As much as I try not to be, even I'm not immune to bias. I love game developers, always have, always will. What they do, to me, is just an incredible thing, and therefore I'm always on their side. So when the news dropped in March of last year that Activision had fired Infinity Ward founders Vince Zampella and Jason West, I was more than a little upset. So much so that when I found out that Bungie, my favorite game developer, had signed a 10 year deal with Activision, I was very upset with them.
After the firing of West and Zampella, followed by the mass exodus of senior IW staff that followed, I wanted the CoD franchise to fail. I was so pissed that Activision thought that they could just shit on the very people that created the cash cow that is CoD that I wanted to see the series die. There was no chance that I was gonna buy Black Ops, that is, until my son wanted it for Christmas.
I remember the first time I played Black Ops I thought the graphics were noticably worse than Modern Warfare 2, not to mention the gameplay didn't feel as good. I wanted nothing to do with this obviously inferior CoD game. So here I am, 6 months later, and not only am I playing Black Ops almost everyday, I even dropped $140 on the Prestige Edition so my son could have the classic zombie maps and I could have my own copy of the game.
So what changed? Well for one I remembered that I really like Treyarch and World at War was one of my favorite CoD games. Treyarch is great at adding stuff that's just "fun". The zombie mode is a great example of this. But I've always really liked their single player campaigns, WaW's campaign is still one of my favorite, if not my favorite CoD campaign mode. I'm really happy for Treyarch that they finally got they're chance to shine, they're a talented studio that's pumped out tons of games of consistent quality over the years.
So have my initial opinions of Black Ops changed? Yes and no. While I do have a much more positive view of the game these days, I still think that MW2 has noticably better graphics and gameplay. But I prefer the faster pace of MW2 over Black Ops. One of my biggest problems with Black Ops is that most of the things they changed in multiplayer seem to be a direct response to all the internet bitching by people that didn't even play the game. I felt like MW2 was destined to be the bad guy even before it shipped because of all the negative press IW was receiving, between the Friends Against Grenade Spam video, and the lack of dedicated servers. But I really feel like all the people bitching about certain features in MW2 were in the minority whereas the majority of players just played the game and enjoyed it.
So what do I like about Black Ops? Well a lot actually. I love all the customization options. the camos, reticules, face paints, etc., are all fun additions to the series. Also the theater mode and wager matches are very cool. I think the campaign mode is very good, though I'm not sure if I like it better than WaW's yet. I like the Dead Ops Arcade mode and think that the fact that they even did something like that is very cool. The DLC packs, First Strike and Escalation are both very good, with the "Call of the Dead" zombie map being one of the freshest things I've seen in a long time.
I guess in the end Blacks Ops made me eat my words, kind of. While my initial impressions haven't really changed, it was wrong of me to wish ill on Treyarch. Not to mention the good folks that were left at Infinity Ward after the dust had settled. As much as I hate the way that Activision did the IW founders, at the end of the day the whole debacle just gave us another (potentially) awesome game studio. And more awesome games benefits all of us.
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