It’s exactly a DLC that Activision realised they could make people pay £70 for instead of half that. Only a few weeks after MW2 came out it was being floated that there was no COD for 2023, and instead a Ghost focused expansion would come out to fill the void.
Don’t like it don’t buy it but FFS stop with faux shock and horror. COD is of the most aggressively monetised franchises in mainstream gaming, from a company with zero scruples. Facts that have been valid for a decade or more and the regular news cycle attached to it all gets tiring.
Ignore the bugger and maybe they’ll be forced to do better next time when this sell’s poorer (you can hope at least). It’s not like this is some long awaited sequel either, just skip this one. There’s so much more to play this year in particular.
The achievements on Xbox and PS5 even show up as a DLC of MW2. I wonder how late in the development process did they realize that if they could sell almost the same game every year then they probably could literally sell the same game twice.
They realized that in 2012 tbh. I haven't purchased an MW game since (old) MW2 because I hated their practice of yearly releases while only adding incremental changes.
Leading up to mw2 launch, they were repeatedly saying it was the first 2 year release. They said there would only be a paid dlc at the end of the year. A few weeks into launch they back pedeled and released a statement saying that wasn't true. Something they could have done before launch, but didn't, for sales. There are maps in mw3 that have been in the code of mw2 since launch andnwere never released. Fuck them.
My thoughts exactly, we live in a world where content creators have to make content on new releases to stay afloat. Never pre-order and VOTE WITH YOUR MONEY
I think this is also what happened with AC: Mirage. Ubi originally had planned it as DLC for Valhalla.
At least they had the decency not to charge $70 for it, but still, it's MBA businessthink in charge of AAA gaming right now. Unless people stop buying them, nothing changes.
If you're sick of massive AAA developers running cash grabs, my suggestion is stop patronizing their games until they get their sh*t together. An excellent alternative if you're looking for a fun FPS game is Battle-Bit Remastered. I personally love this game, and there is a long running joke that the three guys that made this basically shat on the AAA developer world when they released a full featured FPS for $15 that is enjoyable and has 0 micro transactions.
I stated playing battlebit and I don’t even consider bothering with mainstream titles anymore. This release is garbage, the last 5 releases have just been progressively worse and worse, like hey even bother?
It feels like I have more fun in 1 game of battlebit than I did over the entirety of my 200+ hours of BO2, which was the last mainstream shooter I played that didn’t feel entirely like a waste of money.
I have basically been addicted to CoD for the past couple of years, but recently finally cracked and got annoyed enough that I don't play nearly as often, or nearly as long anymore. Expensive and overly monetized, absolutely, but there are so many other issues. This is my way-too-long rant that I always go on about CoD:
Camo that is always intentionally very dark so that people will buy it, and then it will get nerfed once sales die down
Same with OP weapon blueprints-- sell the new OP blueprint, then nerf it eventually, and then take the PR stance of claiming that you listen to fan feedback.
Feeling like I'm playing Pokémon with all the swords and shields... I hate shields. Shields making someone practically invincible on almost half of their body, and them having zero movement penalty when they are on someone's back is absolute horseshit. Swords, where people can run faster because it's a light weapon, and you can have the Double Time perk to move even faster, so that they can just rush you and slap you with an instant kill is also absolute horseshit. I DO love sticking a shield person with Thermite, but so many other things should work against them and they just don't.
The game crashing, and crashing often. Which for MWII was only fixed in the last couple of months, in my experience.
The incredibly annoying "Restart Game" prompt when you load up CoD, it downloads the stupid store bullshit, and then the game needs to be restarted before you can continue
The stupid UI. Let me get to Quick Play, IDK, quickly, maybe? I should not have to click through a million stupid tiles just to get to Quick Play
Oh, and stop fucking changing my playlist filter to include some random game mode every now and then. If I have my filter set to just TDM, don't you damn dare any other mode onto that filter.
Night maps. Fuck night maps. MWII has one night map, and there's zero options in these games to filter out night maps or any other map you may despise (like Border Crossing).
Despite all of this (and so, so much more) I still have 600+ hours into MWII alone, but the more I play it now, the more I find I just get angry at how shitty the entire experience actually is. The parts of it that are fun and addicting are not worth all the other bullshit. I do not intend to purchase MWIII.
Feeling like I'm playing Pokémon with all the swords and shields... I hate shields. Shields making someone practically invincible on almost half of their body, and them having zero movement penalty when they are on someone's back is absolute horseshit. Swords, where people can run faster because it's a light weapon, and you can have the Double Time perk to move even faster, so that they can just rush you and slap you with an instant kill is also absolute horseshit. I DO love sticking a shield person with Thermite, but so many other things should work against them and they just don't.
Wait, I don't play CoD. Can you clarify what you mean by swords and shields? Shields I can imagine being some sort of body armor, but are people carrying around steel swords like they're medieval knights in a game titled "Modern Warfare"?
I don't play COD all that much, but I was one of the crowd who made my purchase of MWII in part because it was supposedly going to stick around for 2 years. I feel slighted that they had nearly complete versions of nostalgic maps in Warzone only to never release them in regular multiplayer and instead hold them for MWIII. I refuse to support this bait by spending on COD any further.
I'm done with COD after last year's. If I don't buy battle pass blah blah...I spent 70 fucking dollars already, that's the price of the game not a ticket to continually pay. Fuck off.
The people who care enough to complain are also largely the ones who keep buying it, so they train companies to realize that complaining is something that can be ignored because it's all bark and no bite.
They'll probably think we didn't have enough DLCs and microtransactions to make people happy, and out DRM needs to be more intrusive to improve our sales.
I feel like CoD has been a joke for like the past 5-7 years. They just keep rehashing the same thing year after year and players gobble it up. My friend is addicted to it and plays it online constantly, I stopped playing it when they shifted focus from the offline single player and two player story/missions to the online Battle Royale style games. I don't find getting spawn killed and getting screamed at by 10 year olds fun.
Cod has been a joke since development was taken from Infinity Ward. Infinity Ward worked on the engine for CoD3 but Treyarch developed the game. The last great CoD was the original Modern Warfare.
Do you mean the original MW or the rehashed one? The last one I probably played was MW2. My friend (not the one mentioned above, another friend) loved playing the co-op wave style missions, and the stealth missions.
I remember playing the one that had Christopher Meloni in it and it ran like shit on my PC which was high end. After that, I lost interest. When I moved in with the one that was addicted, I'd play with him just as a "bonding experience", then he wanted me to play online with him , which I did occasionally. I remember trying to do the "secrets" and then having some asshole bitch me out because I moved an inch off of a platform or didn't kill someone in time. Fuck that.
Well, you vote with your wallet. This is what happens when gamers pre-order incomplete games and scream about the state of the game on social media: you get crap products like this.
Money is the only thing that appeals to companies. If people would just vote with their wallets, we wouldn't have this situation.
We do...the problem is we're a drop in an ocean compared to the vast majority who do not, or as NightOwl put it, they do too, but they help perpetuate the lazy products AAA companies typically spew out by just buying
We vote with our wallets. It's the huge majority of the mainstream audience that also voted with their wallet by buying that makes out opinions irrelevant.
Heh. I was just discussing this with a friend 2 days ago. We surmised that they would half ass it even more than MW2 because this one was already half assed and still sold well, and Battlefield, which is basically their only competitor, is in shambles right now (and was in a an even more sorry state around when they probably started working on MW3).
I'm itching for a good single player arcade-y/soldier-y FPS. Anyone have a suggestion? Haven't played CoD (nor BF for that matter) since the one with the No Russian level.
3 days late but, seconded on battlebit! expecially for that arcade feel. it’s all the best parts of battlefield in a package that can run on basically any modern hardware.
I tried the beta a couple weeks ago. Right off the bat, I got windows firewall popups when launching the client which crashed the client. And it's slow to launch too. The menus are terrible. It actually launches a 2nd client from the first one, which prompted another Windows firewall popup which crashed it again, so I had to go through launching both clients again before it actually got around to launching the actual game (I don't think that one actually prompted firewall again).
The gameplay was ok. It was pretty smooth and I saw no obvious bugs or crashes. There were some balance problems, but it is a beta so I wrote those off. At the same time, nothing really stood out to me as new, novel, or innovative. I'm assuming this is what the article means by it feeling like a DLC of the last game. I didn't play the last one but I can see it not being any different. Maybe just new maps. Those kinds of things used to be released for free in games (and many games still do) in order to keep the game alive and retain players so they keep paying those microtransactions.
The biggest problem I had was that I noticed some guns are unlocked just by playing the game. But some guns specifically said they had to be unlocked in the shop. Literally pay to win weapons. I've played CoD games in the past with microtransactions and they always only sold cosmetics so I didn't mind, but weapons now? That's a no from me dawg.
Lastly, I prefer playing games with friends. But due to the nature of randomized respawns in most of the game modes, you don't really experience coordinated gameplay. You could play battle royale but I'm over that now. So I'm back on OW2 instead. While it has stupid expensive skins that used to be free, at least it's not pay to win, and I can enjoy actual team play.
I had the feeling that every CoD since MW was more like a DLC with some new features rather than a fully fledged new game. Unfortunately Battlefield went a similiar route.
I mean if it would be 30 € or you could either purchase a full price standalone or an expansion at half price of your existing standalone game it would be fine.
On the issue of weapons only being unlock-able in the shop, I think that may have been some kind of UI bug in the beta. When I played with my friends, they complained when they saw the “Unlocked in Shop” tag on certain guns. When I looked at them on my end, they had regular level requirements. None of us pre-ordered anything or purchased anything. When I reached the required level in the beta, I unlocked the gun that my friends indicated was “Shop Only”
Everybody complaining about a business practice that works, same as the mobile games with their micro transactions.
Just don’t pay full price for the DLC, let them come back to you with a discount later. It was so obvious when they said they were copying all the skins and maps to MWIII