The Dropshot

We go through Activision's MW4 DMZ Deep Dive Part 2 blog post, the full guide to the Forward Operating Base (FOB), section by section. Part 1 is on the Patreon. Some of it is a real step up from DMZ 1: there's finally a stash, an actual DMZ cash economy, a vendor with rotating stock, weapon manuals you have to find and extract to unlock gunsmith builds, and three operator trait trees (Warfighter,...

GTA 6 isn't even out yet and the Miami Heat are changing their name for it. On November 18th, the night before launch, the Heat become the Vice City Heat — new jerseys, a new court, a "Welcome to Vice City" sign, all on ESPN. Raz and Jake try to figure out what Rockstar paid, why the NBA said yes, and why Coca-Cola still bothers advertising at all. Then the GTA 6 ESRB rating drops, and it says mor...

Microsoft just handed the next mainline Halo to Activision, and two guys who ran a Call of Duty show for years have thoughts. Raz has been saying for five years that Halo should have made a battle royale, and he explains why it might already be too late. Jake makes the case that Halo is in such a bad spot that new developers can't make it worse, and asks what Call of Duty's monetization playbook w...

Call of Duty is done with Black Ops, and Modern Warfare 4 is the "epic conclusion" of the Task Force 141 story. We think it's the smartest call Activision has made in years. It only matters if the next series changes the game as much as jetpacks did, and a new name and new villains won't do that. We also make a prediction: Call of Duty will copy WARDOGS. It happened with PUBG and Warzone, then wit...

WARDOGS launched into Early Access on Thursday, peaked at roughly 340,000 concurrent players on Steam, went straight to the #1 seller spot — and got review bombed down to Mixed at the same time. Raz has 8.5 hours in since launch. Jake has 0.0, because Tarkov currently has him in a chokehold. So this one is a split: what WARDOGS actually plays like two days in, and what the launch looked like from...

The first FPS Games Show happened, and the two biggest things in it both came from the guy who's had Escape from Tarkov in beta for a decade. Nikita opened the whole showcase with Fragmentary Order — sci-fi, Unreal Engine 5, maps four to five times the size of Tarkov's, and a promise that it'll be "more complex, more punishing, more painful." Then Battlestate turned around and launched a publishin...

We played the Modern Warfare 4 beta this weekend — including Warzone and the new Zodiac Resurgence map — and it took about fifteen minutes to know it was over. Not "this year is mid" over. Over over. This is the episode where a podcast that ran on Call of Duty for 600+ episodes says out loud that it's done. Raz makes the case that nothing else in an FPS matters if you can't see or hear the enemy,...

Two shooter betas dropped on the same weekend, so we played both and came back with very different verdicts. WARDOGS is Bulkhead's 100-player, three-team tactical shooter with a real money economy — you buy your loadout every respawn, you lose money when you die, and it turns out that changes how a match actually feels. Modern Warfare 4 finally dumps omnimovement, removes bloom from hipfire, and p...

Episode 600. On August 21st the Modern Warfare 4 early access beta, the WARDOGS closed beta, and Call of Duty NEXT all land on the same day — and the two games are asking for wildly different amounts of money. We go through everything Activision is cramming into the MW4 beta: a playable campaign mission called Entrenched, six multiplayer maps, the return of Ground War, and a brand new Warzone Resu...

Imagine Battlefield, but dying matters. That's the WARDOGS closed alpha in one sentence — and after a weekend in it, we're calling it the most polished alpha we've ever played. WARDOGS is Bulkhead and Team17's 100-player tactical shooter: three factions, one randomized control zone, first side to 100 points wins. You start with $10,000, you buy your loadout from in-game vendors, and when you die y...

On Tuesday, Electronic Arts stops being a public company. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners are closing a $55 billion all-cash buyout — the largest leveraged buyout of a public company in history — and PIF walks away with 93.4% of Madden, FIFA, Apex, The Sims, Battlefield and BioWare. So we spent half the episode on what that actually means: w...

WARDOGS ran its first ever gameplay livestream this week and it went about as well as you'd expect from a studio full of guys in their late twenties: the alpha codes were a QR-code disaster, the stream started two hours late, and it ended with a Twitch ban for throwing a sex toy across the room. And yet — the actual gameplay looked incredible. We break down everything we saw: the enormous map, the...

Infinity Ward just had its biggest Modern Warfare 4 reveal week yet — and the community immediately found the flaws. We break down everything shown at the MW4 creator event and Fanatics Fest: the Kill Block modular map with 500+ configurations, the gunplay reveal and the instant visual recoil backlash, VFX masking, no-bloom hipfire, doors, takedowns, proximity chat, and the Aston Martin Dreadnough...

Black Flag Resynced just became the biggest Assassin's Creed launch in history — and it's a remake of a 13-year-old game with mixed Steam reviews. The boys break down the day-one microtransaction backlash, whether the remake gold rush is good for gaming, and which classics deserve the full ground-up treatment next. Then it gets heavier: Microsoft's July layoff wave hit Bethesda and ZeniMax hard, a...

Valve's Steam Machine reviews are in — and the verdict is brutal: by most measures it's slightly less powerful than a base PS5 while costing more than double. We break down the benchmarks, why Valve went semi-custom on the chips, and whether "access to the entire Steam library" is worth the price of admission. Before that, we go deep on Escape from Tarkov's first-ever season, Cord Breach — the new...

GTA 6 pre-orders are live, the price is confirmed, and the internet is melting down — so naturally that's the whole episode. Raz and Jake break down the $80 standard / $100 Ultimate pricing, the "physical copy" that's really just a download code in a box with no disc, and whether you're actually losing anything (spoiler: lending to your buddies, and not much else). Then it's the free-market case f...

Halo is on PlayStation. Let that sink in. On this one we get into Halo: Campaign Evolved — the full Unreal Engine 5 remake landing on PS5, Xbox and PC on July 28 — and why cutting the multiplayer to protect the "next mainline Halo" might be the dumbest part of the whole thing. Plus the AI controversy Halo Studios can't stop being squirrely about. Then it's GTA 6: pre-orders go live June 25, Novemb...

Jake's sick, Raz is recovered, and karma is real — so we kept it loose and answered your questions from the Discord this week. We get into whether Apex hitting all-time-high player counts means anything for a Warzone comeback (short version: Warzone is the abusive ex who shows up with roses), why Zelda is a children's game, the most overrated franchises in gaming, when a game stops being a game an...

It's the summer of the delay. This week Raz and Jake break down two tactical shooters moving in opposite directions — Hell Let Loose: Vietnam getting pushed back to August after a rough beta, and Wardogs pulling its early access UP (something you basically never see) — and what each move says about a studio's confidence. Then it's Summer Game Fest: the turn-based Star Wars Zero Company that's righ...

Modern Warfare 4 got revealed, 007 First Light is finally out, and the Hell Let Loose: Vietnam beta dropped — so naturally we spent an episode on the franchise we swore off, a Bond game that isn't quite Hitman, and a beta that can't hold a frame rate. We get into the HLL: Vietnam open beta (the rubber-banding, the keybinds that won't stick, the studio's track record) and whether it's worth grabbin...

Forza Horizon 6 dropped in Japan and we both went deep — Raz put in 27 hours, Jake is still learning. This week we break down everything: who this game is actually for, whether you need to be a car guy to enjoy it, and whether the critics are right about the Metacritic 92. We go hard on the manual vs. automatic debate (Jake is on manual with clutch, Raz is on automatic — and Jake has opinions abou...

California's Stop Killing Games bill just cleared its first major hurdle — and if it becomes law, publishers won't be able to just flip the switch on your games anymore. We break down what the bill actually says, why the gaming industry is quietly panicking, and whether it'll even survive long enough to matter. Then: Subnautica 2 launched in Early Access and immediately broke Steam records for the...

Sony just wrote off $765 million on Bungie — and somehow that's not even the wildest thing that happened in gaming this week. We break down what PlayStation's impairment loss actually means for Marathon, whether Xbox has quietly become just a publishing label, and why the GTA 6 PC delay is a deliberate cash grab no matter what Take-Two's CEO says. Plus: Tarkov is officially going the live service...

The boys talk the news of the week in gaming including a substantial amount of time on the much-anticipated GTA 6. 0:00 — Intro 5:00 — Format explanation: public episodes vs. Patreon 5:58 — Grey Zone Warfare / Tarkov fail story 9:10 — Active Matter extraction shooter preview 15:44 — Black Ops 7 review bombing + AI in game assets controversy 27:59 — Windows Recall (K2) / Microsoft bloatware story 3...

Big news. Exciting changes. L Call of Duty. W Claude. Big announcement in this one take a listen. The podcast is available wherever you listen to podcasts, and ad-free & early access versions - as well as bonus episodes - are available to all of our Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/thedropshot) supporters. We stream the podcast live on our website (https://www.thedropshot.com/live), on YouTube (ht...