Category: News

Last updated 18 July 2026

Three notable releases land in the back half of July, and they have more in common than the calendar suggests. All three are revivals. None of them are reinventions. That distinction is turning into the defining pattern of 2026.

Splatoon Raiders — 23 July

After four years of quiet, Splatoon returns — but not as Splatoon 4. Raiders is a spin-off: a single-player treasure-hunting adventure with optional co-op for up to four players. For a series built almost entirely on competitive multiplayer, that is a significant pivot.

It is also less of a gamble than it looks. Splatoon’s single-player campaigns were always its quietly excellent component, buried behind the multiplayer that sold it. Raiders bets a whole game on that.

Why it matters: spin-offs are where Nintendo experiments before committing. If Raiders works, its structure, traversal and co-op design will shape Splatoon 4. Worth watching even if you have never touched a splat charger.

Halo: Campaign Evolved — 28 July

The other long-rumoured revival arrives two weeks after Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced posted the series’ best launch in thirteen years.

That timing set a bar. Black Flag Resynced sold 2 million copies on day one and scored 85 on OpenCritic by being faithful rather than clever. Campaign Evolved will be measured against that, on a franchise carrying considerably more emotional baggage.

Why it matters: Halo does not need reimagining, it needs respecting. If Campaign Evolved resists the urge to fix 2001, Xbox gets the win its rough July needs.

Final Fantasy X 25th Anniversary — Switch 2

Square Enix marks the anniversary with an enhanced port: improved visuals, a high-speed mode, and a random encounter toggle.

That toggle is quietly the whole story. It concedes that what made JRPGs feel long in 2001 does not have to survive into 2026, without touching what made them matter in the first place. Blitzball, mercifully, remains untouched.

Why it matters: it is the clearest example yet of respectful modernisation — changing the friction, not the substance.

The pattern worth noticing

Black Flag, Halo, Spira. Three franchises, three publishers, one approach: restore the thing people remember, remove the parts that only ever existed because of hardware limits, and change nothing else.

2026 keeps proving that thesis. The games rewarding publishers this year are not the ones that reinvented themselves. Whether that is a healthy industry or a cautious one is a separate argument, and a fair one.

For everything else dated this year, see our release calendar.

The Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters are officially real. Bethesda has confirmed remasters of both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, alongside news that Fallout 5 is now in pre-production and Obsidian is building a new Fallout game of its own.

What Bethesda confirmed about the Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters

In a statement published July 17, Bethesda laid out its roadmap for the Fallout franchise:

• Remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are in development
• Fallout 5 is in pre-production, running on Creation Engine 3, alongside The Elder Scrolls 6
• Obsidian Entertainment — the studio behind New Vegas — is officially making a new Fallout game
• Fallout 76 is getting a “massive expansion” — no further detail given
• Starfield remains “an important part of our future,” with new content coming in 2027

No release dates, prices, or platforms have been confirmed for the remasters or Fallout 5. Treat any window you see elsewhere as unconfirmed.

Why the timing matters

This is the part worth sitting with. Ten days before this announcement, Xbox laid off roughly 1,600 employees and severed ties with five studios. Obsidian — the very studio now confirmed to be building a new Fallout game — reportedly lost about a quarter of its staff in that same round of cuts.

Bethesda didn’t connect these events publicly. But the sequence is notable: mass layoffs, protests from unionised workers, visible modder pushback inside Fallout 4 itself, and then — a wave of good news about the franchise those same cuts were meant to “focus” on.

The PlayTheory take: Read the roadmap as reassurance, not just information. Bethesda needed a win after a brutal few weeks for its parent company’s workforce. That doesn’t make the remasters or Fallout 5 any less real — it just tells you why we’re hearing about them now instead of at a normal showcase.

What’s still unknown

• No release dates for either remaster
• No confirmed platforms
• No pricing
• Fallout 5 has no release window — Todd Howard has said the wait continues (IGN)
• Details on the Fallout 76 “massive expansion” are thin

We’ll update this piece the moment Bethesda confirms a release window for either remaster.

Ubisoft has confirmed New Game Plus is coming to Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, announced alongside the news that the remake has now sold 3 million copies (IGN, July 17). No release date yet.

What we know for sure

The confirmation comes from IGN, with Eurogamer independently reporting the same development and quoting game director Richard Knight on the decision. Both outlets frame it as a direct response to the game’s commercial performance — this isn’t a launch-day promise, it’s a post-launch addition greenlit because the numbers justified it.

Black Flag Resynced launched July 9, 2026, and sold 2 million copies on day one alone, per Eurogamer — reportedly a stronger opening pace than Assassin’s Creed Shadows managed on Steam. Hitting 3 million total within about a week puts this among the faster-selling entries in the remake’s short life.

What NG+ could realistically add

Ubisoft hasn’t detailed specific features yet, so treat this as informed speculation, not a leak:

• Carried-over ship progression. Starting a replay with the Jackdaw already upgraded would remove the slowest part of a second playthrough.
• A harder naval tier. Facing Man O’Wars earlier would give NG+ actual teeth instead of just a stat multiplier.
• Completion-based cosmetics. Given the backlash over single-player microtransactions at launch (our review roundup covers it), free cosmetic unlocks tied to 100% completion would be a smart goodwill move.
• Faster boarding and looting. Quality-of-life speedups for players who’ve already sat through the animations once.

The rougher edges of a good launch

3 million copies is a real win, but the rollout wasn’t clean. The game was review-bombed on Steam over single-player microtransactions shortly after launch, and its release overlapped with a three-day strike at Ubisoft Barcelona protesting planned layoffs. A patch has since addressed smaller issues, including ship-shopping trips accidentally triggering mutinies.

For our full breakdown of how the game actually plays, read our Black Flag Resynced review roundup and verdict.

The PlayTheory take

NG+ makes sense here — Ubisoft rarely funds post-launch modes for games that underperform. But the real test isn’t whether NG+ ships, it’s whether it adds mechanical depth or just recycles the same map with bigger numbers. We’ll know when Ubisoft actually details it.

Image: Ubisoft, official key art.

Edward Kenway’s hidden blade combat isn’t fully in Black Flag Resynced. Director Richard Knight confirmed it to IGN directly, and the dev team gave a reason to PC Gamer separately: priorities.

What was actually cut

Knight’s IGN interview confirms some of Edward’s “most beloved fighting moves” are missing in the remake — reported specifically around hidden blade combat mechanics. We don’t have an itemized list of every specific animation or counter-kill cut — treat “some moves” as the accurate scope until more detail surfaces.

The stated reason: core combat came first

PC Gamer got the sharper quote. The dev team said: “We prioritised core combat because we needed to nail that.” Read plainly: hidden blade counter-kills were lower priority than getting base sword-and-pistol combat feeling right for a 2026 release. Something had to lose the development-time argument. This did.

“Shouldn’t lose hope” — what that actually means

Knight told IGN fans “shouldn’t lose hope” on the missing mechanics returning. That phrasing is doing a lot of work without confirming anything. It could mean a post-launch patch. It could mean nothing beyond managing expectations. We’re flagging this as unconfirmed — don’t read it as a roadmap.

The bigger question: craft or identity?

This isn’t an isolated combat tweak. It plugs straight into the split our review roundup already found: is Resynced a faithful remaster of what made Black Flag distinct, or a different game that happens to be set on the same ship? Eurogamer’s review frames the whole remake through the Ship of Theseus problem — replace enough parts and you have to ask if it’s still the same object. RPS calls it “a great pirate game” that trades old AC’s highs and lows for new AC’s highs and lows — different game, still good, just not the same one.

Cutting hidden blade combat to sharpen core combat is that argument in miniature: modernization at the cost of a signature identity marker.

The PlayTheory take

Sharper core combat is a reasonable trade if it makes the base game feel better minute-to-minute — most players spend far more time in regular combat than executing hidden blade counter-kills. But Edward’s identity as an assassin, not just a pirate, was built partly on that mechanic. Cutting it to fund polish elsewhere is a legitimate development call. Whether it’s the right one depends on whether you came to this remake for the pirate or the assassin.

Rockstar Games added two trees to GTA Online. That’s the update. And according to Kotaku, it led to a wave of anger and confusion online.

What the GTA Online two trees update actually changed

Rockstar’s patch, per Kotaku, added two trees to the game map — a change so minor it became a lightning rod for player frustration rather than going unnoticed like most small fixes do. That’s not the whole picture, though.

That heist landed the same week as the tree patch. It’s a genuinely new mission — not filler. So “Rockstar shipped nothing but trees” isn’t accurate. It’s more that the trees were the funniest, most screenshot-able part of a mixed update, and the internet ran with the joke.

Why players are actually angry

This isn’t really about foliage. It’s about GTA VI.

Every GTA Online update between now and November gets read through one question: is this game being maintained, or quietly wound down? Two trees, dropped without fanfare, reads to a tired playerbase as “the bare minimum.” A real heist, dropped the same week, gets ignored because it doesn’t fit the meme.

The PlayTheory take

The trees aren’t the story. The story is that GTA Online’s playerbase is in a holding pattern, watching every patch for a signal about what happens after November 19. When Rockstar ships something substantial (the heist) and something trivial (the trees) in the same window, players will always talk about the trivial thing — because it’s funnier, and because it confirms the fear they already have: that Rockstar’s attention is elsewhere. That fear isn’t irrational. It’s just aimed at the wrong patch note. For what actually is confirmed about GTA 6, our ledger keeps score.

Sources

• Kotaku — the two-trees report
• Rock Paper Shotgun — the new heist and Rockstar’s multiplayer silence

Related: the full 1.73 payout tables · the Acid Lab guide · all GTA Online money guides