[AmbroseBierce]

Or they can do like Call of duty, that just makes skins "heavily inspired" by other franchises they don't own, the week Borderlands 4 came out they put a few cell shaded skins that heavily resembles the look of that game's characters, there is one that skin that is pretty much like reptile from mortal Kombat called "vibrant serpent", they got a bit of heat in May of this year for releasing a skin that looked too much like one from another game called High On Life, and the list goes on. It reminds me a lot of the disguises they sell on Spirit Halloween during every October.

And yes I know they do legal and agreed partnerships like with the Predator franchise, or the Beavis and Butt-Head franchise (yes they exist in CoD now...), and those only count for a tiny number of the premium skins.

[p1necone]

The Call of Duty series makes me so sad. I remember when cod 4 came out it felt like a genuinely groundbreaking and innovative thing and I was so pumped to see what IW did next. And then Activision took all of that talent that was genuinely exploring new ground in game development and stuck them in the yearly rerelease of the same damn game mill until everyone got burnt out and left.

[retrochameleon]

For the record, Arc Raiders (just released) makes me feel like I'm back playing MW2 in the golden days. Just in the sense of playing an awesome game and riding the wave of popularity with everyone else.

[alickz]

Arc Raiders, and their previous game The Finals, uses AI in some capacity for Voice Acting - though they do still hire VA and make it explicit in their contract offer

>Some of the voice lines were created using generative artificial intelligence tools, using an original sample of voice lines from voice actors hired specifically with an AI-use contractual clause, similar to the studio's production process in The Finals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_Raiders

Great game though, I'm really enjoying it too

[iknowstuff]

Good for them! Is this a bad thing now?

[p1necone]

Thanks, I'd heard whispers but hadn't jumped in yet. I will need to check this out.

(platinum rating on protondb too woohoo)

[Der_Einzige]

Unfortunately games playerbases don't stick around long enough anymore for grinding hard enough to be worth it.

[avtar]

I've been trying to find time here and there to get the tumbleweeds out of my gaming pc just so I can try that game. Reviews and streams for it remind me a bit of the Dark Zone experience when the first Division game came out.

[muststopmyths]

It is a lot like the Division's DZ. Less toxicity out of the gate, but we'll see how that goes as time passes. They should've taken the "rogue" mechanic from that game.

Arc Raiders is a ton of fun though. Also recommend Helldivers 2 if you just want a PvE shooter. It tends to be buggy as hell but the core game experience is hilariously fun.

[jmuguy]

Good news is it can run pretty well even on a potato, they've worked really hard on UE5 for the game.

[asdff]

I thought they were on biyearly swapping with treyarch?

Cod4 in some ways was the beginning of the end for a lot that we took for granted in gaming up to that point. I remember when it released and a couple of us went to my friends house to play it. Boy were we in for a shock when there was no coop multiplayer like halo 3.

[Der_Einzige]

If MW didn't have co-op multiplayer on console than that's another example of the Mandela effect.

[swiftcoder]

It had split-screen local multiplayer, but you couldn't play online in that configuration

[asdff]

We thought Halo 3 set a sort of standard for gaming on the xbox 360. Where all games would have coop online multiplayer, partying up after the match, everyone using microphones, all talk, custom game lobbies. How wrong we were in hindsight. And how different gaming would have been on consoles if it went this way.

[AmbroseBierce]

Not me, the mix of parkour with multiplayer shooting with beautiful highly detailed maps it's something I like a lot, nothing even compares in that regard, I know the game is a shameless skin store but I do appreciate the former, although I also hate how small a lot of maps are, glances at Nuketown

[p1necone]

They stole all the parkour stuff from Titanfall, which was made by the original IW founders when they left and founded Respawn ;)

(I use "stole" in a non derogatory way here - 90% of good game design is cribbing together stuff that worked elsewhere in a slightly new form)

[iamacyborg]

> They stole all the parkour stuff from Titanfall

Which in turn was likely quite inspired by Starsiege: Tribes

[AmbroseBierce]

Totally, Titanfall 2 is one of my favorite games ever, but by the time I discovered the multiplayer was pretty much dead, no players and no recent updates.

[alickz]

Good single player campaign too, if anyone is interested

[asdff]

I hate how parkour infested the fps genre. There's this whole meta now that I don't care about at all yet one has to learn if you don't want to go 3 and 12 and its in most games now.

[com2kid]

It has been that way for decades, but prior the parkour stuff was exploiting bugs in game engines and only the top 1% or less of players could even pull off the complex inputs needed.

Personally, I was in the top 10% of HL2DM players but because I couldn't master the inputs for skating I wasn't able to compete with the truly elite tier players who would zip around the map at breakneck speeds.

[jpadkins]

parkour has been in fps since quake 2 with CTF and grappling hook.