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.”
Apex Legends Emergence has begun (Season 10 patch notes are live too), introducing the 18th playable character: Obi Edolasim, aka “Seer.” Like Season 9’s Valkyrie, Seer is a recon legend, making him ideally suited to scouting and tracking. Unlike Valkyrie, Seer is better equipped for the latter than the former–he can’t get a lay for the land or transport his allies to safety as easily as Valkyrie can, but Seer’s abilities make him a powerful tracker.
Below, we go over everything we’ve learned playing as Seer, including his weaknesses and strengths. We also detail which legends pair well with Seer’s abilities, as well as how to play as the described “ambush artist” to take down your prey amidst the chaos of a battle royale.
Click To Unmute
Size:
Want us to remember this setting for all your devices?
Seer is a stealth-based tracker, ideally suited for pinpointing an enemy’s location and surprising them with a carefully orchestrated ambush. He excels at close- to mid-range, so he should take the lead when enemies are within 75-100m. You should grab weapons designed for that range (our favorites are the G7 Scout, 30-30 Repeater, Bocek Compound Bow, and Rampage LMG) and take on a more supportive role from behind the close-range fighters on your squad if combat occurs in an open space.
Though his tactical ability does do a slight amount of damage (10 points of damage–it’s really not that much), Seer’s abilities are all primarily geared around gathering and sharing information with his squad. When playing as Seer, it’s your job to manage the cooldowns on your tactical and ultimate abilities, using each at the best opportune time to highlight enemies so that your allies can easily kill them.
Because of the limited range of his abilities, Seer is tailored to very specific situations–remaining in constant contact with your team and knowing the layout of the battlefield is key to success. Many legends have abilities geared to helping them overcome mistakes; Seer does not. So to best utilize his abilities, it’s ideal to have a basic understanding of how to best approach all major points of interest and know where your allies are in relation to the enemy at all times.
Surprisingly enough, Seer’s greatest weakness is the sky. Because of the delay on Focus of Attention, it can be trickier to time it with a falling/flying target than one running along the ground. Additionally, Exhibit stops tracking targets once they’ve left the ground for a certain amount of time (no matter how fast they’re moving). A small jump won’t get you off Seer’s radar, but Pathfinder’s Zipline Gun, Octane’s Jump Pad, Horizon’s Gravity Lift, and both Valkyrie’s VTOL Jets and Skyward Dive will.
Best Pairings With Seer’s Abilities
Bloodhound is one of the best legends to pair with Seer as Bloodhound can first use their abilities to cast a wide net and figure out the general location where enemies are hiding and then Seer can use his abilities to pinpoint the enemy squad’s exact location.
Bangalore is a surprisingly helpful pairing as well. Using her Smoke Launcher, Bangalore can fill rooms with smoke, blinding friend and foe alike–unless Seer is there to use Exhibit, highlighting the enemies through the smoke. Your enemies won’t be able to see you, but you and your teammates will be able to see them. Caustic works for this strategy too, but he can’t blanket as wide an area as quickly as Bangalore can.
Because Seer has such a small window of effectiveness, any legend that can help him quickly move across open fields to reach the more enclosed spaces where he excels is a worthwhile partner. Pathfinder and Octane are our favorites, but Valkyrie and Wraith work too.
Click To Unmute
Apex Legends – Official Emergence Gameplay Trailer
Size:
Want us to remember this setting for all your devices?
Seer’s direct counter is Mirage. Though the holographic trickster’s decoys don’t produce heartbeats, they all get tagged as targets in Seer’s Exhibit. If you see a Seer Exhibit, send in a decoy with your two squadmates while you wrap around and you’ll possibly trick the Seer into thinking your two allies are a full squad. And once you actually are on the Seer, use Mirage’s ultimate ability–Seer will be so overloaded with information, it will prove difficult for him to react before you get a few shots on him first.
Keep in mind: Mirage’s decoys need to be in close proximity to Seer for Mirage to be a direct counter. From a distance, it’s much easier to discern which Mirage is a decoy and which is the real deal–at that point, Seer is more a direct counter to Mirage.
Both Revenant and Caustic are good counters to Seer as well, though to a lesser extent. Revenant can use his Death Totem outside of Exhibit before walking into it as a shadow to scout the area without much consequence, and maybe even manage to Silence the Seer before getting sent back to the totem. And Seer’s abilities do not pick up or destroy Caustic’s traps–if Seer manages to scan you while you’re playing as Caustic, throw up some Nox Gas Traps and just wait for him to come to you.
Though not a direct counter to Seer, Wraith does not appear in his Exhibit nor on his Heart Seeker while she’s using Into the Void. So she can get the drop on him provided the battlefield is noisy enough to mask the unique sound she makes while entering and exiting the void.
Click To Unmute
Apex Legends Season 10 Emergence Trailer | EA Play Live 2021
Size:
Want us to remember this setting for all your devices?
Heart Seeker can track up to 10 heartbeats but will only play audio for the closest one.
The audio for heartbeats will quicken the weaker an enemy is. If you hear a really fast heartbeat, that means the enemy closest to you has very low health–you might be able to knock them with a single Focus of Attention blast.
You can use Heart Seeker without actually holding a firearm–just aim down sights while not holding a gun or grenade.
Your minimap tells you what area you’re sensing with Heart Seeker–this is helpful if you’re having trouble gauging 75m.
Focus of Attention doesn’t just interrupt healing and revives, it stops certain legend abilities too. Use Focus of Attention to interrupt a Pathfinder’s Grappling Hook, Wraith’s Into the Void (provided she’s still in the midst of activating it), and Valkyrie’s VTOL Jets. Ensure your enemy can’t get away.
By holding the tactical ability button, Seer will prepare but not fire Focus of Attention. In this state, Heart Seeker will activate, helping you pinpoint where to best fire Focus of Attention.
Exhibit doesn’t create a dome, it makes a sphere. So if you’re above an enemy squad, you can toss out Exhibit to mark everyone below you.
Exhibit can be easily destroyed by attacking the heart chamber that Seer throws out to activate it, so be sure to toss the chamber to a place behind cover where enemies can’t easily get to it.
Scan survey beacons often–Seer is at his best when you have a good idea of where people are or where they will be, and knowing how the ring is going to close can help you set up an ambush.
Splitgate, an arena shooter that combines Halo-style gameplay with portals, continues to be too popular for its own good. In a recent tweet, 1047 Games said that the servers for the game were no longer down for maintenance and that it had banned a number of people for using queue skipping programs. While the maintenance did increase the server capacity, the game still has very long queue times to get into the servers.
1047 made another tweet shortly afterward, making a joke about how we would live in a utopia if the Splitgate servers worked properly. While the studio hasn’t given an update on queue times today, as of August 3 it was an over 100 minute wait time to get into the servers. Splitgate is still currently in beta and is set to fully release sometime this month after the congested servers are dealt with using a $10 million investment from a venture capital firm.
It does seem as though server queue times are improving though. At the time of writing this article, it took a little over 30 minutes to get into the game on Xbox Series X. 1047 Games said on Twitter that the goal is to increase server capacity to over 100,000 players.
Here’s some good news for Zelda fans: the special Skyward Sword HD Joy-Cons are back in stock. These fine-looking blue controllers have been tough to find ever since they released alongside The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD in July. They’re shipping at different times from different retailers, but you can order them, and they’ll arrive soon enough.
Nintendo Joy-Con – The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD Edition
Like all Joy-Con, these wireless, motion-sensing, rumble-capable pieces of technology retail for $79.99. But unlike most other models of Joy-Con, they have cool designs on them. The right Joy-Con is has iconography reminiscent of the Master Sword, while the left one sports Hylian Shield etchings.
You can use them to play any game, of course, but if you haven’t picked up Skyward Sword HD, I would encourage you to do so. I’ve been playing it for the past couple of weeks (had skipped it on Wii) and have been absolutely loving it. You can check out our Skyward Sword HD review for full details on the game.
It’s unclear how long these things will stay in stock, so you might want to grab them sooner rather than later if you’re interested. For a few weeks there, you couldn’t find them anywhere. Who knows how many units Nintendo plans to make.
So pick them up if you want them–but be sure to check the shipping date indicated on the retailers’ sites. At the time of this writing, Amazon was shipping about a month out, while Best Buy and GameStop could deliver them sooner.
[poilib element=”accentDivider”]
Chris Reed is a commerce editor for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @_chrislreed.
EA is continuing to move toward a larger live service-based games strategy as full game sales dropped 19% compared to the previous year, according to the company’s latest financial report to investors on Wednesday. EA reported revenue of $1.55 billion for Q1 FY22, up 6.3% from last year. Net income for EA, however, dropped to $204 million, compared to $365 million the previous year.
Despite the drop in-game sales, EA’s live service revenue is offsetting the loss up to 13%.
EA attributes its growth to various live-service aspects of its most popular games, including FIFA Ultimate Team, Apex Legends, mobile games, and other franchises. EA said that more than 31 million people have played FIFA 21 on console and PC since launch. Meanwhile, FIFA’s Ultimate Team mode matches have grown 48% year-over-year.
Apex Legends also set a new record for concurrent players with the launch of season 9 and averaged 13 million weekly active players.
It’s easy to see why EA is continuing to shift towards more live-service-focused games like FIFA and Apex Legends. The publisher is hoping to expand its sports game offerings to a target audience of more than 500 million players in the next five years. That would effectively double EA Sports’ audience from what the studio says is a current audience of 230 million players.
While the live-service sector continues to grow, and companies like Ubisoft lean into developing more ongoing titles, EA does have single-player games in the works. BioWare is working on the next Dragon Age, while EA recently announced a full Dead Space remake.
The first trailer for Hulu’s adaptation of Y: The Last Man will drop on August 5 at 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST. The streaming service announced that the first substantive clip of the series in a tweet you can see below–which has a five-second teaser with some very quick imagery from the show.
An adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s Vertigo comic series Y: The Last Man has been in the works for years. Production finally began last fall, along with the announcement that the series was forthcoming sometime in 2021. The series stars Ben Schnetzer (Warcraft) as Yorick Brown–the last human male on Earth–Ashley Romans (NOS4A2) as Agent 355, Diane Lane (Batman v Superman) as Jennifer Brown, Olivia Thirlby (Dredd) as Hero Brown, and Juliana Canfield (Succession) as Beth Deville. The series will also feature Amber Tamblyn, Marin Ireland, Diana Bang, and Elliot Fletcher.
Debuting in 2002, the Vertigo comic series Y: The Last Man follows Yorick Brown and his monkey Ampersand, the last two surviving males on Earth, after a virus wipes out every mammal with a Y chromosome. The series ran for 60 issues and is widely considered an iconic story from DC Comics’ adult imprint–one that also produced Preacher, Constantine, A History of Violence, and others.
It’s been a very long road for this show to get made, but it’ll finally debut on September 13.
Insomniac Games has revealed that the last-minute addition of the Performance RT mode in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart was the result of multiple teams working together to extract as much as possible out of the PlayStation 5.
The Performance RT patch was originally released just six days before the launch of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. It was one of three modes available in the game, with the other two being a Fidelity mode and a standard Performance mode. The team didn’t have much to say about the new mode other than the fact that it offered 60FPS gameplay with ray-tracing enabled.
Thanks to a new newsletter from Axios, we now know why this impressive mode was added to the game so close to launch. The answer is quite simple: it was legitimately a last-minute discovery. According to Axios, Insomniac director of core technology, Mike Fitzgerald, said it was the result of teams across multiple Insomniac departments working together to push the PS5 as far as they could.
“There’s no point, say, in the middle of production where we say, ‘OK, engine’s locked, good luck, game team, finish your thing and we’re going to move on to the next thing,'” Fitzgerald said. “We have the whole core technology team focused on the quality of Ratchet & Clank until a month after it ships.”
Fitzgerald said that it’s toward the end of a game’s development that you learn how much performance can be pushed out of a console. He also said that having multiple performance modes in Spider-Man: Miles Morales and the remastered version of 2018’s Spider-Man put the pressure on the Rift Apart team.
“We knew, OK, well people are going to expect this [multiple performance modes] out of the next game,” Fitzgerald said. “We do, too, but it’s built for (the PS5), so how are we going to find that extra?”
Jet Set Radio protagonist Beat, the rambunctious teen “Rudie” who skates around tagging property and pissing off the cops, is joining the notably less anti-establishment — but no less mobile — gang over on the Super Monkey Ball franchise.
Check out the trailer above for a look at Beat as a new playable character in the upcoming Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania. Funny enough, instead of collecting bananas, Beat is rolling down yellow spray paint cans.
Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania is out on October 5, 2021 for Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One. It’s described by SEGA as a “definitive remaster” of Super Monkey Ball 1, 2, and Deluxe.
Jet Set Radio, meanwhile, came out all the way back in 2000 for the SEGA Dreamcast, and got a surprise HD re-release in 2016. If you’re hoping for a reboot or proper sequel, there’s a small, small glimmer of hope. It looks like SEGA is considering sequels to Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi, according to their last financial report.
But if you can’t wait til SEGA gets in gear, check out Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, a spiritual successor to JSR that’s being developed by the team behind Lethal League Blaze.
[poilib element=”accentDivider”]
Joseph Knoop is a writer/producer/prime-mate for IGN.
The Rainbow Six Siege developers at Ubisoft released a massive AMA for Y6S2 addressing players’ concerns. The blog post covers mouse and keyboard on consoles, cheaters, playlists, and much more.
Two big topics covered in the AMA were cheaters and people using the mouse and keyboard on consoles. The developers said that while they have team members dedicated to working on mouse and keyboard input for consoles, it is still an “R&D subject.” They said that the goal is to make sure that mouse and keyboard does not provide an unfair advantage on consoles, while still allowing it as an input option.
Click To Unmute
Size:
Want us to remember this setting for all your devices?
Now Playing: Rainbow Six Siege: North Star Story Trailer | Ubisoft Forward 2021
As for plans to deal with cheaters in the game, Ubisoft was unable to provide details around its anti-cheating security, as anything it shares could be used by cheat makers to bypass the security. The developers did provide some more information around other exploits and if something is a bannable offense or not, like how using a glitch or exploit doesn’t result in a ban, since it brings the issue to their attention.
The Rainbow Six Siege team did say that it si aiming to add more restrictions to the Ranked playlist, limiting access for accounts that are high enough level but haven’t played the game in a while or did not play enough public PvP matches prior to playing ranked. Ubisoft also said that while the team does see the benefit to manually banning cheaters instead of relying on auto-bans, it doesn’t think that can be the main method since it would be too hard to scale.
Ubisoft also said that it is currently unhappy with the current way it does battle passes and is aiming to make “a new type of battle pass that won’t be found anywhere else.” It also said that tweaks are coming to the challenges and that season pass owners will receive a battle pass bonus in the future.
