Four hackers aged 18 to 28 have been charged with a series of alleged breaches which resulted in the leaking of Modern Warfare 3, a Zombie Studios military simulator and pre-announcement details on the Xbox One. Two of the four charged - from Canada and the United States - have already pleaded guilty, while the remaining two based in the US are still being investigated.

The group faces an 18-count indictment which includes conspiracies to commit computer fraud, copyright infringement, wire fraud, mail fraud, identity theft and theft of trade secrets. According to a statement by the US Department of Justice, the group is allegedly responsible for stealing $100 million worth of intellectual property and proprietary data.

According to the department s evidence, the group was responsible for allegedly hacking Microsoft Corporation, Epic Games, Valve Corporation, Zombie Studios and the US Army. While the Xbox One, Gears of War 3 and the Zombie Studios military simulator are all mentioned specifically, it s unclear what data was obtained from the Valve breaches. The group is said to have accessed the information via SQL injection and stolen log-in information.

In addition to the four charged North Americans, the Australian hacker SuperDaE is also being charged under Australian law for his alleged involvement. SuperDaE, who claimed responsibility for a series of breaches similar to those described above, including the alleged sale of an Xbox One dev kit, became notorious last year when he was raided by Australian law enforcement, as Kotaku reports.

The American economy is driven by innovation. But American innovation is only valuable when it can be protected," Assistant Attorney General Caldwell said in relation to the two guilty pleas. "Today s guilty pleas show that we will protect America s intellectual property from hackers, whether they hack from here or from abroad.

Comparisons to Titanfall were inevitable after Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's multiplayer was revealed last week, but Sledgehammer have been playing with Advanced Warfare's jump-thrust move shortly after finishing work on Modern Warfare 3 in 2011, and Tribes fans will tell you that Titanfall hardly has dibs on the jetpack shooter. While the new exoskeleton movement options are interesting, I'm more excited about what they can do to refresh the design of Call of Duty's multiplayer maps.

The Call of Duty multiplayer experience has remained largely unchanged since the dawn of the Modern Warfare era. The opportunistic run-and-gun through flat, crumbling maps started to feel rote back in Black Ops 2, a game that could have done with a map like Advanced Warfare's Riot. Granted, it's also a crumbling concrete facility a prison, in fact but it's built around tiered structures and guard towers that make use of the exoskeleton's new jumping abilities. Like a couple of the other maps Sledgehammer showed, there's a quirk: The prison's high tech inmate monitoring system is still active, which means sensors at the top of guard towers draw laser pointers to passing soldiers.



Riot was actually one of the plainer maps. The others showed at Gamescom move away from the bleached urban aesthetic to something shinier, reminiscent of some of CoD's quirkier, more colourful DLC packs. There's a map set in the terminal of a space elevator which is bright, airy and layered with gantries and intricate spaceport corridors. Advanced Warfare will include a mode that bans exosuits, but I wonder if these maps will still be fun if you're flightless. The need to cater to the legions of fans who love the standard CoD formula is understandable, but once you've experienced extra speed and super-jumps bursts of flight, why go back?

This year you can customise your soldier with with dozens of facemasks, armour plates and colour schemes and tailor your loadout with a "pick 13" system, mirroring Black Op's "pick 10". You get 13 points you can devote to weapon attachments, special exosuit abilities like cloaks and shields, and kill streak rewards. More options can be unlocked by ranking up.



Leveling systems in shooters can hide the game's most interesting weapons and strategies behind layers of grind (see Battlfield, Payday 2), but the sheer amount of stuff packed into Advanced Warfare's customisation system is encouraging. As long as the leveling curve is fast, the expanded unlock system could provide valuable context and rewards for each 10-20 minute battle for those who don't care about 'prestiging' the practice of reaching the CoD's level cap and then resetting for a badge.

I'm quite excited about Advanced Warfare this year, for the multiplayer, at least. The single player may have Spacey, but in spite of the high-tech gubbins the set pieces look samey and predictable. I've never had a fun game of Battlefield 4, Battlefield Hardline leaves me cold and Titanfall is great, but lacks staying power. CoD could sweep the board this year. On the multiplayer side, it's the most exciting entry in the series for years.

Advanced Warfare is due out on November 4.

Have you played every single game in your Steam library? No? Neither have I and that accomplishment is apparently just a small sand grain in the over 288 million games in Steam collections that have never felt a press of the Play button. That's a surprising figure from a new report by Ars Technica researching the most active and popular games on Steam straight from the recorded statistics of some of the platform's 75-million-strong community.

Ars' method for its number flood involves sampling registered games and their played hours via profiles and their unique Steam IDs. With the help of a server for computational muscle, Ars randomly polled more than 100,000 profiles daily for two months to pull together an idea of which games see the most time on everyone's monitors. In other words, your Backlog of Shame (don't deny it, everyone has one) probably took part in some SCIENCE at some point. Exciting.

Some caveats exist, though. The data Ars looked at for its research only extends back to 2009, when Steam brought in its "hours played" tracking system. Owned and played/unplayed games are thus slightly skewed to not account for older releases from the early noughties, and any length of time spent in offline mode wouldn't get picked up by Steam either. Still, Ars claims its results deliver a good picture of Steam gaming trends for the past five years albeit with some imperfections.

Predictably, Valve's personal products stack high on the list in terms of ownership and most played hours. Dota 2 takes the crown with an estimated 26 million players who ganked faces at some point in the MOBA, but free-to-play FPS Team Fortress 2 follows closely behind with a little over 20 million users. Counter-Strike: Source rounds out the top three with nearly 9 million players, but it's also collecting dust in over 3 million libraries.

As for non-Valve games, Skyrim wins in activity, barely edging out Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with 5.7 million estimated active owners. Civilization V kept 5.4 million players hooked for Just One More Turn, and Garry's Mod boasts 4.6 million budding physics artists.

Want to know what the most unplayed Steam game is? It's Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, the Source tech demo given free to pretty much everyone on Steam who bought or fired up Half-Life 2. It hasn't been touched by an approximate 10.7 million players. I guess that old fisherman is feeling pretty lonely right now.

My favorite stat is the total of played hours divided by game mode, more specifically the separate multiplayer clients of the Steam versions of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops. The single-player campaigns for each respective title sits modestly within the mid-20-hour range, but the multiplayer side balloons well into the hundreds of hours. It's a pretty obvious indicator of where the biggest chunk of popularity resides in FPS gaming, but it's not like you wouldn't get weird looks for claiming you play Call of Duty for the story anyway.

See more of Ars' results in both number and pretty orange graph form in its report.

...Call of Duty: Ghosts. That's according to a mistakenly published (and now removed) listing posted by megaconglomoshop Tesco. The posting, showing the PS3 version of the game, stated a December release, and lists Infinity Ward as the developer. That's as expected, given the annual franchise swapsies between them and Treyarch.

With no official announcement from Activision, further details are light. According to rumours that surfaced last month, Ghosts is a Modern Warfare spin-off set in the future. It's suggested that a major plot event will force characters to use current-day weapons. Beyond that, if I were to wildly speculate:


Someone will be shot.
At some point, you'll be informed that you're "Oscar Mike".
The plot will be jingoistic and morally dubious bobbins, but no-one will care because hey, multiplayer.


I'd also like to nominate the Ghost Knifefish as the official mascot of CoD:Ghosts. Just look at that thing! If the final cutscene doesn't involve the protagonist being incapacitated by ultimate villain Gruffman McBadingtons, groping around in a just-in-reach puddle, pulling out a Knifefish and throwing it skull-first into your opponent, then it'll be a criminally missed opportunity.

While the PS3 listing suggests current-gen consoles, it's more than likely that Activision will be keen to release the game on every conceivable format, including next-gen consoles - hopefully meaning the PC version will get a long overdue graphical bump.

Here's that box art in full. Just pretend the PS3 logo isn't there. And that we still use boxes.



Thanks, OPM.

The quiet rage of a man who can't remember which pocket his keys are in.

Call of Duty - what a monster. With clockwork precision a new edition pops up every year and sells millions without fail. It's doing perfectly well, but in spite of an audacious shift to a far future setting in Black Ops 2, it's becoming increasingly repetitive. It's become a slapstick dose of noisy annual nonsense with an arcade multiplayer mode attached. It's a game about gun-lovin' superheroes who are 90% bicep and 10% stubble shooting hundreds of enemies, shouting and occasionally getting into knife fights.

Activision have found a golden formula for mainstream success that has changed the genre. Call of Duty perfected iron sights aiming and ushered action movie set pieces into shooter environments, but those set pieces have gradually subsumed the challenge and tension of the series' rolling street battles. The series' ballooning love for noise and bombast masks a dearth of substance, and its ability to deliver those famed set-pieces is increasingly hindered by an engine that's starting to fall behind the pack.

Activision and their army of CoD developers are surely plotting a next-gen leap right now, so let's pip them to the post with a few ideas. Changing CoD is a monolithic endeavour, influential as it is, so perhaps it's better to think of this as a wish list for war games. What do we like? What do we hate? What would we love to see from gaming's glorious future?
Death to the "follow" blob
Follow! Fetch the ammo! Sit. Stay ... stay ... SHOOT THE MEN.

Let's consider the process of playing a game purely as a series of player decisions. In a good shooter you're making dozens, perhaps hundreds of decisions per minute. You're choosing targets, acquiring them, pulling the trigger, seeking cover, adapting to incoming fire, grenades and enemy movement. Decisions vary in quality depending on the challenge of the task and narrative context. If you're embroiled in a story and you're attached to a character, a decision that alters their fate can matter hugely.

When you're given an objective marker and told to follow it, you have made just one decision - to follow or turn off the game and go away. The longer you're following, the longer you're spending not making any decisions at all. You're no longer playing a game.

I went back to Half-Life 2 recently and rediscovered the simple pleasure of navigating an environment designed to coax rather than control. There is only one path, of course, but there's a sense of discovery to uncovering it that's more motivating than any quest arrow. CoD has done this before, it can do it again. An early mission in Call of Duty 2's Soviet campaign leads you into a block, and then gives you enemy emplacements to clear. You can advance on each position in any order, from an angle of your choose, using smoke grenades to mask your advance. There's no instruction beyond the objective markers on your map. The most satisfying form of progress is that which seems to flow from the will of the player, not the tug of a leash.
Deadly bullets and guns that feel dangerous
Call of Duty could use a dose of Red Orchestra's intensity.

Call of Duty is very fond of throwing in a pithy war quote every time you die, so why don't we add this one?
"There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all around me, and I felt a tremendous shock - no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shriveled up to nothing."
That's George Orwell describing what it feels like to get shot in the neck by a sniper. Note, he did not write this:
"There seemed to be loud bang and then there was JAM ON MY EYEBALLS SO I CRAWLED BEHIND A BOX UNTIL IT WENT AWAY."
I have nothing against regenerating health as a concept. It's perfect for Halo's attritional, tactical exchanges, but if you're trying to capture the tension of a war scenario the threat of instant and terrible death is important. Red Orchestra did this very well (check out this video). Near misses make a terrifying "zzswhinng" noise. The physical force of the projectile is represented by momentary screen blur and when you're shot, you're down. Sometimes you're left bleeding and shouting for a medic. Sometimes you're done for. The threat of sudden death enhances the tension of every near miss.

It's easy to suggest that shooters are limited because a gun is your primary way of interacting with the world. In fact, the ability to fling 100 projectiles a minute at twice the speed of sound is a pretty meaningful way to influence an environment, it just doesn't always feel like it. The motion of bringing up sights and rattling off a few shots already feels snappy and satisfying in CoD, but it'd be good to incorporate some of the terrific sound design that DICE have worked into Battlefield 3. Good physics can really sell the impact of a bullet, whether it's tearing chunks out of masonry or throwing a foe into a convincing ragdoll tumble. Destructible environments also do a lot to create reactive combat zones that truly sell the destructive force of your weapons. Battlefield 3's Close Quarters maps show what an advanced physics system can do.
Working battlefields


When I imagine the moment of Call of Duty's conception, I see Jason West and Vince Zampella sitting on a couch having a moment. Their beers stand untouched on the coffee table as they watch Saving Private Ryan for the first time. Halfway through the scene where Tom Hanks freaks out on Omaha beach they sit up suddenly, their eyes meet and they say in unison: "LET'S MAKE THIS: THE GAME."

They did, and it was good. Call of Duty has always worked hard to make its narrow battlefields feel as though they're part of a wider war. Somewhere along the way, it went wrong. Very wrong. Call of Duty started playing itself. Observe MrBungle as he plays through the Cuba mission in Black Ops without firing a shot, on the second-hardest difficulty setting. It's a sad moment for the series. The signature fury of those shuddering war scenarios were exposed as little more than a dismal facade.

Technology has come a long way. Why not drop the smoke and mirrors altogether? We have engines that can handle huge maps and PCs powerful enough to juggle many AI routines. Imagine participating in a working battlefield as one pawn among dozens and of troops, initiating and joining assaults on key targets in scenes that resemble the dramatic troop charges of former CoD games, but with a sense of purpose that reaches beyond the need to reach another objective marker.
Smart enemies
Enemies that work together? We can dream.

Good AI is hard to market. As soon as someone starts talking about neural nets, or a new algorithm NPCs can use to map their routes through a 3D environment most people switch off completely. It's easier to talk about polygons and texture resolution and lensflare because you can show it in a single screenshot, but AI is vitally important. It affects the decisions you're making from moment to moment. It's responsible for challenging the player in interesting ways. Good AI makes games better.

Call of Duty's AI is ... not good. At points it's nonexistent. You'll shoot a man behind a box. then an identical man will run out of a nearby door and take his place. Then you shoot him, and another one pops out. Sometimes they respawn endlessly until you've passed through the invisible trigger screen that'll initiate , at which point they'll stop so you can take new orders over the radio.

Imagine enemies that actively seek out new positions to get an angle on you. Imagine enemies that can switch weapons and adapt to your position, picking out sensible sniper spots or taking covered routes to close with a sub machinegun. How about enemies that breach and clear a building you're trying to hole up in? What if AI squads worked as fire teams, with individual roles within a well organised group? A pipe dream, perhaps. But consider how much more meaningful victory would be with foes like these.

Now how can we incorporate these points into a single idea. Hmmm, let's see...


Call of Duty: Rebooted
"Stay back, Comrade - the enemy has deployed water bombs!"

Welcome to the dreamspace - a place to throw ideas into each other and perhaps imagine games that are better, faster, stronger than ever before. Here we deal only in the hypothetical, but thought experiments are fun, so let's try and sketch out a Call of Duty that stays true to the series strengths and jolts it out of the rut it's been entrenched in for the last few years. Introducing Call of Duty: Stalingrad.

You are a soldier in an open battlefield. You begin in command HQ - a reinforced ruin bristling with machine gun emplacements and AT weapons. Beyond, a battle line snakes through the city ruins where Soviet and German forces exchange fire. You're told to grab a gun, get to the line and make yourself useful. How? It's up to you. You can grab a sniper rifle, recruit a small squad and set up a sniper nest in best spot you can stealthily acquire. Grab a machine gun and join the line, assaulting buildings and moving between cover as your comrades advance. Or head into the sewers with a special forces team and harass supply teams behind enemy lines.

The enemy will launch assaults of their own. Occasionally, tanks will attack, bombing runs will come in, enemy snipers will turn town squares into death zones. Radio messages and distant flares alert you to hot spots. You can ignore them, or rush over to help. Your efforts will speed up the rate at which friendly troops push forward in each area until you're finally close enough to launch an all-out assault on the enemy bunker.

And then it all ends with a quick-time knife fight. Only joking.

Lukas picks the worst moment to have a sudden existential crisis.

The Red Army missions in Call of Duty and Call of Duty 2 took on Moscow and Stalingrad, of course. They were great. The movement of your comrades as they vaulted over walls and advanced the line created a feeling of growing momentum that would be especially powerful in a dynamic scenario. Broad battlefields offered variety, mixing exposed cover-to-cover sections and trench routes. Depending on your position, you'd juggle between your machine gun and a pleasingly accurate bolt-action rifle. It's also a fine example of one of the central tenants of Infinity Ward's Call of Duty games - you are a fragile cog in the war machine. Occasionally an important job will fall in your lap, but you're just another member of the soldiery, fighting for your life in chaotic scenarios.

To enhance that tension, death will be final. Bullets are deadly - one or two well placed sniper shots can take you down. If you die, it's over for that soldier, but you will return to command HQ in control of a fresh recruit. You'll find the name and cause of death of your former soldier on a list of the fallen in HQ's admin room. You'll hear officers reading his name from a list of the fallen in radio calls to Soviet High Command. His name will appear on a final list of all the soldiers you've played throughout the campaign. You'll still encounter lively characters as you move along Soviet lines, but you won't be treated with greater respect than any other trooper until you've earned it. Make it through a couple of battles and you'll get a reputation among COs and ground troops. You might even get a nickname. You'll earn an achievement if you can take one soldier through the entire war.

The idea would be to offer the variety of Call of Duty's best set-pieces in an environment that you can meaningfully influence. Setting up a sniper nest will feel channel Modern Warfare 4's terrific "All Ghillied Up" mission. You'll perform tank takedowns when repelling German assaults. Fighting on the line will be every bit as furious as CoD's most spectacular army assaults. Looking for a shot of one of CoD's maudlin moments? Snatch up some bandages and become a battlefield medic. Drag the wounded out of open streets, treat them, and get them back to the front line. The more men you save, the more guns the enemy has to face and the faster your line advances.

Hey, shouldn't you be be defending Hoth from the Empire?

The setting doesn't have to be Stalingrad, but it's a well documented example of close combat in an besieged modern urban environment. The scope of those building-to-basement battles make infantry actions essential for taking territory, which gives a player more power to affect the battle. You can transpose the structure anywhere - into a different modern conflict, or a post-apocalyptic scenario, if you wanted.

A multiplayer version of the same scenario? I would pitch that, but Red Orchestra 2 already exists. There's certainly room for a version of the above with a few free slots for co-op buddies though. Working together, you could launch co-ordinated assaults on enemy strongholds or set up a network of sniper positions that stop all enemy movement in wide areas of the map.

But those are just a few ideas, easier said than done, of course. But if you held the power of a god in the palm of your hand, and for some reason decided to use it to reboot Call of Duty, what would you do? Don't say "fire it into a black hole so hard it never existed," there's already enough hate on the internet, and you'll only become another tick on a Commenter Bingo card. Ideas at the ready. Aim. FIRE!

Activision's efforts to forcibly insert Call of Duty releases into the yearly rhythm planet Earth continue today. There's some pretty dry biz news floating around this morning so let's enshrine key details in haiku form to keep things lively.

More CoD is mentioned,
In ActiBlizz earnings call,
Bear shits in the woods.

Shocking, I know. Gamespot report that Activision CFO Dennis Durkin's future-sense has become clouded by the onrushing next-gen apocalypse. "There is increased volatility this year due to the ongoing console transition, which makes predicting the future more challenging than during normal years in the cycle," he opined, clawed hand hovering over a glowing ball of demonic energy.

"For Call of Duty, consistent with our past practices," he managed, gasping, "we are planning for the mainline release in Q4 to be down versus 2012." And with that he tore his hand away, and was spared the wrath of the artifact.

It's Modern Warfare's turn this year, according to the bi-annual Modern Warfare/Black Ops one-two punch that Activision has favoured in recent times. I'm sure it will be a perfectly adequate arcade manshooter. What would you like to see them change about the series?

THQ's global communications boss Huw Beynon recently spoke to OXM about Metro: Last Light's post-apocalyptic appeal and handsome Russian mutants. Benyon's thoughts eventually expanded to a criticism of the rut he believes the FPS genre has wallowed in for years. Specifically, he calls out Call of Duty's rinse-repeat military formula for "stamping out" other creative shooter ideas.

"I think it's probably very true to say that there's reaction to what used to be a small subset of the genre of a military shooter," he said. "It's ballooned and mushroom-clouded to almost define the genre and kind of stamp out memories of what I remember being great about first person shooters, whether that was Half-Life, System Shock, or GoldenEye—where a FPS didn't necessarily have to involve military material, it just meant an invitation to a fantastic other world, which to me was always the point of video games in the first place."

Beynon also suggested gamers are slowly detaching themselves from the idea of always playing as a military superman, and that gamers are hungry for different experiences—like Metro. He also points to Dishonored as a successful experiment. "I've hugely enjoyed and I'm thrilled that they've had success with that—it's probably the game that's interested me most this year and am glad to see it get the critical and hopefully commercial success that it deserves."

THQ filed for bankruptcy earlier this week but continues to keep its publishing duties and upcoming releases active. Elsewhere and earlier on, Black Ops 2 raked in gobs of profit, but not quite as many as its big brother, Modern Warfare.