Starfield has officially managed to surpass the concurrent Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim player record on Steam. The latest Bethesda title came out on September 6, 2023, taking over the gaming community with its vast space adventure and thousands of planets to explore. That said, Starfield also raised the expectations for future open-world games.

According to SteamDB, Starfield peaked on Sunday, September 10, with the title hitting over 330,700 concurrent players on Steam. The label has achieved more than Skyrim did 12 years ago, with the latter hitting 287,411 gamers playing the title at the same time.

Also Read: Starfield Crosses 6 Million Players On Day 2 Making It The One Of The Biggest Launches In Bethesda's History

Starfield Accoplishes Greater Concurrent Player Record Than Skyrim

The recent Starfield player numbers have proven to be an incredible feat for the title regarding sales and general appreciation. The title recently also crossed a player count of 6 million on its second day, making it the biggest Bethesda launch to date. However, the space-adventure epic has yet to surpass the numbers for Fallout 4 when counting concurrent players.The SteamDB numbers only recorded the concurrent player count for PC. The console concurrent count remains unknown, meaning the title may have already beaten many IPs launched this year so far.

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Regarding concurrent players, Fallout 4 peaked in Bethesda's list, holding 472,962 players at its height. The game still has time before achieving similar or more significant numbers. Only five days after its launch, the game has garnered much attention and love from the gaming community. The title also has the potential to beat the likes of Fallout with its availability on the Xbox Game Pass, making it more accessible to players on the available platforms: Xbox Series X|S and Microsoft Windows.

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According to many fans, the title is also one of the best Bethesda launches. As one of the few Xbox exclusives released recently and a new IP from Bethesda after 25 years, the game has enormous content for fans to discover, making it a vast journey for single-player title lovers.

Activision claims to have “disabled a workaround to a detection system” in Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone which has led to legit players getting banned by Ricochet's anti-cheat system. The company says the problem “impacted a small number of legitimate player accounts,” and all accounts affected were restored.

However, zebleer, who runs the Phantom Overlay store selling cheats, claims the problem is much bigger than Activision’s post makes it seem. In a detailed post on X, they wrote when Ricochet scanned the memory of a player’s system to find known cheat software, one of the signatures it scanned for was a plaintext string reading: 54 72 69 67 67 65 72 20 42 6f 74 (Trigger Bot).

Also Read: Activision Wins $14.5 Million In Call Of Duty Cheating Lawsuit

How Many Players Were Affected By This Hack

Zebleer claims that “for quite some time,” it has been possible to get someone banned permanently just by sending them a friend request with a phrase or posting a message like “Nice Trigger Bot dude!” in the game’s chat since it would then show up in their memory and get recognized by Ricochet.

Despite Activision claiming that a “small number” of legit accounts were affected, zebleer claims that “several thousand random COD players were banned by this exploit” before anyone started targeting big streamers.

Zebleer points to BobbyPoff, a CoD streamer, as one of the players who got banned due to the person using the exploit since October 3 before his account was suddenly unbanned. Similar to other players and streamers caught up in the bans, there had been intense speculation and discussion over whether or not BobbyPoff was a cheater.

The Call of Duty Updates account suggested that the Ricochet team will share a blog post, though the account hasn’t specified if the post will discuss this exploit.

Also Read: Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Live Action Trailer Revealed

Activision Finally Trimming Call Of Duty’s Huge Downloads

Call of Duty is infamous for its huge file sizes, but ahead of the October 25th launch of Black Ops 6, Activision will finally be making some changes so that Call of Duty games don’t eat up a lot of space on users’ hard drives — including separating Warzone from the default download for the annual games.

The default separation of Warzone is going to happen soon: on August 21, along with the launch of Season 5 Reloaded. As part of that, when users download an annual Call of Duty game, users will be able to choose Warzone if they want. And if users just wish to download Warzone, that will still be an option.

Horizon: Zero Dawn, created by Guerrilla Games, will soon be getting a remaster. Recently, the remaster’s co-developer Nixxes stepped into the spotlight on the PlayStation blog to highlight a number of improvements players will see in the remaster, including the addition of lots of new NPCs.

The post talks about a number of updates coming to the game, perhaps the most notable of which is that Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered will "significantly boost the number of non-player characters." This doesn’t mean more quests or stories, but it does mean that villages and camps will be populated with more NPCs.

Also Read: Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered Is Coming to PS5 and PC

Remaster To Have More People Moving Around

Brian van Nunen, senior technical game designer at Nixxes, offered more details: “Building the game for PS5 allowed us to leverage the increased amount of memory available, enabling us to significantly boost the number of non-player characters," he said.

"We added many more places for NPCs to stand, sit, work, and fulfill their needs. We gave them more varied schedules to increase movement and liveliness in different areas. We also tried to make creative use of existing animations. For example, there is now a woman feeding geese at the well in Meridian, reusing an existing sowing animation. Additionally, on the bridge to Meridian, we’ve made significant strides in improving the atmosphere and sense of activity.”

This is not the only change coming to the game. The blog also talks about how the foliage is being overhauled to be more dense, realistic, and closer to the original concept art. Besides, the terrain is also being updated, including snow and sand that actually moves as it’s disturbed.

Also Read: Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition is Coming to PC; Release Date Confirmed by Sony

Horizon: Zero Dawn Remaster Gets Better Lighting

Apart from these improvements, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered benefits from 10 additional hours of motion capture data for various characters, which Nixxes says will make conversations seem livelier.

Mark Bazelmans, senior technical artist, said: “Horizon Zero Dawn has almost 300 conversations and well over 3100 dialog options, so we needed to find a way to easily integrate this huge number of updated animations into the conversations," he said. 

"We created a tool with Python to process the almost 2500 mocap files that Guerrilla provided to replace the original animation in the conversations, removing deprecated events and replacing those with the mocap and setup.”

The blog post also talks about how the lighting of the game has been improved, both world and cinematic, and how character models were updated to have more detail to hair, skin, and outfits.

IO Interactive, the studio that was behind the development of the popular Hitman series, hopes its upcoming James Bond origin story could start a trilogy. While speaking to IGN, IO boss Hakan Abrak said the team feels like it's had "20 plus years of training for the agent fantasy," courtesy of Hitman.

Indeed, Agent 47 is very Bond-like with his endless talents and ability to handle any weapon you can think of. "But obviously James Bond is a different IP. It's a huge IP. It's not our IP. It's actually the first IP that is not our original IP from the ground up," Abrak told the publication.

Also Read: PS5 Pro Announced: Launch Date, Price, Specs, Games, and More

IO Interactive To Bring James Bond’s Origin Story

"So it's not a gamification of a movie," Abrak continued. "It's completely beginning and becoming a story, hopefully for a big trilogy out there in the future. And equally important and exciting, it's a new Bond. It's a Bond we built from the ground up for gamers. It's extremely exciting with all the tradition and all the history there is... to work on this together with the family [and create] a Bond that the gamers can call their own and grow with."

"It's been, what, almost 15 years since the last game. So it's been a long time," Abrak added. "It definitely is something that is not overexposed in gaming. We actually see that as a strength... There are a lot of people out there who think about GoldenEye as the classic... I don't want to speak too big about it, but I just hope we'll do a thing that will define James Bond in gaming for years to come. And that is not only one game but that we create a universe for gamers to own for many years to come that we can grow with that next to the Bond on the movies."

Speaking of when fans will get to see the output of IO Interactive’s efforts, that’s still to be seen for now. It’s anyone's guess when the story of the decorated British spy will hit the consoles.

Also Read: Call of Duty Black Ops 6 Open Beta was the Biggest in Franchise History

James Bond Fans Will Have To Wait A Little Longer

"I don't have an update today, but believe me, it's itching here as well to be talking about it soon," Abrak admitted. "So we are following our plans. The production's going amazingly well and we will soon be talking more about it. I know it was a little teaser, not a lot of information, but there's a lot of cool stuff coming up."

IO first announced its James Bond title back in 2021. Very little has been given out about the game since, although some information has come out of the cracks.

But while fans will have to wait a little longer to hear anything more concrete on IO’s James Bond, the studio has also announced it’s taking on publishing duties for MindsEye, the expensive action adventure in development from former Rockstar executive Leslie Benzies.

If you are someone who loves the Call of Duty series so much that you wish to have it available on every surface, Microsoft has some good news for you. The company has brought its new Black Ops 6 Accessories Collection - featuring two customizable Call of Duty: Black Ops 6-themed controller variants, and a matching Xbox Series X wrap.

Speaking of the controllers, Microsoft’s Black Ops 6 Accessories Collection includes a themed Xbox Wireless Controller as well as a fancied-up Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2.

Both, showcase the company’s overblown marketing strategy, designed to "capture the tension and intrigue of the '90s spy thriller theme" and bring visual elements that "immerse players deeper into the game's world."

The newly launched controllers are available through the company’s Xbox Design Labs website, which means they are fully considerable aside from the mandatory Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 skin.

Also Read: Microsoft Introduces Wave 2, Integrates AI Across All M365 Products

Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 Controllers Price And Features

The standard controller starts at £84.55 in the UK, while the Elite Series 2 starts at £124.99 for the base controller and Black Ops 6 skin. Both controllers can be bought right now, and a matching Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 wrap for Xbox Series X, costing £49.99, is currently available to pre-order ahead of its 23rd October release via the Microsoft Store.

Consumers who pre-order the controller before the end of 22nd October will get a token granting players one hour of double Black Ops 6 XP, but only “while supplies last.”

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will be released for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC next Friday, 25th October. It’s also available as part of a PC Game Pass or Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, but there won’t be any signing up for a free one-month trial to try it out.

Also Read: Microsoft Lays Off 650 Employees From Its Xbox Division

Call of Duty Black Ops 6 Open Beta was the Biggest in Franchise History

Previously, Activision Blizzard confirmed that Call of Duty Black Ops 6 Open Beta was the biggest in the franchise's history through an official X post. The Black Ops 6 Open Beta ended with a massive positive response from gamers, as it showcased various new additions coming to the franchise, including the new movement and human shield features, which were used by players during the beta session.

According to the X post by Activision Blizzard, the Call of Duty Black Ops 6 Open Beta was on top in terms of total players compared to all the past Beta Sessions, alongside maintaining the same ranking in total hours played, playtime per player, and most matches played.

The Halo Infinite battle royale mode which was reportedly scrapped by Microsoft was in fact a real thing, with one developer saying it "could have been a game changer" for the beloved Xbox franchise.

According to GameSpot, Halo Infinite battle royale was mentioned on the LinkedIn page of Mike Clopper, the former game director at Halo support studio Certain Affinity. Clopper is now working for Raven Software.

"I led a large team of designers working on a canceled Battle Royale mode for Halo," Clopper said. "I believe this product could have been a game changer for the franchise. We loved playing it and working on it was a fantastic experience in spite of its cancelation."

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Why Was Halo Battle Royale Scrapped

Though a halo battle royale has been rumored for years following the success of the likes of PUBG and Fortnite, a report in January revealed it had been in development but is now scrapped by Microsoft. Clopper is the first developer to comment on it publicly, however, with everyone else at Certain Affinity, halo Studios, and Xbox all staying quiet.

Certain Affinity president and COO Paul Sams did tease a large project in September 2022 though, and Certain Affinity itself posted on X in April 2022 to say it was "further evolving Halo Infinite in some new and exciting ways."

Halo has otherwise witnessed some drastic changes in the past few years, most recently with developer 343 Industries being rebranded as Halo Studios. This happened after player counts for Halo Infinite dropped dramatically after launch as fans expressed frustration over a lack of content, poor progression systems, monetization, and much more.

Microsoft seems to be trying to restore some excitement to the flagship Xbox franchise with the rebranding. The company also announced a shift to Unreal Engine 5 and said "multiple projects" are in development.

Also Read: Annapurna Interactive Team Resigns Following Owner Dispute

SuperGaming Launches Indus Battle Royale Game

Indian video game developer SuperGaming has announced the launch of its latest battle royale mobile game, Indus. Slated to launch on October 16 for both Android and iOS, Indus Battle Royale will bring a unique twist to the conventional battle royale gaming style with its dual victory concept. Besides, it will come with a new in-game feature called “Grudge,” which will enable players to track down opponents who have taken them down.

The game is set in the future on the planet Indus, featuring visuals that are inspired by ancient civilizations. Within the game, players will take on the role of Mythwalkers-elite operatives under the command of a powerful criminal syndicate, COVEN.

Players will be given the task of collecting a rare resource called Cosmium while outlasting other players on Virlok, a floating island-style map sent on planet Indus, characterized by shifting terrain. It will also include several Indian-inspired avatars such as Morni, Pokhran, Sirtaj, Heena, and Mech-Balika, alongside various futuristic-style weapons and vehicles.