The Game Awards are set to return this year on December 10. Because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, there will not be a live audience this year, but host Geoff Keighley announced that this year’s awards show will be hosted from three international locations: Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo. The Game Awards will be hosted live on Thursday, December 10, 2020, as a digital livestream. The annual awards show hosted and founded by Geoff Keighley honors some of the best games of the year and are also where games receive new trailers or premieres. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=confirmed-xbox-series-x-games&captions=true"] In past years, The Game Awards were hosted live in Los Angeles in front of an audience. However, the coronavirus pandemic has caused The Game Awards to take a different approach this year. Instead, the show will air live from studio locations in Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo. The Game Awards are still promising awards presentations, musical performances, and new game announcements. Speaking with IGN, however, Keighley says “It’s too early to talk about world premieres for the show this year, but we’re in discussions now with all the publishers and developers of this year’s lineup,” Keighley says. “We’re looking forward to a big night of announcements and surprises for the fans.” Regarding the new three host city structure, Keighley says The Game Awards hopes to make the three locations feel connected. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=confirmed-playstation-5-games&captions=true"] “The biggest challenge is coordinating three different hub cities versus just one,” Keighley explained. “Our goal is to make everything feel interconnected and unite the world around video games. It’s challenging but also exciting to bring the show to more cities. I’ve long had the dream of hosting The Game Awards in other locations.” Check out The Games Awards on December 10 and IGN which will cover the show and all the updates live. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Matt T.M. Kim is a reporter for IGN.

Hello Games has revealed its latest free update for No Man's Sky: Origins. The update will effectively rewrite the entire game universe to add more variation, new planets, and much more - without altering user generated content. Origins brings the game to its 3.0 version, and it's out today. Announced on the No Man's Sky website (where you can see the full, enormous list of changes), Origins is 2020's biggest update so far, and aims to offer a "stranger, richer and more varied universe, with deeper planetary diversity, dramatic new terrain, a host of new creatures, new weather conditions, colossal buildings, and much more." Among its many additions, the update adds brand new planets (with more dramatic scenery than previously possible, including active volcanoes), rare systems with multiple stars, a new UI, brand new fauna types and updated behaviours for them, dramatic weather systems (including lightning, fire and gravity storms), planetary NPC encounters, rare planets with entirely synthetic life, and more. On top of all that, giant sand worms have finally become a part of the game, after being teased in No Man's Sky's first ever trailer. For those worried about their creations, these changes won't touch or harm user-created structures, meaning the worlds around you might change, but your part in them will remain as you left it pre-update. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/09/23/sean-murray-explains-no-mans-sky-origins"] Speaking to IGN, creator Sean Murray explained the meaning behind the update's title, saying: "Origins is, yes, it's another update, but it's kind of a new start for us in some ways. And we wanted to get that across, that this isn't an end. It isn't just, 'here is an update with some more content in'. It's something quite fundamental for us, and that is that we're adding more diversity, more variation to that universe, which is something that we haven't really done that much. But also, we're adding literal new planets. We're going to birth them into the universe, which is quite a cool thing for us. "It's taken us a while to figure out how best to do it and how to make it work. But we have this really nice problem, which is we have this universe that the community owns, right? They've built bases on it. They've built communities. They've gone off and had adventures, made discoveries. And then, we come along and we say, 'We want to make new planets, new worlds.' We want to freshen all of this up, and so we were trying to find ways to do that without destroying what's gone before. And so that's been one of the ways that we've done it, is to just actually make the universe more dense, introduced new worlds, literal new worlds to go off and explore – and that's the origin." There won't be a given in-game reason for this to have happened, with Murray explaining: "So we talked about lore reasons. But, I don't know, it's been done before, that 'cataclysm update'. And then, every NPC you talk to keeps mentioning the cataclysm. I don't know. Personally, it doesn't appeal to me. Because we know what's happened, and it's really strange to me for every NPC to suddenly start talking about DLC." [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/09/23/no-mans-sky-origins-official-trailer"] Unlike other recent updates, Origins aims primarily to improve what already exists in No Man's Sky's universe, rather than slot new features in around it, something Murray says was a goal because the team now had a sense of the existing game's limits. "We have this universe that we built four years ago, and we released it. And we said that thing of, 'Even we don't know what's out there.' [...] People could go out and have this experience and send screenshots, and we would say, 'Oh, I didn't know it could do that.' Or, 'I haven't seen that before.' And then, actually, that hasn't been true for the last four years for us [...] For us to have that moment that I was talking about again, of what we had four years ago, where I will be looking at screenshots for the first time in four years being like, 'Oh, I didn't know that was possible.' That's the feeling that we want to get back." This doesn't mark the end of 2020's additions to No Man's Sky, either, with Murray confirming that – although this has already been the game's busiest year for updates – there's more coming this year. "We're all locked in our houses now," he laughs. "What else can we do?" [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=no-mans-sky-origins-update-screenshots&captions=true"] I ask if any of those updates might involve a next-gen version of the game, but that's one subject Murray won't be drawn on, saying there's nothing to announce about that: "Next-gen is something we've been lucky enough to be included in, and have kits and all of that, from the very early days. It's something I'm super excited about, but I have to say that annoying thing of, 'We don't have any announcements at the moment'. We have a big project planned in the future, and that's part of the reason that we're excited about next gen, and we'll see if we'll have any announcement for No Man's Sky in the future." That "big project" is the huge, ambitious new game Murray mentioned earlier this month. During our talk, he made clear that he's currently working across both games, but won't be offering specifics about the new project because the team has "learned our lesson" after discussing No Man's Sky too early in its development last time around. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Sean Murray is working on Hello Games' next major game, which he's hoping will be even larger than his last creation, No Man's Sky. Exactly what that means is not yet clear, and will likely remain so for some time, because Murray says Hello Games "learned our lesson" after opening up too early about No Man's Sky. We first learned about the "huge, ambitious" new game earlier this month. Speaking to IGN ahead of the release of the No Man's Sky: Origins update, Murray confirmed that he is currently working on both No Man's Sky and the new game – but Hello Games isn't discussing specifics about the new project right now. "I mean, look, we have learned our lesson. We don't want to start talking about anything too early", explains Murray, referencing No Man's Sky's extremely open (and occasionally controversial) pre-release. "The only reason we talked at all about it was because we released our most recent game, Last Campfire, which was the first thing to come out since No Man's Sky. It's done by a separate team that we supported within the studio. But when we talk to press about it, a lot of them came at it from the angle of, 'Oh, well you did Joe Danger before. You've done No Man's Sky, and I guess you're doing Joe Danger-size games again.' [...] We didn't want people to have that impression, because it's not exactly true." [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/09/23/sean-murray-explains-no-mans-sky-origins"] Murray makes clear that the new game is aiming to be an even larger project than No Man's Sky: "I would hope that there's a line between Joe Danger to No Man's Sky. And then hopefully, we continue up on that line. Personally, I came away from No Man's Sky with a lot of hunger going forward for things that we have yet to do and things that we've yet to prove. So this project will be a big focus for me and the guys." It's worth noting that size, in this case, does not necessarily mean the scope of the game's world – No Man's Sky's universe is made up of billions of planets, which may just be a difficult marker to beat in literal terms. Instead, Murray is likely referring to the complexity and depth the next game can offer – although what that specifically means remains unknown. He does, however, mention that Hello has next-gen devkits right now, and mentions that the part of the reason the team is excited for new consoles is because of this project. Closing the discussion, Murray reiterates that Hello Games is a developer more interested in major new projects than smaller experiments after No Man's Sky: "As a studio, we definitely are very focused on doing new, big, ambitious things." [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=no-mans-sky-origins-update-screenshots&captions=true"]

As for right now, Murray's been concentrating on No Man's Sky: Origins, the game's 3.0 update that adds a huge amount of variety to the game's existing universe, including new terrain, weather effects and more. It also adds giant sand worms for the first time, which is just amazing.

[poilib element="accentDivider"] Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

In 2013, the first trailer for No Man's Sky showed off a lot of things people got very excited for. Some of those things were in the base game, others were added later. But one feature shown in that trailer never materialised in the release version of the game – gigantic sand worm/snake creatures that burrowed into the ground. That wait is now over. In 2020, No Man's Sky finally adds giant sand worms, and we got creator Sean Murray to tell us why they didn't make it into the game, and why they're being added now. In an interview ahead of the release of the new Origins update – the trailer for which includes a grand entrance for the game's new creature type – Murray explained that there was a very simple reason for why giant sand worms had never made it into the game until now: "This is a very boring story when people asked me about it. They weren't that fun. "It sounds fun, right? Fundamentally, it works really well in a trailer, and it's a cool thing, and it's cool when you see it, but if you play the game for a hundred hours and you've got your save that you really care about, it's really annoying to be randomly killed by a sand worm that just appears, right? I mean the people who hunt for Spice in Dune or whatever, they know this pain. Lots of random death in that world. So we sidelined those. They were just never fun enough." [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/09/23/no-mans-sky-origins-official-trailer"] Among a myriad of other updates and changes that needed to be made, giant sand worms weren't quite the priority for the Hello Games team – but Origins' focus on adding depth and variety to the game's existing galaxy offered a new opportunity to make them a priority. Murray explains how they solved the slimy problem of making giant worms fun: "I think now – and it is something that we revisited a couple of times – we found a way to make them play well with the game, to signpost themselves well, and to fit the environment around them so that it feels, hopefully, fun and in keeping with the rest of the game. Some of these things just take time for them to bubble up to be the priority." Murray's clearly very pleased to finally be able to cross off that player request after almost 7 years: "Each time we do an update, there's one of these major things that we get to cross the check box off. I don't think we're quite done yet, but we go up to the board, and we X another one out." [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2013/12/09/no-mans-sky-announcement-trailer"] The key, it seems, is balance, with the dev team making changes they think need to be made alongside adding features the audience is asking for: "We often have key things that we're doing that we know no one is asking for, but we feel are fundamentally important for the game", explains Murray. "So this time round, we've revisited the UI and changed it visually and also tightened it up to make it flow nicer. People weren't generally asking for that, but I think it has a real impact on the game and fundamentally just helps how the game plays. You spend a lot of time in and out of the UI. So for me, that adds a lot of freshness, but there's stuff like that. "There is also stuff that it is really fun to work on when you know the community are going to love it. Sand worms are one of those. Hopefully, people are going to play and really enjoy them [...] It is a big motivating factor for us. It's really nice to be working on something and thinking, this is going to really please some people." I know I'm pleased, for one. Giant Sand Worms are just one of many, many changes brought to No Man's Sky in the Origins update, which ups the variety on show on planets, adding new terrain types, weather effects, and even spawning entirely new worlds to discover and explore. The free update is out today. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=no-mans-sky-origins-update-screenshots&captions=true"] [poilib element="accentDivider"] Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Mike Morhaime was quite enjoying not having a job, for a while. Almost three decades after co-founding the company that would become Blizzard Entertainment – steering it through multi-billion dollar acquisitions, and releasing some of the best-loved games of all time – he finally had time to focus on other things for a while. After he and his wife Amy (who was vice president of Blizzard eSports) left the company, they’ve been able to travel, to relax, to consider projects they simply didn’t have time to complete before. Morhaime talks at length about how much he’s been enjoying playing Marvel’s Avengers with his five year-old daughter, watching her get the same excitement out of meeting her heroes as Kamala Khan does onscreen. Perhaps more than anything else, disconnecting was what he felt he needed: “In the 28 years at Blizzard, I mean, it was just heads-down, focusing on what Blizzard was doing. And so people would always reach out and want to chat about this or that. But unless it was related to what we were doing, I rarely had time to do that. [...] At first we tried just to not make any decisions, not decide what we wanted to do. We actually didn't know if we wanted to go back into gaming.” What finally changed his mind was hearing that some of his old colleagues, Jason Chayes and Dustin Browder, had also left Blizzard after the collapse of a project, and were looking to start a studio of their own. The idea of a Blizzard executive producer and the game director of StarCraft 2 working on something new of their own excited him – but Morhaime’s interest wasn’t so much an impetus to get involved in making it with them, as to remove some of the burden he knew they’d run into in the early days of starting a new company. [poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=We%20actually%20didn't%20know%20if%20we%20wanted%20to%20go%20back%20into%20gaming."]“You have these really awesome game developers and they go off and they start up a new company. What's the first thing they have to do? They have to think about incorporation and trademarks and all this stuff that's not actually making games. And then you have a whole funding question, which is a huge distraction and source of anxiety. So we felt like we were in a position – maybe we could remove a lot of these barriers. [Amy and I] have a lot of experience on the operational and organizational and go-to-market side of gaming that maybe we could try to structure what we think is the ideal gaming corporate environment to house a small number of wholly-owned, but independent feeling studios.” “We knew others that were going to go off and do this, people that we have a ton of respect for and a ton of talent. We could either wait and watch these guys do it in little pods and scatter in the wind, or we could try to create a home for some of that and actually be ready in the future when opportunity presents itself.” Dreamhaven was born out of that line of thought – Morhaime’s new company is less a developer itself than a support network for new studios. It feels closer to something like old-fashioned patronage than a traditional developer/publisher deal (not least because everyone who becomes a part of Dreamhaven gets equity in the company). It feels very new amid an industry that so often reverts to decades-old business structures to get by. After a dinner where Morhaime laid out his vision, Chayes and Browder came aboard and formed Moonshot, Dreamhaven’s first internal studio. The second wasn’t far behind. “We were slightly later to the party”, explains Chris Sigaty, newly minted studio head for Secret Door, Dreamhaven’s second internal developer. Sigaty was drawn in not just by the stability Dreamhaven could offer a brand new venture, but by the very fact that the likes of Morhaime and Chayes were involved – people he already knew shared his ideals for development, and had guided him through his career, which, over 23 years at Blizzard, included producing Hearthstone, StarCraft 2, and the original Warcraft 3. “It was very exciting to think about the idea of forming something specifically to make a game with our own studio, with our own sort of vision for that studio; but knowing it's built on these core shared values that we'd built up over many, many years working together. [There was] already excitement before we even knew the name of the studio or what sorts of games we might do, just the idea of getting together to work with this stellar group of people.” [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=dreamhavens-key-developers-and-what-theyve-worked-on-before&captions=true"] That group of people comes with some incredible pedigree. Apart from Chayes, Browder, and Sigaty, Moonshot and Secret Door have attracted the likes of Eric Dodds (director of Hearthstone, game designer on World of WarCraft and StarCraft), Alan Dabiri (game director on Heroes of the Storm), Ben Thompson (creative director of Hearthstone), and many others who have worked on Blizzard titles and beyond. Dreamhaven aims to take full advantage of the experience it has behind its doors from day one. The idea is to offer not just a stable place to work for new studios, but an enriching one, and that’s key to how Morhaime thinks about Dreamhaven, even in its earliest days. Both Moonshot and Secret Door will have autonomy over the games they create, and will work without any team overlap, but will be encouraged to swap feedback between themselves. Morhaime, and Dreamhaven as a whole, will advise where necessary, but the CEO is prizing agency above almost everything else – he wants his new studios to feel as creative as possible, not to mention responsible for fixing problems they might come across along the way. With that idea of quality and responsibility in mind, I ask Morhaime if he wants Dreamhaven to apply the same stringent, some might say brutal, standards he oversaw at Blizzard. Famously, Morhaime once explained that Blizzard canceled almost half of the game projects it began while he was at the company because of its commitment to releasing a high-quality product. Is Dreamhaven going to be as forceful with its smaller teams? “I don't think anybody aspires to a 50% ship rate,” laughs Morhaime. “I think the more impressive number is that a hundred percent of those that actually were released were great. That's what we aspire to and hopefully, we can do better. It's hard to hope that we'll do better than what Blizzard was able to do, but we're going to try, and I think you always set out to try. You try to make the choices every step of the way, trying to increase your odds of having what you're working on be the thing that ends up achieving greatness. It's certainly a lot more fun if it's a hundred percent along the way.” [poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=%E2%80%9CI%20don't%20think%20anybody%20aspires%20to%20a%2050%25%20ship%20rate.%20I%20think%20the%20more%20impressive%20number%20is%20that%20a%20hundred%20percent%20of%20those%20that%20actually%20were%20released%20were%20great."]There are other areas where Dreamhaven aspires to work differently to Blizzard, too. Fairly obviously, Morhaime points to the fact that, when he co-founded the company that would become Blizzard, the team was forced to work out its own way forward, writing its own tools and creating its own place in the gaming market – which naturally limited what they could make in the beginning. With the benefit of decades of experience, and a far more welcoming development landscape, Dreamhaven’s studios can “hit the ground being a bit more ambitious”. Morhaime also makes clear that he wants Dreamhaven to feel like a very different kind of developer to the early Blizzard, simply by dint of those working there: “We are paying a lot more attention to the makeup of our studio in terms of diversity, which is not something that we really spent much time thinking about or talking about back in the early days. But I think we've all come to believe that we want to build a place that is inclusive and welcoming to people of all backgrounds and we want to make our games for the world. We think we can be stronger if we have a lot of diverse voices at the company.” That commitment to doing things differently should only strengthen over time. While Moonshot and Secret Door are all the studios Dreamhaven wants right now, Morhaime envisages it growing to accommodate more: “We're not actively searching and frankly, I think we have bitten off a lot right now, so we need to be able to start digesting what we've bitten off and start building our central services to be able to scale up to accommodate these two studios. But eventually, we do anticipate growing beyond the two studios. We just don't really have a time frame or target for when that might happen.” So what of those existing studios – what are Moonshot and Secret Door actually making? Morhaime makes clear that every part of Dreamhaven is “very early”, and neither he nor his studio heads will be drawn on specifics about their games right now. That’s as much down to the creative philosophy of the company as it is the free-form ideas themselves – while both studios are now actively working on a game idea each, they’re thinking without platforms in mind right now, trying to come up with game ideas that work for them, rather than ones that work for specific hardware. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=dreamhaven-moonshot-and-secret-door-logos&captions=true"] What we can draw on, however, is the philosophy – or maybe personality – of Moonshot and Secret Door themselves. “I think if you go and look at their pages on the website, you'll see a pretty different feel between the two”, explains Morhaime. “They already do have a different personality and the types of games that they've chosen to focus on for their first game is also quite different and complementary.” For Sigaty and Secret Door, that philosophy revolves as much around board gaming as it does video gaming. “The individuals I'm working with, there's a number of seasoned veterans within the studio itself, and we really came together around this idea of ‘social’, and bringing people together in positive ways and really exploring that space. [...] We are consummate board gamers, Dungeons & Dragons players, video game players, of course, as well. And we get great joy about getting together with our friends and playing. What could that mean for a game that we create? So we spent a lot of time in the early days discussing what each of us were passionate about in that space, and eventually aligned around a singular idea pretty recently at this point and are in the beginning points of exploring this specific idea that we're very excited about.” For Chayes and Moonshot, he too is thinking in terms of the ways players come together, but with a different end goal in mind. “This idea of ‘wonder’, enthuses Chayes. “We remember times back when we were kids growing up, and you see things for the first time and really have this feeling when you see it for the first time of, ‘Wow, I didn't imagine that kind of a thing was possible in the world.’ The very first time you ever saw an elephant, it's this sense of how incredible this thing, this creature is. And as you get older, you kind of lose that connection to seeing things with fresh eyes for the very first time. So one of our major goals at Moonshot is to try and evoke this sense of wonder, which can be wonder for beautiful and incredible things, or wonder for sometimes things that can be quite scary, and finding ways to kind of create that emotional resonance with the games we're pursuing.” While both studios are aiming to make different kinds of games, their scope should be relatively similar. Secret Door is currently made up of 7 developers, with Moonshot boasting 10 – both are hiring, but both studio heads are keen not to expand too soon. “We're somewhat designing the size of the studio based around our ambitions and what the game requires,” explains Chayes. “What I can say certainly is we're not shooting for hundreds of people for our game. And at the same time, I think that there is a point where it's difficult to hit the sense of wonder and the sense of big feel to the titles we're thinking about with the team that's a little too small.” [poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=We're%20somewhat%20designing%20the%20size%20of%20the%20studio%20based%20around%20our%20ambitions%20and%20what%20the%20game%20requires."] Sigaty and Chayes both avoid terms like ‘AAA’ or ‘indie’ to describe what they’re doing, with Sigaty preferring different qualifiers: “Quality is going to be something that comes out of our backgrounds, I think, and the games that we've worked on in the past. I think it's somewhat subjective on what thing you call ‘indie’ or not, but we definitely want [the game] to have high fidelity and be super high-quality.” As for when we’ll get more concrete details, that remains up in the air, with Morhaime cautioning that, “I think that they're actually able to create things that they can interact with much quicker than they were able to do that in the old days, but it's going to be quite a while before we're ready to start talking about what we're doing.” But even at such an early stage, Morhaime’s confident about what his new studios can create, and what Dreamhaven – this experiment in making games differently – could mean as a result. “We want to make a positive impact on the industry. We also want to do things that make the world a better place. [...] We talk about trying to have this independent studio model where you have these studios that feel like they're in control of their destiny, that they're making decisions for themselves about their work environment and their games. And then they can pivot when those things aren't working with access to central support, central services and enough resources to enable them to do what they want. I think that if we're going to have a positive impact on the industry, it's through showing that this can be a successful model and giving encouragement and inspiration to others that share our values and beliefs so that maybe we can help turn the tide in the industry and show that there's a better way of approaching game making and business.” He sounds excited – everyone I speak to at Dreamhaven does – and it occurs to me that this is surely Morhaime’s main motivation. If you can afford not to need a job, what’s going to get you to start a brand new company, amid a pandemic no less? Well, something exciting enough not to feel like much of a job in the first place. I ask Morhaime what excites him about the industry as a whole and he reels off a string of thoughts: VR (specifically the Oculus Quest), Discord, real competition on the PC platform, and a wider interest in smaller gaming companies from the perspective of big business. And then he sums up what that means for Dreamhaven: “I think that we just see opportunity everywhere.” Yes, Mike Morhaime was quite enjoying not having a job, for a while. But then having this one suddenly seemed far more exciting. If the philosophy pays off, with the calibre of developers at its disposal, Dreamhaven feels very much worth being excited by.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that the company will continue considering buying video game companies "where it makes sense." In an interview with CNET about the company's $7.5 billion acquisition of ZeniMax Media and Bethesda, Nadella confirmed that Microsoft would continue looking to expand. Explaining what Microsoft would look for, Nadella said, "We'll always look for places where there is that commonality of purpose, mission and culture. We will always look to grow inorganically where it makes sense." Nadella appears to see buying established companies as a more efficient means of adding to Xbox's line-up than opening new studios (although Microsoft has created 'AAAA' studio The Initiative in recent years): "You can't wake up one day and say, 'Let me build a game studio'. The idea of having content is so we can reach larger communities." Head of Xbox Phil Spencer added, "Content is just the incredible ingredient to our platform that we continue to invest in." [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/09/22/the-5-biggest-takeaways-from-xboxs-bethesda-acquisition"] Nadella and Spencer didn't offer any indication as to whether other acquisitions were in the works. The surprise purchase of ZeniMax and Bethesda is one of the biggest purchases in game industry history, and we've listed the 5 biggest takeaways from the deal. It's led to speculation as to whether Bethesda games will become Xbox exclusives now, with some at IGN saying they'd be shocked if The Elder Scrolls, Fallout or Doom appeared on PS5 now. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

As part of a consultation on loot boxes, the UK government is looking to hear from "video games players and adults responsible for children and young people who play video games" to figure out if they "may encourage or lead to problem gambling." Surveys can be filled out here and will inform the government's review of the Gambling Act 2005, which could lead to new regulations on loot boxes. The call for evidence will run until the 22 November 2020, and is also seeking consultation from video game businesses, researchers and organizations. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2019/08/07/nintendo-sony-microsoft-working-on-loot-box-odds-policy"] Back in January 2020, England's top mental health nurse Claire Murdoch released a report calling for a review of microtransactions, noting that loot boxes were "setting kids up for addiction." The UK government then formally announced a call for evidence in June 2020, to "gather evidence and understand the impact of loot boxes." In August 2019 it was announced that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo were working on new loot box policies that would disclose a range of odds for a player's purchase. The ESRB recently launched a new ratings label that will inform consumers about whether a game includes random items as part of its in-game purchasing system. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.

Netflix has released a nightmarish new trailer for The Haunting of Bly Manor - the second season of Mike Flanagan's horror anthology series which began with The Haunting of Hill House. The latest trailer plunges the Bly Manor residents into an abyss of sinister secrets and dark tragedies from the centuries of love and loss that possess the haunted building at the centre of the new season, which is scheduled to hit Netflix on October 9, with nine brand new episodes for audiences to unlock. Watch the new trailer for The Haunting of Bly Manor below: [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/09/23/the-haunting-of-bly-manor-official-trailer"] The Haunting of Bly Manor is a loose adaptation of Henry James' 1898 novel The Turn of the Screw, which is said to be "a jumping-off point" for Hill House Season 2's "much scarier" narrative. The new chapter will feature several actors from the first season of Netflix's The Haunting of... anthology series. The returning stars will portray new characters in the upcoming season, which is set in 1980s England. The story will follow the unexplainable events that occur after Henry Wingrave (Henry Thomas) hires a young American nanny (Victoria Pedretti) to care for his orphaned niece and nephew (Amelie Bea Smith, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) who reside at Bly Manor with the estate's chef Owen (Rahul Kohli), groundskeeper Jamie (Amelia Eve) and housekeeper, Mrs. Grose (T'Nia Miller). [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=the-haunting-of-hill-house-season-2-first-look-at-the-haunting-of-bly-manor&captions=true"] Want to know more about Bly Manor? Take a "look beneath the surface" of the show's chilling poster, make a phone call to apply for the "live-in nanny" role at the haunted residence or watch the show's first teaser trailer for some more frightening footage from the new series. Alternatively, if you need to attend to house duties and are short on time, check out our broader round-up of everything we know about Netflix's Hill House Season 2. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Adele Ankers is a Freelance Entertainment Journalist. You can reach her on Twitter.

Head of Xbox Phil Spencer has confirmed that Bethesda will continue to run semi-independently after the company's acquisition by Microsoft. Speaking to CNET, Spencer made clear that, while Bethesda games will adopt some of Xbox's new practices - including launching into Xbox Game Pass and becoming playable through game streaming - the company will retain some of the autonomy that resulted into some of the biggest games of all time: "It is about the culture of those teams," Spencer explained. "They're not about becoming us." The specifics here aren't clear, but it seems likely that that Microsoft will allow for Bethesda to retain the development culture at its studios, as well as the existing connections between individual studios and the wider Bethesda Softworks organisation. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/will-bethesda-games-be-xbox-exclusives-now"] This tallies with previous comments from Bethesda SVP of global marketing Pete Hines, who said, "We’re still working on the same games we were yesterday, made by the same studios we’ve worked with for years, and those games will be published by us." The implication here may be that, while Bethesda's 8 studios are now owned by Microsoft, they may not become a part of the formal Xbox Game Studios group (the listed publisher for Microsoft's other owned studios). Apart from a difference in development oversight, this could also have some effect on whether Bethesda games become Xbox exclusives - it may be that Bethesda is able to choose to continue releasing games across all platforms. There's much still to learn about Bethesda's status as a Microsoft company after the planned acquisition goes through in the second half of 2021, but here are the 5 biggest takeaways from the move. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Blizzard co-founder and ex-CEO Mike Morhaime has announced Dreamhaven, a new games company with two internal development studios, each of which is working on a new game, and is headed by other Blizzard veterans. As reported by GamesBeat and The Washington Post, Dreamhaven is designed as an overarching company - offering guidance and funding - within which development studios can open. Its first two internal studios are Moonshot and Secret Door. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/06/30/blizzard-veterans-reflect-on-starcrafts-past-and-future"] Moonshot’s studio head is Jason Chayes (executive producer on Hearthstone and lead producer on StarCraft 2). He’s joined by Dustin Browder (game director on StarCraft 2, Heroes of the Storm, and Command and Conquer), and Ben Thompson (creative director on Hearthstone), as well as a group of other seasoned developers. Secret Door’s studio head is Chris Sigaty (executive producer on Hearthstone, StarCraft 2, and Heroes of the Storm, and lead producer on the original Warcraft 3). He’s joined by Eric Dodds (first game director on Hearthstone) and Alan Dabiri (game director on Heroes of the Storm) and a team of other veteran developers. Both team's games are currently unknown, and the entire company is in its early stages, meaning we shouldn't expect announcements anytime soon. Morhaime will act as CEO of Dreamhaven as a whole, which will be based in Irvine, California. It marks his first major move in the games industry since stepping down as Blizzard president in 2018 and leaving the company he helped create in 2019. Stay tuned to IGN for more – we have an interview with Morhaime, Chayes, and Sigaty coming later today. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.