It's Gaming as We Never Knew It (and I don't know if I Feel Fine?)

 I remember this song's chorus being more somber when I heard it. Then again, I never actually listened to the original.

YUP YUP!

    I didn't play much video games when I was a kid. I had like a PSP for a short time once, which was really cool. So aside from occasionally visiting my neighbor or relatives who always had an Xbox, or playing Flash games on Y3 or Y8 or later Roblox on every computer I could find, I didn't do much aside from watching the TV or sleeping. I didn't really have a reason to get into gaming that hard, and when I did get access to my parents' laptop I was already pretty deep into Roblox.

    Much later, after getting onto Steam through Team Fortress 2 (and mostly playing offline single-player with bots), I was out and about with my family on vacation when I came across a Data Blitz store. It's a local chain of video game stores, and they sold a lot of games. Console games, PC games, et cetera. I loved entering them and just looking at the games, despite not being able to buy them or even run them. But this time was a little different. It was Christmas, I had a bit saved over, I could have gotten something.

this will be team fortress in 2022

 

    I found a copy of Counter Strike: Global Offensive here. It was in a paper sleeve, which I found kinda odd at the time. But I did manage to get it. At this point I'd played a bit of bootleg 1.6 before, and I was excited for this, having seen the trailer and the parody animation (and other CS animations(and other CS-related videos in general)) by Flashdeck. It was a special experience, packing it and hoping it didn't break on the way back, inserting the disc into the laptop and typing in the CD-Key to activate the product onto my Steam account. I think I hold Counter-Strike in a special place in my heart, specifically because it was the first game I ever bought or owned entirely myself.

real

    Five years later, CS:GO suddenly gained popularity among my peers. I was like, "Wow, that's so cool!" I'd get to play the game I liked with my friends. But the game was different. There was a more competitive lean to it. I wasn't playing Demolition on L4D2 map ports, I was playing 5v5 bomb defusal matches wherein I needed to be good at shooting, moving and communicating. All in all, it was a pretty harsh new reality, and I wouldn't really realize what had changed til much, much later.

    I think a majority of gaming as a whole has shifted towards a more competitive atmosphere, where the default expectation of most gamers are to play the game to "get good," and to climb the leaderboards. My gaming experience with Counter-strike as a whole prior to this was the opposite; It was just a chill experience. There was no expectation of me or an expectation I held to myself to win, or to rack as many kills as possible. I was just there for a chill time, shooting enemies and having a mellow experience. It was never an extreme rat race of constant "self-improvement."

    I'm absolutely certain that my approach to CS:GO was similar for a vast majority of FPS players around the 2010s. For the longest time, competitive experiences were never the focus or the default expectation of games. But that's changed. The shift to matchmaking, developer-hosted and controlled servers, et cetera have made past gaming culture the likes found on Source games something of obscurity. I don't think "the old way" will ever return as the dominant culture for video games. And I'm not sure how I feel about that.

The opposite of "Suboptimal!"

 

    This year's Call of Duty makes me feel weird. It's very obviously bait, using nostalgia as the hook for hundreds of 25-somethings, some of which cry for "the old CoD to come back." I never owned the original Modern Warfare games -I played some Spec Ops Survival with my relatives- so I don't have the same type of attachment to this franchise as I do them. But I am excited for this game because of the teased campaign and the cooperative Zombies experience.

    The first Call of Duty I bought was 2019, because I was interested in the campaign and it's presentation. I'm under no false impression that it's a "tactical" experience. It's an arcade shooter with a "tactical" presentation, and I love it for that. I learned to like the multiplayer too because of that (and because I'd become disappointed by the direction of Insurgency: Sandstorm.) And these are the same reasons why I liked Modern Warfare 2022. The campaign was a bit "safe" and too afraid to take risks with its characters or plotlines, but the general depiction of the campaign and the multiplayer was still the same thing I liked.

    However, this year's Modern Warfare entry strikes me as odd. It's developed by a different studio than MW2019 and MW2022. Sledgehammer Games' previous entry was Call of Duty Vanguard, and before that Call of Duty WW2. My only exposure with CoD WW2 is some videos I've watched, but it seems like a good depiction of WW2 slapped onto a good arcade experience. Vanguard however lacks the good presentation of WW2. I'm not sure why, whether it was caused by having to integrate Warzone 1's gunsmith system on firearms that never really had such a thing, whether it was due to time and resource constraints because of MW2022 or some sinister third thing, but it feels like little care was taken on that aspect (which Call of Duty has paid attention to for a long time.) And the same thing appears to be happening with this year's game.

    It's all a bunch of little things which individually don't really matter but add up to something. Fake optics that have little distractions from CoD Vanguard return. While an extremely close effort, the Sledgehammer games developers haven't exactly got the style of Hyper, MrBrightside and other IW animators down. The bolt-action AK breaks the weapon "rules" set by MW19 and 2022 by having an extremely fast but relatively small-caliber rifle in the "sniper" section reserved for relatively slow but high caliber rifles rather than in the "marksman" rifle section which fit its criteria better. Rumors and leaks of future updates including sci-fi fictional firearms and even a laser gun. And the sounds in general being kind of anemic or discordant to what's happening compared to the previous games.

 

    I'm aware that some of these changes were to provide a better competitive experience. I'm aware that a lot of people are celebrating this new game because of that. Sure, whatever. I'm not a bad player, but I wouldn't consider myself extremely competitively inclined either. I need more time on the game, but I'm not jiving with the experience thus far. I'm sure some of it is because of the aforementioned presentation issues, but aside from that the gameplay is a bit odd. The time-to-kill feels a bit inconsistent from what I'm used to, because it's heavily reliant on you consistently tracking moving targets on the upper torso to head from either far away than typical of most maps or close up against targets that move a lot faster than what I was used to from even MW19. I'm sure the existence of the Tac-stance (another one of those point-shooting stances) was meant to help players deal with moving targets up close, but no-one is genuinely going to be switching to those modes on the fly like that. It's not smooth. I've had a couple of situations where I went to melee instead of going into tac-stance because I wasn't aiming in, I guess.

    Maybe my opinion will change with time and experience, or changes and adjustments done to the final game. I dunno. We'll see this December. But it's clear that this competitive experience is what the vocal community wants, despite it being little like the original. There's the OG maps I guess (I don't have the attachment to these) 🤷

 

    I think the moment that should have signaled to me about the shift was when I was reminiscing about the early CS:GO having a golden Desert Eagle in a group chat. Only for one of my peers to jab at me, asking why my skill hasn't improved since then. I dunno, maybe things were different then.

 

 

im aware that the call of duty community is extremely vast and several different groups will have different opinions and to attribute the opinions of some to all is a gross oversimplification.

other stuff: now that I'm able to buy more games i've been meaning to buy some more so I can have some experiences that aren't like first person shooters. unfortunately i've been funnelling all my money into airsoft guns i don't bring to games and the steam deck, which i don't take anywhere (yet) lmao. i promise, after I build this upper ill actually buy stuff i can use. and after my helmet. and after more storage for my pc. and-

also re gaming: larp shooters fucking suck. insurgency is not a larp shooter. ground branch doesn't really have any game attached to the sandbox it has. ready or not is ground branch taking the form of the righteous (SWAT4.) i don't know what zero hour is doing (it didn't run that well on my PC). 

there was this one place i distinctly remember from probably like more than a decade ago. it was on the roblox frontpage, it was some social hangout place with a pool and ye olde roblox style PC whose translucent brick would flash colors when you sat infront of it. i remember joining it and walking my character onto the PC just to watch it flash colors (my little guy was playing videogames!!)