to spend less to get Pokémon cards is a win, whether or not the prices are getting a little ridiculous in recent memory.
Finishing up, if you’re after the exclusive Pokémon Center Elite Trainer Box for Ascended Heroes, you’re instead looking at around $357 market price right now. That’s pretty steep, but hardly unsurprising with how sought after these exclusive ETBs are, even years after release.
On the other hand, Ascended Heroes’ Booster Bundles are looking a little steep right now, and sit at $79.10 market price at TCGplayer. That’s a fair lot more than its $26.94 list price, roughly a 194% markup, and almost triple the cost for what accounts for just six boosters.
Still, that’s the price of cards on the resale market these days! I’m sure most of us are already quite used to it, even if it’s still a mega pricey. By comparison, just to be clear, single boosters will still run you around $14.50 at market, which works out at $87, so it’s still a better offering to pick up the bundle if you’re dead set on it. It’s out on Feburary 20, just like the ETBs.
So what else is up for grabs, and how are the prices looking right now? For starters, there’s the Premium Poster Collection (with a choice of Mega Lucario or Mega Gardevoir), that’s running for $86 for each.
There’s also the First Partners Deluxe Pin Collection, currently at $75.90, alongside the various Ascended Heroes Mini Tins, that are sitting at around $35 market price as well.
You’ve also got the Tech Sticker Collection, Charmander or Ghastly, for around $37, and then the Ascended Heroes Booster Collection featuring either Larry Erika, for about $44.
Robert Anderson is Senior Commerce Editor and IGN’s resident deals expert on games, collectibles, trading card games, and more. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Twitter/X or Bluesky.
Microsoft are telling the world that the sooner we all switch to using generative AI tools in our day-to-day lives, the sooner we will 10x ourselves. Yet the corporation are still only finding haphazard pick up by videogame developers, including some of their own studios.
As executive producer Susan Kath tells me, the Elder Scrolls Online team haven’t yet found a part of development where they can use it. “Right now, we generally use it for things like this,” Kath says, indicating our call. “A lot of us get a lot of use out of Copilot, for meetings, for summaries, inbox organisations, stuff like that.”
But, in the case of art, coding, or writing, generative AI is not something the team are using in Elder Scrolls Online’s development, and its adoption is still an open discussion within the studio. “I don’t know what our decision is going to be, because we’re still having conversations about where we go with that,” Kath says. “Obviously we all have strong opinions within the studio. Obviously Microsoft has invested heavily in this. That would be a thing that I would imagine we would talk about in the future.”
Animal Crossing: New Horizons got a big 3.0 update earlier this month, which alongside a lot of new content for everyone included a Nintendo Switch 2 upgrade with some fancy technological buffs. One of those was the ability to play with up to 12 total people on the same island, up from eight in the original version.
Sounds fun, right? Wrong. It’s a nightmare. A nightmare once again spawned by Nintendo handling online functionality in the most ridiculous way possible.
I was so foolish and naive a week ago, when I first had the idea to get 12 of us together for an Animal Crossing session. It would be easy, I thought! So easy, I originally didn’t even plan on writing anything about it! Let me just call up…11 other people I know who are still playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
Who also have Nintendo Switch 2s.
And somehow we’ll manage to find an hour we can all do this, despite everyone being busy adults.
Okay, harder than I thought, but we did it! Last night, a group of 12 of us all logged on at once with a plan to meet up on my island. We considered using the Game Chat functionality, but decided against it due to lack of compatibility with Bluetooth headsets, the function’s friending requirements, and the fact that you can’t take screenshots while Game Chat is active. Discord it was, then, apparently still the second-best place for Nintendo Voice Chat (after the podcast, of course).
The plan was for an hour-long session from 9pm to 10pm last night, but I recalled that the cutscene for people landing on the island was a bit lengthy, and we’d have to watch it 11 times, so I logged on half an hour early to open my island so we could start filtering in. I was hopeful that with improved Nintendo Switch 2 loading times, it might not be so bad. And it’s true, the actual loading times were notably faster, though most of the wait for people to land is a combination of said cutscene (“We’ll be making a water landing, but that’s OK because this is a seaplane.”) and everyone saving the game each time, so we didn’t really shorten the wait by that much.
But all that was to be expected. Here was where the nightmare began.
At 8:35pm, my friends began trickling in. We managed to get three people in before the entire session crashed, booting out everyone who had showed up so far and shutting my islands gates for me. I reopened at 8:46pm and we started again, this time creating a “queue” in our Discord text chat so everyone didn’t try to flood in at once. At 8:58pm, one of my friends got an error that kicked her out alongside one other person, but everyone else stayed, so we brought them back and continued down the line.
At 9:19pm, I typed in Discord, “WE DID IT” as person #12 seemingly landed successfully.
At 9:21pm, as person #12 strolled in, another error occurred and two other people got kicked out. At this point, my husband (who was playing Ace Attorney next to me) started rolling his eyes.
At 9:24pm, one of the people who had been kicked out tried to rejoin, errored out, and the whole session crashed again. Every single person got booted back to their islands and my gates were closed again, just as we were finally about to taste success.
Please enjoy this timelapse video, courtesy of our intrepid Wiki writer KBABZ, of 40 minutes of us trying desperately to get everyone onto the island, only for the unthinkable to happen right at the very end:
I was undaunted. By golly, we got all these people together, we were going to hit each other with nets and drop recipe cards for each other! We started again from the top. This time I forbade everyone from doing anything once they landed aside from standing still in a line next to the airport. No menuing. No talking to villagers. Nothing. Folks started coming back in at 9:27pm. At 9:37pm, the fourth person to join crashed the island again. At 9:39pm, almost 40 minutes after our planned start time, we began yet again. Everyone posted cat pics in the Discord channel for emotional support.
This time worked. Finally, at 10:05pm, after multiple crashes and false starts, we had 12 people on my Animal Crossing island.
I’m happy to report that after the 90 minute ordeal that was getting 12 people onto one island, online play actually worked great. We all exchanged gifts, took a pic in the Town Square, explored the island, and got coffee at Brewster’s. People wrote on my bulletin board and sent me letters. Some borrowed my Wario costume from the hotel. A couple people decided to play pranks, burying junk and trapping my villagers with holes. It was genuinely a pretty great time. It just, you know, took way too dang long to set up.
It’s baffling to me that Nintendo’s infrastructure for Animal Crossing is still set up this way. Yes, the island landing cutscene is very cute, and I do think the sea plane line is pretty funny. But why on earth do we need to sit through it 11 times, with everyone who’s not traveling collectively watching a mostly-blank airport-themed loading screen? Why does everything on my island need to completely freeze and exit menus so someone can come in? Why does Group Stretching require me to be Best Friends with everyone on my island? How much worse would all this have been if we had used Game Chat? Mario Kart World doesn’t have this problem!
The best explanation I can think of is that Nintendo genuinely didn’t intend for anyone to use this feature in the first place. Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ 3.0 update is fun, sure, but it’s not creating the same massive surge in interest that existed in 2020 when we were all locked at home and had nothing better to do than ponder whatever it is that Dodos do. You’re unlikely to ever need to collect 11 friends and drag them to your island all at once. Heck, given how hard this was to schedule, I’ll be lucky to get four one of these weekends.
Anyway, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is still very fun to play with friends, but it’s still a massive pain in the butt to actually set up the circumstances for that play to be possible. Next time I’ll just get everyone together for Jackbox.
As the price of RAM, GPUs, and even SSDs climbs ever higher off the back of AI data centre demand, it’s causing a significant price crunch for hardware manufacturers. “It is such a volatile situation at this point in time it is hard to figure out pricing,” Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan said in a recent episode of The Verge’s Decoder podcast. “I don’t know if I can pick a number right now as I speak with you and [be confident in it] by the end of the podcast.”
The rapidly increasing prices mean the company are keeping schtum on how much their next round of gaming laptops will cost. “This is something that concerns me,” Tan explained. “The RAM prices are going up and we want to be able to make sure our laptops remain affordable and in the reach of gamers out there.”
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom during the CES podcast recording.
Final Fantasy VII Remake! Escape from Ever After! Dynasty Warriors: Origins!
The latest Nintendo Download update for North America has arrived, and it’s bringing new games galore to the eShop in your region. As always, be sure to drop a vote in our poll and comment down below with your potential picks for the week. Enjoy!
Switch eShop – Highlights
DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS(KOEI TECMO AMERICA, 22nd Jan, $59.99) – Play as a nameless hero as you fight fiercely, making bold choices to restore peace and shape history in this tactical action game set during China’s Three Kingdoms period. With the most intense combat and largest armies in Dynasty Warriors history, your choices will influence the story and could alter historical events. With the paid DLC1 launching alongside the game, you can choose a different path and experience new developments that weren’t in the main story. – Read our DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS review
Free Play Days – Sherlock Holmes Chapter One, South Park: Snow Day, This War of Mine: Final Cut and Cult of the Lamb
Kyle OceanMarketing Manager, Xbox
Try something new this weekend with Free Play Days! Sherlock Holmes Chapter One, South Park: Snow Day, This War of Mine: Final Cut and Cult of the Lamb are available this weekend for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Premium and Essential members to play from Thursday, January 22 until Sunday, January 25.
How To Start Playing
Scroll down and find and install the games on each of the individual game details page on Xbox.com. Clicking through will send you to the Microsoft Store, where you must be signed in to see the option to install with your Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Premium and Essential membership. To download on console, click on the Subscriptions tab in the Xbox Store and navigate down to the Free Play Days collection on your Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S.
Keep The Fun Going
Purchase the game and other editions at a limited time discount and continue playing while keeping your Gamerscore and achievements earned during the event! Please note that discounts, percentages, and title availability may vary by title and region.
Sherlock Holmes Chapter One Optimized for Xbox Series X|S Sherlock Holmes Chapter One lets you step into the shoes of a young Sherlock Holmes, long before he became the world’s greatest detective. Drawn back to a Mediterranean island by the mysterious death of his mother, Sherlock takes on what may be the first—and most important—case of his life, one that will shape his future. Explore a vibrant city marked by crime, corruption, and moral ambiguity, gather clues from across the island, and solve cases using deduction, disguise, or force. Try it during Xbox Free Play Days and save 90% on the full game for a limited time.
South Park: Snow Day Optimized for Xbox Series X|S Play as the New Kid in South Park and join Cartman, Stan, Kyle, and Kenny, in three-dimensional glory, to celebrate the most magical day in any young child’s life – a snow day! Grab up to three friends, in this four-player co-op, and battle your way through the snow-piled town of South Park on a quest to save the world and enjoy a day without school. It’s a Snow Day, dude!
This War of Mine: Final Cut Optimized for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox Play Anywhere The critically acclaimed indie bestseller, This War of Mine, puts you in the role of a group of civilians trying to survive in a besieged city, struggling with lack of food, medicine, and constant danger from snipers and hostile scavengers. The game provides an experience of war seen from an entirely different perspective. This War of Mine: Final Cut contains all the updates and free expansions released and is 90% off during the Free Play Days.
Cult of the Lamb Optimized for Xbox Series X|S, Smart Delivery Start your own cult in a land of false prophets, venturing out into diverse and mysterious regions to build a loyal community of woodland Followers and spread your Word. Crusade through dungeons, slay heretics, build your cult, and seek new powers together. But there’s more. As well as the addition of co-op play, the Unholy Alliance expansion also adds new tarot cards, relics, buildings, fleeces, follower traits, follower quests, and other secrets to discover!
Don’t miss out on these exciting Free Play Days for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Premium and Essential members! Learn more about Free Play Days here and stay tuned to Xbox Wire to find out about future Free Play Days and all the latest Xbox gaming news.
Amazon has produced yet another brilliant Pokémon TCG deal ready for the weekend, and it’s once again on the latest Mega Evolution set, Phantasmal Flames.
While we’re looking forward to Ascended Heroes at the end of the month, it’s a mighty bit of fresh air to finally get some reasonable prices on boosters for the popular Mega Charizard sporting set from last year.
While stock lasts, at least, as this is such an excellent deal, and below market price, I fully expect these to fly off the digital shelves. Other Phantasmal Flames deals include that UPC for $145 at Amazon or TCGplayer, or you can pick up the Elite Trainer Box for just $79.94 at Amazon as well.
All around, these are pretty excellent deals, and hopefully a sign of things to come when Ascended Heroes and Perfect Order.
Best Phantasmal Flames Cards Chase Cards
According to marketplaces like TCGPlayer, certain Phantasmal Flames cards have already skyrocketed further in price, and, following up from our Mega Evolution round-up, we’ve ranked the ten most expensive cards so far just above. From aggressive Mega attackers to powerful evolution support, Phantasmal Flames brings a fiery mix of competitive threats and high-demand pulls.
Robert Anderson is Senior Commerce Editor and IGN’s resident deals expert on games, collectibles, trading card games, and more. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Twitter/X or Bluesky.
Out today in early access, Turnbound is a tile and turn-based autobattler about mythical heroes trapped in a haunted boardgame, where the starting player is chosen by flipping a coin bearing a picture of a cat’s anus. It’s saying a lot for Turnbound’s mellow, fairytale ambience and rich, rosy tile designs that I consider the cat’s anus a positive – a touch of whimsy, rather than just, well, that feeling you get when you’ve been flashbanged by a picture of a cat’s anus. Rare indeed are the videogames that contain a cat’s anus, and rarer still are the videogames in which the cat’s anus isn’t grounds for a refund.
Pokémon Go looks set to add another battle currency to the ever-popular mobile game, this time focused around raids for Mega Pokémon.
As Pokémon Go prepares to roll-out the first of Pokémon Legends Z-A’s new wave of Mega Evolutions next month as part of its upcoming Go Tour Kalos event, the game also appears to have a major rework of its Mega Raid system in the offing.
Datamined information published by The Pokémod Group have spilled details of Link Charges, a new in-game resource that the game’s files refer to as “enhanced currency.” An in-game description states that Link Charges “can be used to enter Mega Raid in place of Raid passes” and will now be “required to enter Mega Raids remotely.”
The addition of a new type PVE battle resource for Mega raids comes as something of a surprise, as Mega battles have existed in the game for years, accessible simply via regular raid passes.
While details remain unconfirmed and subject to change, Link Charges sound like something of a cross between existing raid passes and the Max Energy system introduced more recently specifically for use in Dynamax/Gigantamax battles. The introduction of Link Charges would certainly also delineate Mega raids from regular raid battles — similar to how the use of Max Energy sets Max battles apart.
Unreleased in-game text states that players will be able to “earn Link Charges from activities such as Weekly Challenges, Campfire Check-Ins, and opening Gifts,” all of which are free. That said, images showing the Link Charges themselves (which look like futuristic USB sticks) in various bundles suggest the resource will, of course, also be sold via the game’s in-game shop.
A new item called “enhanced currency” has been added, along with some variations featuring “RRP” (remote raid pass? idk). It looks like something that could be sold in the shop, but we’re not sure what it does yet.
As ever, Pokémon Go’s highly-engaged community have been reacting to the datamined details with their usual mix of excitement and healthy scepticism.
“Are we cooked?” wrote Kind_Cheesecake_8297 on top Pokémon Go reddit The Silph Road. “Asked the frog in the pot,” replied EquivalentReality988. “This is just another temperature increase, we’ve been boiling for years.”
But while the introduction of another PVE battle resource has naturally prompted questions over how plentiful it will be (and how much it will cost via the in-game shop), many others have agreed that the game’s Mega raids do need some form of shakeup.
Following their most recent rework years ago, Mega raids typically provide enough in-game resource to Mega Evolve a specific Pokémon within a few battles. After that, Mega Pokémon can be set as a Buddy Pokémon to generate Mega Energy for free. Beyond hunting for a Shiny or better stat version of a particular creature, there’s little need to then continue raiding — and as an active player, I have to say I don’t consider Mega creatures when deciding what to spend my daily raid pass on.
While this is fine for players who have all Mega Pokémon unlocked already, this leaves newer players without others to battle Mega raids alongside (and most Megas require multiple people to take down). Providing an additional resource to battle Mega raids means players can choose to take on the battles in addition to regular raids — just as the Max Particle system works for Dynamax and Gigantamax battles now.
“I don’t actually hate this (depending on how easy they are to get for free),” said TheWiseMountain. “I feel like Mega raids can get dead very easily because you can just walk Pokémon for more energy. If they’re free and give normal raid rewards though? Seems like a win for newer players who might need help with those raids.”
“Yeah as a F2P [free-to-play player] who can hardly remote anyways this sounds great,” Mushimishi agreed. “I haven’t done a Mega raid outside of new debuts and raid days in almost 2 years, since getting enough energy for everything.”
Pokémon Go has so far introduced all Mega Pokémon species released prior to last year’s Pokémon Legends Z-A other than the highly-anticipated Mega Mewtwo X and Y. The game has officially confirmed the introduction of both Mega Malamar and Mega Victreebell from Legends Z-A next month. As for Mega Mewtwo, while there’s no word on its arrival just yet, the same datamine includes an all-new Tier 7 difficulty Mega raid egg — suggesting that players may finally see it arrive in the future, once this Mega raid rework has been introduced.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
