Quick Hits

• ARC Raiders opens the vault: the extraction shooter goes free-to-play for four days starting next week — its first no-purchase window — as the team ramps up hype for its major new update, Frozen Trail.
• Digital Foundry's verdict on The Witcher 3 Remastered for Switch 2: "a colossal upgrade" and "easy to recommend" — and for many, it's completely free if you owned the original Switch release.
• Epic's October free games are headlined by System Shock 2's 25th anniversary remaster, alongside Buried Stars, Out of Sight, and TerraScape.
• The vibe-coder crackdown is real: Activision and Bethesda are sending cease-and-desist notices over GenAI-built Modern Warfare 2 and Fallout projects.
• Halo news, reportedly: Eurogamer says Activision — Halo's new steward — is weighing a series reboot, with a team at Sledgehammer Games leading the charge.

Pokémon & Nintendo

The biggest Switch 2 story of the day is Digital Foundry's tech breakdown of The Witcher 3 Remastered, which Nintendo Life summarizes as "a colossal upgrade" that's easy to recommend — especially since owners of the original Switch version get it free. In survey land, Nintendo Life's 2026 Switch 2 Summer Survey results are in after 64 questions posed back in August covering gaming habits and Switch 2 sentiment — and the site is still crossing its fingers for a Kid Icarus revival. October is also packed: Nintendo Life counts 15 exciting new games hitting Switch 1 & 2 this month alone. Meanwhile, RuneScape: Dragonwilds unveiled a multi-year roadmap with monthly and quarterly updates running through the rest of 2026 and all of 2027.

On the Pokémon front, Destructoid has a guide for grabbing Astronaut Pikachu in Pokémon Go — the special cosmetic skin teased earlier is now earnable during the game's first October weekend event. And the r/pokemon community is showing off in style: a Charizard mosaic built entirely from Energy cards, a delightfully spooky Phantump & Trevenant LEGO MOC, Poketober art prompts already rolling, and a tutorial claiming you can play Gen 3 Pokémon online on literally any device.

Fortnite

Spooky season is in full swing. GameSpot points out that among 2,800 Fortnite skins, only the Five Nights at Freddy's set — Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy — has a certain special feature no other skin offers. Over in Chapter 7, Season 4's Fortnitemares event, Destructoid walks you through finding and extracting the Dumpster Dive Sprite, one of the seasonal event's most important new additions to the growing Sprite collection.

Call of Duty

Ahead of Modern Warfare 4, Activision is deploying a new "Server Culling" anti-cheat method that Destructoid reports aims to kill wallhacks for good — the publisher clearly wants players to know how hard it's fighting cheaters. In bigger-picture news, Eurogamer reports that Microsoft handed the next Halo game to Activision, where a purpose-built team separate from the Call of Duty studios is overseeing it — and a Sledgehammer Games team is reportedly leading a potential reboot. File this one firmly under "rumor" for now.

Arc Raiders

Mark your calendars: ARC Raiders will be completely free to play for four days next week, a first for the game, as Embark's extraction shooter builds toward its new major update, Frozen Trail. If you've been waiting for a zero-risk excuse to drop in, this is it.

Steam & PC

The Epic Games Store October lineup is a treat: the System Shock 2 25th anniversary remaster leads a free batch that also includes Buried Stars, Out of Sight, and TerraScape, all claimable through October. PC Gamer's genre "sickos" have curated 11 underappreciated gems worth grabbing in the Steam Autumn Sale. In Valve country, PC Gamer crowns Deadlock the king of MOBA character design thanks to its embrace of "New Yorkyness," while Destructoid explains the new-look hero vote system for the incoming hero package — and whether you can track the votes at all. On the hardware beat: GameSpot calls the Steam Frame the best VR headset it's ever used but frames it as VR gaming's "swan song moment," and Rock Paper Shotgun laments that RAM, SSD, and GPU price inflation has bargain hunters reluctantly circling back to gaming laptops. Oh, and Stellar Blade has crashed to its lowest PC price yet — GameSpot says it's time to save humanity on a budget.

Gaming Roundup

Huge Jagex news out of RuneFest in Birmingham: a fourth RuneScape MMO built in Unreal Engine is in the works, plus an animated RuneScape adaptation involving MoistCr1TiKaL. The GenAI mod saga escalated as Activision and Bethesda sent legal notices to creators of AI-generated projects — Destructoid notes this follows days of vibe-coded chaos, including the SFO situation for Total War: Warhammer 3, while Kotaku's opinion desk asks bluntly: does anyone actually want to play Skate 3 inside Modern Warfare 2 inside Minecraft? Finally, GameSpot declares God of War Ragnarok finally cheap enough to shout "Boy, buy it," and rounds up 50 video game movies currently in the works — how many will actually escape development hell?