Call of Duty : Black Ops - First Impressions
As any gamer worth his weight in salt will know, this week has seen the launch of one of the most anticipated FPS's in years, Call of Duty : Black Ops (Going to abbreviate to BO for the rest of this article). After being 'talked' into getting it, launch day came and in my usual style ive hit it quite hardcore. Just want to share my experiences and thoughts so far, please feel free to comment and post your own experiences afterwards!
Treyarch has a lot to live up to with BO, the Call of Duty series is certainly one of the most successful FPS's collections in the history of gaming, has a massive competitive community globally, and is known and played by just about every FPS junkie whether it be on PC or consoles. Theres a lot of mixed feelings on how well they have pulled BO off, but for me personally, at least from the Singleplayer perspective, theyve delivered a good experience, multiplayer however could have launched in much better shape...
Singleplayer Campaign
The Campaign is certainly the gem of BO currently, staying true to the CoD series, its a solid and deep storyline, with scripted scenes, a magnitude of explosions, and wave upon wave of NPC's. Playing on regular, id completed the campaign in less than 7 hours, so not the longest game weve seen, but reasonable, and considering the quality of the storyline (im a sucker for pschological thrillers) and the delivery of it, id rate it as one of my top singleplayer experiences in past years without a doubt.
Zombie Mode
World at War fans all know the infamous Zombie Mode, but most CoD users are quite new to the whole thing. In short its a coop survival mode with tactical and even rpg like elements thrown in. Kills earn credits, credits buy weaponry and open doors deeper in to the maps, its a simple but effective idea, and certainly fun for a break from the seriousness of other game modes. Could I play it daily? Hello no, but im sure ill jump on from time to time for some fun at LAN's etc, its a nice extra to pad things out and a good move by Treyarch.
Multiplayer
This is where BO should really shine, considering the amount of ideas and past of the CoD series, unfortunately right now though launch blues are hitting it hard where it counts most, performance.
The general mechanics are better than any CoD title to date in my opinion, perks and streaks are handled with much more fluidity, gameplay feels fast and constant, weapon balance for a new launch seems to be above average, generally its been done in the right frame of mind and with the right direction.
Unfortunately 2 mechanics in my eyes are an issue.
Anyone that watched earlier dev videos knows that lunging to prone is an addition to aid in dodging gun fire, rockets etc, in theory its an awesome idea, in execution however theyve failed to combat what they said they would, the fact that its the single best way to kill someone in armed combat without a doubt. Developers commented pre release that a delay would occur between lunging and being able to fire again, the delay however is so short most people dont have the reactions to even drop aim from head height to the floor for it to even count, resulting in most people now running around shooting at peoples crotches in hope that they lunge or die from extreme lead to the balls.
Secondly, and in my opinion the plague of the CoD series, melee is still the dominating close quarters ideal. Theres still very little reason to even bother with the true CQB weapons, shoot bullets in a CQB battle and youre almost guaranteed to be left with a knife to the head going wtfjusthappened. Some people love it, some hate it, personally to met its never made sense but I doubt it will ever change. The real problem lies however in the engine and poor server performance. Running unreasonable distances and rapidly spamming melee attacks can currently be a rewarding tactic unfortunately due to a poor server implentation and the client side performance issues being seen my many.
The stuttering issue is a widespread problem, users on systems of all kinds of different specs are becoming plagued with 100% cpu useage, and im not talking old chips here, people running i7's are amongst threads all over the forums. Theres clearly a massive resource issue with the engine, as when considering its not changed from the modern warfare titles, we should all be running max settings with ease. Serverside performance from GS, the official hosting partners, has also been very up and down. Launch day saw all servers running a maxrate of 5000, a very very rookie mistake indeed, with setting the rate to 25000 actually being posted by a dev as a lag fix on the official forums...doh.
Client side resource issues and serverside performance, coupled with mechanics like instant melee kills, and lunge firing, leads to a sometimes frustrating multiplayer experience currently, no one likes dying due to performance issues in a situation they could have easily overcome.
From here its all down Treyarch whether BO succeeds or fails. Its clearly sold a lot of boxes at release, but the PC community looks to have been stitched with another console port so far, hopefully good patching and communication can turn BO into the next big competitive FPS...the coming weeks will tell.
I dont want my post to come across negative, its certainly a good game and a solid base for the future, it just needs a little love and care to blossom. Its a small amount of issues holding it back, and I wait eagerly every hour for some news from Treyarch on fixes they are supposedly working on...*fingers crossed*
COMMENTS
Benneb - 03:02pm, 18th July 2016
I agree with all of that. I would like to add some issues i have found so far. There is a pile of things missing from the game. Mainly with the dedicated servers. Examples being: No way to change the current map. To change game mode on the server you have to select a playlist and wait for the current map to finish which is incredibly irritating as the servers have a habit of crashing/rebooting often, putting them back to their default state of softcore TDM. No changing the order of the maplist. Sure you can remove maps from the list but thats not the same thing. No changing any of the game mode settings like respawn timers, number of rounds in a S&D match etc. I dont see how having S&D at first to 12 rounds instead of 4 would change the balance of ranked mode. They somehow managed to screw up the server browser so that is does not return all of the servers. Apparantly to prevent the game being overwhelmed. I find that hard to believe as cod4's server browser handles well over 15,000 servers and far more at the games peak. Whats worse is that it is usualy your own server that does not get returned and they have even removed the fallback option of using the console to connect to a specific ip and port. You cannot change your custom classes inbetween matches without first leaving the server. Coupled with the last point where you need an invite from someone already in the server to get back on it and it gets very old very fast. Please don't get me wrong, i am enjoying the game so far. It is just some of the choices they have made really leave you scratching your head and others leave you feeling frustrated.
Killa-Kyle-1428101104 - 03:02pm, 18th July 2016
Ex0. Nice work. I'd agree with your impressions in relation to the single player and the overall game, as I've not touched MP. This week you can call me "Mr Luckbox" as a friend at work had 2 copies on release day... and he was offering his second copy for silly money, so... even though I boycotted the MW2 because of the uber negative feedback on opening week on metacritic and other sources... I thought I'd rip his arm off and have a look at it. See if they've addressed any of the issues. The DVD launched my steam, associated the key, installed the files from the DISC and synced with steam. Ready to go in 20 minutes without a fuss and its nice to know its permanently on my account and I don't have to worry about the DVD. I checked this was possible, before handing over the readies for the physical copy. I was impressed that the install and steam integration was good and appeared well tested. Not like the GTA2 fiasco... Sooooo... the game. I've played the first couple of SP scenarios on Veteran and by golly... its ridiculous to try and beat the AI in some of the checkpoints... had to turn it down to hardcore to do the Vietnam first scenario... I burnt one hour in a hallway section at the Russian rocket base... determined not to turn down the difficulty... but Vietnam was just unplayable to any level of enjoyment on Vet imho. My advise to anyone, do hardcore before Vet so you at least get a second or two know what you have to do before you die... I wish the gap between Vet and Hardcore wasn't so big. Anyway... next beef... sometimes it is completely unobvious what needs to be done to progress. They've done a fairly decent job on the storytelling so far... however the main in game characters don't seem to give enough advice if you get stuck on an objective. I've really found some stuff counter intuitive. Damage model/hit boxes and splash/area damage weapons seem to have a lot of bugs... grenades seems to disappear if you throw them against certain materials. I'm fairly certain that the hit boxes are a little off, if you were to measure them in a lab. However the cfg isn't tweaked for FPS... so that might be party to blame. Graphically, impressed but not WOW'ed... so far, some of the cut scenes and set pieces are very well done but others lack detail and execution... the motorbikes + truck while escaping from prison was very poor imho. Performance wise, my quad core CPU wasn't breaking a sweat... overall CPU was under 45% iirc, less most of the time. GPU usage was under 50% on both cores... Clearly room for improvements by driver providers and the game devs to squeeze more out of the available horse power. Saying that... it hasn't dropped below 30FPS at 2560x1600 with everything on full. I've not tried any AA or MsAA. Not a huge gain on my monitors native res. Runs fine and stability is solid as rock... it feels polished there. I get the feeling there has been near zero optimization work for the PC platform. Would like to see some in a patch, so I can enjoy replaying on Vet with better FPS. Might stick Windows 7 on and see if the DX11 API uses any more of the horses! Zombie mode... class one of the highlights of the game so far... might even try some CoOp... Concerning MP, will likely only try this at LAN. I just don't have the desire to become addicted to games that use a levelling up system. If I need a FPS MP fix, I'd still fire up CS:Source or Quake 3 or UT 2004... something easy to put down for months at a time!
Ex0dUs-1428097470 - 03:02pm, 18th July 2016 Author
Great to hear how you are both getting on to, I havent touched the serverside of things yet but it doesnt surprise me to see theres a few obvious things missing considering the state of the DS ive seen so far. Going to give the next difficulty a shot this weekend, sounds a lot more intense from your words, and with knowing whats coming where ill hopefully be in a decent position to make a dent in it! Although im dreading one or two scenes that I barely scraped through in regular XD At the moment its in my good game pile, despite all the niggly problems and bugs it has, I dont recall any title recently ive enjoyed as much, it just really needs some good love and attention now from Treyarch to make it as great as it really could be.