The PlayStation 5 controller is easily one of the more impressive pieces of technology that comes with Sony’s next-gen console. It has a number of advanced features built into it, such as adaptive triggers, more sophisticated haptic feedback, and its own internal microphone. One feature that the controller doesn’t have though is a default mute state, something users might want to change for the sake of privacy and security.
Doing so is easy enough, as there are two paths you can take. One mutes your controller quickly until you switch it off, the other is a more permanent solution.
How to quickly mute your PS5 controller
PS5 microphone mute button
Just press the button above the PlayStation icon and it’ll be set to mute until you press it again or switch the console and controller off. You’ll also know that you’ve enabled the mute function as the PS5 informs you when the function has been activated.
How to mute your PS5 controller for longer
First you’ll need to navigate to the PS5 settings menu, which can be found in the top right corner and is represented as a cog icon. From there, make your way down to the “Sound” menu, and then select the “Microphone” option.
Select the option “Microphone status when logged in” and you’ll be able to toggle the microphone to be muted on default whenever you power your PS5 console on.
With that option organized, you’ll never have to worry about your online team picking up any unnecessary background noise or music whenever you start a game.
For more PS5 guides, you can see how easy it is to switch the orientation of the device. For more on the new console, you can check out our PS5 review and keep an eye on our PS5 order guide to see when more stock will be available.
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YouTube Premium subscribers are eligible for a damn good freebie–but only if they were already signed up to the service before the promotion was announced. Subscribers in the UK, Europe, Canada, and the US will be able to redeem the Stadia Premiere Edition bundle, according to an article by Android Central.
The Stadia Premiere Edition bundle is normally priced at $100, and comes with a Chromecast Ultra and a white Stadia Controller. YouTube Premium subscribers in eligible regions will be able to grab one of these for free. The offer should pop up for subscribers once they open their YouTube app, though you can also manually check if you’re eligible at this link.
You won’t be able to sign up to YouTube Premium just to grab this bundle, however–a screenshot shared on Twitter shows that the giveaway is only eligible to people who were subscribed before November 6, 2020.
Like other similar promotions, the offer may only be open while stocks of the Stadia bundle last, though Google may continue to open up the freebie to other regions where Stadia is available.
While the Premiere Edition bundle is designed for streaming games to a TV, the Stadia controller is a lot more versatile now, with updates this year adding wireless connectivity with laptops and PCs, and more recently Android devices.
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The third episode of The Mandalorian Season 2 introduced some interesting new twists and turns for the story, and sent Mando and Baby Yoda on the road to a fan-favorite Star Wars character who will hopefully show up soon.
Warning: If you haven’t seen Season 2, Episode 3 of The Mandalorian, titled “Chapter 11: The Heiress,” you should stop reading now. We’re going to get into heavy spoilers.
In this episode, Mando finally found more of his kind, which not only tied the show to other Star Wars properties, but propelled the story forward as we learned exactly what these other Mandalorians were after and how they could help guide Mando on his journey to get The Child home.
The episode was also jam-packed with Easter eggs and references to other corners of the Star Wars galaxy. Take a look below at the ones we found, then sound off in the comments with the moments, scenes, and Easter eggs you noticed. Then, make sure to check out our Easter Egg deep dives for the first two episodes of Season 2, The Marshal and The Passenger.
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1. Dank Farrik
Once again, Mando throws out his favorite line. We still don’t know what it means, but another character says it later in the episode.
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2. It’s a trap
Trask has its fair share of different alien species, including a bunch of Mon Calamari. For Star Wars fans, the most notable of this particular species was Admiral Ackbar, who appeared in multiple movies. They were also heavily featured in The Clone Wars.
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3. AT-AT’s have many uses
It certainly looks like an old Imperial AT-AT has been repurposed into the crane that pulls the Razor Crest out of the water. After the fall of the Empire, something had to be done with everything the evil order left behind.
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4. Quarren
Trask is also full of Quarren. These squid-like species are also native to Mon Cala, where they coexisted with the Mon Calamari. They have previously appeared on screen in Return of the Jedi, Episode II, Episode III, and The Clone Wars.
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5. Sasha Banks in a cloak
We knew she was cast this season, but this was the first official appearance of WWE Smackdown Women’s Champion Sasha Banks on the show. Thankfully, it didn’t take long to learn a lot more about her character.
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6. Mamacore
While this episode featured some familiar alien species, this one might be new to the Star Wars franchise. The beast swallowed The Child whole, which is kinda funny given that it’s called a “mama”core and technically had a baby inside of it. That didn’t last long, though.
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7. Clan Kryze
This is one of the most exciting developments on The Mandalorian yet. Clan Kryze–or what’s left of them–was introduced, which explained Banks’ character and tied deeply into Star Wars lore. The leader of the crew was Bo-Katan, played by Battlestar Galactica alum Katee Sackhoff. Sackhoff also voiced the part of Bo-Katan on Clone Wars.
Banks, who is credited by her real name Mercedes Varnado, played Koska Reeves. That character seems to be new to Star Wars lore, though there was a female captain in the Rebel Alliance named Reeves, who was mentioned in a Star Wars roleplaying adventure feature in a 1994 issue of the magazine Valkyrie.
Lastly, Axe Woves, played by Simon Kassianides, seems to be another new addition to the lore. He also speaks the least of the three new Mandalorians.
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8. The Watch
Bo-Katan calls Mando a Child of the Watch, and explains that The Watch was a cult of religious zealots that followed the Way of the Mandalore. If we had to guess, she’s referring to the Death Watch, a splinter group of Mandalorians that opposed the Mandalorian government–which was led by Satine of Clan Kryze at the time.
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9. Imperial Officer Titus Welliver
This Imperial officer is played by actor Titus Welliver, who you may recognize from shows like Sons of Anarchy and The Good Wife, or as the Man in Black from Lost.
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10. Long live the Empire
In the first appearance of Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito) this season, the character appears as a hologram and utters the words “Long live the Empire.” At that point, the officer played by Welliver attempts to crash his ship, killing everyone on board, for the good of what’s left of the Empire.
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11. Thermal detonators
In a last ditch effort to reach the cockpit of the ship, Mando walks straight into a firefight and tosses a pair of thermal detonators to blow up what’s left of the storm troopers. Unlike the ones at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, these weren’t filled with Sprite.
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12. Bo-Katan wants the Darksaber
Bo-Katan is looking for the Darksaber, which is currently in the hands of Moff Gideon as we saw in the Season 1 finale. In Star Wars Rebels, Bo-Katan accepted the Darksaber from Clan Wren, took the mantle of leader, and united several Mandalorian clans.
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13. Ahsoka Tano
It’s been reported for months, but now we know it’s happening. In Mando’s final scene (for now) with Bo-Katan, she sends him off in search of the Jedi Ahsoka Tano. She’s given him a location to search her out and he’s on his way. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll see Ahsoka in the next episode of the series, but our fingers are crossed.
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Disclosure: ViacomCBS is GameSpot’s parent company
While a number of industries have gone into decline in 2020 due to the global pandemic, gaming has taken off, as people largely stuck at home look for ways to occupy themselves. New data from NPD looking at the July to September period shows record spending on games, the highest ever in US history.
Spending on games, hardware, consoles, and all their various accessories reached $11.2 billion in the quarter, an increase of 24% on the same period last year. $10.4 billion of that was on software and content alone, with mobile spending and subscriptions seeing a particularly notable increase.
In terms of the content that drove this record-breaking quarter, surprise indie hit Among Us sits comfortably among a number of larger AAA releases including NBA 2K21, Super Mario 3D All-Stars, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2, and Ghost of Tsushima, as well as older favorites including Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Fortnite, and Minecraft. Despite performing worse than expected for Square Enix, Marvel’s Avengers still got a look in the list too.
“We can anticipate another record-breaking quarter in Q4,” said analyst said Mat Piscatella. “In large part due to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles entering the market with one of the fastest-selling consoles in U.S. history, the Nintendo Switch.”
The next-gen PS5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles have already been incredibly popular, selling out almost as soon as they became available. Despite having been in the market for over three years the Nintendo Switch is also continuing to sell well, with October seeing a huge month of sales for the hybrid console.
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Sony’s PlayStation 5 is out now, and it features a whole suite of games that show off what’s to come with the next-generation of 4K media and gaming. In addition to new releases like Demon’s Souls, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Astro’s Playroom, the PS5 also supports an extensive list of PS4 games available for backwards compatible play. Simply put, the PS5 at launch does not have a shortage of games to play and download. However, with an extensive library of games, most of which are continuing the trend of games with large files sizes, you’ll have to be a bit more mindful about managing your data.
The PS5 comes with a 825GB SSD for storage, about 667GB of which is free for you to use. With the growing size of games like Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War–which sits around 200GB–the available real estate in your PS5 can quickly fill up. That’s a problem, because PS5 games must be installed to the internal drive, and cannot be moved to external storage. (Backwards-compatible games can be stored and played externally.) Currently, you cannot expand your internal storage at this time, but Sony has stated that PS5 owners will be able to sometime in the future. With this issue in mind, we wanted to offer some tips on how best to optimize and maximize your storage space for your new PlayStation 5.
PS5 Storage Tips
Prioritize The Games You Want To Keep: One of the crucial things you’ll need to do with your next-gen console is keep an eye on your available storage space. It’s never fun purchasing a new game and then discovering that you lack the open storage to download it. Every game you have in your library will take up space in your console’s SSD, and this also includes game discs that will need to load data onto your drive. While you may have the urge to download all your most wanted games at once, it’s best to focus on the essentials. You will always have access to purchased games in your account library, so even when you delete the game from your drive, you can still download it again later if you want to revisit the game.
Turn Off Auto Updates: Another solid tip is to go into your system settings and disable the auto-update features. Generally, updates for your current set of installed games will be downloaded automatically to your drive when your console is online. These include games you may have finished or may not get back to anytime soon. To optimize space, be sure to switch this off and focus on downloading updates for games you want to play regularly.
Turn Off Trophy Videos: One interesting change that came with the PlayStation’s Trophy system is that the PS5 will now save a clip of the exact moment you earn a Trophy. By default, the PS5 will automatically save quick videos of every Trophy you unlock in a game. This innovation can be great for those who want to save a particular moment. However, these video files will add up over time, resulting in a bulky media folder filled with videos of you earning all sorts of Trophies–even the minor ones that don’t require much effort. To save on space, we’d highly recommend disabling this feature outright. If you do want to save a moment when you earn a Trophy, then the PS5’s upgraded share button will allow you to save video files capturing several minutes from your recent gameplay session. So once something exciting happens, just tap the share button and the moment will be saved as a video. It’s always good to keep an eye out for the growing size of your media folder. So every once in a while, it would be a good idea to start clearing out old videos that are taking up too much space.
The PlayStation 5 features a 825 GB SSD at launch. Sony has stated that there will be plans for adding options to expand storage in the future.
Use An External Storage Device: The PS5’s sophisticated SSD is an impressive storage device, and it also shows off the speed in next-gen loading times. You may be tempted to load everything onto the SSD, but you can also play backwards compatible games via an external drive. Plugged in through a USB, you can download PS4 games straight onto an external device and play them from there (though your load times will vary depending on the drive you’re using).
Look Before You Download: The PS5 line-up includes a set of games that are available for the PS4 as well. Along with letting PS4 users experience some of the latest games, these cross-gen titles also allow players to carry their progress to the PS5. However, a surprising quirk that comes from this is that it’s possible to download PS4 and PS5 versions of the same game simultaneously on your next-gen console. According to GameSpot staff, this happened after selecting the “download all” option when trying to load the games onto our hard drives. When this happens, you’ll take up far more storage space than you intended. To avoid this from happening to you, download the games you purchased straight from your library instead.
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Both the Xbox Series X and Series S are out now, and each console offers a solid entry point into the next generation of gaming. At launch, the new Xbox consoles lean heavily into the existing library of games from the Xbox library, along with new releases like Yakuza: Like A Dragon, Gears Tactics, and Dirt 5. The new consoles also support the fantastic Game Pass service, which allows users to play through some of the greatest hits from Xbox’s history.
The breadth of games is impressive; however, this also brings attention to the Xbox Series X and Series S’s available storage space. With the Series X outfitted with a 1TB SSD for storage and the Series S having a 512GB SSD, you’ll likely run into the issue of insufficient storage space for your console once you begin downloading games (particularly because they only allow you to use 802GB and 364GB, respectively). While there is an option to purchase an expansion card that adds an additional 1TB of space, it sits at the pricey cost $220–almost the same retail cost of a Series S. With the rise of game file sizes venturing further into the 100GB-plus range, you’ll quickly find out that storage management will be a constant work in progress in this new generation. So with that, here are some tips on how to best organize and save space for your new Xbox console.
Xbox Series X|S Storage Tips
Prioritize The Games You Want To Keep: One of the crucial things you’ll need to do with your next-gen console is to keep an eye out for your available storage space. It’s never fun purchasing a new game and then discovering that you lack the open storage to download it. Every game you have in your library will take up space in your console’s SSD, and this also includes game discs that will need to load data onto your drive. While you may have the urge to download all your most wanted games at once, it’s best to focus on the essentials. You will always have access to purchased games in your account library, so even when you delete the game from your drive, you can still download it again later if you want to revisit the game.
Turn Off Auto Updates: Another solid tip is to go into your system settings and disable the auto-update features. Generally, updates for your current set of installed games will be downloaded automatically to your drive when your console is connected online. These include games you may have finished or may not get back to anytime soon. To optimize space, be sure to switch this off and focus on downloading updates for games you want to play regularly.
Rely On An External Device For Backwards Compatibility: The Xbox Series X|S can use an external drive to store games. However, it will only allow games to be played from Xbox One and previous generations. No games exclusive to the Xbox Series X|S (including Xbox One games with X|S enhancement updates) can be played from an external drive, although you can temporarily store X|S games on one. That will allow you to avoid the need to redownload games you would otherwise have to delete from the internal drive. As such, using an external drive on the Xbox Series X|S can be a reliable way to easily manage storage space. With the vast library of games from the Game Pass service, having an external drive as your dedicated backward compatibility space can be worthwhile. You can still enjoy Quick Resume in supported games and benefit from improved loading times (depending on the drive you’re using).
The Xbox Series X – 802GB usable storage space / The Xbox Series X – 364GB usable storage space.
Reduce The Size Of Saved Media: Another solid way to save on storage space is to adjust the file sizes for your saved media. With the 4K HDR support on Xbox Series X, it can be easy to pile up a massive amount of gameplay videos with large file sizes. You can adjust the size of screenshots and video clips to be 1080p to keep the file size down in the settings.
Some Games Are Just Smaller On Xbox Series S: This is not so much a tip, but rather a reminder that if you’re using the Xbox Series S that some games will have reduced install sizes since developers can choose to leave out 4K assets. For example, Sea of Thieves is 17GB on the Series S, but 46GB on the Series X. Others won’t be as drastic, but Gears 5 shrinks to 55GB down from 72GB and Forza Horizon 4 stands at 71 GB down from 85GB. Differences will vary between games, and although it may not make up for the smaller SSD, it’s a nice perk to help keep a bit more room on the system.
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After a few days with Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, I’ve played through the campaign twice to see both main endings, spent some time in multiplayer, and scratched the surface of Zombies. I still need to play more multiplayer (particularly on live servers) and delve much deeper into Zombies before this review is final, so keep in mind that details, including the score, are subject to change in the coming days.
The key takeaway from Cold War thus far is that Call of Duty fares far better when it errs on the side of fantasy. This is true within Cold War’s campaign, where the inclusion of Ronald Reagan is a bizarre fit for an otherwise larger-than-life story about espionage and brainwashing, and it’s true when comparing its story to that of last year’s overly serious Modern Warfare. Cold War plays up its far-fetched premise, and that extends to some of its more inventive and creative multiplayer maps, too.
Campaign
Like any Call of Duty campaign, Cold War is theatrical. From the ’80s-themed montage that opens the campaign to a Vietnam flashback set to Steppenwolf–along with plenty of explosions, helicopter crashes, and slo-mo shootouts–Cold War’s campaign is as action-movie as you’d expect. It largely works with the inherent over-the-top nature of a Black Ops story, and although some bits can be kind of goofy, it’s both easy and fun to buy into the spy drama and massive gunfights in equal measure.
That’s partially thanks to good comedic timing in the dialogue, which helps prevent most scenes from coming across as too self-serious. You’re also given plenty of choice throughout the campaign, including optional side missions, whether to kill or capture particular antagonists, and various dialogue options that range from lawful good to cheeky to loose cannon. While most decisions don’t materially affect the overall story, I had fun playing around with them and going back to previous levels to try the more chaotic options, like throwing an enemy spy off a building instead of capturing him.
Most levels give you multiple options in terms of your approach to combat, too, and some even account for blunders on your part. For example, an early mission tasks you with assassinating a target before he boards a plane and gets away. You’ll screw up the assassination regardless, but the first time I did it, I was too slow and didn’t even get a shot off before he began to escape; the second time, I did it “correctly” and shot at him, but the shot ended up hitting someone else and the target began to escape anyway. Even though the scene proceeds the same way no matter what, the illusion of flexibility, at least, makes Cold War’s campaign dynamic and exciting–it often feels like you’re just barely getting away with whatever hijinks you’re trying to pull.
Simple stealth mechanics add to this feeling. Most missions have at least some stealth, which means staying out of sight, relying on silent takedowns, and then hiding a body before someone can find it. In some instances I felt like I got away with more than I realistically should have, especially when noisily stabbing someone right behind someone else. But there are a few missions that create satisfying tension, as if you could be caught doing your spy business at any moment if you aren’t quick and careful.
The level design is par for the course for Call of Duty, with clear objectives and bombastic set-pieces. Hidden intel and the occasional optional objective mix it up a bit and encourage you to explore places like a well-realized East Berlin or a clever and creative Soviet training facility. One level, however, really stands out as a showcase for both stealth and freedom of choice, giving you free rein inside a KGB building and multiple options for completing your objective. I spent more time in this mission than in any of the others, exploring all the possibilities and sneaking into restricted areas just to see what was behind each door.
There really are a lot of explosions in Cold War.
You have plenty of opportunities to go loud, of course, and the shooting is as tight as ever. I’ll never get tired of the satisfying thump that confirms a kill, whether I’m using a sniper rifle or an attack helicopter’s minigun. Weapons are responsive and distinct from each other, and on PS5, the DualSense controller’s adaptive triggers further differentiate one weapon from the next–I’ll get to that a bit later on.
Cold War largely avoids specific real-life events in its missions and overall story–at least to my knowledge–and instead uses the backdrop of the Cold War and the Iran hostage crisis to establish a sense of place and a main conflict (though the CIA is no stranger to illegal and questionable operations like those in Cold War’s missions). One bizarre intrusion of real life comes in the form of Ronald Reagan, who only appears in a brief scene at the beginning and via a few voice lines toward the end of the game. While the recreation of his likeness and manner of speech is undeniably striking–a technical feat to be sure–he comes across as a weirdly benign grandpa in a room full of rough-talking, chain-smoking badasses discussing illegal military operations. It has very little to do with Reagan’s real-life foreign or military policy, and he himself really has no impact on the trajectory of Cold War’s story. He might as well have been any generic president in any American political drama, and his appearance sticks out as an attempt to force “realism” into an otherwise fantastical story.
It’s overall a fun action-movie story that absolutely delivers on the quintessential Black Ops twists and turns, but it ultimately walks back its more interesting and relevant questions.
Cold War’s biggest miss, in terms of story, is giving the United States very little grief for its imagined ills. Without going into too much detail, the US is ultimately responsible for the main (and completely fictional) issue at the center of the game’s campaign, all due to an absolutely bonkers anti-Soviet strategy gone awry. The protagonists’ main concern is that the US will be blamed for how the Soviets use this to their advantage, rather than that the US is indeed guilty of a major foreign policy blunder and human rights violation in the first place. There are moments in one of the two major endings where the game flirts with the idea that the US is not blameless, but it’s ostensibly the bad ending; completing its objectives made me feel guilty, which ultimately solidified my suspicion that the US was meant to be the good guys all along and that the ends justified the questionable means.
It’s clear that a core theme of Cold War’s story is that things are more complicated than just good or evil, and the ways in which this sequel plays off the original Black Ops underscore that. But like many Call of Duty stories, it only gestures at a greater point and stops short of making it. It’s overall a fun action-movie story that absolutely delivers on the quintessential Black Ops twists and turns, but it ultimately walks back its more interesting and relevant questions–though I was completely invested in the story for the entire duration.
Multiplayer
As with any Call of Duty game, the standard suite of 6v6 multiplayer modes is back. There’s not much to say about the modes themselves that hasn’t been said before; they’re the bread and butter of the multiplayer CoD experience, and there’s been no need to fix what isn’t broken. I need to spend more time with the maps to see how they fare from mode to mode, but I haven’t encountered any glaring spawn or balance issues thus far.
Combined Arms, an objective-based mode that includes vehicles prominently, is my favorite of the new modes so far, largely thanks to one of its maps. Called Armada, the map pits you against another team across several ships, with ziplines connecting the various areas to one another. You can swim if you want, but you can also take a jet ski or a larger boat equipped with a turret to capture an objective and move on to the next. Deciding which method to use on your way to an objective is genuinely fun, and it’s also an easy-to-read map with strong long-range sightlines across ships and plenty of close-quarters areas within each.
The other Combined Arms map I played, Cartel, is less successful with its vehicles. While the ships and jetskis of Armada give you an efficient way of navigating a water-based map (and add an element of silliness to it), Cartel’s motorcycles don’t serve much of a purpose besides alerting everyone to your position. And while the water-based vehicles are easy to pilot–you just have to use the analog sticks to move like normal–I wished that the motorcycles controlled more tightly to suit the bumpy roads and smaller spaces on Cartel.
Fireteam: Dirty Bomb, another new mode, suffers under the weight of its large player count. The 40-player mode isn’t battle royale, but it borrows ideas from battle royale games, including dropping out of a plane and playing against quite a few teams of four. However, it lacks the stakes that make this realm of battle royale exciting. You can respawn over and over again after a short cooldown, and the objectives are scattered around the map–which means it’s never quite clear which one you should be moving toward and where other teams might be moving in relation to you. It’s easy to get flanked by multiple teams because you can’t be sure where they’re likely to come from, resulting in frustration. That said, I definitely need to spend more time with this mode, since I was playing without mics during the pre-release access period–communication and better map and objective literacy could improve things.
Using The DualSense
On PS5, Cold War utilizes the DualSense controller’s various features, including nuanced haptic feedback and the much-touted adaptive triggers. When you’re low on health, you can feel your heartbeat in your hands as it thumps in your ears and flashes red on the screen. When switching weapons, you can feel the difference in ADS speed through the left trigger’s level of resistance; you can feel the difference in fire rate depending on how snappy (or not) the right trigger is, and the intensity of the vibration changes depending on the firepower and recoil you’re working with.
So far, I’ve only experimented with a few pre-made classes, so I’m especially curious to see if there’s a discernible difference in feedback depending on how you customize a weapon. Does adding a stock reduce the recoil vibration you’d feel in the right trigger? Does adding a scope affect the pressure you need to aim down sights? I’ll be testing out some theories in the coming days, but from what I’ve played, it’s exciting that the DualSense can make weapons feel far more distinct and therefore inform what you use, at least in part.
Gallery
While the DualSense features provide engaging feedback, they may not necessarily improve your Call of Duty game. Some guns, like long-range ones, require far more pressure to aim down sights than a standard assault rifle, which made my left pointer finger sore after a few hours of matches. That might sound kind of silly, but over time, having to put a lot of pressure on a trigger adds up, and I found myself switching to the much more forgiving AK-47 to offset this. Haptic feedback, too, could potentially interfere with your aim, though personally, I’m here to have a good time rather than nail a lot of headshots. If you prefer a more traditional controller feel, you can disable the features entirely in the game’s settings.
Zombies
Zombies is the biggest question mark so far, and I haven’t had much time to dig in deep with the mode yet. It does have shared progression with multiplayer and Warzone, which is a plus. I’ll be spending a lot of time playing in the coming days and will update this review with full impressions when I’ve gotten a handle on it.
That’s true for multiplayer, too, so stay tuned for the final review.
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With Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, developer Treyarch picks up the story it started 10 years ago with the original Black Ops. And while there have been other Call of Duty franchises, including Ghosts, Advanced Warfare, Infinite Warfare, and the acclaimed Modern Warfare games, so far the franchises have stayed pretty separate from one another.
That changes with Black Ops Cold War, which fills in a gap in the Black Ops story between 1968 and 2025, taking place in 1981. But that still leaves a huge amount of time between the events of Cold War and Black Ops II, which takes place in way off in 2025. In Cold War, we get a hint at what might else might fill that gap, because Cold War makes a bridge between the Black Ops games and Infinity Ward’s rebooted Modern Warfare storyline.
That connection is a character: Imran Zakhaev. If you’re a Modern Warfare fan, that name will sound familiar. Zakhaev is a Russian ultranationalist in both Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and the 2019 reboot game. He’s the mastermind behind the events of the first game, and although he’s killed in both Modern Warfare and the reboot by Captain Price, it’s Zakhaev’s machinations that fuel the rest of the original Modern Warfare trilogy. His son Victor becomes a major antagonist following Imran’s death.
Now we know that Modern Warfare, or at least the reboot, takes place in the same timeline as Black Ops 1, 2, and Cold War. In the latter, you take part in a mission that takes them to the headquarters of the KGB. There, they briefly encounter Imran Zakhaev in his role as a Soviet military officer.
Though he’s not a huge part of the story, Zakhaev’s presence in 1981 serves as a pretty solid tether between the two franchises. And it suggests that, if Infinity Ward continues to reboot the complete Modern Warfare trilogy, we might see more connections to Black Ops. The rebooted Modern Warfare adjusts the series’ original timeline pretty significantly–the original was set in 2011, but the reboot moves its setting up to 2019–so if this line of thinking continues, a rebooted Modern Warfare 2 and 3 will probably overlap Black Ops II’s story in 2025. If Infinity Ward and Treyarch really are bridging the two franchises, it seems likely we could see a rebooted Black Ops II to retcon the timeline discrepancy.
Then again, this could just be a fun Easter egg, implying a connection between Modern Warfare and Black Ops that doesn’t really make a ton of sense–after all, the rest of Modern Warfare trilogy included a Russian invasion of the US. But if Treyarch and Infinity Ward mean for us to take the Zakhaev cameo at face value, it might imply that we’ll see the two franchises tying together in more ways in the future.
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Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War differs from other games in the series thanks to the inclusion of the safe house, a location you’ll often head back to between missions. But the safe house has secrets of its own, including a padlocked, chainlink door that blocks off a chunk of the room. Behind it are a number of Easter eggs and other elements that make opening it a worthwhile way to spend a few minutes.
To open the padlock, you need a six-digit combination. Piecing that number together requires finding several clues, however. Beside the door, you’ll find a list of documents (all of which relate to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy) that reveal the numbers you need for the lock. The documents are scattered around the safe house, but it can be easy to overlook them.
Here’s a quick rundown of where to find each of the clues for the combination, as well as the code if you want to skip that part.
Safe House Door Clues
To open the safe house door, you’ll need numbers hidden on three documents: the Clinical Record, the Warren Commission report, the Clinical Report, and the Dallas News Article.
Clinical Record
The first document is in a hallway off the back of the safe room. With the evidence board at your back, walk around to the right side of the small office building with the blinds. You’ll see a doorway you can pass through into the hall beyond. Hanging on the left wall is the code.
Warren Commission Report
The second document is the toughest to find just because of how it’s positioned. Standing in front of the padlock, take a few steps back and look down. The report is right there under your feet–easy to blow past because it can be difficult to spot.
Dallas News Article
Look for the last document in the dark room, on the right wall as you go through the door.
Safe House Padlock Code
If you want to skip finding the clues, you can just input the code, although you might have already guessed what it is. The padlock code is 11-22-63–the date of the Kennedy assassination.
What’s Behind The Door?
Unlocking the safe house door gets you to a few surprises. You’ll find an arcade cabinet in the back area that you can actually play, as well as a computer you can log into that includes a number of programs to mess with and has text adventure games on it.
Depending on your choices through the game, opening the gate can also have an effect on Cold War’s ending, so make sure you do it before the end of the game.
Why The Kennedy Assassination Tie-In?
All these references to Kennedy have some links to Black Ops lore. In the first Black Ops game, Alex Mason is captured by Russians and brainwashed–their plan is to use him as a sleeper agent who can get close to and assassinate the president. Though the story of the first Black Ops is all about a counter-brainwashing program that sends Mason to take out the men who first tried to indoctrinate him, it’s heavily implied that Mason wasn’t able to break free of his programming and was involved in Kennedy’s murder. The inclusion of three clues related to the assassination builds on that idea.
The Kennedy tidbit isn’t the only interesting story Easter egg in Black Ops Cold War–there’s also a connection to the Modern Warfare games that’s easy to miss.
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