Silencing the Call of Duty

I've kept up with the Call of Duty franchise since the first one came out. The first was one of those games in the early '00's that was foregoing the industry standard of allowing the player to carry as many weapons as the game had available and moving towards a more realistic approach. You could carry only as many guns as humanly possible (not Duke Nukemly possible), so when your MP44 and M1 Garand both run out of bullets you better find yourself some replacements. It also moved towards the more cinematic with scenes evoking various World War II films and adding a "shellshock" effect that made the visuals go dizzy when things went boom. Even though my PC had trouble running it, I dug it. Call of Duty 2 was the second game I got for my Xbox 360 and became a permanent fixture for splitscreen multiplayer at the summer camp I worked at. Despite it not being an Infinity Ward effort, I still found pleasure in 3 when it came to running down my online enemies in a shoddily-handled truck.

There was a delay, but I finally got into Modern Warfare and liked it enough to grab Modern Warfare 2, though I waved my hand at World at War because I wanted no part of its return to WW2, regardless of its zombies minigame. The Modern Warfare games had shiny new guns. I could have an TAR-21! I could accessorize it! But then there came the drama at Infinity Ward and the ousting of its leadership and subsequent gutting of its staff, all the while Treyarch was quietly putting out Black Ops which I warmed up to and played the hell out of. Though the story was meh it was only marginally so as I gave Treyarch props for injecting an unconventional narrative into the Call of Duty franchise. It didn't quite feel like a cannibalized Tom Clancy novel despite the presence of Pinko Commie Scum. The protagonist was a broken individual, not the silent professional that MIGHT AS WELL HAVE BEEN THE SAME DAMN GUY IN EVERY GAME. He was voiced by Hollywood favorite Sam Worthington who has since gone missing (if someone sees him, let me know).

Shortly after, the franchise was stale for me. I knew already that Activision was pulling off this ludicrous trick of putting out a new game every year between two studios, all in the same franchise. The games haven't been outright terrible--they're polished and they've got that AAA budget behind them that makes hella dough back. It wasn't that I saw behind the curtain and saw Bobby Kotick's elfin face rubbing his palms. It just fizzled out for me.

So now we have Call of Duty: Ghosts upon us. And nobody's excited. People seem satisfied...mostly. Metacritic ratings show nothing above a 78. Self-profess CoD fan Jim Sterling expressed his disappointment in a somewhat melancholy review, giving the game a 5/10. Chris Carter confirms the franchise's staleness, but credits developer Treyarch with "innovat[ing] the franchise" and blames "complacency" for Ghosts' loss of love. But the sin is greater than complacency.

For years, we've been getting a yearly helping of mediocre techno-thriller served as a side to the bullet ballet of death that is the CoD multiplayer. We're getting the dish served by two different cooks: Infinity Ward and Treyarch. But now it's more complicated. While there are two different names serving out the food, there are different hands chopping up the carrots and browning the beef of the stew. Treyarch's got the same hands but they're learning and sort of innovating. Infinity Ward's got different hands but they've got the name, so now they're left to just mimic what the old guard did.

On paper, Activision had a killer business plan. But they should have known that the franchise would get diluted. And it happened much sooner than people are led to believe. The big argument for World at War was its "innovation" with the zombie mode: shooting Nazi zombies = pinnacle of fun. But it lacks depth and, despite it being initially only an unlockable mode after completing the campaign, that was the big selling point for the game. Treyarch's main multiplayer offering was CoD 4's reskinned for World War 2. Again, fun, but was hardly innovative. Hardly innovative but still successful.

Now we've got Infinity Ward version 2.0 copying Treyarch's recipe for success, using that secret zombie ingredient--but replacing it with aliens. Treyarch lucked out when they were riding the wave of zombie craze and have been able to continuously ride for a while. Aliens, unfortunately, haven't seen the resurgence that zombies had. Yeah, you've got a show like Falling Skies that shows there's some interest in little green men, but it's got nothing on the momentum behind The Walking Dead and every other god-awful zombie-centric creation. Sterling argues the alien mode lacks the camp of Treyarch's Zombies, instead manifesting as "a fairly bland slice of chaos, in which fairly uninteresting aliens are mowed through across blasted cities littered with quivering pustules." But of the two sister developers, Infinity Ward has always appeared the more severe and prudish one while Treyarch presented itself as the one who might buy you a beer if you take her out.

Perhaps the franchise has gone long in the tooth, and the weakness of Ghosts is just symptomatic of that. Judging from the gameplay footage, Titanfall might be the very cure that Call of Duty needs. The ease of controls that Call of Duty has always been praised for appears to have been "borrowed" by the former Infinity Ward devs that makeup Sledgehammer Games. But they didn't just add big-ass robots. They added another dimension to the gameplay altogether. Titanfall might be the Call of Duty game that is long overdue.