It’s Call Of Duty season once again, which means that people are already speculating about the series’ future rather than concentrating on the game that’s about to ratatat out of the end of Activision Blizzard’s rifle. Ahead of Modern Warfare 2’s eruption on October 28th, rumours are circulating that Sledgehammer Games will return to the near-future world of their 2014 boots-off-the-ground instalment, Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare. COD help us all.
]]>Like a zipline descending into Verdansk, the quality curve of the Call of Duty campaign trends ever downward, year-on-year. Or so a casual observer might assume. But this is Task Force 141, soldier: we don’t do casual observation. Take my binoculars and you’ll soon see that the real story is far more complicated and compelling.
For every Ghosts in the graveyard of CODs past, there’s an unlikely space adventure to rival Titanfall. And no matter how many times Captain Price tells you to let ‘em pass, there’s always an experimental RTS mechanic or Hitman-lite stealth mission waiting around the next corner. Call of Duty has been far more brave and changeable than it’s given credit for, and while the best ideas haven’t always stuck, they’re still very much playable. What’s more, they rarely outlast a weekend - which counts for a lot in an age of life-consuming AAA releases.
Over 20 years of service, I’ve played every single COD campaign, and can share my intel freely with allies like you. So hop in for a ride through the ups and downs of the series. Just don’t take the helicopter - those things never land softly around here.
]]>The last ten years have brought us many joys. We've already celebrated the best games of the past decade, but with such scattergun nomination comes neglect. Only three of the fifty games we picked had grappling hooks, so clearly the entire endeavour was pointless and you will need an alternative resource.
Here's my definitive guide to the swinging tenties. I haven't mentioned Worms, because they get everywhere and I don't want to spend my whole day talking about helminths.
]]>Michael Condrey, who co-founded Call Of Duty crew Sledgehammer Games after being a big cheese at EA's Visceral Games on games including Dead Space, has now joined 2K as president of a mysterious new studio. Continuing his tour of big American publishers, 2K say Condrey "will build and lead a new development team to work on an unannounced project." It is weird to see 2K opening a studio after shutting down so many in recent years, and that does make me doubt its long-term chances, but hey, we'll see.
]]>“Those who do not learn from from history, are doomed to make another World War II videogame.” A famous saying, and one we all know well. So when Activision hosted a live presentation for the reveal trailer of their latest shooter, Call of Duty: WWII [official site], I watched and felt nothing but a tired wave of low-burning resentment for everyone involved. During this presentation the word “visceral” was said a total of eight times and our own news editor Alice silently got up from her desk, walked solemnly out of her house, and never returned. If anyone has seen Alice, please call us.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
You are Kevin Spacey's surrogate son. Look at those eyes, focused with paternalistic concern. He is placing a hand warmly upon your robot arm, the robot arm he gave you along with robot legs and probably robot other things. It's a shame, really. It's a shame you'll have to kill him later.
This is Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.
]]>This morning I have been documenting a fruit and vegetable market in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. I think I was supposed to be rescuing a president or something but the shiny fruit looked more interesting. I don't mean that as a sick burn or anything. I just got distracted by some nice fruit.
]]>Tweets from developers dumping details are a bit like bubble gum wrapper trivia facts, aren't they? You won't be fascinated and enthralled, you won't learn the deepest secrets of the darkest beings, but you might raise your eyebrows a little, but approvingly, and at the back of your mouth grind out an approving throaty vocalisation like "Mmh!" or "Hhhoh!" or "Hmm!" or "Hrmmm!"
Now we've chewed the Cyberbazooka Joe gum of Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 [official site] in that trailer, it's trivia time, with wrapfacts on dedicated servers, field of view, and other touchy issues.
]]>Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare [official site] has introduced Master Prestige ranks which are another way to earn elite weapon drops and culminate in a Grand Master Prestige gear set which kind of makes you look like your character has been mistaken for a couch and upholstered.
]]>Activision have started vaguely muttering about this year's Call of Duty, which is the first from Cod Blops folks Treyarch on the series' new three-year development cycle. We knew that was happening, and all Activision had to say in an earnings conference call yesterday is that it'll be "loaded with innovation". Right-o. The FPS is now a decade into annual sequels and quite set on that path, so I wonder: what would you do with Call of Duty?
You can reboot, resurrect, reinvent, fragment, and spin-off all you like, but let's assume you won't get the green light from Activision without releasing a core FPS. Past, present, future, revolutions, invasions, operations, robots, dinosaurs, spacemen - go. Dream. Me, I'm thinking episodic.
]]>Over the holidays I started playing Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare multiplayer. After initially mistaking it for a "shooting people in the back" simulator wherein I had accidentally signed up to play the exciting role of "sole target" I started to pick into it a bit further, upping my KD ratio and experimenting with a bunch of the loadout perks and options. I think an 8 kill streak is my current most impressive achievement and I'm kind of in love with my Steel Bite variation on the ARX-160. It makes me feel like a weaponised Pat Butcher.
But another thing I started to pick into at the same time was my own behaviour when starting any new multiplayer FPS game - hi Titanfall, Counter-Strike, CoD... I get exceedingly grumpy for about the first 10 hours. It's for this reason I prefer to grapple with multiplayer in a quiet room where people who think I'm a reasonable member of society can't hear me wailing about the unfairness of it all, swearing about IMPOSSIBLE odds and declaring that I never liked videogames anyway and that I'm going to go and have a calming walk (all the while queuing for another round).
With that in mind, here are the five stages of an FPS multiplayer experience*:
]]>It's a pleasant fantasy to think that holidays mean long weeks of playing games, but in reality there's trains and planes to be boarded, family to be visited, lives to be unavoidably lived. Gaming during holidays is therefore similar to gaming at any other time, about stealing moments to sneak away to a quiet corner and catch up on backlogs or curl up with comforts. Some of you told us what you played over the break yesterday, but here's what RPS played between the parsnips and presents.
]]>More than any Call of Duty in a long time, I fancy a crack at Advanced Warfare. I want to see how those exosuits and zany futuristic weapons shake up what was already a pretty fast for a modern FPS, but I'm not curious enough to splash out - strewth! - £40. Thankfully, the multiplayer side is free to play on Steam this weekend, so I'm downloading that now. One minor issue: the download is 36.5GB, so you might not have much time left to play by the time that's finished.
]]>The Call of Duty games are often best understood not as first-person shooters in the lineage of Half-Life 2 and Halo, but as extensions of light-gun rail shooters. They're games set in strictly scripted corridors, with one button to pop in and out of cover, one to shoot, and another to reload. That you can move your legs around a bit hardly matters, and taken on these terms, the entries in the series which lean towards boyish action romp are at least lightly entertaining.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare resists even these acts of apologia. If the first Crysis game was made by a team of people asking themselves, "How can we create a videogame which approximates the thrilling freedom and power of being a super-suited soldier?", Advanced Warfare was made by people asking, "How can we create a Call of Duty game that approximates the thrilling freedom and power of playing Crysis?" Much like the metallic 'exosuits' that wrap around its grizzled heroes, this is Call of Duty wearing the artificial shell of a more interesting game.
]]>It's a good year for videogame trailer one-liners, but who would have guessed at the start of the year that the best of them would be delivered by Kevin Spacey? The poster-boy of this year's Call of Duty installment and for Evil Capitalism actually says the name of the game in the launch trailer. That's bold - and I've never smiled so hard at something so cliché.
]]>Call of Duty games aren't any more stupid than most action games, but there's an adopted seriousness to its bombast that makes me want to prick its balloon at every opportunity. In this latest Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare trailer for example, they throw up the quote "TRANSCENDS THE LINE BETWEEN GAME AND FILM", then a few seconds later cut to Kevin Spacey's uncanny, screaming, plastic eyes.
Yet then there's guns and exo-suits and double-jumping and ooh, I do like a bit of an action romp sometimes and the multiplayer's always worth a spin. The back half of this trailer even introduces a new mode, Exo Survival, which is four-player co-op.
]]>How do you keep a multiplayer game interesting, or even alive, over years and successive instalments? I hugely admire how Magic: The Gathering has, a few missteps aside, kept revitalising itself with expansions for over twenty years. New card types, abilities, and stories come and go, but the core game is still there and quite splendid. Call of Duty is now almost eleven years old and seemingly doing pretty well for itself.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare looks, in many ways, to bring the biggest shift since Call of Duty 4 in 2007, with exo-suits changing a player's basic abilities. I wonder how it'll work out. Come see more in a new lengthy trailer.
]]>Heya, Call of Duty, buddy, how are you doing? Breakups are hard, aren't they? Ex-friends Respawn are off doing their own thing and that big bully Battlefield's still swanning about, making your life difficult. You wanna look cool and hip, so at Gamescom yesterday you showed off your hottest new clothes, spruced up versions of the last-season garbage those losers are wearing. Double-jumps and cloaking, maps that modify themselves over time - you've taken the best of them and mixed it in with your own feel. Plus, for some reason, Unreal Tournament dodging. That one's a bit off the wall.
]]>FADE IN
INT. SKYSCRAPER - NIGHT
JONATHAN IRONS is hanging from a window ledge. We can see shards of broken glass, but the camera pushes in on his face. He looks like Kevin Spacey. Or a sort of facsimile of Kevin Spacey's head, smooshed on to a Vince McMahon wrestling figure.
This scene doesn't appear in the new Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare story trailer, I'm just guessing at where this whole thing is headed. Trailer and more thoughts below.
]]>Ahhh, don't hurt me, okay? Hear me out. Up until now the twenty-three-game Call of Duty franchise has been running its yearly main sequels (which make up 'just' eleven of those) through a two-year development cycle. Releases have alternated between original developers Infinity Ward, who were basically decapitated after the release of Modern Warfare 2, and Treyarch.
But this year's offering isn't from either of those studios, rather relative nu-kidz Sledgehammer Games. They helped finish Modern Warfare 3 while Activision wrestled legally with Infinity Ward. Plus, studio main-men Glen Schofield and Michael Condrey were co-directors of the original Dead Space and have brought some of the staff from Visceral with them. What they've shown off so far, in Activision's usual blitz of trailers, actually has me excited. Come see.
]]>Finally! A new Call of Duty game! What has it been? Five years? Ten years? One whole minute? Never mind the agonizing wait. All that matters now is this perfect moment, this sweet embrace. Activision were planning to take the wraps off Call of Duty: Ominous, Obvious, Or Utterly Meaningless Subtitle (aka, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare) this weekend, but a couple of leaks have prompted them to offer a few early details. Foremost, this one is being developed by series first-timer Sledgehammer as part of Activision's plan to give each series entry a three year development cycle. Second, it's about Private Military Companies (PMCs) deciding to STOP TAKING ORDERS and START TAKING OVER and there's a brief SHOCK-YOU-MENTARY below. Third, there's also now a trailer and this time the villain is Kevin Spacey.
]]>
