Call of Duty Reflections

I do love me a good first person shooter.  A lot of it probably has to do with what I played when I was really falling in love with videogames, but FPS games really push the right buttons for me.  It feels a little bit immature sometimes to play so many of them, and despite what other gamers and members on this blog might tell you, I do try to expand my horizons.  Somehow though, it all comes down to having a good solid shooter.

It shouldn't be a surprise that I picked up Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (COD, MW3).  One could do a quick search and find all the stats and information about the game and be impressed by the numbers in every direction.  I think it did something like 6.5 million copies sold in the first 24 hours of sales.  Absurd.  It got so many phenomenal reviews and such high critical acclaim between persons and co-workers that it would be difficult to discredit the game from popular opinion alone.  As a smart and seasoned gamer, though, albeit one who loves first-person shooters, I know this can't be the end all.

And indeed, it is not. What I've found sort of "across the board"is that there is some polarization going on.    Some people love it, some people hate it, some people swear by it, some people swear by the previous installments of the franchise.  I think, to a degree, that this happens with all games and media.  Not everyone could love everything, but most media sells on a smaller scale, so it isn't as noticeable.  If 5% of the crowd didn't like a game like Bayonetta, the screams of frustration wouldn't be nearly as the loud  (let  me do the math here...) 325 million users (also 5%) who bought it the first day.

Something that I don't think gets done though in the industry, either in marketing, reviews, personal blogs, etc., is calling the game what it is.  We get caught up in the sensationalism and take it all too personally, regardless of whether the opinion is positive or negative. At least, I know I do.  Here's my breakdown so far....

Call of Duty is Call of Duty is Call of Duty...

Since the release of COD4, these games have basically been a license to print money.  They're so addictive, so steady with it's learning curve, and for the most part, fairly balanced. But you would be doing yourself a disservice if you went into a Call of Duty game expecting anything different.  Take a look at Activision's business model - nothing changes from game to game, they just go and sell it to you again.  Mark my words, there will be a definite, clean cut ending to the COD games someday, because Activision will do exactly what they did with Guitar Hero.  I don't think that will be for quite sometime though.  The COD machine is rolling, and the momentum shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.

I don't want my warnings about expectations to go misunderstood, however.  I don't just mean for optimists who want something new, but also for the pessimists who think too much has changed.  It hasn't. It hasn't even changed game engines since COD4.  Five games in a row now, with the same engine!  They may have changed the killstreaks, or maybe how some of the weapons look, but they can't change too much, otherwise the most important part of what makes COD what it is would be lost - the feeling.  If the game designers (whichever studio is working on it, it doesn't really matter anymore...) want to have a successful COD release, they have to make it feel like the other ones.  Gamers might disagree across the board about which game has the best aesthetics, but at their core, they all play the same.

I think that's all ok though.  Consistency is a fine trait to have amongst a franchise, and regardless of preference, I think all of the good, long-lasting, series have a strong and consistent feel to them.

Kill Confirmed is Awesome


COD basically does one multiplayer playlist very, very well - Team Deathmatch.  TDM is the standard to which all other COD playlists have been measured.  The downside of having a really good TDM mode is not having enough diversity.  Since that "killing" aspect of the game is a core design element, it makes it hard to have any other the other playlists feel different. CTF feels like TDM with a flag being run around.  Even the most tactical of gametypes like Search and Destroy feel like simple variants of TDM.  Kill Confirmed takes that simple principle and runs away with it.

Kill Confirmed is what I would say is MW3's big gift to the franchise.  It takes the simplicity of TDM and adds a scoring system into the mix.  Regular TDM rules apply, such as the call-ins and pointstreaks, but to win as a team, you need to "collect" the dog tags of your slain foes.  A golden pair of dog tags will glow to collect after a kill is executed, and a point adds to your score.  If a teammate gets cut down, then a red pair of tags will exist.  Deny the enemy an opportunity to score by collecting the red-tags.  First to 65 wins.

Although it's a fairly simple and familiar concept (can anyone think of any other playlist that does this? It feels so familiar...) it really adds a lot to how a game will flow.  "Hot spots" of death and destruction will naturally occur, making sense to the idea of holding an area down.  As a team, you can alter the flow of a match by deliberately choosing to move to a different location - after all, the enemy can't score if they can't collect your tags.  Changing the eb and flow of a battle is a really cool feeling. It's also nice to see less sniping.

This playlist also helps compensate for one of COD's biggest weaknesses - the sensation of camaraderie.  Although Team-Deathmatch is the name of the playlist, it hardly plays as a team game.  Kill Confirmed, like Battlefield's scoring and leveling system, forces the player to play as a group. I still wouldn't recommend COD as the best "group" game, but Kill Confirmed definitely fills in a lot of those weak spots that COD has.

Kill - no wait... Pointstreaks


In the past COD games, killstreaks are everything.  Getting X number of kills in a row will allow the player to call in something to help out the team.  Radar scans, chopper, support... tactical nuclear strike. The call-ins have changed in the past, but the premise had not - it's always about kills.  Not so anymore.  Call-ins are done through points, instead of kills. Points can be earned by taking down air-support, knocking out a turret, capturing a flag or a point, and of course, killing an enemy. This not only encourages the player to not appeal to the lowest common denominator and always focus on killing, but lets them choose to play as they wish, rewarding them for helping out in whatever way they choose to.

Additionally to implementing point streaks, the COD designers have created "strike packages".  These are preset call in packages that the player chooses.  Each class has it's own strike package making switching out on the fly as easy as picking a new class post-mortem. There are three packages to choose from - Assault, Support, and Specialist.  As one could probably surmise by the naming, Assault and Support have call-ins related to more killing and more support, respectively. (The Support class also has a cumulative total for points, that don't reset after a death).  The Specialist, my personal favorite, is new.  Specialists don't get any call-ins for their team, but instead, unlock additional perks for themselves.  After 2 kills, a Specialist will receive an additional perk of their choice, to work in addition to the three they've already selected for their class.  This continues with 4 and 6 kills (That's six perks at the same time...).  At 8 consecutive kills with no deaths, the "specialist bonus" is unlocked, giving the player who earned them all  of the perks at the same time.

I'm gonna start a new paragraph here, because it took me a while to appreciate the impact that this has on one's game, and it totally freaked me out the first time I earned the bonus.  With all the perks running, I can run longer, I don't make noise, I reload quicker, I aim down the sights quicker, I switch guns faster, I don't take fall damage, I'm invisible to radar, helicopters and thermal, and if I start to run out of bullets, I resupply my guns from my fallen enemies.  In the simplest of terms, this is as close to God-mode that anyone could get in a COD game.  It does all restart if I die, but it makes the whole experience very rewarding.  If I finish a game with a 24/3 Kill/Death ratio, I know I earned every single one of those kills.  No choppers doing the work, no turrets keeping me safe... all my hands, my weapon.  I am a one man army.

Final Thoughts


I don't want to give off the wrong impression here.  I don't think COD is the best game in the world.  I don't think it should win any game of the year awards.  I don't even think that the changes made in MW3 even make it worthy of being called the best COD game yet.  But it is good. It is a solid experience, and it is a safe and consistent choice.  COD does what it does very well, and I don't think it's blind ignorance that's moving millions upon millions of this title off the shelves at stores.

If that's not the stuff you think you want in a game, than stay away, but I don't necessarily believe you.  I think that we consciously and subconsciously make decisions about our games with safety in mind.  It's why we go to review sites, it's why metacritic exists at all. We want consistency in our gaming, but we also want the experience to remain fresh.  With both of those things in mind, Activision really has done some amazing work here.  It's incredible to think that they've been able to release the same game experience, with some small variances, for five years in a row with consistent growth in sales.  There is a small art to changing something just enough, but not too much.

I look forward to my time with this game over the next year, but not so much that I couldn't put it down to play something else.  It will always be on my shelf even though I may not be playing it like there is no tomorrow.  It's like I like it just enough to warrant not getting rid of it until the next installment comes out.

Do you hear that? I think it's the sound of Bobby Kotick laughing.