Jason Schreier, who usually has some great sources, has confirmed that Activision is going to call the next CoD “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” because it’s a “soft reboot” of the franchise.
Keep in mind this scoop as well:
I’m still waiting to see if they do a parallel/bundled release of a Remastered Modern Warfare 2. I would play the shit out of the multiplayer again with a renewed population. I know there were rumors that it was single player only, but that would break my heart.
Anyone who wants to play the kind of game that COD:MW was should be playing games from Respawn, like Titanfall 2, because those are the guys who actually know how to make shooters.
Activision doesn’t have the talent necessary to innovate, or really even replicate what the old IW guys did, in that genre.
Treyarch was always just off-brand infinity ward, existing to fill the off-years between IW COD incarnations.
Eh. I can’t agree with that fully. The Treyarch BLOPs installments have been arguably as good, and in at least a couple cases, better than the IW titles near them.
BLOPs 4 is terrific, lack of a single player campaign be damned.
Yeah Treyarch are amazing and very consistent in quality across titles.
But the most recent IW titles aren’t actually from the IW guys. The core talent left IW in 2009, joining up with Activision proper, and then left Activision entirely in 2010 (the same year the first BLOPS came out).
I played the BLOPS games too, and they were… fine. But there wasn’t anything really amazing about them. There wasn’t anything about them that was on par with the genre defining stuff that the original IW team had done, or what Respawn had done since.
While the BLOPS games were ok, saying that Treyarch was amazing and consistent is just incorrect. Their early stuff in the COD franchise was hot garbage that basically just took stuff that IW had made, and then implemented it in a worse, more poorly balanced manner.
COD 3 was basically just an inferior version of COD2. COD:WaW was likewise pretty poor compared to prior COD titles, leveraging the general CoD brand well enough, but still just feeling like an off brand addition.
Treyarch definitely got better and came into their own with the BLOPS arc, but I think part of that is just that at that point IW was just a shadow of their former glory.
But then you play a game like Titanfall 2, and you say, “holy shit.” Because the Respawn guys have a better fundamental understanding of what makes a shooter work than anyone else, and they’re able to actually add in novel gameplay mechanics that work well.
We are probably deep into YMMV territory and personal taste. For me, Treyarch have been very consistent since World at War (which I absolutely loved). Since IW imploded I have found Treyarch’s titles to be the most consistent in quality (for me) even if they aren’t innovating wildly. I believe that Treyarch was the first in the series to introduce AI Bots and have included them with every title since and that is really important to me.
I am as big a fan of the Titanfall series as anyone here, but it just doesn’t retain players and the multiplayer is a very uneven experience. Treyarch titles keep their populations longer than probably any other COD release.
I will always support Respawn and agree that they are more willing to innovate…it’s just that their innovations don’t really stick.
You’re totally not the only person I know that likes the Treyarch games. I was just expressing my own views about their stuff compared to the stuff put out by the original COD team.
Titanfall’s issues with player count are largely a result of most folks simply not even knowing those games exist, whereas CoD benefits from the brand name that IW originally built up for it. CoD games are like Madden at this point.
TF2 was easily one of the best shooters in years, but was released on the week between a COD game and a Battlefield game. It was absurd.
I definitely agree with many of your points.
Put a gun to my head and ask about my absolute favorite Call of Duty games and I would quickly say:
Tie between Call of Duty 2 and Modern Warfare 1
with Modern Warfare 2 a close second
So in terms of absolute rankings early Infinity Ward titles still reign at the top, but after the split Treyarch has been carrying the baton in my opinion (with the other studios still putting in great work too).
Definitely agree. :-)
I guess if your argument is IW is no longer the IW you were comparing Treyarch to, then sure, but your statement was that Treyarch “was always” inferior.
I’m not saying later Treyarch turned into garbage, but there’s a reason why BLOPs 2 and 3 were far and away the most popular MP for years in the community while the other titles withered quickly. Heck, BLOPs 3 still has a pretty vibrant MP showing in tournaments.
Ya, I think part of that is because my original view of Treyarch formed when comparing their early stuff to the original COD team’s stuff. That’s where I got the notion of “off brand Infinity Ward”.
But certainly, Infinity Ward itself became off-brand infinity ward too. And at that point, it’s fair to say that Treyarch kind of came into their own with the BLOPS games.
Yeah, I think that changeover between the studios was pretty tough for fans. I remember epic arguments around the IW split.
I don’t have a dog in the studio race, but I can tell you my interest in any shooter franchise, let alone Call of Duty, begins and ends with a singleplayer campaign (optionally with coop), so if they continue down the Blops IV path, that’s me out.
Now I want to go fire up my Xbox backcompat copy of Modern Warfare 2 and see if the community is still lively (maybe got a boost from this week’s sale) and play a few rounds.
One of my favorite things about Xbox’s backwards compatibility feature is that each time they release a new BC game the community springs to life again and lets me travel back in time to a decade ago.
Say you were managing COD 43 or whatever it is. Your mandate is to refresh the series and reignite interest. What do you do?
You’ve got Breakpoint, Youngblood, maybe Rage 2 on top of all the BRs and GAASs already floating around. What do you do…?
Does not sound easy.
Supposedly, the campaign being dropped from BLOPs 4 won’t be repeated. The scuttlebutt was that the campaign was dropped only after a ton of work on it had been done anyway, (there are a bunch of story hooks and character videos buried in the tutorial areas that totally look like they were ripped from a normal SP game) and Activision doesn’t want to repeat that loss of revenue.
I’m not sure how Activision plans to work on a story campaign, standard MP, zombies, and battle royale every year. The other story I posted shows things aren’t working.
What’s really funny is that Robert Bowling, longtime CM for CoD, tweeted this during the May 9th invitational event, and everyone assumed he was just wearing some retro t-shirt.
I thought you were exaggerating. But nope, you’re not. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (4) will be the 42nd Call of Duty game. So the next one (BLOPS 5, probably) will be CoD 43.
If you don’t count the off-shoot side games though, it will be CoD 17. Which is still crazy.
You’re kidding. I was being facetious :)
I want Raven to abandon acting as fluffers for Activision’s cash cow, and go back to independently creating B-level shooters. I always enjoyed their stuff. I wish they’d had the time to finish up Singularity.