Pick 13, Exoskeletons and you: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare multiplayer hands-on

The "it" in question is Advanced Warfare's most obvious change, the exoskeleton. Each soldier has an augmented combat chassis strapped to their body, which allows for things like "boost jumping" — allowing troops to leap into the air and then jump in a completely different direction if they prefer — as well as boosting dashes, which in turn can be added on to a boost jump for more sophisticated navigation of environments.

Each player's exoskeleton also allows for combat equipment customizations such as cloaking, energy-based riot shields and more. This considerable change to basic character movement in Advanced Warfare has led to some major philosophical changes in Call of Duty level design, based on the four maps on display so far. Multiple levels of verticality are everywhere, and the old patrol routes and lines that defined multiplayer before are broken up, remixed, unreliable. Death could come from any direction now, and the levels are built to deliver it to unwary players.

But Sledgehammer has worked hard to ensure that despite the new additions, Advanced Warfare still feels like a Call of Duty game. "We feel like the speed to engage and fluidity of motion and low latency of the controls that makes COD is there, but in a more elegant, robust way," Condrey says.

In practice, though, it's more complicated than that. The vast array of new, alien options to basic movement in Advanced Warfare introduces a brand-new learning curve, arguably for the first time in Call of Duty since Modern Warfare. I had to learn how to dash, what the capabilities of my boost jump were and how that all fit into a new kind of level-design puzzle.

Pick 13 folds into new choices you'll need to make in Advanced Warfare's multiplayer, as you'll have more choices to make about what you can and can't do than ever. Exo abilities are assigned by points as well as other perks and weapon attachments. Maybe you don't need an exo ability, would rather have an additional modifier for your weapon or an additional perk. Maybe perks are your priority, and you only need a simple gun to make things happen.

Advanced Warfare seems to be comfortable letting you figure it out for yourself, aside from the usual cluster of premade classes. But Sledgehammer isn't leaving new or less-experienced players out in the cold. In fact, the return of scorestreaks isn't the only way the developer is accounting for a broader audience than the most elite players.

For starters, the pregame lobby now allows you to boot into a virtual firing range instantly, allowing you to test your loadouts without setting yourself up for a potentially unfortunate real-world field test. This is one of the most innocuous-seeming additions, but it's also one of the most "next-gen"-feeling — there's no real delay, no loading and no inadvertent discouragement for switching up loadouts between games. Much like the traversal upgrades built into Advanced Warfare, the firing range encourages experimentation.

The game is peppered with touches like this that feel geared toward drawing new players in. There are new cooperative scorestreaks that allow newer players to help the murder machines on their team with their ordnance calldowns. And lobbies are now virtual spaces where you can see how the people you're playing with are outfitted.

Spending a decent chunk of time with the four maps on display, I was struck by the aforementioned learning curve and how much readjustment seemed necessary to properly navigate Advanced Warfare. This isn't just about movement. The new directed-energy weapons also feel genuinely new, and each provides a completely different set of pros and cons and a different kind of feel to Call of Duty gunplay. The new Minority Report-style energy shotgun is my favorite addition in this respect. It's powered by a wobbling, rippling blast of clear-ish energy that abruptly stops after a short distance. There's an interesting balance there that's always seemed to elude Call of Duty — it's a wrecking ball up close, but it isn't the anti-aircraft gun that's always seemed unfairly accurate from too far away.

The directed-energy laser, meanwhile, feels plucked from the Halo series, and I'm curious to see how the community reacts to it. It's a beam weapon that requires a sustained bead on a target to take it down, but there's no reloading involved at all. Instead, use the laser too long and it will overheat and need to cool down. I wonder how the competitive base will take to it, how it will play against more conventional Call of Duty standbys (though the future setting of Advanced Warfare means no gun is completely recognizable). But mostly, I was struck by how fun and interesting it was to play a game that was at its heart a Call of Duty game with such new, different variables in play.

This was clearest to me playing Uplink, as I mentioned before. But Uplink is interesting for more reasons than "it's fun and new," in that it is so clearly designed for the eSports community. Uplink is joined by a revived spectator mode to offer a more promising candidate for public viewership than last year's Ghosts — or any other shooter I can think of.

It was this topic where I found Condrey the most animated.

"I only got into eSports something like five years ago," Condrey said, "but I'm a sports fanatic. I'm a football fan. But my first introduction to eSports wasn't a great spectator experience. It was great to watch the competitors ... but it was difficult to understand what they were doing, to grok all the strategy. It was pretty intimidating. And outside of even first-person shooters, I remember the first time I went to BlizzCon and watched some of their tournaments. It was a great time, but I had the hardest time understanding what was going on. I saw the spectacle but the strategy escaped me."

Condrey pointed out the advances made in spectator sports like football and basketball in the last 40 years to make them more comprehensible, and the commensurate success that they enjoyed. "For us," he said, "the idea that the spectator and broadcaster mode can help fans understand what's happening and get into it is our focus."

This philosophy is driving a renewed focus on eSports for Call of Duty in the wake of the success of games like Dota 2 and League of Legends in bringing in millions of viewers, a mass audience that no shooter has managed to approach in the medium. "I think that we want to be part of eSports and part of that community, and that comes from a very genuine place," Condrey said.

Some changes to Advanced Warfare seem to make it a better candidate to occupy that space. The reworked engine results in a game that feels different, not just gameplay-wise but in its presentational foundation. Watching killcams and seeing other players move around, everything feels more weighted in a unified world — the sense of floatiness and unhinged animation that made previous games in the franchise odd to look at from the outside are gone. Advanced Warfare feels more physically rooted, and it makes it more fun to watch.

Ideally, Condrey also hopes the renewed focus on competitive gaming will serve the general audience. "I hear people say that if you focus on the 1 percent of eSports players we're somehow not catering to the majority of players, but I don't believe that at all."

Flashing back to Uplink on the map Defender, I think about how different and fun it felt. I think about how geared toward competitive play it clearly is, how uncompetitive at Call of Duty I am and how it nevertheless is the part of Advanced Warfare I'm still thinking about days later. And I think that Condrey might just have a point.