Call of Duty: Modern Warfare ushered in a new era of
multiplayer play in first person shooters.
Keenly designed, with a lean UI, a carefully manicured selection of
weapons, dynamic new gameplay elements and a breathless, kinetic pace, it was
revolutionary in the way that Counter-Strike was revolutionary. But where Counter-Strike could be called
hostile to new players, with its unforgiving health and round systems and a
system for purchasing and using weapons that would be unintelligible to many of
the “casualcore” gamers that populate the internet today, Modern Warfare was
anything but. With a clear a breakdown
of each weapon’s performance and a set of default classes designed to acclimate
players to certain kinds of play, Modern Warfare welcomed new users in with
open arms, gently encouraging them to experiment. Its superlative introductory tutorial is also
worth mentioning, as is the manner in which it has since been removed or pared
down within Call of Duty games, but that veers into single player territory, a
rabbit hole I don’t want to go down here.
Since Modern Warfare, there’s been a trend towards feature
creep in the Call of Duty franchise. Not
just within its multiplayer environs, certainly, but within those environs it
is particularly apparent. Modern Warfare
had three killstreaks. Three killstreaks
that capped out after being completed once in a single “life.” Three easily understood killstreaks that
were, despite their simplicity, extremely useful. Modern Warfare 2 added many, many more. All sorts of crazy shit could appear on the
battlefield, and killstreaks would often have similar or identical
functionality to one another, some simply constituting slight improvements to
existing killstreaks. Black Ops took it
another step further, adding in crazy, weird killstreaks that were in equal
turn obscenely powerful and obtuse to the point of uselessness, making an
exceedingly queer gaming concoction that maximized its bombast while
maintaining an endearing, winking absurdity.
Modern Warfare 3 took it one step further, adding in multiple
categories of killstreaks, each of them dense with potential tools. Helicopters with cameras, AC-130 gunships,
ospreys that dropped killstreak rewards while firing their guns wildly at
enemies, suits of armor. It was a bevy
of toys showcased during the game which, in multiplayer, presented a tremendous
hurdle to new players and presented skilled, experienced players (or players
with the temerity to cheat) with a set of toys specifically aimed at making the
game hostile to anyone unfamiliar with its varied arsenal. It gave players with an advantage an
advantage they no longer needed. Rather
than providing cute, enjoyable rewards, these killstreaks constituted hostile
acts against losing players that made games into miserable slogs. Getting killed by a bombing run sucks. Getting repeatedly shot as you spawn by an
AC-130 sucks exponentially more.
And what of the guns?
The repetitive, useless, shamefully imbalanced guns, added, again, for
the sake of presenting players with “cool shit” rather than presenting them
with a game, a game with balanced tools suited to distinct situations? In the
first Modern Warfare each gun had a personality. It had its quirks, its upsides and its
downsides. There were guns that were
extremely challenging to use, and guns that were incredibly easy to use. Guns had reputations. They had personas. They had feels all their own, and the gun you
chose fundamentally changed the way you played.
Not all assault rifles were created equal. In later entries into the Modern Warfare
series, it’s difficult to recall the personality of each gun with any kind of
clarity, let alone the clarity I can bring to my discourse on the difference
between the G-36c and the M-4 assault rifles from the first Modern
Warfare. There were weapons that
fundamentally broke the game at times, dual wielded 1898 shotguns and
teleporting tactical knives attached to pistols for example, but these were design
missteps, not carefully constructed gameplay elements.
When Black Ops 2 was announced, I could give two shits. After this trend of multiplayer feature
creep, I expected more of the same. I
decided that I’d purchase Black Ops 2 when it went on sale, which usually means
around six months after release with a Call of Duty game. I turned my nose up at its feverishly
positive reviews, many of which came from people I respect quite a bit, and contented
myself playing through the heroic backlog of games I’ve built up over the last
two years. But a friend with an Amazon
gift card had a different plan in mind, and with the help of that gift card and
some healthy peer pressure, he pushed me into purchasing Black Ops 2.
This is how I came into contact with its nonsensical single
player campaign. This is how I came to
play its phenomenal multiplayer, which constitutes a gesture of compromise,
though not quite the return to form I might’ve hoped for.
Black Ops 2 isn’t as lean or elegant as the original Modern
Warfare. It’s a little absurd to think
that this game will ever approach that delicate balance again, given Activision’s
drive to “Madden-ize” the franchise, with a driving philosophy to add more and
more to a package that was, at one point in the past, extremely successful and,
to some degree, optimized. But it is a
step back from the extreme systems of Call of Duty of yore – an apparent
declaration against the driving philosophy that Activision has showcased in the
past in favor of normalizing multiplayer for players of all skill levels while
cutting down on the raw amount of ambient noise present in a Call of Duty
game. There’s a democratization of
content at work in Black Ops 2 which stands as nothing short of remarkable.
The most prominent element within this new system, and the
portion that I would contend contributes most to its encouragement to newer
players, is an unlock system that abandons Call of Duty’s previous mindset of
strongly favoring entrenched or experienced players at the expense of newbies. Black Ops 2 still features a series of gated
equipment unlocks which require players to grind multiplayer in order to grab
new toys. But the wealth of toys
available at the beginning of the process eases the process tremendously, and
the unlocks themselves possess an internal gating and balancing system in the
form of a “cap” of sorts. While each
player can create a custom class with their unlocked gear, a series of “points”
have been introduced, wherein players can only choose to equip ten objects to a
given character. Each object, be it a
gun, a perk, a grenade or a tactical item, takes up a slot. Modifications to weapons take up slots too,
which means that if you want to use that grenade launcher you unlocked on your
MTAR, you’re going to need to drop something else. Maybe a flashbang, or the second type 3 perk
you unlocked. Maybe your pistol, or your
lethal grenade, depending on how you’ve built your class.
This doesn’t completely address issues of balance. There are still inherently “better” weapons
that need to be unlocked, and there are combinations of equipment that
devastate game balance. An SMG or a
shotgun with a laser sight dramatically changes the game, and can render even a
skillless player a killing machine on many maps, as they point and click their
way to victory in close quarters. But it
does allay feature creep commendably: you’ll no longer be shot through a wall
of smoke with a thermal scope during your first game before a rain of hellfire
missiles crash down on you. Now you’ll
die to a carefully cultivated class consisting of equipment that another player
has leveled up and, at least on some level, made sacrifices to improve at the
cost of their ability to engage in certain types of gameplay.
It’s a small victory to celebrate, but the use of an “unlock
currency” to build a class is a brilliant step back from the grand poise that
Call of Duty has been moving towards. It
forces players to look at the toys available to them and make real decisions
about which ones to use, how. It adds a
strategic layer to Call of Duty and prevents experienced players from totally
steamrolling newbies.
It also showcases the personality that each of the guns
possesses quite nicely. That element is
back from the first Modern Warfare: no two guns are quite alike, and weapons
from the single player game have been omitted or changed into killstreak
rewards in order to retain a balanced selection of distinct weapons that each
have their own look and feel. Even
similar guns play very differently. My
MTAR jumps around wildly as it fires in close quarters battles, doling out
healthy damage with each hit, while my M27 barely scratches my enemies up close
up lets me pick them off with rapid efficiency from a distance. My FAL lets me rattle off round after round,
forcing me to stabilize my aim myself with my mouse, while my SWAT barely jumps
up at all but moves sluggishly, awkwardly rechambering, making
close-quarters-battles tense experiences that almost always end disastrously. Each assault rifle, SMG, shotgun, sniper
rifle, whatever, is just bursting with personality. So far I haven’t run into any “improved”
versions of earlier guns, or any weapons that outright copy other weapons. I can’t say the same for any other post-Modern
Warfare Call of Duty game to date.
And I haven’t even touched on the “ranked” system of play,
which endeavors to place players into competitive brackets in an effort to give
Black Ops 2 potential as a legitimate e-sport.
It can’t actually live up to that expectation – I’m not sure any Call of
Duty game ever has been able to – but it’s a nice nod to the idea of
skill-based matchmaking and the massive divide between casual players,
mid-ground players and the hardcore and the hackers that populate most public
Call of Duty servers. I’ve yet to engage
with the ranked servers at all myself, but I’m glad they’re there and I look
forward to trying them (and their fully-unlocked gear sets) out when I get a
chance.
Black Ops 2 isn’t perfect.
It isn’t Modern Warfare – we’re never going to see a game like that
again. But it’s good. It’s good in a way that Call of Duty games
haven’t been in a while. Treyarch
crafted a solid multiplayer experience that actually addressed the problems
that Call of Duty games have been making for themselves over the last four
years, and it did so in a way that didn’t compromise the spectacle that they’ve
been trying to infuse into the gameplay (the very thing, ironically, that
prevents it from ever becoming the sort of e-sport that Counter-Strike was and Modern
Warfare might’ve been). It reflects
concern for their players, love for the game they’ve made, and an adept
knowledge of what makes multiplayer games on the internet fun.
Nice work, Treyarch.
Now please stop trying to sell me content packs for your sixty dollar
game. I’m not interested. Unless it’s a set of bundled zombie maps for
like fifteen dollars, in which case YES PLEASE!
