Xbox Series X and Series S will open for pre-orders at 8am UK time on September 22.
Announced by Xbox UK’s marketing lead on Twitter, the timing is currently only confirmed for the UK timezone. However, that time maps to midnight, September 22 in Pacific time.
Given Xbox headquarters are in the Pacific timezone, midnight feels like a likely time for pre-orders to open in the US.
Pre-orders for Xbox Series X | S go live on the 22nd September at 8AM from the following UK retailers:
Microsoft Store
Amazon
GAME
Argos
Currys PC World
Smyths Toys
John Lewis & Partners
AO .com
Very .co.uk pic.twitter.com/W0zf1bSVda
Both consoles will join the Xbox All Access program (a subscription service that gets you a console and an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate membership), with Series X coming in at $34.99 USD / £28.99 a month, and Series S at $24.99 USD / £20.99.
We’ll likely learn about PS5 preorder plans tomorrow, September 16 at the PS5 showcase, which will “feature updates on the latest titles from Worldwide Studios and our world-class development partners.”
Still not sure if you want an Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, or a PS5? Check out our PS5 vs. Xbox Series comparison chart to get a better sense of what each shiny new box will offer.
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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 [email protected].
We did it, everyone: we finally have price, preorder, and release information for Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.
Xbox preorders go live September 22, and in the UK we know they’ll be popping up at 8 am, which is midnight Pacific Time in the US. We’ve reached out to Microsoft to see if they have a time window for the US and we’ll update this page when we have the info.
If you just came here for the console wars, you can read about where to sign up for PS5 preorder notifications on our dedicated PlayStation page for the subject.
Everything You Need to Know About Xbox Series X Preorders at a Glance
Xbox Series X and Series S Release Date: November 10, 2020
Xbox Series X and Series X Preorder Date: September 22, 2020
Xbox Series X Preorder Placeholder Pages
Here are the sites with live placeholder pages for Xbox Series X. NOTE: you can’t preorder Xbox Series X until September 22, but these are the retailer pages where orders will be live:
We’ve known for a while. now the Xbox Series X is coming November 2020, but the exact preorder date, price, and release date were closely held secrets for what seemed an eternity. We now know Xbox Series X preorders go live September 22, with a $499 price tag and a November 10 release date.
When preorders go live, we’re going to update this page, so be sure to add a bookmark.
For more immediate info about Xbox One X and Xbox Series S preorders when they eventually go live, be sure to follow IGN Deals on Twitter.
The info pages on major retailers have changed to reflect the new information, and some of the sites have removed the option to sign up for information:
Retailers have, for the most part, adapted their earlier Xbox Series X pages to include information on preorders for Xbox Series S as well. They’ve also started updating the pages to reflect the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X November 10 release dates.
Xbox Series X Specs
Microsoft released the official Xbox Series X technical specs on February 24, promising 12 teraflops of graphical processing power and backwards compatibility all the way back to the original Xbox console.
Here’s a quick rundown of the Xbox Series X technical specifications:
Custom-designed AMD Zen 2 and RDNA 2 processor
A “patented form” of variable rate shading (VRS)
DirectX raytracing (hardware accelerated)
SSD storage
HDMI 2.1
120fps support
The console’s Velocity Architecture, Microsoft Says, should mean we’ll see smaller game file sizes, less and faster loading, along with other immediate benefits. Microsoft also showed off the Xbox Series X UI, saying its new interface reduces load times to the home screen on start-up and when returning to it from a game.
Xbox Series X Release Date
The Xbox Series X release date is officially November 10, 2020. It took a long time to get here, but we finally made it.
Are Next Gen Games Going to Be $70?
Pricing on next-gen games is a little complicated. Many Xbox Series X-compatible games launching this fall, including Ubisoft’s fall lineup, will cost $60. Others, like NBA 2K21, will cost $70. But… probably not? Take-Two went back on its initial price point declaration for Xbox Series X and PS5 games, so only time will tell.
But if you check retailer pages for Xbox Series X games, you see $70 all over the place. Ultimately consumer demand will dictate prices, but for now, the $60 game looks like it’s sticking around, but won’t be much longer.
Xbox Series X Games
Thanks to Microsoft’s years-long push for backwards compatibility, Xbox Series X will launch with “thousands of games.” Some of the big launch-window titles that have been announced include Halo Infinite, Cyberpunk 2077, and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Check out our Xbox Series X game list wiki for an up-to-date list of all the confirmed and rumored Series X titles.
Actor Chris Evans, best known for playing Captain America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, found himself trending on social media the other day when he inadvertently posted a snap of his camera roll that included a nude photo. Using that leverage for good, he’s tweeted out a reminder for Americans to get out and vote in this year’s already fraught election.
After the actor accidentally posted the nude photo on his Instagram stories, fans immediately flooded hashtags and searches for his name with unrelated photos in a bid to stop screenshots of the leak from spreading. His co-star Mark Ruffalo also weighed in on the mistake with a “silver lining.”
.@ChrisEvans Bro, while Trump is in office there is NOTHING you could possibly do to embarrass yourself. See… silver lining.
Now, Evans has created his own silver lining, tweeting out a reminder to vote in a tweet that started with the understatement of “now that I have your attention.”
Now that I have your attention 🤦🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️…. VOTE Nov 3rd!!!
While Chris Evans has officially retired from playing Captain America, he’s now looking for ways to help America in real life, which has meant getting more involved in politics. Lately he has helped boost campaigns such as Power The Polls, which aims to sign up new poll workers, and Democrat campaign $45 to fire 45, which is… exactly how it sounds.
Evans also recently launched A Starting Point, a bipartisan political site designed to educate Americans on the issues they may not fully understand. He’s previously spoken about how his long-running role as Captain America has influenced his activism. “There’s no denying that I played a certain character,” Evans explained in an interview with People. “And it just so happens to align with part of my nature in terms of being someone who is politically involved and who cares about the wellbeing of people in this country.”
After a long period of silence on Microsoft’s next-gen consoles, we’re finally getting to know the Xbox Series S and Series X–some of it officially, some of it through leaks. The latest info to have been revealed is the retail box art for both consoles, which was tweeted out by Wario64, a prominent source of many of the recent Xbox leaks.
The good news is, while the names are easily confused, the box art isn’t. The Xbox Series X comes with classic Xbox green and black styling, while the Series S is predominantly white with just a green stripe at the bottom harking back to Xbox branding.
The X and S denoting the console versions are prominent in the bottom left of the box. The Series S box only seems to be a little smaller than the Series X box, though the discless console is quite a bit smaller than its higher-powered counterpart.
Earlier this year, a wave of DMCA copyright claims hit Twitch creators who had played copyrighted music in their streams, leading Twitch to recommend streamers not to play copyrighted music at all. Facebook Gaming, the social media giant’s Twitch competitor, has taken a different approach to the issue, announcing that it has worked out licensing agreements with the industry so its streamers can play copyrighted music.
The move is a first in the game streaming industry, and one creators had expected or at least requested from Amazon-owned Twitch. “We’re partnering with the music industry to open up a vast catalogue of popular music for Facebook Gaming Partners to play while livestreaming games,” the Facebook announcement reads. “Our work with music labels, publishers and societies, including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Kobalt Music Group, BMG publishing, Merlin and many partners means you’re able to include a vast amount of music across a variety of genres – current pop hits, dance floor beats, hip hop, 80s classics and much more.”
At the moment, the license is only current for Facebook’s streaming partners, though the announcement says it’s working on opening up the program to its Level Up creators, a lower tier similar to Twitch’s affiliate program.
For the partners who are eligible, the announcement means they can stream their own playlists from their own music players of choice–though the intricacies of copyright mean Facebook can’t actually say what songs are and aren’t licensed, so it warns that creators may still get a takedown notice for the odd song or two that isn’t covered.
Facebook says that its music rights cover more than 90 countries, though it hasn’t yet listed what countries those are–still, the music license program may suddenly make Facebook a far more attractive platform for game streamers who miss jamming to their favorite songs on stream.
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NBA 2K21‘s upcoming PS5 and Xbox Series X edition will cost $70 USD, which is $10 above the normal price of current-generation games. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has now defended the price increase to Protocol, pointing to the ballooning costs of game development. He remarked that he doesn’t expect consumers to care about rising development costs, but outside of that, Zelnick argued that the NBA 2K series has expanded its own value proposition by virtue of making the game more robust and deep.
“The bottom line is that we haven’t seen a front-line price increase for nearly 15 years, and production costs have gone up 200 to 300%,” Zelnick said. “But more to the point since no one really cares what your production costs are, what consumers are able to do with the product has completely changed.”
The newer NBA 2K games are “much, much bigger” in terms of what they offer, Zelnick said. As such, this warrants a price increase, he added. NBA 2K also offers the ability to pay for various microtransactions, but Zelnick said the base game is compelling enough to warrant a more expensive sticker price.
“We deliver a much, much bigger game for $60 or $70 than we delivered for $60 10 years ago,” he said. “The opportunity to spend money online is completely optional, and it’s not a free-to-play title. It’s a complete, incredibly robust experience even if you never spend another penny after your initial purchase.”
NBA 2K21 is not the only upcoming next-gen game to charge $10 extra. Activision will offer a cross-gen bundle for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War that gets you the current- and next-gen editions of the game for $70.
It looks like Ubisoft changed the name of Gods & Monsters to Immortals Fenyx Rising due to a trademark dispute with Monster Energy.
As detailed in this video from Hoeg Law, the Gods & Monsters trademark faced an opposition filing from the Monster Energy Company in April of 2020, which may have forced Ubisoft’s hand, necessitating the name change to Immortals Fenyx Rising.
You can see the full timeline of Gods & Monsters attempted patent registration over on the United States Patent and Trademark Office website. Ubisoft applied for the patent back in June of 2019, and did not face any issues until January of this year, when Monster Energy applied to oppose the trademark under a belief that its brand would be damaged due to the “likelihood of confusion” between the two entities.
In the notice of opposition the energy drink brand cites its ties to the games industry through sponsorship of professional gamers and esports organizations in support of its many claims. What’s interesting is that in Ubisoft’s May 2020 answer to Monster Energy’s notice of opposition, they deny almost all of the claims. Yet ahead of September’s Ubisoft Forward, the game’s name was officially changed from Gods & Monsters to Immortals Fenyx Rising.
In an interview with VGC last week, associate game director Julien Galloudec said that the name change was not a technical decision, but one related to the evolved “vision” of the game:
So no, the change of name was entirely because of the vision of the game. When you start a game it’s always an adventure and it’s a very iterative process. So you start with a vision that evolves as you craft it with the team and we get feedback and ideas. […] So after that, the game changed a lot, to the point where we felt we needed a new name to be better aligned with that updated vision, so that’s where we decided to change to Immortals Fenyx Rising”.
Immortals: Fenyx Rising will launch on Google Stadia, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch and PC on December 3, 2020. You can check out our preview here.
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Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.
Remember when making an “edgy” game didn’t mean adding Godsmack to the soundtrack of your swashbuckling 9th century Persian fantasy, or painting Sonic the Hedgehog black and giving him a gun? Hotshot Racing remembers. In this endearingly vibrant and deliberately primitive 3D aesthetic it means octagonal wheels, chunky environments, and plenty of pointy bits and pieces that’ll poke an eye out. As a single-player experience Hotshot Racing definitely runs out of puff a bit faster than I’d expected, but it’s certainly an earnest throwback put together with a huge amount of love for the early 3D racing era.
Hotshot Racing may be full of sharp lines and low on modern detail, but its blocky cars and chiselled characters burst from the screen with retro appeal. Developers Lucky Mountain Games and Sumo Digital’s stab at an authentically ’90s atmosphere has been a roaring success in that regard.
Better still, however, is the handling of most of the cars. Arcade racers live and die on their driving dynamics, but Hotshot Racing boasts a very finely-honed handling model. Cars feel planted on the road with a satisfying sense of weight that’s sometimes absent from pure arcade racers, but they’re still snappy and responsive enough to obey your inputs instantly as you hurl them into sweeping bends. The drifting is painless to trigger with a quick dab of brake, and it’s very easy to add or reduce drift angle throughout a slide to balance your speed for a perfect corner exit. Boost is a potent way to catch opponents (although largely useless to shake them), and there’s a surprisingly powerful drafting mechanic that facilitates some furiously fast slingshot manoeuvres.
Informed heavily by its Sega AM2 ancestors and the very finest of the best-in-class British arcade racers that followed in their slipstream – including Burnout and Split/Second – Hotshot Racing is extremely easy to pick and play but demands near-perfection when tackled at Expert difficultly.
Each of the eight over-the-top drivers has a garage of four vehicles at their disposal. They’re unlicensed, but it’s not at all hard to make out Hotshot Racing’s nod to the likes of Days of Thunder’s iconic Mellow Yellow Chevy Lumina – hell, it’s even called the Thunder! Likewise, racing veterans should be able to easily identify everything from an off-brand Bugatti to a lookalike Lotus Espirit or a pretend Pennzoil R34 GT-R. There’s a decent amount of customisation options of offer for each, too – from blowers to bobbleheads – though the simple visual style means that not all of these custom bits and bobs necessarily make a big impact on screen.
Vehicles drive with subtle differences due to nuances with their speed, acceleration, and drifting stats, although I’ve found I can only feel notable dissimilarities when hopping between cars with stat bars that significantly differ from each other. I can’t really detect the smaller variations. Cars with low drifting stats are my least favourite to drive; I’ve found winning Expert races in them much more difficult than in cars with ostensibly worse top speed and/or acceleration but better drift capabilities. For instance, I won all the Expert cups in the Thunder – despite its apparent top-speed handicap – because of its ability to drift around corners like butter sluicing around the curves of a hot frying pan. The cars that are more cumbersome to drift definitely aren’t as fun to use.
Those Expert cups came pretty quickly though; there are four GPs, each featuring four races, and I collected them over a single session. Hotshot Racing attempts to incentivise attacking them over and over again by tying upgrades to achieving specific feats across the entire assortment of vehicles, but the tracks probably lack the zest to make tackling them a dozen times each feel hugely tempting.
That said, they are quite fabulous to look at and packed with eye-catching, living elements, like spinning carnival rides to animated water displays, and raging dinosaurs to somersaulting sea creatures. But that’s all on the periphery; the track ribbons themselves don’t really linger in the imagination. The circuits are wide and well-suited to this aggressive brand of racing, but they’re also not exactly brimming with memorable strings of weaving esses or cool switchbacks. You don’t want every track to be a punishing barrage of mad bends one after another, but Hotshot Racing probably features too many simple courses versus more complex ones.
The regular racing is buoyed by the presence of a couple of additional modes – the pursuit-themed ‘Cops N Robbers’ and a Speed-inspired mode called ‘Drive or Explode’ (drop below a certain speed and you’ll blow; you know the drill). Cops N Robbers is a bit more like an infected-style mode (taken down robbers are just converted into cops) and isn’t quite as fun as it sounds playing solo. The secret to success as a robber just seems to be to hang back and let the AI hassle the frontrunners, and the car combat as a cop is fine but a little one-note.
The breakneck Drive or Explode is the better of the two – a hectic battle against both the clock and an ever-increasing minimum speed limit. Collecting checkpoints to fend off the bomb timer, avoiding damage, and keeping your car travelling as fast as possible is a frantic juggling act and some of the better fun I had in Hotshot Racing.
The best way to have fun, however, is the four-player splitscreen. It doesn’t quite reach the highs of a full-on, four-way combat racer like Mario Kart or Crash Team Racing, but the high-speed hijinks of Hotshot Racing makes for some quality same-couch competition.
There’s a fine line when playing a deliberately awkward game. On one hand, unreliable physics and purposefully clunky controls can yield hilarious results, as the struggle to perform basic actions is delightfully silly. Much like other absurdist “simulation” games such as Goat Simulator and the original Surgeon Simulator, Surgeon Simulator 2’s best moments come from facing a ridiculous scenario while being woefully ill-equipped to deal with it. However, the laughs eventually die down, replaced by exasperated sighs as surgeries become more complex and picking up a scalpel doesn’t get any less cumbersome.
Played from a first-person perspective, Surgeon Simulator 2 is far closer to a wobbly puzzle game than a proper simulation–albeit one with tongue firmly planted in cheek. In addition to performing surgery, you’ll be navigating hospital labyrinths, solving conditional logic puzzles to access medical supplies, and generally trying to prevent the surgical dummy affectionately known as Bob from dying. Surgeon Simulator 2 features a story mode, playable solo or cooperatively with up to four players, where you’re learning on the job using allegedly state-of-the-art simulation technology instead of bothering with stuffy medical school. This takes place over a series of levels, beginning with a tutorial, after which you’ll be attempting your first heart transplant–a completely natural progression for medical practitioners, surely.
Surgeon Simulator 2’s story is communicated through voiceover while you encounter increasingly outlandish situations. What begins as solely performing surgery quickly escalates to uncovering mysteries and conspiracies facing the shady medical facility in which you find yourself. It’s all highly ridiculous, but in a way that complements the equally bizarre gameplay.
Each level challenges you to not only fix what ails the patient but also to solve various problems en route to providing treatment. This includes passing through inexplicably locked doors that won’t open unless a button is pushed or a specific item is placed on a nearby scanner. Usually, an essential item lies behind these locked doors, such as a fresh set of intestines required for a transplant. However, the unlock condition is often placing the patient’s old organs on the scanner, resulting in a frantic dash between rooms to replace organs before poor Bob bleeds out. Regardless of how badly you botch an operation, the only fail state is running out of blood. It doesn’t matter if you conveniently forget to replace a lung as long as the diagnosed ailment is resolved. You also don’t need to bother putting Bob’s insides back in anything resembling anatomically correct order–just slap them in and Bob’s your uncle (or rather, creepy surgical test dummy). Conversely, heads and limbs must be attached correctly. Surgeon Simulator 2 doesn’t provide an explanation for this discrepancy, but making a mess of someone’s insides is often incredibly funny.
While each level increases in scope and complexity, the controls offer the most consistent challenge. Beyond the standard act of moving in first-person, Surgeon Simulator 2’s controls are wildly unconventional. Most notable is the sole arm dangling in your field of vision, which is used to interact with anything you can grab, be it a switch, a tool, or a vital organ. If you’re using a keyboard and mouse on PC, holding shift locks your feet in place, allowing you to extend and retract your arm using the mouse. Similarly, clicking in the right-mouse button enables hand rotation, necessary for getting the correct grip angle on objects. Combined with the left-mouse button used for grabbing and releasing, Surgeon Simulator 2 intentionally makes actions taken for granted in typical first-person games incredibly clumsy. Even picking up and using a swipe access card is an awkward flailing mess, let alone successfully completing a double amputation.
At first, this baby giraffe level of coordination is hilarious; gleefully tossing vital organs across the room delights for a while. However, as Surgeon Simulator 2’s levels and puzzles ramp up in extravagance, imprecise controls begin to grate. Even when wielding a scalpel, there’s no aiming cursor or highlighted outlines to indicate what you’re about to cut free. Accidentally ripping out the wrong appendage while Bob’s vitals plummet only amuses so many times before frustration sets in.
A recurring example of Surgeon Simulator 2’s double-edged clumsiness is prominent whenever limbs are involved. Sure, you can literally grab and yank Bob’s leg off, but taking the time to use a saw results in far less blood loss. Saws and axes cause dotted lines to appear where you can chop away at the unfortunate patient, but it’s far too easy to miss these guides and cause more damage than intended. While mimicking the physical act of sawing with your mouse is morbidly amusing, Surgeon Simulator 2’s deliberately clumsy control system undermines its skill-based elements. This surgical anarchy would prove to be more amusing–especially in story mode–if the penalty for losing too much blood wasn’t restarting the level from scratch. Some later levels are hefty and mazelike in structure, requiring a decent amount of exploration and puzzle-solving. This makes it all the more annoying when you’re forced back to the beginning due to the unreliable controls causing a medical mishap of epic proportions.
Fortunately, Surgeon Simulator 2 isn’t all exasperation. To help prevent disasters, there are two types of syringes: one for stopping bleeding and another for replenishing Bob’s blood stores. If you prepare ahead of time by having some injections on hand, everything will usually turn out okay. Most malpractice will only occur when chasing the story mode’s extra challenges, such as finishing a level within a strict time limit or keeping blood loss below a set amount.
Where Surgeon Simulator 2’s obtuse nature works more consistently in its favour is in the community-created content. You can even make your own levels with a comprehensive creation mode, giving you access to all the tools seen in the story mode to enact your own brand of chaos. Oddly, the creation mode tutorial redirects you to a YouTube playlist instead of an interactive guide, which feels a little disjointed. Regardless, playing community-made levels is refreshing, largely due to how the objectives differ from simply healing Bob. You can access community levels by joining a random quickplay queue or searching for specific content to play by yourself or with others. Naturally, the quality of these levels varies, but there are plenty of clever twists on the core surgical gameplay. Some of my favorites included various escape-the-room settings, one of which was an Indiana Jones-themed level replete with giant boulders and Bob in a sarcophagus.
Surgeon Simulator 2 likely began its own medical school in protest of being kicked out of the real thing. In creating its own brand of hospital hospitality, there are plenty of laughs to be had. However, hearty chuckles from chucking a heart across a grimy hospital room only last for so long before Surgeon Simulator 2’s clumsiness begins to frustrate more than entertain.
As the CEO of Take-Two Interactive Software, which publishes some of the biggest games out there (literally), Strauss Zelnick doesn’t see cloud gaming making a huge difference to his business. Zelnick explained his lack of enthusiasm in an in-depth interview with Protocol.
Though he isn’t claiming cloud gaming is a bad thing, the gaming exec is reluctant to believe the cloud is going to make a big dent in industry income. “Any new distribution vehicle that offers high-quality, efficiency and a reasonable price is good for our business,” he prefaces. “That said, there was all this hype for years about VR, and I wasn’t very compelled by that. Thankfully, as a result, we didn’t waste any money on it. Equally, there was an enormous amount of hype around movement to the cloud for interactive entertainment distribution.”
His problem with cloud gaming isn’t around the technology or the execution, but rather the premise that it will open up a whole new market of people who haven’t previously been gamers. “There were some parties who were saying there are 130 [million] to 140 million current-gen consoles out there,” Strauss explained. “There are billions of PCs out there. You know, if you can make in a frictionless way, console video games available to everyone who has a PC or a tablet or a phone, then your market size automatically would be 20x, just mathematically. Of course that doesn’t make any sense at all. Because the implication is you are super interested in video games but you were just unwilling to buy a console.”
He also brings up an issue that people in parts of the world with slower internet speeds know too well. “[The consumer is] beholden to whatever technology exists wherever they live,” Strauss said. “You may be out on the cloud, but if they’re on a phone line, they won’t be able to avail themselves of what you’re distributing.”
While the CEO admits that he may be speaking against his own interests, he doesn’t see it making a big change to any of Take Two’s biggest games. “We’ve sold 135 million units of Grand Theft Auto V, 32 million units of Red Dead Redemption. I wish I could tell you that there will come a point where various cloud gaming services will mean those numbers are doubled or tripled, but I don’t really see it.”
Microsoft released the official 
