Call of Duty – what a monster. With clockwork precision a new edition pops up every year and sells millions without fail. It’s doing perfectly well, but in spite of an audacious shift to a far future setting in Black Ops 2, it’s becoming increasingly repetitive. It’s become a slapstick dose of noisy annual nonsense with an arcade multiplayer mode attached. It’s a game about gun-lovin’ superheroes who are 90% bicep and 10% stubble shooting hundreds of enemies, shouting and occasionally getting into knife fights.
Activision have found a golden formula for mainstream success that has changed the genre. Call of Duty perfected iron sights aiming and ushered action movie set pieces into shooter environments, but those set pieces have gradually subsumed the challenge and tension of the series’ rolling street battles. The series’ ballooning love for noise and bombast masks a dearth of substance, and its ability to deliver those famed set-pieces is increasingly hindered by an engine that’s starting to fall behind the pack.
Activision and their army of CoD developers are surely plotting a next-gen leap right now, so let’s pip them to the post with a few ideas. Changing CoD is a monolithic endeavour, influential as it is, so perhaps it’s better to think of this as a wish list for war games. What do we like? What do we hate? What would we love to see from gaming’s glorious future?
Do you remember what gaming was like before Fortnite entered the gaming space? One of the biggest arguments was about loot boxes. Now we have conversations about crossovers, battle passes, and community outreach.
Idk. Loot boxes did disappear and battle passes and in game purchases are all cosmetic. We get free weapons and maps post launch, any gameplay affecting content. I could care less about all the cosmetics.
I absolutely hated the days where weapons were locked behind a less than 1% chance lootbox pull where it'd take 5+ hours to have enough tokens to do a single pull and lazy remastered/remake maps cost you $15 each wave or $50 for the season pass that you didn't know what you'd get and these maps were only available to those that bought it so you get a smaller pool of players match with.
The "good ole days" are actually what drove me away from COD and Halo 3/Reach. Halo 4 becoming a COD-like drove me away from that only a week or so after it launched and I beat its campaign.
It sucked way back then, going a month or two without playing online-shooter-of-the-moment, and then needing to buy a $15 map pack to play with the majority of the population or your favorite playlist. The "community" rejecting Spartan Points in MCC killed that game's support, too. No revenue = no support, plain and simple.
That headline could easily be something Spencer could have said 😅 I had to check if it was really an opinion piece
As times gone on, the COD battle pass has got ALOT worse so they can push people to buy the more premium battle pass which itself is a huge rip off and nearly half the price of the base game.
The cosmetics can be fine but they've taken it to far to the point of no return. Why make a military themed game then have rabbits, dinosaurs, cats, rats & z list rappers as skins? You wouldn't add a Lamborghini to a fantasy RPG to replace a horse and you would never see Mario have limb dismemberment because they know what they are. COD is having identity crisis but kids and streamer but then all
Call of duty can simply not copy the bad aspects of Fortnite? Or is that too out of this world? Like COD, a realistic shooter-just HAD to have Nicki Minaj running around? Or super heroes?
Exactly! Trends don't all need to be followed. Plus where Fortnite got somewhat better with it's monetization, Acti got worse. Or at least Fortnite has lended itself more to the wacky stuff, and has put more effort and quality into that stuff.
I prefer the battle passes with free maps than the $50 season pass that divided the community. I definitely feel that Fortnite had some influence on CoD having loot boxes with Blackout being introduced in 2018 with Black Ops 4.
Actually Fortnite bullshit ruined Unreal Tournament. Epic are sellouts and I will never have that shitty store on my PC, fuck them and that shit bag Tim Sweeney. At least the community keeps the games alive, I still play UT2004.
I mean cant really blame them for supporting the game that made them the most money and the most people player...ever?
100% correct! The makers of Call of Duty ran out of ideas long, long ago so they take ideas from other games like Ghost Recon, Fortnite and any other FPS game hat had success hell CoD remasters maps that they've remastered several times already then charge you again for it. Call of Duty is simply a cut, copy and paste and then put the $70 price on it every year. Activision and now Microsoft has been essentially remastering Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare every year since it was released in 2007 its to the point it's worse than the sports game like the Madden, NBA and others yearly sports franchises.
@Psychonaut85 is spot on "Call of Duty ruined Call of Duty. They needed no outside assistance"!
The Black Ops Gulf War leaks continue with a list of weapon descriptions giving more info on what you can expect from new and returning weapons.
Recently, players of Modern Warfare 3 and Warzone were met with a new bundle featuring the B.E.A.S.T. Glove, inspired by King Kong's armament in the Godzilla x Kong movie. However, the $80 price tag attached to this themed accessory left many Call of Duty fans feeling underwhelmed.
Morons that allow themselves to be milked continuously by this company is the definition of irony.
Spend more $$ and you'll end up In easier lobbies so you win both ways when ya spend that cash
Controversy in the COD community feels like it happens within an alternate timeline. Activision will take the piss with something, there will be a momentary fuss about it, and then they will forget about it and carry on anyway. Repeat this cycle literally every year for the rest of time.
They call that a crack head! Thats what this is really about, its an addiction. People who dont smoke cigarettes look and laugh at the addicts that spend $8-$10 a pack, but they cant help themselves, they are addicted. That same analogy applies perfectly to the whole MT industry. Only an addict that was not thinking clearly would spend this kind of money on something so frivolous. A round of multiplayer provides the same high a person gets from scratching a lotto ticket, or putting money on a sports bet. MT in general need to really be regulated because you have a generation of kids becoming adults who grew up only knowing the MT era of gaming. Its normal to them and they will in turn teach their kids the same by just being a gaming parent and getting their kids involved with them in gaming. Thats why no matter how ridiculous the headlines keep getting out of the MT industry, it never seems to fade or go away.
I'm so tired of hearing about what they're doing with this game, its never going to change and it's never going to value the consumer over money, furthermore the people who engage so heavily in the microtransactions I guess allegedly are having a blast and can't wait to do it some more this year when the new version of the game drops.
Go back to WWII but this time don't wear-out the era. Throw in some Vietnam one year, Korean War the next, and maybe a dash of Gulf War and Cold War.
Also, I don't know about other people, but I prefer games with a little historical background. So, you know, I think it would be good if they covered Fallujah or Battle of Seoul.
And take out all the dudebros and make your games at least a little bit believable like you did with CoD4 and back. I mean, you can have cool special forces guys but it got kinda out of hand MW2 and beyond...
"It’s become a slapstick dose of noisy annual nonsense with an arcade multiplayer mode attached."
I think it's more like an arcade multiplayer mode with a campaign attached. Multiplayer is the lifeblood of the franchise, the campaign is irrelevant.
What's the point its not like it has a coherent story.
A reboot makes sense when you want to retell a story of an established franchise.
Activision pulls call of duty stories out of there ___ a reboot is a waste of time.
Even if you reboot the series, you can't reboot the prepubescent 12 year olds that plague the multiplayer.
Let's not