There’s The Grounds, a sort of social hub where you get to interact with other players and get started with a variety of activities like Kickabouts. It’s looking quite interesting, and is also confirmation of rumors that FC 27 is releasing on past-gen systems, since the space is exclusive to Xbox Series X/S, PS5, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2.

Other additions include Career Mode’s new Transfer Market, which adds new wrinkles into the manager’s gameplay loop, with buyback clauses, realistic player values, and active bidding from various clubs coming into play. There’s also the FUT Gallery in Ultimate Teams to look forward to, alongside gameplay tweaks like dynamic corners, improved attacker awareness, and player-focused defense improvements that could make the action look and feel much more immersive.

Time will tell if these changes are going to usher in new glory for the franchise, or prove to be iterative improvements over what was on offer last year. As always, we’ll be here to tell you all about it.

While the developer hasn’t officially confirmed this, Alinea Analytics estimates $700 million in revenue from 30.5 million sales, with Steam apparently making up 85 percent. And since it exited early access, Palworld has allegedly reached almost 1.5 million sales on the platform, with 300,000 on PS5 and 70,000 on Xbox and Xbox Series X/S.

Its concurrent player peak on Steam almost recently hit one million – an impressive milestone, for sure. However, across all platforms, Palworld reportedly averaged 3.7 million this past weekend. Other notable figures include a reported 5.2 million players on Steam, about 20 percent of the total player base, already having more than 100 hours. Meanwhile, about 200,000 (0.7 percent) have apparently crossed 500 hours.

Though Palworld is a massive hit and Pocketpair is interested in post-launch support, it won’t be as straightforward as simply adding new resources and increasing the level cap. Time will tell, so stay tuned for updates, and check out our review, where we scored it a 9 out of 10.

This Palworld 1.0 guide is a complete listing of all 13 new weapons sorted by the Technology Level required to unlock them, their Attack values, and the crafting materials required to produce both them as well as additional holsters.

All New Weapons In Palworld 1.0

How To Unlock More Weapon Holsters

With so many great new weapons to choose from, you would be hard-pressed to reduce them to just the four that you can normally carry. However, the 1.0 update allows for two Extra Weapon Holsters to be unlocked and crafted individually.

Simply hold them in your inventory in order to be able to carry two additional weapons, for a total of six.

Extra Weapon Holster

Technology Level 27

• 30x Fiber
• 20x Leather
• 20x Wooden Board

Extra Weapon Holster 2

Technology Level 54

• 20x Carbon Fiber
• 100x Fiber
• 40x Leather
• 40x High Quality Wooden Board

Those are all 13 new weapons to be unlocked from the Technology Tree in Palworld 1.0, as well as how to unlock two additional weapon holsters to carry them.

This guide for Palworld 1.0 is all about the intricacies of the Mutation breeding mechanic introduced with the update, and how to boost your odds for success.

Mutated Eggs

As mentioned earlier, Mutated Eggs always hatch into the Alpha variant of their Pal. Naturally, the randomness has now been shifted to the rarity of even spawning said Mutated Egg when breeding any two Pals.

Still, there are some things you can do in order to tip the scales in your favor.

Boosting RNG For Mutated Eggs

While there is no guarantee that a Mutated Egg will spawn in the first place, your chances can be improved to a small degree through the use of various Cakes.

Cake

~1% Mutated Egg spawn chance.

• 5x Flour
• 8x Egg
• 2x Honey
• 7x Milk
• 8x Red Berries

Mushroom Cake

Improves the chances of a newborn Pal having better stats.

• 5x Flour
• 3x Cavern Mushroom
• 8x Egg
• 2x Honey
• 5x Mushroom

Vegetable Cake

A technically 2% Mutated Egg spawn chance due to spawning two Pal Eggs simultaneously.

• 8x Flour
• 8x Egg
• 4x Honey
• 7x Lettuce
• 8x Tomato

Extravagant Vegetable Cake

Epic Food with a ~3% Mutated Egg spawn chance, and better stats.

• 12x Flour
• 8x Carrot
• 8x Cotton Candy
• 6x Onion
• 10x Potato

Special Cake

A monstrously expensive cake to bake, but allows for the inheritance of more parent Pal passives, as many as six.

• 20x Flour
• 8x Caramel Cotton Candy
• 15x Egg
• 2x Mammorest Meat
• 15x Milk

Lastly, the Ancient Hatchery in combination with the Philanthropist and/or Babysitter Passives can produce and hatch dozens of Eggs quickly enough that you can focus on boosting the skill spawn chances instead.

Mutated Pals

As for what to expect once a Mutated Egg hatches, aside from that guaranteed Alpha status, their base stats are in the 90-100 IV range by default.

Same-species breeding can now produce a completely different species of hatchling. Even the old formulas for which combination of two species would predictably produce a target species are completely ignored when dealing with Mutated Eggs.

Condensation starts at two stars, sparing you the seemingly endless loop of combining Pals.

A single Active Skill for that particular species will be at a high tier.

Finally, a selection of five new unique Rainbow Passives are initially exclusive to Pals from Mutated Eggs, only one of which will be randomly applied at a time, unless a Special Cake was used to boost the overall Passive Skill count to six potential slots.

At least two other non-exclusive Rainbow Passives will also be applied.

Babysitter

A boosted breeding Passive that speeds up Egg-laying and hatching at Breeding Farms.

Heavily Armored

Total immunity to explosive damage.

Idiosyncratic

Concurrent health regeneration for both the Pal and you, boosted Defense, and total immunity to the status effects of poison and fire damage.

Immortal

Rapid health regeneration exclusively for the Pal, Life Steal, and a boosted Attack.

Skymarcher

Additional jumps for mounts.

That is everything there is to know about the new Mutation mechanic, and how to raise the spawn chance for Mutated Eggs in Palworld 1.0.

However, the inability of the service to reach a critical mass of subscribers that was needed to sustain it is what ultimately led to it not working out. Due to this, the service also couldn’t be used to fund more projects.

“I think it’s really sad, and I think it’s really unfortunate,” said Brown, “because they’ve honestly invested a fortune in the concept of Game Pass as a service, which led to loads of teams being acquired, loads of games being funded, loads of people getting jobs, all with a vision of getting regular games landing in this service for players. And I think the reality is not enough people have subscribed to it at the prices they needed to pay in order to make that business viable.”

“And that’s actually just really sad because we’re now going to see studios getting shut down or spun off. Loads of people are going to lose their jobs. And that is honestly just a result of a well-meaning, player-focused concept of Xbox Game Pass not working out. And that’s just a real shame.”

Brown also defended some of the Xbox employees that have been catching criticism from people, especially in light of the recent layoffs across the division.

“As much as people point fingers and call different people within Xbox the villain of the piece, the concept of Game Pass was good. It’s a good idea. Like, let’s have a subscription, make it affordable, try and get games to more people. We’ll have a really diverse selection of games on there. We’ll get a load of studios involved. We’ll make some games that probably couldn’t exist otherwise. And if more people had subscribed, that it makes enough money and it works and all of those studios go on, and those games get made again, and those teams will make other games. Unfortunately, it never reached the number that would make the $70 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard make financial sense.”

Brown is far from the first person to have spoken about the business behind the Game Pass subscription. Just last month, CEO of Moon Studios, George Broussard, had similarly noted that the subscription service had the potential to work out. However, his criticism largely revolved around Microsoft pushing out “mediocre content like a factory” on the service.

“You need those games your studios are producing to become smash hits, cultural events that everyone wants to play – but what was the big Xbox game in recent years that was just delightfully good? That game doesn’t exist,” he said, before going on to say that Microsoft needs to “deeply, fundamentally understand gamers and what they want”.

“As of the end of this week, it will be my last day at 1047 Games due to the third wave of studio layoffs. Throughout the years in this industry, my main goal has always been to work with inspiring artists and art directors, which was a significant reason why I joined. Unfortunately, that didn’t last as long as I hoped, but I’m grateful for the experience and the wonderful people I had the chance to work with,” wrote Kuo.

The layoffs have also included the studio’s community specialist, Jesse Griefenberg, and its director of QA, Igor Krinitskiy. The studio hasn’t revealed any details about the exact number of employees affected.

1047 Games went through a round of layoffs just last year, with studio boss Ian Proulx saying that the team wanted to revamp Splitgate 2, which he said had “ambitious goals” with its initial release, acknowledging that it came out “too early”.

“We’re still perfecting the Splitgate 2 gameplay experience in response to community feedback, and we are redirecting resources to build the best game for our players. We are sad to see our teammates go, and we are actively working to help them secure new opportunities,” said the studio in a statement last year.

The latest round of layoffs comes just a couple of months after 1047 Games unveiled its next project: a 6v6 movement-based shooter dubbed EMPULSE. It was released last month across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

While it shares quite a bit in common with the critically-acclaimed gameplay of Titanfall 2, in our Early Access review, we noted that these similarities tend to feel like gimmicks since EMPULSE can’t really achieve the highs provided by Respawn’s shooter. However, we also acknowledged that it’s an Early Access game that can continue to improve over time, and that 1047 Games has plenty of ways to make it better.

In the meantime, 1047 Games is also continuing its work on supporting Splitgate: Arena Reloaded – essentially a relaunch of Splitgate 2. The title seemingly hasn’t done well, with Steam player numbers being quite low, even on launch. In response to questions about low player numbers, however, the studio said that “Steam Charts don’t measure fun.”

“[Steam Charts] show one number, on one platform, at one given moment. They don’t show the full picture or what it feels like to actually play, and they definitely don’t capture the community that’s actively helping shape what Arena Reloaded is becoming (including upcoming content like Arena Royale).”

For now, 1047 Games seems to be quite committed to supporting Splitgate: Arena Reloaded with continued development, and has made no official announcement about whether the release of EMPULSE means updates for the shooter will be slowing down anytime soon. For more details, take a look at our review of the original release of Splitgate 2.

The news comes via a tweet which revealed both Mbappé’s return and a gameplay reveal that’s slated for July 24th. If past titles are any indication, it’s going to lift the curtain on the annual release, and what we’re hoping is a worthy follow-up to FC 26.

The franchise is still as fun as ever, but has begun to feel a little long in the tooth, a facet that we pointed out in our review. However, we’re hoping that the gameplay reveal can bring welcome news of changes to the formula that could revitalize it and be a fitting welcome for Mbappé, who makes his EA Sports FC cover debut, although he was on the cover of successive iterations of FIFA back in the day.

Here’s hoping that EA Sports FC 27 manages to live up to the heavy expectations it’s already shouldering, and you can be sure we’re keeping a sharp eye out on this one ahead of its launch in the coming months.

https://x.com/EASPORTSFC/status/2079582337264726271

This Palworld 1.0 guide is all about farming Soralite and Paloxite as quickly and efficiently as possible. Crafting the Technology Level 54 Plasma Multicutter is required in order to mine all endgame crafting materials.

Where And How To Farm Soralite Ore

The blue-hued Soralite rock nodes are located on the new Sunreach Islands exclusively, and will naturally require some way to fly in order to access it.

An excellent Soralite farming location with five nodes in close proximity, is at -300,-1400, east of the Farcry Marsh fast travel point. 

Mining Soralite effectively requires aiming the beam of the Multicutter directly at the brightly glowing spot on the node for maximum damage.

Alternatively, engage in combat with specific Pals in the locality, such as the crystalline Pierdon Cryst, and gather their Soralite drops.

Ideally though, it would be best to set up a forward base with a Soralite Quarry where Mining Pals can automate much of the tedium. This will require an Ancient Technology Level of 72 to unlock, and a starting pool of 100 Soralite at least, in order to construct.

Where And How To Farm Paloxite Ore

Paloxite is an even rarer ore, and is only to be discovered in the World Tree. Its nodes appear to dematerialize as you approach, and therefore require some strategy in order to mine them successfully.

After you interact with the Altar and initially spawn at the World Tree, ascend the stairs and take a moment to speak with the World Tree Guardian before proceeding. This will net you a quest and the rare-tier consumable: World Tree Holy Water. You must consume one in order to neutralize the dematerializing effect of Paloxite ore, but the aura effect is very short-lived at a mere 30 seconds, so be quick about harvesting the required resources while it remains active. Note that once dismounted, your Pal itself can also cause the dematerializing effect, so in order to mitigate that issue you will have to feed it World Tree Holy Water as well.

Most Pals that you kill or capture within the World Tree may leave behind World Tree Holy Water drops, which are also needed for farming the similarly dematerializing rare-tier Mythical Wood resource.

An ideal location for farming Paloxite is at -1560,1510, due to its proximity to the Dusty Ravine fast travel point. The three nodes here are spaced closely enough for you to be able to snatch up all of them in a single consumption of World Tree Holy Water. Fortunately, the mined ore pickups do not dematerialize, so you can skip their collection until after completion of your mining run.

An alternate Paloxite farming location is at -1710,1535, near the Remnant Riverside fast travel point. There is a trio of Paloxite nodes right in close proximity.

A third farming location at -1800,1465, just north of the Gilded City Ruins fast travel point, has two trios of Paloxite nodes a short distance from each other, but it will be a race for time as you attempt to mine six nodes while the aura of the World Tree Holy Water steadily runs out.

A more permanent approach involves catching a Pal that has World Tree-exclusive passive skills such as Hermit Sage. With a Pal like that in your active party, Paloxite ore nodes will not despawn, no matter what.

The high-risk Pal Expeditions to the World Tree Subterranean City Ruins can net you Paloxite and a host of Ancient Relics as reward items.

Finally, any rarity tier of Ancient Relics can be broken down with the help of the Ancient Relic Recycler into Paloxite ore, as well as Mythical Wood, and a host of other materials and Schematics, if you can be bothered to set the process for Pals to collect the relics and return them to the base.

That is everything there is to know about farming Soralite and Paloxite fast and effortlessly in Palworld 1.0.

“It’s been a while, Ghosts! We know some of you saw some updates; we’ll have more to say on the 6th of August when we celebrate the 25th Anniversary of Ghost Recon. Intel coming soon.”

As many assume based on the supposed leaked image, Ghost Recon Wildlands Definitive Edition could receive 4K and 60 FPS support on Xbox Series X/S and PS5. Released on July 6th, it faced criticism for lacking both, even as it included the base game and all its content, including cosmetics, in one package for $99.99

What’s even more interesting is the potential new mission, Last Rites. Nothing is known about it, though the name has more than a few implications for the squad’s future. The leaked image touted it as part of a major update, so existing owners (including those on PC) will likely get it for free.

And since this is for the 25th anniversary of the franchise, Ubisoft could very well announce that a new Ghost Recon is in development. Reportedly codenamed Ovr, it’s a darker, grittier tactical shooter that’s inspired by Ready or Not.

There have been some hiccups throughout its development, but things seem to have stabilized after the team allegedly cut several features, including helicopters and deep weapon customization. A release window may still be too much to ask, but we can always hope.

It premieres on July 23rd for all three tiers and follows Remy as he ventures into Hadea to search for his parents in the midst of a civil war. The presence of supernatural monsters spawning from the Calamity doesn’t help either. Despite story and combat consternation, it’s well worth playing if you’re into an action-adventure that won’t hold your hand.

Next up is Halo: Campaign Evolved, the much-anticipated remake of Halo: Combat Evolved, which arrives on July 28th for Ultimate and PC Game Pass. While it retains the story and structure of the original, Halo Studios has added four-player co-op, three new Prologue missions, dozens of new Skulls, Campaign Remix and much more.

Mistfall Hunter debuts on July 30th for the same tiers, offering a PvEvP Souls-like extraction loop for up to three players. Then there’s Corsair Cove, a city builder with a pirate twist from Limbic Entertainment debuting on July 31st.

As a small preview for next month, you can look forward to Heretic + Hexen on Premium and Game Freak’s Beast of Reincarnation on August 4th. The latter is a triple-A action RPG set in a post-apocalyptic Japan, where players control Emma and Koo in their journey to stop the Blight. Head here for more details.

Of course, as usual, there’s a selection of titles leaving the service on July 31st. Check them out below:

• Back to the Dawn (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Celeste (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• My Friendly Neighborhood (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Rain World (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Sniper Elite Resistance (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Whiskerwood (PC)