Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare – Multiplayer Preview

It was on a crowded rooftop in San Francisco that I and about sixty other journalists and YouTubers had the opportunity to get some hands-on time with the Xbox One version of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, the first to be developed on a three-year cycle. It’s also the first title to be fully handled by Sledgehammer Games. After a forty five minute presentation in which many of the new features, modes and maps were detailed I had a chance to try them out for myself despite a somewhat inadequate number of gaming stations for the number of people at the event. While boasting a few much-needed upgrades to the audio-visual presentation alongside some interesting albeit unoriginal new mechanics and features, the core gameplay that made Call of Duty such a success remains mostly intact. Whether or not that is a good or bad thing will likely hinge on how much battle-fatigue you have from previous installments.

The first and most obvious place to start when talking about the game is the Exo-suit and jet-pack that all soldiers come equipped with. These add a layer of mobility and tactical versatility to the game that is very much akin to what the Nanosuit provides for the Crysis games. While the full extent of what the suit will change in the game wasn’t made entirely clear at the reveal, we did get to play around with some of its features. The most interesting change that also represents the biggest upset to the core gameplay is the jet-pack that lets you double-jump and reach higher ledges. It also lets you dash quickly from side to side or forward and back, and also preform quick mid-air dashes and slam-down on opponents if you are above them in the air. Every soldier gets to use this as a standard piece of equipment and it definitely breathes some life into the increasingly stale gameplay of the last few installments.

Apart from the jet-pack, the bonuses the suit provides largely depend on what and how many Exo-related perks and wild-cards you use. We had a limited variety of these at the event, with an invisibility cloak being the main suit-related boost available. Others that were available granted things like a temporary on-foot speed boost, a temporary increase in health regeneration and the ability to briefly hover in place while in the air. Exo perks are separate and include things like the ability to reload while sprinting as well as extra energy to power the abilities. You can also choose to duel-wield heavy weapons due to your increased strength, although the efficiency of this tactic was questionable in my experience.

How much you utilize the new suit will also depend on how you choose to allocate your weapons and abilities in the Black Ops 2-inspired “Pick 13” system. As in Black Ops 2, you can choose to deck out your primary weapon with several attachments while sacrificing perks or grenades. Kill and score streaks are included in the thirteen, so you can opt to have none of these in favour of more perks and weapon attachments, or select a large number of kill and score streaks while using less attachments and perks. Speaking of kill and score streaks, you now have the opportunity to modify kill-streak rewards with the example given at the presentation being a regular turret being turned into a rocket-turret. On top of this, co-op score streaks have been added, allowing you and another player to work together to earn score-streak rewards that only one of the two players will be able to use once earned. You will also earn “Reinforcements” which are one-time use low-level score streak rewards and extra perks, which will be received as Supply Drops.

This is not the only area where customization in Advanced Warfare has been fleshed out. Soldier customization returns from Ghosts, but with more options for individual pieces of clothing such as gloves and boots, alongside your choice of gender and facial appearance. Most customizable items including weapons and clothing can be fine-tuned with the new “Supply Drop” system. After each game, you have a chance to receive a random loot drop. The loot will be a variation on existing gear with slightly altered appearance or stats and will come in three levels of rarity. For guns, the changes usually involve slight tweaks to the base stats, like increased damage but decreased accuracy. For cosmetics, there are variations in item appearances. This system adds a Diablo-esque addiction factor to the game and along with the “Operator” soldier customization and pick-13 systems you will be able to fine tune your loadout more than ever before.

While the Call of Duty series has been slowly creeping into the future, Advanced Warfare feels like the first game to really embrace a science-fiction premise as reflected in much of your arsenal. Some weapons like assault rifles feel more or less the same as in previous games, but others like shotguns, sniper-rifles and the all new Directed-Energy weapons feel distinctly more sci-fi. When you fire a shotgun, you see a sort of energy wave blasting out from it, not unlike the pressurized air guns from Dead Space 3. The snipers have a similar effect, but the Heat weapons are like nothing seen before in a Call of Duty game. They do not use traditional clips but instead a battery that will drain when you fire and slowly recharge when not in use. The Heat weapon available at the event fired a solid beam that was quite accurate, especially when fired from the hip.

One clever addition that lets you play around with these new weapons and loadouts is a quickly loading “virtual firing range” map that’s full of moving and stationary targets to get a feel for your loadout before jumping into a match. Between matches you can also have a detailed look at what your opponents’ loadouts are in a system dubbed “virtual lobby.” This is great if you were getting dominated by another player and want to see exactly what setup they were using.

Of course, none of this would matter much of the gameplay didn’t evolve with the customization. As mentioned earlier, the maps and modes have been designed to reflect the increased mobility of your soldier and this leads to some fun moments. You might be running around on the ground and see an enemy sprint by on a cat-walk two stories above you. In the past, you would have no choice but to try and gun him down before he vanished out the door. Now you can jet-pack up to the cat-walk and give chase. There are loads of moments like this in Advanced Warfare, with most maps having lots of verticality to let you try and escape from or out-maneuver opponents.

As for the game modes, the developers have opted to mostly bring back old favorites and tweak them to take advantage of the new mobility system. At the presentation, the developers revealed that there will be twelve modes in the final release, listing off Team Deathmatch, Search and Destroy, Kill Confirmed, Hardpoint, Domination and Capture the Flag as returning modes. The one new mode we did get to try was Uplink, which is a spin on Capture the Flag where the flag is replaced with a single drone that both teams must fight over. Once you have the drone you must take it to the enemies’ Uplink (essentially their flag) which is floating in the air so you must jet-pack up to it.

The other mode that has not been seen since World at War (when it was called War) is Momentum. This mode is like a riff on Domination where there are five capture points in a row and both teams try and push the other back by capturing all of the points in a sort of tug-of-war. Only one point can be captured at a time, and the more captures and kills a team gets, the faster they can capture further objectives. I also had the chance to try out Hardpoint and Team Deathmatch. The former mode as well as War saw many of the capture points on the roofs of buildings, forcing you to jet-pack up to the objective in order to capture it and allowing attackers to come into the objectives from odd angles to surprise the defenders.

I got to play on three different maps when exploring these modes, all of which had a lot of verticality and a mix of indoor and outdoor areas. The first map, Riot, was centered around a burning prison that had a ground floor strewn with debris and an upper floor consisting of a network of cat-walks. Outside of this central structure were a variety of small enterable buildings and more open areas which were a lot of fun to jet-pack around. The second map, Biolab, took place in a snowy environment filled with buildings made from large crates with man-sized windows that you could jet into and out of. Despite a good mix of indoor and outdoor areas it was probably the least memorable of the three.

The final map I played on, Defender, was the largest and most open of the three, taking place below one end of the Golden Gate Bridge. It had a variety of bunkers and trenches you could run through, or stick to the high ground and jet over the gaps. This level also featured one of the dynamic map events introduced in Ghosts, in the form of a large wave that comes in and submerges a portion of the level. Although the other maps I played did not feature dynamic events, Defender signals that there will be more to come.

One thing evident across all modes and maps was the enhancement to the visuals and audio. Indoor areas like the Prison looked particularly impressive with great lighting and particle effects stemming from the fire burning inside, although the outdoor areas in some maps were somewhat less inspiring due to flat lighting. More impressive are the improvements made to the audio, with most weapons sounding very meaty compared to previous games. Combined with the improved ragdoll physics, the new audio gives most combat encounters a bit more weight and impact which made kills all that much more satisfying

Despite these improvements and changes, much of the time the gameplay in Advanced Warfare felt fairly familiar. Weapons still don’t have much recoil and you spend a lot of time running (or jet-packing) around the map giving chase to other players as in previous games. The changes made here will surely excite core fans of the series, but none of them are original outside of the Call of Duty universe; whether or not they do enough to draw in new players or veterans who have burned out on the franchise, remains to be seen. Look for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare to launch on November 4th, 2014 for PC, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4.