Whatever happened to Call of Duty?

[Barry Admin]

I remember when MW1 and MW2 came out, and everyone from here was on playing. My friends lists was absolutely full of people playing those games, in a way you don't see outside of a new GTA launch.

Yet it seems that hardly anyone bothers with them anymore. I personally end up getting most of the games just for Zombies, then drift back into multiplayer. I usually still find it to be a really fun, fast-paced experience. Samey, sure, but still great at what it does.

CoD does seem to have picked up an absolutely terrible reputation over the years. Is that part of what put you off, have you just lost interest, or... something else?

[asids]

Probably the fact they keep releasing a new game every year just to milk as much of that sweet sweet cash as possible. Eventually people were just going to give up on it. There seems to be a general lack of any attempt at proper innovation, and eventually people are going to get sick of that.

The last one I bought was Ghosts, which was fairly shit. I just haven't even given the series another thought after that.

CoD 4 is still fantastic though.

[biggytitbo]

Infinite warfare is meant to be pretty good but I think by the time it came out most were a fed up with the series. The ww2 one might be good but I think  it needs to take a year off like assassins creed did and have a bit of some rethink about what it wants to be.

[Neomod]

I never enjoyed CoD, much preferred Battlefield. I still pop back on to 1943 (xbox) once in a while, I spent hours on that one.

[biggytitbo]

I played the first 2 black op games a while back and was very disappointed in them, so 1 dimensional to virtually be on rails, no sense of environment or exploration, and the pacing just relentlessly one note. From what I've read Infinite Warfare actually corrects this somewhat, in that its a lot better balanced between the action and slower paced exploration. I might pick it up if it ever falls under a tenner, which the COD games never seem to do.

[itsfredtitmus]

Last Cod game I bought was Black Ops 1, actually got it on release date, which is rare for me. Multiplayer was buggy shit (all the Treyarch ones are.) Single player had lots of gimmicks that I really enjoyed

[Bazooka]

Yeah Battlefield happened.

[Barry Admin]

A very different type of game though, although they've made some inroads towards CoD-style action since BF3 onwards.

And sadly nothing to rival Zombies in the Battlefield series. There's a survival mode in Battlefront, but it's shite. Activision recognise the huge love for Zombies, and now the other two CoD makers do their own version of Treyarch's masterpiece.

Must admit I rarely bother with the campaigns anymore (true for a lot of games when I'm primarily interested in the multiplayer), but Zombies always keeps me coming back for more. Infinity Ward did a surprisingly great job with their version, even though Infinity Ward are shit now. David Tenant is in the one that gets released tomorrow, not sure who else as I've been avoiding any talk of it. Doesn't seem that great either.

Reception for WW2 as a whole will be interesting. People went mad wanting "boots on the ground" and an end to all the advanced movement of recent CoD's, and now there are some early indications that people are finding that style of play too fucking slow and boring!

[biggytitbo]

Its funny how big a deal they've made about getting the story and historical details right for the WW2 setting and treating it seriously and with respect, then right next to it on the menu is 'Nazi zombies!!'

[Lee Van Cleef]

...or standing on Normandy beach watching other players call in and open loot boxes.

I thought the Advanced Warfare campaign was pretty decent, even with "Press F To pay respects". Plus you get to send Kevin Spacey to a firey death, which takes on greater significance now!

Isn't it just the case that years of attrition have dwindled numbers a bit? Oh it's November... New call of duty... Well I could but I'd rather play a multiplayer game that's fun where I'm not matched against people that have been playing it 14 hours a day since launch...

[AsparagusTrevor]

I remember playing the first two Call of Duty PC games back in the day, it's been odd watching them grow from pretty humble beginnings into the modern definition of AAA titles, seemingly kickstarted by Modern Warfare, which lets' remember was titled Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I never got round to MW3 and BO2 and the last one I played was Advanced Warfare which was fine. I'll only ever play the campaigns though, online CoD seems to be the absolute worst of all that's wrong with gaming.

They all provide an entertaining enough, if shallow, experience but I don't think any of them provide the better examples of any particular gameplay aspect so it's strange to see their popularity overtake superior shooters. The CoD games are popcorn FPS games.

[Barry Admin]

I think they do what they set out to do really well, for the most part. It's a very fast twitch shooter, and they've always excelled at the psychological stuff, eg giving you millions of rewards to constantly earn. I think the Crysis games perhaps did a better job at CoD than a lot of CoD's have, but they never had the user base to sustain them, sadly. CoD does need to just junk all the old Quake code and build a beautiful new engine from the ground up, but I can't see that happening for a long time, if ever.

[Mister Six]

CoD does seem to have picked up an absolutely terrible reputation over the years. Is that part of what put you off, have you just lost interest, or... something else?

MW1 was incredible - a war game that was fun, but still made war look absolutely petrifying and awful. One that subverted the gung-ho heroism of war games by having the dubious SAS bastards who shot people in their beds (almost) come out as heroes while the hoo-rah American soldier who rescues trapped pilots dies of massive radiation poisoning after an atomic blast. It was a war game that quoted Gandhi and Sun Tzu without ever seeming pretentious, because the horror of war and exhilaration of battle were both integral to the themes of the story.

Then the original designers got the boot and MW2 opened with a skidoo action scene straight out of a James Bond movie and I thought "Well this is fucking stupid" and I never returned to the well.

[Mister Six]

I do find it amusing that the new game is Call of Duty: FUCKING HELL LADS, ITS WORLD WAR II, given that is exactly what every FPS war shooter was (especially Cal of Duty) until MW came out.

[biggytitbo]

I still enjoy the big red one from time to time.

[Operty1]

They do need to re-invent Call Of Duty from the ground up. This new iteration could have come out in 2009 as World At War 2, the only difference between then and now are the micro-transactions. Titanfall 2, Battlefield 1 and Rainbow Six Siege are all better examples of modern FPS's. They are also games in which if you only have few hours a week to play, you can still come top of the leader board, COD is unforgiving in that respect.

[asids]

I still enjoy the big red one from time to time.

What, Call of Duty or rectal prolapse?

[Barry Admin]

Titanfall 2, Battlefield 1 and Rainbow Six Siege are all better examples of modern FPS's. They are also games in which if you only have few hours a week to play, you can still come top of the leader board, COD is unforgiving in that respect.

I dunno about that really, although it's a hard thing to quantify, but certainly the CoD community itself thinks the games are a bit too easy mode so that everyone can do well, these days.

With all of them, there is an adaption period, of course. CoD is so fast that I simply can't drink while playing it, one or two beers is enough to absolutely wreck my performance quite noticeably.

You have a very, very low time to kill, and streaks, which is the main reason CoD is thought to be a game where it's not hard to do well. The two recent ones even let you keep your score streak after death.

I love R6 Siege and think it's become an amazing game, but it seems to require a much larger investment of time, due primarily to the awesome map destruction system. I should really, really get back into TF2, but as I say, Zombies is one of my favourite games of all time, and that always keeps me coming back to CoD. BO3 started making stuff you unlocked in multiplayer count also in Zombies (camos basically), so they've done a great job at still providing a worthwhile package in terms of STUFF, and now also in getting people to try out all the modes. I mean, I was thinking today I really need to go back to Blops 3 multiplayer just to finish unlocking diamond skins for my shotguns, so I then have them in Zombies. I play there Zombies modes for years and years after release, on and off, so they do give value for money.

[Lemming]

Having revisited CoD1, United Offensive and CoD2 relatively recently, it's amazing how badly they hold up. Every weapon feels so underpowered that they might as well be super-soakers, every other map has a fucking infinite spawn zone that shuts off after a you reach a completely arbitrary trigger, sometimes so badly placed that you can literally see the identical German soldiers materialising into existence before your eyes. Every level consists of some combination of these traits:

- Fight your way to a door to stop enemies spawning. Wait an hour for your comrades to catch up, who are all busy showing off their AI capabilities by screaming at each other to take cover and dramatically crawling over to you after you've already cleared all enemies in the map. Eventually, one of them will come and kick the small wooden door that was blocking you down.

-Something on the map begins glowing. Go to it and press F.

- Stand in a fenced-in area and shoot at endlessly spawning enemies while your allies scream at you and shoot at the air or at walls. After a specified amount of time, one of your allies will kick a small wooden door that was blocking you down, allowing you to progress.

- Turret segment.

- Vehicle-based turret segment.

The lack of playtesting (seems that way to me, at least) in all three games when playing on Veteran is shocking, especially CoD1 and UO. The Russian campaign in UO was the overall highlight, and it still suffered from all of the above.

As for post-CoD2 entries, I played MW1 when it came out and wasn't feeling it at all. I can't remember if I actually played MW2 or just watched people play it, which is the sign of a great game. I don't recall playing any CoD games after that. EDIT: Just remembered CoD5, which I really hated.

All of the above refers to single-player only. Multiplayer is pretty consistently fine across all CoD games from what I've seen, but I was playing Counter-Strike back when CoD was relevant and I play Battlefield now, so I just sort of missed CoD multiplayer.

[Barry Admin]

Fucking love Call of Duty lads, absolutely love the shit out of it. There are few experiences as satisfying in all of gaming as landing a few quickscopes in rapid succession or hitting a quad feed. It's just the best arcade shooter out there.

[QDRPHNC]

MW1 is probably my favourite FPS ever. I checked out after that though. I want to find a hiding place with a sniper rifle, not fuck about the remote control cars and drones and shit.

And I do mean shit.

Fast fact: I once got a kill streak of 28, but unfortunately did not have the nuclear bomb option activated.

[Barry Admin]

I was watching a stream of MWR yesterday and it was lovely to see those old maps again, but it was also very noticeable how much slower the gameplay was. Bigger maps, too, mostly. So yeah, you could indeed stake out a position with claymores and snipe away. It's a lot faster now, and about 90% of sniping takes place on the move via quickscoping. This does annoy a lot of people, partly because they want realism, but mostly because it's fucking annoying to get sniped or killed with a shotgun.

I'm gutted I missed World At War. At that point I would never consider buying the same game every year, and wanted a break, but I missed the launch of Zombies! And it seems like I also missed some kind of objective-based mode which has only reoccurred now as "War" - a superb BF1 Operations style thing where teams have to attack or defend multiple targets across maps with three distinct segments.

I wasn't sure I'd enjoy a return to boots on the ground, as advanced movement with jet packs is wonderful and takes me back to my Quake days, but WWII is fucking brilliant, it really is.

Nice one/shame about the Nuke! Still not got one myself, but do remember Limmy getting one in MW2.

[Barry Admin]

War really is the best thing to happen to this franchise since Zombies. I just had one of those games where I was a total fucking BEAST. I nipped out and grabbed their flamethrower from under them, twice, and lit them all up and took B bunker by myself. Jump-shotting all over the place with incendiary rounds in my shotgun, giving call outs to the rest of the team, it was a stomping. They didn't even get stage 1 of 3 while attacking, and then we smashed the living bollocks out of them in record time when they were defending.

There's no KDR in War, brilliantly, but sometimes you'll get people doing their camos instead of playing the obejective. I do that myself at times, but still try to work towards the objective at least partially. This time it was just full throttle PTFO, chucking smoke grenades to give us cover, doing all the demolition and building, clearing choke points with the flamethrower. Absolutely amazing. A really incredibly well done game mode (made by Raven, rather than Sledgehammer.)

[lazarou]

It's the DLC practices that did for me really. I like a bit of Zombies, but doling them out one at a time as part of $15 DLC packs makes it pretty expensive if you're really not all that interested in the other stuff that comes with that bundle.

[itsfredtitmus]

1v1 me Barry

[Barry Admin]

Shovel fight? What's your gamertag?

[Glebe]

[tag]Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais try to "get with the times."[/tag]