Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 - We Ran Out of Ideas

   Sorry about the late posting guys, this one took longer to write than I expected because of the content size. But here ya go, thanks for your patience! ^_^

   So I bet a lot of you have heard about and are possibly pretty excited about the announcement of Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. For a lot of people, as the classic shooter that everyone knows of, this is an exciting announcement as the series is popular with the gaming industry and it's game mode "Zombies" that originally began as "Nazi Zombies" back in "World at War." Personally I'm pretty excited as I have a lot of nostalgia from playing the zombie mode with friends throughout high school and playing what we called "virgin gameplay" where none of us looked up the new zombies map would be and we played with all the surprises and recorded how long we would last. I think the most memorable moment that I've had was my first year in college with my roommate, which happened to be a "virgin gameplay" without being planned, and unfortunately we didn't record it we were so excited to play it. The map was "Buried" and it we made it to the mansion on our first try as we were just spending most of our points exploring the map. As my partner ran ahead into a hallway to the left, I turned right to check out a side room that was a dead end, I immediately turned around and hollered, loud enough to make our neighbor slam on the wall to quiet us down, as a ghost was in my face.
   Anyhow though, I wanna get into the real meat of this story. So the reason why this article is called, "We Ran Out of Ideas" is because watching through the trailer, I noticed some things that were shown that seemed pretty familiar. Watch it for yourself, then I'll go over what I noticed.

   Alright, so now that you've seen it, lets go over a few things that are very familiar ideas, that I think were stolen from other video games. Real quick though, because it was brief, a quick throwback to the "Ember" teaser for BO3 that was released not too long ago. In "Deus Ex: Human Revolution," there is a cutscene at the beginning of the game that shows a basketball player with a special contact lens that shows the exact trajectory and how he needs to throw the ball to make a perfect swish from the spot he is standing on the court, wherever he is. This scene in the middle of the "Ember" teaser, is almost a mirror image of this cutscene.

   But on to the meatier content of this latest trailer. So the first thing that I noticed in the trailer was the seemingly direct steal from the "Bioshock" series, the plasmid abilities (called Cyber Cores in BO3) "Insect Swarm..."

and "Incinerate..."

    I found this pretty funny, and it was a cool throwback when I first saw it. Unfortunately that wasn't the only thing that was very familiar. The next thing I saw was a throwback to a game released not too long ago even, I'm sure a lot of you have played and 100% of you have at least heard of it. The game "Destiny" developed by Bunjie. There is a helmet style in-game that is prevalent on the Warlock class, and given, it's not a direct copy and paste, but you can definitely see where they got their idea from...

   Now it is a little hard to tell from the angle of the second picture, but you can definitely see the similarities, and though I wasn't able to find a picture in the time that I spent writing this, a better picture, there is actually a very low-level helmet that is pretty much a starter item for the warlock class that bears an even greater resemblance to the one pictured in the BO3 picture. The next thing I saw was a reference to a pretty cool game that I actually didn't get to play a lot of, but was a pretty good game nonetheless. "Crysis," a pretty popular series with gamers due to it's futuristic and "Tom Clancy" style of game-play. Just saying, there's a lot of similarities that are here and the style reminded me of Crysis pretty closely.

   And another one, that most people kinda pulled more easily than the rest because of how recent it is and the popularity it had as the game took off, Titanfall. Plain and simple, they jacked wall-running, yes, but they did refine it a little better to add into combat a little more steadily and easier to handle shooting while wall-running from the game footage.

   And lastly, a game pretty near and dear to my heart. I've been playing a long time and have made some pretty good friends and spent a lot of time with other friends (IRL of course). "World of Warcraft," the Blizzard classic that will never end, and has changed the face of MMORPG's forever. The game recently had an expansion, I'm sure you heard about it. "Warlords of Draenor." But even before that, the expansion "Mists of Pandaria" showcased the object/machine/enemy, called an "Iron Star." A massive circular disk that is launched and rolls towards its target, typically exploding on impact, or just crushing it beneath its mass. Seems incredibly similar to the one shown in the BO trailer that is trying to create a futuristic "attack dogs" like scorestreak reward. The only difference perhaps is size, though Warcraft had several different sizes that the Iron Star came in. Anyhow, you can decide for yourself.

   So that's pretty much it from what I saw, but probably not all that was shown, please feel free to let me know of any others you saw in the video and I'll be sure to credit you and report on that one too. I haven't played every game ever made, so I can't catch everything.

   This isn't necessarily a bad thing, I'm not accusing Treyarch of doing this purposely. If anything this goes to show that ideas are few and far between these days and we're getting to the point that there isn't much "original" anymore from even the biggest developers. I personally can't wait to play this game and can't wait to see what Treyarch has in store for us this time!

Thanks again for reading! I appreciate the support now more than ever! Game On!