Black Ops 2 Is Like A Rich Jerk

[Yahtzee Croshaw]

Black Ops 2 Is Like A Rich Jerk

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2's design is lacking in class.

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[Tireseas_v1legacy]

Modern warfare shooters, meanwhile, are like a busload of football hooligans on tour around Europe, stopping for five minutes at a time at fifty different cultural hotspots or areas of outstanding natural beauty to drink a few cans of Special Brew and punch one of the locals. It never takes the time to understand the location with any kind of depth, or appreciate all the heavily-researched art assets the environment design team spent so much time on.

*cries a bit from happiness*

I've never seen something so perfectly analogous to the modern military genre...

 

[Squilookle]

Wait- he doesn't vote? In Australia? Isn't it mandatory?

On topic, the gist of this article is why, when the Driver series went from 4, to 3, and finally to only having one city in them... I was okay with that.

Though Multiplayer shooters should not get off so easily. Back in my day you had at least 15 multiplayer maps to play with at launch or else. These days devs think they can get away with 6 or so, and the consumers mindlessly prove them right.

Shit... was that politics I was just speaking?

 

[Tohron]

The thing is, it sounds like many of the one-off designs could have been used more by combining them with laser designs. Jumping out of a VTOL in a wingsuit and then using a grappling hook to help maneuver sounds cool, assuming the interface could handle it. It would also allow more time to be spent on things more original than shooting people in the face on foot with a gun.

 

[FallenMessiah88]

It's true that wasted potential does seem to be a big issue amongst AAA games these days. I still don't agree with Yahtzee's take on "white privilege" or "hite guilt" though.

 

[itsthesheppy]

Perhaps one of his best written articles to date.

 

[gardian06]

but, Yahtzee making games where we reuse fun mechanics to the point where they are features would be to boring, and easy.

besides you could also make an argument that the idolized object that at some point dominates the persons life could also become boring, and repetitive, and only seen as a jumping stone to the next "thing"

EDIT: isn't this actually the counter argument to your criticism of Saints Row The Third. where these really cool things that you could do because you got them so relatively early that they just became boring to use, and you found it more fun to just run around on the street doing the "meanial" things

 

[Kopikatsu]

The main flaw in his argument is this right here:

the privilege of being in a position to make a triple-A game with cutting edge technology, some of the greatest talent in the world, and under one of the highest-profile titles in the industry. A privilege which is utterly squandered.

Here's the thing: It has the talent assigned to it, it sells like hotcakes, and it's possibly the most well known name in gaming because it is what it is. It didn't start out as an indie stealth/platformer. If they changed the formula significantly, then a lot of people who do buy it probably wouldn't and the people who wanted the change wouldn't buy it either because they'd still decry it as long as it has the name 'Call of Duty' attached.

Dishonored is considered the best stealth title of this year, for instance, and it barely broke a million as of last week. No recent COD has sold under 10 million within the first month or two. CoD is the game that people want. No more, no less. It's pretentious to claim otherwise.

Edit: Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 has sold about as much as Skyrim as of last week. Since I doubt Skyrim will be getting too many new sales and Christmas is coming up...it's going to beat Skyrim for sure. Just a small sidenote.

 

[T'Generalissimo]

Isn't pornography the pornography of the senses?

 

[AnarchistAbe]

The main flaw in his argument is this right here:

the privilege of being in a position to make a triple-A game with cutting edge technology, some of the greatest talent in the world, and under one of the highest-profile titles in the industry. A privilege which is utterly squandered.

Here's the thing: It has the talent assigned to it, it sells like hotcakes, and it's possibly the most well known name in gaming because it is what it is. It didn't start out as an indie stealth/platformer. If they changed the formula significantly, then a lot of people who do buy it probably wouldn't and the people who wanted the change wouldn't buy it either because they'd still decry it as long as it has the name 'Call of Duty' attached.

Dishonored is considered the best stealth title of this year, for instance, and it barely broke a million as of last week. No recent COD has sold under 10 million within the first month or two. CoD is the game that people want. No more, no less. It's pretentious to claim otherwise.

Very well put. People can ***** about it all they want, but it sells and it hasn't really deviated from what it has ALWAYS been. Don't like it? I can't really get behind your arguments, because you should have KNOWN what you were buying.

 

[AnarchistAbe]

It's true that wasted potential does seem to be a big issue amongst AAA games these days. I still don't agree with Yahtzee's take on "white privilege" or "hite guilt" though.

Yeah...I'm coming to realize more and more that white, middle-class to upper-class American men are made out to be the devil in the rest of the world. It's a weird thing that I've kinda just started noticing. Maybe it's becoming more prevalent, maybe not. Either way, I don't get why.

 

[AnarchistAbe]

Not helping your credibility here, Ben.

You don't like talking about politics, yet you do it every time one of these dumbass military shooters lands on your show's table, and it just get's more and more preachy with each entry.

You mention that you grew up under the background hum of guilt....well, brudda, it was people like you before you that inflicted that guilt, and you seem to have little issue continuing the cycle of regarding people as shit just because their ancestors were imperial jerk offs.

The Dead Kennedys song "Holiday in Cambodia" was written about people like you, baby, seeing as you seem to think the 'slums got so much soul' that we privledged and universally powerful whities don't.

Also very well put. Not trying to make this thread political, but this is a huge trend I'm seeing emerge. The socialist mentality that anyone who isn't poor is evil, as long as there are people who are more poor. If you're successful, that isn't ok because there are people who aren't successful. Personally, it makes no sense to me; but it seems to be very popular around the world.

 

[AnarchistAbe]

Yes, COD should stay as COD and not change dramatically, but as I see it that isnt the point Yahtzee was making. The point is (I think) that the amount of resources poured into making a new COD game is largely a waste. They have largely the same style of play from game to game, same art style, same engine etc, with just a few tweaks and a new story each time. Considering how much money each iteration makes, can you honestly say the company spends that amount making the next title? Of course not, and so maybe they could use some of the huge profit they make every year developing new ideas and franchises, as they are in an almost unique position to play around.

PS. Sorry if there are typos in the last quarter of the comment box, theres an ad here

There's the old adage, "if it ain't broke, dont fix it" that comes to mind here. I enjoy CoD. I LOVED Black Ops, and liked Black Ops 2. I've, actually, really liked EVERY CoD game that I've played [1, 2, 3, MW, WaW, Mw2, BO, MW3, & BO2]. They sell fantastically and they're very popular.

Also, in the end, it isn't our business how much they spend on each title. It matters not to me. At the end of the day, I'm going to pay $60 for a game I want to play, whether they spend $500k or $550M on it. That's up to Activision.

 

[JarinArenos]

Also very well put. Not trying to make this thread political, but this is a huge trend I'm seeing emerge. The socialist mentality that anyone who isn't poor is evil, as long as there are people who are more poor. If you're successful, that isn't ok because there are people who aren't successful. Personally, it makes no sense to me; but it seems to be very popular around the world.

I think you're taking it to extremes here. Backing off the potential strawman ('all success is bad if there's anyone unsuccessful'), what he's really talking about is imperialism. Look at the British Empire at its height, and how it treated its colonies. Now look at the many third-world countries that the US has interests in. See a parallel? These games that cast all nonwhite characters as cardboard-cut-out-evil just exacerbate this problem.

 

[remnant_phoenix]

The main flaw in his argument is this right here:

the privilege of being in a position to make a triple-A game with cutting edge technology, some of the greatest talent in the world, and under one of the highest-profile titles in the industry. A privilege which is utterly squandered.

Here's the thing: It has the talent assigned to it, it sells like hotcakes, and it's possibly the most well known name in gaming because it is what it is. It didn't start out as an indie stealth/platformer. If they changed the formula significantly, then a lot of people who do buy it probably wouldn't and the people who wanted the change wouldn't buy it either because they'd still decry it as long as it has the name 'Call of Duty' attached.

Dishonored is considered the best stealth title of this year, for instance, and it barely broke a million as of last week. No recent COD has sold under 10 million within the first month or two. CoD is the game that people want. No more, no less. It's pretentious to claim otherwise.

Edit: Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 has sold about as much as Skyrim as of last week. Since I doubt Skyrim will be getting too many new sales and Christmas is coming up...it's going to beat Skyrim for sure. Just a small sidenote.

And the main flaw in your argument is that sales numbers are the be-all/end-all of legitimization.

Just because something is popular and financially successful doesn't make it classy, respectable, or objectively good. And many things that are classy, respectable, or good are not popular and financially successful.

Is CoD the game people want? Yeah. Is it rediculously financially successful? Of course. But neither of these things instill CoD with deeper value, and I'm confident that that was Yahtzee's point: Acitivision and the CoD teams could use their position ("we know that millions are going to buy this game on day one") to at least bring innovation to the genre (they could even push the boundaries of the medium if they chose) but they don't. And that is a waste of potential. Not potential revenue, but potential for something of deeper value.

 

[Gigano]

If I was an investor, I think I'd go for the game series that's compared to privilege and pornography.

Though it's pointless to politicize a problem pertaining to poor pacing in a tacked on single player campaign. Call of Duty 4 was a legitimately great game - both SP and MP - everything after that is merely a multiplayer oriented rethread of it, with a tacked on single player with big set pieces connected by an increasingly disjointed story. If there weren't a wingsuit somewhere, it'd be Unreal Tournament 3 all over again, where the "campaign" was multiplayer maps interspersed with cutscenes.

Nobody goes to Call of Duty for the story campaign, so expending tons of resources on devising gameplay mechanics for it would be a waste of time: Some mascara is all that can be asked for. Not everything can - or should - be indie anyway, if you want great storytelling with minimalistic elements, go play Virtue's Last Reward and leave poor rich CoDBlops 2 alone.