Whiskey Golf
Being of Editing & Technical Assistance
- Location
- Chained to my desk
Yeah, but i was referring to how early game you need a lot of dakka to put down robots; it's only after you get the man o war that rifles become viable.
Call of Duty: Black Ops III
- Thread starter Dangerman
- Start date
- Discussion
Honestly, they should have made it its own series. Call it "Call of Duty: Postmodern(ist) Warfare."
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
In a nutshell.
Y'know just to layer that on a bit: I don't think the Main Character is ever properly named. Literally the only time he is is at the very end of the final Zurich level when he's staggering out into the sunlight. Before that? He's literally a cipher. A faceless, nameless, generic soldier who the audience ultimately isn't sure really even exists. Like, as a person. And considering the games themes and stuff that was probably intentional.
...Treyarch are you getting meta on us you sly dogs you?
Last edited:
Given the framing device and the pre-mission text, I think that they are getting meta.
Remember what Call of Duty has generally done-it's taken famous scenes from big ol' war movies or from history, changed names on them, removed the context, and strung them together in a way that only makes sense if you don't think about it too hard because you're too busy killing Nazis/Brown People/Russians/Vietnamese to notice. What is the Black Ops 3 campaign plot?
It's taking things which happened in the game's fictional history, changing names from them, altering their context (which makes them often nonsensical, like the Second Cairo Uprising, 5 years after the First Cairo Uprising! The CDP has reconquered Egypt after being kicked out! Whee!) and stringing them together in a way which doesn't make sense if you think about it hard enough-but because you're too busy killing French Warcrime Robots (apparently outside of the UK, the EU is a CDP member?) and Singaporeans it feels coherent.
And none of this is actually happening. It's just escapism because the player character is avoiding facing reality. It is a metaphor for Call of Duty itself.
Dangerman
I fits I sits
- Location
- Wirral, England, UK
The EU dissolved; most of the former EU members went to the Winslow Accord.
Whiskey Golf
Being of Editing & Technical Assistance
- Location
- Chained to my desk
Iirc the big EU nations - UK, france, germany, - went WA. Which honestly surprised me - thought the former CIS nations would have jumped to WA instead of CDP.
I fear that I'm tragically not as generous about my view of Black Ops III than you are, MJ12 Commando. I think this is one of those very clear instances where someone thought it'd be an absolutely great and mind-shattering idea on paper, but which didn't really pan out well when actually put into practice. The fact that there's a clever twist to this - which is really only alluded to if you literally use freeze-framing - doesn't change the fact that the campaign itself was incredibly draining. The awful dialogue, disjointed narrative, and undeveloped characters did not magically go away because "it was all just a dying dream" or "they were all actually hijacked by an AI that turns out to be entirely imaginary". Virtually none of the alleged setting development and brainstorming actually came seriously into play or became relevant in the campaign; in fact, a lot of the themes about transhumanism that the game supposedly wanted to touch on doesn't even really factor into the story at all. I'm honestly not terribly fond of the increasing use of "this is your gameplay on acid" sequences that seems to have become a thing ever since Far Cry 3 popularized it, and I honestly didn't enjoy it much when it came up in this game either. T_T
I think that only happens if you try to go in-depth on the plot rather than "this is an action movie" and then refuse to take into account the other parts of the plot which are just as important for a deeper analysis.
Like, on a superficial level Black Ops 3 is a macho action movie about Hard Men of Hard Nations Making Hard Decisions While Hard-Hedricks is indirectly responsible for a hell of a lot of the problems the player faces because of his heroism, while Taylor, another guy who makes a decision because he's morally conflicted, is shown as aiding and abetting the side which deploys atrocidrones in their attempts to atrocity their way through Egypt. In that way, it's kind of like Modern Warfare, the original. The well-meaning white knights fuck everything up, and it's the sociopathic wet works people who have to fix everything behind the scenes.
And it holds together well enough-it's vignettes of a war movie. You have enough time to meet and greet Taylor's team, who save your ass a bunch of times in the first mission and train you in the second, so that their betrayal comes as a legitimate plot twist-and when you see what went on in SP/CORVUS, is actually reasonable. The excuses to go around the world are well, excuses, but they at least become a coherent plot-you're chasing down leads so you can get to them before Taylor can erase them, and this involves you in a bunch of places.
I think it holds together enough for an action movie if you look at the surface and if you start combing everywhere for lore, it works out really well-so Bro Gamers can engage the game on the Bro Gamer perspective, while people who are into Black Ops because Black Ops 1 was a gigantic mindfuck and want to obsessively hunt down everything are given a pretty interesting payoff.
Last edited:
Just finished watching the walkthrough of the Nightmares campaign. Was not disappointed.
And it made me want to see more. If Treyarch can play it up right, I hope to see a standalone game or at least another side campaign with an overall original design instead of using already existing levels with replaced dialogues, acting as a sequel for this.
In other words:
And it made me want to see more. If Treyarch can play it up right, I hope to see a standalone game or at least another side campaign with an overall original design instead of using already existing levels with replaced dialogues, acting as a sequel for this.
In other words:
I want to see the actual entities from Malum and the implied war between the said entities for real
all fictions
I hate you! (it's not against the rules!)
- Location
- Mons Regius
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hey, look what I found! The full transcript of the scrolling texts in the loading screens, in a Google doc!
Bless the internets.
...
"Dragovich Kravchenko Steiner these men must die"
Bless the internets.
...
"Dragovich Kravchenko Steiner these men must die"