Black to the future
The way we play FPS games has changed. No more hammering away with just an assault rifle and grenades; no, now it's about movement, escaping, jumping, running... It's about the fluid and skilful exploitation of your environment. With this trend of attaching a thruster to every feasible place (Titanfall, Killzone, Advanced Warfare et al), we’ve all become used to moving geometrically. Imagine a heat map of your favourite recent online shooter - the trajectory of your movements would likely form an impressionist graph, etched in blood. The thing is, since the saturation of these boost jumps, mathematical 90-degree turns and U-tums. and verticality being the new buzzword in FPS games, we’ve gotten bored. It's time for a change.
So, yes, Black Ops III gives you boosters on your armour, but not as you'd expect Rather than a short sharp burst of directional thrust you get to control something more in line with the old gravity-beating space games: you can activate your thruster as much or as little as you like dunng your jump, course-correcting at will, giving you the opportunity to float glide, manoeuvre towards a hole blasted into a wall.
Think of Destines Warlocks - when you activate your special space-magic powers at the height of your jump, you can hammer on the X or A button at will allowing you to levitate towards your goal or get above an enemy to get the drop on them. Black Ops ///(like Titanfall before it) wants to revolutionise the way you see maps and stages - viewing them as multi-levelled vertical conveyor belts, rather than singular paths with irritating little obstacles getting in your way.
But movement is just one facet of Call Of Duty games. What Call OfDutyis really all about is shooting: guns, collision detection, aim-down-sights. velocity. So how do you make a Call Of Duty game more, well. Call Of Duty-tsh? By adding more shooting, obviously. Now bear with us, because that doesn't instantly make sense. Treyarch's approach to constructing this sparkly new-fangled Black Ops has been very 'guns up'. That's the studio's way of saying 'on the stick' - it wants to take you out of the action as little as possible, it wants to prevent that immersion haemorrhaging that happens when control of your player is wrested away from you, only to have some ‘epic’ Michael Bay-esque explosion play out glibly on-screen.
So instead, Black Ops III will be ‘guns up’, which is more pertinent for the single-player-focused gamers than it is for those that buy Call Of Duty games to discard the campaign in favour of some PvP action. The campaign itself is something of a departure from what you’d expect of a Black Ops game - which have been set in the past and a cynical ‘present’. This time, you take on the role of a soldier in 2060,35 years after Black Ops II, in which world leaders have taken direct action against the threat of unmanned air drones that blanketed the world in air strikes three decades ago.
Thanks to technological breakthroughs, the united nations of Earth developed DEAD technology (how creative), an acronym that stands for Directed Energy Air Defenses; this basically means any air superiority is rendered useless - military strength reverts to the power of footsoldiers. Footsoldiers. then, became the focus of military research, eventually being enhanced with DNI (Direct Neural Interface) technology; allowing them to pair up with computer systems, be equipped with cybernetic limbs and co-ordinate with other units without missing a heartbeat.
So, you're put into the boots of one of these soldiers and you’re sent to a CIA blacksite in Singapore where - shock horror! - you lose contact with HQ. You're out there in hostile territory on your own, and to make matters worse, some canny hacker out there has just instigated the largest leak of classified military intelligence in recorded history. It's worth noting at this point that the Black Ops series has always taken its cues from real life - the second game made news when ex-Panama dictator Manuel Noriega tried to sue Activision for use of his likeness in-game - and it looks like Black Ops III is no different; this time, the 'historical figure' Treyarch is delicately lampooning looks similar to Edward Snowden.
Satirical political pastiche aside, the campaign shakes up the core Call Of Duty formula that Treyarch has been playing with for the last couple of instalments. Gone are the selection of limited abilities you can only activate during scripted setpieces, replaced with ‘Cyber Cores' that can be customised by players and used during any time, during any level. Think of Halo: Reach's 'Spartan Abilities’ - you equip different buffs to see you through different areas and obstacles. One of the revealed Cores is ‘immolation’ - an X-Men inspired power that allows you to set your enemies alight with a simple wave of the hand. You can also equip 'remote hijack’, a perk that lets you patch yourself into drones and vehicles at will, and turn hostile tech against its creators.
But the thing were most excited about isn't this sort of ability (come on, we’ve seen it all before), but rather the fact the campaign is open to you and your friends to play simultaneously. That’s right, for the first time in forever, you can run through the main Call Of Duty story experience with up to three friends, meaning the team has had to approach level design in a much more open way. No more corridor levels! Rejoice! It seems like the campaign has actually been built around co-op as well - it's not just tacked on. There are multiple routes that converge at one point, for example, and a whole new mechanic has been introduced that allows you to tag enemies for your allies to map out, even if they don't have a direct line of sight (Treyarch calls this T-mode, but it’s basically the same system that you'd have seen in countless Tom Clancy games).
The focus on teamwork extends beyond single-player, though. Weirdly enough, Treyarch has taken its cues from the booming MOBA genre for some subtle changes to its multiplayer facet A little peculiar, we know, but there does seem to be some logic to the shift: the class system of previous Call Of Duty games has been done away with (those custom classes were starting to get broken anyway), and instead, you’ve got actual players to get to grips with -seemingly emulating what Rainbow Six: Siege has done with its ‘named’ heroes, Black Ops III lets you choose a ‘specialist’ before each match, each with a selection of powers that are unique to that character.
These powers activate on kill-streaks - think UAVs from any previous Call Of Duty game in the last eight years - and give you a tactical upper hand in the bout... if you know how to use them. There are four ’specialists' revealed so fan Ruin, Seraph, Outrider and Reaper.
Ruin, a male ops soldier, can deploy Gravity Spikes (his weapon) which allow him to manipulate physics to get huge superhero jumps and slam down with an area-of-effect shockwave. His power, Overdrive, gives him a crazy boost to movement speed; combined with the Spikes, he becomes a run-and-gun tank. Seraph, a female ops soldier, is armed with the Annihilator, the meatiest hand cannon we've had the pleasure of shooting in a game for years. She can one-shot enemies with this, and penetrate armour - meaning you can shoot through (and kill) two enemies in one fell swoop. Her power, Combat Focus, allows your score to get multiplied with every kill, meaning powers at the top of her kill-streak ladder will activate sooner.
Then there's Outrider - the archer. She's armed with an incredibly satisfying compound bow, and while the start-up on her shooting animation takes longer than her peers, the impact of her explosive bolts is a damn sight wider than the other characters that have revealed so far. She's the Hawkeye of the team - tactical and ferocious, Hold her back until a group of enemies rounds a comer and bang, bag 'em and tag 'em (or something). Her power is Vision Pulse, a circular radar ping that’ll tag all enemy players through walls, highlighting them for your team. The UAV of Black Ops III, and our favourite character right now. Finally, there's Reaper - a robot that looks like it was designed with a hat-tip towards Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie. This is your up-dose-and-personal unit; armed with a scythe, he can literally cut enemies down, but the drawback is that his retractable mini-gun arm hasn't got amazing range. Alas, he has the most technical ability of all: Glitch, a power that'll flash you back to wherever you were a couple of seconds ago. Perfect for rerolling that encounter gone awry.
It’s clear to us that Treyarch has actually listened to the disenfranchised hardcore when it comes to this year's Call Of Duty offering. Yes, the studio might be ticking every box of the Zeitgeist (fluid movement, MOBA-like setups, 'social' gaming) but these things are popular for a reason, right? With the budget and creative power behind the studio, it's not likely these ideas will be sloppily implemented. It might look similar to Advanced Warface and Titanfall, but we’re trusting that Treyarch will make Call Of Duty: Black Ops III as successful as its canonical predecessor.