Big Beta Weekend, Gamescom, and More!

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**Jeff Gerstmann** (0:14)
Unbelievable.

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**Jeff Gerstmann** (0:52)
Hello, everybody. What's going on? What? No, what is going on? What happened? What is, no, what is happening here? Why does this, okay. Why does this video, okay, why does this keep playing? World premiere. It's all broken. It's all broken. Welcome to the program. Welcome to the program. My name is Jeff Gerstmann. This is The Jeff Gerstmann Show. I'm your host for this week, Jeff Gerstmann. It is an eventful Tuesday here, August 25th here. We are getting ready for Gamescom, Opening Night Live, which is happening in Germany. It's nighttime there, I'm led to believe. In a little bit of time here, they're going to be showcasing a bunch of trailers and stuff in traditional form. So if you're here live, or we're going to podcast for a bit, then we're going to stop and watch that thing, and then we're going to finish the podcast afterwards, which will be nice, because we'll be able to talk about the things we saw. But there's more going on than just that, of course. It has been a somewhat eventful week in the world of video games. Last weekend was the first of two beta weekends for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4, and people have been playing that. I played that. There's a video up on YouTube, if you want to see me playing that. This was an interesting series of events where I played it, found it to be decidedly underwhelming for a handful of reasons that I mentioned in said video, and then the following day they moved to correct some of those issues.
I don't think that what they changed is of great import. I think it's stuff that matters, but ultimately it has not really changed my feelings on it overall. I think it doesn't have a hook. I think it's a game without any kind of flash or... Like, I don't, like, there's nothing... They really pushed reset on a lot of things, and some of that is necessary, right? And, you know, like, I don't think that the wall jumping stuff from last year's game is something that needs to be codified and locked into every single year or whatever, but this just doesn't feel like it has anything to write home. Like, they made a Call of Duty game. You look at the list of perks, which, you know, it's a beta, so maybe there's going to be more in the full game or whatever, but as you look through the gun attachments and perks and loadouts and all the options, it's all the stuff that they have all, you know, you go like, okay, well, this is the one if I want to make it so, if they drop bullets when I kill them so I can pick those up. This is the one if I want to not appear on UAVs. This is the perk I need to pick. There is no flexibility, you know, like in years past, they've done stuff where it's like, okay, you know, you have your pick 10 system and your wild cards and things you can do to kind of further craft your build in directions that I've come to appreciate over the years. There's really none of that. It's just like, here are the three perks. Choose one for each slot. You're like, okay, here's the gun attachments. Pick five of them because there's no option to make it so you can pick eight if you like to have fun that way. Like it just feels like a step backwards in so many ways with nothing replacing it. And that's, in a lot of ways, that's how Call of Duty has done it, right? You have different developers offering different takes on the same concept. And Infinity Ward would traditionally go in one direction. Treyarch would go in another. Treyarch would get kind of weird with it, and Infinity Ward typically would not. And it's weird after all these years to feel like that's a thing again, or that that is something that they are crawling back to. Because I don't think that... I don't think that Modern Warfare 4 has anything new and exciting going for it that makes it stand out. Instead of replacing it with something else equally as cool but different, instead they have just like rolled the crank back and said, all that shit and run around and shoot people, idiot. I go, okay, great. The main thing that they seem to be leaning on this time is the notion of an apex attachment for your gun, and different guns will have different apex attachments when you fully level them up. This can be some kind of interesting variance that... You know, the ones that they had immediately in, you know, that unlocked were... There was one for a sub-machine gun where if you shot someone, it would tag them, and there was a little reticle, like a little screen on the gun that would show the direction they were in. But like, the time to kill in this game is so fast, you don't get in engagements that don't end in someone dying. Or rather, that's very rare. And so the idea that you're going to hit someone, they're going to hide, and you're going to go, where did they go? Like, this mysterious map, where could they have possibly gone? Like, it's just not how the game works. I saw some footage, there's stuff where like, here's a gun that also comes with some knives. And so you can kind of like fling out throwing knives. Throwing knife is a thing you can just equip on your class, if you just want to have one or two of them or whatever, instead of a grenade. But this was like, hey man, now you can push, I assume it's like push right on the D-pad, because that's how they do it with launchers and all this other stuff, so it's always clumsy, because you're shifting between fire gun and fire grenade launcher. And so the idea that like, I've got throwing knives, why? This isn't a stealth, you know, if I need to be stealthy, I'll put a silencer on the gun. Like, who is this for? What is the use case for this in actual multiplayer gameplay, where everything's happening so fast, who cares? If I'm showing up on the map for a second or not, because I shot the gun. It's just, it's rare that that matters in the majority of matches that I think you're in. You know, they had one new mode in there called inflation, that is just like everyone drops money when they die, and then you pick up the money, and then you drop the money when you die. And so there's like a back and forth as to who's got money. And there is Kill Block, which is kind of the new thing that they have been trying to talk about. It is a shifting map where they've got like different prefab chunks of map. And each time the map is rolled, three new chunks are picked and they're put in into place. Some of these chunks look like old Call of Duty maps, which is like kind of fun. But it's like a gunfight mission where it's like, it's a 10v10 round based thing. Or later on in the weekend, they added a 3v3 version of it, which just the end result is like, oh, now there's barely anybody on this map. Cool. That's, I don't know, I guess that's one way to do it. So, Kill Block, if you can play normal modes on Kill Block, then maybe that'll be fun. I don't really want to play a round based mode in Call of Duty, like it ain't Counter-Strike, son. It ain't never going to be Counter-Strike, son.