Call of Duty Royal Battle Beta: Surprisingly Tamed, Surprisingly Strong

News about the latest annual Call of Duty video game focused on what's missing: a single-player campaign. Activision rolls the dice this year in November CoD: Black Ops 4 by focusing entirely on online multiplayer, and your opinion about it can range from "wtf Activision" to "I only play multiplayer, anyway".

In any case, has this change unlocked enough major benefits online? Until now, it is not clear. Two of the three modes of the upcoming game – cooperative "zombie" missions and traditional combat versus combat – are remarkably similar to what has already happened in the zillions of CoD development houses under the direction of Activision.

Pre-release this week CoD: BO4 The beta test, on the other hand, brings a change of tide for the series: a new mode "Blackout". As in, the first shot of CoD at the 100-player royal battle genre, popularized by tastes of PUBG and Fortnite.

Normally, we pass beta tests with grains of salt stuck in our hands, and this Blackout test – which eliminates fights in the traditional closed arenas of CoD and in a PUBGworld-scale was no exception. But, if the PS4 test is an indication, Activision and its affiliates have apparently made it impossible: they have translated the tight CoD fight into a gigantic world without sacrificing performance at 60 fps or combat depth.

PUBG with a pinch of Bruckheimer

The beta test launched Monday exclusively for PS4 consoles, only for pre-ordered players CoD: BO4, after a week of testing more traditional online against combat. (Blackout's Windows and Xbox beta tests will begin on Friday.) Our impressions are based on a few hours of testing since deployment on Monday, when Activision has already activated a patch.

If you played a royal battle game, especially PUBGYou know what you are for. At the start of a match, dozens of soldiers land on a vast field without weapons or items and they clash to be the last man (or team of two or four people) standing. Browse buildings for rifles, ammunition, armor, health care kits and more, then keep in mind an increasingly narrow "safety zone" that requires all fighters to fight in a tiny combat radius. (You lose health when you are out of the safety zone and this penalty becomes more intense over time.)

CoD's Blackout mode borrows generously from PUBG. The circle of the safety zone narrows and moves almost identically. PUBGthe version of. Your soldier can stand, squat or fall in shock. The weapons can be increased with microphones like scopes and handles. Fast strollers for two people and slower trucks for four people help teams navigate the map quickly. And health must be recovered by using healing objects. Conversely, Blackout does not pick a lot of Fortnitetake the genre. Armor is a pickup based on an object, not a refillable one, Fortnitestylish potion; weapons do not usually come in "rare" rows; and there is no craft or building to find.

The easiest way to say it is that Blackout sees your standard, a little PUBG Formula and raises with bolted attachments, Bruckheimer-esque.

For example, scary helicopters! Each Blackout match hides some military class helicopters around the map, which can accommodate up to four soldiers (one pilot, three passengers). This is a first for a great royal battle shooter. Unlike the "authentic" helicopter controls of the Battlefield series, they are absolutely easy to fly: a button raises the altitude; another lowers it; and the joysticks control your movements on a flat plane. Helicopters do not have their own turrets, but they do not really need them; In my experience, having a sniper rifle and a good view of an open field should be enough to harass or even kill anyone caught in the trap.

But as any experienced FPS pro will tell you, you can not put a helicopter "overkill" in a video game without adding a rocket launcher as a countermeasure. Blackout throwers offer ammo in search of heat, provided you can hold your target on the helicopter or vehicle in question for a few seconds.

Blackout also includes a unique range of temporary one-time accelerations. Each of them offers particularly useful benefits from 90 to 120 seconds: silenced steps, amplified hearing of the steps of nearby enemies, reduced healing and resuscitation timers, the ability to see set an enemy you target with a weapon. Unsurprisingly, you can only activate one at a time and each fills a valuable space in your backpack (which you can not develop as much as in other royal battle games).

In practice, these advantages are already the case, as they organically encourage four-player teams to coordinate. A person is silent to enlighten; another audition to detect potential threats; a third takes the "lung of iron" advantage to keep breathing longer while swimming (yes, you can swim, which opens tunnels and impressive shortcuts); and yet another which makes the advantage of the foreigner turn to live longer (and run faster) outside the safe zone, so as to patrol and sneak from behind on the enemies.

Some gadgets that can be embedded are also included in the Blackout, including barricade shields (which other teammates may hide) and remotely controlled cars (which allow a player to drive a small car within a certain radius). This last option is the most interesting, especially for players who find themselves in a bunker waiting in the security zone and want to ward off incoming threats.

Super performance, "Super Nintendo" trees

All this at first glance may not seem revolutionary, and it's just right. PUBG with some adjustments and quality of life experiences, the needle may not be moved for you. We've seen similar things from newcomers like Nyne Islands, and this game, despite its quick launch and thoughtful modifications, has already lost tons of players.

But Blackout has a few things to do besides pure mechanics. More importantly, the development team responsible for this Call of Duty fork focused on pace and performance. Neither the power of the PS4 nor the 88-player online sessions have resulted in Blackout's overall gameplay under a relatively stable refresh of 60 frames per second, even standing on top of one of the huge towers in the area. fight.

The compromises come in the form of a resolution, barely greater than 1080p on PlayStation 4 Pro, and general details. A random online teammate shouted the phrase "Super Nintendo Trees", and although I do not agree that Blackout's foliage is this wrong, it's actually a bit worse than what you'll find in the console port of PUBG. Level of detail rendering for remote objects is reduced in a particularly aggressive way, and the variety and quality of textures are rather low for this generation.

But it's not as weak as Radical heights, to be fair, and he says something that Activision got this right in the first day of the beta of Blackout. In comparison, PUBG on Xbox does not look much better, whether in the resolution or retail departments, and this console port again hardly reach a lock at 30 frames per second.

In addition, the Blackout map includes a wide variety of complex buildings, all composed of geometries, textures and colors to bring the map to life and make it interesting to explore. These locations, usually removed from previous CoD installments, include a sleek series of upscale homes (with floor-to-ceiling windows that make them hugely hideous), a nuclear test facility (with a series of useful and hidden tunnels) ). be exposed with switches on the surface), and an abandoned farmland, New Orleans-esque (which is sometimes invaded by NPC zombies, which can be killed for spitting useful loot).

This mode also reaches the ground with familiar CoD weapons, all with proper recoil, reloading, aiming, and damage measures, as well as experienced first-person mechanics. There is not much to learn for CoD followers (beyond holding the squat button longer), and this familiarity and popularity have not hurt the line. Almost instantaneous waiting for the beta period. If a given time of a day of the week, limited only to players in pre-order, can produce quick matches of 88 players, it augurs well for the populations of players once the final version put online.

All of this is not perfect at this point, of course, with the types of problems you expect in a beta version. Random disconnections at the start of a match have hit most people on my friends list (but not me somehow). Meanwhile, current calculations of the game make the fighters of the last games are sponges with absolute bullets (which can be healed quickly and easily).

There is also the biggest problem of Blackout with the slower tempo, sometimes even boring of PUBG-Not to propose interesting solutions to this. The RC cars loaded with cameras and some super-powerful benefits do not make the archetype of "chance in a safe zone hiding for a moment" tremble, and nothing allows to say if the faithful of CoD will be satisfied version – or if fans will come back in the fastest and craziest popularity of Fortnite. (By the way, do not expect CoD standards like "kill" to be in this beta version, and it probably makes sense to stay alive and loot the bodies of dead enemies). like a royal battle.)

But already, at least, Blackout seems to be doing PUBG on console – in terms of performance, combat, gadgets and helicopters – better than PUBG himself does it. And this mode still has a month to fight its way to a huge launch on October 12 on PS4, Xbox One and Windows PC.