The myth of the "tacked on campaign" in Battlefield and Call of Duty.

[Ambient_Malice]

What does Killzone do that Call of Duty doesn't? What does Resistance do?

Killzone and Resistance have good single-player campaigns.
Call of Duty doesn't.

That's not an actual argument.

The Half Life series has always had deeply mediocre shooting mechanics and level design that is a corridor that doesn't even bother hiding the fact it's a corridor.

And it's universally praised and held up as the gold standard of how to do a single-player FPS. Unlike Call of Duty and Battlefield.
So I don't see your point.

Not universally. Half Life is the gold standard for dumbing down your FPS game enough so that your focus testers never get lost because they can't get lost because there is only one way to go and none of the doors work. In terms of "gold standard", modern FPS developers are far more interested in imitating Call of Duty campaign design than Half Life campaign design.

How many story-driven FPS games besides Black Ops II have tried to integrate obvious and subtle player choice into a branching narrative? I can't name many.

I can't think of any either. So? Woop-de-doo, BLOPS did something unique for an FPS. That still doesn't make it good.

Oh wait, does Deus Ex count?
There's also the latest Wolfenstein. Of course, the choice there doesn't really mean anything, but the campaign was still better than the cods or battlefields.

Wolfenstein -- that so-so retread of game design ideas that were better used in Syndicate 2012 and GoldenEye Wii. The silly thing is that Wolfenstein is a blatant clone of Syndicate (Perfect Dark/TimeSplitters-style developer split after Riddick) which whiny people accused of being a "Call of Duty clone" back when it came out. It seems that if you jangle WWII keys in front of people's faces they forget their ability to think rationally about the game they're playing.

One of Wolfenstein's biggest gimmicks was stealth, with mechanics that were basically identical to GoldenEye Wii's. You know, that FPS game people accused of being a "Call of Duty clone" because it had optional regenerating health.

If they're making two games, why not release two games instead of packaging them together as ONE SINGLE GAME?!

Because they don't want to? Because giving people two games for the price of one has traditionally been seen as awesome value?

Apart from maybe BLOPS 2, I dont think there's been a single CoD or Battlefield game that tells a story that could only be told in a videogame.

Battlefield 4's ending was something that only videogames could offer, and it an was extremely powerful synergy of music, acting, and "atmosphere".

 

[Ambient_Malice]

I think I'll drop out of this discussion for now. It doesn't seem to be going anywhere. The critics have unanimously spoken, and nothing you have to say will ever change that.

Since when were critics an ultimate authority on the highly contentious subject of MP vs SP in first person shooters? Perfect Dark was more critically acclaimed than any entry in the Half Life series. We're talking universal worshipful adoration. Scores of 101/100. Does that make its campaign automatically better than Half Life? No. Is the game better than Half Life? Sure, it's the best FPS game ever made. But it is the best because of what it is, not because everyone orgasmed at the bootup sound that was lifted directly from Castlevania 64.

Oh, on the subjects of critics, what about Donkey Kong 64's 90 Metacritic score? The critics have spoken, dude. DK64 is better than Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. Look at all those pathetic losers who think that Tropic Freeze is somehow "better" than DK64. (DK64 was in fact universally well received. The idea it was somehow a bad game that people didn't like is very much revisionism.)

 

[Ambient_Malice]

Not if half of the package is utter shit.

The MP was bad, but it wasn't THAT bad. Battlefield 3 was... no so fantastic. That said, Battlefield 3 was a loose remake of BLACK. The lead character is named Black, you're in serious trouble, in prison, in fact, and the two games were kinda written by the same person. I'd say BF3 was a better game than BLACK.

And Battlefield 4? Fantastic FPS game. Great story and great soundtrack.

Then you've got Hardline, which remains one of the best stealth-oriented FPS games I've ever played. It addressed a lot of the design issues with BF3-4 by embracing player freedom and reducing the linearity of level layouts.

None of these games are anything resembling shit. Their MP may be so-so, but as this whole thread is about, MP isn't exactly a huge concern for these developers anymore. It's just something they're obliged to provide in order to get funding for their next dramatic set piece shooter.

Because anyone who defends the bf3 campaign cannot be taken seriously.

It was a linear campaign that was too tightly scripted. It was also too long. But it was a very good game overall. There's nothing wrong with linear FPS games where the AI opens all the doors for you. If anything, the AI opening all the doors for you is a technological triumph which should be praised.

edit:

Battlefield 3 had... three MP level designers. It had fourteen campaign mission designers. It annoys me how some people seem to have trouble grasping the fact that making a linear FPS game that is heavily scripted is way more work and effort to ensure nothing breaks and everything goes smoothly. It's not something that "lazy" devs do. "Lazy" devs make games where you're free to roam around and you occasionally stumble across some enemies. Making something with "cinematic" sensibilies and very tight scripting is a huge amount of work. So much can go wrong.

 

[TheSapphireKnight]

I can't comment on recent CoD games since I haven't played them recently, but as far as games like BF3 and BF4 go, those campaigns have been a complete waste of space. They were both nothing but very linear setpiece shooters that felt out of place for a series based around around large scale, vehicle based gameplay on wide open maps.

Not only did they fail to fit the spirit of the series, they did not even function as a teaching tool to give introduce players to the various multiplayer concepts. A linear game could work for BF if you spent the time moving between different roles and vehicles to show new players the ropes so they don't immediate crash the first time they get into a Jet or helicopter. Instead players got nothing but a QTE Jet level with no substance. BF Bad Company 1, despite its mechanical problems managed to both capture the essence of the series in a single player format(with fairly wide open maps) and taught players about the different weapons, equipment, and vehicles, even the Helicopter. So its not impossible to do.

Why should the campaigns bear any resemblance to the multiplayer? It's not a training mode -- it's a standalone story-driven first person shooter campaign created by people who make story-driven singleplayer games. The people who make these campaigns are frequently not the same people who make the multiplayer. And if the publisher makes them stop making SP games, like Battlefront III, from the credits it would appear they jump ship to go work at developers who will let them make singleplayer, story-driven games.

It seems to me that you would want to make a single player campaign that is going to appeal to the playerbase who are already there for the multiplayer. Its not a bundle, one would think you would want the features of the game feel like a cohesive package.

There is nothing wrong with having a single player in a multiplayer centric title like Battlefield, it is the type of campaigns that they choose to make. Notice how I mentioned the Bad Company 1 campaign. I loved that game despite a few mechanical flaws in part because it utilizes what makes the Battlefield franchise special. It had fairly open levels that allowed for players to tackle objectives in multiple ways every aspect of the sandbox including the weapons, class equipment, and vehicles. Then it added a fun, lighthearted story with likable character's on top of it. As a Battlefield fan who bought a Battlefield game it appealed to me for many of the same reasons that the multiplayer did. The single player and multiplayer were two sides of the same coin.

I don't feel the same way about the BF3 and BF4 campaigns. They were ultra linear spectacle shooters and not particularly good ones at that. If you are not going to use what makes your series special than why even bother? Both experiences would probably be better off if they were not cannibalizing each other's budget.

 

[UfokinDingus]

I used to LOVE playing though the battlefield and Call of Duty campaigns... but then call of duty decided that they can just keep cloning the call of duty 4 story and paste it into the next 6 games... that is when i decided that call of duty was a waste of my time. I still play Battlefield but only because i love the hardcore game mode

 

[Gennadios]

I might be missing half the argument. I've only played Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3, and Homefront campaigns. Are COD campaigns any better, or good enough to be some sort of gold standard?

Say what you will about Half-Life, at least I don't get lost figuring out what the hell the scripters were thinking.

I remember Homefront had that horrible 5 minute church set-piecce that I spent 40 minutes on.
I kept dying. I couldn't figure out the direction from which to approach a set of barricades and how to run at an evac helicopter once I got far enough to trigger it. I eventually bumrushed it with a godmode cheat.

I approached that game for the setting and story, and it all turned out complete and utter shit for various reasons. The only thing that got me some value out of the game was the multiplayer. That is the very definition of "tacked on."

 

[Lightspeaker]

Any group of nobodies can make a passable MP shooter. It takes dedication, hard work, and often a lot of money to make a story-driven FPS game. That's why MP shooters are a dime a dozen and story-driven SP ones are almost nonexistent in the indie scene.


...




I was referring to people like Idris Elba and Gary Oldman and Ed Harris and Michael Keaton. Generally Golden Globes and Academy Awards and stuff like that.

As for the writing awards, David Goyer (Black Ops & Black Ops II) only ever won a Saturn. However, Stephen Gaghan (Ghosts) has won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe and a Writer's Guild of America Award for his film Traffic and an Emmy for an episode of NYPD Blue.

Battlefield: Hardline was written by Tom Bissell. (Ethan Carter, Uncharted 4, Gears of War 3.) He's something of a respected writer, although his work has only won "literary-ish" awards.

You seem to be leaning towards this argument of "lots of talented people, hard work and money go into these games so they're therefore good" and frankly its somewhat frivolous as an argument. Just because a lot of work and money is put into something by talented people doesn't automatically mean that its going to be good. Nor does a history of producing good things guarantee good things for a new project.

Duke Nukem Forever took fifteen years to go gold thanks to the constant, constant attempts to make it 'better and better' by switching engines, adding features and so on and so forth. Until it eventually got pushed out the door years later after being picked up by Gearbox (with a background in the Halo PC port, Brothers in Arms and Borderlands, so they were hardly rank amateurs) and critically panned.

Mass Effect 3 suffered one of the biggest backlashes in gaming history from an audience widely dissatisfied with parts of the writing and story; it was made by Bioware (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age...as examples), was directed by Casey Hudson (worked on both previous Mass Effect games, Jade Empire and the aforementioned KOTOR) and the head writer was Mac Walters (writer for Jade Empire and Mass Effect, lead writer on Mass Effect 2). These previous works are all well-received games by and large; with ME3 they factually screwed up, because they pissed off a lot of their audience.

And do I really need to bring up the spectre of the absolutely infamous Daikatana?

The same thing happens in movies literally all the time. The reboot of Total Recall had Golden Globe Winner Bryan Cranston in it and was, frankly, cringeworthy. The much criticised Batman and Robin featured George Clooney, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Uma Thurman; hardly lightweight actors even back then. Battlefield Earth is considered one of the worst films of all time and included Forest Whitaker who went on to win an Oscar for The Last King of Scotland, hell John Travolta had won a Golden Globe before doing it. Johnny Depp and Tim Burton (both Golden Globe winners) have collaborated on stuff for over 25 years ranging from Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow (both critically acclaimed) to the disappointing Dark Shadows; a film that also included Golden Globe winner Michelle Pfeiffer and the formidable BAFTA winning actress Helena Bonham Carter. Johnny Depp is actually a perfect example of this in recent years, with films like Mortdecai and The Lone Ranger being generally poor.

Hell, just look at the Golden Raspberry Awards for virtually any year. Take this year. Eddie Redmayne is currently in the running for Best Actor at the Oscars for The Danish Girl and actually won last year for The Theory of Everything. Simultaneously with this he's been nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actor for his performance in Jupiter Ascending. A film, incidentally, that was directed by The Wachowskis, of The Matrix fame.

Money, talent and hard work don't guarantee something will be good. Ever. At least two of the three are required for something to be ABLE to be good, but they don't automatically make it good. And every single person involved in a creative pursuit is (or should be) well aware that things can be misjudged and thus fail badly; all you can do is do your best to ensure that doesn't happen because of you specifically.

The late, great Sir Christopher Lee summed this up best I feel:
"Every actor has to make terrible films from time to time, but the trick is never to be terrible in them."


However there is a very prevailing notion that game studios are most definitely NOT doing their best to ensure this doesn't happen. Because the businesspeople at the top of a lot of these companies don't actually understand what they're doing and why some things are a success and others aren't. And that's only considering one aspect of it. I've talked a lot about critical success here and that's all well and good, but there are other factors, as with Mass Effect 3 mentioned above. Take Evolve. Evolve was critically well received and apparently sold quite well. It is also all but dead on PC.

Making a game that is an out and out success is not guaranteed. No matter how much money you pour in, no matter how much labour you put in and no matter how many top-quality developers, writers, musicians, VAs, directors etc etc you hire there is always the chance for a final product that doesn't match up to the input.

 

[Lightspeaker]

I wrote up an fairly lengthy post, but then I read through what's already been posted again and I realised this seems more like somebody trolling than anything else. Because anyone who defends the bf3 campaign cannot be taken seriously.

You're probably right about the trolling. But I spent like an hour and a half writing and researching my own lengthy post so I posted it anyway.

Are COD campaigns any better, or good enough to be some sort of gold standard?

That's an interesting question actually. The original Call of Duty and its expansion (United Offensive) I maintain to be one of the finest shooters ever produced, with some of the most entertaining multiplayer for its time. Call of Duty 2, meanwhile, is widely cited as the best game in the entire series and one of the best shooters ever made by people who played it though personally I still preferred the first game. Call of Duty 3 was a console-only affair that...well I've actually never heard of anyone having played it in all honesty; it was Treyarch's first outing for CoD.

Call of Duty 4 was the 'big turnaround' which brought the whole Modern Warfare setting that practically the entire industry has been obsessed with ever since. Its a very good competent game, most people view it favourably. From there...I think for most its only been down from there. The exception to this is the Black Ops spinoff series which a lot of people seem to like, personally I've never been a fan because I feel Treyarch is actually quite poor at developing shooters and Black Ops have all been Treyarch developed. For the same reason I don't particularly like the callback to the WW2 setting as represented by World at War because the whole game felt subtly wrong to me.

So in general the peak was either CoD2 or CoD4 depending on who you talk to (except me, because I still maintain it was the very first game). With another group who will argue the best games are the Treyarch games Black Ops or Black Ops 2 depending on personal preference.

Most recently Advanced Warfare came out (by another studio entirely), which I've not actually played but I hear its quite good. Though I rarely hear anyone claiming its the best of the lot.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

Like people have already explained to you, THE NUMBER OF TEAM MEMBERS WORKING ON EACH HALF OF THE GAME DOES NOT MATTER. NEITHER DOES THE AMOUNT OF WORK DONE ON EACH PART, OR THE DIFFICULTY OF THAT WORK.

What matters is the QUALITY of the final product.

What is wrong with the quality of the products? Take Battlefield: Hardline. What specifically is wrong with it as a first person stealth FPS with a heavy focus on storytelling?

These are linear, 6-9 hour long story-driven FPS games. Their very nature as linear and story-driven is why they take so many developers so long to make and why making them usually requires so much money. Their focus on story is why the games have minimal fluff and aren't padded out to 20 hours with boss battles and key hunts.

Nobody in this thread has come up with any meaningful problems with these games. "I don't like this particular genre" is not a particularly meaningful criticism.

The reboot of Total Recall had Golden Globe Winner Bryan Cranston in it and was, frankly, cringeworthy.

It was a better film than Verhoeven's, but that might not be saying much.

Johnny Depp is actually a perfect example of this in recent years, with films like Mortdecai and The Lone Ranger being generally poor.

The Lone Ranger is one of the best action films of recent years, even if it is a mashup of Zorro 2, Shanghai Noon, and Back to the Future III. Depp was particularly outstanding in the film.

However there is a very prevailing notion that game studios are most definitely NOT doing their best to ensure this doesn't happen. Because the businesspeople at the top of a lot of these companies don't actually understand what they're doing and why some things are a success and others aren't. And that's only considering one aspect of it. I've talked a lot about critical success here and that's all well and good, but there are other factors, as with Mass Effect 3 mentioned above. Take Evolve. Evolve was critically well received and apparently sold quite well. It is also all but dead on PC.

Making a game that is an out and out success is not guaranteed. No matter how much money you pour in, no matter how much labour you put in and no matter how many top-quality developers, writers, musicians, VAs, directors etc etc you hire there is always the chance for a final product that doesn't match up to the input.

What are you talking about here? Publishers are generally allowing developers to make the type of FPS game they want to make -- which is story driven and very "cinematic".

DICE hired Mikael Kasurinen to make Battlefield 4. They hired Rickard Johansson. The first man is best known for making story driven third person shooters like Max Payne and Alan Wake. He's known for dropping "open" gameplay in favor of more limited and linear story focus. The second man was one of the lead designers on Syndicate 2012.

With Battlefront III, thanks to publisher meddling, the developers weren't allowed to make the singleplayer FPS game their track record heavily suggests they wanted to make, so it would appear quite a few jumped ship to go work on Wolfenstein. The same thing has happened with Valve. Developers who want to make story-driven games like Half Life have over the years drifted away.

What "fans" and "consumers" want isn't hugely relevant. Just as these developers were perfectly entitled to turn Syndicate into a linear cyberpunk FPS game and Dead Space 3 into a cooperative shooter, they're perfectly entitled to turn the Battlefield series into linear FPS game. (Remember when id Software turned Wolfenstein from a stealth game into a dumbed down FPS game? Oh, man, the outrage of it all!) If people don't like this choice of genre, they don't have to play it. Just as people who don't like competitive MP don't have to play the MP component in these games. But "I don't like the genre favored by modern FPS developers" is not a meaningful criticism. It's childish whining. I say this as someone who thinks Perfect Dark was the peak of FPS design, and everything since then has been a sort of downward spiral. It doesn't matter if I prefer a certain genre. These developers want to make these games. And millions of people want to play them.

 

[Lightspeaker]

The reboot of Total Recall had Golden Globe Winner Bryan Cranston in it and was, frankly, cringeworthy.

It was a better film than Verhoeven's, but that might not be saying much.

Johnny Depp is actually a perfect example of this in recent years, with films like Mortdecai and The Lone Ranger being generally poor.

The Lone Ranger is one of the best action films of recent years, even if it is a mashup of Zorro 2, Shanghai Noon, and Back to the Future III. Depp was particularly outstanding in the film.

In both cases your individual personal opinion of the film is utterly irrelevant. Total Recall was a critical flop and a commercial failure inside the US, only escaping general 'commercial failure' status thanks to a surprisingly strong international performance. Despite that consumer reviews are meh at best. The Lone Ranger was both a critical and commercial flop; critics didn't like it and consumers didn't like it enough to go and see it so it failed as a film.

However there is a very prevailing notion that game studios are most definitely NOT doing their best to ensure this doesn't happen. Because the businesspeople at the top of a lot of these companies don't actually understand what they're doing and why some things are a success and others aren't. And that's only considering one aspect of it. I've talked a lot about critical success here and that's all well and good, but there are other factors, as with Mass Effect 3 mentioned above. Take Evolve. Evolve was critically well received and apparently sold quite well. It is also all but dead on PC.

Making a game that is an out and out success is not guaranteed. No matter how much money you pour in, no matter how much labour you put in and no matter how many top-quality developers, writers, musicians, VAs, directors etc etc you hire there is always the chance for a final product that doesn't match up to the input.

What are you talking about here? Publishers are generally allowing developers to make the type of FPS game they want to make -- which is story driven and very "cinematic".

DICE hired Mikael Kasurinen to make Battlefield 4. They hired Rickard Johansson. The first man is best known for making story driven third person shooters like Max Payne and Alan Wake. He's known for dropping "open" gameplay in favor of more limited and linear story focus. The second man was one of the lead designers on Syndicate 2012.

With Battlefront III, thanks to publisher meddling, the developers weren't allowed to make the singleplayer FPS game their track record heavily suggests they wanted to make, so it would appear quite a few jumped ship to go work on Wolfenstein. The same thing has happened with Valve. Developers who want to make story-driven games like Half Life have over the years drifted away.

What "fans" and "consumers" want isn't hugely relevant. Just as these developers were perfectly entitled to turn Syndicate into a linear cyberpunk FPS game and Dead Space 3 into a cooperative shooter, they're perfectly entitled to turn the Battlefield series into linear FPS game. (Remember when id Software turned Wolfenstein from a stealth game into a dumbed down FPS game? Oh, man, the outrage of it all!) If people don't like this choice of genre, they don't have to play it. Just as people who don't like competitive MP don't have to play the MP component in these games. But "I don't like the genre favored by modern FPS developers" is not a meaningful criticism. It's childish whining. I say this as someone who thinks Perfect Dark was the peak of FPS design, and everything since then has been a sort of downward spiral. It doesn't matter if I prefer a certain genre. These developers want to make these games. And millions of people want to play them.

You're going down the rabbit hole of "they're hiring good people, so it must be a good game" again here. They can hire whoever they want. It doesn't mean they're going to make a good game. Regardless of who is hired they have to work within the confines of what the publishing studio contracts for.

They're entitled to develop anything their producers let them. But that doesn't mean what they produce is going to automatically be good. I don't think anyone is talking about 'genres being favoured' anywhere in this thread except for you. What people ARE doing is, rightly, criticising poorly written and poorly thought out games with weak concepts and no depth to the story. In the interests of being fair to developers people are leaning towards blaming publishers for this because its usually publishers who have the developers' hands tied (this is what I was doing here, for the record, because I don't personally believe that so many writers totally forgot how to write a good story).

All your argument here does is effectively argue that we should be blaming the developers and writers themselves a lot more for doing terrible jobs on games.


Ultimately to cut through all of the stuff going on in this thread: if single player campaigns AREN'T being merely "tacked on" in Battlefield and Call of Duty then the people producing those campaigns are, on the whole, doing a very poor job these days. Because the single player campaigns being produced, for all of the cost, time and talent involved, are generally pretty poor in quality.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

Ultimately to cut through all of the stuff going on in this thread: if single player campaigns AREN'T being merely "tacked on" in Battlefield and Call of Duty then the people producing those campaigns are, on the whole, doing a very poor job these days. Because the single player campaigns being produced, for all of the cost, time and talent involved, are generally pretty poor in quality.

In what sense are they "poor in quality?" I'd say Black Ops 3 is a poor quality campaign for a variety of reasons including poor writing and excessive padding. But the rest of the series? There isn't some huge quality issue here.

To look at things another way, from a purist "story driven" perspective, Call of Duty 1 and 2 are a "poor quality" FPS game. You play a generic soldier fighting large scale battles. There isn't any huge sense of personal drama. There's far too much emphasis on mindless combat, and not enough emphasis on storytelling.

My point is that this boils down to genre disagreements. People who think their opinion that FPS games shouldn't have linear, non-looping level designs is some sort of law when it comes to evaluating game quality.

That's how people can rationalise hating Syndicate but liking Wolfenstein despite the two games being almost identical mechanically. It's all about branding and genre labels and this weird obsession with going back to World War II or something resembling World War II.

 

[Lil_Rimmy]

Because anyone who defends the bf3 campaign cannot be taken seriously.

It was a linear campaign that was too tightly scripted. It was also too long. But it was a very good game overall. There's nothing wrong with linear FPS games where the AI opens all the doors for you. If anything, the AI opening all the doors for you is a technological triumph which should be praised.

You know, I almost thought you were serious, right up to this point.

OT: A game is not a package of two games, it's a game. It contains multiple elements, and so if one of those elements is utter shit is a waste of money and the consumer has to pay for something they don't want. This is one of those times when the argument that skyrim co-op or multiplayer would take money away from the singleplayer and really shouldn't be done works in reverse. Your argument that all these good people were put on to work on the singleplayer is actually a problem. 60% of the team made a shitty part of the game that the majority of gamers didn't like or want, and would rather play either: 1) A cheaper game without the single player or 2) 100% of the team set on the multiplayer to make it much better than it already is.

Here's the thing - When someone is talking about games and they want to objectively say it was better or worse, they say that the consumers and critics either received it well or not.

But you seem to think that because you like these awfully mediocre campaigns they are good. Sorry, the majority of people disagree with you.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

In both cases your individual personal opinion of the film is utterly irrelevant. Total Recall was a critical flop and a commercial failure inside the US, only escaping general 'commercial failure' status thanks to a surprisingly strong international performance. Despite that consumer reviews are meh at best. The Lone Ranger was both a critical and commercial flop; critics didn't like it and consumers didn't like it enough to go and see it so it failed as a film.

Terrible argument because now legendary films ranging from Shawshank Redemption to Blade Runner to Citizen Kane were box office failures.

Which Charlie and the Chocolate Factory/Willy Wonka film is better? The one that was a commercial failure or the Tim Burton adaptation that actually made money? Good luck convincing the people who love the "failure" that its a bad film simply because it was unpopular at release.

Because anyone who defends the bf3 campaign cannot be taken seriously.

It was a linear campaign that was too tightly scripted. It was also too long. But it was a very good game overall. There's nothing wrong with linear FPS games where the AI opens all the doors for you. If anything, the AI opening all the doors for you is a technological triumph which should be praised.

You know, I almost thought you were serious, right up to this point.

I'd like to see you code companion AI that can open a series of doors 100% of the time without getting stuck or misaligned or otherwise failing. We're come a long way since Daikatana, which is basically the father of AI companions and RPG elements shoehorned into FPS design.

OT: A game is not a package of two games, it's a game. It contains multiple elements, and so if one of those elements is utter shit is a waste of money and the consumer has to pay for something they don't want.[/spoiler]
You're not exactly wrong, but why should FPS campaign fans be forced to pay for MP they'll either play a few times or won't play at all?

This is one of those times when the argument that skyrim co-op or multiplayer would take money away from the singleplayer and really shouldn't be done works in reverse.

The only problem with Skyrim co-op is that is is technologically unfeasible and coop clashes with RPG elements. That's why Black Ops III is heavily dumbed down from Black Ops II and its choice and consequence elements were stripped out.

Your argument that all these good people were put on to work on the singleplayer is actually a problem. 60% of the team made a shitty part of the game that the majority of gamers didn't like or want.

It doesn't matter what the majority wants. Game developers are not obliged to give their audience what they want. Michael Bay is no morally obliged to keep making Transformers movies just because a vast, vast majority of people like his Transormers movies more than any other version of the source material.

Here's the thing - When someone is talking about games and they want to objectively say it was better or worse, they say that the consumers and critics either received it well or not.

But you seem to think that because you like these awfully mediocre campaigns they are good. Sorry, the majority of people disagree with you.

Firstly, you haven't given a single reason for these campaigns being "mediocre". Secondly, you need to think about the numbers for a minute, no pun intended.

On PC, 40% of players have finished Call of Duty: Ghosts' campaign. 33% completed Black Ops II's campaign. Ghosts sold 19 million copies. Black Ops 2 sold 24 million copies.

That means 7.9 million people, in theory, finished Black Ops II's campaign. That is an insane number of players. A lot of FPS games would kill for that kind of campaign retention. More people have FINISHED the campaign in Black Ops II than PURCHASED "iconic" FPS entries like Killzone, that sell a million or two copies at best.

Black Ops 1 sold 26 million copies, and 45% of players completed the campaign. These are insane numbers. 11.7 million people finished that game's campaign. To ignore this and pretend that the campaigns are some feature an insignificant minority cares about is delusional. The "minority" who play these campaigns in some cases outnumber the people who buy individual Halo entries.

edit:
And 39% completed Advanced Warfare's campaign. It only sold 17 million or so, though.

 

[Hawki]

Huh, impressive. It took less than one page of discussion for a shouting match to begin.

Anyway, I haven't played a CoD game since the WWII era, or a Battlefield game since Bad Company (which had an enjoyable, if flawed campaign IMO), so I won't harp on that. Nor do I feel like discussing every FPS that's been mentioned thus far. However, I'll leave two points behind:

1) Something with a lot of effort can still suck. This is true of pretty much anything. Someone can slave away for years on an artistic work, and end up producing dogshit. I could aspire to be an Olympic runner, but my build and flat feet would prevent me from ever reaching the required level of physical stamina and speed to succeed. I think effort in itself should be praised, but effort does not excuse sub-par material.

2) On the flip side, if someone likes what the majority has deemed to be sub-par work...so what? There's plenty of stuff I like that I'm in the minority of, I'd like to think that this doesn't threaten other people's perceptions, and in return, that doesn't entitle me to say "you just don't get it." For instance, I can explain why I think Alien 3 is one of the most underrated movies out there, and while not up to snuff with the first two, is still a good film in its own right. I'd like to think that I could give that opinion without being chastised, provided I don't go down the route of "you just don't get it" for anyone who doesn't like the film. Or, to use an FPS example, Total Biscuit reviewed Medal of Honour: Warfighter awhile back, where he made his disdain clear for the singleplayer clear. Fine. It's his opinion, he's given his reasons. But when he said (paraphrased), "I need to find the demographic who likes these games [modern military shooters] and knock some goddamn sense in them...yeah." Developers cater for the majority, I get that, but, y'know...as the saying goes, criticize the product, not the people.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

Someone defending BF4's shitty ass campaign?

My stars and garters, now I have seen it all.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

Someone defending BF4's shitty ass campaign?

What was wrong with BF4's campaign? It was well paced, well written and acted (Jesse Stern's best work), had great gunplay, and it addressed a lot of the flaws in BF3 relating to player freedom. Hardline was an improvement on BF4 because it offered even more freedom, but BF4 is by no means a poor game.

 

[JamesStone]

"I have an opinion and am pissed because it isn't widely accepted as fact, and I don't want to even consider it might have to do with my poor taste" - OP

Nothing to see here really. I believe this is what is colloquially known as a "fanboy thread". There ain't anythin' of value to be taken from this discussion