This week on Steam, there was a free play weekend for Call of Duty: Black Ops’ multiplayer. I decided to test it out as the last Call of Duty game I played was the original. I also wanted to see if all the hype I’ve heard about COD’s multiplayer was warranted. Where I used to work, the three games everyone wouldn’t stop talking about were: World of Warcraft, Madden and Call of Duty. Having spent enough time getting to level 14 I have to ask the following question: Did I miss something here?
Everything just felt horribly bland, with people running around shooting everyone. With how quickly people re-spawn and low health makes death or, any kind of team-play meaningless .All the different perks, weapons and attachments feel like a waste of time because of this. With so many kinds of guns it just seems that the only two people need are either long range weapons or close range shotguns. There are some mechanics I like, such as how players can upgrade perks by completing specific objectives or setting up their own goals for additional points. However, all this feels unneeded in the grand scope of things.
To me, this feels like a poor man’s Team Fortress 2 and I’m not even playing that anymore. While TF2’s game-play has become somewhat troublesome due to a focus on items over game-play (which I’m writing an article for another website about), I can at least appreciate the class diversity and the side-grades from items. In COD everything felt incredibly simplistic and no amount of items or clan tags would fix it.
This goes back to my question, is there something hidden here that makes the game rise up out of mediocrity? Thinking about Starcraft 2, which is another popular game that I don’t play. Even though I suck at the game, I can at least see the depth there from watching tournament level play and from my own attempts at learning it. That’s why I’m hoping that someone can explain to me the love affair gamers have with this series. From what I saw while playing Black Ops there was nothing interesting about the game-play to be seen.
With the recent announcement of the Elite subscription service, I am more confused than ever about why this game has gotten so big. The people at my old job would not stop talking about how much they loved COD and that they couldn’t wait to get home to play it for a few hours. A part of me wonders if Valve didn’t have the patching issues with trying to update the 360 version of TF 2, would it have taken off instead of COD. I’m not going to share my opinion on Elite here, as I’m saving that for another article where I’m going to look at the big picture of this kind of subscription service.
I will say that one positive from this whole experience, is that I totally get that parody that was mentioned during the Bullet Storm commercials now.
Josh.
