“Call of Duty: Black Ops III contains graphic content, historical footage and language which some players may find disturbing. Player discretion is advised. Would you like to enable graphic content?”
That message is the first thing you see after clicking past Black Ops III’s title screen, an armored soldier sitting in front of a flaming “III.” You must choose “Yes” or “No.”
There has been a Call of Duty each year since 2003. It’s one of the biggest video game franchises ever. With more than 175 million copies sold, no other first-person shooter even comes close. In order to keep up the annualization, there have been two teams—Infinity Ward, which created the series, and Treyarch, alternating releases. Quality has waxed and waned over the years, but Call of Duty: Ghosts, Infinity Ward’s 2013 release, was something of a dud. With 2008’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Infinity Ward killed the World War II shooter, and video games haven’t looked back. With Ghosts, Infinity Ward killed the present-day shooter as well.
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Neither Infinity Ward nor Treyarch released a Call of Duty game in 2014. Instead, Advanced Warfare was made by a third developer: Sledgehammer Games. It was unique not just because of its 2050s setting, Advanced Warfare, cast Kevin Spacey as the villain and attempted to make a meaningful narrative experience. Successful or not, it was an interesting step for the series.
This year’s release, Black Ops III, does not follow in those footsteps. Nor does it build on the small amount of player choice that Black Ops II was lauded for. If past Call of Duty games were blockbuster movies, Black Ops III is a cartoon—a really, really dark cartoon.
In 2010, Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 2 featured a scene in which you were tasked with open firing on civilians in an airport. Ultimately, the sequence was made optional, which either amounts to artistic censorship or evidence of the scene’s intentions to be little more than shock value, depending on your point of view. That was in the back of my mind when I enabled graphic content, but the question, of course, is: What does that mean? Is the violence intentionally over-the-top, to the point that removing the violence has no impact on the narrative and thus points to sketchy priorities on the part of the developer? Or were Treyarch’s hands forced when they brought the game in, as violent as they felt it needed to be, and someone higher up said, “Tone it down… or make it optional.”
I thought about this when my character’s arms were literally ripped off her body in first person by a robot. After the first one, the screen turns and looks at the bleeding stump. Call of Duty games have been killing off playable characters in horrible ways since the first Modern Warfare, and it seemed like this would be yet another particularly graphic instance of that. Then the robot rips off your other arm, and you stare at that bleeding stump. “I wonder if it looks like this when I have the graphic filter on,” I thought, just as I had thought when scrolling through prison security footage and watching characters being waterboarded and beaten with pipes, or when I walked beneath hanged bodies beside still-burning skeletons. Really, there were a lot of moments of violence—usually against civilians—where I wondered just how “graphic” was being defined. On the one hand, this seems like a natural extension of scenes like “No Russian,” but it also feels excessive and mean. Extreme violence can be used to make a point, but that’s not the case here. The occasional moralizing that the game does isn’t about the horrors of war or its effect on humanity at all. Instead, it’s about something far more generic, something that pretty much every modern shooter considers: Who’s pulling the strings?
You may have noticed that I said “her” before. That’s because you can now choose your character’s gender. And I chose to play as a woman, because I appreciated that choice. It’s an ultimately meaningless decision, though, as gender choice offers no tangible benefits, and you can change in-between missions if you so choose. I’m conflicted about that. On the one hand, this is apparently a future where gender in the military is irrelevant. That’s pretty cool. But it seems less like a statement than a byproduct of laziness, as the game doesn’t seem to even register the choice. Other characters don’t acknowledge your gender (or even your character in general), and when they do it’s… awkward. Early in the game, a character is speaking to an old partner (or something, their relationship wasn’t clear). He looks at you and says, “I hope you treat him better than you treated me.” The subtitle said, “Them,” but the actor clearly said “him.” With all of the time and resources that went into this game, that’s just sad.
Nor are you given the dignity of a name. When you speak, the subtitle says, “Player.” Every other character in the game is referred to by their last name—but not you. And as previously mentioned, this leads to a weird disconnect as you find yourself effectively outside of the conversation. No one asks how you are over the radios or really interacts with you at all except in direct conversation. One line drew particular attention to this: You’re separated from your one teammate, and over the radio he says, “I got separated from the others.” What “others?” It was just me, the Nameless One. It eventually gives some kind of justification for part of that, but it’s a nonsensical copout. You could probably guess what it is without even playing the game.
Player, by the way, has what can only be described as psychic abilities. See an enemy in a crowd? Wave your hand and it’ll activate a grenade on their belt, blowing the lot of them away. It’s kind of satisfying, tactically speaking, as it adds an extra layer of strategy to the series’ tried-and-true combat. It’s interesting to note that Black Ops III is set only a few years after last year’s Advanced Warfare, and it’s interesting to see how different developers depict mid-21st century military technology. It’s impossible to know which, if either, is more representative of the future, but Advanced Warfare felt more plausible.
Those psychic powers, interesting as they are from a gameplay perspective, are also rather silly in a sadistic sort of way. You can hit enemies with incendiary nanobots or a sonic wave that causes their bodies to collapse from exhaustion, rendering them immobile. These “Core” abilities don’t really make a lot of sense (their narrative justification is flimsy at best), and they undermine the relative seriousness of the chaos and evil surrounding you.
It’s a narrative that gets increasingly convoluted and bizarre. Down the rabbit hole is more and more horror (literally and figuratively), and trying to keep track of it all would break your brain. The writing itself is acceptable by video game standards, but the performances are problematic. There’s a disconcerting silence in between nearly all spoken sentences, and the emotions don’t always fit. And so for a while, I was actively bothered by the mere existence of the narrative. But at some point, things changed. It didn’t become “good” and I wasn’t “invested,” but it got weird in a fascinating way that kept me pushing on. But when I reached the credits, I had changed my mind again. Maybe I should have quit while the potential was still there.
After you enable/disable graphic content when the game first boots up, you’re greeted with a message from the developer: “Black Ops III has been a labor of love for Treyarch,” it says. “We’ve been playing games most of our lives, and we want to create and deliver the same kind of fun to fans of gaming that we have spent a lifetime enjoying.” It appeared again after I’d started up the game another half-dozen times. “Now, let’s go and have some fun!” it ends, and it feels a bit like a plea.
Three years went into the creation of this game, but it’s still rough around the edges. “We tried our best,” it seems to say, “and we hope that’s enough.”
And sometimes it is, like when the giant set pieces awe you or you survive a particularly difficult enemy onslaught. But when your character is being ignored or the violence turns needlessly grotesque, it feels like the game’s priorities are in the wrong place. Three years seems like a long time, but perhaps it wasn’t long enough.
