With its latest patch for Marathon, Bungie has decided that the haunting, derelict expanse of Tau Ceti IV is stressful enough without any adrenaline-crazed acrobats launching themselves across your screen like frenzied, gun-toting cybergibbons. Marathon is now, officially, a No Movement Freak Zone.

In its patch notes for Marathon update 1.0.5.2, Bungie says it's fixed a movement exploit that had been allowing players to generate unintended levels of momentum by sliding into and cancelling equipment or ability animations like the Thief's grapple device. And the studio says we should expect a similar zero-tolerance policy on movement exploits going forward.

Bungie said that by allowing players to launch themselves at high speeds with little drawback, the slide cancel exploit broke a central tenet of its design theory: Nobody gets to engage in freak behavior for free.

"One of our core philosophies for Marathon is that rapid repositioning and aggression must always have a meaningful cost. That cost can be an ability charge, heat buildup, or increased risk but it must exist and be understandable to an observer," Bungie said in the patch notes. "Unbounded movement, while expressive and clip-worthy, is ultimately unhealthy for the pace of play we want to maintain for Marathon. To set expectations early, we will be looking at any future movement exploits through the same lens."

Thief players can still use the grapple ability for a one-off boost of momentum, but doing so will now incur an ability cooldown where the previous movement exploit hadn't.

While we should spare a moment of silence for those in the Marathon highlight reel ecosystem who must once again remain within intended velocity margins, I think I speak for many when I say: Thank god. Nothing turns me off a shooter like the idea of having to contend with high-intensity combat contortionists. I'm an honest man and I expect to be murdered in honest ways.

If I ambush you with a shotgun, I guarantee it'll be at a respectable, pedestrian pace. Hopefully you'll return the courtesy. It's only neighborly.

Arc Raiders' new Flashpoint update brings a bushel of changes to shake up the state of Embark's robotic post-apocalypse: two new weapons expand the raider arsenal with SMGs and energy shotguns, a new airborne Arc enemy threatens players with an array of laser weaponry, and locked rooms will be stuffed with ever better loot.

But the best change in Flashpoint is a balm for a long-standing source of raider frustration: Late spawns. According to the version 1.22.0 patch notes, players are now more likely to be sorted into a fresh server if they embark from Speranza with their own loadout.

"As part of an ongoing look at free loadout usage and how it impacts the game, we're going to bias the matchmaking to put players with custom loadouts into fresh servers," Embark said in the patch notes. "This won't be a guarantee, as map choice, time of day, and region will still affect the number of players available to matchmake. This does have an effect on overall matchmaking times so we'll be keeping a close eye on it."

Since Arc Raiders' launch, late spawns have been one of the biggest possible bummers raiders can face. Nothing's as disheartening as loading into a match where 10 minutes have already passed, meaning you've risked your valuable gear just to enjoy the privilege of rummaging whatever scraps have been left by raiders who got first dibs on a map's worth of fresh loot containers.

Now, as long as you're not using a free loadout, that's an outcome that should be a lot less likely. Raiders with bespoke kits should have better odds of a good return on their gear investment, and while that could make life a little harder if you're relying on a free loadout, you should still have some time to stuff your pockets for funds to get back on your feet.

The implications and impacts of Arc Raiders' free loadouts have been the subject of regular discourse since launch, but it's unsurprising that we're seeing Embark tinker with its formula now that Marathon introduced its own competing vision of free loadout philosophy—one in which freebie-toting Rook players always join late and can only play solo.

While we'll likely see more adjustments in the future, Embark reiterated its intent for free loadouts in the Flashpoint patch notes:

"Free loadouts are primarily meant as a safety net for a player's personal economy. With these kits, those who play carefully should have enough to build themselves back up, accomplish a few tasks, or make a bit of progress."

This week, the first season pass arrived for the recently-reborn Skate in an update that—as a quick glance at the Skate subreddit will tell you—isn't being received very well, with players complaining that a spattering of superficial challenge additions are being used to justify a pile of new microtransactions.

The most reviled among Skate's new monetization vectors is the Isaac Clarke bundle, which offers players the opportunity to roll around San Vansterdam as a cardboard-and-duct-tape knockoff of the Dead Space protagonist for the price of 3350 San Van Bucks, which shakes out to around $35 USD.

If that price alone didn't feel contemptuous enough for you, the bundle's got all the usual grimy monetization trappings: It's a limited time offering. It's got stickers and emotes crammed in to rationalize the price. And it costs just enough SVB to force you to buy more premium currency than you need if the bundle's all you're interested in.

That all felt grimy enough to me already, especially when players have noted that Skate 3 had an Isaac Clarke skin that only cost the amount of time it took to enter a cheat code—and that one wasn't cardboard. But it became particularly egregious when I fired up Skate myself and ran into repeated crashes for 40 minutes before I could check the in-game store.

After making my character—I was starting a new account—the initial load into the tutorial took an unsettling amount of time. After a solid two minutes of watching the kickflipping load screen graphic, I was finally dropped into the world, where I proved myself worthy of an initial skateboard with some basic movement and climbing.

The Issac Clarke skin was FREE in Skate 3 and looked better. from r/SkateEA

I approached the glowing purple circle to trigger the cutscene where I'd be granted my fated implement for inevitable grinds and flips… and then the game locked up for forty seconds and crashed out with a memory error.

I relaunched. Another lengthy tutorial load. Another run through the basic movement lesson. Another attempt to claim my god-given right to skate, and another crash for my efforts. I tried validating installed files through Steam; crashed. I tried deleting EA anti-cheat files so they could be redownloaded on game startup, a fix I'd used elsewhere; still crashed.

The solution I found after browsing the many threads from users experiencing similar issues was—inexplicably—disabling crossplay. If you're wondering why that would produce memory errors during cutscene transitions, your guess is as good as mine.

Monetization is the devil's bargain we suffer in exchange for free-to-play games; all of us understand that. But I think we can all agree that if you're going to use your game as a trough for cosmetic slurry, you should at least wait until it's deep enough into early access that its default settings don't leave the game unplayable.

Then again, if EA's going to be looking down the barrel of $20 billion in leveraged buyout debt, we probably shouldn't expect anything else.

It's a landmark day in the greatest ideological conflict of our time: In a blog detailing its Black Ops 7 beta takeaways, Treyarch has announced that BO7 will launch with "minimal skill consideration" as the multiplayer default, reversing a series trajectory of skill-based matchmaking implementation that dates all the way back to Call of Duty 4.

"Simply put, imagine the matchmaking experience of Open Moshpit from the Beta, but as the standard in Black Ops 7 on day one," Treyarch said. "Our team feels strongly about providing players with a more varied experience, and the Beta proved to be a great opportunity to test this approach."

If you haven't been tuned into this years-long contentious debate, the main argument of SBMM critics is that matchmaking logic that attempts to clump together similarly-skilled players leads to less variety. It means less crushing defeats, sure, but also fewer blowout victories. Every match becomes a battle of tryhard attrition.

It's worth noting that SBMM's loudest critics tend to be those who'd most benefit from ditching it: high skill players and streamers who'd get to enjoy more public games where they can reap clip-worthy killstreaks from the hapless, outmatched masses. Whether or not that risk sounds appealing is probably down to personal preference—but it seems like a preference that plenty of BO7 beta players shared.

The impressions of PC Gamer staff who played the Open Moshpit beta playlist were generally in the neighborhood of "seems alright, but didn't really notice a difference." But it's a win for anyone nostalgic for the days where pubstomping was more achievable.

And that's not the only item CoD players can cross off their matchmaking wishlists: BO7 will also bring back persistent lobbies, so your bitter rivalries with that dude who won't stop camping the staircase can once more carry over from one match to the next.

"We’ve heard the community discussion and dialogue around lobby disbanding, and as we mentioned earlier during the Beta, we’re focused on keeping players together from match to match more often," Treyarch said. "Today, we’re excited to announce we’ll have persistent lobbies at launch for Black Ops 7. We’re committed to improving this experience for players, and will be sharing more details soon."

Treyarch said that aim assist will get additional tuning before launch, too. These are some dramatic changes to what's been the standard CoD multiplayer formula for years now—and it's probably not coincidental that they're being announced just a day before the Battlefield 6 launch.