Category: Video Games

Activision has warned Call of Duty fans anxious to jump straight into Modern Warfare 3 Ranked Play after the Season 1 Reloaded update goes live that the new feature will not be available immediately.

In a tweet from the official Call of Duty Updates account, Activision said Ranked Play will not be available immediately after the Season 1 Reloaded update goes live today, January 17, at 9am Pacific / 12noon Eastern / 5pm UK across all platforms. The developers want to “perform checks” before enabling the mode, Activision said.

“Heads up competitors, Modern Warfare 3 Ranked Play will not be available immediately after players receive the Season 1 Reloaded update,” Activision said. “The Ranked Play team will be performing checks before enabling the mode for all players. Stay tuned for more updates.”

It’s unclear how long players will have to wait before Ranked Play is made available after Season 1 Reloaded goes live, but hopefully it won’t be a significant delay.

Modern Warfare 3’s Ranked Play, when it does go live, lets players rise through the ranks and skill divisions in four versus four competitive play featuring the same ruleset (settings, maps, and modes) used by the Call of Duty League.

Here’s how it works, per the Call of Duty blog: Ranked Play becomes available after players reach at least Level 55. All unrestricted gameplay items are unlocked for use in Ranked Play, regardless of how much you’ve previously unlocked. Some weapons, Killstreaks, Equipment, and gameplay content are restricted in Ranked Play to match CDL competitive rules. As you’d expect, Friendly Fire is enabled in all Ranked Play matches.

You begin at Rank 1. Your rank represents your Ranked Career. Win matches to earn stars and rank up. Rank is permanent and persists across seasons. You start your first Season in Bronze I. Advance through eight Skill Divisions and Tiers by earning SR (Skill Rating). SR is awarded when you win based on personal and team performance. In subsequent seasons, you will be dropped back three Tiers.

The highest Skill Division you can start a new season in is Diamond I. (SR penalties will result from being inactive, disconnecting from matches, and engaging in repeated friendly fire.) Win three matches in a row to earn a flaming rank. Continue winning to progress the Hot Streak flames. The flames expire if you lose or after 72 hours.

And here are the Ranked Play maps and modes:

• CDL Search & Destroy: No respawning; 1.5-minute round timer; Friendly Fire enabled. Supported maps include Highrise, Invasion, Karachi, Skidrow, and Terminal.
• CDL Hardpoint: 5-minute time limit; 250 score limit; 60-second objective rotation; Friendly Fire enabled. Supported maps include Invasion, Karachi, Skidrow, Sub Base, and Terminal.
• CDL Control: 30 lives per team; 1.5-minute time limit; 3-round win limit; Friendly Fire enabled. Supported maps include Highrise, Invasion, and Karachi.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

We’re continuing this month’s IGN First on Dragon’s Dogma 2 with a detailed look at its new, robust character creator. The original Dragon’s Dogma had a pretty intense character creator, but Dragon’s Dogma 2 has upped the ante for just how detailed you can get for your character and ideal Pawn.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno explained during IGN’s visit to Capcom in Japan that the character creator was something they put a lot of work into for the first game, but with better hardware performance this time around, they could add as much freedom to the system as they wanted.

Itsuno-san said, “The problem is that this means that the act of creating a cool character, or the character that you want to see, becomes no different from doing so with clay… You could have your ideal character in mind, but you’d basically need to be an artist to form that character with your own hands, so that’s where we had to begin when deciding how character creation would work,”

He thought maybe they should make the character creator simpler, but because the game’s artists wanted something that detailed, they worked hard to create a system that gives players access to every available setting if they want it while also offering a simpler creation method.

They accomplished this by having two body types for each race, nine base bodies per type, and an uncountable number of base head variations created from nearly a hundred real human face scans. From there, you can make the final adjustments yourself, giving Dragon’s Dogma 2 a system where anyone can create attractive, realistic-looking faces without needing to be an artist.

The options are indeed vast, and you can get incredibly granular while editing a character if you so choose–there are 40 types of “muscle styles” and 12 sliders just for a human’s nose, for example.

“I imagine some people getting themselves stuck in the creator and having trouble starting the game,” art director Daigo Ikeno admitted. “That said, I think it’s a creator that will be able to meet the needs of most people.”

I’m one of those people who consider a character creator as deep as the one in Dragon’s Dogma 2 as the “first boss,” as I can easily spend more than an hour (happily) tweaking a character – which I was tempted to do at Capcom Japan despite my limited time hands-on.

Of course, the most obvious new addition to the character creator is a brand new race: the Beastren – anthropomorphic big-cats Itsuno-san wanted to add since the first game, but couldn’t due to hardware limitations. Specifically, rendering their fur on many subjects on the screen at once.

To make sure the Beastren had enough diversity compared to humans, Ikeno-san explained that the team “looked at the kinds of patterns and colors found in felines and made sure that the kind of variety that players would surely want were included.”

Ikeno-san concluded: “I hope that players will try changing both beastren and human faces to see what they can make.”

Casey DeFreitas is the deputy editor of guides at IGN. Catch her on Twitter @ShinyCaseyD.