Black Ops 3 Beta: First Day Impressions
Hello and welcome everyone to Digital Bounds. Today I am bringing you an in-depth first impressions of the all new Black Ops 3 Beta! As most of you know here at Digital Bounds we play mainly on Xbox consoles, nothing against Playstation, just a matter of personal preference. I’m going to give you guys my first impressions, what I do and don’t like about the game, and I what I hope to see changed when the full game comes out. The game is in a Beta stage. Meaning, it’s still being developed and a lot of fine tuning is being done, so we have to open minded to the game’s first preview.
Downloading
This was my first frustration of the beta. Pretty much every Xbox One player’s beta codes did not work. Due to everyone trying to redeem their code at once, the Xbox Marketplace somewhat crashed, delaying everyone on starting the download. After about 2 hours of trying to redeem my beta, and a lot of following people’s tweets, a solution was released. After finally getting my code to work it took about two hours to download. I was pretty pumped to start my first game, and sure enough the game crashed taking me back to the Xbox Home menu.. I thought I was going to lose it with this game, it was one problem after another.
First Game
I was pretty eager to start my first game, after waiting hours to get it finally downloaded the anticipation grew strong. Being a pretty good Call of Duty player myself I wasn’t expecting my first game to be as bad as it was for me. I got smacked around the whole game and ended up dying 27 times before the end of the match. The game is a lot harder than previos CoD games, but it had a familiar feel to it. It really just took some getting use to. A lot of my problem was transitioning from Advanced Warfare physics, to a game nothing at all similar. It didn’t take long to get a feel for the new game and start contributing to the team. After messing around with some guns and getting an idea of spawns, I started putting some kills on the board.
Maps
The beta only offers 3 maps to try out. Combine, Evac, and Hunted are the 3 maps available throughout the beta. All 3 maps had well placed spawns, and fairly even playing grounds for both sides. The all have plenty of places for you to tryout new movements such as the wall-run. My personal favorite out of the 3 was Hunted. It was a great map and had some pretty good features. It went well with my favorite game mode and I managed to get a decent amount of kills playing it. All maps had a unique setting, and offered multiple points of interest for both teams. The map Combine offered the best sniping gameplay, and the most wall-running. My only problem with this map was it was pretty easy for the other team to spawn trap you, forcing you to challenge your way out of home base. Dominant players would get a good amount of kills just by running you down in your spawn. This was pretty annoying, especially because it was only my first game. The Evac map wasn’t very appealing to me. It was hard to stay alive because there were a lot of different flanks, and routes for players to take. It definitely wasn’t a high scoring kind of map.
Weapons
There were a lot of good weapons right off the bat. Some better than others, there was a good variety to fit your playing style. I found some guns particularly more powerful than the others so I stuck with those. My personal favorite so far is the Man-O-War, an over-powered assault rifle, that is very well-rounded. This gun was popular among other players as well. Unlocking attachments on this game is not hard at all. Each gun has it’s own leveling system. With each level you achieve on a gun, a new attachment it unlocked. I gave sniping a chance just to see what it would be like. It was much more difficult than previous Call of Duty games. There were a lot of people running around quickscoping, but I personally found it too difficult to do. I really only stuck to this gun so I can’t say too much more on the subject.
Specialists
If you aren’t familiar, Black Ops 3 is bring a new soldier system to the game. Your soldier is now known as a Specialist. Each Specialist has it’s own unique look, and abilities. You get a few choices to pick from when you first start the game. Ruin, who kind of has a Titan from Destiny feel to it, is for a more up-close and personal kind of player. Outrider, seemed to be the popular choice with the Sparrow streak, is more for the players with good accuracy. And Prophet, who’s Specialist comes with a super sweet weapon streak that just about anyone can use with ease. I was most drawn to the Outrider Specialist after seeing some Ps4 gameplay with the character, and my choice served me pretty well. I got multiple kills with the explosive tip bow and arrow Sparrow killstreak. I haven’t tried much the other Specialist but I will be sure to give them a shot throughout the Beta. Moving on.
Game Modes
The Beta gives you a taste of 7 different game modes. TDM, Domination, fan-favorite Demolition, Kill Confirmed, Hardpoint, Capture the Flag, and Search & Destroy. I played my first few game on Team Deathmatch just to get a feel for the game and then hopped right over to my favorite game mode, Domination. The game modes are the exact same as previous CoD games, nothing has changed. All of them run fairly smooth, and played well on the maps. I enjoy Domination the most, and had some really fun games on it.
Overall Opinion
Finally, my overall opinion of the game. First off, let me start by saying this. The game is in Beta stage. So we can’t be too picky with what we get. It’s only a preview of much more to come. For a first taste of the game, I really enjoyed it. It’s finally something new for the series. I’m glad they got rid of Exo Movement, which was an overused aspect of Advanced Warfare. I personally think Exo made AW unenjoyable. Black Ops 3 has a previous Black Ops 2 feel to it. Which I enjoy. It’s very well rounded gameplay, and a better experience. I enjoyed the maps, game modes, guns, and lobbies of the Beta. I’m very excited for the game to release. I feel like this is the game we’ve all been waiting for. It’s a new game, with unique features, and our favorite elements from old games. For only playing one day, I’m extremely impressed, and do not regret pre-ordering. I’m looking forward for the full game!
That concludes my article everyone. I stayed up as late as possible to get a good look at the Beta, and write this article. It took 2 Redbulls to keep me up this late, and it’s going to take many more alarms to wake me up for work in 3 hours. Tune in to the stream on Twitch, and follow our updates on Twitter! I will post the links to those below. To conclude this artice I was to leave you guys with a QOTD: How do you feel about Playstation getting exclusive rights to the game? Let us know what you think below or Tweet us on Twitter! See you guys tomorrow!
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