The Dropshot podcast

MW4's DMZ is out in early access and getting good reviews. We think it's shallow and won't hold people once multiplayer and Warzone come out. We talk about IceManIsaac finishing the story in five hours, the Possum perk and the NICKMERCS self-revive clip, the day-one server crash, the $90K gun, wheth

WARDOGS Season 2 came out on October 15, and two days later Bulkhead said its faster progression was the wrong call. Players had Tier 4 armor and main battle tanks within days, so the wipe never really felt like a fresh start. Bulkhead isn't doing another reset. They're bringing Season 3 forward ins

We go through Activision's MW4 DMZ Deep Dive Part 2 blog post, the full guide to the Forward Operating Base (FOB), section by section. Part 1 is on the Patreon. Some of it is a real step up from DMZ 1: there's finally a stash, an actual DMZ cash economy, a vendor with rotating stock, weapon manuals

Infinity Ward dropped a giant MW4 DMZ deep dive, so we skipped the summaries and read the whole blog post ourselves. Old school. Raz has already decided DMZ won't be good, and he explains why with a painting analogy you won't forget. Then we go line by line: the FOB, three operators with separate tr

GTA 6 isn't even out yet and the Miami Heat are changing their name for it. On November 18th, the night before launch, the Heat become the Vice City Heat — new jerseys, a new court, a "Welcome to Vice City" sign, all on ESPN. Raz and Jake try to figure out what Rockstar paid, why the NBA said yes, a

Microsoft just handed the next mainline Halo to Activision, and two guys who ran a Call of Duty show for years have thoughts. Raz has been saying for five years that Halo should have made a battle royale, and he explains why it might already be too late. Jake makes the case that Halo is in such a ba

We answer your absolute questions as per usual. The end got heated so be warned.

Every shooter is adding a PvE mode right now: The Finals, Arena Breakout Infinite, Arc Raiders, Tarkov, and even Marathon after losing 96% of its players. But is PvE a win for gamers, or is it quietly wrecking PvP? Raz makes the case that Warzone Casuals was the beginning of the end for Warzone. It

Call of Duty is done with Black Ops, and Modern Warfare 4 is the "epic conclusion" of the Task Force 141 story. We think it's the smartest call Activision has made in years. It only matters if the next series changes the game as much as jetpacks did, and a new name and new villains won't do that. We

One of us has put 40 hours into WARDOGS since launch. The other one has 5 and is calling it "Clunk Dogs." This is our real first impressions episode, now that the game is out. Raz lays out where WARDOGS is actually clunky: finicky healing, grenades that sometimes don't throw, and a tac sprint that b

WARDOGS launched into Early Access on Thursday, peaked at roughly 340,000 concurrent players on Steam, went straight to the #1 seller spot — and got review bombed down to Mixed at the same time. Raz has 8.5 hours in since launch. Jake has 0.0, because Tarkov currently has him in a chokehold. So this

Raz said on 603 that there are only two hardcore games — Dark Souls/Elden Ring and Tarkov. The Instagram comments disagreed. So this is the audit. We start with the least hardcore thing in all of video games (Call of Duty hardcore mode, and it isn't close), then try to actually build the rule. Is ha

The first FPS Games Show happened, and the two biggest things in it both came from the guy who's had Escape from Tarkov in beta for a decade. Nikita opened the whole showcase with Fragmentary Order — sci-fi, Unreal Engine 5, maps four to five times the size of Tarkov's, and a promise that it'll be "

We played the Modern Warfare 4 beta this weekend — including Warzone and the new Zodiac Resurgence map — and it took about fifteen minutes to know it was over. Not "this year is mid" over. Over over. This is the episode where a podcast that ran on Call of Duty for 600+ episodes says out loud that it

Ask us more fucking questions, pigs!

Escape from Tarkov has the steepest learning curve in gaming, and this is the episode where we try to flatten it. A full primer on what to actually focus on and what to completely ignore when you start playing. We open on a straight disagreement — asked in one word whether a normal person should lea

Two shooter betas dropped on the same weekend, so we played both and came back with very different verdicts. WARDOGS is Bulkhead's 100-player, three-team tactical shooter with a real money economy — you buy your loadout every respawn, you lose money when you die, and it turns out that changes how a

Raz reads the wiki. Jake plays the campaign every year and feels weird about it. So we finally sat down and worked out why video game lore grabs some people by the throat and slides right off everyone else — using Halo, Call of Duty, and Escape from Tarkov as the three test cases. Halo treats lore a

Episode 600. On August 21st the Modern Warfare 4 early access beta, the WARDOGS closed beta, and Call of Duty NEXT all land on the same day — and the two games are asking for wildly different amounts of money. We go through everything Activision is cramming into the MW4 beta: a playable campaign mis

Tarkov Season 1: Kord Breach dropped on August 3rd and we have not stopped playing it. This is the bonus episode — a full week-one breakdown of the biggest Escape from Tarkov update since 1.0. We get into the positive and negative modifier system and what we each actually built, the Allergic modifie

Imagine Battlefield, but dying matters. That's the WARDOGS closed alpha in one sentence — and after a weekend in it, we're calling it the most polished alpha we've ever played. WARDOGS is Bulkhead and Team17's 100-player tactical shooter: three factions, one randomized control zone, first side to 10

Actually a really fun episode. Jake is slacking on the timestamps but I figure you'd rather have it earlier without them. Enjoy slampigs.

WARDOGS ran its first ever gameplay livestream this week and it went about as well as you'd expect from a studio full of guys in their late twenties: the alpha codes were a QR-code disaster, the stream started two hours late, and it ended with a Twitch ban for throwing a sex toy across the room. And

Hero shooters are somehow the biggest genre in gaming AND a graveyard at the same time. Marvel Rivals pulls 400,000+ daily players, Overwatch just deleted the "2" and relaunched itself — and meanwhile Concord died in days and Highguard didn't survive a single season. Raz is back on Overwatch after a

Bethesda finally broke its silence. On July 17, Bethesda Game Studios posted a note laying out the future of Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, and Starfield — and we're breaking down every line of it. Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas remasters are officially real. Fallout 5 is in pre-production. Obsidian

Starting in August, Jake and I are going to revitalize the old Damascus hangouts but this time for all patrons Gold and up. Let us know which time of the week you'd prefer in the provided poll (assuming Pacific time). Also be sure to join the Discord and link your Patreon account to it so you can ac

Infinity Ward just had its biggest Modern Warfare 4 reveal week yet — and the community immediately found the flaws. We break down everything shown at the MW4 creator event and Fanatics Fest: the Kill Block modular map with 500+ configurations, the gunplay reveal and the instant visual recoil backla

We answer your questions and! we need more of them. Requesting your service. Thank you inside of advance.

Black Flag Resynced just became the biggest Assassin's Creed launch in history — and it's a remake of a 13-year-old game with mixed Steam reviews. The boys break down the day-one microtransaction backlash, whether the remake gold rush is good for gaming, and which classics deserve the full ground-up

Two new shooters are coming in 2026, and they could not be more different. WARDOGS — the 100-player, three-team FPS from Bulkhead and Team17 — keeps sounding better with every playtest detail: a Counter-Strike-style economy stretched over large-scale warfare, a running profit-and-loss counter on eve

Valve's Steam Machine reviews are in — and the verdict is brutal: by most measures it's slightly less powerful than a base PS5 while costing more than double. We break down the benchmarks, why Valve went semi-custom on the chips, and whether "access to the entire Steam library" is worth the price of

GTA 6 pre-orders are live, the price is confirmed, and the internet is melting down — so naturally that's the whole episode. Raz and Jake break down the $80 standard / $100 Ultimate pricing, the "physical copy" that's really just a download code in a box with no disc, and whether you're actually los

Razinon and Jakedown take one deceptively simple question and refuse to let it go: if a shooter is built on three pillars — movement, gunplay, and maps — which one actually matters most? Each guy locks in a pick and defends it to the death, from MW2019's best-gunplay-ever feel to BO4's god-tier maps

Raz opens with a hot take — "video games aren't good" — so naturally we spent two hours designing the one that would be. No genre is safe: we argue core loop, game feel, story, art style, multiplayer, monetization and live-service, then Frankenstein the whole thing out of real games (movement from T

Halo is on PlayStation. Let that sink in. On this one we get into Halo: Campaign Evolved — the full Unreal Engine 5 remake landing on PS5, Xbox and PC on July 28 — and why cutting the multiplayer to protect the "next mainline Halo" might be the dumbest part of the whole thing. Plus the AI controvers

We open the Patreon mailbag and the questions get weird fast. We argue about whether you'd call the cops on a neighbor's 10pm street fight (no — we're getting popcorn), which secret archive we'd raid if we could (CIA remote-viewing files vs. the Vatican vaults), and which WWII leader would've been t

Jake's sick, Raz is recovered, and karma is real — so we kept it loose and answered your questions from the Discord this week. We get into whether Apex hitting all-time-high player counts means anything for a Warzone comeback (short version: Warzone is the abusive ex who shows up with roses), the be

Call of Duty is bringing DMZ back in Modern Warfare 4, calling it "a full-featured game inside the game" — and we're reacting to the deep-dive blog in real time, mostly raw, mostly unimpressed. The new DMZ drops you into Hajin, an irradiated exclusion zone across the Korean peninsula forged by the M

Modern Warfare 4 got revealed, 007 First Light is finally out, and the Hell Let Loose: Vietnam beta dropped — so naturally we spent an episode on the franchise we swore off, a Bond game that isn't quite Hitman, and a beta that can't hold a frame rate. We get into the HLL: Vietnam open beta (the rubb