Today, October 28, reviews went live for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. I reviewed it here at Kotaku, and despite being jaded toward the series for the better part of a decade, I really loved the long-awaited fourth entry. Right now it sits at a strong 84 on review aggregate site Metacritic, which is about in line with where these games typically land. The original Dragon Age: Origins sits at an 86, with Inquisition, the series’ third entry, landing close by at 84. Meanwhile, Dragon Age II, probably the most divisive game in the series, sits at 79. As much as I loved my time with The Veilguard, I knew it would elicit some pretty divergent reactions from folks. There are 10s and there are some more middling scores. You can even find some folks straight-up saying they “do not recommend” the game, like YouTuber Skill Up does while discussing all his problems with BioWare’s latest entry. But what’s the issue? What are folks so split on? Well, everything, it sounds like. – Kenneth Shepard Read More
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6is a game about shadowy organizations causing geopolitical turmoil and well-timed headshots. It’s also an RPG about making the progress meters fill up. When it comes to the latter, Black Ops 6‘s first patch is already increasing XP rewards for certain modes to keep the level-ups flowing.
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An October 26 update for the game listed a handful of changes and bug fixes, including a series of map exploits, a problem with matches quickly replacing players that leave, and various glitches in Black Ops 6‘s well-received Zombies mode. The changes that are most noteworthy were to XP, though. Four modes will now get boosted rewards.
Increased XP and Weapon XP rates for modes that were awarding less XP than expected
Team Deathmatch
Control
Search & Destroy
Gunfight
“Our team is closely monitoring XP rates for all modes to ensure players are progressing as expected wherever they play,” the development team wrote. XP earned and other rewards often start out a little stingier at launch since it’s always easier to increase them later once the data from millions of people playing comes back, rather than the reverse.
There are already lots of different strategies for optimizing XP gain in multiplayer. Obviously, playing better—landing headshots, chasing objectives, and unloading killstreaks—all accrue rank-ups faster. Some players also recommend playing Hardpoint instead of Domination because players in that mode are more likely to actually play objectives. Others suggest grinding out all of those camo challenges. And, of course, no new Call of Duty launch is complete without sickos crushing cases of Monster Energy for double XP.
Black Ops 6 players had latched onto one easy trick for getting bonus XP by exploiting the decoy grenades for guaranteed kill assists. Treyarch nerfed that one in the above patch as well, though.
Photo: Roblox Corp / Kotaku, Image: Black Tabby Games, Bungie, CSA Images / Sony / Kotaku, Treyarch / Activision
This week saw the arrival of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and with it, the return of a classic Zombies experience. It’s terrific, and took our writer right back to the nights he spent happily playing the mode with friends back in the days of Black Ops 3. Meanwhile, the arrival of Destiny 2‘s latest content update, and the terrible drop rate for god rolls on its hottest weapon, has some fans certain that there’s a statistical disadvantage for that drop to occur. The result is a compelling conspiracy theory about how loot drops actually work in Destiny 2, and given that the community has the statistics to back it up, Bungie is now conducting its own investigation. Find these stories and more in the pages ahead.
Paramount+ announced today that it has canceled Xbox’s Halo TV show after its second season. The team behind the show is reportedly looking to shop the sci-fi adaption around to other places in an effort to continue the series.
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On July 18, Paramount confirmed with The Hollywood Reporter that the Halo TV show will not receive a third season on its streaming platform. In March, the show—based on the popular Xbox video game franchise—ended its second season with fans hopeful that there was more to come following an uptick in quality. But that isn’t going to happen, or at least not at Paramount+.
“We are extremely proud of this ambitious series,” said Paramount+ in a statement confirming the news. “And would like to thank our partners at Xbox, 343 Industries, and Amblin Television, along with showrunner and executive producer David Wiener, his fellow executive producers, the entire cast led by Pablo Schreiber as Master Chief, and the amazing crew for all their outstanding work. We wish everyone the best going forward.”
The Hollywood Reporter says that its sources have confirmed that Xbox, 343 Industries, and Amblin are all interested in continuing the live-action series somewhere else. It’s reported that Paramount is supportive of this plan.
Xbox / Paramount
“We deeply appreciate the millions of fans who propelled the Halo series to be a global success, and we remain committed to broadening the Halo universe in different ways in the future,” said 343 Industries in a statement. “We are grateful to Amblin and Paramount for their partnership in bringing our expansive sci-fi universe to viewers around the world.”
Gearbox’s Borderlandsgames are known for quite a few things, but the biggest among those is arguably its sense of humor. It was Borderlands 2 where the franchise’s sense of comedy really took shape, and the series has since been littered with humor largely in the vein of crass or internet humor. No surprise then that carries over to the live-action film, whose first clip is…well, it is what it is.
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Lionsgate came to IGN Fan Fest with a new clip for the film, which features series mascot Claptrap (as voiced by Jack Black) shitting out a lot of bullets. Thankfully it doesn’t go on too long, but it’s still a bit of weirdness that probably lands more if you groove with the games’ general sense of humor.(Which can be legit funny sometimes, even outside the more-regarded Tales from the Borderlands spinoff!) If not…well, that visual’s in your head now, so sorry about that.
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On the bright side, the rest of the clip has decent-looking action featuring the Vault Hunters—Roland (Kevin Hart), Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), Krieg (Florian Munteau), and Lilith (Cate Blanchett) going up against a group of raiders. This part is the most Borderlands-ass part of the entire clip, minus how no one’s using of their class skills to make this fight significantly shorter. If you need something in this movie to latch onto, it looks like Blanchett will be your lifeline. She looks to be doing an alright impression of a sci-fi gunslinger, something the movie seems to recognize since she gets to be the most involved in this fight.
The bigger issue here might be that the clip is too sterile for its own good. Borderlands games aren’t bloody to the degree of a Mortal Kombat or Gears of War, but their approach to violence is delightfully cartoonish because the guns are goofy as all hell. There needs to be more flavor here; one of these guys needs a gun that melts these raiders or electrocutes or lights them on fire. (Maybe a combination of all three, since the later games have guns with two element types?)
Borderlands comes to theaters on August 9, and hopefully between now and then, the movie looks more like the games in the way that matters: endearingly stupid violence and humor that feels like there was intent behind it.
As Bungie continues to tease out the release of Destiny 2: The Final Shape, it has finally unveiled how Keith David (The Thing, Halo, Mass Effect) will sound when he assumes the mantle of Commander Zavala. Zavala, a key character in the Destiny series, had been played by the beloved actor Lance Reddick until last year, when he tragically passed from coronary heart disease.
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As part of the upcoming expansion’s marketing cycle, Bungie is in the midst of releasing a series of short documentaries on the making of The Final Shape. The first part of this doc, which debuted on May 23, contains two brief scenes debuting David as Zavala. They are, predictably, a gut punch.
The first scene, which comes about three minutes into the first part of the ViDoc, features Zavala telling an unseen character that he would’ve given anything to bring them back. He is presumably talking to Cayde-6, a character who was killed off in 2018’s Forsaken expansion and with whom Zavala had a close relationship (who is returning and will be voiced, once again, by Nathan Fillion). Later on, there is another cutscene of Zavala telling his fellow vanguard Ikora Rey that he won’t “lose another soldier in this war.” It’s impossible not to read the lines as the game’s developers and fans alike wishing Reddick could still be here for this momentous moment in the series.
Reddick’s character became an increasingly integral part of Destiny’s long-running story, but the actor was a positive fixture of the game’s community in real life, too. Fans adored Reddick, who often took the time out of his day to engage with them on social media. He’d often field questions from fans on Twitter even when he wasn’t actively working on the game or promoting it. When he passed,countless players amassed near his character in Destiny 2’s hub and publicly mourned Reddick’s passing while celebrating his contributions to the series.
After his passing, many Bungie developers who’d worked with Reddick shared how fond they had become of him over the years. Reddick, who’d been with the series since day one, seemed to have fostered an especially strong affinity for Destiny, and he often played the game. In a heartbreaking and completely unintended gesture, it was eventually discovered that Reddick was playing Destiny 2 the night before he passed away.
At the time of his passing, Reddick had recorded some lines for Zavala for some of the content following 2023’s Lightfall expansion. Over the course of some months though, Zavala’s role in the story diminished, and players understood before long that they’d probably heard the last of Reddick’s posthumous work. Beginning with The Final Shape, David is taking over the role, and though he has a commanding voice and certainly has the gravitas, Reddick’s unique take on the character he originated will be missed.
After years of marketing, delays, betas, and name changes, XDefiantfrom Ubisoft is finally here and…things aren’t going very well. Players are currently unable to find matches as the game’s servers can’t seem to cope with the large influx of people.
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XDefiant—out now on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC—is Ubisoft’s big-budget free-to-play Call of Duty-like first-person online shooter. The FPS has had a long road to release. It was first announced back in July 2021 as Tom Clancy’sXDefiant, but in March 2022 the game dropped the “Tom Clancy” bit and expanded to include characters and locations from various Ubisoft-owned franchises, like Far Cry and Watch Dogs. In 2023, it got its first big open-beta playtest and I enjoyed its fast-paced, Black Ops II-like gameplay. Later that year, it wasdelayed twice. But now, after all that, XDefiant is out. Good luck playing it, though.
Poking around online, XDefiant isn’t completely broken. I’ve found streams online of people playing it. However, in my testing on Xbox, I was unable to join a match and was stuck in a lobby waiting for something to happen. And even players who do get into matches have reported long waits to get into another.
At 1:30 pm EST, the official XDefiant Twitter account posted that it was aware that “some players are unable to join a game” and asked folks to wait as the devs looked into the situation.
At 2:55 pm EST, the account offered an update, saying that things were improving but that it was continuing to work on making sure everyone could get in and play the FPS.
Then at 3:50 pm EST, in response to players complaining about the lack of updates and continued matchmaking issues, Ubisoft posted on Twitter:
Update: We are all focused on the matchmaking issue and are continuously investigating. We will continue to provide updates as possible.
As of about an hour later, that’s the last update from the main XDefiant account on Twitter. Players are frustrated, as you might expect. But, really, in the year of our lord 2024, I’m not sure how anyone could be surprised that a large-scale online multiplatformvideo game is having issues at launch. Still, hopefully, Ubisoft is able to get the game up and running without resorting to making developers and engineers stay late into the night.
One of the worst years for cancellations, cuts, and closures in the history of the video game industry has just claimed its next victims, including Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks. Developers and fans alike are in disbelief. “Great teams are sunsetting before our eyes again, and it’s a fucking gut stab,” wrote Dinga Bakaba, director at Arkane Austin sister-studio, Arkane Lyon.
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Set up in 2006, Arkane Austin helped develop the acclaimed 2012 whale-oil-punk immersive sim Dishonored, before leading development on 2017’s haunting sci-fi shooter Prey. Tango Gameworks, meanwhile, was founded in 2010 and is best known for making the Evil Within series of survival horrorgames, before bestowing a collective breath of fresh air on the video game industry last year with the colorful rhythm hack and slash platformer Hi-Fi Rush. Microsoft shut down both studios today, as well as other Bethesda subsidiaries Roundhouse Games and Alpha Dog Games, citing a need to focus on “high-impact” “priority games.”
“This is absolutely terrible,” tweeted Bakaba, co-creative director at the remaining Arkane studio, in the wake of the news. “Permission to be human: to any executive reading this, friendly reminder that video games are an entertainment/cultural industry, and your business as a corporation is to take care of your artists/entertainers and help them create value for you.”
The Deathloop co-director at the Microsoft-owned studio continued:
Don’t throw us into gold fever gambits, don’t use us as strawmen for miscalculations/blind spots, don’t make our work environments darwinist jungles. You say we make you proud when we make a good game. Make us proud when times are tough. We know you can, we seen it before.
For now, great teams are sunsetting before our eyes again, and it’s a fucking gut stab. Lyon is safe, but please be tactful and discerning about all this, and respect affected folks’ voice and leave it room to be heard, it’s their story to tell, their feelings to express.
Inside baseball, but if I read ‘immersive sim curse’ from the community, especially from a fellow dev, I swear to God… Please, let’s talk about the *real* challenges instead of rehashing irrational anxieties of the past. Even more inside baseball, but with a very, very wide range, as a wise and sorely missed man said: “Please Stop.”
Harvey Smith, co-director on Redfall at Arkane Austin, called today’s new “terrible,” adding that the team there had been through a lot together. Bloomberg previously reported that the vampire shooter’s troubled development grew out of a push by top Bethesda leadership to make a live-service game, a decision that ultimately led to sky-high attrition and multiple delays. “Your talent will lift you up, and I will do anything I can to help,” tweeted Smith. John Johanas, game director at Tango Gameworks, was also at a loss. “So this is how it ends…” he wrote. “Unfortunately I don’t quite have the words…But at least thank you to everyone who supported us.”
Back when Microsoft acquired Bethesda in 2021, its burgeoning Game Pass model seemed like a potentially great fit for Arkane Studios, whose creatively ambitious projects didn’t always seem to find the audiences they deserved. If Bethesda would never greenlight a Prey 2, maybe a deep-pocketed tech giant would see it as as a worthwhile addition to its Netflix-like subscription gaming library. If nothing else, the newly acquired teams would have no shortage of other holes to fill in Xbox’s struggling first-party lineup.
Adam Boyes, co-CEO at Iron Galaxy Studios, juxtaposed today’s carnage with Microsoft’s bottom line in a tweet screencapping the company’s recently announced quarterly profits of roughly $20 billion. “It hurts dude… it hurts,” wrote back Rich Lambert, head of ZeniMax Online Studios. “Angry. Frustrated. Shocked. Furious. Speechless. Dumbfounded. Perplexed,” wrote Alistair Hatch, another long-time veteran of Bethesda. “I have so much love for the studios affected. The people that made those teams were incredible, hard working, dedicated, and talented.”
People from other Microsoft-owned studios and outside the company have also been horrified by the news. “We took a lot of inspiration from both Evil Within and Evil Within 2 when developing Alan Wake 2,” tweeted Remedy Entertainment game director Kyle Rowley. “They are both excellent horror games and I’m very sad we will not get to see a continuation of the franchise from Tango Gameworks. “Why do I still do this?” tweeted Obsidian Entertainment communications director Mikey Dowling.
“Arkane did solid work and had a highly talented and motivated staff,” Mike Wikan, the former Retro Studios developer who led design on Metroid Prime, wrote on LinkedIn. “Companies need to understand that burning your Creative Production Studios to the ground is NOT the path to profitability.”
Garry’s Mod, a popular 2006 sandbox game that emerged from the modding scene around Valve’s Source software, has recently been issued takedown notices by Nintendo. As a result, Facepunch Studios, the developers of Garry’s Mod, are in the process of removing about 20 years’ worth of Nintendo-related content from the game.
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In an update to Garry’s Mod’s Steam page, the developers stated, “Some of you may have noticed that certain Nintendo related workshop items have recently been taken down. This is not a mistake, the takedowns came from Nintendo.”
The update continues, “Honestly, this is fair enough. This is Nintendo’s content and what they allow and don’t allow is up to them. They don’t want you playing with that stuff in Garry’s Mod – that’s their decision, we have to respect that and take down as much as we can.”
Despite Nintendo’s litigious nature, not to mention its fierce protectiveness over its brand image and that of its mascots, the notice from Nintendo comes as a bit of a shock. As the update goes on to note, Nintendo content has been hosted on Garry’s Mod for close to 20 years. Models of countless Nintendo mascots like Mario have been ported over to the Source engine for the enjoyment of anyone playing Garry’s Mod since the very beginning. It’s strange for Nintendo to suddenly come out of the blue and enforce a takedown of this much content, especially since the flexibility of the Source engine in Garry’s Mod was a large part of the appeal behind the game, which was popularized in the early 2010s by a slew of gaming Youtube personalities playing multiplayer social-deduction games in Garry’s Mod such as Prop Hunt and Trouble In Terrorist Town. Of course, you could also argue that Facepunch was, at times, a little too lenient about what they allowed on Garry’s Mod, making sense of Nintendo’s decision to take action after all this time.
Nintendo-themed add-ons seem to have begun getting taken down a few months ago, though Facepunch didn’t publicly divulge that the company had issued the takedowns until earlier today. The process has been “ongoing” since then, and the developers are still working to remove all of it, which is an understandably Herculean task.
It’s so much, in fact, that at the very end of the update, Facepunch jokes that, “If you want to help us by deleting your Nintendo related uploads and never uploading them again, that would help us a lot.”
Immersive sims are traditionally thought of as single-player titles. They can be really dense and systems-heavy games in which having even one player introduces an incredible number of variables, as that one player uses the freedom they’re afforded to tackle situations in any number of ways. It takes no small amount of creative ingenuity and coding wizardry to allow for all those possibilities, and that would only be magnified by the presence of another player, or a whole set of other players. Think of titles like System Shockor Prey, for instance, and imagine how injecting another player into these games—which already encourage folks to bend the rules—might completely turn them on their heads, and potentially even break them. Imagine The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom with a second Link capable of doing all the things the first could already do. It sounds unwieldy, but the grandfather of the immersive sim thinks this is the logical next step for the genre. I think he’s probably right.
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In an interview with Game Developer, Warren Spector, the acclaimed developer credited with the creation of the immersive sim and landmark titles in the genre like Deus Ex and System Shock, divulged some details about one of his studio’s upcoming games, Thick as Thieves, which aims to marry immersive sim gameplay with a competitive multiplayer angle to break new ground in the genre. The upcoming immersive sim would drop two thieves into a setting not unlike that of Thief: The Dark Project and task them with traipsing through the dark city streets trying to outthief one another. One might embark on a job to steal some highly prized loot while the other waits in the shadows trying to screw them over. Players are also afforded the opportunity to work together, or interact in any number of ways. Spector shared that players can outright avoid each other if they choose to, follow one another, take each other out, or even set aside their momentary differences to work together towards a mutual goal.
Spector’s studio, OtherSide Entertainment, is also working on making the game’s world react to the actions that players take in it. Accordingly, a large part of the loop of a Thick as Thieves session will include gathering intel from around the city, which can be gained by bribing guards, for example. This kind of interactivity with one another in a live and reactive environment is the “next logical step” for the genre, according to Spector. “Part of the simulation is the human interactions in the world…It’s really a simulation that we drop a set of thieves into.” As part of its live-service offerings, Thick as Thieves will likely release new neighborhoods of the city over time as well as new thieves to promote different play styles, according to OtherSide’s CEO Paul Nerath.
OtherSide’s design philosophy surrounding Thick as Thieves emerged from a Dungeons & Dragonsgame that Spector played a number of years ago. The team is trying to successfully recreate the feeling Spector felt playing D&D, specifically the novelty of player-driven storytelling, by empowering players of Thick as Thieves to chart their own story in a live environment. It’s an approach that’s not unlike the kind of stuff Larian Studios received acclaim for in its previous title, Divinity: Original Sin II, which was praised for the open-endedness of its story and how much the world reacted to the player’s actions by the end of the journey.
The multiplayer angle of Thick as Thieves might also ring familiar to folks who’ve played Arkane’s Deathloop, which allowed players to invade one another’s games as a pivotal character in the narrative. Though Deathloop’s experimentation with this format yielded mixed results, perhaps due to how restrictive the mechanic was, there’s reason to believe that there’s potential in the approach by looking at other titles. Baldur’s Gate 3’s fully functional multiplayer in an otherwise-complicated game suggests as much.
There might be a lot of roadblocks standing in the way of such a clearly ambitious project, and I’m definitely reserving judgment until I see the game in action, but the concept is promising. Not to suggest that single-player immersive sims have bottomed out, because they absolutely haven’t, but one of the most exciting things about modern games is how much players have been able to use them to tell their own stories. A studio making games that explicitly pick up on that thread and seeing what exciting new things it can yield for the medium is a net positive, in my eyes.
Destiny 2 is back on the menu thanks to a brilliant new horde mode called Onslaught. As players return to the sci-fi shooter MMO in droves following the free Into The Light update that’s been showering them with loot, a lot of you are no doubt behind on the latest top gear. Fortunately, Apex Predator is arguably the best legendary rocket launcher in the game and it’s really straightforward to get, making it the perfect piece of loot to grind for ahead of The Final Shape.
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A reprised version of Apex Predator arrived in Destiny 2’s Last Wish raid last year and remains the gold standard in high-damage rocket launchers thanks to brand new perks like Reconstruction and Bait and Switch.
The first slowly increases reload speed over time while the second provides a damage boost shortly after firing all weapons back to back. Bipod for more ammo and Explosive Light for higher damage and blast radius after picking up an orb of light are also decent perks.
While some of Destiny 2’s best guns are a pain to get, Apex Predator isn’t one of them. It can drop from any encounter in the Last Wish raid, making it easy to hop in, get to the first checkpoint, and then fight the first boss, Kalli, over and over until you finally get Apex Predator to drop. Here’s a quick guide from Destiny 2 YouTuber Datto on how to complete that encounter:
If you’re lucky, you’ll get one with some version of the above perks earlier on. If not, however, don’t worry: Apex Predator is also craftable. Unlocking the craftable frame for Apex Predator requires collecting five deepsight versions of the weapon (also known as red borders). That can take a lot longer but it will also allow you to level the solar rocket launcher up and equip enhanced versions of its perks to boost its stats even more. Players can also take part in the recently added Riven Wishes quests to unlock weekly tokens that let them automatically earn one randomly rolled Apex Predator.
Now, perhaps you’re just getting back into Destiny 2 and really want a great rocket launcher people won’t make fun of you for but all of this sounds like way more work than you were counting on. Good news: Hothead is another decent rocket launcher and it doesn’t require any raiding. You can get one directly from Zavala in The Tower. All you need in order to buy it is to give him three Vanguard Engrams and 25,000 Glimmer.
Hopefully you land one with Auto-Loading Holster, Explosive Light, Demolitionist, Clown Cartridge, Field Prep, or Vorpal Weapon. Still, if you plan on going hard once Destiny 2’s climactic The Final Shape expansion arrives on June 4, it’s probably worth chasing Apex Predator. It’ll be a great day-one raid weapon and will no doubt serve you well in the expansion’s challenging main campaign.
Late last year, it was reported that Destiny 2’s upcoming expansion, The Final Shape, was getting delayed amidst struggles and layoffs at Bungie. The expansion, which was initially supposed to release by February, was then officially pushed back to June, leaving a tremendous gap of time between what was supposed to be the end of last year’s expansion and the eventual conclusion of Destiny 2’s ongoing saga. In light of this gap, Bungie has planned a pseudo-season of content, billed as Destiny 2: Into the Light, which is bringing new maps, modes, and weapons when it launches on April 9.
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Into the Light’s weapons are of particular note, as they make up what Bungie has dubbed the “BRAVE arsenal,” a collection of beloved older weapons that have been renewed and enhanced for the current state of the game. When they were first unveiled in the second of three planned developer streams earlier this week, however, they were met with both excitement and a hint of hesitation. The latter was due to the fact that Bungie announced it would release half of the BRAVE arsenal at launch, followed by a protracted weekly rollout for the other half of the armory. Per the initial plan, players who started playing Into the Light at launch wouldn’t be able to get their hands on the full arsenal for a full six weeks.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being in and around the Destiny 2 community for years now, it’s that you should do as little as possible to stand in the way of players and their loot. Fans of the game were none too pleased about the drip feed of weapons, especially considering how many of those weapons are fan favorites whose value deprecated over the years. Crucially, earlier access to the full arsenal would grant players more time to grind them in Into the Light’s new PvE Onslaught mode and earn special variants that are only available for a limited time. On Bungie’s originally intended schedule, this time would be cut dramatically short for the weapons releasing later. Countless players made their concerns and complaints known to Bungie, which despite its missteps is often open to feedback and fairly quick to respond to it, and the team is now (sort of) reversing course.
A thread on the Destiny 2 Team Twitter account (which shares insights and feedback directly from the developers) responded to fans’ concerns yesterday and announced that Bungie would be tweaking the planned weapon rollout. Rather than six weeks, the schedule has now been cut to three weeks, meaning the team will be dropping two weapons a week after launch. On this timeline, players will now be able to get the entire BRAVE arsenal by the end of April, rather than late May. Though it doesn’t completely eliminate the “timegating” that many players are calling out, the decision is largely a step in the right direction.
Further down the thread, Bungie outlines many of the ways in which it is making sure that players can get guaranteed god rolls and limited variants of the BRAVE arsenal. According to Bungie, “weapon drop rates during Destiny 2: Into the Light will be among our highest in Destiny’s history, even harkening back to the days of Season of Opulence,” ensuring that folks who spend any time playing Destiny 2 during the next few months will be able to get their hands on the much-desired weapons.
The entirety of the thread is worth a read if you’re curious about the various pathways to earn loot throughout Into the Light, but the message is clear: you will be able to get the BRAVE weapons no matter what.
Cheech and Chong, the comedy pair famous for their albums and movies from the 1970s and ‘80s, will be added to Call of Duty as part of the upcoming Season 3.
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An iconic stoner duo, Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin don’t seem like the kind of guys who would grab M4s and shoot people. The two created films and comedy routines focused on hippies, free love, drugs, and counterculture ideas. But the Activision machine demands more and so in they go, with the publisher confirming in a new blog post that the duo are heading to Call of Duty Warzone, Warzone Mobile, and Modern Warfare 3 sometime next month.
While we don’t yet know officially when the duo will be playable in Call of Duty’s various multiplayer offerings, other weed-inspired cosmetics and a “Blaze It Up” event seem to point toward Cheech and Chong arriving on or around April 20, aka 4/20.
Here’s how Activision, a very large and not-at-all hippie-like corporation, describes the two and the new cosmetic pack in the lengthy blog post:
Forged in the counterculture revolution, yet armed with drive and creative power, Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin turned cultural friction into comedic success. Facing systemic barriers with humor and cannabis, the duo exploited adversity to bring underground voices into the mainstream. Chong’s ingenuity and Marin’s heritage primed them for fame, while their comedic chemistry made them icons. Their albums and films exposed injustice with subversive joy, pioneering stoner comedy and becoming symbols of irreverent truth.
I know some will get a kick out of this, giggle about all the weed content, and not think much more about it all, and that’s fine. But I just keep getting sadder and sadder as I watch all of pop culture and entertainment slowly consume itself and we get closer and closer to a future where everything is one big grey blob owned by WarnerBros Disney Fox Universal Monsanto Sony Tencent Apple Microsoft.
Sure, it’s silly that I can watch Ariana Grande fight Goku and Michael Myers in Fortnite. But watching all art get chopped up and chucked into the never-ending maw that is the metaverse makes me really sad, man. I miss when stuff was distinct and unique.
Season 3 of Call of Duty Warzone, Warzone Mobile, and Modern Warfare III starts April 3 on all platforms.
This week, one of the biggest stories in gaming involved updates to an eight-year-old game. Yes, Stardew Valley developer ConcernedApe trickled out a series of details about the game’s latest patch that had fans hanging on every word in anticipation. We’ve got all the facts for you about this game-changing update, as well as a report on Overwatch 2‘s once-vaunted story missions, a story on the motivations behind an Apex Legends hack, and more.
The team behind the polarizing Halo TV series on Paramount+ really wants to change your mind in season two. In the lead up to the latest season’s debut, everyone from producer Kiki Wolfkill to new showrunner David Wiener and even Master Chief himself (Pablo Schreiber) have told us this is a new angle, not necessarily a “reset” but certainly a reevaluation. The team’s attempts to rejig the series based on the iconic first-person shooter franchise are obvious just moments into “Sanctuary,” the first episode in season two.
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Is it a good episode? I’d say yes. It’s even a good Halo adaptation, though a few of the first season’s problems linger. But overall, “Sanctuary” is exactly what it needs to be—a reintroduction to Master Chief and his team of Spartans, a reminder of the stakes, and a readjustment that looks to set the series on a stronger course. Let’s get into it.
Sangheili in the mist
The episode begins where it should: with the core four that is the Spartan Silver Team—consisting of Schreiber’s John-117, Kai-125 (Kate Kennedy), Riz-028 (Natasha Culzac), and Vannak-134—embedded in a “babysitting” mission on the planet Sanctuary, which is mid-evacuation. They’re pissy, because this is a mission for a team of lesser caliber than them, but they’re clearly being sidelined for a reason.
From the outset, it’s obvious that season two got a visual upgrade—an early shot of the Spartans camped on top of a mountain looks beautiful, from the striations in the sedimentary rock to the subtle sheen of their Mjolnir armor. It’s like the rework Halo Infinite’s visuals got after the first look at the campaign was met with middling reactions and the memeification of one especially Playdoh-looking brute fans nicknamed Craig.
As John and Riz run off to help the Marines diplomatically remove the planet’s citizens, we get a chance to see more of Vannak’s personality—he’s removed the emotional inhibitor chip implanted in the Spartans, which Kai and John did last season. Though he remains stoic, and acts affronted when Kai asks him how he feels, he admits that lately, he’s been enjoying watching nature documentaries in his spare time. Just a few moments later, as the team gets word of a missing Marine unit and John rushes off to investigate, Vannak compares Chief’s hesitancy to scale the rock face to the ease with which an ibex could pull off the same thing. If this season just featured Silver Team bantering while coming to terms with their personalities as full-grown adult supersoldiers, I’d give it five stars.
Image: Paramount+ / 343 Industries
Unlike the video-gamey action we saw in the first episode of season one (which featured first-person views and a HUD almost identical to the one in the Halo games), “Sanctuary” gives us straight-up, no chaser action from the jump—and it’s good. Chief, after scaling the cliff face with his grappling hook (he’s not an ibex), finds himself surrounded by soupy, dense fog. It’s blocking his comms, too, and the team is eager to extract everyone because some Covenant ships have been spotted in orbit.
John finds the Marines, and what follows is a horror-tinged, action-packed scene that hits all the right notes for live-action Halo. Some of the Marines are yanked into the dense fog by invisible attackers, who are revealed to be cloaked Elites. Kinetic, hand-to-hand combat between John and several of the big baddies ends with him victorious (of course), until we see several energy swords ignite on the horizon, followed by several more. It’s scary, and serves as a reminder that Halo is about humanity fighting against a previously unknown and terrifying alien force. It helps that the scene is set in fog, as the CGI reads much better than in the first season.
Chief gets back to the evac ship just in time for the team to leave before the Covenant glasses the planet, but he’s clearly shaken up by the ordeal. Not just because the Covenant attack was massive in scope, but because he maybe probably definitely saw Makee (the human-turned-Covenant-sympathizer and his former lover) in the mist before the alien soldiers retreated into it.
Master Chief unmasked, but not unbothered
Back on Reach, Silver Team is decompressing from the mission, which resulted in the deaths of all the Marines, save for the one John helped to the evac ship. During their debriefing, Captain Jacob Keyes (Danny Sapani) tells them that these kinds of attacks have been happening across the outer colonies, but he doesn’t seem interested in John’s questions and concerns. As his frustration grows, we get a mid-scene introduction to this season’s new bureaucratic bastard, James Ackerson (Joseph Morgan), who saunters in and takes a seat with the kind of dickish swagger Morgan has perfected (have you seen The Vampire Diaries, c’mon now). He’s here to replace Dr. Catherine Halsey (Natascha McElhone), who faked her own death last season to disappear after causing a bit of a coup.
Morgan is excellent casting here, an absolute scene-stealer, and a son-of-a-bitch to boot—any scene with him in it is better than half the ones from last season, and I’m sure that’ll be the same going forward. He grounds Silver Team, refusing to deploy them into battle until he can sign off on John’s mental status.
But then Halo starts to stumble again. Though I adore Bokeem Woodbine and love his portrayal of Spartan-turned-pirate Soren-066, his B-plot feels even more flimsy than last season. It’s hard to shift from the Spartans’ plight against the Covenant and Chief’s grappling with his emotions to really care about a man trying to maintain a hold on his pirate empire—even with all the beautiful things Woodbine does with Soren, from the brilliant way he plays guarded and hyper-aware, like a big cat on the open plains, to the softness clearly hiding behind that modded Mjolnir armor. I find my attention wandering whenever the episode swaps to Soren’s story, though it does seem that he is on a fast-track to getting wrapped up in the main plot—as he goes looking for Halsey to get the bounty on her head (and for a personal vendetta he won’t admit to) but is betrayed and kidnapped by unknown attackers.
Image: Paramount+ / 343 Industries
When Halo snaps back to John, I snap back to attention, whether it’s his back-and-forth with Ackerson about what happened on Sanctuary (Ackerson gaslights him) or the desperate moment in which he goes to, basically, a VR escort that he makes take the shape of Cortana (Jen Taylor). The nerds can continue arguing amongst themselves about whether or not John should take his mask off, because Schrieber is so good in this role, and a huge part of that is being able to see emotions play across his face.
The episode ends with John envisioning Makee (who did appear to die in the last episode of season one) warning him that he “should have stayed with [her]” while a flashback shows Kwan-Ha (Yerin Ha) telling a scary story to Soren’s son, Kessler (Tylan Bailey) in a shadowy cave. “It’s very old, the monster. Older than the light. Older than this rock. Older than your God,” she says. “It knows us. Inside and out. Smells our fear. Sees our secrets. It’s been here. All that time. Waiting.”
Covenant ships rise from the clouds of an unknown planet. Reach is coming.
The second episode of Halo season two is available now on Paramount+, review to come soon.
First introduced in 2022’s Modern Warfare II, Call of Duty currently features a nonlinear battle pass themed like a geographic map. While this allows players to choose what they want to unlock from the pass instead of going through a scripted path, it can be a little confusing to newcomers used to more traditional, linear sets of unlockables. What’s more, the “token” system that CoD uses to unlock stuff from the battle pass can be a little confusing as well, especially if you’re not sure whether you should just let the pass automatically unlock itself by spending tokens for you. – Claire Jackson Read More
According to new data, it appears that Valve likely made about $1 billion from digitalCounter-Strike 2 (previously Global Offensive) cases and keys in 2023. Yes, that’s billion with a “B.”
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In Valve’s immensely popular free-to-play tactical FPS Counter-Strike 2, players can get cases by playing and earning them through level drops, or purchase cases from Steam’s community market. These cases come in different variants and can contain extremely rare and valuable cosmetic items like weapon skins. But once you have a case, you don’t just open it. You also need a key, which must be purchased either directly from Steam or from other players on the community market. And because CS2 is very popular, this lootbox system is making Valve a lot of money.
As spotted by Dexerto, third-party website CS2 Case Tracker recently released its 2023 year in review for cases. And the biggest stat is the estimated $980,000,000 that Valve earned from players buying keys to open cases. Because keys are just digital items that unlock cases, it’s not like it costs Valve all that much to make them or maintain them so the company likely absorbed almost all of that staggering figure as profit.
But wait, that massive $980 million stat is only how much money Valve likely made from the sale of keys. It doesn’t factor in the 15% cut they get from every case sold on the community market. When you factor that in, it becomes very likely that Valve made well over $1 billion on cases and keys in 2023 alone.
That probably is one of the reasons Valve isn’t in a rush to make new video games. They don’t really need to. Instead, they can sit back and let Steam and Counter-Strike fund all their virtual reality experiments and other hardware projects. Honestly, it’s a miracle we ever got Half-Life: Alyx.
One last stat for the road: According to CS2 Case Tracker’s data the most popular day to open cases was Wednesday. Why? I don’t know. But there you go. You can now likely win a bar bet with this weird bit of trivia.
Halo Infinite is killing its seasonal model in 2024. Three years after its initial launch, the live-service multiplayer shooter is shifting toward more bite-sized, 20-level battle passes arriving every four to six weeks. Developer 343 industries announced the content change in its January update stream on January 19, along with several other major features, cosmetics, and more that are set to arrive on the FPS this year
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This guide will take you through everything you need to know about Halo Infinite in 2024—and it’s all looking rather exciting.
Halo Infinite in 2024: Goodbye Seasons, hello Operations
343 Industries didn’t mince words regarding the future of Halo Infinite’s content releases. As community director Brian Jarrard said during the stream, “we’re shifting away from seasons.” Seasons would arrive every few months, usually with some kind of theme and 100-tiers of unlockables through the battle pass. Instead, you can now look forward to regular “Operations,” starting with “Spirit of Fire” on January 30. Each Operation will have 20 levels of rewards to chew through, so while they’re not called “seasons” any more, things should still feel somewhat similar.
Operation Spirit of Fire isn’t the only thing arriving on January 30, however. You can look forward to the following additions once this update arrives:
Mark IV armor core (free for all players)
The ability to swap shoulders across different armor cores
A new 4v4 arena map named “Illusion”
Get hyped for Halo Infinite’s new map, “Illusion”
The new map, “Illusion” will have a symmetrical layout, making it great for competitive play as it ensures more even starts for each team. There’s even a super-narrow corridor running straight through the center with an uninterrupted sightline between opposing enemy bases, which will likely be a magnet for some serious carnage. If you’ve ever played Husky Raid, which has teams of Spartans face off against one another in a simple corridor, you know how deadly hallways can get in Halo. There’s also a lot of variable elevation from what we saw in the stream.
This new map is looking really promising and should be an excellent addition to the map rotation across various playlists.
Gif: 343 Industries / Kotaku
But that’s not all! Remember that corridor running straight through the map? Well, if you step in there, you go invisible. Objective based games like capture the flag or even king of the hill ought to see some interesting plays with a stealthy option like that so readily available.
The possibility that future maps might contain interesting augmentations like readily accessible invisibility or unique power weapons sounds like a welcome change from the usual rollout of standard arena maps that recycle the same guns and traversal methods.
Halo Infinite is leaning into nostalgia
Though there have been a few variations on Halo’s iconic assault rifle in Infinite, the stock assault rifle is reminiscent of the one that appeared in 2010’s Halo Reach. Joining this will be a new skin for the assault rifle that makes it look just like the assault rifle from Halo Combat Evolved, the game that started it all. As it’s just a skin, it won’t come with any change in stats (sorry, no 60-round magazine). The skin will be a part of the paid version of the January 30 operation.
Screenshot: 343 Industries / Kotaku
And the new Mark IV armor core, which is from the 2009 RTS spinoff Halo Wars, will also drop as a free cosmetic for all players.
Finally, in what seems like a cosmetic element pulled from the new “Illusion” map, there’s a square-shaped overshield that looks straight out of Halo Combat Evolved. It’s little things like this which help sell Halo as a cohesive world—and given the amount of stylistic changes the series has gone through, these unifying features are more than welcome.
Forge and playlist updates are on the way
If you’re into Forge creations, there’s some other fun headed your way on January 30, including Covenant-themed items in a nod to the series’ main antagonists and lovers of all things purple. Extra color customization options will also be available on January 30, which will add even more color options to choose from across the wide variety of in-game objects in Forge. Finally, “script brains,” which is a fancy term for code that lets complex objects t behave in unique ways, can be saved to game modes and used on multiple maps—previously script brains were inherently tied to a specific map.
Screenshot: 343 Industries / Kotaku
There’re also Flood-themed items coming to Forge, as well. Based on Halo’s undead enemy faction, these assets look particularly gnarly. Brian Jarrard referred to them as “moist” on stream. You’re welcome.
Finally, Big Team Battle will get three community maps added into the rotation in February, as well as refreshes to Husky Raid, Squad Battle, and Firefight. But most importantly, a new way of selecting matches is expected to arrive sometime in 2024 that is similar to Halo: The Master Chief Collection’s “Match Composer,” which lets you search across broad categories like player count, game type, and more (instead of mode-specific playlists).If you’re sick of playlists locking you into the same game modes over and over again, this should be a great way to customize what games you want to play. It works wonderfully in The Master Chief Collection.
If you’re looking to get some more time in with Halo Infinite, 2024 is shaping up to be a very good year for the iconic shooter franchise.
Call of Duty: Warzone and Modern Warfare III’s Season 1 Reloaded update launched midday on January 17—and almost immediately broke both FPS titles. The Reloaded update promised anti-cheat improvements, adjustments to the Zombies mode, new cosmetics, new multiplayer maps, and more, but the launch was plagued by server issues and visual glitches. In the time since launch, the dev team has deployed multiple fixes to right the ship, even appearing to work overnight into the wee hours of the morning on Thursday, January 18.
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Historically, ‘Reloaded’ updates come in the middle of Call of Duty seasons as a way to keep the game fresh between massive seasonal changes and adjustments. Notably, this is the first Reloaded update for Modern Warfare III, which launched back in November of last year (confusingly, every time a new Call of Duty title drops, the season count starts all over again, though the updates have remained tied to the free-to-play Warzone battle royale since Modern Warfare II). The update promised a massive new anti-cheat measure that automatically shut downs the Call of Duty PC application if aim assist is detected, MWIII ranked play, a new Rio-based map, an Operator based on The Boys TV series, new game modes, and much more.
Unfortunately, from the moment the Season 1 Reloaded update launched, players began reporting serious issues across both Warzone and MWIII. Streamer fifakill shared a clip on X/Twitter of the game glitching just under half an hour after the Reloaded launch, writing “If you try to go to ‘create a class’ in the menu your game will bug and you’ll have to restart. If you try to hit loadout in game this happens.” He also shared a clip showing a strange dent in the topography of the Urzikstan map, which was definitely not intentional. MWIII Ranked was delayed, some weapon attachments were broken, challenge progress was bugged, interacting with in-game loot crates was freezing the game, and more. Call of Duty site CharlieIntel called it “the worst Call of Duty update of all time” on X/Twitter.
In the face of the litany of issues, the dev teams (Raven Software, which works on Warzone, and Sledgehammer Games, which works on MWIII) have been rolling out fixes as soon as they’re ready to go rather than in one massive patch, so that nearly 24 hours after launch, many of the major problems have been fixed. Unfortunately, it also seems like the dev teams had to work overnight to ensure this, as some of the updates were shared as early/late as 3:40 a.m. ET. “I don’t think I can recall seeing updates going out in the middle of the night. Ggs,” wrote one commenter. While it’s great to see the dev teams responding swiftly to issues, I don’t think overnight work is ever worth a “gg.” Work/life balance is much more important than bugged loot crates, IMO.
Kotaku reached out to Activision for details on how/when the dev teams were working on fixes, but did not receive a comment in time for publication.
Updating live-service games like Warzone involves a ton of moving parts, and sometimes one little change can render the entire car undriveable. Luckily, if you’re a Call of Duty player, it seems that Reloaded is in a much better state just 24 hours after launch.
