Wolverine's fart gas, a $40M budget, and Xbox's ad ambitions

Insomniac Games has been doing damage control on two fronts around Marvel's Wolverine. The studio nerfed scent trails and audio sense indicators after players dubbed the mechanic 'fart gas', and separately confirmed the game contains no AI-generated assets after a peculiar-looking sign went viral and sparked speculation. Both clarifications land ahead of what is shaping up to be one of the more scrutinized releases in recent memory.

The Blood of Dawnwalker was built on a budget of just $40 million, according to a new report — a figure that stands out given current AAA spending norms. That frugality conversation extends to Fable's developer, whose lead says the team felt driven to prove they could handle a genre beyond open-world racing after Forza Horizon, citing 'a little bit of pride' as motivation. And Diablo 5 got a clearer rationale from its project lead, who says the decision to move on from Diablo 4 expansions came down to Diablo himself — the character demanded his own game.

Xbox has apparently filed a patent for technology that would detect natural pauses in gameplay to surface in-game ads, a detail that will do little to quiet ongoing concerns about advertising in premium titles. On the Switch 2 side, Dragon's Dogma 2 has been confirmed to use frame generation on the hardware, and an update for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered on Switch 2 is now live. Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, the closing chapter of the remake trilogy, is coming with a director-warned install size of 200GB.