Yesterday Treyarch made their Black Ops 3 Beta open for everyone and I decided to try it out and see if I would enjoy it. The following is a collection of my first impressions and how I feel about the game.
When I try out betas, I only judge them by one factor: raw gameplay. I do this because the core gameplay is the only part of a game that will never be changed after a beta. Sound design, graphical optimization, weapons and spawning can not be judged because of the likelihood that the will be changed.
Wall Running
Right when I started playing, I automatically noticed that there were many aspects of the game that did not need to be there. For example, wall running. Yes it’s a fun aspect of the game, but in my opinion it gives little to no advantage. When wall running you will most likely be seen by many people and get killed when you’re either in the process of doing a wall run or trying to jump off the wall. I also noticed you can also do a wall run on several parts of the maps that are popular for close range battles. This is a big concern for me because I can only imagine how CoD players will get aggravated over getting killed by someone who is wall running. It adds another element that just doesn’t feel right for the game.
Triple Jumping
Treyarch decided to take a different approach to the EXO suit from Advanced Warfare. They understood that the EXO suit was strongly disliked by the community but yet they still felt that that they could persuade the haters by just making it feel different. Now instead of thruster packing everywhere like in AW, BO3 only allows you to do triple jumps and slides with your EXO. It gives you just enough jumping power to make your way around the map like jumping onto obstacles, transfer to wall runs or jumping into buildings. I really enjoyed the EXO in many parts of the game, but just like the wall run I feel there are some problems associated with it. There were many parts of a map that would require me to jump over a cliff or jump on to ledges that I feel give the player too much of an advantage in a gunfight. There were also several situations where I would make my way around the map just to run into someone who is several meters away from me and three stories high. This makes the map feel relatively tight which is a major concern considering that the maps we have gotten in the beta are relatively large.
Specialist
I really enjoyed the addition of the specialists for BO3. Having different characters with their own unique abilities and weapons makes the game a little bit more interesting to play. There are a few specialist weapons that may need a tune up but like I said before, this is a beta so I won’t judge it based off its current balancing.
Overall
I really liked several new additions to the game, however I feel that there were many parts that simply were not necessary and make the game very annoying to play at times. Sometimes it’s almost as if the good parts of the game are also the annoying parts. On top of this I also strongly dislike that many aspects they added to the game were taken from other games. This is a big concern for me because I think it shows the lack of creativity the developers have, which is making the games less interesting every year. I have been playing the series since CoD 2 and I honestly feel like none of the newer CoD games offer anything that makes them feel unique. BO3, in my honest opinion, feels like Titanfall and Super Mario Bros combined. The raw game play without perks, abilities and slides feels almost exactly the same which aggravates me in so many ways. CoD was never designed to be a game where you can soar through the air in the first place. Battles were meant to take place on the ground and the movement was meant to be simple and slow to allow players to focus more on their positioning rather than worrying about someone jumping 20 feet in the air. At this point I feel that if the CoD franchise is going to continue to go in the direction of EXO suits they should just rename the franchise because CoD does not feel like CoD anymore.
