Call of Duty: Ghosts multiplayer tries to satisfy noobs and vets (hands-on preview)

It was odd to attend a giant press conference yesterday as Activision showed off the multiplayer combat mode for Call of Duty: Ghosts. After all, it was a big press event dedicated to just part of a video game, and the gaming world was glued to it.

But it’s hard to understate how critical the multiplayer mode is to the giant game publisher’s ability to reach and engage tens of millions of players since multiplayer is what keeps a Call of Duty game alive for a long time after it releases. It is why, many months after Call of Duty: Black Ops II first shipped last November, 10 million people are playing Call of Duty every day. For hardcore players, multiplayer is a year-round occupation while new players just want to survive it long enough to see what all the fuss is about.

I’m somewhere in between. Amid the darkened tent and deafening rock music, I tried my best to shoot as many of my journalist colleagues as possible in hands-on combat. It was a challenge for me to stay alive for more than 30 seconds at a stretch.

The multiplayer sessions made me think about how difficult it is to balance the multiplayer games for both “noobs,” or new players, and hardcore veteran gamers. After all, more than 40 million people played Call of Duty in the past month. How many of those are the dedicated hardcore? How many are noobs trying to tag along with their friends? There are all sorts of players with different preferences, and they’re all very demanding. If the game is too hard or intimidating for the noobs or too easy for the pros, then Call of Duty will stop defying gravity and eventually see its sales falter.

I looked at my hands-on experience through the prism of a veteran as I was able to hit the top level of Prestige — the highest rank in multiplayer — in last year’s game. At the same time, I’ve also looked at it through the eyes of a noob, as many of my multiplayer matches end in ignominious defeat and my colleagues are frequently able to beat me into the dust.

What’s new this time

The hallmarks of this new multiplayer mode for Ghosts are its better graphics, which are worthy of the upcoming next-generation consoles. You’ll notice that everything looks sharper and more realistic, with shadows and proper lighting in complex scenes. But the game will still run at 60 frames per second, or split-second speeds. That’s a hallmark of Call of Duty games — they’re pretty and fast — and it looks like Activision is delivering on that.

Now you can also have your best friend in the game. Your companion dog, Riley, serves as a drone-like scout, detecting enemies for you and ripping their throats out. But you have to be something of an expert to earn Riley as you need to get five kills in a row. The dog is generating a huge amount of attention because it is a character that players can get attached to, both in single-player and multiplayer.

And you can infinitely customize your character, which means that, for the first time, you can play as a female. Mark Rubin, the game producer at developer Infinity Ward, told me in an interview that adding women wasn’t just about seeking new audiences for Call of Duty. It was about recognizing players who already play the game and really want to choose a character that looks like themselves. This is a feature that makes it more accessible as a game, and so chalk one up in favor of the noobs. It is also a way for veterans to proudly declare their own identity through the game.

I welcome the female characters though I suspect that we’re going to get lots of dudes playing as females. And I like the idea that each character I create means something now. It looks like me, but that avatar also goes into my squad, a collection of soldiers who represent the variety and depth for what I can be as a Call of Duty player. You can level up with as many as 10 squad members.

I didn’t get a chance to play around much with the character creation. So we’ll find out more about that later in terms of how flexible it really is.

Where you really get to customize your experience is with the freedom to equip your soldiers with unique weaponry and perks.

Survival of the fittest

I moved into action as a grenadier. I could have also entered as a sniper, engineer, or other type of specialist. But producer Mark Rubin at Infinity Ward pointed out that you aren’t just creating a class of character this time. You’re creating a unique soldier using the Create-a-Soldier customization system. You pick your weapon by spending a number of points on it. Your decision leaves you with either more or less points to spend on secondary weapons and accessories such as flashbang grenades. You can wind up with 20,000 combinations of characteristics.

You can create up to 10 soldiers, and each can level all the way to the top, dubbed Prestige. Your squad becomes an entity in itself that can level up and earn experience. Your friends can challenge your squad even when you’re offline.

Since my accessories included grenades, I made a point to toss some into a cave or over obstacles and walls. I hoped for the best, but usually the time it took to toss the grenade left me vulnerable to gunfire.

In the first few rounds, I had to remember how to play, and so I died twice for every time I shot someone. Once I got used to it, I did reasonably well, getting eight kills and nine deaths in one match. I didn’t have leveled-up weapons with great gun sights. But neither did anybody else.

The assault gun is still a trusty weapon. If you squeeze off a few rounds at your target with an a gun called the Honey Badger, you can take out your enemy very efficiently. But if you spray bullets wildly while trying to take down a running target, somebody else will inevitably detect your gunfire and take you down.

If you’re a good shot, you can survive for more seconds than your counterparts in multiplayer, and that means you can kill more people in a row, earning “Killstreaks.” If you can’t hit anything, there are ways to compensate for that. You can support your team by dropping ammo for them or use weapons and tactics that make up for your inaccuracy.

Cranked mode, Search and Rescue, and Domination

Activision showed off a few modes that shape very different styles of gameplay. With Cranked, you can enter “cranked” mode for 30 seconds after you get a kill. You have to get another kill in that 30 seconds or you explode. That motivates a very aggressive style of play. This kind of mode favors the noobs because it forces everyone to take wild risks by running toward the action rather than sitting tight and waiting for players to come to them. The vets will like this mode because it lets them rack up a lot of points.

I liked Cranked because it leveled the playing field and motivated me to get Killstreaks. The Search and Rescue mode was very different. Inspired by Search and Destroy, this mode could leave the noobs feeling burned. If you get shot once, you could be out of the game. But if your ally picks up your dog tags where you fall, they can revive you and put you back in the action. If the enemy grabs your dog tags, you’re out of the round for good. Each round has an objective like arming and blowing up a bomb or defending a cache and defusing a bomb.

Activision showed Domination mode on an arctic map that looked very pretty. Snowflakes, fires, and smoke factored into the gameplay because they could obscure your vision. This is my favorite mode of play as you have to capture three flags on a map and hold them while preventing the enemy from doing the same. In this battle, the B flag was placed in a cave where all of the combatants gravitated. Each side tossed grenades into the cave and charged. But the smarter players went off to capture the flags at points A and C. In this mode, you can get points for your team by capturing flags. You don’t have to be the best shooter. In that sense, the noobs will welcome the return of Domination.

Dynamic events

Each map will now have its own “dynamic map events.” These include player-triggered traps, such as a gas station roof that you can shoot out so that it collapses on top of enemy soldiers. The events allow you to strategically redirect the course of the match. You can, for instance, call in a Killstreak that will change the map altogether. Noobs can trigger this immensely satisfying actions as well as vets.

New fluid movements

Each soldier now has the ability to engage in nuanced movements. These include “mantling,” or hopping over a barrier while running. You can do this while you are shooting. You can also do a “contextual lean,” where you lean around a corner rather than expose your whole body. Depending on how close you are to a wall, you can lean out less or lean out further. Lastly, you can perform a knee slide, where your run and slide across a floor and strafe your enemies at the same time. That’s a cool, tricky move. I suspect that vets will use this movement much more effectively than noobs, but it doesn’t require complex gestures or button pushes. So the noobs will be able to use this too, Infinity Ward community manager Tina Palacios told GamesBeat.

Easy upgrades and second-screen mobility

Call of Duty: Ghosts will be more portable than any other previous game. If you register for the Call of Duty Elite gamer social network, you can sign in to your cloud-based profile anywhere. That means you can go to a friend’s house and sign in as your own character. And if you upgrade to the Xbox One, all of your achievements and identity will carry over. The transition to the new consoles will be seamless, so the console transition will not be a barrier to adoption.

The game will also come with a “second-screen” mobile app that you can use to communicate with other players in your clan even if you are not playing a game at the time. You can use the app to organize play among clan members during a match as well. In allowing this, both Sony and Microsoft are recognizing that multiplatform games will spill out of the walled gardens and become cross-platform titles, said Eric Hirshberg, the president and chief executive of Activision Publishing.

Beachhead Studio, the creator of Call of Duty Elite, has returned with an app that gives players the power to edit the loadout of their entire squad of 10 characters on a mobile app. They can also use it to share after-action reports on social networks. The Call of Duty App will debut this November when the game ships. I used last year’s app to show my friends my multiplayer stats. It settles any debate about who really has bragging rights. In this sense, both the vets and the noobs will like this app.

Conclusion

Once again, I’m looking forward to this version of Call of Duty. But there will be a huge amount of competition this year, not just from the brand-new consoles and the new games debuting on them but also from first-person shooter competitors such as Battlefield 4. I can’t wait to see how this game stacks up. So far, so good. But I still want to see a lot more of the single-player story. So far, Activision has revealed stealth gameplay in the single-player mode. Hirshberg promises the rest of the game will have the calamitous, over-the-top, “adrenalized, hair-on-fire” moments. I say bring them on.

As for multiplayer, I can see that Infinity Ward’s approach to it is far different from Treyarch’s with last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Last year’s game had some great new advantages for the noobs, such as the electroshock charge that stopped enemies in their tracks. Combined with the Bouncing Betty land mine, this accessory could stop enemies from sneaking up on me, and it left me free to camp in a spot with a huge light machine gun. There were also reticles (which help you aim) that were much more friendly to the noobs in Black Ops II. I haven’t seen those yet in Call of Duty: Ghosts, but I’m assured that they’re there.

So in conclusion, I’m happy to say that the game appears to have a good balance that will make veterans and newcomers happy. The noobs can always gang up on the vets. And the vets need not worry that skill will not matter in determining the outcome of matches.

Check our videos below.

The first video is a few minutes of gameplay from one of my own unskillful matches.

Here’s the official Call of Duty: Ghosts multiplayer reveal trailer, featuring Eminem’s new song “Survival.”

And here is the entire multiplayer gameplay reveal event.

Here’s the multiplayer gameplay features.

This is the first Call of Duty: Ghosts live public multiplayer match between pro gamers and real Marines.