Preface: I will start by saying that I am referring to the multiplayer of the franchise rather the Single Player or other modes that would appear in the game.
I have always liked the Call of Duty video games series. They have been “fun”, “exciting”, “enjoyable”.
But now we are over-saturated with them. Ever since Modern Warfare 2, the franchise has gone downhill. Modern Warfare 3, Ghosts, Black Ops and Black Ops 2 have been overall a disappointment to the name of “Call of Duty”.
For at least 3 years, players of the franchise have been wondering if the series is going to turn into a yearly subtitled released. Eg. Call of Duty 2014, Call of Duty 2015 etc. But recently it has been revealed that they are going to switch to a 3-year title…Let’s see how that would work.
But there has been 5 CoD’s in 5 years, which is far too many for a franchise which is mainly focused on the Multiplayer Content. With all of the latest technologies that have been available since the dawn of the 7th generation consoles (Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3), you would think that they could use them to create updates for the game and actually update the game after the release instead of just releasing a brand new game every year which in-turn obsoletes the previous game within days of release of the new version.
I am still surprised that to this day, Activision/Infinity Ward/Treyarch/Sledgehammer haven’t decided to close the servers for the older Call of Duty games (CoD4, WaW, MW2, Blops) and now with the 9th game being released last November, you have got to think…when are they going to stop producing the same game year after year.
Here is a TL;DR of what goes on when they go to make the next Call of Duty. Inifinity Ward, just goes to their engine program, Copy and pastes the engine folder, renames it to “MW4” and opens it. Make a couple of changes here and there…adjust that…Change that value, change this value. Save and export. There is the new version of the engine.
Right, let’s make maps. Open the “Map Maker”. Load a templete of the MW2, MW3 maps. Remove all the textures and props and start building from there. Test them for about 6 months and put them into the game.
Develop the weapons. Copy and paste from the previous games, change the weapon value so that Shotguns are OP and then put a new entry into the weapons database for a concept weapon drawn by one of the dev’s children.
Make a UI change. Then with about 2 months to go before the release of the game…start to think of a Single-Player to shove in there. Make sure the characters are named Price and Soap. Export. Send to mass-producers…Bugs will get fixed in a Day-1/DLC Patch that will pushed to the consoles and not PC players.
Develop 20 maps over the next 4-5 months, release them in bundles of 5 for about €15 each. Update to fix bugs. Game done. Rinse and repeat for the next CoD game.
When you look at it…You wouldn’t want to be a developer for IW/Trey/Sledge now do you? You take the lazy way out by reusing assets and charge the same amount of money for it…No one will be able to tell the difference and becomes the Number 1 game for Christmas of that year. Hip hip, horray!
We are done with CoD. The players are done with CoD. You are losing players.
There is 2 games that CoD has to go up with this year, Titanfall and Destiny. And early indication shows that Titanfall and Destiny are going to be here for quite a while and that we ask now “What is Call of Duty going to bring out this year?”
I personally don’t think that Call of Duty is going to be around for much longer. They are not innovating on anything and they are bringing out the same garbage every year and people are still dumb enough to purchase the sodding game.
With the newer futuristic games that are coming out, I am hoping that one of these games will take the majority of gamers that did once play Call of Duty play something else. Titanfall is a very big contender in this.
Titanfall is made by the ex-Infinity Ward devs that created Modern Warfare 2 (Which was the last good Call of Duty imo) and you can see how much love has gone into the game. They didn’t decide that they were going to do another Modern Mil Sim…Why? Because the market is saturated with them. We have too many.
This happened a few years ago when we had too many World War 2 FPS’ and that we all started switching to something better…but now with the Battlefield Series contacting the Call of Duty disease…You can see that they are not going to innovate any time soon and if they had it their way (Dice/EA), they would be releasing a game every year. But they are better than that. They are smart. They know what they are doing (Somewhat).
So, what am I saying here. It’s time for the Call of Duty franchise to die and stay dead. Maybe in 10 years time…come back with a re-release of CoD4 and then go away again.
There is new games out there and we need to start playing them and stop hugging up to the CoD Series.
I apologise if this post was all over the gaff. I was typing before I could think it….So, some parts may be repeated and other parts may not make sense at all. Thank you 🙂