My Thoughts on the Black Ops 4 Beta

I know that this is going up on Monday as opposed to Sunday but I just had so much going on over the weekend that it would have impossible to write this yesterday.

The multiplayer in Call of Duty can be very hit or miss with me. For example, I thoroughly enjoy playing Call of Duty: World War II’s multiplayer, but I can’t stand the multiplayer in Infinite Warfare. And after spending some time with the Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 beta, I have rather mixed feelings.

Weapon balance tends to be a bit of a joke in COD games, and it still kind of is in the BO4 beta. For example, the Swordfish, a 4-round burst gun, can probably kill you in one burst with the right attachments, otherwise it’ll be two bursts. Then there’s also a semi-auto (one bullet at a time) gun that takes maybe five or so good shots to kill. The M1 Garand from COD: WWII and the Sheiva from BO3 could each kill in two to three shots and they had decently fast fire rates. I know that this is still a beta and not everything is polished, but if this is any indication of what’s to come, then I can’t wait to see which gun comes out on top as the most obnoxious.

It also doesn’t help that all of the guns kind of felt the same. After using the first three assault rifles, I didn’t notice too much of a difference between them all. In virtually every other Call of Duty game, every gun seemed to have a distinctive feel, but all of the guns in the beta just felt the same. I hope that in the final release everything feels a bit different, but now we just have to wait and see. Though I will say this: weapon customization is great. One of my issues with COD: WWII was that it felt like every weapon only had a few attachments to choose from, and they were the same for every single weapon. BO4 has a lot of different attachments and not every weapon has the same ones, which does provide some differences, albeit minute and nuanced, between the weapons.

Many of the specialists that were introduced in BO3 make a return in BO4, and I don’t really mind them for the most part. Every specialist has two unique abilities and a manual heal. For the most part, these abilities don’t feel too obnoxious, but there are a few exceptions. First up is Ajax and his flashbang. In other Call of Duty games, you get flashed and are at a disadvantage for a second or so, but you can still potentially fight back. Well not against Ajax. His flashbang lasts for an obnoxiously long time and not only is there the initial blindness, but after a second or so of that, your character holds their hand up to their face for a few more seconds, effectively doubling the length of the flashbang. And of course by the time that the effect has worn off, you’re dead. Battery is the other specialist that is a little too strong. Due to these new specialist abilities, you can’t equip grenades like you normally could. Instead, you either get your specialist abilities, or you can replace one with a pice of equipment, like a trophy system or tomahawk. So not only do characters with grenades like Ajax and Battery at an advantage, their grenades are incredibly strong. Battery’s grenade is like a cluster bomb mixed with a semtex grenade, so the damage is incredibly high, and so is its blast radius. Her War Machine ultimate ability is also infuriating and borderline broken. You really don’t have to aim with the War Machine at all and you will still get kills. While playing domination other night, someone got the play of the game by just shooting the War Machine at the B point flag. No aiming was involved. To further my point, earlier today I got flashed shortly after activating my war machine. I couldn’t see, but I still fired about wildly and got two kills. Totally fair and balanced.

The game modes that I played in the beta were also a mixed bag. Team deathmatch, my all around favorite game mode in most games, was just fine, unfortunately I could rarely play it. The way that the game modes were divided up had kill confirmed (the game mode where after you kill an enemy you have to pick up their dropped dog tag in order to confirm the kill and the point for your team) and team deathmatch put in the same playlist, and almost every game was kill confirmed. Kill confirmed has never been my favorite game mode in COD but I hated it so much more in this beta. Domination was fun (the game mode where the two teams fight over three points), while hardpoint was just as mediocre as it usually is (the game mode where the two teams fight over one single point that appears at different locations every minute or so). There were also two new game modes: control and heist.

I thoroughly enjoyed control. In control, the one team defends two points while the other team tries to capture them, then the roles switch until one team wins three rounds. However, each team only has thirty lives, so the victor could also be decided through a war of attrition. I played a few games of control and thought that it was a ton of fun, because even though lives mattered and it was competitive, it was still forgiving enough to be fun.

Heist, on the other hand, was awful. Imagine the already stressful and annoying search and destroy game mode, the one life per round game mode teeming with the sweatiest try-hards, then put it on steroids. In heist, you get one life, so you either win by killing the other team, or you can win by picking up the cash and extracting it. But, instead of going in with your own custom loadout, you need to build it up from scratch in the game based on how much money you have and how much money the different guns, attachments, and perks cost, much like how Counter-Strike: Global Offensive works, but even more annoying. Due to the fast-paced, casual nature of Call of Duty, extremely strategic and punishing game modes like this just aren’t that fun or enjoyable, at least for me.

I also feel obligated to talk about the new manual health regeneration. It’s fine. It honestly doesn’t feel that intrusive and I think that it makes gunfights a lot more unpredictable, and therefore interesting. I really don’t mind the new mechanic, but I really do hope that it doesn’t become the new norm in every single game.

Another new addition is the fog of war on the minimap, but unlike the manual health regeneration, the fog of war is a not a new addition that I like. Due to the fog of war, it’s easy for you to know where your enemy is, but the same thing applies to your opponent. Because of this, flanking becomes very difficult. Numerous times I have tried to go around one of the back lanes to get behind the enemy, but someone has always seen me and intercepted me before I could reach my unsuspecting targets. I’m hoping that in the full release of the game they fix the fog of war somehow, because it genuinely messes with a lot of playstyles. Flanking becomes virtually impossible, and if you want to use a silencer, what’s the point when you aren’t hidden? If the fog of war only worked when you fired your gun, then it would be fine, but as of right now, it needs some work.

In summary, I enjoyed the Black Ops 4 beta, but I also didn’t. For every game I had that made me say, “This is actually a lot of fun,” there was another game that made me say, “This is so stupid.” I don’t know how BO4 will ultimately do based on this beta. I think that it feels a lot better than BO3, but it still has a lot of the same problems that BO3 did (mainly the specialisits), and even a few more (such as the fog of war).