Best selling game of last year:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7213009.stm
... and you couldn't really begrudge it that. Single player is very linear, and perhaps a little dull at times because of that, but CoD4 is extremely well produced, written, and acted all the same. There are some really great set pieces here and there, with the military gung-ho nicely muted by some dead-pan dialogue and well chosen you-are-dead quotations. The usual niggle of a tightly scripted FPS hampering any worthwhile AI applies, but it doesn't hurt the game a great deal - story and set pieces take priority.
Visually CoD4 is exceptional, thanks in the main to the artfully reduced colour palette and subtle lighting, smoke, and dust effects that decorate decaying buildings and bombed up environments. The effect is of a desperate, washed out war zone, which clashes nicely against the can-do attitude of your squad. Ambient sfx are also very impressive, expanding the atmosphere with distant military rumbling. The experience is unusually involving and unsettling. Previous CoDs felt like mooching around an unlikely movie set to me, but here the tone is spot on and pulls you right in. Somehow what should have been a generic military FPS shmup becomes a mood piece. NPC characterisation is less memorable, although there is some great moustache work on the SAS lead.
Where COD4 really flies is the online multiplayer though. I have barely got started here, but it very enjoyable indeed. The weapons balance is fair, with steady unlocking of improved and more specialised kit as you go along with a peculiar yet satisfying level system. Keeping the game fluid for simple team deathmatch is cleverly managed by roving spawn points, so that a team on the back foot is relieved by 'reinforcements' pincering the enemy from the rear. This must have been done before (no idea where though?), but it works very well here. The feel is very much of a super-slick Counter Strike, which is about as good as this type of game can get for me.
Good analysis, the single player which I went through on toughest level with a buddy... now on that level each initial encounter with enemies can be percieved as an arcade game, as the enemies have specfic starting locations and movements, and react identically each time, and your respawn / retry location is the same and resets the enemies... so its probably accidentally classic memorising of enemy locations and techniques to dispatch asap... obviously it disintegrates once you sink into the level, but on a per respawn / death and the resets its quite interesting.
The online is great stuff, old school FPS stuff aka Counter Strike but with the interesting class system and XP points lathering everything up. But its balanced in such a way that you aren't playing to level up or leveling up to play, its just a natural reward for playing well, somehow they've manage to balance it just right. Just right. Frightening.
Now we are upto Call of Duty, i'm gonna say 8 i.e. Modern Warefare 3, I've just spent my weekend completing the whole thing on veteran, both single player and spec ops. Spec Ops are excellent, single player is slightly "better" than Modern Warefare 2.... Better is a strange concept as the fundamental mechanics of the game haven't really changed since, I don't know, the first game?
The only thing to get you through these games is the narrative, or lack therof. Now because they seem to build a narrative structure out of playing cards, it all gets exposition in usually the last 3 sentences of a level i.e.
"wow that was hard work",
"yeah this object says somehting is happening in siginificant Country Locale number RND",
"ok, lets tell someone and then maybe we might be the avatar or someone else might be".
So Modern Warefare 3 suffers from essentially being about 4 Roger Moore James Bond films rolled into one, so one level you are, I don't know, stuff happens, there is too much of it and you kinda get sensory overload, whereas the first Modern Warefare game was "nuanced" by comparison this is just bombastic nauseous.
Spec Ops though is the best bit really, pure coop and manages in its best moments to have the feel of Hidden and Dangerous and the insanity of Doom. Anyways its all done now, took 24 hours to totally complete all the missions on Spec Ops and 8 hours to polish off the single player. Oh yeah, difficulty has been radically reduced, not because of the quality or power of the enemies, but because of the sheer volume of checkpoints.
Really I shouldn't hate on this game as much as I do. I just can't help myself though.
I think fundamentally my beef is that these games bring absolutely nothing new to an already tired genre other than a massive amount of polish. I'm also totally craptacular at all versions of COD, mainly because I can't shoot for shit when the adrenalin starts to pump and worse still in COD if you don't shoot first you're dead.
I think that last one is where it all falls apart for me. In most 'fiction based' fps the designers can put in some well engineered balance to the weapons so that you're having to make decisions and compromises with weapon choice that leaves you vulnerable to certain types of attack or formation. I'm going to get some flack for this, but games like Duke Nukem 3D and Quake II understood this and developed weapon sets where every tool in the box had a use. Obviously with COD you've basically got 100 types of gun that all shoot bullets into your enemies head, with the end result being the same, regardless of what fired that bullet in the firs place.
It's just a different type of fps to the ones I grew up with and for me it's a retrograde step in terms of gameplay. It's basically a game of hide and seek with guns and I find that less fun than actually getting stuck into a proper fire-fight that might last 10 or more seconds.
Having said all of that I've not played MW3, so feel free to tell me I'm talking out of my backside.
Sure, it took a friend of mine to really articulate where to gleen the funs from this sub genre. The fundamentals are different from the traditional FPS, I don't know if we start calling this an AFPS, Action First Person Shooter, because as you say it really isn't a step up from the days of Quake or Half Life in terms of mechanics, its retrograded some concepts, dropped others and completely, I'm gonna say, tuned, level design.
One of the fundamental mechnics is that aiming is optional, it has a snap lock system to auto aim to basically mitigate that a controller isn't going to let you aim under duress at the types of enemies that are being thrown at you. This is acheived by getting the retecule somewhere near an enemy and pressing the aim / iron sights button, and firing off a round or two. Now they introduce enemies that require a more nuanced aim, but the auto aim will get you 90% there. Once you let that go, you are half way to enjoying it.
The next level of getting on with these games is understanding the level design. Usually there are two routes, Goldeneye style, maybe not depends on the level, larger level do have different approaches, smalelr levels are a single corridor but there might be a sequence that may or may not have been carefully constructed... For instance on a Spec Ops level there was a quite deliberate smoke plume that I couldn't see through to make taking down some dudes on a stair case more challenging... So what initially seems as random level clutter, might be actual design.
Finally you have to play it on the hardest difficulty or else you can sleep walk the whole game. As I refered to earlier the difficulty is completely diluted by the many in level checkpoints for respawning... But still it means the enemies offer a mild threat, otherwise on easier levels you can probably just sneeze on them to get through.
With these 3 steps you can probably get something out of it, and marvel at how the hell they've managed to get what is probably quite an old graphic engine to get some of the things it does, done. There are sequences in MW3 that are on a par with the more impressive in game, this s happening without a cut sequences of Uncharted.
I never thought I'd be able to bother with this genre, but it has enough game in there if you want to find it. Its the best Quake 3 mod I've ever played.