Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is still more than a month away from release,
but a couple of Beta sessions were made available to a select group of
players. It turns out that it’s much better than people anticipated,
although it remains to be seen if the developers and the publishers are
willing to listen to what the community is saying.
One of the problems with multiplayer games is that you simply can’t
please anyone, and Activision and Treyarch are well aware of this
issue. And, to make matters worse, they only started on the wrong foot
by announcing early on that it’s not going to ship with a single player.
To be fair, a lot of Call of Duty players were getting the game for the
multiplayer part, which had its highlights and failures over the years.
For the most part, the multiplayer modes for these games have been
enjoyable, and the main driver for the sales. It’s easy to see why
Activision would choose to dump the single-player campaign altogether.
To combat the fact that some people just won’t find what they are
looking for in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, the developers decided to put
as much stuff in as possible. For now, only a few known or familiar
multiplayer modes were made available, but it should be more than enough
for a simple Beta.
"Gameplay and multiplayer"
I make a difference between the two because it’s important to explain
one of the big improvements we’re going to see in the latest CoD and its
gameplay fluency. While it might not be immediately apparent what I’m
trying to say, please bear with me.
Multiplayer games, good and bad, usually have one thing in common, and
that is that they are hectic and chaotic, for the most part. Sure, if a
group of people that know each other get together to form a team, they
can work in a more orderly fashion and get things done, but that’s not
what I’m talking about.
The chaos I’m referring to is the way the physics is implemented at the
basic level, how the characters are moving around the map, and how they
react to being shot or fired at. In the latest CoD, all of these aspects
have been reined in and optimized in a much more direct fashion.
For a proper comparison, I played both Infinity Warfare and WWII. I know
that they are made by different developers, but they both come from
Activision and Black Ops 4 borrows some concepts from previous titles as
well.
The one thing I noticed was that the movement of characters on the maps
was way more erratic, which in turn makes them much more difficult to
hit the enemies. While it might be fun to jump around or to strafe right
and left with superhuman speed, it’s not all that realistic.
I’m not saying that Call of Duty should be more like ARMA, for example,
just that it would benefit from having the in-game characters move more
like the real-world counterparts. It makes the gameplay more
predictable, as you’re not forced to follow the enemy while it's making
some incredibly improbable strafing moreover, but it also makes you more
aware that you’re going to get hit.
I know that it sounds like it might not make that much of a difference,
but it does. Sure enough, it’s still chaotic sometimes, and you’ll be
wondering how did you miss, but it’s a whole lot better than the
previous generations. Also, the speed of the gameplay has been decreased
slightly, and that includes changes to TTK.
TTK stands for time to kill, and it’s basically the time it takes to
kill an enemy, based on the damage being inflicted. It’s a metric that’s
being refined with each new release, and one of the things that people
will definitely notice is that enemy players are going down pretty fast.
As for the multiplayer part, the latest Beta only had Control (take
turns defending an objective), Capture Moshpit (various capture modes),
Search and Destroy (old and good), and Chaos TDM. Out of all of these,
it turns out that Chaos TDM, with all its variants, is probably the
preferred mode online, and the quickest way to find a match.
Most of the stuff that we had in previous games was kept, including
skills, older character classes (four new ones), and a ton of other
stuff. In fact, this is one of the main criticisms brought against Black
Ops 4. It’s not bringing enough new things into the mix. But we’re
getting ahead of ourselves.
Some of the changes implemented at the basic level are really important.
For example, they’ve done away with regenerating health, and now you
have to do it manually. Deploying class skills is on a time, and it’s a
lot more useful than before, although they still have a lot of work
ahead of them.
"What works and what doesn’t"
As you would expect, a lot of stuff in the game doesn’t really work as
intended, but that’s to be expected in a Beta release. In fact, that’s
the point for this kind of testing phases, to make sure that the
gameplay is balanced adequately before the official release.
That means that some of the maps are going to get some minor adjustments
here and there, mostly to minimize line of fire problems. Also, the
spawning system needs to be adjusted, because it doesn’t work as it
should 100% of the time. I died numerous times because I was respawned
too close to enemy troops, who were either passing through or waiting
for members of the enemy team to show up.
Also, there are some major differences between classes. While everyone
can use and specialize in any weapon they want, the skills are not
equally useful. For example, one class has barbed wire, which is great
in tight quarters, but another class has trip mines, which are far more
devastating. A third class initially came with a dog that was really
good but got nerfed the second day.
Some of the unlocked skills and attributes are very valuable, like
seeing on the radar the general direction of incoming enemy troops. It
can be counteracted with another one that makes you walk around with no
sound, so that’s a plus.
The problem is that most people will choose to see the direction of
incoming enemies, and having almost an arrow on the map pointing to the
bad guys is not only helpful but overpowered. In its current form is
quite deadly, much more than it should be.
Conclusion
I tested the PC version of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and I have to say
that it was extremely well optimized. Even with all the problems, which
were to be expected, I think it’s safe to say that it’s shaping up to be
one of the best CoD games ever released.
We still have to test Blackout, the incoming battle-royale mode, but
even if the game were to ship with just these multiplayer modes and
zombies, it would still be a hit. We can only hope that the team will
continue to improve the game after the launch and that they will listen
to the community.
https://www.geezgo.com/sps/37467
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