The official social media account for the popular RPG-dating sim Love and Deepspace issued a warning to players after announcing some fictional cocktails with potentially disastrous real-world consequences if actually consumed.
On September 28, Love and Deepspace revealed five ‘Shimmering Blend’ cocktail recipes as part of an in-game event, each themed around one of the game’s dashing romanceable characters. While they’re pretty to look at, you shouldn’t actually make some of these, as they include garnishes that are poisonous to humans.
For example, one of these drinks is made of pomegranate juice, with a garnish of cinnamon and datura. Another features sweet peach juice with a flame lily garnish and gelatin sheets.
There’s nothing wrong with peach and pomegranate juice, but these floral garnishes are making some players anxious that a fan might actually try to out the recipes themselves. Datura is a highly poisonous plant and is considered psychoactive; when consumed, it produces side effects like delirium, fever, tachychardia, and hallucinations.
Flame Lilies are also dangerous, as all parts of the plant contain a chemical called colchicine; while it’s used for medicinal purposes, it can be lethal, causing symptoms like fever, vomiting, diarrhea, and even hypovolemic shock, which causes the loss of lethal amounts of blood and bodily fluids.
It didn’t take long for concerned fans to point out these dangerous plants, fearing that some players might try their hand at making the cocktails for real. Commenters flooded the replies with calls for the Love and Deepspace account to delete the post completely, with one writing, “Delete this. This is literal poison. Nobody make this.”
Safety Notice: All drinks shown are fictional and for in-game purposes only. Do not attempt to recreate or consume them in reality.
“Hey, so some of these flowers are literally poisonous. Be careful. This is so reckless to post this,” another said.
“Don’t try to recreate these drinks, they contain toxic plants!” yet another warned. “I can’t believe this is posted as ‘recipes.'”
Not long after, the LaDS account added a follow-up post with a safety notice, which reads: “All drinks shown are fictional and for in-game purposes only. Do not attempt to recreate or consume them in reality.”
In addition to calls from fans to delete the posts, the LaDS social media accounts continue to be flooded with photos of canceled love interest Valko, who was announced and subsequently canned before he was even released. This prompted an impressive movement from the game’s playerbase, who created shrines to the character and even gathered outside the developer’s physical offices to make their voices heard.
Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With ten years of experience reporting on games and entertainment, she’s got a storied background in the fighting game community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her on Twitter at@TheeMissGlaze.
Resident Evil and Street Fighter developer Capcom revealed some big changes coming to its RE Engine, which they plan to incrementally improve and transform into an “AI-generation game engine.”
On October 2, Capcom held its own tech conference, called ‘Capcom Open Conference RE: 2026.’ One of the most notable takeaways from this event was a presentation given by programmer Satoshi Ishida, titled ‘The Outlook and Future of the REX Project, Further Evolving the RE Engine for the Next Generation.’ The purpose of this presentation was to outline several major changes coming to the RE Engine, which will come in the form of a multi-step improvement project called ‘REX.’
As reported by Japanese news outlet GameBiz, Ishida mentioned three major issues that Capcom is currently experiencing when it comes to game development: First, games are now so massive that simple processes have become extremely time-consuming; increased numbers of staff mean an engine is needed that’s easy for everyone to use; and finally, “successfully integrating AI technology into development workflows has become an essential condition for streamlining future development.”
GameBiz’s report confirmed that REX was created to help solve these problems by improving the efficiency of game development, game performance, tools, quality assurance, etc. Capcom felt that, rather than creating a brand-new engine from scratch, gradually adding these improvements over time is the best way to help evolve the RE Engine to the next generation.
We won’t get into the weeds of all the specific improvements included in the REX program, but Capcom is making at least some of them open-source for the purpose of training AI. Most interestingly, AI plays into Capcom’s larger, long-term goal of turning the RE Engine into an “AI-generation game engine” using its REX improvements.
GameBiz stated that REX unifies the entire RE Engine system under the “world’s most common programming language,” meaning that it’s equal parts easier for humans to use and for AI to understand. Capcom’s goal is to build a future where it “creates games together with AI”; keeping REX in mind, this seems to mean that Capcom is utilizing artificial intelligence to speed up and streamline certain processes to make development easier, not necessarily to generate assets or artworks wholesale.
In the past, Capcom has been publicly averse to using AI to create assets, but confirmed that it will use artificial intelligence as a tool for optimizing how it makes games.
“We will not implement assets generated by AI into our games.” Capcom said in a March 2026 shareholders meeting. “However, we plan to proactively use it as a contributing technology to improve the efficiency and productivity of the game development process. To this end, we are currently exploring ways to implement it in various areas, including graphics, sound and programming.”
This is the latest big news to come from Capcom after Resident Evil executive producer Jun Takeuchi revealed that plans are already in place to prepare the series for when RE remakes catch up to modern games, saying the series is being developed along “two tracks.”
Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With ten years of experience reporting on games and entertainment, she’s got a storied background in the fighting game community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her on Twitter at@TheeMissGlaze.
Former NFL coach Mike Tomlin spent 19 seasons with the Pittsburgh Steelers and won Super Bowl LXIII, and now he’s added another major accomplishment to his resume: becoming a Minecraft YouTuber.
The former coach gave football fans a little something different when he launched his new YouTube channel earlier this week. With a profile picture taken in front of NBC’s Football Night in America logo, watchers probably weren’t expecting Tomlin’s first upload to see him confess how his love for architecture and family led him to work on a Minecraft city he spent 12 years building.
“You know, 12 or 13 years ago, when my kids were in middle school, they’d be in their room all weekend and have friends over. They were obsessed with playing this game, Minecraft, that I knew nothing about,” he explained as his son and channel operator, Dino, sat in the background. “I got interested because I just was mesmerized by what could occupy their attention for such large periods of time.”
He admitted he lacked the “stick control” to handle something like Minecraft’s Survival mode but still managed to find enjoyment in Creative Mode. That’s where Mojang’s systems really started to click.
“I like to build,” he said. “I’ve always had an interest in architecture, and so forth, so I started doing this creative city. It was a means of spending time with them. They participated all over this city. All my kids have buildings.”
However, as his kids went off to high school and college, their interest in Minecraft waned. For Tomlin, it was just beginning. In 2026, after 12 years of building, the sandbox phenomenon has become therapeutic for the former NFL coach, and what he’s built has the internet in disbelief.
“This is where it all started for me,” Tomlin said as a blocky blue pond surrounded by detailed city buildings faded into view. His tour then begins with a closer look at a hotel. This one building features a fully fleshed-out interior with labeled rooms, a lobby, a ballroom, a pool, bathrooms, and more. Tomlin even factored in how lighting might affect the views in some of these rooms – and that’s just one of many locations he’s made.
“I was always inspired,” he added. “I’d go places, and I’d see things and buildings, and I get inspired, I go home, and I work on it.”
Tomlin then referenced the off-campus housing around universities that he recreated after dropping Dino off at college. The color, floor plans, and other memorable elements all came from these memories, with much of his creation also built around different bodies of water.
Tomlin stepped down as the Steelers’ coach in January 2026, with today’s video showing how he’s spent at least some of the downtime since. He spent years in the NFL, but it’s his work as a Minecraft YouTuber that has everyone talking today.
Mike Tomlin has been working on his Minecraft world for over a decade
“I’m obsessed why is he genuinely a better builder than me,” content creator @Krtzyy said.
“Mike Tomlin becoming a Minecraft YouTuber was not on my bingo card for 2026,” one X/Twitter user said.
Tomlin signed off, promising to take a closer look at his city in future videos. He also teased plans to show off something that “I think you’re going to find interesting.” Despite being maybe the most creative celebrity gamer to come out of 2026, the ex-NFL coach isn’t the only notable name to share their love for gaming in the last year. Obsession breakout Inde Navarrette garnered attention for her The Last of Us and Call of Duty streams a few months ago. Newly announced X-Men star, Samara Weaving, is also a big gamer.
Photo by Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images.
Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
(Image credit: Alberto PIZZOLI / AFP via Getty Images)
Opinion
Opinion
Tyler Wilde
For a while now, AI guys have been arguing with the pope—Bishop of Rome, Primate of Italy, Chicago White Sox fan—over whether or not their chatbots and image generators are consistent with the will of the Lord, and in one recently-revealed exchange, whether making a computer talk constitutes creating life.
According to a New York Times report published this week, Anthropic lobbied the pope’s advisers “to take the prospect of AI model consciousness seriously” back in May.
The pope, apparently unmoved, stated in his Magnifica Humanitas that “so-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.”
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Former White House technology adviser Dean Ball criticized the pope’s letter at the time, saying it “puts the Church into the awkward role of the European technocratic regulatory advocate.”
Ball is now head of strategic futures at OpenAI.
The latest in this ongoing beef between the pope and AI boosters is a new anti-slop message from His Holiness posted on X this week.
“In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce,” wrote the pope. “There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.”
(Image credit: Pope Leo XIV)
Even on X, ruled as it is by the dunce king of tech and his Grok-riddled followers, there is a lot of support for the pope’s stance. But of course there are also AI evangelists intent on schooling the Holy See about the beauty of “super intelligence,” as it has been dubbed by people who must lack conviction in their own.
In one response I saw pointed out on Bluesky, the pope is asked “What about the Minions?” Indeed… what about them?
(Image credit: Jesus Returns Movie)
With the battle lines drawn between powerful AI interests and the Catholic church, will the next Great Schism be over whether or not Claude is a real person? Will an AI thoughtleader ascend to pope-like status of their own?
An event like that wouldn’t be out of place in ’90s cyberpunk-comedy novel Snow Crash. I’d once assumed that those satirical visions of mad techno-cultists and lawless megacorps would manifest in a somehow more buttoned-up way, more ‘realistically.’ I gravely misjudged reality’s capacity for farce.
A tangentially-related case-in-point: Palmer Luckey, the guy who invented the first decent consumer VR headset, is now a weapons mogul with a personal UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. Deus Ex bosses are real, and they wear Hawaiian shirts.
Similar to every other high-end GPU on the market, the AMD Radeon 9070 XT graphics card is selling for greater than MSRP. Fortunately, it’s nowhere near as egregiously marked up as the GeForce RTX 50 series cards. While supplies last, Best Buy is offering the Asrock Challenger AMD Radeon 9070 XT 16GB GPU for $739.99 with free shipping. It’s important to note that the MSRP for a 9070 XT is $599.99, but this is currently the best price you’ll find for a new unit. It approaches the performance of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, which currently can’t be found for under $1,100.
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is the only 2025-released GPU that we gave a 10/10 score. This is the least expensive graphics card from either AMD or Nvidia that I would comfortably recommend for playing the latest and most demanding games in 4K at 60fps or higher. Even though it costs about $400 less than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti in today’s market, the 9070 XT matches it or beats in several of the games we tested. The RTX 5070 Ti does pull away when you factor in DLSS or ray tracing, but if you want those technologies you’ll have to pay dearly for them.
Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn’t hunting for deals for other people at work, he’s hunting for deals for himself during his free time.
Disney has responded after rumors suggested it was interested in buying Fortnite developer Epic Games.
Disney president and chief creative officer Dana Walden touched on the company’s relationship with Epic during an interview with Bloomberg Live. When asked if there have been talks about expanding their previously established relationship with a full-on acquisition, she said that strategy isn’t something Disney is entertaining, at least right now.
“Well, I think that it was pretty obvious that we had very serious conversations about an investment and an equity stake,” Walden responded. “Those are not the conversations we’re having right now, but we have a great partnership and a number of launches coming up over the next two years that are going to demonstrate the value of this partnership.”
The relationship referenced here was solidified when Disney announced it acquired a $1.5 billion stake in Epic back in early 2024. It was a massive play that it promised would result in collaborations across Fortnite and more in the future.
“Our exciting new relationship with Epic Games will bring together Disney’s beloved brands and franchises with the hugely popular Fortnite in a transformational new games and entertainment universe,” then-CEO Bob Iger said. “This marks Disney’s biggest entry ever into the world of games and offers significant opportunities for growth and expansion. We can’t wait for fans to experience the Disney stories and worlds they love in groundbreaking new ways.”
We’re now kicking off October with no official mention of that unannounced project, but that doesn’t mean Disney x Epic is going anywhere any time soon. While an acquisition isn’t in the cards, Walden’s promise regarding “a number of launches” set to arrive in the next few years suggests there is plenty more to talk about.
Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
I have spent the last three days scrolling through some of the most insane mod videos I’ve ever seen. Modders are taking games that have been decompiled with Claude, and mashing them up with other games. As the week has gone on, there have only been more clips of these mods pouring out on X/Twitter.
These mods are everywhere online right now, though they thankfully haven’t filtered into modding websites like Nexus Mods yet. But, with the sheer volume of these mods and with how accessible Opus 5.5 is, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before the gates are fully torn down. And if that happens, it could change the face of the modding scene entirely.
Why Now?
Claude Opus 5.5 launched last week, promising cheaper tokens and more efficient code work. I’m sure that Anthropic meant for it to be used by professionals, but gamers have used it to create some of the weirdest mods I have ever seen.
Opus is a model that can power AI agents, which can be deployed to create entire games from the engine, to the art and enemy behavior. Brendan Jowett has a great video on YouTube of the model in action: He develops little slices of video games and compares them directly with the same tasks from OpenAI’s Astra 6 model. While the results of both are far from what you’d expect from a fully featured game, Claude’s new model has clearly come a long way.
The problem with the examples in Jowett’s video is that while the models are good at piecing together disparate parts of a game, enemy AI (lol) and art assets are lackluster to say the least. In one of the slices, a space combat sim, the space fighter flys at a diagonal angle, while moving in a straight line ahead, and shooting. In another slice enemies completely ignore the player character.
As good as Claude Opus 5.5 seems to be, it’s still lightyears away from developing something like a true mashup of Minecraft and Elden Ring from scratch. But the model doesn’t have to start from scratch.
The big, driving force behind a lot of these mods is decompilation, where people are pointing Opus at a game and letting the agent break it down to its source code (here’s a handy blog if you want to really get in the weeds). Just earlier today, we covered Halo: Combat Evolved being decompiled and ported to run natively in a browser. Once that step is complete, it takes little effort to take that source code and work huge swaths of games into other games as mods, and with very little input from the user.
Couple that with the relatively affordable tokens, and it shouldn’t be surprising that X/Twitter’s generally pro-AI users went wild with it, creating hundreds of mashups. And it doesn’t seem like it’s slowing down any time soon; what started off as a weird video that my boss sent me on Tuesday has now evolved to the point where I can’t even open X/Twitter without seeing a deluge of these mods.
Piracy?
The obvious problem with all of this is that these models are breaking open games developed by real people, getting the source code and then just mashing stuff together without consideration or permission from the original developers. That’s nothing particularly new – the modding scene is definitely no stranger to mashups, all the Thomas the Tank Engine mods are proof of that. However, this trend might be breaking into new territory, thanks to decompilation.
This could be another reason none of these mods have made their way onto any distribution platforms. Nexus Mods doesn’t outright ban AI-generated content, but it doesn’t let people use AI tools to upload content that they don’t have the rights to.
In a blog post from 2023, Nexus laid out its rules around AI generated content. The policy states that, “In order to prevent any issues with your mods, we encourage you to avoid using these tools unless you have explicit permission to use all the assets. This is particularly true for AI-generated voice acting but also covers images, models, code and anything else that you can use this technology to create.”
Every single one of these passthrough mods are using images, models, and code that the people generating them don’t have the rights to. But it’s only a matter of time until some platform holder allows these mods to be hosted, and I’m sure a massive legal battle will happen immediately afterwards.
The Modding Community Hates This
Way before all of these Claude-authored mod videos started cropping up online, people had been creating mods by hand for years, typically out of pure love for the game. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that a lot of mod authors aren’t fans of this phenomenon.
Mod authors have been expressing their frustration on X/Twitter as this has been happening. “I mod games and I’m not shy about the fact that I use AI to do it. I hate this bullshit ‘trend’. Pure slop, there’s nothing creative about this at all,” kran27_ posted. “AI has a lot of potential in the modding scene, but the shit that’s getting the clicks is this jingling keys bullshit.”
Kran wasn’t alone, with discountmodder ready to just leave the scene, saying, “Dude I’m really disappointed. If this becomes the permanent state of modding, this may be my last project. I don’t wanna be involved in an AI slop-factory.”
I can’t escape the feeling that most of these mashups are born from people just playing with a new AI model and seeing what will happen, and I hope that this weird trend will die off soon. Modding is one of the best parts of PC gaming, and there is a lot of incredible content that people make just because they love a game. Some of the best games started off as mods, after all, and without them we never would have got the likes of Half-Life or League of Legends.
I hope that this is just a trend, rather than a sign of where the modding scene is heading. Fortunately, because these mods seemingly only exist to farm engagement on Twitter (at least so far), you don’t have to worry too much about them if you just want to start a new modded run of The Witcher 3 Remastered. If anything, it just means that if you want to avoid AI content, you need to pay even more attention to who you’re getting your mods from.
Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. She’s been covering gaming hardware for more than a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and more. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
LEGO announces new sets so often, it’s hard to keep track of what’s coming and when. To ease your mind and simplify your purchase planning, I’ve gathered every announced set and its release date in one place below. You’ll also find links to where it’s available to preorder, where applicable. August 2026 is a huge month for new releases, with dozens of killer sets launching.
In a Guardian piece on how Colleen Hoover became a global best-selling author, one YA fan that was interviewed by the paper suggested it was because she’s “writing for people who don’t like reading.” If that’s the case, then one could argue that the film adaptations of her work are for people who don’t like cinema.
Now that I’ve watched all four films inspired by her literary prose — 2024’s It Ends with Us, 2025’s Regretting You, this year’s Reminders of Him, and now Verity — I’m making that case. For these are not adaptations that make any attempt to elevate the middling narratives fumbling around Hoover’s novels; I realised this when reading It Ends with Us after suffering through the movie, and I vowed never to read another.
With Verity, I had more hope that it would buck the trend. Divorced from the sentimentality of previous adaptations, this story opens with a meet-cute that’ll give you whiplash. After introducing Anne Hathaway’s best-selling author Verity Crawford through interviews with the likes of Gayle King, where she discusses the darkness in her writing, struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) enters the chat. Lowen’s agent has landed her a meeting with Crawford’s publishing house for a mysterious job opportunity, but on the way, she not only witnesses a road accident but is drenched in the blood of the cyclist involved. It’s an opener as out there as the one in Meet Joe Black (IYKYK), but it does provide an opportunity for Josh Hartnett’s handsome stranger to step in and help clean her up.
In typical Hoover fashion, the pair trauma bond: He tells her he dragged his dead daughter out of a lake, and she says her mother died of cancer the week before. There’s no build up, just some awkward exposition-dumping in a men’s toilet. They’re soon reunited at the publishing house, where it’s revealed that he’s Verity’s husband, Jeremy. He and the editors want to commission Lowen to finish his wife’s novel series; Verity is in a comatose state after a car accident and cannot speak or move. So, with little deliberation and due to the shoehorned fact that Lowen is also being evicted from her New York apartment, she packs up and moves into the Crawfords’ sprawling Vermont home for six months.
There she meets Verity, a shell of her glamorous self wearing a glazed stare. This is one of the few scenes the women share; most of Hathaway’s performance is marginalised to interviews on the likes of Hot Ones and the Call Her Daddy podcast, as well as flashbacks layered with sultry voiceovers as Lowen reads Verity’s secret autobiography. Every time she picks it up, sentences run across the screen, and often Lowen is superimposed over scenes from the past to try to enliven the act of reading. It doesn’t.
What’s most infuriating is how long it takes Lowen to finish the text. It’s unbelievable that an author would constantly run away from the autobiography to masturbate and go on a date with Jeremy, given how unflinching Verity’s candour is. She reveals juicy details about her marriage and hints that their daughter’s death might not have been an accident — how did she not finish it in one sitting? Nothing screams “padding for time” more than this tedious set-up, accomplishing little in the way of ingratiating the viewer with Johnson’s “pick me” girl protagonist.
Nothing screams “padding for time” more than this tedious set-up.
“
Nor does it scratch the surface of who Jeremy actually is beyond the one-dimensional trope of a swoon-worthy husband. Screenwriter Nick Antosca, who recently impressed with his adaptation of Cape Fear, hints at some resentment on Jeremy’s part for his wife’s success, but the script never probes deeper than in a final act reveal that flings the missing pieces at you in one blink. The best Antosca offers is an examination of the reliability of the narrator, but even that effort is phoned in. Michael Showalter’s direction is similarly dull, conveying little of the vision seen in his Oscar-nominated films, The Eyes of Tammy Faye and The Big Sick. Instead, it plods an uneven, uninspiring route into cliché and lazy convention.
That Anne Hathaway has been on an exquisite run of big screen releases from The Odyssey and Mother Mary to The End of Oak Street and The Devil Wears Prada 2 makes this, her last 2026 performance, even more disappointing. What a lead balloon for everyone involved — one that proves a moratorium on Colleen Hoover adaptations is long overdue. To misquote Lady Catherine from Pride and Prejudice: “Are the shades of cinema to be thus polluted?”
Walmart exclusively has the best price on Switch 2 memory cards. The Onn 512GB MicroSD Express Memory Card is in stock for $84.77 and the 256GB model is also in stock for $46.77, both with free shipping. Better yet, there’s a new unadvertised coupon code “SAVE3X” that takes an additional $10 off either memory card! That brings the prices down to $74.77 and $36.77, respectively. Your mileage may vary (it might not work for you) but we’ve confirmed that it is working for a lot of people. Here are the coupon code’s official terms and conditions from Walmart:
Valid on your first three online pickup or delivery orders
Only for new customers (although it actually works for many returning customers)
Minimum order of $35.
512GB Nintendo Switch 2 Memory Card for $75, 256GB for $37
The Switch 2 only comes with 256GB of onboard storage and it will run out faster than you think. If you have a standard MicroSD card from your previous Switch, it won’t work on the Switch 2. Although the two might look similar, the MicroSD Express card is much faster than its precedessor. The Onn model boasts speeds of 800MB/s write and 600MB/s read.
Quite a few games have now been released for the Switch 2 and some of them require an enormous amount of space. Final Fantasy 14 is the most gigabyte-hungry game to date, requiring about 117GB all by itself. That game alone takes up half of the Switch 2’s internal storage capacity. Other plus-sized games include Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (90GB), Split Fiction (70GB), Cyberpunk 2077 (60GB), and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment (44GB). Nowadays it’s completely possible to download just three or four games and find yourself completely out of onboard storage.
Nintendo Customer Appreciation Sale:
Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn’t hunting for deals for other people at work, he’s hunting for deals for himself during his free time.
