Gaming News Roundup: GTA 6 Skips PS5's New Upscaler (For Now), Halo's Scrapped Extraction Shooter, Outlast Hits 60M Players & More (Oct 18, 2026)

Grand Theft Auto VI (image via Push Square / Rockstar Games)

We're running a little late today. GTA 6 leads: Digital Foundry doesn't see the PS5's new QSSR upscaler anywhere in the launch trailer, and the game got Japan's CERO Z rating. Also on Sunday: Halo Studios reportedly scrapped an extraction shooter/battle royale hybrid, Outlast has passed 60 million players after a rocky road for The Outlast Trials, a dataminer found a giant cut coliseum in Dark Souls 2, Bloober Team is sticking with physical games, and Tim Sweeney says AI will bring a "golden age of gaming." Plus: Gray Zone Warfare goes "merc-sim," Modern Warfare 4's campaign reviews, Insignia revives Burnout 3 online, Xbox adds the Defold engine, eight games leave Game Pass, Atelier Karia's snack-based body shapes, and a Game Boy museum on a cartridge. Here's the Lanbrew gaming roundup for October 18, 2026.

Grand Theft Auto VI (image via Pixel Herald / Rockstar Games)

GTA 6's launch trailer shows no sign of the PS5's new QSSR upscaler, and Japan rates it CERO Z

Sony brought a version of the PS5 Pro's PSSR upscaler to the base PS5 this month under the name QSSR, and plenty of people assumed the timing was about GTA 6, which Rockstar's marketing says "plays best on PS5." Digital Foundry's Rich Leadbetter isn't seeing it in the launch trailer, which a disclaimer says was captured on PS5: "I don't think we're seeing it here." He points out that QSSR took about 4ms per frame to upscale to 4K in Marvel's Wolverine's Quality Mode. On a 33ms budget, that's more than 10% of the frame, which is a lot to spend if GTA 6 is already rendering at around 1440p.

The trailer probably uses older footage, so this could change before the November 19 launch. Separately, GTA 6 now has its Japanese rating: CERO Z (18+ only), the same as GTA V, with "Crime" and "Violence" content icons now on the Japanese PlayStation and Microsoft stores after about two weeks as "pending." Rockstar hasn't said whether the Japanese version changes any content. GTA V's Japanese release did have some edits. Japanese preorders are ¥9,800 for Standard and ¥12,280 for Ultimate.

Source: Push Square (via Digital Foundry); Pixel Herald / Game*Spark

Halo (image via GamesRadar+ / Xbox)

A Halo extraction shooter/battle royale hybrid was reportedly scrapped during Campaign Evolved

YouTuber HiddenXperia, citing sources laid off from Halo Studios, says the studio once worked on a multiplayer project that started as Project Tatanka, a battle royale built from stitched-together classic Halo maps. It then became Project Ekur: an extraction shooter where squads drop onto Zeta Halo as the map shrinks. Players would have been either UNSC Spartans or, for the first time, Banished Brutes, fighting each other and Flood outbreaks that were meant to lead into a future Halo 7.

According to the report, it was dropped in favor of a more traditional Unreal Engine multiplayer game, and that one was scrapped too as developers were moved onto Campaign Evolved's troubled production. Halo Studios was largely gutted in last month's Xbox restructure, and Halo is now under Activision.

Source: GamesRadar+

The Outlast Trials (image via PC Gamer / Red Barrels)

Outlast passes 60 million players, after The Outlast Trials' early playtests went badly

Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin told GameSpot that the Outlast series has now reached 60 million players. The Outlast Trials, which has close to 19 million lifetime players, accounts for a big share of that. Getting there was hard: Trials took six years and "a s**t-ton of prototypes." A build that seemed shippable was ready after four years, but playtests went so poorly that the team started over. Morin says the team "went too far trying to make it systemic, random" and had to pull back toward something that "felt more like Outlast."

Morin also recalled a playtester who "ran out of the studio to go cry outside" and never came back. Red Barrels has stayed independent the whole time, after no publisher wanted the original Outlast.

Source: GameSpot; PC Gamer

Dark Souls 2 prototype coliseum (image via PC Gamer / Doneda)

Dark Souls 2 dataminer digs up a massive prototype coliseum

Dataminer Doneda, who previously showed an ambitious early version of The Gutter and made a Nightreign-compatible Eleum Loyce, has found a huge unused coliseum level in Dark Souls 2's files. It's another sign of how much the game changed during its rough development: Hidetaka Miyazaki was focused on Bloodborne, and early trailers and cut content point to major story rewrites. Nobody knows where the arena was supposed to go.

Source: PC Gamer

Bloober Team (image via GamesRadar+)

Silent Hill 2 Remake studio Bloober Team wants to keep making physical games "for as long as possible"

As PlayStation plans to stop producing discs by 2028, Bloober Team CEO Piotr Babieno told GamesRadar+ that "if we are able to produce a [physical] retail version of our games, we would like to make them for as long as possible." Tymon Smektala, the former Dying Light lead who now runs Bloober's publishing label Broken Mirror Games, agreed: "The physical element of gaming will always be there." The subject came up while they were discussing Onyx: The Dark Grip, a Switch 2-exclusive horror game designed for handheld mode.

Source: GamesRadar+

Fortnite (image via Polygon / Epic Games)

Tim Sweeney says AI will usher in a "golden age of gaming"

Epic's CEO is sticking with his pro-AI position. He argues that AI coding has improved a lot in the past year and will let studios build large games with fewer resources. He also says Epic is "moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration." Many replies disagreed. Polygon notes the pushback Epic is already getting, including reports about AI use on its upcoming Disney project and its vibe-coded new launcher.

Source: Polygon

Gray Zone Warfare (image via Insider Gaming / MADFINGER Games)

Gray Zone Warfare's Rogue Ops update turns the mil-sim into a "merc-sim" on October 22

MADFINGER's 0.5 update, Rogue Ops, arrives October 22. It adds a Hideout with rooms for salvaging and repurposing tech, plus a black-market loop that leans hard into the mercenary angle: you can raid rival operations and sell gadgets for profit. The studio now describes the game as a merc-sim rather than a pure military sim, months after it stopped calling it an extraction shooter.

Source: Insider Gaming

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 (image via Nintendo Life / Activision)

Modern Warfare 4's campaign reviews are in, and critics are mostly positive

The campaign early access is live ahead of the October 23 launch, and the first reviews are positive. One review says it "made me feel something for the series again" and calls it a high-note send-off for the saga. Another calls it "a confident cinematic shooter" held back at times by rigid mission design. The campaign has 16 missions and takes about 6 to 8 hours. Most reviews are still in progress until multiplayer and DMZ go live. Nintendo Life's Switch 2 impressions call it "one hell of a 'popcorn game.'"

Source: Nintendo Life

Burnout 3: Takedown (image via Pure Xbox / EA)

Insignia brings online play back to Burnout 3 and more original Xbox games

Insignia, the fan-made replacement for the original Xbox Live, has started adding games again after a six-month pause. New additions include Burnout 3: Takedown (PAL and NTSC players can play together with PAL-60 on), Delta Force Black Hawk Down, NFL Blitz: The League, Madden NFL 2005, NHL 2005, and Robotech: Invasion. It only works on original Xbox hardware, requires a one-time exploit, and has no connection to Microsoft. It has about 35,000 users.

Source: Pure Xbox

Defold engine (image via Pure Xbox)

Xbox now officially supports the free Defold game engine

Defold, a free, lightweight cross-platform engine, now supports Xbox as of version 1.14.0. Approved Xbox developers can request access through Microsoft's middleware page and get platform-specific tools and documentation at no cost. Expect mostly small 2D indies, like Switch games Void Scrappers and Sector 781, but Defold also powers the mobile hit Family Island, which has more than 50 million downloads.

Source: Pure Xbox

Xbox Game Pass (image via Pure Xbox)

Eight games are leaving Xbox Game Pass in late October

Microsoft has marked eight games as "leaving soon" in the Xbox app. They include LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga and Deep Rock Galactic, plus Double Fine's Full Throttle and Day of the Tentacle now that the studio is independent again. Most are discounted by at least 20% until they leave.

Source: Pure Xbox

Atelier Karia (image via Nintendo Life / Koei Tecmo)

Atelier Karia confirms an optional body shape change feature

After a fan survey in which 78.9% of respondents asked for it, Gust confirmed that Karia's body shape in Atelier Karia: The Night Kingdom & the Guide of Memories will change depending on how many snacks she eats. You can turn it on or off and lock the shape you like. The game launches February 25, 2027, on Switch 2 and other platforms.

Source: Nintendo Life

Game Boy Museum cartridge (image via Eurogamer / Marcel Pflug)

One fan fit an entire Game Boy museum onto a working cartridge

Dr. Marcel Pflug, who runs the online Game Boy Museum, turned it into a cartridge that plays nothing. Slot it into a real Game Boy and the handheld becomes a guide to its own history. Getting there meant working around the Game Boy being "a spectacularly bad e-reader" and getting it to show QR codes, which weren't invented until 1994, so it can point phones to the photos it can't display.

Source: Eurogamer