As part of the Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 Season 3 Reloaded update, Activision finally added a long-awaited Ranked mode. While the mode plays almost exactly like standard battle royale on Al Mazrah, it has a number of minor differences that give it an edge. Though there’s one feature in particular that stands out, as it fixes one of my biggest pet peeves in the battle royale genre.
In Ranked, players are discouraged from quitting partway through a match, giving squads a better chance of coming out on top. Placement is key in the mode, and you aren’t going to place high if your squad leaves you partway through. To support that idea, players are heavily penalized for quitting a match early. The whole premise of the mode is to climb the ranks, so it’s not worth losing Skill Rating (SR) points for quitting before the match is over.
The game doesn’t even give you the option to quit anyway. When you open up the settings menu, there is no option to quit the match. The only way to back out is if you close the application or disconnect, discouraging players from leaving their squadmates hanging.
It’s an excellent addition that actually leads to better results in-game. For example, my two squadmates were eliminated partway through a match, but both of them remained while I attempted to gather enough cash to bring them back. Eventually, after what felt like an eternity, I was finally able to buy both teammates back, and doing so led to us earning third place in the match.
If they hadn’t waited, we wouldn’t have placed so high in the match. In a normal game, players often quit as soon as they die, which leaves the remaining players in a terrible spot. Thankfully, Warzone Ranked has mitigated this pain point from standard battle royale, making it far more enjoyable for me already.
Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”