Category: Games

Call of Duty’s Season 5 arrives on August 12, and today’s roadmap intel reveals Warzone’s update might finally shake up the perk meta. The new season is expected to bring new points of interest to Verdansk, a Red Door in-game event, and all-new Warzone-exclusive perks.

Currently, Warzone only utilizes Modern Warfare’s perk selection, despite this year’s Cold War integration. Warzone’s current slate of perks are dominated by a select few: E.O.D., Ghost, Overkill, and Amped. However, Season 5 is set to introduce Combat Scout and Tempered, which could make a player’s perk decisions a little bit harder.

With Combat Scout, players will receive a burst of in-field intel, as damaging an enemy briefly highlights that opponent in bright orange and automatically pings them. Activision’s wording suggests that this orange highlight will only be visible to the player who activated the ping, as the description suggests the perk is stronger if the player can “communicate effectively to their squadmates.” Regardless, it would be really useful to see the highlighted positioning of the player you’ve just peppered up but couldn’t kill.

The second new perk will be Tempered, which provides more reinforced armor plates. Only two of these heavier plates are needed for a player to be “fully armored” compared to the standard three. Meaning, Tempered allows each plate to absorb 75 points of damage instead of the standard 50, but a player will only be able to wear two plates instead of three. So, basically, you get the same amount of armor, but you have one less plate to worry about.

Re-plating after a gunfight is obviously something that leaves you vulnerable, but you can plate up quickly enough that I’m not sure if this tradeoff will be worth the sacrifice, as Activision did mention this perk will come at the sacrifice of the second perk slot, which is the coveted perk Ghost/Overkill slot. Players either run Ghost to stay off the radar, or Overkill to carry a second primary weapon, and I think the benefits of both of these outweigh the usefulness of the upcoming Tempered perk.

Activision did not mention which perk slot will be used by Combat Scout, and I highly doubt they’d introduce two perks and stack them both in the second perk slot. Combat Scout could make the most waves here, but it will be interesting to see where this perk is placed. The intel it provides could be more beneficial to players than the currently used Double Time or E.O.D. first perk selections, but I’m not sure how many players would sacrifice their third perk slot. Currently, Amped is the most used and sensible choice for the third perk slot, as it provides faster weapon swap and rocket launcher reload speed. It’s a very noticeable difference in weapon swap time if you’re not running this perk.

Surprisingly, the Season 5 intel didn’t mention changes to the High Alert perk. Raven Software previously teased these two new Warzone-exclusive perks would be coming, but also announced High Alert would be updated to counter the Dead Silent field upgrade. Maybe that will still arrive sometime later in the season.

It will be interesting to see how much these new additions will affect the perk meta with Season 5’s arrival. And we’ll update our best perks guide, if any of these new additions dethrone Warzone’s current perk champions.

Ahead of the Back 4 Blood beta, we got to go hands-on with the upcoming cooperative zombie killing shooter from developer Turtle Rock. In our time with the game, we only got hands-on with the PvE campaign. But afterwards, I sat down with Turtle Rock executive producer Lianne Papp to talk about all aspects of Back 4 Blood, including its PvP Swarm mode, which Papp describes as “snackable” (a term I will be stealing and using to describe many games from now on).

Swarm mode is a best-of-three-rounds competition, in which two teams of four go up against one another. One side plays as the human Cleaners who need to survive as long as possible, while the other is composed of the zombie-like Ridden that must kill all the Cleaners as quickly as possible.

Between each round, teams switch sides and the winner is whichever team manages to get the best score. According to Papp, there’s no concrete time limit to the rounds. Theoretically, they could go on for a very long time. But the mode remains a snackable escape because rounds are designed to prevent the overall matches from going on too long.

“As the Cleaners, you’re in this arena that’s constantly shrinking and so you have a little bit of a time limit from the standpoint that it’s going to get so tiny that it’s just absolute chaos if you’re still alive,” Papp told me.

“We like [Swarm’s] format a lot. I stole this term from someone else in the industry and I’m going to make it a thing because I love it. It’s a very ‘snackable’ game mode. You can just jump in, play those rounds, and you’re done. And it can be anywhere from five minutes–if you’re very unevenly matched–to 15 minutes.”

The overall design of each PvP map helps in this regard as well. According to Papp, the team was “very intentional about what maps can actually be played in PvP,” ensuring that the Cleaners will eventually be overrun and defeated by the Ridden despite their best efforts.

At launch, all players will be paired together, as Back 4 Blood will not launch with a separate ranked playlist. You have the option of playing PvE or PvP, and that’s it. Back 4 Blood will support cross-play at launch too, putting all players into the same PvP pot, even across console and PC.

“By default, if you leave everything the way that we have it, you will cross-play with everyone,” Papp said. “So that’s current gen–Xbox One, PS4–and next gen. You can choose to turn that off if you want. We do mix [console players] into the PC pool as well–we went ahead and made it one big pot–but if you want to turn that off, you absolutely can.”

If jumping into PvP seems intimidating, or it’s just not what you want from a cooperative zombie-killing game, you don’t have to engage with it. It’s completely optional and Turtle Rock hasn’t tied any of Back 4 Blood’s narrative elements to it. “[Swarm] is just a game mode,” Papp said. “[It’s] more focused on getting in and destroying each other.”

Instead, the overall narrative of Back 4 Blood plays out in the PvE campaign. Similar to games like Left 4 Dead (which Turtle Rock also developed) and World War Z, Back 4 Blood doesn’t primarily deliver its narrative through traditional cutscenes. The game seems to use emergent storytelling, relying on dialogue between the characters and details in the environment to paint a picture of what’s going on. “We don’t want to take control away from the player, force the game to pause, and have you watch a whole cinematic,” Papp said.

When we played Back 4 Blood during the preview, we noticed that this meant there wasn’t much feeling of camaraderie between the playable characters–in the first few levels anyway, there were no substantial character arcs or noteworthy developments in interpersonal relationships. The characters felt a little flat and stereotypically generic for the zombie-killing game genre–they mostly spouted one-liners at each other or apologized for accidentally shooting their teammates in the back of the head.

But where the individual Cleaners fall short, the world delivers. Back 4 Blood’s environments are full of details to unearth. There’s graffiti to notice, random notes to look over, safe houses to explore. And these details translate into worthwhile information that informs the gameplay, rewarding you for taking the time to pay attention. As an example, we finished a level by reaching a small safehouse that had a crude drawing of an Ogre on the wall, with painted warnings of where a previous group of survivors had run into it. The miniboss appeared in the next level, but we were prepared for it because we saw the graffiti and heeded the warnings.

Intriguingly, Papp teased that Back 4 Blood will go beyond the character dialogue and world details to tell its story but would not reveal what that might look like. “There will be more to the storytelling–we won’t go into details now, you’ll have to see at launch–but it’s mostly through dialogue,” she said.

We won’t have too much longer to wait to see what Papp means. Back 4 Blood is scheduled to launch for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, and PC on October 12. The game will also be available on Xbox Game Pass on day one.

In Destiny 2, few moments are more infuriating than seeing a Titan charging you in the Crucible and hitting the melee button, expecting your character to whip out a deadly throwing knife–and instead watching as your Guardian commits to a much less effectual stab attack, putting you in perfect position to get erased by a shotgun blast. Thankfully, starting next season, it’s possible no Destiny 2 player will ever experience such disappointment again.

Staring in Season 15, Bungie is instituting a change that will allow players to separate their “charged” melee abilities–those that exist on a cooldown, like the Hunter’s throwing knife–and their standard, uncharged melee attack (essentially just punching an enemy for a middling amount of damage) onto different inputs. It’s one of a long list of changes coming to player abilities Bungie detailed in its This Week At Bungie blog post, most of which will see buffs and nerfs applied to grenades, melee attacks, and Super abilities next season.

While the melee change is a nice tweak, it’s the many adjustments to the speed and damage of abilities that’s going to have a major effect on Destiny 2 in Season 15. Bungie is adding penalties to sliding around the battlefield, for instance, which is a major tactic in PvP matches in particular. A lot of players use the short-range slide ability to close gaps, get to cover, and wallop unsuspecting opponents, and you’ll often see players who do nothing but slide throughout a match. Bungie’s looking to lessen sliding’s advantage, and in Season 15, you’ll incur a penalty to weapon stability and an increase in shotgun pellet spread when you slide, making it more of a tactical tradeoff to hit the dirt.

Bungie recently made tweaks to a host of Stasis abilities, the new powers introduced in the Beyond Light expansion, to balance them in the PvP arena known as the Crucible. Some of those tweaks are being, uh, tweaked again in Season 15. Hunters’ Silence and Squall Supers are being made slightly more effective–they generate a freezing whirlwind that tracks players, but currently, that whirlwind moves so slowly that most players largely ignore it. The squall’s speed is getting boosted to make it a bit more threatening, and Bungie is increasing the speed and tracking of Hunters’ Stasis melee ability, Withering Blade, which previously saw a nerf that Bungie now says was a bit too much.

For Titans, the speed of the Shiver Strike melee attack that’s part of the Glacial Quake Super is getting buffed, bringing it up 25%. That’s in response to slowing the move down in a previous patch. When Stasis first came on the scene, Titans were able to use Shiver Strike to dart around PvP maps. The previous nerf lessened that capability, but Bungie says it went too far, and the increase in speed should make the attack more viable and feel better.

Finally, Warlocks’ Stasis Super is being toned down a bit. Currently, the Winter’s Wrath Super is strong enough that Warlocks are able to easily take out other players, even if they’re also using their Super–Winter’s Wrath allows the Warlock to freeze the opponent and then shatter them in one hit, usually at a pretty significant distance. Bungie is making Winter’s Wrath less effective against close-range melee Supers that force players to close the gap on an opponent in order to do any damage, which should give other players more of a fighting chance against Shadebinder Warlocks. In Season 15, if you’re using a melee Super, a Warlock using Winter’s Wrath will need to freeze and shatter you twice to kill you, instead of just once.

There are a whole host of other changes coming as well, beyond just the tweaks to Stasis. Standing out on the list are adjustments and nerfs coming to Warlocks’ Dawnblade class, which is currently dominant in the PvP arena. The “top-tree” Dawnblade loadout favors players who fight while in the air, conveying a dodge ability that lets players zip around while airborne to avoid incoming fire and become seriously difficult to deal with. Bungie is nerfing some of those top-tree Dawnblade abilities somewhat, while increasing the subclass’s reliance on aerial combat, which should require Warlocks to develop a little more skill to use the class to its fullest potential. The tweaks are increasing air dash cooldown so players can’t use them quite so often, reducing the tracking and explosion radius on Warlocks’ Celestial Fire melee ability, and causing players to show up on enemy radar whenever they use their airborne “Heat Rises” buff.

You can check out the rest of Bungie’s changes in its blog post. Season 15 starts in Destiny 2 on August 24, which is also the date of Bungie’s next Destiny 2 showcase. That should provide a whole lot of new information about future seasons and the game’s next upcoming expansion, The Witch Queen, which is set to launch in early 2022.

One of the most noteworthy new features in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War‘s big new Season 5 update is a new mode called Double Agent. Similar to Among Us and Trouble in Terrorist Town, Double Agent is a game of cat-and-mouse, of sorts, as Double Agent characters try to sabotage a mission and stay cloaked.

This is a new mode for Call of Duty in general. There are 10 players in a match, and players are assigned to one of three roles. You can see a rundown of the roles and their missions below, as written by Activision:

• Double Agents, who must either eliminate everyone else or successfully set off explosive charges around the map.
• The Investigator, who can use clues to target suspected Double Agents as Wanted criminals.
• Operatives, who must work together to identify and eliminate the Double Agents before it’s too late.

Players begin with a pistol and can add more firepower in the “Preparing Stage” of the match by finding weapons on the map. Double Agents can a variety of tools to stay hidden, including gas mines, counter spy plans, combat bows, and attack helicopters.

Investigators can use trophy systems, stimshots, and hand cannons; they also can see the footprints of a the person who killed their teammate to help in their detective work. Investigators are also able to designate someone as “suspicious” and launch a Wanted order against them.

Meanwhile, regular Operative players need to then work together to piece the clues together and discover the true identity of Double Agents. Working together by voice chat is strongly encouraged. Double Agent is playable in matchmaking or by creating your own custom lobby with friends. Double Agent matches take place on existing maps and new ones coming in Season 5.

Season 5 is a huge update for Black Ops Cold War and Warzone. In addition to Double Agent, it ushers in five more multiplayer maps, three new Operators, more weapons, and potentially teasers for Call of Duty: Vanguard. Check out GameSpot’s Black Ops Cold War/Warzone Season 5 overview to learn more.

Get ready for new game announcements and sneak peaks at upcoming releases during the second /twitchgaming Showcase: ID@Xbox on August 10. Details here: https://t.co/du4uwYiJKO

— Xbox Wire (@XboxWire) August 5, 2021

FunKon 2021 is here. With the toy event happening now, you’ll have plenty of exclusive Funkon 2021 Funkos to choose from (if you can catch them before they sell out, that is). Below, we have a rundown on all the FunKon-exclusive figures and where to buy them. And if you scroll down further, you’ll find some of the other coolest upcoming Funko Pop figures you can preorder now.

FunKon 2021 Exclusives

A number of FunKon 2021 exclusive Funko Pops will be available to everyone at a variety of retailers starting at 6am PT / 9am ET on August 5. You can see which figures will be available at which retailers in the image above, and find links to the landing pages below.

• See at Amazon
• See at GameStop
• See at Walmart
• See at Barnes & Noble

• See at BoxLunch
• See at Funko
• See at Entertainment Earth
• See at Hot Topic
• See at Target
• See at FYE
• See at Walgreens
• See at Toy Tokyo

There will also be a series of Funko bags available exclusively at Loungefly.com.

If you’re looking for upcoming Funko Pops unrelated to Funkon 2021, ones you can preorder now, keep on reading. You’ll find Funkos based on Loki, Suicide Squad, and more.

Loki Funko Pop

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Many people consider Loki the best Marvel/Disney+ show yet. If you were a fan, you can pick up some great-looking Funkos.

Spider-Man: No Way Home Funko Pop

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Spider-Man: No Way Home is set to release in December, but you can preorder these figures from the movie, which will feature the cool new costumes shown here.

Suicide Squad Funko Pop

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This James Gun-directed film is set to launch in theaters and on HBO Max on August 6. You can preorder the great-looking Funko Pops now.

TMNT 2: Secret of the Ooze Funko Pop

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Nineties kids will remember Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze, a movie that hit theaters in the halcyon days of 1991. These Pops reference memorable moments in the movie.

FunKon 2021 Details

FunKon 2021 will be a hybrid event that takes place both virtually and in person. The virtual portion will be a series of events, livestreams, giveaways, and games–and participation is based on a lottery system (see below). The in-person portion of the event will take place at Funko Hollywood in Los Angeles. Pre-registration has already been filled. You can find the full details of Funkon 2021 on Funko’s blog.

If you want a shot at participating in the virtual events of FunKon 2021 (and the guaranteed purchase of any of the FunKon 2021 Funkos), you’ll need to enter a lottery. There are a few catches, though. To qualify for the lottery, you need to have made a Funko account and joined the Funko Fan Club before May 31, 2021. That date has already passed, so if you don’t have an account, you can sign up now to be eligible for next year’s lottery.

If you have an account and you’ve signed up for the Funko newsletter, you should have received a lottery invitation on July 19. Just follow the instructions in the email to sign up for the lottery. If you’re a winner, you’ll be notified on July 28, 2021.

Additionally, Walmart has a page dedicated to its Collector Con event, which runs July 22-25. That’s where you’ll find new reveals, as well as rare and exclusive collectibles with franchises like Star Wars, Marvel, DC, WWE, Transformers, and many more.

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Chris Reed is a commerce editor for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.

Evil Dead: The Game, a multiplayer-focused video game adaptation of the cult-classic Evil Dead film franchise and Starz television series Ash vs. Evil Dead, has been delayed to February 2022. First revealed during 2020’s The Game Awards, Evil Dead: The Game was originally slated to release sometime in 2021 for PC and consoles.

The game, developed by Boss Team Games and Saber Interactive, is being delayed so the teams can have more time to polish the title for release “to ensure this is the ultimate Evil Dead experience you’ve all been waiting for.” That time will also allow the developers to implement a single-player option.

Much of Evil Dead: The Game’s gameplay has put a spotlight on co-op action, as players take on the role of various iconic characters from the franchise, including Bruce Campbell’s chainsaw-wielding Ash. There are options for PvP as well, with players able to take control of the Kandarian Demon and possess various enemies to give the heroes a run for their money. No additional details on how the game’s newly announced single-player feature will work have been made public.

The best look at the game yet came during Geoff Keighley’s 2021 Summer Game Fest, where a new, bloody gameplay trailer gave fans an idea of what to expect. The title follows in the footsteps of other horror film franchises turned multiplayer-focused video games like Predator: Hunting Grounds and Friday the 13th: The Game. A similar asymmetric multiplayer title, Dead by Daylight, has found big success incorporating characters from throughout the horror genre, including Evil Dead and, most recently, Resident Evil.

We’ve seen bits and pieces of Axiom Verge 2 over the years, but this latest trailer from Thomas Happ Games shows off one of the game’s more impressive additions. According to a post on the PlayStation Blog, the metroidvania sequel will feature a second dimension that lies behind the default map, meaning that the game has a Link to the Past-style “dark world”/”light world” dynamic.

In the post, Happ says that players will have to find entrances to this “breach” dimension in the overworld in order to uncover secrets in both dimensions. The Metroidvania platformer The Messenger featured a similar idea, where one realm was styled on 8-bit games and the other realm was 16-bit. However, given that Axiom Verge was a game about exploration, it’s fair to say that this breach is going to be a big part of the game.

The trailer revealed today shows off many elements you would expect to see in an Axiom Verge sequel, including a glitchy aesthetic and the ability to manipulate enemies to better achieve your goals. There’s still no word on a release date for Axiom Verge 2, but the blog post does say that it’ll be “out before you know it,” whatever that means. The game was originally intended to come out in 2020, but was delayed due to the pandemic and the increased complexity of the game compared to its predecessor. Axiom Verge 2 will release for PS4, PS5, PC, and Nintendo Switch when it does come out. We recently got word that fellow indie darling Oxenfree will be coming to PS4 and PS5 later this year; its sequel, Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals, is also coming soon.