Just finished Call of Duty

[Mochan]

Man, that was AWESOME. Another straight shooter that just comes together really good and blows me away. Rather like Far Cry. I never thought I'd give so much credit to a straight shooter but this game deserves it. I think I'm gonna go buy the game next time I go to the mall.

This game made me shelf SWAT 4 and everything else I was doing and I finished it almost in a day, I only stopped to play some SRW@3 and watch some Pride Fighting with my brother. But otherwise I couldn't put it down, it was really a stupendous game. Good thing I got it during the weekend.

Whereas Far Cry made an incredible impression with its wide expansive environments and graphics along with some really good long-distance fighting along with some not so bad traditional Half Life mission crawls, Call of Duty impressed with how life-like your battalion and the enemies behaved in massive out-and-out warfare. I was surprised that it finished so quickly, I think I only played it for like 5 hours. Anyway I got the expansion up and running, too bad my weekend ends in four hours and I'll have to play it over the week.

Still that was a great experience, it made the squad combat of games like SWAT 4 or Vietcong look amateurish, as if you were controlling your squad as an RTS commander would control his troops. CoD made it feel like you were really there with some brothers at arms, fighting an opposing army much the same, and all the atmospheric effects like mortars and tank shells blowing the real estate made it feel so much more "there."

I can't praise the game enough, and that has to be surprising coming from somebody like me.

On the other hand, it does underscore that the only dominant games coming out on PC these days are FPSs and there really aren't any other good games from other genres coming out. We need more RPGs and strategy games to round out the table. I'm hoping Civ4 and Oblivion deliver the goods where Far Cry and Call of Duty have for the FPS arena so far.


In other news, Battlefield 2 is a mess on my new LCD, I can't get the game to work properly at the native res (1280x1024), somehow it messes up the game and I can see the wiremesh on some of the polys even! Worse, anti-aliasing and AF won't work no matter what I try and it made a bad looking render look even worse. It's really unsightly. I love this LCD screen but it is causing problems for some games that I'd rather not be dealing with. Well I'm shelving AVP2 and BF2 for now, both games are looking ugly on the monitor but on the bright side I've got Call of Duty to keep me happy.

[moya]

Call of Duty was a good experience the first time through, with some really memorable setpieces (especially playing as the Russian soldier), but I can't imagine wanting to go back and play through it all again. It's far too linear for that. Ditto for the add-on.

I'm suprised you think it makes tactical shooters like SWAT 4 look amateurish. If anything, I'd say it's the other way around. Yeah, the atmosphere of war is intense in COD, but everything's so scripted. A really good example of this is the demo mission, funnily enough. The first time I was fighting my way through this bombed out French town and the flak cannons were firing and the noise was incredible and I was all "Hell yeah, I'm IN TEH WAR!!!!1" But playing through that level again, I started noticing stuff. Stuff like how you have to walk into certain trigger points for the enemy to swarm towards you. If you don't trigger them, they never come. The only "AI" on display is when they seemingly randomly duck behind walls and windows. Big deal!

I also noticed how your buddies can walk straight into mortar shells one minute without so much as a scratch, but the next minute they snuff it from a weak German pistol shot somewhere in the vicinity of their left leg. "What's going on here?" I thought. Then I realised that was scripted, too. And to add insult to injury, sure, your buddies might die, but 9 times out of 10 your squad will mysteriously be topped up with fresh new recruits when you round the next corner. That's not real war; it's like taking the war and wrapping up it in magic Hollywood cotton wool.

Yes, you can die, but quite often I found I only died from an unexpected "LOL 10 enemies appear out of nowhere and flank you, bang ur dead, but hay THAT'S WAR!" type moment, rather than because the game was actually HARD. And also, although it was a far better game than Medal of Honour, it still fell prey to the "one man on a top-secret undercover war mission" syndrome more times than it should have.

Wow, that was harsh. I actually did enjoy the game quite a lot on my first (and, so far, only) run through. Like Half-Life it's paced to perfection and, as mentioned, the set-pieces are awesome. But I can't help feeling it's a dying breed - the old school way of doing FPS before we got used to the precious freedom we could taste in games like Operation Flashpoint, Ghost Recon, Far Cry, Boiling Point, SWAT 3 & 4, and (hopefully) STALKER.

[BaneNWN]

Ya i like COD alot myself.They werent after making the game non linear they were after making it a realistic cinematic experience which they pulled off perfectly.I have to dissagree with Farcry not being linear when it actually it was linear.Yes the terrain was expansive but it was still Linear compared to games like swat3 and 4 and GR.COD is even more fun online Mochan you might wanna check that out to!

[DBS]

CoD is something similar to living a movie. It is not in the same class as Swat 4, OF or Ghost Recon at all. I am not saying which is better because I enjoyed both classes of shooters and if you enjoyed CoD the expansion is far harder in my opinion. I am looking forward to CoD 2 which should be out before too long.

I have a little time before my retail WoW shows up so I am digging back into some unfinished games now. Gothic 2- damn I want to like it...but Vietcong and completing Dungeon Siege expansion before DS 2 comes in a few weeks.

[Mochan]

Well yes, obviously it's the kind of thing you only go through once. Regarding the tactical shooters, I'm not referring to the AI, but rather how the game managed to portray the battlefield with the squadmates. For the first time around at least, it felt quite real and impressive compared to how in tactical shooters your squad feels like robots at your command.

It's matter of suspension of disbelief and being able to make you think for a moment that you're in a movie, as DBS said.

I also think it's a dying breed, the straight shooter as I term it, but I have to say this is one of the best of the bunch.

Take note that I am not saying it's the same type of game as the tactical shooters, the point of comparison only came in in reference of how the game made you feel about the other people on your side bringing out the feeling of the scenario.

This game also now makes me realize the basis of the Killzone 2 footage everyone's a buzz about for the PS3. I didn't realize you could do scripting scenarios to perfection like this, when I saw the Killzone 2 footage I thought what was harder to pull off was scripting all the people in the background as opposed to the graphics. Now I realize that game devs are already good enough in scripting that they can pull off that kind of scene. This is to the level of something I hadn't seen before in previous straight shooters, and it looks like it's the same thing Killzone 2 is going for.

And I do agree with Bane, Farcry was linear although you had a *LOT* of room to go around the levels. I wouldn't call it a non-linear game, only non-linear to the point that you almost never feel hedged in in the maps. Tactical shooters are less linear in that they actually randomize the maps instead of scripting them, and let the AI take care of what the different objects do (by objects I am referring to the terrorists and stuff). I am hoping Stalker will raise the bar for non-linearity, from what we've heard of it it looks to deliver on that.

[moya]

I agree with what you're all saying about the point of CoD being that it's like a movie, rather than a free-form tactical shooter. However, my point was that even in that area it's flawed because of the rather obvious scripting, trigger points and "on-a-rail gameplay". All of those things made me drop my suspension of disbelief from time to time, and the game was the worse for it in my opinion. Don't get me wrong: it's still a really good game, and it's clearly one of the best of the recent WW2 shooter crop.

[Mochan]

Those are definitely minus points for the game, but I would still say that despite the scripting, and the rail-design, the game does manage to pull you in to the point where you don't notice this most of the time.

Most... there was one part in the game where I ran out of targets to shoot and didn't progress in the scripting because I didn't blow up the tank with the anti-tank gun) during the bridge battle in the British campaign. All that was left was that tank. When I finally realized I had to blow it up, I did and the enemies started pouring in the droves over the sides of the fence that were "off limits" to you (yeah that rail design really does hurt the game).

Regardless it all comes together really well IMO despite those limits, and gave me a convincing depiction of the war that was also at the same time a lot of fun to play. The way it made me feel like I was with a "band of brothers" fighting the war was still superior to how games like SWAT or GR made me feel I was leading a squad. Again, in SWAT or GR I am leading a Squad around and telling them to do things -- (again they are like robots I am giving orders to), but with Call of Duty I was "in a band of brothers" and the way it felt was really different and in many ways superior.

[moya]

Yeah, I see what you're saying (kind of), and I agree to a certain extent. But really, a lot of it is to do with the scope of the game: in CoD you're supposed to be in the middle of a war on a battlefield -- just a grunt with not a clue what is going on most of the time as the guns and bombs go off around you. In SWAT the atmosphere is entirely different. You're leading a small squad into a tight space, facing off against an equally small number of enemies... There's no way that's going to hold a candle to the epic scope of CoD.

Besides, I felt the atmosphere in SWAT was just as intense (in a different way of course) when storming a room that you've just gassed and there's civilians and suspects running around, guns are fired, you can't see a freaking thing, everyone's screaming "POLICE! DROP YOUR WEAPONS!", civvies are shouting "DON'T SHOOT!" etc.

For me the atmosphere in both games was great, but the depth and non-linearity of the SWAT (and OpFlash and GR...) gameplay frankly leaves CoD in the dust. But, meh, it's all a matter of taste in the end.

[Mochan]

Definitely, the atmosphere in SWAT is really intense, but as you said in a different way. It's not a flashy bombastic experience like COD, it's a more cerebral and tense, suspenseful atmosphere.

One thing I didn't like about SWAT is that the AI of your squad is pretty stupid. If you don't give them orders they'll barely react to their surroundings and are prime pickings for the occasional suspect that becomes brave enough to charge you. They just aren't smart or reactive enough. This leads to the impression that you really are leading a bunch of robots.

Not to say CoD was inherently superior in this respect; as you mentioned, CoD's squadmates are also idiots.

I do agree with you though; SWAT gameplay definitely has more depth and non-linearity than CoD. But they really are different games, it's definitely a case of apples and oranges here. CoD has no real depth (as I said, it's nothing but a straight shooter) but its strength is its presentation and the epic feel it manages to induce. SWAT is more concentrated on its gameplay and all the unique situations you can get into (which are always different... highly replayable!)

[moya]

Not to say CoD was inherently superior in this respect; as you mentioned, CoD's squadmates are also idiots.


Heh, well I wouldn't say they were idiots. They seemed to act reasonably intelligently most of the time, but again I'd say that's more down to the scripting than anything sophisticated going on with AI.

[Mochan]

Definitely the scripting. They are smart while the scripting lasts, but if you do something unexpected enough that the next script doesn't trigger, they do just stand their like dolts, as you had mentioned. Sometimes your boys and the enemy troops will engage in staring matches for no real reason until you get a little closer.

Yet overall this didn't really drag my opinion of the game down too much. You're usually too busy to notice it anyway since there will usually be a lot of action wherever you're at. So maybe you can attribute it to "Fog of War" and maybe there was so much chaos everyone lost their senses for a moment. :)

[tango012]

Callofduty is great, although the first is better than the expansion. I really didn't get in to United Offensive, even though it improved on some graphics and added tanks/jeeps. I just whant to play carentan search and destroy...