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Is Jesus now canon in Game of Thrones? Will we get a surprise Final Fantasy XIII announcement at this week’s PlayStation State of Play? And why are video game genre names usually terrible? Welcome to the latest edition of Morning Checkpoint, Kotaku‘s daily roundup of gaming news and culture. I purchased Star Wars: Rogue Squadron last night and have been having the time of my life. I also re-watched Episode 2: Attack of the Clones and was much less impressed. It remains the worst Star Wars movie by far.
A Lannister always pays his AI
“So just to let y’all know the new [A Feast For Crows] illustrated edition is like almost definitely ai lol and id argue has taken pretty hard ’inspiration’ from existing fanart,” X user novembernatten wrote in a post that blew up last week (via TheGamer). They weren’t the only one throwing around accusations of generative AI, and now the publisher has stepped in to tell fans they’re wrong.
lol. lmao, even pic.twitter.com/YYwEO911nb
— 2åse (@novembernatten) November 5, 2025
“Recently there have been accusations floating around that the Penguin Random House’s illustrated edition of A Feast For Crows was produced using AI generative art,” Raya Golden, responsible for Song of Fire and Ice book materials, wrote on George R.R. Martin’s blog yesterday. “To our knowledge and as presented by the artist who completed the work in question there was NO such programing used. While he is a digital multimedia artist and relies on digital programing to complete his work, he has expressed unequivocally that no AI was used, and we believe him.”
Fans remain unconvinced, however. They point to an apparent crucifix that blurrily appears in the background of one of the scenes. “Uh. Then why are they all in blue?” wrote one. “Why is there a cross on a wall? Why is Tywin obviously an AI recreation of Viserys? Why is there no heraldry? It genuinely could not be more obvious and no amount of lying is gonna work.” Is this a case of AI slop or just bad art?
Is Final Fantasy XIII finally getting ported?
That’s the wishcasting from some fans after discovering a Final Fantasy XIII voice actor will be MC-ing the PlayStation Japan State of Play this week. It might just be cope, but a trilogy ported to PlayStation 5 (and Switch 2) would be pretty awesome. It’s the only major Final Fantasy arc that’s not playable on Sony’s current hardware.
Former Marathon dev thinks “extraction” is a bad genre name
Ex-Bungie production manager Chris Sides told the Shooter Monthly podcast it’s “dumb. “I hate the genre name of extraction shooter,” he said (via PCGamesN). “When I was working on Marathon, I was working with marketing, dying to be like, ‘Can we please create a different genre name?’ because extraction shooter is so dumb. It’s the only genre where its name is a mechanic.”
He continued, “I cannot stand the name of it. So I think that when you say the extraction genre, it should hit your spot. I think it’s really the fact that the genre doesn’t even know what it is. You, as a player, how do you know what you’re going to get? And I think that’s one of the real issues with the genre itself.”
Battlefield 6‘s nasty drone glitch has finally been fixed
Players will no longer be able to take to the skies and rain down death. “Fixed an exploit allowing players to ascend and access unintended areas when standing on a XFGM-6D Recon Drone by hitting it with the Sledgehammer,” EA’s developers confirmed in the latest patch notes.
Switch 2 gets some nifty new features
A new firmware update made small but notable tweaks to the new console. Those include updated game card icons to make it clear when an installation is from a physical or digital purchase, the ability to cancel multiple game downloads at once, and an option to keep the system from going into rest mode while GameChat is active. Most importantly, perhaps, there’s now an “Improved the screen display when using Adjust Screen Size to make it easier to adjust.” Hopefully, that makes it easier to fix the system’s poor HDR implementation.
