Month: May 2021

Another week brings more modes and playlist changes to Black Ops Cold War, as we continue Call of Duty’s ’80s Action Hero event. Today’s May 27 patch notes include a playlist refresher, the introduction of Rambo’s Gun Game, a double XP event, and a free access weekend.

New Playlists

Today’s update adds a Rambo twist to the Gun Game party mode. Explosive weapons like the Combat Bow, Death Machine, War Machine, and the RPG-7 are now part of the weapon cycle. Thankfully, everyone gets a Stimshot to increase their odds of survival against such powerful weapons. As usual, dying by melee in Gun Game drops you back one stage in the weapon rotation, and the match ends once the first player gets a ranged kill with the ballistic knife.

Additionally for the playlist updates, Snipers Only moshpit returns, and 3v3 Gunfight makes its Cold War debut. Prop Hunt is also being showcased in the Featured playlist hub, while standard Gun Game and Sticks and Stones can be found under the Quick Play tab.

Multi-Team Elimination Updates

Treyarch also highlighted a host of improvements for Cold War’s Multi-Team Elimination Fireteam mode. The gameplay and UI improvements include increased XP values, map voting, improved ping visibility, and more. Multi-Team Elimination has the feel of a mini-battle royale, and these changes should make player experience even better.

Double XP And Free Access Weekend

Black Ops Cold War is hosting double XP this weekend, beginning tomorrow May 28 and running through June 1. This is a Black Ops Cold War-specific event, so Warzone players will only earn the standard progression XP rate. Black Ops Cold War is also free to play across all platforms this weekend. From now until June 1, anyone can jump into multiplayer and Zombies Outbreak mode.

You can see the full May 27 patch notes for Black Ops Cold War below, as shared by Treyarch.

Warzone also received a weekly update for May 27 with new weapon balancing, and there was a nerf to the Bertha cargo trucks in solo matches.

GLOBAL

Multiplayer + Outbreak Free Access

Progression

• Addressed an issue where some players’ Season Levels were capped at Level 182 in the After Action Report and in-game scoreboard.

MULTIPLAYER

Modes

• Rambo’s Gun Game [NEW]
• New ‘80s Action Heroes Multiplayer mode available in Featured Playlists.
• 3v3 Gunfight [NEW]
• New 3v3 variant of Gunfight mode available in Featured Playlists.

Multi-Team Elimination

• Increased XP values.
• Enabled map voting in the playlist.
• Increased the opacity of pings for better visibility. Pings will also be less visible while aiming down sights.
• Map loading stats that show your performance in Elimination on each map should now properly display the correct stats.
• UI
• Enemy pings will now follow the pinged player for 5 seconds. To ping an enemy player, with an enemy player in your field of view, double-tap the left d-Pad button on controller or press the Z key twice on your keyboard.
• Addressed an issue where the player would sometimes receive a UI error when being downed or killed by the Ballistic Knife.

Medals

• The “Have a Blast” Medal can now be earned with explosive Scorestreaks.

UI

• Increased the size of Weapon Mastery badges displayed during Best Play.

Featured Playlists

• Rambo’s Gun Game [NEW]
• Die Hardpoint
• Standoff 24/7 (also available in Hardcore via Quick Play)
• Multi-Team Elimination
• Nuketown 24/7 (also available in Hardcore via Quick Play)
• 12v12 Moshpit (also available in Hardcore via Quick Play)
• Party Games
• 3v3 Gunfight [NEW]
• Multi-Team Moshpit

LEAGUE PLAY

Maps

• Removed Checkmate from rotation in CDL Search & Destroy.

ZOMBIES

Weapons

Wonder Weapons

• Addressed an issue where players could apply an Ammo Mod to the D.I.E. Wonder Weapons.

Ammo Mods

• Addressed an issue where the Cryofreeze Ammo Mod visual FX could display on screen when walking backwards.

Stability

• Added stability fixes for Fishing.

Featured Playlists

• Outbreak
• Firebase Z
• Die Maschine
• Cranked 2: No Time to Crank
• Dead Ops Arcade: First Person
• Dead Ops Arcade
• Onslaught (PlayStation)
• Onslaught Mystery Munitions (PlayStation)
• Onslaught Standoff (PlayStation)

Ahead of its Dying Light 2 stream later today, developer Techland has announced a new version of Dying Light that comes bundled with all of its DLC. Titled Dying Light: Platinum Edition, customers can pick up the game across all platforms starting today.

The bundle’s list price is $100, but retailers are selling it at a deep discount. If you’re picking the game up on PC, it’s available on both Steam and GOG for just $25. Xbox users can also pick the game up via the Microsoft store for $25. However, on the PlayStation Store you can only get the bundle for $25 if you’re a PlayStation Plus subscriber. Without a subscription, you will have to pay the full $100 for Dying Light: Platinum Edition.

Dying Light: Platinum Edition — $25 ($100)

As it turns out, over the years a ton of DLC has been released for Dying Light. Besides the base game and its expansion, The Following, anyone that purchases Dying Light: Platinum Edition will receive an extra 20 pieces of DLC content. The DLC generally varies, adding new weapons, armors, blueprints, buggy decals, and gameplay content to Dying Light.

Techland’s reveal of Dying Light: Platinum Edition came right before a stream focused entirely on Dying Light 2. The stream has been teased over the course of the past week with short videos posted to the Dying Light Twitter page as well as the game’s Discord channel. So far, a release date for Dying Light 2 has not been revealed, but that may change by the end of the day.

No entrant in the so-called streaming wars has navigated a more chaotic first year than HBO Max. 

WarnerMedia’s prized new streaming service launched one year ago today. Since then, it has become the center for fights over Hollywood’s future, the cornerstone for a massive media merger, and a key component in the debate over whether new streaming services can compete against Netflix. That’s a lot of pressure for a new product, especially one that came out during the pandemic at a time when nothing in the world made sense. 

HBO Max came alive during unprecedented times, leaning into the chaos of it all. Yes, that includes everything with AT&T and Discovery, but more on that in a second. 

The biggest question readers might have one year on is whether or not HBO Max is working. Objectively, it is growing. HBO Max has continued to add subscribers every quarter. HBO Max launched with nearly three million new customers buying HBO Max directly (these were once referred to as retail customers) and 4.1 million total activations (this refers to people who installed the streaming service but already had HBO accounts). 

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HBO and HBO Max had a combined subscriber base of 36.3 million subscribers in June 2020, up nearly two million from the end of 2019. Since then, HBO Max and HBO have grown to a combined subscriber base of 44.2 million US subscribers. HBO, with HBO Max, has grown more in the last 12 months than HBO grew by itself over the last five years. 

So, yes, HBO Max is arguably succeeding. Is it successful enough? There are some analysts who argue that HBO Max isn’t growing fast enough. Netflix is sitting at more than 200 million subscribers worldwide, Disney+ surpassed 100 million subscribers within its first 16 months, and there is seemingly more competition popping up everyday. There are concerns that the price ⁠— $15 per month ⁠— is too high. There are concerns that HBO Max isn’t a necessity right now for consumers, and if it’s not a necessity, that’s a long-term problem.

“We’re going to be a company that has a very significant streaming opportunity,” former AT&T CFO John Stevens said in December 2019. 

HBO Max also boasts one of the highest revenue cuts of all of the streaming services, touting nearly $12 in average revenue per user. All of which is a long way of saying that for every customer signing up and paying $15, WarnerMedia is making $12. 

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Each of these points can be pretty easily countered. HBO Max is launching in new regions, including Latin America and parts of Europe, very soon. A new ad-supported version of HBO Max will also drop the price to $9.99 per month, on par with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. While it’s still one of the more expensive ad-supported streaming services, it’s still the cheapest way to get HBO. Disney+ is growing faster, but its revenue cut isn’t as high. Netflix has more than 200 million global subscribers, but its business is slowing down in the United States. 

As WarnerMedia heads into HBO Max’s second year, the questions aren’t so much about HBO Max succeeding. It’s growing, the revenue split is good, and as it expands into more territories, more subscribers will join — hopefully. The bigger questions are about what HBO Max looks like as part of a new company that has the time, understanding, and energy to make HBO Max a necessity. 

Let’s address the giant ampersand in the room. After less than three years of owning WarnerMedia, and less than one year of HBO Max launching, AT&T is handing WarnerMedia off to Discovery. AT&T isn’t selling WarnerMedia; it’s spinning the company off, with shareholders maintaining a majority stake in the company while Discovery leadership takes over the reins. 

“I actually believe the glory days are still in front of us,” AT&T CEO John Stankey said in April, one month before announcing WarnerMedia was being split off. “They’re not behind us.”

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It’s a new era for HBO Max — kind of. With Discovery, HBO Max could potentially be home to some of the world’s most beloved and recognized unscripted programming, including whatever Guy Fieri gets up to next and Shark Week. HBO Max could become part of a better bundle that will give fans of premium TV (you diehard Mare of Easttown fans) and reality programming (House Hunters reruns for days) a no-brainer purchase. Or HBO Max could disappear completely — but that’s probably less likely. 

The reality is that HBO Max is entering a new first year. There’s a new leader at the top — Discovery CEO David Zaslav will oversee the new company, with questions about current WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar’s future in question — and new opportunities that weren’t present before. Various sports leagues are signing new deals with streaming at the forefront. A combined WarnerMedia and Discovery catalog would also be one of the most in-demand from audiences, according to Parrot Analytics, second just behind Disney. 

And, for now, there are newly-released movies. Arguably, the biggest disruption that HBO Max brought with it into the streaming era was fighting against the theatrical window by making its 2021 slate a simultaneous hybrid release model. Movies would hit HBO Max the same day they got released in theaters. The move, orchestrated by Kilar, seemingly pissed off many in the industry, but was seen as a necessary decision with theaters still closed in certain countries and COVID concerns still floating around audiences’ minds. Films like Wonder Woman 1984, Godzilla vs Kong, and Mortal Kombat helped drive more customers to HBO Max and keep people from canceling. Still, it reportedly cost $200 million in backend deals and multiple phone calls for WarnerMedia to smooth it over.

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“There’s no doubt that it was bumpy back in early December of last year,” Kilar told Recode in 2020. “If I had the chance to do it over again, I think it’s very fair to say that we would have taken a couple more days to see if we could have had even more conversations than we were able to have.”

Now, movies are mostly returning to theaters in 2022. HBO Max will become the second home once they’re finished playing, but WarnerMedia isn’t trying to isolate its talent or lose out on theatrical revenue. HBO Max will become home to exclusive movies that WarnerMedia doesn’t want to release in theaters, but the debate over whether or not those movies could have gone to theaters won’t be so public.

HBO Max is going to see some more changes. It’s the prized part of a new company whose very foundation is centered on success in the streaming space. New types of programming, including sports and far more unscripted series, will likely make their way to the platform. Until this sale closes, however, it’s going to likely be more or less the same. More TV shows, more movies, and available to way more people. 

One year later, HBO Max is still growing. The bigger question is, one year from now, will HBO Max still be around, or will it be part of an entirely new service under Discovery’s leadership?

Borderlands 3 has prepared an update that theoretically enables full cross-play across all platforms – but developer Gearbox has been told to remove cross-play support for PS4 and PS5.

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford tweeted today explaining that there was good and bad news for Borderlands 3 players, and explaining that “the publisher” had required the removal of PlayStation platforms from cross-play support.

Good news or bad news first? Good News: An update for Borderlands 3 has been prepared for release that includes full crossplay support across all platforms. Bad News: For certification, we have been required by the publisher to remove crossplay support for PlayStation consoles.

— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) May 27, 2021

The publisher in this instance would be 2K Games, but it’s not clear if the decision stems from 2K or Sony. We know that Sony requires Epic to pay for Fortnite’s cross-play – it’s possible that 2K has been unwilling to pay for the same privilege. It’s also not clear whether this is simply a certification issue, and that the feature could be re-added down the line. We’ve contacted both companies for comment.

Borderlands 3 already supports cross-play between console generations – Xbox Series X and Xbox One players can play together, for example – but inter-platform play isn’t possible. Fans have been asking for the feature since before the game came out, and it seems we’ve come close. It’s not clear if Gearbox will release Xbox-PC cross-play despite PlayStation being dropped.

Sony has historically been resistant to allowing multiplayer between players on its consoles and those on Xbox, PC, and Nintendo platforms, but that stance had seemed to soften in recent years, with the likes of Rocket League, Fortnite, and Call of Duty all now allowing platform-agnostic multiplayer.

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Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].

An indie game developer has created a 10-million polygon photoscan of his dog having a nap in the new early access version of Unreal Engine 5. Importantly, they were able to load 1,000 instances of the scan and maintain a frame rate of 60fps.

I was able to load a 10 million polygon photoscan of Ziggy in the @UnrealEngine. Using #UE5‘s Nanite meshes I was able to load 1000 instances of it at 60fps before I got bored. That’s 10 billion polygons and it didn’t even blink. It could have handled a lot more than this. pic.twitter.com/IMRnQIjFSx

— Sgt. Gary Freeman of the UNC (@IonizedGames) May 26, 2021

Taylor Loper, the one-man team that makes up CAT Interstellar developer Ionized Games, posted a short video clip to Twitter showing the 1,000 instances of his dog, Ziggy, rendered in Unreal Engine 5. Each one of those meshes were created using a 10-million polygon photoscan, meaning the whole scene contains 10 billion polygons. This was achieved using the new Nanite meshes, which allow developers to import film-industry quality art into the engine to be used in the creation of assets.

The hardware Loper used to render this is good, but not particularly space age; a Ryzen 7 5800x, a RTX 3070 XC graphics card, and 32 GB of RAM. “This didn’t even begin to max out my system,” Loper tweeted. “Any 10 series card or newer is gonna see some mind blowing enhancements.”

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The process also took a surprisingly short amount of time. Loper says it took 10 minutes to take the required 122 pictures of his dog, and 21 minuities to import them into a piece of software to clean the images up. It cost $1.68 to export the model with a 4K texture. This kind of ease and cost, as well as the lack of strain on PC hardware, points to Unreal Engine 5’s huge potential among small developers as well as AAA studios.

Unreal Engine 5 was announced back in May 2020, with particular emphasis on the Nanite technology that helped create its ‘virtualised geometry’, demonstrated in Unreal’s first demo through realistically rocky caves. While that demo – Lumen in the Land of Nanite – wasn’t a real game, it was playable. Rather than a pre-render, the video was played in real time on a PS5.

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Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Entertainment Writer.

Dragon Quest 3 is being remade in a style similar to Octopath Traveler – and it’s just one of several new Dragon Quest spin-offs announced.

The Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake was announced during yesterday’s Dragon Quest 35th Anniversary Stream, which also saw the announcement of Dragon Quest 12: The Flames of Fate.

You can see the game in action on the Square Enix YouTube channel, where you’ll note that 3D effects and assets have been added to the retro pixel backdrops, with sprites being updated for a new generation. It’s become something of a signature style for Square Enix – Octopath Traveler offered a similar art style when it launched back in 2018, and it’s being extended to the upcoming Project Triangle Strategy, too.

Dragon Quest 3 originally launched in 1988, so it’s a great opportunity for newcomers as well as series veterans to play this entry in the storied series. We don’t have a release date for the game yet, but we know that it will receive a worldwide release and come to consoles.

Other spin-off games revealed during the showcase include Dragon Quest Treasures, a treasure-hunting RPG that explores the childhood of Mia and Erik from Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age. Dragon Quest Keshi Keshi was also revealed, a free-to-play mobile puzzler that includes iconic series characters who will come to life as erasers that get rid of grafitti. MMO Dragon Quest 10 will also get an offline version, but this is currently a Japan-only release.

If you’re looking to get into Dragon Quest, check out our review of the latest mainline entry Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age.

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Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.

Amazon Prime Day is one of the biggest online shopping events to occur every year, it’s right up there with Black Friday. It’s certainly going to happen in 2021, but there might be a few changes compared to 2020. Last year, Amazon Prime Day in the UK was set in October rather than its usual July/ Summer slot, so will this continue?

No, is the simple answer. In a recent earnings call, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky confirmed that Prime Day will occur during an undisclosed date in June. We’ll update you once we know more, so make sure to follow @IGNUKDeals for live updates, and bookmark this page for all the best Prime Day 2021 deals on games, tech, gadgets, and more.

TL;DR – Best Prime Day Deals in the UK

• Prime 30-Day Trial – FREE (Save £7.99)

• Prime One Year Membership – £79/year (Save 15%)

What is Amazon Prime Day?

Prime Day is an absolute bonanza of deals and discount, all found online at Amazon. One small requirement, you’ll need an Amazon Prime subscription to take advantage of the deals. Have no fear if you’re not rocking a membership yet, 30-day free trials are currently available, covering you for the whole month of June, and Prime Day as well. Prime membership costs £7.99/month, or £79/year (saving you £16.88 in total per year).

When is Amazon Prime Day 2021?

Amazon Prime Day is set to be in June of 2021, a major change from October of 2020, and a slight change from the typical July slot we’ve seen in most other years prior.

Prime Day in October seems like it was a one-off by Amazon, as it was set later in the year to ensure the safety of employees during the coronavirus pandemic.

How to Get the Best Deals on Amazon Prime Day?

Amazon Prime Day is just like any other shopping event when it comes to deals, know what you want. Impulse buys are bound to happen with the number of discounts on offer, but you’ll come away with a lot more success if you just buy what you need.

Another top tip, follow our UK deals team @IGNUKDeals, who will be updating you throughout the whole of Prime Day 2021 with hand-picked deals on the best tech and games that you actually want.

PS5 and Xbox Series X – Prime Day 2021

Amazon has regular stock drops of PS5 and Xbox Series X at the moment, at least once a month to be specific. But, can we expect to see PS5 stock during Prime Day 2021?

It’s not a simple question and answer, but Amazon might actually prefer to not do any stock drops during the sites busiest time of the year. Console drops can cause problems on the site, and they might prefer to just avoid it altogether. But, this is just speculation, and Amazon might be planning something we don’t know. Stay tuned, and follow @IGNUKDeals for live console stock updates.

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Robert Anderson is a Commerce Editor and deals expert for IGN. Follow him @robertliam21 on Twitter.