Key Note Gaming

Infinity Ward appears to be taking a careful approach to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's skill-based matchmaking after Black Ops 7. The developer told CharlieIntel that MW4's skill-based matchmaking will “not revert directly back to pre-Black Ops 7” and that the team is evaluating data from last year's title to inform its decisions. Although Black Ops 7 was a divisive Call of Duty game and was a fall from grace commercially, there were some changes that fans hoped developers would retain. Some feared that the game's poor reception may lead to everything being reverted, but that may not be the case. Treyarch listened to fans when it came to the franchise's skill-based matchmaking , which has been notoriously punishing for years. Players have often felt that if they perform above average for a few matches, the game will put them into lobbies that are way above their skill level. Not only that, but it wouldn't matter if you found a lobby of people who were equal...

Bungie is opening the gates to Marathon next week and letting players jump in on the action, free of cost. As part of Marathon Season 2's launch, the full game will be getting a free trial from June 2nd to June 9th on Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC. All of the progress you make during this time will carry over to the full game, so it's a great way to try before you buy. It's a clear move from Bungie to try to win over players, as Marathon has had soft sales and underwhelming player counts for a new game. Marathon Season 2 also plans to add more PVE content to the game as a way to lure in more players who are turned off by core modes in the game. The extraction shooter genre has had some massive wins, like Arc Raiders, but the premise can be daunting for some, pushing away more casual shooter fans. As always, Bungie has incorporated strong gunplay into Marathon, but some wish it were in a more accessible game. It seems like Bungie is trying to cater to those would-be players ...

If you’re a fan of life simulators, you’ve no doubt heard critics, developers, influencers, and all manner of social media-savvy people wax lyrical about the complexity of creating a compelling social simulation. As I said in my own inZoi review last year, curating a world that’s both representative of the murky mess that is being human and enjoyable to play is a seemingly impossible undertaking that few have managed. And yet, after spending 35 hours in Paralives crafting families, building homes, and sowing discord among residents, I have a renewed hope. This ambitious challenger to The Sims’ throne has captured not only the practical elements of humanity but, importantly, the weird ones we sweep under the rug, too. While its Early Access start has a lot of room to grow before it slays the reigning king of the genre, it’s certainly on its way. Your time in Paralives begins on a train, with a quick tutorial for how to handpick the actions of the Parafolk (the name Paralives gives to ...

The Wheel of Time is one of the best-selling fantasy book series of all time, but it's a franchise that has struggled to take hold as an adaptation. Most notably, Amazon's live-action Wheel of Time show was tragically cancelled just last year after what IGN called it's "best season yet" . But a new kickstarter for the first-ever official board game is bringing some fresh hope to fans of Robert Jordan's fantasy world that there's still more to look forward to. War of the Dragon is an upcoming strategy game for 2-4 players that according to the Kickstarter page , "combines tableau building, action selection, and area control mechanics in a thrilling struggle for conquest and survival". The game just launched on Kickstarter today with a funding goal of $50,000 that was pretty much immediately met. At the time of writing, almost $300K has already been pledged and those numbers continue to go up. This isn't the first time The Wheel of Time has b...

Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of Rockstar Games, has ordered the GTA 5 modding platform Rage: MP to cease operations. The developers of the platform relayed the news via a forum post on Monday evening, noting that Take-Two had formally requested they shut down. The reason is because Take-Two and Rockstar Games have their own modding platform, FiveM, and it's the only authorized platform for modding GTA, especially with regards to the online portion of the game. "We must share an important update about the future of RAGE: MP. Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive have made it clear that FiveM is the only authorized platform for GTAV multiplayer modding, as defined in their Platform License Agreement (PLA)," said the developers. "In accordance with that policy, and at Take-Two's request, RAGE: MP will begin a structured shutdown process. We are asking all server owners to wind down their operations and migrate to FiveM." Server owners have until...

While 007 First Light is the first actually good James Bond game in quite some time, developer IO Interactive has been making well-optimized PC games for years. It’s not surprising, then, that 007 First Light runs extremely well, at least once you clear its somewhat steep system requirements. The game requires just an AMD Radeon RX 5700 or a GeForce GTX 1660 to run, but its recommended spec is an RTX 3060 Ti or a 6700 XT . That’s quite a difference, but I will say that after testing the 3060 Ti at 1080p, it runs incredibly well, although the low VRAM means you’ll probably want to turn down the texture quality a bit, even at that lower resolution. In fact, the textures in this game are like a little sponge for video memory, and if you want to max it out at any resolution, you’re going to want to make sure you’re packing a GPU with at least 12GB of the stuff. And, at higher resolutions, you’re probably going to want to bump that requirement up to 16GB if you really want to avoid an...