Missives from Isolation #16 – Hidden Gems (in videogames again)

In order to take a brief break from replaying my beloved Ratchet and Clank 3 (because I’m already halfway through the New Game + playthrough…), I went back and replayed the campaign of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. On the one hand, the story was significantly more jingoistic and… well, American than I remembered it,* which was a little depressing. But on the other hand, the overall feel is cyberpunk as hell in places, the crazy future weapons are great fun and the acting is overall pretty good.

And on the other other hand, the branching storyline was just as cool as it ever was.

Call of Duty games aren’t exactly famous for their storylines. The campaigns are usually good fun to play, but nothing to shout about. The first Black Ops had some good moments and clever twists – but Black Ops 2‘s story was on another level, because for the first time in a CoD game the story didn’t always play out the same way. That’s right: it’s branching storyline time.

Now you’d expect most of the ‘choices’ in a CoD game’s storyline to be linear ‘X or Y’ button-presses – and yes, there are a couple of moments where it’s ‘Press X to shoot man #1’ and ‘Press Square to shoot man #2’. But there are other, more subtle choices. There’s a whole series of missions where you try to stop China taking over the world that are completely optional to play and that you can lose. If you win them all, you get some significant help later in the game – but if you lose, or you just don’t bother to play them, then the endgame outlook is much less rosy.

There are other things too. There’s a mission (probably my favourite in the game), where you infiltrate a floating island resort city to rescue a computer hacker from terrorists. After piloting a robot spider called Ziggy through some vents, some light VR-hacking and some asides on corporate advertising,** and a dubstep shootout in a future-nightclub, you have to chase the terrorists and catch them before they escape with the kidnapped hacker. And again, you can fail to rescue her. If you fail, you do get a chance in a side-mission to rescue her again, but if you fail again then she’s dead for good.

[image error]To reiterate, hacking your way through a future resort-city with a robot spider is awesome.

There are several other characters who can end up dying from seemingly innocuous decisions throughout the game – including some who you might not even realise you can save at all – and every one impacts how the rest of the game plays out. Want to save your wisecracking sidekick from execution? Go for it. But when doing so means sacrificing another member of your team who you might need later, you may want to think twice about how badly you need sassy dialogue for the rest of the game.

I’m not pretending that Black Ops 2 is a masterwork of choice-driven storytelling. It’s still a Call of Duty game. But all these little ways you can affect the game, from changing endings to just cosmetic changes and particularly the option to fail at objectives, really make it stand out as something special, at least in terms of the campaign. When you go in expecting a totally linear experience, the option to do things differently is pleasant to have – and when you reach those pivotal moments where all your choices suddenly come back to haunt you, and you realise that you really should have done things differently, it’s just brilliant.

* Oh for the days of the original Modern Warfare, where you played as the SAS and just got things done…

* Again surprising in a game series which can often be summarised as ‘woo capitalism go USA’ – Black Ops 2 inserts a little ambiguity in unexpected places.