Photo Credit: Hartwig HKD via Compfight
Dear god why.
So I’m told Call of Duty: Ghosts came out. Also, the PC port is abysmal. There are quite a few problems with it. Lets start from when you first try to play the game. There is a fifty gigabyte install, making it ridiculous to even get it on your computer. Once you do, only the upper third or so of the PC gaming community will be able to play, as it artificially requires six gigs of RAM. One may (mistakenly) think that it means it is an amazingly beautiful game, but more on that later. If were to actually get to play it, you will find that it only takes up a fraction of that in processing power. You can even use a mod to circumvent this artificial requirement, and it works just fine.
Considering you are probably an intelligent person, you might first go to the options menu once you start up the game. It falls flat. First off, you will probably be noticing frequent stuttering in the background for no apparent reason. Looking into the options menu, there is a nice slew of options for graphics, but only one slider for volume. In most games, you will probably want at least two or three, as you might want the voices or sound effects a bit louder than the music. You might look in the gameplay options, and find a distinct lack of an FOV slider. For those uneducated in the ways of gaming, FOV stands for field of view. The field of view is how wide your cone of sight is. Now this might not be a problem, if it weren’t so low. This means that you will frequently be shot by people standing next to you that you can’t see. Also, many people will get motion sickness from a low FOV, as it is sort of like looking through a window. If you are close to it (i.e. in front of a monitor) you will see more than if you are far away, and if this isn’t the case, you may get sick.
But I digress. Onwards to gameplay and graphics. Once you get in, you will find that it is reasonably hideous. It looks like they never updated the engine from the older Call of Duty games. This leaves me wondering why the game is so taxing on your system. 50 gigabytes of memory and (sort of) six gigs of RAM for this? The thing can bring a gaming machine with the best parts you can get for it to its knees, without even looking pretty. If you can survive the lag, the gameplay is highly iterative, uninspired, and bland. There is almost nothing new from previous Call of Duty games, and those were just run of the mill first person shooters.
Now go buy Battlefield 4.