Things have been really tough for this year's Call of Duty, and I mean beyond the general public disdain that this series amasses from anyone who's not a die hard convert. For years pundits have been blaming Call of Duty for everything wrong with the industry, first with the lack of creative ingenuity and lately with the propagation of avaricious and predatory business practises. They've even caught a ribbing due to the fact that they seem to have run out of names to call their games. (In all honesty, Modern Warfare is a pretty dull title to recycle.) At times it can almost feel like Activision's darling series is the whipping boy of the gaming community, but they still make stupid amounts of money each and every year so nobody can call them the underdog.
That being said, this year has been something wholly special for the Call of Duty haters out there. Firstly there was the huge issue of exclusivity that Infinity tried to sneak past it's consumers during a trailer. You know, the one in which they wrote in the smallest of fonts about how Spec Ops Survival mode would be an exclusive feature to PlayStation consumers for a whole year? I covered this in my blog last month, as well as the fervour it caused. People flooded the official CoD subreddit and Twitter account, demanding to know what exactly it was that made their money less valuable than PlayStation owner's money. Some made the sound argument that other consoles should be charged less for the game, considering they are getting less of the game at launch. And it seems no one was soothed by the official response of 'That's only 1% of the game, calm down!'. (It would seem that the general public is capable of basic math, Infinity Ward. You've gotta be more careful with your assertations!)
With all that nonsense having come, and mostly blown over, Infinity Ward and Activision must have thought that they had weathered the brunt of the storm. (And mass pre-order cancellations that were heralded by, said storm.) Then the Hearthstone catastrophe happened with Blitzchung and everything blew up once again. This time, Call of Duty wasn't the instigator of Activision's public relations woes, but was an unfortunate bystander in the chaos. Now that it had been established that Blizzard, and through them Activision, were happy to dump their morales in order to make some that sweet Chinese Yuan, everyone thought it only fitting that they dump Activision whilst telling them to get a room with their Tencent sweethearts. Once again, this led to a string of cancelled pre-orders.
Obviously I covered the majority of these topics on my blog, however there was incident between these two that I ignored, simply because it didn't seem like anything out of the ordinary for an Activision title. Namely, the way in which Call of Duty seemed to be primed for the implementation of Lootboxes. Big shock, right? A greedy company succumbing to greedy tactics that sacrifices the integrity of the game mechanics and balancing in order to supplement their revenue? Absolutely unheard of! But even die hard CoD fans had been voicing their displeasure over this development, so maybe this was an issue worth covering afterall. Apparently, last year's Black Ops 4 (The game that was stripped of it's campaign after development mishap after development mishap) was completely gutted by it's microtransactions, and people were scared of it happening here with 'Modern Warfare'. I remember hearing horror stories of individual red dot lights costing upwards of 3$ and just ended up dismissing it as 'peak CoD'. But I guess last year's systems were the straw that broke the camels back, because we may be getting actual change from this year's CoD.
Of course, I would hesitate to call this a direct response to the 'lootbox issue' and more a concession on Activision's part in answer to all their mounting controversy, but hey, might as well take the little victory while you can. We got wind of some potential action being taking a while back when a popular, and often accurate, leaker claimed that Activision had held meetings to address their steadily dropping pre-order levels. (Hear that people? You were depriving the vampires of their life blood, how cruel of you!) Infinity Ward's response to their initial backlash did got out of it's way to throw shade on this leaker, labelling his or her's information as 'rumor' (A legendary moronic move seeing how these leaks were painting the studio in a socially aware and considerate light.) but most people just ignored the PR babble, as they usually do, and choose to trust the voice that had lied to them less. (Ugh, the state of developer/consumer communication these days...)
But how exactly has Activision responded to the lootbox issue, you may be wondering. What could they have done that is even remotely worthy of praise? Well, in a recent blog post 'The Call of Duty Team' detailed all the ways in which they wanted to prove themselves to the community and adopt a positive player-first approach. (Que the "Trust me, I've changed!" monologue.) This post including such 'revolutionary ideas' as; introducing crossplay. Because I've always wanted to get destroyed by PC players. Okay, to be fair a decent amount of thought did appear to go into this system to ensure that control schemes had to be similar to facilitate this type of crossplay, but I wonder about the framerate advantage of superior rigs. (Or will everyone get artificially throttled to keep things fair?) Then they boasted about their removal of season passes and DLC map packs to keep everyone on the same level. Something that the rest of the gaming industry learnt after 2012 with the community splintering effect of Gears of War 3's map packs. (But better late then never I guess.) They also mentioned how they are delivering free maps and post-launch content going forward, which is just an expansion of the above statement but the team needed another bullet point. Finally they vowed to ensure that all post launch maps and modes hit everyone simultaneously. Which is a tad laughable considering the cluster that the Survival mode incident incurred for the very merit of ignoring this release model.
Throwing all the rest of the blog away, the one headlining announcement that will have caught everyone's attention would be the fact that the game will now be featuring a Battlepass system, not lootboxes. I feel it important to note that this message went out of it's way to say "Not a loot box system", as if to throw shade on the leaker who claimed that was their original intent. However, we did see some bugs in the Beta mode for the game which gave away the Loot box system too, so you can kindly get the heck off that high-horse Activision, no one's falling for your crap. Additionally, I am so tired of these developers using the "everything's always changing" excuse to keep consumers guessing about monetisation until a week before launch. (Heck, sometimes it's the day of launch.) Just to be clear, everyone already knows that the studios are dead-set on their monetisation system months before launch, and Call of Duty would have most certainly had a Loot box system if Activision didn't have so many fires to put out.
The cherry on the top of it all, however, is the way how CoD are switching to a Battlepass system and calling it a day. Don't get me wrong, I generally do prefer a Battlepass system over lootboxes, it is certainly leagues more fair on the player's bank account, but that just makes CoD another one of those games desperately vying for player's eternal attention through recurrency ensuring tactics. How long until the gaming industry realizes that there are only so many hours in the week that people can realistically divide between games? At this point, Activision are actively poaching recurrency away from their other games, like their own Apex Legends. Although, given Respawn's tone deaf and draconic approach towards monetisation and public relations I would be hard pressed to say that the game didn't deserve it. Yet it does seem like history is repeating itself and no one learnt their lesson. (I'm referring to the time that Respawn's great shooter, Titanfall 2, was killed by Activision because they released it in a window sandwiched between their own Battlefield game and Call of Duty.)
Maybe this is the first sign of Activision turning a new leaf. Maybe we can expect a player first approach from the studio going forward and every proceeding endeavour will prioritize the quality of the game over securing a profit. Maybe we'll all live in flying castles in the sky with talking pigs serving as our butlers. Who knows what the future will bring. But I find it infinitely more enlightening to look at the actions of a company before the walls start closing in on them, and back then they appeared to be just as avaricious as always. So I wouldn't expect much change from the Call of Duty franchise once the brand finishes licking it's wounds and comes back swinging next year. You could argue that this was the right choice on Activision's part and that I'm discounting that in order to feed into my superstitions, but I always like to remember the adage; Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
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