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?