Will Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 actually have better cheat protection? Is another big Nintendo leaker getting overly zealous before the coming Thwomp stomp? Why does Ubisoft want to shove PVP multiplayer back into Far Cry? It’s another edition of Morning Checkpoint, Kotaku‘s daily roundup of gaming news and culture. I was up until 3:00 a.m. ET last night grinding the Depths in Elden Ring Nightreign‘s new Deep of Night mode. Who knew the answer to my Destiny 2 burnout was an even more punishing loot chase that resets every 45 minutes?
Why are there so many leaks at Nintendo?
That’s what former Nintendo of America marketing staffers Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang ask on their latest video breaking down recent rumors about the upcoming Nintendo Direct. “They really do run a pretty tight ship on the first-party side still like we were saying,” Yang says. “Like, you’ve literally got the fear of God and being fired from your job. That fear was really real at Nintendo and you know we joke around about the Nintendo ninjas, like this is actual employees at the company. That is their job to investigate leaks. They’re a team at Nintendo that gets paid to do this and they are very elite. They’re very good at their jobs and and they will solve these cases.”
The pair said a recent series of leaks from a user called SwitchForce reminds them of Pyoro, an infamous leaker who appeared to be using a source with access to the backend of Nintendo’s websites to get information early. Pyoro later leaked his own source to Bloomberg, failed to break any more news after Nintendo changed how its new game pages go live online, and all but disappeared from the video game leaker-verse.
“We all know what happened to Pyoro,” Ellis says. “So, I think just a word of advice to SwitchForce is be careful because, you know, yes, this can be an exciting thing of like, oh my gosh, everybody’s on pins and needles for my next update. You’re on pins and needles until you get that phone call or somebody shows up at your door and you disappear.”
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will make progress in the war on cheating
That’s what Activision is promising in its latest blog post. It outlines how Ricochet anti-cheat features like Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 will help prevent more players from ruining matches with aim-botting and other exploits. “RICOCHET Anti-Cheat uses Remote Attestation, a process that verifies critical PC security settings directly with Microsoft, as part of its implementation of TPM 2.0,.” the company writes.
It continues, “Other games may lean on Client or Local Attestation, where the system checks itself and reports back. The limitation with that method is clear: cheats can sometimes disguise or manipulate what’s being reported, effectively tricking the local system into giving a false ‘all clear.’ By contrast, Remote Attestation places the verification step with an external, trusted authority, making it exponentially harder for tampered machines to pass as legitimate.”
Cheating will still be a thing online, but Activision says it’s getting better. “What matters, and where we’ve seen real improvement, is how quickly we adapt,” it writes. “In Black Ops 6, detections are faster, mitigations are stronger, and enforcement is cutting deeper into the networks that try to harm fair play. With Black Ops 7, hardware protections like Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 will add another layer of defense.”
Ex-Pokémon Company lawyer thinks developers will just ignore Nintendo’s latest patent
The company recently acquired another patent for what sounds like the auto-battling feature from its most recent Pokémon Violet and Scarlet games. It comes amid the ongoing legal fight with PocketPair over Palworld, but could seemingly have repercussions for lots of other creature collecting games. Or maybe not. “I wish Nintendo and Pokémon good luck when the first other developer just entirely ignores this patent and, if those companies sue that developer, the developer shows decades of prior art,” former chief legal officer at The Pokémon Company Don McGowan told Eurogamer. “This isn’t Bandai Namco with the loading screen patent.”
A 2023 shooter finally gets a kill-cam, but not on Xbox Series S
Free-to-play multiplayer FPS The Finals has received a familiar feature nearly two years after launch, but only for the most powerful consoles (via IGN). “We had to calculate everything that matters: player movement, environmental destruction, object interactions in a level of data fidelity that’s hard to pull off in a Dynamism Shooter,” Embark Studios writes in a new season 8 blog post. “Then take all that info and quickly reconstruct the moment.” Microsoft usually requires feature parity between current-gen console versions, but has been bending the rules more and more. The Finals‘ kill-cam won’t be on PS4 either.
A tiny new update just sneaked out for Cyberpunk 2077
Patch 2.31 has fixed AutoDrive so that cars will now drive more smoothly when taking players to their destinations. No more getting stuck behind other cars or jerking to a stop at lights. Johnny also no longer always spawns in the passenger seat when using the Delamain Cab service. Plus, the Photo Mode is gender neutral when it comes to poses now. My favorite bug fix? The Yaiba Semimaru no longer flips over during the Motorbreath chase, which was breaking the quest.
Far Cry will push multiplayer more in the future
That’s according to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot who recently spoke at Saudi Arabia’s New Global Sport Conference. “On Far Cry, it’s really to bring the multiplayer aspects more predominantly pushed so that it can also be played for a long time by players,” he said, according to Game File. Alongside the unannounced Far Cry 7, Ubisoft has also reportedly been working on a Far Cry extraction shooter spin-off. Unlike Far Cry 5, which had an entire map editor for multiplayer, Far Cry 6 backed away from online PVP gameplay.
But wait, what was Guillemot doing in Saudi Arabia to begin with? He was there to publicly reveal a Saudi-based DLC for Assassin’s Creed Mirage, among other things. Is it funded by Saudi Arabia’s controversial Public Investment Fund? Ubisoft won’t say one way or the other. Game File notes that the person on stage interviewing Guillemot said, “Well, congratulations on the deal. It sounds very exciting.”
ICYMI:
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— The Lord of the Rings (@TheRingsofPower) September 10, 2025