COD and plagiarism

 They can't keep getting away with it!

It's funny that COD should in the centre of so many competing crosshairs as big console manufactures argue about whether or not the game is fundamental to competition across the FPS market. It's funny because whatever way you look at it, this conversation is placing COD at the top of a very influential pedestal where almost everyone can agree it is a model to aspire to for continuing success. So all eyes are constantly on them when they have a month like the one they're living through. You know, the sort of month where you get continuously pulled up for plagiarism again and again to the point where you look like hack amateurs with absolutely no quality control department whatsoever; meanwhile giants are wrestling over who gets to stick you on their shelf to be their golden trophy. That's what you get for having idols and role models, I guess.

To be clear, accusations of art theft are a pretty hefty chunk of mud to sling around and are so hard to prove in most cases, almost as much as it is to find. With so many artists in every field, more than at any other point in history by several orders of magnitude, content is being developed incessantly and constantly, everywhere that you look, so if someone wants to steal a little idea concept from some small corner of the internet, who the heck is going to know? To be fair, the COD design artists are probably look at this as 'taking inspiration' from the work they see everyday; which there is nothing wrong with as long as you put enough of your own special juice in it to transform the final product. This month has presented an Activision that were very lax on the whole 'changing up the homework in the assignment' part of the equation.

It started with a posted advert for an upcoming COD Vanguard skin, the worst performing COD game in a very hot minute, in which one of the coming skins had a very eye-caching and interesting design to it. It was a heavy winter suit with the head of a Samoyed dog thrown over the player's usual boring human head; making the player approximately 15% all around better. Honestly it was a striking design that would have been really cool if it wasn't a paid cosmetic... oh, and bastardized from a random artist on the web! An Artist called 'saillin' took credit for the design and compared the COD dog with his own military canine design in some side-by-side comparisons. The concept itself was already pretty novel enough to inspire a raised eye-brow or two by those already in the know, but after that comparison; with how closely the military gear the dog is wearing matches up with what COD were planning: there really is no question, so shenanigans were taken here.

To their credit Activision did move to remove marketing materials featuring that dog and later announced that particular skin would be scrapped (Instead of, I don't know, maybe just paying the original artist to use their cool design. That would have worked even better in my opinion.) And to take away that small credit, they had to be mocked and ridiculed in order to do so. Had no one really made a fuss about this and the situation still be bought to Activision's attention; they would have helpfully ignored it so that they could continue their money raking unabashed; because that's just the kind of company that the COD creators are. Although, I wonder how this backlash might shake the structure of their content development departments going forward considering that, as I mentioned, this was not the only significant case of plagiarism that has been bought up this month.

 

Yet another upcoming skin for Warzone and Vangaurd featuring future-tec glowing pieces, has ended up drawing comparisons to a truly vapid upcoming game, leading myself to wonder if the COD plagiarists have literally no shame. Because at some point you have to grow some standards, and I'd feel that would come at some point before ripping of designs from the Dr Disrespect's Crypto FPS 'game' he's trying to tote up: Dreadrop. Although to be fair, there is a bit more nuance to this one. Not least of all because the aggrieved party is actually an ex Infinity Ward manager. He has taken it 'on the chin' by joking that Activision should name the skin after him (Ha Ha- they're never going to do that.) but even then I have to throw up a little bit of doubt to how much this one quite constitutes plagiarism. 

Oh the designs look similar alright! Damningly so, in fact. But COD's Malware Ultra Skin is just a guy in neon blue techy-armour with a hood on; it's not exactly the most inspired armour design ever invented. Of course not, they're being compared with freakin' Deadrop; a game dripping with unoriginality, this dispute really just raises concerns about the trite thematic elements fuelling both design processes. If it hadn't been for the more obvious dog-skin rip-off, people would probably be making more of a fuss about the big design variations, such as the skull face and glowing exo-skeleton design elements of the COD game versus Deadrop's decidedly more boring hexagonal urban camo design. Both skins do use pretty much the exact same colours, however; which doesn't help Activision's case at all. 

And then people just entered 'Twitter cancellation mode' where they comb through your entire history looking for a smoking gun to hang you with. They found it in the prospective logo for a COD mobile game that doesn't even have a title yet; it's just known as 'Project Aurora'. Well Aurora recently got a new slick logo featuring a sharp and spikey stylized 'A' at a slight slant which certainly looked cool- probably because it was allegedly ripped from Amuro Ray's personal emblemage on his RX-93 v Gundam from 'Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack'. (Thank you, Animenewsnetwork, for being so complete in their coverage of this story.) Again, one could argue this as a coincidence since the logo is quite literally just a stylised A; but it just doesn't make for a very good look, does it? 'Confirmation Bias' is turning into 'Confirmation Prejudice' at this point.

All of which goes to paint COD, one of the biggest franchises in the world, as a lazy corner cutter who cares nothing for the sanctity of art. Although to be fair there is a perfectly rational explanation for a lot of this; pressure piled on by time constraints as a result of failure. Remember, 'Vanguard' pooped the bed as far as COD games go, shipping less units than the franchise has suffered in about ten years. That reflects badly on the team who are then flipped into a rush to hurry out content that might win people over, rushed employees start ignoring due diligence or just ripping off ideas full kettle in order to keep their jobs, and the potential media backlash for any of these screw ups is so unlikely because no one ever pays attention to this stuff. Until the day that they did, and now their bad position has probably become much worse as their indolence has been characterised as incompetence. Let this be an example of the snowball effect of big company run development studios where stopping to take stock is a crime punishable by redundancy. 

The Unfinished Menace

 You don't know the power of corporate deadlines!

What if you found yourself trekking through the deep Appalachian wilderness at 11pm at night in search of a tiny wooden cabin like one does on a free weekend. What if you found that edifice, mottled and windbeaten, doors wide open and cracked on their hinges like a broken gaping maw. What if your horror movie reasoning led you into this cabin off the edge of society, and crouched beside the lampshade in the living room, you find a heaving, seething mass in the corner, all bones and taut skin, gurgling something intelligible and bestial. Your heart catches, but the thing hears you anyway. It stretches it's long white neck and slowly turns around to reveal- the face of a stick figure. Two lines for the eyes and one half moon curve for the mouth. Turns out the monster didn't have time to be finished before it was set loose on society. It would kind of kill the mood a bit, wouldn't it? You would have a hard time taking it seriously as a threat, and if you can't even do that then perhaps the entire purpose of this horrific visage has been ruined, has it not? Well, can you see where I'm going with this?

A fashionable trend has emerged in the recent years, one that some of the truly fashion-forward were already lightyears ahead of (Bethesda, you daring trendsetters) but which has now finally caught on with your average QVC watcher; unfinished releases, in all their piece-meal glory. Because why sit down and actually finish the product and clean to an acceptable state to the audience, when you cut a corner in order to squeeze into the end of yearly financial report. Sure you're going to hurt your reputation, your ultimate sales numbers, probably your future sales numbers, the pedigree of talent you're likely to snag in the future, and just the general respect of the entire industry; but, you know, gotta make those black numbers in the ledger look big! That's a... worthy exchange? None of this is new. I'm not blowing your mind with this take and it's something that has been bubbling away for a while, this trend towards the unfinished. But something about these past 2-3 years has been- just egregious. It's getting much worse, and I want to talk about it.

I think a big one that we tend to forget about for some reason is Anthem. (Never forget, ya'll) A game which, honestly, it feels like no one wanted to actually make. Here Bioware spent several years and too much money sitting on their hands trying to figure out what they even wanted to make whilst EA got more and more upset until they forced out a launch. Now Bioware were no slackers here, they immediately jumped on the Todd Howard defence ("It's not about how your game launches-" etc.) but people soon found the game was almost empty at it's core when you peeled away the faux excitement from the developers, honestly there was little driving potential behind it. This is perhaps the gold standard of the Unfinished Menace, because at no point did Bioware manage to convince the world that they had a plan beyond "Get it out and hope everything works out" and how did that end up for them? Well the game's development just got effectively abandoned for a year before EA officially killed off hopes for a do-over. That's right, Bioware literally sat down and asked if they could just make the game again and start from scratch. I ain't no fan of EA, but I genuinely sympathise with the utter gall they had to endure through this game's entire life cycle. Let this be an example of the worst case unfinished scenario.

And then we have Cyberpunk, at perhaps the other end of the spectrum. I don't like to talk about Cyberpunk much these days because of how badly it hurt me, but seeing them be listed under the potentials for best RPG of the year in Geoff Keighley's game awards just severely triggered me. Best action game and I'd have been fine, but best RPG? What a joke. This is a game that was sold on the premise of 'it'll come out when it's ready', which held true until overconfidence took over and the team at CDPR backed themselves into a corner that they didn't have the resources, staff numbers or time to get out of. What people got was a game utterly unrecognisable to what was promised aside from in visuals, and even then those visuals were what the highest of the high-end consumer could achieve exclusively. The role playing was lacking, the character choice faded away after the prologue, the depth of the city was non-existent, the game just wasn't done; but the game wasn't a total mess either. (at least, not when it was playable.) This has allowed CDPR to quietly pivot the goalposts and pretend that this considerably more vapid 'FPS with extra flairs' style Far Cry game was the goal all along, however seeing as they're up for RPG of the year it seems that the deception did fool some of us, eh Geoff? Consider this the "misdirect ending" for the unfinished game narrative. 

Grand Theft Auto The Definitive version, or whatever the stupid name of this thing was, is the most recent example. (tied with the rest upcoming on this list) A game made by GTA porters who have a history of questionable choices, much of what The Definitive Edition got wrong could be attributed to either laziness or not enough time. (I suspect a little of column A and a lot of column B) Overall the problems sum up like this: AI upscaling, porting inferior mobile version back into PC and consoles and questionable artistic choices. Rockstar have already started tackling a lot of the issues and the latest stupidly big patch shows us that Rockstar-proper doesn't mess around when it comes to their reputation. But it still shows as a rush to finish the polish of a game that they already sold for full price, which isn't the best possible look, now is it? Definitely still ongoing, but I've actually developed a bit of faith that Rockstar might actually make up the difference for Grove Street Games' botched unfinished mess. (An unfinished remaster/remake- how has the industry sunken that low?)

Another big one has been Battlefield 2042, the game to break a thousand fan's hearts. After months of effortless hype built from straight lies, including an interview where they bold-faced claimed that this game was taking the best elements from 3 and 4 and adding new things ontop of that! (Funny, I seem to remember both those games having SCOREBOARDS) The game is a mess, contentless, empty, poorly designed, lacking destruction, you've all heard the spiel. The most sensible reasoning behind this has also been the saddest, people think this game was built to be a battle royale and had to have those systems gutted at the last second for whatever reason. Basically meaning that the mess of a game we now have is due to emergency smashing together of an unfinished product with insides that weren't designed to go with it. A victim of chasing the trends gone horribly, though predictably, wrong.

And finally we have Battlefield's more excitable twin brother, COD Vanguard. A game which is being received much better than it typically would just because the competition is a total dumpster fire this year, although it's still selling the worse than the series has in about 14 years, so you win some you lose a lot. The missing content here comes from the disaster of a mode that has been married with COD games for nearly years now, the Zombie mode, which seems to have been getting worse and worse over the years. Even with that general warning that we weren't exactly heading towards a grand Zombies renaissance, the pathetic lack of grand Easter eggs, strongly themed maps, exotic random weapons or really substantial gimmicks of any kind, was certainly unexpected. Yet another full price game coming this year with a severally wanting package.

These are the games that have flooded the market over the past few years, normalising the belief that products don't need to finished before they're rushed out of the door to an audience, and every consumer out there should find that concerning. Heck, I have no problem with companies like Larian taking the slow approach and releasing their stuff in early access so that they narrow in everything perfectly and learn how to improve the gameplay with the audience, because that's upfront and cooperative, but selling a complete experience as a pipe dream and then spending the next few months trying to patch the leaky ship whilst grumbling about how poorly all your hard work has been received; that's crazy to me. At this rate, the label of 'AAA' should be ripped from the industry entirely, as it no longer indicates a game with polish behind it but just a higher budget potential trainwreck. (In that case; god help the new 'AAAA' Perfect Dark game.)