Call of Duty's new Combat Readiness Program makes multiplayer more fun for 'noobs'

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare’s hardcore fans show no mercy to new players, known as “noobs.” But the new game (which released this week) has a Combat Readiness Program, a new multiplayer mode that makes these noobs feel good about themselves and slowly ramp into the regular multiplayer mode.

The mode follows predecessors like Titanfall, and it has the potential to widen the audience for first-person shooter games like Call of Duty, which generates $1 billion a year and has 40 million monthly active players. Call of Duty games have sold more than 175 million copies and generated $10 billion to date. But to keep growing, and to keep those gamers playing year-round, it needs to encourage the inexperienced players.

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Even with the Combat Readiness Program, that’s a challenge. I’ve played Call of Duty multiplayer games for a long time, and I always have my ass handed to me. It’s no different in Advanced Warfare, as I played for a couple of hours and achieved a kill/death ratio of 0.34. That means I get killed about three times for every time I shoot someone else. I’m not a noob, but my trigger fingers just aren’t what they used to be. (In fact, I was never much better).

It doesn’t help that, even with progress through level 17, I haven’t earned many cool weapon features or abilities that could equalize the skill of other players and give me a longer survival time in between deaths. The new game has sci-fi features, as it’s set in the year 2061, where players can jump to the top of buildings and fire new lethal high-tech weapons. So death comes easier, and the skill required to survive — particularly to shoot someone who is jumping like crazy — is higher.

But as soon as I fired up the Combat Readiness Program, life was different. I could breathe easier. Some of the rival players are “bots,” or artificial intelligence players that are programmed to behave like real players, and not necessarily good ones. The other players are noobs who choose to go into the program. But the game doesn’t tell you which is which, only whether they’re friendlies or enemies.

Going to school

In this mode, you play anonymously. You have no voice chat, so people can’t put you down. (Like when one guy on my regular multiplayer Advanced Warfare team said, “Oh, man, that guy with 3/10 is still on our team,” referring to that I only had three kills to 10 deaths in the round). When the round starts, you may choose a preassembled weapons kit that is tuned for a particular kind of player, like sniper, heavy weaponry, balanced, or “run and gun,” where you run around with a submachine gun shooting at everything.

In normal play, you can customize your kit, or class, so that everything is just right. But as a new player, you can easily mess up your selections. If you play a run-and-gun style with a submachine gun, you should also have the perk that makes you run faster. The developers have preselected features that fit well together in the Combat Readiness Program.

When you’re let loose in the battle, it’s clearly easier. I saw people standing still as they were shooting at someone else. That’s a no-no if you’re not in cover. Some would stay in the same location, or camp, and go back to it even if they were killed multiple times in the same spot. Others would run in a straight line, even if they were being shot at, and didn’t dodge or jump. These were either noobs or really dumb bots. At the same time, I was also getting shot by other players.

The perks

I also received random prizes that I didn’t earn. If you get so many kills in a row, you get prizes like a remote turret or recon drone in regular multiplayer. But most noobs never last long enough to get a string of kills, and so they don’t get to learn how to use most of the Scorestreak prizes. In the noob mode, I was getting these prizes on a regular basis. I had fun, for instance, learning to use the “Vulcan” prize, which is an aircraft that targets players on the battlefield below with a giant laser beam. It was quite satisfying, and I have never earned that prize before.

In my first match, I got 10 kills. The end screen doesn’t tell you how many times you died, and it gathers positive stats. For instance, if you set a new record for a killstreak, it lets you know that. If you beat your best personal score, it also lets you know. But it won’t tell you if that last match was the worst you ever played.

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This may remind you of Titanfall, the Xbox title that came out in last spring. It mixed humans and bots in regular multiplayer matches, making it a lot easier to rack up kills and earn enough points to get a Titan, or a giant mech, to wreak havoc on the battlefield. Call of Duty games had bots in the past, and they also had training sessions where players with low ranks could learn to fight against other noobs. In this training mode, the mixture of new players and bots is a good mix.

I hit a new personal best with 18 kills and a five-kill Scorestreak. That was on a map where I was getting destroyed in regular multiplayer. You won’t find the combat veterans joining in this mode much because the Combat Readiness Program achievements don’t count toward your normal leveling process in regular multiplayer, which is all about fiercely competitive leaderboards and getting access to weapons or abilities that others don’t have.

You may decide on your own that Call of Duty multiplayer just isn’t your game. But you should try playing up to 20 rounds of Combat Readiness Program. You may find that it’s not so hard to pick up after all, and you may join the army of people who give Activision Blizzard $60 a year for the privilege of being a weekend warrior. But if you play the program and you find you still can’t shoot anyone, there’s no hope for you.

Back to brutal reality

After I played the new beginner mode, I was feeling pretty good about myself, and I was learning a few new things about multiplayer for Advanced Warfare, which has a far different feel from other Call of Duty games because of its sci-fi orientation. I had already played through the single-player campaign on a regular setting, and I am going back through it as a “hardened” player, or one notch below the top difficulty level.

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But as soon as I went back into regular multiplayer, I played a round where I got one kill and suffered 18 deaths.

I think I need to spend more time in the Combat Readiness Program.