Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Pop-Up: The DMZ Has Never Been This Much Fun

Image credit: Infinity Ward, Activision. The week of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 DMZ reveals continues, and the latest highlighted a questionable addition that seems to offer an unfair advantage in an extraction shooter.

This year's open-world RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker and its myriad choices got me thinking: What does it really mean for your choices to matter in a video game? Typically, we think it's a good use of branching narratives when you have a properly big, dramatic effect on how things play out or when you have hundreds of endings. Just look at how so much attention on Baldur's Gate 3 focused on its endings or, years before, how everyone tended to ignore the smaller ways the Mass Effect trilogy changed across three games in favor of looking at the restrictive outcomes in Mass Effect 3. Large-scale narrative branches are engaging for a reason. They're satisfying, and they make you feel a sense of influence over events and characters you care about. Like with video game romance, however, they have become somewhat stale and predictable in form. So for this list, I decided to look at three games that use branching narratives in bolder and unexpected ways.

Sam Hill is a news writer at Polygon covering gaming and entertainment. He's a Portland, Oregon–based journalist known for covering gaming, the outdoors, national parks, tech, food, and internet culture. He has written for a range of publications including Outside Magazine, Boston Magazine, Vice, the Seattle Times and Digital Trends. New mod gives NPCs their own histories, grudges, and reasons to hunt down Arthur Morgan

If you’ve ever watched someone play an old PlayStation game and wondered why their character keeps spinning around in circles, congratulations, you’ve already met tank controls. If you’re unfamiliar, here’s your quick introduction: With tank controls, pressing up moves your character forward in whatever direction they’re facing, and pressing left or right only rotates them, so with the stick alone, you can’t sidestep or turn on a dime. That’s manageable in a hallway. It’s much less so when you’re sneaking past a guard, lining up a shot, or timing a leap across a pit, which is why the same scheme caused trouble in just about every genre during the PS1 era. These eight classic games are the hardest to go back to, whether the culprit is tank controls or something else entirely. The dealbreaker: Lining up one jump means turning in place, backing up, taking a run-up, and holding a grab button in midair. Every single time Reminder: Tomb Raider is a platformer. You’re jumping roughly every 15 seconds, and most of those jumps demand precision measured in single pixels.

Amazon has launched another buy 1, get 1 50% off book sale this week and it includes the wonderful Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia. This hardcover book is a great gift for fans of the video game series and the latest discount makes it a good time to pick up a copy for yourself and a friend. The encyclopedia was originally published back in 2018, but has consistently been one of the most popular Legend of Zelda books out there. In addition to being part of Amazon's BOGO promotion, it's also on sale for 45% off list price. Buy 1, Get 1 50% OffThe Legend of Zelda EncyclopediaIt is worth noting that there's a reason this book has consistently been on sale over the last few years. The encyclopedia only explores the first 30 years of The Legend of Zelda, which means it doesn't include information from Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom. The timeline and database element of the book only extends to the Twilight Princess era of the games. Preview of The Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia. That being said, it's still the only version of the encyclopedia that exists.