Modern Shooters Played Out (CoD)

[Joviwan]

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.

There's a third choice, as well. You can just walk slowly through the crowd without firing a shot. It's one of the better subtle things in the game.

Maybe my favorite thing about Spec Ops is the loading screens.

At the start of the game, they're really standard. "Press (button) to duck behind cover." "Some obstacles can be damaged to create new hazards for your enemies," or wahtever. "R to reload." But as you continue playing the game, they get increasingly dark and off topic.

"Do you even remember why you're here?" "How many Americans have you killed today?"

[GuppyShark]

There are a surprising number of ways to go through there - my response was to punch one of them and the rest fled.

I think people overly fixate on the WP scene being forced on you as though you're not already off the rails well before then.

"We're Delta Force and we're here to help!"

[Metahive]

There's a third choice, as well. You can just walk slowly through the crowd without firing a shot. It's one of the better subtle things in the game.

Actually no, if you try that they shove you back and you lose health. Eventually they'll also start throwing rocks at you. Your health-regen is disabled for the duration of this scene and if you try to just walk past the mob they will kill you. If you ever managed to make it past them without firing a shot then it must have been a glitch*.





*or you melee'd one of them, that has the same result as firing into the air.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

I think people overly fixate on the WP scene being forced on you as though you're not already off the rails well before then.

"We're Delta Force and we're here to help!"

Hell, the main menu has ruins, fire and an American flag hanging upside down, and then you have the trailers. It is pretty easy to see things will be fucked; perhaps not WP-fucked, though, as that was quite shocking. Was, I say, because every retard and his dog decided to spoil it.

[Joviwan]

There's a third choice, as well. You can just walk slowly through the crowd without firing a shot. It's one of the better subtle things in the game.

Actually no, if you try that they shove you back and you lose health. Eventually they'll also start throwing rocks at you. Your health-regen is disabled for the duration of this scene and if you try to just walk past the mob they will kill you. If you ever managed to make it past them without firing a shot then it must have been a glitch*.





*or you melee'd one of them, that has the same result as firing into the air.

I... walked through slowly on my first try. I don't recall shoving anyone, but maybe that happened. Or I found a glitch.

[TheFeniX]

Ghosts is being bombed on Metacritic by what I assume are trolls with an axe to grind. I'm sorry, any game that functions is worth at least a 5. Even if you ignore the points system, which you should, being bland isn't a reason to rank a game as an all time low, especially when said game is being ranked against it's predecessors.

Mainstream sites seem to have broken their usual ass-kissing and are rating Ghosts fairly objectively. Except they're just finally now all getting together and saying shit we've known for the past few years. It's safe to bash the series when they should have settled for being more critical years ago.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

It's totally fair to comment upon the hypocrisy of only going after easy targets and how they're going to go right back to giving AAA titles 9s at minimum, but really? "Any game that functions is worth at least a 5"? What's 0-4 for then?

[Metahive]

Ghosts is less like a new CoD and more like a lost, forgotten MW3 DLC that IW found languishing somewhere on their HDs. It deserves at most a 3/10 for being a step back from BO2 in almost every regard.

[TheFeniX]

Broken games. Those that shouldn't even have been rated rather refunds given immediately, which is a problem of the gaming industry as a whole. Shit like Superman 64, Daikatana, Two Worlds. Extra points (deducted) for failure to deliver on "awesome gamplay choices, we promise.*"

*Note: not actually promised except in developer interviews, screen shots, gameplay videos, and totally not bought press.

Brink, The Sims, Fable, Spore, SWTOR and numerous other games skated by with reviews and scores much more generous than deserved because, even though their games weren't totally broken (merely huge swaths, an exception being the Fable series) publisher and developers promises were massively inflated.

It's funny because if someone sold you a broken piece of hardware that still semi-functioned, you'd get a new one (unless you bought a phone from the scum-fucks at at&t). But broken software that works some of the time is still entitled to a review, and usually a positive one because "they'll fix it guys."

But I'd be game for a review system where shit like that had it's own rating: "Don't Buy, Broken." Then you could have a sub-5 rating that meant something, like what Methive posted. I still don't think Ghosts would rate below a 5 in that because from everything read, it's just a pretty average game with emphasis on the tired series yearly release and Actiward didn't promise anything else (unless I'm mistaken).

[Mr Bean]

It's totally fair to comment upon the hypocrisy of only going after easy targets and how they're going to go right back to giving AAA titles 9s at minimum, but really? "Any game that functions is worth at least a 5"? What's 0-4 for then?

By that standard the "leaked" version of GTA5 on the pc which was just a mess of viruses and six gigs of junk data rates a 3 on the scale.

Pro
It installed quickly and easily and did run

Con
-Not GTA5
-Also it stole all my credit card information

[Metahive]

O, Ghosts is an average shooter...for 2007. After Treyarch tried to be innovative at least a little bit with mutliple endings and optional RTS missions in BO2, IW just dragged the whole thing back to square one. The story is dumber than that of either BO titles (EVIL SOUTH AMERICAN IMPERIALISTS...WITH ORBITAL KILLSATS!) and the only "new" thing in Ghosts is that goddamned dog. The graphics don't even look all that better than BO2's. I was one of the few who thought that Megaman 9 was shit for going back to faux 8-bit again and removing any features that had been added from MM3 onwards and I think CoD going back to MW standards is just as bad. Way to start the 8th console generation with a wimper.

[Zaune]

I miss PC Zone. I really, really do. I should email as many of the mag's regulars and see how much money they'd want to come and write for a web-zine and then run a Kickstarter to raise it.

[krakonfour]

I wonder if a shooter could be based entirely around maneouvering in zero gravity like in the Dead space 2 and 3 games....
Meaning, if the scenarios are getting old and everything has been done already, why don't developers tackle the mechanics of the game instead?

[PeZook]

CoD had stale mechanics since CoD 1, it has always thrived on being a movie (read: ripping movies off).

[Simon_Jester]

Call of Duty 2 introduced the "health meter recharges when not getting shot at" mechanic, which... I'm sure other games had it but it was new to me. Aside from that, yeah.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

I wonder if a shooter could be based entirely around maneouvering in zero gravity like in the Dead space 2 and 3 games....
Meaning, if the scenarios are getting old and everything has been done already, why don't developers tackle the mechanics of the game instead?

Because evolution works when the unadapted organisms die, and their space is taken up by the adapted ones.

It is, if you ask me, the gamers' prerogative to kill off the old franchises and mechanics, and this won't happen soon because "old" is kinda subjective. If you've been gaming for a decade then things will seem the same to you, but if you're new to video games you will be getting used to the hang of it. By the time you've gotten used, there is already another generation of gamers learning the ropes. I know that you might cringe when looking at, say, storytelling, but there are teens out there who looked at Far Cry 3 and said WOW DEEP BRO.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I really hate that "regenerating health" thing, especially in games that claim to be "realistic." I much prefer the old "you're hurt, find a medkit/medic/whatever." It made combat a lot more tactical sicne if you are injured it doesn't just go away when you duck behind a sofa.

[TheFeniX]

It's kind of the opposite with the gaming industry though. The arena shooter died out, as did the RTS scene to a lesser extent due to the changing of a control scheme. The controller cannot handle those types of games at all, and they must be reworked around slower controls. What's considered "fast-paced" these days feels like I'm running underwater because of what I grew up with.

Before console FPS became a thing, you had a wide spread of FPS that looked and played almost entirely different. Unreal, Quake, Half-Life, and the oodles of mods turned official like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress all were popular among different groups and even the same groups if they felt like changing things up for a day. Newer gamers entering the market today don't have those kind of choices. They don't even know the other options exist/existed.

Even popular gametypes for CoD like Nazi Zombies get a back-seat to the oora! Fleshed out, Actiward could make a killing providing an alternative to Left 4 Dead that isn't just a clone of it, but IW is pretty butt-hurt about Treyarch putting that in, probably because they hate fun.

[Metahive]

I prefer segmented health regen like in the first Resistance, AVP 2010 and the first two FEAR titles (well, they regenerated up to 25/40 health respectively, not quite a straight example). This way you have the tactical depth of healing items combined with the avoidance of those dreadful "2 health left and about to face a batallion of enemies"-type situations that I ran into way too often when playing, say, the first CoD with its cheap pop-up Germans that spawn right behind you from time to time. It's really no wonder they changed that.

I also like how it's handled in the last Brothers in Arms title and Red Orchestra. There getting shot at doesn't drain health but instead represents your "luck" that is being challenged, prolonged exposure to enemy fire means that you'll be hit eventually. In the former an actual hit means instant death while in the latter you might survive with a fleshwound, survive only to bleed out quickly or drop dead on the spot. Karl Maria Remarque wrote in "All Quiet on the Western Front" that a soldier survives through a myriad of coincidences so this is kind of fitting.

[xthetenth]

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.

And you made a choice. Maybe you learned something. Maybe the idea that you need to unquestioningly consume everything that is presented in front of you because of monetary investment is worth challenging. Unquestioning consumption shouldn't be, and frankly something that makes me think like that would be worth it to me. The experience has stayed with me far more vividly than most because even though I was semi-spoiled and playing it as a sort of means to witness the horror, it really did make me think a lot more about the genre and games in general. I have put down a great many games after less play time because they didn't engage me, a game that I put down like that because it engaged me would be memorable and worthwhile.

Honestly the thing that I found the most brilliant was how everything changed as the game progressed, even the slo-mo effect for headshots, which didn't change at all. The context was just so radically different that things that were unquestioned early in the game became unsettling later in the game. The utterly phenomenal art direction of the game is well worth mention, because it's vital to the whole game reflecting the story arc.

[FaxModem1]

I've found this topic fascinating, and it's made me wonder if I should buy Spec Ops: the Line, but I have to say, if the only choice in a game is 'press A to be a war criminal', or turn it off, and then later on it blames you for becoming a war criminal, then you are being railroaded. Unless there's the choice to simply walk away and have a game over that says that Walker quit, it really is having to pay sixty dollars for being forced into being a monster, or being ripped off.

Y'all mention the alternate choices, such as shooting in the air, or trying to take out the snipers, but it seems that no matter what, the choice is bad, and ends with people dead, or you dying. Is that supposed to be the moral of the game? Don't play it, or you will have no choice but to have horrible things happen by you.

Where's the choice to be moral, that isn't turning your game into the 60 dollar coaster? Is there one? And while you can make the complaint that we're assigning monetary value as a priority, that's only because we're not getting to be satisfied emotionally or recreationally by the game, and instead feel that we're being lectured at by our game about how awful we are.

Look at Bioshock, it wonderfully shows the consequences of blindly following orders, but it doesn't make you a war criminal for doing so, and you can still make things better.

It seems the game is instead saying that trying to be a hero is an awful thing, and will hurt you for trying.

[GuppyShark]

If you find the topic fascinating, then I would definately suggest picking it up.

I wouldn't be too worried about the 'railroading' complaint. The game isn't trying to get you to hate yourself for playing it or to stop playing it. It's telling a story and delivering a rich experience I've not found anywhere else.

[Vendetta]

It seems the game is instead saying that trying to be a hero is an awful thing, and will hurt you for trying.

No, the game is saying that the type of "hero" that modern military shooters are trying to make you be is no hero at all. Among other things.


Play Spec Ops. Play it in one run through and do not turn the difficulty down if you become frustrated, that frustration is important).

(PS it's probably the best derivative of Heart of Darkness ever, in that like the original the darkess is not something which the place generates but something you take into it and that exists because of you not the place. Fuck Apocalypse Now. It's not about someone "going native", it's about the horror inflicted by the "civilised" person on people they refuse to value. Heart of Darkness is about the treatment of the Belgian Congo.).

[Grumman]

Y'all mention the alternate choices, such as shooting in the air...

That's a separate part of the game. That one I think is a great idea - to give the player a meaningful option to reject the Bro Shooter hypothetical ("You have to kill these people, or they will kill you").

If this sort of thing interests you, I'd recommend the free side-scroller Spoiler

Iji.

[xthetenth]

Now that's a fun one and a blast from the past.

Frankly as far as Spec Ops goes, it takes the shooter mindset and stretches it far past the breaking point. I don't see it as calling you a war criminal as much as asking you to turn an eye inwards and ask your self what your role is in this and whether you are actually complicit.