Let's Review! Call of Duty Black Ops III Beta
This year, Call of Duty fans are receiving the gift that is Black Ops III (Blops 3) from Treyarch. As FPS players have come to expect, the release has been preceded by a Beta which took place from August 19th - August 23rd for PS4 owners and from August 26th - August 30th for Xbox One and PC players. Initially I had been told that in order to participate in the Beta you had to either receive a key from a friend or pre-order Blops 3. With the added exception for PC being, you need to own CoD Ghosts, Blops 2, or Advanced Warfare. Much to my empty wallet's delight, the PC beta turned out to be free for anyone since the only CoD I own for the PC is CoD 4: Modern Warfare. So, on Friday August 28th I jumped into the PC beta and I had an absolute blast. Let's review!
The Good
- Wall running and power sliding. I really enjoyed the double jumping and slamming mechanic in Advanced Warfare. In addition to carrying over the double jumping mechanic (it is slightly tweaked though), Treyarch added wall running and power sliding (to replace dolphin diving) and it was definitely the right choice. In additional movement options opens up levels and allows what would be a traditional one directional lane to be traversed in four different ways. It is great. It's also interesting to see how the mechanic is balanced. The player has a power bar which gets used whenever the double jump or power slide and the double jump height/duration is influenced by how long the player holds the jump button down. Hold it down the maximum time allotment and the player will jump really high but use all their power. Timing also plays a part as the player can time the second "jump" and turn it more in a floating stall into a ledge grab since the exo suits are gone and players now have this sort of cyborg thruster suit.
- Pick 10 system. I absolutely loved it when the pick 10 system was introduced and I'm glad it's making a return in Black Ops III. It gives players more freedom and customization over their player classes than the majority of other FPS games and even older CoD games.
- Specialists. Like the wall running and power sliding, Blops 3 introduces "Specialists" into the game which is like having an extra kill streak for no extra cost. Each specialist has one offensive and one defensive pointstreak (you can only use one at a time), which accrues throughout the entire match, as opposed to the actual kill streaks that reset when the player dies. The specialists add some much needed character/character customization to the multiplayer since they all have call signs and they talk to each other at the beginning of each match. It is kind of weird that the multiplayer player character isn't physically customizable or influenced by the perks (see ghillie suit in Blops 1). I had the opportunity to play as "Prophet", "Outrider", "Battery", and "Nomad". "Prophet"'s offensive point streak is a rail gun that fires electric projectiles which apparently can hit multiple enemies, but I was unable to accomplish this feat myself and his defensive point streak is "glitch" which allows the player to teleport back to where they were 30 seconds previous to using the skill. "Outrider"'s offensive point streak is a bow with an explosive arrow and her defensive skill is like wall hack vision. "Battery"'s offensive point streak is a multi-explosive grenade launcher and her defensive ability is armor invincibility. "Nomad"'s offensive weapon is H.I.V.E., another rocket launcher type weapon but instead of firing explosive rounds it fires a proximity mine of bugs that swarm and kill enemies that set it off. His defensive skill detonates a big cloud of smokey lightning when he dies and then revives him; it's useful against players that aren't familiar with it, but once you've played for a while it's easy to just camp and kill "Nomad" twice. Of course, the point streaks are balanced so they stop when the player is killed, the player runs out of their limited ammo, or the time duration of the point streak ends (whichever happens first).
- The guns. I spend most of my Call of Duty time in CoD 4: Modern Warfare mainly for modding purposes so it's really refreshing playing a modern CoD (hah, get it?) where there are more than four guns in most of the weapon categories and a wider range of customization options/slots which do more than add a sight or stability to the gun.
- The unlock/reward system. If it's one thing CoD games do well, it's getting the player to continue to play the game trying to unlock items as if they were playing an MMORPG. In addition to the usual fair of unlocking kill streaks, specialists, player cards et al., perks, weapons, and attachments; the level up system is split into character level AND weapon level. In order to unlock attachments for weapons you have to level up said weapon by using it to kill enemies. It's just a simple change, but in addition to giving players a reason to level up regularly, players now have a reason to use different weapons other than they're not a high enough level for the really good weapons.
- New killstreaks. There are many updated versions of classic kill streaks like the explosive rc car, UAV, counter-UAV, and care package. However, a lot of the classic airborne kill streaks are hybrids. For instance, there is a killstreak called "Hellstorm" which is kind of like a combination of the Predator Missle from MW2 and the Mortar Team from Black Ops. Another killstreak of note is R.A.P.S. which are tiny AI explosive robot balls that function like the Dogs from Black Ops; except they explode. It's also interesting that they are dropped down from a drop ship in the spot where you're standing when you call them in. They also seem to come in, in two waves.
- Safeguard. I prefer objective based game types. Most FPS games feature a mix of deathmatch and objective based scenarios, but the CoD series do it the best. Domination is an awesome evolution of king of the hill, Hardpoint is a fantastic evolution of roaming king of the hill, CoD games of course have the bomb planting/defusal game types made famous by counter-strike, there's even CTF and even Killed Confirm adds a much needed twist on traditional team deathmatch. Black Ops 3 introduces Safeguard. A mode similar to Push Cart in Team Fortress 2 where players on the attacking team stand next to a robot in order to get it to move to an objective point on the other side of the map while defenders try to stop the attackers and disable the robot. The fact that defenders can shoot the robot in order to disable it is a super fun addition over traditional Push Cart mechanics. From my experience with the game mode, it still needs some balancing. When the robot reboots after being disabled it takes a few seconds to stand up and begin moving again which puts the attackers at a disadvantage waiting for the robot's animation state to change while defenders can get in free shots on an active, immobile-no-matter-what, robot. Also, on some of the maps the route the robot takes is ridiculously short which makes defending almost impossible and renders an entire half, or more, of the map irrelevant. The only map that really worked well in the beta was "Hunted" the tropical cabana/resort map. Furthermore, the game type is round based and starts out having a time limit of four minutes and then decreasing every round. As the game goes on it makes it increasingly more difficult for the team that attacks second to win based on the mechanics alone. Personally I think the time should be increased and the routes the robot takes remapped so it takes the little VIP longer to get to the end-point as this game type tends to end quicker than the rest. As a side note, when you're an attacker there is no frontal collision on the robot, but there is from the behind so you can very easily get trapped in sticky situations that cost you a frag. Lastly, I should not that one person I played with complained that the robot shouldn't reboot on his own and it being able to do so makes the game type "broken". I disagree, it takes the robot a while to reboot and expecting players to stand next to it while it's immobile about in the open is ridiculous since, on average, only half of a team will play the objective.
The Bad
- The Specialists are kind unbalanced right now, but this is mainly influenced by how I personally play. Each specialist has the option of using an offensive or defensive pointstreak. As I mentioned in "The Good", during the beta I was able to play as "Prophet", "Outrider", and "Battery". I only saw other players play as (in order of most common to least common) "Outrider", "Prophet", "Ruin", "Nomad", and "Reaper". Both "Nomad" and "Reaper" required high levels to unlock and boy are they worth it. "Nomad" has a grenade launcher similar to "Battery" except these robotic locust type bugs swarm out of each grenade and seemingly chase down enemies to kills them/act as a proximity attack if the shot does not hit an enemy immediate. "Reaper's" offensive point streak is a gatling gun that seemed to have an infinite time limit and only stopped after the player was killed. Furthermore, I only saw the offensive versions of "Ruin", "Nomad", and "Reaper" and I only saw two people use the defensive version of "Prophet" and "Outrider". Does this mean players would rather get a boost in their killing abilities or that the reward for using an offensive capability far outweighs the pros for using a defensive skill? As far as I can tell for the beta, it's the latter.
- I also encountered two people playing as "Spectre", one of which just ran around knifing people the entire time.
- The recoil, aka my terrible aim. I'm used to playing Call of Duty games with a game pad on a console and I've never had recoil/aiming issues in the past. With Blops 3 on the PC though, using a keyboard and mouse was extremely frustrating. My mouse sensitivity never felt good because it was either too high or too low thanks to most of weapons having weirdly wild recoil. To add insult to injury it seemed like everyone else in the matches I played had laser-like precision 24/7. Does this mean I don't know how to play FPS games on PC? I doubt it considering I still play Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Chivalry, Borderlands 2/Pre-Sequel, Payday 2, and PlanetSide 2 on the PC with no problems. With all this being said, I'd like to point out I did not get a chance to use every single weapon in the game so this could boil down to the weapons I was using, but it felt like a general mouse cursor speed problem most of the time. Also, I had a lot of lag issues (see below) so this could have also contributed, but again, the overall movement and then trying to keep the cross-hair where I wanted it was the problem.
- After switching from keyboard and mouse to a gamepad I had a lot easier time getting my usual average 2-1 KD ratio. Some balances do need to be made because some of the faster firing weapons, specifically the Vesper (a low accuracy, highest rate of fire SMG) and the Dingo (LMG) which have relatively low accuracy don't seem to actually be effected by said stat and players seemed to be able to fully fire them with laser precision.
- The game crashes. A lot. I'm not sure if it's because of my own hardware or just the nature of beta builds themselves. From what I can find from internet commentators and forums, the game crashes more when you're in the menus, but for me it's only crashed during games. I also assume the console versions are more stable since CoD's target release platforms are the PS4 and Xbox One.
- Besides the crashes, I've had tremendous issues with lag. Normally I would chalk it up to slow internet on my end. However, I don't have lag issues like what I ran into in Blops 3 in any other multiplayer PC games.
- The stuttering/lag seemed to be a product of the game itself being a beta build as the weekend progressed I encountered less games that lagged. It still happened from time to time so I believe it was due to other players' connections. If everyone's average ping was under 100 the match was fine, if anyone had over 100 ping then the game would stutter considerably.
- The irony of the crashing and lagging issues is that I run into both problems in a great little game called Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. So we can conclude the beta build of Blops 3 is structurally as good as the best a small indie studio can produce for their released game. Of course, Blops doesn't have the same collision, hitbox, spawning, screen tearing, or total game instability that Chivalry features. Why bring this up? When games first start their journey to being released they are a broken mess and devs spend countless hours trying to fix enough of the problems without producing more. Most games are a slight breeze away from completely falling apart like a house made from a deck of cards. It bodes extremely well that the beta version of Black Ops III is holding together so well.
- Melee attack debuff. Previous CoD games features a one hit kill melee attack which is now gone unless the player has a specific combat knife weapon equipped. The only way to get a one hit melee kill while having a gun is to allegedly melee an enemy in the back, otherwise it's a two hit kill - the same system used by the Halo franchise. The old system was better.
- The pick 10 system. While the pick 10 inventory system is absolutely great, it does have one glaring issue. In order to double up on perks, a third weapon attachment, equipping a primary weapon in your secondary slot, or second lethal grenade you have to also equip a wild card for each extra you want. Each wild card also takes up one of the 10 pick 10 slots. So this effectively means if you want a third weapon attachment, for instance, it will cost 2 out of your 10 slots to obtain one extra item. I understand the need for designing it this way, but it really isn't worth it.
The Ugly
- The graphics. I've had graphical issues with every single Call of Duty Game I've played on the PC - Modern Warfare (though it's old and the asset resolution may just be poor compared to todays standards), Ghosts, Advanced Warfare, and now Black Ops III. The graphics card I use is a factory overclocked (superclocked) GTX 560 so it comes with Nvidia's "GeForce Experience" which I use to optimize all of my games. Everything else I play looks great, but for some reason I can never get Call of Duty games right. Even manually changing the graphics in-game does little to improve things and causes massive performance issues. This is all the more confusing when you consider that the GTX 560 is at least 27 times better than the Xenos graphics chip in the Xbox 360, yet Black Ops 1 on my 360 looks better, overall, than any of the last three CoD games on my PC. Plus, there are no graphical performance issues on the 360. I have to assume it's because the Call of Duty developers (Treyarch, Sledgehammer Games, Raven Software, and Infinity Ward) optimize the game for consoles and let the PC gamers fend for themselves since most "PC Gamers" have monster rigs running multiple high-end graphics cards, etc. which allow for super extreme realistic graphics at 60 frames per second.
Derek holds a Bachelor's Degree in Game Design and has three years of game development experience. To view his other work please visit www.dereksinex.com or his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/JDKevlar
