I’m not the largest Call of Duty fan out there, I don’t buy all the DLC packs, I don’t particularly enjoy Black Ops, and I find myself growing ever more cynical about the lack of cooperation among teammates when playing the more recent titles in the Call of Duty franchise.
That being said, I still play Modern Warfare 2 like a fiend. I often ride passenger to my addictive personality and I am more than addicted to this game. I hit the prestige cap long ago and can clearly remember numerous nights of playing round after round of the fast-paced and twitchy shooter. Most likely, after I finish this column I will proceed directly to my PlayStation 3 and fire up Modern Warfare 2 and play a few rounds.
Just what is it that draws me back to playing the Call of Duty games time after time? Why do CoD games persistently outsell equally good, if not better, other first person shooters? What does CoD have that other games don’t?
Is it that the CoD franchise is well established and trusted in providing players with the exact kind of game they are looking for? I think this might be partially valid. Yet due to the large changes that have come to the franchise lately, jumping time periods and significantly different levels of quality between the two different development companies, perhaps it is something else that keeps players on a short leash.
Does CoD offer a unique approach to the FPS genre that cannot be found in other games? Posing this question to myself honestly made me laugh. The one fact about modern CoD games that never leaves my mind is that every game since Call of Duty 2 (2005) has been run on the same engine. Albeit the dev teams have tweaked and altered the engine for each game, nevertheless the games have been running on an old engine for a long time now. The practice of using older features and simply adjusting them for each new game appears to be a common theme for the CoD franchise, and that’s not entirely bad. It is this practice of taking what they know to be successful and making just the right amount of changes to make the game appear “new” to players, and subsequently selling more copies than Robert Bowling could shake a stick at.
Furthermore, the games have offered a selection between “classes” of soldier. The “class” system has evolved over time, and now players create and use their own customized classes. The killstreak system of the games is something that is inseparable from the franchise at this point. While that system may be best presented in their games, many of the actual killstreak rewards have been re-used by now. Weapon customization, a leveling and unlock system for new weapons, and a clutter display are all aspects that while present in the more recent games can also be found in numerous other shooters these days. Simply put, the CoD franchise has simply been making minor alterations to a successful formula that is not entirely groundbreaking.
To the credit of CoD games they have become a standard of comparison for modern shooters. Finding an upcoming pure FPS game (one without RPG elements) that is not compared to CoD in some way will be difficult. Simply consider Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3: these games are only alike in that they share the involvement of shooting enemies in a setting described as a “war.” The two titles are radically different past that, and I think their primary audiences are different. However, there will be some crossover between their entire audiences; already the internet stirs with fanboys of each title declaring holy war against each other. The fact that Call of Duty games stand as a standard could be due to the fact that Activision has the financial power to market them almost everywhere you can look, or that they can draw media personalities like Ice Cube to voice characters in the game, or perhaps it is as simple as the fact that the games sell so many copies.
I feel that the term “run and gun” so accurately describes the most recent releases in the CoD franchise. CoD games are something you can pick up, play for ten minutes to a couple of hours, and stop playing at any point. They don’t aim to draw the player in with really intricate story lines or rich characters with whom you really feel connected. The multiplayer can almost be seen as always one player versus everyone else since there is no real element of cooperation or coordination within team deathmatch, the most active game mode.
Finally, I think it’s the ease of play of the CoD games that sets it as the gold standard. I can get online, play a few great rounds, and then walk away satisfied. It’s not that I like Modern Warfare 2 over Bad Company 2 or Bulletstorm or any of the numerous other first person shooters, it’s just that “Call of Duty” first comes to mind when I want to play a delightfully twitchy shooter.
Now if you will excuse me I’m going to go play Modern Warfare 2 as all this talking about it has made my craving kick back in.