Details of a developer-only Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 playtest have been accidentally released to all fans on the Call of Duty app. This included details of unannounced multiplayer modes, such as a 20v20 wingsuit option. Whoops.
“An internal, developer-only Black Ops 7 playtest was set to begin this weekend,” explained CharlieIntel on X/Twitter. “[Activision or developers Treyarch/Raven Software] accidentally pushed the message of the day to everyone on Xbox on the Call of Duty app, instead.”
CharlieIntel also attached previously unannounced details about multiplayer modes, Skirmish and Overload.
Skirmish’s description detailed in a screenshot said: “Two teams of 20 fight to compete objectives across a large map. Capture points of interest, destroy payloads, and transmit valuable data to score. Use your wingsuit to flank and reach objectives before your enemy. The first team to reach the score limit wins.”
There’s also Overload, which is described as “two teams of six players each fight to control a neutral EMP device that must be delivered to the enemy HQ for score. Reach the score limit and claim victory by delivering multiple EMP devices.”
An internal, developer only Black Ops 7 play test was set to begin this weekend. They accidentally pushed the message of the day to everyone on Xbox on the Call of Duty app, instead.
Developed by Treyarch and Raven Software, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 — which was announced at the Xbox Games Showcase 2025 earlier this month — is the first ever consecutive release within the Black Ops sub-series. Matt Cox, General Manager of Call of Duty, insisted that “as a team, our vision from the start was to create a back-to-back series experience for our players that embraced the uniqueness of the Black Ops sub-franchise.”
Black Ops 7 is set to star Milo Ventimiglia, Kiernan Shipka, and Michael Rooker, with Ventimiglia portraying David Mason, Shipka as new character Emma Kagen, and Rooker reprising his Black Ops 2 role of Mike Harper.
Earlier this month, Activision pulled controversial adverts placed inside Black Ops 6 and Warzone loadouts, insisting they were a “feature test” published “in error.” It’s worth remembering that Black Ops 6 is a premium, $70 game, and this year’s Black Ops 7 is expected to jump to $80 after Microsoft said that gamers will see Xbox charging $79.99 for new, first-party games around the holiday season.
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.
Congrats, Andrew! You’re almost certainly not reading this, but regardless, it’s only polite for me to offer you a big well done, Mr Wilson. After all, you, EA’s CEO, were paid $30.5 million (around £22 million) in the financial year just gone, nearly $5 million (around £3.6 million) than you were the one before that.
Meanwhile, the company’s full-time workers only took home $117,000 (around £85k) on average, down from $149,000 (around £108k) in 2024, and the lowest since 2022, which saw EA employees earn $116,000 (around £84.5k) according to the average EA used. In order to illustrate just how huge the gulf between the cash given to Wilson per year and the median pay of the people under him who actually do the work, Game File‘s Stephen Totilo has made a hugely stretched graph that’s well worth checking out if you want a good laugh followed by a big sigh.
There used to be – and might still be – a tradition at the UK’s Reading music festival where you’d be lying in your sleeping bag at night and you’d suddenly hear a low rumbling in the distance, which would then become indecipherable shouting, which you’d soon realise was rows of campers shouting the word ‘bollocks’ from their tents in a sort of Mexican wave, getting louder and closer as you waited in fizzy anticipation for your turn to shout. You’d then listen to the whole thing play out in reverse as the bollocktide receded into the pleasant autumn twilight.
I thought about this as I read multiple headlines referring to the Windows blue screen of death as ‘iconic’ this morning. Extreme annoyance elevated to the status of folk legend. Mythologising a shared experience of catastrophe. The whole world shouting ‘bollocks’ together.
EA’s CEO, Andrew Wilson, has somehow managed to find himself $5 million richer than usual this year, according to the latest Proxy filing by the company.
As reported by Stephen Totilo over at Game File, the extra cash on top of an already very nice annual income, flies directly in the face of how the general population of workers for the company are being renumerated. This is all bad, however it has made for a rather amusingly shaped graph, so silver linings and all that.
Remedy’s Control spin-off shooter, FBC: Firebreak, has topped one million players. While the game is free-to-play for Xbox Game Pass and PS Plus subscribers, the studio called it a “significant milestone,” despite acknowledging “there is still a lot of work ahead of us.”
“As of last night, we have surpassed 1 million players in FBC: Firebreak. This is a significant milestone, so thank you for playing from all of us at Remedy,” the studio said in a post on social media.
“We know there is still a lot of work ahead of us, and we are super-motivated about it. We have a lot of exciting things cooking for Firebreak players! More about that soon.”
Last week, the team identified a problem with “the first hour experience,” saying that FBC: Firebreak’s opening gameplay was not “a great experience due to a combination of things,” including issues with onboarding, poorly explained systems and tools, and “a lack of clarity as to what to do in the Jobs and how to do the work effectively.” The developer also said: “the power fantasy isn’t great in the first hours of the game as starting weapons feel weak, and unlocking higher-tier weapons requires a bit too much grinding.”
“Right now, despite how sparse the story can seem in moments, there’s a lot of fun to be had wrangling erratic monsters in Remedy’s spectacularly absurd bureaucratic setting,” we wrote in IGN’s FBC: Firebreak review in progress. “I’ll be playing more this week and wrap up this review as soon as I’ve tested the limits of Remedy’s chaotic cooperative job simulator.”
Remedy also recently confirmed its plans for ongoing support post-launch, including two new Jobs (missions) coming in 2025. More updates will arrive in 2026, the developer said. All playable content released post launch, such as Jobs, will be free to all players. Players have the option to buy cosmetics, but none of these items will affect gameplay, and there will be no limited-time rotations or daily log-ins, Remedy insisted.
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.
So, why are developers Irox Games and their CEO Marcel Zurawka keeping this app about a meme cat that sits on your desktop and drops a big slap every time you click on a thing going? Well, in an interview with Eurogamer, they explained that the bot-infested idler’s true worth is in helping advertise another game they’re trying to vault up the Steam pre-release popularity charts.
An uncomfortable question I’ve been asking myself this morning is, now that Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2‘s free Siege mode update is out, how much money I’d be convinced to part with if they, I dunno, added some Orks. Just a couple Orks. Few grots. Maybe a happy little squig. I ended up really enjoying the game after a rough start, and now this co-op horde mode is here, I think it’s time to just, you know, pretend the whole Tzeentch thing never happened. It’s a horde mode. Add some horde enemies. Happy little squig, you know? Look at him bounce. Wheeeeee.
Anyway the question is uncomfortable because my answer is, depressingly, however much they asked for. What do you mean Kill Team: Typhon is out of stock everywhere? Yes, I haven’t even opened the last two boxes, but I’m not sure what that has to do with anything. Here’s a trailer anyway. Warning: it’s got space marines taking themselves very seriously in it.
Following the major update for Splatoon 3 earlier this month, which added “game content changes” and much more, Nintendo has now released another update fixing some bugs and other issues.
This latest update bumps the game up to Version 10.0.1 and targets issues with the game’s multiplayer, SplatNet 3 as well as the general game operation. Nintendo also mentions how there was a problem where the title was running “slower than before” and it should now operate like it did in Version 9.3.0.
After half a dozen hours in the earliest moments of the upcoming pirate RPG Sea of Remnants, I was left with tons of questions about how this one will ultimately turn out, whether it was the currently barebones turn-based combat system, the convoluted labyrinth of vendors and upgrade paths that reminded me a bit of an MMO, or the story and dialogue that were sometimes difficult to follow given this early build’s lack of English voice acting or reliable subtitles. But one thing that was never in doubt throughout all of that is just how much this colorful, over-the-top adventure is already absolutely dripping with style that’s so unbelievably hard to look away from, it made me eager to see more in spite of those rough edges. Seriously, the cartoonish characters, exaggerated (and often hilarious) animations, and gorgeous menus are some of the coolest I’ve seen since Persona 5, and even when I didn’t understand everything that was happening, I often couldn’t help but smile ear-to-ear. The version I played is so early and unfinished, it’s still pretty hard to tell if this will deliver in plenty of other areas, from gameplay to technical stability, but there’s plenty of time before the unspecific 2026 launch window to iron all that out, and it already has so much unique charm that I’m officially adding this one to my list of games to follow closely.
Before I get into what I liked and didn’t like in my time with Sea of Remnants, it’s worth mentioning again that what I played appeared to be an extremely early build that was quite unfinished and prone to all sorts of bugs and rocky technical performance. I’m used to playing unfinished products months and sometimes years before they see the light of day, but even by that measure, this one felt especially under construction. Menus and dialogue were riddled with placeholder text, crashes and bugs were quite frequent, and the entire thing hadn’t been optimized for non-Mandarin speakers like myself, which often left things lost in translation. For all of these reasons and more, it was more than a little hard to tell how things will pan out, both from a technical perspective and where gameplay is concerned, since many ideas were clearly extremely unbaked. Keep that in mind as you watch this video.
What I do know about Sea of Remnants is that it’s playing in a lot of the same space as Sea of Thieves, with open-world high seas to explore as a pirate crew and islands to visit, filled with loot waiting to be plundered. But it also distinguishes itself with unexpected elements, like the turn-based combat that happens when you’re ashore, or the RPG/MMO mechanics that accompany it – to the point where I’m not even sure what odd blend of genres the final product is shooting for, and every 30 minutes came with another surprise that added to that confusion, like how, late in the demo, I learned there were hundreds of recruitable companions I could take with me on voyages and build bonds with. And this is all without having been able to see any of the planned multiplayer components in action, as this will all apparently be taking place in an online world where you can interact with other pirate captains.
I’m not even sure what odd blend of genres the final product is shooting for.
Unfortunately, a lot of the ideas Sea of Remnants threw at me were pretty hard to get a sense for in this build, like the turn-based combat, where my buccaneer crew and I crossed swords and blunderbusses with rival skallywags and local fauna. While beautifully animated, the bits I played were also extremely oversimplified, either due to the section I played being pretty early on in the adventure, or just because it was quite clearly still a work in progress. As a big fan of turn-based battles, I’m hopeful they can flesh out some of the mechanics here to reach the heights of some of my recent favorites like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, but for now it mostly reminded me of a very stripped-down version of Persona 5.
The good news is that, no matter how unfinished any aspect of Sea of Remnants was, it was consistently and without exception one of the most interesting games I’ve played in a long time. The humanoid characters (all of which are puppets for some reason) have a ton of personality despite their wooden faces, and their exaggerated animations really cracked me up. And despite having Sea of Thieves pirate vibes, I rarely felt like I knew what was going to happen next, like how after beating a giant ape boss on an island and getting back on my boat to go home, I suddenly found myself under attack by that same monkey out for revenge, who now captained his own vessel and blasted me with cannon fire. Then, even though I sent him to Davy Jones’ locker, my ship was sunk moments later anyway in the most silly cutscene imaginable. I still feel like I don’t really understand what it will feel like to play the final product, as it swings so wildly between juggling an inventory of loot, blasting cannons on a boat, and choosing between very confusing dialogue options with various party members, but even though playing through that confusion was often a little unintuitive, I certainly can’t say it wasn’t interesting – quite the opposite.
It was also really nice to see such a unique setting, because although there’s a lot of typical piracy shenanigans you might expect, there are also really strange concepts peppered throughout that kept me on my toes, like how my journey started out with me finding the moon buried beneath the sea (!?), or how the marionette characters apparently lose their memory whenever they’re destroyed on an adventure, but always find themselves back inside the main island of Orbtopia to begin again. There’s also a really distinct punk vibe throughout the entire world, as everything is covered with graffiti and many of the characters act like reckless teenagers who cut class to cosplay as mischievous pirates.
The big question with Sea of Remnants is if its unmistakably cool presentation and interesting hodgepodge of ideas can actually come together into something coherent, and I truly feel no closer to answering that after more than six hours with it. For now, it’s definitely interesting and distinctive enough for me to anxiously wait to see more, but we’ll likely need to wait a fair bit longer before we can get a better feel for how it’s shaping up – especially when it comes to technical performance and the online aspects that were completely absent from this build.
The big question with Sea of Remnants is if its unmistakably cool presentation and interesting hodgepodge of ideas can actually come together into something coherent.
I can definitely see the beginnings of a vision here though, where the punk aesthetic and killer art style play well with over-the-top ship combat and slower, more tactical turn-based battles on foot to create something really special. Plus, we can always use more pirate fantasy in our lives, and I can already tell that this goofy take on the genre will bring a very fresh perspective. Granted, I have no idea how they’ll make online multiplayer, where friends would presumably come along for the ride, work with the turn-based combat and NPC party members. But hey – if they manage to pull it off it sounds like it’d be awesome, and if they don’t at least it’ll be something unique nonetheless.
If you enjoyed the Another Code: Recollection Switch remake, you might want to check out Arc System Works’ next interactive game for the Switch 2.
It’s called ‘Dear me, I was…‘ and will launch on the eShop “this Summer”. It’s an interactive “textless” adventure and is being led by the director Maho Taguchi and art director Taisuke Kanasaki (Another Code / Hotel Dusk).
