We’ve returned with more of Call of Duty’s most broken guns! In our previous list, Richie Bracamonte went over many of broken guns featured throughout the series’ long history. Some were silly and barely functional, and remembered for how poorly they performed. This time, Richie returns with only the most overpowered broken weapons picked by our viewers. These guns are infamous for their destructive power are most were subject to a much-needed patch in order to rebalance the multiplayer experience.
Even though patching and/or “Nerfing” a weapon is commonplace today, a handful of these guns are still fan-favorites for their competitive edge, and some would say that they’re still broken. Shotguns such as Black Ops III’s 205 Brecci, Modern Warfare’s 725, and of course Modern Warfare 2’s iconic 1887s (featured in Part 1) all had above-average ranges. In the submachine class, contenders like World at War’s MP40 and MW3’s MP7 hit hard and fast. They also featured quick times to kill and high fire rates. In some cases, guns like the MP5 are broken in nearly every game they’re featured it.
In our review of Cold War, Kallie Plagge explains how “The Cold War setting allows for a lot of variety from one map to the next, which helps the limited slate feel richer; a highlight in terms of aesthetic are Miami’s neon-soaked streets. Each core 6v6 map balances close-quarters spaces with long-range sightlines, and in my experience, they mostly translate well from one mode to the next.”
Escape From Tarkov is a brutally realistic take on the first person shooter genre, and its fictional region of Norvinsk is full to the brim contemporary firearms like the M4A1 carbine, the AS Val rifle, the SV-98 sniper rifle, and KS23 shotgun.
In the above video, Jonathan Ferguson–a weapons expert and Keeper of Firearms & Artillery at the Royal Armouries–breaks down the weapons of Escape From Tarkov, and compares their in-game depictions against their real-world counterparts.
Cyberpunk 2077 released on December 10, and despite the game receiving generally good reviews, it has also found itself as the subject of controversy regarding its numerous bugs and poor state on last-gen systems. These criticisms haven’t escaped the management at CD Projekt Red, as the company has reportedly changed how it awards bonuses to no longer factor in the game’s average review score.
According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Cyberpunk 2077 creative director Adam Badowski emailed the development team to explain how bonuses were changing. He admitted that given the “circumstances”–possibly referring to the work-from-home woes the team has gone through–it wasn’t fair to tie these bonuses to a review score.
“We underestimated the lengths and complexity involved to make this a reality, and still you did everything you could to deliver an ambitious, special game,” he added.
However, it appears the bonus system could still be controversial, as it apparently makes use of a system that awards tokens to employees that can later be exchanged if the game hits its goals. But some developers felt this system was encouraging them to work longer hours in a company that had already found itself in hot water over “crunch,” despite pledging not to do so earlier.
Cyberpunk 2077 had already been delayed three times before its eventual launch this month. Xbox Series X|S and PS5 versions are planned, likely for 2021, and the game can struggle to perform adequately on older consoles at the moment. In GameSpot’s Cyberpunk 2077 review, which was based on the PC version, we found the technical issues “so pervasive that it’s impossible to ignore.”
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The Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon is picking up speed as it adds new cast members and bit of plot detail. This week, the upcoming show adds three new cast members with character outlines coming straight from HBO itself.
Joining the growing cast alongside the previously announced Paddy Considine are Olivia Cooke (Ready Player One), Emma D’Arcy (Truth Seekers), and Matt Smith (Doctor Who).
Cooke will play the part of Alicent Hightower. She’s the daughter of Hand of the King Otto Hightower. Alicent was raised in the Red Keep and has developed a keen political acumen, as well as being “the most comely woman in the Seven Kingdoms” according to HBO’s character profile.
D’Arcy plays Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen, the first-born child of King Viserys Targaryen, both a pure-blood Valyrian and a dragonrider. “Many would say that Rhaenyra was born with everything,” the profile says. “But she was not born a man.”
Smith, finally, plays Prince Daemon Targaryen, younger brother to King Viserys. Like his niece Rhaenyra, Daemon is a dragonrider in addition to being a peerless warrior. “But it is said that whenever a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin in the air,” his profile reads, suggesting he might be in for an ignominious or tragic end.
House of the Dragon begins filming in the next few months, per word from WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar, and will broadcast in 2022. The series, inspired by author George R.R. Martin’s Westeros historical account Fire & Blood, is set 300 years before the events of Game of Thrones and is currently set to run for 10 episodes; HBO has not yet discussed potential future seasons.
This week on Wrestle Buddies, GameSpot’s professional wrestling podcast, Chris E. Hayner and Mat Elfring are discussing the AEW/Impact crossover from the past week. Additionally, they’re looking at the BTE Championship and answering your questions.
First up, with Kenny Omega’s recent AEW Championship win, he made the announcement he would be on Impact wrestling. Chris and Mat discuss Omega’s appearance on Impact wrestling and what that means for both promotions. Does this help AEW at all? Where will this relationship go in the future? We may not have all the answers, but we certainly do have opinions.
Later, the guys go back to one of their favorite YouTube shows, Being The Elite, to talk about the BTE Championship, a wrestling title which involves no wrestling at all. In order to win the title–whose current champion is Dark Order member John Silver–you need to compete in games like “flipping a bottle” or “eating a really spicy chip.”
All that, plus we answer your questions. New episodes of Wrestle Buddies are released every Thursday on the podcast platform or app of your choice, including Spotify, Stitcher, and Apple Podcasts. You can also keep up to date with the podcast by following it on Twitter.
Disney fans, Pixar fans, and Toy Story fans are excited about Lightyear, but there might be nobody more excited about the movie than its star, Chris Evans.
“Working with Pixar is a dream come true,” Evans said in an Instagram post yesterday. “I’ve been a massive fan of their films since the very beginning. My team could barely contain their excitement when they told me that Pixar had a pitch for me. All they said was ‘Buzz Lightyear.'”
As you can see in the post above, Evans told his team that he didn’t quite understand the pitch because Tim Allen, who has been the voice of Buzz Lightyear for over 20 years, and his performance as the character, were untouchable. He said he needed to know how this character was different from the Buzz Lightyear toy in Toy Story 1, 2, 3, and 4, and why the story of Lightyear is a story worth telling.
“I can say 2 things with absolute confidence,” he said. “1. I didn’t stop smiling through the ENTIRE pitch. Ear to ear. 2. Everyone can rest easy. And get very excited.”
Evans is living proof of his second point as his excitement about the official announcement couldn’t be contained, as evidenced by his Instagram post and elsewhere. Shortly after the announcement was made, the actor said on Twitter, “I don’t even have the words.” He then explained that the story of Lightyear isn’t about the Buzz Lightyear toy featured in the Toy Story movies — it’s the origin story of the human Buzz Lightyear that the toy in those movies is based on.
It turns out that Evans is just a generally excited person when it comes to anything related to space. Entertainment Weekly writer, Devan Coggan, has a Twitter thread spanning over two years of tweets featuring Evans’ many excited reactions to news about space, as you can see in Coggan’s tweet below.
My absolute favorite thing about Twitter is Chris Evans being totally wonderstruck by the majesty of outer space. pic.twitter.com/h99eFYqpYo
The thread features over a dozen tweets dissecting how much Evans loves space and every bit of it is worth your time. Almost as if it were written in the stars, Coggan’s thread that spans over two years ends with her saying “our boy is going to space” and a picture of Buzz from Lightyear.
To infinity and beyond, Chris Evans.
If you missed the announcement of Lightyear yesterday, be sure to check it out in our Disney Investor Day 2020 announcement story, which features every movie and TV announcement made during the investor call.
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Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.
Welcome to NVC! This week, your new fill-in host Seth Macy is joined by Peer Schneider, Brian Altano, and Tom Marks to discuss Nintendo’s presence at The Game Awards. Hear about the one-winged angel, Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII, coming to Super Smash Bros., our thoughts on Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, recent Switch sales numbers, and more.
You can listen to NVC on your preferred platform every Thursday at 3pm PT/6pm ET. Have a question for Question Block? Write to us at [email protected] and we may pick your question! Also, make sure to join the Nintendo Voice Chat Podcast Forums on Facebook. We’re all pretty active there and often pull Question Block questions and comments straight from the community.
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Logan Plant is the Production Assistant for NVC. You can find him on Twitter at @LoganJPlant.
Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond attempts to return to the series’ roots with a VR twist. It’s also storied Titanfall 2 developer Respawn Entertainment’s first step into VR and one of the first major World War 2-themed shooters to land in the medium. While it largely succeeds with frantic Nazi-killing action that brings you into the chaos of the second World War in locations like Omaha Beach and Peenemünde, its inconsistent tone and quality makes for a shooter campaign that drags on past its welcome. Next to that, though, is the truly impressive documentary dedicated to shedding light on the true stories of those who fought and served. Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond itself, however, pales in comparison, not only to the legendary legacy that it attempts to draw from, but also in comparison to other recent VR shooters.
Before you can jump into this Oculus exclusive (which I played on an Oculus Rift S), you have to get past Medal of Honor’s shockingly high system specs that warn of performance issues on anything less than an RTX 2080 or equivalent — and you need a spectacular 340GB of storage space to even launch the installer in the first place before it settles into a mere 180GB. That’s right: Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond is almost as big as Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. But for all that, we do get a diverse number of wonderfully detailed scenes throughout, including the gorgeous French countryside and the Norwegian Telemark. That said, NPCs rarely manage to cross the uncanny valley in VR, making their stiff and overly drawn-out performances all the more difficult to sit through when you just want to get back into the action.
Yowza!
There’s a pretty good amount of content, at least. Between a lengthy Campaign mode, online multiplayer, a versatile Survival mode, and the wonderful Gallery mode filled with interviews with living World War 2 veterans, there’s plenty to see and do here. However, if you came expecting the VR equivalent of Respawn’s conventional shooters like Apex Legends and Titanfall 2, the slow pace of the campaign is going to be a disappointment. Instead, the often low-key missions take about nine hours to clear from start to finish across six acts set in the European Theater.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=There%E2%80%99s%20something%20commanding%20an%20M4%20Sherman%20tank%20that%20you%20just%20can%E2%80%99t%20replicate%20outside%20of%20VR.”]There’s something enthralling about standing atop frozen mountains in Norway or commanding an M4 Sherman tank into battle that you just can’t replicate outside of VR. Likewise, there’s no equivalent to landing on the shores of Omaha Beach and using your hands to physically plant dynamite on hedgehog blockades while taking enemy fire from all sides. The problem is that these high points are buffered by long corridors of repetitive shooting and lukewarm, exposition-riddled dialogue that slows the whole thing down at the worst moments. There’s a solid half of this campaign that isn’t all that memorable, and by the end it feels like it’s dragged on too long.
Again, there are peaks and valleys in this landscape. Some of the most interesting challenges in the campaign have you searching for mines, planting bombs, and clambering your way out of a rapidly flooding Nazi U-Boat before paddling your way up to the ocean surface. Each of these makes pretty good use of the motion controllers, though because all of it is so scripted, none would feel out of place on a traditional keyboard-and-mouse shooter. Further, it’s a shame that there’s only a few limited physics-based interactions throughout the campaign. In the same year when we’ve played Half-Life: Alyx and even The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, both of which use physics to cleverly present unique scenarios that would never work outside of VR, this minimal level of interactivity feels primitive.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Next%20to%20Half-Life%3A%20Alyx%20and%20The%20Walking%20Dead%3A%20Saints%20%26%20Sinners%2C%20this%20minimal%20level%20of%20interactivity%20feels%20primitive.”]Medal of Honor presents its vignettes with the exuberance of a high school history teacher. It wants to hurriedly explain what happened before rapidly switching to the next scene, rather than letting you bask in the emotional impact that these events might have had. This is fine for a game so focused on big moments and intense combat. However, while it seems like it’s trying to evoke those deeper emotions through its dialogue, the execution and the timing never lands quite right in VR, where the cold, dead eyes of characters you’re meant to be familiar with have more of an unsettling effect than an affirming one.
And then you’re back in the action. And while it’s often exciting, it keeps getting bogged down in battles with the annoyingly bullet-sponge enemy AI. After a while, that makes the whole thing repetitive. Combat is already much slower and more grounded in VR than in run-and-gun games like Call of Duty, but it’s disappointing that enemies rarely provide much challenge; most spawn and immediately rush toward you instead of working together to try and flank you.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Medal%20of%20Honor%E2%80%99s%20satisfyingly%20punchy%20weapons%20handle%20very%20nicely%20in%20VR.”]The silver lining is that Medal of Honor’s satisfyingly punchy weapons handle very nicely in VR, giving appropriate feedback both on-screen and in the controllers’ haptic motors. There are also a lot of them to pick up when you’re fighting through the Campaign and in Survival mode: OG weapons like the M1 Garand and MP40 produce a lovely kickback, as does the Combat Shotgun. It’s also nifty that you can pull grenade pins out with either your “teeth” or your hands before lobbing them, depending on your preference. That said, it’s disappointing that the number of weapons you can find in multiplayer is thinned down to about eight or nine total, which makes that mode feel less fleshed-out.
Comfort also seems behind the times. There is no option to teleport here, and your character moves rather quickly when in full sprint mode. I don’t personally have an issue with this, but Above and Beyond is clearly designed for larger maps instead of smaller and more intimate ones, which is potentially nauseating for those who do suffer from motion sickness. Strafing is a useful way of navigating tight combat encounters, but it feels completely unnatural in VR, as if you’re sliding around on a skateboard rather than moving from side to side with your legs. On the other hand, there are some cool immersion effects here. For instance, if you toggle it on, you can see a “threat level” meter that appears over enemies’ heads so you can assess how to engage them in battle. You can also toggle camera shake and hit markers that boost the intensity of combat. These are great – if you can stomach them.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=Multiplayer%20feels%20inferior%20to%20established%20VR%20shooters%20like%20Pavlov%20and%20Contractors.”]Medal of Honor’s multiplayer modes are split up into the Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Domination, Mad Bomber, and Blast Radius modes. They all have their subtle charms, but except for the territory-control Domination mode, they each basically break down to killing the most enemy players in order to get the most points, and there’s little more to it than that. Given the tiny number of available maps, no mod support or meta-progression system, and with physics almost completely turned off except for grenades, these battles end up feeling tacked on and certainly feel inferior to established multiplayer VR shooters like Pavlov and Contractors. One cool thing, however, is that lobbies will automatically populate with AI players when not enough real ones join the match. But as you’d expect, these bots are target practice at best; they don’t put up much of a fight.
Survival mode is a little different and more interesting. It’s a set of challenges where you’ve got to hold out against an onslaught of Nazis for five minutes without dying. That’s not terribly novel on its own, but you can mix things up by adding harder modifiers in exchange for a higher score multiplier, or you can sacrifice your score multiplier in exchange for boons like more powerful weapons and abundant healing syringes. You can also mix and match these things, setting up interesting scenarios against the AI whenever you feel like it.
[poilib element=”quoteBox” parameters=”excerpt=The%20true%20prize%20of%20Above%20and%20Beyond%20is%20the%20Gallery%20-%20every%20part%20of%20it%20is%20a%20must-see.”]Again, though, the true prize of Above and Beyond is the Gallery, which is dedicated to telling the stories of real World War 2 veterans. It’s both a comprehensive showcase of interviews and of breathtaking 360-degree footage from inside important locations most of us may never get to visit, like real overgrown battlefields, bombed-out Nazi bunkers, and U-Boat manufacturing facilities. It’s unexpectedly immersive and affecting, and every part of it is an absolute must-see. But in a sense, it’s as if Medal of Honor takes its fabulous and historically critical Gallery hostage behind the tremendous storage space and performance demands needed to run the less appealing game attached to it.
