Infinity Ward community head fourzerotwo has informed the masses that all four of the new Call of Duty 4 playlists tested the weekend before last have made the cut and will soon find their way into the game. The four new playlists on the way are:
Bare-Bones Team Deathmatch
Hardcore HQ
Multi-Bomb Search and Destroy
Hardcore FFA
Harcore HQ and FFA are fairly self-explanatory, as they are simply more hardcore versions of standard gametypes. They include higher damage and no HUD, so tactics are key. Multi-Bomb Search and Destroy, unsurprisingly, gives all memebers of the attacking team a bomb for their planting pleasure. Bare-Bones Team Deathmatch may be the most intriguing of the bunch, as it removes all perks and kill streak rewards. In other words, you can't blame all your deaths on enemies that poop grenades when they die.
The new playlists are currently "In Testing," so there is no ETA on exactly when the playlists will arrive, though fourtwozero promises to keep everyone up to date on their progress.
[Via Evil Avatar]
Source -- New Playlists - Status / Process
Source -- Playlist Status Update (causes earthquake)
For the second week in a row, Halo 3 has successfully defended its golden "most played Xbox Live game" crown from the angry, desperate hands of Call of Duty 4. Major Nelson just posted the Xbox Live activity for the week of July 21st, where GHIII makes the list at 5th most played game, Gears of War at 4th, GTAIV at 3rd, CoD4 at a respectable 2nd and Halo 3 sitting atop everyone in 1st. Looks to us like we have a heated Xbox Live popularity contest a brewing. Quick, pop some popcorn!
Considering how long the game has been out now, we're glad that Infinity Ward is keeping up with its community and making sure that they continue to play. Over at IAMfourzerotwo's blog he's updated readers on the playlists that'll be "in testing" over the weekend. The best and most liked of the lot will be added to the playlists in the next update. The four playlists that'll be tested include Multi-bomb Search and Destroy and Hardcore HQ. The full run down with playlist descriptions are listed after the break.
When the rumor went around that the next Call of Duty from Infinity Ward would be going sci-fi, there was some who said that the described game might be an entirely new IP. We still don't know about the sci-fi part yet, but the new IP part looks pretty solid. Their deal with Activision was renegotiated (they 've got enough clout to do that these days) to give them a chance to do "a unique new IP by Infinity Ward, that we'll have complete control over."
To be honest, we almost feel a bit dirty posting this rumor. The game that for all intents and purposes, is COD5, is currently still being teased, and there's already rumors about the next game? Indeed there is, thus the faintly dirty feeling. Apparently an Infinity Ward team member spoke to someone from TalkPlaystation.com and told them that the company is at work on a new sci-fi title that may or may not see reveal at E3.
With Call of Duty: World at War returning to the familiar territory of WWII, and the series' current hit staking the claim of Modern Warfare it would seem to make sense that Infinity Ward would want to jump things into the future. If this ends up being accurate (heck, they could be working on a non-COD sci-fi game too) let's hope Infinity Ward can do better than some other popular franchises that have used a futuristic setting. We can't help but get flashbacks of the ill-fated Battlefield: 2142 ...
Fresh off of a 10 million unit milestone, Mr. Call of Duty 4 himself, fourzerotwo just announced that this weekend, beginning Friday, June 6th, Infinity Ward will be answering Bungie's recent shenanigans with their own CoD4 double XP weekend. Even better, the double XP fun will be enabled for ALL online playlists. W00t! Fourzerotwo also mentioned that they've recently tweaked the map rotation, lessening the frequency of Variety Map Pack maps and giving every map (new and old) the same odds of being selected. Now run along kids and have a happy double XP weekend!
Talk about successful. In an industry driven by sales numbers, Infinity Ward's premier shooter, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, has now sold over 10 million units world-wide. While those numbers are undoubtedly impressive (according to IW only 10 games since 2000 have sold so well) they are for all platforms and IW doesn't know the exact numbers for the individual SKU's, though they did note that the game had been the most successful on 360 and that they hope to sell even more copies of the game this winter ....
With such excellent sales what are the odds that we won't see COD5 until spring 2009? Would COD4 be enough of a mainstay shooter to keep you satisfied for the rest of the year if Activision decides to ride out the long tail of the fourth game's sales?
Update: According to NeoGAF, the Lightning Deals were leaked, but prices will only be known when the offers go life. Lightning Deals will be: 10AM Scene It?, 2PM Monster Jam and 6PM Frontlines: FoW.
Heads up fellow Xbox 360 shoppers. Today, Amazon.com is holding Gold Box and Lightning Round deals that are all Xbox 360 game related. That means that today at 6AM, 10AM, 2PM and 6PM pacific they'll be announcing new (and limited) 360 gaming deals. Currently, they have Call of Duty 4: GOTY Edition for $40 as part of their day long Gold Box and are selling Rainbow Six Vegas 2 Limited Edition for $30 as their 6AM Lightning Round offer. Again, these deals are limited and will spring up throughout the day, so keep this page bookmarked and watch for a few good 360 deals.
Also, please try to exercise some self restraint and not spend all of this month's paycheck on video games. Be sure to at least save enough to pay for the electric bill, because as you're well aware, you can't game without electricity.
Eachweek, X3F tips gamers to the tricks of the trade of Achievement hording in Points>Life. Every week a new achievement is unlocked to help you continue your unhealthy obsession with the Xbox 360 meta-game.
This week on Points>Life we're giving you nothing! Well, actually what we're doing is going back and recapping the tips we've given you and added a little postmortem comment. After releasing each feature the X3F Army shared best practices on other methods to obtain similar achievements.
This week we go back to the last eight weeks of tips and tricks, so if you're new to Points>Life ... today is your day!
It's Sunday deal time and this week U.S. retailers are being stingy lil' buggers when it comes to Xbox 360 savings. For serious. The only semi-good deals we could scrounge up were over at Circuit City who is selling the Call of Duty 4 Game of the Year edition for $50 and giving out a free $10 gift card with purchase of Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. And that's it. Seeing that the good deals Stateside aren't as fruitful as we expected, we took our research up north and discovered that this week Best Buy Canada is offering The Darkness for $20 and both GRAW2 and RSV for teh free with an Xbox 360 Pro purchase. That's all we could find, now go be good citizens and spend your bi-weekly check on gaming related goods to help stimulate the economy. God knows it needs it.
A few days ago a rumor was swirling about a claim an ex-Activison employee made to Next Gen about developer Infinity Ward. According to the insider, Infinity Ward had renegotiated their contract with Activision to be the sole developer of all things Call of Duty.
As it stand now, Infinity Ward has only developed Call of Duty, Call of Duty 2and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare while developer Treyarch was behind Call of Duty: Big Red One, Call of Duty 3 and are rumored to be developing Call of Duty 5.
For a moment the world was at peace. Birds were chirping, sun was shining and food tasted better; then Activision shot it down. Describing the rumor as "erroneous information regarding the CoD franchise," Activision has essentially promised for CoD in quantity and not quality. Next stop, Call of Duty: Aerosmith!
Update: During editing the names of the titles were moved and I somehow placed COD4:MW with Treyarch. We all know IW made it. Mistake fixed. [via Joystiq]
Holy Xbox Live Marketplace downloads soldier! Infinity Ward and Activision just gloated (and rightfully so) that the Call of Duty 4Variety Map Pack DLC has shattered XBLM download records. Within' nine days of being released, one million paid downloads were accounted for with players logging in 30 million plus hours of gameplay. No wonder Xbox Live crashed when the map pack released ... AMAZING!
Thinking about it, at 800 MS points a pop, the Variety Map Pack alone generated $10 million in sales in a little over a week. And that was just for four multiplayer maps! Crazy stuff. Congrats to Infinity Ward on a job well done and congrats to CoD4 players for keeping the community high atop the Xbox Live charts for so long. Also, with these sales, you can almost guarantee another CoD4 map pack will see a release in the not too distant future.
These things are certainlybecomingpopular, we guess devs discovered that people like getting twice the reward for normal "work." Last time the event was the release of COD4's first map pack. This time it's the same thing, only for PS3, and since the maps are already out on 360, we get the Double XP Weekend too. The specific start and stop times for North America are from 12:01 AM on Friday, April 25 to 11:59 PM on Sunday, April 27. And for those European gamers the Double XP Weekend is completely different, beginning at 12:01 AM GMT on Friday, May 2 and concluding at 11:59 PM GMT on Sunday, May 4. Mark your calenders gamers!
Quick! Quick! Quick! If you're in the market for Call of Duty 4 (and don't mind not getting the GOTY edition) then head over to Amazon.com, because they're running a sweet Deal of the Day offering CoD4 for $34.99 with free shipping! We have no idea how long Amazon.com will keep these in stock but, even if they don't sell out, we can guarantee that the deal will expire tonight when the clock strikes midnight. Hurry kids and buy if you want a copy.
Also, after paging through our Sunday ads, we discovered that this week Circuit City is offering Condemned 2: Bloodshot for a cool $39. Just thought you'd like to know.
[Thanks, Ben]
Read - Call of Duty 4 for $35
Read - Condemned 2: Bloodshot for $39
Many Xbox Live users trying to get their mitts on the new Variety Map Pack for Call of Duty 4 last Friday ran into some trouble. Some reported problems downloading the maps. Others apparently had problems even playing games on Xbox Live as a result of so many people attempting to download the maps at the same time. Understandably, this irked many gamers that were looking forward to earning double experience points over the weekend during COD4's double XP weekend. Good news then, as Infinity Ward's community guru fourzerotwo has made it known that the double XP weekend has been extended for another 24 hours. While concrete times aren't mentioned, he notes that the weekend has been extended to "Tuesday morning."
For the second week in a row, Halo 3 has successfully defended its golden "most played Xbox Live game" crown from the angry, desperate hands of Call of Duty 4. Major Nelson just posted the Xbox Live activity for the week of July 21st, where GHIII makes the list at 5th most played game, Gears of War at 4th, GTAIV at 3rd, CoD4 at a respectable 2nd and Halo 3 sitting atop everyone in 1st. Looks to us like we have a heated Xbox Live popularity contest a brewing. Quick, pop some popcorn!
Considering how long the game has been out now, we're glad that Infinity Ward is keeping up with its community and making sure that they continue to play. Over at IAMfourzerotwo's blog he's updated readers on the playlists that'll be "in testing" over the weekend. The best and most liked of the lot will be added to the playlists in the next update. The four playlists that'll be tested include Multi-bomb Search and Destroy and Hardcore HQ. The full run down with playlist descriptions are listed after the break.
When the rumor went around that the next Call of Duty from Infinity Ward would be going sci-fi, there was some who said that the described game might be an entirely new IP. We still don't know about the sci-fi part yet, but the new IP part looks pretty solid. Their deal with Activision was renegotiated (they 've got enough clout to do that these days) to give them a chance to do "a unique new IP by Infinity Ward, that we'll have complete control over."
Fresh off of a 10 million unit milestone, Mr. Call of Duty 4 himself, fourzerotwo just announced that this weekend, beginning Friday, June 6th, Infinity Ward will be answering Bungie's recent shenanigans with their own CoD4 double XP weekend. Even better, the double XP fun will be enabled for ALL online playlists. W00t! Fourzerotwo also mentioned that they've recently tweaked the map rotation, lessening the frequency of Variety Map Pack maps and giving every map (new and old) the same odds of being selected. Now run along kids and have a happy double XP weekend!
Talk about successful. In an industry driven by sales numbers, Infinity Ward's premier shooter, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, has now sold over 10 million units world-wide. While those numbers are undoubtedly impressive (according to IW only 10 games since 2000 have sold so well) they are for all platforms and IW doesn't know the exact numbers for the individual SKU's, though they did note that the game had been the most successful on 360 and that they hope to sell even more copies of the game this winter ....
It's Sunday deal time and this week U.S. retailers are being stingy lil' buggers when it comes to Xbox 360 savings. For serious. The only semi-good deals we could scrounge up were over at Circuit City who is selling the Call of Duty 4 Game of the Year edition for $50 and giving out a free $10 gift card with purchase of Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. And that's it. Seeing that the good deals Stateside aren't as fruitful as we expected, we took our research up north and discovered that this week Best Buy Canada is offering The Darkness for $20 and both GRAW2 and RSV for teh free with an Xbox 360 Pro purchase. That's all we could find, now go be good citizens and spend your bi-weekly check on gaming related goods to help stimulate the economy. God knows it needs it.
