The year ahead

Outbreak stops borrowing

Outbreak is half the product and half the audience arrives for it alone. Today it runs on the shooter's maps, with the shooter's bodies, behind the shooter's menu. Beta is where that ends.

• Its own maps. The locations built only for the horde come back from the vault, rebuilt rather than patched. Once they are live the Outbreak playlist draws from them alone instead of sharing the Multiplayer rotation, and custom games keep access to both (why Outbreak repeats maps today).
• Its own front door. A home page in the menu separate from Multiplayer, with its own crates, boosters, barracks and bulletin.
• A survivor roster. Eight named survivors whose passive comes out of their backstory rather than being picked off a list, with attack and defence icons on the cards so a passive reads at a glance.
• Its own currency, shop and ranking ladder, including ascension past the ladder's top rank, and airdrops instead of supply crates as the reward delivery.
• New horde models and an Outbreak heads-up display, so the mode stops wearing the shooter's interface.

And the game around it

• Scenery that gives way. Furniture and fittings take damage instead of standing there being solid.
• What holds a fight together stays solid. Hard walls, terrain and countertops still hold — a countertop takes a damaged face, not a hole. Destruction that deletes every piece of cover deletes the round with it.
• A first boot that sets the game up. A display and brightness step before the intro, and a first Outbreak round that teaches Outbreak instead of assuming it.
• Weapon progression by class. A gun unlocks by levelling the previous gun in its class, so a class is a ladder rather than a shopping list.
• One account across both modes. Emblems, calling cards, dog tags and boosters carry between Multiplayer and Outbreak.
• The interface rebuilt — live menu backgrounds, reworked operator and gunsmith screens, and an audio pass that rebuilds impacts and weapons around transients instead of tones.