EA CEO Andrew Wilson told investors “you should think of Battlefield as a service,” indicating the direction the popular first-person multiplayer shooter will take with the upcoming Battlefield 2042.
“I think that is our orientation. But more important, I think you should think of Battlefield as a service,” Wilson said during EA’s Q1 FY 2022 investors call on Wednesday.
Notably, EA did not clarify whether or not the Battlefield franchise will release every other year like previous entries. The implication is that EA will continue to treat Battlefield like an ongoing ecosystem that sees regular updates.
Wilson pointed to EA’s continuing shift to live service-focused games for the future throughout the investors call, saying games like Battlefield 2042 will “reinvent what our epic scale games are.”
With the recent announcement of Battlefield 2042’s Portal mode, which allows players to create custom matches combining wildly different eras of Battlefield weaponry and mechanics, it appears EA is hoping user-created content will spur long-term, continuous growth for the franchise.
“This really forms the foundation for what we think the future of Battlefield is,” Wilson said, adding that different versions of Battlefield, including an upcoming mobile release, will “change the nature of what happens from launch to launch” and that EA aims to focus on “365 day engagement on a platform level.”
Most modern MMOs have their own take on the usual questing, exploring, and dungeon crawling, with player-versus-player combat as an afterthought, but Crowfall skirts all of that entirely. Instead, it focuses on relatively short PvP campaigns that last for at least 30 days – seasons, basically – that are meant to culminate in full-on, guild-vs.-guild warfare by the end. If you stick with it that long you might even experience a siege or a fortress battle. And if you’re especially lucky, you might even get to build your own realm. However, much like the similarly PvP-centric EVE Online or older games like Dark Age of Camelot, it’s unlikely that the average person will ever get to do that without joining the most powerful guild on the server – or being willing to pay for the privilege of decking out your custom realm via Crowfall’s cash shop.
Crowfall’s single best feature is its character creator. Among the 12 fantasy races and 11 classes are some genuinely interesting picks, like the giant Stoneborn and the gerbil-esque Guineceans. All of them offer totally unique abilities and the class system is versatile, allowing you to switch your role on the fly by slotting Major and Minor Disciplines in and out at any time. This system is especially robust thanks to the highly detailed Crowpedia, which you can pull up directly from the talent tree menu and get an overview of each area of specializations your classes, races, and Disciplines can follow. There is a bewildering quantity of traits and abilities you can mix and match, and it’s always fun to play around with and experiment with different traits. It’s also cool that each class also features three different Promotion Classes, which are subclasses that allow you to push your customization that much further.
However, all that choice doesn’t always amount to a great experience in the end.
There’s an introductory leveling arc from one to 30 that encompasses the tutorial, and it’s pretty short in practice. But the thing MMO fans have to be aware of is that this tutorial is the only place in Crowfall in which you’ll find any quests at all – and even then, they only amount to basic “run here, do this” kind of stuff at best. While it’s important for you to learn your class before being trusted to lead a full-blown siege, this whole tutorial section feels like a meaningless buffer. For one, until close to the very end, it’s only teaching you how your class operates when fighting small groups of PvE enemies and no other players.
It’s great then that with subsequent alt characters, you can simply use the Sacrifice mechanic – where you can sacrifice items and gold to shrines in exchange for experience points – to simply exchange your way back up to level 30. But this is hindered by the fact that sacrificing too many items at once and reaching the next level stops you from receiving more experience points. That’s right: if you drop an entire pile of gold into the sacrifice altar, you only receive enough experience to level up one time. If you use too much at once, that’s too bad, because the rest of the stack disappears into the ether. You can work around this by deliberately splitting up your items and planning it all out, but the fact that you would need to do that 29 separate times to go from one to 30, is a testament to how clunky this interface is.
But even if you train your character all the way up to that level by doing the PvE tutorial content, once you get out into the PvP zones, it’s clear just how unprepared you actually are to fight other players without switching up your playstyle or even reworking your entire class specializations. Builds that promised to be interesting against the AI enemies you fought in the tutorial quickly melt down into min-max territory, since domination in PvP combat ultimately boils down to who can hit the hardest the fastest, and who has the numbers on their side.
Since the tutorial skims over the important facets of guild-vs.-guild and faction-vs.-faction warfare, it’s easy to immediately feel lost if you weren’t taking notes. There’s really no bridge between Crowfall’s tutorial and Crowfall itself; you have to find one in the form of other players, and this is hit or miss. What I soon discovered is that whether you have any fun in Crowfall is determined by how much you’re willing to grind, and the most interesting facets of Crowfall’s endgame – castle and keep conquests, and the Eternal Kingdom system where you can eventually design your own zone – are locked behind a herculean undertaking of many players grinding in organized repetition.
Or you can just join a faction and run around in the Skypoint zone and its neighbors, like The Solarium and The Arboretum, where you can casually gank other players. But this is boring, since Skypoint is a small zone without much room for any kind of tactical engagements, often leaving you running in circles while you capture the same points and kill the same group of players for loot and gold. Strongholds exist in Skypoint, but they’re not quite as captivating or rewarding to engage with as their endgame counterparts.
A step up from Skypoint is the faction-vs.-faction game mode called The Shadow, which is theoretically more player-friendly than the guild-vs.-guild-focused endgame, but ends up falling flat in that regard. On one hand, it’s impossible to coordinate with the rest of your faction in-game if nobody is responding to the specific “Faction” chat channel. If that’s the case, good luck organizing at all, since the maximum number of players you can invite to your party is six. Even if you do manage to coordinate enough support, you still need to wait hours or potentially days for the next keep to become available to siege.
On the other hand, despite The Shadow being a supposed “bridge” between the tutorial and The Dregs, it’s easy to spin your wheels here for hours with very little to show for it. This is especially aggravating given that the rewards you get for winning an entire 30+-day faction-vs.-faction campaign are equivalent to what you can earn from a few hours of farming low-effort targets in The Dregs. For this reason, most guilds worth their salt will still end up steering clear of The Shadow anyway, other than to troll new players – which completely defeats the purpose of having an “easily accessible” faction-vs.-faction mode in the first place.
As it stands, the real end game is supposed to begin in Crowfall’s guild-vs.-guild area, called The Dregs. Again, if you’re the kind of MMO player who likes to go solo most of the time, you need not apply. In fact, everything in Crowfall’s guild-vs.-guild area is designed to be effectively inaccessible to solo players. But the shift into joining a guild – let alone finding one that’s both welcoming and active – is jarring when first ascending out of the unclear and monotonous tutorial section.
But okay, let’s assume you’ve gotten your group together: it still doesn’t seem like there’s much to do besides rove around the open world and gank smaller groups of players while capturing outposts and attempting to dominate parts of the various disconnected zones located across your server. That might be entertaining enough for a few hours, but it doesn’t hold up for long. The only two meaningful alternatives to this are sitting in a circle and harvesting ore and wood for hours to build your guild’s stockpile, or farming the same boring elite enemies and bosses for loot.
That’d be fine if any of those systems were fun to engage with, but they’re simply not. For a game that is so focused on PvP above all else, Crowfall’s battles lack a feeling of rhythm and deliberate pacing. You can simply hold the left mouse button near an enemy and it will eventually die. In Crowfall’s best moments, it’s slippery; at worst, it’s brain-numbing.
Despite all of the different skills and abilities I could dole out to my character through the Discipline system to liven up my humble Guinecean Duelist – or my later alt, my Stoneborn Champion – each and every battle boiled down to a frantic button mash where I held my left mouse button down while randomly tapping the assortment of DPS abilities on my hotbar, some of which at least used a secondary resource called Pips that would refresh intermittently as I attacked. However, this was still too lenient to afford any interesting interplay to my skills, especially since none of them needed to preempt one another in order, a la Final Fantasy 14. Some Major Disciplines – equippable skill sets that can augment your class – do offer up combo skills that need to fire off in sequence, but it still takes a lot of extra work to find the right match of Disciplines that keep your character effective and fun to play.
Granted, Duelist is a class that is supposed to be able to do a ton of melee or ranged damage in a short period of time, but playing as one gets old quickly; every fight in the open world boils down to a skirmish where you and your opponents basically slide around and whittle one another’s health bars to zero without much more strategy, nuance, or class interplay beyond the basic “Healers heal, tanks take a lot of damage, DPS stabs things.” This simplicity undermines all that aforementioned customization that makes the character creation so interesting.
The only clear caveats here are the Ranger class, which can see much further than the average character, and the Assassin’s (and the gerbil-like Guinecean’s) ability to move around undetected by enemy players. Both of these feats make it viable for some players to slip off to the side and go on scouting missions, which is interesting in theory, but doesn’t actually help much once the fighting starts if your side is grossly outnumbered, and especially if the opposite team has the funds to bring in siege weaponry.
Crowfall might’ve been onto something here with its player-versus-player metagame as well, but the unfortunate reality is that there’s a deep, empty divide between the repetitive tasks that make up the nuts and bolts of what you’re actually doing moment-to-moment compared to the theoretically much more interesting Eternal Kingdom system and siege events. Those are dotted across each map, beckoning you to join them, but they only happen at specific times of the week and are only really available to hardcore players: yes, it’s possible for a casual group to eventually work their way up to building an empire in Eternal Kingdom or fighting in castle sieges in the Dregs, but good luck with that. On paper you can earn it, but in practice it’d take weeks of organized effort, harvesting materials in the wilderness, and repeatedly grinding outposts and forts around the clock for a reasonably-sized guild of at least 30-40 players to even touch upon the interesting parts of the endgame, let alone win a campaign. Sure, you can always join the biggest guild on the server and coast on their success, but that’s hardly a great solution considering that the whole appeal of Crowfall in the first place is building up your own guild and guiding it to success.
At least these zones look great: Crowfall’s minimalist art style is colorful and clean, making it simple to parse in the heat of the action. But the animations are stiff if not downright cheesy, aggravating the earlier issues I mentioned I had with the combat system.
Crowfall’s interface is clean-looking as well, but it doesn’t function as well as it first appears. The map is difficult to make heads or tails of, and that makes coordinating with your allies tougher than it should be. It’s extremely minimalistic, forcing you to scroll over its various quadrants and call out coordinates to your teammates in order to figure out where they are if there are more than six of you playing together at once.
On top of that, Crowfall’s in-game text chat system is not viable for communicating with your party or to your broader faction or guild when you’re trying to coordinate anything in the moment. This is because you need to tab all the way to your inventory screen in order to switch chat channels. And, instead of collating them together, there’s a unique channel for each type of communication, making it easy to completely ignore critical messages from your faction or guildmates if you simply leave the default General channel open. Worse, the built-in voice chat system rarely works at all. If you can, go with Discord or some other app to talk to your friends as you play.
And it goes without saying that your experience hinges upon who you play with. The right group of players (if you can find it) will make this process much more enjoyable. Crowfall can be the type of game where you turn off your brain, sit around with a group of friends, and joke around while grinding your way through The Dregs or Skypoint. The fact that it’s possible to lose all of your loot when you die – especially in The Dregs, where it can take a long time to cover ground – adds just enough tension to make things interesting for a group of engaged players, and I was lucky enough to find my way into a rather casual guild that did exactly that. But I stumbled around for almost a week and a half, skipping from one inactive guild to another, before I finally discovered this group that actually seemed to genuinely enjoy Crowfall despite all its faults.
We love us a good many-things-for-less bargain, and so that’s our discount theme for today. Because you know what? Some franchises are just worth owning in their entirety. Case in point(s): the Batman Arkham, Trine, BioShock, Tomb Raider, Contra, Borderlands, Mass Effect and Halo series. They’re all here, and they’re all priced to own.
As James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad heads to theaters, one thing that has become clear from the trailers is that Task Force X is going to have to battle Starro at some point during the course of this misadventure.
Who? Why, Starro the Conqueror, of course. Otherwise known as the very first supervillain the Justice League ever battled and one of the most powerful psychics in the DC Universe. But if you need to brush up on your giant starfish lore, we’re here to help. We’ll break down the colorful history of this very odd villain and why he’s making his live-action debut in a Suicide Squad sequel of all places. These are the topics we cover here…
Some villains are exactly who and what they appear to be. Starro is a gigantic alien parasite who resembles a starfish. His never-ending thirst for conquest has taken him from one end of the DCU to the other, seeking out worlds to enslave. Between his enormous size, his prodigious psychic powers, and his ability to spawn millions of spores, Starro is all but an unstoppable force. Fortunately for Earth, the Justice League has always managed to find a way to loosen Starro’s suction-cupped grip on the planet. We wouldn’t be so optimistic about Amanda Waller’s band of D-Listers managing the same feat in The Suicide Squad.
Starro made his original debut in 1960’s The Brave and the Bold #28, the issue that also introduced comic readers to the Justice League of America. Whereas the DCEU and DC’s contemporary comics depict Darkseid as the all-encompassing threat that brings together Earth’s most powerful heroes for the first time, back in the day a giant, psychic starfish was the only call to action Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash, Green Lantern and Martian Manhunter needed (Batman and Superman couldn’t be bothered).
Starro’s creation is credited to writer Gardner Fox and artist Mike Sekowsky, though editor Julius Schwartz also contributed to the original Starro conception. Schwartz once indicated the “Starro the Conqueror” name was inspired by Ray Cummings’ sci-fi novel Tarrano the Conqueror, which deals with a Machiavellian alien who plots to conquer worlds through strategic assassinations. Interestingly, the character Tarrano as he’s depicted on the book’s cover bears more than a passing resemblance to Green Lantern’s arch-rival Sinestro.
As for why the creators opted for a giant starfish, that seems to have been yet another case of DC tapping into the monster movie craze of the time, specifically the growing popularity of Godzilla and other Japanese kaiju characters. DC fans have pointed out the clear similarities between Starro’s design and the starfish monsters from 1956’s Warning From Space, so that may have played a part in Starro’s creation.
Thanks to his ability to asexually reproduce, Starro has a habit of cheating death, nursing himself back to full size, and returning to threaten Earth all over again. The character has served as an infrequently recurring villain over the decades, appearing in various Justice League comics as well as other titles like Adventure Comics, Teen Titans and REBELS. Little by little, DC has revealed more about the villain’s unusual background and even pushed the self-styled “Conqueror” in a more heroic direction.
Starro’s Powers and Abilities
Starro has all the strength and durability you’d expect from a kaiju-sized starfish, along with other powers like flight, energy manipulation, and regeneration. So long as some piece of his body survives, Starro will always eventually grow back to full health.
His greatest strength, however, is his psychic talent. Starro is a telepath who can control the minds of others, even powerful heroes like Green Lantern. Starro can also spawn millions of smaller duplicates of himself, which can then attach themselves to his prey and control their bodies so long as they remain bonded. Basically, Starro combines all the worst things about kaiju and the Xenomorphs of the Alien franchise.
Normally, Starro in his full-grown form is several hundred feet tall – enough to knock over buildings and generally wreak havoc on major cities. But in some cases, he’s grown large enough to cover entire oceans and terraform planets.
Fortunately for Earth’s heroes, Starro has a few weaknesses that are easily exploitable. Often these weaknesses seem to be completely arbitrary plot devices. For example, in his original battle with the Justice League, the team’s obligatory, useless sidekick Snapper Carr saves the day because his quicklime-covered body proves immune to Starro’s powers. In a later battle, Starro receives a power boost by drawing in polluted water, only for Aquaman to turn the tables by summoning a flood of clean water.
While traditionally DC has used the names “Starro” and “Starro the Conqueror” pretty much interchangeably, it was only fairly recently that fans learned the two are actually different characters. As revealed in the 2009 REBELS comic from writer Tony Bedard, the real Starro the Conqueror isn’t a starfish at all. He’s a humanoid alien who managed to bend an entire race of parasitic starfish to his will.
According to this revamped origin story, originally Starro’s race consisted of waves of mindless, nomadic parasites who traveled the galaxy in search of civilizations to turn into helpless slaves. These aliens finally meet their match when they attempt to conquer the planet Hatorei, which is populated by a race of peaceful, psychically connected beings. One of the Hatorei, Cobi, is driven mad by the destruction of his homeworld and is able to psychically overpower the Starro attached to his face. Using that Starro as a link to the others, Cobi is able to psychically bend the entire race to his will. He becomes Starro the Conqueror – the true power behind an endless armada of parasitic starfish.
That story played out shortly before DC partly rebooted its comic book line with the New 52, so it’s unclear whether this revamped approach to Starro still holds true in 2021. He may be back to just being a giant, psychic starfish with a gluttonous appetite.
Starro has undergone another major transformation in recent years, pivoting away from his traditional villain role to become an ally to the Justice League. That evolution begins in 2018’s Justice League: No Justice, which features a united team of Earth’s greatest heroes and villains responding to the fallout of Dark Nights: Metal. After spending some psychic bonding time with Martian Manhunter, Starro feels the call to be a hero. He makes good on that desire when he helps save Brainiac’s people, the Coluans, from an all-powerful Omega Titan. Starro tries and fails to take over the Titan’s body, only to be ripped to pieces. However, his heroic sacrifice buys enough time for the Coluans to evacuate their world.
That’s not the end of Starro’s tale. Batman is able to save a piece of the starfish’s body, which he nurtures in a jar. That reborn, pint-sized Starro becomes known as “Jarro,” basically the Justice League’s answer to Baby Groot. Jarro even refers to Batman as “Dad” and dreams of one day becoming the new Robin. No one has the heart to tell Jarro what usually becomes of Robins after a year or two on the job.
Starro in TV and Games
Given his massive size and unusual appearance, it should probably come as no surprise that Starro has yet to make a proper live-action appearance. To date, we’ve only seen cameos of and references to this villain on shows like Arrow, The Flash, Smallville, and Powerless. However, Starro does have a long history of appearing in DC’s animated projects (both TV series and DVD movies) and video games.
TV: Starro’s first TV appearance came in an episode of 1967’s The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure. He later popped up in Superman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond and Young Justice. However, Starro’s biggest role to date has been in Batman: The Brave and the Bold (voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson) where he becomes the main villain of Season 2.
Games: Starro has served as a boss character in DC games like the Nintendo Wii version of Batman: The Brave and the Bold and DC Universe Online, and has cameoed in games like Injustice: Gods Among Us and Batman: Arkham Knight. Only one game – the MOBA title Infinite Crisis – actually allows gamers to play as Starro.
We’ve finally reached the era where a giant psychic starfish is just par for the course in a big-budget superhero movie. Starro will play a role in The Suicide Squad, though whether he’s meant to be the film’s main villain or just one foe among many is unclear.
Based on what we know about the plot of The Suicide Squad, Task Force X is sent on a search-and-destroy mission to the politically unstable nation of Corto Maltese. In the comics, Corto Maltese houses a top-secret laboratory/prison called Jotunheim, which houses a number of top-secret experiments and weapons dating back to the Nazis. We can probably assume a Starro specimen is being kept in the lab. And given that these mercenaries aren’t exactly the brightest bulbs in the supervillain box, one of them will probably set Starro free by accident. How will a crew of expendable killers with mostly minor super-powers stop a being as powerful as Starro the Conqueror? That should be interesting to see.
Based on the poster above, it also seems Peter Capaldi’s character, The Thinker, is somehow connected to Starro. Given that The Thinker uses his custom-built “thinking cap” to control the minds of others, it may be that his powers are derived from Starro. Or it could be that Clifford DeVoe is forcibly recruited for the mission because his cap makes him one of the few resistant to Starro’s powers.
DC didn’t reveal Starro’s existence in the film until the first trailer debuted. Given that we still don’t know who or what Taika Waititi is playing in the movie, we could easily see him providing the voice of Starro. After previously playing Korg in the MCU and IG-11 on The Mandalorian, voicing a psychic starfish may be the only logical next step for Waititi.
Today you can save 25%-30% off two excellent games, Super Smash Bros Ultimate for the Nintendo Switch and Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade for the PS5. In other deal news, save over 50% off the Razer Hammerhead truly wireless earbuds (bigger discount than yesterday), score a Lenovo Legion 7i gaming tower with RTX 3070 video card for only $1599, or preorder the new flagship Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 49″ Mini LED gaming monitor and get a $300 pair of JBL headphones for free. These deals and more below.
One of the most rarely discounted Switch games has dropped in price by about 25% today. Super Smash Bros Ultimate is, in my opinion, the best “party” game you can get for the Nintendo Switch and is easily the most comprehensive Smash Bros game to date with a whopping 76 character roster and over 100 levels to choose from. This is a game that everyone should have in his or her collection, especially at this price.
Save 30% off the PS5 exclusive Intergrade edition. This edition brings plenty of updates to the table, including a brand new episode featuring Yuffie. Some quality of life changes include a performance mode that bumps up the frame rate to 60fps, support for the PS5 DualSense haptic feedback, and improved texture, lighting, and environments (no more ugly doors).
The Pro Controller normally sells for $69.99 everywhere, but Amazon has it for $59 (17% off). Apart from Joy-Cons, this is the only officially licensed wireless Switch controller that supports motion controls, HD rumble, and built-in amiibo functionality. It’s also the preferred controller for Super Smash Bros Ultimate, which is on sale today.
The Razer Hammerhead truly wireless earbuds is over 50% off today at Amazon. These gaming-centric earbuds feature 13mm drivers with ample amounts of bass, low latency, IPX4 rating for sweat and water resistance, up to 15 hours of battery life.
This Lenovo gaming PC is actually sold and shipped from Lenovo direct, but through Newegg. This is the best price we’ve seen on an RTX 3070 equipped Lenovo Legion 7i tower. It’s paired with the new 11th generation Intel Core i7-11700K unlocked 8-core processor, 16GB of memory, and a generous 1TB solid state drive. The RTX 3070 is a beast of a video card; it’s slightly more powerful than the previous generation RTX 2080 SUPER.
Now you can take R2-D2 wherever you go as a cute little tamagotchi. Take care of your little droid by keeping him charged, cleaning him, and teaching him up to 19 different skills with a variety of mini-games. Of course there are dire consequences if you neglect your job in keeping R2-D2 happy.
Sony WH1000XM4 Active Noise Cancelling Wireless Bluetooh Headphones
The ever popular and highly rated Sony WH1000XM4 headphones are back down to $278 from its original $350 price point (21% off). This is the newest generation of Sony’s best sounding noise-cancelling headphones and the active noise cancellation and audio quality are equal to that of the best Bose QuietComfort headphones, which is currently $100 more.
Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 49-Inch Mini LED Gaming Monitor – The Best Gaming Monitor Around
Preorder the Samsung Neo G9 gaming monitor (out on August 23), and get the JBL Quantum One Gaming Headset for free. That’s a $300 headset. This is the first Mini LED gaming monitor we’ve seen and easily the best monitor in Samsung’s “Odyssey” series. Mini LED technology is pretty new. You’ll see them in the highest end Samsung and TCL TVs as well as the newest Apple iPad Pro 12.9″ XDR display. The cost keeps 99% of us gamers at bay, but for those who can afford it, you currently won’t find a better monitor.
This is a great gaming monitor at an outstanding price. For only $250 you’re getting a 32″ LG UltraGear monitor with QHD (2560×1440) resolution, 1ms response time, 165Hz refresh rate a,d AMD FreeSync compatibility. The VA panel makes it both a good gaming and workstation monitor thanks to its wide viewing angles.
This portable hard drive adds more storage to your PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. Portable drives are much smaller than their desktop hard drive siblings and require no additional power other than the obligatory USB port.
This is currently the most popular (and probably the best) SSD to get for your PS5 storage upgrade. This is a blazing fast drive with transfer speeds rated at up to 7,000 MB/s and a PCIe Gen4 interface and it comes preinstalled with a heatsink. It’s also confirmed by Western Digital themselves to be compatible with the PS5.
Crucial has released a brand new PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 SSD today, and it’s not a coincidence that it’s a perfect match for the PS5’s SSD upgrade requirements. The only caveat is that this SSD comes bare without any heatsink. If you’re going to get one, don’t splurge. Something like this $12 low-profile heatsink will do just fine.
This LotR Illustrated Hardcover Edition hasn’t been released it (it’s out October 19), but you can already preorder it and save 20% off the retail price. This is the first discount we’ve seen. This massive 1,200+ page tome includes illustrations from author JRR Tolkien, for the first time in any edition of the series since 1954.
The Suicide Squad won’t release to HBO Max and theaters until August 6, and is poised to make more than $30 million for its opening weekend in the US alone. Not everyone is enthusiastic, however. The movie is being “review bombed.” Typically, this is internet phenomenon where disgruntled fans flock to leave negative user reviews of a movie they haven’t seen in an attempt to harm its sales or popularity. While review bombing is relatively common, writer-director James Gunn has responded to it on Twitter, which is somewhat unusual.
“I’ll live,” said Gunn on Twitter. “Stuff like this means nothing in the big picture.”
I’ll live – stuff like this means nothing in the big picture. (And important to point out most the SnyderCut fans have been supportive, it’s only a few who feel it’s worthwhile spending their time doing stuff like this.)
Gunn only spoke up about it because a fan asked him about it, and why he thinks it’s happening. Per the tweet above, Gunn says “I’ll live” and thinks “it’s only a few who feel it’s worthwhile spending their time doing stuff like this.”
Back 4 Blood is just a few months away from launching, and in case you’re wondering if the game is just right for you without having to spend $60 on it, an upcoming beta should give you a good idea of how the game operates. Here’s everything you need to know about Back 4 Blood’s beta, how to get in early, and the content that you can expect to try out.
What Is Back 4 Blood?
Back 4 Blood
Developed by Turtle Rock, Back 4 Blood is a spiritual successor to Valve’s classic Left 4 Dead series. A first-person co-op zombie shooter except infected people are referred to as “The Ridden” after being infected by parasitic worms, Back 4 Blood’s gameplay mixes action with several layers of customization as players fight to survive in the post-apocalypse.
Back 4 Blood Beta Start Date
There’ll be two different betas available. An early access beta for anyone who preordered the game will start on August 5 and an open beta will kick off from August 12.
Early Access Beta–August 5-9, 12 PM PT / 3 PM ET
Open Beta–August 12-16, 12 PM PT / 3 PM ET
How Do I Sign Up For The Early Access Beta?
If you can’t wait for the open beta, the easiest way to try it out early is to preorder Back 4 Blood for guaranteed access. You can also register for Early Access Beta access on the official Back 4 Blood beta homepage and hope that you get a beta code in your email inbox, or you can link your Warner Bros. Games account to your Twitch account. By watching a streamer play the Back 4 Blood Early Access Beta for 60 minutes with Twitch Drops enabled, there’s a chance that you might receive a beta key this way if you’re lucky.
What’s Included In The Beta?
Back 4 Blood’s beta will include two maps for its Swarm and PvP modes, two co-op PvE maps, access to a variety of weapons, and the characters Mom, Evangelo, Holly, Walker, and Hoffman to play as.
Swarm pits two squads of four players against each other, with each side taking turns to play as the human Cleaners or infected Ridden, with the winners being the first team to successfully win the most rounds in a best-of-three series. Players can also explore the Fort Hope hub and build decks using Back 4 Blood’s rogue-lite card system that provides various effects during combat.
Which Platforms Is The Beta Available On?
PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, and PS5.
When Does Back 4 Blood Release?
Back 4 Blood officially launches on October 12 for PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, and PS5. Xbox Game Pass subscribers will be able to access the game on launch day as part of the service on console, PC, and cloud.
For more info on the game, the various editions available for order, and early adoption bonuses, you can check out our Black 4 Blood preorder hub.
New World, the upcoming MMORPG from developer Amazon Games Orange County, has been delayed for the third time. The game now launches on September 28, missing its August 31 release date.
In a Twitter statement, the New World development team said the extra time will give them the chance to “smash bugs, improve stability, and polish the game.” This delay comes after it had a successful closed beta period, which featured issues the studio wants to iron out before launch.
The closed beta was available to anyone who preordered the game on PC. According to Amazon Games Orange County, New World accrued “more than a million adventures” who played some 16 million hours, making it one of the most-watched games on Twitch. At the very least, the MMORPG got off to a good start with more than 200,000 concurrent players on Steam during its first week. It even become one of Steam’s best-selling games following the opening of its closed beta period.
Still, there are some glaring bumps in the road for New World. Being exclusive to PC for the time being, the game reportedly bricked high-end graphics cards like the RTX 3090. Amazon has since responded to the complaints by downplaying the severity of the issue, while video card manufacturer EVGA said it would replace fried RTX 3090 GPUs–as long as it was a company-licensed card.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Warzone are offering double XP this coming weekend, and the timing is notable. That’s because with Season 5 beginning on August 12, now is the final chance to make it through the Season 4 battle pass and unlock more content before it goes away.
This double XP weekend for Cold War and Warzone applies to standard progression XP and battle pass XP. The promotional period begins August 6 at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET and wraps up on August 9 at the same time.
Close out Season Four with Double XP + Double Battle Pass XP all weekend, starting Friday! Season Five is just around the corner… pic.twitter.com/jWxVA3Lkf6
Season 5 begins August 12 and there is a lot more content expected for both Black Ops Cold War and Warzone, so fans of both games have more to look forward to. For more, check out everything we know so far about Season 5 ahead of its launch next week.
Outside of those games, Activision recently reaffirmed that Sledgehammer will release its new Call of Duty game later this year, and it will take players to a setting that “fans know and love.” It is widely rumored that the game is a sequel to 2017’s Call of Duty: WWII and returns to that historical setting. This game is rumored to be announced in August, so it might not be much longer until we know more.
Outside of the console/PC series, Activision also just announced that it created a new internal mobile studio to work on a second Call of Duty game for phones.
Beyond Activision’s games, parent company Activision Blizzard is embroiled in a lawsuit from the state of California over the company’s reported “frat boy” culture and discrimination against women. During an earnings call, CEO Bobby Kotick responded to the suit and said, “There is no place at our company where discrimination, harassment, or unequal treatment of any kind will be tolerated.” He also promised to fire employees and managers who have run afoul of Activision Blizzard’s policies.
Over 400 accounts have reportedly been banned from Tekken 7 following a recent update targeting players suspected of cheating and/or boosting their ranks.
According to producer Michael Murray, the 3D fighter received an update on August 3 that takes out “people suspected of using a cheat tool in Ranked Matches.” Others who were found cheating or violating the game’s End-User License Agreement (EULA) were also banned from Tekken 7.
Murray outlined the specific kinds of players that have been banned from the game. Those who play multiple matches against the same opponent “within a certain time frame” and no other matches in between were banned, as this is seemingly an exploit to boost a person’s Rank.
For example, players who, within a certain time frame, had many matches against the same opponent, finishing the match in an extremely short amount of time each time. Over 400 players were banned for infractions, and players found cheating will be banned moving forward.
This explanation led to some confusion, so Murray provided a further explanation. The players that were banned played multiple matches in quick succession of each other, with rounds lasting “way less than 10 seconds” and the subsequent winner walking away with perfects on most occasions.
Rematching against someone you’re having fun with shouldn’t get you banned, according to Murray. It’s when you exploit the system to boost your rank or cheat in Tekken 7 that results in punishment. Murray said that while the team can’t address individual cases where someone might have been inappropriately banned, they’re “hoping to improve the experience of everyone playing the game.”
