If you need the answer to today’s Wordle delivered as quickly as possible then just click or scroll down this page because I’ve got the word you’re looking for right here. And if you were hoping to find a more subtle hint for the November 18 (517) challenge then don’t worry, because you’ll find a fresh clue just below.
I do love it when my daily Wordle goes from bad to amazing in a single guess—it’s like I’ve got proof good luck really does exist. Today I found myself with just enough of exactly the right sort of clues (as well as several lines of greys) to turn things around in a spectacular way exactly when I needed to.
Wordle hint
A Wordle hint for Friday, November 18
Today’s answer is the word for a predefined symbol representing a single letter, word, or concept—the sort of characters used in ancient Egyptian texts, for example. The only vowel used today is the “sometimes” vowel.
Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day
If there’s one thing better than playing Wordle, it’s playing Wordle well, which is why I’m going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the path to success:
A good opener contains a balanced mix of unique vowels and consonants.
A tactical second guess helps to narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
The solution may contain repeat letters.
There’s no time pressure beyond making sure it’s done by midnight. So there’s no reason to not treat the game like a casual newspaper crossword and come back to it later if you’re coming up blank.
Today’s Wordle answer
(Image credit: Josh Wardle)
What is the Wordle 517 answer?
Some days those greens just seem to hide. The answer to the November 18 (517) Wordle is GLYPH.
Previous answers
Wordle archive: Which words have been used
The more past Wordle answers you can cram into your memory banks, the better your chances of guessing today’s Wordle answer without accidentally picking a solution that’s already been used. Past Wordle answers can also give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle solving fresh.
Here are some recent Wordle solutions:
November 17: THERE
November 16: BAKER
November 15: SNARL
November 14: MAPLE
November 13: INANE
November 12: VALET
November 11: MEDAL
November 10: UNITE
November 9: RAINY
November 8: SPELL
Learn more about Wordle
Every day Wordle presents you with six rows of five boxes, and it’s up to you to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them.
You’ll want to start with a strong word (opens in new tab) like ALERT—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters. Hit Enter and the boxes will show you which letters you’ve got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn’t in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you’ve got the right letter in the right spot.
You’ll want your second go to compliment the first, using another “good” word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn’t present in today’s answer.
After that it’s just a case of using what you’ve learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there’s an E). Don’t forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).
If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips (opens in new tab), and if you’d like to find out which words have already been used you’ll find those below.
Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle (opens in new tab), as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle (opens in new tab), refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn’t long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures (opens in new tab). Surely it’s only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1668751962_Todays-Wordle-answer-and-hint-for-Friday-November-18.jpg6071200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2022-11-18 06:05:462022-11-18 06:05:46Today’s Wordle answer and hint for Friday, November 18
As was the case for a lot of ’90s adventure games, the small team at DreamForge making point-and-click horror adventure Sanitarium had mostly no idea what they were doing.
Most of them were fresh art school grads, and studio leadership was only a little older. When the game debuted in 1998, the narrative-driven horror market was already filled with Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, Phantasmagoria, and The 7th Guest. Sanitarium (opens in new tab) was a little different. It was still within the familiar, tried-and-true adventure genre that DreamForge already had experience working in (Veil of Darkness had been first other big horror hit), but with a psychological peg.
I made so many dreadful mistakes it’s truly a miracle the game made it across the finish line
Mike Nicholson
Sanitarium was one of the first point-and-click adventures I’d played that felt like a natural extension of ’80s and early ’90s pop culture—a real product of its time that paid homage to everything from classic science fiction to old Zippy the Pinhead comics.
The journey begins with a jarring opening cinematic of a man in a terrifying car accident (it was originally synced to Metallica’s “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” in hopes that the team could get the rights to the song, which very sadly didn’t happen). Max wakes up in the sanitarium—a distinctive, labyrinthine round tower that drew me in the second I started playing—with his head wrapped in bandages. He has no idea who he is, and after yet another accident, finds himself tumbling down a rabbit hole of fantastical “episodes” or realms where he must struggle to make sense of his identity, his trauma, and figure out how to escape.
The problem is, Max isn’t quite sure what’s real, and what isn’t.
After the game shipped, a new DreamForge staffer approached writer/artist/designer Mike Nicholson to tell him how much they appreciated the circular room design and its relationship to psychological theory. “As much as I wanted to accept the compliment, unfortunately, I had to explain that the only reason why the opening area was circular was that when we first started to design the space, it was rectangular,” says Nicholson. “Our boss saw it and said the square play space looks too antiquated/traditional to isometric adventure games. To placate him I redesigned the area to be a big circle instead.”
According to Nicholson, Sanitarium was truly a case of a bunch of young devs with little-to-no experience determined to make a fun game that they wanted to play themselves. Back then there weren’t really standard playtesting practices, so they also relied on each other to fine-tune the game.
“My entry into game development was a case of being in the right place at the right time,” says Nicholson, who, in 1994, was working at a small ad agency in Pittsburgh. While job-hunting in the classifieds, his then-girlfriend spotted an ad from a local computer game developer. “They were looking for a fantasy artist to make video game art. No experience necessary,” he says. “I went to the interview with my sketchbook and a lot of enthusiasm. Thankfully that was enough back then for me to get my foot in the door. It felt like I had found a winning lottery ticket, and in many ways, I still feel like I did.”
Meeting after work hours, the fledgling Sanitarium team discussed shared interests to figure out what kind of game they wanted to make. They loved the “episodic and wildly creative aspects of the classic Twilight Zone” and “creepy movies like Jacob’s Ladder.” Eventually they landed on the idea of a hub-based narrative so they could really branch out with the themes and locations.
And branch out they did—my favorite chapter of the game was The Hive, an far-future alien landscape full of fleshy organic gristle and insectoid cybernetics (where there are bugs, of course, there is also the obligate Starship Troopers quote). There’s an almost claymation-style quality to the characters here, with one of the most gorgeous puzzles adventure gaming has ever seen. It began as one of Nicholson’s ink drawings before the art team translated it into 3D. “I wanted to design a puzzle that fits into the area, and I was fond of the idea of having light pass through the insect wings to reveal patterns,” he says.
Dreamforge at the time was in the town of Jeanette, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, home to a well-known glass factory whose abandoned ruins became a driving inspiration behind some of the game’s scenes. The fictional decaying town full of mutant children is named Genet, which sounds almost biblical. In Nicholson’s words, Jeannette was a “depressed small town” with the enormous ruined specter of the Jeannette Glass Factory looming over it—a mood that also affected the team’s work commute.
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(Image credit: Mike Nicholson)
(Image credit: Mike Nicholson)
(Image credit: Mike Nicholson)
(Image credit: Mike Nicholson)
(Image credit: Mike Nicholson)
On one of his dark drives home, Nicholson finally came up with the cross-section dollhouse diorama concept for the Mansion chapter of the game—a chapter that got one of the devs, someone Nicholson considered a stoic sort of fellow, teary-eyed and choked up.
“Inspiration can hit at any time I suppose, and for reasons I honestly can’t recall, it was that late evening drive that did it,” he says. “The next day I brought the idea to the team, and they loved it with almost no changes to the idea. It’s been my experience in game development that this situation doesn’t happen very often and that’s probably why I still remember it to this day.”
At one point the feedback we received was that players wouldn’t be able to identify with the main character of Max because his head was wrapped in bandages
Mike Nicholson
Sanitarium doesn’t consistently hit those highs; it isn’t exactly a bastion of realism when it comes to ancient Aztec culture and some of the finer points of mental health. The games industry of 1998 was still relatively fresh and experimenting with evolving visual technology, evolving practices, and storytelling methods. All of this makes Sanitarium a genuinely engaging time capsule of the very distinct cluster of interests and influences that went into it.
“Our research was, to put it plainly—fairly shallow,” Nicholson admits with a laugh. He also remembers the difficulty of finding a publisher who was open to having what was essentially a “faceless” protagonist. “At one point the feedback we received was that players wouldn’t be able to identify with the main character of Max because his head was wrapped in bandages and they suggested we remove them. Considering the story and the huge reveal at the end of the game with Max’s bandages coming off, you can imagine our response to that.”
When I ask Nicholson about what he could have done differently, the first thing he says is that he would have gotten himself some real management training. “I made so many dreadful mistakes it’s truly a miracle the game made it across the finish line,” he says. “I benefited from an otherworldly and arguably undeserved amount of patience from my team and studio leadership, and for that, I will be eternally grateful.”
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(Image credit: DreamForge)
(Image credit: DreamForge)
(Image credit: DreamForge)
On the creative side of things, he would’ve liked to go deeper.
“My design sense was based almost entirely on my life experiences up to that point, and at age 28 when we started, it was admittedly not all that much,” he says. “Were Sanitarium to be designed today I’d like to think narratively it would have a broader scope and more depth to the characterization.” Nicholson went on to focus on UI/UX work—he spent 14 years at Blizzard working on the Diablo 3 UI and art for other games. He still keeps up to date with adventure games.
“I enjoyed the narrative design and presentation of games such as The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and What Remains of Edith Finch,” he says. “If we were ever afforded the opportunity to pursue a sequel to Sanitarium, I’d like to think it would take a similar approach.” In the meantime, Sanitarium exists as an unparalleled example of late ’90s game art that wasn’t afraid to get weird and raise the aesthetic bar for the adventure genre as a whole.
The Hive scene where antagonist Gromna is giving a “televised” speech, complete with fascist rally footage flanking a giant, semi-translucent wasp torso, is the good stuff.
In the town of Genet, each mutant child’s portrait was a labor of love.
And those writhing maggot beds. The fleshy door-lock puzzle studded with clear mucus pods.
Revisiting this strange, messy realm—almost a visual anthology with the way you move through different themes and styles—is a breath of refreshingly putrid air, and if you too have never felt like photorealism was the path to better game worlds, it’s well worth remembering.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/How-a-bunch-of-art-school-grads-made-putrid-brilliant.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2022-11-18 01:45:052022-11-18 01:45:05How a bunch of art school grads made putrid, brilliant horror adventure Sanitarium
For the first time in what feels like ages, Call of Duty is innovating again. Even bogged down by a rough launch and saddled with an agonizingly clunky user interface, Call of Duty: Warzone 2 is still a massive step up over its predecessor.
A battle royale game is only as good as its map(s), and Al Mazrah is up there as one of the best I’ve yet played on. A jewel of the Islamic Golden Age, the fictional Syria-like has been laid low by internal strife and foreign intervention. Gaudy contemporary business districts contrast wonderfully against the mosques and bazaars, creating a map that feels much more lived in than predecessors Verdansk and Caldera.
Al-Mazrah’s been carved up not only by foreign capital, but climate change as well, leaving a network of man-made waterways that allow for easy traversal via boat. Strongholds populated by surprisingly vicious AI goons dot the map. These encounters are tough but predictable, serving as a great warmup in the early to mid-game, making the Warzone 2 structure feel less like a strict battle royale and more like an MMO PvP area.
The art design is a welcome return to simplicity, and Warzone 2’s cohesive visual identity is as of yet unburdened by gaudy cosmetics and ludicrous operator skins. Even if the Season 1 Battle Pass rewards look like overdesigned airsoft guns, there’s at least a theme rather than a hodgepodge of styles. MW2’s stellar line-up of royalty free gun approximations integrates well with the near-future war aesthetic, even if some of the hyper-tacticool guns feel out of place. Visually, Warzone 2 is a major improvement over the bloated Warzone 1.0.
(Image credit: Activision Blizzard)
The sound design is still incredible, owing to some clever mixing and layering. Letting off a salvo of 7.62 rounds from an RPD at a passing vehicle is made all the better when you hear that crunch of ceramic armor plates shattering. It feels great to be able to identify the pops and crackles of nearby gunfire as belonging to a specific caliber of bullet. In a meta that favors the AK-74u, it’s saved me from getting melted in CQC a couple times.
Warzone 2’s cohesive visual identity is as of yet unburdened by gaudy cosmetics and ludicrous operator skins.
The Gulag system received a substantial overhaul. It’s now a lobby that fills up with prisoners and stots them into 2v2 deathmatches in a large arena littered with weapon pickups. If the match drags on too long, the Jailer, a minigun wielding juggernaut, will drop down and hurry things along. Being able to rely on a teammate is a welcome switch-up from the sweaty 1v1s of Warzone 1.0, and the opportunity for both teams to team up and go after the Jailer in pursuit of freedom gives Warzone’s unique Gulag system a lot more depth.
Al Mazrah is huge, with hostile terrain perfect for ambushers littered all throughout.
Vehicles are now vital for crossing those dangerous areas. One of my favorite new features is the ability to transition from the car seat to the roof with a button press, a change that feels like Infinity Ward acknowledging how cool it is to move freely in the backs of trucks or on the hoods of cars while they’re in motion. It’s a lot of fun to get into a chase with another squad and see soldiers crawl out the windows, desperately trying to quickscope the other driver from the roof.
(Image credit: Activision Blizzard)
Another great new addition is the proximity voice chat, which means that a loud-mouthed fourteen year old will never get the drop on you ever again. Every match so far has been made better by its inclusion (opens in new tab)—hearing a voice nearby has always elicited either frantic shushing or berserk war cries from my party. Remember the OG MW2 lobbies? Warzone 2 is less toxic, but just as fun.
Unfortunately, it’s not all smooth sailing: Wonky performance, extreme stuttering when dropping at the start of the game, and frustrating inconsistencies with hit detection have soured what’s been a mostly fantastic time in Al Mazrah. While the stuttering has been remedied by last-minute update, it remains to be seen if Infinity Ward can avoid the technical pitfalls that Warzone 1.0 constantly tripped into. Worth flagging is that in my brief time in Warzone 2, I haven’t seen any fishy killcams that make me wonder whether my assailants are cheating.
Ultimately, I’m curious to see how Warzone 2’s battle royale suite stacks up against the Tarkov-like DMZ mode. Our finished review of Call of Duty Warzone 2 is coming soon, but check out more coverage here (opens in new tab).
Normally I don’t pay much attention to the story side of Magic: The Gathering. I know that it has one, I watch the trailers (opens in new tab) and appreciate enough of the broad sweep to put the cards in context, but I’m not out here reading novelizations or tie-in comics or official cookbooks. (There isn’t actually an official cookbook, but it’s only a matter of time.) Then I saw that Miguel Lopez, co-creator of the Lancer tabletop RPG (opens in new tab), wrote the story for Magic’s new expansion The Brothers’ War.
Lancer is a neat “mud and lasers” game of giant robot pilots who fight gritty battles for a better future, while The Brothers’ War is about traveling back in time to a period of war between—wouldn’t you know it—giant robots. It’s in Lopez’s wheelhouse is what I’m saying. I figured I’d give his card-game fiction a chance, and now I’m three episodes into a story about robots powered by magic rocks and the end of the world (opens in new tab), enjoying it so much I’ve built a deck around Queen Kayla bin-Kroog (opens in new tab) because I thought she seemed neat. I don’t even recognize myself any more.
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(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
As far as the actual cards go, giant robots means the Brothers’ War contains lots of artifact creatures like Terror Ballista, a cross between a beetle and a crossbow that lets you sacrifice your own creatures to kill those of your opponent. I like to imagine you’re using them as ammunition, just flinging goblins out of your big ballista beetle.
Then there’s Liberator, Urza’s Battlethopter, a troop carrier that starts out with power 1 and costs 3 mana, but gets a +1/+1 token whenever you cast something that costs more mana than it. If you’re playing paper Magic you’ll need a pile of tokens at the ready, because The Brothers’ War is full of cards that make them rain like confetti. My first win came via piling up counters on Thopter Mechanic and Lat-Nam Adept, two blue cards that get +1/+1 whenever you draw a second time on your turn (a specialty of annoying blue cards).
You’ll want plenty of powerstone tokens too, which I now know provide the lore explanation for what fuels all these machines. They can be tapped for colorless mana you can use to pay for more artifacts—and also to activate abilities, which the wording “This mana can’t be spent to cast a nonartifact spell” doesn’t make as clear as it should.
To accentuate the themes of artifacts and time travel, 63 old artifact cards have been reprinted with retro frames. If you’ve been wanting a copy of Precursor Golem (opens in new tab) or Ramos, Dragon Engine (opens in new tab), now’s your chance. Just because they’ve been reprinted doesn’t mean they’re legal in standard format again though, which makes it tempting to start playing historic in Arena again just to see if they’re shaking things up.
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
The other way the theme of the Brothers’ War manifests is an odder one. Every physical set booster and collector booster has a chance of containing a Transformers card. Yep, Transformers as in “robots in disguise”. They’re double-sided to represent their ability to flip back and forth between forms, and have variant art that either looks like the 1980s cartoons, or is based on a mirror-universe thing called Shattered Glass (opens in new tab).
It’s two of Hasbro’s biggest brands having a marketing crossover, but I can’t be cynical about it because I saw the Laserbeak token and it unlocked some deep childhood memory of thinking a cassette that transformed into a robot vulture was the coolest shit ever. Now I kind of want to collect all of them, or at least Starscream and Cyclonus. Maybe Jetfire? Goddammit.
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(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
Tempting paper products aside, Arena is where I play Magic the most. Collecting the Brothers’ War in digital form has been made easier by the addition of “golden packs”, which contain half-a-dozen rare cards from recent sets and come free with every 10 regular boosters you buy in Arena. That includes boosters you get with gold earned from wins and daily quests. Where before the best way to get value for money in Arena was to play draft or sealed, now buying boosters is a competitive way of building your collection, which is great if those aren’t formats you like.
While that Queen Kayla bin-Kroog deck hasn’t been doing great for me, I’ve seen something else in The Brothers’ War I’m tempted to build a deck around. It’s Rescue Retriever (opens in new tab). This 3/3 dog soldier lets you drop yet more of those +1/+1 counters—one on every other soldier card you’ve got, and there’s plenty of those in The Brothers’ War. Like Yotian Frontliner, a sword-wielding robot soldier that gives +1/+1 to another creature whenever it attacks, though only until the end of the turn. And Siege Veteran, a regular human soldier who, you’ll never guess, lets you put a free +1/+1 counter on a target at the start of every single combat phase.
I started out with the best of intentions and a heavily thematic deck that was accurate to the lore, but the urge to make something more degenerate and likely to make people ragequit never really goes away.
The Brothers’ War (opens in new tab) cards will be available in stores from November 18, and are in Arena now. You can score three free boosters in Arena by entering the code PlayBRO.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1668733499_Magic-The-Gathering-gets-mechs-in-the-new-Brothers-War.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2022-11-18 00:23:582022-11-18 00:23:58Magic: The Gathering gets mechs in the new Brothers’ War set
The long road to max level in World of Warcraft has been cut in half weeks before the Dragonflight (opens in new tab)expansion drops at the end of the month.
Blizzard has issued a patch to lower the amount of XP it takes to go from level one to level 60, which is a 57% reduction, according to a calculation from Icy-Veins (opens in new tab). Unlike temporary boosts to XP gain, like the recent Winds of Winter buff, Blizzard has permanently made the entire leveling experience faster than it’s ever been.
The XP required to go from level 49 to 60 has been reduced by about 70%, which means if you left off somewhere in Shadowlands, you can zoom up to max level in as little as 2 hours (opens in new tab) with XP-boosting items and a good questing route.
Blizzard has hastened the leveling experience a lot over the years. Not only are zones packed with quests and enemies, but the entire world scales to your level. Once you hit level 10, you can choose a specific expansion’s zones to visit. Most people recommend heading to Warlords of Draenor for its high concentration of quests and bonus objectives that reward loads of XP for doing very little. Combine that efficiency with the new XP requirements, XP boosts from heirlooms, having the PvP Warmode on, and rested bonus XP, and you can zip up to level 60 within a few days.
WoW: Dragonflight will increase the level cap to 70 and introduce a new Dragon-themed storyline set in their ancient home, the Dragon Isles. New expansions are intended to be about experiencing the story and unlocking new features rather than racing to the level cap, so leveling up there might feel sluggish compared to the rest of the game.
You could always skip most of this process by boosting a character to level 60 by pre-ordering the Heroic or Epic edition of Dragonflight, or buying a level skip separately for $60. As long as you have a single level 50 character, you can roll a Dracthyr, the new highly-customizable (opens in new tab) dragon race, who start at level 58 and end their starting zone (opens in new tab) at level 60.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1668744632_WoW-Dragonflight-just-made-it-absurdly-easy-to-level-a.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2022-11-18 00:13:222022-11-18 00:13:22WoW: Dragonflight just made it absurdly easy to level a new character to 60
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 players have noticed a quirky feature that intertwines that game’s multiplayer unlocks with DMZ, the extraction mode that launched this week alongside Warzone 2. If you escape from DMZ with a new gun, it’ll be unlocked in Modern Warfare 2, too.
Activision mentioned this feature a couple days ago in one of its enormous blog posts, but a lot of players, myself included, are just now noticing it.
“In DMZ, extracting with any Contraband weapon unlocks it across all other game modes,” reads the post. “This includes the M13B Assault Rifle, a new free functional weapon earned by defeating [[REDACTED]].”
The “redacted” bit there is a PvE boss battle in the DMZ mode. We’ve got a guide to unlocking the M13B Assault Rifle, if you want the details. Playing DMZ is the only way to get that gun in Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer.
We like DMZ so far—Rich said that it feels like “Call of Duty’s future”—and it’s free, so it’s not the most torturous promotional tie-in for those who favor regular old Call of Duty multiplayer. I don’t mind it. Finding a dusty FSS Hurricane out in the wilds of Al Mazrah is almost certainly a faster process than leveling up the M4 so I can then level up the FTAC Recon until I eventually unlock the SMG variant the normal way. And the basic activity is the same: run, crouch slide, shoot, run, crouch slide, shoot, run, crouch slide, shoot.
DMZ isn’t just a way to bypass tech trees, either. Shooting up dozens of AI grunts, completing contracts, and fighting the occasional human player is also a very efficient way to earn both weapon XP and battle pass XP. An OK match of DMZ can net you anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 XP total.
Things sure are getting complicated with Call of Duty. On Steam, the latest game is called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 | Warzone 2.0 in my library; it was renamed after the latter launched. From the main menu, I can launch Modern Warfare 2, which leads to a menu which divides its competitive, co-op, and campaign modes, or launch Warzone 2.0 for battle royale modes, or launch DMZ for the extraction mode—it’s presented as its own thing. It works well enough for now, but what happens when the next Call of Duty comes out? Will DMZ and Warzone 2.0 battle royale float over to that game’s menu, like spirits departing an old host body and possessing a new one?
There is a rumor that next year’s Call of Duty will actually be a Modern Warfare 2 expansion, so maybe that question won’t have to be answered in 2023, and the Modern Warfare 2 menu will just get even bigger.
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1668729855_If-you-extract-with-a-gun-in-Warzone-2-DMZ.jpg5941200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2022-11-17 23:47:002022-11-17 23:47:00If you extract with a gun in Warzone 2 DMZ, you unlock it forever in Modern Warfare 2
Update:Fuji News Network (opens in new tab) is now reporting that Yuji Naka, co-creator of Sonic the Hedgehog and director of Balan Wonderworld, has been arrested by the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office in connection with the insider trading case. Like the two previously arrested suspects, Naka is accused of buying shares in Aiming Co before it was revealed that the developer was taking on a lucrative contract to make a Dragon Quest mobile game. In Naka’s case, he allegedly bought around 10,000 shares, roughly worth 2.8 million yen. It has not been disclosed whether Naka or the other suspects sold their shares.
Original story: On November 17, Japanese outlet Automaton (opens in new tab) reported that two Square Enix employees had been arrested by Tokyo Police on suspicion of insider trading. The arrest is in relation to money they invested in a third-party developer, Aiming Co, ahead of the public reveal that it would work on the mobile Dragon Quest spinoff, Dragon Quest Tact (opens in new tab), which released in 2020.
Automaton identifies the employees as Fumiaki Suzuki (opens in new tab) and Taisuke Sasaki (opens in new tab) (alternately Sazaki). The two men have technical production credits and special thanks on a number of high-profile Square Enix games, including Dragon Quest 11, Final Fantasy 14, and NieR Automata.
Sasaki and Suzuki were allegedly aware of Aming Co’s unannounced collaboration with Square Enix through internal sources when they purchased 47 million yen (around $335,000) worth of Aming Co stock. Given the Dragon Quest series’ massive popularity, especially in Japan, that investment would presumably have a lucrative payoff, with Aiming Co’s value increasing as soon as the high profile project was announced.
On November 17, Square Enix released a public statement (opens in new tab) on the matter. The company said it will “fully cooperate with the investigation to clarify the facts.” Square Enix also stated that it is “taking disciplinary action against the former employees,” and went on to assert that it will strengthen its internal measures to detect and prevent insider trading by employees.
$335,000 is absolutely a life changing amount of money for an individual, but it strikes me as a paltry amount in the world of high finance and billion dollar videogame studio acquisitions. I can almost imagine an Office Space-style situation with two mid-level Square Enix employees coming up with a scheme to make some extra money in the shadow of corporate profits. Whatever the case may be, this is a developing story, and thus far the first instance I know of where Dragon Quest was involved in an alleged financial crime.
Activision has eliminated the restrictions on prepaid mobile phones for Battle.net’s 2FA system, meaning that everyone with a mobile phone—no matter what kind—will be able to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Overwatch 2.
Activision and Blizzard came under fire over the 2FA system, called SMS Protect (opens in new tab), in October—not because of the phone number requirement, which other games including Dota 2 (opens in new tab) and Rainbow Six Siege (opens in new tab) also require, but because it would not accept prepaid mobile phones or VOIP. If you wanted to play two of the biggest games of the year, in other words, you had to be signed up for a mobile phone contract, something an awful lot of people are choosing not to do (opens in new tab) as prepaid wireless services become more flexible and competitive.
Locking out a large number of potential players was a baffling choice, but the situation grew even worse almost immediately. While many players confirmed that their prepaid mobiles would not work with SMS Protect, some people, including our associate editor and Overwatch 2 reviewer Tyler Colp, said their prepaids did work with it (opens in new tab). So instead of a definitive “no,” which sucks but at least leaves no doubt about what’s happening, there was confusion.
An update shared later in the month clarified that the phone number requirement would not apply to console players (opens in new tab), and that PC players who had previously verified themselves for Call of Duty: Warzone; a similar loosening of the phone requirement was extended to Overwatch 2 players on October 7. But now, everything is a whole lot simpler, because as long as you’ve got a phone, you’re set.
Overwatch 2 was the first to announce that SMS Protect will ditch the prepaid restriction, following an update that will go live tomorrow, November 18.
No reason for the change was given, but I’ve reached out to Activision and Blizzard to ask and will update if I receive a reply. In the meantime, it’s definitely good news for everyone who isn’t already playing either game: If you want to get into it, now you can.
Warzone 2 has barely left the barracks and touched its boots on the ground, but that hasn’t stopped players, pros, and the wider internet from sharing strong opinions on what the best Warzone 2 loadouts and guns are the most powerful so far.
If you’re coming into Call of Duty: Warzone 2 after a long hiatus, you should know upfront that the sequel has brought significant changes to the arsenal at large, as well as the way that loadouts work in Warzone. Sniper rifles aren’t the one-shot-kill lasers they used to be and a new premium on armor vests is speeding up the average time-to-kill. But maybe more importantly, you don’t purchase loadouts from Buy Stations anymore—only primary weapons can be picked up here, for a flat cost of $5000 (previously Warzone allowed you to grab an entire loadout for $10,000). This design change forces you to be more flexible in the field, fighting with what you’ve found in the environment rather than grabbing your best kit every single match. For that reason, keep an eye out for these guns that are being favored so far in Warzone 2.
The nascent meta seems to be favoring seven different weapons from what we’ve played and seen so far:
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/The-best-Warzone-2-loadouts-so-far.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2022-11-17 22:58:502022-11-17 22:58:50The best Warzone 2 loadouts so far
Someone call Geoguessr god Trevor Rainbolt (opens in new tab) because the World of Warcraft version of the game is making me question what I was doing with all those hours in Blizzard’s MMO.
Lostgamer.io dropped its WoW Geoguessr (opens in new tab) and I swear I wasn’t this bad at finding my way around Azeroth in-game. The map-based game covers most of WoW’s geography, including the planet Draenor and alternate timeline Draenor. One of the creators, TheEdenChild (opens in new tab), said the team used specialized tools and “roughly 3,000,000 images” to make it. And they expect Dragonflight to take another million.
The game works just like the real world Geoguessr. You’re given a first-person Google street view of the location and have to try to mark it on the map before the timer runs out. If you need more information, you can move around the map too. Points are rewarded for how close you get to the specific coordinates.
As an on-and-off WoW player, you’d think the classic zones would be the easiest to guess—they’re where I spent the most time before the game had flying mounts and other fast travel options. But somehow they are still hard for me. Did they move the Caverns of Time? I thought it was at the bottom of Tanaris. It’s apparently not, and that error cost me my high score and my WoW Geoguessr speedrunner (opens in new tab) career. The Barrens, an old early-game questing area, is imprinted in my brain though. I spent so much time there as a new player back in 2006 and the changes to it in the Cataclysm expansion weren’t substantial enough to render those memories useless.
The expansive zones from the most recent expansions are much harder, but if you know a thing or two about how Blizzard designs environments, you can get fairly close. WoW areas are obviously not as big as real world countries and they often have pockets of NPCs and buildings for quests to help narrow it down. The hardest ones to guess are when you’re dropped into the middle of a forest and there aren’t even any roads nearby to help pinpoint the exact location.
Lostgamer.io’s WoW Geoguessr isn’t the first one to come out. You can also play Where in Warcraft? (opens in new tab) or watch TikTok user TheVignox (opens in new tab) demonstrate what it’s like to be geographically gifted. Someone will surely get so good at this new WoW Geoguessr that they’ll be able to do it using only the ground textures, sort of like Rainbolt did (opens in new tab).
https://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/1668726163_This-WoW-Geoguessr-uses-roughly-3-million-images-and-Im.jpg6751200Carlos Pachecohttps://gamingarmyunited.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Website-Logo-300x74.pngCarlos Pacheco2022-11-17 22:53:352022-11-17 22:53:35This WoW Geoguessr uses ‘roughly 3 million images’ and I’m still lost
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