Category: Video Games

Activision has finally dropped new details of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6‘s fifth season.

Set to launch on August 7, Activision wants you to “unleash your inner action hero” courtesy of six new modes, four new and/or remastered maps, and a smorgasbord of new weapons, updates, and enemies across Black Ops 6, Zombies, and Warzone.

“The Rogue Black Ops team is finally back in the good graces of the CIA, and that means access to all the weapons and firepower they could ask for,” the publisher teases. “It’s time to finish the job they started and crush the final Pantheon moles, putting their betrayal to rest once and for all.”

In terms of maps, you’ll find three new ones in Black Ops 6: Runway (6v6), Exchange (6v6, 2v2), the remastered World Motor Dynasty (WMD) (6v6), plus an in-season update is on the way for Jackpot (6v6). Warzone, on the other hand, gets a Stadium POI update in Verdansk.

New modes coming to Black Ops 6 are the headshot-tastic Aim High, Snipers Only, Cranked Moshpit, plus in-season updates to Cranked Demotion, Blueprint Gunfight, and Ransack. Warzone gets LTM modes Stadium Resurgence and Deadline.

Warzone gets new cosmetics, weapon attachments, bundles, and a number of limited-time events like 90 Action Heroes, Atomic Block Party, and Operation: Hell Ride “and more.”

“Recent intelligence indicates a massive disruption across Verdansk is imminent, as recon teams have confirmed the existence of a clandestine military base hidden within the sealed walls of the National Acropolis Arena,” Activision added. “The extent of the threat remains unclear, though a weapon capable of large-scale destruction is expected to be unearthed within the vicinity.

“Breach the stadium in possibly the most impressively explosive way possible as you and other enemy squads attempt race to complete the multi-step Satellite Hijack Contract. Infiltrate the Stadium by any means necessary, confirming the nefarious operations and hidden compound within.”

As always, expect a plethora of rewards — charms, emblems, calling cards, stickers, and weapon skins — for those daring to step into ranked play, regards of whether you’re jumping into Black Ops 6’s multiplayer or Warzone’s battle royale.

Activision added that it has now completed the second phase of testing Warzone’s Casual Solos and Core Solos side-by-side, with results showing players are more than three times likely to step into Casual over Core. Consequently, as Season 5 rolls over, both Core and Casual will be available globally on day one, but within a couple of days, Core Solos will only remain an option for North American and European players — Casual will continue to be available for all.

“By tailoring playlists based on regional data, we’re ensuring that every Call of Duty: Warzone player gets the best possible experience, regardless of location,” the publisher said. “This is the next step in refining how we build playlists that serve all Call of Duty: Warzone players. We’ll continue to evaluate performance and feedback as Season 05 rolls out.”

Rounding out the update are some features for Zombies, including new map Reckoning and new Wonder Weapon Gorgofex, which combines fungal, floral, and insectile traits to “deliver precise impact damage and gravity-defying disruption in close quarters, glowing membranes on the weapon show hints of motion and circulation under the surface.” You can also expect new field upgrade Mister Peeks, enemies Uber Klaus and Kommando Klaus, as well as new grief arenas and a shiny new combat bow for stealthy takedowns.

Earlier today, we learned that Activision unshackled Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 from the main Call of Duty HQ launcher. In a brief message posted to social media, publisher Activision confirmed people with either Modern Warfare 2 or 3 will be able to “access them directly” and without going into HQ first once they’ve redownloaded fresh installs of the shooter games.

Activision didn’t give a reason for the change, but it’s fair to suggest this is just a way of tidying up HQ ahead of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7‘s release later this year.

And while we’re talking about the next Call of Duty game… Announced at the Xbox Games Showcase 2025 last month, we know it’ll feature the Skirmish and Overload multiplayer modes as well a 20v20 wingsuit option after details of a developer-only Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 playtest were accidentally released to all fans on the Call of Duty app last month.

That’s not the only CoD-flavored news we had last month, either. Activision ended up pulling controversial adverts placed inside Black Ops 6 and Warzone loadouts, insisting they were a “feature test” published “in error.”

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

If you’ve put down your controller this year to go touch a very particular patch of grass, you might have noticed that something strange is going on at the world’s major film festivals. It started in May, when a film adaptation of virally-successful Japanese indie game Exit 8 premiered at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival – the first videogame movie to do so. The film’s director, Genki Kawamura, gives his source material a compelling structural spin, appealing equally to the arthouse crowd and to game fans. But live-action adaptations of video games are, of course, nothing new.

That’s why Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Cinematic Cut is so interesting. It is not a live-action adaptation of developer Warhorse Studios’ critically-acclaimed RPG. Instead, it is an abridged and reformatted version of Act One of the game itself, presenting a newly-edited blend of the open-world game’s cutscenes and gameplay in a two-hour linear form. It was perhaps the strangest Special Presentation at this month’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic – a unique cross-format experiment. One that wasn’t Warhorse’s idea.

“It all happened at the official launch of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2,” explains KVIFF artistic director, Karel Och. “The first contact was made through a mutual friend, and Warhorse and KVIFF made each other understand that they wanted to collaborate at some point. During the following months, it was exciting to have a glimpse of what Warhorse represents – and I dare to say the same goes for our friends from the top of the gaming business.”

Warhorse’s communications director, Tobias Stolz-Zwilling, concurs. “They wanted to make the festival more modern and interesting – to offer something new”. The largest film festival in Eastern Europe, KVIFF attracts a younger, more adventurous audience than its contemporaries. The studio saw the film festival’s strange idea as a chance to give video games greater cultural relevancy in the broader mainstream. Besides – much of the game’s cinematics team were already speaking the festival’s language.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s cinematic director, Petr Pekař, studied film editing and directing with the intention of becoming a traditional filmmaker, but he found his calling in video games. “There are a lot of filmmakers in the Czech Republic, but the market is not that big, so it’s a bit overcrowded.” says Pekař. “Thankfully, there are multiple studios creating cutscenes, which are basically animated movies”. Pekar learned on the job creating cutscenes for Mafia 3, then joined Warhorse – first as a cinematic designer on the original Kingdom Come, then as director on its sequel.

Bringing Deliverance 2’s cutscenes to the big screen invites comparison with conventional cinema, an arena far from the cinematics’ original purpose. “If you’re a player, you’re mainly looking forward to playing the game,” says Pekař. “The cutscenes are more like dessert for the game – not necessary – but when it’s good and it clicks, it really helps the game, the story, and the overall feel”.

The Cinematic Cut opens, naturally, on the game’s first cutscene. As it happens, you can’t help but feel like you’re settling in for a YouTube video titled ‘Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 – All Cutscenes’ (“I don’t think anybody actually watches those in full” Pekař quips). The team’s cinematic direction is confident, but familiar – steeped in high fantasy tropes. A fiery siege on the castle is highly reminiscent of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy – a major influence on Warhorse’s stylistic approach. Transported to the cinema screen, the scene serves as a striking reminder of how video games have traded in pastiche since their inception, responding to our desire to live out the fantasy ourselves whenever we see something cool on screen. But, of course, Cinematic Cut doesn’t deliver on this pivotal fantasy like its source material does – it’s non-playable.

When the cutscene footage ends, something curious happens. Father Godwin readies his crossbow and the scene transitions into first-person. But this is no Let’s Play. Smart, quick cuts establish a new, more cinematic editing language for first-person gameplay. Godwin heads towards the stairs – cut – now he’s halfway up them – cut – now he’s atop the ramparts, plunging his sword into an enemy. It’s remarkably thrilling. “[The gameplay] was mostly recorded by Vítek Mičke, our marketing specialist,” explains Pekař. “He also made the trailers, and he’s got a good sense of timing and aesthetics. He knows how to control the camera with the controller to properly set the scene and set the mood – so it looks cool.”

A couple of awkward transitions disrupt this otherwise ‘cinematic’ tempo. A sudden cut to a ladder lowering, for example, has the distinct feel of a gameplay segment ending and a cutscene beginning, and reminds you of the objective-based game that birthed the footage. But these moments are few and far between, and they accentuate how much Warhorse has otherwise succeeded in their first attempt.

“I think this is an experiment that somebody can pick up and do better than we did – or maybe we can do it again in the future with our future projects, and learn from our mistakes.” reflects Pekař. “It’s a really interesting experience to see it on the big screen – and I was surprised that it held up. It’s odd, but it somewhat works. It’s not some kind of new cinematic media that will sit next to the movies, but for festivals and conventions, for fans – I think it’s a format that others will be doing as well”.

The team at KVIFF are equally pleased with the results. “Storytelling has many faces,” says Och. “We’re proud that a new chapter in the festival’s modern history was written in collaboration with people that we respect a great deal who follow the same goal.”

“I think this format builds a bridge,” concludes Pekař. “Gamers can come to appreciate aesthetics and cinematography, the color palettes and moods in games more, and – in the same way – movie fans can understand how movies have different functions when they’re working with interactivity. When these two mediums collaborate, sometimes it creates really strange and cool ideas. When people go out of their bubble to see something different, it helps us to understand each other’s mediums.”

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Cinematic Cut is available to watch on the KVIFF.TV website for a small fee (approx. $6) until July 31, 2027.

Blake Simons is a journalist with a taste for the self-reflexive, sentimental and surreal.

It only took one match of Wildgate to see the potential in its spacefaring PvPvE mayhem. The intensely cooperative chaos of managing a spacecraft, delving into PvE dungeons for loot, and fending off rival crews makes for complex and exciting contests of teamwork and communication. After dozens of matches and more than 20 hours of playtime, though, it’s also become clear that there’s plenty of room left to build on that compelling concept. There are only a small number of characters, ships, and weapons to bring into battle, and once you’ve trekked across a few matches worth of dungeons, you’ll likely have seen all the different enemies to fight and areas to explore, which limits the longevity of these cosmic bouts. But when a good crew comes together, Wildgate’s simple but solid gunplay and multifaceted ship-to-ship combat gives Sea of Thieves a run for its money.

Wildgate is a unique multiplayer shooter that sends five teams of four players out into the most dangerous section of the galaxy, called the Reach, to battle it out for loot and glory. Their ultimate goal is to find the all-important Artifact hidden somewhere in space and escape with it out of the Wildgate, but since there’s the little issue of only being one to go around, a clash of crews in tumultuous FPS combat is all but inevitable. To improve your chances of survival (and search for the Artifact along the way), you’ll want to hurriedly touch down on various asteroids and planetoids to enter as many of the small PvE dungeons as possible, killing enemies and solving simple puzzles to claim whatever loot they’re hiding.

Upgrading your spacecraft with better shields, weapons, defensive measures, and stat improvements (like improved turning speed) can make all the difference when an enemy vessel nears and all hell breaks loose, which make for Wildgate’s tensest moments. I especially enjoy picking my favorite cannons for my ship, as there are some really neat options, like the sniper cannon that can cause a whole lot of trouble for enemies even when they’re far away, or the bomb cannon that attaches bombs to whatever they hit and can be exploded when shot by another cannon. If you’re able to find and escape with the Artifact, or simply murder all the enemy crews before they’re able to extract it themselves, then victory is yours – and in matches that can run over 40 minutes each, the taste of triumph is one of the sweetest there is.

Unfortunately, the level of coordination required doesn’t always lead to great outcomes when matchmaking with random crewmates, where silent players or, worse yet, insanely toxic personalities can make for a bad time. I found the vast majority of my matchmade experiences resulted in catastrophically bad showcasings of Wildgate’s potential, as you really need a full team communicating and firing on all cylinders to have any hope of beating your opponents. But when I got lucky with matchmade teams or brought my own friends to the party, working together to take down dungeons and outplay rival squads made for some incredibly memorable matches.

There’s no story to be found in Wildgate, or at least not one outside of little snippets you can read from a menu between matches, but the world definitely has a distinct and endearing personality to it. That could be in the baddies like raiders and alien life forms who look like booger people, or the playable characters, called Prospectors, who span from a big dog-looking alien to an aquatic creature in a mecha fishbowl. Each Prospector has their own interesting set of traits and abilities they can use to contribute to the team’s success (or demise). A four-armed alien named Ion, for example, can use his brawn to damage the hulls of ships just by smacking them with his fists, while Venture the robot serves as a great starter character since they don’t require oxygen to survive, regenerate health faster, and get warned when enemies are behind them.

I had a lot of fun trying each one out to see which suits my playstyle, with my favorite being Sal, an aquatic engineer who is an expert at healing the ship and can turn unwanted loot into useful items by rerolling it – a frankly overpowered ability in a game where your luck with loot drops is often the difference between life and death. There seems to be a little bit of imbalance with the characters in that regard, as Prospectors like Kae, whose teleport and telekinesis abilities makes her amazing at boarding ships without notice, even stealing items off their hull without ever entering the vessel, can seem quite busted at times. On the other hand, characters like Adrian, who can mostly just move through space extremely quickly, feel woefully underpowered by comparison. And, as is the case with lots of stuff in Wildgate, the biggest issue is simply a scarcity of options, because it doesn’t take long to unlock all seven Prospectors and decide on the winners. Seeing the same handful of familiar characters aboard each ship just feels a bit underwhelming in what’s supposed to be a galaxy of possibilities.

There are also several ships to unlock, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Your starter ship, the Hunter, is reliable all around, with three front-facing cannons and increased speed when you elect to drop your shields that make it well-suited for getting in and out of skirmishes quickly, but the other three are more interesting in their tradeoffs. My favorite, The Bastion, has a special feature that makes it much more difficult to board by rival players, with doors that lock down tight (if your knucklehead teammates remember to close them) and the ability to detect intruders by default – plus it has more health and defensive capabilities than other ships to offset its modest cannons and speed. This allowed me to play it slow in matches, building up defenses and resources while outlasting my opponents like a balled up hedgehog waiting to prick would-be predators.

There’s also the Privateer, a warship with eight cannon slots that fire faster and do more damage than other ships, which all but mandates an extremely aggressive playstyle that either proved immediately effective or resulted in the shortest matches imaginable. Finally, there’s the Scout: a tiny little ship with low health and offense that’s more than made whole by insane maneuverability and speed, and which I must admit that I won the most matches with just because being able to more easily find or steal the artifact, then outrun my opponents for a quick extraction, is pretty hard to beat. Unfortunately, these were also some of the less interesting games I played since ship-to-ship combat is so much fun and it’s tough to set that aside in the name of victory.

When fighting on foot, you’ll use a small handful of weapons and gadgets to ward off NPC monsters, and occasionally other players when boarding or being boarded by the enemy. With only nine weapons currently available, there’s not a lot of different playstyles to choose from. That’s especially true when some options like the Sidelong launcher, a weird, horizontally-firing blaster that pierces through the environment, didn’t really connect with me and gathered dust on the shelf, making my viable pool of options that much smaller. Still, there are a few that stole my heart, like the goo-firing gatling gun or the powerful anti-ship rocket launcher that lets you tear through enemy vessels without needing to be mounted on a turret. You’ll also pick two gadgets to keep in your toolbelt, which allow you to do things like toss a drill onto the side of a ship to damage it over time, or a tool that automatically reloads all your weapons whenever you teleport back to your ship. My personal favorite is the rock, which is, well, a rock. You throw it at people and it does enormous damage – I just really appreciate that they could have made it a throwing dagger, but they chose the funniest possible option instead. There are few better feelings than bringing down a rampaging enemy who is carrying a massive weapon with a regular ol’ rock.

Although matches can be a ton of fun and you can definitely develop a “just one more match” mindset early on, with only one game mode and such limited character and ship options, it all feels a tad thin at the moment. Wildgate could have some real legs with regular content updates, and it’s nice that developer Moonshot Games has already put out a roadmap that promises three new characters or ships per year, because what’s here at the moment feels like just a taste of what will hopefully be a game with a lot more variety down the road. I’m not quite sure that update cadence will be fast enough to sustain my short attention span, but it’s at least a good sign there’s a plan in place that has the potential to keep me coming back to this weird galaxy. There’s still a ton of fun to be found in getting better at winning, and knowing what I know now about the types of dungeons to be found and loot to be claimed has made me a lot more strategic with how I play, but I stopped being surprised by things I saw out in the Reach pretty quickly.

One thing that does help keep games fresh is the fact that there are randomly generated modifiers injected into each match that require you to adapt if you want a chance at winning. One game might feature energy-devouring leeches floating out in the void that attach to your ship as you go and need to be shot off, while another might be filled with an abundance of asteroids that make traveling especially dangerous, or a cosmic storm that sweeps through large swathes of the map and will destroy your ship unless you’re able to loot a special shield to defend against it. These are a really clever way to make every match not feel like a carbon copy of the last, but once again, there just aren’t that many of them yet, and I started seeing repeat modifiers in pretty short order – definitely one of the areas where a bit more variety would go quite a long way, especially if they have live events that impact the world in some way to shake things up.

Last weekend, a global beta test began for Where Winds Meet, the open-world game published by NetEase that is already available in China. This free-to-play game takes place around the year 1000 between the great Tang and Song dynasties during what’s known as the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. In it, players take the role of a lone wandering hero during this time of upheaval where one’s own strength matters more than the rules of society. IGN readers may not be too familiar with the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, but don’t worry – the same even seems to apply to players in China.

We know that the game takes some influence from Ghost of Tsushima and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild thanks to a past interview with lead designer Chris Lyu, but it can be difficult to imagine exactly what the gameplay will be like. According to Lyu, it is “the world’s first wuxia-themed open-world” game. Once I got my hands on the game, I found Where Winds Meet was indeed a wuxia game through-and-through, with the strength of the concept bringing together a variety of elements seen in games today.

Once you’re finished with character creation and begin playing the game, you’re first met with a graceful man with flowing hair resting in a bamboo grove while holding a baby to his chest, almost like Zhao Yun from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Then, another handsome and long-haired man comes to talk to him, and it seems that this man with a baby has betrayed his school. He hops on a white horse then gallops through the bamboo while avoiding his pursuer’s weapons, at times in slow motion. All of these shots are reminiscent of famous scenes from various Chinese movies of the past, making it clear from the start that this game is closely linked to the wuxia tradition.

A sense of “wuxia-ness” oozes out of this game at every turn even after this opening scene ends and you take control of the character you’ve created – whether that’s through its gameplay in general, its systems and graphics, or its dialogue. A few minutes after I started walking freely through its world, I spoke to an old man on the side of the road who asked me to repel a bear who’s been after honey. It seems that the protagonist is able to learn techniques from the movements of the bear, as pressing buttons at the right time according to icons that pop up caused him to learn tai chi from the beast, incredibly enough.

All of this serves as a tutorial for the Mystic Arts that make up part of your arsenal, but more importantly, this process of observing familiar objects and nature to learn abilities and grow stronger gives the player a strong sense of the game’s wuxia flavor. It seems there are other abilities that come from nature, like Lion’s Roar and the venomous Toad Style, so I’m sure there will be many other techniques the protagonist learns from all the creatures of the game’s world. Just as you might expect to be able to use magic to create fire in a game with a fantasy setting, the player in this game’s wuxia world is able to master strange powers of their own. It’s also interesting to note that these abilities can be used outside of combat as well. For example, nearby fish are caught up in tai chi when it’s used by the water’s surface, making for efficient fishing.

One of the most notable things about this thoroughly wuxia game is its inclusion of many elements we’ve come to expect from combat systems and exploration in action games today. For example, pressing the correct button just before an enemy’s attack lands will parry it, creating a back-and-forth tempo during action segments.

While equivalent to the kinds of parry systems that have become a staple in recent action games, this game goes into slow motion when it’s time to parry an enemy attack and displays an icon telling you what button to press (though it is possible to turn this icon off in the options). While similar to Final Fantasy XVI’s Story-Focused mode, these icons deplete an Insight Points meter when they’re displayed and won’t show up if you run out, so you can’t recklessly fend off every single enemy attack.

There are currently seven weapon types that a player can use (with plans to add more). In addition to standard swords and spears, there are also more unusual weapons like umbrellas and folding fans. Each weapon provides for its own unique gameplay, such as the umbrella’s skill that temporarily stuns an enemy, or the fan’s ability to create a zone that heals the player and their allies.

Players can equip both a main weapon and a sub-weapon, each enabling a variety of martial techniques. What techniques are available to you will also change based on the school you study under, with a total of eleven available schools. The game’s combat style changes quite a bit depending on the combination of mystic and martial skills you use, allowing for a wide degree of customization. Between all of the different attacks, the balance between offense and defense enabled by parries, and the overall voracious approach to combat elements, it felt like the game had taken a menu of popular modern features and ordered one of everything.

The bow and arrow is treated differently whether it’s being used as a main or a sub-weapon, capable of attacking enemies from afar while also solving puzzles by burning through vines to open up pathways. The way it’s positioned shows the influence of another game that was previously mentioned, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

The game’s core of open world exploration and progression has also been extravagantly created. During the preview, I was able to visit Kaifeng, one of China’s eight ancient capitals located in Heinan province that flourished at the time as one of the world’s largest cities. Despite the war-ravaged world, the city in the game was open and lively, with its residents chatting away like it was Cyberpunk 2077 after just a short walk through its streets. It sounds like upwards of a thousand NPCs have reputation levels, allowing you to befriend them on an individual basis.

It’s not hard to imagine how people live in the game’s detailed streets of Kaifeng, apparently recreated by referring to historical remains that still exist today. Walk down the big street that cuts through it all and eventually you’ll find a large arching bridge. A beautiful palace with towering defenses awaits you on the other side, making it clear just how prosperous this Chinese capital was at the time. From there the player will be able to dig into the secrets around their own birth as a wandering hero.

After only about three hours of gameplay, I could tell that Where Winds Meet is packed full of elements that players have experienced before in open-world games. But what shocked me most of all is that while you could call this a mishmash of features, the key concept of wuxia along with the way those elements are presented worked to bring all of them together in a natural way. Perhaps you could say that what best defines Where Winds Meet is this coexistence of the past decade of what has made open-world and action games fun alongside its Chinese creators’ love for the genre of wuxia.