When you play games, read about games, talk to people about games, you begin to notice certain trends in arguments for or against video games either as a whole or about specific titles and franchises. I'd like to talk to one series in particular, Call of Duty and it's goliath publisher Activision.
For those who've been living on the dark side of the moon for the past 10 years, Call of Duty is a First Person Shooter game that has, over the past couple of years, slowly taken a monopoly on the market to become the biggest shooter on sale, and the highest grossing series that makes literally billions with each installment.
Speaking of money, I want to start off by saying that video games are not what they used to be. They aren't cheap and fast to make. They're like movies and the mainstream video game market is like Hollywood. Titles cost hundreds of thousands to millions on average and the production of a single title can either keep a company afloat for years or bring it to financial oblivion. It's no wonder then when games take so much to make and titles like Call of Duty start making billions that the people who are actually in control of the money, the publishers, are going to want to take less risks. Risk means danger. It means you can lose money. If you had two choices; make 250 million or risk losing millions on something that could make triple the normal amount, what would you go for? A lot of people would just take the safe option, the fast 250 mil'.
This philosophy of "take few risks, make more money in the long run" has lead to Activision becoming notorious in the gaming industry. They make damn sure that their flagship title, Call of Duty, takes as few risks as possible with each installment. This is why their engine is years old, in technology terms it's literally ancient, and why they've come under heavy fire for essentially repackaging the same product year after year and selling it at a huge profit. But it's not all they're getting heat for.
Activision are known for having followed the trends that Sports games have always used: yearly releases. A sports game can do this easily because all they need to change are the graphics, the players and some other minor things. They can't change anything because the real sport it's based off of hasn't changed. It's easy and it's faster money. When Call of Duty became a yearly franchise, people got angry. The problem is that you can't do yearly installments with anything other than sports games. A first-person shooter can become stale very quickly and its an incredibly competitive market. Activision and its developers were fast to notice that its incredibly difficult to both innovate and push out a game in such a tight deadline. So, something had to be cut. The former was what they stopped focusing on. Instead of opting for trying to do something new, impressive or otherwise original in any way, they decided to aim for the fastest methods of production and this meant the game couldn't change. They couldn't make a new engine, they couldn't add lots of new features. They had to make minor changes to the existing core game or they'd never do it in time. This has skewed public opinion of Activision, making them appear like rabid money-hungry fiends that are trying to exploit gamers that frankly don't know any better (the vast majority of the Call of Duty community are the 12-16 demographics that may not know that game sequels aren't supposed to be the same game with a different number), however I think those criticisms aren't totally justified. Yes, I agree that Activision should be focusing on quality of product rather than being consistent in release times, but you have to understand that at the end of the day they are a multi-billion dollar business that has a lot riding on the success of the Call of Duty franchise. Without it, they'd still be making good money, but no where near the amount, and now they've established a core fanbase that not only wants yearly releases, but has been made to expect them. Changing their strategy now could diminish sales and cause a loss in product interest. For some companies this means a loss of a few hundred thousand max, but for Activision this means the loss of millions of dollars. It isn't hard to see why they're so terrified of change.
This is problem 1 with Call of Duty; the people that are making it are being put into a situation where they can only do so much, they can't revolutionise the product because they're being forced into restrictive deadlines.
But what is problem 2? Is it the game itself? No. It has problems, though.
For those that don't know, Call of Duty has had a growing history of serious problems. Hacking, cheating, lag, instability. The most recent series, Black Ops and it's counter-series Modern Warfare, have been the primary vehicles for these issues. However, Black Ops, being the most recent, is where everyone's attention is, and the issues only become more apparent.
The first installment of Black Ops was an alright game. It was a standard Call of Duty game in a retro-setting (the 1960s) which, at the time, was refreshing given that the previous titles had been modern shooters. But, one of the biggest problems it had was in its primary mode: multiplayer. You see, Call of Duty is known as a multiplayer game. It has single player modes, but it's entire marketing machine focuses on the highly lucrative multiplayer aspect of its games. So you would think this is where they'd want the game to be smoothest, it's what people are buying it for, afterall. There was one fatal flaw in the game that certainly put a very clear mark on the franchises reputation. The lag.
In online games, the most important thing is having a smooth connection. Obviously this depends on the locations of the other players, the servers hosting the game, and your internet connection. Call of Duty does away with dedicated servers and allows a player to host the game instead. In theory this is good as players in the same region as the host will have better connections. Typically, this holds true. However, your internet connection still has a serious effect. The worse your connection is as a whole (in terms of raw speed it can achieve), the laggier and poorer your game will play as a result. This was, for a long time, considered the way of the world. You can't afford a good internet connection, don't play online. For me, this was the fair way of looking at things. Back maybe 5 to 10 years ago, it sounded more harsh, but today ISPs are providing faster and faster internet packages for lower costs each year, making it, for the most part, your own fault if you've got a bad connection. If your ISP isn't good, you move to a new one. Obviously your area plays a role in connection speed, but for the most part it's the provider that matters.
Call of Duty looked at this concept and said "no." They wanted the game to be more accessible (and yes, this is motivated by money, but again, that's not a good criticism entirely.) To do this, they added a mechanic called Lag Compensation. To speak in simplest terms, if you have a bad connection, but everyone else does, the game will simulate and create lag for other players to compensate for your bad connection. It tries to even the playing field and if done right it goes by unnoticed. But, Black Ops didn't do it right at all. In fact, their lag compensation was notoriously exaggerated. This created a very noticeable advantage for players with worse connections, flipping traditional gameplay on its head -- the worse your connection, the better a game you got. This caused a huge deal of controversy. Treyarch, the developer, were called into question when shown literally hours and hours of recorded footage demonstrating very clearly where the lag compensation was causing issues for players. Treyarch wouldn't accept responsibility. They claimed that viewing the game in Theather mode (a mechanic of the game that lets you record matches for later viewing) wasn't an accurate representation of what happened in games, and sometimes it would not depict what had happened as it may have in-game. This was all they would say on the matter.
For Black Ops 2, the same problem existed but to a far lesser extent. Tarring the reputation of Treyarch further.
So am I saying that what's wrong with Call of Duty is the developers? They are a big problem, but the problem. Then what is?
It's not the publisher. It's not the developer. It's not the game itself. That leaves only one thing: the people playing it.
With gamers all over the world, the name Call of Duty has become synonymous with campers (a method of playing where one essentially sits in the corner of a room and waits for people to come in un-awares, in FPS games it's considered incredibly lazy and unsporting) and quickscopers (a playstyle that once exploited a bug that allowed players to zoom in very quickly with a sniper rifle, fire off a shot and move which, with practice, essentially made the weapon an infinite-range 1-hit kill weapon that, thanks to Aim Assist and other in-game features, became a largely used and widely hated method of player.) It's this association with lazy, unsporting and bug-exploiting that has turned Call of Duty from a once-praised title to a largely despised name. The question you need to ask is this, though: if the players are creating a community that supports playing the game in a specific fashion that is largely seen as unsporting or 'cheap', is it the responsibility of the community as a whole to review itself, or is it the responsibility of the developer to try to fix the problem?
The issue then becomes if it's the communities responsibility how are they going to promote fairer-play and more "sporting" conduct in a game that while it's growing in widespread dislike still remains as the top-seller that's constantly bringing in new players that play the game with the mindset that that's the gameplay that's not only allowed but expected of them.
If it's up to the developers to sort the game, then I see the entire franchise as a lost soul. The developers actively now support quickscoping and know about the problems the community has as a whole (such as the wide use of camping and even being known as a breeding ground for elitism, vitriol and a mindset of "I against all" rather than a community that seeks to better itself and help new players (who, at the moment, are often despised by veterans rather than guided or helped to better learn the game) and to me this says one thing: they don't care. If not that, they're told not to fix the problems. If the game is making this kind of money with the status of being the go-to game for people that like to play in the aforementioned ways, then, as I'ved said before, they need to pander to that. It's money. Activision's chief concern is money.
If you ask me the publisher, developer and community are the triad that make up Call of Duty's core problems. Many people see it differently and views on this differ radically from gamer to gamer. Where do you stand? Do you think the problem with the game is how it's treated by those who make it, or how it's trated by those who play it?
Thanks for reading. There's a comment secton for a reason, if you have issues or an opinion on the article or the topic, don't be afraid to speak about it.
Stay tuned for more 'What's Really Wrong' where I will be going into detail on a wide range of topics involving media (chiefly movies and games, but possibly other things) and media-centric things that have become, in the public eye, notorious for having serious problems. Like EA also known by some as "the biggest fucking problem in gaming and business history ever."
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