Four long years after it was announced, we finally have some idea when we'll be able to play Kingdom Hearts 4. At Disney's D23 fan event, Square Enix revealed that the sequel will arrive sometime in late 2027.

That isn't everything new that Square Enix had in store for fans either. The reveal was accompanied by a new trailer for Kingdom Hearts 4 that showed off a new world the sequel will take players to—Coco's colourful land of the dead. The trailer shows Sora fighting enemies in the crowd of a concert and riding sky rails, as Mickey, Goofy and Hades strive to reunite with the series' errant hero after he disappeared at the end of Kingdom Hearts 3.

Obviously, it would have been nice if Square Enix had committed to a specific date. But even having some idea of when the game will be released is a big deal after years of near-total radio silence from Square Enix. It was only in June that we received our first glimpse of the game since the sequel was announced in 2022, so going from that to knowing roughly when we'll be able to play it in the space of two months is quite the surprise.

Despite the dearth of information about the game over the years, we do have a rough idea of what Kingdom Hearts 4 will involve. The sequel will commence a new story arc which Square Enix is calling the Lost Master Arc, and will be primarily set in Quadratum—Kingdom Heart's Equivalent of Tokyo. As the latest trailer demonstrates, however, it will still involve the usual jaunt through various Disney worlds

While Square Enix has kept the lid on Kingdom Hearts 4 over the years, series director Tetsuya Nomora has repeatedly reassured fans that the game is on track. And both Square Enix and Disney have plenty of reasons to continue supporting it, since Disney recently revealed that Kingdom Hearts ranks among the company's "billion-dollar franchises". Turns out players really love it when you combine Disney characters and Final Fantasy-style JRPG action. Who knew?

Kingdom Hearts 4 fans wished for rain and got a flood at this weekend's D23 event with a release window trailer, the announcement of a Disney Plus anime, and now, new details about the game's playable King Mickey sections that heavily echo Paper Mario. Oh, and we'll also get to control Donald Duck and Goofy for the first time ever in a mainline game.

People who exist in the venn diagram centre of Disney movie fanatic and JRPG connoisseur will be pleased to know that publisher Square Enix released an extended trailer last night, showing off more from Kingdom Heart 4's Coco world and beyond. Sora has a phone now. City guards who resemble Final Fantasy 15's are here for some reason. Mickey's trying to solve a mystery while exploring the pages of a magical book. And 13 games later, we can finally force Donald to heal, damn it, by playing as him and Goofy directly.

In a deep dive panel, Kingdom Hearts 4 co-director Tai Yasue elaborated on Mickey's sections a little further. We see the Disney icon transform into a 2D paper cut out and a hulking origami to move around, and Yasue says the developers employed a "sort of puzzle-based game design that's very different from Sora's adventure, and I think it's really refreshing and interesting."

"So in this world you get to play with Mickey and you jump into a book [that's] like a paper world," Yasue explains. "And so Mickey in this paper world recreates origami paper copies of himself, and you could create paper-thin Mickeys, giant Mickeys, a tiny Mickey, box Mickeys. When you're a paper thin Mickey, [you can] go through the cracks on the walls, for example. If you throw him he becomes a paper airplane [and] you fly around. And by utilizing these special abilities of these copies of origami Mickeys, you can solve puzzles."

Contorting yourself into different papery forms definitely reminds me of the type of puzzles present in Nintendo's Paper Mario games, but it oddly seems to fit Kingdom Hearts' whole vibe too - the first game was, at least partially, inspired by Super Mario 64, after all.

Kingdom Hearts 4 is set to come out late 2027 for PC, PS5, Switch 2, and Xbox Series X|S.

"Please let your imaginations run wild" - The Kingdom Hearts 4 team and Tetsuya Nomura are involved in the new Disney Plus anime

After a decade of solid updates and player numbers that would make most games blush, No Man's Sky lead Sean Murray says the best part of the journey has actually been watching the team work together.

We caught up with Hello Games' Sean Murray to talk about 10 years of No Man's Sky, a journey that's included some low lows and spacey highs. Asked about the best moments of that decade, Murray says the easy answer would be "when we hit the highest plater numbers since launch with [the Voyagers update]" or when the team won awards at BAFTA and The Game Awards.

But, really, player numbers and gold trophies pale next to the "more boring, slightly difficult answer." Murray recalls moments where the team would play the Voyagers update together for the first time before its release, or the pretty transformative third-person camera option, or the player hub of The Space Anomaly, or... you get the gist. Coming together as a team to play something really exciting that "no one's seen" before is "the real sort of development high." (Just don't ruin it by telling him how much No Man's Sky DLC would've made.)

"Those have been a buzz," Murray explains. "That's when I'm going home and I'm just buzzing about it. And you're like, 'People are gonna love this.'"

Another example came when Hello Games put put the Beyond update, which was plagued with all sorts of bugs and problems. "We just worked really, really hard and I think we put out something ridiculous like 27 hot fixes in a week or something crazy." Being able to work together so quickly was only possible thanks to "systems that we'd been building for years", but the highlight was simply "the team just meshing together" and "solving problems just really quickly."

"You know, so those moments are a real buzz," he adds.

Sean Murray says a "weight had lifted" when No Man's Sky players were finally talking more about its new content than its controversial launch

Quake mappers are absolutely killing it in celebration of Quake's 30^th birthday. The Quake community has been running map jams of varying themes all year. In the last few months there have been two 'Quickie' speedmapping jams, a 1024 Jam where contributors had to build maps of 1024 units cubed, and a Limits Jam, with the fun restriction that submitted maps had to use the same technical and design limitations as the original Quake campaign.

Now, the Quake community has brought another bloodstained birthday present to Quake's afterparty with Q30 Deathmatch Jam. Organised by Quake mappers Annihilazor & Infiniti, the map-pack adds 22 new arenas designed specifically to be played with regular old Quake.

The maps run the gamut of Quake's interdimensional settings, ranging from gothic castles through sci-fi kill-zones to an industrial brown sewer called The Filth Pit. Numerous notable designers from the fan community have taken part, including a collaborative map called Overflow by Mazu and Makkon. The latter was one of the organisers of the excellent Quake Brutalist Jam 3, while the former designed that Jam's showstopper map—a five hour long mini-campaign with its own internal story.

If you want to give the maps a whirl yourself, Q30 Deathmatch Jam is designed to work with numerous modern Quake sourceports, including Ironwail, Netquake or Nightdive's Kex port as seen in the Quake Remaster. In each case you can play it as a standalone mod by dropping the folder straight into your Quake directory and using the in-game console to call it up. If you want to play online via Netquake or QuakeWorld servers however, you'll need to copy the map, loc files, and skybox data into the relevant folders of your competitive multiplayer install.

None of this is to mention all the other Quake-related events that have happened this year. As mentioned, January had barely begun when the community released Quake Brutalist Jam 3, a massive mod themed around concrete megastructures which was essentially a new FPS in all but name.

Then, at QuakeCon id Software launched a brand new episode for Quake, developed in collaboration with Machine Games to celebrate the shooter's 30^th anniversary. While Microsoft's brutal layoffs cast a pall over the proceedings, Dawn of the Machine is nonetheless a fantastic collection of maps, and a worthy successor to Machine Games' Dimension of the Machine from 2021.

Marvel boss Kevin Feige has revealed more about the approach to Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

The film is the fourth in Marvel and Sony's joint Spider-Man movie series, and it's set years after the massive, multiversal events of Spider-Man: No Way Home, which saw Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield co-star alongside Tom Holland as their respective versions of Peter Parker.

"When we made Brand New Day, we set out saying, 'Well, we'll never make more than No Way Home, never make it bigger than No Way Home. So, let's just go deeper and make it special," Feige said during a D23 panel celebrating 65 years of Spider-Man attended by GamesRadar+.

"And I have a memory, we were on set of No Way Home, which of course was about Tobey and Andrew and Tom, three Spider-Men together," he continued. "How do you get bigger than three Spider-Men together? Well, sitting on a golf cart outside the set were Zendaya and Jacob [Batalon] and Tom. And it occurred to me, looking at those three, that that trio is as iconic as the three Spider-Men. And now Brand New Day has proved that."

During the No Way Home ending, Tom Holland's Peter Parker is erased from the memories of everyone he knows by a spell from Doctor Strange. So, in Brand New Day, he's more alone than ever, and the story is more grounded in his emotional state rather than the multiversal stakes of No Way Home.

Brand New Day is in theaters now. For more, check out our Spider-Man: Brand New Day review and our guide on watching the Marvel movies in order.