Month: March 2020

Call of Duty: Warzone is taking the world by storm. More than 30 million people have jumped into Modern Warfare’s 150 player Battle Royale mode since it launched nearly a fortnight ago, and people are loving it.

I’ve already poured around 30 hours into it, winning games I shouldn’t have, losing others I should, dying early and late and every time in between before escaping from the Gulag. I’ve had a lot of fun in Call of Duty: Warzone – it’s entirely filled the Battle Royale-shaped hole in my life – but there is one element unique to its design that is somewhat troubling to an experienced fan of the genre: it’s Loadout drop crates.

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None of this is to say Infinity Ward shouldn’t strive to leave its own mark on the genre – Battle Royales are regularly defined by their most effective tactics, or “metas”. There’s the building meta in Fortnite, shield management in Apex, which encourages mid-fight looting, and in PUBG the DMR/M4 combo dominates both casual and pro play. That said, the new meta that is emerging in Warzone around Loadouts – which allow players to have custom-created weapon and perk loadouts air-dropped to them – has the potential to reshape – or even completely negate – some of the most important aspects of the Battle Royale experience.

On-Site Procurement

In Warzone, like in most battle royales, the dominant strategy is to acquire your favourite guns and perks as soon as possible after dropping into a match so that you have an effective arsenal as you reach the final showdown. This is known as “the loot phase” and, much like the “laning” phase in MOBAs, eliminating or drastically altering this phase of play can fundamentally change the way a game is played.

Allowing players to walk into Warzone’s final circle with the exact equipment they need – regardless of the game they may have had up until that point – defeats the purpose of the first phase of a battle royale altogether. Finding crates and boxes full of random guns and equipment is a vital component of the genre’s appeal because it directly leads to conflict or, at the very least, offers an exhilarating sense of tension. People feel good when they open a crate and find their favourite gun – but, more importantly, if they don’t see their favourite gun, they’ll typically seek out another crate, which increases the odds that they’ll run into more players as they search.

Warzone’s Loadout drops eliminate the need for this loot phase almost entirely — at least any beyond all three players collecting the requisite $2000 each and finding a buy station (though crates also drop randomly, too). You can pool your cash, and suddenly you and your team are fully kitted out with the best weapons and perks, scavenging and fate be damned – which, of course, manages to further complicate Warzone’s meta.

Balancing Act

Warzone feels like it’s balanced for engagements using the weapons you can find within Verdansk itself — the weapons dropped by in-world loot crates. In the first few hours of the game — before everyone realized Loadout drops were practically mandatory — there was a priority management system in place. If you wanted to be silent, you needed to find specific weapons like the Nursing Death Bizon or Dry Heat P90. If engaging at range was your plan, you’d want a sniper rifle or DMR — ideally a high rarity one that actually had a scope – and if you found the Zip Tie M4 and a Khemical FAL, your only concern was ammo, because you had short to mid-range engagements locked up.

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But Loadout drops introduce a whole swarm of weapons into the loot economy of Warzone that it’s not prepared for or balanced around. The JOKR launcher adds rainable death to player’s secondary slots, usurping a role designed for the Cluster Strike or Airstrike killstreaks, and silencers can be equipped to practically any weapon. Perhaps the biggest shift, though, is that Thermal Imaging Scopes make visible what was previously hidden.

All Battle Royales are information games at heart – information drives positioning, positioning leads to lopsided gunfights and winning gunfights is how you get your Helicopter Ride. And thermal imaging significantly redefines the information aspect of the game, showing (most) players as bright white objects against a dark grey background.

It’s not great that the scope doesn’t show up on any of the weapons native to Warzone, but what’s worse is that the only way to directly combat it is via Loadouts themselves. Cold-blooded is a perk which makes the user invisible to thermals, AI targeting systems and Snapshot Grenades. If you add it to your preferred loadout, snipers with thermal imaging scopes will find it harder to see you. This is commonly referred to in other games as ‘teching’ — using specific items or abilities to deliberately counter the specific abilities of your opponent.

In competitive play, teching is par for the course, and can actually be a fascinating element of the meta-game itself. But Warzone doesn’t currently have a “ranked” mode, meaning there is no competitive play  — which means teching is instead just the absence of player agency. It robs players of choice, forcing them down a particular path — you have no option but to equip perks X, Y, and Z to avoid being more vulnerable, even if you’d rather use others instead. You’re no longer making decisions about your gear as you play — you’re not even really making them about your loadout. A choice between winning and being kicked repeatedly in the crotch is no choice at all.

Thermals aren’t the only thing the Warzone ecosystem has a problem handling, either. Riot Shields are notoriously tricky to deal with, requiring either specific gear or flawless coordination between teammates, and Underbarrel grenade launchers inject either lethal or non-lethal explosives into the economy as effectively a third weapon. In essence, players can ditch their rocket launchers to just use underbarrels instead.

Teching in high-tier competitive play is exciting because it demonstrates mastery of the systems involved, and tournaments require a few dozen matches at most. Having to tech in regular games causes stagnation, when the absence of repetition is the entire reason Battle Royales became so popular in the first place.

Positional Play

When Infinity Ward revealed Modern Warfare’s multiplayer, the team explained that the changes they’d made to the game emphasised a slower pace and ‘positional play’.

To many people, positional play simply means “camping” – but there’s a bit more to it than that. When you’re camping on the objective — that’s positional play. Nobody should be getting mad at you for hanging out around B to defend it from incoming attackers in Domination, because that’s the objective of the mode. Similarly, in Battle Royales, any movement you make which leads to a higher end-game ranking is furthering your objective, so there is no such thing as ‘camping’. There is only “positional play”.

Of course, that doesn’t make it any less frustrating when you get blapped by somebody hiding behind a door and a claymore, or that your best course of action is to do the same. But acquiring a superior position and holding it is literally the aim of a Battle Royale – it widens your path to victory.

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One of the common arguments we’ve heard from people who enjoy Loadouts is the idea that it disrupts the “typical” Battle Royale end-game where everyone in the final circle “camps” until they are finally forced to engage in a fight. In practice, however, Loadouts exacerbate this issue. The players who are bringing thermal-scoped AX-50s into the game the moment they get a collective $6000 together are also setting claymores at every entry point they can. They’re hunkering down until the gas itself forces them to move — and even then, the Overkill perk means they’re switching to a fully-decked out M4 (with a thermal-hybrid scope of its own, naturally) so they can enter the circle with superior firepower.

As we pointed out in our review, you can have a loadout drop inside the first minutes of a round of Warzone. The average game lasts around 20 minutes. That’s a long time for players to engage in positional play, generally by heading to where you think the centre of the circle will be and pitching a tent. Not only do loadouts fail to rectify the “final circle campers” issue — by eliminating the loot phase, they extend it dramatically.

What To Do?

There are a few different ways that Infinity Ward could potentially remedy this Loadout situation. The most drastic solution is to simply remove weapons from loadouts entirely. Loadout drops could still give players perks, and, ideally, players would pick perks based on the weapons the match had offered them thus far. They might select a sneaky perk loadout to accompany their silenced weapons, or a Scavenger-based loadout if they’re rocking the AR/LMG combo.

That said, Loadouts are very “Call of Duty”, and it would be a shame to rob Warzone of that unique flavour. Another alternative could be to restrict Loadouts to “blueprint” weapons. A large number of the guns native to Warzone are based on blueprints — that is, they drop with multiple attachments already installed. Blueprints would allow Infinity Ward to still give players a wide array of excellent weapons while also maintaining the loot phase spirit by not including items like Riot Shields or Thermal Sights.

By the same token, Infinity Ward might simply put together a unique list of attachments that aren’t available in Warzone. The team already restricts the “Specialist” system from the mode, and certain Perks work differently in Warzone than they do in regular multiplayer, so there’s precedent — Infinity Ward doesn’t seem to have a problem altering elements of Modern Warfare to better suit the needs of a given game mode.

However, even if weapons are restricted to blueprints or attachments and shields are banned, the loot phase will still be disrupted by an early influx of superior weaponry.

The other adjustment Warzone needs is to raise the price of Loadout drops in order to heighten the risk/reward stakes. Raising the price to something like $18,000, or making the $6000 drop from a buy station a single-use only, would drive more engagement with the world and other combatants, plus it would help incentivise more players to go for the random drops, especially if random drops were still three-use items. I’ve noticed more and more that players aren’t contesting the random drops at all – the risk is too high compared to directly buying your own. But if purchased loadout drops were more expensive, some players might reassess, and random drops would become a focal point for conflict once again.

The Saga Continues

At the end of the day, the appeal of Battle Royale games is in the stories we get out of them.The genre is built on emergent player-generated narrative, going as far back as DayZ, where players would spend four hours doing nothing while sharing tales of the 10 minutes where something happened.

All great stories need stakes. They need risk, and they need players to experience adversity in order to overcome it. The stories we tell are about succeeding against impossible odds, about the difficulties we face and how we managed to overcome them — not the times we’re given everything and still nearly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. But Loadouts lower the stakes of each Warzone match, therein lowering the variance in the storytelling.

If loadout drops as they currently exist are going to remain core to the Warzone experience, then I wonder why there remains any loot phase at all. We could just as easily with our ideal loadouts, as the game does in Plunder, and abandon loot entirely beyond cash, armour and utilities. Regardless of how the adjustments manifest, it will be interesting to see how Warzone evolves, both in terms of its own metas and how it fits into the Battle Royale genre as a whole. Without substantial revisions it risks going the way of games like Radical Heights – but, hopefully, it endures to become as unique as its contemporaries rather than just another flash in the Battle Royale pan.

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Joab Gilroy is an Australian freelancer that specialises in competitive online games and chicken dinner acquisition. You can tweet at him here.

Swedish company Avalanche Studios, known for the Just Cause series, has announced a series of changes for 2020, while also teasing a “dangerous and ominous” brand-new game from one of its new divisions.

First off, Avalanche Studios has officially changed its name to Avalanche Studios Group, and the company has a new logo to go along with it (see it below). The company also confirmed it now has three separate creative divisions: Avalanche Studios, Expansive Worlds, and Systemic Reaction.

Avalanche Studios is the team that made the Just Cause series and recently collaborated with Warner Bros. on Mad Max and with Bethesda on Rage 2. Expansive Worlds is the developer of the free-to-play hunting game, The Hunter: Call of the Wild. Systemic Reaction, meanwhile, is a self-publishing brand that previously released the open-world action game Generation Zero.

“Transitioning to Avalanche Studios Group and its three divisions marks the start of a new era,” Avalanche Studios Group CEO Pim Holfve said in a statement. “Although we have expanded to three creative divisions, our singular focus is to bring immersive open world experiences to millions of players around the globe.”

Holfve said that Avalanche Studios Group has “several” games in development across its three divisions. One of these is from Systemic Reaction, and you can check out a teaser trailer below. This game is being developed in Malmo, Sweden, but that’s all Avalanche had to say on the subject.

To celebrate the big changes at Avalanche, the company has discounted all of its games and DLC on Steam, including Rage 2 and Just Cause 4. Avalanche was acquired in 2018 by Nordisk Film.

Avalanche Studios is not to be confused with Avalanche Software, the developer of Disney Infinity until Disney closed the studio and canceled the franchise. Avalanche Software is now owned by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.

On this week’s episode of IGN’s PlayStation show Podcast Beyond!, host Jonathon Dornbush is joined by Brian Altano and Max Scoville to celebrate Bloodborne’s 5th anniversary, reminiscing on why the game is still so beloved for PS4 players, what it’s like to jump into the game now, and more.

Plus, we discuss the latest updates to Sony’s PS5 backward compatibility stance, PS5’s messaging overall, PS Plus games leaking for April, and much more.

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And, we’ve got a little teaser of our Bloodborne let’s play to come.

Have a That One Thing or Memory Card story to share? Write in to [email protected]!

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Download or listen to the show on these platforms:

• Direct Download

• YouTube

• Apple Podcasts/iTunes

• Spotify

• Stitcher

• PlayerFM

• Podbay

• TuneIn

• Podbean

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Podcast Beyond! is live every Wednesday at 3 p.m. PT. For the latest on PS5, check out the PS5 full specs list, why we’re excited about PS5’s 3D audio focus, an analysis of what teraflops really mean for the PS5 and Xbox Series X, and check out images of the allegedly PS5 dev kit and controller.

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Jonathon Dornbush is IGN’s Senior News Editor, host of Podcast Beyond!, and PlayStation lead. Talk to him on Twitter @jmdornbush.

In the DS PC ver trailer, what Sam is wearing is called the Headcrab and Gravity Gloves from Half-Life. Since those are collaboration items, each one has a special feature. See the comparison of Half-Life: Alyx and DEATH STRANDING below.
Pre-Order now:https://t.co/TxRuNL91u2 pic.twitter.com/6R42eqe4hT

— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) March 12, 2020

The SteelSeries Apex 5 gaming keyboard has brought the Danish company’s design language and knack for peripherals to a more affordable price point at $99. This new gaming keyboard delivers many of the premium gaming features, like per-key RGB lighting, found in much more expensive products to a lower price by using a key switch that aims to offer a mechanical feel while using a more affordable membrane. Let’s see how well it pulls this off.

Design and Features

The Apex 5 looks like I’d expect from a SteelSeries keyboard after having used the Apex M500 and Apex M750. It has a similar aluminum construction to its siblings, with a clean design and a simple drop at the front and back. The underside includes handy three-way cable routing, structural reinforcement that keeps the keyboard incredibly sturdy, and two small legs for adjusting its angle.

SteelSeries has included a wrist rest, which is a surprising extra at this price point. It feels decent, though not luxurious, thanks to a soft touch coating, and it uses magnets that make it easy to attach and remove. Rubber feet on both the keyboard and wrist rest keep the whole thing from sliding around.

The Apex 5 is a full-length keyboard with a numeric pad, but doesn’t stretch to take up an excess of space on my desk. It tacks on a few extras with a volume wheel, play/pause button, and a small OLED display. The wheel has a good feel to it, spinning smoothly and clicking to mute audio. The OLED display is a simple black and white affair, and has limited use in gaming, but that’s not to say it’s useless. It can display simple GIFs for some fun flair, or indicate which profile is selected. I set it up to display who was talking in Discord, which I felt was maybe the most handy thing it could do.

The keys on the Apex 5 are where things get interesting. For $99, it’s impressive that they come with per-key RGB lighting, especially since SteelSeries lighting effects are dazzling. The Audio Visualizer effect is particularly fun to watch. But, for all its impressive products, SteelSeries still doesn’t seem to know how to make key switches with LEDs that can light up the whole keycap. Secondary symbols are all dim, and taller characters fade near the bottom. It’s a small lack of polish, but also one I see frequently on mechanical keyboards.

Of course, this isn’t exactly a mechanical keyboard. The key switch is a hybrid mechanical switch. In look and feel, it’s mechanical, but the actual actuation happens through a membrane. It presses down with a tactile bump like a mechanical keyboard, it clicks as loud as ever, and it still has the wobbly keycaps I’ve come to expect from a mechanical keyboard. But, beneath the key, there’s still a soft membrane that gets pressed down to complete the electrical circuit rather than expensive, gold-plated contacts at the side of the switch which close when the key reaches a certain depth. The consistency and durability of a soft membrane is questionable, but we haven’t noticed any issues.

SteelSeries put a pleasant finishing touch on each keycap with a subtle soft touch coating that adds a hint of grip. That traction makes it easier to keep my finger at home on WASD, but it would have been even more useful to have a bump on the W key as some gaming keyboards like the Roccat Horde AIMO feature.

Software

SteelSeries Engine 3 lets you customize the Apex 5 with up to five on-board profiles. It allows custom keybinds for all the keys, macro editing, and custom lighting. You can also draw or upload an image or animation for the OLED display. Some of the best features for the Apex 5 are available in the Apps section of the software, where you can enable integrations with select games and programs, enabling special lighting effects and letting the OLED panel show notifications or game data.

Gaming

Gaming is where the Apex 5 gets interesting. Considering its features and solid design, it would be truly impressive at $99 if it were a true mechanical keyboard. Few mechanical gaming keyboards come below $100 without ditching fancy lighting or other extras – the IOGear HVER Pro RGB being a compelling exception. But, the Apex 5 isn’t a true mechanical keyboard because of its membrane switch. That said, in my testing it performs just as well as one.

The Apex 5 switch has a 4mm travel and 2mm actuation point, the same as many mechanical gaming keyboards. In practice, I found it to be every bit as dependable as other mechanical keyboards I’ve used.

In more than a dozen hours gaming and typing on the Apex 5, it didn’t let me down in any unique ways. I find mechanical switches can fall short when it comes to repeatedly pressing a key because of the long travel. The Apex 5 suffers from that same issue, but it does so in the same way as competing mechanical keyboards.

It performs stunningly for every other action, though. I could count on it well enough to pull off quick peeks around edges or popping up over shields in Rainbow Six Siege. In every match I played, I felt comfortable with the Apex 5. I never noticed inconsistencies some might expect from a membrane keyboard, nor did I notice any mushiness. It’s not clear if the membrane will continue to behave the same way over a long time (SteelSeries rates it for 20 million keypresses), but I can say the experience isn’t readily distinguishable from a pure mechanical switch.

Some of the extras can even be semi-handy while gaming. When I’m in a game wondering who popped onto Discord to silently breathe into their microphone, the OLED display can show me exactly who. The volume wheel is great for a quick adjustment as well, so I can crank the sound of enemy footsteps during tense moments in a game.

SteelSeries missed an opportunity to make the visual equalizer not just cool but also useful. If the equalizer could show stereo separation, thus indicating which direction louder noises were coming from, it could have been a handy extra indicator in games.

Purchasing Guide

The SteelSeries Apex 5 is available on Amazon and Best Buy with an MSRP of $99.

The Batman v Superman four-year anniversary is today, March 25, and fans came out in droves to show their support of the Zack Snyder movie with some of their favorite shots from the movie.

Zack Snyder’s last complete DC movie, Batman v Superman, hit theaters four years ago on March 25, 2016, and fans have the hashtag #BvS4Years trending on Twitter as a result. With new tweets going up every few seconds featuring stills from the movie, custom art, apparel, and feel-good stories about personal connections to the movie.

We’ve created a slideshow of just a handful of the movie stills and accompanying words shared on Twitter that you can check out below.

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Some fans are using this opportunity to voice their support of specific scenes or shots. Others are sharing their thoughts on the movie, calling it “severely underrated,” “absolutely beautiful,” and the “best comic book movie ever made.” You won’t find negativity in this thread and it’s clear that fans of the movie are still thinking about it four years later.

Others are using the trending moment to voice their support of Zack Snyder’s fabled cut of Justice League using the now-famous hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut. This cut of the movie seemingly exists if the original director of the movie’s Vero posts is anything to go by. Stars of that movie have even voiced their support of this cut with Ben Affleck commenting on it as recent as last month.

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Whether or not the Snyder Cut ever amounts to anything more is unknown, but one thing that is known is that fans of Batman v Superman absolutely adore the movie and still look back on it fondly four years later.

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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.

Like plenty of other squad-based multiplayer games that have launched in recent years, such as Apex Legends and Call of Duty: Warzone, Ninja Theory’s Bleeding Edge has a ping system that allows you to communicate with your team without actually speaking into a mic. As someone who doesn’t always want to talk to his teammates when I’m playing online, it’s a trend I hope to see continue in multiplayer games.

Though I’m not a huge fan of Bleeding Edge’s ping system overall (most of its pings require two button presses instead of just one, making it difficult to use in combat), it does offer an option that I haven’t seen in similar games. It’s something that I’ve been hoping Respawn adds to Apex Legends one day–in fact, I hope most multiplayer-focused games steal this one aspect from Bleeding Edge’s ping system. In Bleeding Edge, you can ping your squad to suggest a retreat.

Now, obviously, you shouldn’t just run from every fight. It’s better to win than run away, but sometimes you need to flee in order to regroup so that you can win the subsequent encounter. Most ping systems handle the concept of retreat the same way they do pushing forward–by pinging in a certain direction, your character informs the rest of the team that they should move in that direction.

The problem with this system is that there’s no difference in the level of urgency. For instance, if you’re sniping in Apex Legends and you see that your teammates are about to be ambushed, you’ll just as calmly say, “We should go this way” as if you and your team are just scavenging for loot. Pinging “retreat” in this type of system is even worse if you’re actually in the midst of the fight, as you then have to physically point in the direction you want to go–so that means turning away from the fight in order to imply going away from the fight, aka retreat. Pro tip: Turning your back on the people shooting you is not how you survive.

So, ultimately, most people don’t sound retreats in games like Apex Legends or Warzone. They just push forward and hope for the best or run away and hope their teammates decide to follow suit. Neither option is good, which is why having a dedicated “retreat” ping is such a wonderful mechanic in Bleeding Edge. If you identify a situation where falling back is the right choice–say, your team’s only healer goes down or you see enemy reinforcements approaching–you can quickly and effectively sound the alarm to everyone. More squad-based multiplayer games need this feature–it provides an option that’s sometimes crucial to a team’s success.

If you’re itching to get into Bleeding Edge yourself, the game is now officially live and available for both Xbox One and PC. If you’re an Xbox Game Pass subscriber, the service offers the game to you on both platforms, making it a great “free” game to pick up and then play online with your friends if y’all are stuck inside. Fair warning though, as a MOBA-like game, Bleeding Edge has a bit of a steep learning curve. If you’re having a hard time, we do have a Bleeding Edge guide of nine helpful gameplay tips.

AMC Theaters has announced that the company has furloughed its corporate employees, including its CEO Adam Aron. The decision was made after the COVID-19 pandemic forced AMC to close 634 move theater locations across the U.S. and Canda.

“At this time, AMC is not terminating any of its corporate employees, however, we were forced under the circumstances to implement a furlough plan, which is absolutely necessary to preserve cash and to ensure that AMC can reopen our doors once this health crisis has dissipated,” the company said in a statement to Variety.

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The theater closures impacted 27,000 U.S. employees. During this time, AMC announced that it would pay those employees “as much as we can possibly afford to pay them,” while also providing those who qualify to continue to have health-care benefits.

AMC maintains that it intends to bring back its employees once the movie theaters re-open. AMC previously tried to keep theaters open at 50% capacity, but ultimately ended up closing theaters.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a massive disruption in the U.S. workforce, resulting in a wave of layoffs for non-essential staff, or new work situations that discourages direct contact and mass gatherings. Retailers like GameStop announced stores would be closed in favor of online orders and curbside pick-ups.

Check out IGN’s resource on how to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic here.

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Matt Kim is a reporter for IGN.