In April of 2008 I decided to treat myself to a Sony PS3. The price had finally come down to a reasonable level, GTA:IV was about to be released, and Bluray seemed like a nice addition to my HDTV.I purchased the PS3 a few weeks before Grand Theft Auto came out, so found myself with a cool new games console and no games.
I took a trip to a local game store and asked the geek behind the counter to recommend a game. He instantly began a torrent of enthusiasm about Call of Duty 4, claiming it to be last years game of the year, blah blah. And I have to say, he was right. I've logged a fair few hours online reaching the gold cross level, and more recently getting my gold AK-47.
This fall Call of Duty 5 came out, and I decided to put a copy on my Amazon.com wish list. A relative purchased it for me, and on Christmas day I was able to try it for the first time.
Apparently this was a popular game for Christmas because I've never seen fewer than 70,000 people logged in at any time of the day or night. I also keep getting the unbelievably annoying Activision Error 33, which is basically some kind of overload when too many people are trying to play. This annoying error makes it impossible to play online, and as far as I know, the only fix is to wait and try again later.
I've not played the game a lot, maybe a few hours. But I have a few initial observations.
The single player game is a good way to pass time when the Activision Error 33 prevents you from playing online. Although frankly, if it were not for the multiplayer option I would not own the game.
The multiplayer option (when working) does seem a shade smoother than Call of Duty 4, although the makers have made a number of changes I am not especially thrilled about.
I don't like the lighting of the game. I can see what they are trying to do, recreate the washed out color look of old movies or something. But I suspect that for the people who were actually fighting in World War II, the sun looked pretty much the same as it does now.
The maps are big and detailed, probably twice the size of the COD4 maps, although my unfamiliarity of them may make them seem bigger than they actually are.
Much of the features COD4 players know and love are still there. UAV is replaced with a recognisance plane. The air strike is now a mortar attack. The helicopter attacks are now rather amusingly replaced with attack dogs that you can shoot.
But I think one of my biggest issues with the game is the weapons. Certainly in the lower ranks the choice of weapons seems limited. It is harder to get the equivalent of the red dot sights. There are fewer automatic weapons and a lot more slow loading bolt action things. I guess they have to remain true to the era, which is why I am not convinced they should have gone back to WWII.
It appears they still have ten levels of prestige, but have also added ten more ranks, so now you have to get to level 65 (not 55) before you can prestige up.
You can still get bonus experience (XP) points for head shots, but I don't think you can get different weapon designs (blue tiger, red tiger, gold etc) like you can on COD4.
It is now possible to drive a tank, or operate the machine gun on a tank, which is new (COD4 had no vehicles).
I guess my biggest concern at this stage is whether the weapons I have yet to unlock will make up for the general suckiness of the weapons I have already tried. This in turn has another point of concern attached. Even if the later weapons are as cool as they should be, it looks like I will have to play the game for long portions of time with sucky weapons each time I prestige (assuming that the good weapons are locked again, once you level up).
At least with COD4 you could get a nice LMG, and quickly level up to the good assault rifles nice and quick. But with COD5 you have to get 75 kills with a single gun (not 25 like in COD4) to unlock the optical sights (the red dot equivalent).
I'll need quite a few more hours to figure out if I really like the game or not. To me it all hinges on how much more effort is needed to unlock the later weapons, and how good they are.
Most importantly, I need them to fix the Error 33 that prevents me from actually playing the game at least 50% of the times I have tried to.
In the meantime I'll be playing COD4 (decided to get my gold LMG), and Tiger Woods 09, which is very good. I'm not a golfer, but I've always enjoyed that game, and I have not purchased a new version since the 2005 version I had for the PS2. So far the changes and improvements have been quite impressive, but that's probably another post at some point.
4 comments:
dude your fair few hours on cod4 could not have been less than 10 days of game play to get to 10th 55 and if you have the gold ak47 i am convinced you spent at least 15 days on it. that would be your "fair few" faggot.
That's a very strange thing to get angry about. But thanks for your comments.
I actually like a lot of the changes from CoD4 to CoD:WaW. I think that, since red dot sight gave you about a 70% bonus to just about everything (not game-mechanically, but in experience, I shoot more accurately, my range is longer, less ammo usage, more headshots, etc); the change from 25 kills to 75 is fair.
The change from Helicopter to the Dogs seemed reasonable too, one: they didn't have those back then, and two: helicopters were too difficult to take down and could last whole matches.
I don't care much for the transition from more automatic weapons to bolt-action. But since there weren't too many automatics back then, and the ones that were there were extremely sloppy and useless.
And as for the shading, there is a DEVELOPER excuse for that: they made the game with a upper-class graphics engine, but stupidly enough, did it on a low-class graphics card (nVidia 6600 GeForce or equivalent). Since the higher-end cards (nVidia 8600 GeForce for example) don't recognize these shaders since they are obsolete, you get choppy gameplay, wrong shading, etc. Luckily, for PC there is a temporary fix (for nVidia): downgrade your driver to like v1.2 or something.
Anyway, that's my response to this and I do like the 5th prestige icon, which I've used forever and never changed. :D
Hey ScarletSky, some very good points.
I agree on the red dot and the helicopter. They don't ever last a complete game (so I disagree there), but they can be hard to knock down, whereas each individual dog can be shot fairly easily if you do it right.
I understand the fact that they were trying to be true with the guns, but that still doesn't stop them from being annoyingly ineffective.
Quite honestly, I became so fed up with the crappy weapons on WaW, I ended up playing hardcore a lot more.
In turn this prompted me to go back to COD4, and try that in hardcore mode. I've been enjoying a whole different game style of hardcore vs. regular.
The bottom line is that while I really like some of the innovations of WaW, they simply don't go far enough to capture the magic of MW. I look forward to the next offering from Infinity Ward, and will not buy any more CoD games by Treyarch.
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