Why The Gulag remains Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s best mission (opens in new tab)

Some truths are hard to swallow, but here’s one that I’ve been reluctantly digesting over the last few years. The Battlefield series has had its ups and downs over the course of the last generation, as its overall trajectory continues to bend away from the franchise’s core appeal, to the point where its most recent release, Battlefield 5, felt a far cry from the series’ highpoint of Bad Company 2. 

That’s not to say that DICE’s shooter series hasn’t had its moments since then. Battlefield 4 and Battlefield 1, in particular, are fantastic games in their own ways. On the contrary, it’s not so much that the quality of Battlefield games has deteriorated, but rather their identity has shifted, and subsequently narrowed in the process. 

The franchise’s patented brand of destructible, open-ended sandboxes have been slowly switched out for more static, corridor shooter-style arenas that hold more in common with DICE’s recent Star Wars Battlefront games than they do Battlefield. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that kind of shooter. It’s just not the experience I’ve come to know and love from this long revered IP.

Which is where Call of Duty comes in. Battlefield’s primary competitor has been undergoing its own pivot of late, albeit one that swings in the opposite direction. 

Where Call of Duty was once known for its three-lane, close quarters combat, Activision and its rotating roster developers have been empowered by the opportunities of evolving hardware to stretch those parameters upwards and outwards, designing larger maps with higher player counts, vehicular combat, and more. 

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare‘s Ground War mode, while problematic, represented the apotheosis of that evolution… until Call of Duty: Warzone came along and took that scope to even greater heights. Now, with Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, we have Fireteam mode, in  which “10 teams in squads of four face off against one another in large-scale maps featuring land/sea/air vehicles and various objectives”. I don’t know about you, but that sounds awfully familiar to me…

Only in Battlefield?

While my impressions of Black Ops Cold War had been somewhat marred by a poor experience with last month’s Open Alpha on PS4, October’s ongoing Beta testing presents a much better picture of Treyarch’s upcoming instalment. Nowhere is that picture more flattering, however, than in the recently released Fireteam mode, which is already a favourite of mine amongst the roster of the game’s new multiplayer modes. 

Set across a collection of large-scale zones (which are almost certainly going to be stitched together to form the next Warzone map), the mode is a tapestry of chaos in all the right ways. There are a number of variants planned, too, but players are currently privy to only one in the beta, Dirty Bomb, whereby teams are tasked with collecting uranium caches to arm and detonate radioactive bombs peppered around the battleground. Blow up a bomb, and its blast zone becomes a toxic wasteland. It’s Conquest meets Rush, with a Warzone twist. 

What’s more, Fireteam’s introduction of squadplay, right down to the ability to respawn on a squadmate, is yet another brazen-faced loan from Battlefield’s playbook, but I’m not even mad about it. Frankly, after long losing interest in Battlefield 5’s unsatisfying shootouts just a few months after its launch, I’m just happy to be enjoying something that emulates the comforting rhythms of classic Battlefield once again. 

To be clear, Call of Duty is still leagues apart from the soaring heights of Battlefield at its best, where RendeZooks (opens in new tab) and destruction multi-kills were just part of the package, and that’s okay too. There’s room for both shooters in the marketplace, and both occupy a space in the genre that caters to different tastes. But that’s just it. With Battlefield currently MIA, I’m more than happy to let Call of Duty come in and fill the vacuum for now, even if it’s not a worthy replacement in and of itself. 

Battlefield 6 is scheduled to launch sometime next year, and with the power of PS5 and Xbox Series X behind it, I hope DICE capitalises on the opportunity to take the series back to its roots, removing the ever encroaching barriers of recent entries to put player experimentation and sandbox strategy back at the forefront ofs its multiplayer combat. If it doesn’t, however, then I don’t see any reason why Call of Duty can’t keep winning me over in the meantime. 

For more, check out the best Call of Duty games in the series’ history, or find out everything you need to know about the PS5 in the video below. 

The post The Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War betas Fireteam mode continues the franchises hard pivot into Battlefield territory appeared first on Game News.

Let’s be clear here. This isn’t just finding a little secret thing, or pressing a switch. This starts with a lantern flashing out a message in Morse code. Oh, and the message is in Belarussian.

But that’s the easy stuff. As well as solving puzzle-like patterns requiring much paper and working out, more Morse code at faster rates and hidden keypads to enter codes into, this peaks WITH A BUTTON HIDDEN IN A TREE.

There are several, tiny, tiny buttons hidden under rocks and edges to find. Most are visible from very tricky angles but one is inside a tree. You have to blow it up to expose it. Not just any tree either. One particular tree.

This is not a map with a lack of trees.

Later, after many, many more steps (like recording and speeding up slow-mo audio, and more keypads) you eventually end up having to switch to a different server, waiting for two minutes in a very precise spot, and then finding another tiny, tiny switch that activates a keypad that lets you claim you reward: some special DICE LA camo that was previously exclusive to the developers. It’s no giant shark, that’s for sure.

Seen something newsworthy? Tell us!

The post This Battlefield 4 Easter egg is insanely complicated (and slightly pointless) appeared first on Game News.

Developer DICE has opened up a survey (opens in new tab) that asks fans which of the series’ dozens of maps they’d most like to see remade (possibly for a second time, if you count Battlefield 1943). The post doesn’t explicitly say that the studio is definitely going to remake the most popular selections, but it seems to be a very likely candidate for post-Final Stand content.

DICE said elsewhere in the post that it plans to keep making more stuff for Battlefield 4 even though the ‘Premium’ content’s five planned map packs have come and gone. What better place to start than with the series’ rich history, right?

Even though the game is more than a year old, with the long-suffered connection issues (opens in new tab) a (mostly) distant memory and fan-pleasing map updates on the horizon, we could be headed for the golden age of Battlefield 4.

The post Battlefield 4 polls open for classic map updates appeared first on Game News.

First off, how in the hell will Apple sift through 37,000 claims and verify that they were all made by kids with no concept of pay-to-play? The FTC took particular concern with the App Store’s purchasing policy, where confirmation is only required for an initial transaction before giving the buyer free reign for the next 15 minutes. Kid whines for his parent’s credit card info, parent hastily enters it to appease the offspring, kid unknowingly (or more likely knowingly) goes on a spending spree before the validated account info expires.

Only, what if the kids never got involved? Couldn’t a parent who’s addicted to Smurfs’ Village, FarmVille, or any variety of horrendous free-to-play mobile games lose themselves to a microtransaction fervor? Perhaps the next day, hungover from the rush of time coins, friendship points, or booster vouchers, they looked at their bank balance and realized how irresponsible their spending had been. What’s stopping them from pinning it on the innocence of their dopey child?

The FTC’s announcement seems to be the payoff of investigations that started as far back as 2011. Jon Leibowitz, then-chairman of the FTC, wrote that “consumers, particularly children, are unlikely to understand the ramifications of these types of purchases.” Uh-oh. Couldn’t that statement be made about randomized microtransactions that clutter dozens of the latest games? Say I really, really wanted a special class from a Mass Effect 3 booster pack, or a kickin’ new Tauntaun mount in a Star Wars: The Old Republic Cartel Pack (I didn’t plan the common EA thread, it just happened). If I went through 100 purchases and never got the item I wanted, how was I supposed to know the odds? It could be construed that I didn’t, in Leibowitz’s words, “understand the ramifications” of how stupidly I was spending my money.

Author Rob Fahey claims that some microtransactions are “explicitly designed to convince people to spend money on things they don’t actually want…they disproportionately target people who are bad at delayed gratification or not educated about such underhanded tactics.” In other words, the most insidious in-game purchases are like Jedi mind tricks, subversively coercing us into reaching for our wallets again and again. If the FTC could somehow be convinced that I felt exploited by a free-to-play game, could I reverse hundreds in microtransaction expenditures scot-free? It’d be like getting away with the murder of my bank account by pleading temporary, freemium-induced insanity.

Of course, all this is postulation, and I don’t have the answers to these questions. And even if the FTC can convince Apple to reimburse millions in microtransations, that’d just be a drop in Apple’s $15 billion bucket. But it’s interesting to imagine: If big companies can be forced to refund money spent by the gullible minds of children, what happens to deluded adults who seem incapable of breaking their microtransaction addiction? Because in both cases, it could be said that they just didn’t know any better.

The post “I didnt know what I was buying” is now a valid excuse for a gaming refund appeared first on Game News.

Each of the multiplayer maps in Battlefield 4 have actions that can be performed to change how they are played called “Levolutions”. While most of these actions are catastrophic events such as buildings and bridges collapsing, some are just as simple as moving a flag from one point to another. With our guide, we will tell you which levolution action happens on each map, how it affects gameplay, and how to trigger it to make things a little more hectic.

Table of Contents

• Paracel Storm, Operation Locker
• Lancang Dam, Flood Zone
• Golmud Railway, Hainan Resort, Zavod 311
• Rogue Transmission, Dawn Breaker, Siege of Shanghai

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5

Current page:

Page 1

Next Page Page 2

The post Battlefield 4 Levolution guide: How to trigger destruction appeared first on Game News.

Why? I’ve already said it: I own you. Battlefield’s dogtag system is one of the few ways to keep a permanent record of the enemies that you’ve taken down in a multiplayer game. Not only do you get to cycle through the tags you’ve collected, occasionally laughing at the Gamertag / PSN ID / Origin ID that someone has chosen for themselves (seriously, were there 3 other players called ‘xxJuStIcE_Lrdxx’, so you went for xxJuStIcE_Lrdxx4’. Individuality FTW, right?), but you also recall memories of a specific session. In other words: you remember how you got the tag.

One of my favourite tag steals was in Bad Company 2 (opens in new tab), Arica Harbour map. It was a game of Rush, I was defending the second phase (in the town) and I got picked off by the same camping asshole four times, as he sat in the rocks on the hillside, not helping his team win. I was furious. I was determined to claim his tag. So I spent ages sneaking around the bottom edge of town, keeping away from conflict, getting myself in a position to strike. Asshole Recon was being kept alive by a Medic, who I dispatched quietly before finally claiming my nemesis’ dogtag and the tag of his asshole friend, also camping in the same rocks. Triple dogtag get.

That’s the only time I killed this guy. He outscored me 4-1. But he never got my tag, and I claimed his, gloriously. It’s something I’ll remember long after he’s forgotten that match. While it’s no real achievement on my behalf, it’s a memory I still have from a game that gave me many happy hours of multiplayer carnage. It’s a lasting token of enjoyment from a moment of superiority. That’s the essence of the dogtag system.

Other online shooters, like Call of Duty, simply don’t offer that kind of recall. They’re impersonal experiences that ask you to constantly kill as you try to fill up a near-infinite XP progression system. To me, its just meaningless grind and other players are digital meat–they may as well be smart AI bots who occasionally fling blood-curdling racist / homophobic slurs at you. When you’re playing online the idea is that you’re pitting your skills either directly against (or in cooperation with) other human players. But you rarely get the sense of that, unless you’re in squads with real friends. Until, that is, you outsmart an opponent in Battlefield and get close enough to claim his or her ‘tags. If you’re really lucky, you’ll make them mad enough to seek revenge and that’s when the very human micro-battles begin. They come back for you, they seek you out on the battlefield. Can you think of any other in-game reward that triggers such strong human emotions? They’re few and far between.

In more recent iterations of Battlefield, DICE has added extra details to the dogtag system. You can add specialist tags to indicate where your skills and interests lie (are you a headshot expert, a tank killer, a provider of endless ammo?), and in BF4 that personalisation is even deeper. There’s even a more elaborate animation that sees you aggressively ripping the tag off your enemy’s neck as you end their life with a blade. I hope you’ll forgive me for skimming over the moral implications of this one–it’s just a game, and that’s definitely a separate editorial.

The Beta also shows off the ability to indicate what country you’re from, and there are loads more ‘skill’ tags to unlock too. The more information you choose to share only increases my desire to claim your tag. I want to know how you play, where you’re from, and if you’re better at Battlefield than me. Taking any dogtag is enjoyable… taking one from a player significantly higher ranked than you is a rare thrill.

While I’m no fan of the new knife counter-kill system, which allows you to counter a knife kill with the simple tap of a button, I can appreciate the added dimension it brings to dogtag collecting. If you don’t hit a player completely by surprise (essentially, from behind–so no random melee charging in BF4, folks), you could lose your tag to them. You feel stupid, clumsy. You may even lose the game by giving your life away cheaply at a key moment, instead of just hosing your enemy with a burst of carbine fire. Moreover, you have to really want to collect a player’s tag. Counter-kills have made it even more personal.

So keep your special golden guns and bizarre new character outfits–the only in-game collectable I really want is hanging around your neck, and somewhere out there I’m waiting to claim it. Again… only if you’re playing Battlefield.

You know that crazed dogtag collector at parties who talks too much? Drink in hand, way too enthusiastic, ponderously well-educated in topics no one in their right mind should know about? Loud? Well, that guy’s occasionally us. GR Editorials is a semi-regular feature where we share our informed insights on the news at hand. Sharp, funny, and finger-on-the-pulse, it’s the information you need to know even when you don’t know you need it.

The post Why Battlefields dogtags are the most satisfying rewards in video games appeared first on Game News.