The Metacritic Users bomb Call of Duty again

[Scow2]

CoD might be stale, but they're stale at a very high level.

Stale at a very high level

Really? Really?

Here, do you want this pizza? It's all you'll have for the next 2 weeks. The same thing, day in, day out. I'm not even gonna try to improve it. Do you think you might get sick of it at the end? Do you think you may enjoy it less as time goes on and loses all that is fresh and original about it? What? You would? But it's stale at a high quality!

That's a silly argument. If a game from a different franchise can be a lazy rip-off for being the same thing as a CoD game, a CoD game can be too. The name doesn't give it any kind of special dispensation. It's stale, it adds nothing. Whatever its good qualities are, it's something that's been done before and something you can get cheaper elsewhere. It's just not worth the bother.

You may get sick of Pizza if that's all you want, but each version of Call of Duty, while it may be the same recipe, is freshly-baked. If YOU can't be bothered to occassionally order something OTHER than CoD pizza, that's you're problem, not the developers. To use this analogy, it's like calling up Pizza Hut or Dominoes for your daily order and whining that they only sell pizza (And maybe occassionally Breadstick spinoffs), and you're hungry for a Sub.

And the name does give it something special - consistency. If you're a fan of, say, Domino's Pepperoni pizza, and you like their recipe, and they make it fresh every day (Or in this analogy, a similar game every year - the reset server and MP ranks DOES freshen the game), it's fine to dismiss, say, Little Caeser's pepperoni pizza as inferior (To your tastes). The analogy kinda starts to break down since pizza is such a staple food where I'm from.

I'm not sure what you're saying..... Are you saying that people buy CoD because they want consistency. Because that really is where a food metaphor breaks down. Namely in that you buy pizza and games in very different quantities for very different reasons.

I guess if you want to say that buying a "season pass" for CoD multiplayer is like buying a pizza out of habit, then I guess that works. Although it is paying $60 for an upgrade, and a minor one if that, seeing as many other servers are still working today. That might be one reason to buy it, I guess. If it's one of the few games you play, that might be a perfectly acceptable reason to buy it. But it does seem a bit much to pay. Then again, there are people paying more than that for football season tickers. I guess we'll have to deal with frat-boys as gaming expands. Might as well get used to it.

$60 a year isn't much, especially if it's the only game you play. Call of Duty is VERY much an E-sport. People buy it because it's the same enough each year to not alienate the playerbase, while also different enough (for example, the perk changes in each game) to give the series a sense of "direction" and evolution with the times. And then, there are probably those who only buy every other or every third year, instead of every every year. The community changes over time as people move on, get sick of the exact same rules, maps, and guns, and become complacent in their ranking. The leaderboard/progress reset, new gun and map roster (With "legacy maps" being updated), and rule tweaks break the complacency and reinvigorate the player base.

My only complaint is that it's Activision's Call of Duty doing this, instead of Epic's Unreal Tournament. The shooter genre would be MUCH better if it featured colorful, fantastic environments, audacious, unique player avatars, and exotic weapons with more than just cosmetic differences between them. I wouldn't care if it ended up gaining regenerating health, killstreaks, and CoD's other additions to the genre if Unreal Tournament became THE E-sport shooter.

 

[Osbojo]

This is another reason I'm not a huge fan of the 1-10 rating scale with a bunch of decimal places. I've always used 1-5 because its simpler and easier to convey what the overall impression of the game is. Can anyone tell me what the difference between a 9.1 and an 8.8 is? I think games must be treated differently than other forms of media because it's possible for a game to just be broken. 0 should only apply to a game that is completely unplayable.