Sales Mean Nothing: Has Call of Duty Gone Stale?

HL2 was also the game where you could pick up a milk crate, place it under you while holding onto it, and jump. Since you landed on it in mid air, and you were still holding on, you could jump again and again until you were just soaring around the fucking map on a piece of wood or whatever.

Physics indeed.

LOL, you don't even have to go that far to point out the flaws of physics in halflife 2. Stuff moves around like they're in some sort of moon gravity.

The CoD fans don't give a crap if the office chair rollers don't have physics, or that the collision for the doors on the fire extinguisher boxes have weird collision problems. They aren't playing it for that.

Do I think CoD sucks? Yeah, that's why I didn't buy it. But I hardly need to nitpick a minor aspect of the game that most of it's fans couldn't care less about and even less who actually notice it's even there with issues. Yes, the game is the FPS equivalent of Madden, I don't play Madden either. Pretty much the only physics anyone cares about in CoD, is for grenades, that's it. The office chair not rolling around isn't going to affect gameplay for 99% of the players.
 
Treyarch has probably made as many changes to the COD formula as possible with Black Ops 2 without changing what actually defines COD. Killstreaks have been turned into scorestreaks, the player customisation has been changed, the single-player has RTS sections and branching storylines, and the game's sound effects aren't so damn horrific anymore.
 
The game is not holding my interest this time around. At times, I lose the storyline and while I am not a real fan of the ported games, I will play if nothing else is around at the time (i.e., waiting for the next Skyrim download).
 
I didn't get it because I was sure that there would be terrible lag in their matchmaking system. From the looks of the COD forums I was right. I won't be getting this game unless they fix it. I know that's not going to happen though, once a COD game comes out nothing ever changes.
 
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?

Umm... BF3, Halo 4, ummm virtually every console game in the last 2 years has made improvements on their visuals versus previous iterations. They have zero excuse, even with the dated hardware.
 
Unfortunately, if you look at the video game industry in the past maybe 5 years, US/Europe in recession/rebuilding, $60 is a lot to stomach for a new game. This means less people willing to buy new IPs out of fear it might suck. We've seen countless studios go under or be bought out and tons of games costing millions to produce and market only to flop. Over this period, mobile games like Angry Birds and other iOS/Android took front seat because these could be taken with you with little to no money invested. A person is much more likely to spend $.99-$5.00 on a game that might be meh rather than $60.

Now big development studios are just looking to push sequels to their AAA titles, cause their brands already exist and people have shown interest for them in the past. Why do people keep buying Nintendo? Franchises like Mario, Metroid, Zelda, etc. Call of Duty is one of those cash cow franchises. A FPS game set for gamers of any skill level who just want to play shoot-em-up. Heck, I remember putting way too many hours into CoD1 and 2 (the golden age IMO) but when I picked up MW2.. I felt it just wasn't for me. However, it is for millions of other gamers who continue to be brand loyal and buy the same crap over and over. And that's fine. If you enjoy something, by all means enjoy it.

But this creates a success vortex, where in Company A says "Hey, people like this game, so let's make a game that mimics that success." Copy cat games do not grow an industry, innovation does. There's still innovation in the game industry, but it's slowing at a very quick pace. Even the new Hitman game borrows the QTE style that for some reason has grown popular and from early reviews has abandoned it's unique stealth mechanic gameplay for more third person shooter action. Same with RE5/6 which has abandoned its survival horror gameplay for more third person shooter action. Developers are trying to mimic success of other game genres while alienating the fan base that made those games popular.

The question is, where do we go from here? Game companies are a business. And if a business doesn't turn a profit, it ultimately fails. This becomes the industry see-saw.. copy and at least get gauranteed sales, or innovate and risk it all?
 
I dunno.

$500 million dollars opening day seems to make me think someone's mommy has a big enough CC to continue to buy it.

Halo 4 same thing. They are both going to do well, same as BF3 did. They are all AAA titles for a reason, stale or not, you are going to get the same basic concepts. Granted BF3 was a huge leap compared to 2 in graphics quality and style, but its still the same thing. Shoot, blow up, camp, choppers, etc.

As long as they continue to sell those things huge, and it allows them to experiment then with other concepts to try and make good IP, I don't care anymore. I'm so burned out with hate this, like this, support this. I just want to enjoy the game I paid my hard earned money for.

COD is not one of those games I enjoy, but I'm moving along at this point, let their fans enjoy it..
 
BF3 is a vastly different game than BF2. BF2's single player campaign was nothing more than the multiplayer game with bots. BF3 was a on-rail shooter for single player. Even the multiplayer is quite different than BF2s.

Now BF3 is just an evolution of the BF: Bad Company games. Doesn't follow BF1942, BF Vietnam, BF2142, or BF2's game style.

New games just make use of old game mechanics. From what I'm reading, CoD:BO2 just takes elements from old 3rd person shooters, with the branching storylines. That or from RPGs. Think we'll just see more mixed style games.
 
IMO sales mean everything in a business model. It's hard to swallow but the companies that will prevail are the companies than can resell repetitive information @ a discount to produce and a profit to sell. So if people continue to flock to this title regardless of how stale it is (and believe me this makes bread crumbs under the oven from last decade look fresh) then they'll continue to sell them.

It's your responsibility to let them know by hitting their pockets, so if you keep the conversation on the table they'll sell. Instead, might I suggest refusing to by and ridiculing anyone that does for buying the "New Guns Yearly" game.

It's a great business model... no or little investment on change, and huge profit margins on sales. But what's good for business sucks for the gamer. Nobody's refused to buy as an action demanding change.

The worst offense to this, is they quite literally give you 1/3 of a game. Because no less than 2 months after COD releases with 4 new maps for 60 bucks, the following 4 maps that were already developed are offered for +/- $20 still, people flock. Then there's new map packs(plus a few new guns) about 2-3 months later for +/- $20. All said people are willing to pay $100/yr. on a stale franchise that continues to sell.

The question should not be WHY do they keep trying to sell it, that has a simple and quite obvious answer: Because you buy it. So the question on the table should be "why are you willing to buy it yearly with maps and guns for 100 bucks?" Frankly, I would be embarrassed of myself if I was still buying COD titles.
 
Stale as a cracker discovered in the tomb of a mummy? Yeah, about that stale.
 
I wish I could say the game is stale, but I can't even enjoy playing it because of the lag compensation in multiplayer. I am always 1-2 seconds behind everyone it seems. I die instantly in firefights (no screen going red or hit sounds) and when I do kill people it takes an entire clip of 30 bullets with hit markers on every single shot.

Read the forums and turns out I am not the only one having this issue. Anyone with ridiculously good internet is being punished. I have 100/15mbit with a 30ms ping. This game is nothing more than a lagfest for me.
 
Umm... BF3, Halo 4, ummm virtually every console game in the last 2 years has made improvements on their visuals versus previous iterations. They have zero excuse, even with the dated hardware.

The tradeoff is terrible framrates. Halo is capped at 30FPS while BF3 is lucky to be hitting 30FPS (unless you turn off AA... and even then it's not great) on PS3. That's okay for platformers and such, but for a twitch shooter 60 is the absolute bare minimum IMHO.

I'll gladly take better gameplay over fancy lens flair effects anyday. To each his own
 
Can you create maps in Call of Duty on PC? If that were possible, then no one would buy the new game versions.

I liked Call of Duty. Then I bought Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and realized there wasn't much difference. That's when it got stale for me. I played Zombies mode at a friends and it got boring pretty quick.

I don't mind games that have the same old features in them, but these games lacked the ability to hook me in.
 
HAS gone stale??

It's been stale for years. They have done sweet FA to revitalize the franchise. What incentive do they have if morons keep buying the same crap over and over.
COD is the Toronto Maple Leafs of the video game world.
 
Sales mean people are happy with it. I don't get the whining about it being "stale". Yes, it is the same thing, over and over. That is what CoD has been for quite some time. Well guess what? That would seem to be what people want, so can you blame them? If you give me a way to make a lot of money with little effort I'll be all over that shit.
 
Didn't buy the last 3 versions. It's been stale for a long time now. The "shiny" left when West and Zampella left IW.
 
How is this different from every Madden game ever released? Normally, that wouldn't mean much on its own, but EA, the world's largest publisher, has claimed that's their biggest seller. Do the math.
 
Sales mean people are happy with it. I don't get the whining about it being "stale". Yes, it is the same thing, over and over. That is what CoD has been for quite some time. Well guess what? That would seem to be what people want, so can you blame them? If you give me a way to make a lot of money with little effort I'll be all over that shit.

That's honestly like the MMO industry, in fact.

Majority of the MMOs today are a derivative or copy of World of Warcraft in some way. It can be controls or quest system or story and characters or job classes. If you try to copy WoW or try to stray away from it, you either succeed or fail. And, many MMOs have failed in that regard. If they try to copy WoW, then the developer has to add something that makes just slightly different-- examples are Allods Online and TERA Online. If you try to stray away from WoW, you need something slightly unique-- examples are The Old Republic or EVE Online. And, if you do something unique, do not expect a large playerbase as large as WoW, even if you copied the WoW-formula.

Why still play WoW or its derivatives? Like you said, people are just happy with those kind of games, and continue to pay for them. It's why the WoW-formula hasn't changed much in the past several years of the MMO industry. The problem there, like with Call of Duty, it lacks any sense of creativity or innovation. Hence, it gets stale over time.

If people are happy with a stale product and continue to pay for it, then they are pretty close-minded to what is possible in the same genre. People have to be more willing to accept change and more willing to accept something new in the genre or we're going to be playing the same game over and over again. To the developers of those supposedly stale games with the same overused gameplay and settings, it shows a lack of creativity or innovation in the design of the game.
How many times do we have to go to some fictional Middle Eastern or East European country with the same stereotypical East European or MIddle Eastern terrorist group?

How many times do we have to go to some alien planet or space station?

How many times are we given the same weapons or similar powerful weapons? An SVD sniper rifle in Counter Strike: CS is no different than the SVD in ARMA II, Battlefield 3, or even Call of Duty except in how the developers implement damage calculation. It is still an SVD sniper rifle in the end. The plasma rifle or fictional assault rifle probably is no different from Halo to another space-based FPS game.

How many times do we have to go from Point A to Point B in a game just to transition to the next area to do the same thing and fight just slightly harder enemies or tackle just slightly harder objectives?

How many times do we have to save the world from the hands of terrorists or an evil government or an alien race?​
See, it is still the same stale and overused gameplay and settings. It's the same exact problem with MMOs in general. There is no sign of difference between one game to the next. Sure, there are updated graphics that push the system harder or better textures, but that's just icing on the cake. Graphics isn't everything to a game. It's only part of the equation of making a game.

And, to Activision, touting better graphics and DirectX 11 graphics for the PC, and market it exhaustively as the next big thing in the Call of Duty series, they're just marketing on the strengths of the game, the icing so to speak. But, once you take that icing off that supposedly new cake, the game is not that different from other Call of Duty games post-CoD 2 or 3.

The game industry today feeds on "quickie games," or games you can just pick up and finish in a few days or less. They're in smartphone games up to PC games. The games today are much different than the games I played as a child. Gaming has become too mainstream, too common that difficulty and challenges, and innovation take a backseat. Yet, people cry out the "death of consoles" and "death of PCs" every year. Why? Just simply look at the games you are playing. If it's nothing more than a "quickie game" just like what you can get on your smartphone for substantially less than what you pay for a console game or PC game, why bother getting a console or a high-end gaming PC in the first place? Or, why bother getting the new Madden or new Call of Duty game if the consumers smart enough to know that the game will not be that much different than the previous version? New players, new cards, new settings, but yet still doing the same gameplay. That's gaming in general today, and it feeds off of the hapless consumer with short-attention span, closed-minded attitudes.

I miss the games that gives me a challenge, that tries something new and different. I don't see a lot of it nowadays except in a handful of indie games I've bought in the past few years. It doesn't matter what MMO, FPS, or driving game or other game I play, they're not vastly different than the previous games in the same genre.
 
Madden hasn't changed or been fresh in years and years and years. It'll be released next year as the same game and will be bought by millions, it's about profit, not inovation so nothing will change.

I haven't bought either series in a long time.
 
This just in, game companies release basically the same games over and over

More news at 11
 
Never underestimate the stupidity of consumers, especially video game consumers. They will be on Black Ops 4 before sales drop in any significant way. If you have a captive audience of total fucking retards, why not milk them for every possible dime?
 
Video games are just like Hollywood! All creative and innovative ideas have already been done! We have a serious lack of people that can come up with new ideas for games and movies these days sadly hence the remakes... :mad:
 
Stale, synergy: CoD, Madden, Transformers/Battleship, Top 40 pop/rap and Youtube music videos and hard rock, MMA and Affliction, Bud/Miller/Coors, Coke+Pepsi, burger chains and Taco Bell, pickup trucks and motorcycles+ATVs
 
Sales don't mean nothing, nor do they have anything do do with how stale CoD is.
 
Oh and I supervised kids last year at churches, and many of them were super-duper fans of Black Ops 1, going nuts whenever it was mentioned or we asked them about their favorite game. Even if they were 7 or 8.
 
Ain't that the truth. When I was 7 or 8, I was dying to get my hands on an NES for some Super Mario action. I remember when I finally got one around Xmas, I was hugging the box as if I were the luckiest kid on earth. These day's, I walk into gamestop and I see kids hovering around a violent game. Where has society gone? :confused:


Oh and I supervised kids last year at churches, and many of them were super-duper fans of Black Ops 1, going nuts whenever it was mentioned or we asked them about their favorite game. Even if they were 7 or 8.
 
they have a system that seemingly works, why bother risking "fixing" it. Sure people who want creativity or soul in their games will be turned off, but apparantly they don't make up enough of the market for activision to care. To me, I just file COD in the same category as madden and dont really care about it being the same ol' every year. I just don't buy it.
 
If the world were comprised only of you guys here, every company would go bankrupt.

Fortunately, for the big companies, 95% of the world is comprised of sheep, fools who repeatedly part with their cash for the same shit over and over.
 
If the world were comprised only of you guys here, every company would go bankrupt.

Fortunately, for the big companies, 95% of the world is comprised of sheep, fools who repeatedly part with their cash for the same shit over and over.

Hush now. Most people on [H] spend tons of money on gaming.
 
Call of Duty under Infinity Ward got stale after Call of Duty 2.
Infinity Ward then rebooted as CoD: Modern Warfare, and it was good again. Fresh perspective made it enjoyable.
Never played CoD: WaW as it was Treyarch, and not Infinity Ward.
CoD: Modern Warfare 2 was ok, it was basically MW with a new story.
Infinity Ward Left, and any hope of innovation left with them. Treyarch and others took over and the series has since been horrible all around ever since.

Whenever Respawn Entertainment reveals their next project, I'm sure it will show the same great game development abilities the original Infinity Ward had.
 
I've played Doom 2, Quake, Counter-Strike and similar games in the past. I was very, very bad in all of them.

I did not play any CoD game except for the new one, Black Ops 2.

After getting bored of WoW, Diablo III failing to deliver (and I did not play Diablo I and II, so I was not expecting anything), I got addicted to Torchlight II. Now that game is AMAZING. Hours and hours of fun, and more.

But I wanted to play something else. My wife played Counter-Strike a lot back in the day, so we decided to try out a shooter. Well... I thought about Battlefield 3, but I saw lots of people saying it's empty and hard to find a populated server. CoD Black Ops 2 launched, and my brother was talking about it all the time. Bought 2 copies and went to play.

First thing: it didn't run on my wife's PC. Well, past CoD games would. Bought a new processor and it's playable with a GeForce 9600GT 512MB. Will get a new GPU when money permits. My computer runs it fine.

I was expecting a mindless shooter. In fact, I bought this game for these moments when you want to blow things up without thinking too much. And it delivers. Yes, there are some cheaters. And some really good players that blow my noob ass far too many times. But me and my wife are enjoying it. A lot. It's not a game to dedicate yourself to (I have Torchlight II for that), it's a game to kill time and shoot mindlessly. Yes, I know Activision and I hate what it did to WoW - loved it, met my wife there... now it sucks balls - but they have a winner on their hands. Elitist gamers may rejoice themselves in saying CoD players are dumb kids or something like that, but still, people are having fun. It's old, dated, I don't know, didn't play the other CoD games. Fact is: it works.
 
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