Call of Duty Black Ops 3 beta

[Dirty Hipsters]

I got into the Call of Duty Black Ops 3 beta on the PS4. I haven't played a Call of Duty game since Modern Warfare 3, a game so boring and lifeless that it made me quit Call of Duty altogether for the next 3 years. Prior to that I was a big fan of the series, even playing competitively in a clan in MW2, Black Ops 1, and MW3.

Here are my impressions of the Black Ops 3 beta:

1. Movement feels good, REALLY good. The whole game feels fast, and ability to shoot and reload while sprinting, sliding, and jetpacking makes everything feel extremely fluid. The new movement system has also so far meant that I have not run into any campers. Everyone is sprinting and flying around like maniacs. I'm really enjoying the mobility.

2. Specialist powers feel fun and are mostly surprisingly well balanced. They give you a slight edge without ever feeling really cheap. I'm currently running "glitch" an ability that allows you to teleport to a spot you were in a few seconds prior. This allows you to use yourself as bait to set up traps, get out of sticky situations where you run into the entire enemy team and have no hope of winning, and even lets you teleport away from the fight if you get hit with a stun grenade or flashbang and need a moment to recover. This ability ties into the movement system of the game directly and not only enhances your mobility but also incentivizes movement because "glitch" doesn't do anything if you've been sitting in a corner for the last few seconds, it only works if you've been running around.

3. Weapons seem decently balanced and each weapon feels unique. They seem to have paired down the weapons significantly from previous call of duty games. Now there's only about 6 or less weapons in each class, and each weapon fills a specific role and feels different from every other weapon in said class. This is a great thing because call of duty gun rosters got really bloated around MW2, with a lot of weapons doing the same thing and feeling the same. I haven't unlocked all the guns in the beta yet, but so far nothing has felt especially over or under powered. I feel like the shotguns could use a bit of range in their default state, but that's pretty much my only complaint.

4. Kill streaks take some skill to earn, and are not overpowered from what I've seen. They're fun to use but do not get you an obscene amount of kills like chopper gunner or ac130 did in MW2. All in all they're fun little rewards but they really don't turn the tide of the game. This is great because it means most of the game is just gun on gun, and even if you have poor teammates you won't have explosives raining down on you every moment of the match.

5. The maps in the beta are decent. I really like Hunt, but Evac and Combine feel a little too small and have spawn problems once in a while. I'm really hoping to see more big maps with a lot of verticality to them in the final game.

All in all, I went into this beta with pretty low expectations and so far the game is much more fun and interesting than I imagined it to be. This beta actually sold me on buying the game when it comes out, which is a damn impressive feat after I basically swore off the series 3 years ago.

I'm having fun with this and I hope you are as well.

Any thoughts, impressions? How are you guys liking (or hating) the game?

 

[Offworlder_v1legacy]

Do you think it's a good point to get back into the series after being burnt out or bored? I'm curious to see if this is worth the money after not playing it for years.

 

[DrownedAmmet]

Call Of Duty still pushing this pseudo sci fi future bullshit? Yes? I'm out. While CoD was never ARMA levels of realism. I did appreciate the WWII campaigns and MW1 (and some parts of 2) atleast tried to keep it grounded in reality. It wasn't being burnt out on the series that made me give up. It was Black Ops 2 that and the fucking laughably cringe worthy community.

Yeah, I miss when there was some semblance of realism. I find it hard to get in to the new games when there aren't any real guns. I know what an AK and an M4 are, I don't know the difference between generic Sci-fi assault rifle #1 and generic Sci-fi assault rifle #2

 

[Something Amyss]

It was pretty awesome when it worked. But 3/5 days nobody I knew could connect, or we were all hit with massively crippling lag.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Do you think it's a good point to get back into the series after being burnt out or bored? I'm curious to see if this is worth the money after not playing it for years.

Depends. If you're interested in story then I don't have an answer for you. If you're interested in the multiplayer gameplay I can tell you that it plays very well and that I had fun with it, and intend to buy it barred on my impressions of the multiplayer from the beta. I was also pretty burned out on the series after MW3 but the mechanics in this game were enough to get me back into it.

 

[Sleepy Sol]

I'd say it's the first CoD I really felt good about playing since MW2. Of course, part of that was probably a lack of investment in playing "well" so I felt a lot more relaxed in general.

The amount of movement options impressed me, too. May have just been that I missed years of fpses that already had similar stuff, but running on walls and jetpacking all over the damn place was exhilarating.

Oh, and getting four consecutive Sparrow kills in the span of a few seconds was hilarious and quite a bit of an adrenaline rush.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

It was pretty awesome when it worked. But 3/5 days nobody I knew could connect, or we were all hit with massively crippling lag.

Huh, that's weird.

I only played over the weekend, but I played for 6 hours the first day and only got into a laggy match once. The second day I got into laggy matches about 1/8 of the time or so, but I'm putting that down to the fact that my NAT type changed itself to "strict" for some reason. Don't know why it happened or what made it go back to normal.

Played a bit more today and my NAT was open again, and it was taking me roughly 10 seconds to get into games, and there was no noticeable lag.

 

[Something Amyss]

Played a bit more today and my NAT was open again, and it was taking me roughly 10 seconds to get into games, and there was no noticeable lag.

We all had open NAT. I troubleshot a couple of them through it, even. I quite out a few times because the stuttering was making me sick.

 

[Sexual Harassment Panda]

I've been playing a bit on PC, and from that I'd say it's fairly hard to recommend... I would not be at all surprised to learn that it's very enjoyable on console though, since that's generally where the focus of the balancing and everything seems to go.

So far:

- Weapons are kinda cool.

- Sound is very meaty for some reason. Approximately Battlefield levels of deafening.

- Not particularly good looking, same old CoD.

- Runs like crap even on my good hardware.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

2. Specialist powers feel fun and are mostly surprisingly well balanced. They give you a slight edge without ever feeling really cheap. I'm currently running "glitch" an ability that allows you to teleport to a spot you were in a few seconds prior. This allows you to use yourself as bait to set up traps, get out of sticky situations where you run into the entire enemy team and have no hope of winning, and even lets you teleport away from the fight if you get hit with a stun grenade or flashbang and need a moment to recover. This ability ties into the movement system of the game directly and not only enhances your mobility but also incentivizes movement because "glitch" doesn't do anything if you've been sitting in a corner for the last few seconds, it only works if you've been running around.

Some of the specialist abilities are fucking bullshit man. My personal favourite is the ground slam thing. Fucked up your positioning? Your aim? Got outplayed? Don't worry fam, just hit a button and your character will launch an instakill move which your enemy cannot stop no matter what he does.

Rejack is just second chance on steroids. Anyone who played Black Ops 1 here remember that problem second chance had where, as the character was falling on the ground, he would get one or two more bullets out of his primary weapon than he would have without the perk? It happens with rejack too. This one just needs to be removed, theres no way you can really make it balanced.

Ripper is essentially the commando perk from MW2, but the dude has a cool voice in a cheesy kind of way, so I'll let this one fly.

And thats not to mention the mother of them all, the noobtube. Sorry, did I say noobtube? What I actually meant was the bow, which works in exactly the same fashion, except that its easier to aim.

In short, half the specialist abilities are just unbalanced shit that got removed from past COD games because they were terrible ideas. Nice try Vahn, but you ain't fooling me. I've had entire rounds in which I had something like 10 deaths ALL from the groundslam and bow, without losing a single gunfight.

But the worst thing is probably the flinch. If an enemy so much as clears his throat while looking at you, your character will suddenly feel the apparent urge to look at the sky for a few seconds. Its bullshit and basically a coinflip in what would otherwise be a fair gunfight. I'm absolutely wrecking people who see me first by just aiming at their feet and letting the insane flinch carry my crosshair up to their heads. Its stupid and needs to go, or at least be toned down a lot. I get that Treyarch wanted to make an effort to remove clutch perks, but if the singular clutch perk in your last game was one that removed flinch, maybe the solution isn't removing the perk and increasing the flinch? Just an idea. Oh, and Flak Jacket is going to be a clutch perk 100%, simply because there are so many explosives in the game.

Other than that, its certainly better than the textbook trainwrecks which were AW, MW3 and Ghosts. Its also better than the decent-but-boring BO2. I actually might buy this one if they patch up the PC version before release and do something about the flinch. Jetpacks are actually decently implemented and don't turn the game into rooftop warfare, the maps are FINALLY decent again and not racetracks masquerading as FPS multiplayer maps, plus weapon balance is fine (b-but muh Razorback and M8, they're fine bro, just learn to use the other guns properly). Lets face it, it wouldn't be COD without some sort of cheesy, unfair trash you can equip in your class setup. If I couldn't stand it I'd play CSGO and be done with it.

Spoiler: I hope this never gets fixed though, its great. And yes, this is currently the soundscape in every single killcam on PC. I refuse to believe its not the dev team having a laugh.

Ground slam is fine, I've gotten killed by it a total of roughly 4 times. It's pretty cool when people actually implement it into their movement and do a ground slam off a wall run or something. My only problem with it is that ground slam goes through walls, which is kind of bullshit.

Rejack is probably the worst offender of all the special abilities, but it's actually pretty easily defeated, just throw a grenade when you see the cloud of smoke pop. My biggest problem with the ability is that it can activated after death. If they tweak it so that you have to manually activate it right before you die for it to work then it'll be balanced.

As far as the weapon specialist abilities go, I could take them or leave them. None of them is as interesting to use as their support ability counterparts, and they really feel like things that should have been kill streaks rather than abilities, but really I haven't minded them all that much. If there's a reason I'm running flak jacket all day it's not because of the bow, it's the rc car.

 

[DC_78]

Black Ops III: CoD and Destiny had a baby.

The sci-fi aesthetic I found appealing, not to futuristic but enough that it was still CoD. I really liked the use of Specialists as a kind of character class. The choice to not have them as customizable as past game's soldiers is worrying. I think microtransactions of new character skins or (hopefully not) new Specialists might come down the pike. Which is yuck.

Movement is awesome and the battlefields are fast paced. They reward players that get creative in their parkour. The weapons are a nice mix and none seemed overpowering. I used everything from the assault rifle, sub machine gun, shotgun, RPG all the way to the first pistol and reliably got consecutive kills. The removal of one hit death melee strikes threw me off at first, but being a Destiny and Halo player I quickly adjusted.

Specialist skills are twitchy to me and required a bit of practice. I used Ruin's Groundpound, Outriders Sparrow, Prophet's Electro gun, and Battery's Armor.

2. Specialist powers feel fun and are mostly surprisingly well balanced. They give you a slight edge without ever feeling really cheap. I'm currently running "glitch" an ability that allows you to teleport to a spot you were in a few seconds prior. This allows you to use yourself as bait to set up traps, get out of sticky situations where you run into the entire enemy team and have no hope of winning, and even lets you teleport away from the fight if you get hit with a stun grenade or flashbang and need a moment to recover. This ability ties into the movement system of the game directly and not only enhances your mobility but also incentivizes movement because "glitch" doesn't do anything if you've been sitting in a corner for the last few seconds, it only works if you've been running around.

Some of the specialist abilities are fucking bullshit man. My personal favourite is the ground slam thing. Fucked up your positioning? Your aim? Got outplayed? Don't worry fam, just hit a button and your character will launch an instakill move which your enemy cannot stop no matter what he does.

Rejack is just second chance on steroids. Anyone who played Black Ops 1 here remember that problem second chance had where, as the character was falling on the ground, he would get one or two more bullets out of his primary weapon than he would have without the perk? It happens with rejack too. This one just needs to be removed, theres no way you can really make it balanced.

Ripper is essentially the commando perk from MW2, but the dude has a cool voice in a cheesy kind of way, so I'll let this one fly.

And thats not to mention the mother of them all, the noobtube. Sorry, did I say noobtube? What I actually meant was the bow, which works in exactly the same fashion, except that its easier to aim.

In short, half the specialist abilities are just unbalanced shit that got removed from past COD games because they were terrible ideas. Nice try Vahn, but you ain't fooling me. I've had entire rounds in which I had something like 10 deaths ALL from the groundslam and bow, without losing a single gunfight.

I gotta disagree about Ruin's ground pound. It is mostly balanced from my plays in beta. The decent cooldown for what amounts to a one use death punch to a grenade AoE is not that bad. It springs you forward which has you vulnerable. This is the time I got shot more often than not by the opponent. Doing it in the air from a leap is better, but a quick sniper can one shot you if they see you fast enough. The fact that it went through walls is cheesy and I hope is just a beta glitch.

The bow never seemed that overpowering to me. I never used the Outrider much, but every time it was used against me it was an instant death. Which to be honest for an ability that only last a minute at most, if you survive, is not that bad. Most often because the rate of fire seemed so slow to me a pair of teammates always mowed down the Outrider before they got off their second shot.

Prophet's electrogun is a doozy. Hit a target, theiy're dead, and it instantly kills any teammates around the target too. In about grenade AoE. But at most it was five maybe six shots before it powered down and then you had to wait for it to cool down before you could use it again. I got it usually once a match.

Battery's armor was...meh.... I regretted taking it and often thought about switching to the rotating grenade launcher special. But didn't have the time.

All in all I liked the Beta enough to pre-order it. I skipped the last CoD and planned to skip this one too, but the enjoyment I had out of the Beta changed my mind. After I found out that the campaign is going to be 4 player co-op I am sold. No season pass though. I hate that shit.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Ground slam is fine, I've gotten killed by it a total of roughly 4 times. It's pretty cool when people actually implement it into their movement and do a ground slam off a wall run or something. My only problem with it is that ground slam goes through walls, which is kind of bullshit.

I gotta disagree about Ruin's ground pound. It is mostly balanced from my plays in beta. The decent cooldown for what amounts to a one use death punch to a grenade AoE is not that bad. It springs you forward which has you vulnerable. This is the time I got shot more often than not by the opponent. Doing it in the air from a leap is better, but a quick sniper can one shot you if they see you fast enough. The fact that it went through walls is cheesy and I hope is just a beta glitch.

The bow never seemed that overpowering to me. I never used the Outrider much, but every time it was used against me it was an instant death. Which to be honest for an ability that only last a minute at most, if you survive, is not that bad. Most often because the rate of fire seemed so slow to me a pair of teammates always mowed down the Outrider before they got off their second shot.

Guys, cmon, take it from a guy who's been playing COD since the first one and was pretty pro at promod (hue) in COD4 and MW2. Technically, yes, people are vulnerable while using it. The problem is Treyarchs engine simply cannot handle fast movement. See: having to aim slightly to the right of everyone in Black Ops 1 when they were moving and the hit detection issues with the Lightweight perk in BO2. Anything faster than the normal sprint just fucks the hit detection up beyond belief. The other issue is that Johnny Nothumbs can earn it 5 times in a match of Domination while going 5-50 in terms of k/d without jumping on a single flag. Two possible fixes off the top of my head would be to 1) give the ground slam a flash/concussion grenade effect with increased AoE or 2) adjust the way you earn it to the current game mode. Stackable upon death but in Domination you have to get 3 flag caps, in TDM you have to get 10 kills, etc etc, you get the idea.

The bow is literally just a better noobtube. There is no difference except that the projectile is faster and easier to aim. Well, and you have to "earn" it by playing for 90 seconds. Its not a problem though, Flak Jacket exists. Oh and also DC - the outriders you've seen suck balls in that case. Any decent player can do some serious damage with it.

You know there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the noobtube. It got a bad rap in MW2 because it pretty much broke the game, but it wasn't the attachment itself, but danger close and one man army/scavenger that made it so ridiculous. The bow from black ops 3 doesn't have the explosive radius of the mw2 noob tube, nor do you have access to it all game, so really it's fine. Hell, in the beta most of the times I got killed by the bow it was a direct hit, in which case I would have died to a sniper shot just as easily.