During Microsoft’s Tokyo Game Show 2024 broadcast, Square Enix announced nine of its classic RPGs are coming to Xbox today, September 26.
Final Fantasy I – VI Pixel Remaster is finally available on Xbox Series X and S and Windows PC (but not Game Pass). The Pixel Remaster series takes the classic originals and remakes them with new pixel art optimized for HD displays, with rearranged soundtracks and quality-of-life features, including multiple font options, the ability to switch to the old soundtracks if you’re a purist, the ability to boost experience for faster levelling, turn off random enemy encounters, and even auto-battle.
Meanwhile, Square Enix’s Trials of Mana and Legend of Mana are available on Xbox Series X and S, Windows PC, and Game Pass today. Visions of Mana launched on Xbox Series X and S earlier this year.
And as already announced, Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake has a November 14, 2024 release date. The new Tokyo Game Show trailer is below:
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.
StarCraft: Remastered and StarCraft 2: Campaign Collection hit Game Pass from November 5, Microsoft has announced.
Blizzard’s sci-fi real-time strategy games are the latest from the company following Microsoft’s $69 billion aquisition of Activision Blizzard last year.
While the entirety of the original StarCraft and StarCraft 2’s multiplayer components are free-to-play, StarCraft: Remastered and StarCraft 2: Campaign Collection will be available to anyone with a PC Game Pass or Game Pass Ultimate subscription from November 5.
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.
Konami and Bloober Team will soon release their Silent Hill 2 remake for PlayStation 5 and Steam, but a PC almost didn’t happen at all.
News that Konami nearly left PC players behind comes from Bloober CEO Piotr Babieno, who spoke about the sequel remake ahead of its October launch (via Bankier.pl). Although the Silent Hill 2 reimagining is a project that fans have begged for years for, its release was nearly limited to only one platform. The only thing that saved it from sticking exclusively with PlayStation at launch was Bloober itself.
“Definitely Silent Hill 2 is a game that has been associated with the PlayStation brand from the very beginning,” the CEO said (as translated by DeepL). “At the very beginning, we had to push Konami very hard to lean on the PC topic. For them the main market is PlayStation, while looking at the interest on Steam, it seems that it should also be a successful launch.”
After much anticipation, Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 remake was announced in October 2022. It’s a title fans have waited ages to see revealed, but the road to its launch hasn’t been without issues. When fans took issue with a combat trailer that arrived in January, Babieno quickly clarified that the footage was handled by Konami, not Bloober. At the time, he went as far as to say that the trailer in question was “not the spirit of what used to be, or what we’re creating now.” The CEO also asked fans to give the team “a chance” last month.
The October launch will be Bloober’s opportunity to prove itself. For now, it appears Bloober is confident that its push to release the Silent Hill 2 remake on PC via Steam will pay off.
Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He started writing in the industry in 2017 and is best known for his work at outlets such as The Pitch, The Escapist, OnlySP, and Gameranx.
Be sure to give him a follow on Twitter @MikeCripe.
The move begs comparison between the two, as they’re both games set in feudal Japan and feature classical images of ninjas, samurai, and ronin. But despite the similarities, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot says there’s room enough for two big open-world action-adventure games set in Japan.
“There’s a lot of space for very high-quality games, and those two games can sell very well,” Guillemot said.
On what differentiates the two, Guillemot focused on Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ dual protagonists, which allows players to take control of either a ninja or a samurai.
“The focus is to really make sure that we deliver a fantastic experience with this dual protagonist approach and two different and complimentary gameplays…. a setting taking place in feudal Japan should be really enticing,” he said.
One way or another, Assassin’s Creed Shadows will be facing a lot of competition now that it’s been pushed into February 2025, as it will be pitted against Avowed, Civilization VII, Monster Hunter Wilds, and a host of other high-profile games. Indeed, 2025 is shaping up to be a very busy year in general thanks to the expected release of the Switch 2 and GTA VI.
To try and give Assassin’s Creed Shadows a boost, Ubisoft plans to release it Day 1 on Steam in a shift from its previous strategy. It also confirmed that Assassin’s Creed Shadows will include PS5 Pro enhancements.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows releases February 14 on PS5, Xbox, and PC, and you can read our hands-off preview right here. As for Ghost of Yotei, we don’t have a release date yet, but expect it to come out closer to the holidays. In the meantime, you can read about the best video games of 2024 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.
In a note to investors on Wednesday, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot acknowledged that the company’s “second quarter fell short of expectations” and vowed to launch “a review aimed at further improving our execution.”
But Guillemot also addressed some of the cultural conversations happening around the company lately, which have intensified around Star Wars Outlaws and the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Shadows (which was delayed to February 2025 today) in particular.
“We remain committed to creating games for fans and players that everyone can enjoy.”
“Finally, let me address some of the polarized comments around Ubisoft lately,” Guillemot said. “I want to reaffirm that we are an entertainment-first company, creating games for the broadest possible audience, and our goal is not to push any specific agenda. We remain committed to creating games for fans and players that everyone can enjoy.”
Otherwise, Guillemot stated an emphasis on “a player-centric, gameplay-first approach,” while focusing on “focusing on two key verticals – Open World Adventures and GaaS-native experiences.”
Read Guillemot’s full statement below.
Ubisoft last commented on some of the conversation surrounding Assassin’s Creed Shadows in July, issuing a controversial statement to its Japanese fans in which it apologized for promotional materials that “have caused concern” among its community.
Guillemot’s statement is one aspect of Ubisoft’s message to investors that’s been making headlines today. Elsewhere in the note, Ubisoft admitted that its most recent release, Star Wars Outlaws, had a “softer than expected launch,” and revealed that Assassin’s Creed Shadows will mark a return to the company’s releases hitting Steam on Day 1.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
The open-world adventure game was due out November 12, 2024. It now launches February 14, 2025.
In a statement, Ubisoft said it needs more time “to polish and refine the experience, pushing further some of our key features.”
Meanwhile, Ubisoft confirmed that Assassin’s Creed Shadows will release on Steam, unlike the company’s previous major release, Star Wars Outlaws. Preorders will be refunded, and all future preorders will be granted the first expansion for free.
In a note to the investment community, Ubisoft said that while Assassin’s Creed Shadows was “feature complete”, the “learnings” from the release of Star Wars Outlaws “led us to provide additional time to further polish the title.” Star Wars Outlaws had a “softer than expected launch,” Ubisoft said.
“This will enable the biggest entry in the franchise to fully deliver on its ambition, notably by fulfilling the promise of our dual protagonist adventure, with Naoe and Yasuke bringing two very different gameplay
styles,” Ubisoft contined.
Developing…
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.
The PlayStation 5 Pro has officially been revealed, and developers will be releasing new-and-improved modes for their games that will take advantage of all that new horsepower. But what will it mean, really?
At a recent PlayStation 5 Pro preview event, we spoke with the technical leads of some of PlayStation’s biggest games, including Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, The Last of Us Part 2, and others, to discuss what improvements we can expect to see now that there’s a more powerful PlayStation 5 on the market.
There are three key features of the PS5 Pro as explained by lead architect Mark Cerny during the announcement presentation. The upgraded GPU will allow for 45% faster rendering for gameplay, advanced ray tracing will create better lighting effects, and the AI upscaler, PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, or PSSR, will help further improve graphics.
All of which you’ll see in action in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 according to Mike Fitzgerald, Director of Core Technology at Insomniac Games.
“The first big improvement in the PlayStation 5 Pro is PSSR, which is PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, that lets us improve our old upscaling mode. We can render at a lower resolution, bring it up to a full 4K and get tons of extra detail out of the picture,” Fitzgerald says. “The second big thing is there’s new ray-tracing hardware in the PS5 Pro. We have really nice ray-traced reflections all across Spider-Man 2 and getting to run those faster and do more ray-tracing is a big deal.”
“And the third big thing altogether is these combined to make a new Performance Pro mode as we’re calling it on the PS5 Pro. You get the image quality and visuals of Fidelity Mode at the framerate of Performance Mode.”
Top of mind for several technical leads, including the folks at Naughty Dog, was how on the base PS5, players would often have to choose between Fidelity Mode, which offered better resolution at lower framerates, typically 30 fps, or Performance Mode which raised the frame rate to 60 at the expense of better graphical textures and ray-tracing. That choice is no longer necessary on the PS5 Pro, which can run games combining better resolution with higher frame-rates.
“Now we can focus on cool graphics stuff that we’re doing as opposed to just increasing pixel count.”
“Well the number one thing is gonna be the ability to play at 60fps in 4K, so that has been a huge deal,” Travis McIntosh, Naughty Dog’s head of technology says. “It makes it so we don’t have to compromise, so you don’t have to pick between high fidelity and good performance.”
The Last of Us Part 2 is one of the games that will be enhanced on the PS5 Pro, with the option to play the game with better visuals while still running it in 60 fps through a new Pro Mode. But McIntosh says that both the Fidelity and Performance Modes will also be improved on the PS5 Pro.
“There’s more than that, there’s also the fact that the high fidelity mode on the base PS5 actually looks even better when you’re on Pro. And there are some minor performance issues in performance mode on the PS5 base model that are also much better. Very solid 60 [fps], a lot less frame drops when you get to the pro.”
But McIntosh also says he’s personally excited for PSSR, which uses AI to upscale graphics.
“I would say I’m just really excited about the ability to use AI upscaling. Going forward as a developer, as a tech geek we spend a lot of time worrying about pixel throughput. It’s actually really tough to hit the targets of getting this many pixels through the game, and now we can focus on cool graphics stuff that we’re doing as opposed to just increasing pixel count. So that’s been a big benefit.”
McIntosh goes in-depth on the PSSR technology and how it upscales 1440p resolution to 4K, telling IGN that it, “produces just a way better result than previous upscalers because it can be trained not only on our game but on lots and lots of other games, and it learns and it improves at each iteration can improve and fix graphical errors, fix artifacting, and it learns how to make things look good. Foliage for instance is one example in our game that looks really good after the upscaler because the neural network is trained to do foliage really well.”
For Guerrilla Games World Lighting lead Roderick van der Steen, the biggest changes to Horizon Forbidden West all have to do with resolution and how improved they’ll be on the PS5 Pro, from better lighting to textures on characters.
“A big improvement that we could make by using the PS5 Pro is we could increase the resolution, increase stability of the image which is something we really focused on for this patch. And various other aspects like better filtering, better shadowing, and better volumetrics.”
Van der Steen says these improvements will be seen particularly in complicated models. “So fire, holograms, but also the skin rendering and the hair rendering where we could increase the shadow filtering to give a much more smooth and stable image.”
Lastly, ray tracing has been around for a few years now, but has often been sacrificed on consoles for anyone who prefers performance mode, which according to PlayStation is a majority of players. But the PS5 Pro is now able to add better ray tracing while maintaining a higher framerate. Just ask Jose Villeta, technical director at Avalanche Software, the developers of Hogwarts Legacy.
“So one of the few things we were able to improve on in our game thanks to the PS5 Pro is we focused on three areas,” Villeta reveals. “First we integrated PSSR – that gives a better upscaled image technology. And second we focused on ray-tracing, we tried to enable not only the best ray-tracing capabilities but improve the ray-tracing we had before. We were able to bring ray-tracing shadows, we were able to increase the percentage of ray-tracing reflections so they look sharper and have more content and detail.”
The improvements are a result of the better GPU which Villeta credits for giving Hogwarts extra heft. “The extra power we can actually make sure that all our visual modes, we have Fidelity, Fidelity with ray-tracing, and Performance mode, are all running at better framerate.”
Spider-Man 2, The Last of Us Part 2, Horizon Forbidden West, and Hogwarts Legacy are just four of the many games confirmed for improvements on the PS5 Pro, and we can expect to see even more Pro-enhanced games as we get closer to the new console’s launch on November 7.
For more on the PS5 Pro, check out our full hands-on preview, as well our interview on what more you can expect from the PS5 Pro.
Matt Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.
Sony had made it clear on the God of War Ragnarok Steam page that a PlayStation Network account would be required to play Sony Santa Monica’s purely single-player adventure, but that failed to prevent a number of negative reviews singling out the policy.
One modder going by the name iArtorias took matters into their own hands by stripping out the PSN requirement. iArtorias’ NoPSSDK mod, which had been downloaded thousands of times from Nexus Mods before its removal, “fully strips the PlayStation PC SDK runtime requirement for God of War Ragnarok.”
But because the mod removed the PSN overlay from the game and mimicked an offline mode in the process, it was being used to bypass the PSN / Steam account linking requirement. IGN verified the mod worked before its removal.
But today, September 26, the mod is no longer available from Nexus Mods or Github. In a tweet, Nexus Mods insisted NoPSSDK had been removed from its site “by the author” and was trying to find out why. It seems likely Sony took a dim view of iArtorias’ mod, but it’s unclear at this point if the company got in touch to request its removal or whether iArtorias took it upon themselves to do so. IGN has attempted to contact iArtorias via Nexus Mods, and has asked Sony for comment.
Before the removal of the mod, iArtorias had received requests to release a similar mod for Sony’s other recently released PC games, such as Ghost of Tsushima. Ghost of Tsushima requires a PSN account for the Legends online multiplayer mode and to use PlayStation overlay, but it is not required to play the single-player game.
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.
The Legacy of Kain franchise is enjoying a major resurgence in 2024. Fresh off the reveal of Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver 1-2 Remastered at Sony’s latest State of Play, Dark Horse is debuting a pair of killer statues featuring series icons Kain and Raziel.
Check out the slideshow gallery below for an exclusive first look at the Legacy of Kain: Kain and Raziel statues:
These statues previously appeared in prototype form at SDCC 2024 (where they inadvertently leaked the existence of Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver 1-2 Remastered), but now they’re available to preorder exclusively on the Dark Horse Direct website. The two polyresin statues will be sold separately but are designed to be displayed as a diorama, depicting a major battle between vampire lord Kain and his former ally Raziel.
The Kain statue measures 7.5 inches tall by 11 inches at its widest point. The Raziel statue measures 10.95 inches tall and 11.81 inches at its widest point. Both pieces were sculpted by Mat Brouillard, with prototyping and paint by J.W. Productions.
The Legacy of Kain: Kain and Raziel statues are each priced at $199.99 and limited to 750 pieces worldwide, with an estimated release date between March and May of 2025. You can preorder the Kain statue here and preorder the Raziel statue here.
Mortal Kombat 1 developer NetherRealm decided on its next game three years ago, Ed Boon has confirmed.
In a tweet, Boon said NetherRealm planned to support Mortal Kombat 1 “for a long time to come,” after an interview with ComicBook quoted the developer as saying “NetherRealm’s next game has been in development for three years.”
“Love the fact that there is excitement for our next game,” Boon later clarified. “And I don’t want to be a stickler for words…
“But we haven’t been working on our next game for three years already. The actual quote was that we knew what our next game was going to be three years ago.
“NetherRealm is still fully committed to supporting Mortal Kombat 1 for a long time to come.”
Boon’s comments come as NetherRealm releases the Khaos Rising expansion for Mortal Kombat 1. It adds new story mode chapters available from September 24, along with Kombat Pack 2, which itself includes six new DLC characters: Cyrax, Sektor, and Noob Saibot (available on September 24), and guest fighters Ghostface (Scream franchise), T-1000 (Terminator 2: Judgement Day), and Conan the Barbarian (post-launch release timing to be announced at a later date). Mortal Kombat 1 itself has sold over four million copies since launching in September 2023.
But what’s next? Most fans of the studio’s work expect it to release a third game in its DC fighting game franchise, although neither NetherRealm nor owner and publisher Warner Bros. has yet to confirm that. The first game in the series, Injustice: Gods Among Us, launched in 2013, with its sequel, Injustice 2, coming out in 2017. NetherRealm released Mortal Kombat 11 in 2019 and for a time it seemed like the studio would alternate between Mortal Kombat and Injustice games, but it went on to release another Mortal Kombat, the soft reboot that is Mortal Kombat 1, last year instead.
In an interview with IGN in June 2023, Boon spoke in vague terms about this decision. “There were a number of factors, some of which I can talk about, some of which I probably shouldn’t,” Boon said.
Two reasons Boon was willing to discuss were the unfortunate onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the team’s choice to switch to a newer version of the Unreal game engine (Mortal Kombat 11 runs on Unreal Engine 3, whereas Mortal Kombat 1 runs on Unreal Engine 4).
“But we did go to a new graphics engine, Unreal,” Boon said. “We really wanted to be careful with COVID and all that stuff and everybody staying safe. So there were a bunch of variables involved that eventually we realized, ‘Okay, let’s do another Mortal Kombat game and hopefully we’ll get back to the Injustice games.’ “
Just to be sure, we wanted to confirm with him directly that the door was not closed on the Injustice franchise.
“Not at all,” Boon answered.
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.
