Yes, I am talking about the leading FPS game for, at least, five years running, Call of Duty. Let me just say up front that I played all the CoD titles up to Modern Warfare 2 and I loved them all, though quickly became bored of MW2. I did not play CoD3 as it was console only and for those of you that may not know, I am a PC player. I encourage all gamers to play whatever game they find to be fun. I don’t care if you play on console or PC. I think it is great that someone plays other game types than FPS. This article is not to bash CoD, but to enforce what I was saying in my previous article about CoD vs Battlefield.
Activision released the multiplayer reveal trailer for Call of Duty:Ghosts not too long ago and covered what they have added to Ghosts that makes it better. Here is the trailer:
So this is some of the things that have been added to CoD:
- Ability to build squads
- Destructable Environments
- Ability to destroy set pieces to change the map layout
- New knifing animation
- New sliding new animation
- Women Characters
These are just a few things that have been added, but what I see on that list are all things that Battlefield added by the time of Battlefield 3. The only item not on the list is the women characters, which is something both communities have been asking for.
Since Bad Company 2, at least, the Call of Duty community has been asking for these changes over and over and Activision, or the CoD dev team, have said how it really isn’t necessary. Now in Ghost, there it is. Now, there is nothing wrong with adding things into an FPS to “modernize” it and most FPS games have things that have been used in other FPS games in the past. There is really nothing “new” per se in an FPS game. It all has been done one way or another before.
The issue that I have with all this though is this is the first time these things have been added to CoD. After years of requests for these things, it is now happening. The demand for it is so great that they have finally done it. Activision/CoD has broken away from their standard and has adjusted their engine, again, to support these features. They have broken away from the standard format and has added features that are very popular in Battlefield and that their community has been asking for.
Rather anyone wants to admit anything or not, in business, this is a shift to get with the program or become the under-dog. Survival of the fittest, a very fitting song for what is happening right now with the FPS market.
I still believe that CoD:Ghosts is going to outsell BF4, but is not going to break all the records it has in the past and for Activision to change this declining trend, and this following role that they are now in, is to “reboot” the Call of Duty franchise. It has run the course with the options and engine that it has and the fan-base that supports CoD demand more and more changes to the title. It is the same cycle that the Battlefield franchise also had to do. In the long run, Battlefield will sell more and longer as well as have a lot longer playing time. They have two development teams and one of those teams need to be working on the next new, for real new, engine and be adding the main features that make CoD what it is.
Crunch Time 