Boots on the Ground: Paste Goes to the Black Ops IIII Press Event

There wasn’t much screaming on my team, although there were a couple hollers from our opponents, and I think there are a few reasons for that. On one hand, we weren’t the screaming type. On the other, I believe that Black Ops IIII’s overhauled healing system truly creates a less stressful and more contemplative experience. From the design level, I think that this game might be less geared toward yelling.

The difference here is that healing in no longer automatic. In other games in the franchise, if you wanted to heal you would go crouch behind a crate and wait for the bloody visions to disappear. With a little bit of luck and some time out of action, you could be back to fighting strength and ready to take the fight back to your enemies. In Black Ops IIII, that automatic heal is gone. Instead, you have a button that you can press that gets you all jacked up on healing juice. There’s a subtle timing to it, but now there’s an opportunity to have a fight, dash behind a crash, smash the heal button, and come around the other side with guns blazing again. It’s a tactical choice that actually requires a bit of thought. You need to be paying attention.

Former University of Georgia running back Todd Gurley plays Black Ops IIII.

It’s a different kind of Call of Duty experience. Even though I was all amped up on bodily panic due to that loud, abrasive presentation, the act of actually playing the game was weirdly soothing. Identify enemies, take them out, heal myself, and help my team out with the powers of my specialist character (I mostly played as Crash, a medic character). Playing wasn’t a “let’s go!” experience. Instead it was a slower, more controlled “let’s do this” feeling.

And I wonder if that’s how the developers wanted it to work. The point of these events is to turn us all into that screaming guy. Call of Duty has crafted a player base who craves extreme action and a twitchy gameplay experience, and this game feels like something that tends closer to the speed of Ghosts than any of the other Call of Duties in recent memory. The tactical choices give the game a wax and wane that doesn’t feel face-smashing or scream-worthy. And I wonder how that’ll play over the game’s life cycle.

On the bus back to the hotel, I overheard some content creators talking about their experience of the game. They were “reading” the situation as much as talking about the gameplay, noting that almost everyone was gone after playing once and that very few people lined up to play twice. “If I had to rate it right now, I’d give it a seven out of ten,” one guy said. The anticipation of what the game could be had been shattered by what the game was, and the nervous energy that had filled the bus on the way to the event was fully dissipated into discussions of mechanics, presentation and map layouts.

Releasing a videogame is a nimble act of managing player enthusiasm and delivering something that rewards that enthusiasm. If you miss the mark on either side, or if you mess with expectations too much, then you end up with players who cannot absorb the new thing into their mental model of what the game is “supposed” to be. Black Ops IIII is walking on a thin wire, changing the game in fundamental ways while trying to harvest the flow of good feelings and that “let’s go!” attitude from all of the screaming dudes of the world. It’s hard to imagine that it’s possible to stick that landing.