Halo: Campaign Evolved primarily serves as a full remake of the original Halo's classic campaign mode, but the development team also added a handful of bonus prologue missions. Now, the development team has explained its philosophy for this additional content, and it largely comes down to the bro factor between the Master Chief and Sergeant Johnson.

"As far as the new missions [go], we're really going for providing more context and backstory for Chief and Johnson's relationship," executive producer Damon Conn and creative director Max Szlagor said in an interview with GameSpot at Summer Game Fest. "You see them in [the original Halo] but you don't get a lot of context for who Johnson is and his history of being on missions with Chief."

Aside from providing more backstory for Johnson and Chief, the new missions also gave Halo Studios an opportunity to explore different environments, including a Covenant ship and--as you may notice from the brief gameplay trailers released thus far--space battles. These haven't been a major element of Halo games to date, though they were featured in Halo: Reach back in 2010.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WwqeSUMEIY

Because of how the Halo timeline plays out, the prologue missions will not take place directly prior to Halo: Combat Evolved's story. Instead, they're set one year prior.

"So it sort of neatly helps you to understand some of these relationships and get this broader view into the universe, as well," the devs said.

The missions will be their own "self-contained story," but should serve as a bridge into the rest of the game.

"It's a story about Chief, and it kind of starts out as this smash-and-grab to get some intel, and it becomes something much bigger. And again, you get to explore the relationship between Chief and Johnson, the introduction of the Brutes and Prophets, the relationships between the Spartans and ODSTs--so there are a lot of different elements that kind of layer into there that are all kind of self-contained within that group of missions."

Though the missions are set prior to Halo: Combat Evolved and can be accessed via the game's main menu at any time, Halo Studios actually recommends playing them once you've already completed the campaign. They're going to be a little bit harder than the rest of the game, but if you're up to the challenge, there's nothing stopping you from playing them immediately.

Halo: Campaign Evolved launches for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC on July 28.

Resident Evil: Veronica--a full remake of the 2000 game Resident Evil: Code Veronica--was announced during Summer Game Fest Live earlier this month, but why was now the right time to remake the survival-horror classic? For Capcom, it came down to a mixture of technology and characters.

Speaking to GameSpot during Summer Game Fest, Capcom said that there is no set process in determining which game gets a remake next, but the pieces just seemed to line up because of which characters the recent games have focused on. Leon, for instance, has been the star or co-star of the Resident Evil 2 and 4 remakes, as well as Resident Evil: Requiem, in recent years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wAvJoWyfrM

Capcom wanted to explore a different character next, and chose Claire because of that. We'll also see Chris Redfield in Resident Evil: Veronica, who hasn't been the protagonist or co-protagonist in a Resident Evil game since 6 back in 2012. The development team is aiming to dig deeper into the characters' stories than it did in the original, as well, which should make it appealing to both longtime Code: Veronica fans and first-timers.

Alongside the characters, technological advancements played a key role in the decision to remake the game. The game will be played with the third-person perspective seen in the Resident Evil 2, 3, and 4 remakes, which should make it much less frustrating than the original version. That game relied on the franchise's classic tank controls, which have not exactly aged well.

Resident Evil: Veronica launches in 2027 for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, Switch 2, and PC. The development team certainly has experience with the series, with much of the team having previously worked on the Resident Evil 2 and 4 remakes.

Resident Evil: Veronica was announced during Summer Game Fest to plenty of buzz and excitement, as it's arguably the classic Resident Evil game most in need of a remake. However, while it is indeed a reimagined version of a game from more than 26 years ago, there is one major way Capcom is treating it like a mainline, modern game.

During an interview with GameSpot, Capcom explained that, because the other modern mainline Resident Evil games have one-word subtitles, this should apply to a remake of Code Veronica.

Thus, the "Code" was dropped from the title, and going by that logic, it's likely any future mainline Resident Evil games will stick to this trend. So far, we're three for three over the last decade, with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Resident Evil Village, and Resident Evil Requiem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JNv2CwmoRA

Resident Evil: Code Veronica released back in 2000, initially as a Dreamcast exclusive. Because it didn't launch on the original PlayStation--where Resident Evil 1, 2, and 3 first launched--it was decided to not give it a numbered title. This would make it appear to be a spin-off game to casual players, but there's a very good case to be made that Resident Evil: Code Veronica is the real sequel to Resident Evil 2, while 3 actually functions more as a side-story spin-off.

Resident Evil Veronica launches in 2027 for PS5, PlayStation X|S, Switch 2, and PC.

Gears of War: E-Day made a big splash during the Xbox Games Showcase, as The Coalition dropped an action-packed preview on audiences. Not only is Gears looking better than ever, thanks to Unreal Engine 5 powering it, but several design choices are also adding up to make the game play better through fluid movement mechanics and levels that'll give you opportunities to put your skills to the test.

GameSpot had the opportunity to take a closer look at the game and sit down with The Coalition's developers to learn more about the prequel. You can check out everything new that we learned from this interview that wasn't shown off in the initial preview in the video below.

https://youtu.be/hh5Swf5p4jo

Gears of War: E-Day is a fresh start for the franchise, and according to The Coalition, the developer started with an "empty hard drive" to rebuild Gears in Unreal Engine 5. The key location for E-Day is Kalona on the planet Sera, a city that will be devastated during Emergence Day when the Locust rise up to attack humanity. The Coalition says that the destruction will be felt throughout the campaign as environments change, and while E-Day isn't an open-world game, its large-scale arenas are combat puzzles waiting for players to solve them through smoother cover transitions and ultraviolence.

Some missions will have tighter spaces to fight in, while others will give players access to entire neighborhoods to wage war in. The main goal is to make players feel like they're in a big-budget action movie as they slide and mantle over obstacles so that they can flank enemies.

Other interesting tidbits from our time with The Coalition include the studio mentioning that E-Day has the longest campaign that it has ever designed--with the studio estimating that it'll take around 14 hours to complete--how E-Day was the story the studio wanted to tell next, and owners of PC gaming handhelds should expect to see it run just fine on those systems.

Gears of War: E-Day launches for PC and Xbox Series X|S on October 3, but it’s not coming to PS5.

Gears of War: E-Day will once again see fan-favorite characters like Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago headline the next game in the franchise, but what about that unresolved cliffhanger from Gears 5? Will we ever see those lingering plot threads addressed? Developer The Coalition isn't spilling the beans on whether Kait Diaz and her team will be back in action, but the studio has revealed why it chose to craft a prequel instead of a sequel.

Speaking to GameSpot, studio creative director Matt Searcy said that the tale of Emergence Day was simply the story it wanted to tell the most, with passion for the project dominating discussions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk2Uf2Th9aM

"We've got an opportunity here to tell a story we want to tell. What story do we want to tell? We chose E-Day," Searcy said to GameSpot. "After Gears 5, we shipped a bunch of games back-to-back, and the pandemic hit at the same time. Everybody was evaluating their job, where they wanted to live, and it wasn't so different for us. As a studio, what do we want to do with our next game? And it lined up exactly with Unreal Engine 5. No matter what we do, we're going to be starting with an empty hard drive."

"So we looked at those two things, and the story we really want to tell is a story we've been talking about. And the opportunity to build all those things--not just our mechanics--but the Locust, our characters, all those things from scratch, was just too good to pass up. So we looked at that, and it's one of those things where the passion dominates like any other conversation. We love that story, but we went, 'if all we want to do is this,' then this is what we should be doing, and we just chose that."

Gears 5 introduced some big revelations about the Locust, their origins, and Kait's connection to everything. For now, it looks like the dark origins of the Locust won't be a central plot point in E-Day, but that doesn't mean that the campaign won't be grim. The Coalition revealed that players will see plenty of civilian casualties during the campaign--which the studio estimates will take around 14 hours to complete--and the city of Kalona will start to fall apart as Emergence Day becomes a global catastrophe.

• Gears of War: E-Day Standard Edition

  $70 | Releases October 6

  Preorder at Amazon
• Gears of War: E-Day Premium Edition

  $100 | Releases October 1

  Preorder at Best Buy

Gears of War: E-Day launches for PC and Xbox Series X|S on October 3, but it's not coming to PS5. Ahead of its launch, The Coalition has shown off how movement in the game has evolved and how the iconic Lancer will get an origin story. An open beta to test out the multiplayer will be held in August. 

GameSpot is back from Summer Game Fest, and one of highly anticipated upcoming games we got to try out is Halo: Campaign Evolved. The remake of the 2001 original that's releasing this July for the game's 25th anniversary, the game promises a faithful update to the classic FPS that fans know and love.

At SGF, GameSpot senior video producer Jean-Luc Seipke played two of the re-made missions, Assault on the Control Room and The Silent Cartographer. Their verdict?

Meh.

"I think every Halo game has felt very unique and special in its own way. Halo: Campaign Evolved, unfortunately, feels more like just an amalgamation of all the Halos, while lacking what makes Halo 1 specifically Halo 1. That's my real core issue with it. It's just generic Halo," Seipke said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZFVVcEM38c

Seipke gave Halo Studios credit for upcoming certain elements of the game since we saw it last year. Visors are green again. Grunts now have their classic purple skin and armor that's brighter and more orange than before. The Warthog can now be driven on a particular, important path on The Silent Cartographer. The OG loading screen from the original Xbox version of Halo has been added. And while Seipke acknowledged that Halo Studios listened to fans and made a number of key changes and improvements, it wasn't enough to tilt the scale.

"I just didn't feel wowed the way I want to. This is Halo. It's one of the greatest games ever made. I should be feeling goosebumps. I should be feeling chills," they said. "I should be feeling, 'Oh my god, look at the way they have reimagined this game. They have brought it to life 25 years later.'

"But instead, I was kind of just like, 'Yep. That's Assault on Control Room. That's Halo. I can get inside the Wraith now. I can use the Energy Sword now. I can sprint now. It's fun. It's OK. It's just now wowing me.'"

Halo fans who want to play the classic Halo game with modern updates may like what they get, Seipke said, but ... "I was just really hoping for something more special."

Seipke didn't play any of the newly added prequel missions, spanning the three-mission Operation Meteorite story arc, and they said maybe these new missions will offer something more exciting to convince people this is a remake worth playing.

Halo: Campaign Evolved launches on July 28 for $50, and in addition coming to the places you'd expect like Xbox and PC, it will also be available on PS5. People who pay more for the $70 premium edition can start playing on July 23.

The game does not feature multiplayer support.

If Halo: Campaign Evolved doesn't sound interesting to you, Halo Studios is developing another new Halo game. Though it has not been announced yet, it's rumored to be like Fortnite with a live-service multiplayer approach.

The realm of asymmetrical horror multiplayer games grows a little bigger with Saw: Genesis, Bloober Team and Anshar Studios' co-developed 3v1 game based on Lionsgate's Saw franchise.

I got to sit in on a roughly 30-minute hands-off preview of the game at Summer Game Fest 2026, and I asked the team about what it's like entering this crowded space, where it seems like Hollywood is seeing dollar signs and throwing its licenses at various teams, then leaving some game studios to pick up the pieces when the game doesn't become a big enough hit to continue development.

Bloober Team's head of publishing, Michał Gembicki, told me that the team knows the score, and admitted it does scare them. "We know this is a saturated market, right? There are many corpses in it, many cadavers [pointing to a prop dead body in the Saw-themed room]. We are afraid of that. We are humbled by it, so we know we need to experiment a lot."

Gembecki continued, "But at the same time, from the Bloober perspective, we have established first-party games like Cronos and Silent Hill, obviously, that specialize in storytelling in rather linear worlds, and this is an attempt to enter something new, a completely new division, and become a much broader company."

You can check out my impressions of Saw: Genesis below for a closer look at the upcoming horror multiplayer game.

Broken Mirror Games is Bloober Team's new internal alt-label, and Saw: Genesis represents the first game announced under the banner. Co-developed with Anshar Studios, Saw: Genesis will launch first on Steam Early Access later this year.

The Fable reboot has more than 1,000 NPCs that players can interact with. Given this scale, and the fact that they all speak, people are naturally wondering how developer Playground was able to pull this off, and if some kind of artificial intelligence system was used.

During a recent group Q&A attended by GameSpot at Summer Game Fest, Playground confirmed that there is "no generation involved in it" after being asked if the studio used an Arc Raiders-style text-to-speech AI system.

"We've got a really fantastic cast of actors who have come in and recorded tons and tons of dialogue, which is what you've heard today voicing our NPCs," the developer said.

"All of our NPCs are fully voiced. We cast around 100 actors to voice our Living Population alone," the developer explained.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzwz7KZNBzY&feature=youtu.be

The text-to-speech system in Arc Raiders was controversial because developer Embark used AI to simulate all manner of different things that the in-game characters could say. After the game became a huge hit, Embark brought the actors back to record more lines, and now Arc Raiders has more human-voiced lines than it did at launch.

The Fable reboot has a so-called "Living Population" of NPCs that players can interact with on their journey through Albion.

"As you play the game, you get to know the names of the individual NPCs. You get to know what they like, what they’re looking for in a partner, where they live, where they work, all that kind of cool stuff. It’s an extra dimension to traditional NPCs," game director Ralph Fulton said in January.

The Fable reboot launches in February 2027 for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5. Marvel star Hayley Atwell plays the main villain.

Generative AI was a hot topic during Summer Game Fest, as more game development companies have been implementing it in upcoming projects. One game that isn't utilizing the technology is Gundam: Rogue Orbit, as the next entry in the decades-old mecha anime series has confirmed that its game is 100% human-created.

Speaking to GameSpot, Gundam: Rogue Orbit producers Yuya Tomiyama and Shinya Satake had a simple response when quizzed about the game and how it is being developed.

"For this title, we can say that there's no generative AI use," the producers said.

In contrast, Sega's reveal of Crazy Taxi: World Tour has been met with a mixed reception after the game's original creator, Kenji Kanno, defended the use of GenAI in its development. Following an AI disclosure on Steam, Kanno said that the game's artists use generative AI to produce reference material, and then they start to "draw the actual thing."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXtfc6DfBWc

As noted by the director of research and insights at Niko Partners for the Asia and MENA markets, Daniel Ahmad, GenAI technologies are more widely accepted in Asian markets, while the tools have received noticeable pushback in the West due in part to how they're trained on existing work produced by human artists. Creatives largely view GenAI as a plagiarism machine, due to how many of them find that their work has been used without their permission, credit, or compensation.

Games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 have felt this blowback, as, despite being hailed as one of the best new games of 2025, the use of AI placeholder assets resulted in it losing one of its game awards. Developer Sandfall Interactive has said that humans will make all work in its future games.

Crimson Desert has also been criticized for its use of GenAI--which was quickly removed by Pearl Abyss after it was discovered--while the developers behind recent releases like Subnautica 2 and 007: First Light moved to reassure players that the technology was not used in the development of those games.

Nintendo's decision to host a Nintendo Direct this June befuddles me. The virtual showcase wasn't terrible, but it certainly didn't wow me either. Deltarune is very cool, so it was nice to see a release date for Chapter 5, and I'm sure plenty of folks are thrilled to jump back into Pokemon Pokopia with its new expansion pass. But the games that would have been this Direct's big hitters, Kingdom Hearts IV and a remake for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, got extremely short teasers that didn't drum up much hype (for me, anyway). The entire Direct felt somewhat lackluster, and I wonder why Nintendo didn't just hold off on having a showcase until later this year.

The current landscape of virtual game showcases owes a lot to Nintendo. While major virtual presentations being livestreamed were a major part of E3 when that was still a thing, Nintendo established the framework for how showcases should work with its Directs, starting back in 2011. Nintendo basically separated itself from E3 entirely in 2013, ditching its annual stage presentation to just host Directs. And because of that, Nintendo no longer needed to be restrained to summer for big announcements. The community understood that Directs were their own thing, and they could be hosted at any time.

This has been incredible for Nintendo as it's been able to have showcases whenever there has been something to showcase. While some Directs have been far more impressive than others, most of them--especially in recent years--have done a great job of getting the audience excited and talking about at least one game. Each one felt carefully curated and well-prepared.

The lack of substantial gameplay or news for Kingdom Hearts IV and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time leaves me wondering why Nintendo revealed anything about them at all. These announcements felt undercooked, like they both could have spent a bit more time in secrecy before their public unveiling to the world.

Comparing this Direct to more recent June Directs paints a stark contrast. In 2025, we got a substantial gameplay reveal for Donkey Kong Bananza; in 2024, we got the announcement and gameplay reveal for The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and both a gameplay reveal and plenty of new info for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond; and in 2023, we got the announcement and gameplay reveal for Pokemon Scarlet/Violet's two DLC expansions, the announcement and gameplay reveal for the remake of Super Mario RPG, the gameplay reveal for Pikmin 4, and the announcement and a pretty big gameplay reveal for Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

When I compare those showcases to this year's Direct, it feels like night and day. Maybe something was happening behind the scenes that prevented Nintendo from being able to show what it planned to, or perhaps Nintendo thinks the mere mention of Ocarina of Time getting a remake for Switch 2 is an announcement on par with an entire gameplay reveal for Mario, Pokemon, Donkey Kong, Metroid, or any of its other first-party franchises. If anything, however, this showcase felt more like an act of obligation than anything else, as if Nintendo felt a need to showcase something, anything, to warrant being in the Summer Game Fest conversation. 

And, frankly, Nintendo doesn't need to be a part of the SGF conversation. It continues to draw viewership for its Directs and hype for its games, largely because its showcases for upcoming games almost always celebrate them with detailed looks at gameplay and fun insights from game directors or producers. If Nintendo somehow feels like it needs to host a Direct within the vicinity of SGF, I hope it ditches that philosophy soon. I'd much rather only have Directs when Nintendo has something it wants to show off, not when it feels pressured it has to show anything off.