The latest update for Crimson Desert, Version 1.00.03, is now rolling out, bringing a huge range of gameplay improvements, bug fixes, and quality-of-life changes shaped by player feedback. The patch is currently available on Steam, with other platforms to follow. PlayStation 5 users are expected to receive the update later today, while Xbox players can expect it on March 26.

One of the biggest criticisms of the game has been its clunky and convoluted controls. This patch aims to fix a slew of those. In a statement accompanying the update, the developers emphasized their ongoing commitment to refining the player experience: "However, this is not the end of our control improvements; we will continue to improve both controller and keyboard/mouse controls moving forward."

In addition to control fixes, the developers appear to be making the game more accessible by adjusting difficulty--especially in boss fights and combat. Updates include reducing the health and attack power of certain enemies, lowering stamina consumption when blocking, and easing ambush encounters near the Reed Devil boss stage. Specific bosses, such as Kearush the Slayer, have had their attack patterns adjusted, while successful parries now build stun gauges more quickly. Visibility of boss weaknesses has been improved, and several bugs affecting combat have been resolved, including issues with fire arrows not igniting enemies, bosses behaving erratically, or weaknesses not applying correctly.

A report revealed who will portray Abby's main companions in Season 3 of HBO's The Last of Us adaptation, but the casting of one of these characters is raising questions and debates.

Per Deadline, Michelle Mao will play Yara, and Kyriana Kratter is set to portray her younger brother, Lev. As in the game, Lev will be depicted in the television show as a 13-year-old transgender boy. Kratter, who is 15 and played breakout character KB in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, is understood to be cisgender.

While there is no doubt about Kratter's acting skills, the casting decision has attracted criticism online. Naughty Dog cast transgender actor Ian Alexander as Lev in The Last of Us Part II, but HBO and the show's production team did not cast a trans actor in the role despite holding what Deadline described as an "inclusive casting call" with "young actors of different backgrounds auditioning." Naughty Dog boss and previous co-showrunner of the HBO show, Neil Druckmann, is not involved in the production of Season 3.

New information has come to light about projects from Sony's Firesprite studio that never materialized, including a Breaking Bad video game.

MP1st reported that Firesprite was working on a Breaking Bad VR game for PlayStation VR in 2017 and 2018. The game was said to be more akin to an "experience," similar to 2017's Stranger Things: The VR Experience.

According to the report, the Breaking Bad game would have taken players to famous places from the TV show, including Walter White's backyard with its pool where many notable story moments from the series took place. Another location would have been the New Mexico desert, where Walt and Jesse took part in many wicked deeds, including cooking meth and killing people.

Two weeks after launch, Marathon's pinnacle activity Cryo Archive went live on March 20. The new endgame activity has been well-received so far, but with its strict entry requirements, many players aren't quite ready for the intricate mode just yet. Naturally, this has led to some player feedback, and Bungie says it's listening to fans about how Cryo Archive can be improved.

"Congratulations to all the runners who’ve been battling it out in the floating death fridge we call Cryo Archive," game director Joe Ziegler wrote online. "We've been watching and ingesting all the thoughts and feedback that we're hearing, aggregating it and taking it down in notes. After this weekend, we’ll spend some time looking into feedback and thinking of the next iterations we want to make."

Ziegler added that any improvements will take some time time implement, and Bungie is looking at the mode's scheduling--it's only open on weekends--and if it'll be possible to play solo. The studio also wants to examine if Subroutines can be a guaranteed drop in the future.

The next Xbox Partner Preview event is coming this week, Microsoft has announced. The event will take place on Thursday, March 26, promising news about titles from Sega, GSC Game World, and Owlcat Games, as well as "brand-new reveals."

There will also be "world premieres and Xbox Game Pass announcements," Microsoft said.

Some of the games confirmed for the Xbox Partner Preview include Stranger Than Heaven, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, and The Expanse: Osiris Reborn.

Capcom management has explained how the company will utilize generative AI content in its games going forward, and the answer is that it will not do so.

During a shareholder meeting transcribed by Automaton, Capcom said, "Our company will not be implementing any AI-generated assets into our video game content."

Instead, Capcom will look to "actively utilize" AI technologies to help the process of making games become more efficient, which is what many other developers have also said.

The Minecraft theme park land inspired by the game, Minecraft World, will open at a UK theme park in the UK in 2027. Developer Mojang and Merlin Entertainment announced the opening date and more details for the attraction during Minecraft Live recently.

Mojang and Merlin first announced plans for the park in 2024. It's set to open in 2027 at Chessington World of Adventures. Fans can take a 35-minute direct train from London to the park, or drive themselves.

Minecraft World will feature the first Minecraft-themed roller coaster, along with themed retail and dining options. "Working closely together with Mojang Studios we are meticulously creating an authentic world that the global community of Minecraft fans will want to immerse themselves in and experience the game in a whole new way," Merlin boss Angela Jobson said.

Chief PlayStation 5 architect, Mark Cerny, has confirmed that AI-powered frame generation will come to PlayStation platforms in the near future, before stopping short of confirming which ones and when.

In an interview with Digital Foundry, Cerny explained that PSSR 2, the latest version of the PlayStation 5 Pro exclusive upscaler, stems from the same co-developed algorithm AMD is using with FSR 4 (or FSR Redstone, as it is now known) on PC. It's that same co-development that has helped AMD also include frame generation in its latest iterations, and makes Sony well-poised to include this in its own capacity in the near future.

"Just to clarify a few things about the collaboration with AMD, the new PSSR uses the same core co-developed algorithm as FSR Redstone's Upscaling," Cerny explained. "FSR Frame Generation is also based on co-developed technology (or as my good friend Jack Huynh puts it, 'co-engineered technology'). I’m very happy with how that work is progressing, and an equivalent frame generation library should be seen at some point on PlayStation platforms."

The Resident Evil series is celebrating its 30-year anniversary today, March 22, 2025. Below, we look at the way the series subversively blends thirst traps with horrific thrills.

Leon Kennedy is tied up. The henchmen of cult leader Osmund Saddler have injected him with Las Plagas--an ancient, zombifying parasite. His hands are cuffed to a chain, at the other end of which is Kennedy's sometimes-ally Luis Sera. They work together to get free. There is a rhythm between them as they pull on the chain. Their muscles are taut, they trade grunts like drumbeats. For now, their bodies are triumphant. Yet, in just a few short hours, Luis will be dead and Leon will be coughing up blood, while Las Plagas takes more and more hold of him. This is just one moment across Resident Evil's 30-year history, but it is far from a unique one. The franchise puts its stars in constant peril. Because that peril is so fixated on the body and its permeability, it often has an erotic dimension. It's easy to limit this to the games' casts of femme fatales and women-in-peril, but it is the men, especially Leon Kennedy, who bear the brunt of it in practice. One of the series' sincere pleasures is watching beautiful people, but especially beautiful men, get hurt.

In part, this is a consequence of Resident Evil's mechanical ideas. In most shooters and action games, the player cannot really get injured. The body of the Doomslayer, to take one example, is almost a pure machine, operating with total efficiency until the very moment of death. In Resident Evil, each and every hit has consequences. When Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine get hurt, they start to limp. Moving slower means it is more difficult to evade enemies, which means they might have to use more ammo to kill them. Best then, to take as few hits as possible. Their survival depends on vigilance. The body is something that can change, even if a few green herbs can patch it up. As the series morphed into almost pure action, it never lost this fixation.

The Resident Evil series is celebrating its 30-year anniversary today, March 22, 2025. Below, we look back at how the formative survival horror franchise has shifted the camera itself to accent its atmosphere.

Resident Evil has always felt like a playable horror film. Players step into the role of desperate survivors while Capcom carefully stages every scare, controlling the pace of tension through framing and timing. Across three decades, the series has experimented constantly with perspective, shifting how players view its haunted mansions, ruined villages, and bioengineered nightmares.

Sometimes the camera keeps players at a distance, watching danger unfold across the room. Other times it presses tightly against a character’s back or moves directly into their point of view. Each shift changes the way fear works.

During Minecraft Live today, Mojang announced Minecraft Dungeons II. The sequel to 2020's dungeon-crawler is set for release this fall, and people can start wishlisting the game today.

Back in May 2025, it was reported that a sequel to Minecraft Dungeons was in the works, and has been for several years, so the announcement today was not a total surprise.

Minecraft Dungeons is a Minecraft-flavored take on ARPGs like Diablo, and the game was released across Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and PC. The game also got an expansion and an ultimate edition. GameSpot's Minecraft Dungeons review scored the game a 7/10. "It scratches the dungeon-crawler itch with a sense of goofy charm and expands what Minecraft can be," reviewer Steve Watts said.

During Minecraft Live, Mojang announced its next drop: Chaos Cubed. While the drop doesn't have a confirmed release date as of yet, we're already excited for the chaotic potential it's sure to unleash. Among the things coming to Minecraft in Chaos Cubed is the brand new Sulfur Cube, which sees its physics and properties change as it absorbs various materials, though how that might work remains a mystery for now. We're taking the "Chaos" in Chaos Cubed pretty seriously, though.

Based on our first look, we're imagining that feeding Sulfur Cubes wood will cause them to become sturdy, structural blocks, while perhaps sneaking them a slime ball will turn them into gelatinous, bouncy bundles of fun. While Mojang hasn't gone into the specifics of the physics that can be affected, that hasn't stopped us pondering the possibilities. You'll be able to feed a Sulfur Cube manually, or it can choose to absorb a material of its own accord, as long as it's in range.

The Sulfur Cube will be found in the new Sulfur Caves environments. These areas can spawn in many of the overworld's biomes, meaning there should never be one too far away. Digging down should lead you to a cave with sulfur pools and new blocks to mine. Be careful though--sitting near these pools of water for too long will cause you to obtain the noxious effect, which we imagine will cause you damage over time.

There are a lot of improvements coming to Windows 11 in March and April, according to Microsoft's Windows chief, Pavan Davuluri. And while some of the adjustments may not arrive right away, one of the more immediate changes will give users more control over how they use Windows 11 while also cutting down on AI integration in programs that don't need it.

Davaluri detailed the upcoming changes in a blog post. One of the first notable options will be the ability to reposition the Windows 11 taskbar, which Davaluri noted was one of the most-requested changes. He later wrote that Microsoft will "be more intentional about how and where Copilot integrates across Windows." Programs like Notepad, Snipping Tool, and Photos will subsequently have "unnecessary Copilot entry points" removed.

Users will also have more flexibility to decide whether to skip updates or schedule them at their leisure rather than being forced to go through with those downloads just to shut down or start up their systems. Davuluri added that File Explorer will be given a refined performance that will allow it to function more quickly and reliably. Widget options are also on the way that will allow users to choose how often they appear.

Anya Taylor-Joy is returning as the voice of Princess Peach in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, but she recently shared that voicing the character wasn't quite what she expected. During an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Taylor-Joy said she threw up the first time she had a recording session for The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

"It's super fun," Taylor-Joy told Meyers. "But I will say the first time I ever did a session, I did not realize how taxing it would be because you're yelling continuously the whole time. I think the first time I ever did it, I threw up. I'm pretty sure, like, I drank so much water and I was like, 'Gotta do it.'"

Taylor-Joy went to explain that she had to take part in the "efforts" at the end of the session. That's the part where she had to act out Peach's actions with every yell, grunt, and gasp called for in the script. She said that it felt "really cool" to do them, before adding, "You kind of visit yourself back and you think, 'God, I hope no one ever sees this,' because they do film them."

The Sims 4 (and its developers at Electronic Arts and Maxis) have come under fire recently for adding microtransactions and paid mods to the game, Bethesda Creation Club-style, with a new feature called The Sims 4 Marketplace. Naturally, players are unhappy that a game with over 100 DLC packs (that can cost you $1,600) is implementing more monetization tactics, but the problems with The Sims 4 Marketplace go deeper than player frustration with what they perceive as EA's greed.

To get a better idea of what exactly is going on in The Sims 4, I decided to take its new player-creation marketplace for a spin, and what I found was disappointing, but not surprising. Perhaps the first thing to note is that EA has now implemented a premium in-game currency, called Moola, which players must purchase before they can buy Maker Marketplace items. And it turns out, the Maker Marketplace is everything Sims 4 players don't want in a game update, but it's far from the first time EA has plugged its ears and yelled "I can't hear you!" in response to Sims players' complaints.

To understand how the game ended up here, we'll have to travel back to early 2025. It's been a strange year for The Sims, and the game's path to a paid mod marketplace has been a bumpy one. The franchise celebrated its 25th anniversary in February 2025, which EA and Maxis marked with multiple Sims 4 content creator collaborations, promises to fix game-breaking bugs that had gone ignored for years, and of course, the announcement of even more paid DLC. Naturally, players were excited to see long-standing bugs addressed, and were happy with new base game updates that fleshed out Sims' personalities and romantic aspirations, along with DLC packs that introduced romantic new locales and even new ways for Sims to kick the bucket.

Middling reviews and plummeting stocks haven't prevented Crimson Desert from reaching a tremendous 2 million units sold merely a day after its release. However, a new controversy surrounding developer Pearl Abyss's massive RPG seems to be brewing, and it involves everyone's favorite subject these days: AI-generated art.

In the past few hours, a number of Crimson Desert players have taken to Reddit, Bluesky, and other social media platforms with images depicting what they suspect to be generative AI-created art. In each instance, it seems to be environmental art--like ornate portraits or medieval woodcut-inspired paintings--that is being called into question. In one example, Reddit user Ok-Error-403 explained their reasoning, writing: "Signs of AI: [T]hree fingers on the hand holding the bag and four on the left hand is the biggest giveaway. Also AI does linocut patterns this way where the strokes aren't consistent and has wonky folding for clothing. I could be wrong ... would love to be, but I'm 99% sure it's AI."

On Bluesky, user Lex Luddy shared a series of images of an ornate portrait which, upon closer inspection, depicts mushy-faced warriors atop many-limbed horses. It only takes a cursory glance to realize this picture doesn't suit Crimson Desert's more grounded art direction, and is far more in line with what we see in generative AI-created images. These images were also shared on Reddit, with user Rex_Spy writing that those who wish to see it themselves should go to "Oakenshield Manor, in the southwest part of the first city/town. It's the staircase in the back of the manor."

World of Warcraft: Midnight is here, and with it the long-awaited arrival of player housing in Blizzard's two-decade-old MMORPG. It's a wildly impressive system that allows for boundless creativity, even if there's still significant room for improvement.

For my full thoughts on WoW's 11th expansion, check out GameSpot's WoW: Midnight review, but as Midnight's biggest selling point, housing is worth digging into in greater detail. With 20 years' worth of hopes and dreams attached to housing in WoW, Blizzard finally pulling the trigger on the feature is a big deal, and one that filled many players, myself included, with anxiety regarding whether Blizzard was up to the task.

Thankfully, Blizzard's vision for housing mostly delivers, avoiding many of the housing pitfalls seen in other contemporary MMOs. You get your house for free. You can put your house anywhere in the game's designated housing area as long as the plot you want isn't occupied, and if it is, you can just keep visiting identical instances of the same neighborhood until you find one where it isn't. You can make a neighborhood of just your friends or guildmates. You don't have to pay taxes on your home. You can easily move to a new plot or neighborhood. Players with millions of gold (or a higher credit card limit) don't get to buy a mansion while you can only afford a small shack. Everyone gets the same house, but both the inside and outside can be customized largely how you see fit.

Assassin's Creed Shadows is celebrating its 1-year anniversary today, March 20. Below, we look back at how its dual protagonists could have made an even more meaningful impact.

It's been a year since Assassin's Creed Shadows launched, and I'm still thinking about it. My opinion on what the game is remains largely unchanged--I've talked about this at length in both my Assassin's Creed Shadows review and Claws of Awaji DLC review--but if I could take a moment to talk about what Shadows isn't, I fervently have one wish. Shadows' best idea, that it tells its story via a split perspective, should have been pushed further. In fact, that should have been the entire focus of the game's second act--I want Act 2 to have solely been about two distinct characters growing simultaneously, and perpetually being unable to see eye-to-eye with one another while still unified in a shared purpose.

Shadows has two playable protagonists: the shinobi Naoe and the samurai Yasuke. The former is fictional, native to Japan, and driven by vengeance; while the latter is a real person from history, an African outsider, and motivated by duty. The point is that they're very different people, reinforced by differing playstyles--Naoe primarily relies on subterfuge and stealth, while Yasuke is geared toward excelling in open combat as a powerful warrior. Save for specific missions, Shadows allows you to freely switch between the two as you explore 16th-century Japan.

After Amazon's first effort in the smartphone market came up short more than a decade ago, it appears the retail and technology giant is trying again, and with the help of a former Xbox boss.

Reuters reported that Amazon is working on a new phone, known inside the company as "Transformer," and it will be AI-driven and meant to push people to Amazon's products and services.

Amazon is said to be developing this phone via its "ZeroOne" unit, which sources said is a team with the goal of creating "breakthrough" products. J Allard, the former Xbox boss who helped created the original Xbox and the Zune music player at Microsoft, is leading the team.

FBC: Firebreak bombed. The multiplayer spin-off of Remedy's hit game Control, which imagines players as squads of gun-toting supernatural janitors meant to clean up the messes inside its eerie and magical setting, did not find the audience that the original game did. If the readily available Steam charts are any indication, it missed the mark by a sizable margin and Remedy itself has since confirmed that the title underperformed. And yet, the multiplayer title, which Remedy has spent the better part of a year tuning up and molding into something more appealing to players, isn't just disappearing from the face of the Earth after failing to connect with audiences. With its dying breath, it is actually setting a standard that the rest of the games industry ought to rise to meet.

When Remedy announced that it would be sunsetting FBC: Firebreak after one final update, I was prepared to see an expiration date: a finish line or resignation of sorts. Instead, I found this: "FBC: Firebreak will stay online and continue to be playable for years to come. We have done engineering work to ensure we can sustain the upkeep of the relay servers when the player volume is lower." This move, and the addition of a friend pass system--allowing one person to own the game and share it with others who don't--has assured that FBC: Firebreak will have legs for some time to come.

This is a shocking, and very welcome, development at a perilous time for multiplayer games. While titles like Marathon try to find an audience (let alone one the size of its most immediate competition, the viral sensation Arc Raiders), others, like Highguard, have come and gone seemingly in the blink of an eye. And when a game like these is deemed dead, the industry all but assures it stays that way. Like Concord, games are ripped off of physical and digital store shelves. They are delisted and pulled from libraries. Teams are laid off and studios are outright shuttered. The servers powering these games are given an end date and, before long, they are shut down and all we're left with is memories of them.