Rufous

I'm so conflicted about the Black Ops 4 beta. It's a lot of fun, but if feels like something's missing.
Specifically, it feels like wall-running and double-jumping are missing. And while I really am glad to return to "boots-on-the-ground" gameplay which, overall, I prefer in Call Of Duty games, I can't help but wonder if this game would make more sense with the advanced movement mechanics we've seen some variation of in Advanced Warfare, Black Ops 3 and Infinite Warfare.

My philosophy when it comes to the yearly release of Call Of Duty games is that the three studios working on the franchise should alternate between three different types of game.

Infinity Ward should do "modern" warfare games, where things are pretty much current or very-near-future, a la the Modern Warfare sub-franchise or Ghosts (which had a very cool premise but a not-so-great execution.) We've had pretty much zero games like this in the franchise in years, so it's high-time.

Treyarch should do Black Ops games whether they're futuristic with crazy advanced movement stuff, or more historical like the first two entries in the series. (Black Ops 2 was a mish-mash of near-future and near-past.) I suppose they could break off from this sub-franchise, but really if it ain't broke don't fix it.
And then Sledgehammer Games can rotate between historical games like WWII and its Advanced Warfare series, which probably deserves a sequel at some point. Maybe they could do a Vietnam-era game.

You could toss in some other genres---a post-apocalyptic zombie game from Treyarch or a crazy steampunk Call of Duty from Sledgehammer, maybe---but the idea would be you'd see a new type of game each year, and sometimes that would include boots-OFF-the-ground gameplay.




The problem with recent games in this series isn't that they had double-jumping and wall-running, it's that every single one had these abilities, and people started to miss more grounded combat. I don't think we should simply never have another Call Of Duty game with double-jumping. We should just change it up year-to-year. Variety is good.
So it's weird playing Black Ops 4 with its Specialists, many of whom carry over from Black Ops 3, and not be able to double-jump or wall-run. My son, who cut his teeth on Black Ops 3 (against bots primarily because he's young) is confused by the lack of advanced movement stuff. He keeps saying over and over that it would be way better if you could double-jump and run on walls. I'm sure he's not alone.
And while I was plenty sick of this being the standard each year for Call Of Duty, I actually agree that advanced movement would work really well in this game. It's so fast and fluid and frenetic that adding in double-jumps and wall-running would just make sense. My other idea would be adding Ruin's grappling hook to every Specialist and giving him a different ability. Because it's just way more fun to navigate these maps with Ruin than with basically any other character.
Yes, grappling hooks and double-jumps and wall-running all would make this feel like Titanfall-Lite, but I'm okay with that. I'd be perfectly fine if Activision could get Call Of Duty to the same level of awesome movement that Respawn has achieved in the Titanfall series, at least in its futuristic releases. (Without the mechs, obviously.) Sure, I mostly prefer the gravity of Modern Warfare or WWII to the wild verticality of Black Ops 3, but I'm okay with changing it up each year also.
The fact is, Black Ops 4 would be just fine, maybe even great, with advanced movement abilities. It already has so many outlandish powers thanks to its Hero-Shooter-Lite Specialists that these moves would fit right in.
On the other hand, it's also just fine without double-jumping and wall-running. I'm not actually complaining here. It just seems like removing these mechanics from the game was a decision made to placate angry fans rather than to make the game the best possible game it could be.
So yeah, I'm conflicted.
If you played the beta, let me know what you thought of it and whether you agree with me on Twitter and Facebook. Oh, and be sure to follow me on Twitter as I should have more codes for next week's beta. I gave out about 30 for this past weekend and I'm hoping to have even more the second time around.


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