Whether you love the CoD franchise or loathe it you’ve gotta feel for developer Treyarch. The rock on one side of this talented studio: a vocal fanbase demanding meaningful innovation, yesterday. The hard place preventing almost all hope of manoeuvring: pretty much the exact same fans, flip-flopped, shrieking that everything ought to go back to [insert old Call of Duty game here].
Treyarch consistently delivers the boldest moves in this multi-developer franchise but with Black Ops 4 the team may be facing a no-win situation that’s “No Russian” levels of FUBAR.
Betting it All on Black
Parent company Activision recently tried to appease the millions-strong peanut gallery. When 2016’s Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare was virally bullied into oblivion for continuing along the unpopular path of futuristic shtick, the next entry wound the clock back to Call of Duty’s WWII roots but failed to light everybody’s bangalores.
With Black Ops 4 it feels like Treyarch is circling the wagons very tight indeed. The studio has crunched the numbers, identified its strengths, and invested heavily in the results of that self-audit.
The biggest shock change, at least from an outsider fan perspective: somebody has identified that a large percentage of players aren’t finishing CoD solo campaigns. That pillar has been levelled and is being replaced with another PvP initiative called Blackout (more on that in the future, but the basic gist is it’s a battle royale that has more in common with PUBG than Fortnite).
Boots Down, Guns Up
You know what? All nitty-gritty analysis aside, this game just feels good through the controller. Treyarch’s adherence to the “guns up” philosophy returns and it’s a joy to be sprinting about, power-sliding under bullets, mantling into windows unloading a full clip as you go and turning heads into canoes.
Call of Duty: Black Ops II was up there with MW2 as the best PvP the series ever produced and the flow of this return to 5v5 combat is buttery smooth. It’s also been tinkered with, thanks to the biggest formula diversion: health no longer regens over time. You now have to prioritise a little window of time to not only reload your boomstick for the next engagement but to stab yourself with a hypodermic (via L1) to repair your nicks from the last one.
Mercifully, this can be done in a jiffy whilst you’re firing. But the cool-down is about 13 seconds worth and a bright yellow icon in lower-centre screen keeps you well-informed. We have no doubt this mechanic alone will make for a higher skill-gap than ever before.
Mostly because healing isn’t instantaneous — going from a near-death 1 bar back to a full health of 6 requires about 3 seconds of wait time. You should also be aware that hiding your ailments isn’t an option (a segmented health bar is projected above you, so you can’t bluff it).
You’ll also need to be very mindful of the capabilities of the available “class” specialists (some are new, others rejigged from the last Black Ops). According to Treyarch the team studied pro players of their previous games, identified ten different player personality types and then shaped all selectable classes and unique skills accordingly.
The Specialest of Forces
Battery is your demo expert who can earn the use of a room-clearing grenade launcher, plus he’s great for ambushing people with his surface-adhering cluster bombs. Brute force breachers should gravitate to the specialist with a transformable ballistics shield and flashbangs (tip: cook ’em to make them pop off multiple times). Treyarch calls this specialist Ajax but we’re quite confident his real name is Francis.
If you’re out to hold the line, Torque should be sought out for his placeable cover and razor wire that shreds enemies with a speed-depriving status effect. Area-of-denial is also the fruit spread of Firebreak, a specialist who can go offensive with a flamethrower or poison an area with a reactor core (tip: you can sacrifice your own life to make it more potent).
If you’re looking to avoid these annoyances you’ll want to throw in with Recon, an intel-feeding specialist whose sensor darts can paint baddies on everybody’s maps, or his vision pulse gives everybody momentary X-ray specs. Crash is also a team-pleaser, with an assault pack that gives everybody bonus score-per-kill and a heal-allies function that cares not for walls.
Rounding us out is Seraph, a golden gun wielding tactician who can employ beacons to create her own team spawn point. And Ruin, a blitzkrieger who has a wide-diameter ground slam and a grapple gun that insta-zips him to unreachable positions. The latter is an incredibly important skillset, considering everybody else’s sci-fi boots are stuck to the ground.
Blopportunity Calling
Other things we enjoyed include the fog-of-war mini-map that reveals enemies when they’re closer to you, League Play is returning, specialist abilities being made available in create-a-class sounds cool, and we love the attention that’s being put into predictable recoil weapons. In theory this will let players “learn” a gun’s handling to Counter-Strike levels of OCD.
Treyarch has also brought bullet trails and muzzle flare level lighting to the fore. During our hands on these two seemingly innocuous things worked wonders for spatial awareness. Approaching a T-junction would let you quickly see the bullet right of way of who was attacking who before sticking your head out. Likewise, there were instances where muzzle flashing stopped us from entering a murder room before the sound of bullets could.
We’re also intrigued by what Treyarch calls “short single player missions” to introduce Black Ops 4‘s 10 specialists, though there’s no way they’ll be any sort of substitute to a campaign.
Important note: we have it on very, very good authority that this doesn’t mean Call of Duty singleplayer is going away for the other teams making CoD games. We were told this isn’t the start of a trend. Time will tell.
Blackout of Ideas?
Speaking of time, the past-warping Zombies mode and the new Blackout PUBG-inspired battle royale mode were not available for sampling, so there’s little we can tell you that you don’t already know, sadly.
For the record: we can’t wait to play the former with our usual crew and the hope is it’ll help fill the current narrative vacuum. There’s also a chance we’ll see some snippets of story in Blackout, given its map is a pastiche of the best Black Ops maps. All we know for sure is it’ll be a Frankenstein that’s “1500 times bigger than Nuketown + vehicles.” Treyarch will need to nail this first go, because the competition in this sub-genre is incredibly fierce right now.
Bottomline: we think the traditional PvP here plays like a potent blend of old versus new. Rewinding back from the verticality to boots on the ground is initially jarring but we feel Treyarch is on target. The studio has kept the things that worked in the last game and has now layered in a bunch of worthy twists to evolve again into a beast far better than Call of Duty Black Ops III.
Providing they don’t also decide to bring back dabbing taunts and *sigh* supply drop credit-card-to-win weapons. We’ll be making space in our calendar come October 12 to BLOP ’til we drop for a very long time indeed.
