2020 News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

A Cyberpunk 2077 lighting mod called E3VR was recently updated to a new version that essentially restores the lighting system used in the game's pre-release versions.

By Wes Davis, a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.

Cyberpunk 2077 studio CD Projekt Red very cheekily congratulated Hello Games on the reveal of its ambitious new fantasy game Light no Fire at The Game Awards 2023, seemingly joking about the two studios' respective controversies and eventual redemption arcs.

The recently revealed Visions of Mana is bringing back series creator Koichi Ishii as well as veteran composers Hiroki Kikuta, Tsuyoshi Sekito, and Ryo Yamazaki.

£167 million worth of video game consoles, accessories and physical games were sold over the Black Friday week in the UK, GfK reveals.

What would a global disaster look like from inside a really, really nice Airbnb? That’s the question posed — and answered, in a fairly gripping way — by Leave the World Behind, a luxe Netflix thriller adapted by Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail from Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel. But this isn’t another “eat the rich” (or “lick the rich”) classist fable, in spite of some architectural similarities between its setup (and its actual architecture) and those in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. Leave the World Behind gently prods at some racial and economic sore spots, but ultimately, it isn’t about conflict. Its well-to-do characters have more commonalities than differences. It’s a view of what happens when the bubble bursts, seen entirely from inside the bubble.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's latest trailer might have just resolved a four-year-old mystery that started in Remake.

Visually stunning Star Wars space battles are coming to Halo: The Master Chief Collection in early 2024 as part of the popular Battlefront pack mod.

Chinese developer Game Science chose The Game Awards 2023 to present the release date of its upcoming action RPG Black Myth: Wukong.

While TGA 2023 undoubtedly featured many gorgeous games, Last Sentinel was easily one of the most impressive. This is the debut project of Lightspeed LA, a California-based division of Tencent's Lightspeed Studios.

During Gamescom 2018 in Cologne, Germany, NVIDIA announced that ray tracing–a graphics technique capable of rendering special effects on par with motion pictures–was finally coming to video games. The event also marked the introduction of the concept of AI for gaming with the introduction of Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS).

Three years on from a legendarily catastrophic launch that jeopardized CD Projekt Red's once-sterling reputation, Cyberpunk 2077 has completely turned it around. After failing to nab a Game Award for its initial launch (eligible at the 2021 TGA), Cyberpunk took home an award for Best Ongoing Game at this year's show.

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Before Genshin Impact exploded in popularity, developer MiHoYo was largely seen as a mobile game studio. Now, Genshin is one of the biggest action RPGs around, competing directly with games only available on PC or consoles. Gryphline, the Chinese developer of popular mobile strategy game Arknights, is about to attempt the same transformation with a spin-off RPG called Arknights: Endfield.

The Sentry has been dead since 2020's King in Black event, but in December 6's new Sentry #1, his powers are alive and well and spreading among several seemingly random people. But with the Sentry comes his villainous dark side, the Void - and that terrible presence is seemingly also rearing its ugly head already.

Square Enix has filed trademarks for “Visions of Mana” (1, 2) and “Pixelight” (1, 2) in Europe and Australia. Both marks were filed on December 7.

I have strangely fond memories of Kingpin: Life of Crime, a 1999, vaguely dieselpunk-y FPS that I played far, far too young. It was ultraviolent, ultra-sweary, and had a light smattering of RPG elements that made it feel very novel to me back when I played it. I was pretty excited, then, when 3D Realms announced a remaster called Kingpin: Reloaded in 2020.

Next week’s free Epic Games Store title hasn’t been revealed as usual, with Epic instead saying it plans to offer a “mystery game.”

The second season of HBO’s The Last of Us is scheduled for release in 2025.

It was back in 2020 when Fullbright announced Open Roads, a family road trip tale, that was expected to release in 2021. However, the game was delayed but Open Roads has now re-emerged with a new release date, with that date being February 22nd, 2024. A new trailer has also been released to confirm the date.

One of the real-time idle surprise hits of 2020 is coming to mobiles soon. Available on PC and Switch since 2020, The Longing will drop on Android and iOS on December 18, 2023.

Since the PlayStation 5 hit shelves in November 2020, its popularity has been off the charts, and it shows no sign of slowing down. However, with the brand new PlayStation 5 Slim entering the market in November this year — a more space-friendly version of the PS5 — there are now two models to choose from. So, which one do you go for?

New World Interactive has become the latest studio owned by Embracer Group to suffer a round of layoffs.

Back in 2020, a team of StarCraft 2 veterans announced the launch of a new outfit, Frost Giant Studios, with the stated goal of creating «the next great PC real-time strategy game.» We got our hands on that effort, called Stormgate, earlier this year, and it certainly looked like Frost Giant was on track to deliver that promise, with a debut effort that's «shaping up to be a brilliant blend of modern and classic RTS.»

Another studio has fallen afoul of Embracer Group's comprehensive restructuring plan, with an unknown number of layoffs being confirmed at New World Interactive, the developer behind the Insurgency series of tactical first-person shooters.

In more unfortunate layoff news, UK-based developer Codemasters has confirmed an unknown number of redundancies. The veteran studio is best known for its high-quality racing series, F1 and WRC, and was purchased by EA back in 2021.

Xbox Series X|S maker Microsoft has once again expressed a desire to release its membership service Game Pass on to PS5, PS4, allowing first-party titles like Starfield and Forza Motorsport to become available to a wider audience. Xbox CFO Tim Stuart made the comments during the Wells Fargo TMT Summit, stating it to be a «bit of a change of strategy».

Open Roads, the narrative adventure game starring Keri Russell (The Americans, Star Wars Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker) and Kaitlyn Dever (Booksmart, Uncharted 4: A Thief's End), finally has a release date, nearly three years after its initial reveal at The Game Awards 2020. It hits consoles and PC on February 22, 2024. 

It was back in 2020 when Fullbright announced Open Roads, a family road trip tale, that was expected to release in 2021. However, the game was delayed but Open Roads has now re-emerged with a new release date, with that date being February 22nd, 2024. A new trailer has also been released to confirm the date.

By Wes Davis, a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.

When Microsoft Flight Simulator launched in 2020 it felt like the entire game development industry took notice. And how could you not? The software giant’s passion project launched with a satellite-mapped version of our entire Earth, a breathtaking day and night cycle, and real-time air traffic. The simulation is a seemingly effortless fusion of the real and the virtual that you can fly through by the seat of your pants, while playing on consoles and in VR. But players of a certain type always want more. Their latest ask? One time machine, please.

Intel has revealed the truth about AMD's latest Ryzen 7000 mobile CPU family. Some models actually use old CPU designs with Zen 2 architecture, which dates back to 2019.

You know those dystopian notions of seas boiling over thanks to climate change? Well, China has a neat idea to accelerate a process which is already giving us the warmest sea surface temps on record. Heating up the oceans directly with computers.

There was little doubt that the GTA VI trailer would do well in terms of viewership. Still, the debut video of Rockstar's massively anticipated new game surpassed even the rosiest expectations.

Sweden's Embracer Group has shut down Insurgency developer New World Interactive.

Nearly two years later to the day (Halo Infinite launched on December 8, 2021), the first-person shooter game can finally be considered feature complete thanks to the release of the Firefight PvE mode.

I have spent 15 days reporting live from the Epic v. Google trial: an antitrust dispute over whether Google's Android app store is an unfair monopoly. I’ve watched a parade of witnesses go by, including Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. We’re now in a weeklong break before both parties return on December 11th to make their closing arguments, after which a jury will decide who’s right. I’ve chronicled every major thrust, parry, and riposte leading up to that in our Verge StoryStream, writing nearly 600 dispatches from the courtroom so far.

It’s been eight years since the last Hunger Games movie and, as it turns out, fans were eager to come back for more of Panem’s most brutal game show/mechanism of totalitarian control. The newest entry in the series, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, has put up an impressive box office performance so far, earning well over $100 million and going strong into its third week. But with so many other big IP movies bombing at the box office this year, it begs the question: Are other franchises releasing too many movies?

At long last, Soul, Luca, and Turning Red will hit theaters.

Activision has released a trailer for Warzone’s new map and confirmed that its battle royale mode will support a reduced player count of 100 combatants.

The tale of CD Projekt Red and their futuristic cyberpunk-themed video game is likely well-known to you now. But it’s worth retelling again because of the release of Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition, which is meant to be the “definitive version” of the title in every way that matters. If you don’t know, this “Ultimate Edition” brings together the main game that launched in 2020 and the expansion that was released a few months ago. Plus, all the updates that have helped improve the game over the years are included. They even made a special launch trailer bringing back Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba to narrate why you should “enjoy” Night City as you try to make your way through it.

Grand Theft Auto 6, the latest open-world crime simulator from Table Tennis studio Rockstar Games, got its first trailer yesterday. Perhaps you heard. So far as I can make out, the reaction so far has been a kind of obsessive euphoria, as literally millions of people around the world pore over 90 seconds of footage to pick out details, theorycraft, and plan literal crimes against humanity. 

The last 24 hours have been videogame carnage of the best sort. Rockstar had previously announced that the first trailer for GTA 6 would debut, ooh, about three hours from the time of writing. Instead a full trailer leak saw the studio decide to get out ahead of time and release the trailer early. Rockstar's developers may not have been happy about it: but the crowd went wild.

Yesterday, Nick Calandra first circulated the rumor that the Embracer Group had closed down New World Interactive. The rumor was then corroborated by Insider Gaming, although a Saber Interactive spokesperson later clarified the studio was being restructured, not shut down.

Dishonored fans may want to tune in to Geoff Keighley's The Game Awards 2023 event, which is due to air on December 7 at 7:30 PM ET / 4:30 PM PT / 12:30 AM GMT across all major streaming services and social platforms.

Nintendo and Universal's partnership has been a fruitful one. Universal Studios Japan's version of Super Nintendo World kicked it all off in late 2020 and early 2021 with a magical experience for Nintendo fans (learn more about our experience here), then in February 2023, Universal Studios Hollywood's Super Nintendo World opened its doors (see our photo tour of that version here). The collaboration to this point culminated shortly after that with the release of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which garnered strong fan reactions and grossed more than $1 billion at the box office.

Sci-fi RPG Cyberpunk 2077 is an ambitious game with history as up-and-down as its prickly protagonist's mood. The game deflated expectations almost immediately after launch in 2020, disappointing would-be fans with its glitches and fiddly combat. Putting a bow on its comeback arc, developer CD Projekt Red recently released its Phantom Liberty expansion and update 2.0. Now, the game feels deserving of its pre-launch hype, and its unexpected new patch 2.1 happily continues this trend.  

CD Projekt Red has confirmed Cyberpunk 2077’s patch 2.1, due Tuesday, Dec. 5, will be the last major update to the game, closing the book on one of the most controversial game development processes of recent years.

A little over a week ago, an AMD patent titled Distributed Geometry was published by the US Patent Office, the patent itself was filed by AMD in April this year. The patent details a fully chiplet approach to GPUs, where the rendering workload is distributed across a collection of chips, rather than having one massive die handling all of the processing. There's no indication that we'll see this employed in a Radeon graphics card any time soon, of course, but it's the natural evolution of what we've already seen in RDNA 3.

NVIDIA has released its latest GeForce Game Ready driver which adds support for Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition, further enhancing RTX & DLSS capabilities.

Five and a half years ago, KRAFTON (then called PUBG Corporation) filed a lawsuit against NetEase in the US District Court - Northern District of California, alleging that the mobile Battle Royale games Rules of Survival and Knives Out had been basically copied from Playerunknown's Battlegrounds.

Excellent bullet hell and melee battle mashup Furi dropped back in 2016 and left a big impact crater on action genre fans, demanding attention and careful play from players with a unique control scheme emphasizing dual stick play around shooting and slashing. It's certainly one of those games for fans of responsive controls, people who really care about how a game feels while they're playing it.

Saltburn has shaped up as one of 2023’s most divisive love-it-or-hate-it movies. Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to her 2020 writer-director debut, Promising Young Woman, is radically different from that movie in look and tone, but her talent for pushing boundaries and demanding a response is still front and center, and Saltburn is the kind of button-pusher that generally either thrills people or makes them angry. Critics have responded both ways: “Superficially smart and deeply stupid,” Mick LaSalle grumps in the San Francisco Chronicle, while Entertainment Weekly’s Maureen Lee Lenker calls it “a triumph of the cinema of excess, in all its orgiastic, unapologetic glory.”

The hype mode of Amazon Prime Video's upcoming Fallout TV show has officially started. Following the first official photos shared earlier this week, Amazon has now released the debut teaser trailer for the upcoming series.

Microsoft’s head of gaming has acknowledged the demand from fans for a new Banjo-Kazooie game.

We said in October that Cyberpunk 2077's redemption is complete, but I think that may have been a little premature because now it's really complete: CD Projekt has finally settled the class action lawsuit filed against it in 2020 by investors who weren't happy with the state of the game at launch.

Bethesda Softworks stunned Steam users earlier this week when players discovered that Starfield developers were actively replying to negative reviews on Valve’s PC platform.

Once upon a time, maybe 20 years ago, I loved NSYNC. Maybe not as much as my older sister, who had the screen name “justinsgirl309” on AIM, but I was as big of a fan as a 7-year-old could be. NSYNC officially disbanded in 2004, Justin Timberlake went solo, and the rest of the groupmates scattered to the wind, appearing on various random shows. (Chris Kirkpatrick playing Chip Skylark on The Fairly OddParents meant a lot to me as a kid.)

The devs behind Hytale, the long-awaited spiritual successor to Minecraft, have just posted a new development update suggesting that the game is still in the prototyping and engine development phase of production. After 8 years in development, many fans aren't seeing this level of progress as a good sign.

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The upcoming Path of Exile 2 has received a brand-new gameplay video, focusing on the bow-wielding Mercenary class.

Steam will halt support for macOS 10.13 and 10.14 (better known as High Sierra and Mojave) on February 15, 2024.

Riot Games has created a new chief product officer (CPO) role, which will be headed up by co-founder Marc Merrill. 

Two months after saying that Cyberpunk 2077's massive 2.0 patch and Phantom Liberty expansion would be the last of the «big updates» to the game, CD Projekt has surprised everyone with an announcement that update 2.1 is coming in December with «new and hotly anticipated gameplay elements.»

One of my favourite games as a kid was the SNES version of Shadowrun, an isometric action-RPG all about that hacker life. Ever since I've longed for games to scratch a similar itch, and DataJack 2020 certainly fits the bill, a cyberpunk hacktivist action-adventure with light RPG elements. Tonight's PC Gaming Show saw the first gameplay footage and, by golly, Datajack 2020 and me are going to get along just fine.

The first Activision Blizzard game has landed on NVIDIA's GeForce NOW cloud platform, and it's the publisher's biggest franchise: Call of Duty. More specifically, GeForce NOW users will be able to access the newly released Modern Warfare III, last year's Modern Warfare II, and the free-to-play Warzone via Call of Duty HQ. For now, only the Steam version is supported, so those who play Call of Duty via Battle.net won't be able to stream to GFN.

Xbox’s chief financial officer has said the company eventually wants to bring Game Pass to PlayStation and Nintendo consoles.

Dan Houser left an unerasable mark on gaming through his work at Rockstar, though he has since moved on to new projects. This includes two new IPs his entertainment company is working on.

Mozilla is set to revamp Firefox for Android by reintroducing a feature that was removed in 2020, an open ecosystem of extensions. The removal was part of a major security and interface overhaul, but it impacted extension compatibility. Now, Mozilla is making a comeback with over 400 new extensions set to be officially available on December 14. Scott DeVaney of Mozilla had previously hinted at the return of extensions, promising a debut before the end of the year.

Tesla Inc. designed its stainless-steel Cybertuck to be something special: the first vehicle for the masses that doesn't require paint. It's no easy feat. The only other company to come close, DeLorean, sold just 9,000 cars before filing for bankruptcy in 1982.

By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

Back in early 2020, Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser shockingly announced he was leaving the studio. While we don’t necessarily know how this will affect Rockstar as they haven’t released a new game since then, Houser was unquestionably a huge creative force at the company, writing every Grand Theft Auto title since GTA 2 as well as Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2, Bully, and more.

Whether you realize it or not, Sonic The Hedgehog is doing better than ever across virtually all media. Seriously, Sonic had been “hanging” by various threads over the years, but ever since 2020, things have started to come together. He’s had two well-received video games in both the 2D and 3D space, he has a hit show on Netflix that fans adore, and then, there are the live-action movies. These films helped set the tone for future video game adaptations and showed that they aren’t all bad when you put the effort in, and Sonic The Hedgehog 3 will hopefully continue that.

Another discovery in this week's Dragonflight Patch 10.2.5 PTR build are Scarlet Crusade themed robe, cloak, and shield models for the Ensemble: Scarlet Zealot's Trappings coming to the Trading Post in December!Scarlet Zealot's Cassock and Scarlet Zealot's Cloak Interestingly, we discovered the three gear items all the way back in the Patch 10.0.7 PTR last February, though they are just now being added to the Trading Post as part of the Ensemble: Scarlet Zealot's Trappings. While the lavish robe and cloak models are new to this PTR, however, the shield is actually much older still — one of several unused Exile's Reach models from 2020, finally becoming available in game.Scarlet Zealot's Heater Shield Alongside the recent Plate of the Light Avenger and previous customizations such as and Tabard of the Scarlet Crusade, enthusiasts should soon be able to create Scarlet Crusade transmog sets for just about any class or occasion!

Absurd Ventures, the new transmedia company from Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser, has announced its debut projects.

The PC market has had its fair share of breakout hits this year, perhaps most notably in the widespread popularity of, but one game has just performed a trick that might be even more impressive. Although the platform has long been a home to a variety of successful indie games for PC, the top sellers on Steam typically skew toward AAA releases. When a game does claw its way to the top without the same kind of funding, it's often on a rare wave of cultural interest, like with the meteoric rise of in 2020.

In case you hadn't noticed, the holiday run-up has officially begun, and it's the time of year when every company begins its relentless assault on your newsfeed and email inboxes with as much whimsy and good cheer as it can muster. While for many this is something of an unwelcome barrage of forced bon-homie, there is the occasional bit of holiday marketing that elicits a genuine smile. 

The Last of Us is the gift that keeps on giving. Fans looking forward to the game's upcoming PS5 remaster will get the chance to experience a number of previously Lost Levels that will be recreated for the new release.

The Grand Theft Auto VI trailer has not come out yet, but we have a bit of news about what to expect from the game.