14 DAY TRIAL // Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is still more than a month away from release, but a couple of Beta sessions were made available to a select group of players. It turns out that it’s much better than people anticipated, although it remains to be seen if the developers and the publishers are willing to listen to what the community is saying.
One of the problems with multiplayer games is that you simply can’t please anyone, and Activision and Treyarch are well aware of this issue. And, to make matters worse, they only started on the wrong foot by announcing early on that it’s not going to ship with a single player.
To be fair, a lot of Call of Duty players were getting the game for the multiplayer part, which had its highlights and failures over the years. For the most part, the multiplayer modes for these games have been enjoyable, and the main driver for the sales. It’s easy to see why Activision would choose to dump the single-player campaign altogether.
To combat the fact that some people just won’t find what they are looking for in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, the developers decided to put as much stuff in as possible. For now, only a few known or familiar multiplayer modes were made available, but it should be more than enough for a simple Beta.
Gameplay and multiplayer
I make a difference between the two because it’s important to explain one of the big improvements we’re going to see in the latest CoD and its gameplay fluency. While it might not be immediately apparent what I’m trying to say, please bear with me.
Multiplayer games, good and bad, usually have one thing in common, and that is that they are hectic and chaotic, for the most part. Sure, if a group of people that know each other get together to form a team, they can work in a more orderly fashion and get things done, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
The chaos I’m referring to is the way the physics is implemented at the basic level, how the characters are moving around the map, and how they react to being shot or fired at. In the latest CoD, all of these aspects have been reined in and optimized in a much more direct fashion.
For a proper comparison, I played both Infinity Warfare and WWII. I know that they are made by different developers, but they both come from Activision and Black Ops 4 borrows some concepts from previous titles as well.
The one thing I noticed was that the movement of characters on the maps was way more erratic, which in turn makes them much more difficult to hit the enemies. While it might be fun to jump around or to strafe right and left with superhuman speed, it’s not all that realistic.
I’m not saying that Call of Duty should be more like ARMA, for example, just that it would benefit from having the in-game characters move more like the real-world counterparts. It makes the gameplay more predictable, as you’re not forced to follow the enemy while it's making some incredibly improbable strafing moreover, but it also makes you more aware that you’re going to get hit.
I know that it sounds like it might not make that much of a difference, but it does. Sure enough, it’s still chaotic sometimes, and you’ll be wondering how did you miss, but it’s a whole lot better than the previous generations. Also, the speed of the gameplay has been decreased slightly, and that includes changes to TTK.
TTK stands for time to kill, and it’s basically the time it takes to kill an enemy, based on the damage being inflicted. It’s a metric that’s being refined with each new release, and one of the things that people will definitely notice is that enemy players are going down pretty fast.
As for the multiplayer part, the latest Beta only had Control (take turns defending an objective), Capture Moshpit (various capture modes), Search and Destroy (old and good), and Chaos TDM. Out of all of these, it turns out that Chaos TDM, with all its variants, is probably the preferred mode online, and the quickest way to find a match.
Most of the stuff that we had in previous games was kept, including skills, older character classes (four new ones), and a ton of other stuff. In fact, this is one of the main criticisms brought against Black Ops 4. It’s not bringing enough new things into the mix. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Some of the changes implemented at the basic level are really important. For example, they’ve done away with regenerating health, and now you have to do it manually. Deploying class skills is on a time, and it’s a lot more useful than before, although they still have a lot of work ahead of them.
What works and what doesn’t
As you would expect, a lot of stuff in the game doesn’t really work as intended, but that’s to be expected in a Beta release. In fact, that’s the point for this kind of testing phases, to make sure that the gameplay is balanced adequately before the official release.
That means that some of the maps are going to get some minor adjustments here and there, mostly to minimize line of fire problems. Also, the spawning system needs to be adjusted, because it doesn’t work as it should 100% of the time. I died numerous times because I was respawned too close to enemy troops, who were either passing through or waiting for members of the enemy team to show up.
Also, there are some major differences between classes. While everyone can use and specialize in any weapon they want, the skills are not equally useful. For example, one class has barbed wire, which is great in tight quarters, but another class has trip mines, which are far more devastating. A third class initially came with a dog that was really good but got nerfed the second day.
Some of the unlocked skills and attributes are very valuable, like seeing on the radar the general direction of incoming enemy troops. It can be counteracted with another one that makes you walk around with no sound, so that’s a plus.
The problem is that most people will choose to see the direction of incoming enemies, and having almost an arrow on the map pointing to the bad guys is not only helpful but overpowered. In its current form is quite deadly, much more than it should be.
Conclusion
We still have to test Blackout, the incoming battle-royale mode, but even if the game were to ship with just these multiplayer modes and zombies, it would still be a hit. We can only hope that the team will continue to improve the game after the launch and that they will listen to the community.
