I liked Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’s battle royale mode Blackout when I played it. That was, of course, before the modes went into rotation. Then Apex Legends came along, making other battle royale games seem positively archaic by comparison. At this point though, I’m thoroughly over games of its ilk – but if you’ve had enough for Fortnite and Apex and want to try something else, Activision has announced that Blackout is going free-to-play for the entirety of April.

Wrestler Booker T – that’s Robert Huffman to his mum – is suing Activision, saying they put the likeness of his alter ego, comic book character G.I Bro in Black Ops 4, without his consent or the appropriate licencing.

For ages, I’ve been hoping that Activision would break the game up and sell its bits individually. As somebody who doesn’t play the multiplayer at all, but adores Zombies and single player, I’d happily pay less to receive just the bits of Call of Duty that I enjoy playing. While they’re not quite there yet, Activision has released a version of Black Ops 4 on PC that removes Zombies from the mix.

After five years of waiting, players finally got to roam the wild west again in Red Dead Redemption 2. The game scored incredibly well critically, and sold incredibly well too, going on to have the best weekend opening of any product in the history of entertainment media. It was still outsold by Call of Duty.

blackout For the last week or so, Call of Duty players in South Africa (and other countries, predominantly – but not limited to the Southern Hemisphere) have been unable to play the Battle Royale mode, Blackout. Instead, players are greeted with error messages and infinite wait times.

Earlier this week, Black Ops developer Treyarch responded to the controversy over the game’s reduced server send rates. It was discovered that the server send rate in the released version of the game was a third of the send rate seen in the beta. Then, Treyarch said that the rate reduction was done to ensure network stability, and that they would tune the network. They've been increased - but not as much as players had hoped.

This weekend, it was revealed that the server send rate for Black Ops 4 was set to 20hz, a third of what they were during the beta. Treyarch has responded.

Some people were worried that Black Ops 4’s lack of a single player campaign would hurt the game’s sales. Those people were evidently very wrong.