That time of year
again
This week, Activision
officially announced that Call of Duty will
be returning to its World War II roots this year after spending nine years
focusing on modern warfare genres. While touted as a huge announcement with a
big livestream event as well as a week-long preshow of sorts, it was met with a
near unanimous “oh, okay” from the gaming community.
While it’s hard to deny
that Call of Duty is still one of the
undisputed kings of the first-person shooter genre, interest in the series as a
whole has been increasingly on the wane for years now. Most people shrugged off
last year’s Infinite Warfare as the
inferior choice to the other shooters released in not just the year, but the
typical November Warfare season. Plenty of games attempting to be “CoD killers” still pop up around the
holidays, and I personally just think it’s just a matter of time before one of
them defies the odds and dethrones Duty
as the genre leader.
So what happened? Why are
core gamers just not interested in Call
of Duty anymore?
The answer is actually
pretty obvious when you look at what Activision’s been doing to the franchise
for the past few years. Most of the recent games of the series have a gimmick
of some sort: Ghosts was
post-apocalypse, Black Ops III and Advanced Warfare featured a futuristic
military, and Infinite Warfare was
full-blown sci-fi. Every year Activision tries to mix up the formula a bit,
with this year’s flavour being World War II.
But to me this is the
reason why interest in the series is slipping. Call of Duty is suffering from what I like to call “The Assassin’s Creed Effect”: despite each
new game being different than the last thematically, the annual releases are
exhausting customers. Activision is trying to do something new and different
every year to try and draw eyes back to them, but it doesn’t seem to be
working.
We all know the story
about how Assassin’s Creed went from
a promising series to a laughingstock after Ubisoft milked it dry, releasing
half-baked and buggy annual releases that got middling reviews and only really
appealed to hardcore fans of the games. It got so bad that people were beyond
thankful when Ubisoft decided to give the series a break last year just because
they didn’t want to have to play yet another one.
The same problem is happening
with Call of Duty. We’ve had a new
game in the series every single year since the release of Call of Duty 2 in the ye olden days of 2005, and Activision is
showing no signs of slowing down. The problem with this is that with every
release, consumers are getting more and more bored with the franchise. No
matter how much you dress it up and give it a new hat every year, Call of Duty will still be Call of Duty.
There’s also the issue of
annual releases kind of making each game end up feeling kind of flat. Each new
game feels less like a big deal and more like just another game for the
ever-growing pile. You know how it isn’t really a big deal when a new Madden comes out every year because you
know it’s the same as the last ones except with the updated real-life team
rosters? It’s the same deal here. Why spend $70 of your hard earned cash on a
game that is essentially the same thing as one you bought years ago?
And this is the biggest
problem: because the games come out annually, the developers aren’t given
enough time to really try something new with the franchise. Every game now just
feels like the same thing over and over again because there’s such little time
between releases. Even those who play the games every year find it hard to
remember specific releases, with a lot of them saying that the games sort of
form together into one gray mass a few years after release.
So how do we fix this?
The obvious answer is for Activision to do what Ubisoft did last year and give franchise
a year off. But truth be told, they’ve created a situation for themselves that
they can’t really do that.
Like I said before, Call of Duty remains the ultimate military-themed first-person
shooter franchise, ridiculously popular with the casual crowd even today. A
year without a new game could leave the door wide open for some other developer
to jump in with a new IP that changes everything, and when Duty returns the next year everyone’ll have moved on to that
franchise, leaving Activision’s golden goose laying less eggs than it used to.
EA especially has been chomping at the bit to get a seat at that throne, but
their attempts have led to mostly failed attempts and disastrous results, including
how they basically cannibalized their best game of the year just a few months
ago just to try and have Battlefield 1 gain
more traction. The best way to stop enemies from taking your fortress is to
have it protected, which is exactly what Activision is doing right now. Going
back to the Assassin’s Creed example,
when was the last time you thought about that series? When you’ve grown tired
of something and it suddenly goes away, it’s hard to regain interest when it
inevitably comes back. Absence doesn’t always make the heart grow fonder.
Activision definitely
seems to be trying a “back-to-basics” approach with Call of Duty: WWII, but I don’t know if it’ll be enough to really
revitalize the series. By the time it’s released people will likely be too busy
with stuff like Red Dead Redemption 2
to care about it. As much as I’d like them to give the franchise a year-long
vacation, it’s true that they’d leave a massive opening for companies trying to
steal their throne, and I feel it’d be really difficult for Activision to get
people interested again once they return. I think all they can do at this point
is keep pumping out the games and hope they strike gold with one of them,
because right now they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Song
of the Week
That Slippery Little Hutt
of Mine – Star Wars: The Old Republic
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