Borderlands 4 is already on sale. Helldivers 2 is on a break, sorta. The head of Assassin’s Creed is leaving after roughly two decades at Ubisoft. Welcome to the latest edition of Morning Afternoon Checkpoint, Kotaku‘s daily roundup of gaming news and culture. This week is already off to a wild start. We’re officially in peak period for the fall 2025 release calendar. Battlefield 6 was last week. Pokémon Legends: Z-A is this week. And a slew of big launches will finish things off leading up to Halloween. But in the meantime let’s remember how good Final Fantasy Tactics Advance looked. Now that is some gorgeous 16-bit pixel art. If only the rest of the game were as good!
Borderlands 4 is 20 percent off a month after launch
That’s specifically on PC where sales may be soft due to a whole hullaballoo over performance issues last month. Gearbox Entertainment head Randy Pitchford previously promised fans that the newest loot shooter in the franchise would go a long time without any massive discounts. Does this count? “Sales like this and Borderlands 3 showing up on console subscription programs took over 5 years from the game’s launch to happen,” he wrote earlier this year in a thread pointing to a brief 95-percent discount for the series.
“Take advantage when it’s here! And to set expectations, it will be even longer before this kind of thing happens in the next cycle with Borderlands 4.” Let’s see if Borderlands 4 gets down to $50 on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S by Black Friday.
A look at Rare’s cancelled Everwild leaks online
#Vazou Capturas de Tela do Cancelado Everwild da Rare 📸
As imagens mostravam (provavelmente) uma versão relativamente recente, de um pouco antes do jogo ser cancelado pela Microsoft
A interface nos lembra um pouco dos jogos da franquia Zelda modernos , embora tenhamos sido… pic.twitter.com/7lMlrAUvXw
— Pastor Xbox (@PastorXbox) October 13, 2025
The action-adventure fantasy game started as a prototype at the Sea of Thieves studio over a decade ago. Multiple delays and development reboots later, Microsoft finally pulled the plug on the Xbox exclusive earlier this year. Everwild was first shown at an Xbox showcase back in 2019, and now fresh screenshots of a seemingly recent build (via MP1st) have leaked on social media. Longtime Rare developer Gregg Mayles also confirmed he’s leaving the studio following the cancellation.
The Japanese government asks OpenAI to stop stealing its IP
Minoru Kiuchi, Minister of State for Economic Security, shared the news at a press conference last week. “Anime and manga are irreplaceable treasures that we can be proud of around the world,” he said (via ITMedia). We have requested OpenAI not to engage in any actions that could constitute copyright infringement.” The announcement comes after the release of Sora 2 led to a flood of new AI-generated slop based on video game and anime characters, including those from Dragon Ball, One Piece, and Pokémon.
Sucker Punch will stay a one-game studio
Don’t expect the Ghost of Yotei team to start chasing multiple projects at once like Insomniac Games or other PlayStation studios. “If we were good at juggling four projects, yeah, we’d have a remaster, and let’s go do one of those, and one of those, and do some fan request that would be really popular…but we only get to do one thing,” Sucker Punch head Brian Fleming told VGC. “So it kind of has to be your best idea, right? And that’s really clarifying. It’s not like there aren’t 15 good ideas. But you only get to do one. And by the way, you only get to do one about every five years. So that choice is really important. I mean, that is choosing your college and your major every five years.”
Assassin’s Creed franchise boss leaves Ubisoft after shake-up
Marc-Alexis Côté is departing the French publisher following the recently announced Tencent-backed Vantage Studios subsidiary which will oversee Assassin’s Creed and the company’s other major franchises, IGN reports. “Following the organizational restructuring announced in March 2025, Marc-Alexis Côté has chosen to pursue a new path elsewhere outside of Ubisoft,” a Ubisoft spokesperson said in a statement. “While we are saddened to see him go, we’re confident that our talented teams will carry forward the strong foundation he helped build.”
Demon’s Souls Remake studio is working on a new action game
Bluepoint Games has a new project in the queue according to a recent job listing (via Tech4Gamers). The PlayStation studio was previously working on a reportedly canceled live service God of War spin-off. A new job listing, since removed from the website, says the team is hiring a senior combat designer for a third-person melee action game. That sure narrows it down!
The Helldivers 2 team is taking a break from new content to fix performance
The sci-fi extraction shooter got a bunch of big updates this year, but the development team says it’s now pivoting to fixing the overall state of the game’s performance. “We’re taking this very seriously and we are focusing way more now on addressing these issues to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again,” director Mikael Eriksson said in a recent interview (via Eurogamer). “We have made the decision to push some of our content and feature updates a little bit into the future while we’re addressing these things to make sure that we can get to a much more stable state that we can believe in.”
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