DC Studios has released the debut Supergirl movie trailer, which has big Guardians of the Galaxy vibes and offers a very brief look at Jason Momoa’s Lobo.

The trailer kicks off with a hungover Supergirl, played by House of the Dragon star Milly Alcock, waking up in a messy apartment as Krypto the Superdog — last seen causing havoc in Superman — urinates on a copy of The Daily Planet. Given Krypto is urinating directly on a picture of a heroic-looking Superman on the Planet’s front page, we can infer that Supergirl is a very different movie from the outset, and Supergirl herself is nothing like her cousin.

Next, a rickety spaceship lands on some alien planet to pick Supergirl up. We see Kara Zor-El celebrating her 23rd birthday by getting drunk in some alien bar. There’s a flashback to the destruction of Krypton, which Kara witnessed first hand. Eve Ridley’s Ruthye Marye Knoll — Supergirl’s sidekick — asks what it was like.

Kara ends up on another alien planet, this one packed with goons who seem desperate to kill her. Supergirl fights her way out of trouble alongside Ruthye Marye Knoll. There are shots of more spaceships, a very sad Kara stroking an unusually downbeat Krypto, and a blink and you’ll miss it look at Jason Momoa’s Lobo, cigar lighting up his face in a single shot. There’s very little to go on here, but from what we can see Momoa — who played Aquaman in the Zack Snyder’s DCEU — is perfectly cast as Lobo. We then see Supergirl suit up for more overpowered action, flying into the sky and beating up scores of bad guys.

Look out. #Supergirl lands in theaters June 26. pic.twitter.com/79j5ci6DjD

— James Gunn (@JamesGunn) December 11, 2025

And that’s that. Check out IGN's article, Supergirl: Who's Who in the New DC Movie Trailer, to find out more.

IGN attended a press conference in which DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn, Milly Alcock, and director Craig Gillespie talked enthusiastically about Supergirl, due out June 26, 2026. During the conference, Gunn insisted Supergirl was a completely different move than Superman, before Gillespie confirmed it takes place entirely in space.

“They are so different in tone,” Gillespie said. “And to be able to really lean into it and embrace it… and plus… are we allowed to say this? The whole movie takes place in outer space.”

Gunn added: “The outer space thing's a big part of it because it is a space fantasy.”

Supergirl is heavily inspired by Tom King and Bilquis Evely's comic, Woman of Tomorrow, which features a very different Supergirl than audiences are perhaps accustomed to. In July, Gunn said the DC Universe version of Supergirl is “a total mess.”

As revealed in this summer’s DCU kickstarter Superman, Supergirl got drunk on a planet bathed in the light of a red sun (it’s impossible for Superman or any Kryptonian to get drunk on Earth due to the empowering effects of our yellow sun). But beyond this, clearly Supergirl is suffering from mental health issues that are driving her to drink, the result of a very different upbringing compared to her cousin’s.

“I mean, I think as we learn, she's had a completely different background from Superman,” Gunn continued. “A much more difficult background. He's had this wonderful upbringing by these two parents that loved him and were very healthy. And her background was much different than that. And she's ended up different than her cousin.”

“In our story, we have Superman who was sent to Earth and raised by incredibly loving parents,” Gunn has explained. “Kara was on Krypton. She was on a piece of Krypton that drifted away from the planet and she lived there for the first 14 years of her life in a horrible situation where she watched everyone around her die. So, she’s a much harsher and more f***ed up Supergirl than you’ve been used to thus far.”

Recently, Gunn has called Supergirl a “space fantasy” — and said it will have a different tone than Superman. It’s more like Gunn’s own Guardians of the Galaxy, he’s said. For more, check out IGN’s article, Superman Introduces the Girl of Steel: Here's Why This Version of Supergirl Is So Different.

Supergirl also promises to continue the House of El subplot from Superman as she celebrates her 21st birthday by traveling across the galaxy with her dog, Krypto (last seen being a very bad boy in Superman). We know Lobo is in the movie, played by Jason Momoa, but not much else.

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.

James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DCU may currently only have one live-action movie under its belt, but that’ll change in 2026. Next up is director Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl, as Milly Alcock’s Girl of Steel breaks out on her own. And breaks a lot of other stuff for good measure.

Supergirl is interesting in that, unlike Superman or the upcoming Clayface, it’s directly based on a specific DC Comics storyline. How does the new movie adapt Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and who are all these new characters? Here’s what you need to know about the next live-action DC epic and all the characters in the new Supergirl trailer.

Look out. #Supergirl lands in theaters June 26. pic.twitter.com/79j5ci6DjD

— James Gunn (@JamesGunn) December 11, 2025

Milly Alcock’s Supergirl

Unsurprisingly, most of the spotlight in this teaser trailer is directed at Alcock’s Supergirl. There have been a lot of different versions of Supergirl in the comics, not all of which have been depicted as Superman’s cousin from Krypton.

But here, Alcock is playing a fairly traditional version of the character. This is Kara Zor-El. Like her cousin, she’s a survivor of Krypton’s destruction, though she’s clearly taking the loss of her world a lot harder than Kal-El. It doesn’t help that Kara actually has memories of life on Krypton and didn’t arrive on Earth until she was a teenager. Losing your family and your entire homeworld can weigh a person down, even when they have super-strength.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Supergirl appear in live-action. She was played by Helen Slater in 1984’s Supergirl movie, as well as by Laura Vandervoort in Smallville and Melissa Benoist in The CW’s Supergirl series. But in terms of personality, this is a very different take on the character from any of those versions. This Supergirl is hardly the clean-cut, all-American hero and the spitting image of her cousin. She’s a hard-drinking, hard-partying 23-year-old with a lot of emotional baggage.

That’s just one way in which the Supergirl movie is drawing directly from the Woman of Tomorrow comic. Written by Tom King and illustrated by Bilquis Evely, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is notable for delivering a much darker and moodier take on the Girl of Steel than fans were used to. It depicts Kara as a depressed loner tired of living in her cousin’s shadow and still mourning the loss of her home.

As in the comic, it appears the film opens with Supergirl travelling to an alien world to get plastered and let off some steam. She pretty much has to head into space to get drunk, as Earth’s yellow sun causes her body to process alcohol as quickly as she can guzzle it down. But no sooner does Kara find a good watering hole than she’s drawn - very much against her will - into a larger battle. That’s where our next character comes in.

Eve Ridley’s Ruthye Marye Knoll

Like the comic, the movie pairs Supergirl with a character named Ruthye Marye Knoll (played by 3 Body Problem’s Eve Ridley), a resident of the remote alien world where Supergirl has come to drink. Despite her young age and small stature, Ruthye is on a single-minded mission of vengeance. Her father, a humble farmer, was murdered by a man named Krem of the Yellow Hills (more on him in a minute). Krem stabbed Ruthye’s father and left the blade behind, despite the fact that it’s a very fine and valuable weapon. That’s the sword Ruthye now carries, with the hope that she can return it to sender in the bloodiest way possible.

Early in the comic, Ruthye approaches Kara in the hope of hiring her as a mercenary. Despite her protestations, it’s not long before Kara finds herself drawn into Ruthye’s revenge quest. Deep down, Kara sees something of herself in young Ruthye, a girl who lost her metaphorical world as surely as Kara lost her literal one.

If all of this is starting to seem a little familiar, that’s because Woman of Tomorrow shares a lot in common with Charles Portis’ 1968 novel-turned-films True Grit. Ruthye is basically the character Mattie - a young girl whom no one takes seriously but is nonetheless determined to avenge her slain father. That, of course, makes Supergirl herself into the Rooster Cogburn character - representative of the law who reluctantly escorts her young charge on a foolhardy mission.

Basically, Woman of Tomorrow is as much a Western as it is a superhero tale, with a lot of the trappings fans of the genre have come to expect. Gunn has made a big deal out of the fact that every DCU film is stylistically unique, and this looks to be one element that will set Supergirl apart from Superman.

Matthias Schoenaerts’ Krem of the Yellow Hills

Several shots in the trailer showcase the main villain of the film, Krem of the Yellow Hills (who’s played by The Old Guard 2’s Matthias Schoenaerts). In the comic, Krem is introduced as a Kingsagent who seeks shelter with Ruthye’s family for the night, only to clash with her father and murder him. The comic then follows Kara and Ruthye as they pursue Krem across the galaxy. He’s nothing if not a wily and persistent foe.

As the trailer shows, Krem has a full band of rascals and criminals helping to back him up, giving Kara plenty of cannon fodder to fight off in the film. If a bunch of gun-toting goons doesn’t seem like much of a match for a Kryptonian, well, don’t necessarily expect Kara to be operating at full strength in the film. As mentioned, she travels to this remote world specifically to get away from Earth’s yellow sun and enable herself to get drunk. The catch is that this leaves her in a relatively weakened state. Her strength and invulnerability aren’t all there, adding an extra element of danger to this revenge quest.

This means fans shouldn’t expect a DC film on the same scope as Gunn’s Superman. Kara probably won’t be juggling buildings and lifting giant kaiju in this film. She’ll be operating as a leaner, meaner sort of heroine. Gunn and Gillespie have made no secret of the fact that Supergirl is a smaller, more low-budget film than Superman, even though little of it seems to be taking place on Earth.

Jason Momoa’s Lobo

As much as Supergirl is a direct adaptation of the Woman of Tomorrow comic, this isn’t a 1:1 recreation of that story. Nowhere is that more apparent than with the news that Jason Momoa has been cast as Lobo. Lobo is nowhere to be found in the comic, but he’s making his DCU debut in the film.

For those not familiar with Lobo, aka the Main Man, aka Master Frag, aka the Scourge of the Cosmos, he’s pretty much the closest thing DC has to a Wolverine character. He’s got a similarly bad attitude and anti-heroic slant. He’s a bounty hunter who travels the cosmos on his hovering motorcycle. He has little patience for anyone apart from his pet dog Dawg and the space dolphins he loves so much.

With this role, Momoa becomes the first major DCEU veteran to be recast as a new character for the DCU. It’s not at all surprising that he would be tapped for Lobo, though. Apart from the skin tone, he’s basically a dead ringer for Lobo already, and many would argue this is the DC role he should have been playing from the start.

We only see Lobo in one shot in the teaser, unfortunately, so there’s little indication of how exactly he’ll be worked into the plot. We could see him being hired by Krem to stop Supergirl and Ruthye. Lobo is strong enough to take on Kryptonians at full strength, much less the weakened state Kara will find herself in here.

But by the end, we assume the two will put aside their differences. Lobo’s not such a bad guy deep down. Well, not really. Lobo and Kara even have some important qualities in common. They both love their respective dogs, for one thing. And Lobo also knows what it’s like to be the last surviving member of his species. Never mind the fact that he’s only the last Czarnian because he killed all the others.

We also suspect Lobo is being added to this story to counteract any accusations of Supergirl being a film geared toward women specifically. He’ll certainly up the testosterone factor by several degrees. And going back to the True Grit comparison, Gillespie and writer Ana Nogueira may have wanted a second character helping Ruthye on her quest, echoing the fraught dynamic between Rooster Cogburn and La Boeuf.

Supergirl’s Parents

Of the currently confirmed cast of Supergirl, the only two major characters we don’t see in the trailer are Kara’s parents, Zor-El (David Krumholtz) and Alura In-Ze (Emily Beecham). We do see a brief shot of Krypton, though, where it looks like Kara’s home city of Kandor is being bottled up by Brainiac. That probably means we’re getting a flashback to Kara’s origin story at some point in the film.

It’ll be interesting to see exactly how Zor-El and Alura are portrayed here. Superman certainly turned heads with its unconventional depiction of Kal-El’s birth parents. There, we learned they sent their baby to Earth not to be the planet’s greatest defender, but to conquer humanity and start a harem to rebuild the Kryptonian people. Are Kara’s parents cut from that same cloth? Does that influence her more cynical worldview?

Krypto Returns and Kandor Shrinks - How Supergirl Ties Back to Gunn’s Superman

Speaking of Kandor, the shot of Kara’s home raises the question of just how much this new movie will tie back to Superman and its upcoming sequel, 2027’s Man of Tomorrow. News recently broke that Brainiac is the main villain of Man of Tomorrow, a threat so overwhelming that he forces David Corenswet’s Superman and Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor to join together. Supergirl now looks as though it may lay the groundwork for Brainiac’s DCU debut, revealing how the villainous mastermind shrunk the city of Kandor and bottled it up. Heck, he may even turn out to be the one who destroyed Krypton in the first place.

At the very least, the opening scene in the trailer makes it clear that fans are in for more of Kara’s faithful pooch Krypto. Krypto has quickly become the Baby Yoda of the DCU, and we’re not at all surprised to see this spinoff milking the current Krypto craze. But will he appear as prominently as he did in Superman? That remains to be seen.

There’s also the question of whether any other familiar faces from Superman will show up. What about Supes himself? It seems only fitting to follow up Alcock’s surprise cameo in Superman with another reunion of the cousins in Supergirl. But as before, don’t expect DC to spoil that appearance ahead of time.

Ultimately, as much as Gunn has billed Supergirl as a standalone movie with its own agenda, we are expecting it to link back to the Superman movies in a fairly significant way. Supergirl could easily wind up being an important prelude to Man of Tomorrow, especially if Kara herself is meant to play a supporting role. There’s probably a good reason introducing Supergirl has been one of Gunn’s first priorities in the DCU.

What do you think of the first Supergirl teaser? Are you stoked for the next DCU adventure? Let us know in the comments below.

For more on the future of the DCU, find out why Brainiac is the perfect villain for Man of Tomorrow, and brush up on every DC movie and series in development.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.

As part of our ongoing month-long exclusive coverage of High on Life 2, the upcoming first-person shooter, I sat down with Squanch Games Chief Creative Officer Mikey Spano and Chief Design Officer Erich Meyr to discuss the art of making a comedy game sequel. Is it any easier to pull off than the comedy movie sequel, which doesn't have a great overall track record. All that and more are covered in the interview you can watch in the video above or read in the transcript below.

High on Life 2 will be released on February 13, 2026 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S – including launching on day one into Xbox Game Pass.

IGN: I've got a hundred questions here, not literally 100, but there's a lot I want to ask you guys. And I thought I'd kind of start here. And that is, I don't know if you'd agree, but in my opinion, comedy sequels, at least in the movie side of entertainment, don't have an awesome track record, so how do you approach doing a comedy game sequel to avoid some of the same pitfalls that comedy movie sequels seem to fall into?

Eric Meyer: I feel like a lot of movie sequels in general aren't better than the first, right? But game sequels are usually like a refined version of the first game. And yeah, we definitely took a lot of great ideas that we couldn't do in the first game and put them in this one, so hopefully we'll overcome that.

Mikey Spano: Yeah, with the first one, I don't think we really knew what it was until it was in the hands of reviewers and we were like, "Oh, this actually turned out pretty cool." We were just so heads down on it, it was a new IP for us. So I think for this one, we had a good place to start, so we're really hoping that it's a plus up of the original. I mean, there's definitely more jank in the original than this one, which is a lot of fun and keeps things funny, but I think we'll still have plenty of just fun, weird, unexpected stuff, so I'm hoping people like it just as much as the first, if not more.

IGN: Mikey, can you speak a little more to that? Because I've never made a game, I don't have the talent or skills for that, but I've talked to a million developers, reviewed, covered a million games. And I've heard that a lot where games are such a unique art form where often, they don't really come together until the very end and then suddenly you've got a game. So can you kind of talk me through not the development of the first game, but more kind of the very end that you're referencing there when it does come together, and then when it comes out and you start getting feedback from players and from reviewers? Did anything hit differently with players in the public than you thought it would, or did things surprise you versus what you'd intended or planned?

Mikey Spano: Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's a lot of angles we can look at for High On Life in particular. We're pretty open with our team about letting them put in stuff that they're interested in. And then usually they'll just reach out and say, "Hey, is this cool or does this work?" But towards the end, we have people we trust a lot that just can go in and do stuff if they want. So from a perspective of even just the dev that was working on directing the game, we saw stuff, or at least I can say I saw stuff that I didn't even know was in the game, and I am in there.

I saw things in some streams where I'm like, "Where did that even come from? Oh my God, that's awesome." That kind of stuff was really surprising and fun and that was intentional on our part. And then there's just a bunch of stuff that kind of breaks in funny ways or things that somebody approaches it a different way than I would've approached it or someone here would've approached it. And so you get this sort of emergent comedy that's based on the players' actions and not necessarily what we intended the players' actions to be.

Eric Meyer: Yeah, in the first game, there was a bug where people were getting stuck in Applebee's and that became an internet joke for a while. And we're like, "Sure, we'll own it. Yeah, you get stuck in Applebee's forever."

Mikey Spano: Yeah, the other thing we struggle with is, we call it dev eyes, where it's like you've just been looking at the game for so long. All the jokes you've heard a thousand times, they might've been funny the first time. And so you never really know at the end, what's going to land with people because for you, you're so numb to this stuff. So you sort of give it to a friend to play or we'll get some people in and we'll watch them play and evaluate, "Oh, that's surprising, this was their favorite part." And it's something we've seen so much, we weren't even thinking about it.

Eric Meyer: Yeah. That happened with us with our demo, where we put in so many good jokes throughout it. And then the thing that resonated the most was taking Sheath and turning him into a gun and that whole bit, the whole joke of that bit. And I don't think any of us expected that to be the biggest hit. We were like, "Oh no, it's going to be this part or this part." But I mean, the internet doesn't lie, right? That was the part people watched the most.

IGN: What ultimately then, were the lessons that you took out of the first game when you're talking about kind of more hitting the ground running here with High On Life 2? What are those lessons that you took from the first one that are helping this one?

Eric Meyer: I mean, we definitely knew the formula we wanted to do. We knew how a lot of jokes worked. We knew how we did an interactive gameplay with them, and we could take that and be like, "Let's do that kind of thing here, that kind of thing here," or, "Let's one up that one." So it gave us a really good platform to stand on as far as figuring out what all of our different moments would be, what our jokes would be, so that was really great. That helped us tremendously at the beginning.

And then also just, there was a whole can of worms around how do you handle having all these different guns and each one can be out and each one can have its own little comedy layer to a mission? And so we learned a lot of lessons from that and we're able to just like every mission now, we're like, "Yeah, we can focus on this gun here and we can do this here." It really helped us understand how to just build our game.

Mikey Spano: Yeah, for sure. We had the foundation. I mean, in the first game, we kind of take for granted that we were figuring out the gameplay, too. It's a first person shooter, but outside of knowing that it was a first person shooter, we had to figure out everything from the ground up, which is a lot harder than you would think. Starting with that foundation helped us game play-wise to really focus on the things that were working, try not to change those too much. And then the things that weren't working, building on them, and then also just bringing in some new stuff that we wouldn't have been able to bring into the first game because we were just figuring out the basics.

And that goes across comedy, too. I mean, we are always trying jokes that don't land. We're trying ways to tell the jokes that don't always work. And we end up with the best, but a lot of that stuff didn't work for one reason or another. And so we have that stuff left over for the next game that we can try again. And we're never really starting from zero per se, with this sequel. I mean, conceptually, there's a lot of stuff that's from zero, but in terms of our systems and everything, we had a good starting point.

IGN: A lot of developers I know these days just pull a ton of telemetry from players when they're playing. So when it's out there in the wild, kind of building on what you guys are saying, did any particular telemetry jump out at you guys, like people watching a surprisingly high amount of the in-game TV or barely looking at it at all, then maybe you take that and you either double down on something or scale back on something for the sequel?

Eric Meyer: Yeah. I mean, this is a little bit anecdotal from just hearing it everywhere, not necessarily a more qualitative thing, but just the many people who love Tammy and the T-Rex from that. You especially go through Steam reviews or whatever and yeah, there's certain things like that, that we did not expect to hit so strongly. And then yeah, I mean, just like any other game too, you kind of see where people fell off, like how many people played at the beginning. And for us, we were on Game Pass, so a lot of people tried the game, which was great. And we could see how far... Like any game, you have the curve of a lot of people get through the beginning and then you don't have as many people who actually finish it, but even people who didn't finish it still really enjoyed it. So it's cool to see that.

Mikey Spano: Yeah, we kind of had a unique situation where we had so many players. We were not anticipating that, but I think we're over 20 million players at this point on the game, which is insane. So pretty much every little area of the game was poked at in a way we didn't expect and it was really fun to watch that happen. I mean, you're stressed about, "Oh man, somebody found this bug," or, "Somebody exploited this thing," and you get stressed about it. But then you realize most people are out there just kind of having fun and laughing at it. And with 20 million people, there was quite a few variations of things people were hyper focused on or laughing about. I mean, some of my favorite stuff that came out of it is just the weird Hentai fan art of the guns, there's just so much. We hit every facet of weird internet culture and I love it, I couldn't be happier about it.

IGN: That's awesome. I mean, on that note, I wanted to ask you guys about Game Pass because I think Game Pass has been in the news lately for at least maybe not players' favorite reasons recently, but I think more broadly than that, and I even would say this from where I sit as somebody that covers Xbox and talks about Xbox on an Xbox podcast all the time, there's a lot of confusion, I think, from players about the business side of how Game Pass works. Now, I'm not asking you guys to share the terms of your deal with Microsoft or anything like that.

But clearly the first game, as you're talking about, Mikey, that was a huge success for you guys on the back of launching straight into Game Pass. So can you talk about what worked for you with that deal, what you got out of it, basically? Obviously, you mentioned 20 million players, but do you see Steam sales spike when it hits Game Pass or stuff like that? I don't know if, again, without maybe opening up the company's books or anything, which, I know you're not going to do that, but can you kind of speak to the fallout, if you will, of being on Game Pass?

Mikey Spano: Yeah. I mean, I look at Game Pass as a way to get people who are curious about your game. It's almost like a way to just demo games that are on Game Pass, where it reminds me of those old PlayStation Underground CDs you used to get in the mail. Game Pass to me is sort of that feeling. There's so many games that I'm interested in, but it's unlikely I'm going to buy every single one for a variety of reasons. So with Game Pass, it's like I'll check this game out. And typically I fall off. I have really bad ADD, so I'll fall off after an hour or something. And I think with High On Life, we had a lot of people that love Rick and Morty or hated Rick and Morty, but either way they knew about the game for that reason and maybe they wanted to hate play it. And then they ended up actually liking it. And then you kind of build this buzz around, "Have you guys heard of this crazy game," where somebody might not have taken the plunge and bought the full price game, so the online sentiment wouldn't have been as big. It wouldn't have been such a big conversation around the game.

I think that really helped us with marketing the game, especially as a new studio with a new IP and everything. Without Game Pass, we would've had very little visibility, so it was beneficial in that way. And I think there's some ways now that Game Pass has evolved a little where they're allowing people to come out simultaneously day one on PlayStation or come out on Steam. And that kind of stuff, we have no idea how that's going to work out, but based on what happened with the first game, I'm thinking it's going to be really big for us because we still get that conversation around the game from people playing Game Pass. But then people on PlayStation, they don't have to wait a year and then kind of forget about it and then restart the conversation. I think Game Pass is going to be even better for us this time than it was for the first game.

Eric Meyer: Yeah, it's hard. I mean, these days, there's a lot of good games coming out all the time. I'm constantly shocked when I'm like, "Wait, what is this game that looks like everything I want from the game, but it came out two years ago?" And I follow news and everything, so getting a good amount of attention to your game is critical.

IGN: A big new feature of High On Life 2 is skateboarding. I'm a big first person shooter fan and I've played a million of them over the years, and I'm trying to think if I've ever played a first person shooter that has skateboarding in it. Where does the idea come from for that? How does that kind of come up and then hone in as a key new feature of the sequel?

Mikey Spano: Yeah, this is a really interesting one because this is something both Eric and I really wanted on the first game. We had a concept artist, Sean McNally, who, amazing concept artist. You can use his name in here if you want. He's great, love the guy, very talented. We were kind of coming up, "What are some other things you can do with aliens and alien life forms?" And he had drawn this sort of pill bug that unfolded into a skateboard and we were like, "Ah, God, we got to get this-"

Eric Meyer: Yeah, it was so cool. We were like, "We could just throw this in as a thing you could temporarily have for a moment in a level or something."

Mikey Spano: Yeah. And then in my head, it was like the boot in Mario 3 or something, where an enemy and you use it temporarily. And so when we started High On Life 2, we started kicking the conversation around again, "What if we had a power up that let you kind of skateboard?" And so it was meant to just be a little thing. And we started playing with it and the fun was there, but there was so much complexity that I got to the point as like... I grew up skateboarding, I love skateboarding, but I got to the point where I was like, "It's just too risky, we can't do it." And then Eric was like, "I'm not letting go of this."

Eric Meyer: In the first game when we were figuring out a traversal kit, at one point we had this sort of omnidirectional boost thing and it was kind of cool. It helped the momentum of the game, but it just didn't have anything grounding it. We converted it into sort of a power slide, which was really fun the first game. It's my favorite thing to do in that game. And then really, we talked about the skateboard in our creative meetings and we're like, "Yeah, let's do it. Let's figure out some cool thing with a skateboard." And at first I was like, "Well, it'll just be power slide plus. You can slide now, but you can go for longer because you're on a skateboard." And then we did a whole bunch of refactoring our traversal kit.

We kind of really improved all of our movement and a lot of things, me and Carl Glave, who's our programmer for all the traversal stuff. And then we were tagging the skateboard and as we kept going with it, we're like, "Well, yeah, you should be able to go up a vert ramp. Yeah, of course. You should be able to do this, all the skateboarding things." And we were looking at Tony Hawk and a bunch of different games like Session and Skate and stuff that are really technical skating games. And we were like, "Well, we can't do all that technical stuff." There's not enough buttons. You got to shoot as well, you can't just not do all that. But we started just refining and refining and reducing things, but also making it just a really smooth experience.

I really just wanted you to feel like you're on a skateboard, it's doing what you want to do while you're shooting at guys, while you're doing all these other things that are taking up most of your mental space, but you still get that feeling like you're on a board and you can jump off ramps and go and wall ride and do all kinds of cool stuff with it. So we just kept kind of refining it and making it smoother and just more intuitive, and not super technical because that competed too much with the shooter aspect.

I think the hardest thing for a new mechanic like that is it's risky, it's unknown. We looked at a lot of different comps and a lot of other games had been doing kind of similar stuff to try to get some ideas and it really was just an accumulation of just hammering on it and iterating on it continuously and making some really good calls at different points to make it. There was a whole group effort deciding exactly what this needs to do and what it should not do. And that got us to a really good spot.

IGN: And a sequel's boring if it's not taking any creative risks.

Eric Meyer: Exactly.

Mikey Spano: Yeah. And I keep thinking, "Did we take enough creative risks on this game?" And I'm like, "Oh wait, we completely changed-"

Eric Meyer: Yeah, yeah. I mean, to me it's like the Terminator 2, right? Everyone can agree Terminator 2 is a great sequel. Terminator one is great too, but 2, they're like, "Well, we're going to make a quicksilver Terminator," which could have totally failed. Could have been like, "No, I want Arnold Schwarzenegger." But they put something new in with what you already had and made an awesome new experience.

Mikey Spano: Yeah, for sure. The funny little anecdote, Eric mentioned Carl, Carl's an amazing programmer that we have and he is very motion sick sensitive. I don't know exactly the right phrasing for it, but he gets motion sick very easily. And so putting him on the skateboard is so cool, but he did such a good job with it. And I think a lot of the smoothness that you get from it comes from him just being like, "Oh, these numbers make me want to puke. Let me tweak that."

Eric Meyer: Yeah, yeah. No, he made sure it's motion sick friendly, which, in first person is insane.

Mikey Spano: Yeah, it's crazy. I honestly thought it'd be a fun little power up. There's no way I would want to play a whole game where I'm riding a skateboard and shooting. And I was so wrong, it's so cool. It's my favorite part of the game for sure.

IGN: Mikey, you said you grew up skating and there's such... I mean, the artwork for both games, just High On Life in general has such great artwork.

Mikey Spano: Thank you.

IGN: A custom skate deck for High On Life 2 – maybe like a collector's edition thing, limited. Are we going to do that?

Mikey Spano: I will say that we have our biz dev guy, Benny Moore, he comes from Limited Run, so he knows that space really well. And then we just hired somebody, I believe it's merchandising director. I don't know his name, but it's another one that we know from Limited Run, Shaddy, and he's amazing, too. And so he's taking on a lot of really cool merchandising stuff for us. I can say I love skateboards, I love physical stuff. As you can see, my office is full of collectible stuff, so it's a pretty safe bet that there'll be some of my own life decks out there.

Eric Meyer: The hardest thing is going to be choosing which ones to use, because we have a bunch of decks in the game with awesome art on them and there's a lot of ones that, I can't pick a favorite. There's a lot of really, really cool decks.

Mikey Spano: Yeah. For this game, I have a big group of weird, low brow art friends and I wanted to bring them on to do graffiti and signs and stuff like that for us. And it worked out really well that they were able to all do deck designs for us, too. So we have so many cool, weird, unexpected decks in the game that I want to see all of them turn into a physical deck at some point. And I love the idea of a voting system of, "All right, for this next run, here's three. Which one do you guys want to see next?" And keep pitting them against each other. That could be really fun.

IGN: Pivoting back to the video game itself, the weapons, clearly the stars of High On Life and justifiably so. When you're looking at adding new ones for the sequel, I'm curious, where do you start? Do you start with weapon function like, "Well, do we want a rocket launcher type? Do we want this chain gun, this kind of that?" Or do you start with a personality type and then figure out what gun function it should be? Or do you start with an actor in mind and then kind of build a gun around that? I'm really curious to the process because the guns are such a unique aspect of High On Life.

Mikey Spano: Yeah. Typically, I mentioned earlier, I'm super ADD, so I'm always doodling. Even in meetings and stuff, I'll be doodling. So Eric and I will be talking about, "What's a gun archetype we want that we don't have yet?" And so while we're talking, I'll start usually just doodling a few things and I'll show it to Eric and say, "What do you think about this functionality? Does this functionality seem cool?" And then he'll give me some notes and maybe he'll do a sketch and we just kind of go back and forth, honing in on a shotgun archetype. Gus is our shotgun archetype and=

Eric Meyer: Yeah, that's how we figured out a lot of the first game's guns.

Mikey Spano: Yeah, we're a very visual based studio, we let the vibes lead our design. And then Eric and Nick, who is our technical director, but also our combat director for this game, he gets really into the weeds about how the functionality works and, "Let's tune this number and let's try this." And all of that kind of goes back and forth and informs the general look of the gun. And usually when I'm sketching these guns up, I'm thinking about an actor like Sheath from the very beginning, I wanted to be Ralph Ineson. He's been my white whale for years and we finally got him. And so that whole time, I knew that's what I wanted him to look like. And for the caps from the first game, a lot of that look came from just Jim Henson.

And if you look at the really old, fat, weird Kermit the Frog, that's Creature. There's just a bunch. I have all this reference from the game where, believe it or not, Knifey is basically Elmo without a nose or hair. And that's kind of where I started because I thought it would be a fun nod. I love leaning on cultural stuff that exists already, so I'm always putting little nods to everything. And trying to find more Muppets for this game didn't really work out right away, so I just kind of went with what felt right. And luckily, Eric and Nick and I were able to come up with some archetypes that felt really good.

Eric Meyer: Yeah. When we kicked this game off, we locked ourselves in this rental office for a week. Me and Mikey and Alec Robbins, our native director, Nick, and Maddie, our producer, our EP, to just oversee everything. And we just broke down a bunch of stuff from the game. I just remember one of the things we did was we had a big whiteboard of just every gun archetype imaginable and then being like, "Okay, what would fit? What's going to be the next things that would fit into our mix?" And then started playing with those and sort of integrating some of them into the story as we were talking about story as well. I don't remember all the details.

Yeah. And on the first game, like I was saying earlier, we didn't really know what it was, so I drew a million guns. So this game, before I even did anything, I was like, "What about this sheet that we had? Is there anything on here that's a good starting point?" But I don't think we ended up bringing any of that on. The bow and arrow was a new concept, I don't think anything existed for that and Sheath was all new. Travis and Jan were pretty much all new. So even though we started with some of the older sketches, they changed enough that it was just pretty much from scratch.

IGN: Well, speaking of the voice actors for the weapons in High On Life, when you're writing now the sequel, obviously, do you really even write lines for JB Smoove, or do you just give him some ideas and outlines and then just hit record in the VO booth?

Mikey Spano: I wish the latter was possible, but it's just wrangling somebody who's really good at ad-libbing when we have such a tight story. Especially in this game, we focused a lot more on a tight narrative. Alec and his team, Alec Robbins, our Narrative Director and effectively our head writer, him and his team just wrote so much amazing stuff that getting the actor into the booth and getting all of it read out, you've played the game so you interact with someone, they're not just saying one thing, they're saying a bunch of things. And each of those things has multiple permutations. And so there's just really no way to get an actor in and say, "Go crazy."

On the first game, it happened just out of necessity, given the structure of the game, but for this one, we wanted to do a better job and tighten things up. And so we do start pretty much everything written and then we'll have them read the line the way it's written and then, "All right, well, how would you say this line?" And then some of those are the ones that are the funniest and sometimes just reading it as is works better. But it's very taxing on the voice actors to ask for ad lib, especially in that setting, so it can be really tricky. Sometimes it just happens on its own.

Eric Meyer: Yeah, we like to encourage it. And this time, I mean, this game has so much more dialogue than the first game that some of those record sessions were like, "We got to move. We can't ad lib for an hour on this guy." So yeah, it was a lot to get, especially with the guns. And Gus and Sweezy in particular, they're around for the whole game, so they're a lot of dialogue.

IGN: JB is such a master improviser, I just was curious. It's interesting to hear that you almost had to just keep him on script.

Eric Meyer: Yeah, a lot of people go crazy in moments for sure, but you're getting through so many lines, yeah, we kind of had to just let it go off the script first and foremost and then mess around.

IGN: You mentioned the whiteboard of weapon archetypes, that you lock yourself in a WeWork space for a week at the beginning of the project to start to hash out. Did you have any weapons or weapon ideas that had hit the cutting room floor? You're talking about stuff that got cut from the first game. Was anything from the first game that made its way into this one in terms of the weapons?

Eric Meyer: I'm trying to remember. The first game, well, one thing we had in the first game, Sweezy, there was going to be two Sweezys at one point, right, Mikey? One of them died and became a ghost?

Mikey Spano: You had this ghost gun that you could summon, but it never really got traction. We've been wanting to do the dual pistols. I really wanted initially, Eric Andre and Hannibal Burris, just one gun that was overly confident and kind of funny, and then one that just talked to the other gun the whole time. And that was sort of the archetype we were talking about. And then as we got closer, I don't remember who pitched it, but we were like, "It would just be funny if it was just a couple in a relationship and that you had-"

Eric Meyer: I think we were all watching Righteous Gemstones at the time.

Mikey Spano: I think that's probably what it was.

Eric Meyer: And we were like, "Oh yeah, that relationship is like the..." I forget the character's names, but it's so funny. And so we're like, "We should hone in on that."

Mikey Spano: Yeah. And so then we kind of started with that as sort of the archetype. And then we had different actors in mind for the guns initially, and then we kind of just kept swapping actors around based on availability and what the game needed. And we ended up with Ken Marino, who's amazing, so-

Eric Meyer: So good, such a good performance.

Mikey Spano: Yeah, he's just so pro. He gets it, he just nails it. And Gabourey Sidibe, who, she played Mucks in our DLC, but now she plays Jan. And those two together are so funny, it's fantastic. Those two guns, at first, I thought would be a fun little joke for a mission or something, but they're probably the most memorable narrative-wise from the game.

Eric Meyer: I think so too, yeah. Because it's two guns and they span over a couple missions, you get a lot of... Their story becomes actually a pretty prominent story in the whole game.

IGN: Was replacing Kenny in the game from the DLC and now in the sequel, easier than recasting Kenny? Because I mean, you've got the two new voice actors for Rick and Morty now who are just dead on perfect.

Mikey Spano: Yeah, we actually didn't want to bring Kenny over for this game. We're not done with Kenny in the universe, but he's just not part of the story of this game. We will be recasting Kenny, of course, but assuming we continue to make High On Life, which I will fight tooth and nail to keep doing, we still want Kenny to be a part of this universe and he's got a lot more to his story than what we saw in the first game and in DLC. I think our narrative wrapper was that Kenny just got dropped or something in the DLC, but I think that there's more to that story than we let players know, and so we'll be hopefully talking a little bit more about that in future game.

Eric Meyer: Yeah, this game takes place five years after the original, so we kind of alluded some of the things that happened in that time span, but that's definitely an area that we'll explore more in this game and in the future.

IGN: The last question I have for you guys is, you touched on it already with talking about how much more dialogue there is in this one, but scope-wise, for me, I really thought the first game was just the perfect... It didn't overstay its welcome, but it wasn't like a four-hour game by any stretch either. I just thought it really hit its mark super well. So are you aiming for a similar scope to the first game with this one or we go and... What's the thought process there?

Eric Meyer: We're a little bit larger for sure. We wanted to give a little more. This game especially has a much more kind of, I'd just say mature narrative. There's more going on with it. We actually hit our themes a lot stronger at the end and everything, so we wanted to give it more time to feel like a good sequel. And then we actually have quite a bit more sort of side content you can do in this one.

In the first game we sort of have, you could go back to areas, you could bring in some more bases for a little fun vignettes. In this one, you kind of have these regions in the hub that you can actually go around and find cool stuff in and kind of dig into more and just skate, you can just skate over the whole place. So we definitely have a little more extra time for folks who want to mess around as well. We're definitely shooting for a bit of a longer game than the first one, but by no means, this isn't an RPG length game. We're trying to keep it a nice narrative you can play.

Mikey Spano: For the first game, we didn't really know how long it was going to be. And then it came out and we were like, "Okay, good. It was enough." For me, as an older gamer, 10 hours is my favorite amount of time to put into a game. Past that, I get stressed. And so we didn't want to get too far from 10 hours, but then at the same time, we had so much we wanted to do that things just kept growing. And honestly, I don't know how long the game is. It could be 1,000 hours, it could be 11 hours. I really don't know at this point.

We'll know the day before it comes out, how long it really is. But I think it's safe to say it's a decent bit longer than the first game. Our initial desire was 25% more, but I actually think we've probably exceeded that by a bit. And then that's not even thinking about all the new side content and just skating around, doing challenges and stuff like that, so there's a lot there. And it's not all narrative comedy. There's a lot of the side stuff that's just pure gameplay.

Eric Meyer: Yeah, just fun gameplay.

Mikey Spano: It hopefully doesn't overstay its welcome.

Eric Meyer: On this one in particular, we try to make every level very unique. And you're still using all your core mechanics, but there's a lot of levels we're not going to talk about until they release because they're awesome surprises. And so hopefully that keeps. Especially, I know some games midway through, you're kind of like, "All right," I get it. So hopefully we can keep that pacing going for everyone.

Mikey Spano: Each act, if not each mission, could be its own game. All the guns, each time you get a new gun, everything changes. Each time you get to a new location, it's a surprise. And we didn't do a ton of retread this time other than sidetracking or side missions, I guess. It's a lot, and I think people won't get too exhausted with it just because the variety is so broad.

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.

World of Warcraft's new housing feature has been available for those who pre-purchased the upcoming Midnight expansion for over a week now, which naturally means folks have had plenty of time to get really, really creative with their new library of decor. One of the wildest player discoveries early on was finding a trick that would make houses float in the air, which a number of people have used to make wild flying creations. Better yet, instead of patching it out, Blizzard has surprisingly given its blessing for airborne abodes.

Lofting one's house was discovered almost immediately after the housing feature dropped, with players initially using it simply to raise their homes in the air as a fun gimmick.

Apparently, flying houses are surprisingly easy to do. If you're just using the base creation tools, you're never going to be able to do this on accident, as the most you can do is move the house around on the ground within your lot. However, players using Advanced Mode can raise a house by moving any decor object inside or attached to exterior of the house, and then lifting that object up in the air. The house goes with it!

As time has gone on, players have gotten even wackier with their flying houses, using them to create elaborate constructions such as airships:

Mechanical wonders:

And other assorted creations:

Since this discovery was made, players have been understandably concerned that Blizzard would patch it out, as it didn't seem to be intended behavior from houses. However, Blizzard has taken a surprising step in sanctioning the hovering homes, and even actively trying to make it easier to create them. A recent post on the forums from community manager Kaivax reads as follows:

Almost immediately after the 11.2.7 patch went live, we saw players using keybinds to elevate houses off the ground, even though there weren’t UI controls for that. We quickly began work to enable the controls so that it would be easier to move a house upward.

We have two concerns, of course:

The underside of houses aren’t modeled or textured. Players who lift their houses may decide to hide that part behind other things.

If you lift your house up, clicking on the door could become difficult. You might want to consider building a ramp or a jumping puzzle or a mount landing spot, etc.

Honestly, totally fair PSAs from Blizzard there, though it does lead one to wonder if long-term we might see some decor aimed at flying homes specifically if they get popular enough. Now if only we could have an entire floating city-wait, we what? Uh, scratch that. I'm going back home.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Fans of The Last of Us TV show have some new collectibles to look forward to early next year. Funko is gearing up to drop some new Pop figures of Joel, Ellie, Tommy, and a clicker based on their character versions from the show. These are all set to be released on February 4 next year and each come with a list price of $14.99, though the clicker figure is enjoying a minor discount down to $11.13 at the moment.

Funko Pop Figures like these can sometimes sell out very fast. If you're hoping to pick one, or all of them, up to add into your collectibles, now is the time to get a preorder in before they sell out.

Preorder The Last of Us TV Show Funko Pop Figures

The nice part about Funko figures is they don't take up too much space. Each one of the figures above only stands about 3.75-inches tall, so you can have them all in a little row together on your shelf. Considering the third season of the show isn't coming out until 2027, these figures will at least keep you company if you're using 2026 as a time to rewatch seasons one and two.

While there's still a few months to go before these Last of Us Funkos are officially available, there are plenty more collectibles and items you can buy right now instead, especially if you're getting some last-minute holiday shopping done. If you're looking for some ideas to help you out for the holidays this year, we've curated quite a few different gift guides - including a gift guide for LEGO fans and one for those with a love of Magic: The Gathering - to help make seasonal shopping a little bit easier.

Hannah Hoolihan is a freelancer who writes with the guides and commerce teams here at IGN.

Warning: This article contains full spoilers for South Park Season 28, Episode 5!

South Park’s 27th and 28th seasons have been one weird, wild ride, and it all finally culminates in the Season 28 finale, “The Crap Out.” The title alone hints that Trey Parker and Matt Stone know a lot of fans are expecting the wheels to come off the train here at the end. This episode is nothing if not extremely self-aware. But for all the crap out jokes, the finale does actually tie everything in these two seasons together pretty neatly. It’s a satisfying conclusion that comes after a relatively choppy couple of months for the series.

At the very least, “The Crap Out” finally ends the show’s recent, poor track record with holiday episodes. The Halloween-themed “The Woman in the Hat” and the Thanksgiving-focused “Turkey Trot” proved to be the two weak links of this season, but the show finds much more success getting into the Christmas spirit. And why shouldn’t it? South Park has been doing that since the very beginning.

“The Crap Out” strikes a nice balance between focusing squarely on the younger characters (or Stan, specifically), and wrapping up all the political satire that’s so dominated these two seasons. While it would have been nice to see Kyle, Cartman, and Butters (I’m still perplexed at how quickly and thoroughly the show has abandoned all of its Cartman subplots), Stan makes for a good focal point as the season turns colder and more somber. He’s suffered as much as anyone in this new status quo. He deserves his Christmas miracle. Too bad Jesus isn’t exactly in the Christmas spirit these days.

That leads to a really terrific fakeout where we’re led to expect the return of Mr. Hankey, only for the Woodland Critters to show up instead. Best of all, they immediately shoot down any complaints about continuity. Stan, like the rest of us, just has to roll with this bizarre little Christmas odyssey. It’s a crap out. Don’t think too hard about it.

Even as Stan reunites with his unholy critter friends, this episode works fiendishly to tie up all the political loose ends and bring the Antichrist storyline to its big conclusion. We get the hilarious and very welcome return of Towelie, who highlights just how ridiculous the show’s ongoing narrative has become this year as he sums up every plot twist so far. And everything does ultimately wrap up pretty nicely. If anything, it feels all the more like the South Park crew have known for a while how they wanted to end things, and the see-sawing quality of recent episodes is a symptom of the show spinning in place until the endgame arrives.

“The Crap Out” brings everything to a head as Donald Trump and his entourage confront Stan and the Woodland Critters in Hell’s Pass Hospital. I was anticipating some massive battle between good evil and more evil, or maybe even a Home Alone spoof as Stan set traps for the would-be abortionists. Instead, it all ends on a surprisingly anticlimactic note. You really have to hand it to South Park for capping off its Christmas episode with footage of the literal Antichrist hanging itself in the womb. The series still knows how to push the envelope after three decades.

I suspect that ending is going to prove very divisive in the fandom. It’s certainly an abrupt way of wrapping up the conflict. But I think the anticlimactic nature works in the episode’s favor. Anyone expecting Trump to actually be brought down in the finale and face South Park’s brand of justice was barking up the wrong tree. The show is clearly in it for the long haul as far as satirizing the Trump Administration is concerned. And it feels very fitting to end this season by commenting on Trump’s singular talent for wriggling out of legal consequences.

It helps that, as cynical as this ending is, the finale ultimately closes out on a more tender and hopeful note. Yes, Trump is victorious, and Satan is fleeing the White House in shame. But Stan managed to redeem Jesus, and in return, he gets his Christmas miracle as a thank you gift. I’m just grateful Jesus gave Stan his old house back and not Tegridy Farms. That would be a truly depressing way to end the season.

Anyone looking to add some pizazz to their gaming setup doesn’t have to look far to find ways to do so. One of the best ways is to pick up a special edition controller. And fans of Genshin Impact can now preorder the great-looking PS5 DualSense Wireless Controller – Genshin Impact Limited Edition (see it on Amazon). It costs $84.99 and is set to release on February 25 in the U.S.

DualSense Wireless Controller - Genshin Impact Limited Edition

Fallout: Season 2 explores the backstory of how movie star and Vault-Tec pitchman Cooper Howard (played by Walton Goggins) went to Las Vegas before the war and met the man who he later tells Lucy MacLean was the main cause of the end of the world: Robert House.

As seen in the trailer, House recognizes the darkness lurking within Coop that will one day consume him as The Ghoul. House deems Coop “actually quite a violent man” who would do anything to protect his family. “You just don’t want to kill me … yet.” It seems then that the first steps of Coop’s tragic transformation into The Ghoul begins with his interactions with Mr. House.

Fans first saw Mr. House in live-action in Season 1 of the hit Prime Video series where the tech magnate was played by actor Rafi Silver. The Leftovers star Justin Theroux takes over the role for the show’s second season, lending the RobCo Industries founder a more urbane gravitas than the character we met in the first season.

I recently chatted with Justin Theroux over Zoom about Fallout: Season 2, his particular interpretation of Robert House, and the choices he made in bringing this iconic video game character to life. (Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity.)

Disney has agreed to license 200 of its most beloved characters for use in Sora's generative AI videos, alongside a $1 billion investment in OpenAI.

The three-year deal will allow users to generate short-form videos featuring Disney icons such as Mickey Mouse, Pixar favorites such as Woody, Marvel heroes like Black Panther and Captain America, as well as Star Wars characters like Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia.

Disney and OpenAI's agreement includes mention of a "shared commitment to the responsible use of AI that protects user safety and the rights of creators," and notably, Disney has said that all of its licensed characters will be animated, masked or creatures, with no "talent likeness or voices." There will also be "age-appropriate policies and other reasonable controls."

After Sora and ChatGPT both gain the ability to generate AI content based on Disney characters in early 2026, curated selections of this AI-generated content will begin rolling out via Disney+. There's mention of other "new experiences for Disney+ subscribers" generated by AI too, without any further detail — other than that they will provide "innovative and creative ways to connect with Disney’s stories and characters."

The addition of user-generated content on Disney+ was previously mentioned last month by Disney boss Bob Iger, who dubbed its rollout as the "biggest and the most significant change" to Disney's streaming service since its launch.

"Technological innovation has continually shaped the evolution of entertainment, bringing with it new ways to create and share great stories with the world," Iger said in a statement today. "The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works.

"Bringing together Disney’s iconic stories and characters with OpenAI’s groundbreaking technology puts imagination and creativity directly into the hands of Disney fans in ways we’ve never seen before," Iger continued, "giving them richer and more personal ways to connect with the Disney characters and stories they love."

Back in October, the launch of OpenAI's Sora 2 saw it flooded with AI versions of Disney characters, as well as Pokémon and other licensed properties — until the platform belatedly began clamping down on copyright-infringing material. Popular videos included examples of pop culture characters in X-Wings or holding lightsabers — something it seems we're now about to see a lot more of, with Disney's seal of approval.

Licensed characters set to be thrown into the generative AI algorithm include Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Lilo, Stitch, Ariel, Belle, Beast, Cinderella, Baymax, Simba, Mufasa, plus more from Encanto, Frozen, Inside Out, Moana, Monsters Inc., Toy Story, Up, and Zootopia. Marvel and Lucasfilm characters are also included, such as Black Panther, Captain America, Deadpool, Groot, Iron Man, Loki, Thor, Thanos, Darth Vader, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Leia, the Mandalorian, Stormtroopers and Yoda.

Beyond Disney+, the deal will see Disney overall "become a major customer of OpenAI", today's announcement from the two companies revealed, with the ChatGPT and Sora maker's capabilties deployed to help create "new products, tools, and experiences."

In related news, Disney has today accused Google of infringing its copyright "on a massive scale" by using its works to train its own generative AI models. In a cease-and-desist letter revealed by Variety, Disney said it believes Google is allowing its own algorithm to create content featuring many of the same characters it has now licensed to OpenAI, without its permission.

And of course, all of this comes amid the ongoing backdrop of Hollywood's other huge industry development — the $82.7 billion sale of Warner Bros. to Netflix (which Paramount is now trying to disrupt with its own hostile takeover bid). One recent report suggested that Netflix valued Warner Bros. so highly because it wanted to use the century-old company's intellectual properties within its own generative AI content in future.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Big news for zombieheads: Sony is moving forward with a third installment of the 28 Years Later films, with the decision coming over a month before the release of the second installment, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.

According to Deadline, original franchise star Cillian Murphy — who led breakout hit 28 Days Later back in 2002 and reprises that role in Bone Temple — is in talks to come back for the third film as well. Alex Garland, who has written all the franchise entries thus far, is currently working on the third entry, which does not have a title at this point in the process.

As far as a director goes for the next film, nothing is set in stone yet. However, Danny Boyle has been open about wanting to direct the third movie, so there’s a good chance he will. That said, we’ll see when that announcement arrives.

Sony has had the option to make a third 28 Years Later film since it won the rights to the franchise, but waited until now to greenlight it. It appears it wanted to gauge the audience response before proceeding — but by the looks of the recent fan screenings of The Bone Temple, which garnered a huge positive response, it felt confident taking the plunge.

28 Years Later managed to bring in over $150 million worldwide in theaters against a modest production budget, which makes it the highest grossing entry in the franchise as a whole. The first three films — 28 Days Later, 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later, and this summer’s 28 Years Later — of the franchise have made over $300 million worldwide combined.

The next installment, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, is set to arrive in theaters on January 16, 2026.

Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.

Not long ago, the prospect of a 1440p OLED gaming monitor alone would have been exciting. Now OLED gaming monitors are becoming much more widely available, demonstrating performance improvements in leaps and bounds while the technology also trickles down to lower and lower prices. The Asus ROG Strix OLED XG27AQWMG fits somewhere in the middle of that formula, bringing newer Tandem OLED technology while not pushing the limits on speed and reining in the price to a modest $599 – one of the lower prices we’ve seen for any new OLED gaming monitor. But in a market that has been moving fast, the XG27AQWMG’s reservations may hold it back too much.

Asus ROG Strix OLED XG27AQWMG – Design and Features

The Asus ROG Strix OLED XG27AQWMG is a classy monitor, though not a dazzling one. It keeps things fairly simple – there’s a splash of RGB on the back with an illuminated ROG logo, but it stops well short of garishness. The front also includes an ROG logo below the display itself on a little chin that also houses the monitor's controls: a pair of buttons and a four-way joystick for easy control.

The front of the monitor is all glass with a glossy finish and anti-glare layer that effectively cuts down on reflections. The back may be an all plastic affair, but it looks clean. There’s a large box housing all the electronics, the internal power supply, and the two HDMI 2.1, one DisplayPort 1.4, and three USB ports (two downstream, one upstream). That internal power supply is a great perk for keeping desk space clean, and the USB hub doesn’t hurt either. A USB-C port with Power Delivery would have been nice to see, though.

The stand is also considerate of desk space. It has a fairly compact, hexagonal base that only takes up 7.4 inches of space front-to-back. While a small stand can present stability concerns, and the display certainly wiggled a bit, the XG27AQWMG never topped in testing. With an included adapter bracket, the monitor can be swapped over to a VESA 100x100 mount, but the included stand is quite flexible, and doesn’t beg for replacement. It provides a 4.3-inch height adjustment range, tilts 5 degrees down or 20 degrees back, can swivel 45 degrees in either direction, and pivots into a vertical orientation in either direction. The top of the stand includes a threaded hole for a microphone, light, or professional camera.

The display portion of the monitor is a very thin panel, as is typical of OLED. Asus shows this off well by partially separating it from the electronics housing on the rear. The bezels around the screen are minimal, though a touch thicker on the bottom. The display also uses a pixel shifting feature to protect the panel, and this can result in one side bezel being noticeably larger than the other (for aesthetically picky individuals, this can be turned off).

The Asus ROG Strix OLED XG27AQWMG doesn’t go very heavy on additional features. There are no speakers, for instance, but it has some typical gaming monitor features like an fps counter and crosshair overlay. The crosshair can automatically shift color for better contrast, which is a neat touch, though I find the crosshair lines a little thick to want to use in any case. Most of its features are meant to keep the OLED panel healthy by intelligently dimming bright elements if they’re on the screen for too long. The monitor can also use a sensor to detect when no one is near the monitor and turn it black, though the minimum time for this is five minutes, which just leaves me questioning: if you can sense I’m not at the monitor, why wait five minutes and not five seconds?

The monitor works with Asus’s DisplayWidget Center software. This provides access to the monitor’s settings through software on your computer, which can be easier to manage than the built-in OSD. Some features only work with the software, too, like linking display profiles to specific games.

Asus ROG Strix OLED XG27AQWMG – Gaming and Performance

The Asus ROG Strix OLED XG27AQWMG provides a great setup for gaming. The 27-inch, 1440p panel is a tried and true combination for games offering a desk-friendly size with solid clarity that’s also far easier to push at high frame rates than 4K. Getting to match that with an OLED panel capable of running at 280Hz is nothing short of brilliant for gaming. I whipped through hours of combat in Battlefield 6 and had no struggles keeping up with the action thanks to the smooth refresh rates and fast pixel response times – that meant no blur when I had to spin 180 degrees to catch an enemy coming from behind.

The OLED panel is also wonderfully colorful, hitting 98% of the DCI-P3 color space for vivid visuals. If you’re playing a neon-soaked game like Cyberpunk 2077 or Ghostrunner, that color makes a world of difference. And it comes alongside infinite contrast thanks to pitch-black pixels. Unfortunately, the color doesn’t appear to be very accurate. Across several different visual profiles, the monitor saw average dE color errors over 2.5 and max dE errors over 6, limiting its potential for creative use. Only the sRGB Cal profile reached an average dE below 2, but still suffered from a max dE over 6, and it clamped too hard on the color, reducing sRGB color coverage to just 94%.

The XG27AQWMG has its sore points, though. As exciting as Tandem OLED should be, you’ll get some of what you’re hoping for and some of what you’re not. While testing the monitor at its default settings showed perfect black pixels alongside a respectable 253-nit average brightness, maxing out the brightness and enabling the monitor's Performance mode inched up the black floor to 0.02-nit black. It’s hard, bordering on impossible, to perceive, but I measured it consistently. The tradeoff is a more tangible uplift in brightness, with the monitor able to reach 380 nits – a strong result for an OLED display. For comparison, the MSI MAG 272QP QD-OLED X50 topped out at 297.8 nits.

With HDR enabled, the monitor could reach even higher, though this also proved somewhat variable. With a 100% white window, it hit 359 nits, and with a 10% white window it reached 618 nits, both with the Gaming HDR preset. The HDR500 True Black setting had similar performance. While good, the monitor had plenty of room for improvement, and using its Adjustable HDR setting at 100% brightness let it shine even brighter, reaching 842 nits in a 10% window. This setting also didn’t see the raised black floor that had affected other presets. Why Asus made it a minor chore to get this peak brightness is a curiosity, but with HDR performance like this, the monitor has a lot of promise for games and movies alike.

Another OLED issue still lingers here: subpixel arrangements resulting in reduced clarity. While I’ve seen color fringing go from hard-to-overlook to hard-to-spot as panel designs have progressed over the last few years, the XG27AQWMG isn’t at the front of the pack even with its new Tandem OLED tech. This fringing manifests on the edges of fine lines (i.e., text). It’s not a constant nuisance, with black text on a white background rarely exhibiting the fringing. But I’ve seen it more often here than on recent QD-OLED panels.

The Asus ROG Strix OLED XG27AQWMG may have an edge in brightness thanks to its Tandem OLED panel, but it fails to stand out as much as it could with its color accuracy and fringing. This sees it lag behind the MSI MAG 272QP QD-OLED X50, which isn’t quite as bright but hits 500Hz, has the same color gamut, more accurate color, less noticeable fringing, and was $649 at the time of writing.

If you're looking for DTI codes, IGN's got you covered! In this article, you'll find a list of all the active and working Dress to Impress codes in December 2025 that you can redeem for free rewards and bonuses in DTI, including outfits and accessories like hats, bags, and jewelry.

The next Free Comic Book Day may be half a year away, but that's not stopping Oni Press from revealing what they've got in store for 2026's big event. And it's a big one, as it offers a double dose of new stories from acclaimed writer/artist Matt Kindt and his Flux House imprint.

IGN can exclusively reveal that Oni Press will release Mind MGMT/Fort Psycho FCBD 2026 Special. This issue will offer readers a glimpse of both Kindty's Mind MGMT sequel Mind MGMT: New & Improved and Fort Psycho, his upcoming collaboration with The Sixth Gun artist Brian Hurtt. Check out the cover to the FCBD special below:

As the wait for The Elder Scrolls 6 goes on, some fans believe developer Bethesda teased its release year in a live-action Skyrim trailer.

Earlier this week, Bethesda shadow-dropped Skyrim on Nintendo Switch 2, and in doing so released a live-action comedy trailer that saw a bad Santa enlist the help of two of his elves.

The trailer, below, shows one of the elves raising their speech level to 27 after suggesting Skyrim launch on Switch 2, with their overall character level progress working towards 20. Why pick 20 and 27 specifically? Because The Elder Scrolls 6 is coming out in 2027, some fans are now saying.

“This honestly might be the best piece of evidence we have for a release date,” one fan said. “Those are very specific numbers and I don’t think they would use those numbers by accident.” “My god we’ve gotten so desperate,” countered another.

They are oddly specific numbers though, and you’d like to think Bethesda knew what it was doing by choosing them, rather than rolling the dice and coming up with random numbers. This is The Elder Scrolls 6 we’re talking about — it’s one of the most anticipated video games currently in development. Fans want — need! — to know when it’s coming out, and so anything like this was always going to set them off.

But is 2027 a likely release year? Last month, Bethesda chief Todd Howard said The Elder Scrolls 6 wouldn’t be out for some time yet despite being announced over seven years ago. In an interview with GQ magazine to celebrate the release of Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition, Howard said The Elder Scrolls 6 is “still a long way off.” He added: “I’m preaching patience. I don’t want fans to feel anxious.”

You can understand why patience might be difficult for some fans though. In January this year, The Elder Scrolls 6 announcement became as old as predecessor Skyrim was when The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced. Skyrim was released on November 11, 2011, and The Elder Scrolls 6 was revealed on June 10, 2018 — 2,403 days afterwards. It is now seven-and-a-half years since the announcement, and we’re no closer, it seems, to the release of the game.

When the six-year anniversary of The Elder Scrolls 6 announcement arrived in June last year, even Todd Howard paused to say, "oh wow, that has been a while." The Elder Scrolls 6 is at least in production, with Bethesda confirming it had entered "early development" in August 2023 and "early builds" were available in March 2024.

In the GQ article, Howard once again admitted that it has taken too long to get The Elder Scrolls 6 out the door, but did tease a The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered-style shadowdrop — without confirming anything.

“I do like to have a break between them, where it isn’t like a ‘plus one’ sequel,” Howard said of making The Elder Scrolls games again. “I think it’s also good for an audience to have a break — The Elder Scrolls has been too long, let’s be clear. But we wanted to do something new with Starfield. We needed a creative reset.” Bethesda is currently playtesting The Elder Scrolls 6, Howard revealed.

“I like to just announce stuff and release it,” Howard continued. “My perfect version — and I’m not saying this is going to happen — is that it's going to be a while and then, one day, the game will just appear.” The Oblivion Remastered shadowdrop was “a test run,” Howard teased. “It worked out well.”

As for what Bethesda has going on right now, hundreds of people are working on Fallout, Howard said, across Fallout 76 “and some other things we're doing, but The Elder Scrolls 6 is the everyday thing.”

Earlier this year it was confirmed that The Elder Scrolls 6 will include a character designed in memory of a much-missed fan after a remarkable charity campaign that raised more than $85,000 for Make-A-Wish.

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.

Kim Kardashian is joining Fortnite, and you'll be able to play as the TV and fashion icon beginning this weekend.

Two Kim Kardashian skins will become available in Fortnite this Saturday, December 13, cementing the star as one of the game's highest-profile public figures to date.

Leaning into the Kardashian's fashionable status, Kim's skins have been designed to be highly customisable. The Iconic Kim Kardashian skin features her in skin-tight attire with alterable colors, necklines and hairstyles. The regular Kim Kardashian skin, meanwhile, comes with a jacket you can toggle on and off.

The culprit behind the recent viral but very much fake Shenmue 4 trailer has apologized for creating false AI footage of the franchise's fictional fourth game.

In a post on fan forum ShenmueDojo, the creator, under the alias "JustAFan1," issued an apology for misleading the internet — just days after Shenmue developer Ys Net released its own statement that slammed the video for raising fan hopes and revealed it was now exploring legal action.

In their statement, JustAFan1 explained that they had made the video not "out of malice, but love for Shenmue." Indeed, their statement ends with the suggestion that "all the media attention this has received will do something to convince investors" that Shenmue 4 should be made.

"I just wanted to set the record straight for all those who think it might still be half real," JustAFan1 wrote. "It's not.

"I know many of you will want to hang me for dashing your hopes, but know this was not done out of malice, but love for Shenmue. I realize I went about it the wrong way, and I apologize for that. But I hope all the media attention this has received will do something to convince investors that Shenmue is very much alive and profitable if approached correctly."

As proof that they were the creator of the video, JustAFan1 posted a link to a new version of the trailer with additional music and footage, along with a lengthier apology statement in both English and Japanese.

"I want to be absolutely clear: I am merely a fan of the series and have absolutely no professional or personal affiliation with Ys Net, nor have I ever had any," this statement reads. "The creation and release of the trailer, which presented itself as an official piece of promotional material recorded behind the scenes, was a lapse in judgment. I take full responsibility for this action."

JustAFan1's statement continues by confirming that the fake trailer's story elements were made using publicly available lore and common fan theories about where the Shenmue series might progress in future, with nothing that specifically reflected any real development that may or may not be underway within Ys Net.

"While my intent was centered on a positive outcome, the method I chose to achieve it was misleading and unprofessional. I deeply regret creating and sharing information that was not factual, and I understand the negative impact this misinformation had.

"The sole purpose behind creating the 'Shenmue 4' trailer was to demonstrate the sustained and substantial market demand and community enthusiasm for this beloved series," the video statement concludes. "I meant no harm to Ys Net, its brand, or its loyal fans. My motivation was to champion the series and help encourage its continuation, not to mislead or create distress."

Reaction to the statement has been mostly supportive, with many agreeing that the trailer had created fresh buzz for the franchise amid hope for confirmation of a new game.

"Nah, you're good," fan hyo_razuki replied. "I knew it was fake from the beginning but it was fun and you generated some enthusiasm for Shenmue, so no biggie, no need to apologize."

As of now, it's unknown if a fourth major Shenmue game will ever get made, though the franchise's fans certainly hope it happens. Shenmue creator Yu Suzuki told IGN in 2023 that he wanted to create a fourth game at some point, though he is currently still working on an enhanced version of Shenmue 3. This, Suzuki hopes, will win the game a warmer reception across a wider set of platforms, after a middling response to Shenmue 3 at the game's initial launch.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Delta Force is kicking off its year-end festivities with a major splash. With the 2025 Delta Force Invitational: Warfare (DFIW) on the horizon and a jam-packed month of limited-time holiday content, players can dive into a slew of events. From pro-level missions to prediction brackets, exclusive cosmetic items, and chaotic game modes, there is a whole lot to explore this holiday season.

2025 Delta Force Invitational: Warfare Event Roadmap

To coincide with the DFIW, which will see the world’s first 20 vs 20 Warfare World Championship, Delta Force is rolling out a roadmap of four interconnected events.

Fans can tune into the 2025 DFIW starting December 11th at 05:00 UTC across X, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok.

1. Pick’em: Predict the Winners, Claim Exclusive Gear (December 9th – 17th)

The Pick’em event lets players place their predictions on tournament matchups, offering escalating rewards based on accuracy. Pick’em is a single submission only. Once the deadline hits, brackets are locked for good.

Rewards:

• ASV - Night Veil Skin: Earned just by submitting a bracket
• IFV - Zebra: Awarded for correctly predicting at least 2 of the top 4 teams
• Recon Helicopter - Action Time: Given to anyone who predicts the exact Finals matchup

2. Battlefield Challenge: “Play Like a Pro” Mission Track (December 5th – 18th)

This challenge series teaches players the same competitive strategies used by championship teams. Rather than a simple grind, each mission highlights a key tactic from the current esports meta.

Two-Phase Structure:

• Phase 1 (Dec 5): Infantry combat, recon scoring, squad support.
• Phase 2 (Dec 12): Tank gameplay, engineer roles, armour-focused strategies.

Rewards:

• Wheeled Tank Destroyer – Gear Shift
• 2,400 Glacial Tokens

3. Glacial Fortune Shop (December 5th – 18th)

Running alongside the Battlefield Challenge, the Glacial Fortune Shop allows players to redeem their earned tokens for limited Appearances at 600 tokens each. Total completion allows you to buy the full collection.

Available Skins (Glacial Strike Set):

• MK47 Assault Rifle
• SR-3M
• Mini-14
• Bizon

Monster Hunter Wilds Title Update 4, which addresses a number of stability and performance issues, arrives on December 16, Capcom has announced.

As part of this, Capcom has "committed" to improving stability and performance, detailing what changes are coming and when, including CPU/GPU improvements, load reduction, and the optimization of "PC-specific processes and addition of options and presets to reduce processing load."

The commitment comes as Monster Hunter Wilds' impressive sales, especially on PC, were offset by its 'Mixed' Steam reviews at launch. Despite director Yuya Tokuda's commitment to stability and improvements, dissatisfaction persists, and even with new content and seasons, fans remain unhappy with the state of the game, to the point where some are taking things too far and harassing individual Capcom team members.

Now, Capcom says the free Title Update 4 will introduce "an array of performance improvements across all platforms," focusing on CPU and GPU optimization and reducing processing load "with more than 100 under-the-hood improvements, among others."

"We'll follow this up in January with a PC-specific update with even more improvements, and are looking into further optimization for implementation in the February content update," the team explained. "We're committed to making Monster Hunter Wilds a great experience for all players. Thank you for your patience and continued support."

Here's the full list of changes, with more to come on December 12:

Monster Hunter Wilds Commitment to Improving Stability and Performance:

December: Title Update 4

CPU/GPU optimization (All Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series, Steam)

• Processing Improvements: Processing time will be improved by distributing the process across frames for elements that demand the heaviest load, which includes players, monsters, and graphical user interfaces.
• Load Reduction: Processing load is reduced by comprehensively reviewing and streamlining various processes, such as reducing the number of simultaneous effects and improving collision detection for Palico and Seikret.
• Various other improvements, including optimization and reduction of memory usage, will be implemented.

January 2026: Steam Version Exclusive Patch

Optimization of PC-specific processes and addition of options and presets to reduce processing load (Steam)

• Adding new graphics and CPU settings as well as new presets, providing additional options to reduce processing load
• Improving shader compilation process (reduced stuttering)
• VRAM usage improvements
• High-resolution texture pack improvements (improving texture streaming speeds)

February 2026: Ver. 1.041 — Additional Optimization

• Adding level-of-details (LOD) quality levels to the polygon mesh for 3D models (reducing GPU processing load)
• We are also re-examining memory-related processes to identify further potential improvements.

Last week, at the PlayStation Partner Awards 2025 Japan Asia held in Tokyo, Monster Hunter Wilds won the Grand Award and the User's Choice Award. In an interview held before the award ceremony, Ryozo Tsujimoto, the producer of this work, and Yuya Tokuda, the director, answered questions from local media, and acknowledged the criticisms raised by players.

"Immediately after the release, we apologized for the inconvenience caused by the volume of content and the difficulty level," Tokuda said. "Despite this, we were delighted to receive various awards, including Users' Choice awards. We would like to thank all the players who have given their opinions and spoken warm words even in this situation. The development team was able to turn everyone's feedback into an asset and work on the update with all our strength, and I think the result was also the reason why players voted for us."

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead is working on a roguelite mode, the studio’s boss has revealed, although there's no guarantee it will actually come out.

Arrowhead CCO and Helldivers 2 creative director, Johan Pilestedt, responded to a fan on social media to say “we have a prototype of a roguelite mode — it changes the game fundamentally!”

That casual reveal has already set fans of the explosive co-op action shooter into overdrive imagining how a roguelite mode would work in the game, which revolves around open and shut missions restricted by time limits.

“Going to be us defending the Evac from endless patrols but the bird never shows up,” suggested one fan. “Wave complete. Choose a booster to add: Reinforcement budget, flexible budget, discount budget (reinforcing multiple teammates takes up only one call in),” suggested another. And here’s another take: “I think it would be cool to add that… a mission that has no helldiver limit, or no time limit with a limited amount of reinforcements… and just defend a fort from wave after wave of enemies, and we get rewarded based off of how many waves of enemies we can eliminate before time runs out, or the amount of reinforcements runs out…”

It’s worth pointing out that Pilestedt has only so far confirmed that a prototype for this mode has been built, so it may never come to fruition. But given Pilestedt mentioned it in a post on social media — already viewed over 120,000 times — you’d like to think the developers are confident it will eventually see the light of day.

Clearly, Arrowhead will continue to update the game for some time to come. Helldivers 2 is just coming off its big 5.0.0 patch as well as its jungle-themed Python Commandos Warbond, which adds a number of fan-requested weapons including a minigun. In September, the studio’s CEO confirmed Helldivers 3 is not in any plan developer Arrowhead has right now, saying that instead it wants Helldivers 2 to keep going for years and years, like veteran MMO RuneScape. And then there’s the Helldivers 2 movie, which is picking up steam.

In a subsequent tweet, Pilestedt posted a picture of a meeting with the Helldivers 2 directors to discuss the game's next four arcs, which one fan joked would take a few years to work through. Of course there will be plenty more coming to the game in between.

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.

Just a day after Bethesda announced and launched The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on Nintendo Switch 2, the publisher has acknowledged the game has performance issues.

In a lengthy thread on reddit that brands the port as a "disaster," there are widespread complaints about input lag and the game's locked 30 frames per second visuals. "There's like a whole second between me flicking the stick and my character moving its head," the post's author wrote, describing the experience as worse than "online Smash Bros."

Many have compared Skyrim's Switch 2 port with that of the far more recent Cyberpunk 2077, which offers 40 frames per second on Nintendo's new hardware while rendering considerably more detailed environments. And there has been criticism, too, of the fact the game hogs 53GB of space on the Switch 2's relatively limited internal memory, compared to just 25GB on PC.

A separate reddit post with more than 2,400 upvotes showing a video of the game's input delay can be seen below:

On Bethesda's official support site, the publisher has listed a question that asks: "Why am I experiencing frame rate issues with The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim following the Anniversary Edition update on Nintendo Switch?"

"We are investigating reports of performance issues on Nintendo Switch with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim after the Anniversary Edition update," is the official response. There's no word on fixes yet, but the publisher said anyone experiencing issues could subscribe to the article for updates.

"In addition, you can provide feedback and information regarding on this topic via the Feedback form," Bethesda concluded.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Anniversary Edition is being sold for $59.99. Alternatively, anyone who owns Skyrim Anniversary Edition on the original Switch can pay $19.99 to upgrade the game and play on both consoles.

Included for your money are Skyrim's base game and the three official Expansions: Dawnguard; Dragonborn; and Hearthfire. Players on Switch 2 get experience enhanced resolution, improved load times, performance optimisation, Joy-Con 2 mouse support, motion controls, Amiibo support, and more versus the OG Switch version, taking advantage of the more powerful hardware.

This week, IGN talked with Bethesda Game Studios exec Todd Howard about the company's future plans. Intriguinly, Howard said that while The Elder Scrolls 6 was still the next big new video game to be in the works, Fallout is the franchise the studio is doing the most in right now.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Jim Ward, the voice of Ratchet & Clank's Captain Qwark, has died aged 66.

The news was revealed by his former co-host at The Stephanie Miller Show, who wrote on X/Twitter: "One of the saddest messages I have ever received from the amazing Mrs Jim Ward: Our wonderful 'voice deity' as Steph anointed Jim Ward, passed away today at 10:45am."

Ward co-hosted the show with Miller for 13 years until his departure in 2017. In 2021, it was revealed he had contracted a "severe case" of COVID-19 after being hospitalized for a mild cognitive memory issue, which "completely paralyzed" him for four months. He later developed Alzheimer's disease. It's for this reason that Ward did not feature in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart.

Yet another leak ahead of tonight's The Game Awards 2025 has revealed a legendary music star as a new James Bond villain in 007 First Light.

In a now-deleted social post from the official 007 social media account, Fly Away singer Lenny Kravitz was unmasked as playing a First Light character named Bawma, who shares Kravitz's likeness. And while the post may have been swiftly removed, the internet still took notice — seemingly letting a further secret out ahead of tonight's big gaming awards and announcement event.

"He rose from nothing, broke free, and built his own Kindom of Aleph," the now-deleted post read. "Introducing Bawma, the largest black-market dealer in the Western Hemisphere who's as charismatic as he is unpredictable."

The accompanying video, now also deleted, shows clearly that Bawma is a villain, as he has strung up Bond and threatens to drop him into a pit packed with crocodiles.

Creative Assembly has confirmed it has a new Total War video game set to be announced at The Game Awards, but what is it? Warhammer 40,000 fans think they know — and one eagle-eyed viewer even spotted what looks like concrete evidence.

The Sega-owned strategy specialist behind Total War: Warhammer (the fantasy version of Games Workshop's much-loved tabletop setting) is rumored to be working on a Warhammer 40,000 and a Star Wars take on its long-running Total War series, and it looks like the Warhammer 40,000 game will finally get announced at The Game Awards tonight.

Redditor Knavbot took to the Total War subreddit to point to a blink-and-you’ll miss it reference to 40K in Creative Assembly’s recent showcase livestream (the one where the developer announced Total War: Medieval 3). I really do mean blink-and-you'll miss it because the files labeled 40k are incredibly hard to spot. I had to slow the video right down at the 32:42 mark and freeze-frame to see them, but yes, they are there:

Jonathan Blow has just "announced an announcement," teasing he just may be getting on a plane today to join a "gaming industry event coming up."

Blow — perhaps best known for 2008's Braid and 2016's The Witness — popped up on his YouTube channel with a brief video, revealing that a project that has likely taken "nine or 10 years to make" is "finally get[ting] out to people." And while it's probably not "a trailer for like an RPG where you fight monsters from hell" — "nothing wrong with that," he hastily added — whatever it is seems likely to be showing up at 2025's The Game Awards.

"We've been working hard on projects for a very long time. We have a wide variety of things that we've been developing. They're very complicated. Sometimes they take a while to come to fruition. Do we give up? No, we do not. We keep going, and we get them done because ultimately, even if something took nine years or 10 years to make, if you work hard for a long time, you can produce something that is tremendously good, much better than you ever expected in the beginning, and then you can finally get it out to people.