A look at scripted events: Black Ops vs Medal of Honor
By KillyDarko 19 Comments
I haven't finished Black Ops yet, but overall I'm enjoying the adrenalin riddled Black Ops single player campaign a little more than the new very competent and definitely more realistic Medal of Honor campaign, but I remember Jeff being really annoyed at MoH's scripted scenes, and how you couldn't avoid them anyway. Well... that's pretty much the definition of scripted; you CANNOT avoid them. I think Jeff was a little unfair at picking on the game mainly based on that.
Black Ops is also filled with scenes such as those, and equally annoying, IF you happen to notice them-- which is pretty much what happened to Jeff. And once you notice one, you'll most definitely be on the lookout for more.
Just from the top of my head I clearly remember a few examples from Black Ops:
- I shot some guy equipped with an RPG about 6 or 7 times in the head before he fired that thing and ended up killing one of my squad mates-- I killed myself so I could repeat that scene and try to save my mate a second time, but no matter what, the RPG guy just wouldn't die.
- There's a tower in the "river chapter" that I know will be shooting rockets at us whenener I get closer, so I took it down with a missile ages before I actually got to it. Still, a few seconds later, a rocket emerges from midair, where the tower was no longer-- now, that clearly shouldn't have happened!
- I was quick enough to shoot a guy in the head in the "rat tunnels" before it actually reached my squad mate, but it was as if my bullets went right through him-- nothing happened and the "movie" proceeded as if I hadn't shot a single bullet.
- Also in the "rat tunnels", I shot another guy, but it was written that it had to be my squad mate to take it down and so once again my bullets had no effect whatsoever...
There's probably a couple more that I'm not remembering right now, but all in all, I guess that bottomline, pretty much all games these days have scripted scenes or sequences, and they can be pretty awesome if gone unnoticed. However, if you do happen to act ahead of the game's script, before these scenes get triggered, then things can get frustrating, 'cause you clearly feel like you could've altered the sequence of events.
I guess that all in all, you can either choose to be annoyed and start bashing the game for actually trying to tell a story, or you can just realize that there's actually nothing you can do to change these events and just go with the flow..... and try to enjoy the rollercoaster ride as much as possible.
After all, we gotta keep in mind that these are NOT open world games.