I have a friend who is trying to enroll in graduate programs for sound design in video games, and I can’t help but applaud his nobility. He’s trained most of his life as a musician, but he has never really tried to make performing and recording into his primary income, so he’s doing something he thinks he’ll enjoy to pay the bills while he still makes music. And he knows that what he’s doing is a sort of thankless task, something which is only noticed if it’s done poorly. Good sound design, in almost all things, means that no one notices anything while the sound is playing. The same goes for sound mixing and mastering in movies and music, or audio design in plays. If the sound designer does their job perfectly then everything seems to fit just right. The people who are just enjoying the product don’t notice anything as being amiss. It all just seems right. It’s functionally invisible.
And video games have a lot of really talented sound designers who seem to never want for work, so I think he’s going to do great. But his pursuit of this noble, oft unrecognized enterprise made me think of another thing we don’t notice until it’s done wrong in games: level design.
Level design has long been something everyone and anyone can do. The infamous Stevie “Killcreek” Case even did it, although she’s far more notable as a gamer and can, to some extent, be blamed for doing level design for some of the shittier games of the late nineties and early “naughties.” Duke Nukem 3D is known for making a generation of people believe (and occasionally prove) they could design a level just as well as, if not better than, the pros. My point is that there’s no shortage of talented people with a lot of experience in building levels, and that the toolsets that allow people to construct them are the primary bar in actually allowing them to do so.
There are schools of architecture that write about level design in games, standards of functionality and attempts at subverting these standards that people. The short version of what I’m saying is that a professional game development company, a well funded experienced company, has no excuse to ship a game with a haphazard or downright poorly designed level in it. If that group is designing a triple A title, a veritable blockbuster, than this goes double. I shouldn’t wonder why a vault is maze-like in Fallout: New Vegas or why there are invisible walls in a seemingly open level in Borderlands. And to be fair neither of these titles are actually guilty of these most awful of sins. They’re both solidly built games that have great level design, both of them massive and sprawling constructs that deliver in even the smallest areas. A destitute shack isn’t something to be thrown in for these teams, it’s a chance to offer players who explore the world a little treat, something most people won’t notice. It’s nice and it makes the game feel like a crafted object, a labor of love.
Call of Duty: Black Ops totally fails in terms of level design. Many of the multiplayer levels are competent, although none of them are exceptional. There are balance issues, optimization issues, resource management issues, but nothing too terrible. The game is completely playable, and you’ll never encounter a game where you think “man, this is a terribly designed map.” You might think “Wow, nuke-town is way too crowded for sixteen people,” but the design of Nuke Town still feels okay. Play it with eight people and you’ll see that it’s not really a bad level, it’s more an abused one. But there’s no guide to how many players should be on a given level and, from what I’ve seen, no attempt to make one, or to set up play-lists that cater to server size. A customized one might exist, but it seems like Treyarch doesn’t really care about how their maps play.
A brief aside: I believe Treyarch does care about how their game plays. Although they did a terrible job of testing it they are working hard to patch it and we will hopefully see some real improvements in terms of performance very soon. But I don’t think they get how bad their levels are. I don’t think they realize how important a solid level design and a solid integration and recognition of the design of levels is to making a game great.
This point really comes up during the single player campaign. During the campaign you will be asked to figure out what the fuck developers want you to do time and time again. You’ll occasionally receive waypoints, which will be your only guide. The levels themselves will be a baffling series of tunnels transposed on a variety of settings. Want to play a game where you fight through a series of tunnels disguised as a jungle? They’ve got that. A riverboat ride which is really a corridor shooter with unlimited ammo? They’ve got that too. Want a tunnel-run where you fly a fucking helicopter? That’s also here.
This is and of itself isn’t so bad. The FPS as a means of delivering tunnels to players isn’t necessarily a broken system, and tunnel shooters can be good, even great, when they’re done right. Modern Warfare, for example, had a lot of tunnel levels in it that played with the idea of an FPS being a series of haphazard, repurposed and occasionally elegantly designed tubes. I’ll even admit that Modern Warfare 2, a game I despise in so many ways, executed well on this front, serving up a game where nearly every engagement was a fight through a set of tunnels and hiding it marvelously. But in Black Ops the tunnels aren’t just glaring, jarring parts of the level’s makeup, they’re also ill wrought.
My favorite example is the level which reconstructs the Siege of Khe-San as a series of tunnels. Not necessarily a bad idea, right? Could even be kind of fun, running through the outskirts of a base murdering a vastly superior force, feeling like you’re an unstoppable badass. Except there tunnels are so slipshod, the consequences for not responding immediately or correctly to directions so severe, and the directions themselves so muted and poorly phrased, that the level is just a giant piece of shit. Let me show you an example of how the design failed me. Upon spawning I found myself in a triage area, an underground segment of trench where we had overhead cover. Scattered mortar fire was coming in all around us, but nothing was falling directly around me, so I decided I’d run back a little and see if the fallen soldiers behind me were carrying any interesting weapons. It’s not like they were using them anymore, right?
I was immediately cut down by a hail of mortar fire after stepping back into the trench I had just come out of. No warning shots, no shouted request for assistance from my teammates. Just a bunch of explosions and a brief statement telling me that I must defend Khe-San at all costs.
I was pretty pissed off, but since I don’t generally quit games (see Jericho) I decided I’d stick it through. I pressed through the level, followed my allies through tunnels, had a scripted cutscene where a VC threatened to kill me if I didn’t press the V button fast enough and then came out into a wide open area where I found fire down on an endless stream of foes. I stood up there for a while and picked off enemies, thinking I’d lighten resistance before I headed down. I went through two drums of M-60 ammo, hit with most of them, and then ran forward into the trench, only to find my progress blocked. I ran back and forth, looking for an exit, for anything, but there was nothing. Just a hail of bullets from newly respawned enemies that I guess I was supposed to kill.
I reloaded and played through it again. And again. And again. Finally, once, after standing at the top of the hill for a seeming eternity I noticed that Woods, the character I wish I was playing instead of Sam Worthington, rushed up to a barrel and kicked it into a ditch where it blew up and spread a wall of fire obscuring enemy vision. Then I noticed a barrel right next to that one and got the message: I was supposed to knock down a barrel too! I ran up to do so and was promptly shot in the face by roughly a kajillion bullets. Then I respawned, timed by running up to the barrel so that it more or less synced up with Woods and managed to move on to the next part of the level, where I was confronted with another infuriating series of what could charitably be called “puzzles,” if your definition of “puzzle” was “frustrating series of trial and error tests without any visible criteria for success or hints of any kind.”
You’ll run into these moments a lot in Black Ops, moments where the game wants you to do things that aren’t clear at all, either in purpose, aim, or execution. And it’s frustrating every time. There will be relatively few occasions where you’ll look at the problem Treyarch has given you and think “okay, this makes sense, here we go.” Far more often you’ll die, reload, and then try again, hoping for the best this time. Russian riot troopers, endless streams of foes from the banks of rivers, and superfluous scenes involving you directing units from a Blackbird spy plane (seriously?) all fall under this category. And those are just the examples that come to mind right away. I’m sure a second playthrough of the game would find more.
From an amateur developer working under limited funding I could understand some of these issues, even sympathize with the people behind them, but considering just how poor the design is, how well the game was funded and how prominently advertised the release has been, it’s nothing short of atrocious. This is to say nothing of the story, which is pretty standard fare with a weak kneed play at being somewhat psychological and an interesting, if poor utilized framing device. Even if everything else were excellent, and it most certainly is not, Black Ops’ single player is in my eyes a total failure as a design, simply because of the levels. And in a day and age when amateur level designers are creating amazing games and content it’s enough to dismiss this game from anyone who wants a well constructed single-player experience’s wish list. By all means, buy it if you want an incredible multiplayer game that gets exactly what makes Call of Duty great as a game type. But if you’re interested in a series of competently designed corridors that you shoot your way through while getting little snippits of Cold War story? Look elsewhere.
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