E3 2015 - Call of Duty Black Ops 3 Multiplayer Hands On

Another year, another Call of Duty. The series that owns November and causes other titles to move release dates is back and I am happy to report that it's in the hands of Treyarch, who I believe make the better games. At E3 I was fortunate enough to go hands on with the games multiplayer and it was good.

I was taken to a room where there were 16 PlayStation 4’s around it, one of those would be where I would prove my might on the Call of Duty battlefield, but as it turns out my might is not as strong as I thought. While I did fairly well, there were some people in the session who were obviously seasoned players and knew what they were doing. However that did not mean I was thrashed, in fact the matches turned out pretty even across the board.

For Black Ops 3, the new mechanic is that your body is grafted with an exo suit, which unlike the exo suit in last years Advanced Warfare, allows you to be fully nimble in battle, you can now run along walls, jump higher, glide further in your jumps and even take larger falls without too much damage. The exo suit changes things up in a pretty significant way, but if you are a purist and refuse to use those new abilities, you can get around the maps pretty well, I know this because I was able to do that for the first two rounds, before I realised I was able to wall run.

The maps in question were pretty varied, there as a mix of close quarters combat spaces, large long open corridors and lots of verticality. The first map I played on was tropical in its aesthetic, with a large house in the middle, with high cliffs on one side and massive drops on the other. If you looked at the map, it was pretty even between the spaces, which made for some fun and chaotic moments, the game type on show here was capture the points, A was close to our starting ground, C close to the enemies and B towards the middle. The fun here was in getting from B to C, as you could go around, but if you wanted to try something a little more fun, using the extra jump abilities, you could go higher into the window that over looked it.

The other game types were the standard fare, with each offering up fun and tense moments, which was helped by the kill streaks and character types. For the first two rounds, I selected a default character who wielded a bow, because bows are cool, the problem was that when I had enough kills and was able to use it, I had no idea how it was going to work in COD and turns out it was poorly, though that is probably more on my skills than the game, but taking a bow into a gun fight, not a good idea.

The final two rounds I played I switched over to a character that was able to launch a bee hive, or a hive of some sort of insect into the world, which had the creatures then chase after the enemies and while fun, the reload speed on the shots was super slow, making it hard to use in close quarters. The biggest take away that is that the multiplayer was a lot more fun than I had thought it would be, going in I expected some things to be a certain way, but with the exo suit, weapon types and maps on display I was pleasantly surprised. Now I don’t know if I will start playing the multiplayer more when the game comes out, but I know I will be giving it a go.