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.
I think that's the critical point right there. If you are talking movies, 5 - 8 hours is 2 or 3 movies in a series and a lot of content. But BF and CoD are video games. 5 to 8 hours IS a tacked on nothing BY COMPARISON. If you are judging by just mms... maybe that's enough. And so to folks who only play mms or other games that are (again, by comparison) very short on sp content... the complaint really does seem unfair.
But I'm a person who slings around that "tacked on" label. And to me (and I know a developer would scream about how much effort is required, sorry) but anything under 10 hours isn't enough content to really count. Maybe "tacked on" isn't precise enough to convey that... but fans would complain whatever term is used so I don't care enough to find a better insult. And frankly I loved CoD 4's sp. Actually I also enjoyed CoD 2's back in the day (I miss nazi shooting as opposed to feeling more like the villain in mms'.) Despite both being something I could bang through in a couple of days. So quality matters. But for me it's the length that earns mms' the "tacked on campaign" label. And they get a pass if the story is good enough.
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
Of a genre, maybe? Advanced Warfare and Black Ops 3 were two of the worst FPS games I've ever played through. The Call of Duty series is currently in a massive slump, in no small part because Black Ops 3 pandered too much to the multiplayer fanbase by making the entire game highly co-op oriented, leading to a string of general game design problems shared by the notoriously so-so FEAR 3 before it.
Kyrian007 said:
Ambient_Malice said:
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.
I think that's the critical point right there. If you are talking movies, 5 - 8 hours is 2 or 3 movies in a series and a lot of content. But BF and CoD are video games. 5 to 8 hours IS a tacked on nothing BY COMPARISON. If you are judging by just mms... maybe that's enough. And so to folks who only play mms or other games that are (again, by comparison) very short on sp content... the complaint really does seem unfair.
Many iconic FPS games were not especially long. The original Call of Duty was 7-8 hours long. Duke Nukem 3D was 9 hours long. TimeSplitters 3 was 8 hours long. Quake 2 was 8 1/2 hours long. The orignal Doom was four hours long. Doom 2 was 7 hours long.
The longest games tended to be around 12 hours. Stuff like Half Life 2 and Bioshock.
Stop to consider the following:
Battlefield 3 is six hours long.
BLACK was 6 1/2 hours long. I compare them because BF3 is a loose remake of Black with the same writer.
When BLACK came out, people bought the game full price and praised the game for its destruction effects and cool guns and innovative storytelling. There was (almost) no mention of the fact it was only six hours long. When Battlefield 3 came out, its destruction effects were taken for granted, and all you heard from people was about how the campaign was "too short". A campaign that was a mere 1800 seconds shorter than the completely acceptable BLACK campaign.
I would say that the linear "corridor" shooters SP feel tacked on. I know Open World is almost a cliche at this point, but would these games be better if they were open world? I mean, when I pay $90 for a game (Australia represent, yay?), I expect more than 8-10 hours for the single player campaign.
I would say that the linear "corridor" shooters SP feel tacked on. I know Open World is almost a cliche at this point, but would these games be better if they were open world?
You get padded out FPS games like Ubisoft's Far Cry games. A thin smattering of singleplayer missions spread across a world filled with fluff. Lots of repetitive tasks like "kill some dudes", or "defend these randomly generated dudes from these other randomly generated dudes". Making open world games requires a lot of effort, that said. There's a reason Ubisoft games have such huge teams on multiple continents for what is ultimately not a huge amount of story content.
008Zulu said:
I mean, when I pay $90 for a game (Australia represent, yay?), I expect more than 8-10 hours for the single player campaign.
I do partially agree, and I think a lot of games are arguably overpriced for the content they offer -- especially FPS games where publishers continue to charge insane sums for FPS games that are years old. But higher production values is directly linked to shorter games. 4-8 hours was very common for pre-2000 FPS games. There was a spike where they got longer, and then FPS lengths quickly went back to being 6-8 hours, with the occasional 12 hour one.
Quake 4, FEAR, PREY were all 8-ish hours. The Resistance games started at 12 hours, then 10, then 8. The Halo series started at about 10 hours and has proceeded to get shorter with every game. 10 hours, 9 hours, and so on.
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.
Poor quality writing, poor level design, uninteresting stories, etc. The original CoD games actually had more characterisation than the modern ones. As late as CoD4 they were still doing quite well there.
Its absolutely nothing to do with genre disagreements. The problem here is that you think that your opinion on FPS games is the be-all and end-all and just because you like something personally means that its good. That isn't how this works.
Ambient_Malice said:
Lightspeaker said:
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.
And now you're being fundamentally dishonest in your arguments by outright ignoring the fact that I very deliberately brought up both critical response and commercial response. The Shawshank Redemption was a box office failure BUT a massive critical success. Citizen Kane was also critically successful. Blade Runner was critically mixed but is one of those very rare breed of films to go on to be a cult classic.
Anyway I'm done here. Won't be back. You are being incredibly dishonest with your arguments and that makes it impossible to take anything here seriously to the point I'm pretty sure you're trolling. Have a nice day.
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.
Oh yes, I agree with you regarding award winning actors. I don't think I've seen any serious complaints about any CoD or Battlefield game having lackluster voicing- even if most of the voice actors have backgrounds in film or television rather than video games. But even the best VA has to work with that's put in front of them. And that brings us to the writers, who are generally barely worth a mention. Stephen Gaghan is the only name on your list that springs up at me. He's good, sure, but not astoundingly great. And again, most of these writers are television or movie people, not game writers. There's no Chris Avellone (Planescape Torment) or Jim Curry (Legacy of Kain) or Amy Hennig (also Legacy of Kain) or Tim Schaefer (Psychonauts). These are the sorts of writers who'll draw buzz and be worth putting on the box art. People worth advertising, in other words. Instead we get movie guys.
This does feed into the narrative of modern military shooters wanting to be more like movies rather than games but that's another discussion. On the whole, I do find myself agreeing with the opinion that if this is really the best FPS writing can possibly be, then we're in for some dark, dark times on that front.
Poor quality writing, poor level design, uninteresting stories, etc. The original CoD games actually had more characterisation than the modern ones. As late as CoD4 they were still doing quite well there.
Issues with its game mechanics aside--enemies spawning in closets, the sloppy scripting of All Ghillied Up, and the game's vaguely insulting "follow the waypoint HUD marker" design that wasn't removed until Ghosts--MW4/CoD4 was, I would say, a fairly well written game.
I would attribute this to lead writer Jesse Stern. Modern Warfare 2 was another matter in terms of... exceeding plausibility in the pursuit of cinematic splendor. Jesse Stern departed Infinity Ward after Modern Warfare 2, and his follow up project was Battlefield 4. I question how some love Modern Warfare's story yet hate Battlefield 4's to such a passionate degree. I think BF4 is the true successor to Modern Warfare. The man has a touch when it comes to interpersonal drama against the tapestry of war, and the ever popular theme of loss and sacrifice. I don't really consider Battlefield and Call of Duty to be different series. They're two sides of a coin.
Lightspeaker said:
Its absolutely nothing to do with genre disagreements. The problem here is that you think that your opinion on FPS games is the be-all and end-all and just because you like something personally means that its good. That isn't how this works.
The problem here is that you think that your opinion on FPS games is the be-all and end-all and just because you dislike something personally means that its bad. That isn't how this works.
Lightspeaker said:
And now you're being fundamentally dishonest in your arguments by outright ignoring the fact that I very deliberately brought up both critical response and commercial response. The Shawshank Redemption was a box office failure BUT a massive critical success. Citizen Kane was also critically successful. Blade Runner was critically mixed but is one of those very rare breed of films to go on to be a cult classic.
This is something of a tangent, because these games generally speaking attain both critical and commercial success to the point those who are not fond of the series are prone to making accusations of bribery for critics and crass stupidity for audiences.
Black Ops 3 is an overall terrible game, in my view. A supreme disappointment compared to its prequel both mechanically and narratively. I can articulate WHY, unlike a lot of people who just piss and moan about "muh bad writing" and "muh gameplay".
Black Ops 3 lost David Goyer, lead writer of the previous games. As such, the dialogue lacks the sense of purpose and melodramatic memorability of Goyer's work. Lines from the previous games stuck in the mind. Goyer is known for this. Even if people find his dialogue stupid, they find it memorably stupid. Aside from "Listen only to the sound of my voice," Black Ops 3 has barely any truly "catchy" lines. It has characters who prattle and state the obvious repeatedly, intermingled with "there's something wrong here" and variations of such.
The gameplay of Black Ops 3 suffers heavily from a clear focus on cooperative teamplay shooting. The sense of pacing Black Ops 2 had is completely destroyed. A typical level features endless waves of robots that just lumber towards you. It's like the worst part of Binary Domain magnified by a hundred times. Additionally, Binary Domain was a cover shooter with a functional cover system. Black Ops 3 has no cover system, leading to frustrating combat encounters where you cannot effectively fight back against waves of flanking robots without dying.
The frozen forest feels like a poorly thought out, half baked Ender's Game reject. The wolves in particular. Those annoying, comically appearing, unscary wolves that rush you forcing you to shoot waves of wolves. This game's biggest problem lies in the fact you're almost always shooting waves of generic enemies. It destroys the pacing, the tension, and leads to overwhelming fatigue. FEAR 3 suffered many of these same problems. The number of enemies is simply stupid for a singleplayer game.
My disgruntlement and my arguably coherent criticisms don't make Black Ops 3 any less popular or well received by critics. Some people make the mistake of thinking that a videogame's "consumer reception" can be accurately gauged from such sites as Metacritic. This is a fool's way of thinking. A videogames sells 20 million copies or so. 1,500 or so write a Metacritic review. There is no way of proving they own the game. There is no way of proving whether there is fair representation of the percentage of that 20 million who bought the game and enjoyed it vs those who didn't.
That's why Steam reviews tend to give a somewhat better picture of a game's reception with the average gamer--for better or worse, since PC performance issues often muddy the waters of an otherwise quality title. Black Ops 3 had serious performance issues on PC, leading to negative Steam reviews. Getting to the truth becomes a bit difficult.
Back on the topic of films, Citizen Kane received a mixed reception. I suppose the fact the film tread on some powerful toes didn't help.
You are being incredibly dishonest with your arguments and that makes it impossible to take anything here seriously to the point I'm pretty sure you're trolling.
I miss the days when "trolling" wasn't used as shorthand for "Someone on the internet has opinions that differ from my own and won't admit they're wrong when I tell them how wrong they are."
And again, most of these writers are television or movie people, not game writers. There's no Chris Avellone (Planescape Torment) or Jim Curry (Legacy of Kain) or Amy Hennig (also Legacy of Kain) or Tim Schaefer (Psychonauts). These are the sorts of writers who'll draw buzz and be worth putting on the box art. People worth advertising, in other words. Instead we get movie guys.
Well... I think the choice to hire film writers is very much a deliberate one. Games aspire to be like films in terms of writing and structure. Thanks in no small part to beloved Crytek, they also aspire to look like films. Hiring a "game writer" isn't exactly going to gain you much attention outside of certain circles. I have no real issue with Amy Hennig's writing, but not everyone likes the Uncharted games. In fact, a fair few people hate them and hate the writing, at least from what I've seen. Same goes for Neil Druckmann, or basically anyone from Naughty Dog. Outside a certain circle, their names don't carry a great deal of authority or attraction. And Jim Curry? An unknown. Chris Avellone? Pretty good writer. Very respected. But not hugely known. Videogames are like that. Compared to film, there's an alarming lack of concern about who is actually making these games. Most people just care about the brand.
So when choosing a writer, hiring a novelist or a film writer is more likely to gain you attention and respect. David Goyer, for example. Or Richard K. Morgan, author of Altered Carbon and writer for Crysis 2 and Syndicate 2012.
Crysis 3 was written by a man named Steven Hall, an award winning novelist and Doctor Who radio drama writer -- with the assistance of Adrian Vershinin, writer of such games as Black and Battlefield 3 and later Medal of Honor titles.
Warren Ellis, comic book legend, wrote the very good Cold Winter.
There's a strong trend of FPS games seeking respected writers to pen them, and respected actors to act them. It could be tied to the FPS genre's very specific filmic ambitions. And it's not always the obvious "notice us, we hired the man who wrote The Dark Knight" stuff.
An example -- a remarkable number people seem to think think Metro 2033/Last Light = "Ukrainian devs, none of that nasty Hollywood influence. Man, these guys are so much better than those American developers," Except if you dig, you'll notice the writing team included a chap named Paul De Meo, best known for co-writing the 101% pure Hollywood razzle dazzle film The Rocketeer, and also co-writing and writing games such as Nightfire and Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, and of course the Darksiders games.
A cynic might argue the final product matters more than the people who made it, but it's something to chew over.
I've only really seen "tacked on" as a slam on MP in games that aren't necessarilly MP, not the other way around. Is this a thing?
I'll go one further: regardless of any opinions of the quality, the COD teams seem to at least be generally proud of their stories. I don't know about Battlefield, as I don't play it and wouldn't play CoD except for my friends (I give in to peer pressure), but I follow a little bti of COD development, and they pitch the story like they give a crap a good chunk of the time.
Of course, giving a crap doesn't mean good things will come of it.
erttheking said:
All right, fair enough. Call of Duty and Battlefield campaigns aren't tacked on.
"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
See, I'd say it's less a thread of fanboyism and more a thread to be contrarian. Besides, someone who thinks that BF3 campaign was worth any measure of a damn can simply be ignored when talking about singleplayer FPS's.
Something Amyss said:
I've only really seen "tacked on" as a slam on MP in games that aren't necessarilly MP, not the other way around. Is this a thing?
I'll go one further: regardless of any opinions of the quality, the COD teams seem to at least be generally proud of their stories. I don't know about Battlefield, as I don't play it and wouldn't play CoD except for my friends (I give in to peer pressure), but I follow a little bti of COD development, and they pitch the story like they give a crap a good chunk of the time.
Of course, giving a crap doesn't mean good things will come of it.
They're really not, and the "acting" we've seen from developers kind of makes that case.
Also, I'm not sure what the end goal is here. Like, when they hire Kevin Spacey, is this some sort of conspiracy to waste millions of dollars for no other reason than to hide the fact that they tacked on the single-player? I'm not sure I follow the logic. Clearly, both the publishers and developers value this on some level.
Well whatever then. Besides, the people who try to sell you their game tend to be bullshit artists, like Randy Pitchford or Peter "The Hype Man" Molyneux. It's not the norm, but honestly trusting someone trying to sell you something sounds incredibly na?ve to me. You are the only one to lose there.
Something Amyss said:
Also, I'm not sure what the end goal is here. Like, when they hire Kevin Spacey, is this some sort of conspiracy to waste millions of dollars for no other reason than to hide the fact that they tacked on the single-player? I'm not sure I follow the logic. Clearly, both the publishers and developers value this on some level.
It's because when you talk about the game they say "ooh, that's the one with the guy from all those film innit?", so I guess it gives a weird air of respect to the game (even though actors have a price, so even the shittiest game can have some A-lister or other as long as the money's there, see Beyond: Two Souls).
It's because when you talk about the game they say "ooh, that's the one with the guy from all those film innit?", so I guess it gives a weird air of respect to the game (even though actors have a price, so even the shittiest game can have some A-lister or other as long as the money's there, see Beyond: Two Souls).
You say that fewer people are playing campaigns these days, but our metrics say different. This was an active topic at Treyarch, until our numbers showed us that, regardless of what you read on forums, players spend a good amount of time in all modes.
I'll say this, and this is my personal view, the death of storytelling and the death of campaign is the death of society. As a medium, we have to tell stories. For Black Ops, it's absolutely essential to continue the art of storytelling.
It's because when you talk about the game they say "ooh, that's the one with the guy from all those film innit?", so I guess it gives a weird air of respect to the game (even though actors have a price, so even the shittiest game can have some A-lister or other as long as the money's there, see Beyond: Two Souls).
I was talking from a marketing standpoint. "It has a famous person who worked in famous stuff! Good famous stuff! That means our thing is good!". It's a more or less a piece of flair or gimmick to put on the game, in the sense that it has more or less no or negligible influence on its quality.
I was talking from a marketing standpoint. "It has a famous person who worked in famous stuff! Good famous stuff! That means our thing is good!". It's a more or less a piece of flair or gimmick to put on the game, in the sense that it has more or less no or negligible influence on its quality.
I'm still not following the chain of logic here. It sounds like you're saying they take a franchise that's one of the best sellers in games and feel they need to add a "gimmick," despite the great expense being completely unnecessary to sell the game.
And even within this explanation, it still sounds like the only reason there's such an expense is because they put some stock in the campaign.
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.
The most obvious argument against your point is this: if single-player campaigns are not "tacked on", then why 15% of all copies of Black Ops 3 sold without it? If single player were truly the focus, ALL copies would have it on the disk.
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