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Modern Warfare 3 Released
Activision released the latest iteration of their blockbuster first-person shooter franchise yesterday, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, narrowly avoiding a whole year-long gap between this one and the last Call of Duty game. Still, analysts estimated pre-orders at 9 million worldwide, and expect the game to generate another billion dollars in sales, give or take. Reviews for the game range from "amazing" to "slightly less than amazing." Eurogamer sums it up simply: "Modern Warfare 3 is exactly the game you expect. It's conservative in every sense of the word, a paean to military superiority which never ventures far beyond gameplay parameters that were set in stone in 2007. ... With such a well-rehearsed recipe to follow, there's more room here for innovation than there is for improvement. There are plenty who would love to see Call of Duty dragged through the mud for its lack of new ideas, but the game itself is too confidently constructed, too generous with its pleasures, to deserve any lasting vitriol. This is a ferocious and satisfying game that knows exactly what players expect, and delivers on that promise with bullish confidence."
I don't know if Battlefield 3 got itself a post at /. but I thought I might chime in here.
Both of these games aren't what the older (I'd assume slashdot?) crowd are looking for when it comes to single player, there's vastly better experiences to be had with far better told engrossing stories. (Mass Effect for example is perfect for Star Wars and Star Trek nerds, myself included - I didn't realise just how good this was until re-playing it this year, it's REALLY damned good)
Now, as for multiplayer - if we even have time (not many of us I'd expect) Modern Warfare is generally targeted more at the console crowd, it focuses on "lone wolf" style gameplay where one guy can dominate and well you're likely to be called all kinds of names playing it, beggining with "F" or "N"
BF3 however is team and squad focused and a real joy to play even if you don't hit the top of the ladder, infact I'd say satisfying is the word. You might also be called "N" or "F" but generally the crowd is at least a little bit older and the teamplay is very rewarding, it promotes it.
Both are timesink games. I'm not traditionally one for playing MP games at all, however I caved in on BF3 for the social aspect with friends and I must say, I'm very very impressed. Really quite a good game online. 64 players on a decent PC is an absoloute site to behold, it really is.
Note: I make this recommendation as a 33 y/o gamer who doesn't have the time he used to, so it's surprising I'm even fitting in time for the game at all - really good stuff.
The game-play is.. well, MW.
Not much have changed, a few new game modes and so on.
I won't comment of the actual game-play, but I do have a huge beef with MW3:
Matchmaking.
What...the...fuck... is IW thinking?
After all the crap they got from MW2's matchmaking and lack of dedicated servers, they fuck people over AGAIN with the same P2P matchmaking, but with a twist.
They gave us dedicated servers. UNRANKED.
Why can't they do it like BO? That worked perfectly.
Ranked dedicated servers.
Why do we have to endure this P2P Matchmaking if we don't want to?
Already in my second round, there was huge host advantages, everyone else "was 3 bars or less" (again, ignored the community asking for a real ms indicator).
Fine, I get it. On unranked dedicated servers, we can control everything.
Server admins can decide which unlocks you get, or let you progress normally (only on that server of course).
But please, COD is about the progression, why take that away on dedicated servers?
Sorry if this comes off as bitter, but I kind of am.
Eventually, when people have progressed through the first few prestiges, it probably won't matter any more, as they won't care about progression and will must likely end up on a handful of dedicated servers where they've gotten to know people and the server settings and rules are to their liking.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
How did you manage to go through the entire post - commentary included - and not mention it's direct competitor? We discuss apple vs microsoft on a daily basis, but when it comes to games, we won't compare them to their peers? Despite being released 2 weeks apart?
moox. for a new generation.
I just got BF3 and have not even looked at MW3 yet, but I am in the same boat as you. Not as old, but I still have a full time job, a long commute, and something of a "family" which means time for gaming is a lot scarcer that it was in the university days.
My two cents is that these two games, whilst both being modern FPSs released at the same time and "competing" with each other, are apples and oranges. As you have pointed out, MW series is a lone wolf style game where, even if you are on a team, you tend to work alone and there is always one clear winner per match. It also tends to be quite liberal when it comes to things like real-world gravity and physics. Firearms, explosives, and their effect on the world varies greatly to the real world. As such, I would describe the experience of playing it as "action movie, Bruce in Die Hard" style. BF3 (or indeed, the BF series) moves away from this, and more toward a military simulator (I know, it isn't a sim in the strictest sense, there are games out there much more sim-oriented). As you say, it encourages teamwork (though you *can* do allright alone, depending on your skill/experience and situation). The physics are also much more real-world, such as gravity (for example, projectiles drop over a distance, so long sniper kills will need to be adjusted for this). I think this is what attracts the more mature gamer (though as you point out, often it does not. I have been called every name under the rainbow; at this point it's water off a duck's back).
At the end of the day it comes down to what you want from a game. I will probably play both to some extent, since depending on my mood I will be interested in both (and I really want to see the conclusion to the MW storyline).
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head for me.
I've found myself doing fairly poorly in BF3 in pure kills vs deaths terms, at least compared to my own estimation of my skill and experience with other FPS games, yet I've still done fairly well in points & team contribution terms. I've also found that I've invariably had just as much fun playing whether my team wins or loses (I'm thinking mainly of Conquest mode here). You can have a lot of fun just with a decent squad.
I'm not so sure I agree though that BF3 is a game if you have very little time - it seems that there are some significant competency upgrades that you get as you level up, and not having much time to do this will probably hamper you. The ability to carry more ammo, and larger weapon magazines, makes a surprising difference in a firefight. There are also a number of items that many consider very overpowered - though I guess DICE will address this in time.
Metacritic, (the user side, not the pathetically biased and bought critic side) is giving the damn thing a 2...at best. The whole game is built around a so-so multiplayer with a few maps, with the option to pay absurd money for more maps. I don't know about you guys but this game and the map-packs (usually what...2-4 maps and a gun) that will roughly cost half of the original game sounds a big 'fuck you' to your player base and to gamers in general. Activision/Blizzard is starting to act like EA with this mediocre gaming pay-for-the-privilege nonsense.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was a really good game. It was unexpected, it was well-executed, it combined clean, precise shooter mechanics with a campaign plot that felt fresh and different. We'd seen some of the concepts before in the various Tom Clancy branded games, but they'd always been implemented with a kind of clinical detachment that robbed them of any real impact. The CoD4 campaign, by contrast, was a series of highly effective punches to the gut.
But it remains, in my opinion at least, the only game in the entire Call of Duty series to have ever risen above "mediocre". This is a series that has, CoD4 aside, been about dumbing down and immitation. The original Call of Duty was Medal of Honor (the old one, not the recent reboot) with dumber level design. Modern Warfare 2 was CoD4 without the freshness and the just-about-plausible plot. You get the picture.
The problem is that because CoD4 and its successors have been so successful, they've set a direction for the wider industry that has just become deeply boring. Over the last few years, I've played through MW2, Black Ops, Homefront, the Medal of Honor reboot, Battlefield 3 and god-knows-how-many-other soul-less mechanical attempts to reconstruct the CoD4 magic. I've not particularly played them because I've had a burning desire to - but because they are the games that all of my colleagues have played and if you want to be part of the "watercooler" conversation, then you've got to play them. My heart sinks as the next 6-hour-boring-corridor-and-cutscenes-campaign and easily-exploited-and-filled-with-swearing-14-year-olds-multiplayer shooter nears release. And the problem is that the undoubted massive success of Modern Warfare 3 is just going to perpetuate the trend.
I saw the queue outside the branch of Game in London's Victoria station as I headed to work yesterday and I just wanted to grab people by the scruff of the neck and shout "Why are you standing in line for this crap? Don't you know how much better stuff there is out there? Go play Dark Souls - it has a 70+ hour finely crafted campaign with stunning visual designs and some of the cleverest, most innovative and carefully thought through gameplay we've seen in years. And where were you for the Resistance 3 launch? That's even an fps - the only genre you seem to be able to cope with! But it's different, and innovative and it takes chances. Just... please... buy anything but this re-heated trash."
I didn't, of course. Maybe I'm just getting grumpy in my old age. Maybe 6 hour corridor campaigns really are the shape of things to come. Maybe what everybody really wants deep down is to spend hours in multiplayer getting insta-killed by airstrikes called in by 14 year olds swearing in German. But not me. I'm sick of that. I'm sick of the being asked which two of the same collection of over-exposed "real world" guns I want to carry. My heart flutters whenever something like Ratchet & Clank comes along, which lets me fire rockets from a chaingun which blasts out Ode to Joy at full volume for as long as I hold down the trigger. But such moments are becoming few and far between.
Please - Call of Duty and all of your imitators - just go away and die.
I'm wondering why almost no one mentions two aspects of these games when comparing them:
I'd like to note that this is from someone who has enjoyed both games.
What next, you'll lump together Israelis and Palestinians, North and South Koreans, or Nuns and Clowns?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Just get BF3 instead... been a while coming but my it's good and essentially designed for the online multi-player experience.
Decrying CoD and BF as "casual" just seems wrong. Both of those games can be played by noobs and pros alike (not on the same server, though), that doesn't make it casual, it just makes it well balanced. You still need a good amount of dedication if you want to climb the ladders. Also, not every game is casual because it uses a different skillset than your preference ;-)
" Nothing wrong with that, but these are not games, they are toys."
The definition of a "game" is not how deep the needed strategy goes nor how hard it is. A game is a set of rules in which you try to achieve a set goal. A toy is an object to play with, without rules or goals.
So "great gamer" or "great mind" is one of those things you need to have now to enjoy games? While I can agree that deathmatch is quite mindless action, the other game modes are less so. Good team work can gain incredible results in MW3 (and the previous MW's), if you play the objective based game modes like Sabotage or Search&Destroy. They are far from mindless action. The perks, class designing and killstreak choices also add another strategist layout to MW3, is delivered from RPG games and is something I absolutely love, as you can refine your classes as close to your wanted playing style as you want to.
I bet you would also say that Team Fortress 2 is "purely mindless action game" based on it's graphics and sometimes fast game play. Yet, it's one of those games where good team work is absolutely essential and the different classes (and players weapon choices along those classes) affect the game a lot. Especially spies add another highly strategist aspect to game and even that you can play in highly different ways, depending on choice of your loadout.
But yes, do take the elitist "I only play real simulation games, who do otherwise suck", while we others enjoy good games regardless if they simulate real world 1:1. And I can tell you that ArmA doesn't either, so it's a bit silly thing to take into comparison.
None of the perks you listed will be needed in a few weeks, because everyone who played for longer periods will have squad upgrades. These grant the perk to entire squad. I am not the most active of players, and I already have squad sprint, squad ammo and squad flak jackets unlocked.
In this regard, just play engineer if you have little time. SCAR-H is the single best slot 1 weapon available to the class, available after a couple of games as engineer and starter RPG is likely to remain the most versatile of RPGs even after most people get laser designators to make javelin worth taking. The only other meaningful unlock is anti-tank mine, which you also get pretty quickly. Everything else for engineer is either a piece of fluff like EOD bot or just plain useless like the rest of the weapons engineer gets.