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[PC] [360] [PS3] [WII] Call of Duty: Black Ops

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[PC] [360] [PS3] [WII] Call of Duty: Black Ops

Unread postby jhan » 09 Aug 2011 08:12

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When Infinity Ward crafted Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, who knew it would come to this? Every successive game prior to that had introduced substantial changes either to its mechanics or to its visuals. Call of Duty 2 gave us the defining first-person shooting mechanical features of the series that became the standard for the rest of them. Then Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare added those now widely-copied multiplayer features and introduced a massive spike in graphical realism to go along with a game that suddenly began to take its story somewhat seriously, even if a bit sloppily; yet, even in its more “serious” parts, the game was still all in good fun.

Since the time of Call of Duty 4, however, we have seen essentially the same game. Gone is the inventive Infinity Ward, and Treyarch, of course—all Treyarch can ever do is copy, refine, and add zombies. Sorry, boys, but that’s your calling in life I guess. Yes, after their lukewarm World at War, Infinity Ward decided that instead of designing an entirely new graphical experience or introducing another round of brand new changes for multiplayer—which are the types of sweeping changes they had made every time in the past—they would just add some minor graphical enhancements to what was already there, and shuffle and expand the multiplayer features around without actually adding anything of great substance. This is common sense: the series was getting progressively more photo-realistic graphically, and the multiplayer features were getting bloated, so in either case they could only go so far before they had to stop.

Hence the imitation and ritualization process had begun—that of cashing in. Every new Call of Duty game now is simply a rehash of the original Modern Warfare, with new weapons/maps/perks/killstreaks/etc., new customization options (for a trendiness factor), and maybe take away leaning and dedicated servers and then give them back again. But okay, with Black Ops Treyarch had to market themselves as being innovative somehow (while other developers (e.g., DICE) were doing new things with every new game they made), so they gave us wager matches, a few other irrelevancies, and “CODPoints” with which you buy your unlocks instead of unlocking them directly as you rank up and complete challenges. The difficulty of the previous system—and the diversity of equipment it required you to familiarize yourself with—has been dramatically decreased in this new system, along with whatever emotional rewards came with it. It is now possible to grind your way through almost everything in the multiplayer game, without even being forced to change up your equipment to get different types of unlocks.

And I’m not even going to touch on the stupidity of Call of Duty’s current paradigm for their leveling system as a whole. Instead, since Call of Duty changes so little from sequel to sequel, I’m forced to talk about what should have changed by now, and hasn’t. First, the engine. Not only is this engine hopelessly outdated relative to comparable games in the genre, it is even outdated relative to the previous game in the series! Forget what the graphics pseudo-analysts say: Black Ops is uglier than Modern Warfare 2—everything from the visual effects to the environments have been made bland and washed-out—and I along with virtually every other gamer expect to see better visuals in every sequel. Maybe that is too much to ask, since only ARMA II is more photo-realistic than Modern Warfare 2, but it shouldn’t look worse.

Moving on, we are still having problems, at such a later stage in this series, with some mechanical and aesthetic issues that are so basic they’re shameful even to speak of. The mouse, for one thing, is afflicted by consolitis: sluggishness in general, and not of the kind that simulated weapon inertia could understandably create—it is even sluggish in menus, so naturally it will be sluggish in the actual game, such that your gun isn’t even registering your twitches until too many milliseconds too late for the truly hardcore FPS players to give a rat’s ass about this game, since they might as well play it on console if the mouse is going to be so imprecise.

And then we have the running and aiming down the sights, both of which are so buttery that it feels like you’re a fucking ballerina whose gun and body don’t weigh anything, and worse, it produces an environment ideally suited for Rambo-style play. That last part isn’t a problem in and of itself, but I will divulge its overall effect later. The guns still sound like toys, thin and tinny instead of loud and deadly. And now I might be starting to nitpick: physics-wise, the exact moment an enemy dies, bullets stop registering in their body, and animations-wise, they can often be seen to do an absurd leap in the air before falling, reminiscent of corny old kung-fu movies. Not a big deal really, except when you know how much time they’ve had to fix it and how much money goes into these games. Even in a much older game like Counter-Strike: Source, death itself—the be-all-end-all ultimate goal of these games—with the blood splattering on the wall behind them and with their body crumpling down to the ground like the ragdoll it physically becomes, is far more satisfying to watch than in Black Ops.

Indeed, these are problems that have more or less been with us ever since Modern Warfare, but back then it was forgivable; now I’m getting bored. But that’s actually what’s kind of ironic: the game is of such a nature that it is good for quickly relieving a little boredom, but is so boring on its own that I end up right back at square one within about 30-45 minutes. Apart from Search & Destroy mode, the game’s pacing ultimately amounts to: spawn kill die spawn kill die spawn kill die spawn kill die at a very high rate of speed (ad infinitum, and this holds absolutely true in a game full of newbs or in a game full of pros). That is obviously not what each player is doing, since some are much better than others and can go entire rounds without ever dying (when players of entirely different skill levels are present), but the instant respawns (designed to completely eliminate downtime to keep players in the game) coupled with a constant, unending stream of easy one-shot-kills (especially in hardcore mode, and often with this game’s clearly unbalanced weapon, the AK-47U, replacing MW2’s UMP-45) and killstreaks mean that either you’re dying constantly or you’re making other people die constantly in a formula that discourages teamwork (not necessarily a bad thing) while encouraging Rambo-style play (in part due to the running and aiming lacking any feeling of weight or inertia, as mentioned earlier), producing a completely static experience that has no substantial change of pace and therefore no emotional ups and downs, or moments of tension and relief that are so prevalent in better multiplayer shooters where a certain amount of teamwork, or at least the tenaciousness of a single skilled player, are necessary to win. There is no feeling of winning or losing in most of Black Ops’ modes; there is simply one side that was lucky enough to have the more skilled players and accumulated more points by the end of the round. That is different in other games based on this fast-paced deathmatch model, because those other shooters (apart from being more balanced in general) give you substantially more health. And, that is also different in Search & Destroy mode, which is more akin to the Counter-Strike model—whose tension and relief style of pacing allows for more interaction, and therefore for a culture that is more able to bully players who use dumb unbalanced guns into not using them—but the lack of interaction common in the Call of Duty games, due to its fast-paced, right-back-in-the-game style of play influencing its culture, mean that it is much harder for communities of players on servers to effectively discourage poorly balanced weaponry or stupid perks. In a franchise whose multiplayer has come to replace the singleplayer as the core experience, the end product of the aforementioned design is an inferior multiplayer game.

As for that singleplayer, boy does it suck in Black Ops. Modern Warfare 2 may have been rather pretentious, but at least it had that cool stealth mission going for it, and at least it was somewhat harder. Black Ops reintroduces respawning enemies, and I guess they decided to even reintroduce the bugs of the really old games by sometimes having them spawn in areas you’ve already cleared! Respawning enemies is otherwise a good thing, because it creates the feeling of gradually overcoming an overwhelming force, and it forces you to quickly kill, move up, and take cover before the enemies have time to respawn and return to their positions. Yet, they messed this up too because Black Ops is somehow still easier than Modern Warfare 2, despite MW2’s lack of enemy respawns. Oh well. There is also some poor dialogue and voice-acting, especially in one utterly puerile scene during which you are touring the CIA building—and that scene gets so bad it borders on self-parody. And then there are the game’s intolerable, seizure-inducing montage-style cutscenes, which pretty much take a shit on your eyes and ears.

Alas, we come to the conclusion of this laborious review. Alright, I’ll mention some positives. In multiplayer, the guns are generally more balanced and the killstreaks less annoying, since they don’t stack, than in the series’ last iteration. And the extensive weapon customization is cool, I guess. And the zombie mode is alright. Okay, I’m finished with the positives. Now what Call of Duty needs is not another copy (as Modern Warfare 3 promises to be), but a reboot (since I know that simply ending the series is impossible, money being what it is). And not the aesthetically gritty type of reboot that many Hollywood franchises are getting nowadays—the kind that has actually produced some good movies—since the series is already gritty enough in the aesthetics department. What we actually need is a reboot in the opposite direction—that of its basic working mechanics—the direction of what one might call "true grit." The game’s approach to storytelling needs to stop being so self-indulgent. The mechanics need to take a hint from Counter-Strike: Source, or I might even suggest the singleplayer component of the Medal of Honor reboot, poor as that game is in other areas. The leveling and unlocks system needs to get harder, much harder, closer to what it is in the Battlefield games. In fact, just make the whole damn game harder. I understand that this is more of a close-quarters game than its relatives in the genre, so we don’t need huge, expansive maps, but something a little wider than the corners ideal for console controllers would be nice. I just want to be able to experience tension and fear in this game again—I want to have fun again.
Last edited by jhan on 09 Aug 2011 17:37, edited 2 times in total.
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Unread postby icycalm » 09 Aug 2011 15:27

There's not a single word in this review about environments and stage designs. It's as if you were reviewing Pong or Asteroids or some shit.
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Unread postby icycalm » 09 Aug 2011 15:29

And not the “gritty” type of reboot that many Hollywood franchises are getting nowadays—the kind that has actually produced some good movies—since the series is already faux-gritty enough.


So faux-gritty is a good thing? I thought that gritty was good and faux-gritty bad... Dude, I am beginning to lose patience with you. What the fuck are you trying to say here?

The game’s story needs to not have a cow about itself.


say what
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Unread postby jhan » 09 Aug 2011 17:31

I said the game is uglier than MW2, which I hoped would be understood to include the boring environments -- although in context I was talking about graphics and not the broader "visuals," so I'll modify as appropriate to make that clearer. Screenshots should take care of the rest when I can get them.

Ah, yes, grittiness... the idea, to make movie franchises more interesting by making them grittier, seems silly to me at first, but it has produced superior movies (e.g. the Batman reboots being a massive improvement over the absurd levels of campiness that were showing up in the old ones, such as the rubber nipples in Batman & Robin). I was mocking the pop cultural idea of grittiness by putting quotation marks around the word gritty, since I still find it to be a childish idea despite the fact that it often works. Now the reason I find it childish is this: Call of Duty 1 was gritty. If the average person lines up Call of Duty 1 with CoD 5, 6, or 7, however, they will probably say that the later titles are more gritty based on the photo-realistic visuals alone. For this reason I called them "faux-gritty," meaning they create the false appearance of grittiness when "true grit" can better be said to lie in the earlier, harder, more intense titles in spite of their more cartoonish graphics.

The ambiguity in my phrasing must come from my inconsistent use of the word gritty. My suggestion is for the series to move away from its current state of faux-grit (easy game suited for casual/retarded gamers, but with realistic graphics, which most people interpret as true grit) and towards true grit (hard and intense game with whatever aesthetic). In light of this elaboration I see how the review can be edited to be more clear about this.

To "not have a cow" means not to get overly worked up, which means that someone is taking something too seriously. So I am just restating my earlier claim that the modern titles are too self-serious. I could also say that they are too self-indulgent.
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