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‘GTA Online: Smuggler’s Run’ gives a nod toward a classic Rockstar game

Arriving Tuesday, Smuggler's Run takes to the skies above Lost Santos and Blaine County. With a new range of planes, choppers, and ultralights, players can transport criminal cargo across the state.

Grand Theft Auto Online, the multiplayer tie-in with Buy Now , was originally released in 2013. While most multiplayer games see updates for the next year or two, GTA Online continues to supply substantial updates almost four years later. Smuggler’s Run is the latest DLC pack coming next week and it looks to reference an early classic from developer Rockstar Games.

Arriving Tuesday, Smuggler’s Run takes to the skies above Lost Santos and Blaine County. With a new range of planes, choppers, and ultralights, players can transport criminal cargo across the state. Serving as the headquarters for this new smuggling business are a number of expansive aircraft hangars. This is where players can keep their ever-growing fleet.

Later this fall, another update will literally transform races to seamlessly take players across roads, skies, and seas. Akin to Mario Kart 8, these new checkpoints will instantly change a player’s vehicle class to match the portion of the course ahead. This makes custom races more dynamic than ever as players race from the water, onto land, and into the air. Pair this with the previous updates like Stunt Racing and Special Vehicle Circuit Races, players can create some unique races.

Aside from the new aircraft, there will also be a few new four-wheeled vehicles and competitive adversary modes. Timely holiday celebrations will also add special items for Halloween, the December holidays, and more.

For a little bit of Rockstar Games’ history, Smuggler’s Run is a PlayStation 2 game in which players control a member of an international smugglers gang. Players must evade the United States border patrol, the CIA, and cutthroat rivals to deliver the illegal cargo. In the classic game, smuggling involved controlling a variety of off-road vehicles across unforgiving terrain. In GTA Online, smuggling takes to the skies for more daring acrobatics.

This is not the first time GTA Online has gone back to Rockstar’s roots to expand the multiplayer experience. In a previous update titled Tiny Racers, players took control of their vehicles from a top-down perspective. Not only does the perspective change alter the feel of a race, it also harkens back to early entries in the Grand Theft Auto franchise that played in this overhead view.

The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.

After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.

Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.

Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”

It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.

Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.