Another wanting AAA launch.

 Chuck it on the pile.

There's a generally accepted law of production that on a very basic level, the more resources you dedicate towards a project directly collates with the end result of that project in a positive manner. Which is a awfully garbled way to say, put more money behind something and it should turn out better. Emphasis on should, because anyone who has ever actually worked in a team on literally anything knows that having the shiniest tools on hand doesn't count for jack squat if your teammates are speaking another language to one another and don't even know what the project to begin with even is. Still, there is something especially strange about the way that video games are trending towards becoming more and more often broken and buggy in their launches, whilst at the same time the development teams behind them are getting bigger, the budget spent on them is getting larger, and the clowns selling them are making the selling price steeper. It's as though the overall quality of everything in trending, ever so subtly, downwards and every success story good release is a exception to an increasingly ubiquitous set of rules.

The culprit in question this time is, shock of shocks; another bloody remake! Although to be entirely fair, the Call of Duty Remakes are pretty much brand new games stretched over the rough makeup of the old Modern Warfare games from back in the day in terms of general premise and story. The real meat of the product is all new, so this isn't a "remake = lazy" story. (If anything, this game is representative that COD developers have truly run all the way out of ideas.) Actually, it's not even the single player of the game which is even being bought into question because, increadibly, COD is still delivering middle-of-the-road but flashy-action campaigns, just as they been doing since the year dot. (Imagine still putting campaigns in your game so they can appeal to everyone? EA laughs at such frivolity.) It's the part of the package which is, for the majority of the player base, the only sector that matters; the Multiplayer.

Coming at this from the point of view of someone who hasn't played COD since the original Modern Warfare... on the Wii... makes this whole wave of disillusionment totally foreign to me, so I have to rely on the accounts of others. What we're seeing here is a lack of features that previous CODs bought such as Barracks, Prestige Challenges, Medals, unlock notifications, Hardcore mode, Ranked play and... wait, they don't have Leaderboards? What in the... See at this point you know this isn't just a case of oversights or a shift in direction that removed features without conveying that to the expectant audience. These are embarrassing omissions. My air for forgiveness would say that the team were rushed to make a high quality product and couldn't quite meet the deadline to do everything (...including Leaderboards) but my cynical mind tells me that they probably just saw the absolute disaster that was Battlefield 2042 and said "Wow, if they can get away with a 50% finished game, we can totally get away with an 80% finished one!"

But perhaps the most frustrating omission, given the age we live in, in the lack of core matchmaking customisation necessary to allow people to play the game they want to. There's no way to opt out of crossplay match-making; a system which is fine for casual play, but for anyone who is trying to put on an actual performance there's no real room for a system that allows for imbalanced match-ups like crossplay. You want to put a joystick user up against a key board and mouse user? That's just irresponsible. And sure, apparently MW2 managed to launch without a ranked mode, some impossible-how, but if 'crossplay toggling' is a feature the team are holding off for until ranked arrive; then I have to say that I simply don't see the value in not just flipping the switch to enable it now. And before you say "Well it's not so easy as flipping a switch"- you actually can disable crossplay on the Sony version of MW2. The PC and Xbox versions are the only ones doomed to unsolicited match-ups.

All of this is despite the fact that this is the first COD game in years wherein Activision hasn't been forced to scramble together some singular game mode exclusively for the Sony console users because of their exclusivity deal. They didn't even slap one together for Xbox. One has to wonder exactly why it is that the team couldn't manage to wrangle up a game to the standard of their last when they've managed to not only pull off exactly that but build upon it for the last several years. Perhaps this is due to the sudden Microsoft acquisition shaking up the daily proceedings enough to impeded the development process, but I'm literally just writing excuses for them now and even then that doesn't track for why the game couldn't have been pushed back until it wasn't a stain on their quality standard performance.

Of course, this has hardly been a unique situation in recent years when it comes to big game launches. Titles have launched incomplete, barren or buggy and often times it's a coin toss whether the developer can be bothered to stick around long enough to get the final product up to snuff. 343 faced the wrath of their audience for three launches that missed standards in various ways and countless broken promises over the length of ten years. That is a very extreme example of course, but it's not exactly becoming the rare exception of the industry these days either. And to be clear I'm not talking about a game that launches to a standard that isn't as good as the fans expected, such as Gotham Knights or Saints Row; I mean the sorts of games that lack the basic standards that any reasonable team would be expected to deliver. They knew this was going to leave people upset and they went ahead anyway.

At the very least we can understand that the COD team aren't typically the type of devs to cut and run when things become difficult. They'll work on the game and patch the leaky ship they built, but to sell a game at full price during a time when it seemingly isn't finished yet just feels a little dishonest, quite frankly. As though they're cashing in on their pre-ordained 'optimal release window' rather than adjusting to ensure the needs of the client are met. Typically, in a customer satisfaction dependent industry like entertainment, the customer's wants are tantamount; but then I guess Call of Duty has crossed the line into one of those franchises that is "Too big to fail". What is Activision going to do in the face of any actual significant backlash? Drop Infinity Ward? Not in a thousand years.

I just find it amazing how we, as a community, get ourselves regularly gaslit by the big industry heads who chastise us for how demanding we are and how little we really pay for their hard-crafted experiences, only for the product out the box to be a hollow shell gutted of the basics and spoon-fed the difference with endless microtransactions or post support development cycles. It really makes being a follower of the industry feel like managing an abusive relationship you don't remember slipping into, where somehow we're always the bad guy for coughing up our end of deals that always fall through. I'm pretty sure there's supposed to be consumer laws to defend against stuff like this, but no one ever bothered update them in the past fifty years so they're about as useless as they sound. Can't wait for the next AAA game to disappoint at launch and leave us with fifty heartfelt promises.