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With E3 fast approaching, we take a look at what CoD needs to keep up this year.
Well, it looks like the lid’s off on the military’s top secret black operations parkour squads. From everything we’ve seen of Black Ops 3, our yearly fight to save the world from dastardly foreigners and traitorous Americans is set to get a whole lot leap–ier in 2015, as Treyarch’s branch of the Call of Duty franchise hops, skips and jumps on robot legs into a not-at-all-Deus-Ex-like future – in which the cyborg-ification of the human race has made everyone stronger, faster and a lot more cross.
Lesser men would take one look at the trailer’s rolling robot spike balls and be satisfied. We are not those men. To wit, we have compiled the following list of demands – whatever else Black Ops 3 might offer, these are the things we want to see.
1. A proper story… Apologists might say that you know what you’re getting when you buy a new Call of Duty: a molten caramel core of multiplayer with patches of singleplayer carpet fuzz matted to the outside. “No-one buys Call of Duty for the story,” they crow, spinning 720 degrees in the air firing a sniper rifle before getting killed and blaming it on lag.
But here’s the thing, see: Black Ops 3 has a different competitor this year. There’s no Battlefield coming out (presumably) against which to measure its multiplayer chops. No, this year, Call of Duty is competing against a game that doesn’t even have a multiplayer mode: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.
The latest Black Ops trailer is such a shameless – ahem – homage to those live action Human Revolution trailers that the Eidos Montreal devs even deployed a sad kitten to make the point on the official Twitter feed. But the real problem for Treyarch is that while Mankind Divided and Black Ops 3 seem share the same setting and explore the same themes, Deus Ex’s writing is some of the best in the business. If Call of Duty’s 2015 story is just a standard CoD romp with bits of transhumanist wallpaper and the one Hollywood heavyweight the budget could stretch to rolled over the top, Mankind Divided will make it look all the sillier for it.
2. …And a co-op mode that doesn’t detract from it Finally! A use for that dusty, controller-shaped paper weight that you got bundled with your new-gen console. It’s fair to say that local multiplayer has been less of a feature on Xbox One and PS4 than we’d have liked – forcing us to yell insults at strangers halfway round the world rather whisper them menacingly to the person sitting next to us on the couch.
Black Ops 3 is fixing that, with two player local co-op (and up to four players if you decide you’d rather go back to abusing strangers online). And this news, combined with the announcement that the player-character in Black Ops 3 will, for the first time in Call of Duty history, be customisable at the start (you can even decide your gender), makes the question of how the game will handle its story an interesting one. Optional co-op hasn’t always worked in games with a story focus (ah, Dead Space 3’s John Carver, we hardly knew ye), and Treyarch haven’t said anything more about the co-op than that it exists. What it’s actually going to look like (beyond, you know, like playing on two half–sized screens) is a mystery.
But you know what we would like? Some Spec Ops missions. Introduced in Modern Warfare 2, revisited in Modern Warfare 3 and then scrapped after that, a suite of standalone missions that can each be over and done with in ten minutes is a perfect fit for co-op play. We would like them back, please.
3. Better Zombies When Nacht Der Untoten appeared as an extra in World At War back in 2008, it was a delight. It even had a lovely (possibly apocryphal) backstory, about how it had been knocked up for fun by a couple of Treyarch developers in their spare time and was then bundled in when somebody realised that the zombies were turning out to be more fun than standard WWII baddies.
Since then, though, attempts to innovate have been hit and miss. Guest appearances from Danny Trejo and Sarah Michelle Gellar were harmless novelties. Advanced Warfare’s Exo Zombies fit with its ‘make-everything-faster’ design philosophy, but kind of stripped away the point of what a zombie is supposed to be in the first place. In terms of innovating gameplay, Zombies has been shambling and groaning against a chain–link fence.
Breathing new life into a zombie isn’t impossible (except in the literal sense, we suppose). How about some more tactical elements borrowed from games like DayZ or Dying Light, with enemies you can sneak past if you’ve run out of money for the round? Or some kind of evacuation that doesn’t end with your helicopter totally-unexpectedly-expectedly getting blown up at the last second? And whatever happened to boarding up windows? Do people not use hammers in the future?
4. Wide open spaces Those less charitable than we might hear Treyarch’s description of its free-running movement system and think someone’s been peeking at Titanfall’s design notes. But like the saying goes, all good art is imitation. And as we don’t know when Titanfall 2’s coming out, we’ll take what we can get in the meantime.
But if you’re going to take inspiration from Titanfall, take more than its movement system. While there’s plenty of all-caps rage-baiting hilarity to enjoy hanging from the ceiling with a Smart Pistol in Respawn’s 2014 shooter, you don’t have to get up close and personal if you don’t want to. Most maps have areas round the edges that can be used to call in Titans or as impromptu sniper’s nests, which means (provided you’re not the sort of person who jerks awake at night sweating over their kill/death ratio) you can play a multiplayer match more or less at your own pace.
This design philosophy has been binned in the more recent CoD releases – Ghosts and Advanced Warfare in particular are built to keep players moving, with multiple routes into the best hiding spots to flush out campers. But things weren’t always this way: Modern Warfares 1, 2 and even 3 to a degree had fertile hunting grounds in which snipers could set up shop and spend most of the match picking people off from the sidelines. We know that’s the mirror universe version of what Treyarch seem to be pitching with Black Ops 3 – but remember the Wasteland map from MW2? Remember the good times hunched over in the bushes watching the game through an Intervention scope? Remember, Treyarch. Reeemeeembeer…
5. Not just guns, please Hold on, don’t flip your keyboard and spit juice everywhere just yet. Stay with us. Stay in the room.
We like blasting away with shotguns and drones and orbital missile cannons as much as the next person (assuming the next person loves those things, which we do). But. There was something just a teensy bit sad about the Black Ops 3 Ember trailer that we think is worth mentioning: remember that brief bit in the trailer that had been clipped out of a TED talk? Well, that’s this TED talk. It’s amazing and easily worth watching, but just in case you’re reading this in the backseat of a helicopter as you buzz between very important meetings, we’ll tl;dr it for you: the speaker isn’t talking about shooting people, or building better soldiers, or orbital missile cannons.
The talk is about fixing disability, and (spoilers) has a particularly poignant ending. Together with a research team at MIT, Hugh Herr (the guy giving the talk) spent eight months building a prosthetic leg for a woman whose natural leg was lost in the Boston marathon bombing. She was a dancer. These people built her a new leg, and at the end of the video, she dances again.
Yes, yes, yes, it’s not very CoD. Black Ops’ multiplayer can probably survive without the addition of a cybernetic dance off mode. But the singleplayer, like we said at the start of this list, has an amazing wealth of technology to draw on for inspiration – solutions to medical challenges so complex they’re practically magic. It would be a shame if all Black Ops had to show us of 2065 is how much better we’d got at shooting people.
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