What do you think of the Call of Duty series?

[TDRR]

Personally, i find them to be a very good series of games let down by the extremely linear single player campaign. The best one in this aspect was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 1. It had many paths to the same objectives, each including different enemy positions and experiences, really neat. Shame this was removed in later games.

CoD 1 is also really good for big multiplayer sessions and the single player campaign was pretty neat. I still play it sometimes in my Wii.

Also, if you do like them, what is your favorite port? My favorite one is Black Ops 1 for the Wii. The graphics were quite good, and the controls are really fun once you get used to them.

[Rachael]

Extremely over-hyped and over-marketed and overly-monetized, pretty much being a cow at this point. And with Activision playing a big role in the series, that makes it even worse.

I don't know about the games themselves, if I ever even tried it I'd probably try the first game and that's it. From what I understand the re-releases are pretty much that with a new coat of paint anyhow.

It has earned the nickname "Call of Doody" for a reason.

[TDRR]

Extremely over-hyped and over-marketed and overly-monetized, pretty much being a cow at this point. And with Activision playing a big role in the series, that makes it even worse.

I don't know about the games themselves, if I ever even tried it I'd probably try the first game and that's it. From what I understand the re-releases are pretty much that with a new coat of paint anyhow.

It has earned the nickname "Call of Doody" for a reason.

That may be true for the new games. But the ones i played are CoD 1, CoD MW1 (well the Wii remake at least) MW3 and BO1. All in all, they aren't bad games. Not excellent but not as bad as many people say they are. I'm judging them as just games, not considering any of the DLC-money-making and the excessive marketing.

I did play a bit of Ghosts and it seems much worse than previous entries, in story, gameplay and overall design.

[wildweasel]

I rented Black Ops 3 a while ago, when I first came to have a PS4 (and my PC was too weak for it) - beyond the appearance of Christopher Meloni, there was really nothing going for it. They might have added augmentations and the ability to remote-control turrets, but the experience of fighting, shooting, taking cover, etc. is near identical to that of its many predecessors. No alternate routes, no reason to explore the map, nothing.

Some days I wish mass-market FPS games were more like Medal of Honor Airborne.

[dpJudas]

I bought the latest CoD Black Ops 4, just to see why it has so many players. I was extremely unimpressed - its gameplay is just about as far from what I like about shooters as you can get. Which probably means there are other people where this is exactly their thing.

However what really absolutely destroyed this game was how empty it felt. You could really sense just how virtually everything had been pulled out of the actual release and reserved for the in-game store. I won't be buying another CoD, or Activision game for that matter, until I get a positive impression that they've abandoned this business strategy. Felt like I got absolutely nothing for my money.

[Enjay]

I found the original CoD to be OK-ish but it wasn't as good as MoHAA IMO and definitely had some very contrived and weak sequences that pretended to be far more open and innovative than they were. By the end it had become a very predictable, linear game. The final run through a fake open city cemented that impression for me. It's something I understand would be the hallmark of their later instalments too.

Never felt the need to play any more. All the hype and CoD-Kiddies just ensured that a series of games that I wasn't particularly impressed with from the outset wasn't going to get another chance from me.

[Dr_Cosmobyte]

To me they hit the spot in MW2. They gathered connections of characters from the series and good design choices, but i think it ends there.

Zombie mode in CoD BO is interesting too (you don't see Kennedy and Castro shooting zombies everyday), but, i feel the same thing for this and other titles such as Assassin's Creed: a Triple A game which doesn't want to make a legacy; just take your money until they can get another game to impress you, gather your money again, and so on and on.

[Viscra Maelstrom]

i have never played a single COD game, and the franchise's reputation makes it very clear that this isn't a series that's for me. whatever singleplayer merit they once had seem to be gone in favor of focusing on multiplayer and microtransactions in the mode, which to me is just corporate talk for "hand us your 60 hard earned dollars, then spend yet another 60 of them to succeed in the multiplayer." so yeah, not seeing much of value for me here.

[TDRR]

i have never played a single COD game, and the franchise's reputation makes it very clear that this isn't a series that's for me. whatever singleplayer merit they once had seem to be gone in favor of focusing on multiplayer and microtransactions in the mode, which to me is just corporate talk for "hand us your 60 hard earned dollars, then spend yet another 60 of them to succeed in the multiplayer." so yeah, not seeing much of value for me here.

I really agree with this and pretty much all other opinions on this thread. The series started out okay-ish enough to be popular, but unfortunately as it continued microtransactions become more and more common and the single player campaign got each time less effort put in.

I think that the last game to not include microtransactions (that affected the game in a major way) was MW3? That game is definitely among the so-so ones, not too bad, but not great.

[SouthernLion]

Call of Duty is to firearms and military warfare as Need For Speed (not counting the Shift spin-offs) and Fast and the Furious is to cars and racing. I'm very much with Rachael on this one.

[CWolf]

All that are pre-Black Ops games are great in its own way each. Except for Call of Duty 3, this one was somewhat between tech-demo and fully operational game, sadly.

[TDRR]

All that are pre-Black Ops games are great in its own way each. Except for Call of Duty 3, this one was somewhat between tech-demo and fully operational game, sadly.

I thought BO1 was pretty ok. Or maybe it was the pointer controls, because they felt awesome.

[SamVision]

I find that the entire series has generally failed to progress much beyond its first and second installments when it comes to the core systems and mechanics. The campaigns in particular have become pretty bad.

[TDRR]

If there's anything i could do to tweak CoD to actually be fun, then i would do the following:
-Re-add and expand upon the different paths to objectives like in CoD 4
-Make different objectives be doable in any order, and sometimes depending on the order have it get different outcomes
-Replace the health regen system with a portable health-kit, more or less the same but you need to manually activate it and you need to find more health-kits. Pretty much mid-way between regenerating health and medikits, in easier difficutlies the health-kit would activate automatically. Don't transfer this one to multiplayer.
-Keep the protag mute and have you (the player) taking critical decisions in ways that could affect the possible outcome of the ending
-Add secrets that reward exploration
-Make the AI roam freely and actively dodge your shots in harder difficulties, randomize their weapons and attacks.
-ADD COOP MODE!!!
-Have less missions with people helping you, or at least reduce how scripted they are.
-Write better stories pls
-Remove microtransactions, or at least keep them as mere weapon skins and shortcuts to leveling-up. Map-packs could stay i suppose. But definitely not weapons, include them all without paying extra money.

And that's it i guess.

[Rachael]

-Remove microtransactions, or at least keep them as mere weapon skins and shortcuts to leveling-up. Map-packs could stay i suppose. But definitely not weapons, include them all without paying extra money.

And that's it i guess.

Maybe I am showing my age here, but as someone who grew up in an age before PC games had microtransactions, I just can't find myself in any way legitimately being able to just be okay with them.

There was once a time when publishers had to EARN your respect, they had to EARN your patronage, there was no feasible way they could just expect your money to magically drop into their lap the moment you see their pixels. If you had that kind of attitude, your game was an absolute failure, and your game was mocked for being one of the worst that particular year. But things changed - corporations got greedy together, until they pretty much monopolized out anyone that actually DID care about their creations. We live in an era now where artists get to make a great game, only for their game to be cut to pieces by what are known as the "cutting crew" which comes in at the end of the development cycle and cuts content and guts the shit out of the game until it is down to a "minimal viable product" so that it can be milked for cash and the cut content can be drip-fed to be consumers over a span of a decade so that the publisher can maximize profits. (Or at least - that's how they want to do it now, anyway)

Now I am not saying that games should be democratized so much that they're literally designed by consumers - there's ways to do that if that really suits your fancy - but I wish that games and the companies that made them had at least a shred of self respect like they did back in the 90's and early 2000's. But that's never going to happen, because too many people were born and started playing these games long after the greed started creeping in. They don't know what it was like to play games back then - and if they saw one of these oldie titles that have such a cult following they'd vomit at the sight of its severely dated graphics - nevermind that such games should really be treated as black and white movies - they have historical value just like old classics like Gone with the Wind and Casablanca and they show the growth of video gaming from its inception to what it has become today - just as movies from the bygone era did for cinema.

Basically, what it comes down to is this: Games today are made for profit. Games of the 90's were, at least more than now, made for love - and THEN profit. Profit was always a goal, even back then, and engines were more difficult to come by unless you had someone who knew how to program - but the actual goal of original content back then was to impress and woo, before they reached up to squeeze golden utters.

So yeah, microtransactions can fuck right off, give me a full game for $60 and let the good times roll. And the pitiful excuse that costs have gone up is utter horse crap. If they're really that worried about costs, they can cut some of it by investing less in those unskippable cinematics that hardly anyone gives a shit about anyway. But they won't do that because it's all part of their marketing... It's all about the money, Lebowski. Don't you just love being used and abused by AAA game companies and being paraded around like a show pony in front of their shareholders? I hope so, because that's definitely not going away anytime soon.