Call Of Duty – inexplicably popular? (pic: Activision)
A reader is frustrated by the bugs and cheaters in Call Of Duty and argues the time is right for a new military shooter to take its place.
Call Of Duty has been the biggest thing in gaming for so long now there are multiple generations that have grown up not knowing anything else. Its only major rival is Fortnite but it’s not a particularly fair comparison as you don’t need to pay to play Fortnite and it doesn’t take itself very seriously. The yearly, paid-for Call Of Duties are still massive and so is the free-to-play Warzone 2.0… and I have no idea why.
It did seem as if Call Of Duty might be in serious trouble with 2021’s Vanguard but then Modern Warfare 2 came out and suddenly it’s the biggest thing ever again. The franchise seems bulletproof, with the few minor failures never making a dent in its armour for more than a year (remember Infinite Warfare?).
I find this baffling because as someone that plays a lot of Warzone I am pretty much done with the game. Never mind the problems with DMZ, the game as a whole is riddled with bugs and the amount of cheaters is unbelievable. I’d honestly expect them to be more than half the total number of players.
These are not controversial statements. I don’t think anyone would disagree that there is a major problem with bugs and cheats and if you look at any social media you’ll see constant streams of complaints and the usual vague promises from Activision that they’ll fix them. Warzone 2.0 only launched last year and it hasn’t solved any of the problems it was created to solve, to the point where I imagine they’ll probably announce 3.0 within the next couple of years.
It all sounds pretty dire, right? With everyone agreeing there’s a massive problem and that they’re fed up of it not being fixed. So this must have created a pretty massive drop in the number of players, eh? Nope! Call Of Duty has never been more popular and not just because of Modern Warfare 2.
The phrase ‘too big to fail’ sounds silly but I think in the case of Call Of Duty it’s literally true. Especially with Warzone, which costs nothing to play, I think it’s entrenched as the go-to online venue for gamers that don’t want to play Fortnite. Like, that is the main reason for its success: it’s not Fortnite and it’s not some obscure new game that you have to explain to your casual friends about.
People use Call Of Duty as a meeting place and a chat room just as much as they a do a normal video game and if that’s all you’re there for the cheaters don’t matter and the bugs can just be kind of funny. Which means that as long as that’s still the case there’s really little incentive for Activision to fix anything, for those that do actually want to play the game properly.
The only way anything will change, I think, is if someone else comes along and creates a military shooter in a similar style that doesn’t have Call Of Duty’s problems. At the end of the day it’s just a name and if someone else can make a similar, but less broken, alternative I don’t see why everyone wouldn’t switch to that.
Or perhaps they wouldn’t. Perhaps Call Of Duty is just too big of a name, like the online equivalent of a comfy blanket. That’s not exactly how the game likes to advertise itself but it’s what it’s become.
By reader Saldo
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A reader is frustrated by the bugs and cheaters in Call Of Duty and argues the time is right for a new military shooter to take its place.
