So, a leak of a bit of artwork for the next Call of Duty game has led to speculation that the next game will be returning to World War II as its setting.

The leak contains a few images, some being the game’s poster and others potential steelbook designs, all of which hint that Sledgehammer Games are returning the franchise to its roots for 2017’s Call of Duty installment. The images show a group of Allied soldiers storming the beach on D-Day.

Originally sent to a Youtuber who plays Call of Duty (TheFamilyVideoGamers), the screenshots where then compiled by other fans and posted to a subreddit called r/WWII. According to a mod of the subreddit the leaks seemed plausible with “the user [having] leaked plenty in the past,” noting that they also leaked Infinite Warfare before that was released. Others threw doubts onto the legitimacy, saying that the images had been taken from Saving Private Ryan, although since the post was made other sources with insider knowledge have come forward to gaming presses with the same game title as was in the poster – so it’s looking like this is the real deal.

Call of Duty games that went into the future have underperformed recently, so it’s no big surprise if they are taking it back to the game’s origin, especially as a recent financial report stated that Call of Duty would be taken “back to its roots” with the latest installment with “traditional combat taking center stage”.

So, it seems that Ubisoft’s The Division has another game-breaking bug/exploit in it. Are you too surprised by this point?

This one allows you to somehow step out of your body and become an invincible ghost. I’m pretty sure some of you are making Ghost Recon jokes right now, they pretty much make themselves. Still, it’s not exactly something you want in a game you’re playing. The way you do it is distressingly simple as well, simply by pressing against cover and rolling you can astral-project yourself out of your body leaving it standing there to lure in targets you can then shoot through the head because they can’t see or kill you.

You’d expect Ubisoft to be right on fixing it, and they have been. Erm, maybe.

“The issue which causes players to become invisible under certain circumstances could be fixed,” Ubisoft wrote about the glitch on the official subreddit.

I’m sure it has been fixed, but it’s a little strange that they wrote that it ‘could’ be fixed. If they weren’t sure they could have spent the extra time to write that they think they’ve nailed the reason and squashed the bug but aren’t 100% sure yet.

I don’t know, Ubisoft haven’t exactly been winning many fans recently with the previous Division bugs as well as their apparent ‘greed’ with For Honor emotes; so maybe this isn’t so surprising a ‘fix note’ after all.

Recently Ubisoft have come under fire for the introduction of new emotes into their fighting game For Honor, specifically due to how much they actually cost in a game that was already full priced to begin with. True they can be bought through the in-game currency of Steel, so in theory it’s possible for a player who doesn’t want to spend anymore real money to earn all of them but at 7000 Steel a pop it’s going to take a while. How long? Well someone actually did the math – it would take a casual player around two and a half years to earn enough Steel to buy all of the emotes for all the characters. Ouch.

If you do want to spend money on Steel, each 5000 Steel pack costs around $4.99/£3.99 – so you can’t even buy one emote for that. You either have to earn the shortfall yourself, buy another 5k pack or the 11000 pack for $9.99/£7.99 – which again is only enough to get one emote. Out of the many there are.

To the calculations done, Reddit user bystander007 has worked out that each hero in the game right now needs 91,500 Steel to unlock all their associated emotes. There are 12 heroes in the base version of For Honor so times 91,500 by 12 and you get 1,098,000 Steel. It would therefore cost you a total of $732/£585 to unlock everything in the current build of For Honor – on top of the £40/$60 you’ve already spent on the game. And this isn’t even counting the six upcoming heroes.

They then crunched the numbers on time taken if someone wanted to grind out all the Steel needed, if the player earned it through the in-game contracts, half-contracts and duels. Based on a casual player’s estimate of about 1200 Steel per two hours of play, they calculated that it would take 921 days or 2.51 years to unlock everything in just the base version of For Honor, as I said earlier-  this doesn’t take into account the upcoming six new heroes (that pushes the time taken up to around 1373 days or 3.76 years).

Oh, and the game requires you to use Steel to keep your weapons and armour upgraded – you fall behind what your opponents might be using if you don’t.

So you can see why players are currently not impressed at Ubisoft’s actions here, as well as the apparent greed of bleeding the players dry of more money after they bought the game. You expect this in a free-to-play (not to such a scale though), but not here. Not for £40/$60…

It’s a shame too, I enjoyed For Honor when I played in its open beta.