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.
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.
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 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 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.
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
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.
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
No it’s clear that it was meant to be a DLC for PS4 but they reworked it into a new game for PS5 so they could make more money. What’s better for them: $30 for a DLC or $70-$100 to rehash it as a separate game?
Is anyone even surprised that Activision is doing another shitty thing though?
It’s seemed like ever since COD2 came out it went downhill from there. Sure, there are a few they got right and attracted some loyal fans from it, but damn.
I feel like the whole “fans deserve better” was what people said seven releases ago. They just been failing upwards and seeing how badly they can treat players and get away with it. And apparently, it’s a lot!
Do the fans deserve better? If they mindlessly pre-order and buy every yearly release regardless of quality or reviews… they get what they paid for.
Same with most sports games that are just yearly roster updates at full-price, same with Pokemon, other rushed franchise installments, etc. Obviously, this is mainly the fault of greedy publishers, but the point remains: they couldn’t get away with this if people didn’t jump to buy the newest game installment every year.
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.
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.
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.
It was a better package deal when Zombies was at its heyday. It was the only reason I got CODs, though I would play multi as well. Now that Zombies is a pile of steaming shit I have no reason to buy COD.
I think those of us who spend a little more time on forums and such talking about games really over estimate how knowledgeable the average consumer is about these things. Millions of people never, ever question the quality of games they want. They played call of duty for a decade, so they just kinda have an expectation. Same thing when I go out to buy a loaf of bread. Just more expensive lol
So it’s not a faux-shock. For some people this is the first time they bought a game that they had an expectation for and it fell radically short. Why else would they start complaining? They haven’t had a reason to before and they just aren’t generally aware of all of this. If you ask the average call of duty player what they think of Activision, they probably have little to no opinion on them and haven’t even heard of Blizzard. Just like how I don’t have an opinion on every single director, movie studio, etc.
Agreed. To us, it’s not surprising because we decided to look into it because we’re either big into a series, or we got burned enough in the past. for others? It’s either legit the first time they’ve gotten burned, or the straw that broke the camel’s back and made them at least somewhat critical/wary of the media they consume.
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.
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
Didn’t the last few also have paid-for fatalities? Or were those fatalities just tied to paid-for characters? I don’t have them but I remember a friend’s kid whining about it a while back.
(No that doesn’t mean buying games. No that doesn’t mean subscriptions. No that doesn’t mean expansions. No that doesn’t mean card games. No that doesn’t mean arcades. Jesus Christ, do people find a lot of ways to get mad about nonsense, whenever I say this.)
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money. Absolutely fucking nothing. All possible forms are abuse, built on how games by definition invent value for worthless elements that can be arbitrarily granted or withheld. That is what makes them games.
The business model is intolerable - and if we allow it to continue, there will be nothing else. It’s the dominant strategy. Your disgust and non-participation will never outweigh some tiny fraction of people getting taken for obscene quantities of real money in exchange for incrementing a variable. It’s in free mobile trash. It’s in $80 “AAA” flagship-franchise titles. It’s in single-player, multi-player, subscription MMOs - it’s in everything. There is zero incentive for them not to try robbing you like this. Companies that don’t rob you will make less money than companies that do.
So many kids are stuck on terrible games that force them to get angry and beg mommy and daddy to buy stuff in a game. My youngest is forever stuck doing this and it drives me nuts.
I try to avoid making it about kids, because adults are just as exploited. The victims these bastards describe as “whales” to be hunted have jobs and houses and everything - and they’re spending a whole lot of money on a whole lot of nothing.
Yeah that’s fair. I know as an adult I have more control so I avoid those games (now) but once you’re in, your locked into that fomo.
But I see it negatively impacting my kids more than anything. Imagine growing up playing those games… I had Mario and games you bought and owned lol I can’t relate to most of the games of today.
While absolutely too many things are charged for in gaming today (exp boosts? skip potions? cheat armor that was already fully developed at launch? all ways to get your company on my high seas list).... in the specific case where (1) new content is continuously being developed AND (2) the game is not asking for mandatory spending to continue playing (e.g. no expansion pack to purchase, no subscription fees), I don't think the concept of charging for in-game content at all is abusive.
If I buy once and then a year later some optional paid cosmetics or other goodies are added, I think that's permissible. And if I'm in a free to play live service game, I recognize the ongoing dev costs need to get covered somewhere.
I do vastly prefer those companies that give their games TLC and updates for free, and I'm not saying the standard pricing for optional purchases in the modern market are reasonable. But I think the existence of in-game purchases, if not their current state, can make sense sometimes.
“Free to play live service games” are a scam. They’re built on an abusive business model, where addiction and frustration are the only way the game makes money. Fuck their costs. They spend that money because they know they can squeeze it back out of you, if you let them keep subtly disappointing you and dangling the option to open your wallet.
What you want is like saying casinos are okay if they just had better odds. It is an optimistic misunderstanding how this garbage works. All incentives point toward making you less happy, so you can pay them to fix that, but keeping you unaware and unwilling to quit. Charging real money doesn’t just cost more for less content - it is making games objectively less enjoyable.
Maximum profit cannot come from a good game that’s fun to play for an entire year. It comes from day-one fuckery, either gouging gentle enough to keep people from running scared, or gouging hard enough that their boycott counts for nothing.
You're writing all live service games as being based on frustration when that absolutely isn't the case, so I have to think you have too many preconceived notions on this subject to actually be open to a conversation about it.
Oh well. No game is for everyone and sometimes the pay content is worth it just because it's damn awesome.
Frustration is the only reason people give them money. Fear of missing out, forced waiting, rolling the dice in vain - there’s endless ways to make people want something and not get it. Directly monetizing that manufactured desire is an abuse of why anyone plays games.
If you’re having fun without paying them, they’re losing money. Or at best - you’re the AI for paying players to treat like chumps.
I guess ‘you just don’t like it’ goes on the list of reasons people make up instead of addressing the argument.
Lol, instead of addressing what argument? Your argument is entirely "nuh-uh, you are frustrated. I know you are because my argument would fall apart if you weren't, so you are. It's just that you like being frustrated."
It's just not the case. There are rare good ones out there, and if that frustrates you into claiming I'm some masochist and therefore my enjoyment is somehow invalid, that's your own whole subscription of issues.
I named three unambiguously commonplace examples of what I’m talking about. Every single game that squeezes money out of people, over and over, uses some equivalent tricks. That’s what squeezes the money out of people. If you can’t deal with that and want to make up a conversation, have it with yourself and leave me alone.
You‘re a rate breed in this sub. Someone who actually sees what is happening.
But in other words: there should be gaming reviewers that check for any kind of on top cost (that is not an additional expansion imo) and divide games in easy to distinguish categories (green and red for example). Green is without money making schemes.
That way you can just check out the games without these mechanics if you like, like I would.
Unfortunately, even that wouldn’t be reliable information, because several major games have added this crap in after launch. Sometimes immediately. Sometimes after a few weeks on sale.
Even if clear warnings were accurate, I worry they’d just encourage the thought-terminating cliche of “just don’t buy it.” I’m already not-buying it as hard as I can. It’s still spreading. Fools think that proves it’s what consumers want, when obviously it’s so profitable that boycotts can’t work.
You are 100% correct. The same is correct for social media and there are studies that indicate that social media is „trapping“ people through their mechanics, dark patterns and peer pressure.
I‘m still baffled that some people (on lemmy!) are not able to understand why big corpos=bad.
Even fucking Mastodon implemented infinite scrolling. Shoved that right in there when Twitter caught fire - if there’s an option to go back to what I signed up for, I have not found it.
It used to be cleanly paginated like mobile Twitter… back when mobile Twitter existed. You’d get 20 or 40 posts in a row, and then a Next link. Which I think was based on timestamps instead of being /page/2 nonsense, so reloading a tab would actually put you where you left off, instead of some arbitrary distance behind the eternal present.
It’s an antipattern. It prevents you from segmenting your time on a site, so you’re more likely to just keep going, never recognizing it’s been hours.
It’s also dogshit for usability. Are you trying to catch up on some artist’s comic? Have fun holding Page Down for half an hour. Hope the site doesn’t reload whenever it feels like it.
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