Good morning! I’m sorry to say Monday has returned, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Not even Master Chief Trump could stop it. But hey, at least there’s news to read, including Battlefield 6‘s season one patch notes, an explanation of why the internet died last week, the announcement of a battle royale closing, and an update on the future of Forza Motorsport. Welcome to the latest edition of Morning Checkpoint, Kotaku‘s daily roundup of gaming news and culture.
A single bug is to blame for the AWS internet outage
On October 20, multiple online games, apps, and websites stopped working due to a large-scale Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage. Now, as spotted by Ars Technica, Amazon engineers recently posted a lengthy and detailed explanation of what happened and why Fortnite and Roblox went down for nearly 15 hours. And it seems one bug started all the problems.
As explained by Amazon, the problem began in DynamoDB, AWS’s DNS management system. Inside this system is DNS Enactor, a piece of the internet machine that continually updates domain lookup tables to balance server load and usage as conditions change over time. A bug within this DNS Enactor caused it to experience “unusually high delays” as it continued to “retry its update on several of the DNS endpoints.” Meanwhile, a second DNS Enactor kicked in and that should have kept things working smoothly. But the first DNS Enactor eventually started working properly and began overwriting the work of the second DNS tool. A system that was built to prevent this from happening failed due to the large delays. The second DNS Enactor then deleted the older plan, which was now the active plan, and in the process removed “all IP addresses for the regional endpoint.”
This situation had to be manually fixed by Amazon techs, which took some time. The AWS outage was one of the largest yet, and affected everything from games to smart beds. The future is fragile. Anyway, that’s why you couldn’t play Fortnite on Monday. There’s really nothing you can do to stop this from happening again, but don’t let that thought drive you insane.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt shutting down due to low player count
On October 27, the studio behind Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt announced that the game’s servers would be turned off on April 28, 2026. While this gives players a decent chunk of time to keep playing or hop back in for a few last matches, it does mean the undead battle royale is coming to a close and will eventually be unplayable. The reason for the shutdown? Simple. Not many people are playing Bloodhunt, which launched in 2022 and is set in the same tabletop RPG universe as the recently released and oft delayed Bloodlines 2.
“Your feedback, creativity, and enthusiasm for our game has meant the world to us,” said the devs. “However, despite you, our amazing community, the current player population has reached a level where keeping the servers running is no longer sustainable.”
This news won’t be too surprising for those who have been playing and following the game over the last year or so. In 2023, the devs announced that no more new content would be added and explained that the servers would remain up as long as there were enough people playing the game. That’s no longer the case, so Bloodhunt is going away in 2026.
Forza Motorsport isn’t dead, it’s just not a priority, says Xbox boss Phil Spencer
Xbox boss Phil Spencer shared bad news about Forza Motorsport. Fans of the simulation racing series might be in for a long wait before the next entry. As spotted by VGC, Spencer told Famitsu in a recent interview that while the franchise isn’t dead, the company is currently focused on games that can “ship sooner.” Here’s his machine-translated response:
Regarding Forza Motorsport, sometimes we need to shift focus to games that need to ship sooner. We understand the reaction many had when we scaled back Turn 10 Studios. We have many games we want to support with care, and sometimes we give development teams more time to avoid putting them under constant strain. Our current structure, with multiple studios, allows for this flexibility…Some projects require a short-term focus, while others demand a medium-to-long-term perspective. We genuinely want the games we publish to succeed. Xbox Game Studios has numerous titles in development, so please stay tuned for what’s coming.
Here’s our first look at a canceled God of War multiplayer game
©Sony / MP1st
In January, Bloomberg reported that Sony had canceled a multiplayer online God of War game that was being developed by remaster-focused studio Bluepoint. It was yet another casualty of Sony’s shifting live-service plans. Now, MP1st has reportedly gotten their hands on screenshots for the canned God of War game, which would have returned the franchise to Ancient Greece and would have seen Hades come back as a character who sold players items and weapons. You can check out more screenshots of the canceled project over here.
Battlefield 6‘s next patch will fix weapon bloom, improve visibility, and tweak movement
As previously confirmed, EA’s next big patch for Battlefield 6 will be a big one that looks to fix a host of various issues and problems troubling the online shooter’s many, many players. Perhaps the biggest news is that EA and Battlefield Studios are rolling out another update to help fix weapon bloom and bullets not landing where you’d expect. This will hopefully make sprinting less punishing and improve the game’s overall gunplay.
Besides that, the devs are promising improvements to in-game visibility as well as loads of animation and movement tweaks to make BF6 less bouncy and more consistent. All of this and much, much more will arrive in Battlefield 6 on October 28 as the game’s first season rolls out. And it looks like, alongside the update and season one, players might also get that long-rumored battle royale mode, too.
