The Sad Deterioration Of The Call of Duty Franchise

All good things must come to an end, right? Well for me, Call of Duty stopped being a good thing a number of years ago, and it doesn’t look like it will ever recover.

Call of Duty began as a pretty awesome game. The first few early games were good except maybe Call of Duty 3 which was lacking quite a bit. After Call of Duty 3, the franchise was able to recover with the fourth installment, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

I don’t know about you, but I thoroughly enjoyed Modern Warfare. The campaign was excellent, online play was good, and split screen with friends was a lot of fun. It was overall a masterpiece of a first person.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
Via Patrick Lauke

Somehow, things got better after Modern Warfare. The next game in the series was World at War, the WWII based game that brought zombies to the franchise. World at War was another great game followed by a legendary one: Modern Warfare 2.

Depending on who you talk to, things really got bad right after, or soon after Modern Warfare 2. To me, the next game in the series–Black Ops–was fun, it built on the zombies mode we first saw in WaW and had some seriously fun online modes. Some fans also enjoyed MW3, which came out after Black Ops.

For me, Call of Duty was always a believable game to play (to an extent). You fought in battles that looked like something that could have actually happened in real life (excluding the zombies).

Everything after Modern Warfare 3 totally did away with the trend of believability. Jetpacks, hologram shields, and bionic suits made the game a far cry from what it once was.

Black Ops 2 was the first game to really bring futuristic aspects to Call of Duty. Black Ops 2 was also the first COD game since the series became popular to see a drop in sales from the previous release. While 28 million copies of Black Ops 2 were sold, its predecessor MW3 sold 31 million copies.

The newer Call of Duty games are still unpopular with the longtime fans of the franchise. Each release has been selling less copies than the previous one.

I know some people will say “they covered all the time periods, there was nowhere else to go but the future.” That simply isn’t true. There are plenty of conflicts they could have adapted. And there are other ways to keep a game interesting than to jump into the future.

I’m not going to say I’ll never play Call of Duty again, but for the moment, I’ve lost interest. Maybe if they release a believable game once more, I’ll pick up a copy. Until then, I’m taking a COD sabbatical.

[Photo by Shai Barzilay / Flickr]