|
Tuesday 15 January, 2008
--Spoiler Warning!--
GAMEPLAY
The game has followed the same basic gameplay pattern in the last hour as it did the hour before, but the level of fun has not diminished. I've caught a bit more of the story this time, but I still feel that while playing the game the story is largely irrelevant; the action definitely takes center stage.
I think what makes the game so fun are the numerous small victories you win while progressing through a level. Every time you clear a building, or get past a tough group of soldiers, or in any way overcome a challenge, the word "checkpoint" comes on screen and your game is saved. Every checkpoint you hit feels like you have made significant progress towards the end of the level. The checkpoints are frequent enough so that you never lose much progress when you die, so that even at the most frustrating points it is never much more than about 15 or 20 minutes between checkpoints.
DESIGN
Despite the fact that every level has the player doing basically the same thing (shoot enemies until you reach the end), the game still manages to feel varied. For one thing, the environments of the levels constantly change, from the urban Middle-Eastern cities to the Russian countryside. Also, new tools get introduced, like the ability to call in air strikes, that make individual levels seem very different, even though the basic gameplay is mainly the same.
The tone of the gameworld is violent, very dangerous, and rather grim. The introductory sequence places the player in the shoes of a person who has been captured by the enemy. As the player is taken through a Middle-Eastern city, they see civilians being executed by enemy soldiers. Eventually it is revealed that the player is the former president of this country, and the sequence ends with the player's character being shot in the head. This sets the tone of the game, and is not the last time that a character controlled by the player dies (not GAME OVER dead, but "really" dead, that is the story continues after that character has died).
Call of Duty is a very scripted game. There isn't much, if any, emergent complexity, so all of the challenges in the game must have been explicitly put in the game by the designers. I'd like to create a game that exhibits emergent gameplay for my own project, but I'm not sure if I will be up to the programming challenge.
|
