Every shooter keeps making me do dumb stuff and I hate it
Or: "how I've given up on getting Escape From Tarkov's PMC achievement this wipe"
I'm in winter mode. I ate Pigs in Blankets instead of an actual lunch today, I'm walking around swaddled in blankets, and I've started thinking about my "winter game". We're two major game showcases (one of which I'm alarmingly responsible for) from the entire industry slowing down for some well-earned time off.
I don't have a family, so in the winters when I'm not away, I invariably spend my break hiding from the cold, playing video games and catching up on TV. Sadly, as a shooter fan—and a fan of live-service multiplayer shooters at that— I've found that a lot of my "break" has started to feel like work as I try to complete some sort of obscure challenge or earn a time-limited reward. And I hate it.
Worse, it's not just me. Everyone's at it, and we're all stuck in this hell of tasks to be completed, we're all just bashing away at the skinner box.
I've been in a bit of a purgatory of my own making recently, which is what's prompted the griping. After Escape From Tarkov's disastrous zombie event, I found myself using a bloody spreadsheet to figure out how many raids each day I needed to survive to get the PMC achievement that caught my fancy. A spreadsheet. When a raid can take anywhere from 15 to 40 minutes, catching a bullet moments from the extract means all that work is for nothing.
That stopped becoming fun quite quickly, and to take my mind off it, I was sinking a little more time into Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019), I earned the gold camo for every submachine gun in the game, which gave me a shiny platinum skin. To do that in Black Ops 6, you need to get 100 headshots with a gun before you unlock a series of challenges. Complete those and you'll get a few more challenges to snatch the gold, a few after that for platinum.
Alongside this, the most efficient way to get the most of your limited time in Black Ops 6 is to complete the game's daily challenges. They appear deceptively simple, and occasionally they actually are: get 50 kills while moving, kill five enemies with a frag grenade, simple stuff. Then, occasionally, the game will ask you to do something you're not good at. For me, I'm cursed with sniper rifles and so once a week or so Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 asks me to headshot 10 people with a sniper rifle and I realise that I'm going to have to do some heinous things to get the task done in the next 24 hours.
Several games do this, but I'm using my ire about how Call of Duty's has slowly become a Sisyphean prestige journey as a focal point for my rage. This critique comes from a place of love: I've always cherished Call of Duty, but with each yearly iteration it feels like it gets further from something I recognise, no matter how smooth the gunplay feels.
In 2007, when I sat down for an energy drink-fuelled session with the slightly terrifying builders I used to play Call of Duty 4 with, Barracks challenges were a gentle way to direct play and provide something for me to do. Now, these grinds feel like a serious time investment, and if I'm not making progress towards that goal— whether it's killing two enemies without reloading or getting a kill while moving —that time now feels wasted.
This came to a head with the addition of Black Ops 6's version of the Nuketown map. When I first played Call of Duty: Black Ops back in 2010, Nuketown was a revelation. Two houses sat opposite each other in mock mid-century suburban bliss, gunplay was fast and frenetic, and it felt like a fun palette cleanser, the answer to Modern Warfare's chaotic Shipment map. Nuketown is a map designed to throw people together as quickly as possible when you need a change from the tension of other levels.
When Nuketown came to Black Ops 6, it was a different beast. Call of Duty's new challenge checklist economy has players throwing themselves together to try and tick off objectives as quickly as possible. Now, the weird spawn points are something to be exploited, and every single corner of Nuketown is something to be abused: you have never seen highly trained military operators camp in hedges like this, and every possible nook, cranny and desk are being used so players can try to get one more double kill, a couple more headshots.
Nuketown is no longer a palette cleanser, it's the main event. Something I'm slightly bitter about because I think the brilliance of Stakeout— a new map which is just two flats woven into each other— actually plays better to that spirit of those earlier Call of Duty maps. Nuketown's return is supposed to be a fan favourite smash hit, but it's just underlined that the community isn't here for a good time anymore, just an efficient one.
When I first wrote this I thought that the obvious rebuke would be for me to just not play Nuketown, it's in a separate playlist so you can easily avoid it. But this spirit of maxing your Kill/Death ratio and achieving your challenges at all costs has sullied an old favorite map, ruined several other parts of Call of Duty, and even put me off a bunch of other games I like too.
Black Ops 6 multiplayer map Rewind is one of the most interesting in the game thematically, but damn does the pacing fall apart in some lobbies as players start to camp as many weird angles as they can instead of playing the damn objective. And worse, we're all willing participants, drawn in by dopamine hit after dopamine hit of checklist entry completion.
I don't have any real answers here, but it has gotten me thinking. So, as I start to plot out the end of the year, instead of planning the busy work I thought I'd spend my winter break doing, I'm instead thinking about New Year's Resolutions. The first? To stop wasting my time playing games I don't enjoy just to hit the next unlock. Of course, I won't be going cold turkey. Escape From Tarkov's next wipe will likely be here before New Year, after all.
Out this week
It is dead this week. Next week we have both Delta Force and Marvel Rivals coming, which will scratch two very different itches, but for this week I couldn't find anything worthwhile to recommend.
Hell, even a dive into Steam's full stream of upcoming releases left me empty-handed, and I'm used to finding a couple of pearls beneath scores of "adult" games and asset flips.
Gibs
- Sony is working on a portable console that will play PS5 games, according to this Bloomberg report (it's paywalled, so you can get most of the deets from Eurogamer). I have a Steam Deck and despite playing Doom Eternal on there for a giggle, the idea of playing an FPS game on a handheld feels weird to me, but it would be a pretty big move if it makes it to market. Sony had some success with the PSP back in the day (and significantly less success with the PSP Vita), and the idea that you can access your existing PS5 library on a handheld might be enough for me to snag one.
- I reviewed Void Crew for PC Gamer! It's quite good!
- Your weekly dose of Straftat writing.
- Julian Benson's interview with Stalker 2 game director Ievgen Grygorovych in GQ touches on how the Ukrainian team at GSC stamped the game word with their culture. Given the ongoing war, it makes sense that the team would want to draw on their national pride, but it makes me wish that more developers would let their games be so culturally specific, instead of playing to the Anglo-American overlords. Maybe Skull Face from MGSV was right.
- I've spent the week mired in ennui, so I've listened to a lot of Simon & Garfunkel. This track is my favourite.