This year's Summer Game Fest showcase takes place on Thursday. It's an industry-wide event that will include reveals from a bunch of publishers and studios, but host and producer Geoff Keighley has urged fans not to set their hopes too high in terms of new game announcements.

“What I would say is that a lot of the games we’re going to show you are going to be [already] announced… games are going to show new content to you, like some of the ones I’ve mentioned,” Keighley said in a Twitter Spaces chat, according to VGC. “We’ve got a couple of new game announcements in the show and hopefully some surprises if everything holds. But it definitely is a show that’s primarily focused on stuff that is announced.” Keighley added that it might be best for fans to "definitely manage your expectations in terms of the megaton shocks that you’re expecting."

Still, there's a lot to look forward to. Keighley noted some of the games that will be featured. The stream will include the first full level playthrough of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and a gameplay demo for The Callisto Protocol (a survival horror game from Dead Space creator Glen Schofield's new studio). There will also be news on Gotham Knights and new footage from Cuphead expansion The Delicious Last Course.

Keighley said there will be looks at Xbox and Nintendo exclusives as well. However, he pointed out that Microsoft is likely hanging on to the biggest news for its own showcase, which takes place on Sunday. Nintendo, meanwhile, hasn't confirmed whether its next Direct will take place anytime soon.

The Summer Game Fest showcase will include some guests too, such as Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who recently started playing a character in Fortnite. Perhaps we'll learn more about the next video game movie he's working on. The event, meanwhile, is set to run for between 90 minutes and two hours.

Trying to manage expectations is a smart move on Keighley's part. Sony has been doing a similarly good job of keeping conjecture in check ahead of its State of Play streams. While there are always going to be some people who are disappointed by events like this, it's better to have lower expectations and be surprised than get too amped up and get deflated if you don't see a game that excites you.

That's not to say there won't be major reveals. It was at last year's edition of Summer Game Fest that fans got their first look at Elden Ring in two years, along with a release date (which was, inevitably, delayed by a few weeks).

Even if you feel like this year's Summer Game Fest showcase is a bust, there are more than a dozen other gaming events over the next week or so, even without E3 taking place. You're bound to find some games that interest you if you dig a little deeper.

A few months after confirming the existence of Street Fighter 6, Capcom has revealed that the upcoming entry to the fighting franchise will come out in 2023 for the PS 5, PS 4, Xbox Series X|S and PC. Like the company promised in its initial teaser, the game will include Luke, a key DLC character for Street Fighter V, as well as fan favorites Ryu and Chun-Li. The video game developer previously described Luke as "a key player in the future of Street Fighter" who would help expand its world. 

Capcom is using its own RE Engine to develop the fighting game, and it says that gives it the capability to make sure finer details shine through, such as the look of individual muscles tensing up. The company also used the RE Engine to for its other popular titles, including Resident Evil Village, Devil May Cry 5 and Monster Hunter: Rise.

One of the features debuting with the title is Real Time Commentary, which will provide easy-to-understand explanations about gameplay for your matches. These commentaries will be voiced by notable Fighting Game Community commentators, starting with Jeremy "Vicious" Lopez and Aru, and they'll support subtitles in 13 languages.

It will also feature modes from previous entries, along with two new ones called World Tour and Battle Hub. In addition, Capcom is introducing Modern Control Type with Street Fighter 6 to make special moves easier to execute: It will allow you to perform special attacks simply by pressing the button for it along with directional input.

The company has yet to announce an exact release date for it, but you can watch a trailer for the game below:

Final Fantasy XVI is due to hit PlayStation 5 in the summer of 2023 — and Square Enix has a hot new trailer to prove it. The title's first gameplay trailer showcases the massive monsters called Eikons and the Dominant humans that inhabit them, and presents chaotic, cinematic battle scenes in a medieval-inspired world.

FFXVI was officially revealed in September 2020 and developers promised to drop more information about it by the end of the following year. But in December 2021, the development team announced the game was nearly six months behind schedule due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now that we've waited an extra half a year, the gameplay trailer is finally here.

"In our latest trailer, we’ve introduced several new Eikons, as well as provided a more detailed peek at our action-packed battle system and the freedom it gives players," FFXVI director Hiroshi Takai said on the PlayStation blog. "As for development progress, I’m happy to announce that the game is fully playable from start to finish; though, from optimization to brush-up, there is still a mountain of challenges to tackle as we head into our final push."

It seems like Square Enix is back on track with its FFXVI development timeline, aiming to release the game on PS5 next summer. It's set to be exclusive to PS5 for a limited time.

Just a couple of weeks after divulging the release date for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, Activision Blizzard is set to show off much more about the next game in the long-running series. A "worldwide reveal" will take place on June 8th at 1PM ET. 

The embattled publisher teased the reveal when it announced the October 28th release date last month. Activision previously confirmed some of the characters who will appear in Modern Warfare II, including John “Soap” MacTavish and Simon “Ghost” Riley. The reveal will surely offer a lot more info, probably including a first look at gameplay.

Infinity Ward is on deck for this year's Call of Duty game, which is a sequel to 2019's Modern Warfare. That itself was a reboot of the Modern Warfare sub-series, which started in 2007 with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Confused yet? Don't blame you.

Infinity Ward is also working on a major revamp of the Call of Duty: Warzone battle royale, which will arrive at the same time as Modern Warfare II. Among the updates will be a new engine for both games.

NFL Madden 23 will prominently feature the legendary Oakland Raiders coach and Hall of Famer, John Madden. It will mark the first time Madden has appeared on the cover of the eponymous game series since Madden 2000 in 1999. EA Sports revealed the news in a tweet today, adding that it will release a trailer with a full reveal of the game tomorrow. The three covers released today each pay homage to a different era in Madden's career: as a coach, a broadcaster and "a video game icon."

The new title will also pay tribute to the beloved coach within the game itself. The game will feature two versions of Coach Madden leading opposing teams of “All Madden” athletes facing off in the Oakland Coliseum. We’ll also hear from Madden through a series of remastered audio clips that hail from his days as a broadcaster.

Other than that, there’s still a lot that we don’t know about Madden 23, which is expected to release sometime in August. EA hasn’t hinted at any of its new features. Similar to older editions of Madden, there will be three different versions of the game. Most likely there will be a basic version that is priced the lowest, along with two premium bundles with added extras and perks for hardcore Madden fans. For more details, be sure to tune in to EA’s preview of the game, which will air on YouTube tomorrow at 7 am PT/10 am ET.

Diablo fans who have been eager to try the series' first new game in a decade won't need to wait any longer, as long as they're willing to play on mobile. Blizzard has opened up access to Diablo Immortal a day early on iOS and Android. Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson said Blizzard rolled out the mobile version one day before the official release date of June 2nd to give it time "to propagate through all the global stores."

PC players in most regions will still need to wait until tomorrow to dive in. Diablo Immortal will be in open beta on that platform for the time being. Those in some Asia-Pacific countries won't be able to try the PC version until June 22nd, however.

Engadget Weekend Editor Igor Bonifacic tried an early access build and felt that it's Blizzard's best game in years, but had serious reservations about its microtransactions and the monetization approach. In addition, there are randomization elements that could run afoul of loot box bans in Belgium and the Netherlands. As a result, Blizzard won't release the game in those countries.

Diablo Immortal is Blizzard's second mobile game after Hearthstone and its first attempt at bringing an existing series to iOS and Android. Activision Blizzard, spurred by the success of Call of Duty Mobile and its King division, is making a bigger push into mobile games. The company said in 2020 that it has mobile titles in the works for all of its "most important franchises."

Blizzard is planning to release another one later this year. Free-to-play strategy game Warcraft Arclight Rumble will be the first mobile title in the Warcraft series.

Nearly four years after Blizzard announced Diablo Immortal to a mostly apathetic audience at Blizzcon 2018, the game is finally here. And if you’re like me, there’s a good chance you haven’t followed Immortal’s development since its first showing. Not knowing what to expect, I had a chance to play the game ahead of its official launch tomorrow and left the experience both excited and worried about what I saw.

Set five years after the end of Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction, Immortal opens with your character arriving by boat in the town of Wortham, a location from Diablo 3. You find the hamlet under attack by Skarn, the self-styled Lord of Damnation.

I haven’t played the game’s story through to its end, but what unfolds following the introduction is a far more interesting narrative than what Diablo 3 had to offer. Immortal inherits some of its predecessor’s more annoying tendencies. Characters, particularly villains, talk too much, and the game is missing the atmosphere that made past Diablo games so memorable. But on the whole, Immortal serves as a more fitting sequel to its predecessors than Diablo 3 ever did.

Blizzard / NetEase

One early zone in the game sees your character venture to the Dark Wood, an area from Act One of Diablo 2. There, you’re reunited with characters like Akara and Kashya. The voice actors aren’t as memorable as their Diablo 2 counterparts, but the way Immortal pulls on the narrative threads established in its predecessor to continue that game’s story is satisfying and memorable.

But what is even more impressive is that Blizzard tells the story in the context of an MMO. As you go about your adventure, you’ll see other players doing the same, and you can freely group up to tackle the campaign – in addition to dungeons, raids and Immortal’s many other activities – as a party.

Even on a small display, the game features classic Blizzard polish. Controlling your character is similar to titles like League of Legends: Wild Rift. On the bottom left of the screen, there’s a virtual thumbstick for moving your character, while on the right-hand side, you have dedicated buttons for your different skills. Immortal includes controller support, and if you own a Razer Kishi or Backbone One, they’re the best way to play the game on mobile.

Blizzard / NetEase

You can use up to five skills at any one point. At first, combat feels simplistic, but once you have a full complement of abilities, there’s a fun rhythm to your demon slaying. The best part is encountering stronger enemies like elites and bosses. The latter involve multi-stage fights that reward you for learning their move sets. With Immortal, I can safely say the moment-to-moment gameplay is the best it’s ever been in the Diablo franchise.

But with only two primary and 12 secondary skills per class, it feels like there’s less build diversity than in past games. Unlike his Diablo 2 counterpart, I can’t play my Immortal barbarian as an ax-throwing ranged character or a singer who shouts his enemies to death. He’s strictly a dual-wielding melee character.

Modifying your skills also feels more limited than the system Blizzard had in place with Diablo 3. Instead of earning skill runes as you level your character, you find legendary items that tweak their abilities. For example, I found a piece of armor that made it so my barbarian’s whirlwind attack would send out gusts of winds as he spun about. You can equip a legendary weapon or armor piece in every one of your primary item slots, meaning you can add six modifications to your skills.

Blizzard

Most items drop with slots you can modify with stat-enhancing gems. Currently, there are two types of gemstones in Immortal. First, there are the “normal” ones you obtain primarily by completing hidden lairs. These are dungeons you can find in the game’s various zones. Each time one opens in the area you’re exploring, Immortal will notify you and you’ll have a few minutes to find it. You can earn up to six normals gems per day by completing hidden lairs. It’s also possible to obtain them as part of bundles you can purchase with real money, from other players via Immortal’s in-game auction house and a merchant who will trade you them in return for an in-game currency called Hilts.

And then there are the game’s legendary gems. They are the most powerful way to enhance your character, with each one adding new abilities to their attacks. For instance, one I obtained with my barbarian empowered him with lightning that would chain to nearby enemies.

You probably already have a sense of where this is going. Not all legendary gems are equal. Many of the one- and two-star ones are relatively easy to obtain, but if you want to outfit your character with the best-in-slot gems for their class, the sense I get is that you will have to spend money.

Blizzard / NetEase

That’s due to how Blizzard and NetEase designed the system for obtaining those gems. They drop exclusively through dungeons called elder rifts. You can play through one whenever you want and they take at most three to four minutes to complete. The catch is that you can modify the rewards you get at the end of an elder rift with rare and legendary crests. The former you can obtain through the merchant I mentioned earlier, and as part of one-time bundles you can buy for completing certain milestones with your character. The game also gives you one free rare crest per day.

Rare crests increase your chance of earning one-star legendary gems by five percent. Legendary crests, meanwhile, give you a 100 percent chance for a legendary gem to drop at the end of an elder rift. The catch here is that what one you will get is up to chance. Adding a further wrinkle to things is that five-star gems can be anywhere between one and five stars in quality when they drop, and you may need to use other gems to unlock their full potential.

There are a few ways to earn the odd free legendary crest, but you’ll be primarily buying them. A pack of 10 costs 1,600 of the game’s premium currency, or about $25. Legendary crests represent Immortal’s primary form of monetization, but you can also spend money on cosmetics, an enhanced battle pass and a few other things.

The gem system has enough similarities to loot boxes that Activision Blizzard won’t release Immortal in countries with laws against that kind of monetization. It’s also a setup that rewards “whaling.” In other words, the players willing to spend nearly endless amounts of money on the game will be the most powerful.

Blizzard / NetEase

How you will feel about Immortal’s monetization will depend on what you want to get out of it. You can safely ignore all the systems I mentioned if all you want is to play through the game’s story and level your favorite classes. But just how much you’ll need to spend to participate in the game’s endgame is hard for me to say. Going into tomorrow’s release, the consensus among Immortal’s community is that the answer is a lot.

Again, all of that may not matter to you, but if there’s an issue with Immortal’s monetization, it’s how counter it is to the spirit of the franchise. When Blizzard removed Diablo 3’s controversial gold and real-money auction houses in 2013, the studio said it did so because they ultimately undermined the game’s core gameplay.

It must also be said how easily Immortal could become addictive for some people. In the week Blizzard granted me early access to the game, I spent nearly every spare moment I could find playing through it because I was having so much fun. And when the game becomes officially available on June 2nd, I plan to spend money on things like the enhanced battle pass, but I won’t pay to buy any legendary crests because I think that system is predatory. Some won’t have that restraint.

Outside of Diablo 2: Resurrected, there hasn’t been a new Diablo game in 10 years, and, as of this June, it will be 23 years since Blizzard released Diablo 2. And I think that’s what makes Immortal so easy to be conflicted about. It shows the studio can still create engaging experiences when it gives its talented staff the time they need to work on a project, but it’s also a game that’s impossible to separate from its economics. It’s easy to see a scenario where Immortal is hugely successful for the studio and ends up informing its approach to Diablo 4 and future projects.

Young golfers can now turn their physical surroundings into a digital putting green, courtesy of the same tech behind Niantic's Pokémon Go. The PGA Jr. League today unveiled Safari Par-Tee, a new AR mobile gaming platform available on both iOS and Android. Trigger — the developer behind the app — built it with Niantic’s Lightship kit for AR apps. Players can use their smartphone to scan their physical environment into an interactive golf course.

While Safari Par-Tee is aimed toward youth golfers (it even features very cutesy animal avatars), its AR capabilities will likely make it a draw for parents and older family members to join in as well. The game has a number of multiplayer options, allowing players to match with other local players in real-time, or connect with specific players over WiFi The game also allows players to hold communal scoring contests with multiple rounds and different clubs. For players who are new to golf, the game introduces them to the fundamentals of the game as well as the various styles of play. The game features three different terrains, all with different obstacles and objectives. 

Given that the world of golf video games has plenty of options geared to adults (such as PGA TOUR 2K21, Tiger Woods PGA Tour and the recently delayed EA Sports PGA Tour), a free entry for kids seems like a refreshing change of pace. Safari Par-Tee is now available to download on either Apple’s App Store or the Google Play store.

Along with bolstering production of the PlayStation 5, Sony is will bring another next-gen product to market: an upgraded virtual reality headset. PlayStation VR2 (PSVR 2) may not have a release date yet, but Sony clearly has big plans for it. At an investor briefing, the company revealed that there will be at least 20 "major" PSVR 2 games available at the jump.

There will be a blend of first- and third-party titles. The company didn’t reveal more specifics in its slide deck, but it did include key art for Horizon: Call of the Mountain. That’s a VR spinoff of the Horizon games, but it's not a confirmed PSVR 2 launch title as yet.

It’s not clear whether any of the games in question will be remasters, upgraded versions of existing titles (such as No Man’s Sky and Tetris Effect) or ports from other VR platforms. In any case, here’s hoping that Sony can bring over Half-Life: Alyx from SteamVR.

One third-party game that will definitely be available when PSVR 2 arrives is Among Us VR, according to Schell Games. Other titles that are coming to the platform include Firmament from Myst developer Cyan Worlds, multiple games from Fracked studio nDreams and one by Coatsink, the team behind Jurassic World Aftermath.

Sony revealed the design of the PSVR 2 back in February. The headset will come with new VR2 Sense controllers and have a display resolution of 2000 x 2040 pixels for each eye, a 110-degree field of view, a maximum framerate of 120Hz and 4K HDR support. Pricing hasn't been announced.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Game Grumps, the studio that gave us Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator in 2017. This week, the team announced its latest project. And it couldn’t be more different from its debut effort.

Game Grumps describes Homebody as a narrative-driven, psychological horror game. In designing the experience, it says it drew inspiration from ‘80s slasher films, though you can also see the influence of both modern and older gaming classics like Silent Hill, Resident Evil and Hideo Kojima’s P.T. Part of what sells the atmosphere of the game is its slightly pixelated art style and effective use of lighting.

In the trailer the studio shared, we’re introduced to Homebody’s protagonist, Emily. You’ll need to help Emily and her friends escape a relentless killer by avoiding the assailant, solving puzzles and making choices. Homebody sees Game Grumps reunite with Rogue Games, the publisher it worked with to make Dream Daddy. The two companies plan to release Homebody later this year on consoles and PC via the Epic Games Store and Steam.