Spec Ops Message Board

Medal of Honor: Warfighter's ongoing trailer series reaches its eighth installment with this episode, in which the rumbling, computer-disguised voices of former soldiers involved in Tier 1 Operations. The veterans expound upon how technological advancements, such as wide-field night-vision goggles, have changed the battlefield.

The year of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 post-launch content is coming to a close, but it's going out with a bang (gun pun fully intended). The Chaos Pack - previously half-detailed - brings three Face Off maps and four Spec-Ops missions, as well as a new mode, dubbed "Special Ops Chaos Mode." It's a wave-based survival mode, albeit with a Spec-Ops twist. The whole shebang launches for Xbox 360 on August 9, with PS3 and PC versions launching later on.

In September, MW3 players on 360 get the "Final Assault" pack, which adds five multiplayer maps ("Gulch," "Offshore," "Boardwalk," "Decommission," and "Parish"), two of which are already available on 360. Again, this content arrives on PS3 and PC at a later (unknown) date. As Activision community blog One of Swords points out, Call of Duty's Elite season ends with more content than it originally promised, which seems pretty boss if you ask us. But don't go getting your precedents miscalibrated, as this may not be the case in future years.

Modern Warfare 3 "Elite" premium subscribers on 360 are getting a brand new Spec Ops mission and three new Faceoff missions tomorrow. That's according to the Twitter account of Infinity Ward Executive Producer Mark Rubin, who named the three maps "Vortex," U-Turn," and "Intersection," and the mission "Arctic Recon."

Activision's official content calendar isn't updated to reflect Rubin's tweet just yet, but we expect it'll show up not too far from now. Despite the calendar showing three pieces of content - dubbed "map," "mission," and "classified" - don't panic. Rubin said "those guys need to update the categories to be more accurate," which translates to "I swear this is really the truth, regardless of what that silly old calendar says."

As always, the content will show up a bit later for MW3 players on PlayStation 3 and PC, per Microsoft's long-standing exclusivity agreement with Acti. We reached out to the publisher for more information, screens and video, and will update this post when we know more.

Update: The Infinity Ward Twitter account just dropped the image above of Spec Ops mission "Arctic Recon," and said that only two of the three Faceoff maps Rubin spoke of - "U-Turn" and "Vortext" - will go live tomorrow. The same account posted earlier that three Faceoff maps are included. We're trying to clarify the situation with Activision.

Striking that balance of emotional impact and tension in video games is no easy task. For one, video games aren't real, so I generally don't concern myself much when I run over a virtual pedestrian or cut off an AI driver in the final lap. I don't care if I'm a jerk in a video game.

But there's something about watching some thug shoot an innocent virtual person in the face, directly in front of me, that really ticks me off. As Sledgehammer Games community manager Guy Beahm and I ran through the Spec Ops DLC coming to Modern Warfare 3 Elite subscribers and as part of Content Collection #1, I genuinely felt lousy when I was seconds from saving a hostage. I really wanted to save these people.

Video of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's Spec Ops Survival mode (first played way back at E3) has appeared on the Interwebs, and you can watch it in action above. This segment is on the Paris map, and as you can see, players are tasked with killing incoming waves of terrorists, attack dogs and even Juggernauts, while being rewarded with funds used for extra ammo, weapons, and accessories.

In other words, it's Horde mode, done Call of Duty style. Part 2 of the video shows more of the same, including a helicopter wave, and some missile-from-above action. Spec Ops is of course all part of the game, along with singleplayer and multiplayer, when it comes out on November 8.

At first, I felt odd when I walked away from a hands-on co-op sessions of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 earlier today at Gamescom. My colleague Alexander and I had just spent the past 20 minutes carefully defusing IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices, for those of you who don't watch US broadcast news) and murdering potential assailants in a Berlin Spec Ops map, part of a mission named "Invisible Threat." Between laughs, furious button presses, and the occasional expletive, I realized we were having a lot of fun -- far more fun than two grizzled Battlefield vets expected to have with a Call of Duty title, anyway.

And soon after our play session, I understood why. That feeling I couldn't place was nostalgia, subtly reminding me that, yes, at one point I used to really enjoy Infinity Ward-developed shooters. As I carefully sniped oncoming baddies, Alex -- dressed in a "Juggernaut" bomb suit, a first for the series -- slowly lumbered around, dodging bullets/missiles/helicopters/tanks (seriously) while I assisted from above. Moreover, his ability to locate the remaining IEDs was based on me throwing up a UAV and spotting them from above, all the while dodging bullets/rockets myself. Of course, that meant I got to regularly drop missiles from said UAV onto the aforementioned waves of antagonists. Points!

And somewhere in there, it all clicked. I was back in college, shouting at my roommate to cover my back before we got clipped, frantically popping enemy after enemy hoping to hold off the never-ending wave for just another few moments so we could complete the mission.

Curious to get a look at Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's newest cooperative multiplayer Spec Ops mode, dubbed "Survival"? Well, good, because we have a video of it. If you're playing catch up, start with our preview of the Horde slash Firefight slash waves-of-enemies mode from E3.

If you don't feel like reading all that, then we'll do the hard work and explain it to you like this: Kill all the dudes you see, except your buds, survive as long as you can, earn digi-bucks! The video shows two players tag-teaming some "heavily armored ground forces," which is the kind of cooperative teamwork we like to see. It's not just about killing dudes. It's about killing dudes together.

"I can only speak on behalf of Infinity Ward, but I think it's a natural progression of how things have been going in general," Infinity Ward Creative Strategist Robert Bowling explained. We spoke last week during a Modern Warfare 3 preview event in Manhattan, in a hotel about 60 blocks north of the Wall Street setting in the game's campaign. I'd asked Bowling about the upcoming Call of Duty XP extravaganza, the variety of devs working on Modern Warfare 3, and if those things are an indication of a more unified franchise development structure -- a structure perhaps forged out of necessity, given the staff losses IW has seen over the past year.

"We're at a state now in the Call of Duty franchise, where you have several teams working on CoD that have their own very distinct styles on what type of gameplay they deliver," he continued, in reference to Sledgehammer, Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Beachhead all working on various Call of Duty projects. "And I think that's a great thing for Call of Duty in general, especially if you're having games come out every year. To have very distinct flavors and to have very distinct styles, it allows us to innovate in different ways and not feel forced to innovate in the same ways and build on the same interactions in the other games."

Infinity Ward was showing off the newly added Spec-Ops Survival mode at the event as well, where I was handily carried on Bowling's back through eight waves of enemies before a juggernaut murdered us both. Much like Gears of War's Horde and Halo's Firefight modes, Spec-Ops Survival is, by Bowling's own description, an "infinite wave-based mode." A lot like the Treyarch-developed Call of Duty "Zombies" mode that has thus far missed inclusion in any Modern Warfare release.

While Bowling won't deny the allure of adding a Zombies mode to the Modern Warfare titles ("It's a stellar game mode!"), he believes that his branch of the franchise wouldn't be the right fit for MW3. "I think it comes down to design philosophies. Each game has its own personality and voice. Ours typically stick to the authentic/fun aspects, where there's goes in a different directions that's still fun, but unique to Treyarch's voice and their design sensibilities," he explained. He wouldn't outright say whether or not Spec-Ops is exclusive to IW/Sledgehammer, or if Zombies mode is exclusive to Treyarch, but it seems to be heavily encouraged that it stays as such. But then, he's only able to speak on behalf of Infinity Ward.

Series gets revamped.

The cat is out of the bag on this surprise.