Dan G.

Somehow, some crazy way, for some inconceivable reason, Infinity Ward and Activision decided that just about everything good about it’s flagship Call of Duty series needed to be thrown out and rebuilt … much, much, much, much, much WORSE! I’m genuinely flabbergasted how an outfit with almost 15 years of experience making a first person shooter could be so gleeful (almost nihilistically so) about ruining its own game. Let’s get into specifics: For almost 15 years, across all Call of Duty titles, you unlocked weapons and subsequently their attachments by playing and gaining experience points with the game and the weapon. Not anymore. Now you have a specific list of tasks you have to accomplish with a myriad of different weapons across different categories to unlock items you may want. It’s confusing, tedious, cumbersome, and terrible! For almost 15 years, across all Call of Duty titles, you could select perks to fit your style of play. Not anymore. Now you start with 2x (pretty useless) perks, and have to earn the perks you want during the game. This essentially ensures that the game becomes a race to the first killstreaks … and then a general massacre thereafter (if your team isn’t the first to earn them), as there’s simply NO defense to streaks like UAV or any air assets. For almost 15 years, across all Call of Duty titles, hardcore mode was a time-honored way of playing COD with no mini-map and less health. Not anymore. Now “Tier 1” (ridiculous version of hardcore mode) feels like a half-baked, unfinished game that does not let you know if you’ve killed someone, if equipment is friendly or enemy, if you’ve earned your killstreaks, or pretty much ANY useful information at all. Infinity Ward may think “it’s minimalistic”, but it feels more like it’s halfassed. It’s so minimalistic it feels like lazy game making. Like they couldn’t be bothered to build in everything everyone expected of them. There are SOOO many examples of where this game just flips off the COD community. Big things (like the above), intrinsic things (like the ungodly UI), and little but fundamental things (like weapon recoil). Take a small example of weapon reload. The Fast Hands perk is one that must be earned in game. Some of the weapons reload SOOO slowly they are borderline unusable. But wait, IW forces you to use them to unlock other weapons. But you can’t speed up the reload till halfway through a match. What point does that serve? Or what about how, possibly in order to force players to use spotlight-level glinting sniper rifles, IW has decided that Battle Rifles and even Marksman Rifles should recoil so much to make them unusable past like 70 meters. The problem with this is that it feels SO incredibly fake. Real weapons don’t act like Napoleonic muskets past 40 yards. But IW somehow seems to think they do. I could go on and on. I have played COD for 15 years. Unlike many in the community it is literally the ONLY game I play given work and life responsibilities. However the sheer and ridiculous amount of changes (most of which appear to just be “changes for changes sake”) have literally ruined the franchise for me. Unless IW updates the game with all of this nonsense removed or reverted (and if we’re realistic, they most definitely won’t), I’ve been forced to leave the community and learn another shooter. (Maybe Battlefield.) It really sucks, but this is literally what IW/Activision has driven me to. And, sadly, I know I’m not alone.