Black Ops Single Player w/ out shooting

[HybridSquirrel]

i agree, i was just commenting on the metaphor of a child playing make believe..

video games are playing make believe

i still agree with your point about it being ridiculous

but he was saying it wasn't marketed as being realism, and they had marketed it to be "realistic" as MOH was, both of which are not realistic at all (cods the worst)

 

[Baasha]

LOL.. This video was hilarious! I also felt the graphics, especially the textures of the skin of characters etc. was not good at all. Some explosions were very well done but over all, I think BC2 still has some of the best graphics for any game.

I was really hoping this game would outdo BC2 graphics-wise but it wasn't to be.

Also, I'm playing it on Hardened and it is fun but certain parts are really irritating when you can't see the enemy at all.

 

[Matrices]

Some of you guys can enjoy feeling superior to everyone else, but the truth is that the SP in this game is excellent fun. No, it's not tactical, and you're retarded if you go in expecting that, but it is cinematic and spectacular and pretty much a non-stop thrill machine if you pull the rod out of your ass long enough to enjoy the ride.

 

[QuantumPion]

Some of you guys can enjoy feeling superior to everyone else, but the truth is that the SP in this game is excellent fun. No, it's not tactical, and you're retarded if you go in expecting that, but it is cinematic and spectacular and pretty much a non-stop thrill machine if you pull the rod out of your ass long enough to enjoy the ride.

I bet you liked the new star wars trilogy and think empire strikes back is "the boring one". Am I right?

 

[BeauJangles]

Some of you guys can enjoy feeling superior to everyone else, but the truth is that the SP in this game is excellent fun. No, it's not tactical, and you're retarded if you go in expecting that, but it is cinematic and spectacular and pretty much a non-stop thrill machine if you pull the rod out of your ass long enough to enjoy the ride.

Shens.

MW2's single player campaign was about as linear as it gets, but it was fun. In Black Ops I feel like I'm dragged around from place to place, allowed to do only a very limited number of things, all with this stupid plot hanging over my head.

I don't mind a linear FPS, but I do mind a shitty linear FPS and Black Ops' SP really sucks.

 

[minmaster]

i liked BO's campaign more than MW2. tbh, i didn't even know what was going on in MW2 and even MW1 but in BO i knew wth was going on.

 

[Yoshi629]

I did find the AI pretty bad, but the game was pretty fun (for the few hours that the single player campaign lasted anyways). I wouldn't be surprised if they increased the AI with a patch, it's not out of the realm of possibility.

 

[Powermoloch]

I find BO campaign > MOH

 

[AznAnarchy99]

As flawed as some of the mechanics and gameplay of BO's single player, it was probably one of the best CoD single player campaigns ever. MW2's campaign was a huge huge hugeee let down from what CoD4:MW was. MW1 was the best and engaging single player of the series. MW2 took none of that and played it out like each level was a scene from a Michael Bay movie. I felt no connection or care to any of it.

BO however really pulled me in. The whole premise of the guy thinking back to everything that he has been through was pretty awesome. Then realizing that his mind is not what it seems was pretty awesome. I loved the story. The gamplay itself was super linear and the controls to the vehicle levels were awful but I enjoyed it.

My rankings of the CoD series (single player)

1. CoD4:MW
2. CoD 1
3. CoD: BO



100. MW2

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

I just came in here to say Black Ops fucking sucks. I went against my better judgement and purchased the game tonight, played the first 4 levels and really the game is just terrible. I really hope the MP makes up for this. BlOps is pretty much a movie that requires you to press 'F' occasionally to advance the (terrible) story.

Edit - oh, and why is the game so much uglier than MW2 (and less performant)?

 

[BFG10K]

I thought the SP campaign in CoD 4 was average at best, and one of the main reasons was exactly what was illustrated in this thread: your squad-mates did too much work. For most of the game I felt like I was just following them around while they killed everything.

Black Ops is much better in this department and you actually contribute to the killing a lot more, but I still think Call of Duty 2 did it best.

 

[NYHoustonman]

I thought the SP campaign in CoD 4 was average at best, and one of the main reasons was exactly what was illustrated in this thread: your squad-mates did too much work. For most of the game I felt like I was just following them around while they killed everything.

Black Ops is much better in this department and you actually contribute to the killing a lot more, but I still think Call of Duty 2 did it best.

I interpreted this differently. It was nice to feel like part of a unit with teammates as capable as myself. Sure, if you sit back and don't do anything it can be boring, but if you actively engage the enemy and stay on the front line it's a great deal of fun.

I didn't like the linearity or shortness of Black Ops, but overall it was a good experience. Not worth $60, but not terrible, either - as others have mentioned, you'll only be disappointed by this game if you go in expecting ARMA 2 as opposed to MW 2. CoD has always been fairly heavily scripted, all about moving from set piece to set piece... If you (in general) bought this game thinking that wouldn't be the case, I don't know what you were thinking.

 

[skace]

i agree, i was just commenting on the metaphor of a child playing make believe..
video games are playing make believe
i still agree with your point about it being ridiculous

My metaphor was comparing a child imagining things that weren't really there (a dragon) to someone playing Black Ops and imaging a difficulty that isn't really there. If you can't understand that, I don't know what else to say to you.

But to play along with how my words were twisted... games do not require imagination to play, only imagination to create. While the objects on your screen may be virtual, they are not being imagined by you. In fact, due to the highly interactive nature of the media platform, games require much less imagination than movies, books, plays and most other forms.

However, I wasn't discussing imagination, I was discussing real difficulty versus self-imposed difficulty. If you play an RPG and choose not to equip any gear at all, that doesn't mean the game is difficult, it means you are playing like a fool and a properly created game should punish you for not making use of the elements presented to you. It would be like saying Poker is difficult because I choose not to use face cards in any of my hands.

There is also cause and effect, you are fighting a war, if you choose not to defend your plane it should blow up. If you choose to run into a mine field or mortar, you should die. And yes, you can fall back on the point that this is an interactive movie, however from my standpoint you are playing an interactive movie of a very retarded soldier who cannot die. And while I might get drunk and actually watch a movie like that if it existed, in this scenario I do blame lazy developers.

 

[skace]

I still think Call of Duty 2 did it best.

My rankings of the CoD series (single player)
1. CoD4:MW
2. CoD 1
3. CoD: BO

Everyone is allowed an opinion, however CoD1 and the United Offensive was the best of the series by a very, very long margin. Not only is the game play and maps better, the game also has a lot of heart to it. Even the credits for that game were amazing.

Anyone who is sitting here wondering exactly why they are making another CoD needs to go play the original again and remind themselves that, when this all started, it was an absolutely amazing single player game.

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

Yup CoD was an awesome game, no doubt about it. And not just SP, although it was much stronger in SP than the pile of steaming dog shit they call Black Ops.

 

[AstroManLuca]

Yup CoD was an awesome game, no doubt about it. And not just SP, although it was much stronger in SP than the pile of steaming dog shit they call Black Ops.

Yeah. Call of Duty 1 was like Band of Brothers + Enemy at the Gates: The Game.

 

[JoshGuru7]

However, I wasn't discussing imagination, I was discussing real difficulty versus self-imposed difficulty. If you play an RPG and choose not to equip any gear at all, that doesn't mean the game is difficult, it means you are playing like a fool and a properly created game should punish you for not making use of the elements presented to you. It would be like saying Poker is difficult because I choose not to use face cards in any of my hands.

And as I said earlier, I agree with you here that taking away parts of the game, such as equipping gear, in order to make it "challenging" just makes games less fun to play and is not a legitimate way to make easy games harder.

What you are ignoring is there is a huge difference between equipping gear in an RPG, and hiding way behind your allies and letting them fight for you in a FPS game. The first is intended game mechanics, the second is not. A better analogy is saying that Poker is difficult because you choose not to hide cards up your sleeves, or that RPGs are difficult because you don't edit the config files to give yourself all the best gear in the game. Sitting at the beginning and letting your allies do the work for you is not the intended way of playing Black Ops, and I simply don't see why it is surprising that it is boring.

Edit: Perhaps the reason why I feel this thread is so ridiculous is that I've been playing a lot of minecraft lately. Within about 10 seconds in that game you can defend yourself from monsters forever by digging a hole and then covering in the top and standing there. Yet that strategy fails for the same reason that the strategy in the video here fails: it's boring.

 

[JoshGuru7]

I bet you liked the new star wars trilogy and think empire strikes back is "the boring one". Am I right?

Does his opinion on either of those actually matter to you?

I think the reason that there is so much debate about that kind of stuff is that consensus matters too much. You only get your snobby geek badge if you can properly identify which of the star wars movies is the best one, why FF8 was so much worse than FF7, why modern RPGs will never be as good as Wizardry II, etc.

Let's say he did like the new star wars trilogy. How does that make you better off than him? He spent 6 hours watching something he liked, and you spent 6 hours watching something you hated.

 

[skace]

And as I said earlier, I agree with you here that taking away parts of the game, such as equipping gear, in order to make it "challenging" just makes games less fun to play and is not a legitimate way to make easy games harder.

What you are ignoring is there is a huge difference between equipping gear in an RPG, and hiding way behind your allies and letting them fight for you in a FPS game. The first is intended game mechanics, the second is not. A better analogy is saying that Poker is difficult because you choose not to hide cards up your sleeves, or that RPGs are difficult because you don't edit the config files to give yourself all the best gear in the game. Sitting at the beginning and letting your allies do the work for you is not the intended way of playing Black Ops, and I simply don't see why it is surprising that it is boring.

Edit: Perhaps the reason why I feel this thread is so ridiculous is that I've been playing a lot of minecraft lately. Within about 10 seconds in that game you can defend yourself from monsters forever by digging a hole and then covering in the top and standing there. Yet that strategy fails for the same reason that the strategy in the video here fails: it's boring.

The problem here is that you choose to focus on him hiding behind objects (which is a big part of CoD regardless) and letting his teamates kill things and I choose to focus on sequences like the plane where he didn't fire at all, or the run to the car where he was being shot without being hurt, or the mortar fire. So let me outline a few things to make it clear:

1. I am ok with the NPCs being invincible assuming they are plot required and there is no better way of handling the situation.
2. I am not ok with the NPCs being able to push forward without any player involvement. While I'd expect them to survive, I would not expect them to make forward progress on their own. In the CoD games I recall, this is often a situation where the enemies constantly respawn until the player themselves has made it forward far enough for the rest of the units to push forward as well. This mechanic is in place because without it you have the situation we are presented with here.

3. I am ok with explosions that cannot hurt the player given they are the best ways to show realism in the game without killing the player for an element they did not really have any opportunity to dodge.
4. I am not ok with the explosions that cannot hurt the player being incredibly close to the player, doing no damage and killing other npcs nearby. As this breaks my immersion quite significantly.

5. I am ok with the player not dying immediately when enemies shoot at his plane to possibly give crappier players the ability to make it through the scene.
6. I am not ok with the player not dying nor the plane exploding at all, when absolutely no shots have been fired over the course of probably an entire minute while playing on one of the hardest difficulties.

7. I am ok with a blatant tutorial level, especially when it comes in the form of boot camp, a training mission, a simulation, or some other obvious walk through of the game mechanics. And hopefully skippable for the sake of re-playability.
8. I am not ok with a full mission of the game being labeled a tutorial that reeks of terrible gameplay and an otherwise completely boring and offputting experience.

Do you understand where I am drawing the line? I expect certain shortcuts to be taken for the sake of development time, game play and technological viability. However, I do not excuse crap.

Edit: And for what it's worth, hacking the game files is a pretty awful comparison to hiding behind a car. Nothing he does in this video is cheating. And yes, the video, taken at face value, is an incredible exaggeration of the problem, however each player playing the game is actually a victim of the issue in much smaller events. That is what he was trying to illustrate. In this case, exaggeration is put to good use because it is a video and he wants to demonstrate the different situations where this will occur and how it affects the game. Once you take a step back you will realize that while yes, running in circles between 3 rooms to keep from dying while your friends miss the enemy 100 times is probably a poor way to play the game, it also says volumes about the game and it's ai.

 

[JoshGuru7]

I do agree with you that the gimmicky scenes simply aren't good, whether you are driving a motorcycle or firing from a plane. This has nothing to do with the difficulty for me though, and everything to do with the fact that they just aren't very fun because they are on rails and there's no movement aspect. A lot of the fun in these sort of games for me is the movement element, it's why I vastly preferred UT and the translocator over CS.

The reason I focused on him hiding behind his allies is because that is what lets him get through the first mission without shooting, which is the issue brought up by the OP and specifically highlighted in the video. This I do not feel is a problem, and I found the firefights quite enjoyable when I was playing them in the way I prefer to play FPS games.

8. I am not ok with a full mission of the game being labeled a tutorial that reeks of terrible gameplay and an otherwise completely boring and offputting experience.

Have you played this mission yourself? I ask because I liked it, and when my flatmate walked by while I was playing it he commented on how he thought it was pretty fun as well. I do respect everybody having their own opinion, but I would be surprised if the number of people who played that mission and found it completely boring was as high as 10% overall. It's a fun mission for the most part.

And for what it's worth, hacking the game files is a pretty awful comparison to hiding behind a car. Nothing he does in this video is cheating.

They are essentially the same thing to me. They are both things that nobody would normally do but but can be done to make the game easier than the developers. "Cheating" is usually defined by what is acceptable to others, and doesn't have any special meaning to me here when the only person involved is myself.

Once you take a step back you will realize that while yes, running in circles between 3 rooms to keep from dying while your friends miss the enemy 100 times is probably a poor way to play the game, it also says volumes about the game and it's ai.

Finding a weakness when the game is played in one way does not convince me that the weakness exists when it is played in a different way. I actually found some of the later missions quite hard on hardened, and the "boots on the ground" combat excellent.

 

[JSt0rm]

I weep for kids these days that didn't experience cod1

 

[bugsysiegel]

This is great, I can que up a game, go to work, come home and win!!!

Score!!

Its a whole new gaming model!!!

LOL.

Yeah, finally a game I can enjoy while I'm at work!

 

[skace]

lol.

Yeah, finally a game i can enjoy while i'm at work!

eve

 

[skace]

Josh I appreciate that you want to discuss this in a legitimate fashion with me, however the fact that you cannot tell the difference between hacking game files and running around a room shows me that either you are vehemently trying to justify your $60 impulse buy, rabidly support CoD or have some sort of innately flawed logic. Your most recent post adds very little to everything I've already thoroughly covered. Short of re-explaining the scenarios, I see nothing more I can do to explain this to you other than to admit that I still don't think you have a very open viewpoint of what you are discussing.

And no, I have not played the level. I may never play the level at this point. Despite the fact that I've spent over $100 dollars for a single game on many occasions, I don't feel the least bit motivated to pay $60 for Black Ops. The only reason I'd grab it now is on a ridiculous Steam sale. I've got too many extremely good games to play.

I also don't doubt that you could have fun playing this. Hell, I sometimes have fun drawing in mspaint. You can have fun doing just about anything, the question is whether the developers put forth the effort that the series has come to demand or if they just threw together another "me too" effort as a cash grab on all the retarded suckers out there.

 

[schneiderguy]

I weep for kids these days that didn't experience cod1

Are Xbox kiddies even aware of the existence of CoD games before MW? :hmm::hmm: