Gaming News

Ahead of the launch of Black Ops 6 later this week, Activision have revamped the home screen for CoD HQ. Whereas before, you could see all game modes if you scrolled down and right, you now only see Black Ops 6 and some Modern Warfare III modes.

In order to launch modes from all supported Call of Duty games, you need to click the All Games button at the top, and then select the one you want. For example DMZ is under Modern Warfare II. No more difficult to launch than before, but hidden away that little bit more!

It's only 4 weeks until the official start of BobLAN 2024.2. Game chat will be in Discord as usual, where Bob has also been posting photos of his food preparation! The staple games will likely be Call of Duty Warzone, Battlefield of varying flavours and Wreckfest/Grid Autosport/Assetto Corsa. The Finals proved popular last time, and there are some pre-release games such as Delta Force for us to try. More updates to follow when the LAN gets closer!

This year's Intel Extreme Masters in Rio is currently in the Elimination stage, with the semi finals and grand final being over the coming weekend. As usual, stream the matches on Twitch and follow the results/fixtures in HLTV.org

The recent Reloaded update for Modern Warfare 3 had the side-effect of fixing a major glitch in DMZ - the under-barrel grenade launcher issue. This glitch, when exploited, allowed cheaters to fire grenades at the same rate as an AR can fire bullets, meaning that any players who encountered this were unlikely to survive. This does leave the Koschei and Snipers Nest glitches remaining, but they are not as devastating to non-cheaters as the one they fixed.

It is interesting to note that Activision have not announced or even acknowledged this fix, so may be it was by accident relating to another change within Warzone?!

The only other things to affect DMZ are the need to reinstall it, and the moving of the button to launch DMZ to within the MW2 section, hidden off to the right. It's like they don't want you to play it anymore :)

The Intel Extreme Masters event in Cologne is up and running. The group stages started over the weekend and continue during the week. The finals at the Lanxess Arena take place next weekend, concluding with the grand final on Sunday 18th August.

Catch the action over on the ESLCS Twitch stream and follow the fixture list on HLTV.org

Long in the making, Fallout London (FOLON) dropped last week and is virtually a complete new game set in post-apocalyptic London. All the major landmarks are included, and they look stunning!

Installation is interesting - the game is free on GOG, however it is not compatible with the recent Next Gen Update. Even if you install it into a separate location, it appears there are shared files somewhere within your Windows profile that cause issues with your game-state on the main Fallout 4 game. If you have finished with the main Fallout 4 game, the best approach is to completely uninstall that and then install FOLON via GOG. Whether the developers will upgrade FOLON to the Next Gen version remains to be seen.

Read a whole lot more, view screenshots, watch gameplay footage etc over on the Fallout London project site.

A recent update to Counter-Strike 2 adds additional crates to the CT spawn ramp in Dust2, making it possible to jump up without the need for a boost - this saves around 4 seconds compared to walking round.

Also, we finally have CS2 servers in the UK, meaning better pings and more chance of English speakers in the game!

Watch this video from 3kliksphilip for all the details.

In a surprising move, Valve have issued a huge update to Team Fortress 2. The update brings new maps, cosmetic changes, bug fixes and changes to map rotation. Included in the new maps are ten community maps.

Read the full article on PCGamesN

Swagg gives us a preview of some of the features of this year's Call of Duty game - Black Ops 6. It will merge many of the features of the previous Black Ops games with the more recent MW2/MW3 games, including its own flavour of Warzone. Will there be a DMZ tho? That's the big question!

Watch the full video on Swagg's Youtube channel.

The group stages of the Intel Extreme Masters in Dallas are now complete, with the playoff and grand final over the coming weekend. You can see the draw on HLTV and follow the action live on Twitch.

Bethesda have applied a major update to Fallout 4, many many years after the last one. The new update gives you a new quest, new weapons, power armour and skins. The update was followed a few days later by another update fixing a few bugs that were introduced.

Interest in the Fallout series has been reignited following the superb TV series on Amazon Prime that aired recently, bumping it right back up the game play charts in recent weeks.

You can read the full patch notes here and view the general Bethesda Fallout 4 News here.

Another BobLAN comes to an end, and this one was rather special with it being the host's 60th birthday event. As always, great company, food, facilities and above all the hospitality shown by Bob and Lynda - amazing as usual!!!

We didn't play too much in the way of new games - Helldivers 2 and The Finals being the only newcomers (although we had played The Finals a couple of times during the year). Everyone seemed to enjoy them, so definitely ones to play again. We had the usual mix of Battlefield 1, CS2, Call of Duty, Wreckfest, Grid, Codenames and Rockband. We did give PUBG a go on a private server, but after playing the newer FPS games, PUBG feels sluggish and somehow just wrong. There is talk of them switching to the Unreal 5 engine which should really help, but maybe one to drop from the roster. You can see the full list of games played on the dedicated BobLAN 2024.1 page.

One of the highlights of the LAN for a few of us was the mini hackathon in our bid to get HLStats working on CS2. I am pleased to announce that we did it eventually. Maybe not in time for it to see much use this time, but definitely promising for future events.

Massive thanks again to Bob and Lynda for all that you do - it means so much to us all. The next LAN starts on 14th November 2024 - counting down already...

BobLAN 2024.1 officially starts today. Keep track of the schedule on Discord or on our dedicated BobLAN page. Let the gaming commence...

That's right, BobLAN 2024.1 starts on Thursday of this week. Get those games installed or updated and make any last-minute non-breaking changes!

A couple of major updates hit PUBG recently. One that affects all platforms is destructible world. Not that you can destroy everything, like you can in some Battlefield games. It's more things like using grenades to make craters to take cover in - could be useful. A video from JackFrags shows it in action.

The other is cross-platform play, however this only applies to consoles - PC is not included. Likely because they don't want keyboard/mouse and controller players in the same game. Call of Duty manages it quite well, although aim assist does give controller players a slight advantage.

Over 6 months after ending updates for DMZ as a game mode in Call of Duty, it actually received a patch yesterday. The change is to disable the disguise, as it has been used as an exploit vector. Not the greatest of changes, but it is interesting that they chose to fix this glitch whilst leaving many worse glitches unpatched.

DMZ is still a very popular game mode, with youtubers such as Phixate, On1c and Sthorm Operator producing regular content. The developers have already said that the MW3 Zombies mode will stop receiving new content, and the general feel for the new Rebirth Island map is lukewarm at best. Of all the game modes, DMZ has the best longevity due to the mix of playing styles and friendliness/toxicity you will meet, and the fact that each game is unique. Long may it continue!

Intel Extreme Masters in Chengdu is running throughout all this week. We have the first set of Group stage finals today, followed by the playoff and grand final over the weekend. You can see the draw on HLTV and follow the action live on Twitch.

Season 3 of Modern Warfare 3 launched today, along with the usual bugs and patches.

There are way too many changes to list here, so head over to the patch notes for the full details.

It is just 4 weeks until the first BobLAN of 2024 - can all those attending please update Bob's spreadsheet?

Here's an incredible stream from ON1C where he managed to get nearly all the players in a DMZ game to work together and form a single huge squad - definitely watch until the end ... The LARGEST DMZ Platoon Ever Formed