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Disney Dreamlight Valley developer Gameloft seems to be teasing a new update focused on content based on the Star Wars franchise. Since launching in early access in 2022, Disney Dreamlight Valley has featured content based on a plethora of Disney and Pixar franchises, from older classics like Lady and the Tramp to more recent films like Inside Out. The cozy life-sim has earned a big following, in large part due to the game's steady stream of new content.
Last week, the third raid of World of Warcraft's Midnight expansion opened up: The March on Quel'Danas. My guild and I were pretty proud to have finished off both its bosses on Normal difficulty over the weekend, thank you very much. But there's currently an absolutely nuts race going on between the top two World of Warcraft raiding guilds in the world to be the first to beat it on the highest difficulty. Yesterday, one of the teams thought they had won, only to stumble upon a secret, ultra-hard, Easter resurrection-themed final boss phase that absolutely no one saw coming.
Midnight's first raiding "tier" includes three raids: the Voidspire, the Dreamrift, and March on Quel'Danas. The first two raids launched a few weeks ago, but Quel'Danas was held off for a bit both to stagger progression somewhat as well as mitigate story spoilers.
March on Quel'Danas includes two bosses. One is against a very conflicted phoenix. The second is an encounter called "Midnight Falls" that pits the party against the void-corrupted cosmic being, L'ura, that's been held inside one of the main characters, Alleria, for several expansions now. It's a dramatic three-phase encounter against a true cosmic horror of a foe, takes place in the darkened Sunwell (now referred to as the Darkwell), and includes all sorts of cool and challenging mechanics in varying shades of purple and blue. It's a great finale for the tier.
This is L'ura, for context. She's having a bad day. All of her days have been bad for a long time:
WoW's top guilds have been fighting to be the first to defeat L'ura on Mythic difficulty, the hardest level of challenge WoW has to offer, since the raid opened on Tuesday last week. Yesterday, it looked like one of the teams, US-based guild Liquid, had taken the win, bringing L'ura down to 0% health. But just as they started to celebrate, a massive wave of damage hit the team, killing most of them.
The reactions from the team are genuinely delightful. Despite feeling victory slip from their grasp, everyone seemed to be in pretty good spirits about it. More than anything, there seems to be a feeling of real excitement from not just the competitors, but also the community at the presence of a "secret" final phase. Specifically, a secret phase that involved L'ura dying and then "rising" from the grave... discovered on Easter Sunday, no less.
— Echo (@EchoGuild) April 5, 2026 This bonus phase has allowed Liquid's rival guild, the European-based Echo, to push past them into first place. As I'm writing this, Echo has actually gotten closer to finishing that final phase than Liquid has. Echo has gotten L'ura's last phase down to just 11.8% health after 420 attempts, meaning victory is in sight. Meanwhile, Liquid just logged back in and is coming at the fight fresh, after pushing L'ura's final phase down to 44.7% yesterday, and then taking a needed rest. Echo lost all three World First races to Liquid last expansion, so if Echo can pull this off, it'll mark a significant victory. It's also turning around some opinions on Midnight's raiding scene in general, which has up to this point largely been regarded as a bit too easy compared to past expansions.
Blizzard has included secret phases present only on Mythic difficulty for raid bosses in the past, with memorable ones including Archimonde at the end of Warlords of Draenor, the Jailor in Shadowlands, and my personal favorite, Garrosh Hellscream, taking players to his warped dream of a demolished Stormwind at the tail end of Mists of Pandaria.
But L'ura's secret phase is especially notable. For one, while there have been other secret phases at different points in boss fights in past years, L'ura popping back up after hitting 0% is a shock that we haven't really seen since Cho'gall interrupted the Imperator Mar'gok fight in Warlords of Draenor and took over for a final phase.
Plus, no one really saw this one coming. Usually, some info about secret phases can be datamined or figured out in advance by crafty players who do their research. For L'ura, the only clue was an ability called "Reintegrate" attached to her that didn't seem to have much of a purpose. No one really knew what it was for or connected it to a resurrection mechanic like what was used here.
The secrecy here was likely quite challenging for Blizzard to pull off, not just in terms of datamining but also in terms of testing. Very few people can play at the level required to succeed at a fight this difficult this soon after a raid's release, with weaker gear and no prior knowledge of mechanics. That means there's a very limited pool of people who would have been able to test this for Blizzard to make sure it was functional, or even possible. And yet, here we are.
If you want to watch this unfold with me, Echo's currently streaming right here at the time this piece went live, and Liquid's right here. Echo seems like they're going to pull this off any minute now, but the level of precision required to make it through this long and difficult fight is such that they could possibly continue to struggle long enough for Liquid, fully-rested, to surpass them.
Good luck to both teams, who are playing WoW at a level I cannot personally fathom. I will simply be content once my Guild finishes the fight on Heroic difficulty in a few weeks.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn developer Lucas Pope is hesitant to reveal too much about the games he’s working on because he’s concerned his projects could “get slurped up by AI.”
The mind behind some of the most critically acclaimed indie titles of the last 20 years talked about his past, present, and future in game development during a conversation No More Robots co-founder Mike Rose and Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail on the Mike & Rami Are Still Here podcast. When speaking about his approach to the business side of his projects, Pope spoke about his desire to be open about his process – and why he may refrain from doing so.
“But I also like to talk about the stuff I’m working on, and I think, just now, the situation just feels different to me,” Pope said, "You don’t really talk about stuff when you’re working on it, because I don’t know that it’s going to get slurped up by AI or people are going to copy it, or something else like that. It’s not a hard rule. It’s just I got a feeling about that. And I just didn’t feel as comfortable talking about the stuff I was working on again. So I hope that sort of breaks, and I can feel comfortable talking about the stuff I’m working on.”
While also describing himself as a “production-focused” developer, who wants “to produce something at the end,” Pope adds that he does have some concerns about delivering additional projects that live up to the quality seen with Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn. The former launched in 2013, and the latter launched in 2018, and both have gone down as two of the best games of the 2010s. Return of the Obra Dinn even managed to land at 74 on IGN’s list of the top 100 games of all time.
Do I really want to maybe just go out on a high note? Pope went on to release the Playdate exclusive Mars After Midnight in 2024. Although this more bite-sized title went on to earn its own group of dedicated fans, it’s the previously mentioned two hits that he says has him careful to “push my luck too much.”
“There’s also the sense that I was pretty happy with Obra Dinn and Papers, Please, and maybe I can’t do it again?” Pope explained. “Do I really want to maybe just go out on a high note? Why drag myself down with the next thing that people may not like? I feel lucky with those two games. I can do the same things again. I can sort of focus on narrative, and gameplay, and mechanics, and stuff like that, but who knows? It could be a total miss.”
Pope has remained quiet about what’s he’s working on next, and it’s possible the concerns he shared today are behind his silence. While we wait to see what’s next, you can read our 8.7/10 review of Papers, Please, and our 9.2/10 review of Return of the Obra Dinn.
Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
The Honkai: Star Rail 4.2 livestream will soon happen, revealing all the details about the new playable characters being added to the roster, the banner structure for the period, the anticipated anniversary rewards, and much more, such as the story updates and events. HoYoverse’s turn-based RPG is currently near the end of Version 4.1, a much shorter patch in comparison to the regular format. The release of Honkai: Star Rail 4.1 happened nearly two weeks ago.
The zombie apocalypse seems like a known quantity in video games at this point, but God Save Birmingham hopes to throw the genre on its head. In my two half-hour sessions spent in the rotting village of Birmingham at PAX East 2026, I found that the medieval setting and timeframe, the hyper-dangerous infected menace, and the slow pace for scavenging and crafting do indeed make for a new sort of survival experience. It was buggy, as to be expected with pre-alpha builds at conventions, but very unique and promising.
Choosing Birmingham as a setting was a process led both by personal interest in fantasy set in the time period and economical factors. “They looked at London, Paris, all the capital cities were like, ‘These are way too big’ [to recreate faithfully],’” said Game Operations Manager Guinn Kim, who was working the booth for developer Ocean Drive Studios, about the process of finding the right setting. So scaling down to midsize settlements with a manageable geographical footprint (about a kilometer long in the 1300s) but also rich history dating back to the middle ages brought them to the Venice of the North. And a feasible population, which is important because Ocean Drive hopes to turn all roughly 6000 people who would have lived in the city at the time into zombies.
The piece of the city open to us, which is about a fourth of the size of what’s planned in the full release, was dense with derelict houses and buildings, all an approximation of what Birmingham would have looked like back then. “It’s trickier to recreate exact locations with such history,” Guinn said. “But the creative director visited the city and worked with local museums and historians to get it right.” Part of the issue is that the landmarks that might be identifiable in some sense by people from the area don’t resemble their ancient forms anymore. For example, St Martin’s church is roughly the place it should be on the map, but it is modelled after what it looked like before it was burned down and entirely rebuilt.
God Save Birmingham’s first big switch-up on the survival formula is that you can’t make the necessary tools to start turning trash into treasure. Most survival games ask you to start completely from scratch to build yourself a bunker, from grass and sticks to build your first tools all the way to zombie-proof fortresses. God Save Birmingham’s first big switch-up on the formula is that you can’t make the necessary tools to start turning trash into treasure. In order to turn derelict wooden carts into kindling and lumber to make fire or other wooden objects, you'll need to find an axe among the plague-ridden barns and backyards of your former neighbor’s shanties. Easier said than done when the shambling dead are around.
Scavenging essentials for survival becomes a task just as harrowing as not getting mauled to death by your former countrymen. Food is pretty abundant if you look in the right places, like kitchens and store rooms where sausages, bread, cheese, and herbs would likely be. Water, on the other hand, is desperately scarce. In the map section available in this demo there were two wells, neither of which I could find as they weren’t landmarked all that well and also likely surrounded by hordes of undead that deterred me from investigation. I got lucky and found food that provided some quench for my thirst as well, but other factors I needed to consider, like washing myself so that my stench didn’t attract the mob, had to go ignored. I don’t think 30 minutes, which translated to most of a whole in-game day-night cycle, was enough to really notice the consequences of being stinky, though.
Finding clothes and starting fires to keep warm and especially a safe bed to rest in were the toughest of my survival goals. In other games in the genre, finding shelter is normally a matter of building something semi-permanent from the ground up, but God Save Birmingham didn’t feature any construction of the like. Instead, securing shelter meant finding one that's already standing, clearing all of its undead squatters out, and fortifying the entry and exit points. And the more I think about it, both at the time and since, I’ve really come to appreciate this wrinkle. So many survival games, from Valheim to 7 Days to Die, feature a base-building aspect that can serve to minimize the survival aspect by turning players into a homesteading everyman. But here, the best you can do is make the most out of what already exists, which is a lost but ever-important concept in post-disaster works.
The key to securing a shelter in this way is by barricading doors by literally picking up objects and placing them in the way, a mechanic inspired by VR survival sims. Stacking empty footlockers, barrels, and furniture in a doorway will stop the plagued menace from getting inside. Piling objects outside of a building can create an impromptu staircase to get to the next floor up from the outside. The physics in God Save Birmingham are also such that dropping these objects from high elevation onto zombies below creates an appropriate Looney Tunes-level of slapstick violence. Zombies can trip over low rise walls and fences in pursuit of you, or you can pick up a wooden bench and swing it at their legs, tripping them in the process. You can also throw objects at them, my favorite being wagon wheels, as they provide a truly satisfying thunk on contact.
Remember that wood axe from before? It makes a great zombie processing tool as well. These medieval shamblers aren’t too dangerous alone, but become a real issue in groups, and they’re almost always in groups. Zombies can also be pretty durable. Swings from sharp blades can delimb them, which can hinder them but not render them completely harmless. On the other hand, a well placed blow to the head can end a skirmish in a single swing. This kind of body part-relevant damage targeting is a level of detail usually left for single-player zombie shooters like Resident Evil, so to see that kind of tactical flexibility here was great. Aiming for an outstretched arm with an axe and lopping it off before it grabs me or poking at a lead leg with a pitchfork to trip an incoming enemy is oftentimes better than hacking at a single foe until they stop moving.
This is specifically because of the unique way that zombies grapple you. They initiate a sort of grapple condition, slowing you down to a crawling speed as you attempt to shake them off. If you’re quick enough, you can push them back and make some distance to escape. This sounds similar to when a zombie might attack Leon Kennedy, but instead of a quick time button press to send your hatchet on an express trip to its face, the most you’ll do in God Save Birmingham is create separation. This grapple state is dangerous because as other zombies can't necessarily join the initiating grabber (though that seems to be a future goal, according to Guinn), the time it takes to free yourself is just long enough for enemies to surround you. In my first playthrough, I got cornered by half a dozen, and struggling out of one’s clutches freed me just long enough to pass directly into another’s waiting arms. They may not be doing damage with these attacks, but they’re draining stamina, and when you become too tired to fight them off any longer, well…you know what happens next.
If you’re quick enough, you can push them back and make some distance to escape. This sounds similar to when a zombie might attack Leon Kennedy, but instead of a quick time button press to send your hatchet on an express trip to its face, the most you’ll do in God Save Birmingham is create separation. Fortunately, I was never just outright killed by the fiends in either of my playthroughs. Instead, the scratches and bites they managed to lay on me all had a chance to get infected. And if you don’t treat the infection in a timely manner, you will drop dead eventually, as I did attempting to barricade myself into a bedroom in the top floor of whatever passes as a swanky manor in 14th century Birmingham. It was difficult to tell which of the many conditions that populated the hud were ones that I needed to prioritize by lethality, as some of them are just obtuse looking facial expressions that look pretty bad, but appropriate in context of the horrors you’re traipsing through. In fact, those horrors plan to become a factor in and of themselves in the future. “One of the things the team is thinking about adding is Guilt,” Gwinn revealed, connecting the mental stress that a regular person who now has to kill his neighbors to survive might feel to some sort of mechanic that can make reality around you less and less reliable. “All in service of making a hardcore survival experience.”
Whenever God Save Birmingham hits Early Access, I’m confident that it will, for better or for worse, be unlike any game in the genre you’ve played before it. Its commitment to the grind of survival, the unique ways zombies swarm and infect you, the physics and object manipulation, and the medieval setting all combine to create a novel experience that begs to be experienced.
Jarrett Green is a longtime contributor to IGN. Say hello on X @Jarrettjawn.
Following the completion of a community challenge in Borderlands 4, developer Gearbox Software has revealed a new Shift Code to unlock a special "Like Vermillion Bucks" skin for newcomer C4SH. It's been roughly two weeks since Borderlands 4's Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned DLC hit the market, bringing C4SH with it, and so it's no surprise to see players testing out their builds with the new DLC character.
Players are pouring in the hours, at least in the US
Disney Dreamlight Valley developer Gameloft seems to be teasing a new update focused on content based on the Star Wars franchise. Since launching in early access in 2022, 
"Why are we intentionally creating this experience that Half-Life is going to such great lengths to avoid?"
This probably isn't as easy to snuggle, unfortunately
Last week, the third raid of World of Warcraft's Midnight expansion opened up: The March on Quel'Danas. My guild and I were pretty proud to have finished off both its bosses on Normal difficulty over the weekend, thank you very much. But there's currently an absolutely nuts race going on between the top two World of Warcraft raiding guilds in the world to be the first to beat it on the highest difficulty. Yesterday, one of the teams thought they had won, only to stumble upon a secret, ultra-hard, Easter resurrection-themed final boss phase that absolutely no one saw coming.
The 
The zombie apocalypse seems like a known quantity in video games at this point, but God Save Birmingham hopes to throw the genre on its head. In my two half-hour sessions spent in the rotting village of Birmingham at PAX East 2026, I found that the medieval setting and timeframe, the hyper-dangerous infected menace, and the slow pace for scavenging and crafting do indeed make for a new sort of survival experience. It was buggy, as to be expected with pre-alpha builds at conventions, but very unique and promising.
Following the completion of a community challenge in Borderlands 4, developer Gearbox Software has revealed a new Shift Code to unlock a special "Like Vermillion Bucks" skin for newcomer C4SH. It's been roughly two weeks since 