Modern Shooters Played Out (CoD)

[Grumman]

Spec Ops is IMO one of the most underrated games ever due to most reviewers missing the point spectacularly - aka "I look for standard stuff, it is not in there, therefore the game sucks".

And whose fault is that? If your artistic vision requires that you perform a bait-and-switch, you shouldn't be surprised if some of your customers were just here for the bait.

[Thanas]

I'd say it is at least partly the fault of the customers refusing to engage on the deeper levels.

[Mr Bean]

Speaking of Bad Company talk about wasted potential. Bad Company was about these four fuckups trying to steal gold. BC2 could have been about those same fuckups fighting Godzilla or less good accidentally ending up with a WMD or at least saving Xmas. Instead they took these fun characters and all the jokes and tried to make it serious and failing terribly.

Here's hoping Bad Company 3 features a return to form with them trying to steal pirate treasure in a battlefield or something. Seriously take 4 guys, pyromaniac southern boy who loves blowing things up, a younger nerder Egon from the Ghostbusters, Getting to old for this shit Sargent and the player who is a problem with authority punch happy strait man. They are the B team, the fuckup's the rejects who stumble into something and fucking hijinks ensue.

EASY.

[Grumman]

I'd say it is at least partly the fault of the customers refusing to engage on the deeper levels.

The customer has no obligation to engage with a story that they were tricked into buying. I dodged a bullet on Sucker Punch, but if I'd gone to see it on the basis of the trailers which made it look like some fun speculative fiction and ended up with Spoiler

a story about a rape victim getting lobotomised, I would have been pissed. Even if it was the best story about a rape victim getting lobotomised ever written, it still wouldn't be a story I had any desire to experience.

[Thanas]

The point of watching a movie is not knowing how it turns out. You might say you did not like it but that at least means you engaged it.

[The Vortex Empire]

Speaking of Bad Company talk about wasted potential. Bad Company was about these four fuckups trying to steal gold. BC2 could have been about those same fuckups fighting Godzilla or less good accidentally ending up with a WMD or at least saving Xmas. Instead they took these fun characters and all the jokes and tried to make it serious and failing terribly.

Here's hoping Bad Company 3 features a return to form with them trying to steal pirate treasure in a battlefield or something. Seriously take 4 guys, pyromaniac southern boy who loves blowing things up, a younger nerder Egon from the Ghostbusters, Getting to old for this shit Sargent and the player who is a problem with authority punch happy strait man. They are the B team, the fuckup's the rejects who stumble into something and fucking hijinks ensue.

EASY.

I hope they figure this out, because I would play the shit out of that.Hell, BC2 would have been great if you just replaced every mention of the EPM bomb with Godzilla.

[Scottish Ninja]

I hope they figure this out, because I would play the shit out of that.Hell, BC2 would have been great if you just replaced every mention of the EPM bomb with Godzilla.

Well, they still would've taken the open environments of BC1 where you could approach objectives from different directions and totally different methods (the golf course being probably the best example here) and made a stupid corridor shooter. But that's a separate issue to them fucking up the tone of the game.

[TheFeniX]

This thread is pretty great because we can, all in one place, see people complain these games have no innovation while ALSO complaining that the innovation in those games is dumb and unnecessary. Bonus for "that game sucks no I never played it."

Innovating != Good
Not Innovating != Bad
Also, I'm glad to see the tired argument of "you didn't play it, you can't comment on it" is still going strong.

Spec Ops is IMO one of the most underrated games ever due to most reviewers missing the point spectacularly - aka "I look for standard stuff, it is not in there, therefore the game sucks". The writing is good. Much superior to anything done in Call of Duty.

The "standard stuff" is so generic and played out at this point. It's just outdone by games over 5 years old. At a cursory glance, it's R6 with laughably bad "that guy just gunned down 6 of my friends, let's charge him with a knife over and over while he knocks me back."

If your saving grace is the story and the gameplay only exists to facilitate it, then you missed the point of a video game and people (like me) will have a hard time liking the product because we play games for a different reason. Another button for me specifically is being forced to do things to advance the plot, even though I know it's stupid, because the game forces me to. As said, the impact gets lost and then I'm forced to search for another reason I'm playing the game.

[Thanas]

If your saving grace is the story and the gameplay only exists to facilitate it, then you missed the point of a video game and people (like me) will have a hard time liking the product because we play games for a different reason. Another button for me specifically is being forced to do things to advance the plot, even though I know it's stupid, because the game forces me to. As said, the impact gets lost and then I'm forced to search for another reason I'm playing the game.

I don't get how liking video games for their story is missing the point of a video game. Please enlighten me on that one.

[Torchship]

Yeah, I'm having a hard time understanding the idea that poor gameplay automatically qualifies as "missing the point" of a game. What about shooting in horror games? The mechanics are often intentionally designed to be clunky and inefficient (compared to military shooters) to give the impression that the player is a scared and unskilled civilian, as opposed to a trained death machine. In this way, even though the mechanics are 'bad' in an objective sense, they serve to reinforce the story and make the overall product better as a result.

[Metahive]

I actually quite like Spec Ops: The Line. I'm a sucker for those "descent into darkness" type of stories. I consider its gameplay to be servicable enough to carry the story.

Now to address some of the criticisms:
Spoiler

Yes, the game makes you commit atrocities, but consider for a moment how it goes about it. Take the first one for example, you are confronted with an impenetrable enemy position and the White Phosphorous mortars nearby are pointed out as the only way to make it through. You bomb the enemy's base but then discover that they sheltered a group of civilians which have now been cruelly burned to death. What's the player character's reaction? Immediately blame someone else, insist that it's someone else's fault, that he was forced to act this way. Just the same reaction the player him/herself has presumably. Think of other games however. The scene that inspired this scenario is the AC-130 sequence on CoD:MW where the player character liberally rains down death and destruction on a bunch of unidentifiable white dots on the screen and he does so without questioning it because, hey, the game told you to do it. CoD even further supports the hero complex of the player by forcing a restart of the scenario should the player hit any civilians. So it's nice, clean advanced warfare for the indulgence of the player. SO:TL just doesn't give the player this convenient and rather unrealistic gameplay/story break.
This establishes a trend. Walker, the player character, feels ever more the need to commit "good" but only makes things worse and worse and whenever that happens he blames forces outside his control for it. In the end it however turns out that he has no one to blame but himself. It is then left up to the player himself to decide how Walker ultimately deals with it. He can commit suicide (either by shooting himself or "by cop"), simply go home or even embrace his status as a monster and commit further massacres.

SO:TL is way deeper than just " that game that makes players be war criminals". It does deconstruct the whole "do whatever the game asks you to do" thing that's popular in Moder Military Shooters (MMS) and I think it does so better than the first Bioshock since it doesn't give you the cheap excuse of "brainwashing". It also shows how a standard MMS hero would actually appear in a more realistic context.

[PeZook]

You know what MW2 and 3 did wrong?

They went technothriller, rather than WAR. They should've just had a damn world war with bombed-out cities being swept by fallout-carrying winds as your guys roll through them, sickly and dying, while fighting emanciated tattered remnant of the enemy army, exchanging fire amongst dead countryside abused by terrible and powerful modern weaponry.

MW2 and MW3 are trying to be great in scope while using story elements typical of these anti-terror technothrillers and it fails hard because of this disconnect where your main enemy is a wanted terrorist who apparently commands a vast army that conquers Europe at the same damn time, and everyone is acting as if the entire crisis is something minor (Hey dad I KNOW LET'S GO SEE BIG BEN!)

Of course it would be a one-game gimmick, but hey. WORLD WAR. Go terrifying and gut-punching, show civilians being immolated by the millions and modern weapons having a terrifying, rapid and deadly effect on everything. You are already making a barely interactive movie, so...

[Eternal_Freedom]

Hell yeah PeZook I'd play that.

[PeZook]

They could also have the player's OORAHOOAH supersoldier actions in the prologue actually lead to the war which would be awesome but would probably never, ever happen, not with that studio at least.

[Spekio]

I don't get how liking video games for their story is missing the point of a video game. Please enlighten me on that one.

LOL BRO LEMME SHOW YOU MY MAD SKILZZZZ ON THE MULTIPLAYER!!!!


Seriously, Thanas has got it right. I play a lot of games for the plot rather than mechanics, and don't tell me that isn't a vaid way to engage with a game. Planescape: Torment, my favorite video game, is fun despite it's combat. Fuck, one of my favorite board games, Arkham Horror, is only fun due to how it's clunky mechanics convey the theme.

[Metahive]

Heck for a rather extreme example, take something like Nethack. Terribly clunky UI, butt-ugly graphics and an excuse story and yet it's quite addictive if only because of the absurdly wide range of actions you're able to perform in that game. I think between graphics, gameplay and story, no single factor alone decides just how good or enjoyable a game is.

[TheFeniX]

I don't get how liking video games for their story is missing the point of a video game. Please enlighten me on that one.

Go watch a movie. Or more specifically, you said yourself a whole bunch of reviewers "missed the point" because they say the game is standard TPS with a slightly deeper story. However, being told a story aside from choices limited to "shoot X or do not shoot X" isn't anything special, especially when the player feels railroaded. If you like that, that's fine, but to sit back and think you've caught on to some deeper meaning the rest of us missed isn't any better of an argument.

Yeah, I'm having a hard time understanding the idea that poor gameplay automatically qualifies as "missing the point" of a game. What about shooting in horror games? The mechanics are often intentionally designed to be clunky and inefficient (compared to military shooters) to give the impression that the player is a scared and unskilled civilian, as opposed to a trained death machine. In this way, even though the mechanics are 'bad' in an objective sense, they serve to reinforce the story and make the overall product better as a result.

Yes, because the STARS in Resident Evil were unskilled civilians and not highly trained anti-terror operatives. And games like Resident Evil did receive flak for the poor combat controls except it was chalked up to the times and also that you spend more time solving puzzles or exploring than you do fighting zombies.

Seriously, Thanas has got it right. I play a lot of games for the plot rather than mechanics, and don't tell me that isn't a vaid way to engage with a game. Planescape: Torment, my favorite video game, is fun despite it's combat. Fuck, one of my favorite board games, Arkham Horror, is only fun due to how it's clunky mechanics convey the theme.

In what fucking fantasy land is "combat" the central focus of the gameplay in an RPG like Torment? You really want to compare Torment to Spec Ops? A game where you can talk the end boss out of existence or where you can completely break an NPC down with mere words because just killing them is too easy vs "do you want to shoot this guy or not shoot him?" In an RPG (at least those that break away from Dungeon Hacks), the story and how it's handled pretty much IS the gameplay, so you've got me because I was being too broad when talking about FPS and TPS.

Trying to pigeon-hole me when every response seems to be "Combat is the only form of gameplay" is hilarious. That said, what gameplay besides combat does Spec Ops have? "Not-Combat?" Turning the game off?

[xthetenth]

Isn't Spec Ops the game where you're forced to commit atrocities where the game won't continue otherwise and the developers say "You're such a bad person for doing what we're forcing you to do."? I think I watched a zero punctuation on that.

Are they making you play the scene? Think very carefully about the implicit assumptions that get made if you say they are.

This is utterly vital to understanding the game. Why is the idea of refusing to do what the game railroads you into doing so anathema? What are the consequences? Why are you going deeper into the rabbit hole and what does this have to do with your reactions to every other shooter railroading you? What questions aren't you asking of other games that really should probably be asked?

[Academia Nut]

I will preface this with the fact that I have not played Spec Ops: The Line, but I have been reading up a lot of the analysis on it, so here is what I have gathered that has made the game such a gut punch: they mostly successfully use the mechanics as the mechanism by which they tell their Heart of Darkness story. This is the big, important part. Rather than telling the story through things like cut scenes or the like where the character has control taken away from them, they make you pull the trigger yourself. If you want to advance, you have to fire the white phosphorous rounds, but the thing is that the only reason the character is advancing is because he has cast himself as the hero. Pretty much the entire game you are breaking your orders because Walker, and by extension the player, need to advance.

I have actually seen fairly strong speculation that the devs looked over their assets and realized that they did not have the resources to do anything with the Spec Ops license given to them other than make a shitty, soon forgotten CoD clone since they could not afford stuff much beyond 2008 in terms of sophistication. So instead the decided to work with the mechanics they could afford to tell a story, and point out just how insane the mindset that goes along with such mechanics really are. How you are willing, eager even, to mow down endless waves of anyone the game labels 'enemy'. How you will mindlessly engage in all sorts of atrocities simply because that is what you do to advance the game.

Go watch a movie. Or more specifically, you said yourself a whole bunch of reviewers "missed the point" because they say the game is standard TPS with a slightly deeper story. However, being told a story aside from choices limited to "shoot X or do not shoot X" isn't anything special, especially when the player feels railroaded. If you like that, that's fine, but to sit back and think you've caught on to some deeper meaning the rest of us missed isn't any better of an argument.

No, a lot of the choices are "Shoot or turn off the game", which is also the same choices facing the protagonist, because he is breaking orders by even being where he is. He is continuing on in order to be the hero, which he is failing at doing every time he pulls the trigger. He isn't here because he was told to be here, he is here because he wanted to be here, and in the end all of his atrocities are on his (and because you were ultimately controlling him, your) head. This involves a level of viewer interaction that is not present in movies because whatever happens is always external to the viewer where choosing to gun down your fellow countrymen to advance is something that only happens because you pulled the trigger on your gamepad.

In what fucking fantasy land is "combat" the central focus of the gameplay in an RPG like Torment? You really want to compare Torment to Spec Ops? A game where you can talk the end boss out of existence or where you can completely break an NPC down with mere words because just killing them is too easy vs "do you want to shoot this guy or not shoot him?" In an RPG (at least those that break away from Dungeon Hacks), the story and how it's handled pretty much IS the gameplay, so you've got me because I was being too broad when talking about FPS and TPS.

Trying to pigeon-hole me when every response seems to be "Combat is the only form of gameplay" is hilarious. That said, what gameplay besides combat does Spec Ops have? "Not-Combat?" Turning the game off?

Again, that is the horrible beauty of Spec Ops: the story is being told through the gameplay and the gameplay is combat. It makes no innovations with the gameplay and is in fact behind the times, but it uses what it has to tell a story, which is exceedingly rare in games. Most treat story and gameplay as only being loosely connected. In some, the gameplay is bridged by bits and pieces of plot that tend to serve as excuses for whatever it is you are doing in the specific scenario, while in others you go through gameplay to get in between the plot. It is actually fairly rare for these two elements to ever actually connect together, and if they do it is usually that certain moments in gameplay can set you off on different plot lines (and often not particularly divergent ones at that).

The point should be made that different games and types of games will often be serving different emotional and intellectual needs, so how the mechanics work and are accepted by the player varies. In Torment, the engine being used really was not a good fit for the game being played, but we more or less accepted it because it was an RPG and that is what RPGs do. You will have combat and questing and the like, but a lot of the game really does not fit that mould... which ironically is probably one of the reasons it has left such an impression. It was a game that did something very different within its genre and the things it did well it did really well, which was enough to help overlook the fact that it had a lot of clunky, stupid mechanics that came with the engine it was using, with the engine being designed for games with a different sort of expectation of behaviour.

[Thanas]

I don't get how liking video games for their story is missing the point of a video game. Please enlighten me on that one.

Go watch a movie. Or more specifically, you said yourself a whole bunch of reviewers "missed the point" because they say the game is standard TPS with a slightly deeper story. However, being told a story aside from choices limited to "shoot X or do not shoot X" isn't anything special, especially when the player feels railroaded. If you like that, that's fine, but to sit back and think you've caught on to some deeper meaning the rest of us missed isn't any better of an argument.

What academia nut said, much better than I could. I hope you get my point now.

[Grumman]

Why is the idea of refusing to do what the game railroads you into doing so anathema? What are the consequences?

The consequences are that you just paid $60 for a coaster.

[Academia Nut]

Why is the idea of refusing to do what the game railroads you into doing so anathema? What are the consequences?

The consequences are that you just paid $60 for a coaster.

By that standard you probably own a great deal of coasters. In fact, there are a number of interesting points where The Line is far less of a railroad than most of the modern military shooters it is deconstructing (see CoD: Black Ops 1 where you can get through the entire first level on maximum difficulty and only fire about two times, both of which are plot mandated). Two scenes I have heard discussed about the actual relative freedom are that the devs gave you. The first is a scene where you are given the choice to shoot either a man from Dubai who was stealing water to survive, or shoot a US soldier who killed another man. Because this is not a cut scene or a standard dialogue choice but you actually being in control, you can choose to do nothing in which case the snipers making you choose kill them both, or you can open fire on the snipers and your teammates will attempt to cut the two down. You can at most save one person in this scene, but you have far, far more freedom to resolve it than most games will ever give you. Then, there is a scene where you are confronted by a mob of civilians and you need to clear them out to advance. The game puts you in a situation where you feel that you have to start gunning them down to survive, but you can also fire air to scare them off. It is not an obvious choice, but the fact that it works is a testament to the sort of little freedoms you rarely have in the game. CoD:MW2 and the necessity to commit an act of terrorism comes to mind.

All in all, the thing is that Spec Ops is not fun, and that gets under the skin of a lot of people because they play these sorts of games to have fun. The game is of course trying to get under your skin, trying to smack you upside the head with the fact that you consider murder to be fun, that you consider murder to be heroic. Here is the thing though: until games can get past the idea of having to be fun, the medium will never grow up. We all know of literature, movies, music, plays, etc. that are excellent but most emphatically not fun. Would you criticize Schindler's List because it is not fun? No. Fuck no. In fact, fun would take away from the piece, and probably make it offensive. Are all movies Schindler's List? Should all movies be Schindler's List. No and fuck no. There is no one formula. You don't fire up Call of Duty for the same reason you fire up Angry Birds for the same reason you fire up DDR and so on and so forth. Not all games need to be fun, nor should they if fun would detract from some other worthwhile quality.

Here, I can pitch you a two sentence summary of a hypothetical game that could be amazing but would never be fun:

You are a young Jewish mother of three in Poland 1939. Keep as much of your family alive as possible.

There. In the right hands that sort of game could be stunning. But it would never, ever be fun.

Spec Ops: The Line, was a step into a more mature world of gaming, where the same weight of issues that are tackled in all forms of media can be taken on, and addressed using the unique aspects of interactivity and player agency that games can present. Is it a perfect game? No, even its supporters agree that there are flaws and a lot of rough edges, but it is the sort of thing that both shows how gameplay and narrative can be self supporting and woven together and also as a case study in how to properly use resources to achieve big things on a smaller budget. The hostility of many towards it suggests that its message probably hit a sore spot in the minds of many.

[TheFeniX]

I agree with about everything you said, my problem is berating people for not "getting it" even though it seems they did or they rolled their eyes at deconstructing a medium while mowing down waves of bad guys. I've run into this with a couple actions movies rife with gore, sex, and violence where the directors takes time to make a jab at people who enjoy that.

For me specifically, I don't not find value in the "choices" or non-choices presented in a game like that. I have whole other genres that will let me, the player, decide how much of a shit-bag or paragon of virtue I want to be. Then the game has the right to bitch at me. But getting shit for just playing the game comes off as more disrespect to me as a customer, not the player, even if that isn't what they intended. From experience, I do not like that and I'm not going to gamble on a TPS changing my mind in that regard.

I do have to disagree with the overemphasis of "fun" because not all entertainment is supposed to be fun and that's fine. There are people who find entertainment in fear, being forced to think about how shitty things can be, guilt, or just plain smashing their head against the wall with brutal difficulty. Schindler's List may not be "fun," but it is an enjoyable movie with a horrible premise. The characters and their actors, the settings, how terrible it all is when wrapped up. That can be part of entertainment. Lately, the wife has been watching Walking Dead. What is fun about that? She's at some part where literally everyone is dieing and everything looks bleak as Hell (like every episode). Then why is it so entertaining?

Because it's not boring. Say what you will about Schindler's List, but it wasn't boring. It wasn't just a retread of WW2 movies with a "make you think" plot-line and it didn't ever directly call out the viewer. Game don't have to be fun, but they damn sure had better not be boring or frustrating because of mechanics or technical problems.

[aieeegrunt]

I'm pretty late to the whole CoD party. Got Black Ops I and II for the 360 on a whim because they were like ten bucks used and loved them. The campaign was hilarious over the top US wankery while still being entertaining, and the multiplayer had bots, BOTS.

On this basis would CoD Mobile Warfare 1 and 2 be a good purchase?

[TheFeniX]

Modern Warfare 1 stands as a pretty stellar all around FPS. It is well worth whatever you could buy it for today. MW2 has it's moments, but it seems like a retread of MW1 just dialed up to 11 WRT the story. I would recommend World at World over it, even though it's a WW2 shooter.

There's nothing quite like shooting a German sniper right between the eyes only to have Gary Oldman yell "You only wounded him!" No, fuck you Gary, that's bullshit. That's bullshit and you know it.