Me and Call of Duty, sitting in a tree

Call of Duty Black Ops though, is something different altogether. I've never been one to say Treyarch is a worse developer than Infinity Ward but they've really dropped the ball on this one. Before I start my 'rant' I have to say two things: I haven't even finished Black Ops and there will be spoilers. The spoilers are minor because I haven't finished the game and I haven't finished the game because it is already annoying the hell out of me (and I've only made it to the 4th mission). Oh, and I use some bad language, so... there's that.

The game is really into taking you by the hand and never letting go. It won't let you do things on your own at all and isn't that the whole reason why we play games in the first place? To feel like bad-asses who blow up entire bases with just an AK-47 and a pistol? Black Ops is weird this way because I get the feeling it doesn't trust me. It's annoying and weird that a big game developer made a game like this. And not just any game, a game in what might be the biggest franchise in gaming history. Below are my experiences with the first three missions in Black Ops. I know the text is quite long but I am trying to use examples for people who haven't played the game.

My issues with Call of Duty Black Ops

The next section, in true Call of Duty fashion, throws everything at you at once, people are screaming in your earpiece, you have no idea what's going on and you die. The game respawned me in a spot with 4 enemies surrounding me! FOUR! I died within seconds. This goes on for about 10 minutes and I keep dying because there is too much shit going on. Eventually, we get to an airfield and my buddies just fucking book it across the tarmac! I don't have infinite auto-run so I have no chance of keeping up. Already I feel like the game is getting sort of annoyed that it has to play around me.

Nex mission, I'm in prison. Somebody hands me a knife and the game tells me to stab dudes. Ok. I can do that. So I stab every guard in sight. Then I come to some prisoners fighting some guards so I try to stab them. I can't do that. I swear I've stabbed them for 2 minutes straight and nothing happened. Why do I have this knife and why are there guards that I can't stab? For the next 20 minutes or so, I follow some guy. I never get a moment where the game tells me 'Go there and kill everything', only 'Follow this dude'. The story also gets very dodgy in this level. It's all a bit too cartoonish and over the top for me and the voice acting isn't helping. I have a hard time buying any of this and it's not making the game very enjoyable. But the next mission really takes the cake.

The cake

So now I have escaped prison and I'm working for the CIA. Never mind how that happened, the game spends about 10 seconds explaining that so you shouldn't give it a second thought. Because I am a bad-ass (at least, that's what the game tells me), I get to go to the Pentagon! Nice! Now, let me describe what happens in this 'mission'. I arrive in a helicopter, get in a limo, go to the Pentagon, walk through the Pentagon, meet John F. Kennedy and get the mission to kill some dude. First of all, the game doesn't let me control my character! He walks on his own in first person perspective. Not for a little while, no, for the entire mission! Ok, so they don't want me to go off-script and want to keep the immersion going. But then, they cut away from the first person perspective to show THE LIMO DRIVING DOWN THE FREEWAY! What? That was cool enough to break the first person perspective in a Call of Duty game for THE FIRST TIME EVER? Then, they show my character walking around in third person! At this point, I am about to cry. This makes no sense. The whole walk through the Pentagon is in first person and I still can't control my character. Why, in the name of Kotick, did they do this?

There must have been concept art for this level, then somebody made 3D models for it, those were unwrapped and textured, put in the engine and lit. Programmers and animators made sure everything looked alive. This probably cost weeks to create and all so the game can rush me through it in 5 minutes without even letting me control my character? WOW! You know what's cool about games? Going to places you never get to go. You know where none of us is ever going to go? The motherfucking Pentagon!!! Why can't you let me walk around in this fictional version of the Pentagon for a while? WHY?! It could have been fun, you could have put in some Easter Eggs and people would have said "Dude, did you find the Playboy magazine in the bathrooms at the Pentagon in Call of Duty Black Ops? Man, that was cool!". Nope. 5 minute first person walk with no control over your character and no breaks. Awesome.

Nope, guess again. Next mission: I get to follow Woods around again. Seriously, if I am the best soldier the US has, then WHY THE HELL DO I HAVE TO KEEP FOLLOWING THIS DUDE AROUND?! Because, again, the game doesn't trust me to do things on my own. I like poking at games to see how far I can go but Call of Duty doesn't let me go at all! And when I follow Woods around in this mission, everything I do breaks the game. I shot my gun, the helicopter saw me: instant failure. Next section: it won't even let me shoot. Sometimes the game stops and Woods tells me to do something.

You know what, Woods, I don't feel like it. Fuck you, do it yourself! But he never does and the game just stays in that state until you finally do it. At one point, I get to shoot down a rocket going into outer space with a stinger missile. That was kind of cool. So I'm standing there, looking up at the rocket exploding. Looks cool. I look back down and everyone is gone! Everything is quiet and my buddies are waiting for me down the stairs. It's really, really quiet but the second I reach the stairs everything starts exploding! I could almost SEE the hitbox the level designer placed there. More following, more corridor shooting. Sometimes I think the game just throws in these corridor sections to make me feel like I'm at least doing something but it's not helping. Corridor shooting sucks! Woods, Bowman and some guy I don't even know are also in the corridor and they randomly charge forward and jump in front of my gun. Remember: we were pretending to be Russian soldiers so they're dressed in the same fucking uniforms as the enemies! They got really angry when I shot them. Well, don't stand in front of my gun. I'm not moving, you are, idiot!

At the end of the mission, we apparently failed to kill the dude we were supposed to kill. At no point in the mission was it clear to me that we were there to kill a dude (or shoot rockets out of the air, for that matter). The game hardly ever tells you what you should be doing. Anyway, we failed. And now the main character has the balls to say 'we searched the entire base and he wasn't there'. Fuck off, we didn't search the entire base, that thing was massive. Woods just dragged us from point A to point B! So I'm getting sick of the following, the vagueness, the story, the corridor shooting, everything having the same goddamn color and most of all, Woods.

My breaking point

The next mission is in Vietnam. Yeah, Vietnam! I like Vietnam movies (two of my favorite movies: Platoon and Apocalypse Now) so I was psyched about the Vietnam missions. So who shows up: WOODS! AAAAAAAARGH! The game takes control of my character and walks me to a Jeep and I don't even get to walk around the camp we're in. Now Woods starts briefing me again and I'm done. I don't care anymore. I've now played an hour of Call of Duty Black Ops and all I've done is follow two dudes around and odds are, that's what I will be doing for the next five hours. The game won't let me explore, won't let me do things on my own and won't let me mess around. Fuck it!

So I turned it off. And you know what I'm going to do now? I'm going to play Assassin's Creed Brotherhood. There is a massive open world there where I can do all kinds of things. That game does make me feel like a bad-ass, like the person who should be liberating Rome. It trusts me enough to open the world up, fill it with shit to do and say "Have fun, dude!"

Get to the point already!

Black Ops has a huge boner for how awesome, bad-ass and cool it is as a game. But this boner is preventing the game from doing what it's supposed to be doing: making ME feel like a bad-ass! I, the player, am living the experiences the game is giving me through this character. If the game doesn't trust me to be that character and holds my hand the whole way through, then what am I doing? It's the gaming equivalent of being an intern: they give you shit to do, but it's never the good shit and somebody's always looking over your shoulder to see if you're doing it right. And you have to make the coffee.

Me and Call of Duty, sitting in a tree

Call of Duty Black Ops though, is something different altogether. I've never been one to say Treyarch is a worse developer than Infinity Ward but they've really dropped the ball on this one. Before I start my 'rant' I have to say two things: I haven't even finished Black Ops and there will be spoilers. The spoilers are minor because I haven't finished the game and I haven't finished the game because it is already annoying the hell out of me (and I've only made it to the 4th mission). Oh, and I use some bad language, so... there's that.

The game is really into taking you by the hand and never letting go. It won't let you do things on your own at all and isn't that the whole reason why we play games in the first place? To feel like bad-asses who blow up entire bases with just an AK-47 and a pistol? Black Ops is weird this way because I get the feeling it doesn't trust me. It's annoying and weird that a big game developer made a game like this. And not just any game, a game in what might be the biggest franchise in gaming history. Below are my experiences with the first three missions in Black Ops. I know the text is quite long but I am trying to use examples for people who haven't played the game.

My issues with Call of Duty Black Ops

The next section, in true Call of Duty fashion, throws everything at you at once, people are screaming in your earpiece, you have no idea what's going on and you die. The game respawned me in a spot with 4 enemies surrounding me! FOUR! I died within seconds. This goes on for about 10 minutes and I keep dying because there is too much shit going on. Eventually, we get to an airfield and my buddies just fucking book it across the tarmac! I don't have infinite auto-run so I have no chance of keeping up. Already I feel like the game is getting sort of annoyed that it has to play around me.

Nex mission, I'm in prison. Somebody hands me a knife and the game tells me to stab dudes. Ok. I can do that. So I stab every guard in sight. Then I come to some prisoners fighting some guards so I try to stab them. I can't do that. I swear I've stabbed them for 2 minutes straight and nothing happened. Why do I have this knife and why are there guards that I can't stab? For the next 20 minutes or so, I follow some guy. I never get a moment where the game tells me 'Go there and kill everything', only 'Follow this dude'. The story also gets very dodgy in this level. It's all a bit too cartoonish and over the top for me and the voice acting isn't helping. I have a hard time buying any of this and it's not making the game very enjoyable. But the next mission really takes the cake.

The cake

So now I have escaped prison and I'm working for the CIA. Never mind how that happened, the game spends about 10 seconds explaining that so you shouldn't give it a second thought. Because I am a bad-ass (at least, that's what the game tells me), I get to go to the Pentagon! Nice! Now, let me describe what happens in this 'mission'. I arrive in a helicopter, get in a limo, go to the Pentagon, walk through the Pentagon, meet John F. Kennedy and get the mission to kill some dude. First of all, the game doesn't let me control my character! He walks on his own in first person perspective. Not for a little while, no, for the entire mission! Ok, so they don't want me to go off-script and want to keep the immersion going. But then, they cut away from the first person perspective to show THE LIMO DRIVING DOWN THE FREEWAY! What? That was cool enough to break the first person perspective in a Call of Duty game for THE FIRST TIME EVER? Then, they show my character walking around in third person! At this point, I am about to cry. This makes no sense. The whole walk through the Pentagon is in first person and I still can't control my character. Why, in the name of Kotick, did they do this?

There must have been concept art for this level, then somebody made 3D models for it, those were unwrapped and textured, put in the engine and lit. Programmers and animators made sure everything looked alive. This probably cost weeks to create and all so the game can rush me through it in 5 minutes without even letting me control my character? WOW! You know what's cool about games? Going to places you never get to go. You know where none of us is ever going to go? The motherfucking Pentagon!!! Why can't you let me walk around in this fictional version of the Pentagon for a while? WHY?! It could have been fun, you could have put in some Easter Eggs and people would have said "Dude, did you find the Playboy magazine in the bathrooms at the Pentagon in Call of Duty Black Ops? Man, that was cool!". Nope. 5 minute first person walk with no control over your character and no breaks. Awesome.

Nope, guess again. Next mission: I get to follow Woods around again. Seriously, if I am the best soldier the US has, then WHY THE HELL DO I HAVE TO KEEP FOLLOWING THIS DUDE AROUND?! Because, again, the game doesn't trust me to do things on my own. I like poking at games to see how far I can go but Call of Duty doesn't let me go at all! And when I follow Woods around in this mission, everything I do breaks the game. I shot my gun, the helicopter saw me: instant failure. Next section: it won't even let me shoot. Sometimes the game stops and Woods tells me to do something.

You know what, Woods, I don't feel like it. Fuck you, do it yourself! But he never does and the game just stays in that state until you finally do it. At one point, I get to shoot down a rocket going into outer space with a stinger missile. That was kind of cool. So I'm standing there, looking up at the rocket exploding. Looks cool. I look back down and everyone is gone! Everything is quiet and my buddies are waiting for me down the stairs. It's really, really quiet but the second I reach the stairs everything starts exploding! I could almost SEE the hitbox the level designer placed there. More following, more corridor shooting. Sometimes I think the game just throws in these corridor sections to make me feel like I'm at least doing something but it's not helping. Corridor shooting sucks! Woods, Bowman and some guy I don't even know are also in the corridor and they randomly charge forward and jump in front of my gun. Remember: we were pretending to be Russian soldiers so they're dressed in the same fucking uniforms as the enemies! They got really angry when I shot them. Well, don't stand in front of my gun. I'm not moving, you are, idiot!

At the end of the mission, we apparently failed to kill the dude we were supposed to kill. At no point in the mission was it clear to me that we were there to kill a dude (or shoot rockets out of the air, for that matter). The game hardly ever tells you what you should be doing. Anyway, we failed. And now the main character has the balls to say 'we searched the entire base and he wasn't there'. Fuck off, we didn't search the entire base, that thing was massive. Woods just dragged us from point A to point B! So I'm getting sick of the following, the vagueness, the story, the corridor shooting, everything having the same goddamn color and most of all, Woods.

My breaking point

The next mission is in Vietnam. Yeah, Vietnam! I like Vietnam movies (two of my favorite movies: Platoon and Apocalypse Now) so I was psyched about the Vietnam missions. So who shows up: WOODS! AAAAAAAARGH! The game takes control of my character and walks me to a Jeep and I don't even get to walk around the camp we're in. Now Woods starts briefing me again and I'm done. I don't care anymore. I've now played an hour of Call of Duty Black Ops and all I've done is follow two dudes around and odds are, that's what I will be doing for the next five hours. The game won't let me explore, won't let me do things on my own and won't let me mess around. Fuck it!

So I turned it off. And you know what I'm going to do now? I'm going to play Assassin's Creed Brotherhood. There is a massive open world there where I can do all kinds of things. That game does make me feel like a bad-ass, like the person who should be liberating Rome. It trusts me enough to open the world up, fill it with shit to do and say "Have fun, dude!"

Get to the point already!

Black Ops has a huge boner for how awesome, bad-ass and cool it is as a game. But this boner is preventing the game from doing what it's supposed to be doing: making ME feel like a bad-ass! I, the player, am living the experiences the game is giving me through this character. If the game doesn't trust me to be that character and holds my hand the whole way through, then what am I doing? It's the gaming equivalent of being an intern: they give you shit to do, but it's never the good shit and somebody's always looking over your shoulder to see if you're doing it right. And you have to make the coffee.

The single player has some strange design decisions, like the overuse of endlessly spawning enemies and weird checkpoints in places. Multiplayer expands on the formula established by Modern Warfare 2 and removes things like akimbo Rangers/Models and makes it so that there aren't jets and helicopters flying overhead every 5 seconds. 
 
If you don't like it then........ sorry? But this colossal rant isn't going to change anyone's minds.

Although I hate to agree with tl;dr posting, this is quite unmanageably long. I think discussing the overarching ideas, "don't leave all the cool stuff to the cut scenes" and don't use heavy scripting that limits players input too much, at the start would make it clearer what your discussion is, then use the examples but shorten them a bit. I agree with you in principle, but I haven't played the game myself yet.

The single player was a bit much and different but imma give it a second go which i NEVER EVER do with games cept like doom, resident evil 2, super mario etc. they make up for it in multiplayer and nazi zombies. But at the same time i really dont have that high of expectations for a call of duty game. you cant really top off mw1.

I wasn't expecting comments on the way I formatted my post, but maybe I will try and make it more readable in the future ;) Like I said, I don't normally post these kinds of rants at all

Single player campaigns are no longer fun in FPS games. It's been pretty much the same over the past 10 years, only with different graphics. Innovation is needed imo. So it's not just Black Ops. What I've noticed is that variation beyond shooting with a gun is what makes them fun. I don't know about you, but I'm bored when I run down the streets shooting at people. "Mini games" like flying helicopters, and blowing vehicles up from an AC-130 are usually the coolest parts of FPS games, and is what makes the games memorable. I'm too tired to come up with final words.

Yeah, and I haven't even made it past level 4 so I'm really not looking forward to the rest of the game :(

I should have played Black Ops first and Assassins Creed after that :/

I liked this rant, 4 stars
(yes I read all of it)

pretty much all the call of duties have you running from checkpoint to checkpoint killing dudes, with set pieces happening left and right.  i really don't see how this one is different than the others.
 
and i hate to state the obvious, but assassin's creed is an open world game, a completely different genre than black ops.  you said the other call of duty games were awesome roller coaster rides, but you expect black ops to do this all of a sudden: "It trusts me enough to open the world up, fill it with shit to do and say 'Have fun, dude!'"  Although some of the coolest moments of previous games have been completely linear (the ghilli suit mission from CoD4 comes to mind).
 
i'm confused.  black ops is a modern shooter.  this is kind of what you get.

Shortened the text a bit

@csl316:

" I liked this rant, 4 stars (yes I read all of it) "

I quit playing Call of Duty games after Call of Duty 2. They all seem more multiplayer focused, so I'm out.

" @Onno10 said:

" I liked this rant, 4 stars (yes I read all of it) "

Thank you :) For the reading, and the stars :P "

I agree fully with what you said. I lost interested in the multiplayer in MW 2 and Black Ops isn't going to pull me back. Also the single player, just looks rental material to me. The script heavy sequences just annoy me now.

Oh, Gordon Freeman, you never let us lose control in your games.

Your icon is too close to harris'.

I would really enjoy the SP campaign if I DIDN'T OWN THE BROKEN-AS-FUCK PC VERSION THAT FUCKING NEVER WORKS PROPERLY.
 
So I agree that it's a bad, bad game, but for entirely different reasons.

I don't get why you expected to be able to explore anything. This is a CoD game, you know what you're getting into when you play it. MW2 was even worse with the whole "DURP BADASS NESS MAYNE!" stuff. I'm not saying i disagree with you though, it'd be nice to see the games calm the fuck down, but really what did you expect from mw2's follow up?

im pretty much at the point you are (note: I didnt buy the game it was gifted to me on steam, same with MW2 ... seems like im cursed to play every CoD game no matter if I want to or not) and I would agree. So far most of the game feels on rails, run down this corridor, crawl through that ditch rinse repeat.
 
People say Crysis was "only graphics with no game" but crysis was a shooter that let you do things your way, sure, there was always a red line and a point to go to, but how you get there and how you approach your mission was up to you ... guns blazing, sneaky, direction of attack ... everything was up to you as a player. Crysis doesnt get enough credit for that. But it seems like the majority of people like games that take them by the hand and put a big red sign on screen that says "shoot these guys".

I disagree completely with this rant! 0 stars!
No but seriously, i do disagree. You're a black ops unit (thus the title) you're not supposed to feel like you're a soldier in a huge battle. I understand if you prefer that sorta dealy, that's cool, but that isn't what this game is. An i don't really get your complaints about Woods, i thought he was bad ass. And again, you're part of a unit, you're not supposed to be a lone wolf.
The jumping ahead is just a mechanic of the narrative. You're playing through flashbacks during your interrogation. It doesn't make sense for him to spend ten minutes talking about walking from one area to another, the jolting aspect of the narrative follows what a guy strapped in a chair getting electrocuted would be talking like. I assume. Never actually been in that situation. 
And it sounded like you didn't like Gary Oldman as Reznov? That automatically made me want to not finish reading it. But i did. Gary Oldman makes everything better.
Anyway thats cool it's not your type of game but the things you complain about are sorta what this game is. It's like complaining Halo has aliens in it. 
The Pentagon scene for me was cool, having a huge amount of control wouldn't make any sense cause you're supposed to be following Hudson, wandering around would be sorta dumb. Seeing JFK was cool.
CoD has, at least for the last number of years, been a super linear, super scripted game (single player) and Black Ops doesn't deviate. For me this has been the most enjoyable story of the series. But thats just me.

@audiosnag

Exactly, Wood is bad-ass! But I am not Woods in the game! I want to be bad-ass, Woods can pick up whatever bad-assness I leave in my wake ;) I agree that a Black Ops unit shouldn't be in huge battles but breaking everything up the way they do, even the levels feel small. The Gulag level in MW2 has you fighting with a small unit too but that level felt HUGE! (Again, I haven't finished the entire game yet, so that could still come)

I don't agree that the things I complain about are 'sorta what this game is'. No CoD game has made me feel like this before, even though they have been super linear forever. There is a difference between linear and literally not letting me do anything without Woods guiding me there. I also think we shouldn't be accepting this stuff from a franchise as awesome as Call of Duty!

And of course I like Gary Oldman! Are you crazy?! Who doesn't like Gary Oldman?! And there's nothing wrong with Reznov, it was just another dude leading me through another level, telling me what to do.

And if you enjoyed the game: awesome! You probably paid for it so you got your money's worth!

Me, I payed 60 euros (yeah, I'm from over there) and am now stuck with a game I will never enjoy as much as you did. And I really want to enjoy it as much as you did! For god's sake, this is the biggest game of the year, it should be awesome!

Being one of the few that mainly likes Call of Duty for the campaign, this makes me glad I didn't run out to buy it just yet. Thanks for that.

I think BLOPS is a good good game.

So... it's too linear, is the gist of your rant? If not, ignore this, I'm an unapologetic skimmer of long blog posts.  
 
But is it really surprising that a COD game has you following people around, and shooting whoever pops up? The games are basically shooting galleries from COD4 onward. I like 'em, but that's because I know exactly what to expect out of them.

Why would they waste time with things like good design when they already know the game will sell ridiculous numbers regardless? 

I slept through the entire campaign. My friend asked me if Frank Woods was my favorite character or something and I told him I didn't know his first name and wouldn't have known his last if it didn't show up when I aimed at him.

That may be the biggest problem in all of this: it doesn't matter if the next Call of Duty game is an RTS about dancing unicorns who fight werewolf lawyers, it will sell anyway. This might make the developer take some weird choices because, as you said, why bother?

Also, I am totally proposing an RTS about dancing unicorns who fight werewolf lawyers at work today :P

i miss Doom.  now beating that made you feel like a bad ass
 

Yeah, Doom was awesome as hell (pun intended :P)

And I played that when I was 12 or something, never finished it until I got older :)

Don't Get Title Of Thread
 

I completely agree. It is way, way, way too restricting. It decides when you can shoot, when you can run, when you can move, when you can control your own fucking character. I've yet the get into the multiplayer but the single player is not good.  
This doesn't feel like a good game, it feels like a poorly made game with a huge budget.

"

@audiosnag

Exactly, Wood is bad-ass! But I am not Woods in the game! I want to be bad-ass, Woods can pick up whatever bad-assness I leave in my wake ;) I agree that a Black Ops unit shouldn't be in huge battles but breaking everything up the way they do, even the levels feel small. The Gulag level in MW2 has you fighting with a small unit too but that level felt HUGE! (Again, I haven't finished the entire game yet, so that could still come)

I don't agree that the things I complain about are 'sorta what this game is'. No CoD game has made me feel like this before, even though they have been super linear forever. There is a difference between linear and literally not letting me do anything without Woods guiding me there. I also think we shouldn't be accepting this stuff from a franchise as awesome as Call of Duty!

And of course I like Gary Oldman! Are you crazy?! Who doesn't like Gary Oldman?! And there's nothing wrong with Reznov, it was just another dude leading me through another level, telling me what to do.

"

Yeah it's a shooting gallery for sure, that was my impression of it. Reminds me of duck hunt, only I'm shooting military insurgents and bad ass mofos. It's what I expect from the CoD single player though, they are all like this CoD4, W@W, MW2, it's the CoD way. Don't expect anything dafrent bro and you won't be disappointed. I kinda like the hand holding, I played Half-Life 2 for about 3 hours and was wandering around outside going okay, where the hell am I supposed to go now and said fuck this and sold it because I got so bored of the mindless wandering and driving between points of action.