I used to love Call Of Duty. When I was a kid it was the first real PC shooter that ever hooked me - I never played Halo, and before my parents bought a decent PC my FPS games had all been on the N64. So Goldeneye, basically. I never grew up close enough to anyone I knew to get involved in any LAN parties so Call Of Duty, when it was released in 2003, was the first time I had ever played a real shooter with more than 3 other players, and it was the first time I had ever been actively involved in an online community. I was hooked - the setting felt incredibly real, the characters were fully voiced and would talk to one another throughout each mission - and the multiplayer especially was groundbreaking for a kid who grew up in the middle of nowhere and didn't have any friends living within walking/biking distance. I invested hundreds of hours with that game, and when I spoke to my friends at school I couldn't understand why they weren't playing it as well.

Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 has understandably evolved since then. The weapons have been upgraded, the gadgets have been introduced, and the general speed has become punishingly fast - not as fast or ridiculous as Black Ops 3, which has invisible ninjas wall-running with samurai swords - but fast enough that it makes me feel old. This speed, combined with an emphasis on smaller teams and maps, means the game feels a lot more frantic. There's less of the trench-warfare-esque back-n-forth from the original game, which would pit two sides against one another in a way which would allow the push and pull of a frontline to dictate the battle - this game is more focused on individual plays rather than an overwhelming team push, and that's enabled by the way the game channels people into the action: in Black Ops 4 people spawn everywhere, constantly, from every angle, and you'll frequently have people rushing at you from every side. The emphasis is often on tighter streets or corridors instead of rolling vistas, rewarding short-range weapons with faster fire-rates - balanced to make players even more agile and difficult to hit. The result is the multiplayer in Black Ops 4 is a ongoing panic-attack, where you're constantly barraged with lighting fast enemies from every side and are frequently killed by an enemy from a place which was definitely empty just a moment ago. On top of this, once a team takes the lead they are rewarded with increasingly powerful killstreaks, snowballing them further into the lead and preventing the losing side from spawning for more than a few seconds before being endlessly blown up by rockets and helicopters and airstrikes - the small map size meaning there's very few places to hide.

I'm about to hit my first prestige in the multiplayer - I've played predominantly objective-based game modes like Hardpoint, Control, and Search and Destroy, using a variety of different gun types - and (despite the impressions I may have given in the previous paragraph) I'm actually enjoying it quite a lot. After months of endlessly playing PUBG (a game where each life is fragile, and caution is always advised) a game like Black Ops 4 (which rewards repeatedly and enthusiastically throwing yourself into the fray) has been very refreshing. My aim has improved, and not having to deal with the endless bugs and desync of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has also been very satisfying. The main issue I have with Black Ops 4 is that it feels fucking mindless.

Black Ops 4 multiplayer feels like a very reaction-based game - where you're relying on twitch reflexes rather than planning and forethought. Maybe FPS games have always been like that, but in Black Ops 4 it's especially pronounced; This game seems to reward independent play (while some specialist abilities may benefit the team, they seldom compliment one another without high levels of communication, which there is seldom time for) rather than the team-based pressure of something like Overwatch. Imagine if every player in Overwatch always picked Hanzo; that's Black Ops 4. It's about being the fastest and the most accurate - players can immediately heal to full health inbetween all but the most drawn-out of firefights, so it essentially comes down to your ability to kill stuff as efficiently as possible - the physical toll on the player is that it's all happening so fast you're barely engaging with it. It feels good to win, and it's satisfying to murder your opponent before they can murder you, but the game rarely feels that binary; The quirky overpowered abilities and killstreaks, combined with the randomness of the enemy spawns and limited lines of sight, often means you're placed in an unwinnable situation and reaction times/skill/knowledge all become redundant.

Essentially the multiplayer in Black Ops 4 feels very one-note. It's polished, and it's fun, but I can play for 3 hours and not be able to call back a single significant thing that happened - it just feels like a blur of running and frantically clicking at anything that moves. It's been refreshing to check in with the FPS multiplayer genre, but I think I'm at the point where I need something more from my shooting games.

Blackout however, is a whole different ballgame. I'll have some thoughts on that coming soon, once I've spent a bit more time with it.

Thanks For Reading

Love Sweep

Have you played any Siege? Just thinking about what you've said in this post, it seems like Siege might be right up your alley. More teamwork, more complexity, but still frantic and intense (and less buggy than PUBG.)

Good write-up, Sweep. I've been on the fence about Black Ops 4. The PUBG stuff looks great but everything around it regarding the progression feels sort of oily, and knowing that I'd be terrible at every other mode helps me steer clear.

Man, I miss Halo 3.

Yeah, I actually was playing a load of Siege right before PUBG was released, that was my go-to shooter for a long while. I like it a lot, though I didn't have a group of friends that were actively playing and I have a very low tolerance for random people in voice chat, so it felt a little frustrating sometimes. The games I play online "competitively" these days are dictated by whatever my group of friends in Discord are into. Right now that's Call Of Duty.

I feel like your synopsis of Black Ops 4 MP would have perfectly described any COD MP since at least Modern Warfare 2. I feel like that frantic twitch based shooter is just what you sign up for when you play it. Search & Destroy is probably the most strategic communication based mode. Your K/D has probably never mattered less in a COD. Assists are gone; now if you grazed an enemy's shoulder it's going to count as a kill, ala Overwatch. K/D is even somewhat obfuscated in the post game stat screen.

I hate the increased time to kill in BO4 and didn't like abilities in BO3, so having them return is... great... My cooldown has cooled down and now you are dead.
Tried to get a refund but ActiBlizzard never responded so... that's cool.

The thing that strikes me is that the game feels like it has no underlying design philosophy any more. For the Call of Duty series, I've only played the multiplayer of Black Ops 3 and 4 to any great extent. I did, however, rent World at War and the Modern Warfares back in the day and played a decent chunk of those.

When they sped it up in Black Ops 3, that got me back on board. The wall running and double jumps, removal of one hit kill melee as the default, all the crazy robots and special abilities, I thought it was a breath of fresh air, but it still felt like call of duty. The weapon classes and abilities made sense given the gameplay, they found a way to make everything work with the new mobility.

With 4, it just feels like they've lost sight of what game they were making. The maps all feel very small, very square, the movement speed is so fast, but without the double jump or wall running, the angles of attack are all much more predictable. Weapon balance seems to have been abandoned completely. I don't mean weapon balance amongst a category (ie this smg is overpowerd, but this other smg needs a buff) I mean balance between entire weapon classes. Used to be that assault rifles were the all rounders that never really excelled, but could do a bit of everything, they were the baseline. Now, with the ranges of firefights having been compressed so much, they are the best at everything. Short range guns like smgs have become so short ranged and they can't compete with assault rifles even at point blank range since for some reason assault rifles always have a higher damage output (with maybe one exception), and shotguns were moved to secondaries because they didn't fit properly in the game any more. A whole weapon class couldn't fit with this style of gameplay anymore, so they did the only thing they could do short of removing it. Light machine guns used to offer strong damage and accuracy for reduced mobility, but with mobility and speed this high, now they just feel like assault rifles with lots of bullets.

Snipers are perhaps the weirdest of the bunch. All they can do now is quickscoping, that thing people have complained about for ages, that thing that seems to go against the spirit of what the weapon class should be, that's all they have. The maps are too small for actual sniping, and the default sights are way too zoomed in to work on most maps, so the only thing to do with snipers is slap on iron sights or some other low level optic and try to compete in the mid-close range game with assault rifles. But you never can, because people move too fast, come at you in groups, and the sniper just can't keep up. You can do well sure, but by not sticking with an assault rifle or lmg, you're giving up so much for so little.

Even the rocket launcher feels irrelevant, often missing targets for no good reason and not dealing enough damage to bigger score streaks or ground based score streaks. Slap FMJ 1 and 2 onto a gun and you'll deal way more damage to score streaks. A titan (an lmg) with fmj 1 and 2 on it kills a helicopter in 20 bullets, and that thing shoots pretty damn fast all while being a hitscan weapon, not to mention the bonus to shredding armour and shooting through walls.

All that is before you get to the mechanics that seem to just break the game. The difference in power between specialist abilities is laughable, the strobe light on the auto shotgun is just a frustrating experience rather than any sort of fun, the stim pack letting you heal quickly removes all the interesting things that switching to manual heals added to the game, the acoustic sensor just tells you where nearby enemies are, and the existence of armor further weakens the already largely irrelevant smgs and pistols.

This game just feels messy, it feels like they threw it together and didn't have enough time to make all the pieces fit properly. A series that was once about player choice and customizing your own playstyle feels like it's lost much of that customization.

Note: This is for the console version of the game, I've heard PC has an smg focused meta because recoil is much easier to control and a keyboard and mouse allow you to better take advantage of the mobility granted by smgs. Never before has the need for separate balancing been more obvious, and thank god Treyarch has realized that.

Looking forward to your thoughts on Blackout. There's a group of GB folks who play Blackout on PS4 pretty much every night and we all seem to be quite enjoying it, most more than the multiplayer.

Pretty much agree with all of this. To be honest it seems like they designed the maps first and then stat-squished the weapons to fit in with them afterwards. Having sniper rifles in there at all feels like a huge waste of time, as anything over 2x scope means your gun is useless in 90% of firefights. I've been using a SDM but with a red dot sight, and an SMG in secondary with the overkill perk, which seems insane but it works for me. Also - every stealth mechanic feels redundant anywhere except Search and Destroy; I used to love playing MW2 with Ghost and a Suppressor, but that feels like a waste of time here, where the limited routes on the map are going to force people into your path regardless of what you're using.

I bounce back and forth on the abilities and score-streaks. Some of them are cool, and interesting, but some of them are just fucking stupid - like the strike team, a group of AI humans that can soak up an insane amount of damage and immediately murder anyone who gets close - what the fuck is that? Also it seems shortsighted to have the Hellion as the only counter to pretty much everything - such limited options are not indicative of good game design.

The main thing that bugs me is the inconsistency between blackout and multiplayer - where you're using the same guns but they behave wildly different. Blackout seems to prioritize pushing people further apart, to the extent that snipers are ridiculously OP and SMG's are basically useless unless you bump into someone right at the beginning of the game and you're both scrambling. It's like they deliberately designed it so Blackout was the sniper mode and Multiplayer was the SMG mode, which kinda sucks. There should be room there for both playstyles to exist in both game types.

LMG mode doesn't exist I guess? Those guns are garbage even when you're prone, which seems bananas to me. Why even include prone if you're not going to give a recoil advantage for doing so?

@sweep: I actually find smgs have their place right through the match and that snipers (except the sdm) aren't too overwhelming, but we can chat more about that in your follow up topic about Blackout. It also could be a platform specific thing. I do think they could increase the amount of durability smgs take off armour, and that would make them more fair. In general I'd say weapon balance is better in Blackout than multiplayer and as you perfectly put it, it's because they didn't have to squish all the weapons together into such small maps.

No kidding on the weapon difference between mutliplayer. The auger dmr almost feels like a completely different gun between the two modes, and it feels like they accidentally added a couple zeroes when setting the recoil on the swordfish for Blackout.

The main thing that boggled my mind about the specialists is how they thought the tempest (pre-buff) or Crash's health boost or Ruin's ground pound thing were at all comparable to the war machine, or riot shield or dog. Up until recently, if you saw an Ajax with his shield out, you're only real option was to run away. I will say this though, the changes they've made with the specialist system have basically eliminated grenade spam, which is a very welcome change.

on the flipside I've been playing zombies all the time, prestieged twice and all that
I feel like i'm playing an early access of zombies

with features missing, a whole bunch of bugs some didn't even get fix since day1, and patches that somehow makes the game more unstable :|

Yah Call of Duty has been reaction-heavy for a very long time now. It's been a war of who has the better reflexes and aim rather than who can out think the opponent. Wearing surround sound headphones (so 5 pairs of headphones at once and a subwoofer) actually greatly helps in those games. Knowing spawn points is also important of course. What has greatly changed is that there is less focus on kill streaks than in the days of Modern Warfare 1/2. Back then you built off a killstreak to rack up huge kills - 5 carefully earned kills for the rocket, which gets you to the 7 chopper real easy and then the chopper would get you to the AC-130 pretty quickly. The weird new point based reward system balanced that out a bit and also the kill streaks themselves don't appear to be as overpowered as before.

I'm enjoying the game but the areas it sucks at - really suck (here's my list of my pet peeves):

• Kill-steaks last way too long and are too hard to take down (this leads to run away kill-streaks).
• SMG's are overpowered and too accurate.
• Sniper rifles are broken like SMG's.
• Maps look cool but their layouts are all the same: ovals with a line through them
• weapons are too accurate at full auto.
• rate of fire beats out everything, at any range.
• The game doesn't know if it wants to be Advanced War or Modern Warfare 1-2.
• Movement doesn't effect accuracy, this leads to annoying bunny hopping (fine for Unreal or Quake, not for COD).
• Spawns are broken, I've spawned in a pack of enemies far too many times.
• Unlike previous COD's, the battlefield feels chaotic and bland at the same time - it has no smooth flow to it.

I'm still playing, but I'm getting tired of it. Each update seems to make the things I dislike about the game more pronounced.