The iconic voice behind Commander Shepard, Jennifer Hale, hasn’t been asked to return for Mass Effect 5, but “would be there before they finish the sentence” if asked.

Hale, the actress who gave life to “FemShep," the protagonist of the Mass Effect trilogy, spoke to IGN recently and expressed her desire to return to perhaps her most beloved character.

But, it turns out, it wouldn’t even need to be the temptation of reprising her role as Commander Shepard that would lure her back to the series, but just being able to step back into that world once again in any form.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A sold almost six million copies in its opening week.

In a statement, The Pokémon Company announced that Pokémon Legends: Z-A, which debuted on October 16, has already sold 5.8 million units worldwide, with around half of those bought for Nintendo's new console, the Switch 2.

This means the first Pokémon game to feature real-time Pokémon battles is the fifth best-selling game of the franchise in terms of first week sales.

By comparison, that's more than Pokémon X/Y and Let's Go Pikachu / Eevee managed in their first weeks, but, according to X / Twitter user Pierre485, not as much as Pokémon Scarlet / Violet, Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and Pokémon Sword / Shield managed.

First Week Sales for Pokemon games pic.twitter.com/VdQlBCg4bi

— Pierre485 (@pierre485_) October 24, 2025

Pokémon Legends: Z-A is set in Lumiose City, where an urban redevelopment plan is underway to shape the city into a place that belongs to both people and Pokémon and features a new battle system. It returned 8/10 in IGN's review in which we concluded: "Pokémon Legends: Z-A finally feels like Game Freak hitting its stride in Pokémon’s 3D era, with a fun setting to explore, a well-written story, and a total battle system overhaul that works surprisingly well."

For more, check out our guide to Pokemon Legends: Z-A's new battle system, as well as our tips to catch Eevee, Gengar, and where to find all colors of Flabebe. You can learn more about the starter Pokémon and their evolutions in our Wiki guide, check out our Side Missions List to make sure you don't miss anything, and ensure you're dressed to impress with our All Clothing Stores and Clothing in Pokémon Legends: Z-A.

Did you know Pokémon Legends: Z-A has a terrifying zone called Wild Zone 17, which can be scary depending on the time of day?

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

Johnny Depp is reportedly in final talks to star in Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol for Paramount Pictures. Depp would play the title role of Ebenezer Scrooge, following in the footsteps of the likes of Bill Murray, Michael Caine, and Jim Carrey.

Variety reported that the adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel, if it goes ahead, would come out on November 13, 2026. Horror movie director Ti West, who’s behind the likes of Maxxxine and Pearl, has signed on, with Andrea Riseborough, who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in 2022’s To Leslie (2022), set to co-star.

After a number of leaks, Ubisoft has finally made it official: Assassin's Creed Shadows will release for Nintendo Switch 2 on December 2 priced $59.99 / £49.99.

The Nintendo Switch 2 version includes all content updates introduced since the game’s release, as well as cross progression across all platforms and touch screen support, "making navigation of menus, maps, and the hideout more intuitive than ever."

Ubisoft has also confirmed Assassin's Creed Shadows is Game-Key Card game, which means Switch 2 players will have to download the game before they can play. Game-Key Cards have sparked a vociferous debate because they're essentially useless unless your console is connected to the internet.

In September, a Ubisoft developer who worked on the Nintendo port of Star Wars Outlaws defended the use of Game-Key Cards, saying the real reason why the Switch 2 version of Star Wars Outlaws uses a Game-Key Card was due to the console's data speeds, and how quickly the hardware can read information from its bespoke cartridges, versus games downloaded to the console's internal memory.

Later in September, Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy director Naoki Hamaguchi implied that developers are choosing Game-Key Cards not necessarily from a cost perspective, but a performance one, as the format enables them to bring smoother-running games to the Switch 2. Nintendo recently launched a survey designed to poll the Switch 2 userbase on its thoughts surrounding digital and physical games.

In Assassin's Creed Shadows, you choose between a Shinobi or Samurai and explore the open world of Feudal Japan, from spectacular castle towns and bustling ports to peaceful shrines and pastoral landscapes. IGN's Assassin's Creed Shadows review returned an 8/10. We said: "By sharpening the edges of its existing systems, Assassin’s Creed Shadows creates one of the best versions of the open-world style it’s been honing for the last decade."

Earlier this week, IGN reported that Assassin's Creed franchise boss Marc-Alexis Côté had departed Ubisoft after a career spanning more than 20 years. Just a few days later, Côté made it clear that his shock exit from Ubisoft was not his decision.

In a post on LinkedIn, Côté said he bore "no resentment," but wanted to make clear to former colleagues and fans that he had not quit the Assassin's Creed franchise after 15 years of his own free will. The news came just two weeks after Assassin's Creed, Ubisoft's biggest brand, became operated by Vantage Studios, the separate business entity formed by Ubisoft with a 25% stake from Chinese giant Tencent that will also now oversee all future Far Cry and Rainbow Six games.

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

Star Wars fans want Adam Driver's The Hunt for Ben Solo movie so much they flew a banner over Disney studios.

Collider reported on the banner, which read “Save The Hunt for Ben Solo,” as it flew over Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California. Collider interviewed Lianna Al Allaf, the Star Wars fan who commissioned it, who said: "I really hope this banner shows the decision makers at Disney that the fans really do want this. I hope this banner shows just how much the character of Ben Solo means to so many of us, and that the fans really do want this movie.”

Star Wars fans paid for a plane to fly over Disney Studios with a banner reading “Save The Hunt for Ben Solo”

📸: @Collider pic.twitter.com/MhuzNVtwdL

— Star Wars Holocron (@sw_holocron) October 23, 2025

This week, Kylo Ren actor Adam Driver revealed he and director Steven Soderbergh spent two years developing a Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker follow-up called The Hunt for Ben Solo, but Disney said no to the proposal.

Speaking to the Associated Press, Driver said that because Disney had officially declined the movie, he was now able to talk about it.

Driver played Ben Solo / Kylo Ren in each of the three films in Lucasfilm’s Sequel Trilogy, with his final appearance in 2019’s divisive The Rise of Skywalker. “I always was interested in doing another Star Wars,” Driver said. He revealed he had been in talks about another Star Wars movie since 2021, and that Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy had “reached out.”

“I always said: with a great director and a great story, I’d be there in a second,” Driver commented. “I loved that character and loved playing him.”

The idea was The Hunt for Ben Solo, a movie directed by Soderbergh set after The Rise of Skywalker. Of course, it’s hard to imagine Ben Solo in any future Star Wars film after his heroic death at the end of the movie (a fatally wounded Ben uses his remaining Force power to revive Rey and they kiss before he dies). But apparently Driver felt there was unfinished business for his character.

The movie was pitched to Kennedy, Lucasfilm vice president Cary Beck, and Lucasfilm chief creative officer Dave Filoni, and they were apparently interested. Scott Z. Burns was drafted in to write a script, which Driver described as “one of the coolest (expletive) scripts I had ever been a part of.” Driver said Lucasfilm “loved the idea” and “totally understood our angle and why we were doing it.”

However, Disney CEO Bob Iger and Disney co-chairman Alan Bergman said no. "They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive. And that was that,” he said. Soderbergh told AP: “I really enjoyed making the movie in my head. I’m just sorry the fans won’t get to see it.” Disney and Lucasfilm declined to comment.

Driver was described as feeling mystified by the decision, insisting the plan was to “be judicial about how to spend money and be economical with it, and do it for less than most but in the same spirit of what those movies are, which is handmade and character-driven.” He pointed to the much-loved Empire Strikes Back as being “the standard of what those movies were.”

Disney and Lucasfilm have so far declined to comment.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer appeared on a moderated panel with Double Fine Studio Head Tim Schafer at the Paley International Council Summit in Palo Alto, California today, discussing "Big Ideas, Small Games: Creativity Beyond the Blockbuster." In the panel, moderated by Idilio CEO Gabriela Tafur, Spencer was asked about AI use at Xbox. He said that Xbox does use AI, but probably not how you might think.

"Our applications of AI today are mostly actually on the security and protection of our networks," he said, referring to voice and text chat on Xbox Live. "It's now at a scale where you can't really moderate the safety of those with just people alone. The volume is too high. So we have AI that we use to make sure that the conversation and topics that are happening, and for protected child accounts and other things and who gets to talk to those accounts to those people, is locked down by parents or guardians who are setting those controls. That's our primary use of AI inside of our organization today, which maybe isn't the most glamorous use of AI, but it's something that I fundamentally believe in."

He did, however, address the big question of AI use in the creative process of making games: "On the creative side, I really leave it up to the teams," he said. "I have found that creative teams will use tools that make their job easier when it makes their job easier, and any top-down mandate that 'Thou must use a certain tool'...is not really a path to success. I look at the teams, and we make tools available, and I kind of let it organically percolate."

He stayed on the AI topic, but pivoted to the idea of how it might be used for game discovery. "An area that you've talked about that's interesting is discovery," he told Tafur. "How do I find the next thing that I might love? In that scenario where we are looking at some of the AI tools – it's not in practice today – but is there a way for us to use discovery based on things that you've done in the past to surface the next thing that you might not know about that might be interesting to you?

"On the production side, which I think is where a lot of people go...we don't have any goals in our model for that to happen. I think more about the pace of creativity, maybe the number of things we can try and take risks on before we decide on our next opportunity. But our AI use today is much more operational than it is in the creative space."

Be sure to tune in to our weekly Xbox show, Unlocked, for long-form discussion on everything happening in the world of Xbox.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.