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

[Ambient_Malice]

There's a popular, and very illogical myth that somehow the campaigns in popular FPS games are "tacked on". Somewhere along the line, people got this idea that the amount of work required to make an MP shooter was comparable to the crushing amount of work required to make a 5-8 hour long cinematic set piece shooter like, for example, Battlefield 4.

Look at the Battlefield series. Even since BF3, development has been split between two primary teams. One handles the MP, the other the campaign.

Battlefield 4's "MP team" consisted of 68 people. Battlefield 4's "Campaign Team" consisted of 93 people, including the lead developer of Alan Wake and Starbreeze developers who went on to work on Wolfenstein: The New Order and Mad Max.

Battlefield: Hardline, by Visceral, featured 10 designated campaign designers compared to 5 designated MP designers. The MP was handled by Dead Space MP staff mostly, and the campaign was developed by the actual talent most people might associate with Visceral.

The Call of Duty series started out with a singleplayer focus. It continues to sink huge amounts of money and resources into its campaigns. Hiring award winning writers, for a start. And award winning actors. Yet some people still delude themselves that these campaigns aren't the focus of development. Nay, the heavily recycled multiplayer content that is often outsourced to B-teams is obviously the focus of development.

If we look at who is making these games, and how the teams are allocated, it is fairly clear that the campaigns are the focus and the multiplayer is side content that might generously be described as something tacked on to sell more copies. Do people seriously think Infinity Ward is running around headhunting set piece developers from Naughty Dog and game directors from Crystal Dynamics to make multiplayer content? It's nonsensical.

 

[Erttheking]

All right, fair enough. Call of Duty and Battlefield campaigns aren't tacked on.

They just suck.

 

[TheSapphireKnight]

They can throw all the talent and money at a game they want, that doesn't automatically make a single player campaign memorable or add a lot of value to the game itself. 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.

These campaigns(again I can only talk about BF here) don't add anything of substance, they feel like nothing but a back of the box check-mark, which is why people call them "tacked on". Who cares how much effort they put in if the result still feels "tacked on" in the end? It just seems like a total waste of time and resources that could be better spent polishing the multiplayer people came for in the first place since BF was originally a multiplayer only affair(with bots). CoD at least has history of strong(if short) single player campaigns to justify its continued inclusion.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

As others have already adequately expressed, "tacked-on" is a summation of perceived value, not actual value. If players perceive the single player campaign as pointless frippery, then it will feel "tacked-on", regardless of the cost involved in making it.

It would cost a lot of money to make a jewel encrusted tampon, but I doubt anyone would feel the function of the item was greatly improved by it.

 

[nomotog_v1legacy]

All right, fair enough. Call of Duty and Battlefield campaigns aren't tacked on.

They just suck.

Ya. If they are given it seems double the money, then why are the campaigns so shallow and short compared to the MP?

 

[distortedreality]

If SP is a focus for these devs, they should probably just stop, they seem to be in quite the downward spiral.

The argument that massive resources are being put into these campaigns makes the situation worse, not better. It's much easier to swallow if they were doing a half assed job and churning out shit - but if this is the best we can expect....it isn't a good sign.

 

[Lightspeaker]

If SP is a focus for these devs, they should probably just stop, they seem to be in quite the downward spiral.

The argument that massive resources are being put into these campaigns makes the situation worse, not better. It's much easier to swallow if they were doing a half assed job and churning out shit - but if this is the best we can expect....it isn't a good sign.

Pretty much this.

Doing a poor job when you've not been given the resources or manpower or time to do it properly, or are just not giving enough of a damn to do it properly, is one thing. And its therefore somewhat understandable when the final product turns out to be weak and forgettable.

Doing a poor job when you've been given the lions share of the budget and the top talent around to get the job done and are really trying hard to make something good is quite another. And is frankly unforgivable and a sign you should really, really just stop trying.

 

[Silverbeard]

Hiring award winning writers, for a start. And award winning actors.

Ok. Like... who? Give me a list of these award winning actors, what other projects they've worked on and what awards they've won. Telling players that they're getting to experience AWARD WINNING WORK by AWARD WINNING ACTORS without actually mentioning the awards is at best an exercise in pointless hyperbole and at worst insulting to the consumer by implication that consumers are sheep who'll go wherever the shepherd waves his cane.
I'll give you award winning actors, though. Battlefield and CoD have at least always been competently voiced.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

I haven't played any modern Battlefield games and when it comes to Call of Duty, I've only played MW1, MW2 and, BlOps 1. Of those I haven't touched the MP but I did have fun with the campaign. Black Ops specifically really impressed me though it could be due to the fact that it's been years since I've played a Modern Warfare. MW2 was fairly new when I played that and I enjoyed it enough; it was a free rental (I miss Blockbuster) and I did not regret getting it. MW1 was a game I bought years later and had fun with. Black Ops was a game I got this past December and that was my favorite. Definitely not tacked on.

 

[K12]

I don't really give a fuck how much a piece of content cost to make or how many people were needed to make it, I care about how it feels to play. If the single player campaign feels like a bunch of bot matches in slightly modified multiplayer maps with dumb and badly thought out cut scenes to tie them together then I'm gonna call it tacked on. I'm here to play the game not perform a tax audit.

I haven't actually played several of the games you've referred to so I don't know how well this fits but I stand by the fact that saying "the single player cost more" isn't going to make anyone like it any more than they already do.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

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.

As others have already adequately expressed, "tacked-on" is a summation of perceived value, not actual value. If players perceive the single player campaign as pointless frippery, then it will feel "tacked-on", regardless of the cost involved in making it.

It doesn't really matter how an audience that is only interested in competitive multiplayer feels about story-driven singleplayer FPS games. They're a completely different genre. As a loose trend, story driven FPS fans aren't keen on MP, and MP fans aren't keen on story driven FPS. They're two different demographics. All that matters is what the DEVELOPER thinks, and which component they put more work into. Like Treyarch with their "death of campaign is the death of society" rhetoric.

So you're just proving they're giving much more thought to their single player campaigns, but you're admitting for them they outright suck at making decent single player campaigns. Got it!

How do they suck? There's nothng inherently wrong with story-driven, high production values FPS games. Because they're so hard to make, these games tend to be on the short side. Yet FPS games, once you strip away their padding, were always on the short side. Call of Duty an Battlefield have a lot of content. And these games are framed around a steady stream of story content. If the game isn't telling you a story, that part of the game is essentially dead weight, and should probably be cut. Wolfenstein: The New Order had a bit of a problem in this area -- so much content that was essentially just shooting galleries with no real significance to the storyline.

Ya. If they are given it seems double the money, then why are the campaigns so shallow and short compared to the MP?

Define "shallow". The games are short because they are insanely hard to make. 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. You're essentially wondering why Avatar was only 3 hours long instead of 20 hours long.

It seems to me the complaints are more "Boo hoo, why aren't FPS devs interested in making FPS games in the genre I like!" instead of any sort of meaningful criticism of the games themselves. Battlefield 4 was made by the man who stripped Alan Wake of its open world elements because they were interfering with the storytelling. These FPS games exist to tell a story via gameplay. Story > Gameplay. That's how they're sliced and baked. If people don't like that, then it's really their own problem.

Ok. Like... who? Give me a list of these award winning actors, what other projects they've worked on and what awards they've won. Telling players that they're getting to experience AWARD WINNING WORK by AWARD WINNING ACTORS without actually mentioning the awards is at best an exercise in pointless hyperbole and at worst insulting to the consumer by implication that consumers are sheep who'll go wherever the shepherd waves his cane.
I'll give you award winning actors, though. Battlefield and CoD have at least always been competently voiced.

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.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

story driven FPS fans

Hold on, let me think of all the story-driven FPS games I can think of...

Resistance? Killzone? Does Half-life count? Rage?

Now compare the campaigns in those games to the campaigns in your Cods and Battlefields. See? Good single-player story-driven FPS's do exist, and they AREN'T your cods or battlefields. This is the point. They can do it. It can be done. Call of Duty isn't doing it.

What does Killzone do that Call of Duty doesn't? What does Resistance do? Don't forget that the Killzone series was originally almost universally seen as a boring Halo wannabe. And Half Life? Meh. The game series is heavily responsible for sending FPS design backwards after Rareware revolutionised it with GoldenEye. Half Life 2 is a game that is huge amounts of padding with the occasional locked room exposition scene. 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. 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 don't really give a fuck how much a piece of content cost to make or how many people were needed to make it, I care about how it feels to play. If the single player campaign feels like a bunch of bot matches in slightly modified multiplayer maps with dumb and badly thought out cut scenes to tie them together then I'm gonna call it tacked on. I'm here to play the game not perform a tax audit.

I haven't actually played several of the games you've referred to so I don't know how well this fits but I stand by the fact that saying "the single player cost more" isn't going to make anyone like it any more than they already do.

When people talk about these games costing a lot, they're not talking about generic singleplayer training content. Any small team can throw together something like that. Turok: Rage wars was one of the first games to pioneer that approach. MP game set in a singleplayer series with a "campaign" that was basically a training mode. But making a first person shooter with a story focus as a follow up -- Turok 3, proved to be a much bigger task for Acclaim Austin than making Rage Wars.

 

[JamesStone]

If 100 equally talented cartoonists came together, 60 being assgned go a team and 40 to the other, and the 40-man group produced a fairly competent collection of strips organized into three books, and the 60-man team produced a few strips which looked ripped off straight from Zits, the Zits-lookalike would still feel tacked on despite being made by more people.

Quality =/= Quantity, despite what "myths" tell you

 

[Ambient_Malice]

Because then you might as well be making two different games.[/spoiler]
They are making two different games. Half the time the campaign and the MP are loaded completely seperately. They have completely different art teams, different programming teams, different directors, different engineers, etc. Making an MP mode that is completely different to the singleplayer is not exactly a new thing. It goes all the way back to bleeding Superman 64, where you had this competitive shooting MP thing paired with the singleplayer that was sabotated by DC's meddling. The MP was actually fairly decent.

George Weidman did a great job in pointing out the underlying failure in Battlefield 3's campaign as having resulted from gutting the core gameplay. I actually played the BF3 campaign and thought that the hit detection was broken because I didn't realize that they took out bullet drop, which is actually stupid even for a linear campaign like that because while you were going in a straight line there were often very large distances between you and the enemy. Hell, there's a level designed for sniping in BF3 and I couldn't hit shit, chalking it up to being buggy because its not like they'd actually be dumb enough to remove the core mechanic of bullet drop, right?

Removing bullet drop from the campaign was a stupid decision.

You wanna know some shooters that handled singleplayer and multiplayer well simultaneously? Unreal Tournament and Star Wars: Battlefront II. They were all glorified bot modes on matches that already existed for multiplayer, just with a few tweaks made to them. And it worked. Nobody complained. In fact, going back to the original Unreal game, which had a rather lengthy singleplayer campaign, quite a few times I can say that while it was enjoyable there definitely existed a gulf between singleplayer and multiplayer. The maps generally weren't well-suited for the arena shooter mechanics underlying the gameplay. It wasn't bad by any means but it wasn't well-suited.

Going back to that era, Quake III was a tech demo. Id Software did not consider it to be a full game because they didn't have the time to make a proper singleplayer campaign. Unreal Tournament was a Turok: Rage Wars-style spinoff of the singleplayer Unreal game. The singleplayer was a training mode.

Then why have that be in the format of a game in the first place? Any amount of gameplay absolutely gets in the way of the story being told. It objectively slows down the pace because it requires player input whereas a movie would continue on at the same pace regardless of audience circumstance. Even most "non-games" have integral player input. Stuff like Gone Home is completely dependent on player interaction to tell its story whereas you could tell the same story in a movie format. You'd have to do it differently but you could tell the same story and it'd be done more quickly.

Because a lot of people want to tell a story via game mechanics. Stories that are uniquely suited to videogames. They want to marry game mechanics with storytelling. And a lot of people want to play these games.