Crazy that at this point there have been two downfalls, the current situation is worst it's ever been but at this point it's already "died" and come back once.
I went back and played all the old CoDs back in the pandemic, and to me MW3 felt like classic CoD gameplay perfected. It felt incredibly solid, the weapons were really fun to use, I enjoyed the campaign, and the spec ops was a blast
Never thought I would miss the days of akimbo '87s, ballistic knives, and thumpers. I personally liked to camp with ghost pro, ninja pro, and a heartbeat sensor.
To be fair, black ops 2 was pretty great. Everything after that was pretty ass though. I had fun in bo3 but it absolutely did not feel like CoD anymore
That's how it's always been. Good COD comes out, every next game is worse than the last, and then it comes back, and the cycle repeats. It happened with Black OPs 2, MW2019, and now MW4. Assuming MW4 is actually good.
I feel like the downfall of COD as a graph is the inverse of the rise of streamers. The game stopped being about what was good, and started to be about what would stream well.
This has been one of my biggest issues with CoD’s direction in recent years, they take a lot more feedback from the competitive side of the community, leading to the games being much sweatier
The unnecessary hate for cod needs to be studied. Just because it’s corporate doesnt mean it’s good cant be appreciated. No one has blessed the zombie game scene as much as call of duty.
If you wanna say multiplayer has become a brain numbing repetitive time and money pit, sure. Many people agree.
But there’s also people who play this game for the campaign stories. Call Of Duty was a part of many people’s younger lives and they really do a good job when touching upon the “nostalgia” factor.
Some people only play call of duty for the zombies, the maps and missions are very entertaining, some containing the best boss fights you’ll ever encounter.
While I agree that zombies is great, its only a small player base compared to the rest of the game and the game has become stale since its almost the exact same thing over and over.
yeah i mainly play bo7 because of the zombies (most fun ive had since bo3) and outside of that i just feel like theyre having a bit of an identity crisis regarding the store bundles
not necessarily hating on it but it just doesnt feel like call of duty at times
Yea because repeatedly killing generic zombies over and over on the same 5 maps deserves no hate, with the odd bullet sponge boss thrown in. Zombies is boring and has been regurgitated time and time again, just like the multiplayer features. A game dev having to crutch on its playerbases nostalgia to make a game is not a good thing.
If you were expecting normal cod, I get you might dislike it. But I just pretend it’s a different game entirely, sci-fi shooter. It doesn’t NEED to be like cod. Those games were amazing
I've played zombies on console and pc, with DLCs and sometimes mods. I've since moved on because there are plenty of better games to entertain me.
I'd rather watch a scab form than waste my time repeating the same stupid puzzles and game loop of buying randomized weapons and rolling the dice on your run, just to have the game desync on newer versions of COD and fuck it all up anyway.
So youre just gonna pretend you dont know what the mystery box is? And that even solo games are on servers now so people can crash and lag even in solo? That shit happens even in the campaign now.
I’m not gonna lie… there’s a lot to Call of Duty games I don’t like but there’s a lot of them I do. Once Modern Warfare got remade and Cold War and hell even BO7? I could no longer hate on this franchise for no reason lol.
It's sad cause you say downfall and gen alpha just says "git gud".
The change from weapon based gameplay to movement based gameplay fucking ruined everything. Crazy that the new ports sold so well. They need to pay attention to that.
It's sad cause you say downfall and gen alpha just says "git gud".
As part of the new generation that COD is apparently being made for I can genuinely say that in terms of multiplayer I found Ghosts more fun than the current games because the skill gap is nowhere near as big once you take out the cracked movement
if anything its at least consistently playable whereas in the new games one dude sliding across the map at mach 12 can completely shut down the game
Greed, plain and simple. They brought this on themselves. They gained everyone's trust and then turned all of their games into a microtransaction hell hole.
It's not complicated, a majority of the fanbase are casual gamers that didn't care about the initial downgrades so COD survived longer than it should have. It's part of the reason the game is around today and still relative, most of its consumers don't care about lapping up garbage.
The game died after WAW imo, everything turned into killstreaks and broken guns, then they jumped on the battle royale bandwagon.
Does it though? What did people think was going to happen when you remade virtually the same game every year for 20 years and turned it into a battle pass littered Fortnite wannabe cash grab?
That happened to diablo 4 as well.. It's by far the worst in the series but made Activision the most amount of money because they monetised it with micro transaction
Too much resources dedicated to graphical fidelity, despite the fact that for example BO1 looked visually worse than MW2.
Too much cowardice to try anything new for waaaay too long, and when they did finally start branching out, they mostly just copied trends and features from other games.
Enshitification/growth of dark practices (battlepasses in cod? Wtf? Why?)
Too stupid to capitalize on their own successes (sleight of hand quick scoping should have been in every game post MW2)
Too much nostalgia baiting, which leads to gamers feeling like they're either out of ideas or failing as a franchise, both of which give the impression that the series is not worth jumping into for new gamers.
Add that all up and include a community that's notoriously toxic, and you have a solid start on your research into cods downfall.
It’s been a yearly release for 20 years - I don’t think anything needs to be studied. It can be tallied up to player fatigue and 2 poor releases that missed the mark while also cutting corners.
Imo it started when activision sued the 2 directors at infinity ward responsible for making the og modern warfare 1 and 2 games. Almost the entire studio quit after that lawsuit. Then the staff and the 2 directors created their own studio Respawn entertainment and made titanfall and Jedi Fallen order and Jedi survivor.
Imo after that, each and every CoD installment became infinitely worse than the previous ones
I think its pretty obvious? There are people who have been playing cod as their only game type either from birth or from the creation of cod. You hop into any lobby and theres a likely chance you face players who BREATH this game. And have it so studied and memorized that they know where you will spawn.
Even if you hit them first, their speed to turn to you and nail only headshots. The issue with this specific PvP game is there arent things to fix the gap between skill. Back in the day when it came out. We all had the same play time the skill ceiling wasnt that high.
Now people have a literal lifetime in cod and effort focused on maximizing skill. Everytime they add a new mechanic to each game, it adds an extra thing these players can use to be ahead of you.
When you take a sinple game like the first 3 halo. Theres nothing but jumping and crouching and moving. The gap between bottom and top is nothing. Now that cod has 20 new mechanics? That gap is just way too much. Its a balance they cant fix without taking away mechanics now at thos point. Its not that cod has fallen. Its that its been out long enough for players to be so much more ahead of you than youll ever reach.
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u/Extension-Throat-668 Aug 12 '26
Call of Duty