Valor Mortis and Battlefield 6 Headline a Huge Game Pass Day

LOS ANGELES WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2026

Tuesday, October 13, was the biggest single day of Xbox's October Game Pass wave: five Xbox releases landed in the same window, headlined by two day-one Game Pass arrivals and one very large catalog addition. Valor Mortis, a first-person soulslike set in an alternate-history Napoleonic Europe, launched day one on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass, while Battlefield 6 joined the same tiers the same day, according to Pure Xbox and TrueAchievements. For subscribers, it was the rare day when the service added both a brand-new experiment and a blockbuster shooter at once.

02 Valor Mortis: BioShock Meets Dark Souls in Napoleonic Europe

Valor Mortis comes from One More Level, the studio behind Ghostrunner, and it wears its influences openly. You play William, a soldier of Napoleon's Grande Armée who returns from death with corrupted powers and fights his way through a plague-twisted, alternate-history version of 19th-century Europe. The combat mixes first-person melee built around parries, dashes and finishers with supernatural abilities — the comparison reviewers keep reaching for is BioShock's magic-in-one-hand structure pushed through Dark Souls-style challenge and punishment.

The early verdict is encouraging with caveats. The game sits at a Metacritic score of 77, with reviewers praising the combat system while noting unpolished platforming and bugs. That split is familiar territory for the genre: soulslike players tend to forgive rough edges when the parry timing feels right, and by most accounts it does. The game is available on Xbox Series X|S, PC and cloud through Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass, with handheld support including the ROG Xbox Ally, according to TrueAchievements. For our earlier look at the launch, see our Valor Mortis day-one coverage.

03 Battlefield 6 Arrives the Same Day — With Season 5

The other half of Tuesday's headline is scale. Battlefield 6 joined Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass via EA Play on October 13, roughly a year after its original launch, and it did not arrive as a bare catalog drop: Season 5 launched the same day, opening the shooter's second year with a destructible Las Vegas map and an Area 51-inspired military complex. Subscribers get the campaign, the large-scale multiplayer and Portal modes, while the free-to-play Redsec battle royale remains open to everyone. We broke the season down in full in our Game Pass Wave 1 coverage and our Season 5 guide.

The third Game Pass addition of the day, Deep Dish Dungeon, is the quiet one: a dungeon-crawling exploration game for one to three players, built around gathering resources, upgrading a campsite and pushing deeper into a handcrafted dungeon, also launching day one on Ultimate and PC Game Pass. Around those three, Microsoft counts five Xbox releases in the day's window overall — a reminder that October's calendar is crowded well beyond the subscription catalog.

04 Why This Week Matters More Than Most

Timing is the subtext of the whole wave. These additions land about a month before Grand Theft Auto VI launches on November 19 — the release that is reshaping the entire industry calendar. Publishers have spent the autumn either clearing out of November's way or, like Xbox here, giving players reasons to stay subscribed and busy in the meantime. A day-one soulslike, a second-year shooter relaunch and a co-op dungeon crawler in a single day is a value argument aimed squarely at anyone doing the maths on their subscription before the biggest game of the decade arrives. Our GTA VI launch countdown tracks what that November 19 date means for the rest of the slate.

It is also worth saying what Valor Mortis represents for the service. Day-one Game Pass launches are usually safer bets — established studios, familiar genres, sequels with built-in audiences. A punishing first-person soulslike about a resurrected Napoleonic soldier is none of those things, and that is the point: this is the kind of odd, specific, mid-budget swing that subscription catalogs exist to de-risk, for the studio and for players alike. Nobody has to spend full price to find out whether parrying plague monsters in a corrupted Paris is their thing. They just download it, die repeatedly, and decide. If the combat praise holds up over the coming weeks, Tuesday could be remembered as the day a strange little soulslike found the audience it would never have reached on a store shelf alone.

What happens next is already on the calendar. The wave continues on October 15 with Bluey's Happy Snaps, a family photography adventure, and Chained Beasts, a co-op gladiator roguelike for up to four players, then closes on October 16 with the PC-only city-builder Beyond These Stars, set aboard a space whale. A practical note for subscribers weighing tiers: Tuesday's three additions, like most of this wave, require Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass — Premium members were largely spectators for Wave 1, with Neon Abyss 2 from October 8 the notable exception. If your backlog strategy for the month runs through Game Pass, Ultimate is where this wave actually lives.

There is also a deadline inside the good news: nine games leave Game Pass on October 15, including Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and A Plague Tale: Requiem, according to Xbox Wire reporting. If either sits unfinished in your library, Tuesday's arrivals are your warning to finish them first. The wave then continues with Bluey's Happy Snaps and Chained Beasts on October 15 and Beyond These Stars on October 16. Browse the full catalog anytime on our games hub.