Then it didn’t.

It took five years for another game to grab me the way Breath of the Wild did, but Elden Ring pulled it off last year. I played and wrote about Elden Ring every day for a month during work, then booted it up and played hours more at night. As I look back on Elden Ring’s impact on the cusp of its one year anniversary, I’m tempted to make the same proclamation. Elden Ring sold 20 million copies in one year. Surely that means it’s going to trigger a seismic shift in open world game design, right?

I think it’s more likely the opposite is true. No one’s going to copy Elden Ring’s success because no one can.

Rise, Tarnished

I could go on and on about the obvious ways Elden Ring differs from the open world games of Ubisoft or Bethesda or Rockstar—the lack of skins and paid level boosts, the absence of sidequest checklists and glowing waypoints telling you where to go next. The cryptic NPC dialogue, winding castle ramparts and hulking bosses. Blah blah. We all know the deal.

Elden Ring was not a phenomenon because of those design decisions. It was a phenomenon because it was the payoff to a decade-long underdog story. The experience of seeing Elden Ring become the triumphant, ultimate version of the game FromSoftware’s been making and remaking was its own entertainment. If Dark Souls was the scrappy young Rocky Balboa putting up a shocking match for Apollo Creed, Elden Ring was Rocky at the end of Rocky 4, a champion battling under the weight of a million expectations and still managing to outpunch a 250 pound wall of muscle. It’s impossible not to get caught up in the spectacle.

The same way today’s “boomer shooters” like Dusk have skipped 20 years or so of FPS evolution to start a new timeline right from the roots of 1997’s Quake, Dark Souls ignored the conventions of mid-2000s games to reimagine a roughshod ’80s or ’90s RPG in more evocative 3D. It was a full-body shock proving you could make a game that evoked a sadistic DM’s grimy Dungeons & Dragons campaign and people would submit themselves willingly.

Designers couldn’t stop gushing about its raw genius, and players were either inducted into the cult of Souls or pissed off that they found this game nobody would shut up about aggressively off-putting. But even the haters who got murdered by skeletons in the first 30 minutes of Dark Souls and yeeted the disc into a closet got caught up in the hype of Elden Ring. It was an event. The open world, simplified multiplayer, and easier fast travel combined to make millions of people tell themselves that this would be the FromSoftware game they’d finally “get.” Elden Ring was officially too big to ignore.

How do you repeat that kind of trajectory? You don’t.

Sure, you could try. After Elden Ring’s enormous success, some open world games could attempt to parrot Elden Ring’s best ideas, even if they were mostly already present in the Souls games for the last decade: 

• Maybe they drop more explicit waypointed quest design for cryptic requests from inscrutable NPCs
• Maybe they recognize the power of FromSoftware’s utterly stupid yet perfect messaging system, which makes the oppressive world a little less lonely
• Maybe they mirror Elden Ring’s focus on mood, with an aesthetic inspired by classical art over raw ray traced fidelity
• Maybe they’ll reject triple-A’s current overreliance on piles of loot and samey skill trees
• Maybe they go all-in on utterly weird as shit bosses 

But one or all of those pieces put together will not make a game that feels like (or sells like) Elden Ring, just like none of the “Souls-likes” of the last decade truly captured the essence of FromSoftware’s games by being hard or making you do a corpse run after every death.

Those were things in Dark Souls, but they weren’t Dark Souls, any more than some other boxing movie could be Rocky. Rocky is the inexplicable lump you get in your throat 30 seconds into Gonna Fly Now; a Souls game is the paradox of a brutal challenge often being absolutely hilarious. 

Dark Souls and Elden Ring’s flaws are, for the most part, idiosyncrasies that converts hold up as part of their charm, from “fat rolling” to dragons taking fall damage. Until other open world game developers can figure out how to genuinely make 20 million gamers relish being the most fucked up and nasty of guys in a world that sucks soooo bad, they’ll never replicate Elden Ring’s success.

They’ve got some catching up to do: FromSoftware’s been honing the art of the fucked up little man for decades. That’s how you know it comes from the heart. 

Best primary weapon for Ranked Play

Ranked Play features 4v4 gameplay of Hardpoint, Control, and Search and Destroy. The primary weapon you decide to equip for Ranked Play will be determined by the role you prefer to play. If you’re looking to hold down a lane in a slayer role, then the TAQ-56 assault rifle is the best choice, while you’ll want the Vaznev-9k submachine gun for close-quarters action near the objective.

TAQ-56 Ranked Play loadout

Modern Warfare 2’s TAQ-56 is the assault rifle used in the Call of Duty League, and this is a really powerful gun with the right attachments on it. The recommended attachments for the TAQ-56 is the same build used by Octane of the LA Thieves. Some pros swap the TV Xline Pro for the TV Cardinal Stock. The TV Xline Pro helps a bit more with the aim-down-sight speed, but feel free to try out both stocks to see what feels best for you.

Recommended TAQ-56 attachments:

• Barrel: 17.5″ Tundra Pro Barrel
• Stock: TV Xline Pro
• Rear Grip: Demo Cleanshot Grip
• Ammunition: 5.56 High Velocity
• Underbarrel: FSS Sharkfin 90

Vaznev-9k Ranked Play loadout

The Vaznev-9k is the submachine gun used by the pros. Not every SMG pro player uses the exact same attachments, but here is the recommended loadout used by top players like Simp from Atlanta FaZe and Shotzzy from OpTic Texas.

Recommended Vaznev-9k attachments:

• Muzzle: Bruen Pendulum
• Stock: Otrezat Stock
• Rear Grip: True-Tac Grip
• Underbarrel: FSS Sharkfin 90

MCPR-300 Ranked Play loadout

Sniping isn’t always allowed in the Call of Duty League, but it’s not banned for the 2023 season. The limitation for sniper rifles is that only one can be used during Search and Destroy, and pros have agreed to not use any attachments on them. Thankfully, Ranked Play does allow you to equip attachments to your sniper. Pro players are split on which is the best to use, so they either choose between the MCPR-300 or the LA-B 330.

The MCPR-300 is a bit heavier than the LA-B 330, but the recommended attachments will help with speed and mobility in those intense Search and Destroy moments.

Recommended MCPR-300 attachments:

• Stock: FSS Merc Stock
• Rear Grip: Cronen Cheetah Grip
• Magazine: 5 Round Mag
• Ammunition: .300 Mag High Velocity

LA-B 330 Ranked Play loadout

The LA-B 330 is a quicker sniper and perfect for the aggressive player looking for those snappy shots. The recommended attachments will help boost the damage range, bullet velocity, and speed of this sniper rifle.

Recommended LA-B 330 attachments:

• Barrel: 23.5″ Fluted R-67 Barrel
• Stock: ZLR T70 Pad Extension Stock
• Bolt: FSS ST87 Bolt
• Ammunition: .300 Mag High Velocity

Best secondary weapon for Ranked Play

Depending on the map, mode, and playstyle, pro players either equip the X12 pistol or the knife melee weapon. Pros often switch to the knife for better mobility during an intense play, while players who are running an assault rifle or a sniper might prefer to have the pistol in case they need to reload their primary.

X12 Ranked Play Loadout

The X12 is the only secondary gun used because it’s the quickest pistol in the game. The recommended attachments make this secondary even faster to use.

Recommended X12 attachments:

• Barrel: XRK LUC-9
• Rear Grip: Cronen Lima-6
• Trigger Action: XRK Lighting Fire

Ranked Play equipment

For the unrestricted equipment, you can choose between a frag grenade and a semtex for lethals. Frags are generally used for Search and Destroy, while semtex are often picked for the respawn modes of Control and Hardpoint. The only tactical equipment available is the stun grenade.

For the field upgrade, you can choose between dead silence and a trophy system. It’s usually good to have some players on a team run trophy systems and others to have dead silence, depending on playstyle and roles. For Search and Destroy, you’ll likely want more players running dead silence in those sneaky no-respawn moments.

Best Ranked Play perks

Modern Warfare 2’s Ultimate perks are restricted here. This leaves you with two base perks and a bonus perk.

The two base perks are situational, but you’ll want Double Time, Battle Hardened, or Bomb Squad. Battle Hardened and Bomb Squad are recommended for the respawn modes of Hardpoint and Control, while Double Time is mainly picked for Search and Destroy. Fast Hands is the Bonus perk used by the pros.

Note: Ranked Play restrictions are subject to change, as future changes could occur mid-season for the Call of Duty League.

Following this guide should give you the best weapons and perks that are unrestricted in Ranked Play. For recommended loadouts in Warzone 2, make sure to check out our recommended loadouts for battle royale and DMZ. If you’re looking for a greater challenge in battle royale, check out our guide on how to get a tactical nuke in Warzone 2.

•  A loot system, complete with ‘gear score’ and set bonuses. 
•  Upgrade and crafting systems. 
•  A battle pass. 
•  Giant, glowing weak points on everything, including a tank. 
• A guy whose entire shtick is boomerangs firing an SMG over and over. 

The presentation has received a pretty universally negative reaction. Partly people are just getting pretty tired of how common these kinds of mechanics are now, but there’s a more specific problem here: superheroes and live service is a fundamentally awful combination.

I get why developers go after it. You take superheroes, the biggest thing in entertainment today, and you combine them with live service mechanics, proven to have enormous potential for profit over a long period—surely that’s a chance for huge success? But after recent messes like Marvel’s Avengers and Warner Bros.’ own last effort Gotham Knights, we’re now past the point where developers need to realise there’s a conflict here that no amount of level 34 vibranium gauntlets can fix. 

Take that loot grind, to start with. The default approach of games like this is to chase the Destiny model—a slow treadmill of progress based around incrementally better weapons and accessories. Indeed, the new Suicide Squad footage boasts of six different classes of guns, a variety of weapon manufacturers they can hail from and themed gear sets that unlock new modifiers, all contributing to your character’s power level via a gear score. Shots of the character menu show a grimly familiar UI festooned with numbers and stats as Harley Quinn stands there grinning with bizarre enthusiasm about her latest minigun drop.

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That just simply isn’t the superhero fantasy. Superheroes do not pick up loot off bad guys they defeat and equip it for a tiny bonus to their strength. The point of superheroes is that they are super—when we meet them, they are already fully formed, with unique and interesting powers and abilities. When they increase in power, it is by great leaps, not 3% better armour penetration. Their specialness comes from within—either because of innate talents or superpowers, or because of incredible, signature gadgets they wield, often designed themselves. When they use normal guns and gear, the focus isn’t on the items themselves, but the wielder’s skill. Black Widow is deadly with a pair of pistols because she’s an elite assassin, not because she looted some really good ones off a dead Hydra agent. 

It is simply a different power fantasy than the rags-to-riches journey that these loot grinds are based on—going right back to the Dungeons & Dragons fighter who starts as a level 1 farmhand with a spear, and quests to one day become a level 20 knight clad in enchanted armour. It feels absurd for King Shark, the monstrous son of an underwater god, to be rifling through his drops to figure out which pistol he should switch to. The more iconic the character, the more you feel that disconnect. Marvel’s Avengers pushed this wrongness to the point of performance art with its loot, making the Incredible Hulk regularly swap out his actual bones for ones he found on the floor in order to progress.

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The one joy there should be in superhero loot is getting to mix and match different armour pieces to make your own takes on the costumes, but outside of 2017’s Injustice 2, that seems to be off the table. I’m assuming it’s a licensing issue—Marvel and DC not wanting their characters to be too malleable—but whatever the reason, the rule for superheroes seems to be that gear can’t change their look. Not without buying expensive skins that prey on people’s love of iconic or obscure outfits from the films and comics, at least.

The other problem is that live service means multiplayer. For an action game, making even one superhero feel authentic and exciting to control is a serious challenge—how they move, how they fight, how they sound, it all has to feel true to a character that’s larger than life. Think of Spider-Man’s web-slinging, or Superman’s flight, or Hulk’s mighty blows—it has to feel exactly right, or what’s the point? But multiplayer means you not only have to pull that trick off multiple times, it also gets harder every time, because each character needs to feel totally distinct from all the others.

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Starting with four characters, and inevitably having to stack up more for future content drops—it’s an impossible challenge. Marvel’s Avengers and Gotham Knights prove it, with heroes that not only feel half-baked and muddled, but also like they’re working off the same core template with a few extras each. As Tyler Colp wrote in his Gotham Knights review, its “attempt to translate Arkham into an online co-op game fragments great design into jagged pieces for the cheap dopamine hit of gradual progression.” It’s so far from the fantasy that you want.

Sure enough, the Suicide Squad footage shows all four characters bouncing around weightlessly as they shoot the same guns at spongey weakspots, showing their personalities only through canned melee animations. There’s so little of their identities evident in how they move and fight that the trailer has to keep cutting between them as fast as possible and barrage the viewer with one-liners to try and create some sense of this being a super-team. Hopefully there’s something in Suicide Squad that’ll still surprise us, but based on everything we’ve seen so far, I’m seriously wary.

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It’s such a shame, because superhero games used to be all about zeroing in on one character and not only nailing the feel of that hero, but building a whole world around them to reinforce it. Games like Arkham Asylum, Infamous, The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and Prototype—they’re all thrilling sandboxes tailored perfectly to their satisfying stars, and all self-contained singleplayer experiences. The only series that seems to still be carrying that torch in 2023 is Spider-Man, protected by Sony and its love of big budget singleplayer games. Though there may at least be hope on the horizon with the announced but not yet seen Wolverine, Iron Man, and Wonder Woman games. 

When even the creators of the Arkham games, arguably the best superhero games ever made, are falling into this live service trap, you know something’s gone badly wrong. Once Suicide Squad is out and its battle passes have run dry, it’s time we as a society collectively move on. If singleplayer open worlds aren’t enough for superheroes to make money anymore, fine—but developers, I am telling you, live service cannot be the solution. 

Well, two can play at the public statements game, because now the developer of TheDayBefore calendar app has spoken to Eurogamer. TheDayBefore points out that it “first distributed the app under the name ‘The Day Before’ in 2010″—a fact easily confirmed by checking its Google Play page (opens in new tab)—and has held the South Korean trademark for the title since 2015. Upon “Knowing that the game of the same name was produced,” the calendar app’s owners began “taking measures to protect trademark rights,” like registering for a US trademark (opens in new tab) in 2021.

The calendar app told Eurogamer that it currently holds copyright for ‘The Day Before’ in “Korea, the United States, China, Russia, Japan, Vietnam, and the European Union,” which sounds like a hell of a situation for Fntastic’s lawyers to unpick, and that it’s eager to put the trademark dispute behind it so that the app’s fans can “can use it without worrying”. I don’t know that the 40+ million people who have downloaded the calendar app really care enough about its copyright to ‘worry’ about it, exactly, but I suppose it’s the thought that counts.

It all makes the situation about Fntastic and The Day Before seem somehow more absurd than it already was. When the studio first announced that it was having trademark troubles, it mentioned only that the US rights to its name had been snaffled in 2021, which it then failed to notice until January this year. But the calendar app company has held the trademark in Korea for eight years now, and has been a Google search away for over a decade.

In the interests of fairness, Fntastic’s complaint that a calendar app “has nothing to do with the games category” isn’t really invalid. I doubt there’s any serious risk that the audience for either product is going to get them mixed up, and it could certainly be the case that the people behind the app just saw an opportunity when the game got announced and took it. But the fact remains that the well-documented existence of a piece of software with the exact same name as Fntastic’s game has been easy-to-find for over a decade, and it apparently never gave anyone at the studio pause.

It’s the final Trials of Osiris weekend of Destiny 2’s Witch Queen era, and from next week, expect a radically different approach to PvP after Lightfall introduces some major overhauls. As usual, you can look up where Xur is to see which gear the arms dealer has to offer before you attempt to go flawless. Here’s a look at where you’ll play Trials of Osiris this weekend and what weapons you can earn.

Map: Midtown

• Reputation Rank 4: Upgrade Module x 2
• Reputation Rank 7: Enhancement Prism x 3
• Reputation Rank 10: Trials Weapon (Changes for each rank reset)
• Reputation Rank 13: Upgrade Module x 2
• Reputation Rank 16: Trials Weapon (Changes for each rank reset)
• Flawless Reward: Burden of Guilt (Adept)

Trials weapons now carry the Alacrity Origin Trait. It gives you increased aim assist, reload speed, stability, and range on your Trials guns when you’re the last living member of a fireteam or running solo. You can also choose to swap to the Crucible Origin trait, One Quiet Moment, which greatly enhances your gun’s reload speed when you reload while out of combat.

As always, Trials becomes available from Friday’s daily reset at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET until the weekly reset at the same time the following Tuesday. During that time, you can also pay a visit to Xur to see what Exotics he’s selling. Make sure to pay a visit to Saint-14 in the Tower to pick up a Trials card, which will dictate certain bonuses (such as whether you get bonus rewards at certain milestones or if a loss will be forgiven).

Trials of Osiris is a weekend PvP mode that runs from the daily reset on Friday until the weekly reset on Tuesday, giving you four days to take part. Your goal in the Trials is for you and the other two players in your fireteam to achieve a “Flawless” run, in which you win seven matches without losing any.

Go Flawless and you’ll earn a trip to the Lighthouse and receive some special rewards, including the new Adept weapons. These have additional stat bonuses, making them among the most coveted items you can get your hands on.

Thanks to a bunch of changes to Trials this year, though, the mode is a little easier to get into than it has been. The Trials of Osiris now features matchmaking, so you can jump into matches even if you don’t have a full squad of three players to take it on. Your Trials Passage–the card you purchase from Saint-14 that grants you access to the mode and tracks your wins–now does not track your losses–so you can keep playing and earning rewards even if you lose out on a Flawless run. Bungie has also adjusted Trials so that you earn rewards based on the number of rounds, rather than matches, you’ve won during your session, and added a reputation system that’s similar to the Crucible and Gambit, making it easier to earn some of the Trials of Osiris’s unique loot.

Finally, you’ll earn Trials Engrams for participating in the mode, which you can cash in with Saint-14 during the weekend you receive them. You can tune those engrams to yield specific pieces of loot, or take your chances with random drops that will expand what’s available in your loot pool. So even if you’re just jumping into Trials alone, there are plenty of ways you can earn great new gear.