Category: Video Games

Gearbox development chief Randy Pitchford says it’s impossible to break the Borderlands 4 servers this weekend through sheer weight of player numbers alone — and he’s so confident he’s publicly promised that Borderlands 4 won’t join the long list of big AAA games whose online systems fail at launch.

Borderlands 4 launched earlier this week and immediately saw a concurrent player count on Steam bigger than all the other prior Borderlands games. At the time of this article’s publication, Borderlands 4 had seen an impressive peak of 252,530 players on Valve’s platform, with the peak weekend playing time to come.

For context, Borderlands 2 set a Steam peak concurrent player count of 124,678 13 years ago, with Borderlands 3 hitting a peak of 93,820 five-and-a-half years ago, and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel reaching 68,238 10 years ago. Borderlands Game of the Year Edition has a peak of 23,655.

Pitchford took to X / Twitter to address concern about Borderlands 4’s ability to hold up over this weekend, making a promise gamers aren’t used to hearing from developers.

“So here’s the thing with this… We are VERY confident in our backend on-line infrastructure and systems. And we’re off to an insane start — record breaking,” he said.

“But we know from past experience that peak numbers will start really hitting over this weekend. You’re going to be hammering our on-line infrastructure and some people are nervous if our on-line systems can handle the numbers you will be throwing at us.

“But here’s the thing: our on-line team rules.”

Pitchford is taking the opportunity to encourage as many people as possible to play Borderlands 4 this weekend, and so Gearbox is offering the Break Free Pack to all who play the game from September 12-14. This includes 1 Vault Hunter Skin usable by Vex, Rafa, Amon, and Harlowe, and 1 Legendary Ripper Shield, which scales to your Vault Hunter level when redeemed (with a minimum of Lvl 25).

Pitchford said he “wanted to see if we could motivate everyone to log in this weekend to see how far we can stress the system,” which is why the free pack was created.

He continued in typically confident fashion:

“Listen — I’m telling you that it’s going to be VERY unlikely you guys can be enough people to break the backend and take our game down. I know there have been some high profile backend on-line systems failing around big AAA game launches, but not this one.

“I am THAT confident.

“That said, IF concurrency *does* break our systems, I’ll find a way somehow to reward everyone and to make it up to everyone for showing me that it can break. And, you’ll have helped expose something that we will need to make stronger, so… win-win.

“So here it is… I’m throwing down the gauntlet: you cannot break our on-line infrastructure through too many players. You can’t. Hacking doesn’t count, btw. Just concurrent players in the game is what we’re looking for. Play cooperatively; jump into random people’s games; log in and out a bunch of times at peak hours… Whatever you can fairly and reasonably do within the game to add pressure to the system, do it!”

It might not have the audience of football, baseball, or soccer, but to its proud fans there’s something truly special about hockey. It’s the cold air of the arena, the weight of the puck against your stick, and the feel as your skate glides across the surface of the ice. To their credit, the developers at EA Vancouver seem to get all of that, and it’s led them to create an enjoyable NHL simulation that has earned a dedicated audience. That dedication, however, has increasingly been tested in recent years as the series has failed to truly move forward in any meaningful way. EA Sports NHL 26 continues this dynamic with a game that nails most of the elements that make hockey special, but it never feels like the kind of significant jump over what’s come before that might make buying yet another version exciting rather than obligatory.

If you’ve played a hockey game from EA at any point over the last few years, you have a good idea of what to expect from NHL 26. The lynchpin of the series is Franchise mode, which allows you to take the team of your choosing on a season-long quest to hoist the Stanley Cup. It’s basically the default mode, showcasing what the series is best known for and it still does that all pretty well. Individual games are fast, the controls are intuitive, and EA Vancouver has spent years refining a formula that mostly works. Granted, there are very few other hockey games available right now, and those that do exist don’t have the official NHL players or teams; that lack of competition might be what leads the developers to play things so safe and leave so much unchanged year to year. To be fair, it’s hard to fault them too much for not fixing what isn’t broken.

However, this situation has created an unfortunate trend for the series that’s made each year’s version feel like baby steps, and NHL 26 continues to focus more on smaller tweaks than on substantial changes. As a result, it’s easy to miss adjustments made beyond mirroring the big roster changes we’ve seen over the offseason, such as Mitch Marner being on the Golden Knights after leaving the Leafs, and Matt Dumba appearing on the Penguins following his Dallas departure. As of this writing, EA Vancouver seems to have done a pretty good job making sure everything is up to date, including representing the Utah Mammoth with their new name, uniforms, and arena (following a season under the temporary “Utah Hockey Club” label). Lastly, PWHL has been updated to add the women’s league’s two new teams from the 2025-2026 season, though that mode feels completely unchanged beyond that.

Though Franchise mode seems to be the most popular single-player mode in EA’s yearly NHL games, I really enjoy the customization options and the general approach to the sport found in the narrowed focus of Be a Pro. As someone that grew up playing hockey, there’s something that feels really authentic about focusing on controlling an individual player. There’s a greater need to consider line changes, playing in position, and setting up CPU-controlled characters.

So I was pleased to find that some of the bigger changes this year can be found here, but I’ve found that they aren’t all positive. Some of the biggest improvements come from cutting out what hasn’t worked: NHL 26 has finally dropped the often-mocked and frequently repeated “pricey pond hockey” opening scene that appeared across multiple games. You’ll no longer see the same repeated cinematic sequence with an agent talking about how you’re so passionate about hockey that you’re playing pond pick-up with a bunch of kids. Instead, you’re dropped right into the player maker. And mercifully, EA has also scaled back on the frequent coach meetings from past Be a Pro modes, but the catch is that the replacement might be even more monotonous: press conferences.

The idea of taking part in press conferences is actually kind of neat, and the initial questions help to shape your on-ice personality. The hockey press will ask questions like your approach to free agency, and choosing one option will improve your likeability with teammates, while the other helps your brand. However, the execution gets dull fast once you’ve taken part in several in a row. That might be a little too real: I’ve attended real-life NHL press conferences, and the questions from sports journalists really can be as groan-inducing as they are here sometimes. How do I feel about not winning the division? How do you think?

On top of that, the impact from press conference responses on player stats often feels unfair. At one press conference, I was asked about modeling my career around a specific player, with multiple options to choose from. I apparently picked the wrong one, and it immediately led to a decrease in my brand stat. Even worse, NHL 26 doesn’t always make it clear what answers will have a negative impact on your brand or the feelings of management, so a seemingly innocuous response can have an unforeseeable consequence.

A smart change, though, has made NHL’s most intimidating mode more approachable for me. Putting together a team built out of NHL greats in Hockey Ultimate Team (HUT) takes a lot of time and effort. It can also take some real currency, though you are awarded with daily freebies that can help shape a decent team without paying extra. I still don’t necessarily want to take my team up against the passionate players who dominate online with a combination of skill and large wallets, though; sometimes you want to play without the pressure of competing with real people. So it’s a welcome change that for NHL 26, EA has replaced last year’s HUT Squad Battles with a new offline Cup Chase mode that offers a chance to build up a team and try them out in a full single-player campaign with multiple difficulty levels. I was grateful to have the chance to jump into games using my custom team without having to worry about getting schooled by people fiercely protecting their online rankings. And anybody that wants to do so can take that team online just as they normally would in HUT.

Online or off, though, NHL is feeling increasingly behind the annual sports game pack graphically. That’s despite the fact that last year, NHL 25 marked the first game in the series to abandon PS4 and Xbox One and shift focus to current platforms. But NHL 26 still doesn’t feel like it’s really pushing PS5 and Xbox Series X|S to the fullest. The ice itself pops on the screen nicely, and there are lots of impressive details, including wear to the surface as a game progresses, but just about everywhere else is a letdown. The character models are rough, with players, coaches, and fans often looking pretty ugly relative to what we’ve seen in other recent sports games. There are also some weird choices and oversights that are holdovers from past games, like team logos getting cut off on specific screens. Crowd reactions also feel stuck in the past, with awkward celebrations that would be right at home on PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii.

Thankfully, I found the audio much more enjoyable. The menus have some great new songs this year, including tracks from groups like Wet Leg and The Hives. I never would have thought of “Catch These Fists” as a hockey song, but it fits undeniably well. In the games themselves, EA Vancouver continues to replicate the authentic sounds of each rink, with team-specific cheers and organ sounds. The commentary is also pretty faithful to the current NHL viewing experience; it feels like watching a nationally televised game, offering the same chatty play-by-play that you’d expect to hear on TNT. That said, I was grateful for the option to toggle it off when it got repetitive.

Possibly the worst audio in NHL 26 belongs to Macklin Celebrini, though. The San Jose Sharks forward can be heard offering career advice in Be a Pro mode, and it’s clear not all hockey players are cut out for acting.

With just two games, the Nioh series has already cemented its place among the best of the soulslike genre, thanks to its uniquely fast-paced action, deeply customizable builds and playstyles, thrilling boss battles, and a certain fluidity to its combat that feels like Team Ninja’s own signature touch. Based on my five hours of hands-on time with a new preview build, the upcoming third installment is shaping up to continue that trend of excellence, staying true to the core of what has always made the series so successful, but shaking up just enough to challenge veteran players to rethink how they approach its many difficult combat encounters.

Much like Nioh 2, Nioh 3 is shaping up to be an iterative sequel that doesn’t change much about the core systems that were established in Nioh 1; instead adding brand new layers on top of that core to reinvigorate the combat system and force players to engage with it differently. Nioh 2 did this by adding in burst counters and yokai shifts, and Nioh 3 does this primarily by giving the player two styles that they can shift between on the fly: Samurai and Ninja style.

When I first played Nioh 3, back when it was offered up as a limited time demo, I was a little unsure of how I felt about this split. Samurai style, after all, is basically just the way you’d normally play Nioh, minus the ability to use Onmyo Magic; while Ninja Style just felt like a much faster and DPS oriented stance that comes with the substantial drawbacks of no longer being able to use Ki Pulses to regain your stamina, and no longer having the three sword stances to switch between, which are both two staples of Nioh’s gameplay. Not to mention that having two different styles means nearly twice as much inventory management, since they both have their own completely separate sets of gear, and if there’s one game series that already has more than enough inventory and loot management, it’s Nioh.

While loot remains an issue, during my playtime, something clicked with me with regards to Samurai and Ninja style. Not only did I gain an understanding of what each style was good for and when I should swap to one versus continuing with the other, but more importantly, I got a grasp of the sheer amount of options that having two hot swappable styles each with their own equipment loadouts and skill trees brings to the table.

While in Samurai style, you of course have access to the three stances – high, medium, and low – and all of the skills that come from each of those stances. You also are able to to use Ki Pulses to restore spent stamina without having to wait for it to recharge, making it great for sustained offense where you’re able to kind of just plant your feet down and stand and fight against a tough enemy. There’s also a new Arts Proficiency Gauge that fills up as you deal damage and successfully guard, but decreases whenever you get hit. Once it’s full, you’re able to use a powered-up version of your heavy attack, which adds a nice little reward for playing well with a careful balance of offense and defense.

Ninja style on the other hand lets you go absolutely wild. Your dashes go crazy far and are super fast compared to the dodges in Samurai style; instead of stances, you’re able to equip up to three ninja tools; you’re able to very quickly dash to an enemy’s backside to deal extra damage; and most of the weapons take advantage of the fact that Nioh 3 adds a jump button, allowing you to even punctuate your ground combos with a jump cancel, letting you tag on even more damage with air combos. On top of all of this, for both styles, you also have your guardian spirit transformations, guardian spirit skills, Soul Core skills, it’s just a lot of tools to take with you into every battle.

Of course, all of these added options in Ninja Style come at the aforementioned cost of not being able to use Ki Pulses to restore stamina, so I did find myself having to rein in my lust for aggression – it is still a stamina-driven soulslike after all – but I felt a level of creative freedom in combat expression that I typically feel in a good character action game, and I eagerly anticipate getting my hands on the full game and seeing what a high-level character can do once the skill trees start getting maxed out.

Soul Cores also return in Nioh 3, but they’re a bit different this time around. They still appear as random drops from enemies and will let you use that enemy’s signature attack, just to give you yet another option when it comes to how you choose to dispatch your foes. However you have two choices of how to equip them. When you rest at a shrine, you can put them in your Onmyo Box in either the Yin or the Yang position. The Yin position is what I just talked about, you’ll gain some stat increases and the ability of the monster to use in combat. But if you place a core in the Yang position, you’ll instead be able to get spells and items added to your inventory that will refresh every time you rest at a shrine. One of the Soul Cores had a fairly underwhelming skill, but when I equipped it in a Yang slot, it gave me invisibility scrolls that I could use to sneak past tough enemies. It’s a wonderful change to an already excellent system, and I can’t wait to mess around more with it in the full version.

The other big new tentpole feature for Nioh 3 is the addition of non-linear open field-type levels, complete with sidequests, a variety of points of interest with unique challenges and rewards, and wide open environments rife with opportunities for exploration. This is in contrast to Nioh’s typical linear levels with the occasional optional branches off the beaten path that ultimately loop back around. I got to experience one of these in my hands-on time – the frozen region of Kamigamo – and while Nioh 3 doesn’t seem to do anything surprising with its more open level design that hasn’t been done before, the shift was a refreshing change of pace. Right away, the first thing I did was a combat challenge called a Crucible Spike. This was a sealed-off combat arena with multiple waves of enemies that I had to defeat in order to proceed. Clearing the Crucible Spike improved my Spirit Force, which is a new resource that governs your usage of Spirit Skills, and also gained a new spirit skill for one of my guardian spirits.

And that’s really what makes me excited about these open field levels, because these Crucible Spikes, along with other types of points of interests, are strewn all over the map, the challenges are fun, and the rewards are great – which is all the incentive I need to seek them out. Every time you complete one of these points of interest, your exploration level will increase, and each time it increases, you’ll get an extra bonus, from more icons being revealed on your map to give you some direction on where to explore, you may get an added stat bonus while you’re in that specific area, or you may get skill points to spend on your Samurai or Ninja skill trees.

All in all, Nioh 3 is shaping up to be exactly the same kind of iterative step above its predecessor that Nioh 2 ended up being. The style switching between Samurai and Ninja is an excellent addition that adds new layers of depth to an already stacked combat system, and the new open fields offer up even more incentive to explore than ever before, with fun challenges, mini bosses, and secret treasures to discover in every corner. It all ran incredibly smoothly as well, making me forget for a moment that this game is still a ways off, with a planned release in early 2026.

Square Enix has announced a Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade release date of January 22, 2026, for Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series X | S.

An announcement for the long-awaited port arrived as part of today’s September 2025 Nintendo Direct. It came with a trailer, promising to bring the first chapter in Cloud, Tifa, Aerith, and Barret’s story to the new Switch console, as well as Xbox platforms like Xbox on PC and Xbox Cloud, just after the new year kicks off.

Square Enix’s port will bring Final Fantasy 7 Remake to more platforms nearly six years after its original launch on PlayStation 4 in 2020 and a little less than five years since its Intergrade upgrade launched for PlayStation 5. However, players on Switch 2 and Xbox take advantage of more than just the Yuffie-centered add-on story, Episode INTERmission, when Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade arrives in January.

A digital limited early purchase bonus will also be available until January 31, 2026, and grants access to the original Final Fantasy 7 at no extra charge. Those who pre-order on Xbox will be able to play the 1997 JRPG classic the instant their purchase is locked in, while Switch 2 players will have to wait until the January 22 release date.

Switch 2 players, specifically, can also take advantage of a unique offer that lets them in on the recent craze surrounding the Magic: The Gathering and Final Fantasy crossover. Those who pre-order a physical version of Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade for Switch 2 will net a Magic: The Gathering – Final Fantasy Play Booster.

Limit Break

Players revisiting Cloud and Sephiroth’s story or playing it for the first time will also notice Square Enix has included what it is calling a new “Streamlined Progression” setting. This will appear in-game in the form of five new options to make the experience easier for players if they choose to utilize them. Available options include HP that is always full, MP that is always full, a Limit gauge that is always full, an ATB gauge that is always full, and 9999 damage for every attack.

Director Naoki Hamaguchi shared a statement regarding the decision to offer streamlined gameplay options for new platforms, explaining that the team wanted to “allow the game to cater for individual players’ different lifestyles and play styles.”

“I feel that the way people enjoy content has become more flexible these days,” Hamaguci adds, “as we see with video streaming platforms, and that people also want the same thing from games, with options to tailor the experience based on the time they have and their levels of interest. I have also had personal experiences where I wanted to play something with the limited time I have but gave up because of the time it takes to level up characters or traverse the game.

“That’s exactly why I think that the Streamlined Progression feature is very effective – to give players smooth access to the story.”

Square Enix also confirms that the entire Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy will eventually make its way to Switch 2 and Xbox platforms, as well as PS5 and PC. While we wait for the rest of the story to unfold, you can read up on everything announced at the September 2025 Nintendo Direct here.

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).