YMMV / Call of Duty: Black Ops III

• Abridged Arena Array: Expect to see the following maps voted for constantly: All 4 of the beta maps (Combine, Evac, Hunted, and Stronghold), Fringe, and Nuk3town, as usual. With the Awakening DLC, we can add Skyjacked to the list. Not surprising, considering it's a remake of Hijacked.
• Best Level Ever: Mission 8, "Demon Within", is one of the most memorable and downright insane campaign levels in Call of Duty history. Things start off on a high note with a genuine Boss Battle against Sarah Hall, who is piloting a giant battle mech. A legit boss battle and a badass female villain? Already a step away from the standard Call of Duty formula. But when the Player interfaces with Hall's DNI, and enters a virtual reality version of her Dying Dream, which has been corrupted by Corvus, things go from above average to stellar. The mission turns into a Mind Screw level of pure awesomeness as the player takes a brief trip back to the franchise's roots in a World War II battle, and ultimately end up fighting zombies in a burning house while Hall confronts a cerebral manifestation of Corvus. Hell. Yes.
• Bizarro Episode: A lot of fans consider the campaign to be this not only for the Black Ops subseries but perhaps for the franchise as a whole.
• Broken Base: With the release of the first DLC pack, Awakening, new items were added to the Black Market, including some new, unique weapons. Prior to this update, the only items found in the Black Market were purely cosmetic. Now, a portion of the community are crying foul at Activision/Treyarch turning online into pay-to-win, by coercing players into spending real money in order to have a better chance at getting the new weapons. On the other hand, the weapons themselves are Difficult, but Awesome sidegrades at best, or niche at worst, so game imbalance isn't an issue (the exceptions are any of the melee weapons, which appear to be straight upgrades of the combat knife). Furthermore, the weapons themselves are rare enough that paying for them is still a crapshoot and only serves to reduce grinding Cryptokeys the normal way.
  • The campaign. Despite having the "Black Ops" title, and being the third in that series, it contains very few references to previous titles,^note  And the ones it does are incredibly forced, such as the US government apparently suddenly going the Stupid Evil route and stashing Nova 6 in the same facility that was used to create an AI for no reason. Nevermind that the ending in BO2 where Menendez dies and Cordis Die causes anarchy and chaos is the canon ending of Black Ops II judging from Hendricks' comments on Menendez during the events of "Rise and Fall". and is set 40 years after Black Ops II, and a century after the first game. Without the Black Ops name on it, this game could easily stand on its own as an independent entry in the franchise... were it not for the Zombies portion, anyway.
• Complete Monster: Deimos, the Big Bad of the "Nightmares" campaign, is the demigod of dread and terror who, along with his sister Dolos, was brought to Earth from Malum by the SP/CORVUS experiments conducted by Coalescence in Singapore. Upon arriving to Earth his first act was to possess Taylor and his team via their DNIs, attempt to kill Dolos, and massacre the SP/CORVUS headquarters in Singapore, mocking Dr. Salim for thinking that Deimos, a god, should thank a mere human for bringing him to Earth. He then modifies Nova 6 to cause zombie outbreaks, turning humanity into his undead army, and breaks them out of their quarantines so they can ravage the world, stating that humanity is his to rule and destroy. Deimos would later possess Hendricks after Taylor's death in Cairo, before attacking Zurich, planning to use their SP/CORVUS headquarters to open a portal where he would then have his undead army conquer Malum, right after killing Dolos' vessel, Kane.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Firebreak is surprisingly well-liked by fans, especially by Black Ops 4 which gave some information about his past.
• Fandom Rivalry: One stoked by the opposing party, no less. The reveal trailer being very similar to the Deus Ex prequel series (technology versus nature, how far technology can be pushed, whether or not technology makes us less human/moral, rapid societal change and backlash brought by unregulated technology) didn't go unnoticed by the gaming media and Eidos's Deus Ex team, who posted a series of jovial tweets.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Mostly because the plot somehow manages to be darker and bleaker than the previous game, while providing no unambiguously happy ending and also having a virtually In Name Only relationship to the preceding Black Ops games, some choose to disregard Black Ops III (and IV) and instead consider the "golden" ending of Black Ops II to be the true finale of the series.
• Funny Moments:
  • This exchange between Hendricks and the Player after locating Said during the first mission, which becomes a bit of a Brick Joke not too long after:
    Taylor: Two minutes? I'll be timing you.
    Hendricks: Son of a bitch was never funny.
    Player: You sound like the voice of experience.
    Hendricks: Trust me, I am.
  • While more into Black Comedy territory, during the first mission, when you're escaping with Hendricks, Said, and Khalil, Hendricks manages to crash the APC hard enough for it to stall. Keep in mind that this is 2065 and that, well, you just dealt with a platoon of robotic mooks a few moments earlier. Yes, several years into the future and APCs of all things are still prone to breaking down.
  • Literally every time Taylor says, "Outcome? Train go boom", in "Brave New World" for all the wrong reasons.
• Game-Breaker: Black Ops III has some glaring balance issues, with some weapons having ridiculously low damage, players taking more damage to kill than in previous games, and certain overpowered Specialist weapons.
  • The "Holy Trinity" of submachine guns in the game, aka the Kuda, VMP and Vesper. Each has their own quirks, but each absolutely dominates the field in their own special way, even against assault rifles. The Kuda is an all-around good gun that is good at range and in close quarters, with good accuracy and damage. The VMP has a beefy 40 round magazine to start, a high fire rate and excellent damage, meaning it will win in most toe to toe engagements. The Vesper has a 30 round magazine like the Kuda, but has an obscene fire rate, making it unmatched in close quarters. Add in the Fast Mag or Extended Mag attachments, and it's nigh unbeatable. It's not unusual to see games dominated by someone using one of these three guns, usually with a 2.00 or more kill/death ratio. As a result, all of the submachine guns were stealth nerfed in a patch with the Vesper getting the absolute worst of it. This video sums up the dire situation the submachine gun class is now facing. The SMGs continued to be tweaked, with the Vesper briefly getting back its pre-patch dominance before it was hit with an extra recoil nerf and the Kuda getting a range reduction (it still murders up to medium range), leaving the VMP the top of the class.
  • The P-06 burst sniper rifle has extremely high penetration power, making it a force to be reckoned with if FMJ is attached. On a more general note, snipers have no penalty from suppressors in this game, in contrast to the range/damage penalty of prior games, so you could get shot through a wall and not even know where the shooter came from!
  • The BlackCell rocket launcher in multiplayer. It comes with four rockets, can lock onto targets (all Scorestreaks and the Safeguard robot) quickly, and due to its quick reload, is able to be spammed repeatedly at targets. Many players have found it frustrating that their high-tier Scorestreaks are destroyed as soon as they enter the battlefield, especially if the BlackCell user is equipped with the Engineer perk, which lets them see summoned enemy scorestreaks on the mini-map. The BlackCell is also capable of direct-impact killing enemy players caught between the launcher user and ground targets (ground-deployed Scorestreaks and the Safeguard robot). As a result, the launcher's reload speed was nerfed while scorestreak health was increased.
  • Certain Specialist weapons are far and away stronger than the others.
    • The Reaper's Scythe weapon. Not only is it insanely accurate and extremely lethal, but the gun can utterly wreck scorestreaks. Even a poor player can easily get quad kills without much trouble when using it and a good player can wreck an entire team twice over. The only balancing factor is that it is the slowest charging special in the game.
    • Firebreak's Purifier weapon is so insanely overpowered that it's ridiculous. Unlike the Scythe where getting a kill requires a few seconds of aiming, a player using the Purifier only has to graze a player with the flame and it's an automatic kill. It's not unheard of Purifier users to set their sensitivity to insane levels, run into a room filled with enemies, spin around really fast and come out with 7 or 8 kills. Facing a Purifier user at mid-range or closer is absolute suicide, as most of the time the player cannot do enough damage in the time before the flame kills them. Oftentimes, even if you kill them first, the flames will graze you enough for them to pull a Taking You with Me.
    • Battery's War Machine is your average Noob Tube taken up to eleven, being easy to aim, spam, and able to decimate entire rooms with its grenades, whether it's a direct impact or from its Recursive Ammo. Flak Jacket only protects against the latter. The damn thing is arguably even more broken in Campaign. Unlocked at Level 15 (about 70% through the Campaign, if you are playing on Hardened or above), it comes as a secondary weapon, with 8 shots in the cylinder and 8 in reserve. Unlike the previous iteration of the War Machine in Black Ops 2, Black Ops 3's War Machine shoots a grenade which, upon hitting a surface, releases three small balls in a large spread that do a small hop and then cause a massive explosion. With the War Machine, all you have to do is find cover, shoot above the cover at varying angles, and in no time everyone on the other side of that cover is dead. What makes it broken, however is its semi-automatic fire rate, and doubled with the fact that it does 3x the damage if your target is in close range. Top it all off with the fact that most boss enemies (like the P.A.W.W.S) can be taken out in four shots, which roughly amounts to about 1.5 seconds. And to end it off, if you have the Copycat tac-rig equipped, have fun getting infinite ammo every 2 seconds.
    • Ruin's Gravity Spikes come out fast and have a deceptively large range. It's slightly mitigated by the fact that it can be interrupted by killing the player in midair, as well as the fact that many players telegraph when they're going to use it by boosting as high as they can before they land, in an effort to make themselves harder to hit but leaving them open to attack longer.
    • Spectre's Ripper is basically a combo platter of Modern Warfare 2's Commando lunge perk and panic knifing all over again. It also has an insanely fast recharge timer.
    • Prophet's Tempest. Anyone hit with its beam will be instantly killed before you can say "FUCK!" And if there are many players grouped together, that's bad news, since anyone hit by the gun will zap their teammates if they're too close for extra kills.
  • If you thought the SMGs were busted, say hello to the Marshal 16. While it's essentially a gigantic derringer-shotgun hybrid that only fires one shot before needing to reload, it more than makes up for this by firing 16 pellets at once. For reference, most other shotguns only have up to eight at a time, and with the revision made to shotguns in this game^note  As per Drift0r, shotguns usually have a fixed flat damage on the first pellet if it hits, and then every other pellet will deal damage afterward. Take the KRM-262 pump shotgun, for example - it'll deal a fixed 98 damage at the closest range if one pellet hits initially while every other pellet does 2 damage. Since the KRM in this case fires eight pellets at a time, that means you'll be getting 16 extra damage per shot fired, ergo you'll actually deal 114 damage up close, without factoring in range dropoff. , the Marshal 16 will grant you reliable one-hit kills pretty much all the damn time. Oh, and did we not mention that not only is it a secondary, but it's also exclusive to the Black Market? If that doesn't sound like Pay-to-Win, we don't know what else does.
  • With an update, a 10th specialist was added to the game in the form of Blackjack, AKA the Black Market vendor. When he gets a 5 killstreak (scorestreaks excluded), he can obtain the specialist weapon of the 5th consecutive person he killed and for every kill beyond 5 in a row, he can store an extra Specialist weapon. This means you can have Purifiers dominating a whole entire team on the 2ND ROUND of a game of Search and Destroy. If the person who is playing Blackjack is a very good player, he could get a Game-Breaking Specialist weapon every 45 seconds compared to other Specialists who can take up to a couple minutes minimum to acquire their Specialist's weapons. Blackjack is balanced by only having 60 minutes of in-game time to play as him, and the fact that you can only unlock him by using "Blackjack Tokens", which are obtained either by doing very difficult weekly challenges or spending 90 Cryptokeys. Still, a whole team of Blackjacks can absolutely break the meta.
• Genius Bonus: The cultists/terrorists who worship the undead in the Nightmares campaign are referred to as "Cotardists", a reference to Cotard's syndrome, a rare mental illness in which the afflicted believe they are - figuratively or literally - dead.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • During the ad campaign, Treyarch released various teaser trailers featuring Dr. Salim talking about a "Frozen Forest", which got many fans theorizing what significance the Frozen Forest holds. In reality, it's revealed in the game that the Frozen Forest never existed. It was a fantasy created by Dr. Salim that Corvus fooled itself into thinking was real, just like how the fans fooled themselves into thinking the Frozen Forest had a larger role in the plot.
  • Back in 2011, Ace Combat: Assault Horizon was touted as Call of Duty in the sky due to how the Dogfight Mode imposed an obnoxious on-rail experience. Come this game, an actual Call of Duty game, there is a piloting segment highly reminiscent of Assault Horizon's Dogfight Mode.
• Just Here for Godzilla: The game received notable pre-release attention from websites and demographics that wouldn't normally pay attention to Call of Duty for its inclusion of an optionally-female protagonist, arguably making it the biggest game to date to allow players to go through the entire campaign mode as a female character (games like Fallout and Mass Effect may be big, but Call of Duty is the crown of the industry).
• Les Yay: The female Player Character and Rachel Kane, oh so very much, since Kane acts as the Implied Love Interest regardless of gender.
  • Subverted if you believe the theory that your character died after the first mission and is currently living out a Dying Dream of Taylor's last mission, during which he had a relationship with her.
• Magnificent Bitch: "Nightmares" campaign: Dolos is the demigoddess of trickery whose actions prove why she earned such a title. Being brought to Earth from Malum by the SP/CORVUS experiments conducted by Coalescence in Singapore, along with her brother Deimos, she schemes against Deimos when he plans to turn all of humanity into an undead army to conquer Malum. Dolos would posses Kane and through her convince Soldier #25954 and Hendricks to kill Taylor and his team possessed by Deimos before Deimos proceeds to posses Hendricks. Upon arriving at Zurich, Dolos convinces Soldier #25954 to let Deimos open the portal to Malum before trapping them both in Malum. With Deimos now vulnerable in Malum, Dolos helps Soldier #25954 kill her brother before revealing her plan to kill off every demigod and supernatural being that opposes her, successfully persuading the soldier into helping Dolos accomplish this goal.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The Jingle for the Coalescence Corporation. It has been well received by players, who see it as a perfect ringtone sound.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Outcome: X go boom."^Explanation The second campaign level starts on a simulation of a train, which gets blown up in a terrorist attack. Taylor then walks you through everything the Zurich Defense Force did prior to the attack, but with you accompanying to help out. After every section of the level, Taylor says that whatever just took you X minutes to do, took the Zurich police Y days to do, followed by "Outcome: Train go boom."
  • "With these upgrades, you never stood a chance."^Explanation Prophet's default taunt when winning a match with the highest score of his team, which people used to apply to many situations involving advanced or not-so-advanced technology.
• Narm:
  • The aforementioned "Outcome: Train go boom." and Taylor's talks surrounding it are supposed to be intriguing and mysterious, but they just come off as hilariously wonky.
  • Looking at the nations within the Winslow Accords and the Common Defense Pact, it's obvious that the writers were trying to just recreate the Cold War, even if it ended up making no sense. It doesn't take a geopolitical genius to see that most of Eastern Europe isn't likely to ally themselves with Russia over NATO anytime soon.
    • Let's not bother with the fact that in the BO3 timeline, Russia is somehow equally powerful as the USA and China combined.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The PC version has its mouse acceleration tied to the framerate, and there are apparently severe memory leak issues. It's to the point where it's been compared to the craptastic Batman: Arkham Knight port. However, it has improved a fair deal since then, particularly with the addition of mod support and dedicated servers (a rare thing to find in the franchise's PC ports post-World at War).
  • Seventh-gen systems also get the short end of the stick with the removal of the entire single-player campaign, even if it was due to the space limitations of said systems. The graphics are also horrible with sixth-gen art designs, the frame-rate is capped at 30 FPS when even Advanced Warfare managed to run on the same consoles at 60, and the fact the ports have only contained the standard game content since launch, with the exception of the standalone Zombies map The Giant, and the first DLC pack, Awakening. On the other hand, this can be a blessing depending on how you look at it, since the lack of post-launch support also means the 360/PS3 versions never got the Black Market.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Skill-based matchmaking in multiplayer. Unlike in earlier games this was used in, Black Ops 3 changed the mechanics of how skill-based matchmaking works. After a lobby forms based on the connections of the players in the lobby, the skill-based matchmaking kicks in and attempts to balance the teams so a mix of skilled and unskilled players will be on each team. Unfortunately the system ends up deciding to stick the best player on a team that has the majority of the newbie/poor players and makes them face the opposing team full of average to good players. While it is still possible for the best player in the lobby to do well, they will often have little to no support from their team due to their lack of skill. If you're a really good player, be prepared to carry your teams almost every single match and lose a lot if you're playing solo in team modes.
  • C4 returns and retains the "double tap to detonate" ability, but now it also alerts the person who placed it whenever an enemy is near it, unless they have the Hard-Wired perk equipped. On the other side, C4 also has a much more noticeable delay between planting and arming, which cause some minor confusion for players who like C4 Bombing.
  • The fact that powerful weapons can be acquired from the Black Market, such as the Banshii (a One-Hit Kill shotgun at any range), NX ShadowClaw (a crossbow that is also an OHKO weapon with ammo that can be picked up if you miss), and the Marshal 16 (a miniature double-barreled shotgun that, at close range, can - surprise! - OHKO enemies). Especially since the latter two can be Dual Wielded as well.
  • The Black Market itself falls into this due to the constant additions of melee weapons (which are reskinned Combat Knives). Every time a melee weapon is added, it reduces the chances of players getting these ranged weapons. For some players, they may not even see any ranged weapons in their multiplayer careers even if they use both CoD Points and Cryptokeys, while others can obtain every ranged weapon available from supply drops.
• Signature Scene: The Player's first encounter with the Robot Grunts in the first mision for its Shock Value.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • With a protagonist that is part of an elite black ops unit, a Memetic Mutation (using the original definition of the phrase) that is central to the plot, a heavy dose of Mind Screw, ruminations on the nature of man and his relationship with machine, dangerous brainhacking with digital illusions, pursuit of a Fallen Hero, characters that may or may not Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, and a Big Bad that was spontaneously formed from a collective consciousness, Black Ops 3 is a dead-on ringer for many aspects of the Ghost in the Shell universe, particularly the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 'verse. Ironically, at around the same time this game came out, an actual GITS: SAC game, First Assault, was released and was considered a major disappointment due to being a strictly online multiplayer shooter with no plot.
  • In addition, what with all the trips into the center of the mind, complete with abstract and disturbing imagery along with a repeated Madness Mantra, the heavy amounts of Mind Screw and Rule of Symbolism, the Gainax Ending, themes of ascending to a higher plane of existence, an utterly inhuman final antagonist, and overall existential overtones, Black Ops 3 could easily pass for an FPS take on Neon Genesis Evangelion.
  • More of a single level adaptation, but the tenth mission "Lotus Towers" is probably the best adaptation of Dredd we're going to get since the entire level takes place in a giant, vertical arcology that bears a close resemblance to Peach Trees from the film.
• That One Achievement:
  • "No One Will Believe You". To get this achievement, you need to beat the campaign on Realistic. How hard is Realistic? One shot and you're dead.
  • Even worse is the "Personal Decorator" achievement, which requires you to get all commendation medals, most of which have insane or very time-consuming requirements. Beating the campaign on Realistic will only get you ONE of them, you also have to do things like beat every level on Veteran without restarting from a checkpoint at least once, complete all missions accolades, complete all challenges (most of which involve killing 100 enemies or more with each or your cyber powers and weapons) unlock and purchase all weapons, etc.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Not many fans were pleased when the Black Mirror-esque "Ember" trailer and its focus on the bleaker aspects of advancements in technology was sidelined in the actual game. The lack of connections to the previous Black Ops titles was also met with disdain.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Evidently, the campaign shows signs of this, like a very dark settting, excessive amounts of Mind Screw that would make Neon Genesis Evangelion blush, the fact that almost every character is dead by the end of the story, a twist that renders much of the story pointless, and to top it all off, a Gainax Ending. This, combined with how divorced the campaign is from the previous installments, have caused a considerable number to just Play the Game, Skip the Story at best, and just eschew the campaign at worst.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: Similarly to how Cordis Die stood in for the Occupy Movement in Call of Duty: Black Ops II, the whistleblower on the use of military cyborgs resembles Edward Snowden.
• Win Back the Crowd: Thanks to Ghosts and Advanced Warfare's lukewarm receptions, Treyarch's last game, Black Ops 2, still being popular with fans, and Black Ops 3's story trailer justifying the campaign mode's continued existence in Call of Duty, a franchise which is normally seen by many as a purely a multiplayer and Zombies only experience, fans that fell out of the Call of Duty fandom were very excited for Black Ops 3. However as the release date neared, these expectations were soured a bit when it was revealed last gen consoles (PS3 and 360) would not get the campaign mode at all. Said campaign mode was also quite polarizing to the fanbase for its Darker and Edgier approach, even by Treyarch standards (which were already pretty dark to begin with), and borderline incomprehensible Mind Screw plot that had almost nothing to do with the previous two Black Ops games. Ironically, the Game nowadays is well-renowned for its Nazi Zombies storyline and levels, which has an active community 5+ years later.

---