Thinking outside the hitbox
Remember in old platforming games where, right at the start of the level, there’d be a pitfall – a trap that was placed to make you learn how to jump, how to navigate obstacles, how to remain alive? Well, funnily enough, Black Ops III has the same thing… which feels somewhat out of place in a Call Of Duty game, right? It serves the same purpose as those pitfalls did some 30 years ago, though: the traversal in the multiplayer portion of Black Ops III is vital, and the game wants you to learn – immediately – that if you try to take shortcuts through the maps, you can die.
And we died. We died a fair few times trying to wall-run, jump, dash and slide into enemy positions. Some of this, we’ll admit, was down to our own failings (the minimap embedded in the top-left of the screen was telling us where the map boundaries were, but we wanted to test that data, you know?) When these environmental deaths weren’t our fault, though, we got frustrated.
Black Ops III has toned down the erratic boost-jumps that formed that main online experience in Advanced Warfare – taking over from Sledgehammer this year, Treyarch has instead opted for a more grounded take on vertical traversal: you’ve still got a double-jump and you can still wall-run, but it all feels more muted now… more Call Of Duty, less Titanfall.
That said, speed is still of the essence. We started trying to play the game like Destiny or Halo – holding back, checking our corners and playing a more strategic game… and we were punished for that. Punished horribly. Treyarch has done a good job of keeping Call Of Duty safely in the twitch-shooting, arcade-family FPS zone: success is running-and-gunning, success is quicker reflexes than your opponents, and success is killstreaks.
Herein lies one of our problems with the Beta build of the multiplayer: it feels too reliant on random successes: collision detection seems way off – from the myriad matches we played, you’re just as likely to take out an opponent with two shots to the knee as you are with two shots to the head. It doesn’t make sense to us – we spent a long time trying to figure out what the damage values of our favourite gun (the insurmountable Man-OWar) meant in relation to its other stats: rate of fire, accuracy, and so on… as it turns out, it means very little – by day two of the Beta, every gun everyone had equipped would kill you in a heartbeat, no questions asked. It goes against the rock/paper/scissors triangle that FPS players have come to abuse, and for that we’re thankful… but what’s the point in using a sniper when you’re just as likely to land an assault rifle potshot across the map, right? (We ended up with so many ‘Long Shot’ medals we just felt cheap…)
So you mash Square, you respawn instantly and the whole cycle begins again. We wouldn’t go as far as saying Call Of Duty feels mindless (we’ve seen the eSports leagues that prove there’s a solid game underneath the feeding frenzies we saw on the Beta), but the general match-ups we played seemed more inclined with killing and killing and killing than playing any kind of tactical game. The verticality that’s been deftly snuck into the maps only serves to give players an aerial advantage when running about – shooting from the hip when wall-running or doing ‘death from above’ melee attacks.
The introduction of Specialist classes has gone some way towards upsetting the typical Call Of Duty ‘feeling’, though; more than anything, these new ‘supers’ that are equipable to your character felt more like Destiny than any other Call Of Duty game so far. You’re given a meter that slowly builds in the bottom-right of the screen, and when it’s full, you can activate hit R1 and L1 to instigate a power that takes about minute to diminish (or which will last until you’re killed, which is more likely, to be honest).
These Supers don’t guarantee you kills, nor do they massively change the game in any huge way: they simply give you an extra perk or weapon while they’re active – some of them incredibly useful, some of them a little less so. Take, for example, the ‘Gravity Spikes’ the specialist Ruin has – they’re supposed to create a bigger decent shockwave that kills enemies in a wide area-of-effect when you activate them… but it doesn’t. It’s actually got the same range as a melee attack, and will only definitely kill someone if you manage to drop down directly on top of them… which – in a Call Of Duty game – is an incredibly rare occurrence, unfortunately.
So no-one in the games we played chose Ruin (or, if they did, they opted to equip his ability instead – the Overdrive perk that massively increases movement speed… that and a shotgun together is actually a viable play). Instead, most people opted for Outrider – the female bow-user that has a one-shot kill compound bow with explosive rounds. Her ability basically allows you to one-shot enemies while sprinting, keeping the enemy team off your back while getting potshots in wherever you can. We actually managed to skewer three enemies at once with these explosive arrows – which we might call over-powered if it didn’t feel so empowering to pull off!
The other most popular character choice of the Beta is Prophet – whose special weapon is yet another love letter to Destiny, it seems: his Tempest gun acts in an identical way to the Fusion Rifles from the game, albeit with an added chain-lightning effect that’ll kill anyone within a couple of metres of the shock’s initial impact. Outside of that, the Destiny comparisons come thick and fast: specialist Nomad can resurrect himself (like the Sunsinger), specialist Seraph has the ‘Annihilator’, which is a carbon copy of a Hunter’s Golden Gun in Destiny, and Reaper basically pulls out a Heavy Machine Gun straight from Destiny’s vaults when he triggers his special weapon.
So while these supers don’t change the meat of the game as much as they do in that other Activision game, they certainly make the run-and-gun gameplay that’s become part and parcel of the Call Of Duty experience more variable: we mainly played with Outrider and her Sparrow bow – hitting that golden ring of super at the right time and pulling out the bow to devastate the enemy team was easily the highlight of the many hours we played the Beta. It’s a shame that not all the characters and their respective abilities granted the same power fantasy.
However, this was only the Beta, and we imagine Treyarch has been crunching the telemetry pretty hard to sort out what balancing issues need addressing before the game’s proper release.
Speaking of balancing issues, the old Call Of Duty favourites – killstreaks – make a return. For some players, this will be a welcome perk of the multiplayer, but for others… well, it takes a lot of getting used to. The core conceit of the killstreak system is that the longer you stay alive, the more rewards you get: hit 15 or so kills in a row and you can bring in a mothership or a nuke or something else equally as ridiculous that practically ensures your team’s victory.
Black Ops III brings in some new perks for the killstreaks – you’ll still start off with the tried-and-tested favourites; a UAV drone, a hail of missiles, a care package and so on. But after that, it all gets a bit silly: there are a few drones that you can command from a remote location, and they make sense within the games setup, but then there’s the RAPS (or Robotic Anti-Personnel Sentry drones). These are rolling balls of robotic terror that seem to be infinite, just rolling around spreading death and chaos. You can shoot these drones, but if an enemy player gets them, they’ll come at you seemingly forever until you die. They’re frustrating to play against but fun to use, making them a difficult equation to solve for the dev team.
Therein lies our main problem with the Black Ops III Beta – killstreaks stack and stack and if there’s one player dominating your team, matches are surprisingly hard to flip. If you get pushed underfoot in the first three minutes of play, you can practically guarantee that’s where you’ll stay, thanks to the accelerated killstreak perks preventing you from getting a foothold. Pair that up with the fact we only saw capture points rotate once in our many, many games of Domination and we think there are some serious balancing and matchmaking options that need to be addressed in Black Ops III before the main game launches.
At least we have faith that Treyarch will take the touch-and-go nature of this Beta run on board, though.