Black Ops III hands-on preview (from a guy that has no idea what he's doing)

There’s a first time for everything. My first time stepping into a multiplayer first-person shooter map happened just this past week, in the Call of Duty: Black Ops III beta. For real, in my 30-some years as a gamer, I’d managed to avoid all of those FPS arenas. Sure, I’ve played plenty of single-player shooters throughout the years (BioShock, Half-Life 2, Halo, et al), but playing against other human beings on the other side of a T.V. screen? Nuh-uh.

So, take my impressions of the Black Ops III multiplayer beta as you will. If you want someone that knows what they’re talking about and has a history with the series (or with multiplayer FPSes in general), that ain’t me. You know where to find the back button on your browser. But, if there really is a first time for everything, and if somebody else’s first time is something worth reading about, well, here we are.

I went in blind, obviously. Without prior-existing knowledge of what happens on a Call of Duty map, I came equipped with nothing but my fear. It locked itself like an iron maiden around my brain. I can fail over and over on my own and not be bothered. But knowing that my morbid lack of experience could let down my entire team? That’s what I was afraid of. That was the root of my fear.

I got to the beta’s front page. It wasn’t actually a main menu—just a guy in modern-warfare armor, sitting with his back against the fiery outline of the Roman numeral III. Yep. Black Ops III. I was in the right place. But this dude looks like the bad guy. I know we don’t want to run around looking like a bunch of Spaceball troops, but honestly, if this fella is supposed to be the good guy, then I don’t want to see the bad guys.

I get to select from four specialists. There are nine total, but only four are immediately available. I also have only one unlock token to start. I flip left to right and unlock the specialist with a bow and arrow because awesome. I don’t know what the higher levels will unlock, but nice work, Treyarch, for diversity. Of the four initial specialists, two are women and one is a black guy. The fourth specialist, the white guy, looks like one of my best friends from college. Total redneck. One of the sweetest guys you’d ever meet.

Back to my bow. Callsign “Outrider.” Sixty percent of the PlayStation 4’s beta testers are playing deathmatch, so I play deathmatch. It’s half a dozen players against another half a dozen, or so.  I’m immediately confused because I don’t start the match with a bow. Just guns. These guns pump out rounds fast. This one sounds like a zipper, pbbbbbbt.

I’m nervous. It took me a minute to figure out that my team members have names above their heads, but the enemy doesn’t. Then it took me another minute to figure out that some enemies have red names above their heads. I can’t figure out if that means they’re nearly dead, or if they were the person that just killed me. I still don’t know.

I die a lot. Everyone is sprinting. Everyone is jumping. Everyone is wall running and jump jetting. I give it a shot. I fall off the edge of the map. I try again. If someone’s not “zipping me up” with AR-15s, or whatever weapons we’re all using, then I’m probably falling off a building, falling into polluted water, or falling between two buildings into polluted water.

The wall running is smooth, but I keep my boots on the ground. Parkour gets me killed more than anything. But I stick and move, stick and move. The only people I’m able to shoot are the people standing still, so I vow to keep moving. No matter what, keep moving. Sprint, actually. Everything is at a breakneck pace. I reload after every salvo because I’m afraid of taking my eyes off the crosshair to check how many rounds are still in the clip. That’s probably getting me killed, too: not using my peripheral vision around the screen to identify threats.

So I start looking around more. I put some bullets on target, but it’s never enough to take a Tango down before a Tango takes me down. My thumbs. My thumbs are such useless digits. I can’t make the thumbsticks go where they need to go. There’s an enemy. I see them. They’re sprinting. I’m spraying bullets every direction. Nothing lands. I think I just got shanked. Yep, I got shanked.

The downtime is so minimal. I want to just take a breather. No time for breathers, though. I’m thrown back in the suck, and that’s where I see how so many hours can pass by in a game like this. A life in Black Ops III is pretty meaningless. Sure, it feels good to take someone down (I got one kill in my first match), but it never bothered me much to end up face down, again, over and over, on the tile, on the road, on the rooftop, on the bridge behind the waterfall.

Perhaps that’s why I’ll never be good at this. I’m doomed to be worthless at multiplayer first-person shooters simply because I’m dying so much that it’s hard to care that I’m dying so much.

Nice outfits, though. Nice guns, Black Ops III. You know how to create a neat environment, too, if I could take two seconds and actually enjoy the surroundings. Everything I see and take in is reduced to its most basic geometry. I don’t see a slum, or a cliffside lodge, or an ivy-wrapped pergola. Who knows what these environments look like. All I can see are stairs to aim down, hallways to aim down. All I can do is find lines of sight, sigh heavily when no one runs directly into my line of sight, then sigh heavily once more when I catch a clip full of slugs to the back.

Nice touch, seeing the kill cam from my opponent’s perspective, too. Lets me see just how ridiculous I move around, and just how few bullets I put on target, just before I beefed my opponent's kill-death ratio. There you go, opponent. Enjoy that percentile boost, on me.

I get it, though. I finally get the allure of games like Black Ops III. Just because I only tagged and bagged one offender during my first match doesn’t mean I wasn’t improving. And, as I moved on to my second and third (and tenth and twentieth) matches, everything began to solidify. The speed never slowed down, but my reaction time sped up. The thumbsticks got easier to manipulate and stick to targets. Already I’d begun to learn where to go, what to avoid, when to rush the field and when to hang back a second.

Black Ops III handed me just the right amount of near-future hardware to make things interesting—without turning things into science-fiction. I started running walls all the time. Jumping spans at weird angles. I managed to quit falling off the edge of the map. And I think I even started to care when I lost a firefight. Those split seconds I had, when an enemy came into view, became violently precious split seconds. My blood pressure spiked in time to the sound of point-blank gunfire, then chill when I respawned and retook up advantageous positions. Moving, though. Always moving.

I had fun. I can honestly say I had fun in the Black Ops III beta. This, coming from a guy that has never wanted to have anything to do with versus modes of any kind when it comes to FPSes. Don’t ask me if this is better or worse than any other Call of Duty, or any other shooter, for that matter. Destiny is more my speed, more my aesthetic, but I couldn’t even begin to tell you if that multiplayer is superior or subpar to Black Ops. Who knows? But Black Ops III fun. Is it a lifestyle that I’m going to buy into? Probably not. But I get it. And, from my almost completely uninformed opinion, I think you should go there. There’s a good game here.

[Stay tuned for more Gaming Nexus hands-on coverage of Black Ops III, but from people that actually know what they're doing.]