Since the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 just over a week ago, it's the only game I've put any time into. The game is enjoyable. In fact, it's probably the best release the franchise has made since Black Ops 2 back in 2012, in my opinion. However, I have found myself becoming frustrated at the way in which I am losing gunfights. Something hasn't felt quite right, and I'd initially put it down to my own rustiness or slight changes to the mechanics of the game, but it appears that something more sinister is going on.
A Reddit user known as Smcro posted some information recently relating to concerning tick rates found within Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and now everything is starting to make sense. Before we go any further, let's take a quick look at what tick rate actually is.
How Tick Rate Works
Tick rate is the measurement of the speed at which the server updates per second. For example, if a game has a tick rate of 60hz and is running at 60fps then the server is updating 60 times per second, once per frame.
If a game has a tick rate of 30hz and is running at 60fps, however, then the server is updating 30 times per second, once per 2 frames. Ultimately, the higher the tick rate, the more times the server will update per second.
What does this mean in simple terms? Well, let's say you're playing Call of Duty and you're moving behind an object to take cover while another player is shooting at you. Although on your screen you may already be completely covered by the object and thus out of danger, if the tick rate is slow, you may still get shot because the server hasn't been fed enough information to know this. To the server, your character may still be visible to the enemy player and therefore their shots will register as a hit and your character will die.
If the tick rate had been faster then the server would have received information about your character's true whereabouts much more quickly and would understand that you had taken cover and could not be hit by the enemy bullets. It's simply a case of the server lagging behind what is actually happening on your screen. It might sound like a trivial thing but it makes a huge difference to the player experience and can be very frustrating.
Black Ops 4 Tick Rate
Throughout the beta testing stage of Black Ops 4, which was available for the general public to play, the tick rate was running at 60hz. This is an industry standard for this kind of game and is entirely acceptable for a shooter of this nature. However, data now shows that the tick rate within the full release of the game is only running at 20hz, meaning that the server is now receiving information every 3 frames rather than every 1 frame.
This goes a long way to explaining why my experience of the Black Ops 4 multiplayer has been frustrating at times. Although I feel like I am playing the game well, I will often suffer at the hands of a slower tick rate. I will be hidden from view yet the server isn't fed this information quickly enough and therefore my character will be killed anyway. This is unacceptable from a top-selling franchise that saw revenues of over $500M in the first few days of release.
The question, therefore, is why Activision would decide to lower the tick rate like this. If the beta was running smoothly at a tick rate of 60hz then why is it now running at 20hz in the full release of the game? It seems that this decision has been made to provide a more consistent experience across the different game modes. This year, Call of Duty has released a battle royale mode alongside the standard multiplayer, known as Blackout. The game hosts around 100 players per match which is much more than the 10 you'll see in a normal multiplayer game. The increased player count means that there's a lot more information for the servers to handle. During the beta testing of the Blackout mode, it was only running at a tick rate of around 40hz rather than the 60hz seen in the traditional multiplayer mode. That means that there would have been a noticeable difference in feeling about how the game plays between both modes.
The increased tick rate in the standard multiplayer mode would have drawn attention to the fact that the Blackout mode was much less consistent. As Blackout is Call of Duty's newest game mode, and perhaps the reason this title has seen such a resurgent rise to the top of the charts after poor releases in recent years, it appears that it is receiving preferential treatment. In order to reduce the attention to the poorer tick rate in Blackout, it seems that Activision has decided to bring its other modes down to that level, thus creating a worse experience across the board. However, that means that those of us who want to play a standard Call of Duty multiplayer game are being conned. We're paying top prices for a AAA game and are being handed a game that runs at a lower tick rate than was found in previous editions of the franchise.
What Needs To Change?
Since this data has been revealed to the general public, Activision needs to go back into the game and increase the tick rate of the standard multiplayer to 60hz. What was once a point of frustration in my own ability to play the game well has now become a question of whether I'm just being conned by the developers of the game. Video games are supposed to be fun. Sure, some people will see this as a non-issue if they're not invested in the game, but what is the point in playing if skill isn't a factor in how you perform? It can be really disheartening to people who enjoy video games as a hobby and put in the hours to improve their playstyle.
But more importantly, it's a matter of principle. This is a video game developer that will earn over $1Billion from this game and they'll be releasing the next edition around November 2019. There is no excuse for them to charge $60 for a game, prior to all the costly DLC they'll be adding, and to then reduce the quality of gameplay to lower than editions of the game that have come out in previous years. Activision should not be advertising Black Ops 4 as a top quality Call of Duty game if they can't deliver.
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