Raise your hand if you’ve ever overreacted to a trailer.
We’ve all done it. We see something really cool that catches our eye and causes us to buy a ticket to a movie, only for every single funny moment to have been shown in the trailer and the other 85 minutes of runtime to be the blandest shit you’ve ever watched.
(And before you ask, yes I am describing my feelings towards the last Alvin and the Chipmunks movie. It was absolute garbage and a complete waste of a date night with a girl who probably thinks I’m a furry now)
But I have learned at this point in my life to try my best to manage my expectations for things like movies, TV, and most importantly, video games. I love E3 and have watched pretty much every single press conference for gaming for the last 5 years. So I think I’ve gotten pretty good at looking through the Don Draper “it’s toasted” surface level tagline bullshit and seeing what the actual gameplay of a game looks like.
So here’s an informed gamer’s gut reaction toward the multiplayer reveal we just saw for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War:
It looks pretty, but it also looks like Battlefield
We’re all thinking it and I guarantee that this will be one of the most used descriptions of the reveal we just saw. This sand map looks straight outta Battlefield 1 and I gotta say that concerns me. Treyarch has a reputation of making really good maps so I’m not completely out on them yet, but you cannot tell me looking at this map, the boat map, and the woods map that you aren’t a little bit worried about how open they are. Maybe they’re just for 12 v 12 modes? There’s a lot of other maps that are clearly more traditional CoD style maps but I really hope there’s like 75% of those and 25% of the ones we saw in the trailer.
Visually though these maps look awesome. Not a huge step up from the graphics of Modern Warfare, but significant enough to notice.
Gunsmith is back and so are Scorestreaks
I was pretty surprised to see that the full Gunsmith from MW was carrying over to Black Ops; I thought I read in a leak somewhere that it was being canned. But honestly, my biggest issue with the Gunsmith in MW has always been balance. It is incredibly hard as a developer to balance weapons with that much variety. But hey, the guy literally said during this portion of the presentation that their goal is to make the most balanced game ever so I believe him and hopefully, that translates to much faster than the month and a half it took Infinity Ward to fix game-breaking glitches.
The field upgrades are back as well and oh my god when I saw that they put proximity mines in there…I peed a little from excitement. If claymores and proxymines are no longer primary ultilities and have to be earned over time, that will literally fix half the issues in public matchmaking. Hell, throw C4 in there while you’re at it. Do it Treyarch, I dare you.
The movement system looks similar to MW but in a good way
Many of the CoD pros hated the movement system in MW (the kill times, the slide canceling, the bunny hopping, etc) because it closed the skill gap more than any other CoD game in the past. Personally, I didn’t mind that but I understood where they were coming from. Well, it looks like Treyarch went for a happy medium instead of completely eliminating the innovations introduced in MW. You can still slide, but it doesn’t look like you can cancel out of it and when you exit the slide your movement speed is slowed for a second. You can still jump shot around corners, but it kills your momentum unlike the bunny hops in MW. And the kill times are slightly increased from MW.
And “Dead Silence” is a perk not a field upgrade. That’s a W. A big W.
Cross-platform and Cross-generation play will be included
I love this man right here. I love him. I mean it.
With another CoD being released in the launch window for next-gen consoles, this has been one of the top questions I’ve been asked: will we be able to play cross-gen with our friends if they get a new PS5 or Xbox SeX? For Ghosts, the answer was no (ironically from Infinity Ward LOL). But for BoCw? The answer is clearly yes and hopefully on launch day. This may seem like a trivial announcement but there are a TON of games where even cross-platform play isn’t available on launch (Fall Guys is a great example). This is something that Treyarch needed to figure out and I’m glad they did.
For the sake of length, I’m gonna stop there but I really liked alot of what I saw today. I’m not completely sure I’m sold yet; I think I’ll know more after playing the beta in a month. But I feel really hopeful that this game and Treyarch are exactly what the franchise needs after the abysmal performance from Infinity Ward this year.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go get rid of my raging boner I got from watching CoD gameplay at work all afternoon and NO I’M NOT GONNA GO JERK OFF TO FURRY PORN DENISE.
Goddammit…
