Sales Mean Nothing: Has Call of Duty Gone Stale?

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
75,399
In an editorial piece from SlashGear, it’s proposed that even with the success of the franchise overall and the $500M release of Black Ops 2, the gameplay has become redundant, stale and repetitive and should get a complete makeover for continued success. What’s your take on the CoD franchise?

The Call of Duty franchise has become one big, repurposed offering that gets customers to pay too much for what is essentially a bunch of new maps launched annually in November.
Click to expand...
 
well the ol saying goes if its not broke dont fix it. the only new thing should be the engine for some games but devs gotta go putting in their stuff and make it all kinds of fail (diablo 3 comes to mind). just my 2cents.
 
well, if it still sold millions, why invest on something that gonna cost money.
cod series hardcore fanboys will always buy any "cod" games... regardless of graphic or gameplay system they have...
 
The quote sums it up, its been this way for a while though. But on it's release schedule its to be kinda expected.

They got the ball rolling and its hard to stop because everyone wants to play with friends, so people buy the game and play with friends, the next one comes out and everyone thinks everyone else is going to get it and they don't want to be left behind so they buy it. CoD is the epitome of average, do the least and roll on your success as it snowballs because people don't mind paying 60 dollars to hang out with friends and I can't really blame them for that, but I wish they would stop paying 60 dollars for CoD and find another franchise that doesn't copy and paste.
 
Most everything on the console looks and plays the same anyway.

In defense of the developer, the platform is what, 7 years old.
How can you make anything look better when you are forced to adapt to hardware that is that old?
 
Stale is the new... Money maker apparently.

Well, that's not new... So I guess it IS a money maker.


Oh oh... Stuck in a loop.
 
If it sells, sell it. If it doesn't, fix it so it sells. This ain't complicated.
 
Seems like it is pretty successful to me. That's the sad fact, most people WANT the same old crap time and again. Try to do something new and different, and people whine that it isn't what they are used to and demand that it be changed back.
 
It's definitely stale but that doesn't mean the series is on its last leg. I've bought almost every one since COD4 and here's how my experience has dropped:

Cod4: Simply amazing. 'Nuff said.
WaW: Going back to WW2? No thanks.
MW2: PC players get the shaft. Marks the beginning of Activision selling out the series. Bought it on Xbox to play with friends and had a decent time.
BLOPS: Had a decent time with MP. Zombies was the big refresh for me as my fiancé loved it and coop was a blast.
MW3: Got bored very fast, didn't even hit first prestige. Vowed to not waste my money on the series any more.
BLOPS2: Ok, need more zombies with the woman. Caved. MP is ok but not worth another purchase. Campaign is a joke, snoooore. Zombies is a mess and once again regret buying.

So here I am once again, bored, disappointed and done with the series. The next title is going to mark a downturn for the series. But you know what will happen after that? The next wave of consoles will hit offering Activision a chance to relaunch the series with some sexy new graphics which I guarantee will be enough to sell the same gameplay once again. That's all it's going to take.
 
Koolthulu said:
Seems like it is pretty successful to me. That's the sad fact, most people WANT the same old crap time and again. Try to do something new and different, and people whine that it isn't what they are used to and demand that it be changed back.
Click to expand...

That's the one that always gets me. I saw it a lot with TES
 
COD4 multiplayer kept me entertained for years...... all of the others kept me entertained for a couple days and that's it.
 
Weird. Didn't like original black ops, loved MW2 and MW3. Not crazy about this one.

I know I am in the minority on this one, but really do not care for it.
 
*looks up from pumping a Shambler full of nails*
Call of what?
*shoots a rocket into a bunch of Knights*
 
So it's the Madden model.

As long as people buy it, they'll make it. And that's all that matters when the goal is making money. It's not art and it's not a charity. It's business.

Think it's stale? Don't fucking buy it. I didn't. The trailer alone was enough to convince me it was a bag of retard.
 
think is, you'd all make the same shit if you were rolling in the dough...When you make something popular and you make a lot money on it, change becomes the evil side of that. Once you make a change that people dislike, then it becomes harder to come back.
 
I wouldn't mind going back to world war 2. More authentic maps, omaha possibly.
 
I stopped playing COD games after COD2. I'm not easily amused with game mechanics being extremely repetitive. COD type of games don't have any real gameplay, nor a story. It's a game for men who need a power trip to make themselves feel good. Spec ops the line is a game made to make fun of this genre of games. You know it's bad when Spec Ops makes fun of games like COD.
 
Modern Warfare was fun. MW2 was retarded and didn't have dedicated servers on PC, and who gives a shit about everything after that.
 
Has been stale for a while. But I still enjoy playing it with friends.

And despite everyone hating on it , if it keeps selling why should they do anything about it?

If you don't like it , then don't play it. Simple solution.
 
I felt the series went downhill in CoD2 with the single player and CoD4 for the multiplayer. The single player has always been far to overbearingly scripted for me to enjoy. I'm ok with linear, but CoD forces you to have a particular play style to even advance.

I didn't play CoD2's MP too much, but it seemed like it had the depth of the MoH and CoD games that came before it. CoD4's MP was just a mess. It had the depth of a flash game. It's ok as a party game, where you don't want a big skill differential, but it's too random and spamy to invest serious time into. Not nearly enough weapon/combat differentiation between weapons, and the maps had no real strategic flow, just random chaos. For a guy who hadn't played any fps games in quite a while, and never was very good at them to begin with, I felt it was really rather pathetic that it took no learning curve at all to consistently get decent kill death ratio. There's not a lot of twitch skill to develop, and there isn't a whole lot of strategic meta-game to learn. Basic understanding of general FPS strategy will get you pretty far apparently. It's decently fun for a few hours, but I don't feel that it has more than a weekend's worth of entertainment every other year.
 
This is going to sound odd but I don't agree. Then again I didn't play COD MW2, BOps1, or the single player game of MW3. I enjoyed MW3's multiplayer with friends. BOps2 to me has been pretty cool. Zombies with Transit is pretty sweet. Multiplayer is fine, it's multiplayer deathmatch/team deathmatch that you always see. Single Player is pretty cool. To me it just sounds like someone writing an article that says "OMG, Something successful, I'll write an article on how it sucks to get hits". I mean I actually like the bad guy from Bops2's single player game. Menedese is one bad ass bad guy. He belongs in a Bond movie except your defiantly not playing as James Bond which to me makes it interesting.

As for the engine it's obviously a dated engine but that doesn't mean it's gonna be a horrible game. It looks good enough to me. Lets look at what games looked like when the original GoldenEye came out on the N64. PC games looked great at the time. But Bond worked with a horrible game engine to make an amazing game. This game works with a good engine to make a good game.
 
My opinion:

I haven't played a lot of their games, WM3 was the first one I spent some time on AND f**k, f**k, f**king cheating aimjunkie no skilled noobs everywhere! The quickest thing I learned playing that game online was people that suck spend money on subscriptions to know where I'm at so they can either wallhack me or just plain aimbot me if they can't even aim correctly while knowing where I'm at.

I'm not joking when I say someone is running cheats on at least every other board (every third board at most). Fracking company should spend some money on actually curbing the cheats they let run a mok. Never really been an avid MP gamer but that stuff sure ruins it. Honestly, either let me purchase anti-cheat software to take on these fracking f**gs or F**k the whole thing!

I guess I'll have to follow suite and just cheat on BO2 like too many others will be.


By the way, I was very good against non-cheaters at that game so I know exactly who was cheating and who wasn't. I learned somewhat quickly to pick out the f**gs within three kills to five kills on me (75% off the time and i'm talking about the guys hiding that fact. Aimbotters just = duh!).

TDM only, scores; 28-0, 32-1, and a couple 44-**'s. KDR at least 1.75 (while staying on cheater boards harassing cheaters being killed 15 times a board...lol.)


TL:DR: F**k these FPS-MP games until they curb cheating OR let me purchase software that makes ME immune to their cheats.


The' End!
 
shooters.
they're all stale. They're all pretty much a variation of the same game.

Medal of Duty: Battlefield Ops 3.

You really can't do shit with FPS games. The point of these games is to shoot everything that moves and watch it go kaboom!
 
dr.kevin said:
shooters.
they're all stale. They're all pretty much a variation of the same game.

Medal of Duty: Battlefield Ops 3.

You really can't do shit with FPS games. The point of these games is to shoot everything that moves and watch it go kaboom!
Click to expand...

Yup.

Just about every FPS to date is a military-based or fight-this-alien-that-want-to-anal-probe-you shooter dealing with some kind of end of the world or end of the universe scenario where a bunch of guys or a single hero is sent in to do the dirty job and save the world because some developers fail to comprehend the concept of original story since they lack the motivation and determination to write something original that doesn't have to relate to the US military or an army in Europe or some fictitious Middle Eastern country with stereotypical Middle Eastern enemies or stereotypical Eastern European rebels or terrorist groups hellbent at sticking their foot up Democracy's ass all the while we're playing through one level after another that looks no similar to every other single FPS game on nearly every platform to date with the same tired and used scenarios of going from Point A to Point B and shoot down a seemingly endless wave of enemies and face some godforsaken boss or end level event to close the level in order to progress to the next area which becomes another level of monotony and boredom that goes on and on and on where you scramble to conserve ammo or look for them as you shoot down that monster or alien or stereotypical terrorist that acts no different than any other enemy you've fought before in other different FPS games with no semblance of originality or effort poured into it except to milk the next $50 or $60 out of some hapless gamer who will sooner complain about bugs or how consoles are killing PCs when all in all it's the developers' faults for not striving to make some original content so this loop of endless trivial mess of boring FPS games continues on and on from one gaming platform to the next never knowing when the end will come just to torture you continuously with the same droll gameplay layered beneath repeated textures and slightly enhanced graphics each and every generation that developers market it as the next big thing with the next big jump in graphics and fancy effects that is no different than a competitor's game on the same gaming platform thereby contributing to another endless stream of back-and-forth nonsense and lack of creativity from these same developers who will end up getting a diatribe of how unoriginal and stale their game is now after having so many different ports and so many different games of using the same tired and overused gameplay of shoot this and go there and kill this and pick up that ammo and go there and stop this bad guy from destroying the home you love or the universe you live in and go there and save your friends and family and your pet cat and go there and suddenly you realize that you have been playing the same game over and over again for the last ten or twenty years ending up going on some forum writing a long running sentence describing the stupid ass FPS genre as how it just keeps going and going on and on forever and eternity with the same tired bullshit gameplay that doesn't change.

And, that in a nutshell is FPS gaming today. :D

(Yes, I intentionally wrote that as one long sentence.)
 
Game content doesn't even matter much unless they screw up.

Been playing fps since Doom, stayed away from the genre for few years and thought about coming back.
All that came to my mind was CoD, becasue that's all I see/hear around me. Their marketing team won it for them big time. It's like average guys buying apple. Unless I study my options I feel like I only got 1 choice.
 
CoD games have always sucked after the first 2 or 3.

What's more troublesome is the amount of propaganda in these games. Hard to enjoy a game that tries to instill a certain political and cultural mindset into easily influenced youngsters.
 
CoD...went stale when it went MW. Continued being stale into MW2. Started growing mold with BO. Has mushrooms growing on it with MW3. Became compost with BO2.

They need to wipe it and start fresh again.
 
The game reached the pinnacle with World at War. Everything after that was pure repetitive crap.

They had just put in Zombie mode, which kept me and my friends entertained for months with the user maps. They were just barely starting to embrace modding and user maps, then BAM. Sequels start flowing like water, zombie mode gets no real overhauls. The release cycle gets too fast for anyone to care about user content. Everything went backward and the game went stale.

But who really cares? People keep buying. Until they stop we won't get anything different. Which is ok with me I guess. I quit after WAW.
 
Didn't the multiplayer first-person shooter get stale 15-20 years ago? Hasn't it just been different maps and skins since the Quake days?
 
As long as it sales, Activision will continue to sell CoD with the same shit every year. CoD went stale after CoD 4 and has gotten worse from there. The last game I played was MW3 and it turned out to be a big pile of shit and I don't intend on playing Black Ops 2.
 
Used to be a champ back during the first Modern Warfare. I like playing Halo now a days. All time classic has to forever be Counter-Strike though. Maybe TFS Classic.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top