Quake mappers are absolutely killing it in celebration of Quake's 30^th birthday. The Quake community has been running map jams of varying themes all year. In the last few months there have been two 'Quickie' speedmapping jams, a 1024 Jam where contributors had to build maps of 1024 units cubed, and a Limits Jam, with the fun restriction that submitted maps had to use the same technical and design limitations as the original Quake campaign.

Now, the Quake community has brought another bloodstained birthday present to Quake's afterparty with Q30 Deathmatch Jam. Organised by Quake mappers Annihilazor & Infiniti, the map-pack adds 22 new arenas designed specifically to be played with regular old Quake.

The maps run the gamut of Quake's interdimensional settings, ranging from gothic castles through sci-fi kill-zones to an industrial brown sewer called The Filth Pit. Numerous notable designers from the fan community have taken part, including a collaborative map called Overflow by Mazu and Makkon. The latter was one of the organisers of the excellent Quake Brutalist Jam 3, while the former designed that Jam's showstopper map—a five hour long mini-campaign with its own internal story.

If you want to give the maps a whirl yourself, Q30 Deathmatch Jam is designed to work with numerous modern Quake sourceports, including Ironwail, Netquake or Nightdive's Kex port as seen in the Quake Remaster. In each case you can play it as a standalone mod by dropping the folder straight into your Quake directory and using the in-game console to call it up. If you want to play online via Netquake or QuakeWorld servers however, you'll need to copy the map, loc files, and skybox data into the relevant folders of your competitive multiplayer install.

None of this is to mention all the other Quake-related events that have happened this year. As mentioned, January had barely begun when the community released Quake Brutalist Jam 3, a massive mod themed around concrete megastructures which was essentially a new FPS in all but name.

Then, at QuakeCon id Software launched a brand new episode for Quake, developed in collaboration with Machine Games to celebrate the shooter's 30^th anniversary. While Microsoft's brutal layoffs cast a pall over the proceedings, Dawn of the Machine is nonetheless a fantastic collection of maps, and a worthy successor to Machine Games' Dimension of the Machine from 2021.

When I first played Half-Life at the tender age of 11, I found it a terrifying experience. Admittedly, I was scared of pretty much everything at 11. Wasps, heights, loud noises, football (or more specifically, everyone finding out how bad I was at football). I was an anxious child all around. Hence, playing an interactive disaster movie filled with weird aliens was an intense experience and lashings of violence was an intense experience.

Now I'm rapidly approaching 40, the idea of Half-Life being in any way scary seems ridiculous, especially when you compare it to modern horror games and actual real-life terrors like tax returns. But there is one part of Half-Life that still frightens me, and it appears right at the start of the game. Midway through the introductory tram ride, five words and a number appear on the screen:

SUBJECT: Gordon Freeman. Male, Age 27.

Every time I see this caption, it seems wrong, like it must be a typo. Surely Gordon Freeman is older than 27. I mean look at this man. That’s a fella in his mid-thirties at the youngest.

To be clear, this isn't a notion I've developed recently. I've always believed this. I must have seen the caption countless times, but it never really sank in, because I was busy watching all the scenery and cool scripted sequences that you get during that tram ride.

Basically, Freeman's youthfulness weirds me out. It also led me to wonder: how old are all the other '90s FPS protagonists? Is DoomGuy actually DoomBoy? Is B.J. Blazkowicz short for 'Baby Junior Blazkowicz?'. Is Duke Nukem even allowed to enter a strip club?

Riddled with doubt, I decided to try to find out the age of as many '90s shooter heroes as I could. The answers proved pretty surprising, and in some cases, instructive about game design.

B.J Blazkowicz (Wolfenstein 3-D)

Let's start with an easy one. William Joseph Blazkowicz has surprisingly extensive lore for a video game character created in the eighties. According to the Wolfenstein Wiki, Blazkowicz was born on August 11, 1911. Canonically, the events of Wolfenstein 3-D take place in 1943, meaning that Blazkowicz is 32-33 when he takes down MechaHitler.

The Wiki also states that B.J. is canonically the grandfather of Commander Keen and an ancestor of DoomGuy, which is a fun bit of trivia.

Kyle Katarn (Star Wars: Dark Forces)

I'm gonna skip Doom and Duke for the moment and deal with another straightforward case. Kyle Katarn is the protagonist of Star Wars: Dark Forces and Star Wars: Jedi Knight—Dark Forces 2. (And also Jedi Outcast and, in a secondary role, Jedi Academy, but those are noughties games). Because Katarn is a Star Wars character, and because Star Wars fans are, shall we say, fastidious, it's straightforward enough to find out Katarn's age.

According to Wookiepedia, Katarn was born in 23 BBY (That's before the Battle of Yavin—the concluding act of the OG Star Wars—for non-Star Wars heads). Before Rogue One changed the canon, Katarn was the original thief of the Death Star plans which occurred in the same year as the Battle of Yavin. That makes him 23 at the outset of Dark Forces. He was 28 in Jedi Knight, and 35 in Jedi Outcast. Each of these facts is like a needle being pushed into my ageing body.

Cate Archer (The Operative: No One Lives Forever)

Strictly speaking, No One Lives Forever is a noughties shooter, releasing in 2000. But spiritually it is 100% a nineties FPS, and for that reason I'm going to include it.

Like Katarn, finding out Archer's age is easy enough, as Monolith gave her a detailed backstory. The NOLF Fandom Wiki says she was born in 1942. The events of the original NOLF take place in 1967, making her 25 when she becomes a superspy for UNITY. Like James Bond, Archer is apparently also natively Scottish, born in Glasgow.

Prisoner 426 (Unreal)

Another easy one, albeit for different reasons. Unreal's nameless protagonist is also an ageless protagonist. Since Unreal's player character can be customised both in character model and gender, Epic never specified an age for them either. In short, Prisoner 426 is as old as you want them to be (so for me, 57).

Caleb (Blood, Blood 2: The Chosen)

The age of Blood's revenant protagonist is somewhat dependent on perspective. According to the Blood wiki, Caleb was born in 1847 (in Texas, apparently). Since the events of Blood take place in 1928, this would make him a sprightly 81 years old by chronology.

However, Caleb is murdered by his demonic master Tchernobog at some point between 1871 and 1928, so biologically he's likely significantly younger than his chronological age. Amusingly, Blood 2 takes place in 2028, which means Caleb would be 181 years old during the events of that game.

DoomGuy: (Doom)

Here's where things start to get tricky. Unlike his (alleged) ancestor B.J. Blazkowicz, DoomGuy does not have a specified age. It's generally assumed he's somewhere in his mid-thirties—mainly because the face at the bottom of the screen looks like it's seen some shit.

But I took a punt and reached out to John Romero, Doom's co-creator, and asked him whether, either publicly or privately, id Software ever determined a specific age for DoomGuy?

Romero quickly got back to me with a reply. Unfortunately, it appears id never officially pinned it down. "No, we didn’t invent Doomguy’s age, or Ranger’s," Romero wrote in response. "I think it’s assumed they are mid-to-late 20s."

If you're wondering who the hell Ranger is, well, spoilers for the next entry.

Ranger (Quake, Quake 3)

As Romero mentions above, id Software never specified an age for Quake's protagonist as they didn't with Doom. That would seem to be the end of that rabbit hole. However, Ranger also appears in 1999's Quake 3 and 2022's Quake Champions.

Quake 3 isn't all that helpful in determining Ranger's age. But Quake Champions is. According to the lore added by QC, Ranger is actually a Vietnam veteran, having served in the US military up to 1975.

According to the Quake timeline, the events of Quake are concurrent with the game's release—1996, which means 21 years elapse between Ranger's return from Vietnam and the events of Quake.

Unfortunately, the timeline doesn't specify when Ranger signed up to fight, or how old he was when he did. But the youngest he could (legally) have been to sign up was 17. The US began active combat operations in 1965, so it's unlikely that he would have served before then, and the implication seems to be that Ranger did his tour(s) of 'Nam in the early '70s. Quake Champions also includes a photograph of Ranger and his family taken in 1978, in which he looks to be in his mid-to-late twenties—though he could be older.

All of which suggests that Ranger is either a mid fortysomething or an early fiftysomething during the events of Quake, which would make him the oldest still-living protagonist on this list.

Duke Nukem (Duke Nukem 3D)

I've saved the most interesting case until last. There are a couple of ages banded about for Duke Nukem online. But most of those are for Duke Nukem Forever, and they suggest he's somewhere between 45 and 47 during the events of that game. The source for those isn't clear, however, and in any case, we really want the age Duke was during the events of Duke Nukem 3D.

To try to pin it down, I sent an email to Scott Miller, the founder of Apogee Software (later 3D Realms) the developer of Duke Nukem's 3D. He quickly responded with this:

"When I and Todd Replogle first came up with the Duke Nukem character, there were two things I decided to never reveal: what year the game took place in, and how old Duke was," Miller wrote. "I never wanted to say, for example, that the game took place in 2004, because whenever you nail down a date it often comes back to haunt you when you pass that calendar date in real life (eg. 2001: A Space Odyssey).

"So never in the Duke storyverse is a date mentioned. As for his age it was the same thinking—if we had mentioned his age in a game, would we need to keep aging him for every succeeding game? So, I just wanted to fully avoid these issues. But, in my mind, Duke was in his mid-30s".

In short, Duke is forever a man in his prime, which is only fitting for the character.

You could tell that Stalker 2 was a true sequel to 2007's survivalist FPS in that it was as broken as it was brilliant. GSC Game World succeeded in delivering the seamless open world it has spent two decades striving toward, but players' exploration of Chornobyl's exclusion zone was hindered by bugs, broken quests, and more performance issues than a drunk orchestra.

The sequel has received numerous massive patches already, but the biggest and—hopefully—best is yet to come. With the imminent arrival of the shooter's first story expansion, GSC has detailed the enormous 2.0 patch that will accompany the DLC.

Named 'Back to the Zone', the 2.0 update will bring both a visual and mechanical refresh to Stalker 2 upon its release next week, as detailed by GSC in an article on its website. The headline change is an overhaul to the Zone's lighting, which GSC says it has altered to provide more varied conditions:

"The sun still shines brightly outside, but now it plays differently across the environment on the ground—shadows and reflections included," GSC writers. Indoor lighting has also been changed to make it "more realistic", while the landscape and vegetation has apparently been reworked for a more natural look.

Arguably more significant, though, are the changes GSC has made to A-Life—the system that governs the behaviour of the mutants and rival Stalkers that prowl the Zone. Again, the focus appears to be on improving the Zone's atmosphere, making it more of an immersive space and less of a warzone.

"The Zone isn't one constant gunfight. It's a lonely place where life carries on by its own rules," GSC explains. "Every encounter or firefight is the result of stalkers and mutants simply doing stalker and mutant things."

Specific changes include giving creatures more places to be like campfires, bus stops etc, and increasing conflicts around those spots. GSC has also fixed some of the more immersion-breaking glitches experienced in the sequel, like enemies shooting through walls.

Other additions coming with the patch include a custom difficulty where you adjust parameters like combat difficulty, anomalies, and the in-game economy, new weapons and scopes, dynamic fog that you can use to your tactical advantage, and binoculars—which are pretty useful to have in a game like Stalker.

Back to the Zone will be released on August 20, launching in tandem with the expansion 'Cost of Hope'. This DLC—one of two GSC has planned—revolves around the series' authoritarian 'Duty' faction and will see players learn what secrets lie hidden in the centre of the Zone. While I'm up for further story adventures in Stalker 2, a smoother ride in the base game is easily what I'm most excited about.

Few things in gaming are more routine than a Call of Duty multiplayer beta, but this year's is actually a bit different. The Modern Warfare 4 beta kicking off on August 21 (for pre-orders only) will include the usual smattering of multiplayer modes, and in a series first, it'll also include a chunk of the campaign.

"Entrenched" is the campaign mission that'll be playable early, and Infinity Ward has published a brief teaser for it (watch above). Based on what we know about the story of Modern Warfare 4, it seems we're neck deep in North Korea's invasion of South Korea by this point.

The mission will follow a squad of South Korean marines (plus one embedded American) in an uphill offensive—we've got trenches, APCs, shotguns, and that thing where an NPC buddy has an elaborate mo-capped brawl right in front of you. In short: a Call of Duty mission, and perhaps a good one.

Warzone will also make an appearance in a beta for the first time, but not until the second weekend. That's the one that's open for all, August 28 to September 1. The new Zodiac Resurgeance map will be playable, and I imagine we'll also learn the ways in which Warzone will be absorbing Modern Warfare 4's gameplay changes.

If you're not caught up, Infinity Ward's first CoD in four years appears to be more about refinements than anything else—clever solutions to things like muzzle flash, hipfire, and movement aimed at maintaining Modern Warfare's immersive qualities while not annoying serious players. I played a bit of multiplayer back in May against other journalists and had a good time, but next week's beta is a proper test drive.

As for why Infinity Ward is double-stuffing the beta, it has not said, though one could intuit that the studio is extending an olive branch to fans disappointed by last year's pretty bad Black Ops 7, and who might not see the urgency to buy another $70 CoD weeks before GTA6 arrives.

Marcus Lehto is known to some as the "father of Master Chief," and for good reason: He was the art director on Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001, and its two direct sequels. The look of Halo is kind of his thing, in other words, and he has some issues with how the new Halo: Campaign Evolved looks—specifically, its halos.

Halo: Campaign Evolved is a remake of Combat Evolved, all done up pretty in Unreal Engine 5. It looks pretty faithful, to the extent that I watch the trailer and I say to myself, "Yup, that's Halo."

Lehto, however, sees something else—something less. "While Forerunner tech was metal (not stone) it was also ancient, vast, alive, and a tomb to the horrors that lurked within," he wrote on X, alongside images comparing Halo rings then and now. "It had seen hundreds of millennia of conflict. Yet the [new] game shows it as shiny metal that looks like it was built a few years ago.

"The main menu ring is the most offensive thing we see every time we boot up the game. It should feel massive, dark, mysterious, sinister, but also full of wonder. This new ring looks like a shiny new toy—out of scale, no mystery, damn ugly."

In response to a now-deleted post, Lehto also brought up the toll that "war, Flood outbreaks, repairs, [and] collisions" would take on the structure. "Also, the biggest issue is just with [the] pure scale of the design. It lacks all the micro detail that should give it the epic scale it deserves. Lastly, it needs to feel like an ancient tomb."

That might seem to fly in the face of comments Lehto made in 2025, when he said "the game looks and feels genuine," and described it as "gorgeous in a way I wish we could have built it originally back in 2001." For the most part, though, Lehto seems to be having a good time, and he likes how it looks.

"Overall, I really love the upgrades—movement, cinematics, visuals—damn the lighting is brilliant," he wrote on August 4. "Do I have gripes? A few, but they are taking a back seat to the fun."

Those halos, though? Not great.

You know a developer is confident in the game it's making when it's willing to list all of the reasons you might not want to buy it. That's the thrust of the latest dev log for Wardogs, the tactical milsim FPS coming to early access in September.

Wardogs has built up a lot of buzz this year, joining Steam's top-wishlisted games and rising ever since. Now it's up for pre-order, and it's immediately become Steam's top-selling premium game. I played a handful of hours in a closed playtest this past weekend and it totally won me over—this thing might be special.

But developer Bulkhead also knows Wardogs won't be for everyone—which is, coincidentally, one of the "10 reasons NOT to buy" Wardogs, according to the studio. The whole thing is worth a watch, but here's a few of the more interesting bullet points with a relevant quote from the devs:

• Early access content: "Wardogs has a content problem… After launch into early access, we'll be focusing on bug fixes, feedback, and a new map… Players should not expect regular content drops [throughout early access]... We want to make sure your expectations are set here before your purchase."
• The price: "Right now, you can preorder Wardogs for $39.99 on Steam and get access to the beta… If the price feels too high for an early access game, please don't buy it yet. Wait until the game has more of what you want, and consider it then… If you don't enjoy the beta, just refund it."
• Player count will decline: "We expect our initial days after launch to have a lot more players than expected, but we can tell you for a fact that this is completely normal. Those players will fall away over the next coming months. Player numbers will drop off, and journalists and influencers on the fringe of the community will try to ragebait your enjoyment out of the game for social media clicks. This doesn't mean the game is dying. We're thinking longer term than a flash in the plan. Our goal is to settle into a sustainable, close-knit community. If we're pulling in 3,000 to 5,000 daily concurrent players who genuinely love the game, it'll allow new players to buy in anytime and join an active community."
• Monetization: "We will not monetize the game at any point during early access. We will never monetize in-game gold bars, they must be earned through play. We will never allow you to purchase camos, with the sole exception of an optional supporter's edition… However Bulkhead will have ongoing running costs [after 1.0], and those costs will need to be covered if base game sales no longer cover them."
• We made Battalion 1944: "As much as we wanted [our WW2 FPS Battalion 1944] to succeed, with the low player numbers of only 50 to 200 daily players, our publisher relationships broke down, the console version was held in limbo by lawyers, and we burned through our profits supporting the game. We went dark on communication, way darker than we should've gone… If you still don't trust our studio because of Battalion 1944, don't rush to buy Wardogs. We hope our actions speak louder than words."

The video is essentially a clever framing for a design manifesto, laying out what Wardogs is and isn't so that curious Steam shoppers can decide if it's their speed while also addressing common criticisms. The brevity is refreshing: I don't know I've ever seen devs preemptively confront the hobby's fixation on player counts, and the race to declare a "dead game," in official marketing.

Wardogs isn't out until September 10, but pre-ordering gets you into the beta on August 21.

I'm seated on the edge of a transport helicopter, legs dangling in the breeze, when our pilot flips on the radio to Flight of the Valkyries. "Duh duh duh duh, duh, duh duh duh duh, duh" three passengers sing in non-unison, their VOIP lagging two seconds behind the actual song. The pilot interrupts the performance with an announcement: "Jump quick once you see grass, because we're headed to the hot zone. How many of you bought a parachute?" The chopper goes silent. "Well then."

I realize this is the same pilot who taxied me to the frontline at the very beginning of the match over 40 minutes ago. He's been doing this the whole time, has zero kills, and according to his top five position on the scoreboard, has made over $35,000 of in-game currency. Bullets immediately start whizzing past the chopper as we reach the middle of the gigantic map. Our pilot descends toward an LZ with a practiced corkscrew maneuver that, from the inside, could've been mistaken for crashing.

But we land with zero casualties. I touch grass, tip the pilot $25, then get shot in the head about six seconds later. I lay there, bullet in brain, weighing my options: give up and lose the $2,600 I spent on this loadout, or wait for a revive. Were this Battlefield, I'd get impatient and respawn after the first samaritan passed me by. But in this game, money talks: I press F1 to "bribe" anyone in the vicinity. Now, whoever risks their life to save mine gets $100. Ok maybe $150. $300? Yes. At $300 someone took notice, dragged my body to safety, and brought me back.

That is Wardogs, the upcoming milsim FPS from the team behind Battalion 1944 that's entering early access in September. I entered the closed playtest held this past weekend with no expectations—I'm a fan of similar games like Squad, but haven't regularly played a milsim in years. I jumped in because Wardogs has slowly built up a lot of buzz, and five hours of playtime later, I can see why.

Wardogs is PvP only and supports 100-player servers. The main mode in the playtest is three teams (still not sure how they're dividing 100 players in three) fighting over the same circle of territory on a gigantic map. The team with the most bodies in the zone scores, but you can make your body count as two by occupying the "hot zone" within the circle—that's where the most killing happens. The format is directly inspired by a popular Arma 3 mod, Arma: King of the Hill.

Money talks

On the spectrum between "hardcore Arma stuff" and "basically Battlefield," Wardogs finds an exact middle ground. Weapons are snappy and the gunplay is approachable. At a basic level, all you really need to know to contribute is to stand in the capture zone and shoot the other teams—if you get Battlefield, Wardogs won't be a huge leap.

Peeling back another layer reveals a logistical metagame familiar to milsims: building FOBs (forward operating bases), constructing defenses, transporting supplies, and controlling strategic locations.

Where Wardogs differs most is its economy. Players earn account-level money for doing anything productive—getting kills, standing in a capture zone, healing teammates, driving folks from A to B—and you spend that cash to gear up. As mentioned, you can also throw around your cash in the form of tips and bribes.

Cash is how Wardogs (like Arma mod before it) harnesses a bit of extraction shooter juice. You fill a shopping cart with thousands of dollars in guns, helmets, vests, magazines, gadgets, and bandages, and then put that gear on the line. You have a personal stake in surviving, and the best chance of doing that is sticking near teammates.

It's a really smart incentive structure that goes beyond the Battlefield idea of simply rewarding XP for teamplay (Wardogs does that too). It also scratches the part of my brain that enjoys putting together a loadout in extraction shooters. A single life does sort of play out like a raid: you gear up, head out, then try to make more money than you lost. But cash handouts are generous enough that you don't need to obsess over your wallet: I made a profit in 9/10 lives by simply standing on the objective, healing, and getting the occasional kill. I suspect that'll change as I unlock more expensive gear and develop a finer taste in helmets.

I'm impressed by the ways Wardogs is both individualistic and team-focused, but developer Bulkhead might need to adjust the numbers throughout early access. The main thrust of the progression is unlocking more guns and vehicles. That gets expensive fast, so I can see some players adopting an overly safe playstyle to maximise their profit per match.

The weekend playtest saw the beginnings of this: My matches had a lot of teammates camping towers with scoped rifles instead of pushing toward the objective. FOB defense is important and all, but I think they just wanted to farm kills from a safe spot.

Class rules

Similarly, I don't think Wardogs' loosey-goosey class roles set teams up for success. There are no formal classes, just tools that anyone can buy like rockets, defibrillators, and hammers. A class-based game like Squad ensures that a full squad has a balance of every role, but in Wardogs, it was hard to find somebody who'd gone to the trouble of buying a crowbar to break into enemy FOBs, or who had extra bandages for teammates, or who had even unlocked a rocket launcher at all yet (I still haven't).

The flip side is that Wardogs is less prescriptive, and freeing: I'm never locked out of sniping because people with quicker load times grabbed those roles first, or boxed into the medic role nobody else wanted. This is an inherently less organized game than its closest comparisons, but that's also the appeal. There's work to be done, but Bulkhead has done a decent job of making collaboration natural through establishing an extremely clear objective, simplifying logistics, and setting low prices for the most crucial gear.

Wardogs gives a very confident first impression. It's entering a two-year early access period with a robust core mode, strong fundamentals, and a distinctive twist. It's got problems, but it's the type of shooter that's immediately attracting dedicated fans with constructive feedback—this thread is pretty spot-on. I really want to play more.

Out of game, Bulkhead is saying all the right things for a savvy studio confident in what it's making: preorders are open at $40, but Bulkhead encourages buyers to refund if they don't like the beta that begins on August 21. The studio has also committed to zero monetization throughout early access, and said skins will always be earned, not bought (with the exception of a supporter pack). It's also worth noting that Wardogs is a PC-first FPS that'll support community servers. They're really speaking my language here.

Wardogs is out September 10 in early access.

First spotted by Eurogamer, ExplorEverythingOnce on the Battlefield subreddit claims to have received a full refund on Battlefield 6 from Steam support after 470 hours logged, well in excess of the platform's standard refund window of two hours within two weeks.

ExplorEverythingOnce supplied a redacted screenshot of their Steam purchase history, showing a full refund of BF6's more deluxe "Phantom Edition," which they claim to have purchased on launch day. They did not supply proof of playtime or communication with Steam support, leaving an outside chance that a rapid purchase and refund was made to back up the initial post.

But Steam does have a history of offering refunds outside the usual window in extenuating circumstances. In this case, Explor's stated reason for pursuing the refund, which they claim proved persuasive to Steam support, was the surprise removal of multiple popular modes from Battlefield 6's standard quickplay queue. For Explor, the killer was the removal of Rush, their preferred gametype across those 470 hours.

A small, school marmy part of me wants to point out that you might have gotten your money's worth with a game after 470 hours. At the same time, if you make a live service game, you should prepare for live service outrage. It is, I think, a failure on Battlefield Studios' part to effectively downgrade the experience like this.

"I've been a Steam customer for 22 years and have 2500 games on my account," Explor wrote in a comment on the original post. "I have only ever requested a refund once in that entire time until today."

Battlefield Studios presented the controversial mode removal as being in the interest of queue times and healthy matchmaking, consolidating the bulk of the playerbase into a smaller number of supposedly more popular modes. It's going over like a lead balloon, though, with a wave of negative recent reviews on Steam criticizing the decision. Comments under Battlefield Studios' announcement on X and posts on the Battlefield 6 subreddit are similarly hostile.

Overwatch's next season will finally move the hero shooter more in line with the other live service games that don't purely rely on FOMO for their battle passes.

In season 4, Blizzard will "unvault" an old battle pass and make it available again. The details on how exactly the system will work are slim at the moment, but it sounds like a specific old battle pass will become available halfway through every season going forward. It will be on sale for anyone who doesn't own it or simply made available for anyone who paid for it previously, and it will be permanent from that point on.

There is one catch however: The premium currency, player titles, and Mythic-level skins that were in old battle passes won't be available in the new unvaulted versions. Overwatch used to have new heroes locked behind a tier in the old battle passes too, but I am guessing they've been replaced with a generic reward.

Blizzard says there will be more information about exactly how these will work closer to the halfway point of the season, which will be sometime next month.

Ditching some of the FOMO involved with battle passes is always a welcome change in my book. It's a little sad that it won't be every battle pass opening up at the same time. You will still need to wait for each one to show back up. However, it's a step in the right direction, especially when games like Marvel Rivals have done this for a while now.

The old battle passes will act like a linear progression of rewards that will sit alongside Overwatch's new battle pass system that is debuting with season 4. Blizzard is basically taking Fortnite's idea and giving you a way to unlock major cosmetics in whatever order you want. Instead of a linear set of battle pass tiers, they'll now be broken up into "tracks" consisting of multiple rewards. You'll also get one chance to swap out a Legendary skin you don't want with another from a curated selection.

Blizzard stressed that the new battle pass system won't make it take longer to complete in a recent blog post. The goal is to give you a way to choose skins for heroes you actually play. The only downside to this that I can see is that the premium currency to buy Mythic skins is now only unlocked at the end instead of sprinkled throughout.

Considering Overwatch is reportedly doing very well for Blizzard, it makes me wonder if this is a result of the studio loosening up on how it monetizes it. The season 4 trailer just teased the third skin collab with popular K-pop group Le Sserafim—who are also going to be at this year's BlizzCon—so I think it knows where the money's really at.

Season 4 and new mech hero D.Mon will launch on August 11.

The ongoing effort to come up with a new Payday game that people actually want to play continued today with the announcement of Heist Escape Roguelike: Payday Experience, a UEFN game that's available exclusively in (you guessed it) Fortnite.

Heist Escape Roguelike: Payday Experience "reimagines elements of Payday as a progressive roguelike shooter," with three separate heists—the Jewelry Store, the Bank, and the Harbor—each of them made up of multiple unique rooms "ensuring endless replayability."

"We recognize that today's audiences are discovering legendary IPs in entirely new ways," Starbreeze chief growth officer Matt Dixon said. "Integrating Payday into the Fortnite ecosystem through UEFN is a cornerstone of our strategy to engage new players and welcome them into the broader Payday platform."

That's the sort of utterance that you're only going to hear from an entertainment industry executive, but it does nonetheless get to the heart of Starbreeze's big problem. Payday 2, which launched in 2013, is still chugging along on Steam, with concurrent player counts that keep it consistently within the platform's 100 most-played games.

But Payday 3 continues to flounder, and while updates are still rolling out it's hard to shake the feeling that Starbreeze is looking elsewhere for the future of the franchise. The studio announced a Roblox spinoff game in April—actually the second, following Notoriety: A Payday Experience, which came out in 2024—as prior to that, a VR game called Payday: Aces High.

Heist Escape Roguelike: Payday Experience is live now in Fortnite. If you want to check it out for yourself, use Island Code 8105-9005-4478.

You've been shot, and I have the hit marker to prove it.

The humble hit marker glyph is a mainstay of the FPS user interface, dutifully reporting the fate of projectiles. Hit your target and 'X' marks the spot. See nothing, and you're hitting nothing. I like the hit marker—it's an absolute form of feedback unique to shooters, and I can think of a lot of games that wouldn't feel right without it.

But it's also a crutch. The hit marker is both overused and often misused, nowadays appearing in every game with a gun as if it's always the best form of communication. The mechanic has even penetrated the singleplayer arena, which is weird, because the studio that popularized the hit marker always meant it to be a multiplayer-only concession.

There are earlier examples of a hit marker, but it was made famous by Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The 'X' glyph and gratifying "thwip" sound instantly became iconic to the series, but not the campaign. In fact, the majority of Call of Duty campaigns don't use them. I'm not aware of Infinity Ward ever commenting on why it decided this back in the day, but to me, it's obvious: The hit marker was superfluous to the campaign, because you knew you'd killed a guy as soon as he dropped dead.

Looking back at that campaign today, it still looks totally readable and natural:

I don't watch that and think "this could use some hit markers," and in fact, I think they'd detract from the experience. Hit markers make a lot of sense in the context of PvP, where it's helpful for network and competitive reasons to know exactly when your bullets are landing, but they undeniably add a layer of artifice. They're kind of ugly and distracting, to the point that they become the only visual cue I'm paying attention to in the heat of a match. Compare that older CoD to the recent Black Ops 7 campaign, which features hit markers and enemy health bars, and you do give up some immersive qualities.

Intuitive feedback

As anyone who played an FPS before 2007 can attest, developers were using more creative solutions to the same problems way before Modern Warfare came along: impact animations, wound FX, blood spurts. Land a shot, and the target itself reacts, not your UI. It's intuitive feedback—the videogame equivalent of "show, don't tell" filmmaking. When games really nail it (in singleplayer or multiplayer), it's better than a hit marker.

Which is why I'm calling out two series that definitely don't need hit markers, but have deemed them the default nonetheless:

Halo: Campaign Evolved, why have you cluttered up the HUD with hit markers when Bungie designed the original game around clear, diegetic feedback? I know my shot landed because an elite's energy shield flickered, a grunt died, or a jackal shield popped! Halo Studios (formerly 343) has been injecting hit markers into the series since Halo 4, and I don't love it.

And Gears of War: E-Day, you can do better! In 2006, Gear of War's solution to hit feedback was as elegant as it was gory: shoot a locust, and buckets of blood erupt from the wound. Hit; marked. But alas, The Coalition has succumbed to trends in E-Day, and hit markers are the default for both multiplayer and the campaign (if Microsoft's direct presentation from June is any indication). They work fine in the bits of the multiplayer beta I've played, but in turn, they've toned down blood spurts and made them less useful as an alternative. Perhaps a downgrade?

The old ways are far from extinct, but I do think the shift toward hit markers has given developers permission for their FPS to skimp on intuitive feedback.

This week I fired up Left 4 Dead 2 to remind myself what the pinnacle of hit feedback looks like. Then I played some Back 4 Blood, Turtle Rock's spiritual successor to L4D that, among many changes, introduced hit markers.

Pretty big difference! Left 4 Dead 2's zombie animations, wounds, and ragdolls are still unbelievable. I love the way blood splatters on walls and zombies react to individual impacts where they're struck. It's not only impressive 17 years later, but looks cleaner than Back 4 Blood's in-your-face hit markers. Behind the flickering X's are some pretty bland, unremarkable zombies. Back 4 Blood's hordes don't run, react, or die with the same weight or realism, which is weird, because a lot of the core Left 4 Dead leadership returned to make it.

I'm always keen to read what you all think, but I'm especially interested to hear other perspectives on hit markers, so please do sound off in comments or my inbox (morgan.park@futurenet.com). Hit markers are now this omnipresent fixture of the genre, yet nobody really talks about them. They just sort of happened, then kept happening, then stuck.

Typical, isn't it? You wait ages for a surprise launch of additional Quake adventures, and then two come along at once. The original game just received an official new episode as part of the shooter's 30^th anniversary celebrations taking place at this year's QuakeCon. But now Raven Software's Quake 4 has got in on the action, as a build of the sequel's cancelled expansion has been discovered and uploaded to GitHub.

Quake 4: Awakening was being developed at Ritual Entertainment—creators of the soon to be remastered SiN and its aborted episodic sequel—but the project was canned by Activision due to underwhelming sales of the base game. The expansion was thought lost to time, until a veteran game developer chanced upon a copy on the hard drive of a second-hand PC he bought.

Said developer is Justin Marshall, a programmer who has worked on games such as The Evil Within, XCOM 2, Dead Island 2, and The Dark Pictures Anthology—and unfortunately is one of the casualties of the industry's massive swathe of layoffs. The discovery of the build appears to have had a profound impact on him.

"I came across this at a very sad point in my life, it was on a hard drive on a vintage computer I bought off Amazon," Marshall explains on the expansion's GitHub page. "Literally this essentially saved my life, I was going through a divorce and just happen[ing] to come across something like this was insane."

While there's an outside chance this is an elaborate prank, everything points to it being legit. A big clue can be found in the config files, some of which are named after then-employees at Ritual, such as legendary Duke Nukem 3D level designer Richard 'Levelord' Grey, and Michael 'RomSteady' Russell, who has discussed the Quake 4 expansion in the past. Speaking to PC Gamer last year, Russell told us that "the expansion pack was 95% done" before Activision pulled the plug.

The far bigger clue, though, is that numerous people have already got the expansion up and running. A no-commentary let's play by Youtuber pagb666 shows the expansion's first three missions, which feature new weapons like a cryo cannon, and a section where the player pilots a mech (because what self-respecting noughties FPS would be complete without a mech sequence?).

While some elements do look unfinished, like a few of the scripted sequences, it does appear that Russell's estimate of how complete the expansion was may be accurate. Marshall says he uploaded the expansion for preservation purposes, and in the hope that "the community can make something cool with it." Given its apparent state, polishing it up to release-level quality may not be beyond the realms of possibility.

At this year's QuakeCon in Gaylord, Texas, a number of id Software's OGs and founders are in attendance for a retrospective talk and reunion, and it looks like legendary programmer John Carmack took some time to refamiliarize himself with the reason for the season.

"I sat down to try the Evercade Doom port, and before I knew it, I was on level four, and realizing that I had forgotten where all the keycards were," Carmack wrote on X, "The Everything App." "It wound up taking me 15 minutes each on level four and five. Still a great game after all these years!"

It certainly sounds like Carmack's a little rusty: E1M4 and M5 have par times of 1:30 and 2:45 respectively. I'm always curious to see how developers relate to their own games, especially a Criterion classic like Doom decades down the line. Carmack's fellow John, Romero, is still very much "Knee Deep in the Dead," as it were, creating the Sigil expansions and even giving the one-of-a-kind MyHouse.wad a try on stream.

I've always been slightly shaken by Larian honcho Swen Vincke's admission that he's never revisited Ultima 7⁠—one of his favorite games and primary inspirations⁠—because he knows it wouldn't stand up to his memories from the '90s. In the same conversation, Vincke told me that he spends so much time immersed in and testing Larian's games during development, he hardly touches them after launch.

Couldn't be me: I compulsively replay all my favorites to the point that it's a problem. I have to agree with Carmack: The original Doom really has held up after all these years.

Bethesda is currently running a 40th anniversary sale on Steam until August 13, just in time for this year's QuakeCon. The sale covers the studio's entire catalogue, including the offerings of subsidiaries id and Arkane.

That's where the real heat is, if you ask me: The recently-released Doom: The Dark Ages expansion, Revelations, is on sale for 50% off, 10 bucks to a typical 20. If you've missed out on the main game as well, Dark Ages itself is 67% off, or $23.

It's been a month since Revelation's July 7 release, and it's a beast of a shooter. Former PCG guides writer Rory Norris awarded it a 90% in his review, while staff writer Morgan Park, who was more cold on Dark Ages' base game, argued that Revelations redeems the whole endeavor.

Aside from Revelations, there's bound to be something in here to strike your fancy⁠—it's hard to argue against 10 buck Skyrim, if you somehow don't already have it. I'm a huge Arkane freak, personally, so the studio's whole catalogue for $54 gets a hearty recommendation from me.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is weirdly not discounted in this sale, possibly related to its publishing and copyright situation, but it's also only $10. So taking the plunge on the bundle probably comes out in the wash versus buying things piecemeal.

The sale is an undeniably great opportunity from a customer perspective, but comes at a fraught time for Bethesda. The studio and its subsidiaries were hit hard by Microsoft's "reset" at Xbox: Layoffs at Bethesda Game Studios, Zenimax Online, and id Software, while Arkane is getting spun off with an uncertain future. It also makes me nervous to see a game as good as Revelations get a 50% off discount after just one month⁠—you'd think Bethesda would have protected its value with a more token discount if it was selling really well.

Back in 2018, Blizzard revealed something very funny about its iconic mech hero D.Va: Everything about her is a mess under the hood.

Game director Aaron Keller likened the way D.Va is programmed to a "plate of spaghetti," when speaking to Kotaku at the time. When she ditches her mech, she's actually transitioning into a separate hero as far as the game understands it, and this led to lots of weird problems and even weirder bugs.

That won't be a problem with D.mon, the newest mech hero to join Overwatch, lead hero producer Kenny Hudson explained in a recent group interview with PC Gamer. D.mon is "actually one entity," he said, even though she can be separated from her mech just like D.Va.

"Took a little bit of work, definitely doubled the animations and stuff like that," he added. "But overall, [it] makes the experience of making D.Mon a lot easier and fixing D.Mon and providing assets for D.Mon down the road a lot easier for the rest of the team."

That's good news because I think D.Mon will draw a lot of players over to the tank role when she debuts in season 4 next week. Hudson provided a brief demo of her kit built around an energy sword and shield. D.Mon is sort of like the sequel to Reinhardt, holding the frontline and boosting straight into her targets.

As the leader of MEKA Squad, a group of Korean mech pilots that includes D.Va, D.Mon is much sturdier than her Overwatch elder, who zips around the battlefield like a bee. D.Mon is anchored to the ground, but she can still dash in any direction using a limited fuel resource. Her shoulder has a mounted machine gun that can be used long-range before she's close enough to take out her shield. With the shield up, she basically becomes a slightly faster Reinhardt with a bonus charge ability to knock enemies back (or off ledges).

Her ultimate, Limit Break, will probably be the reason to play her (or ban her). She does a big whirlwind slash with the sword, tearing open a weakness on every hit so that enemies take increased damage. It also gives her a huge chunk of overhealth. Hudson said she's dangerous in team compositions that can trample over enemies fast and pairs nicely with any damage-dealing heroes who can quickly capitalize on her ult's debuff.

My favorite part about D.Mon only happens when she's been knocked out of the mech with nothing but her mech's machine gun. In addition to knocking enemies back when she calls down her mech, you get to see the arms and legs fly in and lock together like an episode of Voltron. The whole animation is slick and now has me eager to see if Blizzard will one day surprise us with more members of MEKA Squad.

D.Mon will touchdown with season 4 on August 11.

A very Quake-themed QuakeCon kicked off today, with John Romero and current id studio co-director Marty Stratton speaking on a panel celebrating the shooter's 30th anniversary. A new 19-level Quake episode was announced and released during the panel, which also featured a brief livestreamed appearance from Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor.

Reznor famously composed the music for Quake, which was a very big deal at the time. If ever there was a more 1996 cultural artefact than Quake I don't know what it could be (maybe Space Jam?). Reznor's industrial tumult definitely fit the grimier, darker, browner mood of Quake, compared to the MIDI thrash metal of Doom. I remember sometimes having to mute the music because it made me feel too tense.

"When I first encountered Wolfenstein it felt impossible," Reznor said. "Nothing was like that. It was a radical departure from what I'd known as videogames. I went out and bought a PC just to play it."

But it was Doom that sealed the deal. "Jump ahead a few years, Doom comes out, and it was like a bomb went off," he went on. "It was not only technologically advanced, but there wasn't anything like that. It felt like no adults were involved, nobody said no, it was free, and it was fantastic. In some ways I felt a parallel with what I was trying to do with music, by misshaping things and trying to express myself. I really felt a connection to it."

"[I] crossed paths with the id guys and hit it off, became friends, and I'm grateful to be invited to be part of the Quake team working on music and sound effects. And you know of all the things I've done in my career I'm extremely proud of that, and I think the game holds up today."

Reznor was hardly going to make an appearance at QuakeCon in order to distance himself from Quake and its soundtrack, but it's interesting to hear him draw parallels between Doom and his own music at the time. It's a reminder that the nowadays quaint-looking shooter seemed utterly terrifying in 1993. I remember the music in E1M3 sending shivers down my spine. The first pinkie demon encounter in that level prompted a quick shutting down of the game. Similarly terrifying: hearing the radio edit of Closer on the top 40 countdown.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Quake, a bunch of Nine Inch Nails Quake-themed gear has been released. You can get an ammo box (it really is just a $30 empty box), a t-shirt, a keychain, a hoodie, and the soundtrack has been reissued on vinyl. It's all extraordinarily expensive but you may find yourself buying it anyway.

Just a smidge over 30 years after its original release date, Quake just got a big update. MachineGames has added a new chapter to id Software's landmark 1996 successor to the Doom games, dubbed Dawn of the Machine.

The 19 new levels, which join two previous MachineGames expansions, see Quake's protagonist trapped in "a dimension of endless illusion." I'm most curious about some promised new weapon variants: "the Super Axe—unleashing lightning on successive strikes—and the Laser Cannon, firing ricocheting projectiles that tear through enemies from every angle."

The update also adds a gallery of archival material from Quake's development, including a handful of playable levels that were created early in development and never finished.

The creative process on display is decidedly relatable, with level names like "Tim" "Tim10A," and "Tim14," and notes like, "Lots of tight hallways make navigation tough, and similarly there are many dead ends that were not completed, so it is not entirely clear what the idea was."

The update was revealed at QuakeCon today in a panel which included id Software co-founder John Romero, who noted with laughter that the announcement was occurring not on the 30th anniversary of Quake, which released in June of 1996, but on the 30th anniversary of the day he left id Software.

Quake famously marked the end of an era for id: Romero, American McGee, Michael Abrash, Sandy Petersen and others left the company after its development. Petersen said recently that "Quake ruined id Software."

But ruined or not, the studio carried on and released two of my favorite games, Quake 2 and 3, and everything else that came after, including the much lauded run of modern Doom games.

Id now faces a new kind of adversity following substantial layoffs imposed by Microsoft as part of its plan to "reset" the Xbox business.

"This is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month," id Software co-founder John Carmack said in reaction to the news.

Romero, John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall are all scheduled to appear at a founders reunion panel on Saturday for "a rare conversation about the company's earliest days, and the friendships, challenges, and innovations that have forever changed gaming."

Doom, one of the most influential videogames of all time, was famously distributed via the shareware model: The game's first chapter was completely free, and if you liked it, you sent id Software some money and they mailed you the remaining two episodes.

What would sometimes happen in those pre-online days, though, is that less-than-scrupulous resellers would offer the shareware version for sale, even though it was meant to be free. For $5 (or whatever, it's been a while), you could take home the hot new shooter from the guys who made Wolfenstein—and sure, you weren't getting the whole thing, but whatever. It's still Doom. Do you want to play it or not?

You might think that id Software would take issue with people making money on their work while they received nothing, but speaking at QuakeCon today, studio co-founder John Romero said the opposite was true: They were happy to see it happen.

"Please do it. Don't give us any money. Just get it out there," Romero said about people who made and sold the shareware version of Doom on floppies. "You would go to the store and you would see 10 different boxes that all had the same shareware Doom in it. I don't care. Give it to everybody, get it out there.

"We were totally happy with that. We were doing so much work just getting the game out. We knew in Taiwan that they were copying it: 100%, that was the market back then. So we contacted the biggest pirates there and went, 'Can you buy boxes from us? Really cheap. Really really cheap.' So they bought tons of boxes off of us, so it would be legitimate.

"Get it out there, make them feel good. We made money when people would actually order the rest of the game. We didn't try to make money off the shareware [version]."

Romero said id viewed it as simply a form of distribution—because again, this was years before the ubiquity of the internet, and most gamers didn't have easy access to this stuff, as we explored in our feature on how shareware transformed PC gaming forever.

Doom and other shareware games were available on BBSes, but that meant two things: You had to make a potentially lengthy (and expensive) long distance phone call if you didn't happen to live close enough to a distribution board, and worse, you had to be one of those computer nerd weirdos who actually owned a modem. Believe me, there were not many of us back then. So, dodgy as they might have been, those not-entirely-legit disk-in-a-box distributions were good for id Software and gamers alike.

That attitude also informed the studio's approach to copy protection, which is something it just didn't bother with.

"There's always been a war that's never been won with copy protection, and we didn't want to waste our time with that," Romero said. "If people are going to copy it, they're going to copy it. They might buy it some time later, but—we didn't have money for everything we were playing, so we're like, let's not copy protect it. If people want to play it, they can still figure out how to play it."

In June 2020, Bungie made what would come to be remembered as one of the most reviled PR incidents in modern videogames: It announced the content vault. To make Destiny 2's long-term development more manageable, the studio said, the launch of its Beyond Light expansion coincided with a culling of in-game content, paring away story campaigns, world regions, and activities of all stripes.

The content vault may have been defensible on technical grounds, but the sunsetting of swaths of game content, many of which players had previously paid to access, left Destiny 2 with a reputational stain that never fully washed out. But now, six years after Destiny 2's downsizing and two months after its end of live service development, its players are learning how to pull some of those lost worlds back out of the vault—not for play, but for preservation.

Over the last few days, videos have started bubbling up on X and YouTube seeming to show Destiny 2 players wandering around now-inaccessible game areas, as well as regions that were never fully implemented in the game. Those videos are the products of work being done by developer stanuwu, who's building what he calls Destiny 2 Shadowkeep Singleplayer Exploration Mode—an upcoming tool allowing users to load into and explore the environments present in the last Destiny 2 build released before the Beyond Light content vaulting.

Before you get your hopes up too high, the tool won't make old builds of Destiny 2 playable. You won't be replaying any Red War missions or old raids. Instead, it's purely for exploration and preservation, as stanuwu writes in the Github repo's readme: "No mechanics are implemented and none will be implemented." Once players load up the requisite Season of Arrivals build—something you'll have to provide for yourself—its maps will be empty of enemies, NPCs, and activities.

But it will let users freely navigate the Destiny 2 destinations that have been absent from the game for half a decade, offering additional exploration features like flight and noclip. Personally, I'm eager for a chance to return to the Echo Basin on Io, one Destiny's more alien-feeling regions that was never revisited after its vaulting in 2020. (Rest in peace, Asher Mir. At least you didn't have to see all the Star Wars stuff.)

While I'll welcome the chance to reinhabit some of my old Destiny 2 stomping grounds, stanuwu's work is more promising as a preservation tool—particularly when Bungie doesn't seem to have its own method for easily accessing all of its vaulted material. By making those spaces explorable again, it will help ensure that the full breadth of Destiny 2's environmental art and design will remain accessible, even after someone eventually pulls the live game's plug.

Stanuwu says he plans to release the tool some time in the next two weeks, and that the tool will be both free and open source once it launches.

Students of first-person shooter history will likely know that the technology Half-Life runs on—GoldSrc—is a heavily modified version of the Quake engine. It's one of many, many branches of id-tech's ancient technological tree. Indeed, you'll still find tiny fragments of Quake code in Valve's modern successor to GoldSrc—Source 2.

Now, nearly three decades on from Half-Life's release, a modder has decided to put Quake back into Half-Life. Or maybe it's Half-Life back into Quake? Honestly, it's hard to tell.

The mod in question is called Libre-life, and it's a total conversion mod that aims to port Half-Life's key assets, like entities, weapons, monsters and mechanics, into Quake sourceports derived from DarkPlaces and FTEQW, with the primary target being the Zircon Engine. It's the creation of modder KleskBY, who aims to "combine support for Half-Life, Quake 1 [and] Quake 3 brush entities standard" according to Libre-life's ModDB page.

Why is Klesk doing this? Well, contrary to appearances, it has more to do with looking forward than looking back. Old game engines like GoldSrc tend to have hard-coded limitations that can affect its capability in various ways, like the maximum size of a map you can create.

The way around these limitations is to create a sourceport, like GZDoom (or its newer equivalent UZDoom) for Doom 2, or QuakeSpasm or its fork Ironwail for Quake. Such sourceports are what make mods like Brutal Doom or Arcane Dimensions possible.

Half-Life already has such a sourceport in Xash3D. However, Klesk cites several reasons for not just using Xash. The modder points out that Libre-life is intended to be more than just a straight engine port. "It can run on multiple Quake engines and could even run on Xash with enough adaptation work," Klesk writes. "There is no need for the project to be locked to a single Half-Life based engine".

Klesk also claims that Xash's Half-Life reimplementation of Half-Life is "not technically superior" and that the Quake source-ports he's focussed on provide "many capabilities that Xash does not."

Currently, Libre-Life is still in its early stages, but a fair amount of work has already been done, like reimplementing all of Half-Life 1's weapons. You can see the results of Klesk's work so far in the video above. For the most part it looks and sounds like Half-Life, though there are some obvious differences, like the higher-contrast shadows and the softer blood decals.

I was curious about Klesk's work and went to check out the demo. But it was upon doing so that I discovered Klesk has some, uh, interesting ideas about AI. In an FAQ about the demo, Klesk states unabashedly that he uses AI "a lot" and that "If you are anti-AI please just close this tab and move your focus to XashXT/FreeHL."

Which, as someone who is highly sceptical of generative AI, is what I will probably do. But it wasn't Klesk's use of AI that caused me to raise my eyebrows. It's what the modder said next:

"The Anti AI movement is just a hypocrisy and it does not provide any real solution. My opinion is that Anti-AI rhetoric is influenced by Chinese government and domestic terrorists who are competitors aiming to advance in AI development, as they never provide a solution, only complaints."

Alrighty then! It isn't clear what problem generative AI critics are supposed to be proposing a solution to. If the answer is "coding", then you can do that without generative AI and have been able to since computers were invented.

As for the Chinese government/domestic terrorist stuff, I think it's far more likely that people don't like AI because the technology is built upon plagiarised work, is terrible for the environment, is ruining the PC hardware market, and causing people to lose their minds, among other things.

Given the above statements, it seems unlikely that Klesk will change their mind on using AI for Libre-life. But it's not impossible. The recent Half-Life total conversion Diffusion, which funnily enough was built in Xash3D, used generative AI for its voices. But when criticised for this, creator Aynekko had a very different response, and replaced the AI voices with a cast of human actors to the delight of its fans.

From the archives: This article originally ran in PC Gamer #330 (UK, May 2019). You should still play Bullestorm, which is frequently 90% off on Steam.

Bulletstorm is the stupidest game ever made.

Everything about this game is stupid. Your character is stupid. Your allies are stupid. Your enemies are very stupid. The weapons are daft. The skillshot system is absurd. The script almost prides itself on how much rank idiocy it can cram into every line. Even the setting is stupid, a holiday resort built using prison labour on an alien planet so hostile that it rains gamma radiation.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Bulletstorm was developed by semi-concussed jocks during a two-year long frat party. It makes Gears of War look sensible, an impression that is probably the main reason why it sold a pitiful number of copies when it originally released in 2011. The game has such a brash and puerile exterior that it put a lot of people off playing.

That’s such a shame, because beneath the fathom-thick veneer of dumbness is one of the cleverest shooters designed this side of the millennium. Every stupid thing that Bulletstorm does has been designed with a huge amount of thought.

Take the aforementioned setting. Yes, building a luxury vacation town with a bunch of dangerous criminals on a highly irradiated planet is a terrible idea, but the result is a planet populated by hundreds of mutated psychopaths just desperate to greet your bullets with their faces.

You play Grayson Hunt, a mercenary who formerly worked as an assassin for prize interstellar scumbag General Sarrano. When Hunt realised Sarrano had been sending him to murder innocent people, he went rogue and set his sights on Sarrano himself. Bulletstorm begins as Hunt encounters Sarrano’s flagship, the Ulysses, in orbit around Planet Butlins. With his four-man crew, Hunt embarks upon a frontal assault that would form the climax of any other shooter, ending with Hunt using his own ship as a missile to punch a hole through the Ulysses, sending both vessels crashing down to the planet’s surface.

Stupid is as stupid does

One thing I’ve always admired about Bulletstorm is its sheer breakneck pace. The prologue alone gets through about four missions’ worth of content, including a flashback sequence where you use gravity boots to walk down the side of a skyscraper. By the time the game commences proper, two of Grayson’s crew are dead, while the third—Ishi—has been turned into a cyborg in an effort to save his life.

What’s even more remarkable is that Bulletstorm barely breaks its stride throughout its entire six to eight hour length. The first chapter alone has about three gargantuan set-pieces, including a level where you’re chased by a giant, motorised wheel, and another where you need to escape the nest of a Godzilla-like dinosaur. There’s a sequence where you control a robot-dinosaur and a battle across a giant dam which, naturally, bursts in the process.

Bulletstorm’s sense of scale and spectacle puts most other shooters to shame, and it’s not even the point of the game. It’s merely seasoning sprinkled into the casserole of shooting angry mutants in the most creative ways possible.

Yes, the skillshot systems was and remains Bulletstorm’s most unique feature. While you’re free to kill enemies however you like, killing them in specific ways awards you with varying numbers of points. This could be by combining a kick to the face with a spray from your assault rifle to perform a “Bullet Kick” or impaling an enemy upon some metal railings to pull off a “Voodoo Doll”.

These points can be used to buy ammo and unlock new weapons, which, alongside the ever-shifting environment, can be used to conjure even more creative kills. Like People Can Fly’s earlier game Painkiller, Bulletstorm’s weapons are delightfully eclectic. Highlights include the Flail Gun, which shoots twin explosives connected by a chain that coils around enemies before exploding, and the Driller, a ludicrous weapon that fires gigantic drill-bits at colossal speeds, impaling enemies onto any surface and spinning them around like a meaty windmill. Combine these bizarre guns with the skillshot system, and you’ve got one of the most gleefully entertaining shooters ever made. Impaling multiple enemies on one drillbit for the “Shishkebab” bonus is almost worryingly satisfying, as is kicking a flail-wrapped enemy into a man- eating plant and blowing both up in a shower of blood and chlorophyll.

Like everything else about Bulletstorm, it’s incredibly crass and incredibly silly, but it’s also a huge amount of fun. The only downside to the skillshot system is that it rewards you for set tricks, which limits the creative potential of the system (there’s no difference between kicking or sliding an enemy into spikes, for example).

Swearing up a storm

What’s interesting about Bulletstorm is that it inverts the typical way modern shooters present themselves. Most shooters try to justify their violence with a grand narrative about war and sacrifice and why all that killing is necessary and important. Bulletstorm, on the other hand, doubles down on its own gratuitousness. The script is unbelievably filthy, a cascade of swearing and toilet humour that almost completes the circle and becomes poetic.

Yet despite its crass front, Bulletstorm demonstrates more self-awareness than the majority of its peers. The game is clear on the fact that you’re not playing as a hero.

Hunt is a bad leader and a worse friend, his own arrogance and desire for revenge having cost him everything except for his life by the end of the game’s prologue. Two of his squadmates are dead, while Ish’s RoboCop-style makeover has left him in constant pain, fighting the AI system keeping him alive and taking over control of his own body.

This isn’t subtext either, its frequently pointed out by other characters in the game. Trishka, the leader of Sarrano’s special forces group, is probably the most scathing of Hunt’s critics but Grayson himself is painfully aware of his own failings. Much of his swaggering smack-talk basically amounts to overcompensation. Beneath that he’s desperate to save his last living friend, and in doing so harvest a grain of redemption from the mountain of shit he’s piled up. This is partly why the addition of Duke Nukem as a playable character in 2017’s Full Clip edition rang so hollow. Bulletstorm is ultimately only pretending to be a dumb shooter, whereas there is no pretending with Duke Nukem.

Indeed, to think of Bulletstorm as an “old-school” FPS is a mistake. It’s a thoroughly modern shooter, from the regenerating health to the aiming-down-the-sights to the fact that its characters actually have some layers. Most of the time this works, but there are a few areas where it just doesn’t come together.

No jumping allowed

Most significantly, you can’t jump. You can only mantle over certain obstacles. It’s an odd omission in a game that is essentially about performing stunts with guns, and proves somewhat limiting in play. Moreover, while the environment design of Bulletstorm is incredible – particularly its crumbling sci-fi cityscapes – the actual level design is comparatively simplistic, lots of large, straight corridors cleverly decorated to make them feel more complex.

Ultimately though, this is the only area where Bulletstorm is simpler than it appears. Beneath all the blood and cursing and toilet humour is a brilliantly imaginative shooter with a unique sci-fi setting and enough action to fill a game twice its length. Bulletstorm may be the stupidest game ever made, but boy is it clever in how it goes about that.

You can play Doom on a vape, a printer, an oscilloscope, a pregnancy test, an ATM, and inside Doom itself, but can you play it on a Commodore 64? The old 8-bit powerhouse was discontinued just a year after Doom's 1993 release, and while it was capable of small miracles for its time, it was not a natural home for first-person shooters.

Engineer and programmer Steve McCrea has worked on several Metroid games and Resident Evil 4's VR port, but his current project is inarguably more important: he's building Doom for Commodore 64.

It's a far from straightforward port, and it's technically not 3D. According to McCrea posting on X, it's based on code for The Keep, a first-person dungeon crawler he created for the Commodore VIC-20. The VIC-20 is an ancestor to the Commodore 64 with inferior specs, though it only released a year before the Commodore 64's 1982 launch. McCrea writes that his C64 Doom is "using ray casting in a tile grid".

But unlike The Keep, which was more similar to something like Wolfenstein 3D—essentially a flat, grid-locked maze—McCrea's Doom C64 has variable floor and ceiling heights and elevators. It also has opening doors and "visible weapons" (versus The Keep which didn't).

It really is impressive, especially this most recent work-in-progress video which shows variable lighting (!) and a skybox. According to McCrea he's built levels E1M1 through to E1M8, but is currently looking for help on music. Chris Hülsbeck, are you around?

Apogee Software founder Scott Miller, who published Wolfenstein 3D, is impressed. "Back when we released Wolf3D I begged Id to make a C-64 version and they said it wasn't possible. Now I'm crying."

The PC is the best way to play the new Halo: Campaign Evolved remake, as well as almost every other Halo, except for one glaring flaw: no split-screen, for some reason. Xbox and PS5 get it, but PC is locked to online co-op only.

Ten years ago, that's an omission that might've gone unnoticed by most, but the rise of living room PCs and local game streaming has made split-screen more relevant than ever on the platform. It's dumb and a little insulting that Halo Studios short-shrifted us on this one, but modders are here to help.

Enter mod "Halo Campaign Evolved Split-screen Coop" by Jpurd123 on Nexus. According to the description, this tweak (which Jpurd made with AI, for the record), activates code already existing within the PC remake that enables local split-screen. If accurate, that means the PC version of Campaign Evolved does support local play, but Halo Studios didn't turn it on.

Once hacked in, split-screen can be activated by a simple keyboard shortcut before starting a session. Comments on the mod page suggest it works pretty well as long as you follow the steps exactly as described.

Now, the caveats: This only supports two player split-screen for now, which sucks because 4-player co-op is a big feature of this remake. The mod was only tested with the Steam version of Campaign Evolved, so those playing through PC Game Pass or the Microsoft Store (which is where my copy came from) might be out of luck. Folks are also saying that split-screen only works if both players use controllers—trying to mix KBM and controllers makes the keyboard take over both screens, weirdly.

So yea, it's a finicky little mod. Given its AI makeup, who knows if it'll be improved over time, but it's a good sign that useful tweaks like this are popping up within a day of the remake's full rollout. It took a lot longer for folks to figure out split-screen solutions to the older Halos through Master Chief Collection (which also got left out of split-screen on PC).

A number of recent Linux driver patches has reportedly resulted in significant performance gains for the Steam Deck. Valve's handheld runs on the Linux-based SteamOS, and these patches can apparently improve the Steam Deck's 1% low frame rates by as much as 31%.

A fresh 'epp_boost' feature for the AMD P-State driver is largely responsible for the performance boost. David Vernet, a Linux kernel hacker at Meta, is the developer behind it. The feature implements per-core Energy Performance Preference (EPP) for AMD CPUs. As far as I know, it's not yet been reviewed by AMD's Linux kernel engineers, though Vernet explains via the Linux kernel mailing list that it was developed with gaming specifically in mind (via Phoronix).

Vernet offers a technical breakdown of the inefficiency these patches are designed to address, writing, "In active (EPP) mode the platform autonomously picks the operating point between min_perf and max_perf, biased by the EPP hint, and the kernel only rewrites the CPPC request on policy or limit changes. A workload dominated by one mostly-busy thread that takes frequent short sleeps (common in gaming workloads, for example) can fare poorly under this strategy."

He elaborates, "Each sleep decays the hardware's performance signal, causing post-wakeup bursts to start at a low operating point and inflating tail latency even though the CPU is essentially fully busy while work is available," going on to add, "A game's main or render thread typically blocks briefly on a futex or a GPU fence every frame, and the resulting frequency droop shows up directly as stale frames and inflated frame-time percentiles."

Vernet writes that the most obvious fix would have been to globally force "EPP=performance" but this would not have been power efficient—especially for handhelds like the Steam Deck. So, instead these patches introduce "an opt-in, per-core EPP boost." From there, Vernet offers a breakdown of technical precedents, his testing methodology, and how the fix works in specific detail but honestly I've barely been keeping up with all the Linux riddling to this point. For those who reckon they'll fare better than me, you can read the message archive here.

I've not had a chance to check out the patch myself, but Phoronix took a look using the Civilization VI game benchmark. Their testing apparently saw the 1%-low fps pick up by 31.8%, and frame time improve by 4.1%. That's not nothing for Valve's years old handheld, though newer AMD Ryzen systems would likely also benefit.

Mind you, that's only so long as you don't mind a spot of noodling in Linux's guts to activate the epp_boost feature after downloading the patch. To get the most out of the patch, you'll need to set 'amd_pstate.epp_boost=1'. After that, '/sys/module/amd_pstate/parameters/epp_boost' can be used to check whether the feature is active. I know I said handhelds are cooked, but I will still gladly take any performance boost offered to my wizened Steam Deck.

Tracking down all of the Halo: Campaign Evolved skull locations is a significant undertaking. While there were only ten of these in the original game, there are now 39 to find, including a bonus you get when you acquire your first three skulls. That amounts to three-per-mission, all unlocking new modifiers you activate during the campaign.

Some require you to play on higher difficulties, use other skulls to get them, or even pull off tricks like grenade jumps, so you've got your work cut out for you.

All Halo: Campaign Evolved skull locations

There are 39 skulls to find in Halo: Campaign Evolved, plus once you find three skulls, you'll automatically unlock an additional three skulls used only for the Campaign Remix mode:

• Armistice - Enemy factions never fight one another
• Adaptation - Randomizes the enemy factions present in the mission.
• Reload - Randomizes the pre-placed weapons in the mission.

There are three skulls in each mission, including the bonus ones, so I'll list each as you'll encounter it, the effect, plus the best Rally Point to use to be close to them.

Pillar of Autumn skull locations

1. Speed Limit

• Effect: Disables sprint
• Rally Point: Alpha

As soon as you exit the cryo pod, this skull is on the raised platform to your right, directly above the door. Head right into the alcove with the cryo tank, ascend the slope at the back so you can jump on top of it, then jump onto the platform and go right to find the skull.

2. Magnified

• Effect: 60-round magazines for the AR are now standard issue.
• Rally Point: Alpha

After the previous skull, continue through the mission towards the bridge until the door opens and the Elite jumpscares you. Carry on down the corridor, past the marines at the barricade, and into the room with all the weapon racks. The skull is just on top of one of them to your left.

3. Perspective

• Effect: Changes the player camera to third-person.
• Rally Point: Bravo

After the cutscene on the bridge of the Pillar of Autumn, head back inside, find the two pilots sitting at the front of the cockpit behind Captain Keyes, and drop down into the space below them to find the skull.

Halo skull locations

1. Grunt Funeral

• Effect: Grunts die in a blaze of plasma.
• Rally Point: Charlie

After you emerge from the underground section with the Warthog, continue on, turn left over the river, and follow the trail to find a Forerunner structure where you have to rescue a group of marines underground. If you climb the stairs to the top level of the structure, the skull is on top of the middle section halfway up, just by where the pillar of light emerges. You'll have to jump up as far as you can then grenade jump to reach it, as shown in the video.

2. Give and Take

• Effect: Firing your weapon drains your shield, but dealing damage to enemies recharges it.
• Rally Point: Charlie

From where you emerge from underground with the Warthog, follow the river on the left until it splits, then follow it right until you reach a cave. Passing some green fireflies above you, you'll spot the skull hovering above a rock to your left.

3. Floor is Lava

• Effect: Take continuous damage whenever touching the "ground".
• Rally Point: Charlie

After you exit the underground with the Warthog, head right to the crash site with all the big rocks and Jackal snipers. Go up to the top of the grassy area near where the marine sniper is, jump right onto the other grassy rock, then drop down onto the big rock in the centre below to find the skull, as shown in the video.

Truth and Reconciliation skull locations

1. Iron

• Effect: Dying in co-op resets you to your last checkpoint, dying in solo restarts the level.
• Rally Point: Alpha

When you get to the grav lift leading up to the ship, head to the other side and look for the light on the ground illuminating a cactus and a tree by the cliff edge. Step onto the rock just to the right of the light on the ground and look down to see the skull on a lower ledge. Kill yourself to get back up.

2. Endurance Spec

• Effect: Makes UNSC vehicles indestructible.
• Rally Point: Bravo

This skull is one of the hardest to grab due to its position, so I suggest grabbing the Acrophobia skull from Silent Cartographer first. After you enter the ship and defend the room you arrive in, you'll have to let the marines into a hangar. The skull is in here on the upper level. If you go around to the far end of the walkway and look back across the hangar, you'll see a crate and a bunch of pillars you can jump between with the skull at the far end, though this is hard to reach without Acrophobia active, since that skull lets you fly briefly.

3. Foreign

• Effect: Players cannot use weapons from another faction.
• Rally Point: Bravo

A little further on, through some corridors, you'll reach a hangar where a Covenant drop ship will close its doors and fly away as you enter. Head to the far right corner of this room, where there's a locked door, and wait for the reinforcements who'll open it to enter. Head inside and grab the skull on the left. It's unclear whether this door stays open, so make sure to go there as soon as you enter the room.

Silent Cartographer skull locations

1. Bandana

• Effect: Infinite ammo and grenades (disables some achievements)
• Rally Point: Alpha

After you clear the landing zone of hostiles and circle around the island to the entrance to the Forerunner structure, you'll find a cave just to the right of it. The skull is just inside on the sand in the sunny bit at the cave's centre.

2. Acrophobia

• Effect: The Corps: Now issuing rifles AND wings… (disables some achievements)
• Rally Point: Bravo

When you're directed to the plaza area with the two Hunter enemies to open the security door, climb the sloping structure in the centre (from the right side) and ascend to the far end to find this skull.

3. Hip Fire

• Effect: All weapon zoom functionality is disabled.
• Rally Point: Charlie

After you enter the main facility and defeat the two Hunters in the room, you'll head down a staircase with a hologram in the centre. Look over the edge directly below you, and you'll spot a skull down below on the right side. Drop down and grab it.

Assault on the Control Room skull locations

1. IWHBYD

• Effect: It would have been your dialogue
• Rally Point: Bravo

After you get the Scorpion tank, drive it through the valley and the tunnels until you come to the bridge across the ravine with all the turrets. Turn left at the other end, drive to the icy wall, and then jump on top of your scorpion, and use it to reach the cave halfway up its side with the skull in.

2. Angry

• Effect: Enemies fire their weapons faster and more frequently.
• Rally Point: Charlie

When you finally arrive at the entrance to the Control Center Ziggurat after the long section with the Scorpion (directly below the bridge you walked across at the start of the mission) you'll spot a strange Forerunner ravine structure with a bunch of bridge like struts placed along the top. The skull is on the third strut back towards the cliff.

3. Cowbell

• Effect: Physics mass of objects is reduced, making them more easily displaced
• Rally Point: Echo

When making your way to the control room, you'll emerge onto a bridge outside where two Banshees will be parked. Cortana will tell you to commandeer one. Walk along the bridge to about halfway, where it crosses above the Forerunner structure below, and drop down on the left side. In the channel there, you'll see the skull wedged in a pile of snow.

343 Guilty Spark skull locations

1. Fog

• Effect: Motion tracker is disabled.
• Rally Point: Alpha

Continuing on from the crashed Pelican, you'll find a crashed Covenant drop ship stuck in a tree, turn left here and climb the slope, then turn right at the top, hopping up over the rocks just past the tree and where its roots are sticking out—you'll know the right spot as you can see a weird Flood stalk growing out of the tree. You'll spot the skull on a rock to your left overlooking the fallen tree you cross to continue the mission.

2. That's Just… Wrong

• Effect: Enemies have increased awareness of the player.
• Rally Point: Bravo

After heading through the initial rooms of the Forerunner structure, you'll find a marine who's gone crazy and tries to shoot you with a magnum. Kill him and he drops the skull.

3. They Come Back

• Effect: Flood Combat Forms reanimated by Infection Forms are much more dangerous.
• Rally Point: Charlie

Towards the end of the mission, you'll eventually take an elevator up, meet some marines, and have to defend a tower door against Flood while waiting for evacuation. Instead of killing the enemies, head to the right of the big tower with the door and run until you find a fallen tree resting against a ledge. Climb the tree and jump onto the left side of the rock to find the skull.

The Library skull locations

1. Tilt

• Effect: Enhances both positive and negative damage multipliers, example: plasma does more damage against shields, but less against health.
• Rally Point: Alpha

Just after Guilty Sparks leaves, you'll go through a short tunnel and emerge the other side, where'll appear again with sentinels to help you. Turn right and jump up onto the sloping strut next to the door you came through and walk up to the top to find the skull.

2. Pop

• Effect: Shooting Flood in their weak point causes them to explode.
• Rally Point: Bravo

After you finish defending the lift with Flood dropping onto it, circle around to the left or right to arrive at the next door where Guilty Spark will be waiting. You'll have to defend the door here as he unlocks it. When facing the door, turn around, and immediately behind you'll spot a pedestal sticking out of the far wall a little way up with the skull on top. Climb the sloping strut to the side, hop across to the blocks between, and then jump to the pedestal itself.

3. Famine

• Effect: Weapons dropped by enemies contain half the ammo.
• Rally Point: Charlie

Right at the start of the fourth section, when you arrive at the bottom of the third big elevator, go straight ahead, down the stairs, and turn left before you reach the sentinel beam to find the skull in a little alcove.

Two Betrayals skull locations

1. Tough Luck

• Effect: Enemies always go berserk, constantly roll out of the way, and rarely run from a fight.
• Rally Point: Alpha

After you exit the Halo control centre and descend to the bottom level where the banshee's waiting, get inside, and use it to fly back up to the big crest structure sticking out in front of the light pillar above the control centre. Fly to the top to find the skull and time jumping out of your banshee to land on the platform.

2. Black Eye

• Effect: Your shields will only recharge when you melee enemies.
• Rally Point: Charlie

After you've destroyed the first conduit, you'll emerge out into the bottom of the valley (where you've been before in Assault on the Control Room) and see three bridgelike arches ahead of you. Cross the middle one to the other side, and head right to spot the skull on a pile of snow amidst the Flood growths.

3. Mythic

• Effect: Enemies have increased health (also unlocks LASO mode).
• Rally Point: Charlie

After the previous skull, you'll later have to fly to the top of a valley onto a platform where there are some Banshees, and two doors built into the valley walls on either side. Activate the terminal on the platform and head through the door directly opposite (so the door that's on the opposite side to where the objective marker is directing you). Now you need to:

1. Kill all the enemies in the room (including energy sword Elites and a lot of fuel rod cannon grunts).
2. Activate the terminal to open the door on the far side.
3. Now defeat all the enemies in this hallway and activate the next door.
4. Defeat all the enemies in the final room to spawn the Mythic skull in the pillarlike structure at the centre.

Keyes skull locations

1. Catch

• Effect: Makes enemies throw and drop more grenades.
• Rally Point: Alpha

Without a doubt, the hardest skull to get in Halo: Campaign Evolved, partly because you need to be on Heroic difficulty for it to appear. This skull is timed and will despawn if you take more than a few minutes. From the start of the level, you need to:

1. Rush through the first section to the grav lift (use the optical camo you can pick up at the bottom of the drop to make this easier)
2. Defeat the marked enemies on the lift platform
3. Stand in the centre and face away from the direction you came
4. As soon as you start rising, hold X on controller to grab the skull

The reason this is so tricky is because of the increased difficulty, time constraint, and because the skull is right before the end of the grav lift, meaning you only have one chance to catch it as you pass by. Play on co-op if possible to increase chances of survival and catching the skull.

2. Blind

• Effect: HUD and weapons do not appear on screen.
• Rally Point: Bravo

After you board the ship, you'll enter the upper level of a bay filled with ghosts and wraiths where Cortana comments that the Flood are gathering bodies in the corners. Drop down and look for the open doorway at the far end with the passage blocked by a destroyed Wraith and some Covenant crates. Blast them out of the way with a grenade and head up the corridor to find the skull by the locked door on the left.

3. Pinata

• Effect: Punching enemies makes them drop inert grenades.
• Rally Point: Charlie

After the cutscene plays with Keyes, turn around and melee the flood growth he's in until this skull drops out on the floor in front of him.

The Maw skull locations

1. Stowed Reload

• Effect: Weapons continue to reload while stowed.
• Rally Point: Bravo

After Guilty Spark stops the countdown at the bridge, you'll continue through the ship and arrive in a cryo pod bay that looks quite similar to the one you started the game in, with four pods in the centre facing each other. The skull is in the back left corner of the room on top of a pillar. You can jump to this from the walkway.

2. Boom

• Effect: Explosion radius is increased 2x.
• Rally Point: Bravo

When you enter the engine bay, go right up the slope, continue along the platform and go right through the door, follow the path up to the next floor, then turn left through the doorway and up to the next floor. Then go straight, turn right to where the far terminal is sticking out, jump across to the lower platform, then turn left and drop down between the pillar and the wall to spot the skull. This is quite complex, so follow the video above if confused.

3. Thunderstorm

• Effect: Upgrades the rank of most enemies.
• Rally Point: Charlie

During the final Warthog escape, continue along the main track until you reach the winding tunnel with pillars. You'll pass one vent shortcut on your right, take it, and continue along the main corridor until you spot a second vent shortcut on your right. Go down this about halfway, then get out and look to your right to see the skull on the ground.

Boarding Action skull locations

1. Malfunction

• Effect: Upon respawn, a random element of your HUD no longer appears.
• Rally Point: Alpha

When you meet up with Johnson in the room with the grav lift and fight the two Hunters, after having progressed through the hangar via opposing walkways, head right down the walkway Johnson came up from and follow it. Go down the stairs, past the ship on the left and through the door, then right past the turret onto the walkway, where you'll find the skull on ground overlooking the room with the dropship you started the mission in.

2. Johnny Ammo Seed

• Effect: When reloading, you lose the ammo remaining in the discarded clip.
• Rally Point: Bravo

This skull is on the third level of platforms in the white and gold room just after you start Change of Plans. To get here, you'll have to progress into the next training room with the gold energy sword Elites, climb the stairs at the far end, follow the platform around to the opposite side of the room, head left through the tunnels, and emerge into the third floor of the previous room (where Johnson was sniping from). The skull is on the walkway (by a bunch of elites) with the purple torch just ahead of you, so carry straight on, then turn right to find it.

3. Leadhead

• Effect: Headshots no longer provide extra damage or instant kills.
• Rally Point: Delta

After you meet the Prophet and survive the ambush, you'll return to the room where you originally entered the Gene Forge. After this, you'll get an objective to reach the upper decks and will find yourself in a small room with a grav lift at its centre, fighting waves of Brutes and Elites. Once done, don't go up the lift, but head through the door on the left side of the room to spot the skull a little way in.

The Most Dangerous Game skull locations

1. Temperamental

• Effect: Allies will attack the player more quickly if the player kills a friendly.
• Rally Point: Alpha

This is one of the more complex skulls to grab as it involves breaking a golden Elite's shield three times throughout the level.

1. After you meet Williams and enter the area with the mushrooms and the Jackal snipers, shoot the golden Elite standing up on the ledge to the right until you break his shield and he runs away.
2. Continue into the next area with the Covenant Base and the Wraith, just past the Wraith at the back door is the same golden Elite. Smash his shield before he escapes—this is also where you get the second skull, so check the next entry then check back here.
3. After you free the prisoners in the cell block, you'll emerge outside, at which point Johnson will mention he's spotted a high value target and Williams will mention it's the Elite that butchered her marines. He's up and to the left as soon as you exit into the circular space. Break his shield and kill all the enemies.

Once that's done, make your way up to the central podium which the skull will have spawned in the centre of.

2. Recession

• Effect: Every shot expends twice the normal amount of ammo.
• Rally Point: Bravo

When facing the Wraith in the Covenant base area, turn around and look towards the door with the two torches on either side above. These have fuel barrels inside them you can blow up, opening the door and revealing the skull inside.

3. Ghost

• Effect: Enemies no longer flinch when taking fire.
• Rally Point: Charlie

After you cross the gravity bridge and Chief mentions to Williams "not being able to choose who we are," the door will open into the next area with a couple of Elites with needle rifles ahead. The skull is directly above you on the left torch above the door. Climb around the tree to the left and hop onto the tree to get onto the cliff where the skull is.

Heavy Burden skull locations

1. Eyepatch

• Effect: All auto aim is disabled for all weapons.
• Rally Point: Alpha

After you fight the Hunters in the room with the alien plants, continue through the area until you reach a bridge across a chasm, with a smaller bridge off to the left (which two Elites will come running along). Head through the door to your left and go along the smaller bridge to the door at the far end, where you'll find the skull to your left.

2. Grunt Birthday Party

• Effect: Grunt headshots produce legendary celebrations.
• Rally Point: Bravo

After you descend from the ship's bridge to meet up with Williams, you'll pass through a bunch of rooms you've already been through before reaching a large room with some plants. As you descend a short stairs with a torch on the left, you'll spot a rock-like natural structure with the skull on top. You have to jump to this from the central platform then jump to grab it, as in the video above.

3. Efficient

• Effect: Enemies killed while the player is at full health drop more ammo.
• Rally Point: Charlie

After you reactivate the power on the moving platform, continue under the bridge into the following room, where you need to jump off the platform and run over to the far left corner, and grab the skull before you die of the timeout countdown.

The week I spent in Chornobyl in Stalker 2's pre-release review period is a demented blur in my memory at this point. I remember: gunfire randomly muting itself, multiple main quests that failed to progress until I ran about two kilometres away from them, bloodsuckers that required approximately 46,000 rounds to kill, and enemy corpses becoming nightmarish, distended and levitating things.

Despite it all, I loved it. Stalker 2 had the bones of something beautiful, just as soon as GSC could get around to, you know, finishing making it.

If that time hasn't arrived, I think it's fast-approaching. On August 20, almost two years after the base game's release, Stalker 2 will get its first expansion, Cost of Hope.

This is the first of two planned story DLCs for the game, this one focusing on the Zone's Duty (who think the Zone is scary and we should shoot it), and Freedom (who think the Zone is wondrous and we should share it) factions. "Explore uncharted locations, encounter unexpected allies and enemies, discover powerful weapons, and experience a gripping new story," goes the blurb.

"Launching in line" with Cost of Hope is Stalker 2's long-awaited 2.0 update, which I might honestly be more ravenous for. In August last year, GSC announced that it would be undertaking the fairly mammoth task of completely updating the version of Unreal Engine 5 the game runs on, from 5.1 to 5.5.4. That's update 2.0's big crowning bulletpoint. Mind you, it's also bringing new features and content of its own—which will, unlike the DLC, be free to all Stalker 2 owners.

GSC says it will have more to share on both Cost of Hope and update 2.0 as we draw nearer to the August 20 release date.

I've not touched Stalker 2 since that feverish review period. I figured I'd wait for GSC to do its thing. I think it might be time to return. I loved Stalker 2 when it was practically on fire. A (more or less) working version of the game with some shinier and more stable UE5 bells and whistles? Sign me up.

New Blood's comic book golden age noir detective immersive sim shooter, Fallen Aces, just got a beefy new update: Its second episode, Shadow of Death, is playable right now, while the usually $15 game is on sale for $12 until August 8.

I'm kind of allergic to playing games in early access, so I haven't touched Fallen Aces since I fell in love with its first few levels back in 2024. Those levels were fun, the stealth tense, the combat beautifully slapstick, and the pulpy story engaging. But I mean it as a compliment when I say that the Episode 2 trailer shows a practically unrecognizable game.

It's got car chases, sprawling city environments, medieval broadswords, and I lost track of how many new guns. Shout out to the cartoony Mateba Model 6 Unica in there, a.k.a the cyberpunk detective gun. The more games that sport this beautiful Italian oddity, the better.

New Blood's entire main lineup of the 2020s has been slow to cook, but the three games have justified that time with ambitious increases of scope. Ultrakill's recent layer of Fraud looks like its most striking and unique yet, while Gloomwood's development updates with monster serums, armored pig constables, nonlethal takedowns, and Rat Mode give me a "how did we even get here" feeling like looking at my phone and seeing an Uber driver in the ocean or something. In a good way.

New Blood likes to start its games cheap and raise the price as value is added in early access, so it's long been curtains for Fallen Aces' launch price of $10. 15 bucks is hardly shabby, though, and you can take advantage of that nice compromise $12 sale for the next two weeks on Steam.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was not the series' finest hour, but one aspect of the sequel that has gone down well with players is its experiments with matchmaking. For years, players have complained about the effects of skill-based matchmaking (SBMM), which is intended to level the playing field by sorting players into groups of similar skill. But some players claim that SBMM can outright flatten the experience, neutering much of the fun and unpredictability of arena shooting.

Until recently, Activision had tried to convince players of the merits of SBMM. But last year saw a change in attitude from the publisher. For Black Ops 7's multiplayer, it introduced an "open moshpit" playlist alongside its standard match allocator, wherein skill consideration was "drastically reduced in matchmaking".

It appears this option has gone down well with CoD players, as Activision has said it plans to carry low-SBMM playlists forward into Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. This was revealed in a post on Call of Duty's official X account, where it explained its broader plans for multiplayer matchmaking going forward.

"Over the past year, we've continued to learn a lot about multiplayer matchmaking through player data and community feedback," the developers wrote, adding that these learnings had been "reinforced" by players' reception of the releases of Black Ops and Black Ops 2 alongside Black Ops 7. Clearly, it has concluded that open playlists are worth keeping around, as it says. "We'll continue to offer Open playlists in Black Ops 7, and we'll also include Open Playlist options in the upcoming Modern Warfare 4 beta."

On top of this, Activision is introducing a "new matchmaking system" for various modes in Black Ops 7, including Black Ops classic, quick play and party games. It says that this system is "inspired by" Black Ops and Black Ops 2, and in a follow-up post, explains it builds upon "what we've learned, with smarter team balancing, wide match variety, improvements that keep matches full, and a better experience for mixed-level parties."

It'll be interesting to see how the matchmaking changes align with Modern Warfare 4's adjustments to gunplay and general combat, with a renewed emphasis on making players "feel like they're really behind the gun". The beta kicks off on August 21, though unlike last year Game Pass subscribers will not be entitled to early beta access.

I liked Doom: The Dark Ages when it arrived last year, but I really ought to have loved it. The first two Dooms of id's modern trilogy are generationally great FPS campaigns with unmatched action, memorable guns, and late-game fights that will grind your teeth down to the gums. They successfully reestablished Doom around speed, hyper mobility, and improvisational gun swapping—ideas that id actively turned away from when it designed The Dark Ages around a shield.

The Slayer's shield was a neat multitool, allowing him to block any incoming damage, parry certain attacks, or throw it as a weapon to bisect fodder grunts. But those features came at the cost of mobility and complexity—this Doomguy could no longer jump high or dash around the battlefield, and the new solution to every enemy was to block attacks and blast it in the face with the shotgun.

Revelations, the new Dark Ages expansion that released just hours after id was decimated by layoffs, is a masterful comeback.

The expansion picks up soon after the base game: The Slayer ventures into Hell to take on the very worst it has to offer. He gets his ass kicked, then summarily punted into Purgatory. Beaten and bruised, he has to rip and tear his way out of Hell's wastebasket, and this time he can't hide behind a shield.

No really—a big bad guy literally rips it in half in the opening level. Yea, id is not being subtle in acknowledging the feedback to the base game. Revelations is about the Slayer reclaiming his apex status in the mortal realm, but it's also about id reclaiming the best aspects of Doom. Enter the Chain Spear, a new appendage for the Slayer that immediately upstages the shield on all fronts by reintroducing layers of mobility back into the series.

He can plunge the spear into enemies and geometry to yank himself towards them (similar to Eternal's meat hook), but crucially, his trajectory is controlled by camera movement. That means he can hook a guy from across an arena, aim up or left or right, and turn demons into his personal catapult. It's simple, fun, and immediately more expressive than anything I ever accomplished with the shield.

At the same time, id has added Eternal's air dashes back into the mix, which can now trigger a "perfect dodge" that charges a meter for special spear moves. Such are your two options for dealing with enemy fire: The spear can parry green attacks and dashes can evade everything else. There is no block.

The result is a harmonious combat loop that siphons some of Eternal's brilliance while maintaining The Dark Ages' weighty, defensive identity. You're still doing a lot of deflecting green energy blasts back to their senders, but you're also flinging yourself over hordes to reach the high ground, sniping airborne wraiths with powerful spear throws, and atomizing platoons of demons with a single ground pound. The spear delivers control and options that the shield couldn't.

It's understandable how id thought the shield would be addition through subtraction—a persistent complaint of Eternal was an overwhelming number of guns, mods, grenades, and melee attacks to juggle—but clipping the Slayers' wings was an overcorrection.

Doom is best when the Slayer holds all the cards, and in id fashion, you can eventually swap between the spear and shield at any time in Revelations. You're never required to use both in combat, but the shield is used for traversal puzzles that incorporate both weapons—these, too, are more involved and fun than the base game.

By the time I'd reclaimed the shield and filled out the spear's own ability tree, I did have those Eternal-like moments where the number of guns, moves, and similar-but-different melee attacks at my disposal would occasionally short-circuit my brain. I'd throw my spear when I meant to slash with it, deflect when I meant to stab, or forget for an entire level that I can ground pound. But it's a hill I eventually climbed, and on the other side was a mastery of Revelation's moveset. The Chain Spear became a natural extension of my reach—the hand with which I move the pieces of Hell's armada at my whim. Every piece clicked into place, and Revelations singlehandedly justified Doom: The Dark Ages as an idea.

Do not miss the 10-12 hour Revelations expansion—out now on Steam.

If you're looking for something to do this weekend and would prefer it comes in the form of shooting guys, then allow me to direct your attention to Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, which is holding an open beta that's set to run until Monday.

Announced in 2025, Hell Let Loose: Vietnam is a more-modern follow-up to the WW2 milsim Hell Let Loose. It features the 50v50 battles of the original, expanded with the addition of air power—helicopters, naturally—across six large-scale maps. Battlefield Vietnam may be the obvious point of comparison, but as PC Gamer gunner Morgan Park pointed out, Hell Let Loose is more of a hardcore milsim. The Steam page reflects that as well, emphasizing the need for teamwork and tactics, and the game's focus on historical accuracy.

To get in on that action, just pop around to the Hell Let Loose: Vietnam on Steam and punch the "join the playtest" button. The playtest is fully cross-platform, so you can jump in on consoles if you like—instructions for that are also available on Steam, but the short version is to look for the playtest on either the Xbox or PlayStation Store, and then install it. Console-exclusive servers are also being offered, for those who don't want to get hammered by the mouse-and-keyboard set, but you'll need to have either a PlayStation Plus or Xbox Game Pass Essential subscription to play.

There are a number of known issues with the current build of the game, including dodgy voice chat, occasional performance drops, and "infrequent crashes or stability issues" on some AMD GPUs. Players are encouraged to provide feedback via the playtest survey, and reminded that any progression, XP, and unlocks earned during the test will not carry over to the full release. That's set to happen on August 13.

The Halo remake has released for those who forked out for the advance access version, and they're not thrilled with what they've got. At time of writing, Halo: Campaign Evolved is sitting at a humdrum 68% Mixed rating in the Steam user review scores—a mere 2% off the score given to the game by our Morgan Park in PCG's Halo remake review.

Why are fans—who were sufficiently John-117-pilled to pay the advance access premium—underwhelmed? Oh, the classic reasons: bugs, server problems, utterly extraneous account linking requirements. It wouldn't be a 2026 videogame release without those, would it?

"Login failed. Cannot play the singleplayer game as servers are overloaded," reads a review from Steam user GoatMedic󠁳Echoo. "Screw your DRM. Combat was not evolved." That's pretty much the vibe when it comes to how users feel about signing into their Microsoft account to play. "Error 400 or 500 when trying to login to Microslop's online services to connect Steam account," says user LVL13_. "Typical."

On the plus side, Halo Studios is replying to complaints about login issues to let fans know they're fixed. "This login issue should now be resolved. If you're still encountering this issue, please close and restart Halo: Campaign Evolved," reads the dev comment posted in reply to various different login complaints.

It seems to be more and more common for devs and publishers to wade in and start answering negative reviews these days, which makes me feel a little bad for whoever it is that gets saddled with the responsibility.

Anyway, Halo Studios does not yet have a canned answer for the other complaints players have. Many are encountering technical issues, with one user complaining of "constant crashes, graphical shimmering effect with fast movement [and] inability to disable upscaling". "Disgusting frametime spikes and stutters," laments another. They're far from the only ones. Plenty of the negative reviews touch on performance problems at least once.

All Halo Studios can offer in reply to that is a comment that performance feedback is being passed onto the devs, which probably would not mollify me if I had paid extra money for advance access to a videogame.

On its early access launch yesterday, those who paid to get early access to Halo: Campaign Evolved on Steam couldn't seem to open the game, as it simply wouldn't stop opening up the art book instead. I mean, I enjoy a good art book as much as the next guy, but not being able to play the game you bought on the day it launches sounds like a nightmare to me. Luckily, a fix rolled out pretty quickly.

Forty minutes after reports came in, a member of the Halo team took to the Discord to report "the Steam Art Book issue should be resolved shortly and will only require a Steam Client restart." Checking in on the Discord, this did seem to go live shortly after, and reports started to slow.

However, even then, there was a workaround, which is worth trying next time something like this happens. As pointed out on Reddit, right-clicking on the game, clicking Properties and uninstalling the artbook seemed to get around the problem for users.

In fairness, it is a pretty nice art book, and surprisingly involved. It is its own application, coming with the aforementioned art, a game manual, and even a short story. Adding to this, it has music while you scroll. Coming in at a handful of GB, it is an impressive art book. It's just a shame it got in front of people's eyes in one of the worst possible ways.

This is not the only problem stopping players from playing Halo: Campaign Evolved. You need to link your Microsoft account in order to actually play the game. This is a problem as it means that just booting it up for the first time requires a connection to a server. As you might be able to guess, that server was having problems yesterday.

Still, once you have linked your Microsoft account, you can play the game offline on your PC. It's just a shame how many hoops players are jumping through to play the game they just bought.

If you do happen to get stuck into Halo: Campaign Evolved this week, my personal advice is to skip Ultra graphical settings and stick the game on Low. There's very little difference between the two, and you get a healthy performance bump for picking the latter. If you are on a gaming handheld, I'd recommend playing the game on Very Low (a handheld exclusive mode) with FSR Medium, as even the mighty Asus ROG Xbox Ally X can't handheld the game very well on Native.

Finally, and this is evergreen advice, turn off motion blur. It's particularly egregious in Halo: Campaign Evolved.

I submit that there are two types of videogame remakes. The first type goes all in on transformation, taking big swings with its source material to the point that the remake can be embraced as a wholly new take. The most successful version of this approach is Capcom's Resident Evil remakes—horror shooters so beloved and distinct that they comfortably coexist with their originals.

Halo: Campaign Evolved isn't that.

What we have here is the other type of remake—the kind that goes all in on modernization, offering perceived upgrades to an otherwise unchanged foundation. Halo Studios has no discernably new take on Bungie's landmark FPS, other than a desire to make Combat Evolved look and play more like its later Halos. The "faithful" treatment sets an admirable goal, but that also means Campaign Evolved positions itself as a replacement for, or at least in competition with, the original.

That's a hurdle that was always gonna be tough to clear, because OG Halo is still a fantastic game 25 years later, and among my all-time favorite shooters. It's also readily playable with modern conveniences through The Master Chief Collection (another Halo Studios joint). I completed a playthrough of the original after running through the remake, which was helpful for spotting differences, but honestly, I'd take the weakest excuse to play more Halo.

The high value and quality of the MCC makes Campaign Evolved the superfluous add-on from the jump—it has fewer features, fewer campaigns, and zero competitive multiplayer.

New ride

What Campaign Evolved does have going for it, primarily, is novelty. It's neat to scour battlegrounds I've explored at least a dozen times reimagined by people who care, and to kick back to expanded and expensive-looking cutscenes that rival Halo 2 Anniversary's work. I especially admire how Halo Studios carefully applies hindsight to Halo: CE's weapon sandbox, allowing the occasional SMG, needle rifle, or energy sword to appear earlier in the series than expected without upstaging vanilla loadouts.

It's also impressive to look under the hood and consider what Halo Studios has pulled off here. With the help of underlying Bungie-era code, they've made Halo feel like Halo in an Unreal Engine 5 wrapper. If they hadn't done that right, the whole thing would've been dead on arrival, but the grenades do bounce correctly and Master Chief is appropriately floaty. Campaign Evolved is the best-feeling Halo that this team has ever assembled, and by extension, one of the slickest shooters of this scale in recent history.

Broadly speaking, it's a decent audition for future Halo projects (more remakes, right?) that I expect to go over smoothly with many Halo fans. But I can't help but also see everything that's worse about this thing—stuff that you could write off as nitpicks, but I see as evidence of this team's boring, more ordinary vision for Halo.

Master grief

Indeed, Campaign Evolved has the guts of Bungie, but that hasn't stopped 343 Halo Studios' historically flawed taste in Halo from gumming up the works, such as:

• A sprint button that defangs Flood encounters and makes vehicles less dangerous
• An assault rifle with such a long effective range and ubiquitous ammo that you're rarely pushed to use anything else
• A Warthog that's so convenient to drive and difficult to flip that the campaign's famous "Warthog run" loses all of its tension
• Waypoints that tell you exactly where to go at all times, despite level design already doing that naturally

They're bewildering choices made extra annoying by the remake's measured hand in other areas. Halo Studios clearly believes some old design principles are sacred—there's no mantling or grapple hooks, and only a tasteful sampling of later weapons. So to commit to these consequential revisions tells me the studio is not just updating a 2001 videogame for a younger palate, but truly believes that Halo is better this way. If so, they're wrong.

I know complaining about features that have become standard practice of an FPS sounds silly, but I'm unconvinced that Halo is improved when you can always run away from problems, or when Master Chief's mechanical steed controls like a Honda Civic, or when exploration is optional.

Yes, you're kinda slow in the original, but it's an appropriate speed for its mostly indoor arenas, and outside, Chief's jog ensures vehicles are important. Sure, the old Warthog flips a lot—that's why it's fun to learn its quirks and eventually get good at powersliding its massive body around corners. Yes, it's possible to get lost in the old game, but reading environmental cues can also be a rewarding part of play, and the remake doesn't even try to maintain that (you can turn off waypoints in HUD settings, but you can't disable them at a lobby level).

To enjoy Halo's classic qualities and miss them within this remake is not to succumb to nostalgia. It's to recognize the value of an FPS that does its own thing—that asks something slightly abnormal of its players for a real reason. I want to believe the stewards of Halo also think that, but my faith is shaken when modern trends are applied to a 25-year-old game as if they're an inevitability of an imaginary design rubric. I don't play Doom and wish for a realistic reload button. I don't play Mario and balk at a missing grapple hook. I don't play Halo 1 and expect to sprint.

Postcardification

I'm far less scandalized by, but still mixed on, Campaign Evolve's big art pass. This is an undeniably attractive game. I caught myself many times admiring Halo Studios' reassembled vistas, staring at a downright ridiculous ocean wave effect, or savoring cutscenes that highlighted Master Chief's Mark V armor in fully realized detail.

The results are as impressive as they are expected. I'm confident that this is exactly what Halo Studios was going for—a photoreal reimagining utilizing every bell and whistle that UE5 affords. But as time with Epic's latest tech has revealed, this is an engine that seems to excel at (or maybe insists upon) a certain "generically real" look.

Where I used to gaze out at Alpha Halo's horizons and see a misty, hauntingly beautiful facsimile of nature floating in space, I see in its place picturesque compositions of mountains, trees, and water that belong on a gift shop postcard. This remake makes Halo, the place, less alien.

Playing both versions back-to-back, I took more notice of background environments than I usually would. I like how both games look in all of these instances, but I tended to prefer the original for its readability, atmosphere, and color choices.

Define 'better'

Sometimes, Campaign Evolved would knock my socks off with a view that wasn't just beautiful, but dramatic and communicative in ways the original wasn't capable of, like the jungles of 343 Guilty Spark:

And other times (honestly, more of the time), UE5's raytraced light bounces would produce annoyingly dark rooms with barely anything to appreciate, like in Silent Cartographer:

Rooms like that gave me a renewed appreciation for hand-crafted, baked lighting placed exactly where a developer wanted it. Every room in Halo: CE was the work of fine brush, but Campaign Evolved gives the impression of broader stroke simulations shouldering the VFX load, often with diminished results.

I had the same reaction to the new rendition of Forerunner facilities. In keeping with Halo Studios' past games, the remake's interpretation of Forerunner architecture is of highly reflective steel, made somewhat brushed and weathered only after fan feedback. Not only are these materials less distinct and alien than the original's rough, intriguing marriage of brutalist concrete and metal, but those fancy reflections also turn indoor gunfights into overstimulating particle fests. It never gets so bad as to be broken, but it was an unwelcome obstacle in fights. It's as if readability wasn't the priority for Halo Studios that it clearly was for Bungie.

Speaking of the B word, the close timing of Campaign Evolved and Bungie's Marathon reboot is a useful contrast. One of my favorite things about Bungie's extraction shooter is how its gorgeous environment design zags totally away from photoreal, betting all of its chips on readability, color, and dramatic weather effects that masterfully sell its alien world. The entire visual identity of Marathon ignores the presumption of "next-gen" graphics becoming a slurry of tech demo trees and mountains, and flies in the face of the narrative that Campaign Evolved's new look represents "what Halo would've looked like if Bungie was able."

I also ding this remake for artistic changes that make Halo less fun, like how they messed up plasma grenades. In the remake, the sticky nade has lost its gaseous visuals and dampened its signature hissing, important signs for noticing when one is about to go off. I know because this is the most I've ever died from plasmas in a Halo game, and it was usually because I was standing right next to one without realizing it.

Then there are updated gun sounds that I'm comfortable calling downgrades. The beam rifle has lost its iconic "shutter click", substituted with commonplace laser noises. Halo Studios, post-feedback, repurposed the assault rifle's classic cacophonous scream, but lowered its presence in the audio mix.

And the sniper rifle. Hoo boy, what have they done to my sweet child?

Extra time

The best thing about Campaign Evolved is that you still, ultimately, get to play one of the best shooters ever made. That is points in its favor, though I doubt its proposed value to anyone who's already acquainted.

Since I've seen confusion online and even among friends excited for this remake, it's worth laying out exactly what you do and don't get for $50:

✅The Halo: CE campaign, remade
✅3 bonus missions set before Halo: CE
✅4-player co-op (the original only supports 2)
❌No PvP multiplayer whatsoever
❌No theater mode

It's a sparse package befitting its literal subtitle. While 4-player co-op is a big add, the absence of proper PvP is a serious blemish that ignores a huge reason people love these games, and will personally limit its lasting appeal. I've been denied an Unreal 5 remake of Blood Gulch's skybox, and that must be some sort of crime.

And it can't be ignored that The Master Chief Collection is $40 (often much less on sale) for much, much more:

✅Six Halo campaigns, two with Anniversary updates
✅Full multiplayer support for all games with crossplay
✅Forge, Theater, File Share
✅Mod Support with Steam Workshop
❌No bonus missions

Slightly dulling the blow are those three bonus story missions, though they didn't turn out as fun as I hoped. The trio of lengthy assignments take place on a single Covenant ship, resplendent in shiny purple hallways with little variation beyond a middle chapter that goes outdoors.

I found Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson's quipping in these episodes out of step with their dynamic in the main series, but worse was a noticeable drop off in the quality of encounters. The close quarters and reliance on door spawns did a poor job of hiding the seams between enemy waves, and battles lingered longer than was fun.

The never-ending fights chafe against wonky difficulty tuning—on Heroic (my default), there's not enough ammo or cover to reasonably deal with bullet spongey brutes solo. It takes a lot to push me over the edge in Halo, but when I finally did switch to Normal, suddenly the challenge was in line with the base game. I suspect a balancing patch is in order.

The highlight of the optional interludes was weapon variety—this is where Halo Studios' lets you cut loose with the later-game guns like the battle rifle, Reach's needler rifle, and the brute plasma rifle. There's also one area in mission one that's basically an indoor skate park for Ghosts—a super cool idea for a Halo encounter.

Campaign Evolved ran very well for me at 1440p (90fps average without upscaling), but honestly, that's not an illuminating observation when you play on a RTX 5090, Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and 64GB RAM. I kept everything on Ultra and didn't babysit a framerate counter. I will say that, as the very best case scenario for hardware, I didn't like how fuzzy DLSS can still make bright light sources look. It was distracting enough that I switched to native rendering and took the frame hit. Even though the system requirements were no impediment to me in the review, I wonder if my friends on middling hardware will want to pay to play a version of Halo that runs worse than the one they already own.

That scenario gets to the heart of it: the next time I want to play the first Halo, I don't have many reasons to reinstall this 70GB remake. It was cool to see another interpretation of a game special to me, but the glitzy coat of paint primarily highlights how right Bungie got it in 2001, and how its modern stewards are nudging Halo in an unremarkable direction.

One of the biggest additions in Halo: Campaign Evolved is the inclusion of three new bonus missions set two years before the events of the original Halo campaign. This mini-adventure involving Master Chief and Avery Johnson is separate to the main story, however, meaning you can either play it before or after, or even during the main story if you're an absolute savage.

The remake also adds new terminals and 32 additional skulls—collectible modifiers you can find in each mission, including the bonus missions, and use to tweak your playthrough.

Should you play the bonus mission first in Halo: Campaign Evolved?

After having completed both, I recommend that you don't play the bonus missions first, but instead try them after Halo: Campaign Evolved's main story. You might be wondering why, considering the bonus missions are supposed to be a prequel to the original Halo, but they don't actually relate to the original game that much, acting more as a standalone story.

The bigger reason is that the bonus missions are very sandboxy in terms of weapons, giving you pretty much every gun available in quite a short window, where the campaign (as in the original Halo) trickles them to you a bit more, letting you enjoy each remade gun or new addition by turns, instead of having them all thrown to you at once.

Considering the weapons you find are a big part of the original game, I really wish I'd played the campaign first instead. However, the bonus missions do contain the Grunt Birthday Party skull, so if you're determined to play through the game with that active, you might want to do the bonus missions first instead to grab it.

The new skull modifiers added in Halo: Campaign Evolved do all sorts of things. There are classics like Grunt Birthday Party, but you can also swap to third-person perspective, playing the entire game over the shoulder should you wish.

Since this requires a skull, you'll have to first find the collectible, and then activate the modifier when choosing a mission or rally point to make it active.

How to play third-person in Halo: Campaign Evolved

You'll need to find the Perspective skull collectible to go third-person in Halo: Campaign Evolved, but thankfully you can get it right at the start of the game.

As shown in the video above, once you meet Captain Keyes on the bridge of the Pillar of Autumn and the cutscene has finished, you'll want to walk just behind him to where the pilots are sitting in the front cockpit, and drop down into the space below them. Here, you'll find the Perspective skull on the ground just off to the side. If you've already completed the first mission, then simply load Rally Point Bravo, which drops you in post-cutscene.

Once you have the skull, you'll need to enable it, which means starting a new game on your most recent mission or rally point and toggling Perspective in the skull menu before launching.

The third-person perspective the game gives you is relatively close to the shoulder, so it's not too bad when you're indoors. When you use a scoped weapon and zoom, it will revert back to first-person, so you can still shoot your magnum like you would otherwise.

Few things scream Halo so much as venting a Grunt's cranium to the sound of cheering children and a burst of confetti. Well, you'll be glad to know that Grunt Birthday Party is still available in Halo: Campaign Evolved. This skull collectible, alongside the other 32 added to the game, is actually available in the new bonus missions.

Though this guide won't contain anything particularly spoilery, I will describe a few details about the final bonus mission in order to indicate where the skull is, so be aware. All that said, here's where to find Grunt Birthday Party.

Halo: Campaign Evolved Grunt Birthday Party location

You can find Grunt Birthday Party in the third and final bonus mission, Heavy Burden, so not in the main campaign itself. The skull is accessible in the second section, 'Two-Fisted Cyborg Justice'. If you've already completed the mission, then you'll want to load into Rally Point Bravo, after you and Johnson acquire the info from the bridge.

Follow the nav markers down the lift, continue along the route until you ascend up another short lift, then carry on until you reach the spot shown in the video above—a big room with a load of purple torches to your left that you'll enter into on the upper level. Descend the short stairs ahead, look to your left, and you can spot the skull on top of a tall rock sculpture in the center of the room.

To reach this, you need to head over to the central raised platform you can also see to your left—you can get here by dropping down or via the walkway to your left. Then hop into the torch on its edge, and sprint jump over to the lower level of the rock sculpture. You can then jump up and grab the skull to unlock Grunt Birthday Party.

If you want to make the skull active, simply choose the 'new game' option or any mission and then toggle it on in the skull menu before loading in. It will stay active for any successive missions you play after that.

Human ingenuity is a powerful—sometimes terrifying—thing. Throughout history, no matter how basic the tools available to us, we have always found a way to build the weird obsessions that appear in our minds. You know, like Stonehenge, or the Pyramids, or Doom (1993).

No, really. In a recent chat with Jesse Petrilla on YouTube, id co-founder and Doom lead artist Adrian Carmack revealed that, when it came time to put together the classic FPS' animations, the incredibly complex and advanced animation tool he used to do it was… the undo key.

"As an artist, oftentimes you end up making your own tools," said Carmack. "You know, there was no animation tool, so I started using the undo key to create animation—the undo key in Deluxe Paint, so I'd go back and forth."

If you're unclear as to how that works, remember that animations in original Doom weren't really animations as we think of them today, with models seamlessly transitioning through countless subtle movements to create smooth motion. Doom sprites, from your enemies to your weapons, were all very frame-y indeed. Working with relatively few frames meant Carmack could create and capture animation loops by cycling through frames in Deluxe Paint using undo/redo.

Carmack's fellow id devs were duly astounded by his innovation. "The guys were pretty impressed that I came up with that for animation," he says. "But that's the tool I used, and [Doom programmer] John Carmack really limited me on the frames of animation, so I was always trying to be very frugal… to make this animation look as good as I can with as few frames as possible."

Carmack suggests this was not a risk-free process. Constantly undoing things means you might inadvertently delete your own work, but it sounds like Carmack quickly worked out a system that minimised that possibility. "The first time you lose some work, you're pretty cautious after that. And so, it was very unusual for me to lose anything, doing it that way."

The Halo: Campaign Evolved release date is imminent. Those who spent extra on the premium edition have been playing for the last five days, which, as someone who's completed the whole thing, and seen the somewhat gaudy skins you also get, I can't say I necessarily recommend for the cost.

Especially when the game is also coming to game pass day one, giving you an even cheaper way to play through the whole thing. You can also get some skins just for preordering. Below, I'll explain the regular release date and time for Halo: Campaign Evolved now premium access is coming to an end.

Halo: Campaign Evolved release times

Halo: Campaign Evolved releases for everyone on July 28, but the good news is that the release times are exactly the same as the early access ones, just five days later, so:

• West Coast US: 8 am PDT
• East Coast US: 11 am EDT
• UK: 4 pm BST
• Europe: 5 pm CEST
• Australia: 1 am AEST (July 29)

If you're unsure as to whether you can run Halo: Campaign Evolved or you want to compare any of the different edition benefits, you can find all the info on Steam.

Can you preload Halo: Campaign Evolved?

Yes, preload for premium and collector's edition holders—so those who've been playing since July 22—went live previously, and now owners of the regular edition should also be able to preload before release later today.

Today, Bungie launched Marathon's 1.1.5 update, featuring its awaited Vault Breaker experimental PvE mode which offers a two-week window for players to contend with the typically-endgame Cryo Archive map and its many hazards and puzzles without any twitchy, murderous squads of competing players hanging around.

Shortly after the Vault Breaker update went live, SteamDB charts showed that Marathon's concurrent player count had jumped to over 14,800 players. That's not a massive number compared to its peers on Steam's Most Played ranking, but it's roughly triple the activity that Marathon pulled at similar times of day throughout the last week—and the most concurrent player activity since player numbers started bleeding after the June free weekend.

Vault Breaker trades Marathon's typical extraction loop for an alternative progression scheme. Unlike in normal excursions, runners in Vault Breaker won't keep any gear they pick up and extract with during a run. Instead, the goal is to loot Vault Data that can be used for persistent upgrades to your initial Vault Breaker kit or spent on gear that can be carried into standard runs, offering a more roguelite framework for Bungie's gunplay.

The 1.1.5 update also brings some changes for the Cradle upgrade system, like an option to "evolve" (read: prestige) a fully-levelled Cradle to reset its progress in exchange for a higher energy limit, allowing careerist runners to equip more Cradle upgrades. Bungie has also implemented new voice moderation and reporting systems in an effort to crack down on in-game chat toxicity.

Vault Breaker is a welcome offering for players who've been eager for a chance to savor Marathon's setting, aesthetic, and shooter sandbox without extraction-induced anxiety—particularly in the wake of Destiny 2's abrupt entry into un-live service purgatory. Bungie's clearly willing to tinker with the Marathon formula; whether a long-term audience will materialize for that post-launch experimentation—and how much patience Sony's vague live service strategy is willing to extend—remains to be seen.

A little less than a month after the release of its Titanfall-inspired shooter Empulse, developer 1047 Games has reportedly laid off more employees. While the studio hasn't made a formal announcement of the cuts, multiple employees on LinkedIn (via Game Developer) have said they've been let go in what one described as "the third wave of studio layoffs."

Reports of layoffs at 1047 began to surface last week. "A bunch of us, 'the crew' aboard the 1047 train, are getting off on this post-Empulse station," QA director Igor Krinitskiy wrote at the time. "It has been an interesting ride, bumpy at times, narrowly avoiding derailment and with everyone working hard to keep that 1047 train going."

More recent messages also point to multiple cuts across the studio. UI engineer Iannis Stefan Palaczkos wrote that "the studio has been sadly hit by another wave of layoffs, and I got caught in that wave," while concept artist Jonathan Kuo said separately that "as of the end of this week, it will be my last day at 1047 Games due to the third wave of studio layoffs."

1047 Games found fast success several years ago with Splitgate: Arena Warfare, a 'Halo with portals' mashup that was an immediate hit. That success prompted a $100 million funding round in 2021 and big ambitions about becoming "the next Riot Games," but nothing has clicked since. Splitgate 2 was a mess, leading to a rollback and layoffs just a couple months after it went live; it was resurrected as Splitgate: Arena Reloaded a few months later but hasn't attracted anywhere near the players of its predecessors.

Empulse, announced earlier this year, also made a positive early impression but hasn't drawn big player numbers. Unlike Splitgate, which is free to play, Empulse will cost you $20 to get in, which is no doubt a factor in those smaller numbers. But even in that context, sub-1000 concurrent player counts on Steam aren't great. Studio CEO Ian Proulx said in 2025 that "the goal is to grow over time, not aim for a massive splash on day one"—he was speaking of Splitgate 2's relaunch, but it's a philosophy he'll have to apply more broadly if Empulse (and, by extension, 1047 itself) is to have any future.

I've reached out to 1047 Games for comment on the layoffs and will update if I receive a reply.

With the news that Call of Duty, of all things, is getting adapted into a movie by the director of Battleship—and it's unfortunately set in the Modern Warfare universe—I got vivid flashbacks to the series' last attempt in multimedia.

Back in 2011, Activision decided it was time to change how it would support Call of Duty games post-launch. Modern Warfare 3 (the first one) saw the introduction of Call of Duty Elite, a subscription service that included monthly content like new maps, as well as social network tools. While there was a free, lite version which included things like Theater Mode and career stats, the real deal cost $50 a year.

Of course, the monthly DLC (later sold as separate packs for non-subscribers) was the reason most people, myself included, ever joined up. But Activision was really pushing for it to be a social network-inspired multimedia platform, so it sweetened the deal with three video series, one by Ridley and Tony Scott, another by Will Arnett and Jason Bateman, and one from Andrew Santino.

Friday Night Fights

Ridley Scott, the acclaimed creator of Aliens, Blade Runner, and so on, teamed up with his late brother Tony Scott to executive produce Friday Night Fights. This game show series pitted two teams of players against each other in odd matchups, hosted by Stacy Keebler.

Ever wanted to find out whether the police or fire department were better at Call of Duty? No? Well, now you could. How about rappers versus rockstars? New York or Boston? Winners would get to trash-talk while receiving a championship belt and a donation to the Call of Duty Endowment charity in their name.

Each episode boiled down to the two teams meeting their coaches to discuss the game plan (usually just trash-talking, honestly, or incredibly surface-level tips), then sitting down opposite their enemy to insult each other face-to-face and play a few matches of MW3.

The New York versus Boston episode was basically just the latter team chanting "New York sucks" for the entire 15-minute episode, and occasionally calling the players ugly. You get the vibe—it was very 2011.

Each player would also get an over-the-top MTV Cribs-esque introduction and profile, telling you their favourite weapon, playstyle, and how many hours of CoD they played a week. I'm sure it was cool back then, but it's certainly dated now.

Surprisingly, it did quite well and went for three seasons, airing from 2011-2012 before being discontinued. The final season traded celebrities and themed match-ups for a season-long esports tournament setup. It never quite lived up to its oddly serious intro: "In a world where rivalries rule, one game stands alone. How far will you go to win in the ultimate test of survival? One fight, winner takes all. Every shot counts."

Cocked Hammers

Created by actors Will Arnett and Jason Bateman, Cocked Hammers is genuinely cool, being an odd half-animated, half-in-game footage Machinima-style skit show. It starred Arnett and Bateman, as well as Peter Giles and Justin Theroux, each with unique player models based on their actors since the story was that the four friends had been sucked into the game like Jumanji. And it played out basically like Halo's iconic Red vs Blue Machinima series but in Call of Duty.

Again, it's a product of its time. To give you an idea, in one episode, Will Arnett's character discovers they can't pee because they don't have a penis, so they run around the map trying to figure out how to die. Then he accidentally levels up and unlocks the 'premium upgrade Magnum', turns to the other characters, and says "Now which one of you needle dicks called me a eunuch?".

Cocked Hammers is undoubtedly saved by having Will Arnett and Jason Bateman lead. Simply put, they're good actors so seeing their crudely digitised soldiers interact is good fun even today, and you can tell they're actually trying.

Noob Tube

Noob Tube was a community series where actor and comedian Andrew Santino would react to players' gameplay clips. He'd often make a snide remark or dated joke at the player's expense, but this series did hit the mark for a more community-focused show for Call of Duty's new social platform.

Playing with Santino's experience as a comedian, there were also skits interspersed between the clips. In one episode they did a fake advert for the massage spa on the Bootleg map, and another about the weather forecast on the maps for the week, despite the fact it never changed.

The jokes were relentless and very hit and miss, but I'll admit that there's still some fun to be had in watching this relic, and not just for nostalgia's sake. Honestly, I kind of miss the lighthearted tone of this show—it wouldn't land the same if it was made today.

It's pretty easy to hate on all three of these shows, especially given the big names somehow backing them, but they were, and still are, oddly good fun. Sometimes because they're cringe-worthy, and other times because they're genuinely charming.

Honestly, I think I'd prefer Activision start these weird, creative projects up again rather than pump money into what I can only imagine being the most generic war movie ever produced. I can see Captain Price and co. bending the rules to do what they think is right by playing the campaign. I can't see a confusing mix of celebrities attached to officially home-brewed Machinima animations.

It's that time of year again: The next Call of Duty is on deck, and Activision's got the beta dates to prove it. Modern Warfare 4 won't hit the streets until late October, but the multiplayer beta begins a full two months ahead of time.

As usual, Activision is holding two beta weekends: One for those who pre-order the game and one for everyone else.

• Weekend 1 (August 21-25): For those who pre-order Modern Warfare 4 on PC, PS5, or Xbox (no Switch 2 beta)
• Weekend 2 (August 28 to September 1): A proper public beta on all platforms (including Switch 2)

Fairly expected for a CoD beta calendar, except for a few abnormal details, like how Switch 2 players will be left out of that first weekend (that version might be coming in a little hot compared to the others). There's also the fact that pre-order weekend is five days instead of four—further stretching the definition of "weekend." That means pre-order players can start the same day as the Call of Duty Next livestream and won't have to watch streamers enjoy a 24-hour headstart.

Less surprising, but surely disappointing for many, is that Game Pass subscribers will not be entitled to early beta access this year. They were for both Black Ops 6 and 7, but apparently Microsoft's decision to exclude new CoDs from its service also extends to betas.

Sounds like the Modern Warfare 4 beta will be a decent tasting menu for the full package. Players can unlock "19 different weapons before deploying into everything from small-scale 3v3 skirmishes to massive tactical battles featuring tanks and more," a blog post published today reads. "Test your mettle across new and returning modes, from Search & Destroy to the brand-new Kill Block, plus the Training Mobility Course."

Kill Block is a modular multiplayer map made for both small and medium-sized modes. The map is divided into chunks that dynamically swap between rounds. It's the sort of experimental gimmick that seems unlikely to catch on in a big way, but 10v10 Gunfight on Kill Block was a highlight when I played Modern Warfare 4 back in May. During one round, the map became a 1:1 recreation of Crash from the original 2007 Modern Warfare—charming.

Of the many remarkable abilities possessed by Dishonored hero Corvo Attano, perhaps the most remarkable is, well, possession: Corvo can possess creatures, most famously the game's plentiful rats, to get up to all sorts of trouble, including accessing locations that would be inaccessible to his full-sized body. As it turns out, this wasn't an entirely original idea. More than a decade earlier it had been considered for use in Dishonored's masterpiece progenitor, Thief: The Dark Project.

Thief basically is Dishonored, speaking very broadly: A guy who's good at sneaking around gets caught up in a bunch of political nonsense he'd really rather avoid because of a woman he can't admit to being in love with because it'd be weird. One chief difference is that Garrett, the titular thief of the Thief games (the ones that matter, anyway) doesn't have any powers.

He almost did, though. In a 2018 PC Gamer magazine interview marking the 20^th anniversary of Thief's debut, lead designer Tim Stellmach said Looking Glass Studios had pondered giving Garrett the ability to shrink himself and travel through small passageways like drains. The idea was ultimately dropped, though, for eminently practical reasons.

"We just decided it was gonna be way too much work to do it right," Stellmach explained. And, maybe more importantly: "It started raising questions that we didn't want to answer."

Stellmach didn't expand on the nature of those questions, but it's not too difficult to guess. As a pure stealth game (another big difference between Thief and Dishonored: Garrett is not great in a fight), getting from point A to point B without being seen is central to the experience: Being able to transform into a small, innocuous rodent might make traversing Soulforge less of a brain-crushing grind, but it'd also suck the fun out of the whole thing, right?

Thief is, in many ways, an unforgiving experience, and as we noted a few years back, many of its innovations have been left behind in favor of mainstream accessibility. Stealth is an option in games like Dishonored, but there's always a Plan B of 'kill everyone' if you blow it or just get bored of sneaking around. That's just not an option in Thief, where Garrett can generally handle one guy at a time but no more than that. But it worked: As Richard Cobbett wrote in his own retrospective on how Thief defined the stealth genre, the game's singular focus resulted in a singular immersive sim experience.

Thief is back in the news these days thanks to the Nightdive remaster announced at the PC Gaming Show in June, which despite being called Thief: The Dark Project Remastered will also include the additional missions from Thief Gold, along with a beefy slate of other improvements and upgrades. To ensure it's done right, Nightdive has brought back Thief artist Daniel Thron to help revamp the game's cutscenes, a vital part of any serious Thief reconstruction effort.

There's still no release date on the remaster but as PC Gamer immsim weirdo Joshua Wolens correctly stated when the game was revealed, "Oh hell yes."

I'm not sure who thinks we need a Call of Duty movie, but it's officially a thing, and it's coming out on June 30, 2028. It's "an authentic and exciting experience for longtime fans and newcomers alike." While this tidbit was confirmed earlier in the year, Activision and Paramount gave us little more than that in the months since. The big question was whether it will be set in the Modern Warfare or Black Ops universe, or something more unexpected, like WW2, Advanced Warfare, or Infinite Warfare (although probably not that last one).

The answer is it's going to be set in the Modern Warfare timeline, revealed with a very short teaser trailer at FanaticsFest over the weekend. With Modern Warfare 4 coming up this October, presumably a Black Ops game next year, and then another Modern Warfare game in 2028, it lines up.

Even as far as Call of Duty goes, Modern Warfare is easily the most generic setting Activision and Paramount could have picked. It's basically already a pastiche of bog-standard military films diluted into a game. At least Black Ops plays with perception, history, and tech to add something on top. While we're yet to get any specifics, I bet we'll see the usual Modern Warfare suspects—Captain Price, Ghost, and co.—bending the rules to do what they do best, which is usually a lot of war crimes, truth be told. I wouldn't be surprised to see the actors from the game reprise their roles, even—Captain Price actor Barry Sloane recently popped up as Ser Adrian Redfort in House of the Dragon.

It's previously been revealed that Peter Berg will be helming the project. I don't expect you to remember, but he directed things like Battleship, Deepwater Horizon, and Spencer Confidential, among others. More notably, he directed Lone Survivor in 2013, which is about a group of soldiers on a mission to eliminate a Taliban leader—sounds rather Call of Duty to me.

In a 2013 interview, Berg made his views on military videogames pretty clear, calling them "pathetic."

"Can't stand it. The only people that I give a Call of Duty get-out-of-jail-free card to is the military. They're out there serving and they're bored and they want to entertain themselves? Okay, maybe. Kids? Uh-uh."

So despite his track record for making war films portraying the US military as Hollywood heroes, military shooters like Call of Duty aren't up to his standards. But that was 13 years ago, and now he's got a gig turning those games into a movie, so perhaps he's changed his mind.

LawBreakers was, by many accounts, a great game. But the 2017 shooter was a commercial failure, and developer Boss Key shut it down just a year after release. There's been much speculation about why it stumbled, including from Boss Key co-founder and Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski himself. In a new interview with 80.lv, he offered his latest theories.

For one, a desire for Boss Key to be 'his' studio cost him an opportunity to work with Rod Fergusson, who he worked with on Gears of War.

"I could have used Rod, but I wanted it to be my show, and that was the first step of my ego creeping in right there," Bleszinski said, "believing that ... if I built it as Cliff, people will come. I thought there was this brand loyalty from the people who knew who I was, but it turns out people are loyal to the game, but they're not necessarily loyal to the person."

Bleszinski went on to say that the publishing deal Boss Key secured with Nexon had the wrong priorities. That deal included Boss Key retaining the rights to its IP, but as Bleszinski recalled it, "When the deal is so good for one side, the other side isn't as incentivized … they're not going to make it the next big thing because they're really not going to see that much of the profit."

Bleszinski offered a few other causes too, calling Boss Key's demise "death by 1,000 paper cuts." LawBreakers' art could have stood out more, an earlier launch on Xbox would have brought over more Gears of War fans, his struggle with alcoholism played a role, and he felt he was less involved than a lead should be, going home when others stayed late.

Despite all the turmoil, Bleszinski told 80.lv he still has a craving to make games again. "At the end of the day, I want to create characters and worlds," he said. "I want to make stuff that people will cosplay as and get tattooed on their bodies."

I'd completely forgotten Valve is working on an update for Team Fortress 2's cooperative Mann vs. Machine mode, though in my defence, it's been a long time since we last heard about it. The prospective patch was announced in June last year, via a blog post on TF2's official website that requested map and mission submissions from the community in time for this update—with a "fictional deadline" of August 27.

After that deadline passed, a brief progress report was provided in September. But for the past ten months there's been radio silence. Now though, Valve has provided another snippet of info on the patch's status on its blog. "We wanted to give everyone an update on the update we already gave on the update we're working on, and here it is: We're still working on the MvM update."

That isn't everything Valve had to say on the matter. But it is about half of it. Valve elaborated that "it's taking a lot longer to sort through the new content and changes that we'd originally planned, but we promise we're making progress. Thanks for being patient!"

This tracks with the progress report Valve gave back in September, where it explained that its request for community contributions resulted in "way more" submissions than it expected. At the time, Valve admitted it didn't "have a release date for the update yet" but it would be "going through the submissions and working on it".

Obviously, Valve could allocate more resources to getting this update out of the door if it wanted to, given that Steam alone has raked in an estimated $11.1 billion in revenue this year—not to mention the money Valve makes from Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and the tens of thousands of players still involved with TF2.

But that isn't how Valve operates. The company's flat structure means staff tend to drift between projects through a blend of desire and demand, and there's been a lot happening this year that is likely to be of higher priority than updating TF2. This includes the launch of the Steam Machine and the upcoming release of the Steam Frame, alongside the ongoing development of Deadlock.

Yet while major updates for TF2 are sporadic, with the last arriving in 2023 and pushing player counts to an all-time high, the game does get minor patches on a regular basis. Earlier this month, TF2 received an update that added a bunch of community maps, cosmetics, taunts and so forth, with a flurry of smaller patches following to fix bugs and tweak parameters related to that update.

Just four months after the release of Marathon, game director Joe Ziegler has announced that he's leaving the game, and Bungie, effective today. His role will be filled by Del Chafe III, previously the assistant game director, who along with creative director Julia Nardin will "guide Marathon into the next chapter with an even better and brighter future."

"As for me, I'll be heading to something new, somewhere else, and will update you on where and what soon," Ziegler wrote on X. "I just want to say a deeply heartfelt thank you to all of you for supporting me and Marathon in our windy mission to bring a dark and terrifying space survival frontier to your screen.

"The mission will continue in new and surprising ways so stay tuned for what this team has in store for you! It's been a pleasure seeing all the stories you've created, all the clever ways you've found ways to murder robots and one another. Hopefully as I move onto new things, you'll join me for those adventures as well."

Ziegler's departure, coming so soon after Marathon's release and while it's still struggling to find its footing, is a shock. Bungie is rolling out big changes to Marathon, including an embrace of PvE gameplay in the upcoming Vault Breaker mode, which will debut—temporarily—next week and then roll out in full sometime in season 3.

It's the worst possible time for instability at the top, in other words, particularly given that a turnaround for Marathon is essential. It isn't a Concord-esque disaster, but Marathon's concurrent player counts on Steam are nowhere near what Destiny 2 was (or is even currently) putting up, even when it was in its deepest doldrums.

With the studio gutted and no other releases imminent, Marathon is an existential game for Bungie. Even just as a matter of public perception, losing Ziegler—a highly-regarded developer who only joined Bungie in 2022 and took the reins on Marathon just two years ago—is a major blow: The more it looks like you're in a spiral, the tougher it is to pull out of it.

Compounding Bungie's troubles, Ziegler isn't the only high-profile Bungie employee to leave in recent weeks: Former Marathon design lead Lars Bakken, a storied Bungie developer in his own right, left in June after more than 20 years at the studio and is now "retired from the videogame industry."

When I heard the that Team 4 would be stopping work on Overwatch's Stadium, I didn't feel very surprised. Then when I learned that only 6% of the playerbase actually engaged with the game mode, and I was even less so. But that doesn't mean I'm not really sad to hear the news.

I didn't take to Stadium at first, I found its third person perspective to be a bit jarring, and its huge number of items were something of a hurdle to get over. But that quickly changed after some time spent in the mode, figuring out its intricacies.

I spent 100 hours in Stadium—even with its ridiculously long support queues—it became something more than just a game mode I'd dip into when I was bored of the regular queue. I appreciated how it offered something else for players to enjoy, and how it showcased all the creative and innovative ideas that Team 4 has to offer, but didn't have a chance to add to the game.

See, much of Stadium was made from ideas Team 4 had been mulling over for years before it was announced. There were even elements included which were initially meant to be a part of Overwatch's now controversial PvE mode. I was just happy to have these fun and creative ideas recycled into something fans could appreciate and experience, but it seems like history is repeating itself.

I didn't mourn the loss of PvE as much as others. I always preferred the competitive side, so I didn't give much thought to the story modes—playing against bots just wasn't as fun. But I was sad to see it go, because I saw it as one less area of experimentation and opportunity the devs could use to better showcase the great attributes of Overwatch—in this case, its story and characters.

But it's easier not to miss something we never really had, which is why I feel that this is an even bigger fumble—Stadium got much further than PvE ever did, and it had proven traction. It became Overwatch's most popular mode with 2.3 million matches played during launch week. Even with scaled back involvement, I think a different approach to balancing and more time would've been good for Stadium as extra heroes (aka reasons to play) would be added and players got a better feel for it.

More leeway may have also given the devs time to iron out some of its discrepancies, namely how bloody long a match takes. Team 4 did change the format a few seasons ago to be first to three, but switched it back to best of seven quite quickly after the change.

I'd love to see Team 4 build on what it's created over the last 10 years, and not just be tied to the same old modes. But that's a wish that isn't realistic, especially given that there's been so much pressure on Xbox-owned studios, especially over the last few weeks, to capitalise off the best areas on the game. I'd wager it'd be harder to justify hard work on such a small area of the game now more than ever.

It's the loss of this creativity and innovation that I'm sad to see dialled down, more so than the game mode itself. I also don't think this kind of experimentation can be undervalued, not at a time when Overwatch has more competition to deal with and players to keep engaged. But I'm sure we'll still see it in other areas of the game, not least the Hacked Quickplays, the most recent of which carries the promise of a new kind of 6v6.

In an attempt to fix the bloated Gunsmith system of recent Call of Duty games, Modern Warfare 4 is introducing a new feature, Gunny. It's a little widget in the bottom right of the loadout screen that you can use to create loadouts for you. For example, it'll say "Hello, I can help you build a weapon when you have more attachments unlocked. Keep levelling your weapon," if you've got a brand-new weapon.

Naturally sceptical of a weird widget that communicates with you, Infinity Ward has been accused of using AI for this new system. In a post which instigated a lot of the uproar, retired Call of Duty leaker TheGhostofHope said: "They got an AI chat bot in the game now to help mfs with their loadouts as if it’s not the same shit used every year."

Infinity Ward fired back, saying "Wrong (again.) Gunny is handcrafted by our developers, not AI. It recommends builds based on the attachments you’ve unlocked for each weapon. It helps make quick loadout changes between matches. Give it a shot in the Beta." For those out of the loop, that snarky 'again' refers to various incorrect leaks made by Hope which Activision has called out in the past. There's history.

I, for one, am glad that Gunny isn't an AI chatbot that can't play Call of Duty, telling me how to play Call of Duty. Instead, it's effectively just a personified auto-equip button that collates dev-made weapon builds for those players who don't want to create their own, or even search online for player-made setups.

However, it's not the first time that Call of Duty has been accused of using AI. Players had suspected Activision was using AI to generate cosmetics back in Modern Warfare 3 and Black Ops 6, and this was confirmed last year once Valve's mandated AI disclosure appeared on the Call of Duty Steam page. Later that year, Black Ops 7 also came under fire after players found what looked like AI-generated art.

In fact, as reported by Destructoid from a group presentation, Infinity Ward co-studio head Mark Grigsby confirmed that the team is using AI in MW4. “We use whatever tools we have to enhance and help our developers to complete [tasks] on time,” explained Grigsby. “For the game, there’s developmental things. We use whatever we can, whatever tools we can [in development].”

This is backed up by the game's Steam page, which has an AI usage disclosure, reading "Our team uses generative AI tools to help develop some in-game assets."

So, while Gunny thankfully isn't an AI chatbot despite the vibes, its developer certainly is using this maligned tech elsewhere in its creation. I would not be surprised to see more shoddy AI-generated calling cards popping up in premium bundles once again.

It took nine months, but Battlefield 6 is about to get its most requested feature. Naval warfare returns to the series on July 21 with the introduction of Tsuru Reef—BF6's new biggest map—a pair of boats, and more guns.

Perhaps more interesting is what's coming in phase 2 of Season 4 on August 18: OG Battlefield map Wake Island gets a modern update, complete with its aircraft carrier spawn points and beach assaults. At the same time, Battlefield 6 is hosting a Top Gun crossover that adds a new two-seater jet (styled like the films) and brings back a mode that first debuted in 2006's Battlefield 2142.

Top Gun: Carrier Strike—based on Battlefield 4's Carrier Assault, which is based on 2142's Titan mode—tasks two teams with sinking the other guy's aircraft carrier through the language of Conquest. Capture flags to launch missile barrages at the enemy carrier, culminating in an on-foot boarding assault on the carriers themselves. At least, that's how it worked in the old games. BF Studios says Carrier Strike has been reworked for BF6, which could mean anything from "it takes fewer missiles to win" to "there's no boarding phase anymore," which would be a shame.

It's funny and a little sad that old features are being reintroduced as brand crossovers, as if the only way to justify making a cool mode is to get Paramount to sponsor it, but at least Top Gun is an aesthetic match for Battlefield. It already makes more sense than when Battlefield 6 had an (admittedly fun) motocross course sponsored by Red Bull a few months back.

One other Top Gun-themed mode is coming as well, though this one's on the Redsec side. Top Gun: Fighter Sweep is a jets-only Gauntlet mission that takes place on a "modified Tsuru Reef." If you find Redsec as tedious as I do, the jets will also be usable on jet-only servers in Portal.

EA's press release has more quotes from Top Gun: Maverick actors (sans Cruise) than details about Carrier Strike. Miles "Rooster" Teller says it's "a huge honor to appear in a long-running franchise like Battlefield with its millions of fans, and talented people working on it," adding that "with Top Gun, it's like two titans meeting."

There's a zero percent chance Teller meant to reference the relevant name of the 2142 mode right? Battlefield's Top Gun festivities don't start until August, but the return of naval warfare next week should be a pretty big deal.