4 Multiplayer Tweaks That Give Call Of Duty: Ghosts A New Twist

At this point in time, we are at looking something like Call of Duty 100. Maybe not that high, but it’s sure starting to feel like it. It’s hard not to feel a little fatigued with the franchise, especially if you have been grabbing each one year after year.

That being said, while the core of what makes COD remains in tact in Ghosts, there are some pretty interesting tweaks to the multiplayer formula that hardcore players should definitely enjoy. If you’ve always hated the Call of Duty multiplayer style, this one doesn’t do anything that revolutionary, but for fans, the changes definitely help evolve the experience, even if it’s only in some pretty subtle ways.

Character Customization

COD has always been about tweaking and adjusting your classes to suit your play style. That hasn’t changed in Ghosts, but what has is the ability to change the look and gender of your avatar. While not an actual change to the way the game plays, being able to make your soldier stand out with some cool look changes definitely helps freshen things up a bit. You can change items like their clothes, helmets, and even what their face looks like.

For female gamers, this is actually the first time they can actually play as a female soldier, which is pretty cool. For the males among us, it actually puts a little variety into the sounds you hear on the Battlefield, as the female characters will call out, and of course, their voices sound different. Gender equality is always a hot button issue in the gaming world, and this is a small thing that helps push one of the most popular games in the world in that direction.

New Modes

I’ve always been a Team Deathmatch player in COD. Call me old fashioned, but running around shooting my foes with no other goal besides killing them more than they kill me is just fun. That being said, the new modes in this game are awesome. My personal favorite new mode is called Cranked, which is essentially Team Deathmatch with a major twist. When you get a kill you get a speed boost and become more powerful, but if you don’t get another kill within 30 seconds, you explode. This completely does away with camping, as you can’t get one kill and sit back and enjoy because you need to get out there and get another one.

Another new mode is called Blitz, which is almost like American football and Call of Duty having a baby. Each team has to run into a certain spot on the map controlled by the enemy, sort of like a touchdown. It adds some cool strategy to the game, and while not necessarily a game-changing mode, it’s pretty fun. They also tweaked Search and Destroy, and it’s now called Search and Rescue. In this mode, you can pick up the dog tags of your fallen allies and bring them back, whereas in the original mode, once you were dead you were gone for the rest of the round. Hunted is another cool new mode that starts players with weak weapons and sees them moving up as they go along.

Extinction

One of the things Gears of War is so popular for is Horde mode. Call of Duty’s closest feature that brought that same cooperative experience to the masses was Zombies. Of course, Zombies is a staple of the Treyarch games, and Ghosts is an Infinity Ward release, so it has instead introduced Extinction. It makes just as little sense in the context of the game as Zombies does in the other games. Instead of the walking dead, we have aliens.

Gone are the strange window boarding mechanics from Zombies. Instead, it’s a four player cooperative gameplay experience that sees players trying to survive waves and waves of enemies by upgrading guns, manning turrets, and trying to take out the alien hive. It’s incredibly fun, and as someone who never quite understood the appeal of Zombies, I love this mode. If you want an entertaining way to play with your friends, this mode is just what you’re looking for.

Squads

The Squads mechanic makes some pretty big changes to the COD formula. In this game, you level up ten different squad members separately. Each one can have its own look, loadouts, and so on. When you reach the maximum level, you prestige them separately, but they don’t reset like they did in previous games. Instead you are just going for those prestige rank symbols.

The squad mechanic also applies to bot games, as you can take your squad of soldiers and battle them with other squads. You also gain experience that can be applied to multiplayer, which lets you practice and learn the maps without getting crushed by high-skilled players online.

Conclusion

If you’re a hardcore COD fan, then you will certainly love Call of Duty: Ghosts. To the casual player, these changes might seem like no big deal, but for people who have been dedicated to the series throughout, these changes are actually quite large. Of course, there are some negative changes too, such as the removal of the Search and Destroy, Headquarters, and Hardpoint game modes. Still, the positives outweigh the negatives, and that’s all you can really ask for from an annual franchise.

Have you played COD Ghosts? What did you think of the multiplayer? Where does it rank in terms of overall COD games for you? Hit the comments section and let us know!