D&D: World of Warcraft captures the spirit of the MMO and leaves behind the grind
Dungeons & Dragons: World of Warcraft captures the spirit of the MMO and leaves behind the grind
Dungeons & Dragons: World of Warcraft captures the spirit of the MMO and leaves behind the grind
The upcoming D&D interpretation of World of Warcraft sounds great, but don't expect it to work like the MMO does
Dungeons & Dragons: World of Warcraft is D&D's first Universes Beyond expansion and launches on November 17, covering all of Azeroth up to The War Within. It assigns rough level ranges to each zone, folds in major conflicts like Alliance vs. Horde and the Burning Crusade, and uses Chromie Time to explain out-of-order campaigns. Dungeons become non-linear exploration, with Deadmines, Scarlet Monastery, Dire Maul, and Onyxia's Lair among those revealed, alongside gathering and crafting professions and a Renown system that replaces grinding.
The new DF Direct Weekly is live, taking a closer look at Ghost of Yōtei QSSR, impressions on Star Wars Galactic Racer, Gears of War: E-Day PC and much, much more: https://youtu.be/rd4n4fJ6M0c
Wuthering Waves version 3.7 concludes the Xuanfang arc with its main story "梦枢心相由心生," revealing the relationship between the Dream Prefecture Sentinel "心月狐" and "心." Developer Kuro Games spent versions 3.5 through 3.7 building out Xuanfang's two-hundred-year history, and 3.7 adds the Dream Pivot Celestial Net map, a Rover-as-fox sequence, and the final boss "天演溯心." The Chaoyue Festival then brings the story back to everyday life in Xuanfang City.
The Dungeons & Dragons: World of Warcraft collaboration rulebook launches on November 12, and lead designer James Wyatt says it "paraphrases" the MMO within a tabletop framework instead of emulating its mechanics. Azeroth and its expansions up to Midnight are fair game, with dungeons like the Deadmines largely intact and options to sneak around or skip bosses. Iconic encounters including the Lich King, Illidan, and Jaina Proudmoore are included, with Jaina freezing a player and striking them with an ice lance unless they are thawed out.
Reddit user fantasticauthor2736 has built a VR mod that turns Diablo 2 Resurrected's isometric ARPG into a first-person VR game, using the existing D2R-3D mod along with FlatVR and BodyWalk. The mod hasn't been published yet, and it will likely share D2R-3D's restriction of crashing after about a minute because it trips Blizzard's file integrity checker. The UI was also redesigned, with the inventory moved to the belt, health, mana and the toolbar on the left wrist, and the map summoned as an orb held in hand.
Sword Sage: Awakening feels like a breezier kind of Soulslike, and it's not just the adorable tea-serving panda that's got me intrigued
The new arrow-catching they added is excellent
Review: Dune: Awakening (PS5) - What a Time To Be a Duner
GameSpot rounded up new GTA 6 details from the latest issue of Game Informer. The report says the game may start with Jason while Lucia is still in prison, and the two take a job to improve their lives before getting caught, setting off a mystery spanning all of Leonida. Leonida is said to be twice the size of GTA 5 and Rockstar's largest map yet, split into six regions including Vice City, Leonida Quays, Grassrivers, Port Gellhorn, Ambrosia, and Mount Kalaga National Park, plus a rideshare app called RydeMe and more weather detail.
Push Square reviewed Dune: Awakening on PS5, with the author having previously played the PC version at launch. The review highlights the progression systems, base building, and skill trees, while calling some Fremen trials linear and tedious. The console version's biggest addition is a dedicated single-player mode, though characters cannot be carried over from multiplayer, and the author reports fairly stable frame rates on PS5 and PS5 Pro with some DualSense haptic support.
Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen director Kento Kinoshita and producer Naoto Oyama told VGC why the expansion keeps the series' friction while adding quality-of-life improvements. Kinoshita said friction is essential to the Dragon's Dogma experience, but if it becomes frustration the team has gone too far. Oyama said the Eternal Ferrystones give players the choice to fast travel or not. The expansion was decided about six months after launch and drew on player feedback, and the team is still optimizing the Nintendo Switch 2 version.
Sword Sage: Awakening, developed by Sword Panda Games and published by 4Divinity, is a breezier Soulslike action-RPG starring Pei Sanniang, a disciple of the Yuangong Sect who hunts yaoguai from Chinese folklore. Its combat replaces standard rolls with Evade Cyan dodges and Strike Red counters, and broken weapons can be reforged almost instantly. XP comes from quests and defeating yaoguai, automatically converting into merits spent on a skill tree.
Review: Kingdom Hearts Collection I~III (PS5) - Great Value for Newcomers in This (Almost) Complete Package https://www.pushsquare.com/reviews/ps5/kingdom-hearts-collection-iiii
Auroch Digital's FPS Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 launches next week, and principal designer Matt Bone says the level "Vicious Circles" is made of connected rotating ring sections plus a giant slowly spinning cog that players turn to unlock new areas. Set aboard antagonist Vashtorr's ship with a "fleshmetal" art style, the level was a challenge because enemies must navigate moving platforms, the spinning cog is a performance strain, and the art has to work in multiple rotations.
Fuse Games, a Guildford-based studio staffed by developers from Electronic Arts and Criterion Games, is debuting with Star Wars: Galactic Racer. It is a racing game, a genre Lucasfilm Games has barely touched since Star Wars Episode I: Racer in 1999.
Kingdom Hearts Collection I~III brings every series entry from the 2002 PS2 original through Kingdom Hearts III with its Re Mind DLC to PS5, though Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory is missing. The package re-releases Kingdom Hearts 1.5+2.5 HD Remix and Kingdom Hearts 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue with no changes to their six titles, while Kingdom Hearts III now runs at a mostly stable 60fps. It is great value for newcomers, but hard to recommend to longtime fans.
Square Enix has released native Switch 2 versions of Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5+2.5 ReMix, replacing the earlier cloud versions. The collection includes four playable games and runs at 1080p/60 FPS in handheld mode and what appears to be 4K/60 FPS when docked, with no noticeable hitches. The review calls it the unmissable one among the three Kingdom Hearts releases Square Enix put out this week.
Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue on Switch 2 collects Kingdom Hearts 3D, Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth By Sleep – A Fragmentary Passage, and Kingdom Hearts X cutscenes. Kingdom Hearts 3D runs at 1080p handheld, 4K docked and 60 FPS in both modes, while 0.2 only manages an unstable 30 FPS and can be finished in roughly three hours. The review calls the collection solid overall but easily the most skippable entry in the franchise.
After playing Final Fantasy Resonance at Gamescom 2026, a Eurogamer writer calls its turn-based combat excellent and has since put five hours into the free demo. Director Hiroto Furuya and producer Keisuke Nakashima told Kotaku the team experimented with combining Final Fantasy 5's job system and Final Fantasy 6's character traits, then studied the stagger system from the FF7 Remake series and FF16 within a 1990s-inspired framework. The game, built from the ashes of the closed mobile title Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, uses HD-2D pixel art and launches on 22nd October for PC (Steam), PS5, Switch 2, and Xbox Series X/S.
Final Fantasy Resonance feels so good to play because Square Enix 'experimented' with combining the best bits of FF5 and FF6
A review of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt - Remastered on Switch 2 finds the visuals greatly improved over the original Switch version, with fuller foliage, character models, and cutscenes. CD Projekt Red has confirmed a 30-40fps range, which the author verified, though the map and save menus lag about a second and handheld load times are long. The skill tree is now linear with skills upgradable to level 3, and enemy AI and sign effects are better, but combat remains clunky and the new gyro, mouse, and touch controls are optional extras.
Neon Giant's 24-person team is building the open-world immersive sim No Law, and creative director Tor Frick says they opted out of some features early on, such as letting players drive the cars parked on the streets. Port Desire is much smaller than Cyberpunk 2077's Night City, but its tall towers and steep hills create a sense of vertical scale, with no loading screens and interiors that match their exteriors.
Warhammer: Blood Bowl is Blood Bowl 3.5 rather than a whole new game, but it's definitely an upgrade
PC Gamer's Jody Macgregor played the beta and found Warhammer: Blood Bowl feels more like Blood Bowl 3.5 than a whole new game, though it is an upgrade. The new Rumble Mode draws on the tabletop Sevens format, with seven-a-side teams on a smaller pitch, six turns per half instead of eight, doubled reroll costs, and no line of scrimmage. The game also adds the tabletop third-season rules, including anti-stalling penalties, the Secure the Ball action, revised passing rules, and MVP selection limited to six nominated players (four in Rumble Mode). The public playtest opens October 7 on Steam, with full release planned by the end of the year.
EA Sports FC 27 introduces The Grounds, an open-world mode where up to 100 players share three areas linked by a central plaza, including a French cage pitch, Argentine street-football buildings, and British red-brick streets. After playing it on PS5, the author says it feels closer to a fighting-game lobby, with 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3 small-sided matches plus mini-games like dribble contests, a four-player obstacle race, and target shooting, though whether it changes the series remains uncertain. Other changes include setting corner power and placement before switching to a box player, a multi-stage transfer process that can be hijacked, and a UT collection hall that records cards you once owned.
Yystv interviewed Persona 4 Revival producer Kazuhisa Wada and director Daisuke Yajima at Tokyo Game Show, discussing the backlash to the first trailer's sparse content and the team's wish to reveal the game at a higher state of completion. Wada said experience from Persona 3 Reload's first use of Unreal Engine carried over, while P4R moves to Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen and reflections to improve Inaba's weather and rain scenes; Yajima said the All-Out Attack now has every character moving and uses TV and monitor elements tied to the dungeon setting.
GPTRACK50, a new studio formed by members who worked on Devil May Cry and Dragon's Dogma, spoke at TGS about the design of its first game, The Fool Never Dies. The action RPG, built around transformation and rapid growth, removes conventional defense and dodging to push players toward constant offense and combining ten monster forms; producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi and director Eiichiro Sasaki also addressed player feedback about the demo lacking a lock-on feature and said they will take suggestions into further tuning. The game launches on October 21.
Stellar Jockeys' Hugh and Jack Monahan said in an interview that '90s PC classics often taught really special things, but not because the story said violence is bad. The studio recently released its follow-up Brigador Killers into early access, and the brothers discussed the challenges of adding on-foot gameplay and the importance of not trying to please everyone.
Brigador devs want to show and not tell with their game's story https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/brigador-devs-the-90s-pc-classics-often-taught-really-special-things-but-not-because-the-story-said-wow-violence-is-bad/
Star Wars: Galactic Racer, the first release from UK studio Fuse Games, launches October 6 and is available for pre-order on the Xbox Store at £49.99 / $59.99. After a few early hours on Xbox Series X, the writer highlights its fast and furious racing, Burnout 3-style takedowns, a roguelite campaign, top-tier audio and presentation, and a stable 60FPS.
A Switch 2 review of Minecraft Dungeons II finds the sequel swaps episodic progression for open-world exploration and adds depth to combat and traversal, while staying a light ARPG. The main campaign runs about 12-15 hours and supports couch co-op plus mixed co-op that lets online players join a local game. The review reports frame drops in both docked and handheld modes, lower frame rates in cinematics, and bugs including invisible invincible enemies and enemy AI getting stuck in terrain.
At TGS2026, Dinosaur Hunter: Origins was playable as a series reboot developed by Saber Interactive in UE5, using a third-person action-shooter framework with first-person view switching. It adds character growth, a DNA system, three primal forms (cougar, bison, raven), and up to three-player co-op, while keeping classic weapons like the "brain drill gun." A T-Rex boss fight in the demo used missiles and lasers, though how the DNA and skill systems play out in the full game remains to be seen.
Pure Xbox played a roughly 15-minute combat-focused demo of the Fable reboot at Xbox FanFest in London, drawn from one specific mission and covering melee, magic and ranged attacks. The author found the combat weighty with momentum-based combos, praised the magic and called the crossbow the most overpowered weapon so far, while the parry system felt clunky at first glance. The demo ran at a smooth 60FPS, a 60FPS mode is confirmed for Series X at launch, and companion character Humphrey is voiced by Matt King; the game arrives in February 2027.
In Silent Hill: Townfall's Richard section, players must reach the top of a 10-story office building while fending off a new monster called the widow, which hides behind doors and under desks before stabbing and fleeing. After the widows kept interrupting his looting, the author used a shotgun to clear every floor, then noticed the corpses had photos of deceased loved ones stapled to them, realizing he had repeated the cycle of anger and death behind the town's curse. He credits Screen Burn with conveying who Richard was in a short time, calling him clearly evil yet genuinely convinced he was doing right for the town.
Silent Hill: Townfall is the first horror game to make me feel bad for using a shotgun https://www.pcgamer.com/games/horror/silent-hill-townfall-is-the-first-horror-game-to-make-me-feel-bad-for-using-a-shotgun/
The Coalition Studio Creative Director Matt Searcy and Gameplay Design Director Pax Lyle told Pure Xbox how they made the Locust frightening again, from stripping the Wretch's armour to giving it a shriek attack drawn from a Gears 1 cinematic and letting the Seeder flip out of the ground to grab players. Searcy said the project started from scratch on Unreal Engine 5, so chainsaw duels, meat shields, and frag tags did not make it in, though they could return later. E-Day entered premium early access on October 1 and comes to Ultimate and PC Game Pass on October 6 alongside its full release on Xbox Series X|S.
Nivalis Nights is Ion Lands' follow-up to Cloudpunk, reimagining that game's dystopia as a first-person management sim that mashes up Cyberpunk 2077, Stardew Valley, and Dave the Diver. Players inherit a noodle bar in the neon city of Nivalis, expanding the business while fishing, farming, and picking up side quests. It currently suffers from an unstable framerate, odd bugs, and a fiddly UI.