I’ve never really played a COD game before so this is all pretty new to me.
I’ve mostly stuck to Team Death Match, which has been pretty alright. The last match I was in (and first one I lost in!) had some guy loudly playing a nu metal cover of Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round,” so I’m guessing that’s pretty true to the Call of Duty experience.
Really do like Control, though. Heist (sort of a Counter Strike “buy weapons and perks between rounds” mode) could be alright, but the combination of super quick time to kill, long revives, and people just absolutely not giving a shit for cooperating makes it seem kinda pointless. I guess it’s neat if you want a quick 5v5 one-life death match, since that’s all it winds up being.
I die constantly and am probably a burden to my team, but if they’re gonna blast awful cover songs and send nasty messages, hey, whatever
Haven’t messed with Blackout since the beta, but it seems like a fairly solid One of Those. Putting better guns in zombie infested areas is a way to do things, I guess, but I haven’t tried that yet to see if it pays off (seems like a good way to lose whatever armor/healing items you get).
Same as Sakurina, haven’t touched the Zombies mode. Also just found out the last game had Elvira and Paul Reubens in that mode? Maybe I should have tried it sooner, I dunno.
I wanted to play a fast paced FPS with quick games over the weekend and in a fit of madness started thinking about getting BLOPS4. I was suggested to try Quake Champions instead and it took me 5 minutes to get a match with four players so I ended up getting BLOPS4 anyway. I haven’t really touched this series since COD2 when I brother told me I’d never be able to beat the game on the hardest difficulty and then decided to try it myself (which I did eventually do, though I remember a particularly painful moment where I was on the top of a tower sniping out people with mortars when the game auto-saved 3 seconds before a mortar hit me and I had to keep re-loading for instances where I did not die from the hit).
But yeah, modern COD is pretty foreign to me though I learned enough about it through cultural osmosis. I thought it was a real run and gun game, and it can be, but waiting at chokepoints with your ADS up for someone’s head to walk out of a corner seems to be just as common here here as in other games. So I can’t run around like a maniac like in Quake like I was expecting, but I’m getting used to it. The Specialist abilities feel like they’re in a weird place where their tools are useful but their cool downs are long, so they accent your loadout and normal gameplay but don’t define it. I don’t know that it’s bad, just a bit different from other games that put such a visual focus on You Are Playing This Hero.
But what I actually am most fascinated by right now is Zombies. It’s such a weird and interesting and daunting thing. It’s not just a simple wave based survival mode but a kind of controlled sandbox that gradually grows in scope. Killing zombies earns you money which can be spent to pick up weapons off a wall or to open doors or passageways. These give you more areas to run from enemies into and out of and will progressively feature stronger weapons to obtain or monuments that can activate your Perks. They build out the scale of the level gradually, moving from your compact starting area until you’ve got this large sprawling environment with interconnected passages of all shapes and sizes, like a metroidvania map.
But more interestingly, the maps are filled with these puzzles and “quests” that have you deciphering environmental clues to open new areas, trigger new story events, and progress an actual narrative among the characters’ dialogue, potentially culminating in an actual cutscene ending. But the game doesn’t do much to guide you so it’s got this real exploratory element that I was not expecting. After looking into this aspect of the Zombies mode I saw that lot of the puzzles look super obscure and it’s like people trying to decipher those Destiny raids. But I’m hoping I can at least poke around these maps and do my best to progress the “main quest” and potentially “beat” a map.
It also has a lot of class customization stuff that I don’t really know how to utilize yet.
Does anyone know what the public temperature has been on COD’s Zombie modes? I knew that “easter eggs” were a thing but I had no idea they could be essentially quest lines within a single large map.
Zombies has a dedicated and pretty exclusive following that is definitely smaller than the zillions of people who just want to play TDM. The quasi-secret narrative started as small Easter eggs, as you’ve intuited, and have grown bigger and more complicated as the games have iterated.
black ops 2 is where zombies started getting really fucking out there. i wish i had the energy to describe how ridiculous TranZit is. maybe someone else will see this post and describe TranZit. i loved TranZit!
tranzit is like what if you had to take a bus to a wedding, but the bus constantly got delayed by traffic, and also a dog on the bus bit your dick off thirty minutes into the four hour trip
I got a letter about how I qualify for some antitrust class action lawsuit because of capacitor cartel price fixing, maybe this game will have ended up worth it after all
