Activision promises to solve issue by giving CEO a 3 billion dollar bonus, adding more fees and microtransactions, and firing the entire QA and dev staff.
A decision that will be validated when 30 million people pre-order the next COD which will also be a buggy mess. And the cycle continues.
People pre-ordering is what creates all the perverse incentives to release buggy unfinished garbage.
The CEO’s eyes become even more beady and soulless
I know it’s been easy to dunk on the COD series for almost a decade now, but what made this one different? I thought they had MTX for the last few games and the gameplay always seems to be the same as the annual sports games, but did it finally hit the wall where the majority of their fan base sees all the issues?
Fans are also suspicious that the game requires MW2 to launch making the entire game seem like a $70 DLC
Seems like COD should just be a service at this point and you pay for the new yearly xpac. I hate suggesting that but that’s what the series seemed to be since OG MW2. Guess it’s just milk the money until enough people say enough
They’d probably make more money that way. Which I think is why they’re moving towards it.
Even if it was the same money, people buy it when it comes out so they spend money making it for a year, and get all the profit at once.
Skins sell constantly, and keeps them profitable everyday. With a hyper focus on “quarterly earnings” this keeps stock up all year even if total profit on the year is the same. They want that sustained profit.
I think Black Ops 2 was the last best all-round CoD game. Had a good campaign, great multiplayer and fantastic zombies. Black Ops 3 was good for the zombies. Treyarch were CoD’s final hope after the other studios games fell of a cliff and they also fell apart after BO3.
I personally think BO2 has amazing ideas, but stunted execution. It was held back by being part of COD instead of a stand alone game. There were development time limits, and certain gameplay limits that couldn’t be pushed.
The ideas in the game included branching mission outcomes with later repercussions, side missions controlling an AI squad, picking loadouts for missions - including being able to replay missions in the past using future weapons, and social stealth areas. There’s more but, that game really makes me wish it had been spun off into something new.
Yeah, Treyarch had some great devs honestly, it’s a shame. They always brought new ideas to the franchise and a lot of them stuck around.
CoDaas? Amazing!
$70 to have access to the gun skin shop.
The article says that early reviews are let down by the campaign. Egregious asset reuse on a rushed campaign.
I know a lot of people don’t care about campaigns in COD, but I do. Once a game’s one year MP cycle is over, all that’s really left is the campaign.
The asset reuse in the campaign doesn’t bode well for multiplayer either, since that means more than likely obvious asset reuse there too. Which makes the whole thing look and feel like an overgrown, overpriced DLC, which is apparently what it is.
FWIW I played all console/PC CODs from the very first game to the first Modern Warfare reboot (except for Black Ops 3). Lot of highs and lows in the series, but each game had something to memorably set it apart. MW3 seems to have nothing to draw people in.
Does COD actually release on a yearly basis? That’s insane if they do.
Starting in 2005 there has been a mainline COD released every year.
It’s made slightly better by the fact the studios rotate, which gives the games a two year development cycle instead of one, but it’s still pretty tight.
Jeez, that’s crazy, even with multiple studios.
Yes and no. A two year development cycle is pretty reasonable for a linear game where the engine and foundational mechanics and elements of design are already in place and well understood by all involved. Even animations and assets are to a certain degree acceptable to reuse. Given those constraints, there have been some pretty good COD games.
That’s just the development side though. The crazy part is selling a new game where multiplayer is a large element to people every year. I don’t know if I’m more baffled by the publisher for deciding to do it, or for audiences for putting up with it. I’m personally very sluggish to switch away from an MP shooter that I like. Which is the reason why I stopped trying to keep up after MW2, and only played the other games on a delay and primarily for single player.
If they asset reuse that much then wtf is in that file size lol
It’s a fuckin abuse of hard drives.
The map is all on the Warzone map. Shit you not. Watched Charlie confirm it - if you’ve played warzone you’ve seen every locale in mw3, with obvious differences in set pieces like cars and signage.
They copied it to reuse it, still left the original.
First reviews are about the campaign.
This one was about 4 hours, but you can do it faster.
And absolutely sucked balls.
The new zombies is really fun, but pisses of zombie fans for not being the same thing, and pisses off dmz fans because it’s not dmz. It’s like both smashed together
Being the lowest rates means nothing. As long as people keep buying and ordering the game, they will keep on releasing Shit games. Money talks in business.
I haven’t preordered a game since fallout 76.
I have yet run across a pre-order where I have regretted it either.
Most of the time, you wait 3 months or a year for PlayStation,
- all the bugs are fixed,
- game play has been thoroughly tested by $90 beta tester whales who pay for the privilege.
- It’s on sale
- Wait long enough, even with the DLC
- If it is a good enough game, it will survive the test of time (Elden Ring), and if it doesn’t you didn’t miss anything important.
Players will also typically have done the work of putting together a wiki.
How important that is varies by game, but it can be pretty nice. For many roguelikes, having the mechanisms more-fully-documented can be important in making decisions about how to build out a character, for example.
Also, while I suppose this is less of a factor on console, and the impact varies a lot on a per-game basis, players will have often made mods. They don’t even have to be huge things either – but fixing the one quality-of-life thing that has been driving both you and the modders nuts can be awfully nice.
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Unfortunately there’s a whole slew of people who are going buy it no matter what. See the same shit with sports games. Doesn’t matter how much of a lazy, shitty, watered down mess it is, people are going to buy it.
With licensed sports games – not something I play – my understanding is that the game typically has a player database that tracks the real-world situation. So what you’re paying for is basically the right to play fantasy games with the current year’s teams.
That’s got value to a number of people, I expect.
With multiplayer FPSes – also not something I’ve played much of in quite some years – my guess is that the release does something to create the demand, because a lot of player base will shift to the new release, which yanks them off the old release. So if you stay on the old release, you’re only playing against people who stayed on the old release.
EDIT: Of course, the flip side of the multiplayer thing. is that if the players, as an aggegate, generally don’t move to the new game – as it sounds to me, from the little I read, to be what happened with Payday 3 – then the mechanism works against the publisher.
It’s a bummer that there’s nothing comparable as competition that actually has a playerbase.
There’s a few on the horizon but as of right now it’s a wasteland.
This is what I’ve been saying lately - there is a massive opening for someone to do for CoD what Battlebit did for Battlefield. There are people who just want the old CoD multiplayer back without all the Warzone garbage and they would gladly pay for it.
I can ignore a lot of things if the game still feels good: microtransactions being jammed down my throat I can ignore as long as they are not pay to win. Game modes that don’t interest me, I can ignore (they even give you the option to uninstall JUST warzone if you don’t play it).
The saga of COD’s super aggressive SBMM and active manipulation of the result of 1v1 encounters over the last 12 months I cannot abide. Dropped frames in the middle of a close quarters battle whilst their algorithm decides which player should come out on top to maintain engagement? Nope! If this is the direction that play is headed they are beyond redemption.
Myself and many others are out here hungering for an arcade shooter that rewards player skill and movement mastery. It’s only a matter of time until someone gets that formula right and takes a huge chunk out of the COD franchise.
Xdefiant, The Finals, Unrecord, Marathon are all possibilities, but you can’t play any of them right now.
It’s a bloody sad year for gaming imo - I prefer to play online multiplayer but since I got bored of BF 2042 and swore off of COD altogether, I am spending my time playing some of the great single player games from the last couple of years instead.
There’s plenty of old games with active player bases, the battlefield games off the top of my head are still plenty active.
Lmao you think Microsoft would want to get it “back on track”? The same Microsoft that makes the Windows operating system and has been bungling consoles for a decade now?
Does this mean they’ll finally stop making them?
Of course not, it’s the top selling game on Steam.
Sigh
Ive been saying this shit for years and people argue with me about it. CoD hasnt been a good game for years. Near enough a decade. Maybe even longer.
It was popular and its popularity, regular release of the next CoD, its marketing and hype are the only reason it was big.
It stopped being good when they made reskin after reskin after reskin for a game that other companies were doing better and had been for years. Activision knew what they were doing and they cashed in big time on that IP.
Too bad its ovet.
Wow, the whole singleplayer campaign is a pre-order bonus? It really must be bad, if they’re so hellbent on getting people to buy it before they know what they’ll get.
Early Access to the single player campaign is a pre-order bonus.
Ah, so it’s just that you can play singleplayer already before release, but it will also be available to everyone who buys the game after release?
I interpreted this sentence:
VGC’s Modern Warfare 3 review says of the campaign: “Sold as a pre-order bonus and […]"
…to mean that it would only be available to those who pre-ordered. Which would certainly be wild, but I thought, maybe that is why it’s so short then.
Yep. The single-player campaign is available for everyone, but the people who pre-ordered got to play it a week early.
The shortness of the campaign could be a contributed to a couple factors: there were rumors that MW3 started off life as DLC for MW2; the game developer Sledgehammer Games had come out and said they were initially tasked with developing Advanced Warfare 2 (I think) but that project was cancelled and they pivoted to MW3 and got that completed in 18 months.
Either way, the campaign is a big disappointment. Multiplayer seems to be getting enjoyed by a lot of people, though. Haters gonna hate.
All of them since Call Of Duty 2 have been the lowest rated ever in my book.
COD4-Black Ops 1 was a solid run
1 and 2 were pretty good. A few cutscenes here and there and the rest is just good map design with a few scripted actions. 4 is still my most favourite Call of Duty multiplayer experience to day, but the single player campaign is so rushable even on the highest difficulty. It still has enjoyable bot butchering and cool Ac-130 and Capt. McMillian sniper missions. Gaz is still my most favourite Call of Duty character, alas deader than dead. 5 and 7 has some good cinematic experiences, like the WWII Pacific landings, jungle combat, bomber/fighter combat, CIA Vietnam memories, Russian Gulag rebellion. Plus 4 MP zombie scenarios can be pretty enjoyable. 6 has a few missions that are pretty cool, like the blackout night combats in the US cities.
Although I played up to 10, which is iirc Call of Duty Ghosts, they were mostly shit. I think back in 2018, I had learned the existence of a Call of Duty 1 expansion called United Offensive, which even at that date, after experiencing whole lotta shooters to that day like Arma 3, CSs, Battlefields, Doom, Quake, Halflife, Red Orchestra, Medal of Honor,.etc., still held up to a new fun mixed with nostalgia and fun on a game I hadn’t played before.
COD didn’t start until 4
Imma stay playing my modded CoD WaW. Wake me up when that one’s remastered
Waw got an undeserved bad reputation I feel. People were waiting for an improved cod4 then waw came out and people werent too keen on going back to ww2. Then they killed the series for many people with MW2. Blops1 was OK but the magic had been lost.
Waw was amazing.
It already is in my heart.
Good, fuck activism blizzard microsoft.
This is the first cod I’ve skipped since Finest Hour released on ps2. I knew COD sucked. Every hardcore COD player knows it sucks.
I guess it was running on nostalgic fumes. Warzone was only fun because of the lock downs, it really wasn’t that good either.
MW2’s weird ass gameplay choices (red dots not showing on map when firing, perks not being available right away, garbage ass maps) was the last straw.
Hoping Microsoft gets their shit together with the series in the future, but the series may finally be dead to me :/.
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