Activision plans to go YOLO with 'Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare'

I don’t think I’m alone in expecting Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (CoD: IW)to be the same as almost every Call of Duty (CoD) game before it. And can you blame me? Activision-Blizzard and Treyarch churn out one CoD game after another as regularly as clockwork. With Infinite Warfare, I am expecting an amalgam of Advanced Warfare and Black Ops III, just with some space stuff thrown in. Interestingly, it seems like Activision has decided to up the ante, but only just, with the introduction of a couple of interesting new modes to the game. As it outlines in a blog post, the two new modes, called Specialist Mode and Yolo Mode, offer something unique. In Specialist Mode, there is no health regeneration, helmets take permanent damage and will need to be replaced and your movement speed or aim will be impacted depending on where you were hit. Your weapon can even be shot out of your hands now. Yolo Mode is, as the name suggests, a You Only Live Once mode. It effectively transforms CoD: IW into a roguelike with permadeath. If you die anywhere in the game, you start over from the very beginning, not just at the previous checkpoint or level. Nobody would bat an eye if they saw these features in a tactical shooter like ARMA III (which does, in fact, have most of these “features”) and I’m intrigued by their presence in a CoD game. While I doubt these modes will be as transformative to CoD’s brash, shoot-first, think-later attitude to FPS, I do believe that we’ll be up for some interesting speed runs on Twitch. Other updates mentioned include more ways to acquire prototype weapons, Salvage and daily bonuses. You also get the now obligatory zombie mode and a bunch of tweaks to the gameplay in said mode.