Hello Games marked No Man’s Sky’s 10th anniversary this month by teasing the name of its next content update: Cosmos. No further details or release date have been shared yet, but the studio’s decade-long track record of consistent free updates makes this one worth watching once more information surfaces.
Category: Xbox
Xbox console, subscription, and first-party news
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What’s launching in the final week of August and into September
The next few weeks are packed. Here’s what’s worth having on your radar.
August 27 brings Star Wars Zero Company, Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 2, Plague Tale Legacy Resonance (day one on Game Pass), and Lou’s Lagoon, all landing the same day. Serious Sam: Shatterverse follows on August 31.
September opens with Moonlighter reaching its 1.0 release on September 2, followed by The Blood of Dawnwalker on September 3, which has confirmed a free performance mode at launch. American Truck Simulator’s South Dakota DLC is expected sometime during the month, the next state expansion following May’s Illinois release.
Later in September, Silent Hill: Townfall arrives September 24 on PC and PS5, and The Witcher 3: Remastered launches September 29 as a free upgrade for existing owners.
Looking further out, Path of Exile 2 reaches its full 1.0 release on December 11.
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Mortal Shell II’s Balance Patch 1 fixes most launch issues, one boss bug remains
Mortal Shell II has stabilized considerably since launch. Balance Patch 1 is now live across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series, building on an earlier Hotfix 2 that already resolved several crash and UI issues, including a menu lockup tied to the Slayer Seal and weapons getting stuck after a riposte.
One real issue remains open, though. Fighting the boss Zmey can cause weapons to disappear or attacks to stop registering entirely mid-fight. The official workaround for now is to unequip the Grisha Remnant item before attempting the fight again. No permanent fix has been confirmed yet, so if you hit this bug, that’s your move in the meantime.
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Gamescom Opening Night Live: Witcher 3 Remastered, Path of Exile 2’s 1.0 date, and more
Gamescom’s Opening Night Live delivered a genuine surprise this year. The Witcher 3: Remastered is a free upgrade for existing owners, launching September 29 with overhauled combat, visuals, and monster AI, alongside a new expansion called Songs of the Past coming next year.
Path of Exile 2 finally has its full 1.0 release date: December 11. Mega Man 12 was revealed during the show, and Mega Man: Dual Override got moved up a full year, now targeting a 2026 release instead of its previously expected window. Silent Hill: Townfall also picked up a concrete release date, September 24, for PC and PS5.
Gamescom itself runs through August 30, so it’s worth watching for further announcements before things wrap up.
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GTA 6 leaks trigger a federal lawsuit and a wave of malware scams
Real gameplay footage has continued leaking from an account calling themselves Cyberleek, including one clip that appears to prove the leaker has live control over an actual playable build of the game. Take-Two responded with federal DMCA subpoenas against both Microsoft and Discord, approved by a New York court, and both companies have until September 4 to comply.
The leaker, meanwhile, has started teasing additional footage, including strip club gameplay, in exchange for donations to their cryptocurrency wallet, which tells you most of what you need to know about the actual motive behind this.
Separately, and more urgently for players, the leaks have triggered a wave of fake “playable build” downloads circulating on Discord and torrent sites. These carry infostealers and remote access trojans disguised as leaked game files, with some listings claiming file sizes over 100GB. Fake Rockstar Social Club login pages are also circulating to phish credentials.
The bottom line is worth repeating clearly: there is no public GTA 6 build, no beta, and no PC version right now, period. The game launches November 19 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S only. Anything claiming otherwise, a download, a beta invite, an early access key, is malware or a phishing attempt.
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What’s launching between now and the end of August
The next two weeks are busy. Here’s what’s worth having on your radar.
Mortal Shell II launches August 20 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. The same day, STALKER 2 gets its Cost of Hope DLC.
Gamescom 2026 runs August 26 through 30, and Xbox has confirmed its presence, including the possibility of a surprise reveal. Insiders, including Windows Central’s Jez Corden, say Microsoft is preparing to show a game built on an existing Microsoft IP developed by a third-party studio.
What’s already been ruled out: Elder Scrolls VI, Wolfenstein 3, Banjo-Kazooie, the Fallout remasters, Blade, OD, and a StarCraft shooter. As of now, nobody’s correctly guessed what it actually is.
August 27 rounds out the month with three major releases landing the same day: Star Wars Zero Company, Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 2, and Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, the last of which is available day one on Game Pass.
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Forza Horizon 6 save data issues persist, plus what to know before Gears E-Day’s full launch
Two ongoing issues worth flagging this week, one still unresolved, one revealing useful information ahead of a full launch.
Forza Horizon 6’s save data loss bug has been open since June, and it’s still not fully resolved. The most recent fix, which landed August 5, gives console players a partial workaround: you can now browse and restore previous cloud save versions through Manage game & add-ons, then Saved data, then Restore saved data.
If you’re still experiencing save loss, that restore option is your best current recourse while Playground Games continues working toward a permanent fix. Worth being clear that this is a workaround, not a resolution.
Separately, Gears of War: E-Day’s open beta wrapped up Monday, and The Coalition has been upfront that the stability issues players encountered were expected given it wasn’t final software. A few practical notes worth carrying forward to the full launch on October 6: PC players will need current GPU drivers before the game will even launch, Nvidia 610.74 or newer, AMD 26.7.1 or newer, or Intel 101.8864 or newer.
If you record gameplay, OBS needs to be version 29.0.0 or newer, older versions will cause the game to crash while recording. And if you run Comodo Antivirus, you’ll need to disable it as a workaround, since it currently blocks the game’s executable outright.
None of these are launch-day surprises anymore, but they’re worth having sorted before October 6 rather than discovering them at launch.
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Xbox pushes mandatory fix for the recent server outage bug
Xbox pushed a mandatory client-side fix on Monday addressing the bug behind a recent major outage. The update became required starting August 17, meaning it should apply automatically rather than needing to be manually sought out.
If your Xbox has been having trouble with licensing checks or sign-in reliability recently, this update is specifically targeted at resolving that class of issue. There’s no additional setup required beyond letting the console update normally, this isn’t an opt-in fix.
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Elder Scrolls VI speculation collides with layoffs and protests at Bethesda
Elder Scrolls VI speculation picked back up this week, but it’s arriving alongside a harder story about layoffs and labor unrest at Bethesda, and the two are worth covering honestly rather than separately.
The speculation started with Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s own post on August 11: “Live playthrough of The Elder Scrolls VI: ********,” written after she visited Bethesda’s Rockville studio. Fans quickly matched the eight asterisks to the long-rumored subtitle Sentinel, and pointed back to a 2023 Starfield character-creation screen that reportedly ciphers out to the same word. Former Bethesda lore writer Michael Kirkbride replied “yep” when asked if Sentinel was correct, though he no longer works at the studio, so that’s him agreeing with a theory, not an official confirmation. Nothing about the game itself has been confirmed by Bethesda.
That studio visit was met with a protest, an inflatable rat and roughly 800 red flags representing laid-off workers. Separately, lead character artist Christiane Meister, who worked on every Elder Scrolls game since Morrowind, was laid off after 27 years as part of Microsoft’s broader cuts, roughly 1,600 positions eliminated so far, with a total of around 3,200 planned by mid-2027.
On August 18, Xbox and Bethesda union workers held coordinated “Save Our Devs” rallies across nine cities in the US and Canada, including Rockville, Austin, Dallas, Montreal, Redmond, and Irvine. One union member said the group had submitted a proposal back in February on how to handle a reduction in force fairly, and that the company sat on it for four months before proceeding with layoffs regardless.
Worth being clear about what’s confirmed and what isn’t here: the layoffs and protests are real, documented events. The Sentinel subtitle is fan speculation with some circumstantial support, not an announcement. Both are worth watching, but only one of them is a confirmed fact right now.
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The Sinking City 2 launches to strong reviews, here’s how to get it running smoothly
The Sinking City 2 launched Tuesday to a strong critical reception, Metacritic scores between 75 and 84 across platforms, along with “Very Positive” user reviews on Steam. Critics have specifically called out the tighter, more focused approach compared to the original game’s sprawling open world as a meaningful improvement.
Console players get two performance modes to choose from: a 30fps Quality mode and a 60fps Performance mode. PC players should expect the game to run well across most modern hardware.
If you’re playing on a Steam Deck or a lower-end laptop, though, it’s worth knowing where to look first. Like most recent releases, The Sinking City 2 is built on Unreal Engine 5, and two specific settings account for most of the engine’s performance cost: Lumen, the dynamic lighting system, and Nanite, the geometry detail system. Dropping Lumen to its lower preset and letting Nanite fall back to standard level-of-detail meshes recovers a meaningful chunk of frame rate for a relatively small visual tradeoff.
Pair that with FSR or DLSS upscaling set to Balanced or Quality rather than running at native resolution, and most UE5 titles reach a stable frame rate without needing to max out every setting. This isn’t specific to this one game either, it’s a good default approach for any UE5 release going forward.