CCP Games have shared a few more details about Project Awakening, a new game or at least, “experience” set in the Eve Online universe, which is getting a closed playtest from 21st May 2024. Project Awakening is a single-shard affair – that is, one in which all players inhabit the same world, rather than being split up across servers or instances. It’s “built upon the principles of freedom, consequence, and mastery within a living universe”, and “represents the next step in CCP Games’ journey to create virtual worlds more meaningful than real life”, which, you know, wind your neck in.
When it comes to picking up new games, hardware, or accessories for your Xbox, it feels good when you can find those items at a discounted price. Here, we’ll keep you updated on all of the latest deals for Xbox, from games to controllers and so much more. Below, you can find a wide range of items on sale, including some console bundles that are still available and controllers.
Newegg is offering a nice little deal at the moment on Xbox Game Pass Core. By using the code SSDQAA48 at checkout, you can save $11 on a 12-month membership, bringing the price down from $59.99 to $48.99. You’ll want to act fast, though, as this deal ends tonight!
Enjoy Discounts On Select Xbox Controllers
In need of another Xbox controller? Well, you’re in luck, as there are a few discounted right now. The new Dream Vapor controller (which released in February this year) even has a slight discount of 17% at the moment. In my opinion, you can never have too many controllers. You never know when someone will pop on by and want to play Overcooked or It Takes Two, or any local multiplayer game.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Standard Edition is 50% Off and More Xbox Game Deals
There are several Xbox games on sale right now that are worth adding to your collection. One of our favorite deals at the moment is on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Standard Edition, which you can get for 50% off at Best Buy with a price of $34.99! If you haven’t played this one yet, it’s absolutely worth getting at this price. To see even more Xbox game deals, check out the links below. And if you’re curious to see what digital games are on sale, head to the Xbox store’s deal page.
There are a few console bundles on sale at the moment that are worth taking advantage of. One of our favorite deals leftover from the Black Friday/Cyber Monday season is on the Diablo IV Xbox Series X bundle, which you can get for $458.82 at Walmart. You can also get a Series X discounted at Target for $449.99.
Xbox: Budget to Best
Buying new items for your Xbox doesn’t have to make a massive dent in your wallet, either. Here, we’ll feature a variety of excellent games, accessories, and hardware that are available at more affordable prices regularly or are the just option available when gaming on Xbox.
Get 10% Off the Official Xbox Wireless Headset & More Headset Deals
Does your family complain when you stay up playing loud shooters late into the night? They’ll stop complaining if you pick up anXbox headset that lets no one but you hear the delightful explosions you cause on the screen. Right now, you can get 10% off the Official Xbox Wireless Headset, bringing the price down to $89.99 from $99.99. You can also save 20% on the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless Gaming Headset by using the promo code ‘GET20’ at checkout. To see even more gaming headsets on sale, visit our roundup of the best gaming headset deals.
How to Avoid Xbox Game Pass Price Hike ($44.99 for 3-Months of Ultimate)
By securing 3-months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for $44.99, you can actually avoid the Game Pass price hike. We recommend securing your current subscription for as long as possible. You can stack up to a maximum of 36 months of Game Pass, meaning you have the option to accumulate 3-month subscriptions up to 12 times.
Admittedly, this approach might put a strain on your wallet, totaling $539.88 if you purchase the 3-month package from the link above. However, when you compare it to the new cost of Game Pass Ultimate for 36 months at $16.99 per month, amounting to $611.64, you’ll realize you’re saving $71.76 on your subscription for the next three years. Otherwise, secure your membership for at least a year to lock in at least some savings overall.
In general, it is advisable to keep an eye out for sales and restocks throughout the year, as availability has improved since the initial launch of the console. Unlike the Nintendo Switch, there is no specific recommendation to wait for a sale regardless of the time of year. Instead, it’s a good idea to monitor various retailers and online platforms for restock announcements and promotional offers.
However, certain events like Black Friday or other holiday seasons may bring about unique bundles, discounts, or promotional deals specifically for the Xbox Series X. These bundles may include additional games, accessories, or exclusive limited editions. While quantities for such promotions might be limited, they can provide an opportunity to get more value for your purchase. See our guide to Xbox Series X prices for more info.
Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S?
Choosing between the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S ultimately depends on your gaming preferences, budget, and specific requirements. Let’s compare the two consoles to help you make an informed decision:
1. Performance: The Xbox Series X is the more powerful option, offering native 4K gaming, higher graphical fidelity, and faster loading times. It has more advanced hardware, including a larger storage capacity. On the other hand, the Xbox Series S targets a lower price point and offers a less powerful performance, targeting 1440p resolution gaming and upscaling to 4K.
2. Price: The Xbox Series S is more affordable compared to the Xbox Series X. If budget is a significant factor for you, the Xbox Series S provides a cost-effective option while still delivering a next-generation gaming experience. For example, the Series S can play Starfield at 1440p 30fps (vs 4K 30fps on Series X).
3. Storage: The Xbox Series X comes with a larger internal storage capacity, allowing you to store more games directly on the console. The Xbox Series S, however, has a smaller storage capacity, which means you may need to manage your game library more actively or rely on external storage solutions.
4. Disc Drive: The Xbox Series X includes a disc drive, enabling you to play physical game discs and enjoy a wider range of media options, including Blu-ray and DVD playback. The Xbox Series S, in contrast, is a digital-only console, meaning you can only play games downloaded from the digital store.
5. Graphics and Performance: While both consoles support ray tracing, the Xbox Series X provides a more immersive and visually impressive experience due to its superior hardware capabilities. If you prioritize cutting-edge graphics and want the best performance available, the Xbox Series X is the preferable choice.
Consider your gaming preferences, budget, and whether you prioritize top-of-the-line performance or cost-effectiveness. If you have a 4K TV, want the most powerful console, and are willing to invest more, the Xbox Series X is the recommended option. If you have a lower budget, a 1080p or 1440p TV, and don’t mind sacrificing some performance, the Xbox Series S offers excellent value for money.
With how expensive gaming is getting in 2024, we’re trying to save you as much money as possible on the games and other tech you actually want to buy. We’ve got great deal roundups available for all major platforms such as Switch and Xbox, and keep these updated daily with brand new offers. If you’re trying to keep costs down while maintaining your favorite hobby, stay tuned for more incredible discounts.
Robert Anderson is a deals expert and Commerce Editor for IGN. You can follow him @robertliam21 on Twitter.
One of my favourite ‘jokes’to do is parody Raymond Chandler, i.e. I shout “She had legs all the way up to her thighs!” and then laugh at myself. Chandlers’s trademark “blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window” kind of zingers are very hard to do well, so it’s better to say you’re doing Philip Marlow badly on purpose. The trailer for Nobody Wants To Die seems like it’s self-seriousness is actually self-awareness. I mean, I kind of refuse to believe that hard-boiled future crime detective James Karra saying “I’m in the business of secrets… But it’s more of an addiction… And I like ’em straight… No chaser…” while sipping from a glass of amber liquor isn’t indulging in some amount of winking and nudging.
If you want to add more replay value to the Resident Evil 2 remake then a mod that shifts the perspective from third-person to the traditional fixed camera might do the trick.
Roughly five years after the Resident Evil 2 Remake was released, a modder has finally added fixed camera angles to the PC version.
NexusMods user alphaZomega’s RE2R Classic mod allows players to shift to fixed camera angles, bringing back the original perspective from the 1998 survival horror classic. The mod’s listing page notes that “over 1,700 fixed cameras are all fully placed” and users who install it can complete the game from start to finish in this perspective.
As you can see from the screenshots above, the mod greatly changes the mood of the Resident Evil 2 remake, with the restriction making it more tense by adding blind spots for enemies.
Fans have debated the use of fixed camera angles since Capcom moved away from them in the original Resident Evil 4 released in 2005, instead favoring third and then first person cameras. While official support for the perspective is gone, mods like the RE2R Classic offer players the best of both worlds.
In the case of Resident Evil 4 Remake, Capcom announced it has sold seven million copies since its launch in 2024 on PC, PlayStation, Xbox Series X/S, and Apple devices.
Image Credit: alphaZomega/NexusMods
Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.
For whatever its name is worth, Mario Tennis doesn’t feature a lot of the red guy — at least at first. That may come as an initial disappointment to some who were drawn to the M-word. Now, if you came for the ‘tennis’ part, well, that’s a whole different story.
Palworld developers Pocketpair have announced a new Palworld Testing program that asks players of the wildly popular monster-catching survival game to help test future updates and provide feedback on the game, ahead of new content drops being released to the general public. Players can sign-up via a Google Form now if they wish, though Pocketpair stress that “the testing branch is not intended for free play or experiencing new content early, so we hope that only those of you genuinely interested in bug hunting and testing will apply.” And presumably, those genuinely interested in also not being paid for their free QA support.
With Resident Evil 4’s release last year, Capcom’s project to remake the glory years of its survival horror series is complete. But, as the game’s post-credits scene suggests, the remakes aren’t over. And so the big question is: where next? The obvious answer is a remake of Resident Evil 5. But on the game’s 15th anniversary, it’s clear that moving forward chronologically will take Capcom’s remakes into the series’ weakest era – an era of gameplay and narrative decisions best left in the past. Resident Evil 5 simply can’t be remade, at least not to the standards of Capcom’s best work. And so the answer is not to remake, but to rewrite.
Resident Evil is a survival horror series, not that you’d know that playing Resident Evil 5. Sure, it features a constant flow of horrific imagery, but RE 5 is an action game through-and-through. That’s evident in its cover-shooter mechanics, vehicle chases with on-rails turret sequences, and the constant rattle of assault rifles. Even its visual design evokes the sandy shades of modern military games that experienced mass popularity in the late 2000s. It all speaks to a series that had lost its way. Rather than reflect on the tenets that were the foundation of its existence, Resident Evil 5 looked to the contemporary gaming zeitgeist in an attempt to find a new lease of life. The result is an unholy hybrid of Resident Evil, Gears of War, and Call of Duty. It’s as ugly and unwieldy as it sounds.
This design appears to be not just a misguided attempt to follow Western successes, but also a misreading of its predecessor. With Resident Evil 4, director Shinji Mikami deftly reinvented the series through the use of a new over-the-shoulder camera angle. The perspective allowed for a more kinetic, action-heavy game. Despite this, Mikami never lost sight of the terror at the core of Resident Evil. Through use of enemies that were strategically placed to provide undulating waves of tension and fear, and the inclusion of Ashley as your vulnerable charge, combat encounters were focussed on surviving overwhelming horrors rather than dominating foes.
Resident Evil 5, meanwhile, presents its enemies as waves to be gunned down with increasingly powerful weaponry. Their purpose is cannon fodder; a wall of meat to slow your progress through levels. And those levels are not locations to be explored; instead they are largely funnels that push you from entrance to exit. Resident Evil 4 may have replaced the series’ traditional continuous structure with discrete levels in an attempt to move away from the backtracking-heavy design of previous games, but it preserved the spirit of locations like the Raccoon City Police Station. The village, Salazar’s castle, and the island feature interlocking, explorable pathways that solidify these locations as authentic spaces rather than obstacle courses. Resident Evil 5 has no interest in this, with the majority of its stages being little more than corridors peppered with dead-ends to hide treasures in. Their lack of authenticity means no one will ever mention the Kijuju Autonomous Zone in the same breath as the Spencer Mansion.
A faithful remake of Resident Evil 5 would break Capcom’s seven-year streak of brilliant survival horror.
All this is to say that a faithful remake of Resident Evil 5 would break Capcom’s seven-year streak of brilliant survival horror games. It’s telling that the series’ reset point, Resident Evil 7, was a reinvention of the very first game; a ‘haunted house’ that grew ever larger as you unlocked new rooms by solving its puzzles. Clever reinventions of this base conceit is the key to Resident Evil’s success – be that dropping an unstoppable force into the house’s corridors (Resident Evil 2’s Mr. X) or expanding the scope of the house (Resident Evil: Village’s titular location is effectively a giant manor – its corridors are streets and its rooms are houses). Resident Evil 5’s stage-driven structure is simply inferior to this design. A modern recreation of it would only further highlight its flaws, especially coming in such close proximity to masterclasses like the remake of Resident Evil 2.
Remakes can, of course, completely redefine the structure of their source material. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, for example, is recognisably an updated version of the classic RPG, but its world design and gameplay mechanics are a world apart from the 1997 original. And so you could argue that Resident Evil 5 is actually the Resident Evil most in need of a remake. A whole new environmental structure and scenario design that reigns in the action and dials up the horror would bring it in-line with Capcom’s other remakes. But all of this doesn’t account for Resident Evil 5’s most notorious problem: racism.
Set in a fictional West African country, Resident Evil 5’s primary antagonists are Black people. Yes, technically it’s the Uroboros virus that protagonist Chris Redfield is fighting, but the parasite’s host is depicted as a nation of mobs and primitives who are violent even before their infection. Intentionally or not, Resident Evil 5 positions Africa as the ‘Dark Continent’, an uncivilised world harbouring a diseased population that needs gunning down via Western intervention in the name of global security.
This insensitive treatment of people of colour was hotly debated even as early as Resident Evil 5’s debut trailer, with writers such as N’Gai Croal and Stephen Totilo pointing out the game’s uncomfortable, post-colonial imagery. The arguments and think-pieces continued well into the game’s release window, with IGN’s own former editor-in-chief Hilary Goldstein having also wrestled with the subject. But that was 2009 – a time when race was apparently a debate rather than a reality. In the 2020s, in a post-Black Lives Matter world, there is only one acceptable response to a white man shooting hordes of Africans for an entire video game: no.
Remakes may be able to redefine their source material, but there’s only so many changes you can make until it’s not a remake at all, but an entirely new game. And if you take Africa out of Resident Evil 5, is it Resident Evil 5 anymore? Even with a vastly improved, more sensitive take on the continent – perhaps one with a Black protagonist and more empathetic look at the outbreak – the experience would simply be too divorced from the original to hold the name ‘Resident Evil 5’.
Capcom now has the opportunity to ignore the past and completely reinvent this chunk of the timeline.
So where does Capcom go now? Personally, I’d look backwards – Code: Veronica is an ideal candidate, as is the original Resident Evil. But if the only way is chronologically forward, then a total rewrite of what comes next is the logical path. Because what followed Resident Evil 4 was not one terrible game, but two. Resident Evil 6 doubled down – no, tripled down – on the action-packed, set piece-heavy shooter design, to the extent that much of it could be mistaken for a third-person Call of Duty spin-off were it not for the monsters. Its restrictive level design practically puts you in a chokehold, forcing you to endure a barrage of bombastic moments that have no interest evoking any sense of fear. Resident Evil 6 is a survival horror only in that it’s a horrible game that you have to survive playing. But this time around, it doesn’t have to be like that. Capcom now has the opportunity to ignore the past and completely reinvent this chunk of the timeline.
In Resident Evil 4 remake’s post-credits scene, evil mastermind Albert Wesker details his plans for world domination to Ada Wong. Reflected in his glasses is an image of Excella Gionne and the Stairway of the Sun – two significant plot elements from Resident Evil 5 – which indicates Capcom’s intentions. But there’s more to consider. This scene is largely a replication of a sequence from Assignment: Ada, a non-canon chapter from the original Resident Evil 4. Its shift from unofficial to canon points to a willingness to change. Furthermore, the end of this scene is entirely re-written: when learning of Wesker’s plans, rather than dutifully deliver the stolen Las Plagas sample to him, Ada betrays her shadowy boss and forces her helicopter pilot to turn around. In this moment the future of Resident Evil becomes unclear. Capcom has given itself the freedom to do whatever it wants – I just hope it’s not a remake of Resident Evil 5.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Features Editor.
Stealth games in which you can become “one with the shadows” cover a wide range, though I guess spectrum is the more appropriate word here. You’ve got sober infiltration games like Thief, which metes out gradations of light and dark with the care of somebody calculating their tax expenses, and stylised affairs such as Mark Of The Ninja, in which stepping into shadow desaturates you and sort of makes your character far too fancy for enemies to notice.
There are games such as Splinter Cell, in which hiding in shadows rests on a gentleman’s agreement with NPCs not to perceive the big green torches attached to Sam Fisher’s head. And then you have games like Ereban: Shadow Legacy, which has just been given a release date – 10th April. In this mystical third-person stealth-platformer, your character can literally disintegrate and travel through shadows as a ripple of dark energy – a transformation that puts me in mind less of Thief than of squid-mode in Nintendo’s Splatoon.
A Cyberpunk 2077 player has discovered an Easter egg hidden by CD Projekt Red in the main menu.
While the role-playing game features layers upon layers of open-world exploration with all manner of references hidden throughout, fans were perhaps overlooking this one, which was available from the moment they booted up the game.
Shared by @crushovitz_b on X/Twitter, below, players can discover the Easter egg for themselves by clicking on the version number, which is currently 2.12, in the top right corner. The number flicks between several different symbols and numbers before unfolding into 2.0.77.
“Good find, I started to doubt you chooms will ever find it!” game director Paweł Sasko tweeted in response. “Was hidden way too well.”
It’s unclear when CD Projekt Red added this reference to Cyberpunk 2077, but it wouldn’t be too surprising if it had sneaked in alongside the latest patch. Update 2.11 added an unexplained “munch munch” sound when consuming food in the menus, for example, which turned out to be the result of one developer’s hard fought mission.
This isn’t the only hidden reference to be found in March 2024 either, as one player recently discovered a wild Easter egg that involved finding a random diner, climbing to its roof, and looking through a pair of binoculars at a red bird (akin to CD Projekt Red’s logo) to see a photo of the development team flash across the screen.
The easter eggs keep coming for Cyberpunk 2077, and this one is especially wholesome as it honors the dev team behind CD Projekt Red’s first-person RPG. pic.twitter.com/jj2t4WhLQU
In our 9/10 review of the game, IGN said: “Cyberpunk 2077 throws you into a beautiful, dense cityscape and offers a staggering amount of flexibility in how you choose to take it from there.”
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
There are 137 Pals in Pocketpair’s monster-catching simulator Palworld, which might sound like plenty, but the serial Palworld player is an insatiable creature, always clamouring for new beasties to capture, pet and exploit, even as the developers encourage fans to play other games while they wait for the next Palworld update. If you’ve already bagged all the available Pals and are hungry for more, you might be interested in Palworld mod Breed Unreleased Pals, created by ShameIHaveNoFriends, which grants access to three animals who exist in the game’s files but are not, strictly speaking, available to players.
