Passenger Seat Radio Episode 2019-10-29

Hello everybody, this is Shane Arman row you’re in the passenger seat with me passenger seat radio. It is Tuesday, October 29 2019. year on my 13 mile commute. Whoa, welcome to the show. I’m actually not on a 13 mile commute home. I’m on my way to Justin’s house. My friend Justin, who I work with and longtime friend, listen to the show. Hey, Travis. So I left a few minutes early to try to get a rush on traffic and be dropping off his birthday present. It was his birthday on Sunday. So couple days late in a couple dollars short, but he’ll get his goodie. So I don’t know if you’re gonna want to hang out Travis. I’m going to be pretty much talking about modern warfare the whole time. So I’m not sure if you want to hang out for that or not. Hey, look at it this way. It’s not beat saber at least right? There’s always a positive in here somewhere. So for those of you who are tuning in have absolutely no interest in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2019. This show will be all about Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2019. Yesterday, I talked a little bit about the single player campaign, which I finished last night. And I’ll talk I’ll close up the gaps a little bit more on that. I’ll give you my final disposition. couple of little interesting hints. And, and we’ll talk all about the multiplayer. I’m going to talk about everything different everything changed how they’ve, how they’ve fixed a few things. Couple things have some rough edges. But overall, I passed yesterday. Before I started playing last night. I was at 28 hours as I think I mentioned. And so I think I probably put three or four more minutes I’m sure broke 30 hours last night. That’s all my multiplayer time as well as my campaign time. So I’m thinking the campaign clocks and somewhere around 10 hours I really need to pay attention. The campaign is 14 overall missions and I’m trying to think if they’re equally broken down or not in terms of time I really wasn’t I wasn’t paying that close of attention. But it’s a full blown story arc there’s there’s a lot there’s a lot of decent story involved in the in a single player campaign. It ends Let me think for a second. One of the things that I like about the Call of Duty franchise is they tend to drop you into different characters, right. So as you’re playing through a campaign, you’ll be character a character be user, there’s not a whole lot of distinction between characters and be just a different soldier with a different haircut with a different mustache or no mustache, with a beard without a beard, whatever. But in this case, you got to play a handful of different individuals and felt, I felt there was some decent disparity. And again, I don’t want to go into great details until you about what makes playing the other characters so great. But it would give away part of the plot. And I don’t want to do that either because it’s funny, my son and I, he was in the living room with my wife and the TV was off. My wife was playing some time management game on her laptop. And Brian was in the living room, I don’t know, playing with the dog or whatever. And I told Brian, I said, Hey, I just finished the campaign. He said, Well, what did you think? And I said, I liked it a lot. It might have actually unseeded Infinite Warfare is my is my favorite Call of Duty campaign. And he said, Did you do that thing at the end? because he’d given me a hint because he’d finished it before I did. And I said, I don’t think I did, because he had given me the hint. But it was like three chapters before the end. And so I thought maybe I’d missed what he was to. He didn’t give me any details. You said Oh, and this happens dad. Be sure you don’t do this. And I’m like Whatever. Okay, so now I’ve got to play the last chapter again, because I missed an achievement. And so anyway, so we’re talking about it. And he’s like, Yeah, well, it was suck that this happened. I said, Look how Look how well I’m doing by not giving away any plots. And I’m like, Yeah, but you know what, that’s what they always do in these these campaigns are has to be this there has to be that there’s a little bit of, you know, hollywood stuff. And my wife’s going. This is a game and I’m like, yeah, and she was this is very detailed. And it kind of occurred to me that we’ve kind of, we’ve kind of gotten complacent on just how much storyline I mean, this was like a 10 hour movie. And while there is definitely some linear play to it, there’s one section and I’m not going to I’m not going to give away any plot points. But there’s this one section, where you are investigating several structures. And it’s at night so you’ve got the night vision goggles on and you’re trying to stand lit areas your night vision goggles have A light detector so you can tell when you’re enlightened when you’re not. And essentially, it’s a full blown stealth level right? So you don’t really want to get caught if you get if you you have a silencer on your gun but you know if they see you and they holler, they set off an alarm or they shoot then it causes a whole bunch of people to come after you and you never survive after that. But it’s really cool. There’s another character Hey, Michael Caine, the great British actors here so what are the characters is over watching you while you are doing your investigation at these buildings. And he’s in constant contact with you. And he’s telling you he’s warning you were enemies are he’s, he’s taking out the occasional enemy for you. It’s really cool and it’s, it’s very, it’s very engaging. I don’t always feel engaged, playing Call of Duty campaigns. It’s It’s when there’s a when there’s a sense of urgency, there’s a sense of there’s a fear, you know, because once you’ve played through anybody who’s played Call of Duty campaigns knows this, once you’ve played a particular scene three or four times because you die or, or you miss staff or whatever, you play the same scene three or four times the, the curtain is kind of pulled back and you start seeing some of the logic of the NPC and you start seeing the logic of the enemies and you start seeing the trappings that go behind the level construction. And frankly, it’s sort of it’s sort of ruins the moment, because you know exactly where the next enemies going to pop up right? When it feels organic, and it feels like it feels like nothing, nothing was put there. Everything feels like it’s, it’s it’s not it’s put the chance, right? Until you lose once, twice, maybe three times. You’ve played that same area over and over again, that you started. To lose some of the magic and the disconnect happens in the I believe button gets, you know, gets stuck and you can’t push it anymore. The neat thing about and this could just be my imagination here, but I, I feel like they put more checkpoints in the game. Normally speaking, you’d like go back to the beginning of the damn mission, right? But instead they keep the checkpoints coming. So even if you fail, you don’t roll back three minutes or five minutes or eight minutes or whatever. You roll back like 30 seconds, 45 seconds. So the illusion the illusion isn’t quite as broken. I don’t know how else to explain that. But the entire game there were many many times when I felt a vested interest in what was going on. And that’s hard for any video game. Forget about Call of Duty who you know that comes out every year in order to give you that vested feeling about these characters and the people that you’re not only you’re playing, but you’re watching you’re in Interacting with and all of the there’s there’s the political currents kind of pulled back, right? So there’s a lot of political pieces within the storyline. And again, I don’t want to get into specifics because it might ruin some of it. But the ending is satisfying. It is not. So I’ll tell you what it is not, there’s not a big giant battle at the end of Call of Duty. I will say that for you. There. It’s a very satisfying culmination of a handful of storylines that tie up. And everybody does what everybody gets out at the end what they wanted to do, I gotta leave it at that if to say anything else would ruin a part of the storyline. There’s a lot of time frames jumping around 10 years prior 20 years prior, you see the relationships of these characters that they have built over time. I feel that’s new to call of duty, right. So there are interactive flashbacks where you’ll go back and you’ll play One of the characters 10 years before 20 years before to establish a rapport with the character and, and establish the rapport between that character and other characters that have built bonds and built relationships, friendships, whatever, over the course of time. So pretty neat Oh, by the way, you guys know the prices in here, Captain price that that there was no secret involved there. They mentioned this and lots of the early press prices from the previous some of the previous Modern Warfare so it’s very cool because price it took me a while I had to sit here and thought about it, I thought about it. So they don’t only use the voice actors for these games, they also use their physical representation. So I kept looking at this price. I kept looking at pricing. I know this guy. I mean, he’s a real actor. This isn’t some voice. In a in a, in a generic soldier. skin. This is a real dude. This is a real actor. But I and I know him from something but I never made a connection to him before. What’s up turbo? So it turns out he is Zachary from long Meyer. He was the he was the late deputy one of the last deputies that came into the organization and long Meyer. I had to look it up. I did not figure it out on my own. It just kept bothering me and bothering me and bothering me. And I finally figured out who he was. But it’s him. I mean, and some of the character models of him that he’s got like a dimple in his forehead. There’s a whole bunch of closeup camera of him in the game. And it’s like, I remember that dimple from the actual actor. So when they 3d scan this guy, they got him down to the dimple level that little dimple on his forehead. I greatest that so yeah, single player campaign very satisfying. Lots of I think I already mentioned this yesterday but a lot of variations of tasks. There’s full blown sniper stuff there’s their stealth stuff. There’s running gun stuff there’s there’s vehicles there are lots of explode I mean there’s explosive type stuff. Yeah, and a couple surprises along the way. And yes, there’s a couple of cases where guys just put keep pouring out the door, but they seem to put that in a little bit better perspective. Alright, so there you go. single player campaign. So if you are looking to wrap that into the price of the game is I’d say it’s a solid 10 hours depending on what you know, the difficulty you play, right I played on regular I imagine I’d be replaying many of the components of that single player campaign again, if I were to choose a more different higher difficulty level. Right so on the multiplayer, so multiplayer, they the changes here are largely due to maps how the maps are laid out. And we’ll get to that in a second, along with a couple of really neat additions to the game formula in terms of spawning, in terms of weapon load outs. And Alright, so let’s we’ll just jump into it. So multiplayer here, couple of new additions, there’s a couple of new game modes. Most of them are just derivatives of other game modes, right? There’s a cyber attack game mode, where essentially it’s it’s a lot like it’s all like headquarters, right? You go and you find you, you get the bomb, you take the bomb to the enemy, you set the bomb and you got to defend the bomb until the timer runs out. Right. So bass, similar play modes. There is a ground war much like World War Two, which puts you in giant maps with tons and tons of people. I haven’t actually played that out. I mean, I played it in the beta, but I haven’t played it in the release yet. But I can tell you that it’s like I can’t remember the number of people is it 100 person battle, something like that. 50 on 50 gigantic maps, tons of targets to shoot lots of lots of fun, but I tend to like things a little more intimate. However, they do offer Team Deathmatch and domination in 20 player matches 10 on 10. And I know what you’re thinking, dude, that’s a lot of frickin people. But the saving grace here is the maps now, I don’t know. I don’t know how they’re pulling this off, right? Because typically in Call of Duty there’s like, one good sniper map right? There was one I’m trying to think of, I get my versions they all blend together. But there was one there was like in Russia. They had the really tall buildings across from each other. Travis knows exactly. All of these levels. I bet there was one in I think it was that was in modern warfare two, I think. And then there was another one that had like a big pile of dirt in the middle of this big open field and there was a tank and a couple of buses in the And that was a great sniping map. But for the most part, the maps are kept fairly small and intimate, lots of walls, lots of things to keep you from having to see great distances, as well as having a large field of view. The first thing you’re going to notice getting into modern warfare 2019 is that these maps are big, expansive and open. Right? The phrase bridge map is frickin huge. And you can literally sit on one end of the map and snipe almost all the way to the other end of the map and it is gigantic. Huge bridge going spanning the middle of the gameplay in the middle of the map. Huge, huge map. Huge bridge. Tommy very open. You’ll you’ll look at this going. Wow. I can’t believe they can pull this off from a technology standpoint right? lot you know, it’s not there’s not a lot of popping in a text shares, there’s not a lot of that nonsense, they really did an amazing job of making these maps feel larger than life. And that’s really hard to pull off in a Call of Duty game. So you got that. That alone makes the game a little more interesting. Any map can be a sniping map. So if you’re a sniper and you like to hide in the shadows and you like to do that support role for the team, you’re not limited to that Russian map or that tank map. Any map pretty much can be an act and an adequate to great sniping that. So that changes things right. Nothing I hate worse than playing a running gun game and pumping my head around the corner. snipe popping my head around another corner sniped again. So this keeps you from just making this a random act of violence, right. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is the maps. Don’t Feel flat anymore. The maps all have the maps have rooftops, walls that you can walk along multiple rooftops, right. So there can be three or four layers of height that you can that you can play with him. There are lots of secondary step ups, like for example, you run up to a wall, there might be a barrel there, you get on top of the barrel that gets you on top of the wall, not just crawling over the wall, not just, you know, vaulting over the wall, but actually getting on the wall and walking around. And that wall can lead you to another building that has two or three different rooftops of its own. So now you’re not just running and gunning straight on. You have to watch the sky, you have to watch what’s going on above you and around you, along with the snipers along with the people that are up on the rooftops. You’ve got a lot more going on. And that’s all thanks to a much more diverse A much more robust map. voxel drawn maps I do remember voxel drawn maps now that you mentioned that’s like early days that’s like, like the old bullfrog stuff. magic carpet. I remember that was like the first time I really saw amazing voxel type graphics being used. But I digress. I told you I was going to talk all about modern warfare to get this out because I got chastised for not talking about more about it yesterday when I said I was going to. So you got the maps, you’ve got the possibilities of more people playing, which is always fun. You have cross play, cross play across three platforms, Playstation four, Xbox One, and PC, all play at the same time. And it is transparent, my friends. You will not know if you don’t go looking whether you’re playing on the PC team against an Xbox person. It’s all transparent. Hey, Javier. You missed a lot of the discussion. All right, you have to go back and listen. So that’s really cool. You are also bound with your control type, you will never play against the mouse and keyboard person, if you’re in a controller if you’re using a controller, and vice versa. So those of you who are used to having a distinct advantage by playing with a bunch of console people, or playing against controller users that goes away, you’re now stuck with your own kind. And vice versa, you know, so I do not feel I have not felt cheated by precision accuracy of another player. I have felt that they can see me regardless. I mean, they’re like any other Call of Duty. I feel they can see through walls. I feel like I’m being shot through walls. These are all early release type things. Maybe people have found exploits. I don’t know. But there are times when I feel like I’m I’m viewable when I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t be and I get taken down. But I never want since I’ve been playing Call of Duty felt like somebody pulled off an impossible shot. Nobody’s scoped sniping Nobody is making impossible shots thanks to having a mouse and keyboard. And to me that’s worth its weight in gold. That alone makes Call of Duty, more fun. She got cross play, you’ve got control style, isolation, which is fantastic. It’s fantastic. I love it. Now let’s move over to load outs. Load outs are handled a little bit differently, every weapon so it’s the same idea, right, the higher up you progress, the more weapons unlock. Each weapon has its own leveling, and the more you level up the weapon, the more attachments unlock every item, every gun will almost every every weapon has a fixed number of slots available. You open up all of those slots right away, you don’t have to unlock additional slots, right. So when you unlock the, the M, the M 19. Right when you unlock that it’s instantly got five slots. Now you may not have five accessories to put in those slots right away but you You don’t have to earn the slides and earn the attachments to put in the slides, all you’re doing is earning the attachments. And you can have all five of those or one of those or none of those filled in any given time, based on whatever you like. You do have kill streaks, you also have field upgrades. So much like the specialists in Black Ops for you can choose a special field skill. And these unlock more and more over time, this could be an ammo supply box, this could be a recon drone. This could be a personal portable barrier. There’s all sorts of things that open up a beacon, a location beacon, where that’s where you’ll respond, that sort of thing. Those have been moved into field upgrades and these can generate slowly, quickly, medium over the course of the match. So you’ll get you’re guaranteed you’re going to get that field upgrade just by nature of being on the field. mean kill streets don’t go together well because I don’t tend to get more than three, maybe four kills. Before I’m slaughtered, right so for me kill streets are great, they’re there kill streets are there to kill streets, three kill streaks, five 711 14, kill streaks, whatever. Lots of different things, vehicles, choppers, a lot of the same things you’ve seen before and the kill streak department. But they do have a few new ones right there’s like a cluster thing where you can paint a target and then it sends in some missiles. Personally, there’s a handful of different things. But for the most part, we’ve seen these sort of kill streaks before. One of them is called dead silence which increases your speed and makes you dead quiet. So people can’t hear you on the you know, on the map even if you’re running. That’s been very useful Apparently, the game ship with the bug with regards to that and it gave some people a tactical advantage but apparently they’ve they’ve, they put a small workaround in place for that already. But I use that a lot. So you have your your field upgrades you have your kill streaks and Of course you have your tactical and lethal. You get I think I mentioned yesterday you do have a fragrant aid right out of the box unlike Black Ops for which you had to work your ass off to get a free grenade. There’s frag semtex claim wars, proxy mines, all the same sorts of things. stun grenades, smoke grenades, gas grenades, standard stuff. Hey, Ron, Jay, what’s up? Are you Is this your first live show? This is awesome. I like having new people coming to the show. Good evening. Good evening. Yeah, yeah, calm down. My car doesn’t like being on auto driving on the highway. All right. So anyway, back to back to it. Let’s see. So what else is special about your load outs? So you also have blueprints so blueprints are a lot like the armory was an infinite warfare. You get special weapons which are essentially special versions of that weapon, right? If you preorder, then you automatically got an M one for was an M one for a whatever that Gun is you get one of those custom blueprints right out of the box that lets you one, choose a weapon you have an unlocked, and two, it gives you a set of five fixed attachments right away. So if you have from the day you unlock, I think you had a shotgun to if you’re already pre ordered. Even if you haven’t earned the gun yet, you can use the special armory blueprint version of the gun. And that gives you access to an immediate fight. You can’t change any of the five attachments but you get great set of attachments as a custom gun right out of the box. If you are wise you will spend the first 10 levels of your multiplayer experience using that f1 for a blueprint gun that you got for the pre order. So yeah, so you know she got blueprints. I have a weird feeling that that’s where they’re going to monetize this game later. And it’s going to make me crazy because that is sort of a paid to that could be considered a pay to win advantage right because you Getting a gun you haven’t earned and you’re getting attachments that you haven’t earned. Right? So I don’t know that to me breach of potential statue. Now let me tell you about the greatest thing ever. You can edit your load outs right in the middle of a match. Yes sir He Bob, you can go in and do a full editing of all of your weapons, your, your tactical everything. If you’re getting your ass kicked. And you think that shifting to claim wars would give you an advantage. You can do it. You can go in and change your weapon attachments. You can go in and change your primary or secondary, all of that stuff. You cannot change your kill streaks. You cannot change your field upgrade, but your load outs, every single one of them are fluid from the start of the match to the end of the match. Listen, people you want to exploit this, right? I don’t know how many times that I gone to a basically gone to a gunfight with a knife and got my ass handed to me and I’m locked into those five load outs that I have and not a single one of them are going to do the job. I got a knife instead of a frickin launcher son of a bitch. Well, I took all my classes and made them all launchers except for all knives except for this one, whatever, you can change them on the fly. We’re talking about modern warfare 2019. So that’s pretty much what the whole rest of the show is going to be about. So if you’re not interested in modern warfare, you pick the wrong day to come in live. So fully changeable load outs on the fly during a match in a party in the middle of the game. You can change your load outs, Game Changer folks, game changer. Now the last thing I want to get you because I’m really close to being adjustments house and I making really good time is spawning. We all know that that call of duty is spawn camper paradise. So what they did to help combat that is a new method of spawning. So what happens is when you go to spawn after you’ve been killed, it shows you a top down view of the immediate area, like a, an isometric view of the area. And then you work in use zoom in a camera zoom in to where you’re going to spot. Why is that so great? Because you can see what’s around you momentarily before you go in. You can see not only your teammates that might be in the area, but you also can see the enemy in that area. So it doesn’t eliminate spawn camping, but it makes sure that you’re prepared for it. And that really, I swear to God makes a difference. If you’re not paying attention and you don’t realize that you can see the enemies. It’s just some cool animated effect and then and then No, it is a tactical tool. Your spot You’re warping the the spawn is a tactical tool for you to establish and evaluate your surroundings before your boots hit the ground. So, those are the major things that are changed the map levels, the map, various variations are great. I really enjoy the map. I enjoy the Piccadilly square a lot. There’s like I said, there’s maps for everybody. But the maps are much more balanced. So running gunners don’t necessarily have an advantage on map a versus snipers having an advantage on map be very good stuff. Let’s see. I’m trying to think if there’s anything else because I’m closing in on my destination, and I want to make sure I’ve covered everything. My only game now is War Thunder, and Cod. I was always sir. see you guys again. Thanks. No problem. Yeah, I don’t play free to play games. So anyway, I’m So that’s that’s pretty much it. Now I have not played a co op yet. So I have I’ll have one more thing to discuss with everybody I know I’m forgetting something, but that’s, that’s the overview. If you’re looking for my seal of approval, you have it. Now listen, it’s always possible that they’re going to bolt something on to here that’s going to be miserable and they’re going to put blue boxes all over the place and they’re gonna they’re gonna mess with it. It’s possible folks I’m not gonna lie to you. But I can tell you right now that I’m having a great time with it. I’m can’t wait to go home and play it which I haven’t really had that desire to run home and play a game in a long time. So I like that. I feel that the isolation of controller types all of the all of these things, it’s the sum of its parts folks. The spawning the load out in the middle of the match the the removal of all the wall jumping and jet packing and all that stuff. It’s back to boots on the ground. It’s better Practical weaponry. There’s enough fun little tech in there to keep it interesting, but nothing crazy. Nothing too. That’s part of the issue, I think with Call of Duty in the past is, it doesn’t feel super realistic, right? You feel like there’s always this element of fantasy. This feels more like you’re on the boots in Afghanistan, running around with other soldiers killing people. And listen, I love it. I love it. And if you you know, you can look at the game and say, okay, it’s 60 bucks. And I’m going to get 10 hours out of the campaign, which sounds like a good deal. And I might get 20 hours and maybe only 20 hours out of multiplayer. Let’s I think you can get your money out of it. I really do. So check it out. Listen, it’ll be on sale before Thanksgiving, you know that you’re going to be able to get a good deal. So just be patient. If you if you just can’t can’t spend the 60 bucks. I think I think you’ll find it. It’s a great game though. I’ve really, I applaud them for pulling off what they’ve done by actually making some changes. is in a positive direction. Oh, and by the way, no more season passes. All content drops on all platforms at the same time. That’s magic too. All right, here we go, guys. That was it. Hope you enjoyed the show. This is Shane or Monroe pastor. See ready? We’ll see you next time. Take care. Bye