I love me some Call of Duty multiplayer, I make no bones about it. I'll play just about anything, and usually have fun with it, but CoD is my favorite. To date, I own every Call of Duty made, but like most, CoD4: Modern Warfare was the game that I really cut my CoD Multiplayer teeth on. I played a decent amount of CoD2 multiplayer, but Modern Warfare's setting is what really hooked me. I love guns. I really love guns. So my familiarity with the weapons in Modern Warfare really drew me in. But it was also the other things like the perk system, the kill streak rewards, the camos and attachments, and the leveling and prestige systems that really set it apart from the competition.
I remember that CoD4 was a sort of slow burn. When it first came out the sales were solid, but as the weeks and months went on and word of mouth spread to everybody from hardcore gamers to casual gamers, the sales really took off. If I remember correctly I think it was the No.1 selling game every single month for the better part of a year. I still have fond memories of specific, epic games that I played with my cousin that we still talk about to this day. Oh and the maps. The maps were AMAZING. Maps like Bog, Countdown, Backlot, Showdown, etc., still bring back fond memories.
A year after Modern Warfare we got the obligatory "off year" Treyarch game in the form of CoD: World at War. Now, I will say that WaW is, in my opinion, hands down the best WWII fps ever made. And the Nazi Zombie mode turned into a phenomenon all it's own. But with that said, the game was still perceived as a step backward by many CoD fans because of it's return to the old WWII formula. Make no mistake, WaW was a fantastic game, but it wasn't what fans were really clambering for, which was a sequel to Modern Warfare.
Fast forward to early 2009 and the news started leaking out that Infinity Ward was indeed working on Modern Warfare 2. But something different was happening this time. In 2007 and 2008, CoD4 and Infinity Ward were the darlings of the game industry, but history shows that this is a precious and fragile thing that can come to an ugly and abrupt end. Just ask Halo.
The trouble started with talk of arrogance on Infinity Ward's part, followed by an online, profanity laden rant by Infinity Ward's then community manager Robert bowling pertaining to comparisons made between CoD4 and WaW by Activision executives. And then there was F.A.G.S., or "Fight Against Grenade Spam". This was a YouTube video made by Infinity Ward featuring baseball star Cole Hamels and was supposed to be a public service announcement about grenade spam. Needless to say the acronym "F.A.G.S." offended a lot of people and the video was pulled. Then there was the game being leaked onto the Internet and talk of a controversial level within the game's campaign called "No Russian" in which the player walks through a Russian airport gunning down innocent civilians. And of course who can forget the backlash to the announcement that Modern Warfare 2 would be the first CoD game to not feature dedicated servers (PC version).
Shortly after the announcement that dedicated servers would be absent from the game, Battlefield developer DICE jumped in to help fan the flames of fanboy rage by releasing a statement that their upcoming game, "Battlefield: Bad Company 2", would have dedicated servers and went on to reinforce their dedication to PC players. So by the time the game actually shipped, hardcore gamers and the gaming press, generally speaking, had a pretty negative attitude toward the game. Then there were the cheaters. Infinity Ward had decided to forego a public beta, which was ultimately perceived as more arrogance by the developer. So when the game came out it wasn't long before every single glitch and loophole was exposed and cheaters were running rampant online. I personally didn't encounter them as much as others appeared to, but I did encounter them. Luckily, at least on Xbox, it didn't take long for them to take care of the cheaters.
But even with all of the obstacles it had to overcome, Modern Warfare 2 became the best selling game ever.
But the problems only got worse. In March of 2010 reports started circulating of something going down at the Infinity Ward studio. Shortly after we learned that Jason West and Vince Zampella, the founders of Infinity Ward and the Call of Duty and Modern Warfare franchises, had been fired by Activision management. There were many rumors and theories as to what really happened, and as there is still ongoing litigation pertaining to their firing, we most likely won't know the full story for a long time, if ever.
What we did find out though, left Activision looking even worse than before, a feat many did not think possible. The story was that top executives from Activision had called West and Zampella into an office and questioned them for hours about whether or not they had been in discussions with a rival publisher about leaving Activision. West and Zampella rigorously denied the accusation, but in the end they were fired anyway.
The irony of it is that in the end, after being fired by Activision, West and Zampella signed a publishing deal with Activision's biggest rival, Electronic Arts. So, assuming West and Zampella were telling the truth, Activision's firing of the two founders became a self-fulfilling prophecy. West and Zampella claim that the real reason that Activision fired them was to avoid paying large monetary bonuses promised to them in a contract made between the two founders and Activision, and to have full control of the studio. I personally feel that both stories have truth to them. Infinity Ward's disdain for their parent company was right there in the open for all to see. And their desire to make something besides Call of Duty and Modern Warfare was also known. So the idea that the company founders may have been talking to other publishers about leaving Activision wasn't far fetched. They had, after all, left EA after making the PC hit "Medal of Honor: Allied Assault", to go to Activision and make Call of Duty.
But here's the problem, regardless of whether or not Activision was right and West and Zampella had been courting rival publishers, Activisions approach really showed the companies arrogance. Shortly after the founders were fired, all of the top talent at Infinity Ward began leaving the company, showing Activision that their loyalty lied with the people behind the brand, not the brand itself. A lesson Activision would have done well to learn. In the end almost all of the Infinity Ward staff with the word "lead" in their job description had left Infinity Ward to join West and Zampella at their new company, Respawn Entertainment.
Later in the year Treyarch released their game, Call of Duty: Black Ops, to much fanfare. The game's cold war era setting went over well with fans and the new additions to the multiplayer mode really helped to set it apart from Modern Warfare. It also saw the return of the 4-player co-op zombie mode, bringing back all four of WaW's zombie maps, along with new maps included in the game and released through DLC. Perhaps the most interesting was the zombie map, "Five", which put players in shoes of historical personalities such as John F. Kennedy and Fidel Castro. There was even a top down, twin stick shooter called, "Dead Ops Arcade" hidden in the game. It ended up garnering it's own following of dedicated fans that prefer Treyarch's brand of Call of Duty over Infinity Ward's.
But for Call of Duty purists like myself, there was no substitute for Infinity Ward made games. Unfortunately I knew I couldn't get my expectations up too high since Infinity Ward was merely an empty shell now. My intention isn't to insult any of the remaining staff with this statement, but with that much of the studio's talent gone, it will never be the same. Take Medal of Honor for example. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was a huge hit and really put the series on the map, but in the years since the game's creators left, the series has struggled to find it's place. And this tends to be a recurring theme in video games. There are many examples of games being successful only to come under different management and struggle to find that success again.
But the bigger reason that the series will never be the same is that infinity Ward wrote the game engines. I remember being blown away by the graphics in Call of Duty 2 and the new systems they introduced like "battle chatter" and the great smoke effects. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare took it to the next level with even more realistic visuals and effects, amazing scripted events, and a modern setting. Then finally Modern Warfare 2 took what CoD4 did and made it even better by fine tuning the existing systems, adding new ones, and by giving the graphics a "pop" that made CoD4's visuals look dull by comparison. But perhaps the biggest accomplishment of the engine was the framerate; a rock rock solid 60fps.
I've heard other developers whose games run at 30fps make the claim that the reason CoD games run at that framerate is because there isn't much happening on screen at once. But when MW2 first hit and the cheaters had figured out how to turn custom games into matchmade games, therefore giving way to things like grenade launchers with unlimited ammo and no reload, there was plenty going on at once. I can remember joining one such game and it was total chaos. Everyone in the game had what was essentially a fully automatic grenade launcher with unlimited ammo that you never had to reload. The explosions were deafening and everywhere. But what really amazed me was that the framerate was still 60fps. And this, to me, tells how valuable the talent at Infinity Ward really was, and more importantly, how much of a huge mistake it was for Activision to let them get away.
Modded unlimited ammo lobby in Modern Warfare 2
Not long after the release of CoD: Black Ops, the rumors of the inevitable Modern Warfare 3 started to come out. The first and perhaps biggest sign of the series demise was that the team at Infinity Ward had been completely gutted by all the people that left and so other teams had been brought in to help with the development of the game. Then there was the "leak" of many of the weapons, maps, attachments, and campaign missions. I'm still not completely convinced that this information wasn't leaked by someone at Activision. The fact that Sledgehammer, the new studio headed up by Glen Schofield, who had never worked on a CoD game, basically had equel part in MW3 with InfinityWard, really scared me.
But like any good gamer, and even with all the negatives, I couldn't help but be excited as the launch of the game approached. So when the game dropped, I went to a midnight launch to get it. I came home and immediatley jumped into the campaign mode. Immediately I noticed something was off; the controls. Since CoD2 on Xbox360, the controls have been the same in every single game. I play with my sticks set to southpaw, but in all previous CoD games when you set your sticks to southpaw it only affected the aiming and movement. The sprint/zoom and knife functions were not affected. But apparently someone at either Sledgehammer or Infinity Ward saw fit to fix what wasn't broken.
This one small thing, that I feel wouldn't have happened were it not for the mass exodus of employees in 2010, has basically made MW3 unplayable for me.
With a game like CoD controls are a huge part of the experience. Since I decided to play through campaign first, the controls were less of a factor. I should also add that MW3's campaign is really good, though it is nothing more than a big rehash of previous games. But once I was finished with the campaign and started playing the competitive multiplayer other problems started showing up. The first was the maps. They're all, well, trashy. Literally, almost all the maps have so much blown up crap all over the place that it makes it hard to decipher what is what. They're also too small and cramped. I always loved the mix of maps in CoD games. You always get small run and gun maps, medium range maps, and big open maps for sniping. But almost all of the maps in MW3 are small and cramped.
These Maps Suck!!
Another problem I have is the fact that, in the past, Infinity Ward and Treyarch always did their own thing in their CoD games. Treyarch obviously followed Infinity Ward's lead most of the time, but Treyarch still did cool things like Nazi Zombies, the tank in WaW, etc. I was never able to get into Black Ops for multiple reasons, but the biggest being that a) they slowed the game down and did away with the "stopping power" perk making it take more shots to kill than in previous games, and b) they ruined my M16. So I was hoping that, in spite of the fact that the original Infinity Ward wasn't making the game, MW3 would ignore the things done in Black Ops and make what would essntially be a proper sequel to MW2.
But it was not to meant to be. The fact that MW3 followed Treyarch's lead and eliminated shotguns as a secondary weapon, did away with the stopping power perk, and also ruined my M16 was unforgivable when coupled with the changes to the controls. Oh, and the graphics aren't as good. I've looked at screens and it's hard to see, but there are nuances in the graphics between MW2 and MW3 that make MW2's graphics "pop" more. Black Ops looked noticably worse than MW2, but that was because Treyarch was still using the CoD4 engine, but MW3 is supposedly using a newer, better version of the MW2 engine, known as IW engine 5.0 (MW2 uses IW engine 4.0). It makes me feel like maybe there were things being done by the senior artists and programmers with the engine that couldn't be replicated after they were gone.
Then there's the new "weapon proficiency" system, which I lovingly refer to as, "marking it up, just to mark it down and call it a sale". They basically took the guns from MW2, broke them, and then allowed players to unlock "proficiencies" that kind of made them similar to their MW2 counterparts. They broke the M16, only to make the Type 95 even more powerful than the M16 was originally. Also, having a different set of killstreak rewards for each class, including different types of killstreak rewards becomes too much to keep up with as I rarely know what kind of killstreak rewards I have for a current class much less what they are. So there I was, playing a game with controls that frustrated me, using guns I wasn't happy with, on maps I didn't care for. And I paid the $50 for CoD Elite.
I can sum the end of my MW3 relationship up with a short story. A good friend and I were playing MW3 team deathmatch the other night and hating it. We were both just not having fun. Sure, I was getting a lot of kills, but I wasn't having fun doing it. So I suggested we throw in some MW2. It was immediate gratification. We both couldn't get over how much better the game felt, looked, and played. The maps were great, guns were awesome, and the controls felt perfect. I haven't played MW3 since. As a matter of fact, I've actually gotten back into MW2. I'm very close to 10th prestige level 70 and loving it.
I know that Treyarch is supposed to be working on Black Ops 2 or whatever it will be called. But I think it's safe to say that Treyarch is now the top tier CoD developer. I'm sure that the next CoD will sell well, but I'm willing to bet good money that MW3 was the last game to outsell the previous CoD. I'm pretty sure that Bungie and Respawn will be announcing their new games sometime this year, which should be the next big things in fps gaming. Once Bungie, the creators of Halo, and Respawn, the creators of Call of Duty and Modern Warfare, ship their new games that will be the nail in the coffin for CoD being king of the fps block..
It's the people that makes the game that make them special, not the games themselves.
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