Thoughts of Call of Duty 5

[Phillip Hone]

It's been out for a few days, IIRC. The developers who made it really screwed up COD 3, IMO, but this time they're using the COD 4 engine so it might still be OK. I've heard from people on other forums that it has a "console" feel to it, as if it were a just ported for the computer, but I have no idea how true that is.

The weapons are another thing that I've heard complaints about. How are they?

[Losonti Tokash]

What exactly was screwed up about CoD3? I hear this a lot but I actually enjoyed playing and finished it, unlike 2.

[atg]

I've only had time to play it briefly, but I've found it quite enjoyable. Its very much like CoD4 which is a good thing in my opinion.

The swastikas in some of the levels surprised me - I didn't think they'd have the guts to put them in.

[TheMuffinKing]

The whole game is good, it is basically CoD4, WW2 edition. I found the single player kind of meh, I felt it could have focused exclusively on the pacific. I'm sick of shooting nazi soldiers, I was hoping to be a Chinese guerrilla in addition to a U.S. Marine. As it was I found it pretty fun. The multiplayer is great, it IS CoD 4 but with different maps and guns.

[Executor32]

I thoroughly enjoyed the single-player, especially any time I had a flamethrower.

I thought it was kind of funny, though, when I was walked by the podium in the plenary chamber in the Reichstag and I heard the march from the book-burning scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

[Executor32]

Oh, snap! There's an awesome bonus for completing the game, a new mission on the Mission Select screen called Nacht der Untoten.
Spoiler

You drove them to the heart of the Reich.
You thought they were dead.
You were wrong.

NAZI ZOMBIES!

Where's that flamethrower when I need one?

[Death from the Sea]

Oh, snap! There's an awesome bonus for completing the game, a new mission on the Mission Select screen called Nacht der Untoten.
Spoiler

You drove them to the heart of the Reich.
You thought they were dead.
You were wrong.

NAZI ZOMBIES!

Where's that flamethrower when I need one?

I have been playing this all night with some friends of mine that beat the game... I have yet to start the solo missions.

[Darwin]

Played through single player, I have some issues.

1: No 'oh wow' moments like the Infinity Ward CODs always manage to insert almost every level. For such a linear game, (even moreso than usual for CoD) there weren't very many nifty scripted events, aside from two little Japanese ambushes.

2: Brute force gameplay. You die and you die and you die until you figure out through trial and error or until you just luck your way through. There's 4 or 5 sequences that must be defeated this way and they're annoying as hell. Castle attack and Reichstag attack, I'm looking at you.

3: Weapons: The Flamethrower is great. Too great. It never runs out of ignitors or fuel, and just runs on a heat/cooldown meter. It and the Browning .30 LMG take all the danger out of a banzai charge. The overwhelming utility of these two make it rare to actually pick up any of the other available weapons.

4: Graphics: I've been playing Crysis and Bioshock and Far Cry 2, and COD4 didn't impress me graphics-wise from the start, World at War manages to look even muddier on top of that.

5: None of the fights are really all that fun.

MoH Pacific Assault did the pacific campaign better, and I didn't like that game all too much.

[IRG CommandoJoe]

One thing I noticed is that CoD games are getting progressively brutal. I've played through the campagin, however I did it mostly through co-op mode with a friend, so the experiences I had may differ with the solo mode experience.
Spoiler

The thing that made this game stand apart from other WWII shooters (that I've played) is the war atrocities, and the fact that the game forces you to participate in them. The opening scene on the Eastern front was chilling, where you are laying on the ground among the wounded, seeing Germans shooting anyone still alive. It set the context for your Soviet commanding officer's own bloodlust for Germans and the same ruthlessness he later orders you to commit. The Japanese interrogation scene was nasty, with lots of blood. There was a scene where you and your comrades gun down a bunch of shell-shocked Japanese soldiers after an artillery barrage. Another time you corner three Germans and when you finally have the option of showing humanity and sparing their lives by choosing not to shoot them, your commander throws Molotov cocktails at them and you watch them burn alive. And let us not forget that the use of the flamethrower is truly Hell on Earth.

But I'm glad that Treyarch decided to put brutality in the game. It stays true to the nature of the most destructive war in human history. I don't know how much further they can go, short of showing civilian deaths a la Half-Life 2 (which I think was very well done). If the game developers have the goal of portraying WWII in a more brutal and realistic light, perhaps focusing the next game on a resistance fighter would be the best way to accomplish that goal. Or taking it even further, maybe in the future they will include liberating a death camp, although I think that would remain extremely controversial.

[Darwin]

But I'm glad that Treyarch decided to put brutality in the game. It stays true to the nature of the most destructive war in human history. I don't know how much further they can go, short of showing civilian deaths a la Half-Life 2 (which I think was very well done). If the game developers have the goal of portraying WWII in a more brutal and realistic light, perhaps focusing the next game on a resistance fighter would be the best way to accomplish that goal. Or taking it even further, maybe in the future they will include liberating a death camp, although I think that would remain extremely controversial.

It is at least accurate and representative of the brutal reality of the eastern front and pacific campaigns, where prisoners were really only ever taken to make the executions more efficient.

[Medic]

The perks in this one are far better, as there's a set of counters to most stuff (gas mask and shades to foil gas grenades and signal flares), there is not an aimbot-in-the-sky helicopter your teammates won't shoot at, and you can literally see artillery coming in, which is awesome. The weapon perks are especially neat in MP since there is no "sniper rifle category." There are bolt-action rifles which amount to "sniper rifles" when you earn the attachment. Or you could opt for the bayonet, which is wickedly cool. As is the drum-magazine for SMG's. As is the bi-pod for the LMG's, which means you have a lot of firepower on-the-move in addition to fortifying a particular spot.

The maps are not nearly the claustrophobic, nade-spamming affairs of CoD4. Even big maps like Countdown and Strike "felt" small because of chokepoints (strike) or tons of cover (countdown's silo-door's) with the effect being, any map in CoD4 was either a fairly even game with essential stalemate or spawn-pinning and raping. Sometimes on the bigger maps, you'll manage not to get dreadlocked nor pin the other side down, instead you see the merry-go-round effect in moving spawn points but that still happens and is just an indication of one team being far BETTER than the other. The consistent pattern of spawn-lock though in CoD4 though goes to map design and the multitude of high-explosives, in airstrikes and 3x grenade. That's not nearly the problem it is in CoD5, which, I wanna say, has more maps out of the box than CoD4 with the variety pack, which really introduced only ONE good map, Broadcast. (Creek has got to be the most tilted sniper map in the game -- the side with the high ground off the bat murders that ridgeline all game, Chinatown or "Carentan" sucked in CoD1, sucked in CoD:UO, sucked in CoD2 and still sucks in CoD4 and the training mission is retarded with anything more than 12 people, probably. That's a dead-boring game by pc standards.)

Treyarch didn't SHIT on the PCcrowd either though, which I appreciate. CoD4 came out on the PS3, X360 and PC all at once. But only the console versions had Prestige mode, not that it did anything for you but keep you playing. Now, however, prestige gives you more custom classes (up to 10 now, when you've gone through level 10 prestige) I don't personally have the time to play that much, but completely leaving it out of the PC version pissed me off, we were clearly a secondary market and they treated us like that. I can state this confidently because the patch that brought the new maps to X360 (and that system 1st, at the expense of PS3 by a few weeks and the PC by a few 2 months) also brought the update where you get to see your death from the point-of-view of high-explosive weapons in the kill came. Got "noob-tubed" from across the map? You get a passenger-side seat as it flies through the air at 800 feet a second, ditto with the RPG. They NEVER added this bit of fun to the PC version in CoD4 and evidently have no plans to do so by now. Treyarch put this in the PC release from day ONE. So yeah, all these people talking shit about Treyarch can piss up a rope, especially if they're a PC gamer. The fact of the matter is Infinity Ward shit all over us and Treyarch did NOT; they did not rush a product or update to the market at the expense of fairness across the platforms. We got what the consoles got this time.

Multiplayer wise, the only drawback is this game tests my system even more than CoD4. I desperately need to upgrade but won't have the cash till I pay off my car loan and then get my re-up cash. (which happen in back-to-back months though next spring )

[CaptHawkeye]

I've honestly never understood the shit Treyarch gets from people. Unlike Infinity Ward they actually ass themselves to put in new gameplay mechanics and take risks with the formula. Meanwhile IW waits 3 games or so before they add 'lol gun modz'.

Also, Treyarch apparently agreed with the fans that United Offensive was the best expansion pack ever, and that it single handedly made the first game entertaining. They draw a lot of inspiration from it, which has shown ever since CoD3.

[Scottish Ninja]

I got the chance to play on a friend's PS3 for a while; so far MP is pretty fun, but I predict the game will devolve into the same asshattic bullshittery that happened to CoD4, where people found the most pointlessly effective crap to use and then proceeded to progressively make the game less and less fun. In math terms, there was an inverse relationship between the time per week I spent playing and the number of times I was killed by a red-dot M16, and similar useless person classes.

It's hard to see so far what the idiot trends are going to be, but while I had fun playing against a whole bunch of other people mostly between levels 10 and 20, it suddenly becomes much worse facing off against an entire clan armed with nothing but the PPSh-41.

So to sum up: there are nice things, the tanks are interesting but look like crap, and the aperture sight seems like nothing but unrealistic silliness. There are good things and silly things, that sort of curious mix of realism and bullshit that CoD is now known for in my circles. I'll probably go back to playing Bad Company.

[Medic]

I've honestly never understood the shit Treyarch gets from people. Unlike Infinity Ward they actually ass themselves to put in new gameplay mechanics and take risks with the formula. Meanwhile IW waits 3 games or so before they add 'lol gun modz'.

Also, Treyarch apparently agreed with the fans that United Offensive was the best expansion pack ever, and that it single handedly made the first game entertaining. They draw a lot of inspiration from it, which has shown ever since CoD3.

Dissertation on the shit-gameplay mechanics in CoD4 follows:

It was UO that introduced the sprint and trust me, before this, maps were COMPLETELY different. You simply had no way of expediting yourself out of a corner of a map (say Carentan, next to the crates on the opposite side of the map as the road leading into the town) and that meant spawn raping was a nearly unbreakable siege.

You also had a sideways and backwards sprint back in the day, so it was omnidirectional, not simply in a straight or moderately curving forward-progressing line. The ultimate effect, gameplay-wise for the "can only sprint in a straightline" deal, which is in place in CoD4 and 5 is targets are "cooperative" -- when someone draws a bead on you, you can only keep going in that direction while retaining the option of speeding up to a sprint, if you are not already. Faster is always the best defense. Now you can still sprint while manically curving, but it means you do NOT keep eyes on target. This favors the guy in the prepared camping position and bogs games down when enough decent snipers amass safely by one team. (invariably due to the better efforts of their teammates in keeping pressure in the face of a bad team)
So your remaining options which allow you to keep eyes-on-target are strafing left and right, but at a drastically slower speed. This favors the sniper in a prepared position and lane of fire. You can sprint and jump, but when you hit the ground you are at a virtual standstill for a moment. This only really works in close-quarters where you can fly off the guys screen for that critical quarter second, it's suicide against a sniper unless you're jumping into immediate cover or concealment upon landing. Slowing, crouching, going prone or STOPPING are all terrible options when someone already has you in their sights. With all-direction sprints, you could drastically complicate their firing solution and legitimately threaten a sniper if you saw him.
Now they haven't reneged on this but my point is that this gameplay mechanic worked to prevent a game from devolving into an uncontrollable slaughter once one team got into a powerful enough position that all avenues of advance and retreat are covered by snipers and clogged by sub-machine gunners.

Also on rank, it was not a global-progress thing. More ammo, grenades, and perks were tied to how many points you got in an individual match. You only got artillery once you got 40 points (so 40 kills in a straight-deathmatch, less kills in gamemodes like CTF, domination, HQ, etc) and you had to wait for it to get into position once you spawned -- you had to stay alive for about 45 seconds after spawning and you'd get it. Now I like the rank system as-is, but certain things like the kill-streaks in CoD4 and 5 are ridiculously broken. Get 5 kills and you could get 20 easily. Call in an airstrike and immediately kill yourself or charge blindly in order to die. If the airstrike did it's work, you'd get enough kills for another one and none of those kills went towards a helicopter you can't call in because of a backlog in helicopter cueing, which invariably happened. This use-artillery-to-get-more-artillery-and-never-get-tied-down-to-the-helicopter was more prone to abuse than the 40 kills and you get simultaneous artillery from everyone in UO.

Also grenades were NOT in UO the uberbringer of death they are in CoD4, even when everyone at the end of a long game had 3x of them. Maps were bigger and better (less arbitrary chokepoints) and they simply did less damage. Unless you were good at cooking, they made a lot of noise but accomplished very little in a fluid map where positions are changing constantly. (the maps prone to stalemates or "fronts" of course, will always favor grenades, which is the insipid failing of CoD4)

The easy-auto knife kill is also ridiculous and combined with no sideways sprint means submachine gunners are consistently the best option in CoD4. Maps are small, it's got the best on-the-move accuracy, good power, and people flatfooted as they are by the game mechanics, cannot move fast enough to avoid being knifed. Bashing took some actual semblance of skill in CoD:UO and was NOT one-hit-kill, either. Your bash only went a certain, short distance, it wasn't an auto-kill, and it wasn't instantaneous -- it had to be timed. The knife has an auto-aim / adjust, always kills when it hits and extends your movement speed by giving you a Halo-energy-sword flying boost.
When you conceptually try to describe the knife-melee system in CoD4 and 5, it is a short-range, fast-reloading, infinite-ammo, high-explosive satchel charge which never damages you but only hurts one of the enemy and self-corrects when thrown. Instead of being aimed, you look at your radar and go that direction, instead of flying through the air, you sprint with your sub-machine gun or shotgun at breakneck speed, instead of doing a HIGH amount of damage in a spherical pattern, at a specific point in space, it does a LETHAL amount of damage against a generally-aimed point-in-space. (the circular-error-of-probability of the knife's aiming is such that, for example, if there was a red dot in the middle of the screen, you do not have to be exactly on that, only generally so. Worse, even if between the time your swing starts and connects, the target wouldn't have been in that the exact spot in time and space which would kill him, the knife auto-corrects and provides a speed and movement boost as it guides itself. The knife kills by AREA in other words, not a point-in-space like a bullet, but instead of, like a high-explosive damaging by degrees depending on your distance from the point-of-detonation, the knife automatically kills you if you're in the area covered by it. This is why, conceptually, it's a high-explosive, I label it a high explosive. The only component of skill involved in the knife melee is reaction time -- precision, skill and timing are all easy-automatically self-correcting)



The net effect of all of the above -- cooperative targets vulnerable to snipers, universally small maps (even big maps "felt" small), overpowered grenades combined with the 3x grenade perk, easy-automatic melee combat, self-reinforcing airstrikes, radar completely devaluing the craft, deception and meaning bumrushing SMG'ers don't even have to think on their feet, and aimbot-copters in the sky make CoD4 horribly balanced and nearly unplayable at it's worst.

Almost everything conspires against certain playstyles and what's left is a system which reinforces certain habits (standoffish snipers and UAV-guided tunnel-vision SMG mongers). Unless teams were balanced *just so* in the makeup of playstyles and player skill level, everything devolved into a stalemate or a slaughterfest, be that because of grenade spamming, superior map position, or overwhelming strength of aimed fire from prepared positions. (Creek) Once a trend is established in any particular game, airstrikes -- available from the 1st minute of the game, in stark contrast to UO where you HAD to have 40 points before you could use artillery -- did the rest and literally make something like 8/10 games foregone conclusions. A great team always whips a terrible one, but at least in CoD:UO you had time to get out of your immediate spawning area, a lucky grenade (of literally almost a hundred going off every minute in a busy game, then and now) didn't mean automatic death because of their overpower, you had the ability to present snipers with difficult targets and could legitimately threaten them, you had 2 smoke grenades for more concealment, oh and FINALLY, recoil for most weapons was greater, in some cases egregiously so over what they handle like now.

My ultimate judgement is that in CoD:UO if you got killed, in general, it was due to the skillful application of marksmanship, maneuver, or thought. They either aimed better and faster, worked their way into a better position, or adapted / improvised the best in a continual basis. In CoD4, if you get killed, it is as much a function as your team's ignorance of the match-winning strategems grossly favored by the gameplay mechanics, as they relate to weapons, perks and maps, as it is a function of you having been out-aimed, out-maneuvered, or out-thought.

Crash is the quintessential example of everything that's wrong about CoD4's multiplayer -- the OPFOR either bias their loudout in favor of SMG blitzing and grenade spam, or they spend the 1st half (or the entire game) trying to break out of the handful of easily sniped and clogged chokepoints on their half of the map. Let me just explain the dynamics of the situation: the AREA that an airstrike covers, if centered on your spawn, overlaps with the area directly contested by the other side's players! In short, you are in a fishbowl, from the moment you spawn you can be helicoptered, bombed, and grenaded. You can seek cover, but that's a negative objective (not dying immediately) and gets you nowhere, fast, literally, If you choose to move, before you get out of the high-explosive zone, you're already in the free-fire zone of bullets. If you want to break out of the dread lock, you have no choice but TO move since you can't yourself reliably threaten anyone till you can put eyes on them. Grenade spamming for Arabs in the area they spawn out of in Crash is still an option, but the problem is you can saturate the area outside where the crashed helicopter is, but it's an AREA. Everything the Marines throw up at YOU hits a chokepoint or a huge proportion of the area comprising your "rear" area. You have in essence, no time to stop and aim to lessen the tumult aimed your direction -- oh sure, there are periodic lulls in the combat, but it never ceases for long, and it is a function of luck that you are not grenaded or the better efforts of others in pushing back the enemy if you DO have time to stop in the high-explosive zone and take aimed shots at the enemy.

CoD5 ameliorates the above remaining faults by lowering frag boost perk to 2, not 3, creating perks which are explicitly counters to other weapons, removing the helicopter (too often, it could hit you, but not you, it, in a meaningful amount of time) but most fundamentally, increasing map size and openness.

[Phantasee]

Why do you have a hard-on for tiny text? Jesus, it makes it even less appealing to read.

[Medic]

Ah... dunno, really, a touch of self-deprecation perhaps. I'm not entirely convinced everyone's THAT interested in my opinion, since that's all it is.
I'll change it.

edit: what the flying fuck, is there a one-edit rule?

[Ford Prefect]

edit: what the flying fuck, is there a one-edit rule?

Because you might not know, edittign is now on a ten minute timer. You can edit in any forum on the board, but only within ten minutes of posting.

[Pulp Hero]

I rented CODWOW, and I'mn returning it tomorrow. The whole campaign just feels flat and lifeless. You are never surprised by scripted events(like that haji knifing the Marine in CoD4), instead everything comes to a big standstill and telegraphs that something is about to happen.

Every NPC talks too damn much, while at the same time saying nothing of interest or character.

The infinite fuel flame thrower is gay.

Knifing enemies is retardedly easy- to the point where I don't even carry a shotgun.

The guns all sound like pop-guns.

Shitty puesdo techno music.

Way too linear. I'm not looking for a 'GTA' or 'Far Cry 2' here, I just want more than one path through a building or jungle path.

The only pluses are the environment graphics.

I'm going to give this game a big fat F and lump it in with 'MoH: Rising Sun'

EDIT: Oh, and ripping off scenes from 'Enemy at the Gates' was so cool and original... back in CoD 2!

[CaptHawkeye]

Let me guess, you really liked all the previous CoD's right? Including 4?

The guns all sound like pop-guns.

Ok can we chalk up "big roaring guns" as a giant Hollywood brainbug?

[Pulp Hero]

I enjoyed CoD 4 actually. It wasn't a mind blowing game of the year or anything, but I liked it as a dumb ego-shooter.

EDIT: "Big roaring guns". Look I wear earplugs when I shoot for a reason, even a pistol is fairly loud when you are the one shooting it. Plus this game is (trying to be) a big Hollywood style, shoot 'em up- let's not pretend it isn't- so guns should be way meatier in any case.

[CaptHawkeye]

I enjoyed CoD 4 actually. It wasn't a mind blowing game of the year or anything, but I liked it as a dumb ego-shooter.

This is what I like to call "double standard". Exactly what on your list of complaints could not be applied to 4 as well?

All of the CoD games have shitty single player.

[Pulp Hero]

I enjoyed CoD 4 actually. It wasn't a mind blowing game of the year or anything, but I liked it as a dumb ego-shooter.

This is what I like to call "double standard". Exactly what on your list of complaints could not be applied to 4 as well?

Everything I said applies to CoD 4, but to a lesser degree. Like I said CoD is nowhere near my 10 ten games either (the enemy "monster closets" did that right off the bat).

[CaptHawkeye]

Oh, I see where you're coming from then.

Fanboy claims of CoD's "revolutionary single player" campaign always make me laugh. CoD's single player is filler bullshit. It has been since the 2nd game. Even the original game got critical appraise just for featuring AI bots on the player's side that were TOTALLY USELESS. Among all of CoD's other hilarious characteristics like clown closets and X-ray vision AI that cheats like a mother fucker.

Nice to see after 5 years Infinity Ward hasn't actually fixed anything.

[Darwin]

I rented CODWOW, and I'mn returning it tomorrow. The whole campaign just feels flat and lifeless. You are never surprised by scripted events(like that haji knifing the Marine in CoD4), instead everything comes to a big standstill and telegraphs that something is about to happen.

Every NPC talks too damn much, while at the same time saying nothing of interest or character.

The infinite fuel flame thrower is gay.

Knifing enemies is retardedly easy- to the point where I don't even carry a shotgun.

The guns all sound like pop-guns.

Shitty puesdo techno music.

Way too linear. I'm not looking for a 'GTA' or 'Far Cry 2' here, I just want more than one path through a building or jungle path.

The only pluses are the environment graphics.

I'm going to give this game a big fat F and lump it in with 'MoH: Rising Sun'

EDIT: Oh, and ripping off scenes from 'Enemy at the Gates' was so cool and original... back in CoD 2!

Dear lord. I have to agree with all of this.

The single player campaign is just lifeless.

the Flamethrower, don't get me wrong, it's fun, but infinite fuel? infinite igniter? no vulnerability? Too effective. I can say the same about the Browning m1918. its 250 round belt and astounding accuracy made banzai rushes pathetic non-events.

Enemy at the Gates was at least ripped off brilliantly (if blatantly) in COD1 and 2. Here? Meh.

I just didn't appreciate being lead around by the nose through the entirety of the WaW campaign.

[TheMuffinKing]

I'll echo some of SPC Brunghart's comments concerning MP in CoD5 and 5. I like Cod WaW's multiplayer much better, it seems like less of a grenade fuckfest and requires more thought and strategy than reliance on any particular weapon. Thats been my experience so far.