Cyberpunk 2077’s highly acclaimed and massive expansion, Phantom Liberty, almost feels like its own game. That’s probably because the developers behind the expansion spent over $60 million on developingPhantom Liberty and $21 million on marketing it, bringing the total cost of producing the DLC to about half of what it cost to develop the entire Cyberpunk 2077 base game. And Cyberpunk’s costs rise even more when you factor in the fortune CD Projekt Red spent just plugging up the original release’s worst problems after its disastrous launch.
Phantom Liberty Is Undoing One Key Thing That Cyberpunk Got Right
On October 5, during an investor’s presentation, CDPR revealed the total budget for Phantom Liberty. Its costs were split between zł275 million on “direct production expenditures” and another zł95 million on “marketing campaign costs.” If we do some converting, that equals out to just about $63 million and $21 million in USD, respectively, or roughly $84 million total.
No matter how you slice it, spending nearly $85 million on developing and marketing a single expansion is wild and a sign of just how expensive game development is these days. It’s also a great example of how big, expensive games aren’t allowed to be flops.
Cyberpunk 2077 had to be a beloved hit, no matter the cost
Another interesting number revealed during the presentation is that CDPR spent zł178 million or about $40 million USD on bringing the game to next-gen consoles and building the sweeping 2.0 update. Add that number to the above Phantom Liberty figures and you could feasibly claim CDPR spent almost $125 million on fixing Cyberpunk 2077’s imageand saving its reputation.
However, based on how well Cyberpunk 2077 and its new expansion are selling after the update—CDPR claims there was a “surge” of sales following update 2.0—the company is likely going to wind up making a lot of money off the game. CDPR pointed out during the investor presentation that it is “confident” that the DLC and its main game will be “big sellers” for a long time, pointing toward the continued sales of The Witcher 3 and its DLC years after launch.
With the development of the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel starting and news of a live-action spin-off in the works, it makes sense that CDPR would be willing to invest so much money into making sure Cyberpunk 2077’s legacy amounted to more than a failed launch and bad console ports. It needed the game to be a huge hit with millions of fans. And it got there, even if it cost a lot of money in the end.
Call of Duty’s collaborations this year have cast a wide net, ranging from putting rapper Nicki Minaj in as a playable character to adding cosmetics that are based on the Diablo series. Next month, the series is leaning into all things spooky and hellish, and that includes a tribute to Doom, the landmark 1993 first-person shooter. The Doom bundle, available on October 9 for Warzone and Modern Warfare II, includes a shotgun and chainsaw stylized to look like they did in the original game, and the visual effect is pretty cool.
Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty DLC Probably Won’t Change V’s Fate
If you equip the gun or melee weapon, your character wields it like the space marine hero of the original game did, complete with a lower framerate that looks pretty distinct compared to the rest of Warzone. It’s nostalgic for fans of the original Doom, but it doesn’t seem to actually get in the way of the functionality of the shotgun or chainsaw, even when the game runs at 60FPS. Your character’s animations stutter a little bit when using either weapon, but it’s a pretty faithful recreation of how Doom looked 30 years ago. It rules.
The weapons are definitely the standout, but the Doom bundle comes with a few other homages to the series, as well. The full bundle includes the following:
DOOM Weapon Charm
Cacodemon & Slayer Stickers
DOOM Loading Screen
Super Shotgun Weapon Blueprint
Chainsaw Melee Blueprint
Doomguy Gunscreen
Call of Duty isn’t the only game paying tribute to the original Doom these days. Cyberpunk 2077added a mini-game in the Phantom Liberty expansion based on shooters of the time starring Keanu Reeves’ Johnny Silverhand. Even with so many games paying tribute to the 1993 classic, it’s always a good idea to revisit the OG whenever you can, as it’s pretty foundational to the first-person shooter genre. If you do decide to play it, though, maybe play it on something simple like a PC or console, rather than one of the weirder devices people have ported the game to over the years. Like a tractor or potato-powered calculator.
Doom is still a very good first-person shooter, even if it’s nearly 30 years old. But that first, world-changing chapter did lack something that its predecessor, Wolfenstein 3D, had plenty of—Nazi killin’. Thankfully a new total conversion mod for Doom, called Venturous,has fixed this and in the process created a whole Indiana Jones-inspired game.
Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty DLC Probably Won’t Change V’s Fate
Released all the way back in 1993, the original Doom from id Software was a big step forward for video game technology and also helped popularize the first-person shooter genre. Even today, three decades later, people are still playing and modding Doomand all of its sequels. So it’s not shocking that in 2023 someone has spent a lot of time on a brand-new total conversion mod for the original Doom that turns the game into a Nazi killin’ adventure that sees you spanning the globe as you look for the lost city of Atlantis.
Venturous, developed by PixelFox, came out earlier this month but in the last week has become more popular as folks have discovered this rad adventure-themed GZDoom mod. I just came across it today and ended up getting distracted for about an hour playing it instead of doing my job and writing about it.
Pagb666 / id Software
What immediately stood out to me about Venturous is how heavy guns feel. Even the starting pistol is no peashooter and can take down rooms of Nazis in a few seconds. I also like how the mod plays around with darkness, especially in the first level. You have to use a torch to see in some areas. And you can only hold the torch while using the pistol, which has limited ammo, forcing you to sometimes fight in the dark if you run out of handgun bullets. However, you can also toss the torch to light up areas and make combat easier in these dark hallways. Or you can even chuck the flaming torch at enemies and set them on fire.
The mod has seven maps split across three areas with each map featuring new weapons and enemies. I especially love the MP40 SMG as it sounds menacing and does a lot of damage very quickly. The new lever action shotgun is also just as good and dangerous as any shotgun found in official id Software shooters.
Developer PixelFox—who had only created two maps before this massive project—explained that they made this mod because they wanted to play an “Indiana Jones-style adventure” in a retro shooter engine. So after a year of learning how to create something like a total conversion mod pack, PixelFox has finished Venturous.
You can download and check out Venturous yourself for free. Just a heads up before you hop in: You’ll need to download and install GZDoom and get that all set up first, and this particular total conversion requires the data file from the original Doom, not Doom II. But once you have that sorted, you’ll be able to enjoy this mod and three decades’ worth of other cool stuff, too.
Unlike Panam, Judy, and Kerry, River is the one companion you have to go out of your way to meet. Finding the Night City cop and helping him sort through a local mystery that weaves in and out of his family life makes for one of the most interesting breaks in Cyberpunk 2077’s usual action. Expect a little combat and chatter, but also light adventure game mechanics and some pretty horrifying Night City lore.
This questline does, however, unmask Cyberpunk 2077’s weird, inconsistent framing of cops and law enforcement, even weaponizing the ACAB saying in a particularly tacky lift that I’m not wild about. But if nothing else, these quests offer, for your inspection, a layer of the game’s inherent worldview that’s worth examining and dissecting.
Cyberpunk 2077 players have discovered a new arcade cab hidden in an abandoned church just outside Night City. This new arcade machine, added as part of Cyberpunk 2077’s free 2.0 update, lets you play a Doom-like retro shooter starring Keanu Reeves’ character, Johnny Silverhand.
Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty DLC Probably Won’t Change V’s Fate
Cyberpunk 2077’s 2.0 update and its massive Phantom Liberty expansion have added a lot of new content and features to the already-huge first-person RPG. But who cares about that stuff? (Editor’s note: A lot of people, actually.) Personally, I’m more excited to see that even in the horrible dystopian future of Cyberpunk 2077 people are still making and playing Doom clones. Some things never change, I guess.
To play this new arcade machine, you’ll need to go into the badlands outside Night City and head south to find a lone, abandoned church just north of a protein farm, which is also a fast-travel point. So if you’ve already unlocked the farm for fast travel, feel free to zip over to save yourself a drive into the badlands.
Regardless of how you get there, enter the church, and on the right you’ll find an Arasaka Tower 3D playable arcade machine.
Arasaka Tower 3D is very clearly an homage to classic id Software shooters like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. You play long-dead rockerboy Johnny Silverhand fresh off his historic bombing of one of the world’s most powerful megacorps’ headquarters as he tries to escape the tower, blasting numerous guards as he ambles—surprisingly slowly—toward freedom. Aside from the lack of speed the gameplay looks surprisingly retro, including the fact that you can’t look up or down, as was the case in many classic ‘90s shooters. The full game is about 10 minutes long or so and includes five levels complete with secret doors.
Do you think people in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe have modded Arasaka Tower 3D to death and got it running on ATMs and other weird devices, like how Doom is playable on just about anything in our world today? I hope so. I hope some nerds have made it fully open-source at this point and created whole new levels for it, too.
I guess once you’re done playing Araska Tower 3D you can go and play the rest of Cyberpunk 2077, including the new expansion. I hear it’s like Doom but you can look up and down now. Wild stuff!
The next batch of cross-over operators was just announced for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and Warzone, and it includes none other than Diablo IV’s Succubi queen Lilith and fallen archangel Inarius. Plus a bunch of other horror stars like Spawn and Evil Dead’s Ash Williams. No doubt it will be another bloodbath.
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Activision revealed the season 6 operators on Thursday alongside teases for other horror-themed content, including the return of The Haunting event in October. The seasonal update goes live on Septmebr 27 and will even include a Doom-themed bundle complete with a chainsaw. Al Simmons will be one of the new operators alongside a host of Spawn-related skins, including a couple for the superhero himself as well as Creepy Clown and Violator.
Lilith, Diablo IV’s main antagonist, and Inarius, the hooded asshole, will be separate purchases added to the shop, joined by Skeletor (He-Man), Ash Williams (Evil Dead 2), and Alucard (Hellsing). I can’t wait to see how they play in the Call of Duty sandbox alongside rapper Nicki Minaj, NBA star Kevin Durant, and the Burger King guy. The upcoming event should make the time go a little faster until Modern Warfare 3drops on November 10.
For those who might not be aware, Call of Duty has been going fullblown Fortnite for quite a while now, mixing things up with wild cross-overs from across the pop culture landscape. In July it was characters from Amazon Prime superhero dramedy, The Boys, with Temp V abilities like Homelander’s red eye lasers torching every player in sight.
Some have bemoaned the silliness of it all for undermining the “very-serious” war shooter. Others enjoy the changing party costumes, if not always the seasonal grinds and prices that come with them. The weapons at least, like the Doom bundle, will carry over into Modern Warfare 3.
It’s beautiful when video games break. It can also be incredibly fun for players, and a nightmare for developers in charge of making sure everything keeps humming along without issue. Over the weekend, Destiny 2 players discovered a wonderful glitch that let them craft god-like weapons and tear through challenging end-game missions with ease. Days later, Bungie is still trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
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Destiny 2 is a sci-fi MMO shooter built around collecting rare, magical guns and using them to complete cosmic gauntlets with ever-increasing efficiency and grace. This “grind” can at times feel like running on a treadmill, and Bungie spends a ton of time and resources trying to calibrate the variations in speed and incline to make it challenging and rewarding rather than tedious. Balancing the game’s hundreds of weapons is a big part of that, with minute changes to perk descriptions or numerical values leaving huge marks on the overall shape and trajectory of the experience.
Destiny 2’s bizarre weapon crafting glitch
On September 15, a new crafting glitch started making the rounds on social media and various Destiny 2 subreddits. It effectively allows players to create a new weapon with any set of perks they want by slowing down the game and swapping screens quickly. On PC, players put the framerate down to 30fps to increase the window of time to pull off the exploit, while console owners initiated massive file installs in the background to create a similar amount of lag. The result was the ability to create bows that fire grenades and auto rifles that shoot shotgun shells, each with mixes of some of the most powerful perks from standard legendary ones like Chill Clip to unique Exotic perks from guns like the Dead Messenger grenade launcher and Osteo Striga submachine gun.
These broken builds quickly started proliferating in various modes. In dungeons and raids it allowed players to clear encounters and demolish bosses in record time. In competitive PvP like Trials of Osiris, however, it gave players incredibly unfair advantages, and made it easy to essentially glitch your way into some of Destiny 2’s most coveted accomplishments—like flawlessly going through an entire Trials run (without losing). Many in the community assumed Bungie would roll back the game to remove the glitch and anything players had gained from using it. Instead, the studio gave players its blessing to have fun while it worked on a fix.
“We’re aware of an issue that allows specific weapon perks to be crafted into other legendary weapons and are investigating a fix, which will result in these weapons being reset in the future,” the studio announced on Twitter on September 15. “We currently don’t have any plans to disable Trials of Osiris due to this issue.”
How Bungie is fixing the Destiny 2 weapon-crafting bug
Instead of banning players who gained in-game rewards or achievements using the exploit, Bungie revealed the next day that it would work on deploying two fixes. The first would be a server-side update to disable players from using any crafted weapons. The second would reset the “illegal” weapons back to their defaults.
“This is a complex issue, and as a result of testing, our original timeline for a server-side fix has been extended,” Bungie tweeted on September 17. It disabled the Osteo Striga, Revision Zero, Dead Man’s Tale, Dead Messenger, Vexcalibur, and Exotic class glaives, but over 72 hours later is still working on the second half of the fix to bring everything back online. “Please refrain from asking your local Destiny 2 triage developers how their weekend was,” Joe Blackburn, the game’s director, joked on Monday.
Bungie even leaned into the chaos with a Ted Lasso TikTok meme encouraging everyone to go ahead and “live.” In response, the top comment reads, “The biggest glitch in Destiny’s history and Bungie is letting us have…..fun?”
Word of the loot party clearly spread, because Destiny 2’s concurrent player spiked over the weekend on Steam. Where it had been peeking around 80,000 in the last few weeks, it cracked 100,000, a number usually reserved for seasonal updates. While the glitch has likely sent the team into crisis mode and no doubt ruined several developers’ weekends, the unexpected bonanza has also been a bright spot for a game that’s been caught in a bit of a malaise as its pivotal The Final Shape expansion arrives ahead of Destiny 2’s 10-year anniversary. The integrity of the game and its loot chase may have been fundamentally undermined, but at least for the moment anyway, players had a blast.
Ubisoft’s upcoming Call of Duty-like first-person online shooter, XDefiant, doesn’t have a release date yet, and now we know why. According to Ubisoft, the free-to-play arena FPS failed an important first-party certification test in August, delaying the entire launch process.
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First announced in 2021 as Tom Clancy’s XDefiant, it mixes various Ubisoft franchises like Ghost Recon, Watch Dogs, and Far Cry into a single, shared-universe online shooter. Earlier this year, I played a few hours of the game’s beta and walked away excited to play more thanks to fast, responsive combat that felt similar to the gunplay found in the Xbox 360 era of Call of Duty. However, after that test, XDefiant failed an important regulatory step in the process of bringing a game to consoles, and now Ubisoft can’t say when players will get a chance to play the online FPS.
On September 11, Ubisoft’s Executive Game Director Mark Rubin announced the failed test in a surprisingly open and transparent blog post. As explained by Rubin, games aren’t just released onto consoles and platforms without any checks. Companies like Sony and Microsoft test every game released for their machines to make sure they function properly and don’t break anything. To be clear, these certification and compliance checks aren’t looking at how well a game performs or if it has buggy cutscenes or audio. It’s just meant to make sure the game follows the platform’s rules, doesn’t brick your machine, and works with each vendor’s various built-in features, like friend lists and trophies.
According to Rubin, Ubisoft began the certification process at the end of July and got its first results back in August. XDefiant didn’t pass.
Ubisoft
“We realized then that we had more work related to compliance than we had anticipated,” said Rubin. “If it had passed, then we would have been able to ship at the end of [August]. But it didn’t and so we have spent the last 3-4 weeks fixing those issues and getting ready to do another submission.”
Rubin says the game is currently in the part of the process that involves the devs finalizing their submission build and expects it to be sent back for certification “in a little less than two weeks.” If that build passes certification with no issues, then Rubin suggests XDefiant could be released in September. However, he was clear that this might not happen, and the shooter could partially fail this new round of testing and get a “conditional pass.” In that scenario, which Rubin says is likely, the game would need a day-one patch to reach final compliance with the console makers. That would take extra work and time, pushing the game’s final release date into October.
Why Ubisoft is telling fans about the failed test
So why are Ubisoft and Rubin being so open and transparent about what is often kept behind closed doors? To be clear, XDefiant isn’t some weird outlier. Plenty of games fail “cert” and have to get resubmitted, we just don’t hear about it as delays like that are built into their timeframes for release.
According to Rubin, being open like this is by design, as he and the team have avoided the “typical route” most games follow during development, citing how they have let players hop online and play the shooter long before it was finished, calling the betas “real tests” and not marketing events.
“So, when it comes to when we will release, the real answer is ‘as soon as we can,’” wrote Rubin. “And we will continue to update you with more info when we have it.”
To conclude, we set out since the concept of this game to be more transparent with our community and to listen to our players and act on their feedback. We’ve even shown that we will add features in the middle of development based on player requests. Map Voting which is in now and an S&D-like mode that is coming later are two examples of this. We want this to be your game!
Call of Duty fans’ passions run hot when it comes to the series’ multiplayer maps, which have been the topic of discussion and controversy since United Offensive, the 2004 expansion pack that added multiplayer to the original Call of Duty. Maps are so integral to the Call of Duty experience, so important to each new game’s success, that favorites often get spruced-up and re-released—the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, for instance, is bringing back every single map from 2009 smash Modern Warfare 2.
Some maps in Call of Duty’s extensive multiplayer offerings are thoroughly mid (Quarry) or downright awful (Piccadilly, honey, I’m sorry), but many CoD maps represent the absolute best in video game level design, with distinct movement lanes, great sightlines, and beautiful visuals. These maps are the GOATs, the standouts, the reminders that the franchise is so popular for a reason, and today I’ve tried to pick the 10 best of the bunch.
A lot of the maps on my list are on the smaller end, as smaller maps tend to highlight the best features of CoD’s multiplayer mechanics and gunplay. And many of them are also “three-lane” maps, which describe setups that offer three different directions for players to take from their spawn points, which are often divided by buildings or obstacles that nearly cut them off from one another, but don’t completely isolate them.
You’ll also find that these maps are all from older Call of Duty games—that’s because I believe more recent titles (like Modern Warfare 2019 and Vanguard) have larger, more visually complicated maps that don’t play to the series’ strengths. CoD is at its best when it’s a little frenetic, a little chaotic, and a ton of fun—and running through maps that have myriad sightlines and far too many directions to get attacked from is only fun in Warzone, not multiplayer.
Ready? Here are the 10 best Call of Duty maps of all time, in no particular order.
After 18 years, David Vonderhaar, the studio design director at Treyarch, announced he’s leaving Activision after shipping eight Call of Duty games since 2004.
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Vonderhaar made the announcement on his personal LinkedIn account, where he confirmed he’s moved on to a new project at a different studio but didn’t go into specifics in his post. He also thanked his former coworkers at Treyarch and the Call of Duty fans that have played the studio’s games over the years.
Today I am sharing that I have left Activision and Treyarch after an incredible 18 years and 8 Call of Duty games.
To my co-workers at Treyarch, I am immensely grateful for the time we invested working to improve our craft, never sitting on successes, and always wondering how to improve what we design and how we produce it.
Thank you to the Call of Duty community for your passion and enthusiasm. That energy has often fueled our determination as a studio and individuals. I will always be grateful for the opportunity to interact with so many of you directly online and in person. This energy will always be a massive part of me.
I am staying in the games industry, working on an undisclosed project I can’t discuss yet, but I am excited about a rare and unique opportunity. I’ll update you as soon as possible.
Vonderhaar’s Call of Duty portfolio is synonymous with the Black Ops series, which has been part of the military shooter’s rotating stable of sub-franchises since the first one launched in 2010. The most recent entry was 2020’s Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.
Ever since John Wick and The Wire actor Lance Reddick suddenly and unexpectedly passed away earlier this year, Destiny 2 fans have been wondering what would become of his iconic character, Commander Zavala. Today, Bungie announced that veteran actor Keith David, beloved for his video game work in Halo and Mass Effect, will take over in 2024’s The Final Shape expansion.
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“Lance’s iconic voice led us through the most intense moments in Destiny’s history and his impact on our Guardians, our community, and Bungie as a whole will never be forgotten,” Bungie announced on August 10. “Keith David, a prolific actor on the stage and in television, film, and games, will assume the English language voice of Zavala in The Final Shape and beyond. Separately, Lance’s existing lines in-game will remain untouched for the upcoming release.”
David’s appeared in a ton of movies, including The Thing, Platoon, and Nope. But he also has a long history of voice acting in games where he’s best known for his performances as the Arbiter in Halo 2, and Captain David Anderson in Mass Effect. “I am honored to continue the great work of Lance Reddick as Zavala. Lance captured the character’s sense of integrity so wonderfully,” he said in a press release. “It is my intention to continue that work.”
“One of the great qualities of Zavala that really attracts me is his integrity…and his sense of family,” said David. “And I thought Lance [Reddick] captured that wonderfully. And it is my intention to continue that work and continue to bring that kind of integrity to the role.”
Reddick was beloved within the Destiny 2 community not only as a great talent but also a massive fan of the game himself. He was found to have been playing shortly before his untimely death, and players flocked to the sci-fi MMO’s main social hub to pay their respects in the days that followed. Bungie has promised that The Final Shape, where David will first make his debut as the new voice of Zavala, will be the climactic expansion campaign and raid players have been waiting for as the live-service loot shooter finishes up its first big story arc, a conclusion 10 years in the making.
Update 08/10/2023 6:29 p.m. ET: Added video commentary from David.
Team Fortress 2 has now been with us for over 15 years, and for some reason, developer Valve just decided to jack the maximum number of players who can join a server at once up to 100. Valve doesn’t actually recommend you play with that many people, and warns that the game doesn’t properly support that many players, but that hasn’t stopped the community from creating chaotic 100-player TF2 servers.
Stray Almost Feels Like A Modern Valve Game
Valve’s online class-based FPS,Team Fortress 2, isn’t a spring chicken by any definition, having first been released back in 2007 for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. And while the console versions have been long since abandoned, the PC version on Steam has continued to receive hundreds of tiny, medium-sized, and significantly large updates, all of which have been free. The latest update to the classic shooter has provided gamers with an option to set the world on fire and invite 99 other TF2 players into a single server.
On July 25, Valve released an update for Team Fortress 2. The patch notes reveal a pretty lengthy list of tweaks and changes, but the one change that caught the attention of many was the quiet announcement that the game’s maximum player count had increased from 32 to 100.
Valve: Don’t make 100-player servers, Gamers: LOL
Also in the patch notes? A warning from Valve letting players know that this new max player count is totally “unsupported” and “not recommended.” In other words, Valve isn’t going to spend time fixing bugs introduced by playing with 99 other folks. If shit breaks, that’s just how it goes. You were warned, after all.
Freddy210hill / Valve
As you can probably guess, even with that warning, many players have already fired up servers with the new max player count, and the chaos that followed was incredible. Watching people play on 100-player servers feels like looking into an alternate dimension in which Valve teamed up with Sega to put out a Total War: Team Fortress 2 spin-off.
Unsurprisingly, playing Team Fortress 2 with this many players causes some issues. Players are reporting lots of lag, poor framerates, broken models, collision problems, and even some instances when the game just crashes completely. That’s not surprising considering this is a 16-year-old game that was never designed to handle 75 people, let alone 100.
But also, I love this so much. Good for you TF2! There is something very impressive about 100 people in a single TF2 match. It’s like an old car making a long road trip after years without a tune-up. It might stall a few times, overheat, or even lock up, but it gets the job done. Brings a tear to your eye, really. It’s also a perfect time to let people create high-player-count servers, as Team Fortress 2 is setting player count records on Steam following the last big update.
I started regularly playing competitive online games in 2007, with the launch of Halo 3. Back then, participating in in-game voice chat was harrowing for a 17-year-old girl whose voice betrayed her gender and her youth. I was subjected to such frequent and horrific hostility (rape threats, misogynistic remarks, sexually inappropriate comments, you name it) that I eventually started screaming back, a behavior my parents still bring up today. And yet, voice chat is essential in competitive online games, especially modern ones like Call of Duty: Warzone, Apex Legends, Fortnite, Valorant, and Overwatch.
All of these popular games require extensive amounts of teamwork to succeed, which is bolstered by being able to chat with your teammates. But in-game voice chat remains a scary, toxic place—especially for women.
Unfortunately, despite efforts from developers to crack down on toxicity in voice and text chat, it still feels, at times, like I’m stuck in the same world as that 17-year-old girl just trying to compete in peace. And I’m not alone in that feeling. I spoke to several women about their voice chat experiences, as well as reps from some of today’s biggest online games, to get a better understanding of the current landscape.
A 17-year-old me playing Halo 3 circa 2007.Photo: Alyssa Mercante / Kotaku
Voice-chatting as a woman
Competitive online games are intense, but doubly so if you’re identifiable as outside the industry’s so-called core playerbase for the last 35 years: white, straight, and male. “Marginalized users, especially women, non-binary people, and trans folks, are more likely to experience harassment in voice and video chats,” game researcher PS Berge told Kotaku’s Ashley Bardhan last year.
The moment a woman or woman-presenting person speaks in voice chat, they run the risk of being identified as an “other” and thus deserving of ridicule, ire, or sexual harassment. For many, that fear of being othered and how it could (and often does) lead to harassment directly affects their willingness to speak in competitive game settings.
“I usually wait for someone else to speak first so I know what the vibe will be,” video game level designer Nat Clayton, who regularly plays Apex Legends, told Kotaku via email. “Though I feel more comfortable chatting in Apex than I do going back to older PC games like Team Fortress 2 or Counter-Strike—games where the expectation of bigotry seems absolutely set in stone, where you feel like you cannot turn on voice chat without immediately experiencing a flood of slurs.” Both Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike came out in the early 2000s and still attract an older, male-leaning playerbase, many of whom can be hostile to women.
This problem has been long-standing, but companies are doing more to dissuade people from being toxic or abusive in in-game voice and text chat now than they were 10 years ago—though it often doesn’t feel like it.
Microsoft recently announced a new voice reporting feature that will let players save and submit a clip of someone violating the Xbox Community Standards, which a team will then review to determine the next course of action. “Reactive voice reporting on Xbox is designed to be quick and easy to use with minimal impact to gameplay,” reads the press release announcing the new feature. This means that Xbox players can report toxic voice chat no matter what game they’re playing, which adds another layer of protection on top of the ones set up by individual developers.
Those protections include ones laid out In the uber-popular battle royale game Fortnite. If a player is found in violation of Epic’s community rules (which have guidelines against hate speech, inappropriate content, harassment, and discrimination), they could lose access to in-game voice chat—a newer approach to punishment that the company introduced in 2022—or have their account permanently banned. Epic wouldn’t share specific numbers on bans, but did tell Kotaku that its team is “planning to introduce a new feature for voice chat soon.”
But Fortnite “[relies] on player reports to address violations of our voice and text chats,” which places the onus squarely on those who are on the receiving end of such violations. And for games that don’t record or store voice and text chat, reports can feel especially useless. When asked if she has reported people in Apex Legends, Clatyon replied, “Many, and often, but unfortunately the current Apex reporting system doesn’t monitor/record voice interactions and so doesn’t take action based on voice chat.”
Image: Microsoft
New ways games are combatting toxicity
Companies don’t always rely on players, though. Activision, Blizzard, and Riot Games all use a mix of automation and human moderation for multiplayer modes in Call of Duty, Overwatch 2,and Valorant.
As detailed in an official Call of Duty blog post from last year, an automated filtering system flags inappropriate gamertags, while human moderation of text chat helps identify bad actors. The aforementioned post (which is from September 13, 2022) boasts 500,000 accounts banned and 300,000 renamed thanks to enforcement and anti-toxicity teams. We don’t have more recent data from the Call of Duty publisher.
After the launch of Overwatch 2, Blizzard announced its Defense Matrix Initiative which includes a “machine-learning algorithms to transcribe and identify disruptive voice chat in-game.” Though Blizzard did say what it considers “disruptive voice chat” or what the algorithms entail, the company did say the team is “happy with the results of this new tech” and has plans to deploy it to more regions and in more languages.
But women still often find themselves deploying strategies to deal with the toxicity that isn’t caught by these systems. Anna, a UI/UX researcher who regularly plays competitive games like Overwatch 2 and CS:GO, told Kotaku over email that she also waits to see what the vibe of the chat is before diving in. She’s “more inclined to speak up if I hear another woman too because there’s potentially more safety in numbers then,” she explained. Others, myself included, play solely with friends or offer to group up with women they meet in matches to avoid encountering agitated players.
Toxicity persists, which is likely why companies continue to try new methods and approaches. When Kotaku reached out to Riot Games for details on its efforts combating disruptive behavior and toxicity in Valorant, executive producer Anna Donlon said via email that:
In addition to the player reporting tools, automatic detection system, and our Muted Words List, we’re currently beta testing our voice moderation system in North America, enabling Riot to record and evaluate in-game voice comms. Riot’s fully-dedicated Central Player Dynamics team is leveraging brand new moderation technology, training multi-language models to collect and record evidence-based violations of our behavioral policies.
While companies struggle to find a solution to an admittedly complicated problem, some women have been discouraged from trying altogether. Felicia, a PhD candidate at the University of Montana and full-time content creator, told Kotaku that she used to say hello at the start of every game (she mainly plays Fortnite and Apex Legends) but that willingness eventually “turned into waiting to speak, then not speaking at all.” The shift came as a direct result of her experience using Overwatch’s in-game voice chat function. “It got so bad I’d only talk in Xbox parties,” she said of the feature which allows you to group up and voice chat with friends.
Jessica Wells, group editor at Network N Media, speaks up in her CS:GO matches despite the threat of toxicity. “I say hello, give information, and see how it goes. If my team is toxic to me, I’ll either mute individuals or mute all using the command,” she said via email. “I used to fight it—and I mean really fight the toxicity online—but I find toxicity breeds more toxicity and the game goes to shit as a result.”
Image: Blizzard
Toxicity persists and worsens in highly competitive games
If you’ve played ranked matches in games like Overwatch or Valorant, you’ve experienced this direct correlation: Verbal harassment increases when competition levels increase. And no one experiences this phenomenon more acutely than women.
Alice, a former Grandmaster Overwatch1 player, told Kotaku over email that her experience with the original game “changed how [she] interacted with online multiplayer.” She was ranked higher than her friends, so would have to queue for competitive matches alone, and said she’d get “the usual ‘go make me a sandwich’” remarks or requests to “let your boyfriend back on” in more than half of her games.
Overwatch is a curious case when it comes to harassment and toxicity. Despite a cartoonish visual design that suggests a more approachable game and a diverse cast of characters, competition is at the heart of the team shooter’s identity. Over time, patches and updates have focused on balancing competitive play, and its popular esports league encourages highly competitive gameplay. Overwatch players who regularly watch Overwatch League may be more prone to “backseating” (telling other players what to do) or be more judgmental of the way people play certain characters. And the more extreme ire is often directed towards women—especially those who play support or the few playing Overwatch at a professional level.
“Sometimes someone else on the team would stick up for me, but most of the time the other players would stay silent or join in.” Alice’s experience may not be surprising when you consider the one study that tracked over 20,000 players and found that men played more aggressively when their opponents or their characters were women. “Through our research, we found that women did perform better when they actively concealed their gender identities in online video games,” the study said.
Me, likely playing Call of Duty: Black Ops or Modern Warfare III circa 2011.Photo: Alyssa Mercante / Kotaku
Because of her consistently negative experiences in Overwatch voice chat, Alice plays Valorant now—just not ranked. She chooses not to play at a higher level because competitive Valorant (which also has its own, uber popular esports league) is a cesspool of toxic masculinity.
Anna, who regularly plays Riot Games’ 5v5 hero shooter, told Kotaku over email that she’s “encountered increasing amounts of toxicity in Valorant…which can include anything from sexual assault threats, threats of general violence or death threats, to social media stalking.” Male players have told her to “get on [her] knees and beg for gun drops, and proceed to use their character to teabag or simulate a blowjob.”
Anna says she changed her Riot ID to a “common household object” to try and prevent harassment from male players.
Stacy, a full-time streamer, told Kotaku via email that the harassment has bled into the real world, too. “Threats of DDOS, stalking, assault, murder and other crimes – a lot of which ended up on my live stream…I’ve had people ask me for my personal connections and accounts like Snapchat…as well as my phone number, and have even had people use my PSN account name to find me on social media like Instagram for non-gaming related reasons. [They even found] my email address to try to either harass me, send me unsolicited photos or attempt to bully and berate me beyond the console.”
The future of competitive games for women
It’s clear that even with automated moderation systems, extensive reporting options, and loud declarations against toxicity from publishers and developers, women who play competitive online shooters still regularly experience harassment.
“I have reported people in the past and it was an easy report button but with all the toxicity I encountered it made it feel like reporting them wouldn’t make a difference,” Felicia said. “I stopped reporting for the most part unless they come into my stream or in my comment section being toxic.”
Overwatch has a feature that will show you a pop-up upon login if the team has taken action against someone you’ve reported, but many players rarely (if ever) see that login. I’ve only ever seen it once.
Jessica finds that reporting players in CS:GO is virtually useless. “I can’t think of a single case where it felt like Valve directly took action,” she said.
Image: Alpha Intel / Respawn
The same can be said for Valorant, which has a similar reporting feature as Overwatch. “I think I’ve only seen [the report was actioned on] screen three or four times since it was implemented,” Anna said.
And though the process of reporting is simple, it requires women to retread traumatic territory. “With the particularly nasty people, it always feels gross having to recount the words someone used to explain how they’d like to assault me, or typing (partly censored) slurs that I’d never dream of using myself, but it feels like if my report is not water-tight, it won’t get dealt with,” said Anna.
Unfortunately, eliminating toxic game chat, like so many other problematic things in the gaming industry, requires changing the perspectives of people perpetuating the problem. We need a holistic approach, not one that’s centered solely on automated monitoring or the reports of victims.
“I think more than anything it is a cultural problem,” said Alice. “FPS games are ‘for boys’ and until we change that perception, I think people will continue to be rude in them, especially when there are minimal consequences.”
Game studios can and should center more women and marginalized creators, players, and developers in marketing materials, streams, and esports events—and they should make it explicitly clear that a toxic culture has no place in their games. Instead of shying away from providing details on banned or otherwise penalized players as a result of toxic behavior, studios should wear them like a badge of honor, presenting them proudly as a way of saying “you have no place here.”
FPS games like Splatoon 3 are a great example of how competitive games can be less toxic. Nintendo’s ink-based shooter has minimal communication tools and a diverse character creator that allows for some more gender fluidity, allowing it to feel less like a “boys game.” The perceived casual nature of a Switch player stands in stark contrast to the console warriors and PC try-hards, which begs the question: Can competitive games exist without toxicity?
Nat Clayton has some suggestions: “You need to visibly and publicly create a culture where this kind of behavior isn’t tolerated, to make your community aware that being a hateful wee shit to other players has consequences.”
Update 07/24/23 at 12:00 p.m. EST: The original story included a Jessica Wells quote about Overwatch, but Wells was referring to CS:GO’s reporting system, which is calledOverwatch. The quote has been adjusted to reflect that.
“I just realized Bungie took inspiration from my piece for this week’s cutscene”, they tweeted last week. “Certainly took me by surprise when I watched the cutscene”. As you can see below, the similarities between Faylona’s piece (green, on the right) and the art in Bungie’s trailer (black, left) show that the word “inspiration” is being used very generously:
“We discovered that an external vendor that helped to create this cutscene mistakenly used this art as a reference, assuming it was official Bungie artwork. We are currently waiting to hear back from the artist to take the necessary steps to remedy this situation.”
“To be honest, I’m genuinely excited and happy that the piece I made 2 years ago—which, even back then, I fully acknowledged is based on the Destiny franchise—made it into the cutscene,” they said to PC Gamer in a statement. “It was totally unexpected and completely caught me by surprise. So much so that I wanted to make a shoutout about it.”
It’s official: Warzone Caldera, formerly known as the original Call of Duty: Warzone, is shutting down later this year so developers can focus on the battle royale’s sequel and players are angry. The announcement came in a Call of Duty blog post titled “An update on Call of Duty: Warzone Caldera” published on June 22.
“As of September 21, 2023, Call of Duty: Warzone Caldera will shut down, as our teams focus on future Call of Duty content including the current Warzone free-to-play experience,” the blog post reads. Warzone 2.0 launched in November 2022 as a completely separate experience from the original Warzone, which was tied to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and could only be played within that mainline game and launched back in March 2020.
For fans of the original battle royale reluctant to move over to Warzone 2.0 (which was tied to Modern Warfare II and offered a brand-new map, new modes, new gameplay, and major UI changes, though it had its own separate launcher), Activision offered them Caldera, where the original Warzone experienceand all its cosmetics would remain. Until now.
Conspiracy theories were swirling back in March of this year that suggested cheaters were being paid to keep people from playing Warzone 1 after streamers and other esports pros refused to make the swap over to the 2.0. And though the claims were unsubstantiated, there was a noticeable delay in players warming to the sequel. Now, however, after many changes and updates, Warzone 2.0 has a healthy player base—though there are still those who play and prefer the original.
But the announcement that Warzone Caldera will officially die this fall was met with some rather passionate responses from fans, as the responses to the tweet from the official Call of Duty account show. Several people pointed out that Blackout, a battle royale mode introduced in 2018’s Black Ops 4 and beloved by many, still has operating servers, but the original Warzone will not. Others pointed to all the cosmetics they purchased, while others were angry that the blog posts mentions work on Warzone: Mobile.
I myself haven’t gotten into Warzone 2.0 at all despite being a pretty die-hard original Warzone fan—and I haven’t really been playing Caldera either, as I miss the first battle royale map Verdansk too much. But considering I spent an ungodly amount of time and money getting some really sick skins for my Operators, I am very annoyed that all of them will go bye-bye. I had an ‘80s workout skin, a ‘90s grunge skin, a Ripley from Aliens-inspired skin, and even some footy uniforms.
Though I won’t be able to play with those skins in a battle royale ever again, the Call of Duty blog does note that “regarding purchased content in Warzone Caldera–from Modern Warfare,Black Ops Cold War, or Vanguard–that will continue to be accessible in those specific games.”
I suppose this was always bound to happen, and maybe this is a sign that I should give Warzone 2.0 a proper chance. But it’s an important reminder that live service games can appear, rise to prominence, and fade out in the blink of an eye.
Activision has pulled a Call of Duty skin based on the hugely-popular Nickmercs after he made an anti-LGBTQ comment on Twitter.
A Foe From The Next Team Ninja Game Is Giving Me Sekiro PTSD
Earlier this week broadcaster Chris Puckett tweeted about a local clash between “Pro-LGBT protestors” and bigots near his apartment, to which Nickmercs—referencing a popular rallying cry of the increasingly unhinged right wing media machine, which baselessly asserts that trans people and drag performers are somehow child abusers—replied “They should leave little children alone”.
Nickmercs was swiftly condemned. As this Dexerto roundup summarises, he was rightly rounded on by many notable members of the Call of Duty and wider esports community, including broadcaster Goldenboy, who said “I’m disappointed in you Nick. Teaching acceptance and tolerance for EVERYONE is a valuable life skill for all ages.”
Loopy, a coach at Vexed Gaming, had even stronger words, saying:
I will never work/watch a MFAM event again. I cannot in good conscience work for a bigot. I am a Marine and swore to uphold and protect the constitution which protects protests and demands equality for all.
“Peace and love” unless you’re gay or trans? What a loser.
Due to recent events, we have removed the “NICKMERCS Operator” bundle from the Modern Warfare II and Warzone store. We are focused on celebrating PRIDE with our employees and our community.
If you were wondering if Nickmercs ever apologised for his comment, that process went about as apologetically as you would expect:
A new glitch in Destiny 2’s Season of the Deep makes it easy to farm infinite Legendary Shards through unlimited Exotic drops. It’s super simple and easy and probably won’t be around for long.
A Foe From The Next Team Ninja Game Is Giving Me Sekiro PTSD
I came upon the exploit via theDestiny streamer Leopard, though it’s been spreading like wildfire throughout the community because of how fast and generous it is. Season of the Deep added new class-based Exotic quests for existing gear that’s been reworked over at Ikora Rey in the Tower. One simple trick allows you to take the single Exotic reward and multiply it indefinitely. Here’s how it works:
Go to Ikora and pick one of the Exotic quests.
Get to step four
Go back and speak to her but don’t collect the reward
Instead back out and open your quest log and abandon the quest
Now talk to Ikora again and pick up as many copies of the Exotic as you want
You’ll want to make sure the inventory slot for the relevant armor piece is empty, otherwise space will fill up quickly. But once you get going you can just start deleting all of the extra Exotic pieces and then grab more without ever leaving Ikora’s quest screen. Each broken-down Exotic will net you seven Gunsmith reputation, 500 Glimmer, and five Legendary Shards.
Shards are used for focusing Engrams, buying other resources like upgrade modules, and grabbing new weapons and gear from various vendors. They’re easy to run low on, especially if you’re a new player. And you never know which way the wind is going to turn in Destiny 2’s economy, so it’s always a good time to stock up.
Bungie likes to patch these exploits quickly, however, so who knows how long this one will remain viable. For now it’s nice to have something to fill the Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom duplication glitch-sized hole in my heart after that game’s most recent update.
Update 5/26/2023 7:05 p.m. ET: And it’s already gone. Bummer.
Rarely do I watch a trailer for a video game more than once. Yet with Bungie’s Marathon reboot/sequel/whatever, I’ve found myself looping its slick and stylish announcement trailer. It’s not just because the trailer slaps, but because Bungie is teasing looks to be one of the coolest shooters released in years.
On March 24, shortly before a Spider-Man 2 trailer would set off a whole new “puddlegate,” Bungie (Halo, Destiny) revealed its next big first-person shooter: Marathon. If that name sounds familiar, that’s because this is actually Bungie returning to one of its oldest franchises, the Mac-only shooter trilogy, Marathon. You can read more about those old games, their beloved lore, and how it connects to Halo and modern extraction shooters in this piece from our very own Claire Jackson.
However, I’m not here to talk about Marathon’s lore, history, fandom, or anything involving the Bungie mythos. No, instead, I want to just gush for a few paragraphs about how damn refreshing and awesome this game’s look and announcement trailer are compared to most other shooters and games out there today. And I don’t seem to be alone in loving this trailer as it has hit 18 million views on YouTube already.
PlayStation / Bungie
Marathon has one of the best game trailers of 2023
Anyway, the running character breaks out of the darker tunnels and enters an incredibly bright world where we see that they are also rocking vibrant colors, including a bright, neon-pink helmet. The music builds as the camera zooms in closer and closer to the runner. Things feel tense as the music builds into a digital mess and then BAM! That’s all she wrote for this runner as they are sniped from afar by a slick-looking and white-as-paper android. Our runner, now dead, is seen collapsing in slow motion into what appears to be a milk-like substance, their blue-inky blood mixing and swirling into the water around their corpse. As the robot sniper rips out something from the dead runner the music builds again, glitches out, and BAM! Bungie reveals that this vibrant trailer was for a new Marathon.
“Vibrant” is really the keyword here. Everything in this trailer pops in a way that I’ve not seen in most other shooters released in recent years. A lot of modern shooters seem focused on realism, which can look lovely, but also a bit drab. The popular color scheme we typically see on shooters also starts to make shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield blend together. Or they all look a bit too much like Fortnite, which while colorful, isn’t visually distinct anymore. I enjoy a lot of these modern shooters regardless. But with Marathon, things are different.
Actually, it’s beyond colorful. It’s almost garish with all of its pinks, yellows, greens, and blues clashing in nearly every frame. Yet it’s all balanced by hyper-realistic lighting, materials, textures, and models. The color palettes are incredible to look at and a few of us at Kotaku couldn’t stop gawking at the trailer.
Marathon’s new art style is fresh and bold
Bungie calls Marathon’sart style “graphic realism,” as mentioned in a recent behind-the-scenes video about the rebooted shooter. Bungie dev Emily Katske further elaborates on the game’s art, saying it’s “bold, colorful [and] stylized.”
The game’s director, Christopher Barret, in the same video, also says that the team wanted the art to be “beautiful” and “vibrant”, “mysterious” and “familiar,” “but also, strange.”
Bungie
Normally, I’d roll my eyes a bit at this kind of talk, but after seeing the trailer and concept art of this new take on Marathon, yeah, I get it. Balance is key, though. Bungie has to carefully balance when and where to “dial [things] up to 11” and when to pull back a bit so folks don’t get overwhelmed while trying to play.
It’s a risky option, taking a beloved franchise and reworking it into something bold. It’s also quite a departure from the original Marathon games, which featured more subdued or grimy textures and Doom-like sprites. I’ve already spotted some longtime Marathon fans upset about this new, more colorful, and stylized direction. And until we actually play the final game, we won’t know if any of this will actually work out. Was this a big, expensive mistake? Or a huge gamble that lands perfectly? No idea!
But Marathon’s trailer, concept art, and overall style has me more excited than I expected to play this upcoming extraction shooter. I’m not even a fan of that genre of online FPS, but I want to see more of Marathon so badly that I’ll give it a shot. As long as I can waddle around Bungie’s new incredible-looking world for a few minutes before getting killed, I’ll be happy to play and explore Marathon whenever it comes out.
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