New Blood Interactive has been around for more than a decade—it's celebrating its 12 year anniversary, in fact—and is still going strong. Dusk, Gloomwood, Amid Evil, Fallen Aces, Ultrakill—it's got an enviable catalogue that continues to grow. But CEO Dave Oshry is still imagining how it might end.

By keeping the studio relatively small, letting everyone work remotely, and not putting all its eggs in a franchise basket and spitting out endless sequels, it's been able to keep doing its thing. And that's the only way Oshry wants it to work.

"If we couldn't be successful doing it this way, I wouldn't want to do it at all," he tells us. "Rather than scrambling to find publisher money or investor money, I'd rather just shut it down and be like, 'We tried, we did our best, we made some cool games, that was it.' And I still want to do that. People are like, 'What's the end look like?' And I'm like, 'In 20 years, we're done. I'm gonna say goodbye, shut it down. Thanks for playing our games. That was fun. I'm gonna go fishing now.'"

Should New Blood start to struggle, Oshry has no interest in selling it to keep it alive. "I'm never gonna sell it. I'm never gonna give it to anybody else. It'll be our time." He'll be content, he says, if people remember its games fondly. "I hope people remember us like their favourite game studios from the '90s or 2000s. Except I don't want us to have the shitty ending like a lot of those studios had, where they got acquired or they went out of business. I want us to have a happy ending. I want us to go out on our terms."

It's a promise that hits a lot harder these days, with so many studios getting gobbled up and then being tossed aside. As October came to a close, EA killed off BioWare after years of mismanagement. 30 years down the drain. Like countless studios that have been acquired by the likes of EA, Microsoft and Embracer, there was no happy ending.

Oshry describes the games industry as "a machine that requires product and labour, and that's not us". Instead, he prefers to think of New Blood as a band.

"Our games are our albums. We tour, we sell merchandise, and everybody plays their part. We're like an orchestra now, actually, more than a band. Because we got a lot of people, and a lot of musically inclined people. We're like the Trans-Siberian Orchestra at this point.

"Eventually the band's gonna get old, and we're gonna get tired, and we're gonna do our retirement tour, and we're gonna call it a day before we get sad. Before we're on stage and people are like, 'Ah, they're getting a little long in the tooth. They can't hit those high notes anymore.' So before that happens, I want to shut it down and enjoy my life."

Welcome back to a special election day edition of FOV 90, the only FPS column that insists American readers vote twice today—first on important videogame matters right here, then on crucial *gestures at everything else* matters at your designated polling place.

Today we return from a totally planned hiatus, during which the PC Gamer community settled both the best RTS unit and best horror games, to dispute an issue of far greater significance: The greatest FPS mode of all time. Round 2's matchups reflected an enthusiasm for classic team-based formats with a respectable turnout as well for modern arrivals like Battle Royale. I asked you to make some tough calls and you showed up.

Over 2,500 votes were cast across Round 2 matchups, and the results are in.

🥁drum roooooooooolllllllllllllll🥁

Round 2 Results

• Team Deathmatch (82%) wins over Battle Royale (18%)
• Conquest (63%) wins over Bomb Defusal (37%)
• Payload (77%) wins over Infection (23%)
• Capture the Flag (71%) wins over Attack & Defend (29%)

A decisive victory in each contest. Every mode I voted for came out on top, which I honestly didn't expect. Sure, TDM over Battle Royale makes sense, but an 82% majority tells me that the most popular shooter format of today has not usurped the classics among PC Gamer readers (same). But even so, this is where I expected Conquest (a chaotic fight over territory) to accept a humble defeat to Bomb Defusal (the gold standard of competitive PvP). I'm glad I was wrong!

Not as much comment sparring went down this time, but I would like to highlight one reader comment that got me thinking:

And here's how PC Gamer's staff reacted to the results:

But alas, it's time to bury our dead and move on. Round 3 is on!

The Bracket

Round 3 - Vote!

Read up on the matchups below and vote for your favorite. Round 3 voting closes on Sunday, November 8 at 11:59 PM PDT. The more votes we get, the more interesting the results, so tell your friends! Next week we'll be back to share the results and begin the FINALS.

Team Deathmatch vs Conquest

AKA: Team Slayer (Halo) // Warfare (Hell Let Loose)

Intimate team-based action, or large-scale territory control?

Payload or Capture The Flag?

AKA: It's always Payload and CTF, because they're perfect names

Two modes about escorting an object where the other team doesn't want it to go, but only one moves on.

Overwatch's skin distribution is, in one word, lopsided. With a roster of 54 heroes and counting it can be hard to ensure that every character gets their fair share of cosmetics as is, but when you add popularity into the mix it gets even harder.

As a free-to-play game, Overwatch makes the bulk of its money through cosmetics like bundles or standalone skins. Skins also take a good amount of time to prototype and create, so to ensure its efforts aren't wasted the team needs to pick heroes based on how many players will actually buy the end product.

"Every new piece of content that we introduce to the game, whether it's a hero or even a map, you know, means that the pool of everything that we've got, it is spread out a little bit," game director Aaron Keller says in a group interview (via Kotaku). This leaves room for two kinds of heroes to get regular skins. There's popular heroes like Ana, Genji, and Soldier 76 which are played by a large proportion of players and then there's the fan favourites who aren't just popular but have a dedicated playerbase who will consistently buy skins like Mercy, Kiriko, Juno, and Widowmaker.

However, Team 4 has, in recent years, made a clear effort to bulk up cosmetics for new heroes. "Constantly expanding our capacity" to create skins for characters like Anran, Freyja, and Vendetta who have all been included in recent skin collabs. And while the devs have been able to create more skins than those that just "support the actual bottom-line business", money still needs to be made.

It's kind of like a pay-it-forward system. By making cosmetics that will sell well, Team 4 are able to dedicate time and energy to heroes that won't yield as much of a monetary gain. "The place that you can see that most transparently is the Mythic skins that we release," Keller adds. "Each season we release two Mythic skins, and typically one of those is going to be for a hero that we think is actually going to really drive a lot of that support for the business. And then another one is going to be for a hero that typically hasn't gotten either a Mythic or a lot of other skins in the recent past."

I recognise that I'm probably in a fortunate position where my main, Ana, has always had a healthy amount of new and very cool cosmetics. But the point still stands that this is a business, so Team 4 needs to make responsible financial decisions for reasons that are at times out of their control.

"We recognize it's important to players," Keller says. "We want to be doing as much of it as we can, but we still always want to be doing it in a way that's also responsible, and [lets us] know that we can continue supporting this game going forward."

Nightdive has unveiled the first trailer for Thief: The Tarnished Mirror, a new official expansion to Thief coming with its imminent remaster. Most exciting of all: The Tarnished Mirror is being made by the team behind The Black Parade, a 2023 mod that was one of the most exciting things to happen to the series in 20 years.

The Tarnished Mirror consists of four new missions, and is meant "as a bridge between Thief: The Dark Project and Thief 2: The Metal Age," according to an accompanying press release. Similar to The Black Parade, these new levels will leverage improvements in technology to offer more sprawling, ambitious maps than '90s PCs could handle.

The scenes from the trailer are all very Thief, but similar to The Black Parade, there's immediately more verticality than in the 1997 original game. There are also glimpses at interiors that leverage familiar Thief assets to create weirder, more surprising spaces than I'm used to from the mainline games.

The press release also indicates that The Tarnished Mirror will embrace Thief's contested legacy of horror in a similar way to The Black Parade, and that's music to my ears. I've always been a Thief undead mission defender, and The Black Parade upped the ante⁠—it's one of the scariest games I've ever played.

All told, this news about the expansion has more than made up for my disappointment at there being no PC version of the remaster's big box special edition. I may not get my tchotchke fix here, but the Thief Remaster is shaping up to be something very special.

Preorders are opening up for physical editions of Nightdive's Thief Remaster, and at the high end, the studio is offering an homage to Thief's iconic original PC big box packaging in that shape we all know and love, the trapezoid. The only problem? Nightdive and partner Clear River Games are only offering it for Switch/Switch 2 and PS5.

Why does this matter?

It doesn't really, at least not as much as war and death and politics or whatever. But Thief's original '90s big box edition came in a jaunty little trapezoidal box unlike anything else on the market. It remains a visually striking, highly sought-after collector's item. It's fun, it's memorable, and it's a piece of PC gaming history. I've had to settle for my version of Thief Gold that came in a plain Jane regular box as a reissue.

It's not super surprising that Night Dive and Clear River eschewed a PC version of this physical release⁠—that's fairly common these days, even in boutique indie special editions. I had a similar "we're so back, it's so over" reaction when I saw that indie RPG heater Dread Delusion's limited physical edition had skipped PC.

But the hurt feels new all over again when it's a PC gaming icon like Thief, and a PC gaming phenomenon like the big box. I would have dropped a fat hundo on a physical PC version of Thief Remastered in a heartbeat⁠—it's why I live in an apartment and not a house.

And studios still do come out with physical editions of their PC games: My Baldur's Gate 3 big box has pride of place in my office. All told, it's just a slight bummer and frustration trying to drag down one of my most anticipated games. I'm still going to play the hell out of it when it comes out on December 3, though.

I'm rooting for GOG's proposal to bring back the big box. The company seems to be considering a boutique service where you can purchase physical versions of the games in your library, which sounds pretty rad to me.

As reported by Kotaku, a near-mythical canceled Valve game called F-Stop has been reconstructed from material contained in separate leaks. Direct access to the build seems a little shaky at the moment, but full playthroughs of the game, like this one by Meme Man? on YouTube, are starting to pop up online.

Most of F-Stop's assets came out in this August's Steam "teraleak," but the final pieces⁠—F-Stop's source code and mapsrc data⁠—were only just acquired by the Valve Cut Content Team Discord, which appears to have gone private amid all the newfound attention over F-Stop. With the Discord currently invite-only, you gotta know a guy (or know a guy who knows a guy) to play it yourself.

The Half-Life Wiki has the skinny on F-Stop's origins in the "Directed Design Experiments." Following the megahit launch of the Orange Box in 2007, Gabe Newell effectively shut Valve down for a three-month game jam that produced five prototypes, F-Stop among them.

It applied Team Fortress 2's cel-shaded art style to a vision of Aperture Science in its prime, all mid-century wood-paneled office optimism. F-Stop's central mechanic was a camera that could capture objects in the world, then place them elsewhere to solve puzzles. The excellent 2023 game Viewfinder would apply a similar concept to a full commercial release.

But while loved internally at Valve, F-Stop's playtests were apparently more tepid. The game was shelved, though elements of its worldbuilding would appear in Portal 2 and Aperture Desk Job. It's fun to recognize some of these early ideas in the F-Stop longplays: From the jump, we get a version of Cave Johnson (sadly sans-J.K. Simmons in prototype) talking to the player, as well as the first instance of Aperture Personality Cores as companions in the puzzling.

Given F-Stop's "road not taken" nature, particularly compared to the megathit Left 4 Dead and Portal 2 that would follow, I don't really mourn the fact that we never got to play its final version. It is, however, extremely cool that the prototype game is now preserved for posterity.

If you're a fan of first-person shooters and haven't played Selaco, you should. Built in the Doom engine and inspired by FEAR, Half-Life and System Shock, Selaco is a rollicking, dizzyingly ambitious sci-fi FPS where you battle a mercenary incursion of a vast, city-sized space station that's home to the last of humanity.

Launched into Steam early access in 2024, Selaco's first chapter alone is as long as some entire '90s shooters. Now, developer Altered Orbit Studios is preparing to release an update that will not only double the length of the game, but also introduce a wide array of new features and rework much of its existing design.

Described by Altered Orbit as "an absolute behemoth", Selaco: The Machines of War introduces the second of a planned three chapters to the FPS. Chapter two comprises 19 new campaign maps, which apparently amounts to "6-8 hours of additional content". Alongside further story elements and a voice for the protagonist, the chapter also introduces what sounds like a persistent enemy, in the form of "an unstoppable machine" that is "hunting you down."

Naturally, this second chapter also adds new weapons and enemies, with the former including a minigun and "a heavy machine gun that fires literal explosions". I don't know how that would work, but I'm keen to find out! Alongside your equipped arsenal, players will be able to use new deployable weapons like mini-turrets and sentinel drones, while the update also introduces a "heavy ordnance system" that lets you wield large, disposable weapons scattered across the battlefield, Gears of War-style.

As well as completely new stuff, Altered Orbit says the update will also enhance a lot of existing content. The FEAR inspired enemy AI, for example, has been "rewritten almost entirely from scratch" to facilitate smarter tactics and better decision making. The rewrite also introduces a new "rally" system and NPC area patrolling when not in combat—an addition designed to give players more agency in when and how fighting begins. Oh, and the entire first chapter has been given an overhaul that introduces "improved set pieces" and "new surprises".

And those are just the headline changes. Other improvements mentioned by Altered Orbit include a new lighting system, an overhauled particle system to make combat even more spectacular, improved navigation through Selaco's massive, mazey levels, new voice lines to make enemy communication even more lifelike, better controls, new music, and more. It almost sounds too good to be true, but I've played Chapter 1 and I know Altered Orbit can cook with rocket fuel, so none of this is beyond the studio's capability.

Selaco: The Machines of War arrives on November 13. The scale of the changes means that old saves will no longer be compatible. But if you don't fancy replaying the reworked first episode, you will be able to jump in at the outset of Chapter 2.

Id Software has tightened its relationship with fellow shooter specialists MachineGames according to studio co-director Marty Stratton, after Xbox laid off roughly half of the Doom developer's employees earlier this year.

Stratton was asked how the studio was doing following Xbox's massive job cuts at a recent press event for Doom: The Dark Ages' Revelations DLC (via IGN) and he was keen to assure everyone that things are hunky dory at the legendary FPS developer.

"We're doing great," Stratton explained. "Not to handwave the [layoffs] away … everybody knows we had about half of our studio exit as part of that. But there was a very deliberate effort to make sure that we were incredibly viable coming out of that across everything we do, across game development and [the] technology department."

As part of its response to those layoffs, id Software has apparently deepened its ties with MachineGames, developers of Wolfenstein: The New Order and, more recently, the excellent Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

"We're working more closely with MachineGames than ever," Stratton said. "We've always had a very close partnership with them, but I think we're at the point with technology development that both teams are incredibly talented and have incredibly talented engineers and we're really on an amazing path that had started pre-[layoffs]. We'd kicked this off earlier this year. We're really excited about that. We're both really, really bullish on what we have ahead.

Stratton's comments have led to speculation that the two developers may be cooperating on Wolfenstein 3, which MachineGames is rumoured to be working on. Id Software has just concluded active development of Doom: The Dark Ages following the expansions' release, so this is possible. What's interesting to me, however, is how Stratton repeatedly references technology.

The id Software layoffs heavily impact the developer's Frankfurt arm, including numerous designers of the formidable id-tech engine. This led to fears that id-tech was being shelved. Microsoft contradicted this, though further reports left the question open. But Stratton's comments lead me to believe we might be seeing a tech alignment between the two developers as a result of those Frankfurt layoffs.

While id Software built Doom: The Dark Ages on id-tech 8, MachineGames used a modified version of id-tech 7, called Motor, for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The fact that Stratton references both teams' "incredibly talented engineers" suggests to me that id Software is folding MachineGames' engine programmers directly into id-tech's ongoing development, with both teams working on the engine concurrently going forward. Assuming that id tech hasn't been canned outright, this approach would make sense given the expertise id Software lost from its Frankfurt arm.

Sadly, the layoffs that affected id Software were far from the last at Xbox. After cutting 1600 jobs in the summer, Xbox initiated a second wave of layoffs in September that also saw Obsidian and Bethesda merge and put Activision in charge of Halo. Further Xbox layoffs are planned leading up to January 2027, while Microsoft more broadly has offered a "voluntary exit offer" to over a quarter of its workforce.

In a new interview with VGC, FPS legend John Romero revealed how things were going at Romero Games, the studio he leads alongside his wife, veteran designer Brenda Romero. After its unannounced shooter project was canceled by Xbox last year, Romero Games managed to secure a new publisher, but there's a catch: The team is now only a tenth the size it was while funded by Xbox. Romero says they've rescoped to use the material they already had on a smaller, more focused game.

A Korea Herald report says the opening cinematic of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 will be edited to remove video clips of a real-world disaster in South Korea that left 160 people dead.

The Seoul Halloween crowd crush occurred in October 2022 during Halloween celebrations in the city's Itaewon neighborhood, when a crowd surge in the narrow streets and alleys resulted in 160 deaths and left nearly 200 more injured. The opening cinematic of Modern Warfare 4 uses footage from that disaster to portray the immediate aftermath of a fictional North Korean invasion of South Korea, the basis of the game's story.

Activision said the use of the video was not meant to "reference or trivialize" the actual event, but merely "to establish the game's fictional narrative." A statement released by families of victims reported by the BBC, however, said "using such an event as material for a game made for entertainment is in itself highly inappropriate and senseless," and added that if Activision "has even a minimum of courtesy and empathy towards the victims, it should take corrective action without delay."

That's now set to happen, as Activision has released a statement saying it will remove the footage from the game and apologized for using it. "We offer our deepest condolences and sincere apologies to the bereaved families, victims and everyone who has been deeply hurt or distressed by this incident." the publisher said.

However, there will be some delay before that happens: The Modern Warfare 4 opening cinematic will be changed in an update set to roll out on November 12.

After 23 mainline games, there are far more Call of Duty maps than anyone can reasonably remember. That's why I'm impressed it took just one screenshot for several fans (with back pain, presumably) to clock that an upcoming Modern Warfare 4 map is actually a remake of a map that's over 20 years old.

Backstab, the new 6v6 map arriving on November 6, is a dead ringer for Burgundy, first seen in Call of Duty 2 way back in 2005. That means Backstab is older than the teenagers currently playing Call of Duty—do with that information what you will.

A number of people noticed this around the same time, but I'll credit Reddit user wizward64 for providing helpful visuals.

Apologies to the reader typing "This was a classic, show some respect!", but there's no way I would've noticed the resemblance on my own. I played Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox 360 when it was new, but not all that much multiplayer. I really like the look of the original Burgundy, though: The desaturated green grass and beige brickwork of the French countryside still looks so clean and attractive 21 years later. I'm also now wondering if my favorite Day of Defeat: Source map (Donner) snuck in some of these CoD 2 assets, or if all WW2 shooters of this era were riffing on the same Saving Private Ryan scenes.

The layouts are near 1:1, which is neat, though the theming is clearly altered. Burgundy was a WW2 map in France (duh) and Backstab appears to take place in either Russia or North Korea (I think I see Cyrillic script on those signs, so leaning toward the former). Backstab is also snowy, so maybe this town will exist in the eventual Russian chunk of the Hajin DMZ map.

Burgundy was a pretty small map for Call of Duty 2, and I expect it'll feel even smaller at Modern Warfare 4's quicker pace. The map's signature feature was a pair of two-story buildings that overlooked the central courtyard from opposite sides of the battlefield. High windows with usable machine gun emplacements made these buildings important for map control, but those windows will presumably become regular sniper nests in Backstab.

Call of Duty is famous for recycling old maps, but a deep dive into the vault like this feels different from the usual. This isn't Infinity Ward remaking a popular map to please expectant fans like we see with yearly iterations of Nuketown and Shipment, but instead pulling a relatively unknown goodie and refreshing it for a new audience.

The OG Call of Duty studio has apparently been doing this for a while and I didn't notice: As commenters point out in that same Reddit thread, the Modern Warfare 2 (2022) map Taraq was a remake of CoD 1's Neuville and Modern Warfare 2019 map Suldal Harbor was a remake of CoD 1's Harbor. Hey, those maps were pretty good.

Bungie shocked the world (or at least, it shocked the world's Destiny fans) when it un-canceled Destiny 2 in September, saying the game "is foundational to Bungie’s future" and promising to restore vaulted content and "return Destiny to its original promise." In a community update shared today, the studio revealed more about that process, and one standout point is that it sure sounds like the original Destiny is finally coming to PC.

The update begins with a broad overview of what led up to the unvaulting announcement and what's happened since, a broad roadmap that breaks down into three sections—First Pass, Stretch Goals, and stuff that's probably not going to happen "for technical and/or strategic reasons"—and a progress bar:

It's worth noting up front that while things have been happening fairly quickly so far, the actual Great Unvaultening is still a long way off. The pre-production process is now underway and expected to run until January or February of 2027, and "from that point we expect full production will be about 12 months to fully complete the porting process," Bungie head of product Josh Deane said. That puts it in early 2028—assuming things go according to plan.

Deane then touched on what comes after that, referencing his comment in September that Bungie is "not done with Destiny." With caveats that "some things are subject to change in success or failure," he said that Bungie is "marching forward with a phased plan for Destiny’s future that celebrates our legacy and propels us into a new, far green country." To that end, he cited three "anchors" for players to watch for:

Destiny 2 “Celebration’’ [Expect a new February Progress bar]

• We believe we need to have a celebration in Destiny 2, beyond Monument of Triumph, for the community that provides new updates for you all to enjoy. More details to come!

Destiny ‘Legacy’ [Expect a new February Progress bar]

• Our epic journey started over a decade ago, and the whole experience needs to be served to you all where you play today. Expect more information when we come back to you all early next year.

Redacted [TBD]

• Launch Ventrilo Message: ‘We’re back’

The second point is the one that caught our interest. Destiny 2 was (and, some PC Gamer folks would argue, still is) huge on PC, but the original game never came our way: More than a decade after it launched, it remains exclusive to consoles.

Proclaiming that "the whole experience needs to be served to you all where you play today" pretty strongly suggests to me that's going to change, and that's a big deal: Destiny 2's Final Shape expansion brought an end to the 10-year Light and Darkness saga in 2024, but a lot of us never got to experience how it actually started, and I'd bet that having the opportunity to do so would bring a lot of lapsed players (myself included) back to see what's cooking.

Deane concluded by saying that this is a major undertaking and not one that will be finished quickly. "It’s important to know that this is a true reset moment for Bungie, Marathon, and Destiny. We also know time isn’t our friend; we’re playing from behind with the cards we have and I’m sure we’ll have to take more punches and make some hard decisions along the way," he said.

"Knowing we are early in incubating our future and actively working on projects to bridge us to that new home, don’t expect us to make a Destiny announcement at the TGA’s this year, or to randomly drop a logo that sets the world on fire right away.

"We get there when we get there."

Most Overwatch fans will know its origins by now: as the recycled product made from the scraps of Project Titan, an MMO that was abruptly cancelled by Blizzard after seven years in development. After this, the team was just given six weeks to come up with a new pitch, something that could rival the revenue brought in by Warcraft; that doesn't sound stressful at all.

But if there were a silver lining to this ridiculous crunch, it would be that it instilled resilience and humility into Team 4 from the start of Overwatch's life, according to Keller. This is something that has undoubtedly seen the team through a decade of Overwatch which has included some particularly rough patches, especially around Overwatch 2's inception.

Hard work and staying true to what made Overwatch so great to begin with was key to Team 4 getting the live-service game back on track over the last few years. And now, 10 years later, the team can be proud of the fact that Overwatch is in its best shape ever.

It also means that the team rarely gets too caught up in what the future holds. "It's really hard to predict 'Hey, 10 years out in the future, we'll still be working on this thing that we all enjoy and love today'," Keller adds. "But we're here now… We have big hopes and dreams of what Overwatch can be, and so even though I can't predict the future, I can't wait to see what Overwatch is like 10 years from now."

There is a new game titled "Call of Duty" every year, but it's not every year that Call of Duty is really back.

The tireless schedule of Activision's load-bearing FPS has resulted in more bad games than good as of late—Modern Warfare 3 was an expansion-sized sequel rushed out the door, Black Ops 6 was a step back for multiplayer, and its immediate followup Black Ops 7 was clocked as superfluous and uninteresting even by rain-or-shine fans. These back-to-back games, shouldered by Treyarch, Sledgehammer, and Raven, had cracks and compromises that suggested the Call of Duty machine just can't keep up with both "good" and "fast" anymore.

Modern Warfare 4's greatness shows how right that is. This is an extravagant package on all fronts: A kinetic 6v6 FPS with truly excellent gunplay, a fun campaign that doesn't just play the hits, and an expansive extraction "mode" that would be its own game if any other name were on the box.

I have complaints, but this is what it looks like when Call of Duty is in the pocket. The best Call of Duty studio got to take its time (four years, tied with the longest in series history) and it shows.

Multiplayer

These days, whether or not a Call of Duty clicks with me begins and ends with the guns—how they look, sound, animate, and change with attachments—and Infinity Ward is simply unmatched on those details. Modern Warfare 4's guns spit out layered, cacophonous blasts that will overpower your voice chat by default (as they should). They shake your world as you shoot them without getting in the way of aim. They reload with personality and flair without wasting time. They're loud and metallic without sounding tinny or plastic, like Treyarch guns always do.

Modern Warfare 4 has some of the easiest guns to control in the genre, yet in action, they feel substantial and weighty like a milsim. This is the magic trick that Call of Duty studios regularly attempt, but only this one has mastered.

Infinity Ward just loves being extra about guns in ways that make them memorable. This time, they've had fun mixing both modern and dated weapons with Korean design language: The KG-7 Vulkan is a functionally standard bolt-action sniper rifle, but its worn wooden body and chipped green paint communicate that it's been fished out of an aging North Korean armory. The Warlord, meanwhile, is a double-barrel shotgun with the profile of a brutalist space vessel—flanked by two translucent plastic tubes that you can watch empty and refill as you use it. It's rad.

Not every gun is this distinctive—not even Infinity Ward can produce 30+ guns without forgettable chaff—but there is enough personality in this arsenal to latch onto for hours on-end. I've fully leveled three in just a week, tweaking my attachment setup every few matches to suss out each gun's "thing."

In some cases, Infinity Ward has saved a boring gun by giving it cool attachments. The Han 86 was, to my eye, the most boring assault rifle in the game until I discovered an integrally-suppressed barrel that all-but transforms it into an MP5 in aesthetic and behavior (an FPS classic I'm always happy to see). Attachments feels like bigger choices here than ever before—you can only use five at a time, and instead of stuffing Gunsmith with 20+ barrels, muzzles, and grips that do almost the same thing, there are fewer options per category that are usually the best at what they do.

Infinity Ward has also inherited prestige attachments—the best idea to come out of those recent Black Ops sequels. Called apex attachments in Modern Warfare 4, they're add-ons unique to each gun that drastically change their behavior or add a new dimension to how they work. You only get these after maxing out a gun (or by having a blueprint with them already applied), so I don't have many yet, but I love the ones I've played with.

They range from absurd to subtle:

• The Hyeon Burst's apex turns it into a hybrid burst-auto rifle, beginning with a sped-up burst and transitioning into slower automatic fire as I hold the trigger.
• The M4's apex swaps its traditional magazine for the top-mounted, graphics card-shaped extended mag.
• The Oris DMR gets side-mounted throwing knives (yes) that you can flick at enemies to counteract the gun's close-range weakness.
• The PPSH SMG gets an underbarrel launcher that spews hot napalm on the ground for some on-the-fly area denial.

Apex attachments aren't always worth the hype—I found the Mojave revolver's that lets you "fan the hammer" to fire faster underwhelming as an idea—but they're a way more enticing reason to progress in Modern Warfare 4 than camos or gaudy playercards.

War should change

Elsewhere in the land of "details you end up caring about after 20 years of Call of Duty" are nice quality-of-life touches in Create-a-Class, like the option to copy killstreak or perk selections to other classes, or assign operator skins on a per-class basis.

Then there's all that minutia that Infinity Ward is making a big deal about: revamped movement that allows for smoother mantling and sliding, a depth of field trick that unblurs important parts of the screen, less disruptive gunsmoke, better-looking hipfire. At the time, these all struck me as weirdly minor improvements to trumpet as big swings, and it's now clear why: Modern Warfare 4's core multiplayer takes no big swings. It is, at its core, about executing better what was already there.

That approach has its upsides, like a ridiculous attention to detail, but it underlines Activision's continued disinterest in challenging Call of Duty's status quo. Never has a shooter franchise been so shackled by traditional design choices that haven't been good for years: Killstreaks are still lopsided power trips that bring matches to a screeching halt so that the best player on the server can rack up more kills. Maps are still uninspired square boxes with three lanes and an allergy for verticality. Gunsmith still favors making every gun the same zero-recoil, high-capacity laser beam that wins firefights. It has been 19 years since Call of Duty 4, and I'm still getting shot by a guy who spawned behind me in Team Deathmatch.

The small country of developers who make Call of Duty could take a special interest in these problems, but they consistently don't. Instead, they design sequels around bolted-on distractions—jetpacks, hero abilities, Omnimovement—while actual big swings, like Warzone and DMZ, happen elsewhere on the main menu. We should all want more from a series that asks us to fork over $70 every year.

There is one exception, and it's sadly flying under the radar so far. Among Modern Warfare 4's slate of new modes (several of which are competently made but destined to be ignored) is Frontline, a TDM variant with one change: Teams spawn on opposite sides of the map, and those spawns never change. It sounds so minor, but it's the greatest thing to happen to Call of Duty multiplayer in a generation.

I almost couldn't believe how much better Call of Duty plays with consistent spawns: I can confidently move through the map with an idea of where enemies will come from, which gives matches an understandable continuity—a sense of tug-of-war. Matches are slower, lives more deliberate, and I'm not getting shot in the back.

My life is, for once, not up to the pull of a slot machine. We have territory, they have territory, and there's a middle ground to fight over. It's a winning formula that has worked in better casual shooters for decades (Team Fortress 2, anyone?), and singlehandedly fixes a gigantic problem with these games. Frontline is easily my new favorite way to play Call of Duty and should become the new normal, but knowing Activision and the Call of Duty audience, it'll probably be cycled out of the game and forgotten by next quarter.

DMZ

DMZ is, in many ways, proof that Call of Duty shouldn't be afraid to change.

Going into my first day with the mode, I honestly thought the last thing I needed was another extraction shooter. This genre can be so consuming with its long grinds and punishing stakes that, beyond the occasional Hunt: Showdown night with friends, these days I gravitate to the more consistent, team-based, and casual end of the FPS spectrum. There is no "pick up and play" extraction shooter—or wasn't, until now.

Infinity Ward has made exactly what it's claiming with DMZ: A full-fledged extraction shooter that could be a standalone game like Escape From Tarkov or Marathon, but is instead the third pillar of a yearly Call of Duty installment. Its systems are extensive, its Hajin City map haunting and expansive, and it might have the least annoying chores of any game like it.

DMZ definitely has room for improvement, but I'm impressed. When I look at Modern Warfare 4's iterative core multiplayer and wonder what Infinity Ward has been doing these past four years, I realize this is it.

To me, what sets DMZ apart is how Infinity Ward isn't so interested in loss. Money is easy to make through a combination of valuables, faction assignments, and Dynamic Ops (multi-step missions that randomly populate the map). Cash earned through these missions is "banked", meaning I can't lose it even if I die without extracting. But I'm less likely to actually die than in other games, because I can pick myself up from a DBNO state once at the cost of max health.

Everything accrues XP that unlocks new stations at my FOB, crafting recipes that make future runs more convenient, and traits that permanently enhance my operator. Some of those traits are a huge deal, like a free self-revive in every match, and they don't disappear when I have a bad game. Instead, dying in the field triggers an MIA status for that operator that I can clear any time by dropping a wad of cash.

It's quite generous for this type of game, and I like it. DMZ wants me to always move forward, and in that sense, it sometimes feels more like a Call of Duty RPG.

But it's not like DMZ is immune to gear fear: I had a few anxiety-inducing moments where an especially rare valuable, stack of crafting materials I needed for upgrades, or a rare weapon blueprint was burning a hole in my pack as I tried to sneak off to an extraction site. Hajin City's non-player threats—soldier patrols, helicopters, and drones that snitch on you—have yet to challenge or surprise on the level of Arc Raiders' sophisticated apocalypse machines, but they could easily overwhelm when I took my eye off the ball. I was ready to call the NPC soldiers a bunch of scrubs until they nearly ruined my best run yet.

This gets to my other favorite part of DMZ: Every extraction shooter has chores, but DMZ has a lot of structured events, locations, and formalized missions that can turn grocery runs into something bigger.

A perfect DMZ round

Like one time, a match started as a quick solo trip to find "rigid synthetics" for a stash upgrade I'd been working toward. The description for that material said they're found in residential areas, so I entered an apartment building, looted a locker, and found something I wasn't looking for: a rare key to the "Netshin IT Room."

That key had a helpful description: Unlocks the high-security server room deep within the server clusters on the upper floors of the Netshin Tech Complex within The Grid.

New sidequest added. I love that the hint didn't give everything away: I knew generally where I was going and what to look for, but no arrow or waypoint to follow. So I drove to the center of the city and found The Grid, one of the most dangerous zones in Hajin. You can tell because it's red on the map and walled off on all sides, announcing that you'd have to be dumb to run in there alone.

So I ran in alone, storming the Netshin building and almost dying to heavily armored grunts twice. I ran up six flights of stairs (there was probably an elevator) until I reached the top and started checking every door. Surprisingly, there were other locked doors in Netshin that led to other exclusive areas, and Netshin is just one highrise of several in this part of the city—this map is dense.

I finally found the IT department, used the key, and strolled in thinking I'd hit the jackpot. Not quite: I'd actually disturbed the nest of Jang-ui, one of Hajin's miniboss "lieutenants" that have a chance to appear in each match. Auto-turrets placed in all four corners of the room caught me by surprise and almost killed me on their own, and reinforcements from elsewhere in the building flooded in as well. It was a squirrely fight typical of Call of Duty PvE: Lots of sprinting across the room to buy time for reloads, dumping pounds of lead into Jang-ui's stupid head, and pressing G to replenish armor.

But he finally died, and the rewards were huge: A kitted burst rifle unique to the boss fight and a weapon manual that'd unlock a gun permanently for crafting. That, plus a pile of useful materials, including the synthetics I'd originally been looking for. It was a sweet haul I really didn't wanna lose, which still felt very possible, as I was out of ammo.

I thought for sure I was home free when I found a ventilation shaft that spit me out on the scaffolding under a sky bridge—a hidden exit! From there I could just jump off to escape, and it would've been the perfect end to this little adventure, except I didn't have a parachute. So for the first time, I actually used DMZ's rudimentary stealth system to sneak out of Netshin, hiding behind desks and scrounging for bullet scraps until I left the same way I entered.

PvEvolution

It was a genuinely emergent, self-appointed mission that felt like the best case scenario for DMZ. Not every part of the PvE experience is awesome. Call of Duty still can't escape how normal dudes with heavy armor just aren't interesting as opponents. They can't stack up to Arc Raiders physics-based drones, Hunt: Showdown's supernatural monsters, or even Marathon's UESC corps. But those are all games where, if you're fighting the environment, you're kind of playing them wrong: They are, in practice, multiplayer stealth games until the moment PvP kicks off.

I don't think DMZ will be like that. The fodder soldiers are boring, but they're also everywhere. Killing a few doesn't make so much noise that you're alerting the whole map—relative to its size, Hajin isn't as packed with players as Warzone's battle royale modes. I felt relatively safe to engage AI patrols for their armor plates and ammo without feeling forced into an awkward melee playstyle. That's good, because everything worth doing in Hajin plays out like a mini Spec Ops mission (we all remember that old Modern Warfare co-op mode, right?), including the six "story missions" that are even more campaign-like in nature.

Story missions are longer, narrative-focused tasks available early on. They have more bespoke ingredients than the randomized Dynamic Ops: There's one about a casino heist and another that involves manually pushing a gurney down hospital hallways while AI attacks on all sides. These are fun and pay well, but they don't change from match to match. It seems like Infinity Ward created these as a guided on-ramp for players new to extraction shooters. You have to queue into a story mission before the match starts, and if you do, you'll be the only squad in the match with that mission.

So while DMZ's PvE factions don't stand out, the incentives for fighting them do. Dynamic Ops are repetitive for sure—I did the same "blow up the chemical weapon" routine three times over two days—but they're a better excuse to explore than just opening boxes and praying for the presence of duct tape. This directly tackles a weakness of both Arc Raiders and Marathon, and they'd be smart to steal it.

It's fascinating how Infinity Ward is throwing its weight behind both PvE and PvP here, because I can't really say the same for its competitors. Arc Raiders is, at least to me, about sneaking and scavenging in dangerous environments, not picking fights with other players. In Marathon and Hunt, the loot and boss fights are just the pretense for excellent PvP.

DMZ sprawls out in both directions, which gives it a unique angle, but also means it isn't the best at either play style. PvP fights have been surprisingly rare, but so far they're a lot like Warzone firefights, so just OK. Call of Duty's fast time-to-kill (even with armor plates) and generous aim assist means it's hard to bounce back from being the second one to start shooting, and leads to team fights that begin with one squadmate already down.

Infinity Ward told me DMZ was designed to respect your time, and that really comes through. I love the little touches of streamlining that show this is a Call of Duty extraction shooter, like how you don't need to stuff your backpack with bandages, armor plates, or stacks of ammo before heading out—that's all handled automatically. The game's also smart enough to loot the most obvious stuff for you, like ammo, crafting materials, and items that can stack in my backpack without taking up extra space. Games with this much looting is usually a turn-off, but it's very seamless and pleasant here.

They really went and made a whole-ass extraction shooter within Call of Duty, and it's surprisingly good.

Campaign

As I watched the credits roll on Modern Warfare 4's campaign, a sobering thought infiltrated: I've been playing Call of Duty for two-thirds of my life. While I consider it primarily a multiplayer game these days, what I loved about Call of Duty all that time ago was its campaigns. In 2006, as a shy fourth grader at a new school, I made my first friend because we both played Call of Duty 3 on the Wii and spent a week recounting cool moments from the campaign over lunch. By 2007 (the year of Modern Warfare, of course), our lunch table was losing its collective shit over the part where Captain Price slides you the pistol right as he (as we thought at the time) dies.

As memorable as that sequence was, it marked the moment Call of Duty became globe-trotting romps about superhuman, super serious operatives who prevent WW3 before breakfast. It was pretty badass at the time, but what they gained in the sort of spectacle that makes great Sunday Night Football ads, they lost in relatability.

Sure, those early WW2 campaigns were shlocky riffs on movies, but they starred normal people who primarily wanted to go home—grizzled sergeants and green privates who fended off helplessness with humor. They depicted large-scale offensives won by smaller contributions. That's the energy that Infinity Ward tries to harness again in Modern Warfare 4. At times, it totally works.

This is the most fun I've had with a Call of Duty campaign in years, lending mostly to its new, non-elite faces. Over half of the six-hour campaign revolves around a crew of young South Korean marines (plus a few Americans) running out the clock on their compulsory military service when North Korea suddenly invades. The guys themselves are familiar archetypes—a serious guy, an audience insert who doesn't talk much, an American who fills every silence with a joke—but they're basically charming enough that I cared to remember their names.

I like the idea, even if this latest "ripped from the headlines" premise of a North Korean offensive continues Infinity Ward's streak of flattening complex foreign conflicts through a conventionally American lens (while conveniently making the CIA's dogs the good guys). You'll never guess which global superpower is really pulling the strings this time, ya'll.

Going dark

Playing a "cog in a machine" again unlocks Modern Warfare 4's most standout missions, many of which remind me of the series' best days. "Mayhem" and "Losing Ground" follow a futile attempt to hold the fictional Hajin City against the overwhelming invasion. They're loud, chaotic fights where your characters are noticeably terrified of what's happening (a rarity in a post-Price world) and your side is constantly outnumbered. Later on, "Counter Attack" ramps up the scale and intensity with a massive beachfront assault that can only really be achieved by throwing a silly amount of money at it. It's certainly a better use of resources than the overly gimmicky, Warzone-y campaigns of recent Black Ops sequels.

Even when the action gets smaller, Private Park (no relation) and friends are simply fun to follow. "Stranded" picks up with the squad crash landing behind enemy lines in North Korea, and its Infinity Ward's best swing at a sandbox level to date. The multi-hour mission establishes three non-linear objectives, side quests, and a hideout where you can craft better armor, guns, and camouflage. It's a comparatively quiet, isolating mission than the ones that precede it—almost like playing a micro Far Cry in the middle of a CoD campaign. It was a bit jarring at first, but ended up a major highlight.

I was worried this would prove to be another instance of sneaking Warzone into singleplayer, as the mission uses the DMZ looting system, but I was told the map was made just for the campaign, which is nice.

Infinity Ward could've crafted a whole campaign around Park's squad, and I'm still not sure why they didn't. Instead, their story runs parallel to the disconnected adventures of Captain Price, now a wanted fugitive because of some Modern Warfare 3 business that most people didn't see (the game acknowledges this by playing a lengthy recap video).

Modern Warfare 4 tries to explore a darker Price while replaying the hits—a car chase with shooting, a foot chase with jumping, a cinematic knife fight—but these sequences left my head as quickly as they ended. It's bizarre how different and less interesting this part of the game is, especially considering Price basically exits the story for the back half and never intersects with the real heroes.

It comes off as Infinity Ward checking boxes for the folks who are expecting Price stuff while also wanting, desperately, to do something else. This was billed as the conclusion of the Modern Warfare story that started in 2019, but in practice, it's more like a sprint to be done with it all. It's a shame they dragged Mads Mikkelsen into the bad parts of this one—he could've been a menacing presence in a campaign that actually had time to use him.

It speaks to the quality of this series lately that producing a regular campaign with extravagant setpieces, lavish cinematics, and basically great gunplay is a big win. Uncompromised by the influence of Warzone or Zombies, this is the first time in too long that Call of Duty's campaign does not feel like the afterthought.

It's been 22 years, 11 months, 28 days and counting since we were first graced with Call of Duty. Over those two decades the franchise has emerged as one of the most lucrative in videogame history, with Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announcing that it's passed the $40billion revenue mark.

Speaking of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's success, Sharma reflects: "One of the most celebrated Call of Duty games in its 24-year history, and now $40 billion in lifetime franchise revenue. An incredible milestone. Congrats to the Activision team. And to the players, thank you for being with us."

$40 billion in lifetime revenue places Call of Duty behind goliaths like Mario and Pokémon. It also means that Call of Duty, on average, has earned $4,762,472 a day, which is particularly terrifying if you ask me.

But how it got there is an entirely different question—one that can be answered by the ravenous appetite of consumers in the free market. Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 still sits at the top spot with over 43 million copies sold, with Modern Warfare (2019) comes in a close second with over 41 million copies sold. But by and large, the popularity of Call of Duty is driven by Black Ops, namely its older titles.

The prize for most successful launch, however, has to go to Modern Warfare 2 (2022) which earned $1 billion in just 10 days alongside 200 million hours played. This followed Activision Blizzard's sale to Microsoft, which also meant that Modern Warfare 2 was the first time a Call of Duty game had been on Steam since 2017 with Call of Duty: WW2—it even made it into Steam's top 10 games by concurrent players.

The ridiculous release schedule of one Call of Duty game a year certainly seems to be working for Activision. I doubt it would've been able to pass this landmark without the tireless work of Infinity Ward, Treyarch, Sledgehammer Games, and Raven Software pumping out something new year after year. At this rate I'm pretty sure the Call of Duty franchise will outlive us all. Picture this: the dry arid landscape of an Earth pillaged and then left void of humanity, with the sole proof of our existence being the 15th Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 remaster (2193)—I hope it's good.

Almost a year ago now, Team 4 debuted a new kind of Overwatch, and as part of the huge spotlight we learned that the live service FPS would undergo a new cadence with yearly themes comprising several seasons. Five new heroes were also added straight away; Mizuki, Emre, Anran, Domina, and of course Jetpack Cat.

Ahead of being added to the game, Overwatch's community was overjoyed to see Jetpack Cat, an adorable little ginger kitty in a flying mech—what's not to love? But sentiment quickly shifted after she took to the battlefield. Jetpack Cat broke the game with her new Apache helicopter meta which saw her haul Bastion high into the air so he could gun down the entire enemy team while in turret mode, it was truly horrific.

Who could've predicted that the adorable little cat would cause so much havoc? Well Team 4 had an inkling while Jetpack Cat was in the testing phase. "Internally we were like, 'oh, that's a little scary'," Associate Game Director Alec Dawson tells me. "We were play testing [Jetpack Cat and Bastion] a little bit. I think at one point it was also Jetpack Cat, Bastion, and Mercy. The full trio. It's like an even scarier helicopter."

This Jetpack Cat meta became so strong that it dominated OWCS from the get go. I haven't seen a new hero utilised so heavily and quickly in Overwatch's esports scene for a long time, so it brought home just how busted this team-up was.

Jetpack Cat would eventually undergo some reworks, for example, there was a nerf to how quickly she can move while carrying another hero. It helped to even the odds a little, but she can still be very frustrating and a hard hero to deal with. But the choice to leave Jetpack Cat initially un-nerfed was a deliberate decision according to Dawson:

"We want to make sure we put some of those moments in front of players. Allow them to experience a little bit of that crazy stuff before we come in and try to make sure it's in line, right? It's really that fine line of not taking away all the fun, not diluting it, not trying to take away some of the extremes, and seeing how it actually plays out. Because those are the moments that are going to be really exciting for players, those are going to be the moments that they remember in Overwatch, and that's important not to whittle away too early."

I've been having a grand old time playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 with an RX 9070 XT, but there'll be plenty of people wanting to run the game on older hardware. So, I decided to dust off my old and much-beloved workhorse, the RTX 3060 Ti, and see how it does in the new Activision shooter. I've been quite pleasantly surprised by the results.

Which is good news, considering Activision lists this graphics card, alongside the AMD RX 6600 XT and Intel Arc B580, as the 'recommended' ones to "run at 90 fps in multiplayer on High graphics settings."

I've found this actually pans out, provided you're at 1080p or are fine enabling Quality upscaling at 1440p.

RTX 3060 Ti performance in COD: MW4

As you can see from the chart below, at 1440p native, the game struggles to reach this 90 fps target even on the Minimum preset. And as I noted in my general performance overview—which, by the way, you should read if you want to know which specific settings to alter to improve your frame rate—the Balanced preset offers the best bang for your buck by far, as going up to Ultra lowers your frame rate significantly.

COD MW4 preset performance - 1440p - RTX 3060 Ti

Frame rates were taken at 1440p native, using an RTX 3060 Ti, Ryzen 7 7800X3D, and 32 GB of DDR5 RAM.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4

Avg fps

1% low fps

Minimum

70

59

Basic

66

59

Balanced

64

56

Ultra

48

43

Extreme

43

36

020406080

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Data

Product	Value
Minimum	70 Avg fps, 59 1% low fps
Basic	66 Avg fps, 59 1% low fps
Balanced	64 Avg fps, 56 1% low fps
Ultra	48 Avg fps, 43 1% low fps
Extreme	43 Avg fps, 36 1% low fps

As with higher-end rigs, using the Balanced preset seems to give the best bang for your buck here, balancing visuals and performance. The RTX 3060 Ti maintains just above 60 fps on average when using the Balanced preset without upscaling.

I captured these frame rates during the same repeated 30-second run in a campaign mission, but I've found they translate pretty well to DMZ, although a few frames are shaved off in that mode, and a few additional are shaved off when looking into the distance across the expansive map.

The trick to get buttery smooth frame rates with a GPU like the RTX 3060 Ti is to enable DLSS upscaling in Quality mode.

Enabling Quality upscaling takes frame rates from just above 60 to around 90 or even 100 when using the Balanced preset, if you opt for the older CNN model. I didn't notice much of a difference in visuals between CNN and Transformer models, so I'd be opting for the former just for the extra handful of frames, but either way you're getting something very playable.

DLSS Quality vs native at 1440p

This compares playing the game at 1440p native to the two different versions of DLSS upscaling, set to Quality.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4

Avg fps

1% low fps

DLSS CNN Quality

97

86

DLSS Transformer Quality

89

78

Native 1440p

64

56

0255075100

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Data

Product	Value
DLSS CNN Quality	97 Avg fps, 86 1% low fps
DLSS Transformer Quality	89 Avg fps, 78 1% low fps
Native 1440p	64 Avg fps, 56 1% low fps

Enabling DLSS on Quality turns gameplay from playable into a very smooth experience, whether that's using the CNN or Transformer model.

All of the above is speaking to 1440p, but if you have a 1080p monitor or don't mind dropping to 1080p on your 1440p monitor, you can get some very nice frame rates from a card like the RTX 3060 Ti. As you can see from my final chart below, you can push about 130 fps on average in the campaign if you play at 1080p with DLSS enabled, again on the Balanced preset.

Comparing 1440p to 1080p performance

This chart compares performance at 1440p to 1080p using an RTX 3060 Ti, with upscaling enabled and disabled.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4

Avg fps

1% low fps

1440p Native

64

56

1440p DLSS Quality (CNN)

97

86

1080p Native

92

81

1080p DLSS Quality (CNN)

131

113

037.575112.5150

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Data

Product	Value
1440p Native	64 Avg fps, 56 1% low fps
1440p DLSS Quality (CNN)	97 Avg fps, 86 1% low fps
1080p Native	92 Avg fps, 81 1% low fps
1080p DLSS Quality (CNN)	131 Avg fps, 113 1% low fps

1080p with DLSS enabled performs very smoothly, suitable for a 144 Hz or 165 Hz monitor. Playing at 1440p with DLSS enabled gives about the same performance as playing at 1080p native (DLSS disabled).

There are two caveats here, though. The first is that I wouldn't recommend doing this if you're on a 27-inch, 1440p monitor because it can look quite blurry. I'd just stick to 1440p with DLSS enabled instead.

The second caveat is that, in DMZ, I found frame rates to be a little lower than the ones I recorded in my runs of the campaign mission. But I'd still stick to those settings I just described. At 1440p with DLSS enabled in DMZ I get about 80–95 fps, and at 1080p with DLSS enabled I get about 110 fps.

The settings I'd use in COD: MW2 with an RTX 3060 Ti

This is the resolution and upscaling combo setup I'd personally use to actually play the game if I had a 27-inch, 1440p monitor: 1440p resolution, DLSS Quality upscaling (CNN), and the Balanced preset. If I was using a 24-inch, 1080p monitor, I'd stick to DLSS Quality (CNN) and the Balanced preset, but obviously have the resolution at 1080p instead. With a smaller 1080p monitor, it's not as blurry to have DLSS enabled even at 1080p.

The final bit of good news is that I've found my frame rate to be pretty consistent, too. With an RTX 3060 Ti, I get frame rates consistently pushing closer to 100 fps than 60 fps at 1440p with DLSS Quality enabled and using the Balanced preset.

Comparing higher to lower detail quality

High detail quality on the left, normal on the right. Notice the yellow/orange tree loses all detail in the right-hand image.

High detail quality

Normal detail quality

A couple of final tips. One thing I'd recommend is avoiding the lower presets, and especially the bottom 'Minimum' one, as I found graphical fidelity takes a big hit when dropping that low. Everything is much more crisp at Balanced.

And finally: if you're okay sacrificing just a small handful of frames here and there, try turning your 'detail quality' setting up to High. I've found this eliminates some of the buggy, blocky trees and shrubbery you occasionally run into, and makes them look like actual trees.

I'm not usually one for all these fancy graphics; give me more frames, at all costs. But when I booted up Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, I have to admit, I was a little reluctant to sacrifice too much in the visual department. Because the game is, indeed, gorgeous despite being a little glitchy with texture pop-ins and flickering in DMZ mode. A more tailored approach was needed. So, I set about testing every single graphics setting in the game, one by one, to see which ones have the biggest impact, and I found there are four main settings to tweak.

First things first, though, if you just want to get up and going and you're using a mid-range PC, whack it on the Balanced preset, and you'll be fine. If you're using a high-end rig, then you should be fine setting it to the Ultra preset.

Note: All performance figures were calculated by doing the same 30-second run in-game, on Mission 4 of the campaign. I kept all movements and actions as similar as possible in each run I performed.

Preset performance comparison

Comparing game performance at different graphical presets at 1440p, using an RX 9070 XT, Ryzen 7 7800X3D, and 32 GB of DDR5 RAM.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4

Avg fps

1% low fps

Minimum preset

146

119

Basic preset

137

114

Balanced preset

133

109

Ultra preset

107

85

Extreme preset

97

75

037.575112.5150

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Data

Product	Value
Minimum preset	146 Avg fps, 119 1% low fps
Basic preset	137 Avg fps, 114 1% low fps
Balanced preset	133 Avg fps, 109 1% low fps
Ultra preset	107 Avg fps, 85 1% low fps
Extreme preset	97 Avg fps, 75 1% low fps

The biggest gain in performance comes from dropping from Ultra to Balanced. The differences between the other presets aren't so great. All presets net well above 60 fps with a high-end PC, and most sit above 100 fps.

As you can see from the chart above, apart from enabling upscaling, by far the biggest performance jump comes from dropping from Ultra to Balanced. There's nowhere near as big a difference between Balanced/Basic/Minimum and Ultra/Extreme.

If you're keen on tinkering a little more, however, your first port of call should be the following four settings:

• Detail quality
• Shadow quality
• Shadow filtering quality
• Terrain quality

These settings are all found under Graphics > Quality > Advanced Quality Settings. The shadow settings obviously affect how shadows look, while the detail and terrain quality settings affect how the ground and small objects look. Increasing terrain quality makes things like ground surface textures appear more, well, textured, and detail quality makes small objects appear more—you guessed it—detailed.

Here's the difference between (1) normal shadow quality and high shadow filtering quality on the left, and (2) low shadow quality and normal shadow filtering quality on the right:

Comparing higher vs lower shadow settings

On the left side, shadow quality is normal and shadow filtering quality is high. On the right, shadow quality is low and shadow filtering quality is normal.

Normal quality | High filtering

Low quality | Normal filtering

And here's the difference between (1) high detail quality and high terrain quality on the left, and (2) normal detail quality and medium terrain quality on the right:

Comparing higher vs lower detail/terrain settings

High detail quality and terrain quality on the left, normal/medium detail and terrain quality on the right.

Higher detail and terrain quality

Lower detail and terrain quality

As you can see, the game looks far from awful even with these settings lowered, though the difference isn't unnoticeable. If you're looking to gain some extra frames, though, I'd definitely consider trying out lowering these settings. As you can see from the chart below, you gain a big chunk of performance by dropping both the shadow and detail settings.

Performance gain lowering four key settings

This compares frame rate at the Ultra preset to frame rate with just the four settings listed above lowered down to what they are at the Balanced preset.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4

Avg fps

1% low fps

Ultra preset

107

85

Four settings lowered

124

101

037.575112.5150

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Data

Product	Value
Ultra preset	107 Avg fps, 85 1% low fps
Four settings lowered	124 Avg fps, 101 1% low fps

By lowering just these four settings, you get a sizeable increase in performance.

You might want to steer clear of detail quality if you don't want anything buggy going on. I found that dropping detail quality below high makes the occasional tree look blocky and unfinished even when at a moderate difference. You can see the difference in the image comparison below. For my part, I don't mind it too much because most trees and other details are completely fine.

Comparing higher to lower detail quality

High detail quality on the left, normal on the right. Notice the yellow/orange tree loses all detail in the right-hand image.

High detail quality

Normal detail quality

All this being said, though, upscaling throws a spanner in the works. With upscaling enabled, I found the performance gain to be nowhere near as big when lowering these settings. Instead of the big jump you see above, it pushed me from about 150 fps to about 160–165 fps in DMZ mode using an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT.

Now, as I said at the start, I am a bit of a frame-head—I love upping my frame rate for online shooters. So for my money, given the game looks far from bad with these settings lowered, for DMZ and multiplayer, I think I'd keep the four settings low enough by enabling the Balanced preset, then drop down to 1080p with my 400 Hz monitor, enable Quality upscaling, and get headshotting.

For the campaign, though, and presumably in general for most gamers who aren't massive frame-heads like me (yes, I'm trying to make the term stick), I'd say it's worth keeping the three or four settings above ramped up to what they are on the Ultra preset and instead just enabling Quality upscaling, if your rig can handle it. I'd prefer the nicer shadows avoiding the very slight and occasional loss of crispness that comes with upscaling.

Get ready to start talking about Half-Life 3 again, folks, because it's that time of year: Winter is closing in, The Game Awards are coming, and somebody at Valve said "HLX."

HLX, for those who haven't been following along, is a rumored codename for Half-Life 3, or Half-Life something, the near-mythical new Half-Life game that Valve may or may not be working on.

It first appeared in early 2024 as part of a data string inside a Counter-Strike 2 update that bore a very strong resemblance to "HLVR," Valve's codename for Half-Life: Alyx—a revelation that had PC Gamer contributor Rick Lane "vibrating with excitement."

Sadly for Rick, nothing came of it: No new Half-Life game, 3 or otherwise, followed, and HLX was filed away with all the other myriad Half-Life 3 rumors, hoaxes, and leaks. That is, until Valve composer and audio artist Mike Morasky brought it up completely out of the blue during a GameSoundCon panel on "Valve's Approach to an Open and Flexible Audio Engine."

In response to a question about managing voice counts—essentially the maximum number of sounds that can play simultaneously—Morasky touched on some of the variables involved, before mentioning the role played by Valve's HDR system in optimizing audio. "Deadlock has their own version of HDR," Morasky says. "HLX has its own version, and so on and so forth."

Adding fuel to the fire, co-panelist David Feise, seated next to Morasky, immediately turned to him after the HLX comment and whispered "nice work," or possibly "nice one," obviously suggesting, hey man, you're not supposed to talk about that. Feise then quickly puts an end to the answer as Morasky laughs nervously, saying Groups, which Morasky had been talking about leading up to the HLX remark, "is its own one-hour talk, so come talk to us about that afterwards."

There's no question that Morasky said HLX, and that Feise reacted. In fact, at the end of the panel Feise leaned in and said, "Good job, you only said HLX once." Because this isn't the first time he's done it: Morasky appeared oh-so-close to saying "HLX" in 2025, although he was able to catch himself midway and shift gears, awkwardly, to "Alyx."

So HLX does seem to be a thing, but exactly what type of thing is anyone's guess. Maybe he's tripping over Half-Life: Alyx, or referring to some bit of internal tech, or maybe the whole thing is all just a put-on—Valve devs having a little fun with us. Or maybe it really is Half-Life 3! Nobody knows.

It is interesting, though, that PC Gamer editor Tyler Wilde—a man who does not indulge in the frivolity of baseless rumor and speculation—said in 2025, as the previous round of Half-Life 3 rumors was heating up, that he does think Valve is working on a new Half-Life game (although not necessary Half-Life 3), and that "it's not unreasonable to believe that a new Half-Life game will be announced within the next year or so." Here we are, a year later—and a year closer? We'll see.

"Valve's Approach to an Open and Flexible Audio Engine" panel can be seen in full on Vimeo.

In spite of a bloodletting that saw the end of BioWare—a lion in winter, sure, but still a studio with a rich legacy—and around 400 employees laid off, EA seemingly still has videogame irons in the fire. Per a report from Variety, the corporation is working on a new Battlefront game, said to be in the hands of Respawn and DICE.

This is not officially confirmed, of course. In its gore-flecked letter to staff and rubber-neckers in the wake of yesterday's BioWare news, EA only said that its future involved "bringing together our Respawn and DICE studios to collaborate on a future project."

This, it boasted, would allow it to "balance our resources, and leverage the technology to deliver a shooter portfolio that unlocks growth." Which certainly gets me excited about things to come.

Nevertheless, multiple sources tell Variety that the "future project" is, indeed, a third Battlefront. Which is probably a good idea, in all fairness. I don't think either of the previous two modern Battlefront games have quite lit the world on fire—in fact, the second one's lootboxes were so bad it sparked an uproar that made it all the way to the Belgian Gambling Commission—but the notion of a big boisterous shooter filled with Star Wars stuff feels like something that could be pretty cool, right?

And hey, Respawn's done a good job on those Star Wars Jedi games to the point that we all now go around referring to them as the 'Star Wars Jedi' games like that's not an absurdly bad name. Meanwhile, DICE rather pleased our resident FPS czar Morgan Park with Battlefield 6; he scored it 82% in his Battlefield 6 review and called it "automatically one of the best shooters of the year." So sure, sign me up to see what the two can do with a Battlefront game together.

Clearing a compound is one of the early orders you'll have to complete when you arrive in Modern Warfare 4's DMZ mode, and it requires you to assault a mini enemy stronghold.

Compounds are marked with the little tent and flag symbols on the map, though they vary in difficulty, and some of them require keys to open. If you're looking for an easy one to complete, I recommend the two in Daesong Ridge in the south of the map. These army camps are open, so they're easy to access, and they don't have too many enemies. To clear a compound you need to:

• Kill every enemy in the compound—your current progress is represented by the percentage bar on the left, though it counts up instead of down.
• When you kill the last enemy in the stronghold, make sure to pick up the Medical Extraction Intel they drop and extract it to complete the order.

If you can't find the last enemies, they may be stuck in something, so search around, or just make some noise to attract their attention, or if all else fails, find another compound.

While you're in the compound, don't forget to loot any safes you find for some decent valuables—in the army camps, these are in the tower and in the main building, though the smaller barracks also have lockers and containers with loot.

You'll need electronic sensors in Modern Warfare 4's DMZ mode to upgrade your starting stash, which quickly runs out of space after the first couple of matches. Unlike rigid synthetics, the other material you need, you likely won't find enough electronic sensors without looking in the right place.

The best places to get electronic sensors are:

• Inside buildings, but particularly apartments and apartment blocks. I found quite a few as loose items or inside bags.
• Inside computers. If you spot a computer, open it up and take a look.
• While there are residential buildings all over the map, I had the most luck in Hanrin Village in the north, where one run south along the road gave me all ten sensors I needed.

The good thing about apartment buildings is that they also usually have a lot of rigid synthetics, so you can kill two birds with one stone. So, search buildings, computers, and make sure to bring a blue, medium backpack so you can secure slot what you do find, and still progress to that upgrade even if you don't manage to exfil.

It took almost 25 years to happen, but Serious Sam: The Third Encounter is finally, actually happening. Croteam and Devolver Digital revealed today that a proper new game in the Serious Sam series is now in the early stages of development.

Serious Sam: The Third Encounter will actually be the seventh mainline game in the series, thanks to its oddball naming scheme and twisted timeline. Here's how the whole thing breaks down:

• Serious Sam: The First Encounter (2001)
• Serious Sam: The Second Encounter (2002)
• Serious Sam 2 (2005)
• Serious Sam 3: BFE (2011)
• Serious Sam 4 (2020)
• Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem (2022)

I won't pretend to understand this messy continuity, except that each game is sort of a chapter in the story of Serious Sam, which honestly isn't so much a 'story' as it is an excuse to shoot friggin' huge numbers of guys and make the occasional phone call to an all-conquering intergalactic menace named Mental.

That said, Croteam wants everyone to know that The Third Encounter picks up where The Second Encounter left off, so I hope you were paying attention to how it wrapped up 24 years ago: "Not a side story. A true continuation. This time Sam is going to strike Mental's Horde at its heart, and he’s deadly serious about it."

What matters, though, is that this is seriously Serious Sam: "The only thing standing between you and thousands of enemies is your weapon, and the only thing that matters is who pulls the trigger first." That's what I'm here for, baby.

I can't help wondering if that emphasis on old school Sam doesn't arise at least in part from Serious Sam: Shatterverse, the recently-released co-op roguelite shooter developed by Behaviour Interactive. I played some of it in pre-release and quite frankly, it wasn't very good. (Yes, yes, I was wrong. It happens.) Bugs were a serious issue at launch but the underlying gameplay is a bigger problem: levels are small and constrained, enemy numbers are underwhelming, and the weapons, limited by the game's progression system, are just boring.

Serious Sam 4 didn't really knock my socks off either, to be honest (I never got over them dropping the Planet Badass subtitle), so I'm really looking forward to getting back to the old ways with a new game—one that's just me, a bunch of stupid guns, and zillions of dudes to point them at, as God intended.

Ah, but it's going to be a while before I get to pull that Looney Tunes-style cannon out of my pocket and blast giant lizardmen into sticky bits with it: Croteam noted, with emphasis, that Serious Sam: The Third Encounter is in "early development," so don't expect it to show up anytime soon.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's big extraction mode DMZ has been out for one day, so it's a bit early to make sweeping declarations about balance, but even I'm raising an eyebrow at an operator trait that the internet is already calling broken.

That's "broken" in the "so overpowered it shouldn't exist" way, not the "literally doesn't work way," though when you see Possum in action, it does give the impression of a bug.

As someone who's been around the extraction shooter block, it's a very powerful trump card. It doesn't take that long to get, either: If you beeline straight to it on the Warfighter skill tree, you can do it in a handful of matches.

To be clear, this is not the same as reviving yourself during the DBNO (down but not out) state, which anyone can do from level 1: Possum means you can be a cold, dead, lootable body, and then suddenly spring back to life.

I'm not surprised folks are panicky about the prospect of playing around lobbies full of Possum players. There's already one clip circulating (per xFleXy_ on X) of someone fully killing a player, turning their back to fight other nearby enemies, then getting shot in the back by the guy they just killed.

That's the nightmare scenario, though the perk has drawbacks that xFleXy could've exploited if they'd known Possum existed. The self-revive isn't quick, and once it's done they still have to pick themselves up from DBNO with a tourniquet. If the killer is paying attention when that first step happens, they can easily end them for good before they stand back up.

I reckon Infinity Ward didn't envision folks using the perk to instantly turn the table on a lost fight. Per the name, you're likely meant to sit still, play dead, then self-revive after your corpse has been picked clean and the killers have moved on. You lose some stuff, but you escape with your operator (which can be expensive to replace). Call of Duty YouTuber JGOD demonstrated this use case in his own video.

In those terms, a trait like Possum is a great fit for DMZ, which is designed not to be as punishing as other extraction shooters. The problem is its execution: Players who just won a fight should not always have to worry that their victim is going to stand back up and kill them. Maybe using Possum should make more noise in the moment, or require a long wait (like 5 to 10 minutes) to use. Infinity Ward needs to underline how bad of an idea it is to use while enemies are around, or in lieu of that, players need a way to burn bodies.

"Burn bodies," in this context, refers to Hunt: Showdown, the other extraction shooter with this exact ability. That game's Possum, called Necromancer, works the same way, except that others have the option to set your corpse on fire and wait for a sound cue that confirms "this guy ain't getting up." It's a great bit of balance, because it puts the onus on the killer to already have a molotov cocktail on-hand, look for another way to start a fire, or leave your corpse and accept you may come back. Sometimes Necromancer saves your bacon, sometimes not.

Whatever the eventual solution is, I expect Infinity Ward to react soon.

Got a confusing order about finding a "dynamic op phone" in Modern Warfare 4 DMZ? You're not alone there: I've played around 15 hours of DMZ so far and this is the only objective that has genuinely confused me.

The good news is the answer is simpler than it sounds. The whole order is really just a tutorial for DMZ's free roam option, demonstrating how to lay low and complete contracts.

Where to find a dynamic op phone in DMZ

The page four order that asks you to "Collect a dynamic op phone in Cheongun Village" is really just asking you to pick up and complete a dynamic op. Dynamic ops are any of the missions marked by green satellite phone shapes on the map.

Since the order calls for starting one from Cheongun Village, the quickest way to do this is to enter a DMZ match through free roam (the third option on the deploy screen). This ensures that you won't have a dynamic op or story mission already assigned when the match starts, as you won't be able to start another until that one is finished.

So just get to Cheongun Village as quickly as possible—it's at the northwest corner of the South Korea part of Hajin, near the casino and hospital—and find one of those green markers. You can ping one to find it quickly, but they also make a distinct beeping sound that you can follow to the phone. They look like this:

Be sure to actually complete the dynamic op to finish the rest of the order, or you'll have to do the first step again. If you want to finish the whole page of orders in one run, then you'll also want do the following while you're at it:

• Craft a suppressor, a throwing knife, medium backpack, and two-plate armor vest
• Bring a silenced gun (cheapest is a pistol)
• Using the suppressed gun, kill eight enemies without taking damage

If you're itching to get your pupils up against Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 on PC at launch on Friday, you should probably double-check your system is up to date. We've already had a couple of colleagues here flung against the wall of requirements with the new COD, requiring a BIOS update to play online.

That's because Activision explains that both TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot are required to play any online game mode (multiplayer or DMZ). More specifically, though, you must have a new enough version of PTT (Platform Trust Technology) for Intel systems, and fTPM (Firmware Trusted Platform Module) for AMD ones.

Secure Boot and TPM requirements themselves are part of the toolkit that many modern online games use to keep cheaters out. We've seen requirements for both, for instance, to play Battlefield 6. Secure Boot is what gives your firmware and kernel themselves signatures to ensure they are legit, and the TPM helps verify that everything boots up in order with no extra, malicious software or firmware thrust into the boot process. Intel PTT and AMD fTPM are implementations of TPM.

The key confusion with COD MW4 is that just having Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 doesn't seem to be enough on its own—old versions of PTT or fTPM won't work.

Activision says that, for Intel systems, if your TPM version is some form of 302.1.2.X or 303.1.2.X (where X can be anything), your motherboard may require a firmware update.

For AMD ones, 3.X.0.X versions aren't compatible and will require a firmware update.

To update either PTT or fTPM, you need to update your BIOS.

To check your TPM version, press Win+R and run 'tpm.msc'. It should show you your version under 'TPM Manufacturer Information' at the bottom. If your TPM info window says one of those aforementioned versions you'll need to update your BIOS.

Bear in mind that this isn't just a problem with very old CPUs, as we've had two colleagues here at PC Gamer run into the issue despite running an Intel Core i5 12400KF and AMD Ryzen 5 5800X, respectively. Though they have admitted their BIOS versions were many years old.

If you've not updated your BIOS in a very long time, it's probably a good idea to do so before COD drops. One can fix vulnerabilities and even sometimes resolve pretty serious stability and longevity issues, as was the case with Intel's 14th Gen chips a few years back.

How to update your BIOS

1. Download the most recent stable version for your specific motherboard from its manufacturer's website.
2. Store it on a USB drive and plug that directly into your motherboard at the back of your PC
3. Reboot and head into your BIOS.
4. Find your BIOS update section
5. Choose to do a local/offline install
6. Select your newly downloaded BIOS file to install from.

Oh, and then back away slowly, and don't trip over that power cable while it installs. Kidding, it'll be fine—just take your time and do everything by the book.

If you're struggling to actually get into your BIOS via the traditional Del/F2 route—if your monitor stays black during POST for example—then you can hold down the Shift key while you restart your PC from the Windows shutdown menu. This will boot into a start menu that will allow you to go into an advanced options screen that lets you boot into your UEFI BIOS.

How to get set up after your BIOS update

Bear in mind that updating your BIOS resets everything, so you might need to adjust some settings to get things back how they were.

Most important, given the reason we're doing all this, is checking you have Secure Boot, TPM, and PTT/fTPM enabled. These settings will usually be found in a Security or Boot section, but the exact location will depend on your motherboard and BIOS.

You'll also want to check your memory profile, which adjusts your RAM speed and timings. If you have a specific one you selected previously, you'll have to find that again, but for most people simply enabling XMP (for Intel) or EXPO (for AMD) will do, as these should get your RAM running at faster timings. Most BIOSes should have an obvious toggle for this, though you might have to navigate to a page containing your memory settings.

You might also want to adjust your fan profiles if you prefer a manual curve. It will be worth checking your primary boot drive is recognised and set with first boot priority, too. And lastly, you should check Resizable BAR (ReBAR) is enabled, which is usually found in Advanced or PCIe menus.

Once all is in order, you can boot up into Windows and, with any luck, get into COD without issue.

After Team 4 added map voting to Overwatch one thing became crystal clear: everyone wants to say they're a free thinker who doesn't follow the crowd until King's Row turns up, and then it's a landslide.

King's Row is widely considered to be the best map in Overwatch, I certainly think so. It's one of the few maps that's fun to play on defense and attack, as it doesn't seem overly weighted to either side, at least not until the very end.

"There's high ground there, but there's not oppressive high ground," Aaron Keller, game director of Overwatch explained to me after I asked him what, in his mind, made this such an iconic map. "There's areas for a lot of different heroes to do their things. It's fairly tight and close, so you're not going to get out of the action for too long.

"Another thing that I think about a lot with King's Row—sorry this could go on for a really long time—I think that there's something about being able to play through most of the space in a map that I think is just more satisfying for both teams. It can feel really good to hold a team at spawn, but you don't want that every game. You want to feel like it's a close [game]."

As someone who mostly plays support heroes and has put a hell of a lot of time into Ana I can tell you that King's Row is my favourite map thanks to all of its clear sightlines and the fact that tanks never stray too far away from the payload, although the mid stretch can get a bit dicey at times. What I love the most, however, is how you're almost always coming face to face with the enemy providing "big team fight moments" the whole way through the map. But not everyone will agree with me.

"I do think sometimes there can be a sort of agreement that happens as more people vote for King's Row," Keller says. "It just starts to get some momentum there." There are a good deal of people who either vote with what the group wants or just don't vote at all, but every so often players go against the grain.

"Every single map in the game gets a vote," Keller says. "For some people Clash or 2CP is their favourite mode in Overwatch. Even though we think that there's some issues with them, but I think the playerbase is more varied than we think sometimes." I don't doubt that some people love 2CP. Even I wouldn't say I minded it much, although its second objective had some serious issues, which was one of the reasons as to why it ended up getting pulled from the map rotation.

I'm not sure whether Team 4 has tried to recreate the magic that they captured with King's Row, although Neon Junction sort of feels like it but in reverse. But that's alright, because there's plenty of other good maps to be enjoyed, although I know where my voting allegiances lie.

One day into Wardogs Season 2, Bulkhead Interactive has decided to scrap the bribery plan it announced last week as a way to help convince players to join the Blue team. The problem isn't that the plan didn't work—it actually worked far too well.

THE PLAN:

• "Lonestar cash and XP bonus. Season 2 only. New Bakurani spawn."
• "We're looking at how we can help the win rate of a certain team." -Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer (via "Road to Season 2" devlog)

THE REALITY:

• "We were wrong. We fucked up," Brammer admitted in a new video (via RPS).
• Blue team is now winning "by far, the most," Brammer said, even though the actual boosts are not terribly substantial: 5% Lonestar cash and 2.5% XP.
• "Median" players didn't get much from those percentages, but Bulkhead found that "top tier" players were seeing significant boosts
• Bottom line: it's gone.

"We're removing the Blue XP bonus, the cash bonus. We were wrong," Brammer said. Bulkhead co-founder Howard Philpott added that the studio thought Blue team bonus might work out this way, but said "I don't think we expected it to be this much of a swing."

I can't say I'm terribly surprised by the outcome. I'm not a Wardogs player, but I have been around long enough to know how these things go: If you dangle a competitive edge in front of gamers, they're going to jump for it. Percentage boosts are especially risky because they're performance-based and so much more likely to go spinning out of control, especially in the hands of, as Brammer put it, "tryhards."

And it's not just the extra XP and cash being earned that's a problem: Philpott said the bonus is also "impacting people joining games and starting games," presumably because if they can't be a Blue, they'll leave and try their luck with another game.

(Quick side note: I'm not a fan of the term 'tryhard.' Of course I'm trying hard! Why wouldn't I be? My nephew called me a tryhard once and I told him that maybe if he tried harder he wouldn't get his ass kicked so hard. He was 12 and I got some disapproving looks from other people at the Christmas party, but I stand by it.)

PC Gamer's Morgan Park, who is a Wardogs guy, also made the call when this plan was unveiled last week: "XP and cash bribes are a drastic move, but should have a real impact. It's unclear how big these boosts will be, but I expect Blue will instantly become the most popular team by a wide margin in Season 2."

Predictable as this outcome was, I don't see it as a particularly egregious misstep. Brammer called it an "experiment," and sometimes that's what you have to do—and the early stages of a massively popular videogame with teething issues can definitely be one of those times. Brammer also noted that other changes aimed at rebalancing things, including new spawns on the Bakurani map, have proven effective and will remain.

Alongside the removal of the Blue team bribery, Bulkhead is also fixing issues with driver progression, and is fixing a driver exploit that's letting players access tanks too quickly: Players who are "very clearly" taking advantage of the exploit (less than 1,000 in total, according to Brammer) will be given a 24-hour ban from the game and have their cash and XP wiped.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is releasing soon, but also features early access for many of its modes, including its campaign and the hotly anticipated revival of the DMZ extraction shooter.

To get early access to both the campaign and DMZ, you need to preorder the game digitally, otherwise, you'll be able to play on October 23. Activision hasn't revealed an exact time for the campaign early access unlock on the 16th, but the PC preload is already live.

There also hasn't been any official info about the DMZ early access release time on October 20. However, some sources predict it will be 10 am PT (1 pm ET/6 pm BST). What we do know is that:

• Modern Warfare 4 will release on October 23 at midnight local time, wherever you are.

You'll need 115GB for the game's storage and you can find the official system requirements to run it on the Steam page.

As we draw closer to the DMZ unlock and the full release, I'll update this article with any official time announcements that Activision drops.

Not many live service games have stood the test of time quite like Overwatch. 10 years in and it's still been able to retain its playerbase, maintain momentum, and even ramp it up. How, you ask? Well, besides having really cute skins and a very enticing game loop, Team 4 figured out exactly where Overwatch needed to stand years ago.

"Overwatch exists in an incredibly competitive space among live service shooters," Overwatch's game director Aaron Keller tells me. "Some of the biggest games in the world are here."

To have (and crucially, maintain) a successful live service game is the golden goose egg of this industry right now. With publishers like Sony trying to force it upon countless studios before pulling the plug on eight out of 12 projects when things start to go sideways. Even games that manage to land with an eager audience like Arc Raiders can struggle to maintain momentum. But for some, like Overwatch, the live service model has worked, so what's the secret?

"That's a big question," associate game director Alec Dawson says. "I think some of the things we've learned is to shut away fear as much as possible and push beyond, experiment within that experience. But what it really boils down to is coming to work each morning and making good decisions every day. We've lived that over the last two years." But unfortunately for any eager Sony execs reading this, "there's no secret sauce in particular."

"It's incredibly hard to make something that players can interact with every day for years on end," Keller adds. "You can get 95% of the way there, and your game could still die three months after release. It is much, much harder to come up with that initial sort of experience than I think a lot of people give it credit for. But once you've done it, you've kind of just started the race."

Free time and cash are both at a premium for most players, and with so many options available, games studios need to offer up exactly what they're looking for. Because if they don't, someone else will.

"Our players really want novelty and they really want variety, but they want it inside of a competitive framework," Keller explains. "If you look at other games on the market, there's ones that are really just more about the novelty side of the game, and there's other ones that are really just about straight up competition. There's not a lot of change in those games. We occupy this really unique spot in the middle."

Marvel Rivals came the closest to taking Overwatch's spot, but that didn't last long as it cemented itself as a casual game which is more concerned with balancing for fun. Alternatively, Overwatch offers higher skill ceilings and a "sense that your time was worthwhile in the experience," Dawson explains. "That the rules and structure of the sport were fair towards the outcome."

This isn't to say that Team 4 have uncovered the secret to perfect game balancing, I'm not sure that'll ever be possible, but the idea still stands that players should be able to take away some kind of lesson from each game, lessons that'll help form them into a more skilled player. Even if that lesson is to 'don't solo queue at 2 am'.

"There's a design value at Blizzard called control is king," Keller adds. The idea that players want to feel like they're in control of everything their hero does and therefore experience the cool moments that come from that. Overwatch's newest hero Doctrine is "a powerful example of something like that."

Doctrine offers two experiences: a primal and slightly simplistic one in which it feels good to just use his base kit to land shots. Then there's a more nuanced version, which offers players the chance to raise the skill ceiling with his Infuse mechanic.

"It's so satisfying to be holding down Infuse while you're trying to line up your shot, as the beam gets bigger, you get that sound effect, then you pull the trigger, and you see that connection. It's so satisfying. The hero team, and the audio team, the VFX animations, everybody kind of comes together to have that one moment where control really is king. That moment just needs to feel as good and as visceral as possible."

Doctrine is the only hero I've played since the new season came out last week, and I can confirm his kit is just as good as Keller makes it sound. It's a testimony to Team 4 that 54 heroes later they're still able to offer players something that feels unique, specialised, and just a hell of a lot of fun to play.

"One of the Blizzard greats, Chris Metzen, always described our company as a hero factory," Keller says. "This is just what we do, and you can see it in a lot of our other games, from StarCraft to Warcraft to Diablo, just all these characters that are really larger than life. It's what our fans can really throw their passion behind.

"I think that Overwatch really carries that torch forward. We're trying to make these amazing fantasies that people can just jump into and live out. I can't wait for players to see some of the archetypes that are coming next season, and especially Season 1 next year."

Despite some big changes happening with Overwatch lately, former game director Jeff Kaplan hasn't touched it since the year he left Blizzard. In fact, he actively avoids the game in every way he can, he told GameSpot in a recent interview.

Before Overwatch, Kaplan rose through the ranks on the World of Warcraft team, starting in QA and eventually becoming game director. He described his departure from the WoW team in 2008 as "a training moment" for when he would leave the Overwatch team, and Blizzard altogether, in 2021.

"I kind of went through a little bit of shock leaving WoW back in 2008," Kaplan says. "So, when I stepped away from Overwatch in April of 2021, I was kind of used to that moment of what it meant to give all of yourself, your heart, your soul–because it's not just a job, there's no one who can do this and have it just be a job–and then have this shocking moment where you realize it doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the team, belongs to the players, it belongs to Blizzard, but it doesn’t belong to you."

Kaplan says he "had a very almost clinical separation" with Overwatch after what he went through with WoW. As a result, he stopped playing it the moment he left and has actively avoided it ever since.

"After I said my goodbye to competitive Overwatch and the Overwatch subreddit, I never go back and read," he says. "I don't watch YouTube [videos]. I don't search for my name in Overwatch. I don't search for Overwatch. I sort of just disconnect. I actually tell all the algorithms like, 'Yeah, I'm not really interested in Overwatch anymore. I know you think I'm the Overwatch guy, but like, that's just not for me anymore.'"

In an interview from earlier this year, Kaplan said he fully expected to retire from Blizzard, but the company's former CFO broke him by threatening to lay off 1,000 people if Overwatch didn't meet certain financial goals. Kaplan called that meeting "the biggest fuck you moment I've had in my career, it felt surreal to be in that condition."

Kaplan went quiet for several years before reappearing with a new studio and a new open world survival cowboy game called The Legend of California, which he's heading up alongside former Blizzard developer Tim Ford. He says the new game is an opportunity to explore something more personal to him for the first time. "I didn't leave Blizzard to try to make a Blizzard game. I left Blizzard to make a Tim and Jeff game."

10 years is a long time for anything, but for a live service game it's a milestone that very few are able to cross. Overwatch made it over the line earlier this year, and has since been able to do something of a victory lap because after all the highs and the lows, Overwatch is in the best place it's ever been.

"It doesn't feel like 10 years to me," game director Aaron Keller tells me. "Although, I could probably answer that question in a few ways. There's probably a year or two that might have felt like five or six years in the middle of this process, but there's always so much to be doing on the team and for the game." But Keller reiterates the good old adage "if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.

"Our team is filled with people that are not just passionate about making games, they're passionate about Overwatch itself, our heroes and the world in which they reside. So when you get to go into the office and talk about that all day, the time can fly by pretty quickly."

Alec Dawson, associate game director, joined before the launch of Overwatch 2 but also feels as if these last four years have flown by "in a blink of an eye … It's wild that when we started the year, we had these silhouettes of heroes that we didn't even know what they were going to be, what they were going to look like, and now we do," Dawson adds. "Sometimes it just goes by much quicker than you think it's going to."

Overwatch has undergone many metamorphoses, some good, others not so good. We had the early golden years, then we had GOATS, then a plethora of some of the best game cinematics ever, then we had early Brigitte taking a literal hammer to the game's balance.

After something of a content drought, excitement was renewed with the announcement of Overwatch 2, and while this did offer a lot of good changes like more heroes, content, and focused team fights in 5v5, it failed to meet the requirements of a sequel, and that's without the disappointment surrounding PvE.

There was a time when I thought that was it for Overwatch, that PvE and Overwatch 2 would be all anyone would ever talk about. But I've never been happier to be proven wrong, because all these years later Overwatch is going from strength to strength experimenting with things like perks and Stadium, tweaking the user experience with map voting and hero bans, and changing to a new annual content release format.

"I don't think we could honestly say we knew it would go this far," Keller says. "I believe that there's always been something special about Overwatch. There's something special about the world. This optimistic, hopeful take on the future. I do think that there's something special about the gameplay—it's so crisp and clean—and there's moments you have in Overwatch that you just don't really get to have in other games."

I've said it before but the current success that Team 4 is seeing didn't just happen overnight. It's been a long road, one marked with deliberate decisions and remedies taken by its devs. The passion the devs have exhibited, the humility to admit when things aren't working, and keeping player's best interests at the forefront are why the game is in such a good state today.

What promises have Team 4 kept over the last 10 years?

Next up

Moving on from its tenth anniversary year, Overwatch has a new seasonal cadence which has not only worked to spark excitement, but as Keller sees it, has bolstered the "belief that Overwatch is really going in a good direction." There's a steady flow of quality-of-life changes to its UI as we saw last season with new heal, burn, and team indicators. Team 4 has given players more freedom when it comes to picking Drives, and the narrative story is back to being central to Overwatch's experience.

There's obviously going to be a steady flow of new content and characters, but Dawson has also confirmed that map reworks and tweaks will be "something we want to continue doing". Informed by map voting and community feedback the team will ensure that reworks "can stand on its own" not only fixing problems but gunning for a better overall experience: "I think our next rework does a pretty good job of that."

"We're really far into development on Season 1 for 2027," Keller reveals. "We're talking about what Season 1 is going to look like in 2028, and getting started on that. We want it to feel like not just one big moment but that the game is fresh for players and that we are getting players to look at it through new eyes again—we want to do it in a different way each year."

But while Team 4 gets stuck into planning content for the years to come, Dawson stresses that their overall mission will stay the same: "As much as the industry has changed, games have changed, genres, etc. Overwatch is still home for so many people. It's a really big responsibility that we take to heart of making sure that Overwatch can be a part of those people's lives as long as possible.

"To make sure they have the game and the heroes that they can relate to, make sure that they can play with their friends, and just keep having that place where they feel like, okay, this is where I want to be. This is where I want to spend my time. This is where I want to make memories. Hopefully, we can keep carrying that into the future as well."

New Blood boss Dave Oshry isn't interested in running a massive studio that follows the blockbuster strategy of milking its successful games for all they're worth. The publisher-developer combo has enjoyed a string of big wins with its boomer shooters, but Oshry's plan for building on success is to invest that money into new projects.

"I think a lot of studios would have a big hit like Ultrakill," Oshry tells us, "and then they would maybe open a big office, or just milk the shit out of Ultrakill and do Ultrakill spinoffs, or use that money to make sequels. And I've decided to put that money into projects like Gloomwood and Fallen Aces, artsy projects like Tenebris Somnia. That’s what I've decided to do with our success because I can, because we're independent."

The goal, says Oshry, has never been to create "a big studio with an office and hundreds of employees … I don't know why anyone would want that". And thankfully he doesn't have to deal with shareholders and investors telling him to just keep milking and keep growing.

"The fact that we're one studio and that I control everything means that I can make those kinds of decisions," he says. "If we had publishers or shareholders or investors, they would be like, ‘No, you need to take that money and reinvest it into things that are going to make more money so we can get bigger returns.’ They would be like, ‘You need to be working on Ultrakill spinoff games. You need to be working on Dusk 2, Faith: Chapter Four. Why haven't you made a survival crafting game out of this yet? You need to be reinvesting in the IPs and making money, money, money.’ And we're just like, ‘What cool thing do we want to do? What's coming down the pipe?’"

This isn't to say that New Blood doesn't support its games or give players another taste of the things that they dig. Dusk and Amid Evil continue to be updated, and there have been conversations about a new episode for Dusk or even a proper sequel. A Dusk spin-off is in the works, too, called Dungeons of Dusk, though it's from a different developer, not David Szymanski.

But this is still a far cry from the big publisher strategy of making IPs and bleeding them dry. Like Ubisoft, for example. "Look at fucking Heroes of Might and Magic," says Oshry. "Look at what's happened to that bloody series over the years. Everybody loves Heroes 3, and that was a million years ago. Ubisoft has whored that IP out all over the place for decades, and now finally you've got someone like Hooded Horse making something like Olden Era, and people are like, ‘Yeah, good, this is what we wanted’. But it's all about IP, it always has been with AAA."

Oshry offers Wolverine as another example. "It became designed by corporate, and look what happened. I don't think it was the game they originally set out to make, but it was the game they had to ship. At New Blood we’re never putting out games because it's a game we had to ship—because we had to meet a deadline or we had investors or shareholders. We're literally just trying to make the best games we can and make as many people happy as we can."

If New Blood followed the received wisdom that Sony or Ubisoft follow, it likely wouldn't be the success that it is. "If I just forced David to make Dusk 2," Oshry says, "we never would have gotten Iron Lung. Iron Lung, Markiplier, $50 million [box office] never would have happened if I made David do Dusk 2. And now David Szymanski has got a movie that made $50 million, funded by a YouTuber. That doesn't happen if I don't run New Blood the way that I do. It works. It works for us."

Looking at the state of the industry, the failure of big games like Wolverine, the so-called 'Xbox reset', the grotesque layoffs, it certainly looks like blockbuster game development, endless sequels and an obsession with IP is unsustainable.

"As we've seen with all the layoffs, developers are disposable, whether you make a hit game or not," Oshry says. "What is a hit? Your game can sell millions of copies, but it doesn't balance the balance sheet. So everybody gets laid off. Imagine working for six years on a game, it's not the game you wanted to make anyway, and then you get laid off because it's not the game that sells. And you're like, ‘Well, maybe it would have been if it was the game we wanted to make, and not the game that had to ship, like a Wolverine.’

"People are always like, ‘Oh, the industry is dying and imploding’. We're doing fine. I guess we're the lucky ones. But I think we made our own luck by making the kind of games we want to make, and knowing that they'll sell to the kind of people who like our games."

In August, game director Chris Roberts said that Star Citizen's singleplayer component, Squadron 42, was being delayed out of 2026 to avoid clashing with Grand Theft Auto 6. There was a certain amount of skepticism about the reason for the delay, thanks in part to a recent Star Citizen livestream being declared a disaster, but also because, well. These games have had so many release dates the changes have their own wiki page.

There's something concrete about having Squadron 42 getting a Steam page though, with system requirements and everything. Those system requirements are charmingly old-fashioned, with no mention of ray tracing-capable GPUs or DirectX 12. Although the install size of 150GB is still pretty hefty. (Final Fantasy 7 Revelation is apparently going to be 200GB, oof.)

There's also a new trailer, which leans heavily on the oorah stuff that's always a bit of a turn-off in military science-fiction. Privateer was my favorite Wing Commander game because it left out all the Top Gun nonsense, but of course it's front-and-center in Squadron 42.

So too are the celebrity actors, with appearances by Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Rhona Mitra, that guy who played the Onion Knight in Game of Thrones, and other people who probably filmed most of their scenes a solid decade ago now. We also get to see a fair bit of the male version of the player-character, who will doubtless BroShep his way into most of the promos even though I'll be picking the one voiced by Alix Wilton Regan instead.

The Steam page lists Squadron 42's release date as Q2 2027, and I'd love to see it actually release on that date and be the solid combo of Wing Commander and Half-Life 2 that happens to have Gillian Anderson and Henry Cavill in the cutscenes that's being promised here. It could happen.

For most of PC gaming history, there were three states of PC game—your regular old video game, expansions/DLC, and mods. But for a brief period in the 1990s, there was a fourth state, the level pack—collections of levels for the early first-person shooters like Duke Nukem 3D and Quake.

These level packs were sold on shelves as boxed products just like their video game counterparts. But they occupied a far more amorphous position between the other three states of PC gaming. In form and structure, they were similar to expansions, and are sometimes bundled into the same category. The Master Levels for Doom 2, for example, are regarded as an official expansion to that game.

Others, however, were marketed as "Official Mission Packs," like Quake's additional episodes Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity. On top of these were unofficial mission packs, like those published by Wizardworks for Duke Nukem 3D.

Some of these level packs played small but important roles in FPS history, acting as the primordial soup from which some of the genre's latter-day designers emerged. But they also represented a digital Wild West, varying greatly in both quality and legality, and it all ultimately ended in tears.

The best of these mission packs were generally created by sanctioned third-party developers like Sunstorm Interactive. Specialists in Duke Nukem 3D level packs, Sunstorm were responsible for Duke Caribbean: Life's A Beach, Duke It Out in DC and Duke Xtreme—three of the most well-regarded level packs for 3D Realms' 1996 FPS.

It was at studios like Sunstorm where many of the second generation of FPS level designers would cut their teeth. One such designer was Charlie Wiederhold, a college kid who was obsessed with making maps for games like Rise of the Triad and Duke 3D, who would go on to work on games like Duke Nukem Forever, Borderlands, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Wiederhold was recruited by Sunstorm after designing a level for a LAN tournament he was involved with called the Duke Nukem 3D Rodeo Shootout, which was attended by the likes of Randy Pitchford and Richard 'Levelord' Gray. In fact, there is an archived Usenet post on Google Groups written by Wiederhold advertising the tournament: "I got hired by Sunstorm to write an installer for the Duke addon pack that they were making," Wiederhold recalls. "I got the chance to do one of the levels for Duke It Out in DC, and [combined with] the installer, I looked around and thought 'why am I still going to college?'"

Most of the levels for Duke It Out in DC and Duke Caribbean were built by Wiederhold and just one other designer, Robert Travis. And it wasn't just Duke mission packs they built together. They also worked on Wanton Destruction for Shadow Warrior, Cryptic Passage for Blood, and the beautifully named Suckin' Grits on Route 66 for Redneck Rampage.

All these level packs were released in the space of two years, with Sunstorm rattling them out as quickly as they could make them. "It was very Wild West back then," Wiederhold says. "There was no structure to the industry yet. It felt like it was forging into new territory,"

But this didn't matter to Wiederhold. Getting paid to build these levels for his favourite shooters was his dream job: "It was definitely some of the most fun [I'd had] as a 20-21 year old, just dreaming about making this stuff," he says. "I['d] put my headphones on, listen to soundtracks and make levels."

A big part of the reason why Sunstorm could put out so many mission packs for Duke and other Build Engine games was because the tech had far superior mapping tools than earlier shooters like Doom and Rise of the Triad:

"With Doom, from what I understand, at the time you actually had to save the level and go into the game to see your level fully 3D, whereas Duke 3D, you could actually be flying around in it, so you could see the sprites that you're placing," Wiederhold says. He also points out that 3D Realms had actually "written some documentation. That was a big thing. The 3D Realms guys actually provided a little bit of documentation on how to use it."

While Sunstorm was one of several developers trying to capitalise on the new FPS craze, for Wiederhold, mapping was about more than just cashing in. The FPS was evolving at lightning speed, and Wiederhold wanted to make what small contribution he could to that. "For Duke, I was always trying to push some technical boundary. Like really test all the elements of it. But the only reason I could do that in a sane way was because I could go in and see it. If I'm doing some sort of sector over sector thing or some other crazy effect, I could see it there in the editor."

Not every level pack creator was so scrupulous, however. Alongside Sunstorm's creations, Wizardworks also published numerous level packs of dubious quality. One of these was Duke Assault, which essentially scraped over 1,500 user-made Duke Nukem 3D levels from the Internet and bundled them into the box. No attempt was made to curate these levels, so the pack included many maps that were either unfinished maps from first-time designers, or "troll" maps that would kill the player upon spawning.

Alongside low-grade efforts like Duke Assault, Duke Nukem received dozens of mission packs that were boxed and sold on shelves despite being completely unauthorised. The most infamous of these was the Nuke It series. Like Duke Assault, the Nuke It series were shovelware expansion packs developed by Micro Star Software filled with player-created levels.

Uncertain of its legal standing, Micro Star filed for a declaratory judgement that it had not committed copyright infringement. Duke Nukem 3D's publisher FormGen counter-sued, claiming that the maps found in Nuke It constituted derivative works of Duke Nukem 3D. In 1998, the court found in FormGen's favour.

The ruling made Micro Star v. FormGen a landmark case in US copyright law, as it ultimately determined that video game mods count as derivative works, and constitute a copyright violation if made without the holder's consent. While most game developers wisely tolerate and see the benefits of supporting the modding community, those mods exist at the grace of those companies.

Following Micro Star v. Formgen, unregulated FPS mission packs quickly died out. Third-party addons for PC games became formalised as either official expansions or unofficial mods, But the enthusiasm for expanding the FPS classics of the '90s lived on, and today the mapping scene for many hallmark shooters is arguably better than it has ever been. From unofficial masterpieces like Arcane Dimensions, to official new epidoes like Quake's Dawn of the Machine, these spellbinding addons derive from the exact same desires that drove Wiederhold to push the Build engine to its limits thirty years ago.

Bulkhead wants to boost one team's win rate, and it's willing to bribe its players (with in-game cash) to do it. Despite all three teams starting on equal grounds, many Wardogs players have been avoiding Blue from the start, going so far as to idle on the selection screen for minutes waiting for a slot to open on Green or Red.

The are practical balancing problems that work against Blue team, like their lackluster camouflage and unfavorable spawn points (Season 2 is tackling Bakurani), but the bonuses are meant to counter the other reason Blue sucks, as I covered last month:

"Another, less talked about possibility, is that Blue team's infamy is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Folks have one bad night with Lonestar and decide to believe the reputation, or hear it's the team to avoid, or notice everyone else actively avoiding it, and you end up with a Blue team full of less experienced players."

XP and cash bribes are a drastic move, but should have a real impact. It's unclear how big these boosts will be, but I expect Blue will instantly become the most popular team by a wide margin in Season 2.

I wonder, though, if this problem wasn't slowly sorting itself out already. I've noticed the Blue bias dying down over the past couple weeks—the faction is still mostly losing in the NA West servers I frequent, but they're also scoring points and competing, which is a positive sign. I've even been on a couple of winning Blue teams, if you can believe it.

Wardogs Season 2 is shaping up to be bigger than I expected so soon after release. The October 15 patch also adds new guns, vehicles, rainy weather on all maps, and more to be revealed in the patch notes next week. It also marks the game's first progression wipe—everyone's going back to level 1.

Cheating: it's why we can't have nice things. Whether your online shooter of choice is beset by players targeting you through walls, or you're a Linux user who would definitely be playing more games were it not for kernel-level anti-cheat systems, the actions of a few spoil the fun for many. Banning cheating players is the obvious thing to do, but what's to stop bad eggs making fresh accounts?

A student at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology has a few ideas. Named Christopher B. Didriksen, the student even based his Master's thesis on one possible biometric-based solution. Sharing some of his research findings on Reddit, Didriksen explained that players in Counter-Strike 2 can be differentiated based on how they use their mouse and keyboard in-game. Based on these movements, repeat offenders could then be identified and banned for good.

The researcher analysed a number of 'demos' resulting from competitive CS2 matches. Using the two separate signals from a player's mouse and keyboard during these demos, a 'fingerprint' can be identified that "stays stable across maps, sessions, settings [...] across matches played months apart, and across a sensitivity change from 800 to 640 eDPI." By the sounds of it, you will shine through no matter what bargain bucket peripheral you may use to game.

In a dataset of more than 1,000 players, mouse movement biometrics correctly identified players "every time [...] but often only by a fine margin," and keyboard use "picked out the right player 98% of the time." Cross-referencing these two metrics identifies the humans behind the accounts with a high rate of accuracy. Didriksen writes that this method "found smurfs nobody had reported, and it is fast enough to check every new match against all of CS2's monthly players."

For those a little unclear what those tiny blue fellas have to do with Counter-Strike 2, 'smurf' is the term for a secondary account belonging to an otherwise experienced or high-ranking player. Didriksen proposes that his movement 'finger-printing' system would "sit next to [Valve Anti-Cheat] and Trust Factor and answer the one question they can't. Is this the same human?"

The motivation for Didriksen's thesis was a dissatisfaction with existing anti-cheat and banning systems—essentially, a banned player could make a new 'smurf' account and be "back in a match the same evening." Didriksen notes his proposed method is not a perfect solution to this problem, as it essentially removes the possibility that a banned player may change their cheating ways on a fresh account. He also notes that his fingerprinting system is easily confounded by shared accounts.

Still, a number of Redditors signed up to participate in Didriksen's research earlier this year, with some even revealing their Smurf accounts. Didriksen says this "turned out to be some of the most valuable data I had." For this reason, he goes on to tell the r/CS2 subreddit, "The thesis is now finished and got an A, and none of it would have been possible without you."

And they said videogames could never teach you anything!

Welcome back to another special community tournament edition of FOV 90, the only FPS column that I'm aware of.

Last week, we started the work of determining the greatest FPS mode of all time through spirited democracy. In Round 1, 16 classic and modern modes were pitted against each other in 1v1 matchups. The seeding, which I chose myself, was completely uncontroversial and everyone liked it—especially the part where I made them choose between Conquest and Domination.

Over 7,000 votes were tallied over five days, and the results are in.

🥁drum roooooooooolllllllllllllll🥁

Round 1 Results

• Team Deathmatch (75%) wins over FFA/Deathmatch (25%)
• Battle Royale (52%) wins over Extraction (48%)
• Conquest (68%) wins over Domination (32%)
• Bomb Defusal (85%) wins over Hostage (15%)
• Payload (52%) wins over Gun Game (48%)
• Infection (61%) wins over Prop Hunt (39%)
• Capture the Flag (91%) wins over VIP (9%)
• Attack & Defend (52%) wins over King of the Hill (48%)

I think we can all agree a few of those winners were predictable—I can see Team Deathmatch or Capture the Flag going all the way at this rate—but several matchups surprised me. Battle royale just barely edges out Extraction while Gun Game is brought down by Payload. The voting body showed up for both serious and playful modes, which makes me happy. I also enjoyed watching you all share your votes and memories in the comments.

And here's how PC Gamer's staff reacted to the results:

Yes, I'm a monster. But alas, it's time to bury our dead and move on. Round 2 is on!

The Bracket

Round 2 - Vote!

Read up on the matchups below and vote for your favorite. Round 2 voting closes on Monday, October 12 at 11:59 PM PDT. The more votes we get, the more interesting the results, so tell your friends! Next week we'll be back to share the results and begin Round 3.

Team Deathmatch vs Battle Royale

AKA: Team Slayer (Halo) // It's always called BR

Intimate team-based action, or large-scale slaughter?

Conquest vs Bomb Defusal

AKA: Warfare (Hell Let Loose) // Bomb (Rainbow Six Siege), Plant/Defuse (Valorant)

The consensus king of competitive, or all-out warfare?

Payload vs Infection

AKA: It's always Payload and Infection, because they're perfect names

Both unusual, asymmetrical formats that rely on staying together to get anything done. This will be a painful vote for me.

Capture the Flag vs Attack & Defend

AKA: It's always CTF // 2CP (Overwatch), Breakthrough (Battlefield)

Attack & Defend was a surprise winner of Round 1, but CTF is coming off a 91% majority win. Will this be an upset?

I cover a lot of demos for PC Gamer, and some of them really stick with me. Divine Frequency has been a real lost Lenore among those memorable games: It was a rare shooter that managed to scare the living daylights out of me, while also being an amazingly satisfying action experience. I've been up on the widow's walk every night, watching for any sign of its ship returning from the long voyage.

Only, I wasn't watching closely enough. On September 25, developer Abraxaes released a new trailer revealing an early access launch date of October 27 for the surreal and horrific FPS-RPG. Before that announcement, back in March, they outlined some of the herculean challenges Divine Frequency has faced⁠—most notably the surprise death of lead writer Pablo "Artistical" Lamprea. Here are Abraxaes' own words on their friend and collaborator:

Divine Frequency's demo had some truly amazing cosmic horror writing: SCP-style, banal categorization of the unknown contrasting with flowery, expansive, yet somehow not indulgent prose to capture the majestic enigma of it all. It left an impression on me, and I've wanted more for almost three years. I'm so glad that Lamprea's collaborators have been able to continue this work to bring their shared dream alive.

But this wasn't even the only setback Divine Frequency faced in 2025: It turned out that a number of sound libraries purchased by the developers contained copyrighted material. To avoid liabilities, the developers had to painstakingly go through every audio file in the game and replace the copyright-infringing ones. "This also delayed the game by a fair margin," Abraxaes wrote.

But soon, it will finally come to fruition. Divine Frequency is still targeting an early access launch after so much lead time⁠, but it sounds like its developers want it to be uniquely substantial and polished: "You only get one chance to launch a game," they wrote in the March update, "and this needs to be pristine on launch." They further say it contains the first two of three planned acts, or 70% of the game.

I don't love playing games piecemeal in early access (though I understand how much of a lifesaver it can be to devs), but it sounds like Divine Frequency is coming out with a real chunk of game. After so much time away, I'm thrilled to revisit this awful, unsettling world. Ahead of early access, you can wishlist Divine Frequency and check out its updated demo on Steam.

2026 has been a truly astonishing year for Quake mapping, with both fans and professional game developers delivering some incredible death arenas for id Software's 1996 FPS. We've had the enormous Quake Brutalist Jam 3, numerous map packs celebrating Quake's 30 anniversary, and even a new official campaign called Dawn of the Machine.

You'd think the Quake community would be out of ideas by this point, but if anything, the Quake community is only growing bolder. On Friday, the community released one of its most ambitious map packs yet—a level design extravaganza all about rooftops.

Quake Rooftops Jam adds 19 custom maps to id's shooter, all riffing on the theme of the part of your house that stops the rain falling in. While rooftops might not seem like the most exciting subject for a mapping jam, it is fascinating in the context of Quake. As a corridor shooter, rooftops are rarely glimpsed in Quake. Skittering across a virtual skyline is more the domain of games like Thief: The Dark Project and its spiritual successor Dishonored.

Hence, creating Quake maps where rooftops are the primary play-space is an interesting challenge. The Quake community has taken the idea and run with it, producing wildly different designs. One example is Robert Yang's Mermaids in the Basement, a sun-soaked nonlinear map set in a Mediterranean coastal village semi-submerged in water. Other highlights include Once, But No More, a sprawling cityscape with multiple architectural styles stuffed with platforming sequences, and City of Traitors, a maze of gothic spires set in a misty purple void.

If you fancy giving Quake Rooftops Jam a whirl, you can download it from Slipseer. It's designed to be used with a Quake sourceport like Ironwail or vkQuake, so you'll need a copy of those too. Once you've got both, all you need to do is extract the Rooftops Jam files into your Quake folder (in a new folder titled 'qrtjam'), create a shortcut to your Quake sourceport with the additional command line "-game qrtjam", and boot it up from there.

While Quake itself is thriving three decades on from its release, the future of the series more generally is difficult to discern. There were rumours a while back that Machine Games might be working on Quake 6, but all signs point to the studio's next game being Wolfenstein 3. Meanwhile, multiplayer spinoff Quake Champions recently ceased its live-service updates, though it's still playable as a one-off, paid title.

• User After-Cartoonist-196 on the German-language PCBaumeister subreddit claims to have bought a CPU secondhand, but that it carried the previous owner's Valorant ban.
• Extreme surveillance measures have been adopted by esports devs in recent years to combat and punish endemic cheating in their games.
• Riot support allegedly told them this ban is now associated with all of their other PC components, and there is nothing the company can do to lift the ban.
• Riot anticheat head Phillip Koskinas asserts that the company's hardware bans last four months, and cannot "infect" other components when inserted into a new system.

After-Cartoonist-196's original post was reported on by PC World, and has independently made the rounds on social media as well. They say they bought the CPU on September 21, and that the original owner's ban was logged on August 12.

On Twitter, Koskinas said he was unable to find a support ticket matching After-Cartoonist-196's details, and that the story is "pretty unlikely." Koskinas pointed out that Riot hardware bans have a four month maximum duration, and that Riot support is required to provide the remaining duration of the ban when responding to a ticket.

That does leave much of the original story intact still: If the ban began on August 12, it will not hit the duration limit until mid-December. Koskinas firmly debunked one aspect of the story, though: He denied, in two separate posts, that a system's other hardware is blacklisted when detected alongside a banned component.

We reached out to After-Cartoonist-196 after the PC World article was published, but before Koskinas' public response. The core of the story⁠—that this player inherited another's hardware ban⁠—still seems plausible, and while not as drastic as initially presented by After-Cartoonist-196, it would certainly be an aggravating, Kafkaesque ordeal to get locked out of your favorite game in such a way, no matter the duration.

Assuming the original Reddit account is fully truthful, my theory would be that a shoddy support response resulted in the system ban miscommunication—whatever the official policy cited by Koskinas, Riot is a large company with many divisions and external contractors.

The story speaks to the invasiveness of the most advanced anticheat measures in effect today. I'm not a fan of kernel-level anticheat, myself, but competitive game developers swear by it. Your mileage may vary: I just don't really play this kind of esports-centric competitive game anymore for this, and a host of other reasons.

Just 1 day remains to VOTE in Round 1 of the FPS mode tournament. Four days in, here's where the polls stand in each bout. Many of them are still really close, so let your voice be heard!

• Team Deathmatch 75% // FFA 25%
• Battle Royale 52% // Extraction 48%
• Conquest 68% // Domination 32%
• Bomb Defusal 85% // Hostage 15%
• Payload 52% // Gun Game 48%
• Infection 61 % // Prop Hunt 39%
• Capture The Flag 91% // VIP 9%
• Attack & Defend 52% // King of the Hill 48%

Want to play Arc Raiders but don't want to pay for it? Sorry to say, this is not your lucky day—but October 8 will be. From then until October 12, Arc Raiders will be free to play on all platforms to mark the launch of Frozen Trail, the biggest Arc update since the game's launch in 2025.

The freebie offers full access to the game, including the new content added in Frozen Trail—a new map, enemies, weapons, gadgets, and more—with no limits beyond the calendar. If you dig it enough that you decide you do want to pay for it (and I'd say there's a good chance you will, it's pretty great), Arc Raiders is also on sale for half-price—that's $30/£26/€30—during the Steam Autumn Sale, which also ends October 8.

Another unexpected twist in the Bungle tale:

That's the latest move from Bungie, which recently un-cancelled Destiny 2 following a massive fan backlash over the decision to put the game in maintenance mode. It seems odd to me—I would think that now, with the seeming rebirth of Destiny 2 at hand, is exactly the time you'd want that storefront up and operational. Regardless of the need for a new storefront, taking the old one offline for months while it's being made feels counterproductive.

Also interesting is that the Marathon storefront, which lives on its own subdomain, is not being taken offline while the "new home" is being built. They look effectively identical, so I have no idea what to make of that.

Here's a little comparison of the two:

At a guess, I'd say the most likely outcome here is that the Bungie Store will be integrated into Sony's own storefront—rather like Bungie's own absorption into Sony after the wheels came off the whole "independent subsidiary" thing.

Some followers hope that will lead to lower shipping costs, which would be a positive outcome of sorts, although Sony taking control of the whole endeavor could mean a more limited selection of stuff going forward. That's entirely speculative, but that's also the whole Bungie/Destiny 2 situation in a nutshell: Something is happening, but exactly what we just cannot pin down at this point.

What we can pin down is that the Bungie Store as we know it will close on October 19, while digital downloads and emblem codes will remain accessible until December 31. Get 'em while you can.

In a surprise move, Bungie is bringing a bunch of stuff back to Destiny 2. All the campaigns, destinations and raids that were removed from the game back in 2020 will return at some unspecified point in the future.

It's a big attention grabbing move—one that's welcome, but that also acts as another frustrating reminder of how many unforced errors Bungie made across the length of Destiny 2's active, live-service run. For some, removing paid-for campaigns was the line in the sand—an unforgivable move that poisoned the well for how the wider gaming community viewed the game.

Right now, it's hard to say what any of this means for the future of Destiny. Rather than speculate, I'm going to focus on what bits of these returns I'm actually excited for. Not the campaigns—honestly they range from 'fine' to 'not very good'. No, I'm more interested in the small, hyper-specific parts of Destiny 2 that I've missed over the years—the little moments and memories that still live rent free in my head.

Here are seven such moments. Jump into the comments to let me know yours.

What's going on?

• System Shock 2 is an excellent videogame and all-timer immersive sim.
• Nightdive's 2025 remaster is exquisite.
• It's free on the Epic Games Store until October 8.
• You will have to remember your password and dig out a 2FA code probably. Sorry.

Is this really worth logging in for? Do you know how long it takes to log in to a thing?

Organized FPS scrimmage is a time-honored tradition of PC gaming. Countless battles have been waged, friendships forged, and "GGs" exchanged in the name of contested territories, stolen flags, and almost-exploded explosives. FPS is my favorite genre because it's a canvas that accommodates endless modes of fun—formats that can happily coexist under the same banner to serve the current mood or group.

But if you had to choose just one, which would be the greatest FPS mode of them all?

That's what we're here to decide. We're pitting the greats against each other in a single-elimination tournament, voted on by readers like you. Round 1 starts now. Go go go!

The Bracket

Round 1 - Vote!

Read up on the matchups below and vote for your favorite. Round 1 voting closes on Saturday, October 3 at 11:59 PM PDT. The more votes we get, the more interesting the results, so tell your friends! Next week we'll be back to share the results and begin Round 2.

Team Deathmatch or FFA/Deathmatch?

AKA: Team Slayer (Halo) // Slayer (Halo)

Would you rather fight alone or with a team?

Battle Royale VS Extraction

AKA: BR // Extraction Shooters

Two modes so large and complex that they've spawned vibrant subgenres.

Conquest VS Domination

AKA: Warfare (Hell Let Loose) // Territories (Halo), Domination Control Point (Team Fortress 2)

Large-scale point capture with vehicles and control point respawns popularized by Battlefield, or small-scale point capture with random respawns popularized by Unreal Tournament and Call of Duty?

Bomb Defusal VS Hostage

AKA: Bomb (Rainbow Six Siege), Plant/Defuse (Valorant)

The single-life elimination showdown. Bomb is historically the more competitive mode, but many have a soft spot for escorting NPCs out of buildings.

Gun Game VS Payload

AKA: Arms Race (Counter-Strike), Escalation (Valorant)

Selfishly race to kill with every gun in the game, or push a cart down a track with a coordinated team?

Infection VS Prop Hunt

AKA: They're pretty much always called Infection and Prop Hunt.

Two asymmetrical party mode greats, but only one is moving on.

VIP VS Capture The Flag

AKA: VIP Escort (Call of Duty)

Two legendary objective modes in which one person becomes the most important, yet vulnerable member of the team.

Attack & Defend VS King of the Hill

AKA: 2CP (Overwatch), Breakthrough (Battlefield) // Headquarters (Call of Duty)

I expect this one to get spicy. Take turns attacking and defending on a singular front, or fight over one moving control point?

A few notable quotes from Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer's latest Wardogs discussion video on X, in which he reacts to a video from YouTuber JbowenDaMan.

Wardogs continues to be one of my favorite games of the year, but almost three weeks into early access, I understand why developer Bulkhead was anticipating agita as players got deeper into its progression. The 100-player FPS has a serious XP grind, and some say they were having a better time before the most dedicated players started unlocking the highest tiers of vehicles, armor, and weapons.

Brammer's insights on player feedback and the studio's philosophy on balance are a useful lens into how Bulkhead sees its game—first and foremost a sandbox shooter where no two matches are the same, and not a competitive FPS that requires perfect balance.

"Sometimes in our game, we're going to be OK with something being a bit overpowered for a season and then underpowered next season, to keep it interesting," he said. "That doesn't mean I think level four armor is working, or that our balancing is great. I think the endgame is a bit sh*t."

It can be quite discouraging to face heavily-armored players with a pea shooter, or get smacked around by the strongest vehicles, so I'm curious what Bulkhead is considering to improve the endgame. Many think the thicker armors should go away entirely, and I admit I've had the same reaction when my killers shrug off six bullets to the chest, but that would rid the game of valuable build variety.

Wardogs firefights are asymmetrical by nature, and I wouldn't want to change that. While I'm unlocking stuff slower than the best players, the truth is that I'm also playing like a cheapskate—buying level two armor and cheaper guns because I don't want to risk a $20k loadout. Going into fights at a disadvantage is its own thrill, because I can still eat a bigger fish by getting the drop on them, and then become the bigger fish by looting their stuff.

Top of my mind is the changing playstyles of Wardogs week-to-week. Recently I've had a lot of matches where very few teammates want to do my favorite thing—push the Hot Zone and fight—and instead choose to focus on building or attacking FOBs. It can be frustrating to the point of not wanting to play, but as Jbowen and Brammer note, Wardogs is more fun when you're willing to adapt what you're doing to the current shape of the match. Instead of getting annoyed, I could try to pivot to hunting FOBs, learning anti-air, or practicing my pilot skills.

Brammer also reminded folks that Wardogs' planned metagame features will affect progression in the future. Bulkhead plans to add Tarkov-style skills that are improved through repetition, like tactical sprint duration and staying in-scope when cycling a sniper rifle bolt. Skills will be persistent, not wiped from season to season. In addition to cash and XP, a future "intel" resource will be used for unlocking gun parts and attachments that go beyond the current crop of grips, scopes, and muzzles.

"You're playing 25% of the game," as Brammer put it.

Sounds intriguing and intimidating. I really like how approachable Wardogs is right now, and my experience with full gunsmith systems in Battlefield 6 and CoD have me worried players will optimize guns until they're boring, but maybe Bulkhead's approach will be different.

All other games writers are cowards. Wealth and power have conspired to intimidate them into silence, to concern themselves with trifles instead of things that actually matter. Not me, though. I'm brave, and strong; my voice won't be quieted. I don't care about the consequences that come for speaking the truth. Here is the article no other outlet dares write.

Here is how the main characters of Crime and Punishment would fare if they had to survive the plot of Halo 1.

How bad is the Blue team in Wardogs? We scored 1 point. I have never seen a score this low until this moment, and of course it was Blue. I've seen enough to accept that Blue team is cursed, and I think it has more to do with experienced players actively avoiding the color than anything else. Winning isn't really important in Wardogs, so it's not a big deal to get stomped, but this was tough enough beating that I had to take a break with Red and Green for a while.