BIG NEWS FOR CALL OF DUTY!

I know I said that the next entry I would be making would be suggestions for Activision on how to resolve some of the previously mentioned issues, but there is immediate breaking news which will have effects on the whole world of Call Of Duty. There is a new owner of the franchise! Microsoft! Yesterday Microsoft announced it would be acquiring Activision in a record $70 billion deal. This is huge news! And there are so many things to talk about! 

First it should be pointed out that the deal will not be finalized for another 12-18 months. This means that Microsoft will not have full control of Activision and therefore Call Of Duty for at least that period of time, so you shouldn't expect any immediate changes while playing. However there is much speculation on the future of Call Of Duty. Beginning with the obvious question, will Call Of Duty become an Xbox exclusive? For those who don't know, Xbox (a gaming system which many play COD on)  is owned by Microsoft, and an Xbox exclusive would be a game which only Xbox players have the ability to play. Seeing as PlayStation (Xbox’s competitor) has nearly 15% more average monthly players than Xbox, COD becoming an Xbox exclusive could mean dramatic changes in the player demographics. For instance, native PlayStation players may not choose to switch to Xbox to play COD, hence Call Of Duty would lose a respective portion of its player base.

The exclusivity aspect of the deal is not the only thing people are talking about, many including myself think this deal could mean the resolution of many balancing issues. Like mentioned in earlier posts Activision has struggled with their balancing in the past years because of the way they have adapted through the pandemic. However Microsoft is one of the select few companies who have been thriving within their new environments. With Microsoft  nearly tripling in value since the beginning of the pandemic. This means, or at least I hope this means that Microsoft will be the catalyzing factor in Call Of Duty's flourishing with respect to issues being rectified.

Additionally, seeing as the majority of my audience are Xbox players it is very probable that we will be getting bonus content for playing on Xbox. Such as new operators, camos, and more!

Let me know in the comments whether you think Call Of Duty will be going exclusive to Xbox or remaining cross-platform.

Vanguard

Call Of Duty Vanguard the newest addition to the Call Of Duty Franchise was released a few months ago from the time of writing in September. Before it launched it was advertised that it would be running on the same engine as Modern Warfare. Meaning the mechanics (running, jumping, sliding…) would feel the same. Activision did not disappoint. As soon as I got into my first game I could immediately feel the difference, and I was so happy to be playing a game as good as Modern Warfare again. Or so I thought. 

Although the movement felt the same, after playing for a while I realized that I was not playing a game like Modern Warfare. Graphics were not quite as good, but most prominently there were many problems with the balancing. 

But we won't focus too much on what the problems were when Vanguard first came out, we will talk more about what the problems are now, after all this blog is about the current state of Call Of Duty not the past state.

Maps: I commend Activision for releasing Vanguard with lots of maps, 19 to be exact, but many of the maps are not fun to play. Shipment and Das Haus are great, but other maps like Decoy are just poorly designed. After spawning in you have to run for a solid 15 seconds before you see any action, only because the map is set up in a way where you spawn extremely far away from the middle. 

Shotguns: Even though Activision tried to fix the shotguns they are still overpowered. On a small map like shipment I can easily kill someone on the other side without even trying. Something that shouldn't be possible. 

Incendiary grenades: If there was one thing I could take out of the game right now it would be the incendiary grenade. An enemy can throw it as soon as they spawn in and easily kill me. That is not the worst part, the incendiary grenade not only deals a lot of damage but it also severely obstructs an enemies vision. It is fine when one person is using it but when every one on each team is using it you can barely see your screen. As a camo grinder I need to invest a lot of time into playing, and when I have to go up against people using the incendiary grenades for hours a day it is extremely annoying. Personally I think the incendiary grenade is the biggest problem in Call Of Duty for years and it must be fixed.

Camo Challenges: Vanguard challenges are extremely time consuming, which is fine. What is not fine is the fact that some challenges do not track. This means for example you need to get a long shot kill for a challenge. You kill the person from long range, but since the challenges don't track you don't get your reward. As a camo grinder all I can do is hope this gets fixed quickly.

These are the main problems at the moment in Call Of Duty Vanguard my next post will be my suggestions to Activision on how to resolve these issues. Until then answer this questionnaire and let me know what your favorite Vanguard map is. 

Seperation

As mentioned in the last post once covid hit loads of issues in Call Of Duty started to manifest themselves and for me COD became more and more stressing to play. To make it worse there is something which exacerbated that feeling to another level. Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2019 (the last COD before covid). It was arguably one of the best Call Of Dutys to ever be made. Graphics were ultra realistic, gameplay felt smoother than ever before, weapons were relatively balanced, spawns were good (at least for COD).... 

Additionally for me as a camo grinder the Modern Warfare challenges were comparably fun to other CODs. Going from one of the best games ever to what felt like a rushed game (Call Of Duty Cold War) was rough. The Cold War graphics were substantially worse than its predecessors, in every game you would be dying to the same few guns which were overpowered (better than all other guns by great margins). As well as many other things that just made the game feel worse. Especially for me as a camo ginder the challenges were extremely time consuming and many were boring, something that made the game much more unenjoyable to me. 

Fast forward a year to Call Of Duty Vanguard and much has changed. Graphics look much better, although still not as good as Modern Warfare, feels smooth, and the game is mechanically good. Although there is a new host of problems which we will explore in the next blog, the transition from Cold War to Vanguard felt much better than the transition from Modern Warfare to Cold War. 

With all of these Call Of Duty games in recent years looking very different from one another it has split the player base (the population of players). Many players never left Modern Warfare to go to Cold War, out of the people who did, many never left Cold War to Vanguard. Which leaves Call Of Duty Warzone. Warzone is a unique Call Of Duty, it is a battle royale, the only one of its kind. The people who play battle royale tend to jump through every COD in the past 3 years because every one of those CODs are tied to Warzone. If you want to know more about how Warzone is tied to the multiplayer games (Modern Warfare, Cold War…) check out this link. 

These four games have separated the player base, comment on how you think Activision can reunite the community.    

The recent change

In the last post I talked about how Activision evolved over the years to retain its relevance in the video game space as well as staying fun for all the players. However there has been a change in recent years, Call Of Duty is failing to evolve. In this entry I will tell you about all the ways Activision is failing to adapt and give my opinion on why they are.  

As I reviewed in my last blog post, Call Of Duty has managed to stay relevant and fun because they have always restyled their game, adding jet packs, changing the era in which the game is played and so on. The last time we have seen a change in the game as big as influential as the jetpack update was 2016 when they removed the jetpack. It is not a bad thing that they removed it, but it is just a bad thing that something so significant has not changed for the better half of a decade. 

Another element which has barely changed is the game era. Although every year the game is played in a different epoch (WWII, Modern times…) ever since 2017 they have begun reusing  time periods, which has further dried the gaming experience for some players. The effects of Activision's “laziness” in this case are not too severe though because there is only a small minority of players who actually care about when and where they are playing. 

But what a great majority of players care about is being able to play the game without wanting to rip your own head off. A Call Of Duty player wanting to “rip their own head off” can be cause by many things, including dying to stupid things like your own munitions box exploding. Dying repeatedly after spawning into the game(getting spawn killed), dying repeatedly to better guns. As well as many other unfortunate events which can all be tied back to the balancing of the game. If the weapon balancing was good then you wouldn't have to worry about dying to a better gun then what you are using, if the way spawns were set up changed then you wouldn't have to worry about getting spawn killed…. All of which have been relatively fine in the past, so what changed?

Covid. You may be asking yourself how can a real world virus have any effect on a video game? With the exception of the game era not changing which is understandable seeing as there can only be so many different eras, COD was great before the coronavirus hit. Once the restrictions started to roll out for covid the Activision employees had to work from home just like almost everyone else. Because of this, communication between co-workers became more difficult (or atleast new and needed some getting used to), workers did not have all the equipment they are used to working with, and many other things which hindered the productivity of the developers. Because of the productivity decrease certain issues like weapon balancing and spawn setups went unsolved and continue to go unsolved. 

In the current Call Of Duty there are many issues which need to be solved and in my upcoming posts I will address them, but before I do, if there was one issue which you could magically fix right now what would that be?

History of COD

Before you can understand anything I say about the current state of Call Of Duty you need to understand what I think about the past, or history of Call Of Duty. The first Call Of Duty came out back in 2003 but those CODs looked very different from what we now play.

Personally I think the era of modern Call of Duty started back in 2009 with Modern warfare 2. This is because at this time levelling up became more sought-after, the more camos you had became more prestigious, Esports competitions became more prevalent, and many more elements saw their debut at that time which we see very much of today. 

For the most part Call Of Duty has always been a game to hop on to after school and have fun with your friends. This sort of culture has stayed consistent for years because Activision (the games developer) has been reliable in evolving COD. For example how we have seen CODs from all different historical eras such as the 1910s, 2060s and every epoch in between. This is what made Call Of Duty fun for many, not knowing whether they would be running around killing people, or flying around with a jetpack killing people.

“Modern” Call Of Duty has always been so playable because of how balanced the game was. “Balanced” means there is no one gun, or set of guns better than another, no one perk which is exceedingly better than another… This balance let players express themselves in the game. If you wanted to use snipers then you could because you could compete against me using an assault rifle, and I could compete against an opponent using a shotgun. Succinctly in the “modern” Call Of Duty era players played for fun, played however they wanted to play without penalty, and the game was always releasing new material. 

Since this post was rooted in the history of Call Of Duty I think it is only appropriate to ask my audience what their favorite part of the COD history was, which game? For those who may have just started playing recently, if you could, which COD would you go back and play in its heyday? Comment your pick.

The current state of call of duty

For the past 8 years I have played one of the most successful game franchises in history; Call of Duty. Every year when the new Call Of Duty gets released I am among the first players to purchase it. Throughout my gaming career I have played through some of the best Call of Duty's, as well as some of the worst, making me highly knowledgeable on what players had fun playing and really appreciated, and what they did not. This makes me uniquely qualified to talk about the past as well as Call Of Duty's (COD) current state of affairs. This blog will be a place where I give my (somewhat professional) opinions on the state of COD and where others share their own.

Before I begin giving my opinions on certain matters first I am going to tell you more about who I am as a Call Of Duty player, and why I play, so everyone can get a better idea of where I'm coming from. When I first started playing COD it was just a past time, something new where my friends and I could have fun playing at sleepovers. However as time went on I became better and better and began playing against other players online more and more. For years I enjoyed hoping online to play with my friends and trying to get as many kills as possible. 

But after years of just trying to get kills COD started to become boring. Until I started going for camos. For those who don't know, every year when the new Call Of Duty comes out there are also camo challenges released. A camo is something you put on your weapon-a gun skin-. A camo challenge is simply a challenge that you do in the game and when you complete that challenge you can equip that camo to you gun. 

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2019 (Call Of Duty Modern Warfare) was the first year I tried going for every gun camo in the game, and I loved it. 

My current place in Call Of Duty is a “camo grinder”. What is your current place in Call Of Duty? Fill out this quick questionnaire and let us know!

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeyQHBQKlwv78Pn1zvlySOGvfJpXHibR8wj4iwoT78lJiWs3g/viewform?vc=0&c=0&w=1&flr=0