Today’s Call of Duty Feels Nothing Like the Series That Started 20 Years Ago
Call of Duty is a franchise that needs no introduction, though that doesn’t mean it’s universally beloved. Actually, one might go as far as to say that it’s a bit infamous: over time, Call of Duty has grown to represent everything that’s wrong with big-budget, AAA video game productions of the modern age. The franchise has been heavily criticized for its annual release schedule, monetization practices, and inconsistent tone, among other things, although it has still retained its overwhelming relevance, even in the wake of Black Ops 7 underperforming.
Whether any specific criticisms of Call of Duty are accurate is, of course, a matter of opinion, but most longtime players can generally agree that the IP’s identity has changed quite a bit. From its boots-on-the-ground, historical fiction roots in 2003 to its foray into science fiction and back again, Call of Duty has gone through enough permutations to make your head spin. A big part of this is the series’ notorious annual release schedule: with a few notable exceptions, every year has seen a new Call of Duty entry. One would expect that, given so many releases, the quality standard would fluctuate greatly, but I’d argue that the series has actually been trending downwards over the past two decades, losing much of what made it special in the first place.
20 Years Of Success – The Greatest Call Of Duty Games Ever
Call of Duty celebrates over 20 years of success, so which of their games deserves to claim the top spots as the greatest among the franchise?
Why Has Call of Duty Changed So Much, and Why It’s for the Worse
When Infinity Ward released the first Call of Duty in 2003, it was highly praised for being a more complex and ambitious rendition of 20th-century warfare in gaming, a subgenre that was previously dominated by Medal of Honor. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone calling this the best-ever Call of Duty, but it was certainly a landmark release at the time, and went a long way towards cementing the IP as a gaming giant.
Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.
Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.
Easy (5)Medium (7)Hard (10)
The franchise seemed to grow exponentially after that. While CoD 2 and CoD 3 retain the WW2 premise of the first game, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare would be the release that would come to define the brand to this day. Its pivot into a modern-day setting was a smashing success, and emboldened Call of Duty to continue experimenting in the same vein. This is what led to the futuristic settings of later Black Ops games, Infinite Warfare, Advanced Warfare, and so on.
For a lot of fans, this slide into more outlandish and speculative storytelling is what marked the decline of Call of Duty, but this was more of a symptom than a cause. As multiplayer became the focus of the franchise and immersive storytelling took a back seat, and as Activision continued to push for annual releases, mechanics needed to be borrowed from the likes of Titanfall and PUBG, gradually eroding the Call of Duty identity through derivation and repetition. This is why the series has struggled to recapture its original magic even when revisiting the WW2 setting with games like Vanguard. Put another way, the series has spread itself too thin creatively, its core concepts so thoroughly mined that they’re nearly unrecognizable.
Can Call of Duty Get Back to Its Glory Days?
Even when Call of Duty was on a hot streak in the late-2000s and early-2010s, it followed an annual release schedule; I don’t necessarily think this is the root of the series’ problems, although it does compound them. Rather, I think that the main issue with modern Call of Duty is a marked lack of passion and originality—a soul, if you will—that needs to be found again.
That’s obviously a very difficult problem to quantify, but going back to the basics might be a good start. In the early 2000s, Call of Duty was trying to stand out by being inventive and exciting; these days, it seems to just be giving its audiences what they expect. Even when the games return to specific staples, like grounded gameplay and dedicated single-player campaigns, it feels like a response to criticism rather than the result of creative inspiration. Call of Duty may be a true live-service now, but that shouldn’t mean that it just goes into maintenance mode.