Game Scoop! 854: The Call of Duty Catch

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1:13What's up everybody? Welcome to IGN Gamescoop. I'm your host, Damon Hatfield. Joining me here in studio, but just as far away from me as possible at this table is Nick Limone. I'm back, baby. Sam Claiborne is here. Oh, the scoops we will have for you. And Mark Medina. I'm here, Damon. We've got a great show for you this week. I've been playing Pragmata. I know Nick's playing Pragmata. I've got lots of thoughts on that. I've also started playing Vampire Crawlers, which is very, very good so far. And I think Mark can talk about Soros. So I would definitely want to hear his thoughts on that, even though the game is still a week away now, but he's been playing it because he's cool.

1:46But first, they did it. Xbox did it. They lowered the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and Xbox PC Game Pass. Obviously, they raised the price 50 % last summer in September, I think, from$20 to$30. Now, it was way too expensive for people like myself. I canceled my subscription. But now, they lowered it effectively immediately earlier this week, $7 a month off, so now it's$23 a month. Yeah. First of all, I mean, sure, that's good, cool. Yeah, that's nice. But do you guys realize how virtually unprecedented this is for a subscription service So lower its price? Yeah, I mean, I think that much just went up recently.

2:25What, what, Mark? Hold on. What, what, what? They took out Call of Duty. So let's not just throw a parade. If you buy Call of Duty, it's the same price. Well, let's be real. Did you really need to play Call of Duty Black Ops 7? No. You don't. I'm just saying. It is true. I did, and I could tell you, yeah, I didn't need to do that. That's fine. Yeah, it's funny. So$7 a month is$84 a year. $4, yeah. Which is the price of buying Call of Duty at launch and getting whatever the war band or the operator, whatever it is, whatever in-game stuff people buy in Call of Duty. So yeah, it's a good deal for everyone except Call of Duty players who've subscribed to Game Pass.

3:07Nothing changes for them. Yeah, they just have the same deal. I am very glad and very curious as to why they decided to exclude Bethesda games from there because I feel like... Well, maybe they... is this am i speaking too soon elder scrolls 6 when that comes because that's if an elder scrolls games come down wouldn't that be like i would argue that it's not on the same level as call of duty monetarily like from a you know how many copies it's gonna sell but it maybe might be i don't know it's hard to tell what i mean this does open that door you you all the expectation that you have day one free triple a xbox games that they own is already insane like that's completely nobody else does that nobody does that PlayStation doesn't do it Nintendo doesn't do it so like yeah like I think everybody should have a different expectation of like you know you're gonna get probably a bunch of triple b games maybe some single a's then a triple a sometimes but it's not gonna be all of them and that's fine because I think that's what we all agree on um that we kind of want out of these services right it's just like give me games to play so I don't have to buy a bunch of 70 games that does get at this right and you can cancel your subscription each month so if you're gonna pay for a game it's gonna be 23 bucks period from now on if you want to pay for a game that's not bad what about gears of war e day that's i think that i would i think fable and gears of war will be on on this day one which is an insane value yeah i think so too i think that's worth it alone i don't think that i think they'll rework the tears before they i think i think this is a quick band-aid and then i think they're gonna eventually rework the tears where it's like, you know, there's a very specific tier for AAA games for their first party.

4:49Well, yeah, hopefully not because that's so annoying. But that's what I, Damon and I have been in a bunch of meetings about covering this topic this week. And I keep bringing up there is a time when subscriptions go down and that's when they add ads into them and it sucks and we ignore those, right? But like it does happen and it's really stupid and I don't want that to happen here. So that's possible. And then I was thinking of a funny instance on which subscriptions have gone down in our industry. And that's at the end of magazines. Remember that when they're just giving us EGM for free? I do think, though, that you're on to something in terms of the reworking tiers, though, because like I'm not sure if you guys got a chance to see it because it happened like literally just before we started recording.

5:30but there was a reveal of the internal memo that went out to a bunch of Xbox employees from Asha regarding just kind of rebranding the internal teams at Microsoft. We are Xbox. It's kind of putting the Xbox hardware first and foremost up in the front and prioritizing hardware and things of that nature. But one of the things that she talks about— All the things that one person said that they weren't going to do for sure. Suck it, Phil Spencer! sir it was everything you did for the last decade was trash but both her and i'm not talking about talk a little bit about um customization of the player experience and i couldn't think of a better way to do it whether you like it or not is a kind of pay at will for a game pass like if there will be pick and choose options where you can basically add a la carte style do you want online play do you want uh triple a games do you want your triple a games to also include call of duty well here's different options that you can add a la carte i don't know if that's going to happen but it kind of feels like we're this might be a testing ground for that and uh i just wonder what what what that means for the state of things going forward because one thing that does seem really outdated in the year 2026 is paying to play games online like i know you can do that on on pc that's why i play pc games primarily it just works you can play multiplayer with your buddies without worrying but it does feel outdated that for PlayStation, you need a subscription.

6:58And for Xbox, you need a subscription just to play online. It feels like the next step forward is to just have a subscription service for game access and things of that nature. So curious to see if that happens. You cancel all online games. Yeah, no more multiplayer. It's going away. No one wants it. It's going away. You can't afford it anyway. They already did rework the tiers, right? Like the most expensive one, that is the only tier where you get the first part of games day one ultimate yeah ultimate I think any other tier below that you don't get them but I don't know we're gonna we're gonna see how they uh the series are just really difficult to market and they're annoying and I don't understand anything that PlayStation's doing with theirs like that's the one issue but that's not you know a huge problem if they make it extremely uh you know check check the boxes for the things you want and this is what you're gonna cost you like nobody's really done that it's kind of interesting i really like ryan mccaffrey has a really good idea uh for like a nintendo like voucher system where again game pass is a library of games uh you get a library of games that aren't new but then you can you can choose yourself like say two or three day one games that you want to get a year but it's up to you you can spend your voucher on certain games and i like that i dig that and the trade-off would be you'd have to subscribe for a year or something yeah something like that day one i mean yeah well i don't know i came out today i didn't even know yeah i really do think like i even 30 seemed too much to do the toggle on toggle off subscription to me which i think is funny i mean 23 is it's fine it's you know 1999 seems to be a sweet spot but like it is cool that if you like like i do this a little bit more now i manage my subscriptions and watch an apple tv show and then turn it off for a year like it's totally doable with xbox like They're not churning them out right now.

8:48I just canceled Netflix because they raised the price. And then they released Beef Season 2. And I'm like, oh. I know. I know. What am I going to do? Yeah. It is pretty good, Season 2. Is it? Yeah. Okay, I haven't watched it yet. Not as good as Season 1, but I'm still liking it quite a bit. Okay. And Apple went straight from shrinking into your friends and neighbors. So, like, I have to keep that going for a month now. I'm watching For All Mankind. And then I just started watching the new Margot show. Yeah, my wife is watching. Margot's Got Money problems. She read the book too. So far she likes the show.

9:19Anyway. Yeah, it's cool. Oh yeah, someone mentioned Phil Spencer. I was just thinking about this. I still think it's insane that the news that he was leaving was, it broke on a Friday. Our own Ryan McCaffrey broke that news. And then on Monday, he was just gone. And he's been such like a Xbox gamer focused personality, face of Xbox. But he never had like, first of all, he didn't announce he was leaving. You know, leave like a six month roadmap or something. He is in, like, a little bit of limbo right now. Until October, yeah. Yeah, he was, like, walking around with Asha. He's supposedly still there.

9:53Okay. Until October. But I think he's, like, completely saying, like, I'm doing a handoff at work. I'm not the face of Xbox. Something's up. Yeah. Something's up. I mean, it's not like... Go ahead. He's been addressing, you know, Xbox fans directly for years, ever since he took over. But he's not going to, like, share the news that he's leaving? I don't know. Yeah, that seems weird, too. i mean the sarah bond thing was and then her just quitting yeah something something's up that there is some drama there um and i'm not saying that like anybody was being immature or anything just like it seems like there's more to more there's always more to the story like like we heard about with uh with uh sony's leadership shake-up when was that 15 years ago that came out this week was it when shuhei left the shoe hey oh with with shoe yeah yeah that was wild too uh yeah the Phil Spencer thinks weird because that's what I mean about this whole like town hall thing they had is like Phil's just gone and that whole thing was kind of weird and then this town hall thing just seems to be a we're going to reverse everything that he ever did for the past like 10 years like we're not Microsoft gaming anymore we're back to Xbox no more this is an Xbox it's yeah we're focusing on consoles and lowering the price of Game Pass I mean it does seem like a reassuring thing though if you are an Xbox only player it feels like okay this It's not all doom and gloom for me.

11:11It feels like they are making an active effort to make me feel like I'm getting my money's worth. And I do feel that that is a very strong PR move. But again, actions speak louder than words, and they just literally dropped the price of Game Pass, which is a pretty strong action. So curious to see if they can carry this momentum forward. So what happens when they do something like this? They're like, okay, Game Pass, we're going to make it really expensive, and we're going to say you can play games everywhere. When corporations do that, you try it, And when it doesn't work and people unsubscribe and you're losing money, you change tactics.

11:42It has nothing to do with who's in charge of the company. Like that's great that it's synced up, but they would have had to do this. Like they, they, they have to be ex that they can't just cost the company money. So it's like, this was going to happen. The fact that they synced it up with a leadership change and everything is like, that's the eyebrow raising the corporate timing. The, the weird thing is going to be like, there's so much talk about exclusives. Like if they're going to come back, who, who knows? Well, I mean, we talked about the Call of Duty no longer being a part of it. That's not necessarily the case.

12:11You do get Call of Duty. You just get it one year later. Yeah. Which is effectively meaning you're not going to play it. I'm talking about like Forza Horizon 6 coming to PlayStation, Fable. Is Gears or like I know a lot of folks are kind of hoping that their showcase next month is going to be like. Nick. Gears is exclusive. So I'll be interested to see if it happens. Did you see in that email that there was this talk about creative platforms, creation platforms or something? And it mentioned Minecraft and Roblox. And Roblox and stuff like that. It was Sea of Thieves. Yeah, Sea of Thieves, Minecraft and Elder Scrolls.

12:49And like, what does that mean? Mods, I guess. But like, I thought that was funny. Community driven style, like content creation and stuff like that. But it scares the hell out of me to say that in the same breath as Minecraft and everything. It's like, are we getting Elder Scrolls? It's taking a long time because they wanted to make it a builder like Fallout 4. Congrats. Is that what's happening? Congrats, guides team. There's going to be Grow a Garden in Elder Scrolls now. Yeah. But that seemed a little bit scary to me. And then, you know, if I were Asha, the thing in my email would be like, we have to put out Elder Scrolls game.

13:26Like, that's it. That's the week. Someone release this. You know, like, just put out the game. Yeah. Well, your sort of question about whether or not Elder Scrolls will be part of Game Pass and whether or not it's as big as Call of Duty. Dude, I think Call of Duty is past its prime. I think so, too. I'm not saying it's going away, but it's just, you know, for like 15 years, it was the best. You also said that in 2007, Damon. I probably didn't say that in 2007. I was probably excited about Modern Warfare back then. Yeah. It was the best-selling game of the year. we just took it for granted. We just knew Call of Duty was going to be the best-selling game of the year with the one anomaly being 2023 when Hogwarts Legacy came out.

14:05Hogwarts, yeah. Last year, Call of Duty was not the best-selling game of the year. It wasn't the second best-selling game of the year. It wasn't the third best-selling game of the year. It was the fourth or fifth. I've seen a couple of different reports. Now you could say, but it was on Game Pass and millions of people accessed it through Game Pass. Yeah, but on PlayStation, it didn't even make the top five downloads of the year. So that's it. I think Call of Duty is done as the thousand pound gorilla. I think it's just one of the heavy hitters this year. It's just alongside Fortnite and Minecraft and Roblox.

14:35It's just one of them now. What if we put Jon Snow in it? What if? Wait a minute. Infinite Warfare 2? Perhaps? No, I mean, I would be very surprised if the next time we see Call of Duty, it isn't set somewhere in the past, a la World War II or something within, you know, from the 40s to the 80s. I have a feeling we're going to see something set in that era, and it's going to be boots on the ground, old-school feeling Call of Duty with some cinematic flourishes. That's my bet, at least. They did a World War II a not too long ago, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it was just called Call of Duty World, WW2, right?

15:15Yeah. It would be interesting if they, I mean, everybody's scrambling right now to make an extraction shooter, right? So it's always like, if they're not at the head, they of course made their PUBG knockoff or whatever, Warzone, a few years late. They just seem to be behind multiplayer shooters, but I don't think the multiplayer shooter platform of Call of Duty is really going anywhere, but it just doesn't seem... Is it as big as Apex and everything now? I don't actually know. Well, I mean, Call of Duty tried the extraction stuff with DMZ. Warzone's really big. Yeah. yeah what about the base multiplayer it still seems like the biggest base multiplayer that's around yeah i mean i think it is i think it is because it's it's you don't really get that like anymore right like that's not comparable to apex or anything like that right like call of duty multiplayer is is kind of unique in the the fact that they're kind of the only ones that's i mean steam counter-strikes the biggest one so it's just like i don't see yeah into the world of Call of Duty console.

16:17Getting back to this Game Pass price drop, this is so unprecedented. I can only find two examples of this ever happening. Ever. UGM? No, in 2019, Netflix raised their price and Hulu countered it by lowering their ad-supported tier by$2. So there's that. And then if anyone remembers MoviePass. I do. I was a subscriber. It was like$40 a month and they lowered it to$10 a month. wow which obviously that that just completely destroyed their business but i don't know i don't know what the thinking was there i still have my movie pass card me too i only think of that johnny knoxville like theme park movie because that is a movie i would never watch unless unless it was for movie pass you know uh red lobster made shrimp all you can eat and then went out of business and now all you can eat shrimp is actually back they're back hey man i'm I'm still an active supporter of AMCA list, and this is not sponsored content.

17:15Well, it's nice. I was planning to resubscribe to Game Pass next month for Forza Horizon 6 anyway. Nice that I can do it for$23 instead of$30.

17:29The sun is forever. And so am I.

17:40ceros what's is this is this a preview embargo that's up today mark or is the review embargo no no the review should be live right now actually for people that are watching that's a week early games actually it's actually not a week early the game comes out monday it is one of those very secret 48 hours early and then add another 24 hours early because people in new zealand get to play so the game actually comes out 5 a.m on monday it's a weird thing um weird i think it's so apparently it's pronounced saros okay sarah i'm gonna say i'm gonna say saros for the rest of this podcast because that's what i'm calling it okay the devs call it saros but what do they know anyways uh we gave it a seven i can't speak to the review because i haven't seen it it's live now but we are not where you guys are watching this yet so uh i haven't seen it yet uh i have played probably like four hours i think it's great i think if you liked returnal the the very quick elevator pitch if you liked returnal you'll like saros if you didn't like returnal you might love sarah because it is very different in the sense that like you pick up the controller and you're like yep this is returnal it does all the same kind of stuff you can see it right here it's bullet hell it does the dulcet stuff where you like half press the left trigger for the alt fire full trigger for your you know your power move you pick up different guns all that still there it's a roguelike you die you start over at the base um what this game does that i personally like a lot better is it is a much more straightforward roguelike in this game you play through you die you pick up these um little crystal things you use those to beef your character up in a very straightforward way you walk up to a computer you put skill points in that stay there forever and then you continue your next run so it's a very so you just get stronger and stronger you just get more stronger and stronger where returnal not quite like that so um that's why i'm saying if if you were turned off by returnal a little bit seros might be your might be your game um story-wise i think it's way more comprehensible it's a it's a more straightforward you're on this planet because corporations want to mine the planet for different things um they've sent out three echelons you're part of the fourth um it's it's a very much like the the notes will tell you you know profit above all even you know employee safety type of deal so that's that kind of corporation's kind of a marathon-esque uh type of trend there there's a lesson in there somewhere with today's world um and uh yeah but other than that if again if you liked returnal and you played returnal you know what you're getting with sorrows it's just there's just a few minor changes um some of them will be uh like your dash is on your l1 now because um having to take your thumb off the right stick to push circle was kind of a pain um you have a shield which makes the game a lot easier than returnal was so that's a little shield there uh and that's how you power up your power weapon so not only are you you can dodge and stuff but sometimes those little bullet hell things are shooting at you become collectibles that you actually want to run into what he's doing right there is he's powering up his shield and then he does a shield uh he does a power move uh karuga lives again so because of that demand for this game increases yeah the game's actually a little bit easier this is the first boss this is profit he's uh it's good times so uh just to sum it up housemark is just the king of visuals presentation gameplay and they've done it again like this is a really really really good game uh and a great addition to the ps5 library if people are interested in it.

21:39Okay, with four hours into it, have you discovered or can you share whether or not it is actually a sequel to Eternal and connected in the same universe? As far as I know, it's not, but I don't know. As far as I know, it could be, who knows? But we all know Rahul Cooley. He's great in it. He sounds exactly how he's all sounded to us in real life. So that's great. But the character has a great beard. Yeah. It's modeled after him too. He used to just hang out in the office all the time. Yeah, all the time. So yeah. He's great in it. Hunting of Hill House. Yeah, Haunting of Hill House. He's in the House of Usher.

22:26The fall of the House of Usher. I can't remember. That was the one I was thinking of. I know him from Eye Zombie. He was also in Eye Zombie. know I'm from. Yeah. Yeah. And then, yeah. And then story-wise, I feel like it's more comprehensible because when you die, you go back to a base and there are other people there. So unlike, what was her name? Celeste from Returnal? Celine. Celine. Celine, yeah. There's no way to know. Where she was just like alone. This game, you have a whole cast of characters that you can interact with in between runs. No, you don't like that? I like how weird Returnal was, man.

23:03I like that it didn't tell you everything. I like that it made you use your brain. I'm excited for this regardless, but that's a little bit of a bummer to hear. Hold on. While you're playing the game, he'll radio back to the base and talk and stuff like that just to kind of like keep that stuff going. But there is a lot of mystery. Like right now in my game, like each of the cast members is like slowly going insane. I don't know why. So there's still a lot of mystery there. I want someone to spoil Returnal for me because I never finished it. So if anyone doesn't want to hear it, feel free to skip ahead.

23:34No idea. What ends up being the mystery in Returnal? What's happening? I mean, it's been a minute since I've beaten the game, but I think the TLDR is you have to beat the game twice the first time you do it. It's like, oh, cool. I escaped from this alien planet and whatnot. But then upon, like, you get reset when you beat the final boss, and she's like, what the heck? I thought I escaped this planet. What's going on? And then it's revealed ultimately by beating the game again that this is all kind of like an allegory for her crashing off of a boat, like a bridge killing her daughter in an accident okay and it's like trauma of all this stuff um that's like the tldr and there's a lot of cosmic horror thrown in there but it was all a dream that's roughly what i remember it's basically like uh jacob's ladder to some extent well and this game does the same thing so if you'll remember like returnal like it would like when you die it shows these like weird like flashback type there's a spaceman kind of yeah Yeah, stuff like that.

24:33This game does the same thing. You die and then it'll the game kind of centers around the sun because then the sun if an eclipse happens, all the enemies get way harder and stuff like that. And so there's a lot of mystery. The blood moon rises once again. Yeah, exactly. Great game. I think it's super fun. I cannot wait though. I am very excited. I'm a little bit sad to hear that it's easier because I want something just as mean to me as Returnal, but that's fine. So what I'll say is Mitchell, who is another class of human being, so I'll just beat Elden Ring before it came out. Probably one of the only people on earth to do that.

25:13He said he only died nine times. Oh, man. See, I don't want to hear that. I want to have a challenge. But for reference, I have died five times, and I haven't even beat the first boss. All right. So I got to throw that out there. Mitchell, he's another class of human.

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28:10Who knows? Maybe a Mega Man. But we're going from a game where in Seros with its dashes set to L1, where Pragmata, the dash is set to R1. This is going to be a little bit tricky, but I think I can manage. It's rough. it's rough but luckily in seros the r1 is the shield so even if you think you're dashing you at least turn your shield still use no but uh pragmatis fantastic honestly uh it passed the nick lamone five second test of it feels good to move around that dash button whoever whoever made the dash feel sound and the way it moves work uh you deserve a raise it it all feels so nice and the game is i'm sure you've seen this all over the internet but my suspicions were correct that it is a game that feels like a ps2 game in the best possible way in 2026 and i think we need more games like that it's super charming the relationship between hugh and diana is uh very uh wholesome and just really nice to see um it's a nice subversion of the sad dad uh trope that we've seen in games where he's like he has a tragic backstory he reveals that he was an orphan and all the stuff but he goes yeah it turned out all right though so it's like he doesn't dwell on the fact that he was an orphan he's very positive a lot about like he had a very loving family yeah it's nice didn't really want for things and stuff like that so he's not a dad and and just the game feels very arcadey like dead space but arcadey and i really like that about it and the the puzzle combat combined with the the strategy the rock paper scissors approach of what weapon to use what weak spot to hit on enemies combined with the different ways of going about doing puzzles is really fun and the game is super flexible and you know do i prefer puzzle mechanics do i prefer shooting mechanics or do i prefer a nice blend of the two and the game has uh customization options and upgrades that will complement whatever play style you prefer obviously you're gonna have a better time if you do more balanced stuff but it's just really smart very fun and it feels like it's a nice short and sweet experience i think i'm about halfway through the game roughly and loving in it and my favorite stuff in the world is the game is mostly easy and then you get to the red zones which are like the locked up zones they're optional and those are the most fun things that you that that i've experienced in the game have you have you unlocked the challenge levels yes they're not they're really good it's like the metal gear vr missions they're they're just really and the rewards are super good for all these they're like not three percent yeah they are not optional you you need to do that oh you do well there you go you heard it here first They just give you really good things.

30:43The rewards are worth it. You shouldn't just not, like a Death Stranding and stuff like that, you could just not do them. In this game, you should absolutely do them. There's no punishment for losing. Even in the Red Rooms, you just get sent back to your place and you pick up the weapons and go back in. It's great. Halfway through a challenge, you could just be like, restart. If you're like, this isn't going well. The plot of this game is that there's a and everybody else spoiled everything they talked about so far. And you can trust me, readers, I will not spoil a thing here. Even though I get accused of that all the time.

31:18But they're on the moon and it's all about 3D replication. It's like, oh, these robots are made to build the moon. Is there a holographic cutscene at some point where you watch a French doctor talk to the secretary about, yes, I designed a giant baby. It's just news to smash stuff why did you design it like a baby i thought it'd be creepy what are we doing i hadn't considered that what if we make this robot look like a baby yeah he's got a hat and everything yeah it's like well that's the welder it's yeah it's a it's a really cool visual like if diana wasn't on your back it would just look like dead space but having this little girl on your back with her flowing hair moving around it just it looks really cool the moon is a cool setting it's gorgeous yeah um i am at the area with the first where you you know you go through like a new york city i don't really know why they're trying to replicate new york city on the moon they explain that there's lord there's lord david i like yeah there's just a little bit it's just it's just that like oh humans want a place to kind of like that's what it is but like obviously it's gone amok right because it's pre-printing the same shops over and over again stuff like that yeah yeah i mean obviously yeah that's there's weird there's capcom easter eggs in there there's like a ghouls and ghosts poster resident devil three or something like five there is a mega man there is a mega man i missed the mega man yeah there's a little animated mega man that uh cabin the uh cool computer in your room will show you sometimes yeah and also like the hideouts straight up just look like mega man's helmet like the little icon for him also the most glaring thing is that Diana is wearing a blue bomber jacket.

33:00I'm telling you, it's not off the table yet. And you know, Mega Man Legends does end with Mega Man on the moon. So I don't know. That's where Legends 2 ends? Yeah. And Legends 3, the one that was going to come out for 3DS, you were supposed to bring him back from the moon, but then that game got canceled. Oh, I just... Well, yeah, because you're the only person who played Mega Man Legends. That's not true. They're like, do we make a third one for Nick? Yes. I beat this boss, and then I'm in the next area, which is like a forest-like area. They're 3D printing a forest. Oh, the forest area is so cool.