How much champagne do you charge to the company credit card when GTA 6 mercifully shifts out of your release window? Which celebrity will star in Cyberpunk 2? And what game are Helldivers 2‘s devs working on next? Welcome to another edition of Morning Checkpoint, Kotaku‘s daily roundup of gaming news and culture.
People are buzzing about Jump Space, the sci-fi co-op adventure about blowing up spaceships with friends. It comes to Early Access next week and already has an impressive post-launch roadmap of updates lined up. How many more cool ship games will we get before Starfield‘s next expansion arrives?
It was a good day in the Sucker Punch offices when GTA 6 delayed
Ghost of Yotei is one of the biggest game releases of the fall, at least now that GTA 6 has been delayed to May 2026. Creative director Nate Fox was asked about that moment in a new rapid-fire interview with MinnMax (via VGC). “When GTA 6 was delayed, did the entire studio pop some champagne?” host Ben Hanson asked. “We’re all still hungover. Multi-month hangover,” Fox responded. “That was a great day.”
Yotei‘s October 2 release date was announced before Rockstar revealed its delay, locking in its fate one way or the other. Fortune favors the bold. Now lots of games that were waiting to come out until 2026 to escape the GTA 6 gravity well are faced with a new conundrum: get out ahead of it or come out later in the year and risk stumbling into a second GTA 6 delay?
Helldivers studio’s next game will have a Destiny-style social hub
But what is it, exactly? Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani seemed to be speaking off the cuff when he responded to a fan in the game’s Discord who requested a place where Helldivers 2 players can hang out in between drops. “It’s on the feature list for the next one,” Jorjani teased. What next one? Helldivers 3? Nope.
“This was about our next game. Not HD3,” he added on Reddit. Some fans are wondering if it’s a nod to the studio’s isometric fantasy multiplayer series Magicka. The studio has already confirmed that its next project, whatever it ends up being, won’t be published by Sony.
Fans think GTA 6 parody website names have leaked
The open-world blockbuster is still over six months away, but in the meantime players may have some fresh teases to parse. What seem like in-game website names appear to have been registered as real internet domains by Take-Two back in May. They include what-up.app, rydeme.app, and wipeoutcornskin.com. I don’t know if we’re ready for GTA 6 in the post-internet, algorithmic slop phase of lampooning pop culture.
Will Johnny Silverhand return in Cyberpunk 2?
Because Keanu Reeves would be happy to do it if CD Projekt Red wants him back. “Absolutely,” he told IGN when asked about reprising the role. “I’d love to play Johnny Silverhand again.” Effectively a virtual ghost in the first game, there’s no reason Silverhand would need to come back in a sequel, but also nothing precluding it either. Cyberpunk 2 is set to return to Night City but also take players to a new location likened to “Chicago gone wrong.”
Satoru Iwata laughed when he heard about trying to sell Animal Crossing in America
Veteran Nintendo localizer Leslie Swan told Time Extension that’s how the former president of the company reacted when she told him they were translating the cozy sim. “He just laughed and said, ‘I don’t know how you’re going to do this.’ And it’s true, just everything in that game was so specific to Japan,” she said.
Long-time producer Takashi Tezuka was not confident either. “[Tezuka] basically said to me, ‘We’d like to have you localize it’ and I said, ‘Sure.’ But then he said, ‘No, Leslie, I’m not sure you understand, it’s going to be difficult.’” Swan recalled. “And I kept having to assure him that we would make it happen.” Decades later, the franchise is now one of the best selling in the world.
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