The Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 private beta is live on PS4 as we speak, and I’ve been playing since last night, which has ended up being a good amount of game time.
The return to Black Ops has excited and worried some fans. Excited some who hold Black Ops as the pinnacle of the various Call of Duty subseries, worrying some who think that COD is drawing too much inspiration from its competition.
The biggest story of the year for the series is that Call of Duty is forgoing a single player campaign and replacing it with Blackout, a new, battle royale type mode with a sprawling map and vehicles. Blackout will be previewed in a separate test later this year, but for now, this private beta is just the standard meat and potatoes of Call of Duty, multiplayer.
A few months ago, there was a lot of negative buzz around the supposed idea that Treyarch was leaning hard into the “hero shooter” genre with Black Ops 4 multiplayer. Black Ops 3 introduced classes with “super” moves among other specialties, and the fear was that COD was doubling down on that for Black Ops 4.
In a way it is but…it really isn’t, and I think most “traditional” Call of Duty fans aren’t going to mind the current system in place.
There are more classes this time around, or “heroes” if you really want to call them that (the game calls them “specialists”). The beta has 10 available to play with, and assuredly more will be coming either in the full release or DLC.
However, the only real difference between them is literally just two abilities. There’s one, a super ability that can range from special ultra guns to attack dogs to riot shields and x-ray vision, and another that’s on a shorter cooldown, which can be some sort of grenade, a vision pulse, an ammo pack or a tactical ability like razor wire to cut off corridors or a remote spawn point.
Two abilities does not a hero shooter make, in my opinion.
In the matches I played, you were lucky if you got to use your super move once or twice per game, making it more akin to something like Destiny’s supers rather than the faster-recharging ones of Overwatch. And while the secondary skill was on a lower cooldown, how often you used this singular ability was variable. The grappling hook, for instance, can be used every ten seconds or so. But an auto-seeking shock mine that was essentially a free kill, I probably only got to use four times in a single match.
And if that’s still too much “class stuff” for you, you can ditch the secondary ability altogether. In a custom class, you can swap out whatever that ability is for something more traditional like a frag grenade, stun grenade, throwing tomahawk or what have you. So then you literally only have a super and your usual array of killstreaks.
Of course, another primary difference from Overwatch is that you’re still able to use any weapon you want with any class. Sure, the super weapons some classes get are themed, like electric snipers or grenade launchers or flamethrowers, but you can use an SMG, LMG, AR or sniper with any class as a primary, which is far from anything remotely resembling a hero shooter. It’s just…a Call of Duty game.
I’m not sure whether or not Treyarch walked any of its old plans back after getting negative feedback, but the private beta is showing me that Black Ops 4 is about as close to a traditional COD title as you can get, with one or two caveats, and also this time around there is no jetpack-based movement, taking the series back to “boots on the ground,” other than the one guy whose ability is to zipline around places (which is a little clunky on most of these maps).
I don’t mind the current ability system. You can choose between an auto-injector medkit device that heals you fast, or one that reduces your ability cooldowns. I kind of like things like frags and stun grenades being on cooldowns and being tied to specific classes, which results in way, way less spam, and makes those throws more meaningful. So far it seems like Recon is one of the strongest classes with all its vision granting. I had good luck with Ajax, and his stun grenade that’s more powerful than any I’ve seen across past games, and also Battery, where I racked up five kills in a row with her super grenade launcher.
The subdued class system tied together with ground-based combat makes Black Ops 4 pretty fun, and really, nothing like Overwatch or any other hero shooter, despite initial comparisons. I have zero idea how COD is going to work as a battle royale in Blackout with such low TTK, but I suppose that’s a question for another day.
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