Call of Duty 2019 Game Truth - GameGame

hi guys it's been a couple of weeks now since the modern warfare reveal where a select blog and media got invited by Activision and flown out to the Infinity Ward HQ to see the reveal of the game firsthand in person I was not invited to that event I just didn't get to go and so I've been waiting just like you guys to see more gameplay since the original trailer dropped but thankfully at e32019 I managed to get into a behind-closed-doors gameplay reveal thing of modern warfare and sit through about twenty minutes or so I would say a footage inside the kind of off-limits Activision and meeting room thing for media rather than on the show floor or anything like that and so I figured this would be a good opportunity to give you my honest thoughts about what it was that I actually saw so now we're in the modern warfare area with Activision and it's gonna be a presentation and just like that we're done thank you appreciate it onwards to 2k and before anyone asks no this isn't a sponsored video I don't have any disclosure to give they didn't pay for my flight or my hotel nothing like that these are just going to be completely raw unfiltered thoughts from someone who saw the gameplay reveal wrote down a load of notes and has recently to be completely honest felt like Activision have been doing a pretty poor job with Call of Duty so this should be the first thing they did was they showed us a little video from two of the main tabs iiw and those devs said the following they were like we went round the world and we asked gamers what they want in a Call of Duty title and across the board time and time again the thing that we kept hearing is the players want a Call of Duty game with gameplay ripped from the headlines with morally great realities and morally complex realities present throughout now I don't know about you I do not know about you but personally when I think of Cod I don't think of like a morally provocative and hyper realistic game they kept talking about realism how it's gonna be the most realistic Cod ever and I'm seeing here like I don't want to play a mil sim I don't want to play something where I die in one bullet like that would be a hyper-realistic what I want is just that old Cod DNA to come back really and so it was just interesting that they were really pushing this whole idea of moral complexity the gray area of war and all of these themes that I'm not necessarily against like I don't necessarily think that that shouldn't be in a cod game it's just that that seemed to be the foundational pillar on which the entire rest of the experience was built and that's something that we will come back to in a moment when I get to talking about further in the demo the first thing we see there's been an attack in London it's very much shot like a trailer rather than just gameplay like there's lots of cuts to black lots of sort of scene switching of you being in one location and then another didn't really feel like an actual gameplay preview as much as it did just an extended trailer I guess and honestly the only takeaway that I got from all that stuff was the one of your teammate sis called Crowley or Crowley and it looks very nice to be completely honest ER call of duty in the last couple of years in my opinion has felt like it has been lacking a little bit in the graphics department black ops 4 has this kind of modular blocky aesthetic that I really personally don't click with and infinite warfare cod World War 2 there's  just something about the style in there that didn't really resonate but this game looks much improved from those previous games and granted it's an e3slice so we don't know if the full game is actually going to look like this the full game could look significantly worse because that's just how game dev works or it could look better it's gonna take the next four months of Polish and work for us to really know what the end product is going to look like but for now the slice at least their projection of what they think the end product will look like looks good also I'm just adding this in post because I just remembered it the animations on the other soldiers in your team looked phenomenal so normally NPCs in these sorts of games can look a little bit weird they move a bit robotically but just seeing the way the other soldiers arms were moving the way they were holding their guns and gesturing and doing things in the space around you looked fantastic so animators at iw I salute you you've done a really good job here the second mission though is the thing that I want to really zoom in on in this video so it starts out with the kind of generic thing that you might have expected for a previous Call of Duty games where there's a blueprint on screen loads of maps of plans of what we're going to be doing and you've got press in your ear saying right this is a terrorist cell they've got a safe house in London we're gonna go over there we're gonna get this thing and then we're gonna do this and do that’s neeky beeky like it then cut straight to gameplay we're in the UK in a residential area we're on the pavement and we're basically we're cutting our way into this safe house and there are a bunch of other soldiers around everyone's got silences on everyone's moving very quietly in your air your operator kind of manager I don't know what the word would be but the guy basically calling the shots is probably priced in moment someone else but probably price and he's whispering the whole time because you're staying dead silent it's nighttime the only lighting around you is like a street light that's on the pavement and light coming from the actual house itself so it's dark for sure and you basically make your way into this little compound the first thing that happens is you climb a ladder or climb up at least on the outside of the building and you see a woman getting taken down in the kitchen now the way it works the way it's presented to you is the woman is coming into the room and she doesn't know that there's actually already one of these secret I was gonna say secret agents secret service no that's the wrong word she doesn't know that there's one of these soldiers behind the door already just waiting there being dead silent and so she walks into the room and says don't worry I'll put the kettle on and as soon as she's done saying it mmm a hand goes round her mouth she gets pushed to the floor she's just prone completely can't move can't speak nothing and all this said to her is one of the soldiers just goes a quiet that's it and so at this point I'm honestly gripped I think that this looks really cool so far we are covertly breaking into this building this mystery building that we don't really know the full layout of we don't know was gonna be where at cetera and someone right in front of my eyes has just stealth taken down a person without alerting any of the rest of the house and then we're in we've got our access point we're ready to start progressing through the house and try to get to wherever we're trying to get to you step into another room take some more people down with your silenced weapons and they'll die pretty quickly but what you notice in that next room is the there's a second of hesitation it's very brief but there is a slight little sliver of time where you as a player pause to go is this person gonna shoot me or are they just going to put their hands in the air like what are they gonna do and it seems like that's been very much engineered into the gameplay there is a split-second in every one of the seen counters I'm about to describe where you as a player have to make a choice and you have to make it faster because what's going to happen if you don't make it quick enough is either you're gonna get shot or if you make the decision to hastily you're gonna shoot the person in front of you even if they're innocent so that moral complexity that they talked about and that they setup is already revealing itself in each of these rooms the next room you go into has a dude and he's holding a woman hostage he's got a pistol in his hand he's got his arm around the woman's neck and he basically says don't come in or other shoe her so you as a player don't want to harm the innocent woman but when you take out the dude with a well-placed bullet the woman then reaches for a gun herself and is about to try and shoot you before you then take her down and you begin to realize that the people in this house aren't gonna play by clear-cut rules they're going to pretend to be innocent and then they're gonna try and get the drop on you and use that to their advantage it's at this point that night vision gets switched on I think the night vision actually looks pretty good it's much more sophisticated than the previous night visions from cod4 modern warfare now it's actually properly rendered and the lighting in the scene is accurate based on how well you would be able to see if you actually had night vision goggles in real life and we're looking into a scene like that it also provides this kind of vignette effect around your view so you really feel like you're in the space and you're almost looking through the eyes of an actual soldier on a mission like this it's once you've put the night-vision goggles on that you notice that in the room there's a bathroom door that's mysteriously just closed and as you go towards there you actually get shot through the bathroom door and you then react to that by spraying along the wall and you're gonna silence so doesn't make too much noise and you're able to see that the way the bullet penetration works in this game seems to have been updated as well it's almost like the division kind of system now where you shoot through something and it's not just a bullet mark on a wall like you guys remember playing rust for example right and shooting through loads of surfaces on that map you would never actually make a hole in the surface you would just shoot through whereas now there are holes in the wall and you can see through the holes so you shoot through the wall you take the guy down and you keep moving now the first point where my immersion was broken came in the corridor leaving this room so we go out of the room and there's a very obvious door to my left and then there's a staircase on the right-hand side that we need to go past the door to get to and then we can keep going further up for building the door on the left hasn't been talked about it hasn't been highlighted it's just there and you can see that it's there and what the game does and it just felt a bit annoying really was it makes one of your friends one of your characters when you're soldiers that's in your crew just walk right past the door without caring about it at all they don't check it nothing and so of course what happens is they just walk past the door like an idiot without checking what's going on and they get shot through it and so your friend is wounded you quickly rush into action and help drag your friend out of the way and then you take down the people in the room but it just felt like if we're this elite group of soldiers you're not gonna really carefully clear every room in the house apart from this one room that happens to have a shut door like no that's not gonna be the way that works of course so I kind of feel like it was just almost gratuitously added to show that your teammates can get injured in here as well like that's a risk that you're facing at all times but I just felt like the soldier should have known better anyway it's at this point the controversial bit of the demo happens that everyone's been talking of and the I think is gonna really turn some heads so you're going up the stairs as I mentioned a second ago and it's very obvious that you're now going towards a child's bedroom because there's like a cuddly toy on the wall there's a load of pictures of people with a baby there's just kids stuff essentially on a shelf and your character goes uh-huh takes a look at it and then back to the stairs and you keep going up you then go towards a room and you hear a kid crying and it's like okay they're really going there are we and as you enter the room a woman runs across your vision and goes to the crib where the baby is and where it's crying and basically grabs it and says like don't shoot or something or something along those lines now it's clear to me that in this scenario what the game is doing is its presenting a counterexample to the few examples that we saw previously of these bad guys in this house reaching for guns and then shooting you in this counter example the woman is reaching for a child and is innocent or at least isn't someone that is posing an imminent threat and so you as a player in that split-second window are supposed to make the split-second decision not to shoot the baby in the head thinking that it's a gun or something like that and I don't know man honestly at the time it felt a little less awful that I've heard it described because hearing yes there's a point in the modern warfare demo where you pick up a gun and aim the gun at a baby and if you want you can shoot that doesn't sound very good and that doesn't really sound like COD either right but in the context it wasn't that bad however I still feel like it's almost the little gratuitous just the fact that they use this woman running across the room as a very obvious or there's a bad guy oh wait no it's not and you nearly kill the kid it's something that I think some people are gonna have a real problem with when it comes out I personally think that that territory which they're trying to explore isn't something that really motivates me to play the game but also isn't something that turns me away I don't really think the call of duty would ever get to the point where I was killing so many innocent people the I felt like I just couldn't keep going with the game like it's a game right and that's something important to remember in these kind of conversations where people are talking about things that might strike others as being really controversial it is just the game and in this case as much as what they do might be distasteful to some to others it's just gonna be a scenario in a game that they don't experience as often I guess I do think that it's a very fine line that Call of Duty are trying to tread and I'm doubtful that they're gonna be able to do it tastefully and every single scenario that they try and bring into the game I feel like there are gonna be elements of the game where they try and throw you some moral question and you're gonna be sitting there going you know what this is actually taking me out of the experience because their gamer fiying war and gamifying war in college especially is always gonna end up with things either being more silly than they really are or then trying to have some kind of serious take from something that is I mean it's code for goodness sake right like I just like I said in the beginning don't see Cod as like a mil sim where I need to feel like the people dying around me are actually dying anyway it wasn't long after this part of the demo the whole thing ended and they're like thank you we're not gonna be taking any questions right now but I hope you enjoyed it and I was left afterwards with this feeling of okay I get it now I get what they're going for with modern warfare but at the same time genuinely I feel like it's way too early to actually make any kind of judgement about this game what I'd seen twenty minutes of gameplay and I still to this day don't really know what the moment-to-moment combat is going to be like in this or six seven hour campaign that they give us I know that there's gonna be a fifteen minute section where you're being very sneaky and quiet but that's not what Cod is cod isn't a very sneaky and quiet game for six or seven hours right there are moments we are running through a battlefield and you're shooting everyone in front of you there are moments with big explosions therewith corset pieces there are moments with cool characters that you interact with that do cool stuff themselves and very few of those sorts of things were actually present in the demo I kind of feel like I saw an excerpt of one of the themes that they're trying to go for with modern warfare but I didn't actually see the game if that makes sense I've seen so many people saying this is an insta cop this is a pre-order game this is a day one whatever my opinion is the you shouldn't really pre-order games it's very rarely a good idea to do so even if it turns out to be a great game just because in the same way the people hate micro transactions pre-orders sort of feed into that same issue where you can get a game that doesn't have micro transactions on launch like cod doesn't have every year and then suddenly after a month they put in a load of micro transactions and your bait you all into getting invested in that system it's really scummy and you face that risk if you preorder a game especially this far out and you then further expose yourself to rest because of the fact that they offer things in the pre-order like a prestige token I think it was a black ops 4 but you could redeem that now and as soon as you've redeemed it you can't cancel your pre-order anymore because you've redeemed one of the pre-order items so they're really sneaky with those things and I don't think based on what we've seen you have enough information to say modern warfare is going to be good you just don't we've seen publicly what two minutes of it and privately I've seen about 1520 and that little bit looks cool but who knows what the multiplayer is gonna be like who knows what the spe cops is gonna be like it's still early days anyway hopefully this gave you a bit of an honest insight into what the gameplay actually entailed I tried to kind of paint a picture for you guys of what was actually going on in the mission as well as telling you some of the pertinent details about how it felt to watch I've seen a lot of people saying it looks absolutely terrible because it looks so distasteful it's called a duty they're exploring really serious themes but it's called and there's just a complete disconnect there I've seen others saying they were on the edge of their seat the whole time they felt like it was absolutely riveting they were glued to their screen and I think that that kind of type to me of player experiences is going to continue as we go towards launch and so videos like this where I'm just sort of giving you unfiltered thoughts are gonna be increasingly important as we learn more about the game because it could still honestly go either way so thanks for coming here click for more posts.