Call of Duty: Black Ops PC Multiplayer Review

Treyarch recently released a small patch for Call of Duty: Black Ops that greatly improved its playability. So I’ve gotten quite a few hours in with the game over the weekend and now that I’m halfway into the first prestige I think it’s time to share my thoughts on the state of the game’s multiplayer mode.

It’s a first person shooter that follows in the footsteps of Modern Warfare 2. Players create their own character classes by selecting their desired equipment, perks and weapons to use in numerous team based game modes. And as players gain points and overcome challenges (such as 15 kills with a specific weapon) they gain levels and unlock even more equipment, perks and weapons to improve their classes with.

Blacks Ops introduces a number of important changes to this formula, some of which are very good news for PC gamers. The reintroduction of dedicated servers and a server browser have already resulted in a significant reduction of lag, cheaters and poor map pools in contrast to the previous iteration in the CoD franchise. However, not every change has been a positive one and Treyarch may have done well to postpone release by another month or two …

The Multiplayer Revival

I had been looking forward to the new multiplayer setup for Black Ops a great deal. I’ve been playing a lot of Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer this last year – enough to hit 10th prestige – and its lack of dedicated servers and a server browser got old very fast. So the return to a dedicated server setup has been great. The lag has been noticeably reduced, lame and cheating players are getting banned from servers and the map rotations are great.

A matchmaking system is still included for those who simply want to play and don’t care where they end up, but it seems to be quite broken at the moment. Whenever I tried to find a ranked or wager match it would try to put me in full servers or ones where I had high ping. Treyarch claims to be looking into it, but for now the server browser is definitely a much better option for finding a good game.

This server browser is pretty much feature complete and about as standard as it gets in PC multiplayer gaming. I can select game modes and maps to filter on; lock out full, password protected and empty servers; sort alphabetically or by ping; and as of the latest patch add servers to favorites and search for servers my Steam friends are playing on. The basics are all there, but none of it is very well implemented.

The half-functional server browser is both a blessing and a curse

… And Subsequent Failure

The problems start with the server browser taking about 10 minutes to gather the information for all 11,000 servers These are frequently not up-to-date hits, with many seemingly open servers resulting in “server is full” messages and others providing endless connecting screens. Many of Treyarch’s official servers also suffer from lock ups, so you might join a server only to find out that it’s stuck on the scoreboard of a particular map. And the controls used for filtering through the list of servers are about as intuitive as piloting an Airbus. The left mouse button moves the filter option in the right direction and the right mouse button moves it in the left direction, while the directional arrows bracing these filter options do absolutely nothing.

These aren’t even the end of the problems with the new dedicated server setup either, because server owners have very little control over their purchases. The most important failing here comes from the inability to connect to a server by IP, despite the inclusion of a command console. So even server owners have to just hope that they find their own server in the limited list that Black Ops’ server browser presents. They also have very little control over their server, because they’re limited to kicking players, changing maps and game modes, changing the server name and granting priority access to their friends. That’s it. There is no option to remove auto-ban for friendly fire in hardcore mode, no option to limit specific weapon types, no option to move players to another team, etc.

This may all sound like Black Ops offers the worst multiplayer experience to date, but even this problematic system actually forms an improvement over Modern Warfare 2′s atrocious IWNet filled with lag, cheaters, kiddies and bad maps that can’t be skipped. None of Black Ops’ problems are impossible to solve through patches. In fact, most of them are fairly small issues such as connecting to servers by IP via console commands, adding additional dedicated server functionality, or fixing the server browser filter arrows. It’s hard to believe that Treyarch managed to screw up so many small things that they’ve done right before, in Call of Duty: World at War. That game had 1/3rd the development team, but none of these issues.

You can create some awesome playercards with the new emblem editor

Player Advancement

Treyarch may be known for generally copying the work that Infinity Ward has done in their Call of Duty games, but they seem intent on changing that perception with Black Ops. A lot of small changes have been implemented that add up to make Black Ops a much more enjoyable and varied experience than Modern Warfare 2, once you look past its multitude of technical issues.

The most influential change has to be the new player advancement system, which has been greatly enhanced from Modern Warfare 2. Players still unlock new weapons, attachments, perks and player cards as they gain levels. However, unlocked equipment cannot be used until it is purchased with the newly introduced credits. These credits are earned through scoring points, accomplishing challenges, completing contracts or winning wager matches. And since funds are limited, especially in the beginning, players are thus encouraged to purchase only their favorite items, which results in much more varied class setups.

These credits can now also be used to purchase further weapon upgrades that tie into the new playercard system. These playercards now involve selecting a background picture and creating an emblem from a combination of icons and colors. The system even supports clan tags, so players can denote their clan affiliation without changing their Steam name. These emblems and clan tags can be painted and engraved on your weaponry at a small fee, while the playercard still serves as your calling card that’s shown whenever you kill a player or do something special like capture a domination point. Additional weapon upgrades include colored lenses and customized crosshairs.

Contracts are another interesting new addition that take the form of purchasable challenges with time limits, such as killing three players with a ballistic knife without dieing within 45 minutes of play time. Completing a contract results in a lot of experience and credits, but failing means losing that initial investment. These contracts are further backed by the new wager matches that force players to deposit 500 credits and leave only the top 3 players (out of 6) with a return on investment. These free for all game modes include stick and stones, where each player has only a crossbow and ballistic knife, but also other game modes such as one that limits players to a single bullet in their pistol where they gain extra bullets each time they kill, or a game mode that sees all players cycle through every weapon in the game throughout a match.

There are some server load issues that slightly hamper this system, because players will occasionally lose some experience as the server fails to save your progress. Similarly changing any custom class or player card setting can result in very lengthy “downloading game settings” screens where the server attempts to save your settings, particularly during peak times. These issues should reduce in frequency over the next couple of weeks as the initial load dies down and Treyarch optimizes its server back end.

The G11 isn't much good as a frontline assault rifle, but excellent as a scoped long-range weapon

Weapon Balance

A lot of thought has been put into weapon and loadout balance. Modern Warfare 2 suffered from several very specific setups that overpowered any other loadout in the game, which is a flaw that’s fortunately not present in Black Ops. There are no zero-recoil ACR/UMP, under-barrel grenade launcher (noobtube) with one-man-army instant resupply perk or akimbo G18 machine pistol/model shotgun setups in this game. In fact, secondary weapons are now limited to sidearms only, which means pistols, ballistic knifes (knife-launchers) and crossbows with semtex-tipped explosive points. Akimbo pistols do make a return, but they’re much less accurate than they were in MW2 and machine pistols are gone.

The excessive usage of noobtubes and launcher weapons has been toned down due to a reduction of their blast radius. Shotguns are now primary weapons and are a perfect example of how well the weapon categories are balanced: the first two are high powered and accurate, the SPAS-12 has an exceptional rate of fire and the final shotgun can be wielded in akimbo. In much the same way there are no stand-out weapons amongst the assault rifle, sniper rifle and sub-machine gun primary weapon types.

There doesn’t appear to be any overpowered weapon category either, with assault rifles, shotguns and sub-machine guns all competing quite well from their separate niches. The sniper rifles do deserve a separate mention, because they feel a little underpowered in non-hardcore servers. It can take 2-3 hits even with the extra damage perk, which puts them almost on-par with assault rifles in terms of damage. Quickscoping is also a little less easy, so sniper rifles take a lot more skill to use effectively than they did in MW2.

An added bonus from the universally capable weaponry is that newcomers have only a slight disadvantage against higher level players. The default loadouts can stand toe to toe with any custom loadout and so custom loadouts become more a thing of preference than necessity.

The new SAM Turret kill streak is invaluable if you want to survive some of the new airborne kill streaks

More Balance

This exceptional balance is also extended to the perks. These selectable boosters could provide a decisive advantage when properly combined in MW2, but the more overpowered setups and individual perks have been removed for Black Ops. This means it’s now impossible to get both steady aim and fast reloading (two invaluable perks in MW2), because they’re part of the same Perk group. Similarly, the one-man-army perk has been removed so players have to rely on the scavenger perk or dropped weapons to resupply.

Kill streaks are now much less a focal point of the game, because they can now only be attained by non-kill streak kills and the two most overpowered kill streaks have been removed from the game. No longer will players camp in the same spot over and over to get that game-winning nuke or the EMP that devastates the opposing team by ruining radar, red dot sights and kill streaks all at once. There’s even a new SAM-turret kill streak that players can use to quickly shoot down annoying air-bound kill streaks such as chopper gunners, gunships, care packages and attack helicopters.

Unfortunately the balance is marred by those very chopper gunner and gunship kill streaks. These let you take direct control as you blast away at the enemy team from the skies, who all show up as bright red dots below you. The new replacement for the coldblooded perk, Ghost, doesn’t provide protection from air-bound kill streak detection, so even players with that perk show up as a bright red dot all the same. This means that the gunship or chopper gunner kill streak will run to its very end and dozens upon dozens of kills unless someone happens to have saved or deployed a SAM-turret. It’s clearly unbalanced, because the 11-kill dogs kill streak is much less powerful than the 9-kill chopper gunner kill streak, so hopefully Treyarch recognizes this and will fix the Ghost perk.

Maps like Villa offer wide-open spaces and a lot of routes to every objective

Gameplay

Call of Duty: Black Ops is a much faster and more dynamic game than Modern Warfare 2. This is in part due to the excellent map design that features more open maps with better routing to each location and fewer chokepoints and camp spots, but also due to the improved balance. Matches flow better and see continuous action across the map, as opposed to MW2′s short bouts of combat at very specific and predictable locations.

The classic game modes all return, so players can look forward to anything from straightforward Free For All to the intense team based gameplay of Hardcore Headquarters. There’s still a lot of variety here even though the only new additions are the previously mentioned wager matches and a limited implementation of Call of Duty: World at War‘s zombie co-op mode.

It does everything Modern Warfare 2 does just a little better, with improved pacing, superior map design and great loadout balance. It’s a shame then that many gamers are reporting that Black Ops multiplayer still suffers from unplayable stuttering on their PCs even after last week’s patch. It all works great if you’re lucky and get to have smooth gameplay after the last patch, but otherwise there’s really no playing Black Ops. And the worst part is that it’s not purely a hardware issue, because the stuttering appears CPU-bound, but numerous quad core setups are still reporting the same issue! There are also other, smaller, issues such as the inability to change team. The button is there, but is currently bugged so that it only works on the first map a server runs after restarting.

If Treyarch can resolve the myriad of technical issues plaguing the game, then it could really become something worthwhile. When it works, it’s undoubtedly the best Call of Duty multiplayer game since Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, but that’s only when it works.

Jungle is a beautiful map with a lot of sneaky routes to great vantage points

Map Design

Every last map included in Black Ops is distinctive, memorable and well executed. It’s amazing to see just how much better Treyarch is at designing attractive and competitively viable maps than Infinity Ward. The maps are less restrictive and feature much better use of height levels that are accessible from numerous directions, preventing unbeatable camping spots.

I’ve played every map numerous times thus far and none of them seem inferior to any of the others. It’s a far cry from MW2′s unbalanced map pool featuring horrid monstrosities like Derail and Wasteland. Even the requisite mini-map Nuketown is much better in execution than MW2′s Rust, which always came down to “first one to the top of the platform wins”.

It’s also very important to note here how much work went into making these maps distinctive and memorable. Launch, for instance, features a rocket launch base and halfway into the match the rocket will be launched, causing the entire map to tremble. In similar fashion, Nuketown gets nuked when the match ends and there are maps with interactive elements such as exploding electronic equipment and massive steel doors that can be opened or closed. There is a wide variety of maps and each and every one of them is better executed than any of MW2′s lackluster maps.

That’s not to say that the maps in Black Ops are flawless, because several maps suffer from some terrible spawn point placement. Playing Launch in the Headquarters game mode will result in teams spawning next to or behind each other. This isn’t true of all maps, Nuketown and Crisis (a Cuban coastal map), for example, have very reliable spawn points.

Black Ops is like a Care Package. Alternately useless and awesome.

The Verdict

Call of Duty: Black Ops multiplayer is a hard game to give a verdict for. On the one hand, it improves upon Modern Warfare 2 in nearly every regard and offers excellent gameplay when it works, but on the other hand, it simply doesn’t work at all for many gamers and still offers a slew of technical difficulties even for those who can play the game without heavy stuttering.

It’s a game that surpasses its competition with ease when it comes to gameplay, but then falls horribly short of the mark when you’re actually out looking for a server to join or trying to play the game with friends. Treyarch has made some ridiculous oversights in the PC version, such as the lacking console commands and disappearance of player parties, while also improving the PC multiplayer experience in many other regards.

If you’re lucky and your PC runs it smoothly in multiplayer, then this game is very hard to ignore. That’s why I’m quite certain the group of friends I played Modern Warfare 2 with will switch over to Black Ops completely during the coming weeks. And even with all of its current flaws, Black Ops still offers a superior multiplayer experience to MW2.

Review ratings represent how much I enjoy the game in question and are not a numerical representation of the pros and cons listed.

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