For as long as I can remember, we've had a new Call of Duty every year. If you include Warzone and the remasters, there are now several CoDs per year. But as I think most of you would agree, the games are falling in quality and beginning to feel increasingly unfinished. So, here are 3 reasons Call of Duty should take a year off.We all saw what happened for the Black Ops Cold War release last year, right? The game was completely broken. Constant crashes, broken consoles, and hardly any content. And unbelievably, it looks significantly worse than Modern Warfare 2019. Honestly? Have you ever heard of a sequel looking worse?! To this day, BOCW has not been fixed and continues to struggle with numerous problems. It looks like those problems will never be fixed either, now that we've reached a point in the life cycle when most of the community are already waiting for the next title ...But this pattern of unfinished games looks set to continue with Call of Duty: Vanguard. It's just too much to try and produce, and it creates a strange identity crisis for the franchise, with its single live service split over multiple different games.
Why Call of Duty Needs A Year Off
3. Three Teams Are Working With Different Versions Of The Engine
All CoDs of the last few years were developed with comparatively old engines. The current IW8 engine is just an upgraded version of the original IW engine, which is based on the id Tech 3 engine and is now over 15 years old. In addition, the Black Ops titles mix their own Black Ops engine with the IW engine, and everything is mixed together again in Warzone...
As anyone could tell, this kind of awkwardness was always going to create problems - just look at BOCW and its lack of upgrades to IW8 that Modern Warfare had; there were fewer features, and it looked a lot worse. Important changes that are required yearly prevent any massive upgrades from being developed, hence, we've never had destructibility in Call of Duty (though, we might be getting a little with Vanguard).
Please, Activision, take the time to develop a new Call of Duty engine or at least stop trying to mix the IW and Black Ops engines. Warzone is proof that this only leads to more problems.
2. More Time To Deliver A Finished Product
This is probably one of the most obvious reasons. Spending more time developing a video game is always a good thing. But Activision are too attached to the annual model to care. If you can believe the rumors, a CoD from developer Sledgehammer Games was supposed to come out last year that was so unfinished, Treyarch had to step in with Black Ops Cold War to throw a Hail Mary. Well, we know how that turned out.
The game was so poor that it felt unplayable. $60 for that is a joke. If a game is so unfinished that another studio has to step in, which is itself still in the middle of development, maybe you should consider simply taking a year off and finishing developing the games.Like keeping up to speed with all things Call of Duty? Here are some recent stories in case you missed them:
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1. We have Warzone Now
In my opinion, that's the strongest reason. There has never been a better time than now to finally break the one-year cycle. In the past, you could say that the annual CoDs are important because you need the income. But now, we have Warzone, a huge free-to-play battle royale with more active players than any Call of Duty has experienced in the past.
Sure, it's F2P, but the revenues from microtransactions are enormous. Since Warzone is supposed to exist for several years and is constantly being supplied with new content. I don't think anyone in the community would be bothered if there wasn't a new Call of Duty for a year. So please Activision, focus on fixing Warzone and delivering cool content. Although the games are getting worse and worse, every CoD will reliably sell billions of units, so you can see why they're keeping the model for now. But with the classic 6v6 arcade experience becoming less popular by the day, you've got to wonder how long they can keep this up.
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