I’d like to break something down for you readers, clarify a point reviewers aren’t, perhaps, quite laying out in black and white.

Treyarch’s Call of Duty: Black Ops is now available to purchase in the UK, and if you buy the game (which carries a £55 RRP) for its campaign only, you’re buying it for 7-8 hours of walled-in, rock-to-rock blasting broken up by alternately hard- or soft-boiled flights of political fancy, and spells behind the wheel of a vehicle with an abbreviated name. You’re buying it for the tedious ebb and flow of red damage pigment, for the rough caress of invisible walls, for the meticulously patterned failings of NPC goons.

You’re buying it for a competent variation on yesterday’s shooter, in other words – for blandness, filler. You’re buying it because you need something to do with your hands while you watch Rambo III.

Buy Black Ops for its multiplayer, by contrast, and you’re buying it for thousands of hours of some of the finest online competitive or cooperative action the industry can offer. You’re buying it for heaps of unlockables – perks, weapons, avatar accessories, killstreaks. You’re buying it for a cornucopia of modes, some familiar, some not-so-familiar, all compelling.

You’re buying it for maps you can replay and replay till your thumbs bleed and still get ambushed and stuffed at the outset of the next match you join. You’re buying it for zombies, and Nazis, and Nazi zombies. You’re buying it for those sweet, sweet words “triple kill” and the accompanying rumble of a Cobra attack helicopter.

You’re buying it, in other words, because you have some grasp on the notion of value-for-money, dislike head-butting spawn points, appreciate a bit of actual, genuine variety and are eager to have your wits – rather than your patience – tested.

Now call me presumptuous, but I’d lay heavy odds that those of you buying for the second reason out-number those buying for the first. I’d lay heavy odds that Activision and Treyarch know it, too. They ought to. Multiplayer has been the franchise’s meat, potatoes, peas and ketchup since Modern Warfare, at least. Even the Man in the Street (the one who isn’t queueing for a midnight launch, that is) should have cottoned on by now, and these days, most Men in the Street have steady broadband connections.

So, my little devil’s advocacy routine of the hour is thus: why do we tolerate the existence of a Call of Duty single player? Is that shell-shocked corridor anything more than an introductory formality? Shouldn’t Activision learn a few lessons from the success of Battlefield 1943, and strip the dead wood out of its biggest action franchise? Share your thoughts below.

And watch out for our own Black Ops review shortly.

If you set any store by the predictions of the Wedbush Morgan group, or the businesslike tone of Bobby Kotick’s investor conference calls, the monthly subscription shit may be about to hit the online console shooter fan. And by ‘fan’, of course, we mean Call of Duty fan.

WM’s Michael Pachter (never far from a headline) opined to Industry Gamers this month that it was ‘incumbent’ on Activision Blizzard to ‘monetize’ the multiplayer scene, as the largest fish in a pond lately ruffled by sales slumps the analyst part-attributes to the lasting success of Modern Warfare online.

While there’s no real proof that Activision intends to charge for online offerings in future, despite the efforts of bogus videomakers, the actions of other companies may force matters to a head. Electronic Arts recently introduced an ‘Online Pass’ system for several major upcoming North American sports titles, under which users must fork out an additional $10 to access key multiplayer functions. Sony, meanwhile, has rolled out a top layer of paid-for PlayStation Network content in an indication that the glory days of free network services may be drawing to a close.

Taking a stand

These are Dark Times, readers. But lo, a ray of light doth burst through the gloom! A ray of light fired from the muzzle of a Spartan Laser, wielded by the men and women of Activision’s latest and greatest development partner, Bungie Studios. All you Slayer fanatics, yell ‘hurrah!’ All you money-grubbing CEOs, yell ‘IT BURNS!’

Yesterday, VGD braved the labyrinths of London’s Churchill War Rooms to chat with Halo: Reach Campaign Designer Niles Sankey and Bungie Community Director Brian Jarrard. Among other things, we asked them what they thought of subscription models for online shooters, and were relieved to hear that while the pair consider the issue an ‘interesting dilemma’, there are no plans to pull a World of Warcraft on Bungie titles.

‘As a gamer, I don’t know,’ commented Sankey. ‘I obviously have a limited amount of income to spend on stuff, whether it be a Live membership or the game itself. We’re fortunate that we’re able to create all these core features and make them a part of our game, and a lot of that is provided to us by Xbox Live.

‘But you know, to be fair,’ he conceded, ‘we do have a paid service that’s a part of Halo – it’s our Bungie Pro video rendering, a hardcore niche feature. In the case that somebody has an in-game saved film and they want to render it out to the web and have it become a high res video they can share on Youtube or something, that’s an incremental workload on us – we have to have a server farm for it, we have to have additional bandwidth, instruments…

‘That’s an example where for someone who’d like to do that we’re going to have to charge a small amount of money to accomplish that. But we feel it’s a fair trade.

‘I think our philosophy is probably always going to be you should never have to pay for core entertainment, for core enjoyment. In that example, the rendering – not doing that has no impact on your ability to fully enjoy all that Reach has to offer, that is an outlying hardcore feature. I don’t think we would ever want to start dissecting core components of our game and making it so that you have to pay to enjoy the full experience.’

A Spartan shouldn't have to pay to teabag Elites, dang it.

Asked whether he thought Pachter’s argument that paid-for online shooters are vital to industry growth held water, Sankey was dubious, observing that a monthly fee might bind a player to a particular game at the expense of new releases.

‘I mean, I think DLC’s been adding incremental online revenue for a long time, and it’s become even bigger now, but I don’t know – I feel like as a gamer, from my personal perspective, it’s a fine line, because if you’re into a game like World of Warcraft, you’re heavily invested in it, you’re paying a monthly fee…

‘It certainly starts to impact your desire and ability to play other games, and I do think it’ll start to cannibalise itself in some ways, because people only have so much time and disposable income, and once you start putting money into something you’re going to feel obligated to stick by it and keep doing it, to get that return on the investment, and you’ll be less likely to play other games.

‘It’s been my personal experience in some of the games I’ve played with. It’s an interesting dilemma, because everybody wants to get a piece of the pie, and it can only be carved up in so many ways.’

No fate but what we make

Bungie will be watching all the pie-carving closely.

‘I’m sure the industry will test a lot of those bounds, you know,’ said Jarrard. ‘The process of natural selection, learning from the mistakes of others or yourself… I’m not concerned about the industry in general. Obviously there’s a lot of exciting things happening.’

‘It’s really up to consumers right now,’ Sankey concluded. ‘It’s a pretty incredible time. If people try it and consumers buy into it, then suddenly that’s going to become the thing that everybody starts to do.’

There you have it, readers. The power’s in your hands. We’ll be publishing our thoughts on Halo: Reach (which releases on 14th September) shortly. Sneak preview: break out the awesomesauce.

Just been watching Trumpf’s latest Modern Warfare 2 blowout on Youtube, embedded above. In it, the goodly pro and close chum SeaNanners talk us through a Search and Destroy match over Xbox Live on the Favela map.

The vid’s a little under eight minutes long. Too long? Here’s our scalding hot digest: never take the same route twice, think before you shoot and double back a lot.

Over and out.

A quick disclaimer. Modern Warfare 2 is, in all probability, going to be one of the best-executed and most substantial shooters you play this year. I was very impressed by the game when I previewed it last month, and the fact that my name won’t be gracing our review when it goes live tonight is the cause of many a flung teacup at Kikizo Towers (the honour falls instead to FPS Gamer’s veteran duelist Kristan Reed, with whom I’m currently not on speaking terms).

Not every aspect of the game or its titanic marketing putsch is above question, however, and as the first pre-orders blast through letterboxes and all-night-queues sprout from the doors of HMV, we should take time to reflect on the controversies Activision and Infinity Ward have ignited in the run-up to release.

The furore over pricing needs no introduction, nor is it chief among my concerns. A £55 RRP (or $60 across the Atlantic) is pretty steep given the reported shortish campaign length (Kristan’s run-time is 7-8 hours), Activision’s refusal to supply dedicated servers and the absence of crucial new gameplay functionality (not to mention a host of minor compromises), but retailers haven’t turned a deaf ear to consumer complaints – you can now pick the game up for two-thirds to as little as half the RRP in most major UK supermarkets. Over on GamesIndustry.biz, Rob Fahey has commented with characteristic eloquence on the risk that Activision’s brash pricing strategies will find over-eager imitators, but in the near future at least there seems to be nothing to worry about.

Yours for just $150. Cheer up, it could be the PSPgo.

The infamous playable airport massacre sequence leaked online a few weeks ago deserves less forgiving attention. Right-wing tabloid rants concerning the effects of such (100% skippable) material on the hearts and minds of young people are as predictable as they are groundless, but why, we might ask, did Infinity Ward feel obliged to provoke such reaction at all? Considered (admittedly) out of context, the decision to let players slaughter civilians in callously unhurried style seems little more than a shock tactic, a morbid attempt to one-up the previous game’s hostage execution intro, rather than a sensitively judged trot into the realms of ultra-realism.

Vince Zampella, studio head of Infinity Ward

“It’s just a matter of detail, little touches,” Zampella told us during a recent showing of Modern Warfare 2. “Transitions from wall to ground are now hand-touched by all the artists so that everything fits.”

Modern Warfare 2′s got serious visual presence, its muscular streaming technology allowing the developer to push back level perimeters and step up the detail at close quarters, but if Zampella is to be believed, the engine isn’t at its best when rendering shiny normal-mapped AK47s, nor beautifully textured terrorist bandanas, nor exploding helicopters and the like. No sir, Zampella’s an artist – and artists find beauty in the most unlikely of places.

“If you see some of the Rio scenes from the trailers, there’s just like these uphill broken stairwells that are half-covered in dirt, weeds coming through – one of my favourite parts in the whole game is there’s a back alley there, and there’s just two dumpsters and a piece of garbage, some trash blowing in the wind and the weeds coming up through the cracks in the sidewalk.”

"Might I draw your attention, gentleman, to the exquisite brushwork on the tin can in bottom left..."

Cracks in the sidewalk. Not exactly “attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion”, is it? Next up, an in-engine showreel of Zampella’s favourite discarded shopping trolleys.

Check out our tongue-in-cheek “Quickfire Q&A” with Modern Warfare 2, and stay tuned for our full review. The game’s out for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 on 10th November, like you didn’t know already.

Sometimes you just can’t be arsed reading through a “proper” preview. If we’re honest, sometimes we can’t be arsed writing the bloody things. The solution in both cases? Cram any and all distracted notebook scribblings into an easy-to-produce, easy-to-read question-and-answer piece. Allow me to introduce FPS Gamer’s wilfully oddball Quickfire Q&A feature.

First up for the Quickfire treatment is Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 2. Not long ago we spent an enjoyable hour with the single and multiplayer modes. Hit the jump for details of scopes, sex aids and Special Ops.

OMG, it’s Modern Warfare 2!

Get ahold of yourself, man.

But it’s MODERN WARFARE 2!

Calm down, you muppet. It’s only the sequel to one of the most popular and influential first-person shooters ever created. It’s only got new co-op functionality, new guns, upgradeable perks, customizable killstreak rewards and a sex doll in a bathtub. What’s the big fuss?

You’re just jaded because they boosted the price by a measly tenner – wait, did you say “sex doll in a bathtub”?

That’s right. Blonde and about 5”10, if memory serves. I didn’t get a look at the label.

Where and why is there a sex doll in Modern Warfare 2?

I’m guessing it’s one of them “joke” things. She was tucked away in the second floor bathroom of a forest lodge in one of the Special Ops maps, along with an awful lot of automatic weapons and explosives. Special Ops is the standalone co-op mode, you know. You can play it online or in offline split-screen with one other player.

Is the sex doll classed as “equipment”? Can you dump her out in the open to outrage/distract devout Muslim troops and heathen Russian mercenaries? What about bedding her to regain health?

What a wonderful imagination you have. Nope, I don’t think she’s good for much besides comedy value.

Well done for blowing 200-odd words on her, then.

Interesting choice of verb. But yes, let’s move on. I mention the doll because you’ll find lots of these jolly little touches in Modern Warfare 2. At the beginning of the Favela level, for instance, there’s this fiesta dancer figurine on the taxi dashboard. Gives the game real personality.

Fascinating. Any other hyper-relevant tit-bits, or can I go back to sleep now?

You want hyper-relevancy? Fine. Also in the Favela level, you’ll notice that NPC sniper scopes give off a winking reflection effect to make them easier to spot.

You mean they’ve actually gone and nurfed the sniper rifle?

No, don’t worry – this effect is exclusive to single player. Online sharpshooters will be just as murderously inconspicuous as ever.