Hands on with Call of Duty: Ghosts multiplayer

A little while back I was given the honour of spending some quality time with the upcoming Call of Duty: Ghosts multiplayer; giving the new game modes a try as well as trying out some of the new kill streaks.

Game Modes

Ghosts will ship with your standard game modes of death match, free for all and most of the  usual suspects but there are two new exciting modes that I got play and thoroughly enjoyed. 

We’ve spoken about the first before, Cranked, where every time you get a kill you crank up and become faster and more powerful but you also have a timer that counts down and if it hits zero you explode. This ensures camping and stealth quickly become a thing of the past and keep the game moving nicely.

I hope to see a lot of this in the eSports area of gaming to mix things up a bit.

The next mode I tried was a new one called Blitz which was explained to us briefly as a sports type game where you need to score points by going through portals. Yes it didn’t make any sense to us either.

But the game is pretty simplistic really. Each team has a portal that they need to defend. Your objective is to get to your enemies portal and jump through it to score a point. Once you score a point the portal is disabled for 10 seconds and then opens up again. The first to get to the set score you win.

If your team works well together and shares the offense and defensive duties then you can dominate but if you start getting greedy the opposition can take over your portal and just walk through every 10 seconds. It’s like a simplified, faster version of capture-the-flag. 

Killstreaks

The next thing we were shown were a couple new killstreaks that have been added to the game.

These are broken down into categories to balance the game where the support guys get to arm up with the Night Owl which blocks incoming projectiles and also acts like a personal radar for close quarters. The assault guys can get their own guard dog and a Maniac which is a juggernaut armed with a knife and unlimited sprint.

Now I’m one of the few people who really have no interest in the dog being added to Call of Duty Ghosts but the ability to call up your own guard dog is awesome. The dog will stay with you and attack anyone who tries to sneak up on you or comes close. Then if you are killed the dog will try make his way back to where you spawned taking people out along the way.

So if you are a good protector that dog can stay with you the entire game.

As for the marksman they haven’t been forgotten with the ability to deploy 4 Satcoms, the UAV replacement. Once you have al 4 down your radar turns into a directional radar and your team can see exactly where everyone is going.

One of the killstreaks removed by popular demand is the Stealth Bomber, apparently the community was not a fan of that one and as such it has been put down.

Soldier Customisation

The other major addition to Ghosts is the ability to customise your soldiers and it doesn’t start and end with the choice of gender. No in fact Infinity Ward are promising over 20 000 different combinations for your soldiers from their head shapes to different camo, face paint, patches and background textures.

Oh and those sexual emblems that you just can’t get away from won’t be an issue in Call of Duty: Ghosts thanks to the emblem creator being removed.

This is once again one of those things where we can’t have nice things thanks to a minority of people who haven’t even seen half the things they are creating in Call of Duty. And last but not least the gender or body that you pick will not have any difference in the game as all soldiers have the exact same hit boxes.

Other Stuff

All in all the game is a marked improvement on the current Call of Duty we are enjoying and there has been a lot of work put into refining the little things in the game such as the guns, movements and visuals.

A big change is the new dual render technology that Infinity Ward is able to do with their new engine. Now when sniping instead of you only being able to see what you are zoomed in on you will be able to clearly see the zoomed in section and then external to the scope you can see a blurred render of the environment. This should make sniping easier which to be honest worries me. Sniping is already a problem in COD in my opinion; though at least quick-scoping is going the way of the dodo. 

Thankfully my flight was later that evening so I got to gate crash the next group and play more of the game again. As a fan of the Call of Duty series I can honestly say this is the most exciting edition of the game since Modern Warfare 2. Whether it will be able to live up to the expectations of the COD Army only time will tell.

One thing is for sure though, you are going to want to play this on a next gen system.

Last Updated: September 30, 2013