Last week, Activision held a press event to unveil Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare's multiplayer in San Francisco. Activision flew us out to get a first glimpse at the game's multiplayer, prior to it's "official" unveiling at Gamescom. The Developers talked about the new features in multiplayer and gave us some hands-on time with the game.
Last year's Call of Duty: Ghosts was perhaps the least well received title in the long-lived franchise and sales were less than its predecessor, Black Ops II. The game received a lot of criticism for not being significantly different from past iterations of the series and led many to speculate that the Call of Duty series was in need of a change.
During Activision's presentation at the event, there were three things that were repeated over and over again: Exoskeleton Suit, customization, and verticality.
The Exoskeleton (Exo) can be best described as an "Iron Man" suit, which the US military is actually developing. The suit gives you the ability to boost jump, hover, cloak, deflect bullets/grenades, and use a grappling hook to attach to surfaces. Each of these attributes has an Exo battery so you can only carry out these abilities for a short period of time. The suit feels similar in some respects to the suit you wore in the EA's Crysis series.
During my hands on time with the multiplayer portion of the game, I messed around quite a bit with the Exo Suit. The most notable change to gameplay are the boost jumps, which add a new vertical element (a.k.a. verticality) not seen in previous titles. There's plenty of fire fights that occur while you're airborne shooting down on enemies or taking fire from enemies seeing you jump across the map. The levels have been specifically designed around the boost jumps. In previous games if you want to reach a high spot you had to find a set of stairs or climb your way to the top. No more is this a problem as the boost jumps can give you a ridiculous amount of air. The boost jumps also give you a new slam melee attack by allowing you to land on enemies.
During my hands-on time I also equipped myself with the ballistic shield, which allows you to temporarily deflect enemy gunfire. The shield worked great for my cautious play style. I also noticed during my hands on time that the Exo Suit allows you to boost dodge by letting you move laterally or backwards behind cover much quicker than previous games in the series. You simply activate these abilities using the thumb sticks.
The weapon customization feels similar to Black Ops II's Pick 10 system but instead of 10 items, you can now choose up to 13 items ,which include your weapon attachments, perks, score streaks, killstreak rewards and Exo Suit abilities. There are literally hundreds of combinations to come up with. For those who love experimenting with different loadouts, you will be happy to know that there is a new virtual shooting range that allows you to test your load outs prior to each match. I spent a little time with the shooting range and it's a welcome addition as it gives you something productive to do while waiting for a match to start..
Scorestreaks are back and are now fully customizable. For example you could take a typical score streak reward such as a sentry turret and customize the hell out of it. A regular sentry turret may cost 500 points, but you could outfit it with a missile launcher for an additional 100 points or you could rip the gun off the turret and run around the map mowing down enemies for 200 extra points. These add-ons don't count towards your Pick 13 system. They simply force you to earn a higher score to unlock. On top of that, there are now cooperative score streaks so you can team up with your friends to unlock even more items.
The level of customization doesn't just stop at the weapons, there's plenty you can do with your characters. You can tweak every detail of your soldier, down to the gloves or goggles they wear.(One of the Sledgehammer representatives at the press conference showed off his character, who was wearing two sets of goggles.)
Also new to Advanced Warfare is the virtual lobby, which replaces the old dated lobby look of past games. The virtual lobby allows you to see each players soldier prior to entering the match. It's a cool way to show off your creations and put a face to the name.
On launch day, Advanced Warfare will feature 12 game modes, all of which will be augmented by the new Exo gear, giving a different energy to older modes like Kill confirmed and team deathmatch.
Two new modes were announced at the press conference. One was called Momentum, which is a new take on the old mode War. The second mode that was announced was Uplink, which has two teams fighting over a satellite, with each time trying to deploy the satellite in the opposing team's uplink. Think of it as basketball in the Call of Duty universe.
One of the maps we played was called Defender, which is set along a watery coast adjacent to an abandoned bunker. The level was divided into a lower portion which allowed you to run along the beach and higher ground which let you run through a number of concrete buildings. At a given time, a tsunami warning siren would go off and a huge wave would come crashing towards the beach, wiping out anything on lower ground. This is where the boost jump and hover ability comes in super handy. It wasn't clear whether other maps would feature similar events or not.
Another map we played was called Bio Lab, which is a snow covered bio-engineering facility that has close quarter spaces great for close quarters combat, while the outer lanes feature many vertical options, great for those using boost jump or the hovering ability of the Exo Suit. In addition to that, Bio Lab also features explosive canisters (i.e. small barrels) scattered throughout the map, which can be blown up and kill nearby enemies.
After spending about an hour with the multiplayer, it became apparent that at it's core Advanced Warfare is a Call of Duty game, but the way you fight has been completely changed. As the developer stressed, the Exo Suit truly does add a level of verticality you don't see in other titles. I often found myself trying to get to higher ground and jump around looking for enemies beneath me to fire on or squash like a goomba.
Advanced Warfare truly represents the biggest leap in the series' multiplayer since the game went from World War II to Modern Combat.
Even though our hands on time was fairly brief I walked away extremely impressed by what Advanced Warfare had to offer. Last year's Ghosts was probably my least favourite game in the franchise, but Advanced Warfare is shaping up to be that drastic change the series needed.
- Sidd Masand
