But you can get to the flag from below through a crack in the ground. The distance between the bridges is pretty far, making it hard to get the flag. The middle flag is pretty hard to reach because snipers can watch it from overhead on either side of the battle arena. army convoy that has been hit by a Soviet ambush on a freeway. If you stay inside, you can be pretty safe from helicopter, mortar and jet napalm attacks.Ĭonvoy has a similar set up as you square off on multiple levels of a freeway where trucks have been overturned. There are plenty of paths for you to run around the enemy and hit them in the flanks. The hotel is nicely decorated to look like a swanky joint in Havana. It’s fun to put a claymore mine in the elevator and ambush enemies rushing into the elevator on the next floor. There are elevators you can call and enter. You can shoot down on a drained swimming pool from a second-story window, but you have to be wary of snipers or crossbow-grenade wielders shooting from a similar window on the other side of the complex. There are long distances where you can snipe at enemies from above. The Hotel map is pretty similar to the struggle to control the main flag in Zoo.
But it’s pretty easy to see you walking up there and you won’t have any cover if you get spotted. From there, you can maneuver to a bunch of places and have a height advantage over rivals. One of the best tips for staying alive in this map is to find the entry to get on top of the monorail track that runs through the map. There’s a couple of good spots for snipers but the map mostly favors close combat. That means the flag is in the middle of a killing zone, and it is hard to take without some real teamwork. You can shoot down on the flag from either side and enter the plaza from four directions. The main flag is planted right in the middle of a small plaza area inside an abandoned zoo.
Zoo is a great map for short-range weapons such as shotguns. My favorite mode for playing these maps is Domination, where players try to control three different flags on the map. The Escalation map pack has five maps, entitled Zoo, Hotel, Convoy, Stockpile, and the zombie map Call of the Dead. Players have run around the world of the game so many times that it is as if they had circled the globe 132,073 times. Using their multiplayer currency, players have spent the equivalent of 41 percent of the U.S. Players have been stabbed in the back more than 517.2 million times. Players have been killed 238.2 million times by a ballistic knife. Headquarters units have been destroyed 99.6 million times. About 2.2 million videos have been uploaded so that players can brag about their exploits. Players have shared 118.9 million care packages dropped from the sky with their fellow team members. Some of the numbers associated with the achievements of fans in multiplayer combat are pretty astounding. You can laugh at me, but I’m not alone in being obsessed with the game. Multiplayer is tailored for players like me, since you can go from Level 1 to Level 50 as many as 15 times in Prestige mode. My accuracy rate is 15.94 percent and I’ve gotten 324 head shots. I died 5,541 times, for a kill/death ratio of 0.78. Earlier this week, I had played Black Ops multiplayer for a total of two days, 11 hours and 34 minutes. I’m at the equivalent of level 92 in multiplayer combat. It shows that the game still has a pretty committed audience, and the numbers associated with the engagement of fans is pretty amusing. The number isn’t huge, but it has stayed steady all week, and on Saturday night there were 345,749 players online. That was about three times as many as the night before the map pack launched. On Tuesday night at midnight Pacific time, there were 333,316 players online.
If Activision Blizzard sells millions of these map packs - which have virtually no costs of goods sold (beyond Microsoft’s 30 percent cut) - the profit generated can be as much as a major blockbuster game.Īctivision Blizzard’s latest map pack is the second release of downloadable game content for Black Ops.
The latest map pack costs 1200 Microsoft points on Xbox Live, or about $15. If other games aren’t selling all that well right now, the popularity of Black Ops multiplayer combat could very well be one of the reasons.īack in November, this game generated $360 million in revenue on its first day of sales. This means that the engagement level of the game has stayed pretty constant for six months. Six months after the game launched, that number is 7,633,268,348. That was just one month after the game launched. Back in December, we noted that 1,619,499,217 assists were made in the game, where one player helps another player finish off an enemy. Consider one very interesting fact that sheds light on just how intensely players are playing this game.