The recently released Call of Duty: Black Ops 1 and 2 PlayStation ports have been incredibly popular, but that influx of players also reminded everyone that – classics or not – players will simply keep choosing the same few maps every match.
One of the most popular posts on the Call of Duty subreddit this week is one calling out players who continue voting for Nuketown, Hijacked, and Raid when playing Black Ops 2.
“I’ve just hit first prestige, and there’s one thing that’s seriously killing the experience,” said user Backlash029. “If the map vote isn’t Nuketown, Hijacked, or Raid, everyone just votes Random, and the second a less popular map gets picked, half the lobby backs out.”
If you’re a longtime COD player, you’ll know that this has been a problem since the introduction of map voting. More recent releases have lessened the effect by more regularly refreshing the list of available maps between rounds to encourage players to pick something other than their top three favourites. The thread has many users agreeing with that experience. “Takeoff and Uplink are the most skipped maps I’ve seen,” one user pointed out.
“As a Nuketown hater I always feel physical pain when every [second] map I play is Nuketown,” added another.
That is doubly frustrating for non-fans of those maps, as there’s already a playlist called Nukejacked that only rotates between Nuketown, and Hijacked. Unfortunately, that playlist has the issue of mixing some unpopular game modes with the most played ones, so many end up leaving anyway when a mode they don’t like comes up. Interestingly, other players have reported having a different experience, where Nuketown’s two runner-ups are instead Turbine, and Yemen.
Though the popularity of the others are clear – some even argue Black Ops 2 doesn’t have a bad map – nothing has overtaken Nuketown’s popularity since its introduction with the first Black Ops. It’s been in every game in the series since, and has gone through several thematic variations over the years. Due to its small size, Nuketown guarantees a near-constant flow of action. Unlike Shipment from the Modern Warfare series – a similarly small map – Nuketown’s size still allows weapons like sniper rifles to play a role.
Despite their popularity, the Black Ops 1 and 2 PlayStation ports have found themselves in a lot of controversy in the days since their release. They’ve been criticised for offering barely any upgrades over the PS3 originals, despite costing a lot of money.
Indeed, the ports brought back many problems that continue to exist in those games on the consoles they were originally released on. Namely, rampant hacking and exploiting. Activision has done some work to mitigate some of the more egregious cases, and it appears things have stabilised for now. One has to wonder, however, how much better full-fat ports would’ve been received, with dedicated servers and a sharper presentation.
