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Tag: Sledgehammer Games

  • How To Explain This Whole Dr Disrespect Situation To The Normal People In Your Life

    How To Explain This Whole Dr Disrespect Situation To The Normal People In Your Life

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    Over the last few days, people have been talking a lot about Guy “Dr. Disrespect” Beahm, the once-popular Twitch streamer who was permanently banned from the site in 2020 for mysterious reasons, shifted to YouTube, and who has now come under fire for reportedly sending inappropriate text messages to a minor. These recent allegations have led to the streamer losing fans and sponsors, and forced him to issue a lengthy (and somewhat vague) statement about what he did.

    Meet The Filmmaker Behind This Legend of Zelda Speedrunning Documentary

    Given that you’re reading this article here on Kotaku.com, you probably know what’s happening, have kept up with the news, and understand what a Twitch streamer is and how popular they can be in 2024.

    But for the rest of the world, including some of your friends, family, and spouses, this all might seem incomprehensible. So, this guide should help you provide fairly concise, easy-to-understand answers for all the Dr Disrespect questions you might be receiving from people close to you.

    “Who is Dr Disrespect?”

    Herschel Guy Beahm is a 42-year-old video game streamer who previously worked with Call of Duty developer Sledgehammer Games from 2011 to 2015.

    He began streaming full-time after leaving the studio and became famous for his “toxic gamer” character known as Dr Disrespect. As “the doc,” he would often yell a lot, insulting other players, and act overly confident while playing battle royale titles like PUBG and H1Z1.

    “Wait… so he was famous for yelling a lot and playing video games?”

    Well, when you put it like that it does sound really silly, but yes, that’s basically what turned Dr Disrespect into a popular streamer with millions of subscribers and fans around the world. He was also pretty good at shooters like Call of Duty, which helped build his audience, too.

    “Why does he uh…look like that?”

    It’s part of his schtick. Dr Disrespect is supposed to be a parody of toxic gamers mixed together with an action-hero persona, hence the headphones, sunglasses, ‘80s mullet, and red tactical vest. However, depending on who you ask, Dr Disrespect might have essentially become the very thing he parodied as he became more comfortable spreading conspiracy theories and insulting people’s accents.

    “I saw something about a bathroom incident?”

    In June 2019, Dr Disrespect was invited to E3—a large gaming trade show—and streamed live from the convention floor. At one point, he entered a men’s restroom which had other people in it, and had his camera operator follow him in and stream his bathroom break.

    He was temporarily banned from Twitch for doing this, but this ended up making him even more famous. I don’t really have an answer for that part, sorry.

    “I’m confused, is this a character or really him?”

    That’s a great question! It’s hard to say. While it’s clear that he’s still putting on a wig and fake mustache and all the other parts of the costume, it’s become increasingly difficult to figure out where Dr Disrespect ends and Beahm begins.

    We are jumping ahead a bit here, but in a recent statement about all the shit going on, he decided to write it in character. I’m not sure if this was a choice he made on purpose or just the latest example of his inability to separate reality from his popular creation.

    “Did he really cheat on his wife?”

    According to the man himself in 2017, he was indeed “unfaithful” to his wife.

    “I’m going to take some time off to focus on stupid fuckin’ mistakes,” Beahm said, “I’m going to take time off to focus on my family.” This message, it should be noted, was delivered on video out of character.

    “So why did he get banned from Twitch in 2020?”

    Well, for a long time very few people knew what actually happened. On June 26, Dr Disrespect was permanently banned from Twitch. The streamer had 4 million subscribers and was one of the biggest names on the platform. But that didn’t matter. At the time, Dr Disrespect said he didn’t know why he had been banned.

    In 2021 he filed a lawsuit against Twitch after claiming he learned why he was banned. That lawsuit was settled in 2022. “I have resolved my legal dispute with Twitch,” Dr Disrespect said in a message posted to Twitter. “No party admits to any wrongdoing.” That was all we knew until this past weekend.

    “But now we do know because…”

    Cody Conners, a former higher-up at Twitch, broke his silence on June 21, claiming on Twitter that Dr Disrespect got banned because he “got caught sexting a minor” and trying to “meet up with her at TwitchCon.” As you might expect, this led to a firestorm online and reporters began digging and talking to sources, with The Verge corroborating Conners’ claim on June 23 after speaking to another Twitch employee with information about the situation.

    “Okay, so what has he said about all this?”

    At first, Dr Disrespect seemed to be trying to move on and hoping all this would blow over. However, as more reports came in and more people began talking about the situation, it became clear this wasn’t going away.

    On June 24, the game studio he had helped create cut ties with him after it investigated the claims itself. The news of him being removed from the studio was reportedly sent to him during an Elden Ring stream on Monday, and in a clip near the end of that stream you can see him reacting negatively to a message on his phone.

    On June 25, Dr Disrespect finally broke his silence and issued a lengthy statement on Twitter confirming that in 2017 he’d exchanged text messages with a minor that sometimes “leaned too much in the direction of being inappropriate, but nothing more.”

    “Were there real intentions behind these messages, the answer is absolutely not,” added the streamer. He said he didn’t send any pictures or videos and he claimed no criminal charges were ever filed.

    “Now what happens?”

    Well, I’m not sure! It’s possible that YouTube, where Dr Disrespect currently streams, might remove the content creator from the platform. It’s also possible he’s able to stick around. During his most recent stream, he claimed to be taking an “extended vacation” and said he was burned out by streaming and being online.

    So perhaps he just vanishes into the ether. Or he comes roaring back in a few weeks on a new platform. For now, we don’t know. We’ll just have to wait to find out.

    “Well, what about other streamers and content creators? They aren’t controversial right?”

    lol. Just don’t worry about it and enjoy your life living in peaceful bliss if you don’t know what a Ninja or a Nickmercs is. You are truly blessed.

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    Zack Zwiezen

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  • This Was The Best Xbox Showcase In Years (And The Hardest To Root For)

    This Was The Best Xbox Showcase In Years (And The Hardest To Root For)

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    A Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 campaign that looks like Mission: Impossible by way of an Adam Curtis documentary, a Gears of War prequel that shows fans E-Day and the birth of the series’ iconic “Lancer” chainsaw gun, and a trailer that showed Perfect Dark isn’t just still alive, it’s potentially thriving. Microsoft’s 2024 summer showcase was the best that Xbox has looked going back to the Xbox One years. But it’s come at a huge price, and one the company doesn’t seem ready to acknowledge publicly.

    Thank You, PS Plus, For Making My Backlog Even Bigger

    Insiders had been hyping the showcase for days, in part due to the fact that its full list of reveals and announcements had already leaked to some in the media and beyond. Fans have been burned before, expecting Xbox to finally turn a corner only to have the football pulled once again and realize the platform is still in another one of its inescapable “rebuilding” years. The proof is always in the games themselves, and how successful they are can only really be determined once they get into players’ hands. For now, though, the showcase delivered.

    There was over sixty minutes of games big and small, offering everything from zombie survival to nostalgic teen hangout, punctuated by massive first-party franchises and third-party teases. If you own an Xbox Series X/S there will be plenty to play this year and next. Xbox game studios head Matt Booty’s perennial promise for a steady cadence of quarterly Xbox games worth showing up for might finally come true. The only thing missing from the event was any accountability for what, and who, Microsoft has sacrificed to get here.

    It’s been just over a month since the company announced it’s shutting down three studios and reshuffling a fourth. One of the casualties, Tango Gameworks, and its 2023 hit Hi-Fi Rush, seemed to symbolize the best of Xbox in the Game Pass era: a hyper-stylized passion project from a newer team that wowed critics and won awards and wouldn’t have been possible without the “let a thousand flowers bloom” strategy behind the platform’s pivot to a Netflix-like subscription library. In a crushing reversal, however, the deep-pocketed tech giant cut the team, along with storied immersive sim makers Arkane Austin and others. According to internal comments from Booty and the head of parent company Zenimax, there just wasn’t enough bandwidth for one of the three most valuable companies in the world to manage so many studios.

    The bad news and bullshit explanation might not have gone down like a lead balloon if Microsoft hadn’t announced mass layoffs just months earlier across several departments, including newly acquired Activision Blizzard. The cuts hit everyone from the Overwatch 2 team to Call of Duty makers Sledgehammer Games, and included the cancellation of Odyssey, a survival crafting fantasy game that might have become the first new franchise from Blizzard in nearly a decade. Microsoft spent $69 billion on the acquisition, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer toured the Activision Blizzard King offices shortly after the deal was finalized last fall, and then in early 2024 the mask came off.

    Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer blamed the heel turn on a combination of investor pressure and the stagnation of the console gaming market in interviews with Game File and Polygon. In other words: capitalism. But the complete closure of Tango Gameworks, originally founded by Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami to train a new generation of creatives, seemed especially capricious. The Xbox team didn’t mention the developers it’s laid off and their contributions in its remarks to a live audience ahead of the showcase today, or during the pre-recorded event itself. (Even after learning its fate, Arkane Austin worked hard to push out Redfall’s much-needed final update.)

    Instead, Spencer opened the showcase by promoting Black Ops 6 and the company’s desire to bring one of the most popular franchises to even more players through the power of a $17-a-month subscription. It maybe wasn’t surprising given the billions Microsoft paid to acquire the series, but the choice to open the show this way underscored the new reality of an Xbox brand that now needs to make a return worthy of all of those investments. “I haven’t been talking publicly about this, because right now is the time for us to focus on the team and the individuals,” Spencer told IGN later in the day, away from the hundreds of thousands of fans tunning into the showcase.

    He continued:

    It’s obviously a decision that’s very hard on them, and I want to make sure through severance and other things that we’re doing the right thing for the individuals on the team. It’s not about my PR, it’s not about Xbox PR. It’s about those teams. In the end, I’ve said over and over, I have to run a sustainable business inside the company and grow, and that means sometimes I have to make hard decisions that frankly are not decisions I love, but decisions that somebody needs to go make.

    The showcase, meanwhile, didn’t even clear the bar set days prior by Geoff Keighley at the Game Awards host’s own showcase. Xbox president Sarah Bond, who responded with corpo word salad when asked about studio closures last month, closed out the Xbox showcase by pointing to the future instead of dwelling on the recent past. “It’s our mission to make Xbox the best place to play, by including our own studios’ games on Game Pass at launch, by bringing your games into the future with our commitment to game preservation, by pushing the boundaries in our future hardware, and to empower you to play your games wherever you want on Xbox console, PC, and cloud,” she said. “This is what defines Xbox today and in the future, and we’re hard at work on the next generation.”

    It was a commitment aimed at reassuring fans still recovering from the shock of the brand’s recent pivots. But the future is built on the past, and every shiny new Xbox game now comes with the question of what will happen to the teams Microsoft has purchased or partnered with, once it no longer feels like they serve its bottom line.

    Update 6/9/2024 9:10 p.m. ET: Added comments from Spencer’s post-show interview with IGN.

     

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    Ethan Gach

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  • Call of Duty: Warzone Devs Worked Overnight To Fix Busted Update

    Call of Duty: Warzone Devs Worked Overnight To Fix Busted Update

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    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.

    This Modern Warfare 3 Gameplay Feature Spices Up A Weak Campaign

    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.

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    Alyssa Mercante

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  • Modern Warfare III Is Currently The Worst-Reviewed Call of Duty Ever

    Modern Warfare III Is Currently The Worst-Reviewed Call of Duty Ever

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    Image: Activision

    Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (no, not the 2011 shooter of the same name without the Roman numerals) just launched, and it’s had an interesting few days. On top of having what many are saying is one of the series’ worst campaigns and getting review-bombed by the public, Sledgehammer Games’ latest entry of Activision’s franchise is on track to be the series’ worst-reviewed game in its 20-year history.

    Why The Hot New Redfall Gameplay Trailer Left Us Feeling Cold

    As pointed out by VGC, Modern Warfare III is sitting at a middling 50 out of 100 on review aggregate site Metacritic, putting it a whopping 23 points below the average review score of 2021’s Call of Duty: Vanguard, which previously held the worst-reviewed title with a 73. Metacritic is based on average critic scores, and MWIII has 33 reviews as of this writing—given that the game is just a few days old , more reviews are likely. But the user score is an abysmal 1.5 on a scale from 1 to 10—some of which may be from review-bombing, as player reviews are likely dropping a 0 or 1 score to voice their grievances, but overall, the sentiment around Modern Warfare III is an all-time low for the series.

    Buy Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III: Amazon | Best Buy | GameStop

    Kotaku doesn’t score games in our reviews, but we do have Modern Warfare III campaign impressions, in which Claire Jackson called it “at best a net neutral experience that feels rushed, and a boring waste of charismatic characters at worst.” All of this comes after reports that Modern Warfare III’s development was rushed to get the game out in 2023 after alleged mixed messaging from management about the scope of the project.

    If you’re at all confused about what’s going on with Call of Duty’s Modern Warfare subseries because you thought Modern Warfare 3 came out a decade ago, check out this handy explainer.

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    Kenneth Shepard

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  • Report: Devs Worked Nights And Weekends To Rush Modern Warfare III Out

    Report: Devs Worked Nights And Weekends To Rush Modern Warfare III Out

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    Image: Activision

    Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III’s single-player campaign was panned by critics when it released early on November 2. Reviewers hit it with low scores and said it felt short, rushed, and incomplete. Now Bloomberg reports that the game was rushed out in half the time of a normal Call of Duty sequel, with devs working nights and weekends to meet Activision’s annualized sales goals.

    Why The Hot New Redfall Gameplay Trailer Left Us Feeling Cold

    According to Bloomberg, the game was originally pitched to Sledgehammer developers as an expansion to Modern Warfare II that would focus on missions based in Mexico instead of the series’ normal globetrotting set-pieces. In the summer of 2022, however, Activision executives apparently rebooted the project as a full-fledged sequel about the Modern Warfare II villain Vladimir Makarov. The company needed to fill the gap left by an apparent delay of Treyarch’s next Call of Duty game, and reportedly decided against simply taking a year off from the blockbuster’s annual release schedule.

    Read More: Modern Warfare III’s Campaign Mostly Sucks

    A spokesperson for Activision denied this, however. Sledgehammer Games studio head Aaron Halon told Bloomberg in an interview that the developers who thought Modern Warfare III had originally been planned as an expansion were simply confused because it was a “new type of direct sequel,” despite the PlayStation 5 version of the game appearing as DLC on the trophies menu and asking some players to insert the Modern Warfare II disc.

    But more than a dozen current and former Call of Duty developers told Bloomberg that Halon’s take “conflicted” with what they were initially told. Some of them also seemingly worked nights and weekends to try and get Modern Warfare III out on time, despite the game only having half the development time of a normal Call of Duty sequel. “They felt betrayed by the company because they were promised they wouldn’t have to go through another shortened timeline after the release of their previous game, Call of Duty: Vanguard, which was made under a similarly constrained development cycle,” Bloomberg reports.

    Call of Duty has made billions for Activision, but the series has a long and increasingly-well-documented track record of burning out its developers. One of the big questions facing the franchise now that Microsoft owns it (after recently closing its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard) is whether it will continue the seemingly unsustainable development cycles or let the blockbuster take a year off for the first time in decades.

     

                

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    Ethan Gach

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  • 18-Year Call of Duty Veteran Announces He’s Leaving Activision

    18-Year Call of Duty Veteran Announces He’s Leaving Activision

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    Image: Activision

    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.

    Long-Lost Halo Demo Comes To Life

    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.

    Earlier this week, Activision and Sledgehammer Games unveiled that the next Call of Duty game will be called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, not to be confused with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, as the new game is part of the rebooted Modern Warfare sub-series that began in 2019.

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    Kenneth Shepard

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