GOG.com (opens in new tab) has announced that The Last Leviathan, a fantasy ship-builder frequently summed up as ‘Besiege but with boats’, is about to be removed from sale. “We’d like to inform you that, due to publisher’s request, The Last Leviathan will be delisted from our catalog on Thursday, November 24th, 4 PM UTC”, GOG says. “For everyone who purchased this title prior to delisting, it will remain in their GOG library.”
The Last Leviathan was released in 2016, and our early access expert Chris Livingston played it at the time. Though he mentioned that it felt rougher than Besiege’s first release, he did enjoy building a boat and then sinking repeatedly. “The cannon physics are great, the battles are exciting and entertaining, and bobbing around in the water while trying to line up broadsides is a challenge,” he wrote, “especially if your ship is a poorly-designed wobbly piece of garbage like mine is.”
Developers Super Punk Games updated The Last Leviathan over the subsequent years, with additions like flying blocks to let players make sky-ships, though the last update was three years ago in November of 2019. Their website (opens in new tab) is currently offline.
It’s a shame to see an early access game fail to make it over the finish line, providing fodder for the cynics who see early access as a scam and ignore the successes it’s made possible over the years. The Last Leviathan was released on Steam (opens in new tab) as well as GOG, and will presumably be delisted there as well.
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Warhammer 40,000: Darktide’s best weapons tend to be the ones based on the setting’s greatest hits—and in a setting where there’s only war, there are a lot of those. Chainaxes, chainswords, force swords, power swords, stubbers, lasguns, autoguns, plasma guns, and, of course, boltguns, the preorder beta for Darktide has let us wrap our Imperial mitts around all of them. These are our favorites so far.
Psyker Psykinetic
(Image credit: Fatshark)
It only hurts when I staff
Fraser Brown, Online Editor: Getting my first force staff was really when the Psyker clicked for me. It’s arguably the toughest class to play, and the nerfs since the last beta continue to sting, but with a staff in hand I felt like I had a clearer idea of my role, and an even more versatile bag of tricks.
Staves shoot out slow balls of psychic energy that are most effective at mid-range. The damage and lack of ammo management tends to make up for the slow speed, but it’s the secondary attack that you’ll really want to pay attention to. My first staff allowed me to summon an explosive AoE that’s great at taking out hordes of poxwalkers, but others give you access to different abilities, including one that turns your staff into a flamethrower.
I recommend getting your hands on one of the lightning staffs. Your bolts jump between enemies and, while they do decent damage, the real appeal is the stun, allowing you or your team to follow-up with a killing blow. It really emphasises the Psyker’s support role: just hide behind an Ogryn and start electrocuting people.
They are all of a hell of a lot of fun to use, and the one time I swapped out my staff for a fancy gun the Emperor gifted me, I immediately regretted it. Searching for ammo is for scrubs. The big downside is that your staff generates peril in lieu of chewing through ammo, and it is very easy to get carried away blasting Chaos-corrupted goons then blow up.
Ogryn Skullbreaker
The ripper gun is an all-timer shotgun
Wes Fenlon, Senior Editor: I wrote an article called An ode to the shotgun, so I guess I was primed to love this oversized cannon of a gun for the lumbering Ogryn. It has the potential to enter “best shotgun ever” contention for me, after using it just a few times in Darktide so far. It’s not the weapon the Ogryn starts with, but it’s likely to be the first one you buy. That does not diminish its appeal. You get a shotgun in Doom in the first 10 seconds, and it still kicks ass at the end of the game.
Where Doom’s shotgun is perfectly minimalist—fire, pump, repeat—the Foe-Rend Ripper Gun is a maximalist shotgun. You know that scene in action movies where the sadistic interrogator unrolls the kit of knives and saws and scalpels they just love doing torture with? The ripper gun is like that, but it’s every murderous instrument rolled into one. First there’s the burst fire, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it three shell cacophony that shreds whatever’s directly in front of you. Hold down right-click and you’ll fold out a steadying handle to rhythmically pump out the ripper gun’s entire capacity, semi-auto style.
It’s even built for shanking, with a bayonet on the front that delivers a fast jab straight ahead as the shotgun’s special attack. The Ogryn’s towering height conveniently puts his gun right about head level, too, which makes for easy one hit kills without even firing a shot. There are drawbacks to the ripper gun: it chews through ammo like a hungry swarm of tyranids, and entering semi-auto mode and reloading are both slow. But those just add to its texture; I’m fine with a slow reload when I get to watch my Ogryn smash the magazine off with a meaty fist every time I come up empty. I can almost feel how heavy the ripper gun is through my screen.
Veteran Sharpshooter
The Cadian’s choice
Jody Macgregor, Weekend/AU Editor: Darktide’s bolters are great, maybe the best bolters in any 40K game. They sure do have a lot of recoil though, which is only fair given what they do, and I prefer something more accurate for someone with the word “Sharpshooter” in their name. (When I swap over to the Zealot with a Scottish accent it’s bolter all the way.) Darktide’s power sword is excellent too, definitely the Veteran’s preferred melee weapon. But when I’m playing an ex-Imperial Guard soldier I want the iconic Imperial Guard weapon, and that’s a scuffed-up lasrifle that has recoil for some reason. I assume the Adeptus Mechanicus engineer it into them so the infantry don’t have to spend time adjusting when they switch from recoil-heavy autoguns. Yeah, that makes sense.
The Kantrael MGXII Infantry Lasgun is Darktide’s best long-range lasrifle. Based on the Kantrael pattern weapons preferred by Cadian shock troopers, it’s got a slow rate of fire and the hip-fire is garbage, but you want to be taking your time lining up shots anyway and if you’re not at long range looking down your scope? That’s what the power sword is for. Get yourself a Kantrael MGXII Infantry Lasgun and you’ll be turning brains into milkshake in no time.
Zealot Preacher
You call that a chainsword? This is a chainsword
Sean Martin, Guides Writer: I could play Darktide for a thousand hours and I still wouldn’t get tired of bisecting heretics with my heavy chainsword. Who needs a thunder hammer when you have a weapon that can chop an Ogryn in two?
It’s the perfect fit for the Preacher class as well. You can slash away at smaller hordes, and then rev it up with the special move when you’re dealing with a single tough opponent. The way it feels when it bites home and staggers them is amazing, especially if you use the Chastise the Wicked ability beforehand: the crit pops midway through the revving slash, and suddenly you’re looking at two halves of whatever special enemy you were attacking.
The Preacher isn’t just an infantry-blending class, but also a duelist in the same way the Slayer was in Vermintide 2: facing down individual powerful melee opponents other classes struggle to deal with up close. The thunder hammer has its charged single-target strike for that purpose, but for my money, a revved-up chainsword feels the best. It’s such an iconic 40K weapon, and I’m so glad that Fatshark did it justice.
Fetch the flamer
Sean: Speaking of other iconic 40K weapons, the flamer is *chef kiss*. I’ve seen lots of people disparaging it and claiming it’s underpowered, but it’s far stronger than Bardin’s drakegun from Vermintide 2 ever was. Beside the fact that it can delete hordes of Poxwalkers, the way that Darktide’s suppression system works means the flamer is one of the best weapons for dealing with a lot of ranged units at once, provided they aren’t super far away.
The flamer also seems to stun most special enemies, letting you hold them in place while a teammate moves in for the melee kill, or just keep flaming away until they die. It doesn’t have a cooldown, meaning you can keep going as long as there’s ammo, and friendly fire is basically non-existent in Darktide, which solves one of the main drawbacks that drakegun had. Most important of all, it feels very fun to fire a gout of flame and watch as a horde just disappears.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Our-favorite-weapons-for-each-class-in-Darktide.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2022-11-24 03:33:002022-11-24 03:33:00Our favorite weapons for each class in Darktide
Discord is getting in on the Black Friday season with an offer on its premium subscription service, Discord Nitro, which offers expanded features to the chat app like custom emojis, better streaming quality, and in-app games called Activities.
From now until November 28, those who purchase a new Discord Nitro one-month ($9.99) or annual ($99.9) subscription will get a free month of Nitro added to their account—a pretty good deal if you’ve been meaning to try out Discord’s premium features (opens in new tab).
As a long-time Discord Nitro subscriber who mostly uses the service to stream games to friends at higher resolutions and framerates, I was delightfully surprised by a recent revamp of Nitro that added one of my new favorite Discord features: Activities. These “activities” are mostly in-house games made by Discord that run inside active voice channels, and they’re pretty great.
The selection is basically pulled from the board game shelf of your average family game night: there’s a version of Pictionary called SketchHeads, Scrabble, poker, checkers, and chess, plus a minigolf game called Putt Party and a Snake.io clone called Land-io. It’s been really nice to fire up one of these games in the downtime between watching shows or playing games with friends, and I’ve definitely been caught playing hands of poker before the next round of Overwatch 2 starts.
You need at least one person with a Nitro subscription in the chat for Activities to work, but here’s a nice plus: none of the games have any monetization whatsoever. That’s so rare these days that I was a little confused that I was allowed to just give myself chips as the host in the Poker Night.
Even if the group gets bored after the third round of Putt Party, the BOGO deal is a better time than any to secure a few months of Nitro and see if it’s worth keeping around.
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Something that’s frustrated a lot of players in the Warhammer 40,000: Darktide beta is not knowing exactly what a weapon is like before it’s in our hands. When you see a new autogun or chainsword in the armory there will be a couple of words to sum up its strengths, like Mobile or High Capacity, some numberless bars for attributes like damage and reload speed, and then a trio of icons that are as inscrutable as any of the Chaos runes drawn on the walls of Tertium Hive. It’s hard to know what you’re buying.
Though there’s no mouseover text on these icons in the beta, press the V key while you’re in the menu to inspect a weapon and you’ll bring up an information screen that provides their names, if not descriptions. (The combo attacks of melee weapons are also shown here.) Some are plain enough, and a few will be familiar to those who played Fatshark’s previous Warhammer game, Vermintide 2. Others are still straight-up inscrutable. I’ve spent some time in the Meat Grinder testing room to figure out just what all of the weapon symbols and stats mean.
Ranged weapon symbols
The three symbols for each ranged weapon describe, from left to right, its primary attack, secondary attack, and special action. These are mapped to left-click, right-click, and mouse-five (likely a thumb button) by default. The bullets beneath a gun’s symbols tell you whether that firing mode is:
Semi-automatic (one bullet)
Fully automatic (two bullets)
Burst-fire (two bullets with a circle between them)
A single bullet followed by an arcing trail means it’s a projectile weapon that will drop over distance and needs to be aimed high. The one that looks like a shotgun shell next to a stream of pellets? That’s a shotgun, yes. It’ll fire in a cone.
Here are the many other symbols you’ll see on ranged weapons.
Melee weapon symbols
The first symbol represents a weapon’s light attack, the second its heavy attack (triggered when you hold down the attack button), and the third is its special action, mapped to mouse-five. Make sure to bring up the full details by pressing V, because melee weapon combos often include different attacks that won’t match that symbol.
What do the item rating and stats mean?
(Image credit: Fatshark)
Every weapon in Darktide has a rating number. The higher that number, the more points will be spread across its attribute bars. That doesn’t mean all its bars will be higher, however. Though a higher rating often means a better weapon, sometimes those extra points won’t have been spent wisely. Keep an eye out for high-rating weapons with low damage bars in particular.
As for what those attributes mean, some are self-explanatory, like reload speed, but others are a little more opaque. Here’s what the more confusing ones mean.
Mobility: Bonus dodge distance. This is more complex than it sounds. Each weapon type has a different base dodge distance, and a different number of dodges you can perform in a row before that distance drops off until you reset the chain by performing a block or attack. A low mobility rating on a weapon type that begins with a high dodge distance, like a combat knife, might still be better than high mobility on a weapon like an axe that begins with a low dodge distance. In Vermintide 2, Mobility also made you better at sprinting and might do something similar in Darktide, but if so it’s a slight improvement I haven’t been able to detect.
Cleave Targets: The number of enemies that will be damaged in a single swing. You can increase this by swinging the mouse horizontally as you attack.
First Target: How much damage the first enemy hit by a cleave will take.
Cleave Damage: How much damage will spread to subsequent enemies in a cleave.
Finesse: Bonus weak point damage.
Defences: Reduces the stamina costs of blocking.
Penetration: Reduces the amount of damage negated by carapace armor.
Stopping Power: How likely it is to stagger enemies on hit.
Crowd Control: How likely a shield is to stagger enemies on push.
Collateral: How much suppression it causes, reducing enemies’ aim and sending them into cover.
Stability: Reduces the amount of recoil when firing and the amount of sway in ADS.
Ammo: Can influence the total amount of ammo carried as well as the amount of ammo in each clip. This is the one bar with actual numbers next to it, so make sure to check them.
Charge Speed: How fast it powers up charged attacks.
Warp Resistance: Reduces the amount of peril generated, peril being the stuff psykers build up as they use their abilities and which needs to be managed carefully to prevent their brains blowing up.
Warzone 2’s new sandbox extraction mode has a totally different vibe than other extraction shooters I’ve played. DMZ is not like Escape From Tarkov, where other players are automatically enemies, or like Hunt: Showdown, where squad sizes are even and everyone’s competing for one prize. It’s sort of a micro MMO like GTA Online played in 30-minute chunks, where players (both grouped up and solo) roam a big map, usually traveling in different directions and mostly minding their own business until someone gets in their way.
That someone was me when I learned an important DMZ rule: If a man is sprinting straight toward you, bare fisted, with a desperate look in his eye, he probably isn’t looking for a team up. I should have guessed that ol’ Burnt_Toast575 had ill intentions when he didn’t respond to my friendly remarks. The words “wanna team up” had barely left my lips before he’d already landed three punches to my gobsmacked face. Burny-T wasn’t looking for friendship. He only had eyes for my shiny gun, and a few punches later he got it.
I can’t really blame him. Like most MMOs, playing by yourself can be a struggle and it’s hard to trust some rando who claims to be “chill.” I’ve been trying to embrace the spirit of the mode by making friends before enemies (after all, killing players isn’t the goal of DMZ like it is in battle royale). I’ve had a few successful uses of a neat new ping feature that lets me instantly invite nearby players to my squad, but I’m finding the DMZ community can be pretty cliquish.
My solo DMZ experience has so far been the part in every ’90s movie where a band of spiky-haired bullies roll up on an unsuspecting nerd and stuff him in a locker. That’s not to say the imbalance is unfun: it can be a thrill to hole up in an empty house until the roving APC outside passes. In fact, stealth has been an invaluable tactic for surviving a full round of DMZ.
Skill issue
Surprisingly, actual players have been the least of my problems during solo ventures into Al Mazrah. The real, constant threat of DMZ is the AI soldiers occupying darn near every square block of civilization. These are not your standard campaign grunts, nor are they as harmless as the fodder soldiers running around Modern Warfare 2’s Invasion mode. DMZ soldiers are quick to spot players from far away and, once they have a lock, they will mercilessly hunt you down. Standing out in the open with three or four grunts in sight is a death wish. Even in cover, soldiers will move up to flank from several directions. I got properly destroyed by an AI armored guy yesterday, who kicked open a door while I was looting a box and blasted me back to the main menu.
After that, I started on this depressing loop where I’d take one of my few remaining guns into the next match, die to AI because I have crappy guns and no armor, and repeat until my contraband inventory was completely empty. Maybe that’s how Burnt_Toast ended up Rocky IV-ing me with zero guns to his name.
The AI are so ruthless and deal so much damage that I can’t help but think DMZ was balanced exclusively around teamplay. As a solo player with only one default armor slot, it’s easy to die after less than two seconds of sustained damage. If you’re in a squad this isn’t a big deal, because even completely dead squadmates can be revived once the fight is over. Flying solo, your only lifeline is a self-revive kit, a semi-rare item that I cross my fingers to find every time I loot a medicine cabinet.
Right now, diving in solo is like opting into hard mode. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—I actually think DMZ can be a little too easy with four or more in a squad—but I’m starting to agree with the fans on Reddit calling for some sort of “stay alive longer than two minutes” starter kit for solo players. Some have suggested that solos get a free self-revive kit (opens in new tab) at the start of the round.
DMZ soldiers are quick to spot players from far away and, once they have a lock, they will mercilessly hunt you down.
To be fair, I could stick with teammates from the start. By default, the game matches you with at least one or two other players. This can be cool if you happen to match with nice, cooperative strangers, but playing with randos doesn’t really gel with DMZ’s one main progression track: faction missions. These are disconnected, chore-like tasks that you sign up for before the match, like destroying a certain number of vehicles or capturing a stronghold.
It’s possible to synchronize these missions with friends and you might even get lucky asking a random squadmate to help out, but so many of the missions I’ve done so far are the sort of monotonous, level 2 World of Warcraft fetch quests that I’d be embarrassed to recruit others into. I spent several hours yesterday rummaging through every house on Al Mazrah, filling my backpack with bandages that’d only count toward my mission if I managed to extract them from the map without dying.
Here too, the first few weeks of Warzone DMZ are reminding me of the first few weeks of GTA Online. There isn’t much structure, or much in the way of rewards, but the possibility space feels vast. If Infinity Ward/Raven Software/whoever else is actually making DMZ commits to expanding this exciting new piece of CoD canon, I can see the future where Al Mazrah is populated with side missions, boss battles, or even purely social areas.
For now I’d settle for little things, like AI baddies who don’t magically shoot me through smoke clouds.
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Mercedes is taking on the hellish tactics pioneered here in the videogames industry by offering owners of their Mercedes-EQ electric vehicle line the “opportunity” to pay a huge yearly fee in order to make their car go from 0 to 60MPH faster. You can get this on either the EQS or EQE cars, where it’ll provide something like a 0.8 to 1.0 second increase in the acceleration from 0 to 60.
As reported by The Drive (opens in new tab), Mercedes is asking (opens in new tab) $1,200 a year to “Accelerate more powerfully: increase the torque and maximum output of your Mercedes-EQ.”
To be clear, this is unacceptable and absurd in the extreme. It’s something I’d expect out of a parody of corporate greed. This is charging for a software update that more optimally tweaks the car’s torque by fine-tuning the electric motor. It’s not some expensive, expansive cloud-computing service that needs moment to moment calculations delivered to the vehicle. It’s artificially limiting the power of a machine someone paid for unless they pay a subscription.
Mercedes’ cash grab comes after controversy earlier this year when BMW wanted people to pay to use (opens in new tab) the heated seats in their vehicles. A physical feature of their car. A piece of simple physical equipment. People responded to this by pirating their heated seats. (opens in new tab)
Both of these are madness-inducing, and I hope that these sociopathic “innovations” don’t make their way back to PC gaming. Imagine how excited Nvidia or AMD would be to sell you a service that makes your graphics card “go faster”? How thrilled would Intel be to run a subscription that “unlocks two cores!!” on your CPU? Wait, this kind of already happens (opens in new tab)?
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Riot Games has temporarily disabled League of Legends (opens in new tab) character Neeko after she unexpectedly developed the ability to transform into a massive tower that can kill enemy players in a single shot.
Neeko is actually a shapeshifter: Her character bio (opens in new tab) says she “can blend into any crowd by borrowing the appearances of others, even absorbing something of their emotional state to tell friend from foe in an instant.” Her passive ability enables her to take the form of an allied champion: While disguised she can employ basic attacks, but will revert to her natural form if she takes any damage.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. But a new bug was recently discovered that gave Neeko the ability to transform into a tower—specifically, a Nexus Obelisk, a type of turret that possesses the highest structural damage output in the game. According to the LoL fan wiki (opens in new tab), they’re actually designed as a defensive murder machine: They’re positioned near spawn platforms to keep enemy players from spawn camping them.
This clip, from League streamer Vandiril, pretty clearly demonstrates the problem:
And here it is from the other side of the coin—a player eating a one-shot kill from a transformed Neeko:
Still not fixed, huh? Thanks for this great experience @riotgames @Vandiril pic.twitter.com/4Hks3wWkKmNovember 22, 2022
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As you might imagine, the ability of one character to transform into one of these one-shot death fortresses, immediately and anywhere on the map, throws the game into complete imbalance. It’s basically the LoL equivalent of Anakin Skywalker’s big showdown with the younglings: There’s just no defense against it.
Because of that, Riot was forced to disable Neeko while it tries to fix whatever went wrong.
(Image credit: Riot Games)
Some League players on Reddit were surprised that this could happen at all, given that Nexus Obelisks aren’t characters, but fixed turrets. “How is that even a possible bug?” Rumbleinthejungle8 (opens in new tab) asked. “The game’s code must be a real mess for that to be possible. I guess everything being coded as a minion isn’t just a meme.”
That’s a reference to the fact that more than just minions are coded as “minions” in League of Legends. This Reddit post from 2015 (opens in new tab) breaks it down in detail: Just about everything in the game shares basic, underlying characteristics, although their complexity varies widely.
“The phrase ‘everything is a minion’ is more or less true but it’s closer to saying something like ‘everything is an object’ rather than ‘everything is a lane minion’,” RiotXypherous explained in the post. “Lane minions are actually pretty complicated, given they have a model, animations and an AI—something that the basic minion object doesn’t have (depending on which one is being used, I think they’re all idle cubes.)”
Some players have suggested that the problem might be as simple as a failed or mistaken entity type check, but the fact that Neeko has been disabled for more than 24 hours suggests that the problem is more serious than a simple scripting error. Of course, the timing isn’t ideal either: November 24 is the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, a major holiday that sees most businesses in the country shut down for a long weekend of food, booze, and (I think, I’m Canadian so not super-clear on the details of the ritual) football. So that’s another reason why this Neeko Obelisk business might take a little longer than normal to fix.
Regardless of all that, the Neeko bug is yet another example of the challenges faced by live-game developers, who have to deal with a steady stream of updates that are constantly changing characters, worlds, and gameplay. It’s the nature of the beast: In October, Blizzard had to disable Bastion and Torbjörn (opens in new tab) in Overwatch 2 because of similarly overpowered glitches in their ultimates, and two weeks later shut down Mei (opens in new tab) because she’d become just a little bit more mobile than she was meant to be. Riot was also forced to pull the plug on Valorant’s new hero Harbor (opens in new tab) just last week, because his ultimate had gone screwy as well.
There’s no indication at this point as to when Neeko will be back: Riot Games declined to comment on the situation or offer a possible timeline for the character’s return to action.
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Warzone 2 is fun, especially the new DMZ extraction mode, but for some players, frequent crashes are causing gutting losses. “This is the sixth time I lost maxed out loot,” lamented one DMZ player on Reddit (opens in new tab)after a crash, and they’re far from the only Warzone player who’s seen the dreaded “this application has unexpectedly stopped working” message recently.
“Yesterday we played four games and in each game one of us crashed,” responded one player.
“Happens to [me] at least three times a night,” said another.
This Call of Duty: Warzone 2 crashing issue doesn’t appear to be something that’s happening only to players with some weird PC configuration or out-of-date driver. I personally experienced a few crashes in regular Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer, and the volume of complaints on Reddit suggests there’s genuinely a widespread problem here.
“Are there any PC Warzone/DMZ players who are NOT experiencing daily crashes?” asked one poster (opens in new tab).
A Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2 update that went out yesterday addresses two specific causes of crashes, according to the patch notes (opens in new tab). One crash had to do with parachute deployment, and the other involved Windows Focus Mode. Infinity Ward also says in those patch notes that it “will continue to improve stability,” but crashing as a general issue hasn’t otherwise been acknowledged outside of a generic Activision support page (opens in new tab).
Future Call of Duty: Warzone 2 updates will be detailed by Raven Software, according to Infinity Ward, which says it will focus on communicating about Modern Warfare 2. I’ve asked for comment from either on the crashing issue, which seems to affect both games, and I’ll update this post if I hear back.
In the meantime, players are sharing the tweaks they’ve made to try to prevent crashes. The general format of the advice is: ‘I tried this and I have no idea if it did anything, but I haven’t crashed since, so maybe?’ Here are the most common suggestions I’ve seen, which may or may not do anything desirable, but won’t hurt anything, either:
Try the “Verify the integrity of game files” button in the game properties (for Steam users)
Update your graphics drivers (I know, I know, they say this every time)
Turn off overlays, such as from Steam, GeForce Experience, or Discord (I’ve seen a few players report that this worked for them)
Try using the windowed borderless display mode instead of fullscreen
Call of Duty: Warzone 2 currently has a “Mostly Negative” user review average on Steam, and technical issues are mentioned frequently in the negative reviews (at least, the ones that are more than just some variation on “CoD trash”). The discontent over Warzone 2’s technical state shouldn’t necessarily discourage interested parties from trying it, though. I haven’t had any crashes since the first few days after launch, and it runs basically fine on my Core i5-9600K and Nvidia RTX 2070 Super. It’s free, so the worst case scenario is that you encounter problems and put it aside pending patches.
Infinity Ward and Raven Software will likely say more about crashing in the coming days or weeks—I wouldn’t expect such a common complaint to go unacknowledged forever. We’ll keep tabs on the situation, but if you don’t hear it from us, look for updates on the Call of Duty blog (opens in new tab), the official Warzone 2 Trello board (opens in new tab), or the Steam updates section for Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2 (opens in new tab).
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1669273811_Warzone-2-crashes-are-tormenting-players-especially-in-DMZ.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2022-11-23 22:54:512022-11-23 22:54:51Warzone 2 crashes are tormenting players, especially in DMZ
I’m asking this because for the first time in history Oxford is letting you, the general public, choose what their word of the year will be. “We wanted to open up the final step of our Word of the Year selection process to the true arbiters of language: people around the world,” said what is perhaps the most venerable institution of the english language.
To ease that, Oxford’s “team of expert lexicographers” have decided on three words to choose from for the crown, and one of them is the fucking metaverse.Need I remind you? The metaverse is bullshit (opens in new tab). The other choice is #IStandWith which is such a milquetoast prefix-ass modifier I ain’t even gonna start.
So please y’all go vote for goblin mode. Because goblin mode rules. What is Goblin Mode? “The idea of rejecting societal expectations put upon us, in favour of doing whatever one wants to,” says Oxford. Is that not what we’re here to do, PC gamers? Are we not here to revel in our sixth consecutive round of a MOBA rather than go to the grocery store? (Amen.) Are we not here to tweak the voltage on our processor by 1% rather than touch grass?
Please go vote for our lifestyle. Go vote for taking care of yourself and having joy in rejection of society’s stifling norms. Vote for not taking a shower today and eating a whole bag of chips and taking bites of cheese right off the block and building a tower of empty drink cans beside your monitor over the course of a 12-hour session. Vote for sneaking in a cheeky Vampire Survivors round during a baby’s nap. Vote for not putting on any makeup or brushing your hair or changing out of your pajamas. Vote for the energy of trying to enjoy yourself rather than better yourself.
Because we’re begging you. The metaverse that CEOs want to sell you is awful, a worse version of the internet that’s bound to collapse like all the variously absurd ponzi schemes it’s based on.
Don’t just do it for us, of course. Do it for goblins everywhere. Do it for goblin mode.
You can vote for the Oxford word of the year on their website: languages.oup.com (opens in new tab).
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1669244370_We-must-put-aside-our-petty-differences-and-vote-for.jpg5071200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2022-11-23 22:31:182022-11-23 22:31:18We must put aside our petty differences and vote for ‘goblin mode’ over ‘metaverse’ as the Oxford Word of the Year
Science fiction horror game The Callisto Protocol (opens in new tab) has been marketed as a spiritual successor to Dead Space, vowing (opens in new tab) to go gorier and nastier than the series it’s inspired by. We know a lot (opens in new tab) about The Callisto Protocol, but we today we learned more about its several bits of expansion content on the way post-release.
One of those things is that the game’s DLC packs will include lots of additional gross-out death animations for both protagonist Jacob and the nasty monsters he fights. They’re sort of like skins for his armor—they actually come bundled with armor skins—and there are 25 of them in total: 13 new Jacob deaths in the Contagion Bundle, and 12 enemy deaths in the Riot Bundle. Both bundles are included with the Season Pass, which is part of the Digital Deluxe Edition, available for a mere $20 more than the standard edition.
The Contagion bundle also includes an ultra-hard, permadeath game mode and some skins. The Riot Bundle, meanwhile, includes a wave-survival mode and some skins. Also included in the Season Pass are the Other Way Skin Collection, an armor look themed after an insurgent movement; and a very-vague-for-now Story DLC.
There are of course many perfectly reasonable explanations, other than just a blatant cash grab, for selling death animations as bonus content. Animators and artists and that entire pipeline of developers need something to do, or else you just, what, fire them? That kind of cyclical hiring and firing has been awful for the games industry in the past. These animations are probably what they’ve been working on since the game content was finalized to polish and look for bugs.
Indeed, Striking Distance Studios CEO Glen Schofield offers up another reason: They think this is what fans want, so they’re making more of it and they haven’t started on it yet.
To be clear: We’re not holding anything back from the main game for the season pass. We haven’t even started work on this content yet. It’s all new stuff that we’ll be working on in the new year. Fans have asked for EVEN MORE deaths, so we’re making it a priority next year.November 23, 2022
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It’s actually kind of nice that the developers think their gruesome murders are so cool you’ll be happy to pay for more of them. It’s a kind of confidence in their work. But it’ll still rankle some people, who will be unhappy that these animations were worked on, possibly even completed, before the base game was even on sale. I guess this truly is the legacy of Dead Space, which had lots of microstransaction skins for an already-premium singleplayer game—and if people are unhappy about it, well, it won’t be the first time.
The Callisto Protocol is set to launch on December 2.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1669240720_The-Callisto-Protocol-will-sell-you-extra-death-animations-as.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2022-11-23 21:44:032022-11-23 21:44:03The Callisto Protocol will sell you extra death animations as DLC
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