I've spent hundreds of hours playing every CoD online since Modern Warfare 2. I liked some of them better than others, but they were all good games and I liked them. Ghosts looked amazing, I was still having fun on Black Ops 2 and getting the next brand new CoD seemed to make sense. What the fuck have they done?
The game looks dull, grey and washed out. Yes, sure, we're in the war, everything is destroyed, there's no room for happy colours, but damn, this stuff is depressing! What's even more depressing is how the singleplayer campaign apparently only takes four hours to beat (yay, twice as long as Homefront!), the textures are low-resolution and seriously boring, yet the whole damn thing requires 50 gigs worth of space. How? Why? How the fuck can this pile of crap take up so much space?
Okay, I don't really play CoD for the visuals, but this thing was supposed to be "next gen". It was supposed to be a brand new engine (which later turned out to be a lie and they've just tuned up the same ol' Quake engine some more). It's only gonna be rendered in 720p on the Xbox One. On a next generation console. Sounds like one seriously demanding game, right? Well... strangely enough, it is. Game won't even boot up with anything less than 6 gigs of RAM - and it looks like something from 2008, if that.
Oh well. Claire and I tried to team up, which took countless hours of fiddling with our router. Our NAT shows as 'strict' with all ports known to man being wide open, UPNP active, we've even tried a fucking DMZ, but to no avail. And finding a lag-free game via matchmaking with a strict NAT is about as likely as finding actual chicken inside a McNugget. The real fun began when one of our friends back in Germany wanted to join the fun. Which worked, once, for about five minutes. Then all of us got kicked out of the game. "Lost connection to host". Because fuck dedicated servers in 2013. And since finding a new match took its sweet time, our friend tried to minimize the game (alt+tab is disabled, but ctrl+alt+del works), which caused the game to freeze his entire system.
When he got back, he could no longer connect to any multiplayer mode whatsoever. "Server is currently not available". Both the official forums and the Steam forums are full of complaints regarding that exact same problem, but there's no known fix as of yet. So, back to just Claire and I - after three hours of pointless messing about, trying to get our friend back in the game.
And even with just the two of us, the whole experience was punishing, to say the least. It is perfectly normal on CoD Ghosts to unload round after round after round into an enemy player when walking around a corner, only to die in what looks to be a single shot, within a fracture of a second. On the resulting killcam, you can see yourself casually strutting right into the enemy gunfire without as much as firing a single shot. Lag compensation? Client-side hit detection? Hard to say, because there's no way to tell your damn ping in the game. Ping rates are no longer shown in CoD Ghosts.
Speaking of missing features included in previous CoD games: Theatre mode? Gone. Emblem editor? Gone. A goddamn FOV-slider? Fucking GONE! Ghosts sports a default FOV of 65 - which, when sitting in front of a big PC screen results in headaches, as the whole thing looks seriously zoomed in. There is a 3rd party FOV-changer to help fix the problem, but Activision aren't too keen on people using it. The site hosting the FOV-changer has received a court order, the download had since been removed and one may get banned for using this handy little tool. I'm not kidding. Let me make this perfectly clear: There is a tool out there, which allows me to do something the game should let me do anyway (and has done in every CoD before) and I refrain from using it, out of fear that I might get caught and banned for it!
If you're somewhat familiar with the pre-release footage of the game, you'll probably know about the supposedly super awesome sound-overhaul and the best ingame sound effects in any Call of Duty and what have you. Well, my game sounds tinny, crappy and not overwhelming at all. So I figured, hey, maybe it's just my settings, right? So I checked, and... you're not gonna believe this, but the Ghosts audio settings consist of volume control and... and nothing. That's it. No speaker setup, no individual sliders for speech, music, sound FX, nothing. Just one master volume slider and that's it. And while we're already at it - sound effects changing with your environments was cool and new well over a decade ago, back when Soundblaster Live was new.
I could go on and on and on. About how they've recycled half of the soldier voiceover files from Black Ops 2. How they're still using the same pre-rendered death animations from ten years ago, including a hilarious headshot death sequence, where the character double-facepalms in slow-motion, seemingly trying to locate their nose. I've never been shot in the face before, but I'm relatively sure this is not the way I'd react. Ragdolls? PhysX? Nope. Floating guns, corpses and other crap all over the place!
So, the game looks and sounds mediocre at best. At least that means it performs alright, yes? Ha! Have you seen Battlefield 4? That shit looks amazing! You do get some frame-dips there, even on powerful systems, but damn, it looks SO good! Then there's Ghosts. You fire up the title screen and - BAM! 37 FPS! THE TITLE SCREEN LAGS! The sound stutters, the mouse jumps all over the screen, the fucking thing is so laggy, it's actually quite difficult to click on the online mode to start!
I'm running a decent Quadcore setup here. With a reasonably beefy GTX 770. The 4GB Zotac one. I play a seriously modded Skyrim with ENB and grass on steroids and god knows what else on a smooth, steady 60 FPS in 2k Ultra HD.
Ghosts? Look at the Steam forums! There are countless people demanding a refund, because the game won't even launch if you don't have at least 6 gigs of memory! Ironically, it never uses more than 2 gigs and the minimum requirements section at the Steam store page clearly states that 6 GB are required, but that's beside the point. Why is this game so demanding? Why does it run like crap, even on decent hardware? It sure as fuck isn't related to any stunning, breath-taking visuals, because there aren't any.
I want to like this game. Really, I do. Because it was hideously expensive. And some of the gunplay, when not completely ruined by awful lag and shitty matchmaking, feels pretty solid. I actually like the weapon handling, I think some of the scorestreaks are pretty awesome and a lot more exciting than the same old stuff we've been getting year after year after year. Problem is, when basic features such as a fucking ping meter, fov-slider or sound settings aren't there and the greatest challenge lies within finding a lag-free game that I can join with friends, then I can't help but feel seriously ripped off. But I suppose that's what you get when all the good folks from Infinity Ward are off working on Titanfall and the studio is but a shadow of its former self. Grrr!
Ghosts has a stunning user rating of 1.7 on Metacritic right now, with the console versions following somewhere around 2.3 and 3.0 as of this moment. And I've already seen some reviewers out there go crazy over how fucking good this game is supposed to be. Did they even play this thing? Incompetent fucks, the lot of them.
On a happier note, here's Hugo being fed by hand.
-Cat
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