Title: Thabo's Tirades: What Call Of Duty Meant To Me
Author: MG Thabo
Recovered Author: MG Thabo
Published Date: 2016-05-03
Original URL: https://geeknode.co.za/2016/05/thabos-tirades-what-call-of-duty-meant-to-me
Wayback URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20170703043359id_/http://www.geeknode.co.za/2016/05/thabos-tirades-what-call-of-duty-meant-to-me/
Recovery Confidence: high
Categories: Editorial
Tags: call of duty, call of duty 4, call of duty black ops, call of duty infinite warfare, call of duty modern warfare, column, exclusive, infinity ward, modern warfare, thabo's tirades

- MG Thabo

- 1 year ago

-

The views contained in this article are that of the author and should not be taken as the opinion of Geek Node as a publication.

Call of Duty has taken the gaming world by storm ever since it first released way back in 2003. Through its many years, it has evolved into a media powerhouse, bringing in billions of dollars and a ton of fanfare. Since its move to yearly releases, Call of Duty has become sort of a tradition every year. Always releasing in November and always having a ton of hype and expectations around it. It also became one of my traditions as well. Throughout the years, without fail, I got my hands on the latest Call of Duty. I honestly don’t know how I managed to do it for so long, but I always had that year’s installment. And for the most part, I loved it.

My love for the franchise, much like many others, came with the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I played Call of Duty 2 and 3 and enjoyed them just fine, but Modern Warfare truly blew me away. The modern setting, the excellent narrative, the incredibly tense and sometimes stressful gameplay and the amazing multiplayer had me hooked on it for so long. I even joined a clan and was one of the best players in South Africa for a brief moment in time. Back then we only really had one or two servers with local people playing in them and it was all very intimate and fun. Right now you will have South Africans crawling out of the woodwork whenever you play a Call of Duty game.

I have a weird admiration for Call of Duty games, even if I do think that the series needs some serious shaking up to keep itself relevant. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare has a pretty mammoth task to accomplish for me and that is to pull me back into Call of Duty. Why does it have to do that? Because Black Ops 3 sort of ruined it for me, after all this time. But lets start with a little backstory.

Call of Duty campaigns have never been Oscar winners, for sure, but they do have a cohesive narrative and some great setpieces. Every Call of Duty that I’ve played, including the much hated Ghosts, has been a treat for me. As part of my yearly Call of Duty tradition, I start the game on Veteran and enjoy the challenge as well as the setpieces. I’ve always had a good time during these campaigns, even if they didn’t blow me away with their narrative like Modern Warfare did. I went in not expecting the world and when it didn’t give me the world, I wasn’t disappointed. Sometimes the games have a great narrative which is a lovely bonus. The original Black Ops had a very interesting story dealing with more out there concepts and was more involved than previous games. It dealt with concepts that weren’t really common in shooter games and I loved it for it.

Black Ops 2 is probably my favourite next to Modern Warfare as it got really close to having a story that truly mattered. The main antagonist had motivations and you could witness those motivations for yourself, you actually had to make tough choices and the narrative blended together so perfectly. Also a thing that Black Ops 2 nailed was the multiplayer. It was busy, but it felt so satisfying to play and I believe it has some of the best maps in the series.

I’ve always played each Call of Duty’s multiplayer and it unfortunately got a lot harder for me to get into it as time went on. Modern Warfare’s multiplayer was simple, but unbelievably elegant. The perk system wasn’t too robust and you could get a great loadout pretty quickly. The killstreaks were simple: 3 kills you get a UAV, 5 an airstrike and 7 a chopper. There weren’t too many weapons and mods so the process of getting a gun that suits you didn’t take long at all. There was also a simple leveling system that got you hooked pretty easily because you just wanted to improve and unlock more stuff,

With subsequent games, the muliplayer got a lot more crowded, both by players and by mechanics. When I hop onto a recent Call of Duty’s multiplayer mode, I get overwhelmed by options and stuff I need to figure out and that puts me off. I don’t want to fiddle with a whole smorgasbord of perks, killstreaks, challenges, credits, cosmetic options, crates and so on and so forth. Recent Call of Duty games seemed more like puzzle games than anything else with the amount of time it took you to figure things out. This is a big symptom of the problem I now have with Call of Duty: the unbelievable amount of excess.

I was highly anticipating Black Ops 3 because of my enjoyment of the previous games and when I played the campaign, I absolutely hated it. It was mostly military people screaming fuck, shit and motherfucker into your ear, people constantly shouting at each other and explosions every 2 seconds because they probably thought their audience had the attention span of a goldfish with down-syndrome. Its narrative was ambitious, I’ll give them that, but the story was presented so poorly that it made me not care at all about what was happening. While the story was more conceptual and abstract than, say, Modern Warfare 3, it was just a rollercoaster ride of loud noises, people not abiding by social etiquette and half baked ideas. At least Modern Warfare 3 had a cohesive narrative with a little juxtaposition thrown in there to break the monotony of shooting people in hallways and looking at explosions.

I’ve always hold out a little hope that Call of Duty would have a campaign with the similar emotional impact that Spec Ops: The Line had on me. That game broke you and really showed you the horrors of war. Black Ops 3 was a themepark ride designed for teenagers with ADD. And now, after all this time, I’m tired of Call of Duty. They became too big and started shoveling content into their games without considering the overall level of quality and now it just felt tired and uninteresting. This is the same sentiment that many people have had for quite a while, but I often thought they were a little too petty. Now I fully understand.

It’s telling that I’m more interested in Modern Warfare’s remaster than I am for Infinite Warfare. In my eyes, they need to dial things back a little, get back in touch with the simple elegance that Modern Warfare achieved. Everyone calls for the series to do something fresh, but I firmly believe that they just need to take a step back from their multi-million dollar throne and really look at what makes the franchise so special to begin with. People have even been begging them to go back to World War 2 because the franchise became so huge that it feels overwhelming. Fans are also starting to rebel a little, if you look at the dislike ratio on the Infinite Warfare trailer.

Call of Duty will always remain special to me, but it’s a turbulent relationship. I often feel bad for liking it as much as I do and they do some really stupid things with the franchise sometimes. But there’s a reason why it’s as big as it is and that’s because it is often dripping with quality. They just need to make it fun to play again.

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MG Thabo

Guest Contributor

Marko has played way too many games, listened to way too many metal albums and is probably taller than you. He is a qualified language and communication practitioner and likes to write about the good things in gaming.

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Article Tags:
call of duty · call of duty 4 · call of duty black ops · call of duty infinite warfare · call of duty modern warfare · column · exclusive · infinity ward · modern warfare · thabo's tirades

Article Categories:
Editorial
