Category: Video Games

Sega and Ryu Ga Gotako have revealed that Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth will launch on January 26, 2024. The story follows both current series protagonist Ichiban Kasuga and former protagonist Kazuma Kiryu. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth will be released on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.

Ichiban goes on a journey to Hawaii to find his mother, who he was separated from when he was younger. Additionally, Kiryu makes the shattering announcement that he has been diagnosed with cancer.

With the limited time he has left, Kiryu wants to make amends for his past being part of the Yakuza. As his strength weakens, Kiryu realizes he has to work together with Ichiban, as apparently every other local gang in Hawaii is after his mother as well.

The game’s newest trailer is absolutely bonkers as it shows Kiryu and Ichiban facing off against a myriad of different threats, including a giant shark and giant squid.

The next game in the series, Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased his Name, is set to release on November 9, 2023. It takes place between the events of Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. It will also include a special trial version of Infinite Wealth with scenes that are not set to be in the main game itself. The trial will be available to play after completing Gaiden’s story.

The end of January and the beginning of February 2024 are already piling up on big Japanese game releases, as Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth will launch on the same day as Tekken 8. It’s also a week out from Persona 3 Reload and Granblue Fantasy: Relink, with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth due at the end of February.

George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. He’s been writing about the industry since 2019 and has worked with other publications such as Insider, Kotaku, NPR, and Variety.

When not writing about video games, George is playing video games. What a surprise! You can follow him on Twitter @Yinyangfooey

When I first heard that Mortal Kombat 1 would be skipping the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles, but would in fact, be coming out on the Switch, my first thought was, “Surely that means that it’s going to be one of those cloud version-only games like Resident Evil Village, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and so on. But I was wrong: Mortal Kombat 1 on the Switch is a straight-up port, running directly off the Switch hardware, and yes, that is as bad of an idea as it sounds.

Before we begin, please check out my Mortal Kombat 1 review for the version that’s on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC to get a full overview and my critiques of it. Long story short: MK1 is great! There are exciting changes to the gameplay formula in the form of the Kameo system, the fighting itself feels fresh thanks to some smart tweaks to how combos are structured, and the story mode is fantastic, even if some of its online features feel outdated and the Invasions mode doesn’t quite land.

Mortal Kombat 1 on the Switch can claim all of those things too, but the technical limitations of the hardware make experiencing them feel like you’re trudging through whatever sludge Reptile crawled out of. Let’s get the most obvious knock against it out of the way first: It looks abysmal compared to the other versions. Character models lack detailed textures, the expressive facial animations of the current-gen versions are highly compromised to say the least, clothing – and sometimes even skin – constantly stretches and clips through body parts, and every so often you can even see straight through them. Those absolutely gorgeous stages that I praised in my other review look like they had a heavy gaussian blur filter applied to them in Photoshop and briefly made me think that I needed glasses.

So yeah, it’s bad, but this also isn’t a big surprise – the Switch was an underpowered console when it launched six years ago, and truthfully, if this was the worst of Mortal Kombat 1’s problems, I’d still be able to recommend it because even though it would look bad, it’d still play great. But the issues go far deeper than just skin – they’re down to the bone.

Before you even get into a match, you’ve got to deal with egregious load times lasting, on average, around 40 seconds. This is made all the more noticeable by the fact that the character select screen is designed for you to quickly and seamlessly take you from here into the match. On the other versions you select your characters, they clash, say a quick two lines of dialogue, and when they separate, you’re in the match. On the Switch, they clash, say a quick two lines of dialogue, and then… stare awkwardly at each other for half a minute while textures pop in and out all around them.

Loading pains are felt the most in both Invasions mode and online play. Invasions is particularly bad because it’s designed for a ton of quick bouts that you’re able to generally steamroll through in order to collect rewards like new gear pieces, skins, etc. At its best it’s already pretty grindy and slow paced, but when you add on the fact that you’re frequently spending more time waiting to get in and get out of a fight than you are actually fighting, it becomes straight-up joyless.

Ranked online play is especially frustrating because of the fact that every match is a first to three set, and despite the fact I’m playing with the same characters on the same stage, with the same Kameos, it still takes about 40 seconds of staring at a black screen in between each match of the set. That’s just too long to wait when you consider that you’re also waiting for matchmaking, waiting for opponents to accept matches, and occasionally even waiting a moment or two for fatalities to happen.

But the real kicker is the actual performance of the gameplay during a fight. There’s a lot of slowdown that affected my timing and led to dropped combos, similar to how it’d feel if I was playing online with bad netcode… only this was playing locally, against a CPU. Some stages are worse than others, but it is something that I felt to a certain degree in pretty much every match that I played. There’s also a couple of weird bugs that I encountered, such as Li Mei’s lantern disappearing after a certain amount of time in the air; Sareena’s dreaded boomerang Kameo attack doesn’t return, which makes it essentially useless; and the list of combo trials isn’t at all like the list from the other versions, with most characters getting six challenges instead of seven, and some characters getting just one. It’s almost like it’s working off of a different version.

If Story mode is all you’re interested in, then you may find some value in MK1 on the Switch. The cutscenes are pre-rendered and look great, even though the switch to in-engine fights is incredibly jarring, and the problem with long load times is mitigated due to the fact that you’re just watching the story as it loads. But you’d be less frustrated just watching it on YouTube.

Even though Terraria developer Re-Logic mostly doesn’t use Unity, it’s made a strong statement of condemnation in regards to the engine’s recently announced, controversial install fee policy – and it’s putting its money where its mouth is.

In a statement on X/Twitter today, which you can read in full below, Re-Logic said that the team “has been watching the recent events surrounding Unity with both interest and sadness.”

pic.twitter.com/ZqzGMTui0f

— Terraria🌳 (@Terraria_Logic) September 19, 2023

“The loss of a formerly leading and user-friendly game engine to the darker forces that negatively impact so much of the gaming industry has left us dismayed to put it mildly,” it continued. “While we do not personally use Unity (outside of a few elements on our console/mobile platforms), we feel like we cannot sit idly by as these predatory moves are made against studios everywhere.”

Re-Logic went on to say they “unequivocally condemn and reject the recent TOS/fee changes proposed by Unity and the underhanded way they were rolled out,” in a “flippant manner” that disregarded the trust of publishers, studios, and gamers alike.

Adding that they “do not feel a simple public statement is sufficient,” they then promised to donate $100,000 each to game engines Godot and FNA, in addition to $1,000/month moving forward, with the condition that “they remain good people and keep doing all that they can to make these engines powerful and approachable for developers everywhere.”

Unity garnered near industry-wide backlash when it announced the new policy, dubbed the Unity Runtime Fee, last week. Per the policy, which would go into effect on Jan. 1, 2024, Unity would charge $0.20 per install for any game with more than 200,000 installs. This spawned both confusion and derision among developers and gamers alike, and Unity’s attempts to clarify the policy did little to help.

Over the weekend, however, Unity apologized for the “confusion and angst” the announcement of the policy caused, and promised that it “will be making changes” to it in the coming days. While the engine still hasn’t announced said changes, Bloomberg reported yesterday that it’s considering capping fees to 4% of a game’s revenue for customers making over $1 million, among other tweaks.

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.

To say that Baldur’s Gate 3 was underestimated before its full release last month is an understatement, so much so that Microsoft and others did not expect Larian Studios’ hit RPG to become one of the biggest games of the year.

That surfaced today as part of the latest massive leak of documents from June’s Microsoft vs. FTC trial, which included an email chain published in May 2022 between multiple Microsoft executives that focused on Microsoft scrambling to fill a “huge hole” in its 2022 games lineup. The email chain included a list of potential third-party games to add to its subscription service Game Pass, all of which were slated to be released throughout the 2023 financial year.

One of those was Baldur’s Gate 3 which, under the “Notes” column for Baldur’s Gate 3, was dubbed a “second-run Stadia PC RPG.” The list also rated Baldur’s Gate 3’s “Wow Factor” as “Hub,” but it remains unclear what that means, though it is important to note other games on that list, including Return to Monkey Island, also received that rating.

It also estimated that it would cost $5 million to secure Baldur’s Gate 3 as a day-and-date Game Pass release.

The email has certainly put Microsoft under scrutiny as Baldur’s Gate 3 has proved to become anything but a “second-run Stadia RPG.” Though as Larian Studios Director of Publishing Michael Douse points out, Microsoft was not the only one who thought this way, and that same energy of dismissiveness was also directed to Divinity Original Sin 2, as he mentions. Posting on X (formerly Twitter), Douse explained how “everyone else” felt that way.

“Comes with the genre,” Douse noted. “There just isn’t any existing data that could have told anyone how BG3 was going to perform. We just had to take giant spooky leaps.”

In their defence, so did everyone else. Same with DOS2. Comes with the genre, and the way we approach things, and the way we execute things. There just isn’t any existing data that could have told anyone how BG3 was going to perform. We just had to take giant spooky leaps. https://t.co/BgLyW4cZZx

— Very AFK (@Cromwelp) September 19, 2023

Larien CEO Swen Vincke was a little more tongue-in-cheek, writing, “I’d love to meet that analyst.”

I’d love to meet that analyst https://t.co/ej2W7DJoV8

— Swen Vincke @where? (@LarAtLarian) September 19, 2023

Baldur’s Gate 3 was originally announced for Windows and the now-defunct cloud gaming service Google Stadia, with the early access version released on both platforms in 2020. With Stadia shut down earlier this year, the full release version for that platform was canceled, with PC remaining the first platform to recieve a full version of Baldur’s Gate 3. PS5 and macOS ports followed roughly a month after the PC release. An Xbox Series X/S version is also in development with a 2023 release window.

After leaving Early Access, Baldur’s Gate 3 became a huge success. And, to be fair, even Larian itself was surprised, with Vincke noting that the game has far surpassed the studios expectations.

In our review of Baldur’s Gate 3, which we scored a 10 out of 10, we said “[w]ith crunchy, tactical RPG combat, a memorable story with complex characters, highly polished cinematic presentation, and a world that always rewards exploration and creativity, Baldur’s Gate 3 is the new high-water mark for CRPGs.”

Microsoft’s underestmiation of Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of many revelations coming out of a massive court document leak this week. For more on what else surfaced, check out our roundup focused on all the key takeaways from the big Xbox leaks.

Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

From the city street shootouts of Heat to the creepy clown masks found in The Dark Knight’s opening moments, there’s something alarmingly alluring about the Hollywood bank heist fantasy. Fortunately, the excellent Payday series has been letting me live it out for myself for more than a decade without needing to establish a rap sheet. The next chapter in this long-running burglary simulator, Payday 3, has finally been released from custody, and though it continues the series’ tradition of delivering one of the best digital smash and grab experiences out there, the usual horrible Payday bugs, a dinky pool of jobs to tackle, and a predictably weak story mean it’s not exactly the giant leap forward I was hoping for. Still, if Payday 2’s post-launch support is any indication, this is at least a very promising start for what could become another decade of happily pistol whipping cashiers and fixing drills.

Like its predecessor, Payday 3 is a cooperative multiplayer FPS where you and three friends take on increasingly elaborate heists. The extremely thin story focuses on the same motley crew of criminals as they’re forced out of retirement by a secretive cabal of shadowy and generic silhouettes. All your favorite entrepreneurial personalities are back, including Hoxton, the chain smoking mastermind, and Chains, the always hilarious military man. Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the story itself is just a sequence of slides with voiceover justifying the string of jobs you’ll undertake with precious little to tie them together. There’s even a mission where you work with Ice-T… for some reason? (And yes, I do mean that Ice-T from all 500,000 episodes of Law & Order.) Payday does love a good cameo, and though it definitely makes for an entertaining little encounter, it didn’t exactly do much to draw me into an already barebones tale. But even if the story never really takes off, it does do a good job at setting the stage while hinting at what that future might bring.

Within seconds of beginning my first robbery at the obligatory “local bank branch” intro level, the movement and gunplay already felt enormously upgraded. You move faster overall and can do more modern maneuvers like sliding, which I found useful in combat as well as for stealth. Weapons feel more punchy and satisfying, even if they are burdened with hopelessly small magazines and long reload times before you’ve spent some of your ill-gotten cash on upgrades. You can even use civilian hostages as a meat shield now, forcing enemies to engage you in melee to avoid hurting an innocent soul, which is a nice touch. After years of incremental updates to Payday 2, Payday 3 immediately feels like a proper sequel in the gameplay department, even if the formula of breaking into vaults and throwing bags of cash into an unmarked van remains identical.

The weapon selection isn’t nearly as strong as Payday 2’s roster, with just 30 to pick from instead of more than one hundred, but the options available at present cover all the bases. You’ve got everything from deadly and accurate rifles to silenced pistols, and there’s a good mix of stealth focused gadgets and tools too, like throwing daggers that are perfect for sneaky tryhards, and devious jammers that can gunk up enemy comms. Weapons can also be customized with mods and attachments that significantly alter how they are used, like putting a scope on a weapon to increase its range, or adding a silencer to a giant rifle to make it an option during stealth runs.

Payday 3 also raises the bar with the quality of its misadventures, as the vast majority of the eight available jobs are super well-designed. Many feel like instant classics, like the art museum heist, Under The Surphaze, with its delicate puzzles and labyrinthine halls hiding priceless art to be pilfered, or the fantastic Gold & Shark bank heist that throws you into the most elaborate old fashioned vault break-in yet. Developer Starbreeze has definitely upped its game in terms of variety and quality with these base stages, and I found myself immediately repeating a completed job more often than not, just to practice my strategies and explore other possible outcomes. That said, there are still some weaker levels, like Road Rage, which is a combat-focused mission that has you guiding an armored van on a bridge with very little room for deploying different strategies and no stealth option whatsoever. Thankfully, that was the only one of the eight that was especially weak, and the highs of the good ones far outshine the lows of the less interesting choices.

While almost all of the new heists are great, it is a bit disappointing that there are so few of them after such a long wait. Presumably that library will expand dramatically over time, just like the previous entry did, but after just five hours I’d already completed all the available jobs and had begun the endless grind of repeating those same gigs over and over again. The saving grace there is that repeating these missions is a lot less monotonous thanks to the variety granted by added stealth options that make most jobs feel like two separate levels in one thanks to how differently they play from run and gun playthroughs.

In many ways the changes to Payday’s stealth mechanics are even more significant than any improvements to movement or combat. Only the most committed and elite players stood a chance of pulling off a totally clean heist in Payday 2, and proper leveling was basically a requirement in order to unlock things like a silent drill to get through vaults before making an attempt was even remotely viable. In contrast, Payday 3 provides new mechanics to support stealth right away, like the ability to pickpocket security guards to relieve them of their keycards, or use environmental objects to lure them away. That means pulling off a clandestine operation here is almost immediately achievable, even with a randomly matchmade group of players only loosely communicating with one another via text chat.

That’s also largely owing to the clever and fantastic way its missions are designed, in which stealth runs are now given a completely different route to success. For example, the Secure Capital Bank level normally requires players to go the humdrum path of using thermite to burn through the top of the bank vault then dive in from the floor above before making off with the loot, but this series of objectives smartly only triggers as your primary path once players have been caught. Before that, your crew can take the much more complex and rewarding route of breaking into various parts of the bank to sabotage electrical systems and deactivate security measures to gain access to the vault without anyone being the wiser, which is essentially an entirely different mission if you can pull it off. In Payday 2, that same kind of bank heist required players to follow more or less the exact same path of drilling through the vault no matter your preferred tactic, and to do it stealthily you just had to not get caught.

But all those new options don’t mean pulling off a stealth run is going to be easy, and that’s thanks to enhanced enemy AI across the board. Guards now respond to your actions, breaking free of their usual patrol routes to investigate suspicious activity and doing a whole lot more than drawing their gun and shooting you when you’re spotted. For example, if you’re found in a private but not entirely suspicious area, like the back office at a bank vs. the vault, instead of immediately trying to kill you, they’ll simply escort you to a public area and give you a good tongue lashing, which can be used by cunning players to remove guards from their posts temporarily. That smarter AI extends to combat as well, where the police do a great job of swarming you from all sides instead of standing around as target practice. They can also respond to your actions and try to obstruct your heist, like how they’ll pull the fire alarm when you’ve lit up that thermite, using the sprinkler system to delay your fire’s progress. Likewise, hostages are now much more responsive to your commands and easier to boss around and control as you use them as collateral in combat or negotiation.

Which leads me to one of the most exciting changes to the heist formula: each job now has specific phases, meaning that instead of either being in unmasked stealth mode or chucking grenades around like a maniac, there are now defined moments in between those two extremes that allow for different parts of the crime fantasy to be more thoroughly explored. For example, the “Searching” phase triggers when you’ve caught the authorities’ suspicion in a minor way and they begin actively looking for you, but all hell hasn’t broken loose just yet, and the “Negotiation” phase begins if you ever get caught outright and gives you a window of time to lock the place down to prepare for a fight or play nice by releasing hostages to delay the authorities storming the place. This added nuance opens up some interesting new strategies, like hoarding as many hostages as possible to draw out the negotiation phase as long as you can. It certainly helps that zip ties required to keep hostages in line are no longer a limited resource, too, so you’re able to stack those poor bystanders as high as your heart desires.

It’s also still a ton of fun to make your way down its role-based skill paths while out committing misdeeds, unlocking more abilities within those roles to bolster your preferred playstyle. That could be the The Hacker path, which turns your lawbreaker into a tech wizard who can hack into security cameras and confound security systems, or the Manipulator path, which grants you a silver tongue so you can intimidate civilians and law enforcement officials alike into submitting to your indomitable will. You can have any four of the 17 available roles equipped at a time and can spend your skill points within those however you like, which allows you to create the perfect villainous cocktail without wasting any cherished points on stuff you won’t use. It’s also nice that you level up and upgrade each of these roles by simply equipping them while out on crime sprees, which really rewards you for picking your knavery niche and sticking to it.

Even though I’ve come around on this new, more streamlined upgrade system, I do still miss the depth of Payday 2’s progression. This new system checks the most important box by letting me curate my very own delinquent based on the role I want to play within the crew, but it’s also not quite as chunky or complex – and it’s particularly disappointing that Perk Decks have been done away with entirely. Perk Decks allowed you to round out your character with minor boons related to their background, which was a nice additional system on top of the skill trees that gave me another reason to grind. Here’s hoping something like that makes a return down the road.

Hopefully that’s not the only update coming, either. As always seems to be the case with Payday, severe and horribly painful technical issues have returned like the cold sting of the law. Not only are the usual connectivity issues back, but there’s occasional framerate hitching, people walking backwards for no reason, and more. Even the menu barely works at times, and I’d often find it completely unresponsive as I spammed buttons before it finally noticed my all inputs at once and did insane things like open the same mission 15 times, triggering its intro dialogue to play all at once, overlapping in a incredibly disturbing way. I’m really hoping they iron this stuff out, but given that past entries have remained busted for months and years before finally becoming stable, there’s definitely cause for concern that we’re in for another rocky ride.

At least when you’re booted back to lobbies due to connectivity issues, you can spend plenty of time customizing your character’s loadout. With lots of masks, paints, and trinkets to unlock, you’ll have plenty to chase and can waste quite a bit of time and in-game money customizing the color and patterns on your weapons or the suits your character wears when out committing grand larceny. Like everything else in Payday 3, it’s a fair bit thinner than Payday 2 for now, but there’s little doubt that will change with time as things are added, and in the meantime there’s still quite a bit to unlock. I will say though, I already miss the little card minigame that we got at the end of every mission in Payday 2, where you had a shot at unlocking the odd cosmetic or weapon mod. All those same things are now earned by leveling up and spending your stolen cash, but that dopamine hit when the match concluded is certainly lost here.

Oh, and as always, the music in Payday 3 absolutely crushes it. Any disappointment I may feel when my stealth run fails is immediately forgiven once the beat drops and a money-crazed murder spree begins, making me feel like a complete badass instead of a heartless psychopath. This certainly isn’t new for the series, but it’s great to see they haven’t dropped that very important ball.

Cyberpunk 2077’s next major (and free) update is out later this week, and CD Projekt Red encourages players to start a new save file after installing Update 2.0.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), CD Projekt Red wrote that it is strongly urging players to start a brand new adventure in Night City after installing Update 2.0. The developer explains that due to the number of changes the update will introduce, a clean slate is best to “enhance your overall gameplay experience.”

Hey, chooms! While you’ll be able to continue the game with your current character on an existing save, we recommend starting a new game after @CyberpunkGame Update 2.0. Due to the number of changes, starting fresh will enhance your overall gameplay experience! pic.twitter.com/rqdokahhAg

— CD PROJEKT RED CS (@CDPRED_Support) September 19, 2023

To be clear, you do not have to start a new Cyberpunk 2077 file, which CD Projekt Red even notes at the start of the post. But when you consider that Update 2.0 will introduce a host of new features to players at no additional cost, including revamped perk and skill trees, a revamped police system, and vehicular combat, to name a few, perhaps it’s not an entirely bad idea to heed the developer’s advice and start a new save file.

In particular, the skill tree and perks system might be enough incentive for some to start a new save file. As CDPR noted in a blog post, the idea for the redesign was “to have fewer, but way more impactful perks for players to choose from.” While those on a continued save file will have a one-time opportunity to redistribute these attribute points, a clean slate might be easier, depending on the player’s circumstances.

CD Projekt Red announced Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0 at gamescom Opening Night Live last month as a nice treat for fans who do not want to shell out cash for the paid DLC Phantom Liberty, which is out next week.

The major update will be available on PC, in addition to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. While the eighth-generation consoles are excluded from the next major update, considering the performance problems older hardware encountered at release, this is likely the best-case scenario.

Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.