The New Age of Call of Duty

call of duty cold war — Credit: Activision / Treyarch

What do we think of when we as players look at each respective console and PC rig we see? When we think about gaming as a whole there are a select few games that really stick out, isn’t there? If someone were to ask about Playstation games the typical answers are God of War, The Last of Us, and Spiderman. While Xbox carries the massive nostalgia of Halo and all of its predecessors. PC has always been a massive catalog of award-winning competitive games like League of Legends or Rainbow Six Siege. Yet, when we think of gaming as a whole, it’s usually Call of Duty that falls front and center as a beloved game across decades. Whether you play it for the campaign, multiplayer, or zombies, many of us have been there for each new installment to come out.

Although in recent years, it seems that the massive franchise has been putting out games that are falling a bit short of the pinnacle that they used to have above everything else. Plagued with issues upon release or the ever despised microtransactions that eventually we all fall victim to. The newest installment of the Black Ops series, Cold War, was highly regarded when the trailers began to come out. Yet with its release shortly following the drop of Xbox and Playstation next-generation consoles, it seems to have hit an even lower mark than that of its 2019 Modern Warfare revamp. Constantly bogged down with console crashes, Playstation bricking, and the ever-prevalent PC error codes.

So if we retrace our steps to see where everything, literally and metaphorically, came crashing down, I think it comes down to a matter of quality over quantity. Some of the first CoD games to release, although reaching to grow as a franchise, were humble in their simplicity. A handful of studios worked together to shape daring campaigns that could have stood up against Hollywood movies, and the multiplayer was just a simple run and gun that kept up a faster pace than something along the lines of Halo. It brought with it an air of exhilaration and at the center of it all was a casual fun carrying success through its players. For more recent releases we’ve seen a growth of developers that all work under the Call of Duty banner, and as talented as they all are, sometimes a mass amount of ideas and creative changes can ironically pull away from the charm that older releases pulled players in with.

Call of Duty has become more of a corporate calling card for the gaming industry rather than a dedicated group of teams working to grow their product, and with Cold War’s release, it seems to be very clear where most of the focus has gone. While most players sit and await responses for the issues they have been plagued with since release, the store in-game remains constantly updated, and Warzone updates are steadily streaming in almost weekly. The dedication to creating an exhilarating, working, inspired and realistic wartime game seems to have left, and what we’re left with is a vague husk of what the franchise once was. While I, and many others, hope that Call of Duty can return to its former Modern Warfare and Black Ops 2 glory, I do not think there will be any future updates on that anytime soon.