I’m playing Seraph, a female assassin raised in Singapore’s quarantine zone—one of nine Specialist character types that can bring a unique weapon or ability to a multiplayer match. I pick up the enemy flag and quickly get out of sight, powersliding 15 feet into a nearby building. It’s a lot like the slide in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, but faster and longer.
Inside, I shoot another player in the back. It’s still Call of Duty, where sometimes you get kills because you’re lucky. On the other side of the building, I choose the left route back to base. I can get across a long stretch of it by wall-running over an abyss, which is quicker and much safer than the shooting gallery that is the open courtyard in the middle of the map.
Halfway across, an enemy player starts wallrunning at me from the far side. We can both aim and fire our guns mid-run. I, however, am fully in the zone at this point, and my special ability is charged.
I push the right and left bumpers (I’m playing on PS4 for this demo), drawing Seraph’s special weapon. It’s a cannon-like revolver that kills anyone in one shot, so I blast the fool away and watch him fall to oblivion as I take the flag home for a point.
Then someone kills me. And in the next life I catch a bullet before I do anything cool. Despite some significant changes it’s still Call of Duty: players take turns kicking ass and getting their ass kicked.
Treyarch managed to get through a twohour presentation without ever mentioning Advanced Warfare, and when asked, the devs said that no, even if both games are set in the future, Black Ops 3’s soldiers aren’t wearing exo suits—they’re cybernetically enhanced soldiers with jetpacks.
The distinction between one future war fiction and another is silly, and I’m here to tell you that despite what Treyarch says, movement in Black Ops 3 is very similar to Advanced Warfare, especially because of the ability to boost up into the air. It’s not exactly AW’s double jump—you expend a recharging thrust meter by holding and feathering the jump button—but the impact is the same: you have more freedom of movement, especially vertically.
To Treyarch’s credit, movement in Blops 3 does feel better—slower and smoother
To Treyarch’s credit, movement in Blops 3 does feel better—slower and smoother—but not as good as Titanfall, which despite its problems, has bigger, more interesting maps that encourage improvisation.
Only after playing Blops 3 did I realise AW was too jittery, with incessant jumping, dashing, and sliding from side to side. It’s a complex system worth mastering, but those bursts of movement broke the action into short, violent spurts, a familiar problem in CoD multiplayer that AW made worse.
With unlimited sprint, smooth mounting animations, no dashing, and other small changes, Black Ops 3 let me connect wall-runs, slides, kills, and special abilities so my turn kicking ass was fun enough to justify waiting for another..
You’d think wall-running would be the biggest addition here. It isn’t. The maps are still CoD-sized: three interconnected lanes combining tight and open spaces. Some of those include a wall-running opportunity, which adds welcome variety, but based on the three maps I saw, that’s about it.
Swimming serves a similar function. That’s right: for the first time ever in a Call of Duty, when I saw a body of water I didn’t treat it as off limits. I could jump in, shoot every gun as on dry land, and with the jetpack, break the surface, kill someone in midair, then dive back into cover.
Treyarch seems to understand Call of Duty is in desperate need of variety
Again, there isn’t a body of water in every map, but it was cool when it was there. In this early alpha state, there was a visibility advantage to being underwater, and a cover advantage to being out of the water, which made for some interesting hide and seek.
Treyarch seems to understand Call of Duty is in desperate need of variety in terms of loadouts as well. Black Ops 3 has more guns than necessary that you can customise with up to five attachments, each with one purely cosmetic variation, crazy deep paintjob tools, and Black Ops 2’s ‘pick 10’ perk system. But loadout variety thankfully goes beyond gun fetishism.
We’ve spent more than ten years playing Call of Duty games as generic soldiers, and now Black Ops 3’s Specialists are finally adding some personality to multiplayer (even CoD devs play MOBAs, it seems). You commit to a Specialist and either their special weapon or ability before the match, and there’s no restriction on who gets to pick what. If everyone wants to go into a match as Seraph, that can happen.
In addition to Seraph, I played as Ruin, a Viking-looking rusher with either a ground-pound area-of-effect attack, or a special speed ability. A robot named Reaper was another popular choice, probably because his arm could transform into a minigun, which is easy to understand and pretty badass. A character called Outrider wields a bow with exploding arrows, but I was more interested in her vision pulse ability that revealed enemies through walls.
The abilities are cool and powerful and can be snatched away from you with a stray bullet. They’re just another type of Scorestreak, but they charge up on a timer that goes faster with every kill.
You can customise your Specialist’s appearance, too. I didn’t get to see what that looks like, but I do worry it will make Specialists harder to identify on sight, which is important information to have quickly in an FPS where different characters have strategic significance.
Black Ops 3 is set decades after the events of Black Ops 2. You won’t see returning characters, but you’ll see how they impacted the world, which in short has gone to shit. Following Raul Menendez’s devastating drone attack on the US in 2025, nations split into two opposing world factions, both of which employ comprehensive air defences that put a new emphasis on boots-on-the-ground warfare.
I didn’t get to see much of the campaign, but there are big changes here too. The biggest is that the entire story has fourplayer co-op, each player bringing their own campaign-specific customisable character into the session. A progression system lets you upgrade your cyber-soldier with different abilities, and since each player can change the appearance and gender of their character, they’re not named, celebrity-voiced characters as in previous Black Ops.
In the level I saw, the four characters arrived in Ramses station in Cairo, which, in the midst of a hellish war, looks like something between between a Warhammer 40,000 planet and Mega City One as seen in the 2012 Judge Dredd film. (The good one.)
There was a lot of walk-and-talk exposition, classic, jingoistic Call of Duty monologuing, and then someone shouted “look out!” or something like that and the shooting started.
Ball-shaped drones fell from the sky and exploded into dozens of blades.
Ball-shaped drones fell from the sky and exploded into dozens of blades, impaling redshirts. A harrier dropped a prefabricated barricade with gates and sniper nests, which blocked off city streets by extending into nearby buildings, smashing cars in the process. Drones buzzed above, peppering the battlefield with bullets and missiles. A swarm of bee-sized nanobots set humanoid robots on fire. It’s Call of Duty turned up to 11, but it’s where the volume dial has been stuck for years, so it’s not that impressive.
With four players running around, you need more room than the narrow corridors CoD is known for, and in the Cairo section I saw, once that instant barricade dropped from the sky, it did create an open space for fighting that looked bigger than usual.
I’m extrapolating here based on one section and Treyarch’s promises, but I imagine that rather than an endless on-rails experience, Black Ops 3 will make frequent stops to punctuate these arena-like sections, giving you and your friends more freedom to blow everything up.
Since players will presumably choose different upgrade paths for their campaign soldiers, they can work together in interesting ways. A player with movement enhancements can be a great flanker, while another can stick to the high ground with a sniper, providing cover and marking targets, which other players can see with their shared ‘direct neural interface’. A player with the ability to remotely hijack drones can initiate CoD’s signature, eye-inthe- sky turret sections at any time, which is another way to help your friends. If the campaign includes more of these sections than it does corridors, then I’m excited. If this was just one out of a handful of sections in the game, not so much. The corridor of epic set pieces got tired years ago.
What I’ve seen so far is promising, potentially much better than Advanced Warfare. Traversal improvements and Specialists are changing multiplayer for the better, and co-op could finally open up the campaign a little, and at least let you experience it with friends, a feature we should have had years ago
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