Games you can only play on Nintendo Switch.
Updated with a few tweaks and Princess Peach: Showtime! Enjoy!
Nintendo’s Switch has become home to an almost overwhelming number of fantastic games since launching back in 2017. A great deal of them have appeared on other platforms — whether celebrated indie titles or huge AAA releases getting a second wind on Nintendo’s handheld hybrid — but the console is also home to a clutch of brilliant exclusive titles.
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With Amazon’s new Fallout TV show slated to hit Prime next month, longtime Fallout fans have already started wondering what the next official entry in the iconic post-apocalyptic video game series will look like.
Although it’s still years away, Bethesda Game Studios has been very upfront about the fact that Fallout 5 is in the pipeline, going as far as to say it will be the studio’s next major project after the release of The Elder Scrolls 6. With that in mind, we decided to round up all the early details we’ve heard about the next major installment in the Fallout game series so you can get caught up on everything we know so far.
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The first and most crucial thing to note is that Fallout 5 isn’t going to be released for a very long time. As series director Todd Howard told us in an interview back in 2022, “Elder Scrolls 6 is in pre-production and, you know, we’re going to be doing Fallout 5 after that.”
Bethesda has said multiple times that The Elder Scrolls 6’s development would become the studio’s main focus after it wrapped up work on Starfield, which only launched in late 2023. Considering Xbox Head Phil Spencer claimed during last year’s Microsoft vs FTC Trial that The Elder Scrolls 6 itself isn’t expected for “five plus years,” it’s safe to assume we’re not going to be hearing much about Fallout 5 or its release date for years to come.
Although its still early days for the sequel, Todd Howard has admitted that he’s taken some time laying out the groundwork for Fallout 5 and where he wants to take the franchise next. Speaking to us on the IGN Unfiltered Podcast in 2021, Howard revealed: “We have a one-pager on Fallout 5, what we want to do.”
In essence, it seems Howard has already spent some time figuring out the broad concept for the next major entry in the Fallout series and the ideas Bethesda hopes to tackle going forward. That being said, he did make it clear those ideas are still in the very early stages. Continuing his discussion about Fallout 5 and Bethesda Game Studios’ future projects in general, he claimed: “I’d like to find a way to accelerate what we do, but I can’t really say today or commit to anything, [like] what’s going to happen when.”
During recent press events for the upcoming Fallout TV show, Todd Howard and the show’s crew talked more about the adaptation’s story and crafting a live-action adventure set in such a lore-rich world. During these interviews, Jonathon Nolan claimed that making the show felt like working on “Fallout 5,” telling Total Film that the show being an original, canon story set in the game’s world makes it feel like a “non-interactive” new entry in the series rather than an adaptation.
Todd Howard later expanded on these comments while speaking with Den of Geek, revealing that he had several conversations with the team behind the show and asked them to avoid including certain story elements due to the eventual release of Fallout 5.
“There were some things where I said, ‘don’t do this because we are going to do that in Fallout 5,” Howard revealed, with showrunner Graham Wagner adding, “I think we made Fallout 6.” It appears the show and the next game will explore different aspects of Fallout’s world, although things were close enough that Howard wanted them to circle around certain topics to ensure they both covered new ground. With The Fallout show centering on a vault dweller exploring the remnants of Los Angeles, this could be our first hint that Bethesda aims to head to the West Coast for its next iteration of the series.
Regarding what platforms Fallout 5 will be on, it’s safe to assume that it’ll be available on Xbox consoles and PC considering Bethesda now falls under the Microsoft banner. However, whether that’s on current or next-gen consoles remains to be seen.
Seeing as the game’s still a ways off and Phil Spencer didn’t clarify whether Elder Scrolls 6 (which is launching prior to Fallout 5) was a current or next-gen release when talking about the game during Microsoft’s FTC trial, it seems likely that Fallout 5 will release on future Xbox platforms. We’ll just have to wait and see where the game eventually falls.
Currently, Bethesda Game Studios seems focused on releasing all of its upcoming games exclusively on Xbox platforms and PC. With Starfield releasing as a full Xbox console exclusive and leaked Microsoft documents suggesting that The Elder Scrolls 6 could be following suit, there’s a very good chance Fallout 5 will continue the trend.
That being said, Xbox has been more lenient with its library of exclusives in recent months, announcing that Sea of Thieves, Hi-Fi Rush, Grounded, and Pentiment are all making their way to other consoles. Whether this new approach to first-party releases eventually results in them launching flagship titles on rival consoles remains to be seen, but there’s always a possibility Fallout could be a multi-platform release. Right now, it’s far too early to say. If it did release on PlayStation, it would likely be on the PS6.
In preparation for the release of Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6, Bethesda’s teams announced they’d fully overhauled the Creation engine, which was used to develop Skyrim, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76. The most advanced version of the Creation Engine yet, Todd Howard called it “the largest [overhaul] we’ve probably ever had, maybe larger than Morrowind to Oblivion,” during a Develop: Brighton Digital conference in 2020.
Regardless of whether this remains the engine the team will use for Fallout 5 or they upgrade it further in time for the long-awaited sequel, Fallout will utilize a more advanced set of tools than its predecessors, benefitting from better graphics, pathing, lighting, NPC animations and more.
Callum Williams is a freelance media writer with years of experience as a game critic, news reporter, guides writer and features writer.
Final Fantasy 14‘s next expansion, Dawntrail, will launch in early access on June 28th and then release in full on July 2nd. Producer Yoshi P announced the date onstage at PAX East, while acknowledging the release date’s proximity to another RPG: Elden Ring’s Shadow Of The Erdtree expansion, which releases on June 21st.
Its no secret that while Dragon’s Dogma 2 is great, performance has been an issue from the jump – particularly on PC. There’s a reason for it, Capcom has explained NPCs are individually simulated by your CPU, which makes this game incredibly dependent on your processor. Play the game for an hour or so and you’ll realize how much the game benefits from this approach, but unless you have a top-end CPU paired with the best RAM you can muster, you’re going to have a rough time with the frame rate, especially in cities.
And then even if you do have the best gaming PC money could buy, you’re still going to see frame rate drops. It’s a shame, especially because the issues easily could have been avoided, and it’s not entirely Capcom’s fault.
Capcom’s RE Engine is largely responsible for the bugbears you’ll run into when playing the game. Reiterating our performance review, the RE Engine was primarily designed for linear games, like Resident Evil, which it’s named for. Making it worse is advanced pathing for every NPC, which is why even on my Core i9-14900K, my framerate will drop to 50 fps in towns – where dozens of citizens devour my CPU bandwidth.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 being so reliant on your CPU and memory was kind of unexpected. By and large, games – particularly action role playing games – have depended more on the best graphics cards as time has gone on, as GPUs like the RTX 4080 Super have been improving faster than CPUs have. Then, out of the blue we get a game that needs a hefty CPU to run at its best, and we get stuck with poor performance.
Making things worse is Capcom’s choice of upscaling technology: DLSS 2.0 and FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.0. Having both these upscalers included is better than not having one at all, or only having one, but neither of them really address the elephant in the room: high CPU usage. It’s little wonder that modders have found a way to add DLSS 3.0, which was apparently already in the game files anyway. Unfortunately, as things stand right now, DLSS 3.0 is the only upscaling tech that can mitigate the heavy CPU usage, because of the way it handles, or rather, replaces the rendering pipeline.
Every time I talk to AMD or Nvidia, there’s one thing they keep telling me when I grill them about graphics card prices: Moore’s Law is dead. For the unintiated, Moore’s Law was a theory that the transistors on processors would double every two years at the same price. Whether the GPU makers are using this as an excuse to charge more for GPUs or if it’s actually true, it doesn’t matter. The demand for shinier graphics is growing faster than the hardware that, well, makes the graphics happen.
That’s why upscaling is so important. DLSS launched forever ago at this point, alongside the RTX 2080, and while it didn’t seem that important back then, it’s grown to be the most important thing in PC gaming. It’s little wonder that after seeing how successful this tech was, AMD launched its FSR tech, followed by Intel with XeSS. Unfortunately FSR and XeSS both lag behind DLSS, and it all comes down to having dedicated AI acceleration boosting the Nvidia upscaling technology.
In many ways, everyone else is finally catching on to how important AI acceleration is, which is why AI was the only thing people would talk about at CES this year. AMD and Intel both added Neural Processing Units to their new lines of laptop CPUs, and Team Red even secretly added them to RDNA 3 graphics cards, like the Radeon RX 7800 XT. Unfortunately, AMD hasn’t used these AI accelerators for gaming, even though it vaguely suggested that AI upscaling would be coming sometime in 2024 – but that hasn’t happened yet. Instead, AMD’s AI accelerators are solely used for enterprise AI applications, like Stable Diffusion.
It’s a huge missed opportunity, and the sole reason FSR lags so far behind DLSS, and the gap widened even more with the release of DLSS 3.0 with its AI frame generation tech. And it’s really a travesty that Dragon’s Dogma 2 didn’t release with the technology available, given that it was in the game files all along.
Functionally, DLSS Frame Generation completely replaces the traditional render queue that has powered PC games for years. Rather than having the CPU generate frames for the GPU to render, Nvidia uses Reflex to synchronize the two components, so the processor can essentially hand the GPU the raw data, which it then uses to execute the render queue from start to finish. Basically, in a CPU-limited game like Dragon’s Dogma 2, DLSS 3.0 essentially allows the CPU to focus on simulating the world, while everything else is handled locally on your graphics card.
What sucks is that AMD even has frame generation tech which is supported in Dragon’s Dogma 2, but because it doesn’t run it off of its AI Accelerators – as Nvidia’s does with its Tensor Cores – it comes into the pipeline at a later stage, which introduces latency. You can mitigate this by enabling AMD Anti Lag in your Adrenalin app, but the process will still introduce more latency than DLSS.
Unfortunately, if Dragon’s Dogma 2 proves anything, it’s that AI acceleration is a must in AAA games going forward, and AMD needs to get its shit together to catch up to Nvidia. It’s not really a matter of one graphics card being better than another at this point – PC gaming has kind of grown past that. Everything is riding on upscaling technology if we want to keep having games that look this good, while also having complex physics engines and NPC pathfinding.
It’s either that or we stop demanding that games look photorealistic at all times. I don’t know, pick one.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
The long rumored PS5 Pro has been (somewhat) confirmed after specifications and internal documents leaked online. Codenamed ‘Trinity’ in a nod to the PS4 Pro’s original codename, ‘Neo’, the PS5 Pro offers an expected sizable spec increase over the almost four years old base model PS5 . While many may focus on how many teraflops the PS5 Pro will cram in, we will cover the leaked specifications and explain how this will impact games running on the machine, along with explaining the new “PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution” secret sauce.
Undoubtedly the smallest change over the base model is that the PS5 Pro apparently uses the same Zen 2-based, 8-core 16 thread AMD CPU as the current PS5. According to the leaked documents, the PS5 Pro will offer a small boost via a ‘High CPU Frequency Mode,’ providing an approximate 10% increase above the base 3.5Ghz speed of the original. This new 3.85Ghz is achieved at the small cost of 1% off the top of the new GPU clock speed. Despite that cost, in reality, games will still perform identically to the base machine when CPU limited. In short, this upgrade feels more like a marketing statement to allow Sony to brag about having the fastest console CPU clock speed than anything else. Nothing to see here.
The graphics processing unit is where the real magic happens. Similar to the PS4 Pro, Sony has spent the lion’s share of the budget on increasing the graphical quality, resolution, and performance of the PS5 Pro.
The specific architecture changes are not listed, but we have some data from the leaks that we can extrapolate. Based on the notes, the PS5 Pro is likely to have 60 compute units (CU) over the PS5’s current 36 CUs. This is, on paper at least, a smaller leap than the doubling of CUs the PS4 Pro had over the base PS4.
What we end up with in theory is a 67% increase in graphical performance compared to the “standard” PS5. But wait, we have more! The GPU itself is almost certainly based on the latest RDNA3 Architecture of the current AMD Radeon 7000 cards and this offers up some architectural improvements over the old RDNA2-based PS5 GPU. The proposed teraflop number on the documentation adds some weight to this as it states the PS5 Pro has 33.5Tf as opposed to the 10.28Tf of the standard model. This is almost certainly due to the dual FP32 (Floating Point) operations the latest GPU can process rather than a single issue on the older console. Using these numbers we can surmise a clock frequency of approximately 2335Mhz of 56CUs are active and 2180Mhz of the full 60CUs are in operation. In reality though it is going to be rare and isolated occurrences where double the compute can be pushed through the GPU. However, the biggest issue with the PS4 Pro was that the pure compute increase never matched the bandwidth.
On the memory side, Sony has boosted the PS5’s old 14Gbps 16GB RAM to the latest 18Gbs for the PS5 Pro, which is likely just a benefit of buying the latest nodes available. The hike brings system bandwidth up by 28%, from 448GB/s to 576GB/s, putting it above the Xbox Series X and many current PC GPUs.
Although not confirmed, sources have indicated to IGN that approximately 1GB of game RAM has been added to the total allocation, opening up 13.5GBs available for games. This will be vital for the biggest boosts and secret sauce the PS5 Pro offers with its ray tracing enhancements, as well as Sony’s own competitor to FSR3 and DLSS: PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), which is hardware accelerated with dedicated machine learning hardware (ML).
In summary, then, we have a PS5 that offers nearly the same CPU performance across eight cores and 16 threads as its non-Pro predecessor, paired with faster memory to feed a 67% faster GPU. Sony’s own numbers state an approximate 45% increase in raw rasterization performance (rendering 3D objects into pixels on screen) with the PS5 Pro.
In layman’s terms, a current 1080p title on PS5 would move to 3840 x 2160, or a game that is GPU limited to 42 fps would now be able to hit 60 fps. But the biggest boost comes in that PSSR and dedicated ML hardware, which will be able to increase image quality resolutions without requiring double or more pure hardware muscle. Much like the Tensor cores on Nvidia’s GPUs, this dedicated GPU silicon will take a lower target resolution output – say, 1080p – and upscale that via machine learning reconstruction to a 4K output, all for only the cost of a few milliseconds in rendering time.
Not only does this machine learning system provide a vast increase to all games’ image quality, unlocking 4K (and possibly even better) resolution, but it also solves the issue for higher bandwidth and GPU performance, as this data is inferred rather than rendered. All this means that the PS5 Pro will provide a better-than-4K quality output to your screen at a far lower performance and bandwidth penalty.
The other piece of the graphical pie is, of course, ray tracing. Based on Sony’s own patent and developer documents, the PS5 Pro’s new GPU also offers a base 2x increase to ray tracing performance via improved hardware. In specific circumstances, it can even reach up to a 4x increase.
So enough specs, what does this mean for the games? In reality much of this will come down to how developers use the hardware and new features the PS5 Pro offers. I suspect we will see three main improvements for current games on the PS5 Pro and two more for new titles, with the first being the most exciting.
Dynamic resolution and unlocked frame rates would come for free, tapping into the increased performance and latest SDK that will likely ship with a PS5 firmware update just before the PS5 Pro launches. These benefits could take current games that run at an uneven frame rate and use dynamic resolution scaling (DRS) to instantly run faster and smoother on Sony’s new console.
Games such as Alan Wake 2, which struggle to hit 30 fps and 60 fps in quality and performance modes respectively, could now lock to 30 and 60fps without a developer laying hands on the code. Spider-Man 2’s unlocked VRR mode, which generates frame rates that hover around the 70s, could now leap up into 100s. These are immediate boosts players can expect to see applied to their back catalog.
Via development update patches, studios could easily go back to older games (even PS4 titles) and add an update to the engine code to increase visual quality via the SDK aligned PSSR libraries, or even just by using the increased hardware performance. If they use both, this could mean that an older game that was GPU bound on the PS5 could leap up to 4K/60fps… or maybe even higher, if the headroom was available. Games such as Red Dead Redemption 2 could easily be patched with a 4K/60 fps update that could lean into the PSSR solution to improve image quality, while also leaving enough head room on the table to boost visual quality and match the highest levels available on the PC version.
By leveraging the ray tracing increases in conjunction with PSSR reconstruction, a game could have a PS5 Pro version that could target 1440p/60 with an increased level of ray tracing effects. Cyberpunk 2077, for example, seems a perfect fit for a potential update here that could finally bring the console version close to the high-end PC version.
PSVR2 could also be the beneficiary of these increases, with the PSSR and increased ray tracing capabilities offering up the chance to bring performance better than the current PS5 quality into the VR headset. Gran Turismo 7 could gain the ray tracing effects used in replays during races, but now in VR. The development team could also choose to boost image quality and performance to 120fps and over 4K to improve the immersion of one of the best games on the platform.
The best thing about new hardware is new games, and with the PS5 Pro I can see a big increase in games pushing harder on frame rates and/or ray tracing as the potential market for them becomes bigger. And here may be a reason why we have not seen new first party titles so far this year, as the PS5 Pro will likely be a tent pole machine to show them off looking their best.
We may also see new titles that ship on both PC and consoles come with a ‘PS5 Pro mode’ that offers either a PSSR reconstructed 4K image and ray tracing effects that aren’t possible on the base PS5, or visuals and performance increased overall to be closer to the PC version. Forthcoming games Black Myth: Wukong and Star Wars: Outlaws have been recently announced to support RTX increases on PC. Some or all of these could now ship on the PS5 Pro and offer a closer alignment to the high end PC version, opening the door for more developers to push harder on ray tracing in games. We could even see older releases such as Doom, Quake, or even Tomb Raider come with a path traced version on PS5 Pro, creating a slew of cheaper remasters that offer a vast increase in quality and true next-generation enhancements for a far lower investment.
The PS5 Pro may still not make much sense from a pure market place – this is no surefire hit. But the information leaked shows that, with the hardware and software solutions Sony has developed, the increases across current and future games could be transformative.
Cost will likely be around the $499 mark, which may be with or without the detachable optical disc drive we saw last year in the PS5 Slim. The design is likely to mirror that aesthetic, just with a bulkier figure. Based on the specs, it could even be on the same 6nm node as power use is vital, although a smaller 4nm is possible. Whatever the final design and price, the PS5 Pro could breathe new excitement into the console gaming market, as well as the potential for game visuals.
But what about GTA 6? I hear you scream. You will probably expect a beautifully ray traced world in 4K that looks even better than the reveal trailer. But unfortunately due to that CPU, Rockstar’s next visit to Vice City is likely to be capped at 30fps. As before on the PS4 Pro, developers could still ship a single SKU on PS5 base and Pro models and just let the boosted hardware smooth out any performance wrinkles and sharpen the pixels over the base model. This is almost certainly going to happen, but I suspect between now and when the PS5 Pro is inevitably announced at an event later this year, Sony will be working hard to ensure the developers that take this route are in the minority.
Michael Thompson is a freelance writer for IGN.
Perfect organism.
Hurray, it’s the weekend!
Before we dive into what we’re going to be playing, let’s take a look at what’s been going on this week. For starters, we reviewed Princess Peach: Showtime! for the Switch, and surprise surprise, it turned out to be much better than we were expecting.
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Grab ’em later this week.
Update :
Here’s your reminder this event is now officially underway in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and will run for five days. Have fun!
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New special missions now available.
Following an update to the mobile runner Super Mario Run last week (bumping the game up to Version 3.2.0), Nintendo has now officially announced a new Princess Peach: Showtime! event for the title.
Yes, following a collaboration with Super Mario Bros. Wonder last year, this new event will run until 7th May 2024. It contains a bunch of missions themed around Peach’s transformations in the new Switch outing. Here’s the rundown (via Perfectly-Nintendo):
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Larian Studios is officially finished with Baldur’s Gate. Director Swen Vincke revealed the news at GDC, confirming that the studio has scrapped its DLC plans and won’t be making Baldur’s Gate 4. In a statement sent to IGN, a Hasbro spokesperson responded by calling Larian “an incredible partner,” but offered little insight into what’s coming next.
“Larian has been an incredible partner, and together we are proud of the success of Baldur’s Gate 3. Watch this space for more on some awesome D&D games we are bringing to life through Hasbro’s studios and our network of licensing partners. We have an unbeatable library of toy and game brands and many fantastic partners around the world,” Hasbro’s spokesperson said.
Hasbro didn’t respond to IGN’s question about the future of Baldur’s Gate now that Larian is moving on, nor did it say whether Wizards of the Coast plans to hand the license to a new developer. Baldur’s Gate 3 has made some $90 million for Hasbro, an impressive sum even as the company has struggled overall, experiencing a revenue decline of 15 percent and operating at a loss of $1.5 billion in 2023.
Last year, Wizards of the Coast confirmed that it had canceled five Dungeons & Dragons games in development with various studios, including an internal project codenamed “Jabberwocky.” Starbreeze is currently working on an untitled D&D game codenamed Project Baxter using Unreal Engine 5, which is expected to be out in 2026. Elsewhere, Wizards of the Coast recently revealed its plans for Dungeons & Dragons’ 50th anniversary.
For now, work continues apace on Baldur’s Gate 3, which is adding additional evil endings among other content. Stay tuned for our full interview with director Swen Vincke on Monday.
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.
Every Ghostbuster game, ranked by you.
Heading out to see Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire this weekend? Looking for something to get you in the mood, or to keep the ‘bustin’ going when you get home? Well, here’s our list of every Ghostbusters game on Nintendo platforms to help thaw you out…
There have been plenty of Ghostbusters games across all platforms in the years since Egon, Ray, Winston, and Peter first busted onto screens in 1984, and they run the gamut from classic licensed cash-in to carefully constructed homage.
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