J4MES OX4D

I think it is because when you fuse all these Codified ingredients together, you essentially get a completely different game. There is very little difference between this and what we played 3 years ago in Call of Duty and it's clear this game was developed off the back of that and by ex-COD devs. Battlefield maintaining its identity with all the originality it created was far more important but they've clearly wanted to entice COD players to the series when COD was at its most vulnerable, but this has come at the cost of BF's core design and without doing anything new or innovative. This game is miles off MW2019 and doesn't have much room to manoeuvre in terms of innovation. It just feels like they are recycling so much that we've seen the past 6 years. I don't mind Battlefield moving away from its identity and evolving but there is nothing here that we haven't seen in many other live service games in the past several years and all the padded-monetisation is really piss poor too. These changes could hurt the game because if they lose 50% of players back to COD then all these changes were in vain and then the developers will have to cling on to the alienated Battlefield community to rework things - something they did for 4 years straight after they screwed up royally with 2042.

I think it also is reflected in the general pacing and the amount of engagements players find themselves in. Stims, knee sliding and very generous mechanics make it blur more and more into COD. There are also little consequences for loss of territory and objectives, and even the squad system lacks identity. Plus the challenges and progression system is a carbon-copy and is nowhere near as rewarding or interesting. The interface and how the BR is framed is a ridiculous clone of MW2 back in 2022.

Apparently they were quite taken aback when questioned about it so I'm guessing they just said that to keep people happy and probably don't have anything planned or developed currently. Naval maps should've been in there from the off but with there being no naval maps even in Battlefield 2042 then I can't see it happening anytime soon. Seems like these developers want things strictly Codified and boots on the ground outside of land and air vehicles.

Doesn't surprise me sadly. Games like these need consistent and clear development and they need to get decisions correct from the get-go. When you piss players off early on, lose a huge chunk of them and then spend the next two years trying to recover to a small population, it's kinda game over really.

There's no real standout maps for me but the larger New York one is quite good. The rest are all pretty meh in Battlefield terms and even the two bigger ones are pretty small and rather bland. You compare these to the staggeringly detailed and carefully scaled and constructed ones from from older titles - even BFV, and they are very plain and compact in comparison. Sure, you can get into gunfights aplenty but that isn't what this series is all about and you can tell from interviews that the developers are petrified of modern gamers getting bored because they aren't in a firefight every 15 seconds. Flags also change hands so often that even conquest has become arcade domination. You look at the Sobek City map compared to the Gulf of Oman one and it's pretty embarrassing in comparison. No naval maps is absolutely criminal also. I don't think there is a truly terrible one aside from the new one oil released in season one, as they are all playable to what Battlefield has become in its design philosophy, but there's is zero that radically changes how matches play and in the roles you choose. The watered-down Operation Firestorm is another huge showcase of how inferior maps can be in the wrong design hands.

Dishonored (2012) This game is pure art still and timeless

So Season 1 launched today along with the Battle Royale mode and the game has nosedived into an absolute tacky mess and has gone full-Call of Duty. The user interface is absolutely atrocious and resembles that of MW2 back in 2022 with its TV streaming-style panel menus. It was bad before but now the bloat is horrendous especially with monetisation and locked items. They said the BR mode was standalone yet progression and challenges have been forced into the core BF6 game so it really is nothing more than a shameful bait and switch hook to get people playing that. I want challenges for things like conquest, breakthrough and escalation and not shite attributed to the BR like getting 100 kills within 10 seconds of landing. I played on the new Blackwell Oil Fields map which was an extremely dissatisfying experience. Another very small environment with a terrible layout that is way too open and has absolutely shocking visibility. In BF4 we were getting themed map packs of the highest quality but this is just a shameful offering even for free. This is what the map looks like and it's just so uninspired and hideous. I think this game will ultimately lose a lot of players in the next couple of weeks. The battle pass is a pathetic cash grab and the progression in core and on the pass is just so tedious and boring. The maps are fast becoming stale and even new gimmick modes wont change anything. The battle royale will split the community further and I expect a fair few people will go running back to COD irrespective of how potentially poor that may be also. This isn't Battlefield anymore by gameplay or its design framework - it's another Call of Duty in a slightly different skin. I have zero interest in BO7 but that game does have a strong launch line up and the season one content offering seems solid also.

Subscriptions are unviable for both the consumer and the content publisher in most cases. I have zero and if I see something I want to watch, play or listen to, I will buy it outright if it's worth the money and that way everyone gets paid a fair price. The likes of Spotify have bloated in the music industry so much so, talent is becoming buried and some artists barely get paid £90 for 50,000 plays. Even top artists have reportedly only seen about $1500 after deductions whilst reaching 1m listens to a song. We already know what a shambles Microsoft have made of their Game Pass in killing most of their in-house developers and reducing income to laughable levels, all in the aim of trying to take a slice out of Sony. TV is probably the most attractive form of subscription but that's riddled with bloat between services and content. You can spend more time trying to find something to watch than actually watching. The Xbox subscription will cost $360 for a year next month and if people are also paying $150 for music and another $150-300 on TV and retail subscriptions then it tots up to huge levels of expenditure for consumable products you don't own and wont be able to revisit. I can't support streaming as a concept or the damage it does to the 'small people' aka developers and musicians who don't have much of a choice but to go down this route and see income potential crumbling to laughably low levels. The likes of Microsoft and Spotify will never reveal the income dividends which says it all.

9/11 Operator FREE on Steam Save 100% on 911 Operator on Steam STORE.STEAMPOWERED.COM Game about the difficult work of people that manage emergency lines and services. Answer incoming calls and react properly - give first aid instructions, advise, dispatch correct number of firemen / police /...

They are remaking Halo once again because let's face it, 343 can't make Halo games from the ground up. This one will be on Playstation too, so Microsoft have pretty much conceded the console wars

Probably would've been easier if they just remastered the first.

I don't know why they have to tamper with stuff that doesn't need it but things that do they don't do sod all Battlefield 6 is already walking back its Conquest changes after immediate backlash, but it's still not what we were really asking for | PC Gamer WWW.PCGAMER.COM That's not quite the solution I expected.

Fascinating look at Microsoft's doomed 2013 Xbox One reveal and how it essentially destroyed the brand for the foreseeable. It retrospect, it's truly astonishing how they managed to screw it up so badly.

This is the game Call of Duty should have been in the past 3 years. As a Battlefield game, it's lost too much of its core DNA. It's still a good shooter that both COD and BF can enjoy but it really has blurred the lines and so many of these shooters have lost their identity for money and mass appeal. Once the honeymoon phase fizzles out the lack of content begins to burn here then I think the game will become more strained and people will be less forgiving. We also must not forget that the monetisation framework hasn't kicked in as of yet but that could put a further dampener on things. Some people are already peeved at how similar to COD certain aspects are particularly with unlocks and cosmetics. EA and DICE have succeeded in what they intended to do though and I feel COD players will be more happy with this game than Battlefield veterans.

RIP D'Angelo

Finally reached level 30 and I still got it😎 May have a look at the campaign tomorrow.

I grabbed this in the end and they made some good changes since the beta. It's been quite an enjoyable weekend with no real server problems or any major complaints. Not sure how much staying power the game will have with this pool of maps but there is just about enough content and stuff to do. The progression and unlock system is a carbon-copy of Call of Duty and the gunplay seems a mix of COD and BF. This is definitely the easiest Battlefield game I have ever played and any experienced FPS player will absolutely shred most of the time. The maps are all decent enough but the bigger ones really shine. The New York ones are decent too and hopefully we'll see naval and more snow ones coming up. Operation Firestorm feels off though and a bit unbalanced which is a shame though. Game runs pretty well which is a bonus too!

Battlefield 6

Some more. What they done with GoldenEye on the 30th anniversary is criminal. Even I could do a better job than what they did with Pierce's hand🤣

Useful video here

5/10 for the campaign and I must admit, that's actually higher than I was expecting. Battlefield 6 Campaign Review - IGN WWW.IGN.COM Battlefield 6's campaign is a safe, dull reimagining of what the series once was, rather than a bold reinvention of what it could be. Probably shouldn't have bothered with it really. I also don't understand why they take this half-baked direction and have done since BF1. Just like MW3 2023, it's just generic and has no substance. Not even sure how developers concoct such pointless shit.

Too late in the day really. It's only because Battlefield 6 exists and Activision's 'too big to fail' statement is coming back to bite them. They will re-apply SBMM gradually and call it 'matmaking calibration considerations' or some other corpo drivel and it'll the the same old story. Probably happen a week after release too in typical bait and switch form.

Well this was inevitable and will likely be one of many breaches thanks largely to half arsed 3rd party verification companies being targeted after the UK's embarrassing implementation of their online safety act ID photos of 70,000 users may have been leaked, Discord says WWW.BBC.CO.UK The platform says hackers targeted a firm that helped to verify the ages of its users. Never give away any personal information because you never know where it will end up or how it'll be used. Consequences may not be realised and it could take years to be discovered if at all.

As Destiny 2 hits is lowest ever daily peak for Steam concurrent players, Bungie U-turns on controversial plan to reset player power next season | PC Gamer WWW.PCGAMER.COM Bungie continues to prod at a fundamentally broken system.