Over the holidays I started playing Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare multiplayer. After initially mistaking it for a “shooting people in the back” simulator wherein I had accidentally signed up to play the exciting role of “sole target” I started to pick into it a bit further, upping my KD ratio and experimenting with a bunch of the loadout perks and options. I think an 8 kill streak is my current most impressive achievement and I’m kind of in love with my Steel Bite variation on the ARX-160. It makes me feel like a weaponised Pat Butcher.
But another thing I started to pick into at the same time was my own behaviour when starting any new multiplayer FPS game – hi Titanfall, Counter-Strike, CoD… I get exceedingly grumpy for about the first 10 hours. It’s for this reason I prefer to grapple with multiplayer in a quiet room where people who think I’m a reasonable member of society can’t hear me wailing about the unfairness of it all, swearing about IMPOSSIBLE odds and declaring that I never liked videogames anyway and that I’m going to go and have a calming walk (all the while queuing for another round).
With that in mind, here are the five stages of an FPS multiplayer experience*:
It’s a pleasant fantasy to think that holidays mean long weeks of playing games, but in reality there’s trains and planes to be boarded, family to be visited, lives to be unavoidably lived. Gaming during holidays is therefore similar to gaming at any other time, about stealing moments to sneak away to a quiet corner and catch up on backlogs or curl up with comforts. Some of you told us what you played over the break yesterday, but here’s what RPS played between the parsnips and presents.
More than any Call of Duty in a long time, I fancy a crack at Advanced Warfare. I want to see how those exosuits and zany futuristic weapons shake up what was already a pretty fast for a modern FPS, but I’m not curious enough to splash out – strewth! – 40. Thankfully, the multiplayer side is free to play on Steam this weekend, so I’m downloading that now. One minor issue: the download is 36.5GB, so you might not have much time left to play by the time that’s finished.