That's partly because, though the advantages and disadvantages have been smoothed, the systems still feel opaque. By changing the systems by which those rewards are gained, and by making the rewards considerably less destructive, Codblops mitigates the frustration but doesn't do away with it entirely. The target of the airstrike can’t avoid it by using any of the skills that the game teaches, and the airstrike is itself a reward for a player who likely doesn't need the advantage. This is why there's a problem when one player calls in an airstrike upon the head of another. The unlock system therefore measures your progress for you: rewarding you with short-term rewards during matches, and providing access to new and sometimes more powerful tools which are persistent to your account. Your gradual internal progress at those skills, as you memorise distances and increase reflex speeds and learn to compensate for recoil, is hard to measure. I think it remains a problem because it extends into form rather than only execution.īlops 3's multiplayer is about gathering knowledge of levels and executing on precision skills like positioning, aiming and shooting.

But the problem that remains, which I still encounter constantly, is the part about being killed repeatedly by people with impossibly quick reflexes. To summarise, I think Blops 3 is a pretty great version of a multiplayer game that's been becoming gradually better for years. Black Ops 3's levels are all consistently good, and though I've yet to master any of them, it has been rewarding to learn their sight lines and shortcuts. Jumpjets let you clamber up to high ledges and windows, meaning there's no such thing as a defensible sniper position, and the ability to wallrun allows for more diverse shapes to the atriums and killzones that intersect with each map's twisting corridors. That future setting - and again, this is stuff which has been true for a few iterations - has also helped clean up the worst of Call of Duty's level design. Much of what made Call of Duty multiplayer sour was washed away long ago, when Killstreaks were replaced by the teamwork-encouraging Scorestreaks, unlocks were balanced or removed to make them more generous to worse players and less all-powerful for the best, and when the future setting gave its developers an excuse (as if an excuse was needed) to build a world of colourful buildings, pink guns, tree-covered levels, and now a character roster which includes (gasp) women. Even 'Analking Skywank' showed good sportsmanship at the end of a losing match: I've been playing Black Ops 3 for a few days however and I haven't once been machinegunned to unavoidable death by an invisibly circling AC-130, and I've barely seen any bad chat behaviour. Call of Duty traded its modern military setting for the near- or mid-future some time ago, but the popular conception of the game is still one where mean kids control dudes in khakis, kill you repeatedly with impossibly quick reflexes, and call air strikes down upon your head. Your prize: a game that's increasingly difficult to stereotype, which is fast and often fun, which has found solutions to many of its ancient frustrations, but which still has an annoying and possibly insoluble problem at its core. There are times when Call of Duty: Black Ops III's multiplayer feels like a scratchcard from which you're scraping the dull metal grey surface of a military shooter to reveal the three matching Quake symbols below.

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