YouTube’s ‘Bando do Gato’ has shared three videos showing what a modern-day remake of the classic SNES game Donkey Kong Country could look like. These videos will definitely put a smile on the face of any SNES fan. And since I’m a big fan of the SNES myself, I had to share them with you. … Continue reading This AI Remake of Donkey Kong Country Will Blow You Away→
RuneScape maker Jagex has insisted it will never use generative AI to make content players actually see in-game, in one of the hardest stances on AI yet seen from a video game developer.
In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Jagex SVP of product, James Dobrowski, said that the UK company is “open” to using genAI for development processes, such as “tooling efficiency.” But he promised Jagex will never use genAI to "drive creativity."
"We've got a pretty hard line stance with the team, which is a commitment that no generative AI will ever be present in any asset that a player can touch, hear or feel,” Dobrowski said. “There will be no generative AI in the game that they experience.”
That rules out the likes of AI-generated art, which we have seen in games such as Call of Duty, AI-generated voices, which we have seen in Arc Raiders, and AI-generated text / dialogue, which, again, we have seen pop up in a number of games.
"Where we are open to the use of AI is in things like tooling efficiency,” Dobrowski continued, “how do we make the way we work more efficient in order to make our staff's lives easier and allow us to produce better content. But we do not want to be using AI to drive creativity." Jagex is even speaking with its external partners to make sure no genAI is being used in “inappropriate ways in any of their work that might filter through to the end game."
The use of generative AI in game development is one of the hottest topics in the industry, and it has sparked a number of controversies. Following the reveal of Divinity at the 2025 The Game Awards, Swen Vincke, boss of developer Larian, met with a backlash after he said the studio was using genAI in various capacities. Larian ended up having to address AI concerns in a reddit AMA in which the studio confirmed a U-turn on some aspects of its use.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Last year, IGN broke the news that the wildly popular web series Murder Drones is making the jump to comics, with Oni Press releasing a graphic novel adaptation of the first season. That comic was successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter, but now it's making its way to comic shops as it sees a wider release in 2026.
IGN can now exclusively debut an extended preview of Murder Drones #1. Check it out in the slideshow gallery below:
Murder Drones is a collaboration between Oni and animation studio Glitch Productions. The comic is written by Wyatt Kennedy (Nights, Marvel United) and drawn by Jo Mi-Gyeong (Eve, Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance). The comic serves as an adaptation of the first season of the Murder Drones animated series.
Here's Oni's official description of Murder Drones:
In the far future on the desolate exoplanet designated Copper 9, the humans are long gone but the robotic worker drones they created to mine the planet’s resources are still hard at work. Together, they have managed to forge their own makeshift society . . . or so they thought until a previously unknown kind of robot - the dreaded “Murder Drones” - are activated by a long-forgotten possibly-eldritch protocol to disassemble any worker that deviates from its original programming. But when a rebellious young worker drone named Uzi forms an unlikely alliance with two disassembly drones—Serial Designations N and V—can they, together, uncover the secrets of their origins . . . and survive the deep twisted horrors awaiting them?
Murder Drones #1 will be released on February 11, 2026. You can preorder a copy at your local comic shop.
Developer Hoothanes and publisher 4Divinity have announced The Defiant, an upcoming story-driven, cinematic, single-player World War II-set first-person shooter that sees players take part in China’s War of Resistance against Japan.
Powered by Unreal Engine 5 and created by "a veteran team of filmmakers and game developers," according to its publisher, The Defiant clearly aims to mix things up from the usual WWII FPS fare we've seen a hundred times now. "Missions shift fluidly between stealth infiltration, close-quarters firefights, sniping, urban espionage, code-breaking operations, vehicular combat, and sudden large-scale assaults," 4Defiant said. Check out the first trailer above and the first screenshots in the gallery below.
The Defiant's developers said they're aiming to convey a reverence for history, noting that "weapons in The Defiant are treated as historical artefacts, not just tools" and that the campaign "aims to reframe how the FPS genre approaches history, offering a perspective rarely seen in interactive entertainment." The team added, "The game unfolds across occupied villages, frozen forests, fortified supply routes, and enemy-controlled urban zones, where every environment is shaped by the realities of guerrilla warfare and survival behind enemy lines."
You can wishlist The Defiant on Steam if you're interested.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
Embark Studios’ Arc Raiders and The Finals are suffering from what the studio has described as “extensive, coordinated” Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks.
The attacks were said to be “ongoing” today while the studio battles to mitigate their impact on each game.
Arc Raiders players have been complaining of server issues all morning, with some unable to reconnect to or abandon matches. Some affected players are hoping they will see lost loot return once the issues are fixed. “Was just rubber banding and died because it was of course in front of a shredder, and now stuck on the loading screen while trying to join a new lobby,” said one affected player.
It's unfortunate timing for Arc Raiders in particular, given the DDoS attacks come hot on the heels of Arc Raiders’ Headwinds update, which added a solo vs. squads matchmaking option, a Bird City map condition, and much more.
Meanwhile, Embark said it’s working on a hotfix that will “solve some of the issues and unintended changes” made by the Headwinds update. That should be out later today.
Arc Raiders is one of the biggest games in the world, having sold an incredible 12.4 million copies in just 10 weeks. The enormously popular extraction shooter has seen impressive staying power, too, setting a new concurrent player peak of 960,000 in January 2026. To put Arc Raiders' success into context, the similarly priced Helldivers 2 set a record for the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game of all time by selling 12 million in 12 weeks. Arc Raiders, which launched on Xbox as well as PC and PlayStation, hit the 12 million sales mark even faster. It's done so well so quickly, that it crossed over into the world of South Park with a surprise appearance that was put together in just a few days.
Headwinds is the first of a four-phase roadmap that has content scheduled out through April 2026. Next on the docket is the Shrouded Sky update, which adds a new map condition, Arc threat, player project, map update, Raider Deck, and more sometime in February. Flashpoint will then arrive in March with another map condition and Scrappy update, with Riven Tides rounding things out with a new map and a new large Arc in April.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Well, it turns out that it’s such a small overclock that it barely impacts performance, and even leads to slightly worse multi-core performance over the original 9800X3D. I’ve spent most of the week testing this processor asking myself why AMD felt the need to even release the Ryzen 7 9850X3D. The only answer I can think of is that it costs slightly more and people are going to buy it just to have a higher number in CPU-Z.
Specs and Features
The AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D is practically the same processor as the 9800X3D, only with a slightly higher boost clock. You still get 8 Zen 5 cores, 16 threads and 96MB of L3 Cache, only now it boosts up to 5.6GHz instead of 5.2GHz. That’s a decent boost, but the real magic of the Ryzen 9850X3D is the same magic that makes the 9800X3D great – the 3D-stacked V-Cache.
Cache is essentially memory that’s built into your processor, and it’s a lot faster than system memory, or RAM. Essentially, the more of it is there, the more efficient your CPU is in workloads that demand rapid access to data – like gaming. What makes AMD’s X3D processors, like the 9850X3D, special is that instead of having it on the same physical layer of the chip as the CPU cores, it’s printed on its own layer.
Not only does this allow the Ryzen 7 9850X3D to have more cache than other processors, but it also cuts down on the latency. Because by having the cache located right above the CPU cores, the data simply has less physical distance to travel. This is why the 9850X3D is a great gaming processor, because it can load more game data at any given time, which leads to better performance, especially when paired with a powerful graphics card.
There’s only one problem, though. The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D already exists with the same exact cache configuration and core layout. So unless you’re playing a game that solely relies on single-core performance – which is becoming rare – you don’t really gain anything by shelling out an extra $30 for the Ryzen 7 9850X3D.
Of course, there is the higher boost clock, but it’s important to keep in mind that the processor will only ever hit those speeds in lightly threaded workloads. In anything that uses many cores at the same time, the clock speeds will even out to a much lower limit in order to control temperatures and power consumption.
Throughout my testing, I found that the Ryzen 7 9850X3D reaches the same peak power of 161W as the 9800X3D. That does mean that temperatures stay under control, only peaking at 85°C, but it also means that when all the cores are being used, there isn’t much that the processor can do to get extra performance over the 9800X3D.
It is important to keep in mind, though, that because the 9850X3D comes out of the box with a higher clock speed, while keeping the same power consumption and temperatures as the original chip, it likely means it has more headroom for overclocking. That’s not something I test here at IGN, but if that’s something you’re into, this might be the chip to grab.
Performance
Because the Ryzen 7 9850X3D and 9800X3D are so similar, I was expecting the performance difference between the two chips to be small, but I was still surprised by how little that 400MHz boost clock increase matters. Throughout most of my test suite, the two processors were extremely close, trading blows depending on how heavily threaded the workload is.
The most disappointing bit, though, is that despite the higher asking price, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D turns out to be a little slower than the 9800X3D in multi-threaded workloads like Cinebench and Blender. It’s not a huge gap, to be sure, but it’s a gap that, if anything, should be the other way around.
Specifically, in the Cinebench R23 multi-core test, the 9850X3D gets 22,404 points, compared to 23,195 points from the Ryzen 9800X3D. That’s about a 3% lead for the slightly cheaper processor. This is flipped, however, in the single-core test, where the 9850X3D outperforms the 9800X3D with a score of 2208 to 2082. That’s where that single-core boost increase shows itself.
Likewise, in the 3DMark CPU Profile test, the 9850X3D gets a multi-core score of 10186, compared to 10274 from the 9800X3D. That’s another tiny gap in favor of the 9800X3D. But, again, just like Cinebench, the 9850X3D pulls ahead slightly in the single-core test, with 1265 points to the 9800X3D’s 1210.
Blender repeats the multi-core performance pattern. In the Monster workload, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is able to manage 153 samples per second, compared to 157 from the 9800X3D. That’s a difference so small that it’s within the margin of error, to be fair, but it still leans in the wrong direction for a CPU that AMD is charging more for.
In Adobe, the 9850X3D beats the 9800X3D in Premiere, getting 13773 points in the Puget benchmark, compared to 13025. However, that’s reversed in Photoshop, with the older 9800X3D getting 12929 points, compared to 12167 points from the 9850X3D.
When it comes to real-world gaming, the 9850X3D disappoints again. In Cyberpunk 2077, at 1080p, with the Ultra preset, with no ray tracing or upscaling, the 9850X3D gets 229 fps, compared to 231 from the 9800X3D. Again, that’s within the margin of error but leaning in the wrong direction.
Total War: Warhammer 3 is no different. In this CPU-heavy game, the 9850X3D squeezes 261 fps out of the RTX 4090, compared to 265 fps with the 9800X3D. Another win for the cheaper chip.
I’ve been racking my brain trying to make sense of this performance. I re-ran the tests across the 9800X3D and 9850X3D multiple times, and each time got the same results. There are likely games out there where the 9850X3D does pull ahead of the 9800X3D, particularly in older single-threaded games. But in the games I’ve tested here, the 9850X3D consistently fell short – however small that gap might be.
Even according to AMD’s claims, which you should take with a grain of salt, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is only expected to boost performance by as much as 6% in some esports games. And, then we’re probably talking about the difference between 300 fps and 318 fps in something like Counter-Strike 2. I don’t think that’s worth the extra $30.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
Shelter will be released in theaters on January 30.
"No man is an island, entire of itself," John Donne once wrote, "every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." That's certainly the thematic core and literal setup for Shelter, Jason Statham's latest actioner. We know the drill by now: stoic killer, trying to live out his life in peace, but forced to dust off his knuckles and roundhouse kicks when a covert conspiracy knocks on his door.
This time he's playing Michael Mason, a former elite assassin for the British government who’s hiding out on a gloomy island in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland with his dog sidekick, playing chess against himself and pencil drawing to pass the time. There's a lot of staring out at the sea and into space, as well as one-sided conversations with his mutt to hammer home his self-inflicted isolation.
That is, until he's forced to save precocious orphan Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), who's been delivering food to Mason by way of her uncle's trawler. On her way back to shore, her uncle's boat gets caught in a storm, leading to quite a preposterous "save the cat" scenario when he urges Jessie to return in a rowboat against 10-foot waves – seriously bad caregiving, unc! But there is some joy in seeing the former competitive diver battle the sea in a knitted jumper.
With Jessie injured and in need of medical supplies, Mason must re-enter society, where the plot unfolds, and a venerated cast of British actors enters the frame. It shows just how much affection there is for Jason Statham back home that Bill Nighy, Naomi Ackie and Harriet Walters all signed on to this film. Their presence as former MI6 chief Steven Manafort, his replacement Roberta Frost, and Prime Minister Fordham, respectively, does bring some gravitas to his typically low-brow proceedings.
Fordham and Manafort represent the murky machinations of the establishment. The Prime Minister is in hot water over an unethical surveillance system called T.H.E.A., the exact computer program that captures Mason's image and launches a shoot-to-kill operation against him. Manafort wants Mason dead for so-called treacherous desertion, keen-eyed Roberta wants answers, but as much as Ackie, Nighy and Walters can imbue their characters with cool charisma, the hackneyed dialogue fails to meet them at their level.
There lies my main grievance with Shelter. Ward Parry's screenplay might offer a serviceable story in the shadowy spy-thriller genre, but it lacks finesse or depth, instead serving up clichés at every corner. Lines like "Mason isn’t just an assassin, he’s a precision instrument," and "you don't want this life" function as stock dialogue in a script divorced from subtext. Everything is just too on-the-nose, especially when it comes to Mason.
Shelter is a serviceable story in the shadowy spy-thriller genre, but it lacks finesse or depth, instead serving up clichés at every corner.
There are moments where Statham reminds us he is more than just an action star, but also a penetrating, emphatic actor. Behind his eyes, he conveys the anger, the menace and growing affection he has for his young ward as they fight their way from Scotland to London. He and an enterprising Breathnach, who was recently seen in Chloe Zhao's Hamnet, share a believable chemistry. Her sparky gumption against his rugged fatalism hints at Léon's Natalie Portman and Jean Reno.
But Léon this ain't, as the movie struggles to bolster Jessie's motivations as to why she'd want to hitch her wagon to Mason's murderous star. And instead of trusting in Statham's silent ability to communicate that internal struggle, of a man let down by his country and brought back to life by a traumatised girl, both are given banal sentences to utter that flatten the emotional core.
Where Shelter does succeed is in the creatively brutal fight sequences laced through Mason and Jessie's journey. Angel Has Fallen director Ric Roman Waugh offers bruising stakes, beginning with an island invasion evoking the ingenious spirit of Home Alone – think boulders and flame throwers – and ending with a claustrophobic nightclub bust-up.
In between, Statham faces off against Manafort's asset Workman (Bryan Vigier), a no-nonsense assassin who, one character quips, is "Mason 20 years ago." Their hand-to-hand combat is punishing, packed with so much brute force and rigor you might worry our hero won't make it out alive. These sequences do rely a little too much on tightly framed close-ups and repetitive moves, but props to the sound department as well as David Buckley's thumping score, both of which maintain that intensity with every kick, punch, stab and shot amplified to formidable levels.
Shelter is certainly a safe action vehicle for Statham, but it could have benefited from more narrative risks.
If you like mandatory co-op games, this one's for you: introducing WheelMates, a new two-player co-op action-adventure where each player controls an R/C car in the house of an eccentric scientist, working together in order to clear challenges and obstacles. It's in development for Steam for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, and it's due out this year.
This is no sim, though. You'll have power-ups like jump boosters, magnet wheels, and grappling hooks in order to help you navigate the house and try to find the scientist homeowner, who's missing. Play in split-screen or online, but you'll need two players. Check out the announcement trailer above and the first screenshots in the gallery below.
The developers at FireVolt cite Re-Volt and classic metroidvanias as inspirations for WheelMates. You'll be able to try it out soon, FireVolt said it's planning a playtest for next month. Wishlist it on Steam if you're interested.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our semi-retired interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
DC Universe chief James Gunn is once again having fun on social media with a cryptic tweet referencing Martian Manhunter.
The tweet, below, includes a picture of a pack of Chocos, DC’s take on Oreos. Fans of DC comics know that Martian Manhunter, one of the seven original members of the Justice League of America and one of the most powerful beings in the DC Universe, is addicted to Chocos, which makes this tweet a thinly veiled reference to the much-loved superhero.
Wait a second, are those the cookies that Martian Manhunter loves? Are we getting The Martian Manhunter in Man of Tomorrow????😃 pic.twitter.com/ASYVORZpWe
The suggestion here is that Martian Manhunter will appear in an upcoming DCU movie or TV show. This year’s Supergirl doesn’t feel like the perfect fit. Could next year’s Man of Tomorrow be the right place for the character’s debut?
By the way, the pictures in Gunn’s tweet appear to show the office Ultraman destroys in Superman, so we’re not looking at Man of Tomorrow set photos here. Or maybe the office was rebuilt and repurposed? At this point, it’s anyone’s guess.
— Starlight 💫 (twitch.tv/x0starlight) (@x0Starlight) January 27, 2026
Man of Tomorrow is the 2027 follow-up to Superman, and will see Brainiac, played by Lars Eidinger, enter the fray. Indeed, Superman and bitter rival Lex Luthor look set to put their differences aside (temporarily) to fend Brainiac off. Could Martian Manhunter lend a hand?
In previous interviews, Gunn has teased that Man of Tomorrow is “as much a Lex movie as it is a Superman movie.”
Speaking on Howard Stern’s SiriusXM radio, Gunn confirmed shooting begins in April 2026 ahead of the film’s planned July 9, 2027 release date — just two years after Superman came out.
"It's gonna be out in two years, July 9, 2027, which is a relatively short time between sequels, because we knew immediately where we were going," Gunn said.
"And it is a story about Lex Luthor and Superman having to work together, to a certain degree, against a much, much bigger threat. And it's more complicated than that. It's as much a Lex movie as it is a Superman movie. I relate to the character of Lex Luthor, sadly."
"That's the center of Lex for me," Gunn continued. "Three years ago, before Superman came along, he was considered the greatest guy in the world, even with other metahumans and superheroes in the world. And then in one fell swoop, this guy comes in wearing a silly costume, with dimples, and a charming smile, and a great chin, and he's forgotten."
Photo by CBS via Getty Images.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Connexion
