The OT is littered with relentless comments stating how terrible it supposedly is. Most of which don't provide many details, but seemingly every page has a few posters airing a general dislike with some outright calling it the "worst CoD campaign ever".
With the hole Battlefront has left in terms of solo content, I am eyeing Blops 3 and its glowing reviews, but really want to hear exactly what it is that is causing such disdain from GAF.
I haven't touched a CoD game since Blops 1(really liked!) and figured the new one was the easy choice to jump back in, but now am unsure. Let it all out GAF! Inform and humor me! (Shall I try AW instead? MW3?....Ghosts?)
Everything. It's boring, the story takes forever to pick up, and even when it does it makes very little sense and gives you almost no reason to care about anything that's going on, there's some story beats that are handled laughably poorly, and the encounters always feel just a bit off.
I've enjoyed almost every CoD campaign since 4, even Ghosts to a degree, but I just wanted BO3 to be over.
The campaign doesnt deserve to be in the Black Ops timeline. The previous 3 campaigns in this timeline bare no significance. Wheres Reznov? where's the Masons????
I like it. It's slow in the middle, but the last third has the appropriate amount of crazy for a blops game. The game play is cod so either you like that or you don't.
I've liked the past ones, but I couldn't follow it. They talk about people I didn't know - or remember, maybe - like it was some major revelation and I had no clue what they were talking about, and it jumps around a ton.
I think - when it works - the game is totally worth buying just for the multiplayer this time around. First one that I'd skip the campaign totally.
The final half is crazy as hell. I actually enjoyed the story, very psychedelic. Having said that, the gameplay wasn't varied like previous entries and consisted of move, shoot, move, shoot.
Weren't as many interesting scenarios or set pieces as prior games. Enemies seemed relentless with wave after wave, combat encounters felt like shooting galleries, frame rate issues both in gameplay and especially cutscenes (drops to sub 20FPS were frequent in cutscenes) hilariously bad and cringeworthy writing and voice acting (at least the male VO). The last mission seemingly dragged on.
I still had fun overall as some levels were enjoyable and the gunplay is as tight as ever, it was just a disappointment since Black Ops I and II are my favorite campaigns in the series. I just expected more from Treyarch.
Ditto on the disjointed feel of the campaign. The lack of a proper intro, or even a proper explanation of what exactly is going at the opening is a real downer. The game just throws you into the world with no idea who the players are. I made it about four missions in before I gave up trying to understand it.
For me personally, it being unrelated to the previous two Black Ops games (which had excellent stories and for Black Ops II the multiple endings were a great plus) really put a damper on things. The game just feels...flat, even compared to Advanced Warfare and Ghosts.
I mean, good on people for enjoying the multiplayer if that's their thing, but the package as a whole left me wanting more.
My biggest problem with it is the intense focus on co-op. In a game that already has such a substantial multiplayer suite, including co-op zombies, I just want my god damn Call of Duty single-player campaign. Why you gotta fuck me like this, Treyarch?
The co-op focus leads the single-player experience into a tedious run through waves of spongy robots that take magazine... after magazine...... AFTER MAGAZINE, to take down.
The magic powers they give you in this one are pretty cool, but you know what? The only thing more boring than waiting behind cover for your health to recharge is waiting behind cover for your magic to recharge.
One boring-ass campaign, no Kevin Spacey gimmick to keep me interested, nothing. Better luck next time.
And I certainly can't forget them introducing a character as lame as Hendricks into the franchise, him and his fucking candy bar.
This is something I can agree with. I've really never had this feeling in a CoD campaign before. You'll be in a mission and think it's over...and then it'll keep going...and keep going. It's really strange. I'm not sure if it's like that because they apparently built it with co-op in mind and I played it in single player. But several levels had me thinking "Holy shit, this is still going?".
I like it. I love the skills, the enemy types and all of the mini objectives for more XP and of course the RE Raid Mode like loot with levelled guns. I just need to go and finish it on my profile after playing it through at a friend's. But too much stuff to play now.
I usually enjoy the campaigns of the CoD games I pick up but here I just lost interest. Compared to AW last year which I thoroughly enjoyed, the set pieces, the characters the plot. I thought it was an interesting world with a nice twist and it looked great and ran great on my PC. With Blops3, apart from not looking as good or running as good as AW did, I'm like 5 missions in or something and I don't really care what is going on or who these characters are or why things are bad. And the levels and set pieces so far aren't as good as previous games. Like there is one where you're running from tree thing to three thing, ziplining and eventually getting into a boat and fucking shit up and that sounds cool and exciting but it just wasn't.
The best part was at the end of the very first mission where you
get torn limb from limb by a robot
. That was cool but even then, it seemed like a "lets one-up AW's opening mission!" Like it was shocking when that happened in AW because of how it was executed and it was cool here but also kinda stupid and I couldn't stop thinking of AW which did it much better.
The campaign doesnt deserve to be in the Black Ops timeline. The previous 3 campaigns in this timeline bare no significance. Wheres Reznov? where's the Masons????
-The characters are totally forgettable (though Christopher Meloni was great in the acting department)
-The story is a mess of stupid sci-fi jargon that does not resolve itself in any meaningful way
- Returning to the safehouse every mission is silly and breaks any sense of urgency or cohesion - plus there is nothing interesting to do there. Compare it to something like the Paladin in Splinter Cell Blacklist - you can walk around, upgrade it, talk to your companions for side missions, and at one point it even gets attacked, which breaks up the formula a little.
- ....and lastly the one BIG ISSUE: NO mission variety. Seriously. Aside from one tiny ass stealth section and one VTOL piloting sequence, literally ALL you ever do is walk forward and shoot. Constantly. 100% of the time. It's totally idiotic. People often falsely criticize COD for being a totally boring, linear shooter - but aside from BLOPSIII, that's really rarely ever true. The previous games always make a point of providing variety of pacing, and this game really fails spectacularly on that front.
-Boring characters, not so great voice acting, at times very terrible dialogue.
-Horribly told story (There's a pretty huge twist, but even then it's pretty bleh)
-Mediocre level design and a strong lack of amazing set pieces COD is known for. Everything is the same, lack of variety.
-Many locations we've seen time and time again, Asia, Middle East. Why not something fresh? Why not Warsaw, Toronto, Venice, anything other than the same old.
-Crappy pacing, ending is terrible and seems to drag on forever made worse by the fact that it's probably the worst mission of the game.
-Plenty of new tools, only a few of them are useful.
-Forced co-op seems to have played a roll in some of the issues mentioned above.
-Shouldn't be called Black Ops.
-Finally, offline and online saves are separate. You can't do or earn some of the things offline as you can online. If their servers are down, your internet is down, psn/xbl are down or you just want to play offline, well you can't, unless you play locally start to finish sacrificing access to some features.
This is something I can agree with. I've really never had this feeling in a CoD campaign before. You'll be in a mission and think it's over...and then it'll keep going...and keep going. It's really strange. I'm not sure if it's like that because they apparently built it with co-op in mind and I played it in single player. But several levels had me thinking "Holy shit, this is still going?".
There could be something to that. I too played it single player. As a whole I really enjoyed the campaign to the point that I played, and I'm also into multiplayer much more than I ever thought that I would be. It's a really bizarre situation.
Well...I think gameplay wise it's really fun but it doesn't feature that much classic black ops insanity until the very end. Main problem is it doesn't feel like a sequel and the only ties between 3 and 2 is menedez causing the governments to have dead systems around metropolitan cities. The protagonist comes of as a meathead and the
nova 6
reveal was fucking stupid. No Masons or Reznov really hurt and the lack of Woods screaming like a fucking lunatic really annoyed me. The ending sets up black ops 4 so who knows what we'll get but I personally want it to be like 2s campaign but with cyber core and no strikeforce.
Edit: also I think certain scenes where way too fucked up for their own good.
I don't think it was the worst campaign ever like some people say. It was just... average as a whole.
I really liked the ability to customize your character, level up for unlocks, have various challenges to complete, have items to collect and display at your safehouse. I think other future campaigns will seem boring options wise in comparison if they're lacking that sort of thing.
Story wise, it felt disappointing. I found the first few levels interesting but after that, it sort of goes downhill and in a weird direction. It also sucks that you have to find out what truly happened in the story through a reddit post. I mean, I'm all for things being secrets but if your story is that "out there" that people need to be detectives to find out what really happened, you know you messed up. I don't think this is a spoiler but I'll edit this if people think it is, but parts of the game are set up so you're playing in a simulated world. I thought this perfectly opened up an opportunity to go back to the past two games. After this was introduced, I thought for sure there would be at least one level from each game dedicated to that. A level where you go on some secret important mission that Mason and Frank did, something like that which changed things in the future that led to what's currently happening. But... nope. Never happened. HUGE missed opportunity there in my opinion. Very disappointing to me. The WW2 thing was kind of neat but yeah, it doesn't compare to what could have been.
Design wise, I liked the first level quite a bit. It got me engaged with the world, story and characters. But there was only two levels I liked outside of that. I'll spoiler tag them in case people think they're level spoilers for some reason. But the
rooftop mission where you're supposed to be stealthy and then the mission where you switch back and forth between flying the plane and going on the ground
are the two other cool missions to me. The game just lacked variety outside of those three. They were fun and the rest of the game was "okay, typical waves of enemies, maybe some sort of boss at the end. That's it." Which is also disappointing. I don't know why they always feel the need to throw waves of enemies at you. Mix it up more!
And one last thing, kind of related to level design that really irked me, is how the end of almost every single level ends in "we need to get the hell out of here! Run!" Drives me crazy. Can't a level just end normally without the characters needing to run for their lives because everything is falling apart? It's so stupid and so cliche.
I thought the final level felt like a chore but whatever. Overall, I thought it was an average campaign. I really feel like the customization/unlocks/leveling system of the campaign is what really saved it for me. I liked them introducing all of that. It made me want to keep playing and unlocking new things. But overall I had some fun with it, especially thanks to the trio of levels that I really enjoyed. It could have been so much better, though. But oh well. It wasn't the worst or the most boring CoD campaign ever.
My biggest problem with it is the intense focus on co-op. In a game that already has such a substantial multiplayer suite, including co-op zombies, I just want my god damn Call of Duty single-player campaign. Why you gotta fuck me like this, Treyarch?
The co-op focus leads the single-player experience into a tedious run through waves of spongy robots that take magazine... after magazine...... AFTER MAGAZINE, to take down.
The magic powers they give you in this one are pretty cool, but you know what? The only thing more boring than waiting behind cover for your health to recharge is waiting behind cover for your magic to recharge.
One boring-ass campaign, no Kevin Spacey gimmick to keep me interested, nothing. Better luck next time.
And I certainly can't forget them introducing a character as lame as Hendricks into the franchise, him and his fucking candy bar.
-Finally, offline and online saves are separate. You can't do or earn some of the things offline as you can online. If their servers are down, your internet is down, psn/xbl are down or you just want to play offline, well you can't, unless you play locally start to finish sacrificing access to some features.
Can someone elaborate on the differences between the online and offline campaign? I wasn't even aware that there were two options until I after I finished the game and read up about it. Seemed like a fairly big source of frustration for some folks. And for some reason I can't seem to google up the differences :\
The co-op focus leads the single-player experience into a tedious run through waves of spongy robots that take magazine... after magazine...... AFTER MAGAZINE, to take down.
What did you guys think of the twist hidden in the mission texts?
The entire game is a dream.
I think the story is pretty stupid though, it's largely incoherent then attempts to excuse this with the tying of a few ends at the very end, or in some obscure subtext. That's ridiculous.
Additionally, the entire game screamed as if it was trying to appeal to young teens with shock-value nonsense throughout. Civilan executions, intensive gore even on mission one, people getting limbs cut off. Many of these incidents didn't need to happen either, but they did for the sake of gore and 'intensity', but it just comes across as juvenile.
Played on Hardened. Slight spoilers ahead, but it's so bad who cares.
It's a slog to run through. Gameplay-wise, it's just waves of enemies coming after you small area after small area. None of the set-pieces are particularly well done or good or exciting even. Half the time you're not really using the exo powers or whatever they're called. Even the damn robots aren't all that much more interesting or challenging to fight, they just have some extra health. Drones are boring, too, and were more of a threat in AW.
The story and cast of characters suck, too. Your partner becomes more and more aggravating (maybe not aggravating, but whiny) with each passing level. The writing is TERRIBLE. Especially when they're trying to weave in some exposition for the background of characters or gameplay devices. Like in the first time you get to enter the "in-between missions" barracks your character goes "Hey man where are we??" "Don't you know? You're in the armory where you can prep." "Oh duh, I remember." "Hey, I know this is totally left-field, but you also remember how I don't trust the CIA AT ALL WINK WINK NUDGE NUDGE". It's crap, the characters are crap and aren't anywhere near likeable like the cast from WAW-BOII, and the story feels completely disconnected from those games and stories, which I think is a good thing at this point (aside from Nova 6's brief appearance and one frustrated mention of Raul Menendez).
The only two good things in the campaign was the Katee Sackhoff level because it's WWII (even if it's the most contrived reason for it existing, even WITHIN the game's established story, which is saying something). Plus, the boss fights are pretty cool here as well, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy those.
With an ending ripped straight from Crysis 2 (spoilers?), this game's campaign can take a dump. Even the convoluted Zombies story is far more interesting and character driven than this crap. It's such a shame because this game has a great multiplayer mode and zombie mode, both of which are excellent and worth $60 on their own, I think. But as someone who loves to play COD Campaigns, it seriously puts a huge dent into this game for me. How did we get a campaign with branching stories in BOII to this bullshit nonsense emo AI crap in BOIII? Like what?
Also, the Nightmares campaign that's unlocked, while I love that they tried to do a zombie campaign, is awful, too. It's just reused levels replaced with zombies but it somehow makes things even more boring with an awful narrative slapped over it. They had THREE YEARS and this is the campaign that was delivered? Holy shit.
Treyarch, if you want to do a zombie campaign, grab Dempsey, Nikolai, Takeo, and Richtofen and re-use the WAW-BO maps to Moon, add some cutscenes (maybe) in-between with voiceovers in the actual maps and add whatever bullshit markers or objectives and people would rejoice. Just don't do Nightmares again, please.
Additionally, the entire game screamed as if it was trying to appeal to young teens with shock-value nonsense throughout. Civilan executions, intensive gore even on mission one, people getting limbs cut off. Many of these incidents didn't need to happen either, but they did for the sake of gore and 'intensity', but it just comes across as juvenile.
To be fair Treyarch's games have always been more far gory than the rest since World at War. I actually don't mind, bodies are supposed to get fucked when you're blowing them up with crazy weapons.
I'm enjoying it quite a lot, but some elements of the story are not explained brilliantly, or are delivered as speech in between action which means naturally you don't focus on them because you're keeping an eye out for the next enemies and so on. The actual stages I'm very happy with.
That robot battle in the CIA bunker with the cooling towers was epic
Gameplay wise, you have some variety on what to do with the cybernetic powers and playing with those is fun. Some levels are actually very good, while others are just plain boring. Some of the worst offenders that come to mind are areas with infinite enemies or just plain stupid objectives (plant a mine in the middle of the battlefield).
EDIT: Most of the bosses were actually pretty good.
Also, movement mechanics are underutilized, so all that thing about running into walls to search for new routes aren't all that interesting. The enemies are also pretty generic, I had trouble seeing who was friend and who was foe sometimes.
The story is made to be confusing, but the game never gives you a chance or a reason to solve it's riddle. So that just makes it plain bad and confusing. You are shooting people half away around the world and nothing makes sense. Thus, it becomes mindless shooting and not in a good way.
I wouldn't call the worst campaign or a horrible one. Just unremarkable.
If you really need a SP Shooter, try Wolfenstein or Binary Domain. I guarantee those are much better in terms of campaign.
I really, really liked the second mission where they're introducing you to all the future stuff you can do through re-experiencing that attack and all the investigative events. I thought that was super cool.
The rest of the campaign has been meh so far, and Hendricks is fucking AWFUL. The voice acting for the main character is also really bad.
It's complete and utter nonsense. And lol at them playing Jefferson Airplane in the final act. It's trippy for the sake of being trippy, it's entirely forced and not to serve the plot or gameplay. Everything is completely unearned and uninteresting.
Also, the Nightmares campaign that's unlocked, while I love that they tried to do a zombie campaign, is awful, too. It's just reused levels replaced with zombies but it somehow makes things even more boring with an awful narrative slapped over it. They had THREE YEARS and this is the campaign that was delivered? Holy shit.
Treyarch, if you want to do a zombie campaign, grab Dempsey, Nikolai, Takeo, and Richtofen and re-use the WAW-BO maps to Moon, add some cutscenes (maybe) in-between with voiceovers in the actual maps and add whatever bullshit markers or objectives and people would rejoice. Just don't do Nightmares again, please.
I already knew about the zombie campaign going in, and I just played the mission where you descend into some circular facility and it gets to a point where robots are popping out of windows and some water and I was just thinking "wow, they're just gonna pallette swap these guys with zombies, huh?"
This is something I can agree with. I've really never had this feeling in a CoD campaign before. You'll be in a mission and think it's over...and then it'll keep going...and keep going. It's really strange. I'm not sure if it's like that because they apparently built it with co-op in mind and I played it in single player. But several levels had me thinking "Holy shit, this is still going?".
The second level where you're going through memories or whatever took forever. It just wouldn't end. I only got 3 or 4 missions through before I put it down. It's that bad.
I must not have been gifted this season. I finished Halo 5 and I've been playing Fallout and Battlefront, so I don't know what to say.
I play mostly MP, which is shocking.
The campaign, well I wasn't feeling it real well. I felt more comfortable with AW's.
Idk what's up.
I figured some people (as mentioned above) didn't have any problems finishing it. I was just playing what I wanted and the campaign felt like I was losing interest.
The tech stuff is cool, but what is it doing? Why don't I just play Remember Me or Fear Effect instead?
Throw me in MP for a while and I'm done for a while. I've also had finals coming up, so lol that's been a reason to play selected titles when I can. I've had time, really I have, but the campaign feels like some other person is enjoying it.
I'm at mission 5 or 6? What's to remember besides SVU?
