Call of Duty Ghosts PC evaluation

ABT received a copy of Call of Duty: Ghosts as part of Nvidia’s PC bundle promo.  Although the game was released in November, we received it last week and this editor spent parts of three days playing the main single-player (SP) story from start to finish. When it was first released, it was buggy, however,  Call of Duty: Ghosts has been patched many times including receiving a 50MB patch last night. Here are our impressions playing it with a GTX 780 Ti and Core i7-4770K.

Once we started playing Call of Duty: Ghosts, we were drawn immediately into the game and played longer sessions than normal. The very best parts of Call of Duty: Ghosts use the same hooks that made the first nine Call of Duty (CoD) games popular, but it doesn’t really bring anything new even though it ventures into space and under water.

The Story

Many fans and even reviewers are somewhat divided on the the game. It is unnecessary to have played any CoD games previously to get immediately into the game.   All of the controls are traditional and most of the keys can be remapped to suit the player’s style.  Unfortunately, the field of view (FoV) is very narrow and cannot be adjusted without hacks.

Call of Duty: Ghosts is set in an alternate timeline where the USA has lost its super-power status when the Middle East was bombed into oblivion and a new enemy, The Federation, based in South America, has developed superior technology and resources.  The USA strangely does not use their own space weaponry, called Odin, to decimate their enemy, but they actually lose control of it to an assault on the space station after the Federation breaks their truce.  After several of the USA’s South-West cities are destroyed by their own weapon in a matter of seconds, a couple of astronauts sacrifice their lives to take down America’s particle-beam weapon before it can destroy more of the country.

Call of Duty: Ghosts is an implausible story complete with plot holes that make no sense whatsoever.  It requires a major suspension of disbelief to believe that both sides are incapable of logical planning.  For example, a diversionary attack on a carrier, draws the entire Federation fleet away from what they really need to protect, allowing the weak story to continue.   Ghosts plays as a “story by committee” where the only goal seems to be able to top the last scene, much like the mindless Summer blockbuster movies that are mostly made up of special effects and action.  There is nothing inherently wrong with mindless entertainment, but in the case of Ghosts, the variety of action sequences are not enough to make a truly great game.

After hearing your father Elias’ story of the Ghosts, an ultra-elite special forces division of which only 15 survived a massive assault to be come legendary, the scene shifts in real time to the space station and to the Federation assault where they temporarily gain control of Odin.  It is pretty easy to tell from the very beginning that Elias is the leader of the Ghosts although his teenage two sons apparently have no clue.  The family is “military”, cliched, and mostly dysfunctional.  Besides playing as the youngest son Logan, you also play as one of two American astronauts who sacrifices his life to destroy the Odin weapon.  The player also controls other characters, including playing as a dog, Riley.

The main part of the story begins in San Diego where Elias and his two young sons live as the Federation attack begins on America.  You play the part of the younger brother who idolizes his older brother nicknamed Hesh.  The story of the sibling rivalry is never developed well, and the brothers don’t catch on until years later that their father is the leader of the Ghosts.  This editor has lived in Point Loma where the family evidently had their home, and the vision of a decimated San Diego is interesting although no care was made to make it accurate geographically.  Likewise, the action shifts to Santa Monica and to other South Western USA locations where you are called upon to defend your homeland.  Ghosts is a mostly a story of defense and fighting for survival and it is somewhat similar to World-in-Conflict.

Months later, the story continues to follow the brothers, now in the US army and following in the footsteps of their father.  The USA has fought the Federation to a stalemate and they have erected a huge physical barrier, a wall that separates the USA from Mexico.   The brothers are sent as a test into a no-man’s land between Los Angeles and San Diego, and their story begins in earnest.

The story is experienced mostly through the eyes of Logan, the younger brother.  Through a series of unlocking intelligence reports that you find in the most unusual places, you get a hint of the backstory and of the sibling rivalry.  Technically there is none, as Logan idolizes his older brother, and the father appears to favor the older brother, although Logan reminds him of his late wife.  There should be a touching story, but it is beyond the writers to call up any emotion even when tragedy strikes, and scenes that should be important are glossed over in favor of action – and more action.

Riley and Dynamic Fur

The player also gets to play as the family’s highly trained German Sheppard, Riley where you get a dog’s eye view of the battlefield in mostly black and white and understated colors.  This is probably the best part of the Call of Duty: Ghosts story as Riley is a great companion but is under-utilized.  This dog is highly trained to silently kill enemy troops by ripping out their jugular, yet he can barely defend himself against a wolf who probably escaped from the San Diego Zoo, and whose pack survived against all odds.

Call of Duty: Ghosts uses Nvidia’s HairWorks to give Riley’s fur and that of the wolves real definition instead of looking like plastic.  Nvidia uses DX Compute to allow for dynamic fur to be run on AMD and Nvidia video cards.  Besides, dynamic fur, Nvidia’s PhysX is used for realistic and interactive smoke rendering.

In most video games, fur is created by adding polygon strips to the character mesh and by using textures with transparencies.  It works OK although the fur is static.  In contrast, dynamic fur adds hair strands to to each character which flow in response to the character’s movements.  The silhouette is “fuzzy” with rich color gradients that interact with light and shadows more naturally than previously.  There is not a very large performance impact unless you are right next to Riley as fur density is adjusted relative to distance.

Unfortunately, the Call of Duty: Ghosts missions featuring Riley are rare.  In one mission, the player becomes Riley and must get through enemy lines for reconnaissance without being spotted.  In another, Riley is wounded and you must carry him to safety through a raging battle, stopping often to set him down to defend yourselves.

Mostly, Riley is ignored and the majority of the missions do not reference him at all.  There is a lot of action that is evidently used to distract the player from the lack of plot.

Action and More Action – and AI

The action sequences in Call of Duty: Ghosts are a lot of fun, and it gets one’s heart pounding when it gets to the big battle scenes.  There is a real feeling of being in a massive battle and teamwork is emphasized.  The friendly AI isn’t bad and will mostly stay out of the player’s way while still him giving reasonable support.  The enemy AI is not very good and sheer numbers are used to compensate for their deficiencies.

You never really get to know your companions, and except for the main characters, there is little exploration of any character motivation.  You learn that the Ghosts left their leader behind in South America, believing that he was dead.  As the story turns out, he was captured by the Federation, tortured and turned so that now he is hunting the Ghosts.   And evidently, he is better than any Ghost alive.  Even when he is captured, there are implausible plot twists to continue the story and one has to wonder at the abilities of the Ghosts who were able to capture him at all.

 The CoD World

The Call of Duty: Ghosts world is big and varied.  From Space to Southern California, and from Las Vegas to South America cities; from desert sands to snow and ice, and from tropical jungles and underwater scenes to battles in space, there is plenty of non-stop action.

It is almost as if the devs had a list of “to do” things for the player, and none of it is tied in particularly done well from the story point of view.  So, suspend disbelief and start shooting.

The linear story generally progresses nicely, but not all of the writing has the same quality and it lags in places, and ultimately it feels too long even though it is very short. Call of Duty: Ghosts has a very short single player game which can stretch to a dozen or more hours if the player tries to explore and find the one bit of intelligence in the form of a notebook hidden on every level.  The intel reports will fill the player in on the backstory although none of it is necessary to understand what is going on.

The game is repetitive. After a time, all of the jungles, battles, cities and towns begin to look alike, and the missions tend to repeat the same CoD formula. These are occasionally broken up with flying missions to destroy targets; protect, search and destroy missions, and rescue. There is a fast-paced mandatory battle scene on the top of a speeding train while you and your brother are running and dispatching enemies ahead of you while avoiding fire from the enemy helicopters flying alongside the train.

Mercifully, there are few QTEs (quick time events) and none of them require precise button presses.  The player’s hand is mostly held throughout the game with a lot of prompts and suggestions what to do and where to go next in this extremely linear game.

Odin

It is never explained why America never used their space-based weapon on the Federation.  Instead, we find them attacked by their own weapon and later on we find out that Odin is not the only doomsday weapon.

Besides fighting in space, a few Call of Duty: Ghosts missions use water effectively.  In the picture to the right, a massive dam is broken to flood an entire South American city to try and stop you and the Ghosts from completing their mission.   It is fairly exciting as you now have to race upward in the skyscrapers to avoid being drowned, and there many times where all of the action goes underwater as you are swept along by the raging waters from one location to another.

There are also submarine based missions, and you have to avoid sharks.  It is simply a matter of waiting for them to move on their path and then pressing onward.  For variety, the games moves the action into the air and you get to pilot an attack chopper where you must take out certain targets to proceed.  You also get to pilot a tank several times.  Assaulting a skyscraper and rappelling down and then parachuting from it are probably the highlights of this game that a player will remember.

As befits a big-budget game, the music and the voice acting are excellent.   Sound effects are reasonably accurate and they tend to immerse the player into the big battle sequences.  The is some humor also, although some of it is of the “potty” variety.

(Check out the logo on the porta-potty to the right. “No.1 in No.2 since 2003”.)

 

Battles

The battles are a lot of fun. The weapons are good and feel right.  They are well-balanced and the player can effortlessly more from one to another without feeling disadvantaged.  The sniper rifle is accurate and the sounds are good.  There are clear objectives to follow and there is a feeling of success and relief when they are accomplished

Multiplayer

Besides the staples of CoD multiplayer online play are a brand new set of game types that feature additional maps. You may craft your own game experience by choosing abilities, rules and bonuses to play and share with on-line friends. There is also a way to develop bots in MP in a new mode called “squads”.  There is also a new Extinction co-op mode for 4 players using aliens for one of the sides. Since this editor is Satellite Internet based, ping is ridiculously high and playing in MP is a terrible experience.  However, most players will choose multiplayer, many eschewing the single-player experience entirely.

Bugs

The game is remarkably buggy considering that it has been patched many times.  Playing with the world’s fastest single-GPU video card, the GTX 780 Ti and Core i7-4770K together with 8GB of super-fast Kingston HyperX Predator RAM,  there were many unexplained slowdowns where a good framerate would suddenly tank and drop into the 20s.  Sometimes, the graphics would completely flake out as in the image to the right, and it would be necessary to restart the game.

Although the graphics are good, they are not that impressive considering the game’s performance.  Unfortunately, the Fraps overlay no longer works with Call of Duty: Ghosts and it is pretty difficult to benchmark.  MSI’s Afterburner was able to log all of the framerates, however, and we can give you some idea of the performance.

Checkpoint Saves and difficulty

This gamer normally hates the checkpoint system. No so with this game.  The checkpoints are extremely close together and very little time is usually wasted getting back into the game after dying.  Difficulty is adjustable, from the very easy recruit difficulty where your health regenerates very quickly and it takes quite a few enemy shots to take your character down, to Veteran mode, where a single enemy shot may require you to start the checkpoint over with a new life.

The Graphics

The decent graphics support the game and immerse the player right into it, especially in battles. Call of Duty: Ghosts is powered by a wide range of technologies that allow it to deliver high-quality graphics. In addition to using technologies like FXAA and TXAA to improve image quality, it also uses newer technologies like HBAO+ to enhance the game’s graphics. A recent patch implemented FurFX which makes Riley’s fur look much better than previously.

Image Quality

Generally, 2x TXAA provides the best image for the performance and it is an improvement over TXAA implementations in other games, although probably not as good as in Assassin’s Creed IV. 2x TXAA provides very good anti-aliasing approximating 4xMSAA, while the performance hit is less.

With TXAA, the very slight blur is about the same as with FXAA, but unlike with FXAA and MSAA, the texture crawling and shimmering is nearly gone. If one desires an even sharper image, SweetFX can be used together with TXAA. 2x or 4xMSAA is significantly cleaner than FXAA, and TXAA is often preferred to eliminate the texture crawling and shimmering.

 

TXAA

TXAA is a cinematic-style anti-aliasing technique designed specifically to reduce temporal aliasing (crawling and flickering in motion). TXAA is a mix of hardware AA, custom CG film style AA resolve, and a temporal filter. To filter any given pixel on the screen, TXAA uses a contribution of samples both inside and outside of the pixel in conjunction with samples from prior frames. The trade-off is blur, which for some is intolerable and for others, cinematic. This editor much prefers the mild blur of TXAA to the texture crawling and flickering while in motion without.

TXAA has improved spatial filtering over standard 2x MSAA and 4x MSAA, particularly on fences or foliage. TXAA is also capable of intelligently managing per-pixel effects without introducing lighting artifacts on object edges. The filtering used by TXAA results in a softer image compared to traditional MSAA – the blur.

TXAA uses hardware MSAA in conjunction with a temporal filter. The performance hit of TXAA will vary from game to game and is directly correlated to the performance hit of MSAA. In this game, 2xTXAA takes less of a performance hit than 4xMSAA. Screen shots look better with MSAA, but playing the game with the camera in motion or even a video capture can easily show the advantages of TXAA.

NVIDIA HBAO+

To advance Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) tech, Nvidia’s HBAO+ looks better than the original HBAO algorithm, especially on scenes with thin objects such as grass and leaves. It is now fast enough to be used by top GPUs.

 

DRM

Call of Duty: Ghosts uses Steam to launch the game and the gamer must connect to the Internet at least once. Once the game is authenticated, the game can be played in offline mode on the PC it was installed on, and it never requires the game to be updated although sometimes Steam requires the player to go back online occasionally.

Let’s check out the complete test bed.

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i7 4770K (overclocked to 4.2GHz); Turbo is on. Supplied by Intel.
• ECS Z87 Gank Domination A3x Golden motherboard (Intel Z87 chipset, latest BIOS, PCIe 3.0 specification; CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x), supplied by ECS.
• 8GB Kingston DDR3 Kingston Predator RAM (4x2GB, dual-channel at 2800MHz; supplied by Kingston)
• Thermaltake Water2.0 Pro CPU cooler, supplied by Thermaltake
• 7 case fans, supplied by Noctua.
• GTX 780 Ti 3GB at reference speeds and also overclocked, supplied by Nvidia
• Onboard Realtek Audio
• Genius SP-D150 speakers, supplied by Genius
• Kingston 240GB HyperX SSD, supplied by Kingston
• Thermaltake 775W PSU, supplied by Thermaltake
• Thermaltake Overseer RX-I full tower case, supplied by Thermaltake
• Philips DVD SATA writer
• HP LP3065 2560×1600 thirty inch LCD

 

Test Configuration – Software

• Nvidia GeForce WHQL 332.21 and 334.67 (briefly); High Quality; Single-display Performance mode; Prefer Maximum Performance, Vsync off
• Windows 7 64-bit; very latest updates
• Latest DirectX
• All games are patched to their latest versions.
• Vsync is forced off in the control panels.
• Varying AA enabled as noted in games; all in-game settings are specified with 16xAF always applied; 16xAF forced in control panel for Crysis.
• All results show average frame rates
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
• Windows 7 64, all DX9 titles were run under DX9 render paths, DX10 titles were run under DX10 render paths and DX11 titles under DX11 render paths.

The Game

• Call of Duty: Ghosts, supplied by Activision/Nvidia as part of Nvidia’s Game Bundle

 

Let’s check out the hardware requirements, performance and our conclusion on the next page.

 

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