Tag:

leaked

Leaked Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 release date suggests there’s still no Nintendo Switch 2 version at launch

by admin August 17, 2025

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will reportedly release on 14th November, 2025, and there’s still no Nintendo Switch 2 release planned.

That’s according to noted and highly reliable Dealabs leaker billbil-kun, who suggests the latest instalment of Activision’s tentpole franchise will be coming to PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series, but will not be available on Switch at launch.

Why Tiktok Thirsts over Call of Duty’s Ghost.Watch on YouTube

We noted Nintendo Switch 2 was notably absent from the launch platform line-up when the game was revealed during Summer Games Fest, running counter to Microsoft’s 10-year promise to launch Call of Duty on Nintendo platforms on “the same day as Xbox, with full feature and content parity” if its gargantuan $69 billion offer to buy Activision Blizzard was approved. Which it was, of course.

At the time, however, sources confirmed to Eurogamer: “We’re committed to getting the franchise on Switch. Both teams [are] working on it. Will share details when ready.”

Dealabs posits that all this release information will be confirmed at next week’s Gamescom, including news of a physical release (with a disc included) and pre-orders set to go live on 20th August, following a reveal the night before at Opening Night Live. While U.S./UK pricing has yet to be leaked or confirmed, the leaker suggests it’ll retail for €79.99 in Europe. Xbox has, of course, previously pledged not to raise prices past $70 USD.

Former Activision Blizzard president Mike Ybarra thinks Battlefield 6 will “boot stomp” Call of Duty this year, and that this will push the CoD series to stop being “lazy”.

Source link

August 17, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

War Thunder players have done it again: Yet another restricted document is leaked to win a forum argument

by admin June 24, 2025

It’s a day ending in “y” so you know what that means: as per tradition, military documentation not cleared for public release has once more been posted on the War Thunder forums in order to win an argument about a piece of hardware. If this sounds familiar, maybe it’s because you’ve previously read about leaks involving the Eurofighter Typhoon and F117 Nighthawk, or the M2A2 Bradley.

A brief primer: War Thunder is developed by Gaijin Entertainment, a free-to-play military sim with real-world hardware from various eras. The game’s schtick is realism and attention to detail, which attracts a considerably knowledgeable crowd of enthusiasts, including military personnel, who like to argue over the veracity of how the game simulates various vehicles.

Which is how we end up with things like a June 21 thread titled “All Harrier 2 missing extreme maximum G factor,” where a War Thunder player called MatrixRupture decided to take the red pill. “We all know the Harriers are terribly incorrect,” they begin. “Since the AV-8B manuals have been opened to be shared let’s take a look… All that needs to change is the out-of-balance motion.”

The text was accompanied by source material, in this case a page from the NATOPS AV-8B and TAV-8B Harrier flight manual.

Community Manager Smin1080p_WT was on it instantly: these people have been here before. The material was immediately removed, the OP temporarily banned, and the thread locked with the following familiar statement:

“The source you attempted to post is NOT cleared for public use and is very clearly marked ‘DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT C’ [on] its front cover. No source material that is restricted, export restricted or classified will ever be tolerated, handled or used in any way on any of our platforms.”

This is accompanied by a link to the War Thunder rules on posting source material, which is the top-stickied post atop the most popular of the game’s forums: not that it seems to make much difference. War Thunder’s “Restrictions on Classified and Export Restricted information” are mere guidelines for this fanbase.

The community reaction to the material being posted is either amusement of the “we did it again boys” variety, or players harrumphing over the distinction between classified documents and something marked with “Distribution Statement C,” which means it’s restricted to authorised US government personnel and contractors.

(Image credit: Gaijin Entertainment)

It is true that certain War Thunder leaks have been way more serious than others in terms of classification, and some of them have involved posting material that can be found relatively easily online. But you can almost feel Gaijin’s community managers banging their collective heads against a wall at this point, just muttering “don’t post any restricted material” over and over and over again.

At least there’s no regional bias though. The Harrier material takes its place in a proudly global tradition, with previous leaks including documentation for US aircraft like the F-16, F-15E, and F-117, China’s ZTZ-99, the Eurocopter Tiger and Eurofighter Typhoon, the UK’s Challenger 2 tank, and France’s Leclerc. Gotta win those forum arguments about turret movement range.

“This probably isn’t the biggest leak ever, not at all,” a former RAF engineer told the UK Defence Journal. “These kinds of manuals float around online, especially older ones. But that doesn’t change the fact that if it’s marked as controlled or restricted, platforms like War Thunder have no choice but to take action.”

Every time this happens, Gaijin Entertainment eventually gives the community some sort of reminder that such material will never be used to alter in-game vehicles. But it always falls on deaf ears. It has once again been 0 days since restricted military material has leaked on the War Thunder forums: see you again soon.

Source link

June 24, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Sega’s leaked sales figures show Sonic’s new frontier is heading in the right direction

by admin June 23, 2025

Over the weekend, Sega accidentally leaked sales figures for a number of its key franchises, revealing – among others – the sales of its open zone game Sonic Frontiers.

The numbers were accidentally included on the company’s latest fiscal report and have since been swiftly removed, but not before fans shared the numbers on ResetEra.

Total sales of Sonic Frontiers were 4.57m, while Sonic Superstars was 2.43m, and Team Sonic Racing was 3.5m. Meanwhile, as officially revealed by the company, Sonic X Shadow Generations sold 2.3m units.

Sonic Frontiers | Launch TrailerWatch on YouTube

Elsewhere in the leak, Persona 5 Royal has sold 7.25m units – as expected – while Persona 3 Reload just 2.07m units. Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth sold 1.66m units, and Like A Dragon: The Man Who Erased His Name just 960,000.

Sega also officially revealed Metaphor: ReFantazio sold 2m units.

The company critically had a great year in 2024. Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth was well received by series fans, Metaphor: ReFantazio was an outstanding new RPG, and Sonic X Shadow Generations was one of the best-reviewed Sonic games in recent memory. But this reception seemingly hasn’t translated to strong sales.

Still, the figure for Sonic Frontiers does stand out. Released back in 2022, it proves the game has had a long sales tail – even if that’s been spurred on by discounts. And, as the pre-eminent 3D game in the series, its sales have continued alongside both the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and 3 films.

Back in November 2022, Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka stated Sonic Frontiers’ open zone design was the “cornerstone of future Sonic games”. There will be high hopes, then, for its presumed sequel.

Sonic Frontiers established the “open zone” design (rather than open world), which emphasised exploration as well as speed and took advantage of current hardware technology (despite its egregious pop-in).

Sonic Superstars, released a year later, has just over half the sales of Sonic Frontiers. A 2D game, it perhaps didn’t sit well with fans after the forward-thinking Frontiers.

As for Sonic X Shadow Generations, it has sold well since its release last year, spurred on by the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 film. However, it’s still a remake of an older game. And it seems, as much as Sega trades in nostalgia, it’s the open zone advancement in design that fans have responded to with their wallets.

The fact Team Sonic Racing has outsold more traditional platformers also bodes well for the forthcoming Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds.

In short, Team Sonic is heading in the right direction, and expectations will be high for the original game that follows Sonic Frontiers.

As Eurogamer’s Alex Donaldson discussed with Iizuka recently, Sonic has gone from “fighting to survive” to a global megastar in the past 10 years.

“When I moved over from Tokyo to Los Angeles, it was like an ‘oh my god’ moment,” Iizuka said. “Like, we need to save the brand, or this brand isn’t going to be around for much longer.”

Source link

June 23, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Sega just accidentally leaked its own sales numbers, and somehow Sonic Frontiers sold more than the last two mainline Yakuzas combined, but Persona 5’s putting the rest of the stable to shame

by admin June 22, 2025

First reported by VGC, Sega Sammy Holdings⁠—Sega’s delightfully-named parent company⁠—mistakenly uploaded sales numbers for 11 major games to a public page on the company website. ResetEra user –R uploaded the full table to the forum, allowing us to still peep those numbies after Sega took the original page down.

The original table charts earnings by fiscal year from 2020 to 2025, but for simplicity, here are the total units sold for each game across the entire span:

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth: 1.66 million
Like a Dragon: The Man Who Erased His Name: 960,000
Persona 3 Reload: 2.07 million
Sonic Superstars: 2.43 million
Sonic Frontiers: 4.57 million
Total War: Warhammer 3: 2.34 million
Shin Megami Tensei V: 2.11 million
Yakuza: Like a Dragon: 2.86 million
Persona 5 Royal: 7.25 million
Team Sonic Racing: 3.50 million
Total War: Three Kingdoms: 3.21 million

The biggest surprise for me is how well Sonic games are selling to this day⁠—possibly helped a great deal by the movies⁠—as well as how slowly recent Yakuza/Like a Dragon games have sold by comparison. Sonic Frontiers moved almost as many units as Yakuza 7, Infinite Wealth, and The Man Who Erased His Name combined.

Frontiers is a game that seemed to come and go without much fanfare, while Like a Dragon appears to be at the height of its popularity. I wouldn’t worry about Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio or anything, though: Those are still strong showings, and the developer just cranks games out at an almost unheard-of pace for the 2020s game industry, more than making up for any one game’s relative lack of success.

Two more things stood out to me. First, nothing even comes close to Persona 5 Royal’s 7 million units sold, and this data doesn’t even account for Persona 5’s first three years of non-Royal circulation, likely putting its total north of 10 million.

Second are the notable omissions of Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii and especially Metaphor: ReFantazio. Both were perhaps excluded for having released too close to the end of Sega’s 2025 fiscal year, but Metaphor seems to have sold like gangbusters, and I’m very curious to know how it stacks up.

Source link

June 22, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

PSA: Death Stranding 2’s full opening hour has leaked online

by admin June 22, 2025

The first hour of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach has leaked online, three days ahead of its formal release.

A YouTuber uploaded the opening hour earlier today (22nd June), writing “First part of Death Stranding [2] before everyone else”. At the time of writing, the video is still available, and it is not clear how the player obtained the early copy. Within five minutes of the footage, however, a pop-up appears, inviting the player to apply a new update, suggesting they may be playing a physical copy offline.

8 Things You Need To Know About Death Stranding 2: On The Beach.Watch on YouTube

As you may well imagine, this typically means spoilers – from story to characters to environments and everything in between – will shortly start appearing across social media, so if you prefer to go into games without prior knowledge, now would be the time to ensure your muted words list is up to date.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach will release on PS5 later this week on 25th June.

Earlier this week, we learned Raised by Wolves creator Aaron Guzikowski is penning an animated film set in the world of Death Stranding. As for the live-action film adaptation, Kojima announced his company was partnering with A24 in December 2023. A24 is the production and distribution company behind the likes of Everything Everywhere All At One and Hereditary.

We also recently learned A Quiet Place: Day One’s Michael Sarnoski was attached to write and direct the Death Stranding adaptation.

Source link

June 22, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Leaked footage of “paused” Dungeons & Dragons RPG shows the thing doing a thing with the stuff

by admin June 20, 2025

Some footage from a reportedly cancelled Dungeons and Dragons RPG from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive co-developers Hidden Path Entertainment has surfaced online, alongside concept art.

All of it paints a vague picture of a work-in-progress game – which was being assembled under the watchful eye of a Wizards of the Coast that’s currently facing a post-Larian Baldur’s Gate conundrum – that looked a bit like a bunch of the big fantasy RPGs we’ve gotten in recent years.

If you need a quick refresher, this unannounnced Hidden Path D&D game was reported as having been cancelled alongside a bunch of other stuff at WoTC back in 2023, only for the studio to then refute that reporting. Then, last year, Hidden Path creative director Michael Austin posted on LinkedIn that they had made the call to “pause development on that project and reduce the company size until we have an opportunity to return to it”. 44 devs lost their jobs.

Now, this footage (via MP1st) has come out, and looks to have been put together by a music supervisor on the game, which was codenamed Project Dante. It shows off a party of three adventurers, made up of the player and two companions, putting a bunch of bandits to the sword in third person combat that looks quite Dragon Age: The Veilguardy to me.

They then do some puzzles to get the magical water flowing at a temple, explore a bit, and towards the end things get pretty cutsceney with a group of folks chilling in a tavern, before ending with the player sneakily watching a group of NPCs sing while crouching in some grass. I hope they at least tossed the crooning crew a coin as a tip after taking that last bit in.

Overall, not much sticks out to me as beyond what you might expect from a big fantasy RPG like this, though the concept art does have a very nice picture of a flying cat, or a Tressym to give the furry boi its proper name.

Well, I say that, but while the temple puzzling’s going on one of the companions – named Kavar – does say the line “The thing is starting to do a thing with the stuff”. It’s not really noteworthy, maybe a tiny bit eye-roll inducing, but I got a kick out of it.

If this D&D RPG had made it to release rather than that paused/cancelled limbo, I could see myself quoting it to mates in a fashion I’m sure they wouldn’t find irritating whatsoever.

Source link

June 20, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Eight minutes of footage from an unfinished open world D&D game has leaked

by admin June 20, 2025

Four years ago, Hidden Path Entertainment—the studio behind the Defense Grid series and the codeveloper of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive—posted a bunch of job listings that revealed it was developing a big-budget open world Dungeons & Dragons game. Bad news came in 2024 when its creative director posted on LinkedIn to reveal the studio had spent six months searching for “replacement funding” to continue work on it, but in the absence of that funding, made the decision to “pause development on that project and reduce the company size until we have an opportunity to return to it.” 44 developers lost their jobs.

Now, an eight-minute video and a collection of concept art for the game has leaked (via MP1st). Codenamed Project Dante, it’s a third-person RPG with action combat (very early-in-development action combat, I feel obliged to say), and two AI-controlled companions. After an initial fight we see a simple puzzle being solved to activate a magical temple, some exploration, a flashback cutscene, a snippet of tavern conversation, and then a song.

The fact there’s a full song being sung by a group of NPCs you can overhear just by sneaking up on them is the most surprising thing in the footage, which is otherwise fairly by-the-numbers fantasy RPG stuff. It reminds me of Dragon’s Dogma, only with a Forgotten Realms skin.

The concept art is a nice collection of D&D imagery, showcasing an adventuring party that includes an orc bard, a tiefling rogue, and an elf lady with a tiny dragon pet. There’s a bunch of dragons, some displacer beast kittens, and an adorable tressym—one of the flying cats like Gale has in Baldur’s Gate 3. It looks exactly like the kind of art I show my players when I’m running D&D.

”

While nothing about what’s been leaked seems exceptional, it does seem like development was fairly far along. While Wizards of the Coast did reportedly cancel five in-development videogames a couple of years ago, it seems like Project Dante was put on indefinite hold due to a loss of funding. Either way, it’s a shame to see so much hard work go nowhere.

Another D&D game that’s definitely still in the works is the singleplayer action-adventure coming from the former director of Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi games. That one’s being developed by Giant Skull and all we know is that it will apparently contain “immersive storytelling, heroic combat and exhilarating traversal” and is being made in Unreal Engine 5.

Source link

June 20, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Elden Ring Nightreign’s new “enhanced” boss fights have leaked early, thanks to nosy modders

by admin June 15, 2025

Elden Ring Nightreign will be updated sometime this month with “enhanced fights against existing Nightlords”, but as is often the way of updates, some of the relevant boss files are already in the current version of the game, and yes, there’s a mod if you want an early crack at them.

From Software teased the coming of spruced-up boss battles in a social media post on 3rd June, offering no clue as to what “enhanced” means in this context. Enhanced movesets? Enhanced haircuts? An inflated sense of self-esteem?

Subsequently, owl-eared, eagle-eyed players noticed that there were unused sections in every boss soundtrack theme that implied the addition of a third combat phase, together with unused boss relics that look like a reward for besting them in hard mode. Now, via PCGamer, NexusMods user TerraMag has dug up the files that let you fight the “enhanced” Nightlords and released them as the obliquely named Enhanced Nightlord Fights mod.

If you lack the fortitude to face these maxed-out titans yourself, or you just want to chill to footage of an apoplectic gigaroach, TerraMag has kindly released some videos of the enhanced fights. Bear in mind, of course, that these aren’t the final, From-sanctioned versions of each enhanced boss, so they might appear rough and unfinished.

Watch on YouTube

TerraMag has harsh words for Adel, Baron of Night in one video description, complaining that “this fucker REFUSED to do any normal bite moves to let me show off the new effect on it”. Well, perhaps that’s because you woke Adel’s phase 3 incarnation up before the appointed time, guy. I’m not much of a morning person myself. Don’t ask me to bite anybody before I’ve had my second coffee.

Enhanced Nightlord scuffles aside, From plan to add duo expeditions to Elden Ring Nightreign in the near future – though naturally, there’s already a mod for that as well – in addition to more routine balancing and technical updates. Meanwhile, dataminers continue the task of hollowing out the game’s code like the entrails of a Sentient Pest. Amongst other feats, they’ve been peeking beneath the masks of the game’s Nightfarers.

Source link

June 15, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Persona 4 remake in the works, leaked by voice actor

by admin May 28, 2025

Famed voice actor Yuri Lowenthal has just blown up Atlus’ spot on his personal Bluesky account with a post about not getting to reprise his role as Yosuke in the studio’s Persona 4 remake — a remake that none of us knew for sure was happening until Lowenthal’s post.

“And for those who keep asking, no, I will not be returning as Yosuke for the Persona 4 remake. I asked. Maybe I even begged, but they don’t want me to come back,” Lowenthal wrote. (Despite the post beginning with the word “And,” it’s coming out of nowhere — probably also for Atlus’ PR team.)

Rumors of a Persona 4 remake have been floating around for a while now; Persona 3 Reload just came out in 2024, and it only makes sense for there to be another remake coming down the road for the next game in the series. Furthermore, Persona 3 Reload featured recast voice actors for the main characters, so recasting the voice actors in Persona 4 would also be par for the course.

Polygon has reached out to Atlus and to Lowenthal for comment and will update this story with any further details we receive.

Source link

May 28, 2025 0 comments