The massive Xbox "reset," as the brand's leadership calls it, continues. Yesterday, the company announced another 268 jobs eliminated along its quest to lay off 3,200 employees throughout the fiscal year. We also learned that several Xbox studios and franchises were coming under the Activision Blizzard banner, including Age of Empires developer World's Edge.

Studio creative director Adam Isgreen says there have been substantial layoffs at World's Edge alongside that transition. "I am of course disappointed that this is the way the time with World's Edge and Age ends for myself and many of my talented teammates that were also impacted – we had some great plans for what's next – and I hope the team that remains can rise to the occasion down the line," Isgreen says in a LinkedIn post (thanks, Rock Paper Shotgun).

In a separate post on ResetEra, Isgreen adds that "just under half the studio was let go." We have reached out to Microsoft for comment and will update this story if we learn more.

Isgreen's roots in the RTS genre go back decades. He was a designer on the first Command & Conquer: Red Alert, working at Westwood Studios from 1995 through 2003. He worked on the beloved Star Wars: Empire at War at Westwood successor Petroglyph, and eventually joined Microsoft in 2010.

He served as creative director on a number of projects at Xbox, including such varied projects as Killer Instinct, Crimson Dragon, D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die, and ReCore. Eventually, he helped lead the company's Age of Empire revival, again working as creative director on a massive pile of remasters and 2021's Age of Empires 4.

"I never thought that I'd work at Microsoft, let alone spend a significant amount of my career here – 16 years! – especially in a creative-first role," Isgreen notes in his LinkedIn post.

"What's next?" he asks. "No idea. Maybe games? Maybe not? Pinball machines? Always loved the combination of design + art + engineering they represent."

These are the best RTS games you can play today.

Xbox's new reshuffle has seen Rare moved under Activision, 24 years after Xbox outbid the publisher for the studio.

Rare has mostly been seen as one of the biggest drop offs in games. While the studio's Sea of Thieves is seemingly super successful, it was one of the powerhouse developers of the 1990s only to flounder throughout the 2000s and 2010s; the big shift being when Rare was purchased by Microsoft.

While the studio did release some great games during this era like the Viva Pinata duology and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts (which I get why people don't like a new genre slapped onto an existing franchise), it never reached the highs of its SNES and N64 output.

And with Xbox's latest wave of redundancies that continue the planned 3,200 jobs cut throughout FY27, Microsoft has announced that Rare will be moved under Activision as part of this reshuffling. But as pointed out by co-founder of The Game Business, Chris Dring, this could've been a reality for the studio back in 2002.

Dring notes that when Nintendo declined to buy the remaining 51% of the studio a bidding war for the developer started that was eventually won by Xbox, with the studio being purchased in September 2002 for $375 million. However, other than Xbox and Nintendo (who Microsoft's Ed Fries claims was part of the bidding war after declining to purchase the studio), the other major interested party was none other than Activision.

And now, just over 24 years later, Activision is the home of Rare. Of course, it's a very different company now than it was back in 2002, with the studio focusing on its successful live service title Sea of Thieves. But it does mean the PS1 and N64's biggest platforming icons (outside of Mario, obviously) are now all under the Activision banner as Banjo joins Crash and Spyro.

The Rare SNES game that became Banjo-Kazooie has been preserved thanks to a leaker who wants you to "delete Microsoft and Sony from your lives."

Good Smile Company is getting in on the Crash Bandicoot 30th Anniversary festivities by re-releasing his cute and chibi Nendoroid figure, and my inner '90s kid is frothing at the mouth.

The $53.99 (via Good Smile Company) toy features Crash in all his orange-colored, jeans-wearing glory, and like the rest of the Nendoroid line-up, it includes swappable parts so you can recreate your favorite scenes and poses. You've got extra arms, and even a spare eye and tongue to play around with, but most importantly, Good Smile made sure to include Crash's iconic pal, Aku Aku.

Aku Aku does not make the iconic "ooga-booga" sound when you slap him on Crash's face, but he still looks absolutely adorable in Nendoroid form. Just beware that if you want him, and a little posable Crash to keep amongst the best Crash Bandicoot merch in your collection, the pre-order window closes on October 20 next month.

I don't know about you, but as someone who remembers clutching the original gray PlayStation controller in their hand and looking longingly at the screen as Crash typhooned his way through crates and skunks, I feel like I'm turning into a pile of dust acknowledging his 30th anniversary. Yet this re-release of the incredibly detailed figure is giving me reason to stay on earth and not disappear off into the wind.

Sculpter toytec D.T.C has really outdone themselves with this toy, as Crash looks like he jumped straight out of Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time. While I would have preferred if they took more inspiration from the original PS1 games, the details are glorious. From the 3D tufts of hair on Crash's arms to the markings on his gloves, this is probably one of the best depictions I've seen of the iconic game mascot in toy form.

Of course, what makes any Nendoroid special is not just how adorable these chibi-inspired toys look, but what you can do with them. As I mentioned earlier, you can attach Aku Aku to Crash's face just like in the game series. While that doesn't grant this toy a short stint of invincibility, as a neat detail, the figure includes an additional stand so you can pose the sentient mask next to Crash instead.

That detail alone is what has me hammering to pre-order this Nendoroid while I still can. Aku Aku was such a prominent part of my PlayStation-playing childhood, and I love that Good Smile thought to allow you to pose him on or alongside Crash. Again, the only thing that'd make it sweeter would be if Good Smile packaged in a polygonal version of the iconic sidekick, but maybe we'll get a PS1-looking Crash toy in the future.

If you want a little articulated Crash Bandicoot for yourself, you can pre-order him now from the US or UK Good Smile Company online stores. Just be warned that while the pre-order window closes on October 20, he won't arrive at your door until between April 1 to June 30, 2027. It's a long time to wait, but the pure, nostalgia-fueled detail on display should make it worth it.

• View all Good Smile Company Nendoroid toys at Amazon

For more cool collectibles, check out the best Lego sets.

We'll be back gallivanting with our favorite dragon early next year when Spyro: A Realm Beyond comes out. To celebrate the character's anniversary this year, we've gotten a little tease of what's coming.

Toys For Bob is handling the game, having previously worked on Spyro Reignited Trilogy and Crash 4. Since the namesake scaly mascot first arrived in the US on September 9, the studio decided that day would be a solid choice for another snippet of his upcoming return.

Sadly, there's no new trailer yet, but we do get a better look at one of the areas, Arcadian Vale, a lush blend of old crumbling ruins, hills, and rivers. There are two pieces of concept art provided: one showing the landscape more broadly, and the other depicting a point of interest sitting on a cliff.

They tease the kind of place you'll spend a while just hopping around, having fun, picking up gems, and taking out enemies. "Arcadian Vale captures the charm and wonder that defines Spyro’s new adventure," reads the description.

"Made up of a calm, serene atmosphere, Arcadian Vale is a vibrant landscape filled with natural beauty," the studio continues. "Across the scene are cascading waterfalls tumbling down from towering cliffs. Ancient stone structures and weathered monuments rise from the terrain while lush greenery blankets the valley floor, creating a destination that feels magical and alive."

Sounds delightful, and exactly what I'm looking for from a new Spyro sequel. This is his first full new game since The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon in 2008. That's almost 20 years ago! Hopefully this can live up to the wait - going by what we see here, I'd say so.

Physint goes from PlayStation to Xbox as Sony "unexpectedly" drops Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid spiritual successor

Call of Duty publisher Activision is severely ratcheting up its years-long campaign against cheaters, publishing actual footage of a cheat maker being served a cease and desist order.

The game's main line of defense against cheaters is its kernel level Ricochet anti-cheat system, which is installed at the kernel level of your operating system and loads with the game to detect cheats from a privileged position in your PC's security system. That alone stirred some controversy when it was implemented back in 2021, but there's no denying it works. Since then, Activision has caught hundreds of thousands of Call of Duty and Warzone cheaters, but the fight rages on as they adapt and circumvent the latest anti-cheat measures. Now, Activision is going after something closer to the root of the problem: the people actually making cheats.

"RICOCHET Anti-Cheat doesn't end when your match does. Cheat makers operate around the world. So do we," reads a tweet from the official Call of Duty Twitter account. "We're taking the fight directly to cheat sellers.

"Last weekend during the Closed Beta, we went to Ohio to takedown Elocarry. That's not an isolated case..."

In the above video, you see what appears to be an attorney or process server drive up to a purported cheat maker's home, ring the doorbell, and hand a legal notice over to the accused. "What's this?" the person asks. "Attorneys for Activision and, uh, it's a cease and desist order for you."

When the recipient asks for more information, the server tells them to contact the attorney involved and the conversation ends. Naturally, the accused's visual identity is blurred out and their name redacted, but Activision confirms the video is "an excerpt from a real recording." Unnamed but still shamed.

In follow-up tweets, Activision shows the receipts apparently backing up its claim that this isn't the first or only person it's taken legal action against due to cheating in Call of Duty, with several more images of alleged cheat makers being served legal notices.

"In our ongoing fight against cheat developers and sellers, we've disrupted more than 375 cheat reseller operations, served more than 80 cease-and-desist demands and shut down more than 30 vendors," the publisher says. "And there's more to come, including litigation when necessary. We're prepared to take cheat developers and sellers to court to protect fair play.

"BUILD CHEATS. SELL CHEATS. WE WILL FIND YOU."

Activision adds that its latest anti-cheat measures are targeted at "the people and businesses behind cheating products" so that it can "disrupt the ecosystem that profits from them." Included is a screenshot of what appears to be a cheat seller informing its customers of a pause in operations.

"It's another way we're working to make cheating harder - not just for the people using cheats, but for the people building and selling them," Activision says.

Activision is obviously no darling, but this is an easy win for their PR team. If the accused cheaters and cheat sellers are really guilty, they're actively getting in the way of thousands of people simply wanting to enjoy the games they bought with their hard-earned money. Cheating will always be a thing, and Activision itself seems to acknowledge that, but anything that makes it harder and more legally risky to do is a good thing in my book.

Now onto more important matters: After Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 beta, devs promise to fix Captain Price's hair as his unexpected balding goes viral

Atari and Activision have somewhat of a turbulent history, but the two publishers are teaming back up in the name of new cartridges. The collection will provide vintage console fans with the chance to nab 12 standard edition releases, including Pitfall!, River Raid, Kaboom!, and H.E.R.O, and if you're feeling really fancy, you can add 39 "deluxe" boxed classics to your shelf with ludicrous price tags.

The Atari x Activision Collection almost feels like two old pals finally falling back in. While there hasn't been any real animosity between the two publishing giants, the developer of '80s hits like Pitfall and River Raid originally broke away from the retro console maker in 1979 to become the first-ever third-party developer for the 2600. Let's just say the four programmers who started the legendary company, David Crane, Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead, and Larry Kaplan, weren't happy with their treatment at Atari, and the rest is history.

Of course, even though those grudges were left back in the '80s, the two companies evolved as seperate entities. That matters today since we now have shiny new systems like the Atari 2600+ remake ($129 at Amazon, FYI) accompanied by real carts and even retro handhelds like the Activision Super Pocket loaded up with the developer's classic capers. Normally, you have to opt for something attributed to Atari or Activision, but the new cart collaboration unites the two after almost 50 years.

If you're simply seeking physical Activision cartridges you can play using original hardware or the new Atari 7800+ or 2600+ emulation-based remakes, you're looking at $34.99 / £27. That batch of cardboard releases sticks to just 12 of the console's third-party greats, but you can go absolutely wild and pick up the four "Deluxe" collector's boxes at a staggering $249.99 / £261 a pop.

I should note that with the Treasure, Speed, Secrets, and Victory Deluxe boxes, you're getting a bunch of feelies with each of the 39 games. You'll be treated to collectable patches and pins to stick on your denim jacket, and if you somehow have $999.96 / £1,006 (?!) for the "Complete Collection", you'll also get a mysterious to-be-announced collectable item.

For just shy of $1,000, I'd personally be expecting a solid gold Atari, but I don't want to yuck anyone's collectable yum. At the same time, the Atari x Activision clearly isn't geared towards casual players who want to embrace physical retro gaming, as even the $35 MSRP tied to the standard editions is a little steep.

I'm not completely down with the price tags, but I do appreciate the sentiment behind the Atari x Activision collection. In a statement marking the reveal, the company's VP of hardware, Matt Burnett, acknowledges the historical significance of the breakup that happened way back in the '70s.

“In 1979, a group of Atari programmers set out to prove that great games could come from independent creators and ended up changing the industry forever,” remarks Burnett. “The Atari x Activision Collection brings that legacy to life through the games themselves, giving fans an opportunity to experience, collect and preserve the work of the developers who helped establish a new model for the video game industry.”

The real question is whether the Atari x Activision collaboration will be a one-off, or if we'll continue to see first and third-party games co-exist on the same new systems. That would save the need for separate handhelds like the Super Pocket, but I'm also holding out for new editions that even bring back the likes of Imagic since that developer is owned by Activision.

I'm not asking for much, perhaps even just some nice re-releases of Dragon Fire, Laser Gates, or Moon Sweeper in those metallic boxes. I'd even settle for a nice handheld with all of those baked in, and I guess the Atari x Activision proves that it is possible despite any licensing divisions in the big 26.

• Atari consoles at Amazon
• Retro consoles at Amazon

Swing by the best retro controllers for authentic gamepads with new tricks.

The Modern Warfare 4 beta started over the weekend, and besides all the chatter about balancing and time-to-kill, it's Captain Price's haircut that's caught the attention of many. Our man should maybe get a new barber, and this iteration's developer, Infinity Ward, and Call of Duty publisher, Activision, are actively working to find him one.

Soon after the preview period started, fans began to notice how the handlebar-mustache-sporting soldier wasn't looking too good this time around. Gone is his well-kept head of hair, and what remains is a choppy-looking mess. "Lieutenant Cost," he's been dubbed by online revelers.

Developer Infinity Ward is on the case, since the number of comments and pictures on social media was hard to ignore. "We're aware of an issue with Price's hair not appearing correctly when viewed at the lowest level of detail," a tweet from one of the official accounts says. "The team will be addressing it in a future update."

This is an important caveat: the screenshots aren't from the game running across all standard machines. They're from people on lower specs. There are always trade-offs when it comes to making sure the game runs on low-powered machines, and it seems Captain Price's bedhead was one of them.

The post actually makes a slightly passive-aggressive pass at this fact. "Ultimately this will not be an issue if players meet our recommended specs," the tweet adds.

While it's understandably frustrating to be the butt of a joke that's missing context, there's a substantial audience whose specs are low for whatever reason, and they shouldn't feel like their experience is substandard. It's not the first time the franchise accounts have posted like this either. At least the Captain's hair will be done up properly, likely with a better hair transplant than your uncle got on holiday that time.

"CoD got it. Halo didn't" – Black Ops 1 and 2 ports battered Halo Campaign Evolved on PlayStation last month, analyst says, because $60 for a "graphical touch-up" is a rough sell

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 pre-orders are now live and with two editions up for grabs, a couple of bonuses to choose from, and some early discounts in the UK, things are already heating up ahead of October 23.

Here's what you need to know. Both $69.99 / £69.99 Standard and $99.99 / £99.99 Vault Edition MW4 pre-orders are now available, though retailers are adding their own bonuses onto the former. Amazon's standard edition copies also come with five hours of double XP (at launch) and Best Buy's (Currys in the UK) comes packaged up with a free steelbook. That's if you're not interested in any digital extras.

The Vault Edition is your digital deluxe, available via Xbox or PS Store (or with a Steelbook at Best Buy if you're in the US). The boosted MW4 pre-order comes with:

• Hostile Alliance Operator Pack
• Special Forces Operator Pack
• Signature Weapon Collection
• BlackCell
• DMZ Deployment Bonus
• Hunter Killer Operator Skin
• Gilded Pearl Camo Pack
• Campaign Early Access (October 16)

So here's what I would do. Amazon is your go-to if you're after the standard edition. You're still getting something extra in that double XP, but the site is still currently guaranteeing release day delivery. Best Buy will swap those points for a steelbook, but speedy delivery isn't confirmed as such on the listing itself.

In the UK, you'll be heading to Currys. Amazon is matching the same price, and swapping the steelbook for double XP, but strangely delivery times are a little less concrete at the time of writing. On the flip side, Currys has free release day delivery advertised with that shelf piece as well.

Pre-order Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 in the US

Standard Edition

Vault Edition

Pre-order Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 in the UK

Standard Edition

Vault Edition

We're also rounding up all the latest Marvel's Wolverine pre-orders and showing you where to pre-order Wolverine PS5 consoles, controllers and more.

The beta for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is currently underway, and the next patch will focus on fine-tuning time-to-kill. Complaints have been coming in about how quickly players are getting popped, leading developer Infinity Ward to get under the hood of various weapons in the FPS.

The studio tweeted about the incoming changes earlier today, August 24. "Another [Modern Warfare 4] Beta update is headed to you soon," says the post. "We're working on adjustments for several weapons that will increase the minimum TTK. Bug fixes too."

If it's not obvious, time-to-kill - or TTK - refers to how long it takes to bring someone down from after you first pull the trigger through to their actual death. It's the kind of thing you probably don't actively think about, but would notice if it's too off-kilter, either because it's taking too long to get a kill, or you feel you're dropping too soon.

From the sounds of things, it's an issue across much of the inventory in the upcoming shooter. Tinkering with even just a few of the guns requires careful attention, because any overcorrections will just breed other problems.

For a franchise that's been going as long as Call of Duty, what feels right can be a matter of perception. One back-and-forth in the responses to Infinity Ward's tweet demonstrates this perfectly.

A fan says the TTK should be more like Ghosts, because that "was perfect." But then, in a reply to that one, another player shoots Ghosts down and says that Modern Warfare 3 should be the benchmark.

I'm sure the devs have their own goals and ideas of where these numbers should land. Infinity Ward says fuller patch notes are coming tomorrow, so we'll see then how much gameplay is to be impacted.

New Call of Duty: Black Ops 1 and 2 PS5 update turns the ports into Modern Warfare 4 ads

Earlier this year, PS4 and PS5 got native ports of Call of Duty: Black Ops 1 and 2. Now, Microsoft and Activision are turning these beloved FPS titles into billboards for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, with a big ol' pre-order button for the upcoming game stuck right there in the main multiplayer menu.

These new "pre-order MW4" options appeared after recent updates to the PlayStation versions of both Black Ops 1 and 2. Call of Duty news account CharlieIntel tweets images of both the updated menus, which gives the Modern Warfare 4 pre-orders equal billing with such features as "play online" and "options."

Of course, it's not unusual for modern online games to include regularly updated "news" feeds that often include what are basically ads for new DLC or upcoming sequels. But ports of the OG Black Ops games were well-received, in part, because a big chunk of the COD fandom is frustrated with the state of the modern games. Those same players are, at their most polite, giving a big "yeah, no thanks" to these ads.

Clearly, Microsoft wants every eye it can get on Modern Warfare 4. While Black Ops 7 sales are monstrous compared to almost every other game in the industry, it failed to beat Battlefield 6 on the US sales charts last year. That's the first time in the long rivalry between the two series that EA's FPS has come out on top. Certainly, not the outcome that Xbox was looking for after its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

The price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is falling, and all it cost was day one access to new Call of Duty games.

You can reset the timer, because once again, there's tension between Call of Duty devs and players over online multiplayer. In this instance, Modern Warfare 4 utilizing the matchmaking system from Black Ops 7 Season 5, at least during the upcoming beta, is causing a stir.

To put it succinctly, players simply don't want it, and the official Call of Duty Twitter account's responses aren't helping. "Players are sticking around longer and playing more matches," a tweet reads.

"Since Season 05, quit rates are down across every skill group. For more than half of players, they dropped 41%," the post continues. "Search times are also down vs. Season 04. Average ping has improved too."

The Call of Duty account then revealed more stats on what the devs saw in open matchmaking. There were over 32% higher quit rates, over 14% fewer kills, and over 50% left "Not Fun" ratings. Those are substantial numbers, and paired with the 141% hike in players quitting Nuketown, suggested another structure for doing things was favorable.

Members of the fanbase are contesting these figures. Community notes state search times are actually up, pointing to a video testing such from YouTuber XclusiveAce. Infinity Ward's later claim that 50% of players exit a game when there are disbanding lobbies, a figure that's been dubbed "misleading," citing a guide from the franchise's official site.

Replies by now have gotten a little petty and barbed, and it's worth keeping in mind the beta hasn't actually kicked off yet. ModernWarzone, a dedicated outlet for this FPS series and Battlefield, has been involved in back-and-forths with various representations of Call of Duty on Twitter.

A final statement was made by the central, namesake account. "We asked for feedback and you definitely gave it to us. And that's what a Beta is for," the tweet reads. "We’ll be here online, and in your lobbies, improving as we go. Matchmaking isn't just data, it's a feeling. So jump in, feel it for yourself in Beta."

The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 early beta runs from August 21 through to August 25.

"CoD got it. Halo didn't" – Black Ops 1 and 2 ports battered Halo Campaign Evolved on PlayStation last month, analyst says, because $60 for a "graphical touch-up" is a rough sell

An analyst has shared why Call of Duty's Black Ops 1 and 2 ports are vastly outperforming Halo: Campaign Evolved on PlayStation.

Over on Twitter, Alinea Analytics head of market analysis Rhys Elliott posts a chart of estimates of July's best-selling games on PlayStation consoles. Activision's Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2 ports are right at the top, with the latter estimated at 8.2 million sold, making it far and away the highest-selling game of the month, while Black Ops 1 is estimated at only 3 million.

Halo, on the other hand, was estimated to have sold around 351,000 copies in July.

"Beyond the CoD doing ports doing GANGBUSTERS, the thing that stands out is Halo's notably slow start on PlayStation, which ironically stings even more next to the success of two effort-light CoD ports," Elliott explains. Not to mention Halo's stock has somewhat fallen in the last decade and a half, with Elliott adding, "One can’t help wondering what could have been if Halo had kept the trajectory it had around Halo 3 and Reach."

And ultimately, he believes price is the main factor, saying, "A proven, beloved old game, dropped at the right moment and, just as importantly, at the RIGHT PRICE, can out-earn almost anything new and buy a bit of breathing room in the slate."

And while the Call of Duty ports are kind of expensive, they launched with a pretty significant limited-time discount for PS Plus subscribers. Elliott adds, "CoD got it. Halo didn't. Sixty dollars for what’s essentially a graphical touch-up of a 2001 game was always gonna be a rough sell, and players clearly weren’t having it."

Halo: Campaign Evolved was the 4th most popular game on Xbox at launch in the US but only 29th on PS5, analyst says

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2's PS4 and PS5 port just got some backend updates as Activision works to "improve match security" amid reports of a hacker on the loose altering players' accounts.

Over the last few days, multiple players reported running into a hacker in their multiplayer lobbies who maxed out their accounts, even setting them to Prestige levels that don't actually exist. Some also reported experiencing game crashes after this, preventing them from playing. Thankfully, it's not taken too long for the devs to get on the case.

"We've released backend updates to improve match security as we review accounts with incorrect Prestige levels," a tweet from the official Call of Duty Updates account today reads.

Players are warned that they might "briefly see an account ban notice when they're removed from a match or session so our systems can correctly apply updated account data," but it doesn't necessarily mean they've actually been banned – it's just a "byproduct of legacy systems used by older titles," it adds.

"If you're able to reconnect after receiving this notice, your account has been processed successfully and no further action is required," it continues. "If you're unable to reconnect, your account has been identified for enforcement based on evidence of intentionally obtaining unauthorized Prestige levels or other violations of our Terms of Service, including account manipulation."

In theory, then, anyone who was randomly targeted by the hacker won't see any negative consequences, but it might be a different story if the account manipulation was intentional.

Based on the responses to the tweet, this process seemingly hasn't been entirely successful – some folks are reporting that no changes have been made to their affected accounts at all. Others are also irritated that they already reset their stats themselves after getting hacked – they're apparently back to square one with no way to get themselves back to their progress before having their accounts manipulated.

Perhaps most concerning is that the post doesn't mention any action being taken against those responsible for the hacks in the first place, raising the question of whether Activision is actually dealing with the root issue, which isn't exactly inspiring confidence in players that the situation is resolved.

Activision seemingly didn't bother fixing a 15-year-old Call of Duty: Black Ops exploit for its new port, modder says, but it's now investigating the leftover PS3 issue.

Treyarch's original Spider-Man game lacked something. It was solidly made, and enjoyable enough to play, but failed to replicate the visceral thrill of hurtling through New York as a web-slinging superhero. It didn't capture the freedom, speed and fluidity of movement that makes Spider-Man so compelling.

Jamie Fristrom, one of Treyarch's first employees and a key member of the development team, had been away on his honeymoon when work started on Spider-Man, which was based around the first instalment of the Sam Raimi trilogy. Fristrom returned to the office to find that his colleagues had embarked down a different path to the one he envisaged.

Webs were essentially cosmetic and players could swing continuously from one to another, regardless of whether they attached to anything or not. They didn't respond to your momentum either, carrying you along at the same steady pace regardless of circumstance.

Fristrom felt that the web-swinging experience wasn't anywhere near dynamic or immersive enough. It also made Spider-Man too easy, depriving the game of the necessary speed and peril. "I was pretty disappointed by that, but I also knew that doing something more 'realistic', with physics and grappling hooks, where you actually attach to stuff, was probably not going to fly," he says. "But, during the development of that game, I did work late to cobble together my own ideas. About six months into production, I'd got something that I liked and I showed it around the team. They thought it was interesting and had potential."

That initial discussion with team members gave Fristrom the confidence to push his idea further. "I talked to the owners of Treyarch – my college buddies – and said, 'Here, look what I did.' They were like, 'Come on, Jamie, be reasonable. You can't change the core game mechanic halfway through!' It also wasn't quite there yet. You'd swing and you'd stick to a wall automatically, because Spider-Man was pretty sticky back then. That wasn't fun."

Treyarch decided to continue with the initial plan and put Fristrom's ideas to one side, at least temporarily. After the game was released in 2002, the development team went to watch Spider-Man in the cinema for the first time, an experience which changed everything. Spellbound by the film's sheer dynamism, they recognised that a more ambitious approach would be needed to ensure the sequel lived up to heightened expectations.

"Maybe we still didn't know what to do next, but we knew exactly where we were heading. Now we could do iteration after iteration. If you feel it strongly enough, getting there is just a matter of work. And we were excited enough that we didn't care how much work it would take," says Tomo Moriwaki, the game's creative director.

Soon after Spider-Man shipped, the next game was underway. Treyarch had two years to deliver Spider-Man 2 and spent the first six months of that in preproduction, refining Fristrom's prototype. "We had this period where we had one team working on gameplay and controls and character and how the camera would work, and then another team working on the tech," he explains.

"In today's world, with the kind of budgets that would be in place for a game like that now, it's unreasonable. Our bosses would have stopped us," says Moriwaki. "But, at the time, there was more distance between publisher and developer, and even the leaders of the development company. We were given a wider berth."

There was no guarantee that all this experimentation would deliver the results they wanted, causing a lot of anxiety. "There were several months of us telling our bosses, like, 'Don't look at it yet! Don't look at it yet!' That moment came where we couldn't hold them off anymore," recalls Fristrom. "That was a great day for us because they were all very impressed. They ran it all the way up the chain to the chief operating officer of Activision to show everybody what we'd done."

The new fluid style of web-swinging, in which Spider-Man would latch onto a building, lamppost, tree or other structure and pivot like a pendulum, was given resounding approval. The more attachment points that were added, the smoother the experience became. You could suddenly cover large distances much more quickly than before, in a way that felt liberating and much truer to the film. "Spider-Man becomes more like a ball that just moves through space and is influenced by the choices we make with the controller," says Moriwaki. "That shifted our thinking towards uninterrupted movement. We were on the hunt for animation transitions that took account of player velocity. If you were swinging at like 70 miles an hour, if you let go, you'd fly at that speed before starting to slow down."

This one fundamental change served as the catalyst for so many others that came together to make Spider-Man 2 far more engaging and memorable than its predecessor. Building a large open-world environment – a faithful recreation of Spider-Man's version of Manhattan that players could freely explore outside of missions – was one of the most significant, drawing inevitable comparisons with Grand Theft Auto.

Programmer Greg Taylor led the city's construction, which was a huge task. "It took longer than we expected. Greg definitely did get pretty stressed out," says Fristrom. "One of the things we had that GTA 3 didn't have was the verticality. On GTA, you're usually down on the road so you can't see that far. If you haven't loaded in distant neighbourhoods because you don't have the memory, or whatever, then it didn't matter that much.

"With Spider-Man, you could go up to the top of the Empire State Building and look around so we needed something. You couldn't just have a fog plane, like so many games did back then. Somebody came up with the idea of loading in these low-detail neighbourhoods that were basically just boxes. Always having those things in memory was pretty key, and then just having the nearby stuff loaded in high detail."

Eric Pavone and other designers populated Manhattan with activity to keep players occupied between missions. You can make deliveries for the pizzeria and take photographs for the Daily Bugle. There are various races to complete, hidden tokens to collect and crimes to stop, each earning you Hero Points that are used to buy upgrades like new attack moves or increased swing speed.

The most common type of challenges in Spider-Man 2, where you have to stop a crime or help a member of the public, were referred to as 'shenanigans' by the Treyarch team. Some had to be initiated by players, while others occurred at random, leaving you to choose whether or not to intervene. Time limits occasionally applied, like when a ship was sinking or a construction worker was about to fall from a ledge.

The lack of variety in shenanigan scenarios is one of the game's biggest drawbacks, forcing players to stop an armed carjacking, rescue a kid's lost balloon or retrieve a stolen purse from a mugger many times over. This was a by-product of the approach the team had taken and the scale of what they were trying to achieve. "Part of the problem is that, in hindsight, we were a prototype game long enough that we had to use whatever the results were," says Moriwaki. "We were just diligently going on, building all kinds of complex infrastructure for a system that we didn't know would work. Because of the way we were doing it, it had to work.

"Some of that stuff, like the armoured car robbery, was really complicated. It was already a huge logical difference to the way we scripted gameplay. It meant we were going to have to be responsible for itemising what we pulled into the scene, and also when we dumped it out. That required a difficult and complex memory management and streaming logic model."

Screen to controller

Matthew B Rhoades adapted the Spider-Man 2 screenplay to create the story. It covers the main plotline, the rise of Doctor Octopus and his fusion experiment that threatens to destroy New York, but other Marvel villains like Rhino, Mysterio and Shocker are drafted in to extend the gameplay. A highly sexualised Black Cat competes with Mary Jane Watson for Spider-Man's attentions as he struggles to reconcile his superhero responsibilities with his normal life as Peter Parker.

"We had to get approval and that wasn't automatic for us. We did a first round of just asking for a lot of different characters and a bunch of them came back 'no'. All the stuff that they said 'yes' to, we basically came up with a rationale for it," says Moriwaki. "We broke up the overall story into half a dozen pieces and then plopped the movie script's key points across that timeframe. We just found a place for it to fit in."

There was lots of extra content that the team wanted to include. Too much, as it turned out. "We were definitely behind schedule near the end. If the movie had come out when they originally said it was going to, I don't know what we would have done," says Jamie. "We got a three-month reprieve. That gave us time to bring more polish. Even with that, we had plans to do this whole sewer system with the Lizard boss, which ended up making it into the third game eventually."

Looking back, Moriwaki believes that the team were simply too close to the project, and too passionate about it, to recognise that their bold plans were getting out of hand. Eventually, Activision had to intervene, requesting that Treyarch narrow the scope of the game considerably to ensure that everything could be finished in time. Some painful sacrifices had to be made. "Spider-Man 2 must have more cut content than any game that had come out until that point," says Moriwaki. "The amount that was cut is staggering. There were some people on the project who had almost their entire work removed from the shipped game and that's terrible."

The control system used in Spider-Man was completely overhauled to make the sequel's gameplay as fluid and fast-paced as Treyarch wanted it to be. Amid all the excitement about what they'd created, there was an underlying concern that players might find the new controls too complex, potentially alienating a significant chunk of their audience.

Feedback from playtests was inconclusive. The team estimated that 10% of players might struggle but worried that the true figure could end up being even higher. "It's probably one of the most difficult core game mechanics that you can dump in somebody's lap and say, 'Here, learn this!'" says Jamie. "I was nervous as we were shipping the final thing. It was like, 'Will people just buy this and not be willing to figure out how to play it?' Most games with 3D swinging do fail, but I have a theory that the lure of Spider-Man means people are willing to get over that learning curve."

The new control system was much less intuitive than the previous one, but with the time and space to practise, which the open-world setting offered in abundance, its intricacies would gradually become second nature to most players, making Spider-Man 2 a far more rewarding experience. Treyarch's leap of faith paid off spectacularly. With the success of the film, which was the third-highest grossing of 2004, Spider-Man 2 was always destined to sell in huge numbers. Perhaps more significant was the overwhelmingly positive reception from players and critics, who praised the game for its vast scale, daring style and sheer fun factor. Sprinting, swinging, climbing and leaping around Manhattan was an absolute joy.

The developers reflect fondly on the process that led them there too. "I had an extremely good time and a ton of those people are still basically like family to me," says Tomo. "What we were able to discover, and accomplish, together was super-satisfying. It was a lot of work and, I think in hindsight, it was maybe at a somewhat unreasonable pace, but even that over-commitment just felt like mad science and experimentation.

"We developed a control scheme and a locomotion experience that could sustain an almost unlimited amount of exploration. We had no precedent for what we did and the way we did it gives me this clear example of why we take chances."

"In a lot of ways, I still feel like it was the peak of my career. Even over 20 years later, that's the coolest thing I've ever done, other than having kids!" laughs Jamie. "There's just something about Spider-Man 2 that's special and enduring.

"The fact that Spider-Man games keep coming out, and they keep paying homage to that swinging mechanic we developed, really makes me happy and proud still to this day. We changed gaming history in our own tiny way, right?"

Take a look at the best Spider-Man games for more web-head adventures!

They don't make 'em like they used to, but this week, Season 5 of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will introduce an updated matchmaking system that's more in line with how they used to make 'em.

In a new tweet, the official Call of Duty Twitter account reflects, "Over the past year, we've continued to learn a lot about Multiplayer matchmaking through player data and community feedback."

This comes on the heels of the recent PS4 and PS5 release of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2, which has finally given the latest PlayStation consoles official versions of the first two games in this sub-series. Their release also stoked discussion of how Black Ops used to feel (spoilers: sometimes full of cheaters).

"We're also excited to see all the recent love for Black Ops and Black Ops II, which reinforced that there are many elements of those experiences that players appreciate," Activision agrees. "Starting this week with Season 05, we're updating Black Ops Classic, Quick Play, and Party Games in Black Ops 7 with a new matchmaking system inspired by those classic games."

With this change, the exact vibe of which will warrant some hands-on testing in the days ahead, Black Ops 7 will "continue to offer" modern Open playlists, and Activision says "we'll also include Open playlist options in the upcoming Modern Warfare 4 Beta." But if you're an older Call of Duty fan who maintains that the newer games have lost a little something, you may be in better company than you realized.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 expands Ricochet anti-cheat to combat exploits in Ranked after banning over 263,000 cheaters already this year.

The war against cheaters continues, with Activision bringing in the latest round of protections for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. The publisher is utilizing the Ricochet software to help handle ne'er-do-wells in the FPS, in order to better single out the more discreet exploits players are taking advantage of.

Ricochet is already part of the framework for the latest Call of Duty, and Warzone 2, but now Activision's revealed the partnership is being extended. "Through June, Ricochet Anti-Cheat banned more than 293,000 accounts year-to-date while making it harder for cheaters to create new ones," a social media statement reads. "In Season 5, we're further expanding our hardware ban capabilities."

This was prompted by a rash of poor behavior in Ranked, where the higher-skilled players frequent. Cheaters are getting smarter and more intricate, only using tools for specific instances, making it harder to catch them in the act.

Cases are getting so minute, in fact, that Activision says only a small portion of the accounts that get spotted and banned stem from video evidence captured by others. What you can see as another competitor in the same match is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the data the devs are gathering.

"Public clips can help flag cases that deserve a closer look, but they account for about 0.11% of all enforcement actions," the post reads. "The remaining 99.89% are driven by detection data, investigations, in-game player reports, and internal monitoring. In other words, the work is happening well beyond what players can see publicly."

Ricochet, then, "combines client protections, server-side analysis, and dedicated investigation tools" for a robust set of defences against malicious carry on. A kernel-level driver can spot third-party software that shouldn't be part of the in-game experience, layering the hurdles for cheaters.

The message ends by pointing that while "bans matter," you may not see the banhammer come down straight away. Timing is taken into consideration, to help avoid exploiters adapting too quickly to the latest defences.

This is a constant bugbear, but with any luck, Black Ops 7 and Warzone 2 will see a decrease in such activity. At least, for now.

Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2 ports were both in the top 10 US PlayStation games last week despite cheating and DLC mess

Despite being a bit of a terrible deal, the PS4 and PS5 versions of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2 both charted among the most played games on PlayStation in the US last week.

Earlier this month, Activision released the rumored Call of Duty: Black Ops 1 and 2 ports on PS4 and PS5. And despite being the highlight of the franchise for many people, these ports haven't exactly gone down well with fans.

First off, unless you have PlayStation Plus to take advantage of a limited-time discount, both games are $40 each, and $30 on top of that for the DLC map packs, which fragments the player base between those who do and don't have DLC… the already fragmented player base, as there's no crossplay between PS4 and PS5.

And on top of that, the game swiftly became rife with cheaters – presumably due to the fact that 15-year-old exploits haven't been fixed – making the online just a bit of a miserable experience.

Circana Player Engagement Tracker - US Top 10 Titles by Total Weekly Active Users (Not Concurrent) - W/E Jul 11, 2026- Call of Duty: Black Ops I & II debut in top 10 on PlayStation- Palworld jumps from 57th on Steam a week ago to 2nd with v1.0 official launch

— @matpiscatella.bsky.social (@matpiscatella.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-21T14:54:39.588Z

And yet, the nostalgia for these two games has proven potent, as thanks to Circana's Mat Piscatella, we know that both games debuted in the top 10 most played games on PlayStation in the US. Black Ops came in at ninth place, with only Madden NFL 26 behind it in the top 10, while Minecraft and Marvel Rivals came in eighth and seventh before Black Ops 2 appeared at number six. However, the regular old Call of Duty (the app that encompasses the likes of Warzone) came in fourth, giving Activision's shooter three spots in the top 10.

Predictably, the top 10 outside of these two games is filled with titles that were also in last week's ranking, with Fortnite, NBA 2K26, and Roblox holding the same top three spots. As for last week's big release, Assassin's Creed Black Flag: Resynced, the chart notes that it launched within the top 30 on PlayStation. So nostalgia is potent, but maybe for some things more than others.

Here are the 10 best Call of Duty games of all-time.

Despite having 15 years between them, Call of Duty: Black Ops' PS4 and PS5 port is seemingly suffering from the same exploits that its PS3 version has also been a victim of.

Activision released both Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2 for the PS4 and PS5 last week in the form of straightforward ports, not remasters – both games are also on Xbox Series X|S via backward compatibility. While making two fan-favorite games available to more people should've been a slam dunk win for Activision, XP exploits quickly made multiplayer lobbies nearly unplayable for large waves of Black Ops 1's online population.

As spotted by IGN, YouTuber Tdawgsmitty recently chatted with a modder who explained that the problem might actually be a leftover exploit from the original game's PS3 and Xbox 360 days. Right now, there aren't any aimbots and such flooding the game, but people are modding save files to farm more XP than is usually possible by spamming themselves with grenades, say, which is ruining competitive games for regular players.

"Essentially, what you're doing is that it's like PS3 where you copy [a save file] to your USB, and there's a website that lets you unencrypt it," the modder says. "The site lets you use a jailbroken PS4/PS5, and it will decrypt it for you. The save data is the exact same as PS3. What sucks about this port is that Iron Galaxy [and] Activision didn't bother changing the encryption on the files, which is the whole reason why this is available right now. That's the only reason why."

Activision disabled "select playlists" a few days ago while it investigates reported issues. It then updated some playlists with "a server-wide fix," though the modder suggests other game modes are still exploitable.

For now, reminisce with the best Call of Duty games of all time.

Things aren't going well for the new ports of Call of Duty: Black Ops and its follow-up on PlayStation 4 and 5. Mere days after launch, players found the lobbies to be absolutely riddled with cheaters, to the point that the FPS is basically unplayable, prompting Activision to take drastic action.

These versions of Black Ops 1 and 2 launched on July 9, and it wasn't long before reports emerged of fans having a frustrating time due to hacks and exploits. Not just your routine exploits either, custom lobbies have made it so that you can jump to the top level by grenading yourself right as a match starts.

This is leading to entire teams blowing themselves up, giving the opposition the win by default. What fun, eh? Who needs bullets and guns and actually playing the game properly? Seeing this rather large wildfire of issues, Activision quickly shut everything down by flat-out disabling certain playlists for the time being.

The publisher announced this on the Call of Duty Updates Twitter account on July 13. Since then, the "first phase" of hotfixes have been rolled out. Playlists have gotten a server-side fix, and anyone lumbered with negative XP has now been reset to level 20 for regular progression.

That second one is due to a bizarre hack on the first Black Ops. Killing someone in a round of Domination where a player is already at the top level will either catapult you to level 50, or take away the same amount of experience from overall score, putting you in minus figures and locking you out of playing altogether because the game reads you as less than level 1.

I'm not a gambling man anyway, but I definitely wouldn't be taking that risk. Activision had made it clear the multiplayer infrastructure is built on new servers, to prevent age old glitches and issues re-emerging. Sadly, hackers have only gotten worse in the 16 years since the first Black Ops, and the fact these re-releases are coming at a $40 premium just makes this all the more irritating.

"Call of Duty is bigger than the Marvel Cinematic Universe": New Xbox CEO brags as more of its games turn to film and TV

The first all-new Spyro game in 18 years, Spyro: A Realm Beyond, is finally set to launch early next year, but the devs at Toys for Bob have had to be careful not to get too carried away with their "cool ideas" that would see the platformer run out of budget and time.

Associate creative director Louis "Lou" Studdert and studio head Paul Yan recently appeared on an episode of the Kinda Funny Gamescast, where they were asked if there were any moments during development when they realised they were going too far.

The answer is yes, though Studdert explains that "every game is like that" since there's so much "eyeballing" and "napkin math" involved as the team works out what elements might need cutting back, and what they might want more of.

"There are areas where you tighten the belt, and there's areas where you expand," he continues. "Just part of the game development process."

Yan adds to this, noting that "scope creep is a real thing." There's a simple reason for this: "Every time you're in a conversation with creative folks, it's always like, 'Wouldn't it be cool if this happened?'"

And yes, Yan says, "they absolutely are cool ideas, but if you commit to every single one of those, you know, without some discipline, then your game blows out of budget and blows out of time."

Thankfully, this isn't Toys for Bob's first rodeo. The studio has "high tenure folks who have worked together and can complete each other's sentences," and are also so "highly senior" that they know the drill when it comes to shipping games and understanding "'what is the scope within our team,'" Yan says.

In summary, he concludes, "We know ourselves, and we know when things are a little bit beyond our reach, or too much, and then we'll pull it back down to be what's appropriate for us developing it and also for the experience."

One thing the devs haven't held back on, however, is A Realm Beyond's flight system. In the same podcast, the devs explain that they wanted flying to be a very "active" thing, and crucially, not like a "flight simulator" where you can leave Spyro on "autopilot." So, expect you can find plenty of "decision-making" there.

Spyro: A Realm Beyond dev says the "loud and consistent" fans who bought 11 million copies of the Reignited trilogy helped manifest the series' first new game in years.

The original Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2 are now available natively on PS5 (and PS4) thanks to shadow-dropped new ports, and the prices haven't aged a day.

Call of Duty: Black Ops is $39.99 at base or $19.99 with PlayStation Plus through August 6. Its season pass comes with the First Strike, Escalation, Annihilation, and Rezurrection content packs, and is $29.99 or $9.89 with PlayStation Plus, also through August 6.

The same prices and limited-time PlayStation Plus promos apply to Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and its season pass, which includes four DLCs – Revolution, Uprising, Vengeance, and Apocalypse – along with the Nuketown Zombies map and an "Exclusive Calling Card - 'The Deuce.'"

Cross-platform multiplayer is notably not supported by these versions, which is one of several complaints circulating among Call of Duty fans, along with player base fragmentation resulting from the expansion packs being sold separately. Modern Warzone notes that Wager Matches and Theatre mode are also missing from the PlayStation ports.

All in all, post-discount, you could be spending as much as $140 to get everything in both games. On the one hand, this comes as no surprise; this is exactly how much these games and content packs cost on Steam, for comparison. The PS Plus deals do take the edge off, if only for now, and you will need a PS Plus sub to play online to begin with. It does feel kind of weird to pay this price for the season passes of 16- and 14-year-old games, I'll agree. After all, those seasons have long passed.

Here are the 10 best Call of Duty games of all-time.

It's been nearly seven years now since Activision and Toys for Bob released Spyro: Reignited Trilogy – and there's a reason the well-received three-in-one remake feels so faithful to its old counterparts from the late 90s and early 2000s.

In case you've never played the remade trilogy, it's pretty solid – in fact, it plays exactly as I remember the original few games playing, striking the perfect balance between nostalgia and quality of life (I'm looking at you, OG PlayStation controls).

Toys for Bob studio head Paul Yan explains how and why the developers pulled this off in a new discussion with Kinda Funny on YouTube – and insightful is an understatement here.

According to the lead, the team first tried to find source code in-house so it could "reconstruct it" for the Reignited Trilogy.

So, instead, "one of our engineers took an open- source emulator and then modified that so that we looked at the original game and actually peered into its data, extracted a lot of the models… We extracted the levels. We measured all the metrics. We found the exact placement for every gem."

That's not all, though. "We measured the timing, the speed, and the paths of certain enemies." In other words, they delved deep into the modified emulator. "It gave us a lot of metrics that gave us the authenticity on that side of it," as Yan says.

Obviously, they did change some things so that Spyro: Reignited Trilogy wouldn't feel too "old," so to speak – the controls, as I joked earlier, are one of the bigger things.

And, honestly, I'm grateful that they did. As associate creative director Lou Studdert chimes in, after all, players tend to have "rose-tinted glasses" on when approaching retro games like Spyro.

You imagine them looking and playing a whole lot differently than they actually did – but the devs took that into account with Spyro: Reignited Trilogy, and it's better for it. I do wonder, though… how will Spyro: A Realm Beyond feel, in contrast?

We have some very exciting features – like free flight and such – to look forward to, but also the same colorful visuals that made the original games so comforting. Personally, I can't wait to give it a go… a new entry has been a long time coming.

"Going independent meant taking a massive, massive risk": How Toys for Bob split off from Activision and Xbox to help guide Spyro to A Realm Beyond

Everyone who has played Destiny will tell you a story about it. They'll probably have a few, actually, but ask them to pick their most memorable and it will likely be the tale of how they got their first Gjallarhorn, the all-conquering rocket launcher that made mincemeat of just about everything during Destiny's first year. We doubt many can beat the story of the member of our raid team who got theirs by stopping on the approach to a loot chest deep in the Vault Of Glass, and firing their entire supply of rockets at it. Stepping up to open it, out popped Gjallarhorn. For weeks afterwards, the other five raiders would unleash rocket after rocket at the luckily impervious chest in the hope of seeing it spit out Destiny's most prized reward.

Such were the lengths we went to, in those early days, to tip the odds in our favour. Destiny launched in September 2014, and within days it had become starkly apparent that this was not the game we had dreamed of, or the one Bungie had promised it would be. Its story, if you could call it that, was over in a flash. Our character hit the level cap of 20 within days, and it seemed there was nothing left to do. A pop-up window that appeared after we hit level 20 hinted at a new purpose – the pursuit of Light, the true measure of a Destiny Guardian's power – but the only way to raise it was to play, again and again, levels and missions that we felt we had already picked clean.

In the absence of anything new to do, Bungie gave us punishing difficulty and a miserly random loot system. The weekly Nightfall Strike, for instance – a ramped-up version of an existing mission with tougher enemies and a selection of cruel gameplay modifiers – offered up one of the best loot tables in the game, with a reasonable chance of dropping legendary and exotic gear upon completion. Yet enemies would frequently appear at a level or two higher than you could ever reach, and if all three team members died, they'd be kicked to orbit, and would have to start over from scratch.

Faced with those odds, it's little surprise that players did what they could to cheat the system. One Nightfall boss could be killed by hiding beneath a raised platform, shooting through a small gap that enemy ordnance couldn't fit through, using Ice Breaker, a sniper rifle whose ammo replenished automatically over time. It worked, but playing Destiny this way was slow, boring, and not in the spirit of the game, so Bungie patched it. It did likewise for the infamous loot cave, a small opening in a rockface in Old Russia's Skywatch zone from which enemies constantly spawned, and into which players would empty clip after clip, standing stock still until their supplies ran dry.

Destiny was the first game in Bungie's 10-year deal with Activision, but the game would likely have died, and the contract been ripped up, within weeks of launch were it not for the Vault Of Glass. VOG, to use the Destiny community's affectionate shorthand for the game's first raid, launched a week after the base game – just long enough for the committed player to reach the recommended level 26. Even now, four expansions and three more raids later, VOG is held up as the best Destiny – and co-op console gaming in general – has to offer.

Vault of Glass

It was clear from the start that this was different to everything else in Destiny, whose missions until now had been linear excursions between objective markers, with variously sized gunfights building to a battle against a bullet-sponge boss. Yet VOG opened by asking a six-strong team to split up and hold three capture points from incessantly spawning enemies. Inside there were boss fights, yes, but they were no mere shootouts. Each had a set of exacting mechanics to learn, to devise a solution to, and to conquer.

In between there was light relief – a frequently hilarious platforming puzzle with disappearing scenery, which even now is all too easy to mess up – and a marvellously fraught stealth maze whose patrolling Gorgon enemies would instakill anyone they laid eyes on. VOG was difficult, yes: the first team in the world to clear it took over 10 hours. But it was the most rewarding activity Destiny had to offer, both figuratively – the sense of satisfaction after you and five friends finally clear a difficult section is part of what makes Destiny so special – and literally, as some of the best loot in the game flooded into your inventory after each boss was vanquished.

And what loot it was. The armour on offer was, at the time, the only route to the true level cap of 30. And the guns were, aside from the more widely available Gjallarhorn, the best available. There's never been a hand cannon like Fatebringer: it had the Firefly perk, which caused enemies killed by headshots to explode, dealing heavy damage to those around it, and Outlaw, which greatly increased reload speed after a precision kill. It was more than a gun: it was a game in itself, training you to pick your shots, and rewarding you for doing so by killing four other enemies in the vicinity, then refilling your clip in a split second. It's simply one of those guns – Doom 2's super shotgun, Titanfall's smart pistol, and so on – that will be talked about for years.

Yet for all that VOG was a masterclass in design, and the gear that dropped from it a delight, it also exposed two of Destiny's greatest problems. The first is that a handful of guns were overpowered, to the extent that anything else was considered a waste. When the hard-mode version of Crota's End, the second Destiny raid, launched, it was widely accepted that the final boss fight was as good as impossible without a full team of Gjallarhorn owners. Matchmaking websites, created to help players assemble raid teams – there was no such facility in the game itself – hosted listings with strict team requirements, almost all of which insisted on applicants being max-level and with Gjallarhorn in their inventory.

The second problem was, inevitably, RNG. Since VOG was, for a spell, the gatekeeper to the level cap, you were reliant on the game granting you a full set of raid armour. Many were left looking for just one piece (for most, weirdly, it was a pair of boots). The hunt spawned a meme, 'Forever 29' – one drop short of the maximum level of 30. A wounded Bungie has been working to make amends ever since.

Indeed, the studio has worked tirelessly on these two distinct problems, struggling to balance a set of weapons that must fulfil two very different needs – in PVE, being overpowered is fun, but in PVP, it's ruinous – while reducing Destiny's reliance on a random-number generator. It's been largely successful: in its final form, Destiny is the fairest it's ever been. Guns are finely balanced. Loot still drops randomly, but the most powerful gear is available through fixed, clearly explained (though typically long-winded) means. Everyone can reach the level cap by simply playing what is now a very generous, accommodating game. There's little to complain about in Destiny today. But it's missing something, too.

Randomness is a powerful thing. And for the first 12 months Destiny was defined by RNG – powered by it, propped up by it, the reason we loved it and hated it and kept on playing it anyway, going into work the next day bleary-eyed, disappointed and itching to get back to it. The weeks or months of waiting for your raid boots, or Gjallarhorn, made the eventual payoff all the sweeter.

Better Together

The pain may have stopped, but we didn't. Once you'd got all the gear you really needed you carried on anyway, playing and replaying the same old missions. Routes and enemy patterns had long been committed to memory, your god-tier weapons making mincemeat of them all. Luke Smith – the Bungie staffer who designed VOG, Destiny's first and best raid, directed The Taken King, its best expansion, and went on to lead development of Destiny 2 – once described Destiny as "the bar I can go to in my pyjamas", and it remains the most succinct explanation of the game's appeal.

A few sphincter-clenching raid sections aside, it's the most laid-back game about shooting alien monsters you could possibly imagine. The advantage to having so little content was that, if you played it enough times, you could do it without thinking about it. It's a highly social game, with a largely friendly community – the kind that forms when players come together to see off some of the toughest challenges in video games, then spend a couple of hours popping Cabal heads, farming upgrade materials and talking about their days to wind down.

None of this would have happened had Destiny not been one of the best FPS games around. Not even the magic of VOG would've saved Destiny had there not, beneath the miserly loot system, the wet fart of a story and the content drought, been a rock-solid FPS. We expected great gunplay from the maker of Halo, but Destiny's true mechanical magic lies in the way it borrows from the best MMOs – with its cooldowns and super moves, its deeply customisable subclasses – and uses them to create something that subverts, and elevates, our expectations of the FPS.

That foundation carried the game through three years of peaks and troughs. And as we finally close the book on Destiny, the lingering impression is not one of a shooter, or even an RPG – but a game that somehow managed to be the best when it was, by any objective standard, its absolute worst.

This article was first published in 2017, in issue 308 of Edge Magazine. If you're interested in receiving more stories just like this one, subscribe to Edge Magazine.

Don't expect Call of Duty: Black Ops and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 to come remastered when they hit PlayStation consoles.

Call of Duty's scoring some easy goodwill points by bringing two of the series' most universally loved games to the PS4 and PS5 sometime next month. As developer Treyarch works with Iron Galaxy to make it happen, the company has now clarified what form the original Blops games will take.

Eurogamer reports that the upcoming ports are re-releases, not remasters, a point Activision supposedly emphasized to the outlet. Firm details are still up in the air, but next-gen graphics, new features, and sky-high framerates are likely off the table with this new distinction.

Remaster tags normally imply that some work went into jazzing up a game to add modern bells and whistles to it. With these being simply ports, you can more or less expect to play Black Ops and Black Ops 2 as they were on the PS3 and Xbox 360. However, Treyarch has promised that campaign, multiplayer, and zombies are included.

As Eurogamer also notes, the bigger question is whether these upcoming ports will use the same server infrastructure and lobbies as the PS3 version, which are infamously subject to hackers and cheaters nowadays. We should find out more as the re-releases approach their July release windows.

Until then, my best bet is that PlayStation owners will soon gain access to the same classics that Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S folks have been able to buy and play via the console's backwards compatibility program.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 DMZ devs have been "paying attention" to other extraction shooters like Arc Raiders, but think they've got them beat on "weapon feel."

The future of Compulsion Games, Double Fine, and Ninja Theory are unclear. There are reports this week that Xbox is in discussion to shutter all three legendary studios, and rumors that the teams responsible for South of Midnight, Psychonauts, and Hellblade could buy back their independence. At a time where both first-party creative houses – PlayStation Studios and Xbox Game Studios – have shown little hesitation in closing development houses, the idea that these three could walk away seems unlikely. And while no two situations are alike, it isn't unheard of. Just look at Toys for Bob.

"Toys for Bob was acquired by Activision in 2005, and for many years we enjoyed a long and successful partnership," says studio head Paul Yan, who took on the role following the departure of founders Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford in 2020. It wasn't long before Yan was steering Toys for Bob through one of the most challenging periods in its 30 year history. "Covid hit, and the world turned upside down. There were many changes that happened as a result. One was a corporate mandate [at Activision] to support the large blockbuster IPs – Modern Warfare, Warzone, and Overwatch 2, to name just a few."

Before the studio was drawn into the Call of Duty ecosystem, it was doing industry-leading work – breathing new life into the mascots that fuelled the imaginations of an entire generation of millennials. It spearheaded the burgeoning Toys-to-Life genre with the Skylanders series, "an original IP inspired by Spyro" before being given the opportunity to go a step further.

As Yan explains: "We spent time meticulously handcrafting the first three classic Spyro games for the Reignited Trilogy, and we really got an understanding of the character during this period. And then we moved on to Crash Bandicoot, breathing new life into that series with a sequel, as well as an experimental multiplayer spin-off with Crash Team Rumble." It's a period of prolific creativity, where Toys for Bob was able to leverage its growing confidence and expertise into long-overdue platformers.

And then the world changed. "We learned a lot after we shifted into a support structure to assist other teams with various initiatives, games, feature-sets, and updates. We spread into a lot of territories that we weren't familiar with, or at least hadn't spent a lot of time with. We're very proud of the work that we did there, and of all of the collaboration. But if we're being honest with ourselves, we knew that we were just straying too far from the games that we're passionate about – that we're known for. So at that time, in the back of our mind, we knew we wanted to get back to them somehow."

Soon, Activision began to change too. In 2022, as Toys for Bob was supporting Infinity Ward to get Modern Warfare 2 out the door, Xbox announced its intention to acquire Activision Blizzard King for $68.7 billion. Former Xbox CEO Phil Spencer went on record to say that he was interested in Toys for Bob dusting off older Activision IP, but nothing changed. As the deal closed in 2023, Toys for Bob were locked into supporting development of Overwatch 2 and Modern Warfare 3. Then the Xbox layoffs hit. One of the Toys for Bob studios was shuttered. A month later, it was all change again – the studio secured its freedom.

"In 2023, Microsoft was in the process of acquiring Activision. This was a long, drawn out process which gave us a lot of time to soul search – to ask ourselves, well, how can we get back to the games we're passionate about making? So we got in front of leadership at both the Activision and Xbox level," says Yan. "We proposed a really bold plan. We asked that Toys for Bob would buy back its independence – taking creative, financial and organization control – to spin-off into a separate company. One where we could get back to the games we were known for, and preserve the tight-knit team and the long tenure that we had built up over the years."

There was a major caveat in the proposal. Toys for Bob needed the security of knowing that it would immediately receive funding for a project. So if Toys for Bob was going to spread its wings, it was going to do it with Spyro: the character that had first freed it from the trap of making Disney licensing games with Activision back in the early 00s.

"The other half of the proposal was that the first game we would develop out of the game would be a new title for Xbox, and that it would be based on a concept that we had been stewing on ever since 2018," says Yan. "We learned a lot about Spyro in this time, and we had ideas on where the series could go and how we could evolve the character. So fast forward a bit, and leadership was very supportive of the move and of the game pitch. And for the last two years we've been quietly working on exactly that title: Spyro: A Realm Beyond."

Built in Unreal Engine 5, in development for PC, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X, A Realm Beyond is in many ways a continuation of the iconic Insomniac era of games – with Toys for Bob leveraging everything it learned through remaking that trilogy and then pushing on beyond it. Given how eager Toys for Bob was to regain its independence, I was curious as to why the studio would draw such a hard line in the sand – that it would get what it wanted, only so long as Xbox funded the group as a third-party entity.

Granted anonymity to speak candidly about the situation, multiple staffers at Toys for Bob have told me that it would have been 'near suicidal' to reenter the market without a project in active development, and that the arrangement works for everybody involved: the studio regains control of its future and a degree of security; Xbox gets to revive a legacy IP the community is desperate to see return with little risk; and that this could all ultimately lead to a fruitful partnership between the two in the future.

When I spoke with Xbox's executive vice president and chief content officer last week, Matt Booty didn't wholly shut down the question of whether third-party studios could be entrusted to revive other IP that the publisher has in the vault in the future: "I think the answer is there are options to do all kinds of things, and we're certainly looking at those all the time."

I did ask Toys for Bob associate creative director Lou Studdert why the studio went all-in on Spyro, rather than, say, Banjo-Kazooie, and he was clear about the studio's priorities. "Spyro has a deep place in the studio's heart. Having worked through Skylands and the Reignited trilogy, we've always admired that small but mighty underdog story of the character taking on these overwhelming odds – we see ourselves in that a little bit. And, honestly, it was also a no-brainer."

Yan adds: "Going independent meant taking a massive, massive risk. It's taking a bet on ourselves, but we had confidence in making that move [...] Reignited sold over 11 million copies, so there's an audience that showed up for the series."

As my time with Toys for Bob drew to a close, I asked Yan whether there was ever a world where the studio would have pursued independence without the Spyro sequel in place. "The proposal that we had was complex, and that was part of the equation from the beginning. That in order for us to pursue this, we would go independent. Is there a possibility that could have happened in some other alternate timeline?"

"I can't speak to that, but I can say that those two things together are exactly what we proposed," he says. "That Toys for Bob would spin off and have control over the types of games we wanted to focus on, and that Spyro would be number one."

Spyro: A Realm Beyond is set to release in 2027, although it doesn't have a confirmed release date. Toys for Bob may be developing the title as an upcoming Xbox Series X game, but it's also set to launch for PC, PS5, and Nintendo Switch 2.

Modern Warfare 4 is the Call of Duty I have been waiting all generation to play. It's a slickly produced first-person shooter that truly feels as if it is pushing at the boundaries of what this series can achieve when it's firing on all cylinders.

Activision has finally allowed its vast network of video game studios (who keep the gears of this annualized machine turning) to cease support for the PS4 and Xbox One, and the results are astonishing. There's a fluidity to the movement systems; weight to the weapon handling; a density of detail to the visual and auditory design that's apparent from the first kill to the last. You love to see it.

Jack O'Hara, the co-studio head of Infinity Ward and game director of Modern Warfare 4, believes the decision to leave last-gen systems behind has had a transformative effect on ideation and execution. "The processing power of the PS4 was great in its time, but it was starting to get in the way when it came to certain innovations. Support was making the development of new features harder, because you have to account for the differences between platforms."

"Console generations have been living for longer and longer, so we got better and better at optimization, but it does reach a point where you might be optimizing more than you're making something new. So, once you reach that threshold, you have to make the call," O'Hara adds. It's an exceptionally reasonable argument that has led to compelling results.

I'm told that Infinity Ward has engineered a lot of technology to deliver better balanced firefights. "Every shot should tell the truth" is a phrase I have heard more than once. Basically, there's a stronger alignment between bullet trajectory, weapon motion, and operator stance. Target visibility has been refined as IW introduces solutions to longstanding issues with bloom and depth of field. Weapons now make micro-adjustments as you push into tight spaces and begin to peek corners. It's wonderfully immersive, and feels utterly fantastic.

There's a control and a stability to the way that Modern Warfare 4 plays that simply wasn't present in Sledgehammer Games' disastrous Modern Warfare 3. Infinity Ward has effectively picked up from where it left off with MW2 in 2022. The recoil patterns and damage profiles are familiar, so too is the snappy TTK – though IW promises it's slightly less severe this time around.

"We are dialing in on the details to make that TTK feel consistent and strong," says Jacky Reynolds, multiplayer design lead. "One thing I'm really stoked about is that we made the TTK slightly longer at further ranges. If you played MW2, you probably felt yourself getting beamed across the map a lot. You'll feel that a lot less in Modern Warfare 4." Fighting at range requires more precision aiming than before, but Call of Duty is as lethal as it's always been once you're within sprinting distance of an enemy.

Consecutive Black Ops releases means Call of Duty has been saddled with hyper-mobility for two years. While I was certainly a fan of the omni-movement system within certain contexts, I was worried its introduction had defined a new direction for the wider franchise. IW has leveraged elements of this system to generate more fluid transitions around maps, and to give you new ways to change angles or adapt to pressure. So while you can't sprint, slide, or dive in any lateral direction like you could in BO7, you can now take advantage of backwards slides, mantle cancels, and faster climbing.

Combat Ready

I'm impressed with what Modern Warfare 4 is shooting for. I was able to play two multiplayer maps, and they are very in-keeping with the traditional Infinity Ward style – largely designed around three distinct lanes, promoting constant engagement and shifting momentums. There are some nice tweaks elsewhere too. The Riot Shield being reclassified as 'Equipment' and degrading through repeated use. There's now two Prestige paths, and IW is also very proud of a new Apex Attachment system – a set of unlocks that drastically transform a weapon's lethality and adaptability. Absurd incentives for weapon progression meet a more robust Gunsmith, enhanced customization, and a redesigned Create-a-Class system. There are more maps, modes, weapons, killstreaks, skins, and so it goes on and on.

All told, Modern Warfare 4 recalls memories of Call of Duty at its finest, albeit with a slick new-gen set of refinements, evolutions, and improvements. Beyond multiplayer, Infinity Ward has a lush campaign offering, following the exploits of Task Force 141 in the western hemisphere and a team of ordinary soldiers battling on the frontlines of a Korean war, and a returning DMZ mode that seems primed to take the fight right to Arc Raiders and Marathon. It's still early days, but I can't shake this feeling that Modern Warfare 4 couldn't have come at a better time for Call of Duty.

The series had clearly reached a breaking point. Back-to-back instalments of Black Ops and Modern Warfare titles created fatigue. Overbearing integration between mainline games and Warzone sowed frustration. There's a general sense that Sledgehammer and Treyarch (with three and two contributions this generation, respectively) haven't done enough to push the series forward – problematic as Arc Raiders, Battlefield 6, and a resurgent Overwatch offer competition elsewhere. But there's a quality to Modern Warfare 4 that is undeniable, and I'm desperate to play more.

Modern Warfare 4 is set to release on October 23 for PC, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X. However, the new game for 2026 will no longer land day one on Xbox Game Pass.

Call of Duty studio Treyarch has confirmed that Black Ops 1 and 2 will escape PS3 jail with new PlayStation ports coming in July.

In a Wednesday tweet that closely followed a post from fan account PlayStation Game Size, which teased incoming news for the first two Black Ops games, Treyarch says, "It's official: the original Black Ops and Black Ops 2 are being ported to PlayStation in July, courtesy of our partners at Iron Galaxy."

In a reply, Treyarch adds: "Both will include Campaign, Multiplayer, and Zombies."

Iron Galaxy is a large studio with a long history as a support and co-developer between some original releases. It's been a staple of Activision Blizzard's lineup for a while, contributing to the likes of the Spyro Reignited Trilogy and Overwatch. It also worked on versions of Bethesda games like Fallout 76 and Skyrim, and big PlayStation games like The Last of Us or Uncharted as they came to PC. Most recently, Iron Galaxy handled Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4.

Treyarch's post suggests Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2 will receive fresh PS5 ports in July, though PlayStation Game Size indicated both PS4 and PS5 were in the works. PS4 games are supported by PS5, so both would make sense.

The studio's wording may sound odd since the Black Ops series launched on PlayStation – that is, the PlayStation 3, third of its name – alongside PC and Xbox 360 in the 2010s. However, due to differences in backwards compatibility and legacy support, which are somewhat complicated by the new Call of Duty umbrella launcher used for modern games, the first two Black Ops entries are still stuck in PS3 jail, with no way to play them on PS5. Xbox fans can play the original 360 versions on Xbox One and Series X/S.

There are understandable questions about where these ports will be priced after all these years. Black Ops 1 still goes for $40 on Steam when it's not on sale, for reference. If nothing else, it's fundamentally good to see more games become more accessible and keep up with new platforms, especially some of the more formative Call of Duty installments.

Black Ops vet says his mystery PlayStation project wasn't a live-service game, and even if Sony shutting down his studio "f***ing sucked" he reckons it's just because "times change".

During Summer Game Fest, the annual Xbox Games Showcase brought us some very cool reveals – including the long-awaited Spyro: A Realm Beyond.

The upcoming Spyro game from Activision and Toys for Bob is the first big mainline entry in nearly two decades, and it's just as brilliantly vibrant as its nostalgia-inducing predecessors. In the new trailer, we see everything from bright purples to glowing oranges, green grasses to blue skies – you name it. It feels like a childhood fever dream in the best way, and I have a feeling that the developers wanted it to. They certainly weren't shying away from colors, anyway.

In a new online post, the official Toys for Bob account puts it best: "The world needs more radically joyful, colorful games," asking fans if they agree. I absolutely would.

The devs' statement here lines up well with what they recently said in an interview posted on Xbox Wire, too, that A Realm Beyond is one of those much-needed games the world is calling for now, and that it'll be as whimsical as the old Spyro gems we know and love.

"We know first-hand that a big part of what makes a Spyro game really resonate is having a wide variety of colorful, whimsical spaces with activities, characters, and treasures that motivate you to explore every nook and cranny," studio head Paul Yan explained.

We do get a taste of these spaces in the trailer, and so far, and I'm personally impressed. It's like a modernized step back into the early 2000s, old PlayStation hues and all.

That's not to say that the new Spyro game won't be… well, new. Yan also admitted "the sense of discovery is absolutely core to this new adventure," which translates into some very exciting features – like free flight and such.

All in all, A Realm Beyond sounds like a blend of both familiar and fresh Spyro mechanics (and aesthetics, apparently). We'll get to witness it first-hand come its spring 2027 release date.

Fingers crossed that Spyro: A Realm Beyond delivers on all of its promising visuals, features, and more when it does finally launch. I'll be eagerly awaiting it, anyway.

Searching for something else to wishlist? Here are the best new games coming this year and beyond to look forward to.

Spyro: A Realm Beyond is the iconic purple dragon's first all-new game in 18 years, but the devs at Toys for Bob don't want to stop here, with studio head Paul Yan expressing hopes that "this is the first of many" to come.

Speaking in an interview with GamesRadar+ at Summer Game Fest 2026, Yan says he's "proud of the team," who have been "paying attention and listening to the community."

He sees that A Realm Beyond could have fallen into two extremes: "If you stick too much to nostalgia, then you basically just rehash, and it's like, 'why did we do that?'" he suggests, saying that rehashing things would mean "there's no future that kind of gets out there."

Meanwhile, "on the other extreme, you innovate too much, and all of a sudden you don't even recognize what the character is and what the series is." With that in mind, Yan says, "that tension is so real" when it came to making A Realm Beyond.

After all, he continues, "our goal is that we want Spyro to live on for a long time. We want not just one new game, but many new games. We hope that this is the first of many. So we're going to have to take some risks. We're going to have to move into new territory, and our goal is to make sure that that evolution is always speaking to something that is authentic and reverential to building on the foundation of what is truly Spyro, and then we'll take some leaps." This will be "uncomfortable," he adds, "but we wanna go there."

It certainly sounds promising – the last all-new Spyro game launched in 2008, and while we had 2018's Reignited Trilogy (also made by Toys for Bob) to tide us over, Spyro fans have been ravenous for something fresh for years.

Thankfully, there's not too much longer to wait for Spyro: A Realm Beyond – it's set to launch in Spring 2027 on PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and Switch 2, and hopefully we won't have another 18-year wait for the next one after that.

Spyro: A Realm Beyond lets everyone's favorite dragon fly freely, which is "such a significant addition" devs have "built a whole world around that promise."

Infinity Ward has been watching the rise of extraction shooters, like Arc Raiders and Marathon, as it put together its own version of the genre in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's DMZ mode.

Multiplayer creative director Joe Cecot tells Xbox Wire that the team has been "paying attention to the genre," playing popular games to find out "what's clicking with players, what feels good, what doesn't feel good."

Cecot specifically says that the beta for DMZ lacked "meaningful player growth," which happens to be a major part of Arc Raiders' appeal. To fix that, the updated DMZ mode will give you a persistent inventory of gear and a central base to augment and upgrade your loadouts.

That said, extraction shooters require a level of commitment from players that can make it hard for new games to succeed. Cecot seems confident that won't be a problem for DMZ in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, though. He touts its open world full of mini events and unique locations as well as the pace and aesthetic of its combat as the kind of things you won't find in other games.

"Our rich sandbox combined with our first-person military theme is something that's going to really resonate with people," Cecot explains. "And I think our weapon feel and our movement are a step above most of the games."

We may be talking about Call of Duty here, the first-person shooter series of the last decade and change, but those are still some fighting words for popular games like Arc Raiders. I don't think the other games would've stuck so hard if their weapon feel was bad, which just means Infinity Ward is going to have to knock it out of the park to live up to those claims.

Luckily, if DMZ isn't cutting it right away, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 will also have a full campaign and suite of multiplayer modes to play while the kinks get ironed out. You'll be able to see how it fares on October 23 for PC, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 boss promises transparency over SBMM: "All will be revealed soon"

Tonight's hotly anticipated Summer Game Fest event was the annual Xbox Games Showcase, and boy, did it bring us some cool reveals – including one of Spyro: A Realm Beyond, a title we've waited nearly two decades for.

The last proper Spyro entry landed a whopping 18 years ago with The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon, but Activision and Toys for Bob are finally back with a new entry in the beloved series... one that sounds like it's shaping up to be the biggest we've ever seen – free-flying and all.

Speaking in a new interview with Xbox itself, Toys for Bob studio head Paul Yan seems to tease as much, first admitting that A Realm Beyond is just what the nostalgia doctor ordered.

Admitting that it'll be just as colorful and whimsical as predecessors, he says, "In Spyro: A Realm Beyond, the sense of discovery is absolutely core to this new adventure."

This whole "sense of discovery" that the lead mentions here is made all the better by one stand-out fact: you can fly freely about the skies as Spyro in A Realm Beyond. Yes, freely... and that's a lot for both the developers and fans.

As Yan describes, "For now, I can tell you that our biggest ambition in Spyro: A Realm Beyond is to give the player the freedom and fantasy of dragon flight – to be able to take the skies at a moment's notice and make interesting and active decisions to flow through the spaces as you charge on the ground and now soar through the air."

In fact, "This is such a significant addition to the game" that "we've built a whole world around that promise." That's... exciting, to say the least. It almost feels like the jump that the Super Mario series saw in Odyssey – but Spyro. I am so here for that.

If you're looking forward to soaring the skies as everyone's favorite little purple dragon like I am, it'll be available on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S – and, of course, Xbox Game Pass, too.

Searching for something else to wishlist? Here are the best new games coming this year and beyond to look forward to.

We don't yet know whether or not Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 will feature skill-based matchmaking (SBMM), but one Infinity Ward lead promises the devs will be "transparent" about the situation soon.

SBMM is a divisive topic within the Call of Duty player base – while as the name suggests, it's a system that aims to match players with similar skill levels against each other for a more balanced experience, some argue that doing so makes the game feel less casual and more sweaty, removing the joy from matches where you're head and shoulders above the competition.

Right now, neither Activision nor Infinity Ward have confirmed the extent to which SBMM will be implemented in the upcoming game (if at all), but we at least know that we should find out soon. Asked about it on Twitter, Infinity Ward co-studio head Mark Grigsby simply responds: "All will be revealed soon, and transparent."

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 went through a few ups and downs with its own SBMM – in the runup to its release, it was announced that "at launch, Open Matchmaking with minimal skill consideration will be the default matchmaking." Then, it was later clarified that this wouldn't apply to all playlists, with the majority "similar to the Beta experience where skill is minimally considered." Not everyone was happy about this – some called it a "rug pull" and a "backtrack," and perhaps this could be influencing the devs' immediate promise to be open about their plans this time around.

This is already going down well with fans, too. "It's actually crazy think that if you go back just 2-3 years you'd have never seen a studio head of COD openly replying to someone asking about SBMM. Crazy how things have changed. Only uphill from here," former CoD leaker Ghost of Hope responds.

"If he can deliver on this, then there might be hope," another replies.

Frankly, it seems incredibly unlikely that Infinity Ward will be able to please everyone in practice. For as many people who love the feeling of destroying their opponents, you'll no doubt have just as many who'd be left frustrated in the face of constant annihilation thanks to being matched with players more skilled than them. How the devs will tackle this, then, remains to be seen, but at least they're planning on telling us.

Modern Warfare 4 goes head-to-head with Arc Raiders and Escape from Tarkov as Call of Duty's extraction shooter mode DMZ returns.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 pre-orders are alive and kicking following the game's reveal yesterday, and there's some decent extra swag up for grabs. You'll need to put your order in early if you want access to the open Modern Warfare 4 beta in August. We now know that early access period will run from the end of August to the beginning of September, meaning you can get a considerably early look ahead of the October 23 release date.

That means it's time to get those copies locked in, and retailers are already starting to compete. Amazon and Best Buy are your top bets in the US right now. The former is offering five hours of double XP with its standard edition Call of Duty pre-orders, while the latter can send you home with a steelbook case. In the UK, Currys is my go-to. While UK players can also double their points with Amazon, Currys is throwing in that steelbook with a 10% discount on the game itself.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 pre-orders come in two shapes right now: a Standard Edition with the full game and that open beta access, and a Vault Edition with additional cosmetics, packs, multiplayer bonuses, and BlackCell. Activision is also running a loyalty scheme this time around. Essentially, anyone who has already played a CoD game released after 2019 can score 10% off their Vault Edition pre-order (Warzone doesn't count).

Both Modern Warfare 4 editions are now available to pre-order on PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC - but Activision notes we'll be waiting a little longer for the new Nintendo Switch 2 versions.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 pre-orders in the US

Standard Editions

The standard $69.99 Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 pre-order comes with access to the open beta included. That's the only way you'll be able to play ahead of that release date. Thankfully, Best Buy and Amazon are throwing their own incentives into the ring with steelbooks and double XP offerings.

Vault Edition

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 Vault Edition pre-orders are the digital deluxe versions, with the open beta access included as well as additional in-game cosmetics (with, apparently, a more "grounded" approach), items, and currency:

• Hunter Killer Operator Skin
• Hostile Alliance Operator Pack
• Special Forces Operator Pack
• Signature Weapon Collection
• BlackCell (one season)
• DMZ Deployment Bonus

UK pre-orders

Looking for something to play on? We're also rounding up all the best PS5 bundle deals and the latest Nintendo Switch deals on the market.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 is officially landing this October, meaning you won't have to wait much longer to get stuck into the action for yourself.

Activision and developer Infinity Ward first revealed the next Call of Duty Modern Warfare game back in May with a debut trailer. Offering up our first glimpse of the new conflict we'll be drawn into the in the Korean peninsula, the new game also made a big appearance during the Tokyo Game Show 2026 broadcast in September, with the a campaign trailer giving us a look at new protagonist Private Park, as well as Captain Price, who's now on the run. Excitingly, the trailer also confirmed Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal, Death Stranding) has a role to play, and it seems to be an antagonistic one at that.

Set to put a focus on a "boots on the ground" experience, with a beta offering more insight into Modern Warfare 4's approach to its multiplayer modes, we're here to help you get ready for its upcoming launch by breaking down everything you need to know about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 below.

Modern Warfare 4 release date

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's release date is set for October 23, 2026.

Activision revealed the new Call of Duty game and its release date on May 28, 2026. While you wait for Modern Warfare 4 to arrive next month, you can check out our guide to all of the Call of Duty games in order.

Modern Warfare 4 platforms

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is heading to all the new-gen consoles and PC, so that means PC, PS5, Switch 2, and Xbox Series X/S players will be getting their hands on it once it releases.

It's launch on Switch 2 marks the first Call of Duty game to release on Nintendo's platform since Call of Duty: Ghosts landed on the Wii U back in 2013. While Activision confirmed Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 won't be coming to Xbox Game Pass, Crossplay will be supported for all platforms, including Switch 2.

Modern Warfare 4 trailer

Modern Warfare 4 campaign

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's campaign is centered around the Korean Peninsula, with the threat of a full-scale invasion of South Korea sparking potential global destabilization.

While there is a focus on Korea and the trench style warfare that you will be experiencing there, Modern Warfare 4 will also feature some more locations, too, with missions in the campaign taking you to the likes of New York, Mumbai, and Paris.

In terms of more plot details for the campaign, developer Infinity Ward has also dropped some interesting character insights already. So far, we know that we'll be seeing Private Park in the campaign as the leading playable character, a young Korean grunt soldier who is thrust into combat for the first time. Expect to see a journey from "zero to hero" here as Park and his company have to survive against some impossible odds.

With an official campaign trailer (which you can watch above) dropping during the Tokyo Game Show 2026 broadcast, Infinity Ward is promising a "darker, more dangerous campaign", with Captain Price, who's returning to set up a rogue alliance, making another appearance after his cameo in the initial reveal. Said to be operating outside the system, Price is now on the run, and a "catastrophic weapon of war is on brink of falling into the wrong hands".

The trailer also revealed Hannibal star Mads Mikkelsen (who also appeared in Death Stranding) is featuring in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 as an antagonist.

Modern Warfare 4 gameplay

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is a first-person shooter developed by Infinity Ward that features a single-player campaign, multiplayer and DMZ.

The campaign mode will have players following a narrative as they complete various missions that offer variations of military-based gameplay such as close-quarters battles, high-speed pursuits, SAS night raids, and city-wide assaults.

For multiplayer, on day one players will deploy across 12 all-new core 6v6 maps set in visually and tactically distinct locations around the world. These various maps are built to support a range of playstyles from tight close-quarters combat to more open engagements. Multiplayer also features dedicated Gunfight maps, Big War maps (for vehicle and infantry fans), and a dynamic battleground with more than 500 configurations called Kill Block.

Finally, DMZ is something for all you extraction shooter enthusiasts. This is a living sandbox, where you (either solo or with a squad) are sent into a living combat zone and are tasked with recovering advanced military technology. The exclusion zones are also constantly shifting, keeping things fresh with weather changes, military objectives and plenty of hostiles for you to deal with as well.

Besides these three core gameplay offerings, it's also worth mentioning that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is giving players more choice than ever before through two Prestige paths: Classic Prestige and Regular Prestige. Classic Prestige delivers the traditional reset experience, relocking Create-a-Class progression in exchange for increased XP earn rates and access to exclusive Prestige rewards.

Ballistic Authority is also a new weapon-first technology stack that is used to deliver the most authentic gunplay experience in Modern Warfare yet too by unifying precision aiming, physical handling, realistic audio propagation, enhanced visibility, and smarter combat perception. Honestly, it all sounds like we'll be getting very precise and fair shooting experiences with this one, which is always welcomed.

Thanks to the beta and a patch, we also know that there have been some gameplay tweaks and additions. There is a new mode called Inflation where eliminating enemies gives you cash, but be warned: the higher your value becomes, the bigger target you are as well. Footstep volume has been reduced, and map voting has also been introduced. I'll keep you posted as we discover more before the beta ends. In the meantime, you can read our Modern Warfare 4 hands-on.

Can I pre-order Modern Warfare 4?

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 pre-orders are now live across most platforms, with Activision confirming Switch 2 pre-orders will be going live "later this year".

The Modern Warfare 4 pre-orders became available shortly after the game's reveal, with a blog post confirming the editions, as well as the pre-order bonuses you can get your hands on.

A digital Vault Edition is available for all platforms and will get you Early Access to the Open Beta, along with Special Forces and Hostile Alliance Operator packs, a Hunter Killer Operator skin, the Signature Weapons collection and a DMZ deployment bonus.

Pre-ordering the Standard Edition will also give you Early Access to the Open Beta, along with the Hunter Killer Operator Skin. Digital versions of this edition will be available for all platforms, while a physical release can also be picked up for those playing on consoles.

In the meantime, I suggest checking out our list of the best Call of Duty games if you're looking for something to tuck into ahead of Modern Warfare 4's launch.

If you are after some COD alternatives while you wait, head over to our list of the best games like Call of Duty. Or for more future releases, you can read our round-ups of all the upcoming PS5 games, upcoming Xbox Series X games, and upcoming PC games as well.

It sure looks like Activision is gearing up to announce the rumored Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, as a mysterious live stream teases something after a number of leaks and rumors.

Right now on the official Call of Duty YouTube channel, you can watch a stream titled "카메라 004 | LIVE," which machine translation says simply means "Camera 004 | LIVE" in Korean. The stream itself has already changed significantly in the time I've been watching it – what started as a view of a street somewhere in Korea, complete with ambient noise and power cables gently swaying in the breeze, changed to show soldiers moving through the area, before an enormous explosion set the scene ablaze. Since then, the image has been much darker, and viewers have been able to hear people screaming, air raid sirens, and more explosions.

Being on the Call of Duty channel, it's obvious that this is a tease for something new, but as VGC points out, leaks that have preceded this mean we probably have a pretty good idea of what's coming.

Last year, former Call of Duty leaker TheGhostOfHope (who earlier this year stated that "Activision has legally demanded that I stop leaking and disseminating confidential information") claimed that the 2026 CoD release would feature North and South Korea in its campaign, with 141, the SAS, and Republic of Korea Army being the three main playable factions as you attempt to stop a third world war. What's more, the game was apparently titled Modern Warfare 사 – the Korean character has multiple meanings, but most notably in this case can mean 'four.'

While the leaker's shutdown could be interpreted as confirmation of accuracy, it's worth noting that the official Call of Duty account previously denied that TheGhostOfHope was right about everything, saying: "Even when leaks are wrong, they still hurt the people building the game and mess with player expectations."

Even so, that wasn't the only rumor. Just yesterday, reliable leaker Billbil-kun shared what they claim is blurry cover art for "one of Activision's games: 사." Although it's blurry, you can pretty clearly make out three soldiers standing side by side. NateTheHate – a prominent Nintendo leaker who accurately leaked the Switch 2 reveal, as well as the new Star Fox game amongst other things – took to Reddit to say that this will be the first Call of Duty game on Switch 2, too.

The official Call of Duty channels haven't yet confirmed any of this, but with the stream ongoing, it seems like it's probably only a matter of time before we see what it's all about. A release around October or November has been the pattern for the series since its inception 23 years ago, so it stands to reason that we could expect the reveal for the next one to arrive around now – watch this space.

For now, be sure to check out our list of the best Call of Duty games of all time.

After the studio lost funding from NetEase, former Call of Duty dev David Vonderhaar's studio BulletFarm has confirmed that it's working on a new game.

Yesterday, NetEase veteran Simon Zhu announced a new holding company named GreaterThan Group to invest in multiple game studios, including Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic development team Arcanaut Studios led by Mass Effect veteran Casey Hudson. Zhu said in a press release that GreaterThan Group is "bringing common sense back to the games industry" and that the group's role "is to create the right conditions for creators to work on their dream projects."

Another studio now backed by GreaterThan is BulletFarm, founded by David Vonderhaar, who is best known for his work on the Call of Duty: Black Ops series (with Cold War being his final entry) as well as Warzone. In a post on Twitter, the studio announces that – despite the previous loss of funding – "BulletFarm lives. Same name. Same DNA. Same commitment to the player experience."

The post praises its new partner, saying "GreaterThan Group's core value of empowering development studios enables us to focus entirely on building a world-class team: one empowered to create experiences that leave a legacy for players around the world." It confirms: "We're in the early stages of creating a completely new first-person multiplayer/co-operative experience under the GTG banner, with high-intensity action, systemic gameplay, and cinematic immersion at its core."

Speaking to Bloomberg, Vonderhaar drops a bit more detail about the project, saying that the studio is "definitely not" making a military simulation. He adds that "it's not a Call of Duty killer," but rather something creative that he likens to "if David Lynch made shooters," with a description that seems to confirm it's a PvPvE game. He also notes that he hopes to complete the game in roughly three years.

Activision kills Call of Duty rumor: next game will not be on PS4, ending last-gen support nearly 6 years after PS5 and Xbox Series X launch.

The next Call of Duty game will not be available on PS4 or seemingly Xbox One, ending six years of last-gen support for the series.

The official Call of Duty Twitter account addressed the future of the franchise in a post earlier today, stamping out recent rumors claiming that Modern Warfare 4, widely but somewhat arbitrarily believed to be the next installment, is currently being tested on PS4. (If nothing else, we know that Activision will "no longer do back-to-back releases of Modern Warfare or Black Ops," meaning another Black Ops game is out of the running for now.)

"Not sure where this one started, but it’s not true. The next Call of Duty is not being developed for PS4," the series' account writes. This post notably doesn't specify PS4 and Xbox One, but it would be unthinkable for just one last-gen console to get a port, and this reads more like Activision targeting those PS4 rumors directly.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's cross-gen release last year disappointed some fans hoping to see the series break free from dated hardware and push the bar on current-gen consoles exclusively. Granted, per our Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 review, it also disappointed in several other ways and most certainly did not push the bar.

Call of Duty has been a mass-market money machine for decades, which has long led owner Activision (and now new parent Microsoft) to target the biggest install base possible. Consequently, a lot of Call of Duty games have been cross-gen years into new console cycles. The series' PS3 and Xbox 360 support continued in some capacity until 2015, about a decade post-launch, and ended with Infinite Warfare in 2016 as the first current-gen exclusive of its time (side games notwithstanding).

Terrifyingly, the PS5 and Xbox Series X are already approaching six years old. Call of Duty games tend to be fall releases, so by the time the next entry arrives, it might actually be six years since the November 2020 console launch. With the PS4 era officially dropped as of the next installment, this generation's Call of Duty window has closed a bit slower.

The price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is falling, and all it cost was day one access to new Call of Duty games.

The development of Overwatch 2 was troublesome, to say the least. Some PvE elements wound up being scrapped, and there were tensions over the release schedule. Jeff Kaplan, a former director on Overwatch, considers the whole ordeal one of his greatest failings in the industry.

"It's one of my biggest mistakes I've made as a creative leader in my career," he says on the Lex Fridman podcast. "There were two points of failure for me. The first was, I had people on the game team who didn't like PvP or competitive shooters, and they really loved the Overwatch universe and wanted to play these characters and heroes, they wanted to do it on their own terms in a PvE setting."

Though they were enthusiastic, they wanted the emphasis to be on a more co-operative, campaign-driven experience, rather than PvP, despite the first Overwatch being a "runaway success." The second, he states, was from management.

"The Blizzard, and more so the Activision management teams started really putting the heat on, 'You said Overwatch 2 was going to be out in 2019,'" he remembers, as they pointed towards slides he presented featuring a hypothetical timeline for the hero shooter. "You never want to put a PowerPoint deck in front of a corporate executive, you might as well etch it in stone and come down from the mountain."

The slide shown has a second game arriving around 2019, "all bullshit," as Kaplan calls it. A means of communicating a vision, not a hard plan, but execs apparently saw it differently. The pressure was compounded by ideas being thrown around on Overwatch 2 in 2015, prior to the original, by Kaplan, Chris Metzen, former creative director on Overwatch, and Michael Chu, the former lead writer on Overwatch.

It was all so early, because he was trying to create a runway for Overwatch as a multi-faceted property. Sadly, things didn't turn out that way, and Overwatch 2 launched in 2023, still focused on PvP, and has since been rebranded to simply Overwatch. Kaplan left Blizzard in 2021.

"It felt surreal": Overwatch co-creator allegedly left Blizzard after a former exec said he'd be responsible for 1,000 layoffs if the shooter didn't hit financial targets

A prominent leaker for the Call of Duty franchise has been shut down by Activision. To add insult to injury, the publisher took one last chance to quash the legitimacy of the information they provided.

On March 4, TheGhostofHope, a Call of Duty reporter who claimed to have insider info related to the FPS series, posted about legal ramifications preventing their work from continuing. "Activision has legally demanded that I stop leaking and disseminating confidential information related to Call of Duty/Activision," they write on Twitter. "I am complying with their demands."

TheGhostofHope will continue to cover the games in some capacity, but only based on "official" news, rather than providing or commenting on current leaks and rumors. Their bio now denotes them as "retired."

In response, Call of Duty-related YouTuber Tdawg tweeted out, wondering if this means TheGhostofHope was " right about everything?" Not quite the case, apparently.

"Nah," responds the official Call of Duty Twitter account. "Even when leaks are wrong, they still hurt the people building the game and mess with player expectations."

Ouch. Regardless of your feelings on leaks, how they impact people's perception of what's coming is a valid concern. If an insider claims something you've been hoping will be included in the next Call of Duty or an upcoming season of multiplayer, and it's not, it can be disappointing, through no fault of the development team.

At the same time, it's always concerning to see publishers put the boot into any journalistic practice, and it seems TheGhostofHope was truly cornered. This will no doubt reverberate through the Call of Duty leaks community, perhaps leading to other personalities leaving the scene. For now, one trusted voice has been stifled.

Call of Duty is cracking down on cheaters ahead of season 2 and the launch of ranked play with "major technology innovations" and bans on third-party devices: "Cheating can cost more than a win."

Eight years ago, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 introduced battle royale to the series with its Blackout mode, a formula Warzone vastly expanded over the years. Still, some players continue to crave the more straightforward battle royale experience offered by the original Blackout, and Warzone's Black Ops Royale is poised to deliver exactly that.

Black Ops Royale launches on March 12 at 9pm PT, or March 13 at 12am ET, and as the devs explain in a lengthy blog post, it's "an original Blackout-inspired Battle Royale with no Loadouts, no Gulag, and no Buy Stations."

The Gulag has been replaced by Redeploy Tokens, which essentially serve as extra lives, and Redeploy Towers, which teams can capture to revive their allies. Similarly, instead of loadouts and buy stations, you'll scavenge all of your loot in the classic battle royale way, rushing to map locations to grab the good gear before opposing players do.

You'll be able to grab especially high-value loot from Cradle Breaches, which essentially replace the Zombie Zones of Blackout. During the match, a bomber will drop a hallucinatory gas canister that'll make you see a bunch of presumably fake zombies and certainly very real high-tier loot caches. Each Cradle Breach only lasts for a limited time, so you'll have to contend with both the zombies and other players gunning for that loot as you rush for the best gear.

It seems that Black Ops Royale will launch as an all-quads affair, so smaller squads and solo players are out of luck, but the blog notes that that's just "to begin with." This isn't an LTM, so it seems that the mode is here to stay, and it's very possible that more squad sizes will become available in later updates.

The YouTube comments on the announcement trailer keep calling this "Blackout 2," and the devs are pretty explicit about the mode's inspiration. "There are clear influences from the core Blackout experience – like bullet drop and weapon handling, as well as the armor system and use of the Trauma Kit – capturing the Blackout pacing, traversal, and combat feel in a modern way," they explain in the announcement.

"This isn't a remake; it's a unique experience that pays homage to the Blackout core gameplay while keeping the flow of a match feeling right for Call of Duty: Warzone players," the devs say. Clearly, those players are more than ready for a mode exactly along these lines.

Here are the best Call of Duty games of all time.

Activision is ramping up its perpetual battle against Call of Duty cheaters with significant new anti-cheat measures ahead of Black Ops 7 and Warzone season 2's launch later this week.

In a new Call of Duty blog, Activision assures players – as much as it can, anyway – that it's taking action to ensure Black Ops 7 and Warzone ranked play is as fair as possible right at launch and that cheaters are sifted out before matches even start.

"Season 02 is almost here, and our top priority is clear: launching Ranked Play with the strongest protections possible, so matches are decided by player skill, not exploits," reads the blog.

"To that end, we're focused on making sure that players in these matches are using trusted, secure systems on both console and PC. We're achieving this by investing in major technology innovations in our anti-cheat systems and our security technology stack."

Specifically, Activision says it's adding "a new suite" of detections to its kernel-level Ricochet anti-cheat system that'll help identify third-party devices like Cronus Zen and XIM Matrix, which can be used to give players machine-perfect aim, and the accounts that use them.

On top of that, Activision says Ricochet is setting "a new industry standard in security" with "a stronger form of remote, cloud-based attestation" that operates on Microsoft Azure." This added layer of security will work to authenticate accounts and weed out cheaters before matches begin, and Activision says "most" players won't need to do any settings tweaking for it to start working.

"It's the most robust attestation technology available in gaming and bringing it first to Ranked Play helps ensure competitive matches are won on merit," boasts Activision. "These added protections help stop cheating before a match even begins, so games feel fair from the start."

Of course – as the Black Ops 7 beta proved back in October – the moment that new anti-cheat protections arrive, cheaters will inevitably start looking for ways to bypass them, creating an eternal push and pull between devs and these gosh darn tricksters. The impact of cheating in ranked play is naturally much more consequential than normal modes, and that's why Activision is taking these extra measures before ranked becomes available.

"We know what an unfair match looks like: losing a close gunfight to aim that never seems to miss, recoil that never kicks, or reactions that don't feel human," it says. "In Ranked Play, cheating can cost more than a win. It impacts Skill Rating (SR), momentum in your session, and confidence in the mode."

Here are the best FPS games to play right now.

Battlefield and Call of Duty have been wrapped up in a seemingly eternal feud for as long as both have been around, which is give or take 23 years. They're the shooter equivalent of Ares vs. Athena, Tom vs. Jerry, Coke vs. Pepsi - forever destined to be at odds for the title of the military shooter – and for the first time ever, Battlefield has come out on top.

Veteran games industry analyst, Circana's Mat Piscatella, recently released a list of the best-selling video games of 2025 in the US based on dollar sales. Lo and behold, for the first time in series history, Battlefield 6 comfortably topped the list ahead of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. Here's the full chart:

1. Battlefield 6
2. NBA 2K26
3. Borderlands 4
4. Monster Hunter Wilds
5. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
6. Madden NFL 26
7. EA Sports College Football 26
8. EA Sports FC 26
9. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered
10. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6

The rest of the list also includes the immortal Minecraft, Elden Ring: Nightreign, and Pokemon Legends: Z-A, which may have actually charted higher if Circana's data included digital Nintendo sales.

In over two decades, a Battlefield release has never placed higher than a Call of Duty game on the chart until now. What's more impressive is that, since 2009, only three games have beaten the annual shooter franchise on the year-end list: 2013's GTA 5, 2018's Red Dead Redemption 2, and 2023's Hogwarts Legacy.

This is also the first time since 2008 that Call of Duty hasn't managed to cling onto at least the second-place position, back when Call of Duty: World at War had stiff competition from multiple Wii games and GTA 4.

Franchise fatigue might finally be part of the reason why Black Ops 7 underperformed this time around, but a less-than-stellar reception didn't do the game any favors, either. The latest Call of Duty currently has 'Mostly Negative' reviews on Steam, as well as one of the worst Metacritic scores in the series' record books.

Activision makes big Call of Duty announcement: "We will no longer do back-to-back releases of Modern Warfare or Black Ops" mainly "to ensure we provide an absolutely unique experience each and every year"

Between the high-profile launches of Avowed, Grounded 2, and The Outer Worlds 2, the Xbox Series X was no stranger to smaller-scale successes in 2025.

We finally got our hands on 33 Immortals when it launched into Early Access in March, April saw Bethesda's whipcracking epic Indiana Jones and the Great Circle debut on PS5, Doom: The Dark Ages brought a new spin on a classic FPS in May, and Compulsion Games' action-adventure take on Southern Gothic folklore left me spellbound in my South of Midnight review. Oh, and there's also the tiny matter of one of the best Elder Scrolls games getting a shadowdropped remaster that same month.

The slimmed-down roster, mostly composed of cross-platform and third-party titles, shows that Xbox is in a period of quiet re-focusing. It's good to see it investing in its award-winning IPs and taking chances on new ones after 2024 left many of its victories overshadowed by layoffs and studio closures. That said, the parent company hasn't managed to totally side-step further scrutiny this year; October saw 9,000 more Xbox employees told to pack their bags to cap off an already fraught time for industry layoffs, and the sudden cancelation of Everwild and the Perfect Dark reboot left the latter studio shuttered for good.

For once, though, I feel like I'm heading into the new year with a clearer picture of Microsoft's intentions – even if most of the upcoming Xbox Series X games we've been waiting so patiently for still have question marks over their release dates.

Play safe

When I think about Xbox's journey in 2025, one studio immediately springs to mind. Obsidian was already behind some of the best Xbox Series X games of recent years, but having delivered a staggering trifecta of games in just 10 months, it's clear that Microsoft has found its new Chosen One.

It's just as well, because Xbox started 2025 with big shoes to fill. Specifically, those belonging to a certain exploring archaeologist. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle landed at a curious point in the late-2024 schedule. The bombastic holiday blockbuster was the finishing touch on Microsoft's annual offerings, the hype carrying us into the new year with Xbox firmly in our good graces. Then, February kept the good times rolling with the first Obsidian game of 2025: Avowed.

Sitting somewhere between being Obsidian's own Skyrim and a totally distinct fantasy RPG experience, Avowed was the harbinger of successes yet to come. It would be easy to distil Xbox's 2025 as the year of Obsidian, but I actually find it more helpful to use each of its three games as benchmarks when looking at the year as a whole.

If Avowed marked the continuation of Indiana's rose-tinted hangover, April sobered us up. It was a shame to see Compulsion Games' South of Midnight garner a little less attention than I'd have hoped – it's the perfect example of a made-for-Game Pass game if ever I saw one, easily completed in a single weekend and charming to the very core, but it was no match for buzz around The Elder Scrolls 4: Obsidian Remastered's stealth drop later that month.

The Bethesda remaster launched on PS5 too, with Xbox notably stepping away from total console exclusivity for a lot of its legacy titles inherited through recent studio acquisitions like Bethesda and Activision.

Into the unknown

While I'm personally all for dismantling the unhelpful "console wars" on a fundamental level, it does mean that Xbox didn't see another homegrown exclusive launch until July.

Grounded 2 went into Early Access in the midst of summer, and much like Avowed before it, the Obsidian game is only playable on PC and Xbox Series X|S – at least temporarily, like the first game. Meanwhile, October saw The Outer Worlds 2 skipping the exclusivity stage completely, par for the course given that The Outer Worlds 1 launched on PS5 and Nintendo Switch too.

But Xbox's cross-platform victories still belong to Microsoft. I respect the parent company for ensuring that its newly acquired properties aren't being withheld from their audiences unfairly. It makes sense that Avowed, as a new IP spinning off the Pillars of Eternity universe, has no such compunction.

As 2026 beckons, Xbox leaves 2025 in a much quieter fashion than it entered. Survival horror Routine followed fellow third-party entry Moonlighter 2 as the last (albeit temporary, in Moonlighter 2's case) exclusives of the year, leaving all eyes on the horizon. Xbox had a notable lack in new game release dates shown off at The Game Awards 2025, choosing instead to announce a January developer direct showcase that will hopefully shed some light on big names we're waiting to hear about.

I'm most keen to hear what the score is with Playground's new Fable game, having been pushed to 2026 to stand in the shadow of GTA 6's impending launch, as well as Forza Horizon 6, Clockwork Revolution, Marvel's Blade, and OD – an upcoming horror game from Hideo Kojima. That's before we even glance in the direction of the upcoming Bethesda games in the works, including The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5.

2025 feels like a year where Xbox slowed down to take stock of itself. Here's hoping that 2026 puts those plans into action and presents a refined, united front that will prove why Microsoft deserves to be at the forefront of conversations – with or without the console exclusivity that once governed all.

Xbox has strong rep among the best games of 2025, and there's plenty more besides

To say Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has garnered a mixed reception would be putting it mildly. In response, Activision has pledged to make some stark improvements and "overdeliver" on the game, as well as announcing Black Ops and Modern Warfare games won't release back-to-back any more. The moves have gotten a vote of confidence from a former Microsoft executive, who’s now cheering from the sidelines despite some earlier criticism.

Mike Ybarra, former president of Blizzard and corporate vice president at Xbox, posted as much on Twitter. "Competition is good. I'm rooting for the Call of Duty team to come back with vengeance - for the players and their team," he states. "They work incredibly hard and remain very talented."

He ends with a throwback of sorts to an older, bolder statement: "We will get a better Call of Duty thanks to Battlefield." Big words, but there's been some truth to them. This is a hugely competitive year for Activision’s FPS series, with Battlefield 6 coming out weeks before Black Ops 7 hit shelves.

That lead time gave the new Battlefield an advantage to begin with, a disparity only compounded by the tepid response this Call of Duty received critically (it's on 67 on Metacritic at time of writing) and within the player-base. Having such a rival helps fuel innovation and the urge for recovery, though, leading us to here and now.

Whether the latest Black Ops manages to pull it back, we'll have to wait and see. The post about the state of the game promises the devs at Treyarch and Raven Software, "won't rest until Black Ops 7 earns its place as one of the best Black Ops games we've ever made." Lofty, but plenty are hoping to see it happen, including people who've been helping make and ship games for decades.

Chatter over Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's skill-based matchmaking kicks up another notch after player runs the tests and finds it isn't quite as open as we'd hoped.

Activision says Call of Duty will no longer be getting back-to-back Modern Warfare or Black Ops releases, signaling the start of a major change in the series' release order.

In a blog post from "Call of Duty Staff," Activision seemingly responds to the less-than-stellar response from critics and players to the recently released Black Ops 7.

"With respect to Black Ops 7, we set our sights to deliver a spiritual successor to Black Ops 2 and the studios have poured their passion into making a great game that all of us are very proud of," Activision says. "But it's one thing for us to say it, more importantly it's up to you to try it and judge for yourselves."

Judge it, players have. Black Ops 7 has "mostly negative" Steam reviews at the time of writing, with players heavily criticizing the story, multiplayer modes, and performance. Meanwhile, it has one of the series' worst Metascores at 67 and an abysmal 1.6 user score, suggesting "overwhelming dislike."

But Activision has a three-pronged plan to get everything back on track, starting with a free trial and double XP weekend starting "next week" that'll let everyone "experience the game firsthand and decide for yourselves" whether it's any good.

The second part of Activision's plan is "unprecedented seasonal support," but the specifics are yet to be spelled out. "Season 01 is the largest live season ever and we're just getting started," Activision says. "We won't rest until Black Ops 7 earns its place as one of the best Black Ops games we've ever made."

And finally, Activision is changing the way it releases Call of Duty games in a big way, ditching successive releases of Black Ops and Modern Warfare games. From now on, "we will no longer do back-to-back releases of Modern Warfare or Black Ops games," Activision says.

"The reasons are many, but the main one is to ensure we provide an absolutely unique experience each and every year," it adds. "We will drive innovation that is meaningful, not incremental."

Activision says it'll share more details on all of this "when the time is right," but for now, it says you can rest assured that "the future of Call of Duty is very strong and we believe our best days are ahead of us given the depth and talent of our development teams."

Take a trip down memory lane with our list of the best Call of Duty games.

After assuring fans that skill-based matchmaking would take a backseat in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, one user has tested this, and it seems like it isn't quite as open as people hoped.

During the Black Ops 7 beta, Treyarch made waves with the community by introducing open matchmaking via a special playlist, which was celebrated by the community at large. After testing skill-based matchmaking again for feedback (which everyone still disliked), it was announced that Black Ops 7 would implement open matchmaking as default.

However, since release, some players have begun to feel it isn't quite as open as it was in the beta and suspect it isn't as open as many had hoped, given promises of "minimal skill consideration."

Youtuber XclusiveReloaded put this to the test, comparing games on his main account versus a brand new account. The tests found that when playing on their high-tier account that his ping was significantly lower than it was when playing on the new account (one out of 10 games were in the 20 ms range compared to eight out of 10 on the new account).

This shows that in some cases skill difference is being considered above ping, which in turn results in a different gameplay experience depending on your skill level. While XclusiveReloaded does concede that it's still a better experience than previous Call of Duty entries, he concurs that it's a step down from the beta experience.

Naturally, fans are not happy about this perceived rugpull, with the ModernWarzone Twitter saying, "Just watched Ace’s entire SBMM video and… not looking good." They also expressed hope that Treyarch responds to this, saying "his results definitely indicate a trend of skill not being minimally considered in his matchmaking."

Meanwhile, ModernWarzone owner DougDagnabbit adds that these are "Genuinely such sad results." He adds, "It’s at least been proven that skill is considered above ping in some instances, which should NEVER be the case... Just gotta laugh at this point."

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 review: "I respect Treyarch's attempt to make the weirdest Call of Duty possible, but it results in a campaign misfire and multiplayer that's hardly revolutionary."

The time has come, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is finally here – but it's safe to say that its release hasn't exactly gone over smoothly with the shooter community after the likes of Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6… and the use of generative AI certainly doesn't help.

Eagle-eyed fans recently noted that Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 seemingly employs the use of gen AI instead of human-made artwork in various instances, from its calling cards to reward icons – and it's clear they've not been thrilled to see it. The Steam page itself, which shows "Mixed" reviews from players, confirms that developers didn't shy away from AI, too: "Our team uses generative AI tools to help develop some in-game assets."

Activision did respond to curious outlets, including PCGamesN, explaining the use of AI and saying, "Like so many around the world, we use a variety of digital tools, including AI tools, to empower and support our teams to create the best gaming experiences possible for our players. Our creative process continues to be led by the talented individuals in our studios." This didn't help the situation much, though – and now, it's reached the US Congress.

Congressional representative Ro Khanna of the Democratic Party's new online post on the matter proves as much. "We need regulations that prevent companies from using AI to eliminate jobs to extract greater profits," it reads. "Artists at these companies need to have a say in how AI is deployed. They should share in the profits. And there should be a tax on mass displacement." Khanna further details his stance in replies.

"Support innovation, but in a way that is democratic and benefits all Americans," reads one of his responses. In another, he writes, "I believe tech can create jobs, need tech trades, and should embrace innovation. But having incentives for it to be augmenting capability instead of displacing it and having a plan to hire folks is making sure it's done in a way that benefits every American."

Amusingly enough, this isn't the only instance of video games reaching government officials – just days ago, news of the GTA 6 delay reached the Polish parliament, and shortly after, the recent Rockstar Games firings made it to the UK Parliament as well.

Thinking of hopping into the shooter yourself? Check our Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 review to learn what we think of it so far.

At the very least, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has given me plenty to laugh about. How could it not? This year's storyline is accessed strictly through a "co-op campaign" listing on the main menu, an experience designed to be shared (though you can suffer it solo, if you must). Haphazardly tied together cutscenes and narrative beats flip jarringly between sudden reveals, badly done rehashes of classic Black Ops moments, and a deluge of hallucinatory dream sequence levels that deliver the most absurd mission objectives of any CoD to date. But with a friend there are very non-sensible chuckles to be had, even if it ultimately leaves me sour.

That's not to say Call of Duty campaigns haven't been deeply silly for years. The extreme conspiracy theories of Call of Duty: Black Ops in particular has always been part of its charm. But that tone has always been because it has remained at least partially grounded – the straight-faced over-the-top bombast part of the point. In Black Ops 7, it just becomes ropey.

Boss fights against what appear to be Warzone operators just happen in what appears to be a battle royale style open world map (Avalon) as they recycle a handful of taunts over comms before unceremoniously collapsing. One stage has me walk out of an elevator into an unchanged Black Ops 6 multiplayer map for some cursory 'protect the point'. More than one boss fight feels like Destiny 2 crossed with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League – dodging massive AoE attacks marked on the floor while unloading clips into weak spots. Zombies mode assets are funneled continuously into the main story. Is this just what Call of Duty campaigns are now? How could the series that brought me the highs of the original Modern Warfare, Black Ops, and, yes, even WW2, come to this?

The numbers, Mason

I don't have to be Mason-level conspiracy pilled to have an idea. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is awfully similar in its approach to 2023's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. This is part of an unusual shift in the series' annualized release schedule following the announcement of publisher Activision's sale to Microsoft and Xbox. The series numbering is present in both cases, making these seem like normal releases – but dig beneath the surface and as far as the campaigns are concerned they feel like odd ducks.

Previously, the military FPS would flipflop between sub-series and developer each year (such as the original Modern Warfare 2 in 2009, followed by the first Black Ops in 2010, then the original Modern Warfare 3 in 2010). Recently, we've had back-to-back sub-series sequels. This last happened with the rebooted Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was released in 2022, which was followed by Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 in 2023. Now, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which released last year in 2024, has been followed up by Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 in 2025. In our Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 review we called it "one of the most underwhelming entries in Call of Duty's 20 year history". This is the birth of the Call of Duty halfway sequel I call a CoD point five. It's all become too much.

Thankfully, there are differences – Black Ops 7 does improve on Modern Warfare 3's "uninspired" and "lackluster" approach to its campaign. There, open world style missions were plonked into a battle royale-style open world having you run around an awkwardly large world completing samey objectives. Black Ops 7's Avalon is a similar approach, but with more varied objectives, even if it does all still feel too loose and spread out to really offer very compelling design.

At least in Black Ops 7, the Avalon missions are connective tissue between playing Call of Duty missions that are more traditional in structure if not in content. At one point that means David Mason and the squad handing control over to another unit who must track down data to pass by their way. More often than not, it means Team Mason walking into something like a shipping container to be gassed into having a hallucination nightmare.

These obviously take cues from what we've called "the scariest level in Call of Duty history" – Black Ops 6's Emergence. But, there, the integration of Zombies mode inspired content was a novelty. In Black Ops 7 to say there is a lot of it is, somehow, an understatement. Visually, these chapters offer some striking moments – twisting, spiralling highways of a Los Angeles under attack; a haunted, labyrinthine prison; gnarled jungle vines connecting together islands floating in the sky. The platforming isn't even that bad (though more interesting in its real world location deployment).

Year we go again

The narrative threads connecting these sequences are overly rushed at best, and a jumble at worst. And the mechanical demands mostly amount to mowing down huge waves of nightmare creatures that come right out of Zombies, but with some abstracted names above their health bars (oh, every enemy has a health bar now, I guess).

As a whole, Black Ops 7's campaign feels stitched together from whatever parts were available. Huge plot beats come and go fast enough to give me whiplash. One of the premise's major narrative drivers is explained away offhand, so fast it's easy to miss it. Others involving past series characters are complete nonsense – overly navel-gazing while simultaneously adding nothing to the overarching story because they're all dream sequences anyway.

It's not great, but it's extra frustrating that after the disappointing Modern Warfare 3, Black Ops 6's campaign felt like we were really back on track… only to regress once again. It's clear that rather than being able to hand-off development between studios to successfully release a Call of Duty every year, we now have 'off-year' style Call of Duty games that are mid-step releases in all but their shiny, numbered names. The lack of signposting for anyone who isn't combing through every detail pre-launch almost feels a bit disingenuous.

When Black Ops 4 released without a traditional campaign at all, that was at least a part of the pitch. Ever since that appeal to the hero shooter crowd didn't bear fruit, the series has struggled to reckon with its place as an online gaming pillar amid the modern landscape of live service titans and its annualized format that's held strong since 2005's Call of Duty 2.

Personally, I'd rather Call of Duty games took a year off to really get each sequel right – as was once rumoured to be the case back when it seemed like Modern Warfare 3 was perhaps originally an expansion for Modern Warfare 2 rather than a full release itself. But what was a misstep there, even if it's been tightened for Black Ops 7, is now feeling like a worrying trend. At what point do we start skipping every other entry as players?

It feels like a strategy that may come close to burning fans – though if the majority of players just hop into multiplayer anywhere, maybe that risk has been weighed and found wanting. But, when I'm fighting a strange plant-like nightmare and gunning down 'summoned creatures' to open up its weak points I can't help but think of All Ghillied Up, Vorkuta, and Liberation. I miss when Call of Duty's campaign felt like calling card flourishes and landmark events, rather than an assemblage of multiplayer pieces that are an afterthought.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was played on PS5, with a code provided by the publisher.

Which CoD games should you play? Check out our best Call of Duty games ranking to find out!

Now that the Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 release time has come, naturally, lots of players around the world are diving straight in. Going by early reactions, they're increasingly bemused by what they've found, encountering technical issues and bizarre design choices, including the outlandish, but nonetheless entertaining, campaign.

One need only consult the Steam reviews, where Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is currently sitting at a Mixed rating, for insight as to the problems. "You can't even pause the Black Ops 7 campaign because it's designed like Warzone; it's a disaster. They messed everything up," reads a top review. "The game kicks you for going AFK in Campaign mode!! It kicks you, I repeat, it kicks you!!! And if you resubmit the level, it makes you start from scratch.”

Some are having a real tricky time getting it to run properly, too. "Stuttering, crashing if I alt tab and my mouse feels super floaty/aiming feels off; I don't have this on any other game and I went through all of my settings – nothing fixed it," states another user review.

"Game is laggy and running miserable on pc even with updated drivers. Multiplayer involves dying in less than half a second while being shot less than three bullets in core modes (not hardcore). Seems like a huge downgrade from BO6 despite all new features and remade content," a third writes.

Reactions to the campaign are comedy in themselves. A set-piece involving a gigantic biomechanical soldier is doing the rounds on social media, and onlookers cannot believe what they're seeing. “Wtf is Call of Duty even about nowadays? The last campaign I played was the OG MW3,” says one reply. "This shit is literally a playable Skibidi Toilet video, tears bro," reads a popular quote-tweet.

A second clip, where you're controlling a group of undead, takes place in Vorkuta, from the original Black Ops, and the callback isn't being too warmly received. "Ah of course, because how dare they forget to absolutely shit on the legacy of one of gaming's single greatest campaign missions," says one Twitter user.

Our own Black Ops 7 review notes the absurdity here: "It feels like Black Ops 7's campaign is verging on Destiny or even Borderlands territory." Black Ops is a futuristic sci-fi series, giving the devs freedom to take creative liberties. It seems like perhaps they've taken one liberty too many for this go around, even if critic reviews have been more positive for the title.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7's Metacritic score narrowly beats Battlefield 6 based on early reviews, earns second-highest rating of the Black Ops series so far

Reviews are dripping in for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, and it's looking like a series highlight. Early scores have the seventh installment as the second best in the Black Ops strain, and clean above the franchise's bottom-rated games besides.

At the time of writing, the Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Metacritic is sitting at 84, just scraping over Battlefield 6's 83, and only three points below the original Black Ops, which stands tall at 87. Almost every other entry from this subset of Call of Duty is between 81 and 83, except poor old Black Ops Cold War, which remains the lowest rated, at 76.

It should be noted that Black Ops 7's score comes from only nine critic reviews at the moment, with many major outlets, including yours truly at GamesRadar+, still to provide scores. Compare this to the 89 for the first Black Ops, and you can see why the number may fluctuate in the coming days, even if we're off to a good start.

Developed by Treyarch and Raven Software, Black Ops 7 marks the sixth time the two studios have collaborated on a game in the Black Ops series. Generally more of a multiplayer-focused team, Treyarch tends to focus on the modes outside of the campaign, including the infamous and beloved Call of Duty: Zombies.

Raven Software, then, has handled the single-player story for the last couple of Black Ops games. This is in addition to developing and supporting Warzone, Call of Duty's massive, stand-alone battle royale mode; a busy studio, to say the least.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is out now. Check out our Black Ops 7 release time guide to make sure you can access it.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is adding fan-favorite weapon Maddox and the Standoff map, and FPS fans are let's gooo-ing all over the place: "They are way too good at roping us back in every. damn. time"