News - Call Of Duty: Warzone 2i Is A Slap The Face
Modern Warfare 3 is upon us, and it's times like these where I question if I'm living in some sort of perpetual time loop. Every year a new Call of Duty is announced, and every year the community seems to hate it from the beginning or grow to hate it over time. Every year the top content creators show up to Cod next and are won over by an &m song and a trailer, and every year Cod Out sells every other game on the market despite the largely negative online discourse.
Every year except 2021, we all saw how ass Vanguard would be from a mile away in terms of its gameplay. Modern Warfare 3 is a slight improvement over MW2. The movement is more fluid, red dots are back on the mini map, and the game is packed with over a dozen nostalgic maps from the original MW2, but to say that these improvements justify the $70 asking price for this game is blasphemous.
70 for a game that is obviously a DLC for MW2, for features that could have been included in one of the 30 GB patches they crank out once a month, is insulting. It's a slap in the face for a player whose cheeks are already bright red and throbbing, and I'm about to tell you why. To fully understand the extent of this middle finger from Activision, we have to go back to the beginning, to February 2022.
When rumors surrounding MW3 began to surface. Jason Shrier, one of the most consistently reliable journalists in the gaming industry, first reported on a hybrid DLC expansion pack that Activision was planning to release for their upcoming game, which at the time was Modern Warfare 2. I already covered the history of these leaks in a different article, so I'm not going to get into it heavily here, but Shrier claimed that Activision was finally planning to abandon the annualized release model for COD and give each subsequent game a full 2 years in the limelight.
I'm sure you can imagine how the community reacted to the news. Now, to be fair to Activision. For some nonsensical reason. I feel the need to be fair to Activision here; they never confirmed this rumor and sort of kind of denied it after Shri's initial reporting, but this was the narrative that spread across the gaming industry like wildfire.
I suppose that we can't technically hold it against them because of this little corporate statement, but it's important to note that Shrier did stand by his initial reporting even after the full scope of Modern Warfare 3 was eventually revealed, stating that the game did start as an expansion for MW2 and eventually morphed into a full game.
Do we have smoking gun evidence that this was the case? No, but I'd be willing to bet all the money in my bank account that Shrier isn't talking out of his ass here. I mean all the money in my bank account that could get you like three Nicki Minaj bundles because, after playing the beta, it really seems like that's the case.
This game is nearly identical to MW2. I don't think I've ever seen a more egregious copypaste job in the entire gaming space, let alone the Cod franchise. Outside of the yellow text, you'd be hardpressed to find any difference visually between these two games; everything is just indistinguishable, and that's compared to a game that was already pretty similar-looking to MW 2019.
As sequels, the games are obviously supposed to share a general aesthetic and art style, but if this is going to be marketed and sold as a brand new entry to the Cod franchise, it should be at least a little visually distinctive from the previous entry. I mean, I can't think of a single other shooter that would put so little effort into altering the visuals.
And this copy-and-paste extends into the menus with the UI, which again looks essentially identical to iCal in MW2. One of the most universally, hated uis in COD history the gameplay improvements do result in a marginally better gameplay experience, having red dots show up on the mini map again helps with map flow and general pacing and G fuel sweats around the world are rejoicing over the return of the slide cancel the almighty slide cancel that has graced us from The Godly hands of sledgehammer and brought our franchise back from the depths of no honestly [ __ ] slide cancelling but the movement overall feels smoother and faster and like a step up from MW2, and I got to say that I'm a fan of the slightly higher time to kill in this game it's short enough to still feel like Call of Duty but just long enough to open up a few strafing options and gunfights, and give you that extra millisecond to get behind cover with two Health left but are we going to pretend that the few minor gameplay adjustments they've made justify the cost of this game all three of the things that I just talked about could be implemented into MW2.
Right now, if they wanted to stuff like red dots on the mini map and player health, these are the types of adjustments that games like Apex OverWatch Halo and Battlefield put out for free in their seasonal or monthly updates, and Activision wants to charge you another $70. For the same privilege, this entire package includes the original MW2, maps, some new weapons, and gameplay tweaks.
It doesn't equate to a new game; it's an expansion of MW2, and nothing more. It feels like a huge seasonal drop, not a new experience, and it shouldn't be priced like it's a new experience. And let's also put to bed this notion that the franchise is going to do a 180 out of nowhere and abandon the business model.
It's so thoroughly crafted to this point that the aggressive monetization and overpriced bundles aren't going to change, the matchmaking system isn't going to change, and the faulty net code isn't going to change because why would it? It doesn't matter how many spmm rants we make or how many times we hop online and dramatically call out Activision; it's the bestselling game of the year every year, and that's not something that a YouTube article essay or a boycott among your friend group can solve.
This franchise is like Pokemon: too big to fail. It doesn't matter how little effort they put into these titles; millions of people will eat them up to play COD in 2023. Is to accept that these things have embedded themselves into the DNA of this franchise and gaming in general, which is sad, but at least we have single-player games.
Call of Duty could be in a worse place right now, which isn't saying much considering that community sentiment was at an all-time low throughout most of 2023. But still, the best hope for this franchise moving forward is that things get a little better under Microsoft now that they own the franchise, judging by Halo's Interesting Journey.
Thus far, I'm not exactly sure that's something we can look to with confidence. I think I'm going to make a whole article about the implications of the Microsoft acquisition for COD, but I wouldn't be surprised if Xbox takes a hands-off approach and just lets them do whatever they want to keep raking in cash.
