Greetings, Mid-Worldeans and other blog readers. Many of you already know me as TTL Tortacular. Around these parts I’m known as the Honor Guard Captain (that’s defense, but fancy-like), Spartan Laser Enthusiast, HCS&D Bombwagon or just the guy that quotes Viktor Reznov too much. Beyond the walls of TTL you may have seen me on any number of gaming sites including of course Bnet and the Waypoint. I’m one of several new voices you’ll find emanating from the TTL Blog in the coming weeks and months.
This past week, the Gunslingers joined the rest of the gaming world by answering a new Call of Duty. Storming the bunkers and breaching the buildings of a new title is always an exciting time. We can revel in the enjoyment of new weapons and game types, and laugh at the ridiculous outcomes (like say walking off a cliff) that come from not knowing our new playgrounds very well.
Another sensation that pops up frequently in the early days of a new game is confusion. At TTL, we pride ourselves on things like teamwork and cohesion. But not even those trademarks can bridge the gap into a new game when… you just don’t know what to call something. This happens most frequently in the early days of a game and often leads to a spirited round of what we dubbed “Callout Bingo”. Whether it comes from one teammate or several, you will hear a handful of exclamations like “he’s over by the wall” or “running down the street” that are about as helpful as “under the B, 39” in most cases. Then you will almost always hear some variation of “Sorry, I don’t know where I am.” Don’t worry buddy, we all feel your pain.
Over time we have tried several methods to build a library of callouts. During the earliest days of TTL we were lucky in that Halo 2 had been out for some time, and most of the common callout names had been fairly well established even within the larger Halo community. There were ready-made diagrams pulled from strategy guides or straight out of the ether of the internet to help those that were unfamiliar with the names, or were just picking up the game for the first time.
When Halo 3 launched, we were determined to maintain a communication advantage by laying down callouts for each multiplayer map while the game was still fresh. Bungie gave us some great tools for this monstrous task with their theater and forge additions. Suddenly it was easy to get wide-angle shots of the various maps. While the project did bear some fruit in terms of helping coin terms for a number of locations on different maps, by the time it was finished most of the work had already been done organically.
We would never again try to assign callouts on a large-scale manner as we did with Halo 3. Among the handful of reasons including the colossal amount of work it took, the most prominent would be that it’s just fun to learn them in the game, as a community. Would I rather stare at a map with labels on it, or run down an alley tossing grenades at cars (and hopefully, opponents)? That’s a pretty easy call for me to make.
As a group we were also expanding beyond Halo at the time, which led towards some different callout challenges. After Halo’s vibrant color palate and built-in callouts such as weapon or vehicle spawns, it was pretty jarring for me personally trying to tell the difference between two nearly identical buildings standing next to each other, both the same dingy shade of green-grey. When we had only a small beachhead formed on the Call of Duty shores standard callouts included “Kali’s Building” or “Pony’s Spot”.
With only a double handful of Gunslingers in the mix in this new realm, we could get that specific. But that was a long time, and three Call of Duty games ago. When you’ve got eighty pairs of boots hitting the ground on opening day, nobody’s got exclusive rights to any spot anymore. And that’s when the collective mind cloud of TTL gets put to work.
Sometimes the map designers have mercy on us gamers, providing say a collection of brightly colored fire engines at an intersection (Interchange) or a crashed chopper with a working mounted machine gun (Bakaara) to help us orient ourselves. Other times, it feels as though we’re largely left to fend for ourselves thanks to a collection of warehouses (Carbon) or a myriad of streets (Bootleg) where it can be tough to distinguish one building from the next.
As weeks turn to months in Modern Warfare 3, certain locations will gain the classic TTL monikers “Whack Shack” or “Scrub Throne” (origin stories remain classified… for now). We have already had the joy of celebrating the return of the “Bang Bus”. Already I am hearing “He’s by that thing over there” less and less. But it’s going to take many more games to finally work the last “Under the B, 23” out of the Gunslinger vernacular yet again.
Luckily, that’s the fun part right?
Tort