If rumour speak true, the next Call of Duty game will be another entry in the Black Ops series. It'll also, allegedly, take place during the first Gulf War across 1990 and 1991, in which a US-led coalition of countries including the UK, Saudi Arabia and Egypt invaded Iraq in response to the Saddam Hussein government's conquest of Kuwait.
]]>Once you've finished screaming, let me re-emphasise that this story is one of those "according to report" stories. It comes from unnamed sources at Activision-Blizzard, describing a recent all-hands meeting during which CEO Bobby Kotick laid out his vision for the company and gaming at large following Activison's acquisition by Microsoft, which is tipped to finally conclude this week. Amongst other things, Kotick allegedly discussed machine learning, Guitar Hero and the apocalyptic power of Microsoft R&D. Activision hired James Corden to host the meeting, the sources claim. It sounds like a David Lynch fever dream.
]]>Like a zipline descending into Verdansk, the quality curve of the Call of Duty campaign trends ever downward, year-on-year. Or so a casual observer might assume. But this is Task Force 141, soldier: we don’t do casual observation. Take my binoculars and you’ll soon see that the real story is far more complicated and compelling.
For every Ghosts in the graveyard of CODs past, there’s an unlikely space adventure to rival Titanfall. And no matter how many times Captain Price tells you to let ‘em pass, there’s always an experimental RTS mechanic or Hitman-lite stealth mission waiting around the next corner. Call of Duty has been far more brave and changeable than it’s given credit for, and while the best ideas haven’t always stuck, they’re still very much playable. What’s more, they rarely outlast a weekend - which counts for a lot in an age of life-consuming AAA releases.
Over 20 years of service, I’ve played every single COD campaign, and can share my intel freely with allies like you. So hop in for a ride through the ups and downs of the series. Just don’t take the helicopter - those things never land softly around here.
]]>John has been writing these charts for just a few weeks and already he's had to book a week off in order to recover. I am made of more sterling stuff, and while he's gone it falls to me to share the details of which games sold the best last week on Steam.
]]>Activision Blizzard Studios are planning for potentially years of Call of Duty movies, drawing inspiration from the interwoven Marvel Cinematic Universe. Activision reckon that Call of Duty could carry a series, jumping between the first-person shooter's sub-brands for different perspectives on war. Chinny reckon.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 3's multiplayer is fun. I know, right? You're waiting for the but, in which I'm going to remind you that its willy-waving jingoism is uncomfortable, its level design is brown and dull, its killstreaks reward the best players with frustrating special abilities... but mostly those things aren't true.
]]>I had all the characteristics of a blogger — frayed jeans, opinions, laptop, tea — but my depersonalisation was so intense, had gone so deep, that my normal ability to compile charts had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating top ten articles, a rough resemblance of a best-sellers list, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning.
And yet.
]]>The next Call of Duty may be only five weeks from launching, but last year's model is about to get a new lease on life. Developers Treyarch last night launched the long-awaited Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 [official site] mod tools into open beta, letting people create and play with custom levels, weapons, and modes - y'know, mods. Treyarch still have a bit of work to do, but now the tools are available to all players, rather than a handful of testers. Get cracking!
]]>Yo, you know what would really spice up Black Ops 3's [official site] Zombies mode is some fire-breathing lizards because dammit, this is Call of Duty and they can do whatever they want. Apparently. Alright, I'll admit that as far as DLC goes, having giant swathes of mechanized zombies facing off against dragons in the ruins of Stalingrad does sound pretty cool.
]]>One of the larger issues with being a games critic is having to devote time to sitting down and actually playing the games before you write about them. Finding the space in a busy work day of accepting bribes and secret meetings to decide industry biases is a nightmare, and anyway, you pretty much know what you think of a game from the box cover/Steam store page, right? Right. So let's stop pretending and get on with the sorts of straight-to-the-point honest reviews we're all really after.
]]>Maybe you think you'll like shooting things, but you're not sure what flavour of shooting. Are you the type who likes tense, simulated military manshoots you can play with dozens of friends in wide open areas, with missions you make yourself and vehicles you can pilot and drive? Good news! Arma 3 is free on Steam this weekend.
Or are you the type who likes slightly-silly, rapid paced, run-and-gunning against chums and zombies? Good news! Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 multiplayer is free on Steam this weekend.
]]>Call of Duty: Space Wars. Orbital Ops, maybe. Post-Modern Warfare. Space Warfare? Probably not that one.
Whatever the name might be, there have been rumours and suggestions of a space-based Call of Duty for several years and it seems increasingly likely that this year's Infinity Ward release might be that game. I hope the moon explodes in at least one mission.
]]>Call of Duty doesn't really have time for 'classic' maps, given that a new game comes jumping across time and space every year (smart money says 2016's CoD will pit World War 1 Tommies against robotic Visigoths from the future). CoD's Black Ops subseries has run long enough to establish Nuketown as a staple - though since Blops 2 it's been held back as a pre-order bonus. Well, now all and sundry can visit that old nuke-testing model town in Cod Blops 3 [official site], as it's finally free to all players.
]]>Call of Duty: Black Ops III - Multiplayer Starter Pack is a big mouthful for a simple idea: it's Cod Blops 3's [official site] ranked multiplayer sold separately as a cheaper standalone game. It's an interesting experiment in selling CoD's many modes separately and a short one - Activision will stop selling it on Monday. But until Sunday evening, you can check out this substantial slice of CoD for free. This handy link should fire up Steam and start installing it.
]]>Activision are finally trying splitting Call of Duty's many modes into separate games, for folks who are only interested in part or want a cheap way in, though they've started in a baffling way. Last night they released a standalone version of the Cod Blops 3 [official site] ranked multiplayer which costs only £11.59/14,49€/$14.99 - about a quarter of the full game's price. I'd hoped for a standalone Zombies mode, but what's odd about this release is the restrictions. For starters, Activision will only sell this version until the end of February.
]]>Fail Forward is series of videos all about the bits of games which don’t quite work and why. In this episode, Marsh Davies discusses how Black Ops' segue into sci-fi marks new mechanical innovation in the military shooter - and suggests how it could go even further.
]]>There are times when Call of Duty: Black Ops III's multiplayer feels like a scratchcard from which you're scraping the dull metal grey surface of a military shooter to reveal the three matching Quake symbols below. Your prize: a game that's increasingly difficult to stereotype, which is fast and often fun, which has found solutions to many of its ancient frustrations, but which still has an annoying and possibly insoluble problem at its core.
]]>Call of Duty: Black Ops III [official site] takes place in a future setting not quite close enough to describe as "near-future". It's somewhere in the middle distance, and while the concerns of military and intelligence organisations don't appear to have changed very much, the cyber-modifications available to soldiers promise to make the battlefield a place of superpowered clashes between robots, humans, and operatives caught somewhere between the two. With an arm full of not-plasmids and a sniper scope at the ready, I plunged into the campaign.
]]>Following that Warcraft movie trailer, Activision Blizzard announced over the weekend that they've launched a new arm dedicated to making movies and TV out their games. The first celluloid fruit of Activision Blizzard Studios will be a TV cartoon adaptation of the Spyro spin-off series Skylanders, and they're awfully keen on making Call of Duty talkies too. Oh, if Pip were in today she'd know how to make this funny. Me, I'll just get a bit carried away hoping they make movies based around Cod Blops 3's bee-shooting cyberarm and Jeff Goldblum's escapades as a phoney wizard in its Zombies mode.
]]>The Big Blopper, The Blopster, The Codchop, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 [official site] launched last night, and it's the first in the FPS series to really interest me in a while. Campaign co-op, customisable cyborgs filled with cyberbees, and Jeff Goldblum are right up my alley and oh! supposedly it's a wee touch less corridor-y too.
It has a few problems at launch, though, with many folks reporting unreasonably poor performance. Developers Treyarch are looking into it, and have a few ideas for fixes.
]]>Call of Duty: Black Ops III [official site] looks just about weird enough to be interesting. Whether it's Jeff Goldblum's zombie-splatting magician, the introduction of full-on Chaos powers or the general rocket-powered leap into a robo-soldier sci-fi future, BLOPS the Third does not appear to be constrained by reason. Of course, it may still be restrained by corridors but on the server and modding side we can expect some freedom. Treyarch have announced that modding and map-making will be coming to the game sometime next year.
]]>So Activision Blizzard's creating a new division "devoted to esports" within the company. It's going to be chairman-ed by the former CEO of ESPN and the NFL Network, Steve Bornstein, and senior vice presidente-ed by a co-founder of Major League Gaming, Mike Sepso. There's a press release and everything.
]]>Alright, so we're not the sorts to post every Call of Duty: Black Ops III [official site] trailer, but we are the sorts to post things with Jeff Goldblum in. We've known he's going to be in Black Ops 3 since July, but now there's a new trailer explaining the set up for why he, playing a magician, is going to be fighting alongside a boxer, an actress and a cop in its co-op Zombies campaign mode, Shadows of Evil. Watch it below.
]]>Call Of Duty: Black Ops 3 [official site] has a "sonic anti-personnel" ability which lets you "literally bring your enemies to their knees by making them sick to death." When you use it, people straight up vom' till they die. The latest trailer, found below, introduces this and other Chaos Cybercore abilities.
]]>As far as marketing stunts go, Activision's Call Of Duty: Black Ops 3 [official site] flurry on Twitter through the week was, how shall I put it, not very well thought out. Live-tweeting a fake-but-pretending-to-be-real crisis will turn heads, but what happened to simply showing off a trailer or dropping some screens? Don't worry, we've got you covered. RPS: serving you, minus the hysteria.
]]>Massively jetlagged as I am, I decided to ease back into the post-International real world by catching up with Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 [official site] announcements from Gamescom. Either I am stuck in a MOBA fever dream or Blops 3 really is introducing a protect and ban phase to competitive play. Tell you what. I'm going to cover it as if it's real and then you can just let me know (gently) whether it's all just a big hallucination. I'm also going to put a wodge of new screenshots in.
]]>I would buy the heck out of Call of Duty: Black Ops III's [official site] co-op Zombies mode as a cheaper standalone game. The mode has developed into such silly schlock horror, and draws an increasingly impressive cast of folks from cult movies while going weirder places.
This year's offering, named Shadows of Evil, will see Jeff 'Jeff Chuffing Goldblum' Goldblum, Ron 'War Never Changes' Perlman, Neal McDonough off Band of Brothers, and Heather 'How's Annie?' Graham teaming up to fight zombies and tentacled monsters in a noir-y '40s world. It looks absurd and I like it so much. Come watch the trailer to see Jeff Goldblum as The Magician, chewing the scenery as if it were made of delicious buttery Marmite toast.
]]>Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 [official site] turns soldiers into cyberwizards with dominion over cyberbrains and robobees, but does that make the game much different from any other CoD, Blops or otherwise? For the first ten minutes of a new thirteen-minute gameplay trailer showing off four-player co-op, the answer appears to be no. Soldiers run along corridors in a sandy city and shout and shoot and there's a cinematic where a man dies and oh it's so very tragic. The final three minutes, however, venture into one of the boss battle arenas, and that looks a whole lot more fun.
]]>Wall-jumping and robo-soldiers and crazy weapons and teleporters and OTT awards for doing almost anything: whatever would Captain Price think? Me, I'm sort of relieved that Call of Duty Black Ops III [official site] has given up all pretence of military realism and entirely embraced science-fictional absurdity: it's as though the series is finally allowing itself to be what it's wanted to be for years. This trailer is focused on the hectic-looking multiplayer, which conjures up Titanfall as well as UT, but I sorely hope there's a healthy dose of deliberate silliness in the campaign too.
]]>Tweets from developers dumping details are a bit like bubble gum wrapper trivia facts, aren't they? You won't be fascinated and enthralled, you won't learn the deepest secrets of the darkest beings, but you might raise your eyebrows a little, but approvingly, and at the back of your mouth grind out an approving throaty vocalisation like "Mmh!" or "Hhhoh!" or "Hmm!" or "Hrmmm!"
Now we've chewed the Cyberbazooka Joe gum of Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 [official site] in that trailer, it's trivia time, with wrapfacts on dedicated servers, field of view, and other touchy issues.
]]>The Icarus 'jump from rooftops and land like it's no big deal' augmentation from Deus Ex: Human Revolution may be ousted as my favourite cyberupgrade. Activision gave a peek at Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 [official site] over the weekend, and you guys: you can have a cyberarm containing a cyberhive of cyberbees that swarm enemies. I shall name my arm The Buzzness.
Along with dropping a new trailer with snippets of gameplay, Activision started talking about its campaign. With customisable characters (including ladies!) and perks, it'll support co-op and gosh oh golly won't always be in such restrictive corridors. So they say, anyway.
]]>One detail I enjoy in the world of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is that once cybernetics truly take off, the Paralympics eclipse the Olympics because cyborgs are way cooler. The cybered-up future envisioned in Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 [official site] is a bit more boring. 2028 for the milestone of a lady with robolegs winning a gold medal against two with meatsticks seems unimaginative, not to mention unfair to the lowly meatbags.
Anyway, anyway, if you're wondering about the path to cyberfuture, cybersoldiers, and genome soldiers that Blops 3 will follow, here, this new trailer's a spot of speculative cyberfiction that might entertain until this year's CoD is given its big reveal on Sunday.
]]>In the words of Insane Clown Posse, it's an oldie but a goodie. Zombie mode is returning for Activision's just-anounced Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 [official site].
]]>Activision and Treyarch have announced the worldwide reveal date for Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 - it's April 26th.
As you might expect from a teaser for an announcement, it's all swishy CGI and some echoey near future military-industrial philosophy wiffle and no actual game details. BUT you can watch it:
]]>Ah good, it's time to start talking about Next Call Of Duty and how it's probably going to be Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 because a Snapchat campaign - yes Snapchat, shut up - implies as much.
While streaming some Black Ops 2, YouTuber Drift0r picked up on the addition of one of those QR code ghost things Snapchat introduced so you can befriend #brands and #engage with their #content easily.
"I have a feeling this is going to be like a viral marketing campaign," he notes on the video. "Like in a couple of days if you follow the little ghosty you will get a picture of Black Ops 3 tweeted out or Snapchatted out? I don't really Snapchat so I don't know how that works."
He was right.
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