Digital Foundry- CoD Black Ops Cold War

foodfather

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foodfather on 24 November 2020

shikamaru317 said:

foodfather said:

While the deep dive from DF is appreciated , plenty of reviews have declared this games MP a visual downgrade from MW.

The whole debacle reminds me of Ghost a bit. Good graphics in the SP but the MP graphics and quality of gameplay are poor.

I'm not surprised really, this game was rushed out. Originally CoD 2020 was supposed to be a Sledgehammer game; since Sledgehammer's last CoD was WWII in 2017, it was Sledgehammers turn on the CoD studio rotation. However, there was some kind of falling out over at Sledgehammer with the founders leaving and then disagreements between Sledgehammer and Raven (who was co-developing it with them) on the direction of the game, so 1 year into development Activision took Sledgehammer off the project and Treyarch got brought in to convert their planned 2021 CoD multiplayer into multiplayer for 2020 CoD, with Raven put in charge of the Cold War campaign. So basically Cold War got 2 years of development, like CoD 1 through Ghosts, instead of 3 years of development like CoD Advanced Warfare through Modern Warfare 2019. And CoD 2021 will presumably have 2 years of development as well now because of the upheaval to the studio rotation, though we don't know yet if CoD 2021 will be Infinity Ward or Sledgehammer developed.

This makes sense. I'd be sure to avoid the 2021 COD too.

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Too_Talls on 24 November 2020

foodfather said:

While the deep dive from DF is appreciated , plenty of reviews have declared this games MP a visual downgrade from MW.

The whole debacle reminds me of Ghost a bit. Good graphics in the SP but the MP graphics and quality of gameplay are poor.

As far as downgrades go, it's not really that much of a bad thing when you consider EVERYTHING.

firstly, cod at it's heart and most popular is a 60 fps MP game. and lately, MW especially they forgot the most important part of the franchise's foundation, and the largest install base which was the base xbox one and base ps4. The visual improvements MW introduced catered to the mid-gen console refreshes, and the PC base that was being incorporated through cross-play.

The end result was a nice looking game on the optimized hardware, but a juddery mess on the base consoles running at like 40 to 45 fps on average.

Cod should be built for performance 1st visuals 2nd, because the majority of people that buy the game don't care about the campaign where visuals matter more.

Cold war was clearly built performance 1st as it should be, which can be clearly seen on the base consoles that perform better than MW did on those consoles. If you played any of these games on the base xbox one or ps4, you'd see that black ops 4, and cold war both look better than Modern Warfare looks running on those consoles because of the optimization.

As for this gen, both ps5, and series x have great performance so yeah.............screw anyone that complained about the wrong thing.

http://imageshack.com/a/img801/6426/f7pc.gif

^Yes that's me ripping it up in the GIF. :)

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DonFerrari on 25 November 2020

After several updates and discussion on tweet with John I would update the OP table.

Both games run essentially the same on textures, effects, resolution, etc and also same framerate for most of time. On the 60fpsRT the drops on PS5 were confirmed to be bugs so in fact they run the same. On 120Hz PS5 runs slightly faster (drop less frequent and with smaller quantity) so it is so close that it can also be called a tie. Multiplayer 60 and 120 are locked on both consoles. And finally VRR being supported on Xbox but not on PS5 (currently) the small drops in 120hz are less concerning in Xbox (still that only benefits a small number of games and don't change performance). So this face-off can really be declared a tie in everything. Even Series S performed well for what is expected of it.