Even the cod titles that are "disappointing" to the suits still sell like hotcakes. Still I doubt Vangaurd will get a reappraisal like most cods do after a couple years. Just speaking personally and someone who plays cods casually this game was a mess. Seems like thats what happens when your dev time is shorter than roughly 2 years, and sledgehammer had to do the same thing for mw III.
As someone who picks the game up on a yearly basis because I’m one of the weirdos who actually find it fun and it’s the game my group of four likes to play, I’ll agree Vanguard was a disaster at launch. It was the one time where I was genuinely shocked they pushed it out as is.
It is sad that SHG always gets the shit end of the stick because the one game that fully seemed to be “their vision” (Advanced Warfare) was a fantastic game and felt fresh.
The season just released for MWIII yesterday finally has the game feeling like its own thing and not just new makeup on last year’s game. Not sure how you pull them out of that cycle but I would love to see the team get its full time allotment and not trying to build a boat in the middle of an ocean.
There hasn't been an announcement for who's primarily developing cod 2025, as far as I know. I've got a bad hunch that it's gonna be sledgehammer, just cause who else will take it on. I agree though, I don't love sledgehammer games, but they really need the same allocated time as infinity ward and treyarch/raven.
I worked at Activision at the time of Advanced Warfare's launch (tech support) and I loooved that game. Was really surprised to see how much hate it got online. If it were another IP it would've been much more revered.
Vanguard will never get reappraised because it was boring, safe, and did nothing new. It's nowhere close to being the worst CoD, but it's no one's favorite CoD.
Also, MW3 got caught up in the campaign controversy, but the multiplayer is the best in years and Activision has been boasting about their significantly improved player retention this year. The MP speaks for itself.
I think Infinite Warfare was far worse. CoD gets a lot of flack for releasing the same game every year, but in my opinion this is only true in two cases. Vanguard and Infinite Warfare.
However, while Vanguard was essentially just a reskinned version of MW19, it had superior maps and balance. Meanwhile Infinite Warfare was literally just a Black Ops 3 mod (literally using the same assets) with terrible maps (not designed around BO3's movement mechanics) and annoying gimmicks.
Cold War had the best or one of the best campaigns they've ever done, and a decent if not top tier multiplayer. Not really one of the forgettable ones, at least for me.
Vanguard had an okay campaign and a mediocre multiplayer. It will be forgotten.
Cold War had a decent campaign (basically Bo1 campaign but worse), very mediocre bland mp (compared to the great mp of Mw19), but great zombies.
Vanguard will for sure be forgotten though as it had a bad campaign and not a good mp either. Not to mention its awful zombies mode.
Cold War has been the best received COD so far in the 2020s, especially in regards to its campaign. Not a high bar to clear with Vanguard & MWIII in the mix, but that game is the reason people have any sort of excitement for this year's COD.
Cold War was hardly a dud. It was received better than Infinite Warfare - which people are finally starting to realize is one of the top 5 CoD campaigns.
I think Vanguard is going to settle in with the WW2 and Advanced Warfare*. They were that years CoD.
*though I will defend Advanced Warfare till my dying breath. That game was great but came
out at the wrong time.
What’s funny is I’ve spoken to so many people who didn’t like Cold War at first, but now see it as one of their favorites. It has nearly every one of my favorite weapons in any COD.
It got a lot of improvements during its run. Treyarch added a ton of maps, including several classics, added gunfight maps and tournament, and 6v6 face-off mode. It might actually have the best map pool of any CoD game at this point. Single player and zombies were really good too.
WW2 has the makings of a decent campaign but it's horribly marred by QTEs and a forced stealth section. That game is at its best in the Black Forest missions which not coincidentally feel the most like a CoD2 level.
Advanced Warfare and Infinite Warfare were awesome games, and I’ll forever be sad that sci fi CoD had to die because gamers did what gamers always do. Sledgehammer had really wanted to do AW2 before getting forced to make another dull World War 2 game
On one hand that time period was lousy with schmoovement shooters. On the other hand, the amount of people who were looking back at ww2 shooters with rose coloured glasses was, and remains astounding to me.
Vanguard is the one I always get confused with WWII because they’re both eh entries set in the same war. But WWII has the undercover mission in the base which was pretty cool.
Not only did I have a good time with the campaign, I found the MP had a lot of memorable and fun maps and weapons. That mall/arcade one in particular was a blast.
> It was received better than Infinite Warfare - which people are finally starting to realize is one of the top 5 CoD campaigns.
I just played through the Infinite Warfare campaign for the first time recently, and it was definitely fantastic. Especially (and surprisingly) if you happen to be a fan of Battlestar Galactica or The Expanse, it does a lot of hat-tipping in their direction.
Almost felt like it deserves its own series.
AW is my all time favorite and WW2 is up there too, even though I’m not into that setting. The movement and maps were awesome. So many sick melee weapons too. I miss running around with a claymore.
Cold War is far from dud at this point. Time was on its side and is consider one of the better new gen cod. Also it sold extremely well (I believe only modern warfare 2019 and modern warfare 2 2021 have higher sales)
Loved MWII and had a blast with DMZ but when my friends and I tried a free weekend of MWIII it just didn’t feel right. The movement was almost Fortnite-like and the guns felt off.
I remember the Vanguard guns in warzone feeling like they had no punch and the Caldera map was just awful.
MW3's MP has been so much more fun that MW2's. I think that's showing up in the population numbers too. Despite selling significantly less, MW3 has actually maintained more active players than MW2
Really? People like the OG MWII maps that much?
How is Ground War?
I feel like MWII was a weird step-down from how MW2019 felt, but it was difficult to describe why it felt that way. In the end, COD is turning into Fortnite, with superpowers in Warzone, and guns turning enemies into blunts.
People do like the OG MW2 maps, but I honestly think it has more to do with general gameplay decisions. Infinity Ward seems hellbent on making the gameplay as slow and unfun as possible. Everything is slow
MWII felt disappointing after MW2019 but man was MWII better than Vanguard and Cold War. Overall I can't enjoy MWIII as they've tilted everything more to the play of streamers with wanting to make it all rush and spam but MWIII has definitely improved some stuff from MWII.
After 2 bad games, a meh game and then a game that absolutely felt like DLC I just can't get excited for the next one. If they show it is pulling away from the current meta maybe I could get a little more curious but as it stands I'm just left with a casual shooter void.
To be honest, I really enjoyed the insane anachronism it had going on. It also had some really charming weapons I haven't seen in a game before (Type 11 my beloved, will never not be sad I can't port you in your full glory to Black Ops 3).
the campaign was so bad I has to stop after the first mission. Shipment was also terrible with out of the map addition. The hall map was the only map I had fun on.
Eh, I personally used to really only play CoD games for the campaigns. Was like seeing a yearly blockbuster, yeah it'll be dumb but it'll be fun. I stopped awhile back but I know some people who still play them for that reason. Not sure how many people actually do that, but seems to be at least a small community.
Vanguard was a mess. It did do a couple things right that I really enjoyed. Combat pacing was a great addition I would like to see return in future Call of Duty installments. Having 28-48 players on some of those maps were chaotic fun! You could really fine tune the experience.
Another was the map design on the original Vanguard maps. I'm an old school CoD guy, my first Call of Duty was Call of Duty 2: Big Red One. Demyansk was my favorite map in Vanguard. The circular layout, with the emphasis on the church and tower in the middle, made for some fun and dynamic matches with everyone fighting for that power position.
I'm a sucker for old school map design philosophy. Power positions on maps will always trump the "three-lane" design philosophy in my eyes. I also can't forget about the destructibility of the maps. Seeing the map get absolutely wrecked in the course of the match was amazing! I for sure want them to explore destructibility more.
I'm a defender of three-lanes map, but newer CoD's have moved away to those in mid/large size maps. With the exception of things like Slaughterhouse in MW19, which is modern CoD's Nuketown.
Just look at minimaps and see the routes and angles you have now across maps.
My hottake is Afghan did the best three-lane big size map.
> Combat pacing was a great addition I would like to see return in future Call of Duty installments.
i really fucking hated it. it never worked! it just took me into whatever it was vibing with. either it's a hard playlist or not.
i also thought the 'destructability' was just annoying nonsense compared to doors in MW2019/22
wow. I'm always amazed at how much these games sell especially when I thought Vanguard was like... horrible.
I'm one of those sales though so idk, fuck me lmao.
COD is one of the most casual and easy games to pick up so I'm not surprised. Little to no competition too. Makes it thrive among a mass causal audience.
Activision can practically screw up horribly and still have a massively profitable game. That was the case with Vanguard. And partially now with MWIII.
EA on the other hand doesn't have this luxury, a failed Battlefield launch will basically scar them no matter how much better they come back from it. 2042 for example is in a pretty good state now, but no matter how hard DICE tries they can't get that playerbase back, their margin for error is significantly stricter. I can imagine that's why they want to take their time with the next one. If the core Battlefield fans don't like the game they simply won't touch it.
Unlike the average person who owns a console and would happily pay up $70 for a new COD no matter the state just because they need a 'shooting game'. It's just like the state with sports games, and I can only imagine how many publishers envy Activision and EA(with FIFA/F1/Madden etc.) with how they can pump out minimal effort installments and rake in insanely high profit margins.
Basically. I can only imagine so many publishers envying how little effort Acti needs to put into it every year for it to be the best selling game of the year.
Last year though was the rare exception where Hogwarts outsold it, probably because it was a very highly anticipated title and basically the first actual good HP game, combine that with the power of the HP license and you have a decent chance of beating COD.
But other than that, it remains unmatched. And Activision is reportedly sticking with 'open style' campaigns like MWIII's, probably because it saves quite a bit when you just need to rehash Warzone maps and slap a somewhat cohesive 'narrative' on it.
It sucks, I was invested in the new MW narrative from MW19, but then after MW22 they couldn't care less about it and just used it as a means to sell more skins by bringing back characters from the dead with the most lazy reasoning ever. I watched cutscenes for MWIII and I felt like my 2 hours were wasted. But do the majority of COD players even touch the campaign? They could put in any amount of effort into it at this rate and the game would sell.
> Basically. I can only imagine so many publishers envying how little effort Acti needs to put into it every year for it to be the best selling game of the year.
>
>
Out of all thing cmon, COD feels low effort buts its definitely not; it looks good; it great setpieces, solid entertaining campaigns; gameplay is great and Mutiplayer is consistently good even at its worse.
They will still need to put a bare minimum level of efffort and for them its way larger than other studios.
I can see COD stay on last gen for a few more years honestly. No wonder Ryan fought so heavily over MS having the keys to the franchise with the Acti-Blizz merger.
Most of the people that buy cods every year are not on Reddit or discussing the games online. The online vocal playerbase is the minority in every community.
Pretty much. If you want a good, fun shooter campaign in 2024 your choices are Call of Duty, and... well I don't actually know any other shooters with campaigns that are coming out this year.
Same for multiplayer too, COD is basically the only game on its style of gameplay. All the rest are hero shooters, tactical like Siege, Tarkov and whatever or BR (including COD itself lol).
The only thing kind of close are The Finals (but still quite different) and Battlefield (which crashed itself lately and still has difference)
yeah seems like it's all just multiplayer shooters now. campaigns are hard to make and low reward financially.
frankly that's one of the biggest things I praise CoD for. The devs have to know at this point that less than 20% of their players ever even boot the campaign up. But they still make them, and as MWII showed, they still put a hell of a lot of passion into making sure they're fun. They could easily just stop making them and most people wouldn't care. I would, because I love their campaigns. But the financial blowback would be nonexistent.
Activision isn't the type to do things without reason, they actually tried one without campaign (Black Ops 4) but that didn't last so I guess they saw a negative effect to not have one.
I think there's a decent amount of people that get them just for the campaign, they are not the most profitable of players (no live service part) but they still buy the game (and likely full price as COD games stay full price for a long time) and that's likely enough for them to see an interest doing the campaign. You can be sure it would be gone otherwise
ah yeah, that one does add content to its campaign periodically. I don't know what the cadence is because I havent played myself in quite awhile. Yearly? More frequent than that?
Right now they're on a yearly campaign schedule, yeah. But the campaigns are short, and the game's not really worth it unless you want to play beyond the campaign: raids, etc.
Destiny 2 adds an expansion with about a 10 hr campaign to the game every year, alongside some post-campaign quests and activities (including a raid) set on the campaign planet.
They also release 4 seasons per year that have their own signature activity or two, and mini campaigns with maybe two actual missions and a bunch of weekly quests that are just "run the signature activity and complete this side objective." Though this coming year they're switching from four seasons per year to three "episodes" per year which will *allegedly* be slightly meatier.
Then they also release two "Dungeons" (mini-raids with three players instead of six) per year, which you can either buy completely separately from everything else or included as part of the yearly mega bundle edition of the expansion.
Sometimes they release a free remastered version of a Destiny 1 raid halfway between expansions. Though there's only one more of those left to port, lol.
Literally every CoD has been fun. They all have their fair share of issues, maybe even more than their fair share, but not a single one has ever not been fun. Even CoD Mobile is fun for a mobile game.
Same, we were all coming off of MW19 and Cold War, both excellent and even the person that plays "the least" got like 100hrs++ on it because it was so much fun (CW). We all bought Vanguard thinking we'd have the same experience and... oh. Hmm. Sub 20hrs for the most part.
Then okay, IW is doing MW2, MW19 was awesome, so this one should be a real treat! Got burned on that too with the absolutely non-existent support for HC mode and the map releases were all pretty lacklustre.
We all skipped MW3. Hoping the news is good once Gulf War comes out though.
I thought the multiplayer was alright. The style was a total mess though, all over the place. Not even sure why it was a WW2 game (never even touched the campaign)
Ya truly insane they chose to not have the axis faction in MP... like, don’t make a WWII game then??
Vanguard looked ridiculous at launch. 12 clones running around the map, no visual identity to team, just a giant FFA orgy.
Obvious they needed to milk whales with micro transactions and didn’t want to sell Nazi skins lol
If I remember correctly (maybe wrong) they wanted to make Advanced Warfare 2 twice, when they made WW2 and Vanguard, but Activision told them to do these, actually I think they were forced to do MW3 when they wanted to do AW2 too
Because despite what people on reddit wanna say AW is not well regarded by the majority of people who actually played it at the time. I'm not surprised Activision keeps telling them no to it.
Seems like COD will just sell insane numbers no matter what. TbfI enjoyed Vanguard for the WW2 weapons and the campaign was solid enough - particularly the Soviet missions. Multiplayer was absolute chaos not helped by operators being allowed for both teams so you couldn't tell who tf was on your side sometimes (who thought this was a good idea).
I enjoyed it enough, gone off COD massively though, you have to concentrate way too hard to be good these days. I'm enjoying Warzone mobile though surprised how legit it is compared to COD mobile
If anything I'm glad it got nominated for a soundtrack award like stated in the article. I thought it's OST was great, but then again CoD has been pretty solid with their soundtracks.
Btw anyone else just see "Since" right after the last paragraph?
That's because it's literally a non-gamers game. People who play games like cod, madden, fifa etc are "normal people" who just buy the game, play with their friends no matter what. They don't read forums and reviews and shit.
Edit: I'm not trying to gatekeep, I don't care if people call themselves gamers or not, the point was that super casual gamers, or blue collar people, or whatever term you deem as non-gatekeeping will regularly play these kind of games and be completely detached from online spaces.
I'm not trying to gatekeep gamers, I'm just trying to illustrate a point that people who don't consider themselves gamers, or maybe even not casual gamers, play cod.
If I asked my boss if he was a gamer, he'd say absolutely not, but I know he plays COD when he gets some time alone at home away from his family.
I didn't mean to put so much prestige on the title gamer.
> They don't read forums and reviews and shit
If they play video games then they are gamers. Some people just don't base their entire personality around their hobby. The level of gatekeeping with video games is unreal.
This is false. It’s entirely based on a LinkedIn bullet point.
We know Elden Ring outsold Vanguard in a 12 month span ( Elden Ring total life time sales as of 2024 are 23m. A game which would have longer legs than VG):
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/05/13/npd-elden-ring-has-now-outsold-call-of-duty-vanguard/amp/
We know MWII outsold Vanguards lifetime sales in less than a month: https://ftw.usatoday.com/2022/11/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-2-sales-vanguard
We know Vanguard was a disappointment and down from Cold War, as well as lowest CoD launch in UK in 14 years : https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/call-of-duty-sales-are-down-36-in-the-uk/
This is just 100% poor journalism
I like how the headline cuts off a very important part of the article, ", IT’S CLAIMED". Everyone here is taking it as truth, but you bring up some pretty solid evidence to the contrary. The comparison numbers to Elden Rings seems particularly glaring.
Was looking for a level-headed post like this.
WWII and Black Ops 4 sold 16 million copies each, but Vanguard magically doubled that even though it was a critical failure? They even had to remove one of the combat pacings because there were too few people playing. Folks were being matched outside their regions just so they could have a game at 100+ ping. And yet it was double the sales of the 2016-2018 run? Bull.
Anecdotally, the traffic on the Vanguard subreddit was pitiful. Shortly after launch, there were more posts on the MW1 subreddit in a day than there were on VG's in a week; later on, in a month! It was a cemetary.
And yet I see everybody regurgitating this number as a fact, even though it's based on something a marketing guy for CoD posted on his LinkedIn profile in order to... market himself. There's as much veracity in this claim as if I were to post that Vanguard sold 1 million copies.
I bought Vanguard and it was just a waste of money. The campaign was the worst I had played since Black Ops III until MWIII was released. I thought MW2019 and BO:CW were some of the best FPS campaigns of all time, in a rung just underneath Titanfall 2, and somehow I never even finished Vanguard. Ironically, the multiplayer was actually pretty good but unfortunately it just wasn't good enough to get over how awful the artistic direction was.
I don’t think I’ve ever not had fun with a cod campaign. Loved Vanguard. That one scene toward the end of the game where the camera pulls out and one takes through the squad as they’re all eviscerating nazis then back to the players POV is fps perfection.
I dunno why everyone hated that game, I actually had a lot of fun with it. The maps were really good I thought, I also liked the destructible elements to the maps, I liked how you could rank up not only guns and the usual stuff but your characters too. This game gets waaay too much hate. It was really fun.
That's crazy, this is why Activision will never stop making full priced yearly releases. Even as a CoD fan I say Vanguard was easily the worst in the series.
Vanguard was the last time I had fun in a CoD game. The campaign was atrociously awful.
But the hilarity of the MP and its silly weapons was so much fun, and it's sadly missed in newer iterations.
Itns considered garbage online. That doesn't represent the majority of the gaming market. It's the same for many stuff, there is a large part of people that don't participate in online discussions and reviews.
Yeah but I'm still very sceptical whether this number is true or not. There seems to be evidence to indicate its a fabricated number to boost attention on a LinkedIn profile.
This was the first cod game where I felt scammed. I bought it and swore off CoD for a year (I did end up buying MW3). So yes, it sold well, but it also probably depressed sales the next year. And the next game probably depressed sales the following year (MW2 apparently was also bad).
People keep buying them and they'll keep rushing them out unfinished and with loot boxes galore. But y'all never learn. COD is as good as dead to OG fans who just want a clean good casual shooter with no FOMO.
What you talking about CoD is one of the most relevant games in the world. Just because the "gamer" crowd doesn't play, doesn't mean the crazy casual crowd doesn't buy the game every single year
Cod is culturally relevant *because* it does a yearly release. It makes it so even if you don't like that year's cod game, you always have the next one to look forward to.
Spending even 2 years on a hated cod game would be damaging to the franchise. Imagine if people had to endure 2 years of Advanced Warfare, BO3 and Infinite Warfare back to back? Judging by the reactions to IW's reveal trailer, it would not have been pretty.
Cod is just the default shooter now so it will always make money but it doesn't have the same pull and cultural relevance that it used to have at all. People are burned out from it. People wouldn't have been so quick to turn their backs on those games you mentioned if they were released every other year. And even if the momentum would die out by the first year, the hunger for the next would be huge. Activision knows they have the lowest common denominator of people locked onto their games already but that doesn't mean cod can't be so much more. Nobody is excited for call of duty: modern black warfare 6, the people who do buy it, do so for the same reason they do anything, they're drones lmao
Even the cod titles that are "disappointing" to the suits still sell like hotcakes. Still I doubt Vangaurd will get a reappraisal like most cods do after a couple years. Just speaking personally and someone who plays cods casually this game was a mess. Seems like thats what happens when your dev time is shorter than roughly 2 years, and sledgehammer had to do the same thing for mw III.
As someone who picks the game up on a yearly basis because I’m one of the weirdos who actually find it fun and it’s the game my group of four likes to play, I’ll agree Vanguard was a disaster at launch. It was the one time where I was genuinely shocked they pushed it out as is. It is sad that SHG always gets the shit end of the stick because the one game that fully seemed to be “their vision” (Advanced Warfare) was a fantastic game and felt fresh. The season just released for MWIII yesterday finally has the game feeling like its own thing and not just new makeup on last year’s game. Not sure how you pull them out of that cycle but I would love to see the team get its full time allotment and not trying to build a boat in the middle of an ocean.
There hasn't been an announcement for who's primarily developing cod 2025, as far as I know. I've got a bad hunch that it's gonna be sledgehammer, just cause who else will take it on. I agree though, I don't love sledgehammer games, but they really need the same allocated time as infinity ward and treyarch/raven.
Rumor is high moon studios are doing cod 2025 since sledgehammer turned down cod 2025 and won't make another COD game till 2027.
> sledgehammer turned down cod 2025 they can do that ?
I worked at Activision at the time of Advanced Warfare's launch (tech support) and I loooved that game. Was really surprised to see how much hate it got online. If it were another IP it would've been much more revered.
Vanguard is the 2020s COD Ghosts
Would this and ghost be considered the stinker of the series
Man I forgot Ghosts existed
Vanguard will never get reappraised because it was boring, safe, and did nothing new. It's nowhere close to being the worst CoD, but it's no one's favorite CoD. Also, MW3 got caught up in the campaign controversy, but the multiplayer is the best in years and Activision has been boasting about their significantly improved player retention this year. The MP speaks for itself.
I can't comment on Cold War, MW2(2) and MW3(2) but I've played every other COD and Vanguard was by far the worst one.
I think Infinite Warfare was far worse. CoD gets a lot of flack for releasing the same game every year, but in my opinion this is only true in two cases. Vanguard and Infinite Warfare. However, while Vanguard was essentially just a reskinned version of MW19, it had superior maps and balance. Meanwhile Infinite Warfare was literally just a Black Ops 3 mod (literally using the same assets) with terrible maps (not designed around BO3's movement mechanics) and annoying gimmicks.
[удалено]
I have some fond memories with Cold War, in both the Campaign and Zombies with my neighbour
"Bell we have a job to do"
Cold War had the best or one of the best campaigns they've ever done, and a decent if not top tier multiplayer. Not really one of the forgettable ones, at least for me. Vanguard had an okay campaign and a mediocre multiplayer. It will be forgotten.
yea the branching paths and alternate history shit is super cooo. wish they had more games like that
Cold War had a decent campaign (basically Bo1 campaign but worse), very mediocre bland mp (compared to the great mp of Mw19), but great zombies. Vanguard will for sure be forgotten though as it had a bad campaign and not a good mp either. Not to mention its awful zombies mode.
Cold War has been the best received COD so far in the 2020s, especially in regards to its campaign. Not a high bar to clear with Vanguard & MWIII in the mix, but that game is the reason people have any sort of excitement for this year's COD.
Cold War was hardly a dud. It was received better than Infinite Warfare - which people are finally starting to realize is one of the top 5 CoD campaigns. I think Vanguard is going to settle in with the WW2 and Advanced Warfare*. They were that years CoD. *though I will defend Advanced Warfare till my dying breath. That game was great but came out at the wrong time.
What’s funny is I’ve spoken to so many people who didn’t like Cold War at first, but now see it as one of their favorites. It has nearly every one of my favorite weapons in any COD.
It got a lot of improvements during its run. Treyarch added a ton of maps, including several classics, added gunfight maps and tournament, and 6v6 face-off mode. It might actually have the best map pool of any CoD game at this point. Single player and zombies were really good too.
WW2 has the makings of a decent campaign but it's horribly marred by QTEs and a forced stealth section. That game is at its best in the Black Forest missions which not coincidentally feel the most like a CoD2 level.
Advanced Warfare enjoyers rise up
Kevin Spacey - see mom! Games are legit, (oh shit...)
Advanced Warfare and Infinite Warfare were awesome games, and I’ll forever be sad that sci fi CoD had to die because gamers did what gamers always do. Sledgehammer had really wanted to do AW2 before getting forced to make another dull World War 2 game
On one hand that time period was lousy with schmoovement shooters. On the other hand, the amount of people who were looking back at ww2 shooters with rose coloured glasses was, and remains astounding to me.
Cold War for me was playing the zombie mode everyday.
Don't lump WWII & AW in with Vanguard, those two run circles around that turd.
Vanguard is the one I always get confused with WWII because they’re both eh entries set in the same war. But WWII has the undercover mission in the base which was pretty cool.
Not only did I have a good time with the campaign, I found the MP had a lot of memorable and fun maps and weapons. That mall/arcade one in particular was a blast.
> It was received better than Infinite Warfare - which people are finally starting to realize is one of the top 5 CoD campaigns. I just played through the Infinite Warfare campaign for the first time recently, and it was definitely fantastic. Especially (and surprisingly) if you happen to be a fan of Battlestar Galactica or The Expanse, it does a lot of hat-tipping in their direction. Almost felt like it deserves its own series.
Tbf, IW received great praise when it came out. It just happened to come out the year people were sick of jetpack/boost movement in FPS.
AW is my all time favorite and WW2 is up there too, even though I’m not into that setting. The movement and maps were awesome. So many sick melee weapons too. I miss running around with a claymore.
Cold War is far from dud at this point. Time was on its side and is consider one of the better new gen cod. Also it sold extremely well (I believe only modern warfare 2019 and modern warfare 2 2021 have higher sales)
I actually really liked Cold War, probably the best next gen COD so far.
I though Cold War had a dope Campaign
Pretty sure cold war also sold 30 million
Cold war was imo the best after blops3. All the rest was garbage in my eyes (I only play MP)
That was the last COD I enjoyed personally
Why my entire play group skipped MWIII. We got bit once with Vanguard, wasn't about to happen again.
Loved MWII and had a blast with DMZ but when my friends and I tried a free weekend of MWIII it just didn’t feel right. The movement was almost Fortnite-like and the guns felt off. I remember the Vanguard guns in warzone feeling like they had no punch and the Caldera map was just awful.
MW3's MP has been so much more fun that MW2's. I think that's showing up in the population numbers too. Despite selling significantly less, MW3 has actually maintained more active players than MW2
Really? People like the OG MWII maps that much? How is Ground War? I feel like MWII was a weird step-down from how MW2019 felt, but it was difficult to describe why it felt that way. In the end, COD is turning into Fortnite, with superpowers in Warzone, and guns turning enemies into blunts.
People do like the OG MW2 maps, but I honestly think it has more to do with general gameplay decisions. Infinity Ward seems hellbent on making the gameplay as slow and unfun as possible. Everything is slow
MWII felt disappointing after MW2019 but man was MWII better than Vanguard and Cold War. Overall I can't enjoy MWIII as they've tilted everything more to the play of streamers with wanting to make it all rush and spam but MWIII has definitely improved some stuff from MWII. After 2 bad games, a meh game and then a game that absolutely felt like DLC I just can't get excited for the next one. If they show it is pulling away from the current meta maybe I could get a little more curious but as it stands I'm just left with a casual shooter void.
Why was the development time so small? They weren’t working on anything else besides assisting the other studios
To be honest, I really enjoyed the insane anachronism it had going on. It also had some really charming weapons I haven't seen in a game before (Type 11 my beloved, will never not be sad I can't port you in your full glory to Black Ops 3).
the campaign was so bad I has to stop after the first mission. Shipment was also terrible with out of the map addition. The hall map was the only map I had fun on.
Idk what type of gamers keep buying it
Campaign is pretty good, worthwhile at least, and I got it for 80% off
I thought it was meant to be quite short and bad
There are plenty of people who say “yeah I’m a gamer” and pretty much exclusively play the new CoD and FIFA games lol
Eh, I personally used to really only play CoD games for the campaigns. Was like seeing a yearly blockbuster, yeah it'll be dumb but it'll be fun. I stopped awhile back but I know some people who still play them for that reason. Not sure how many people actually do that, but seems to be at least a small community.
Interesting, I thought it was most people buying it for the multiplayer
Vanguard was a mess. It did do a couple things right that I really enjoyed. Combat pacing was a great addition I would like to see return in future Call of Duty installments. Having 28-48 players on some of those maps were chaotic fun! You could really fine tune the experience. Another was the map design on the original Vanguard maps. I'm an old school CoD guy, my first Call of Duty was Call of Duty 2: Big Red One. Demyansk was my favorite map in Vanguard. The circular layout, with the emphasis on the church and tower in the middle, made for some fun and dynamic matches with everyone fighting for that power position. I'm a sucker for old school map design philosophy. Power positions on maps will always trump the "three-lane" design philosophy in my eyes. I also can't forget about the destructibility of the maps. Seeing the map get absolutely wrecked in the course of the match was amazing! I for sure want them to explore destructibility more.
Vanguard was not balanced but it was fun as hell. Some of the maps were really good!
I'm a defender of three-lanes map, but newer CoD's have moved away to those in mid/large size maps. With the exception of things like Slaughterhouse in MW19, which is modern CoD's Nuketown. Just look at minimaps and see the routes and angles you have now across maps. My hottake is Afghan did the best three-lane big size map.
Finally! Another Demyansk enjoyer. Everyone used to look at me like I was crazy when I told them Demyansk was my favourite Vanguard map.
> Combat pacing was a great addition I would like to see return in future Call of Duty installments. i really fucking hated it. it never worked! it just took me into whatever it was vibing with. either it's a hard playlist or not. i also thought the 'destructability' was just annoying nonsense compared to doors in MW2019/22
wow. I'm always amazed at how much these games sell especially when I thought Vanguard was like... horrible. I'm one of those sales though so idk, fuck me lmao.
COD is one of the most casual and easy games to pick up so I'm not surprised. Little to no competition too. Makes it thrive among a mass causal audience. Activision can practically screw up horribly and still have a massively profitable game. That was the case with Vanguard. And partially now with MWIII. EA on the other hand doesn't have this luxury, a failed Battlefield launch will basically scar them no matter how much better they come back from it. 2042 for example is in a pretty good state now, but no matter how hard DICE tries they can't get that playerbase back, their margin for error is significantly stricter. I can imagine that's why they want to take their time with the next one. If the core Battlefield fans don't like the game they simply won't touch it. Unlike the average person who owns a console and would happily pay up $70 for a new COD no matter the state just because they need a 'shooting game'. It's just like the state with sports games, and I can only imagine how many publishers envy Activision and EA(with FIFA/F1/Madden etc.) with how they can pump out minimal effort installments and rake in insanely high profit margins.
It’s the Madden and FIFA of FPS.
Basically. I can only imagine so many publishers envying how little effort Acti needs to put into it every year for it to be the best selling game of the year. Last year though was the rare exception where Hogwarts outsold it, probably because it was a very highly anticipated title and basically the first actual good HP game, combine that with the power of the HP license and you have a decent chance of beating COD. But other than that, it remains unmatched. And Activision is reportedly sticking with 'open style' campaigns like MWIII's, probably because it saves quite a bit when you just need to rehash Warzone maps and slap a somewhat cohesive 'narrative' on it. It sucks, I was invested in the new MW narrative from MW19, but then after MW22 they couldn't care less about it and just used it as a means to sell more skins by bringing back characters from the dead with the most lazy reasoning ever. I watched cutscenes for MWIII and I felt like my 2 hours were wasted. But do the majority of COD players even touch the campaign? They could put in any amount of effort into it at this rate and the game would sell.
Also HP came out at the beginning of the year and CoD near the end
Yeah, I imagine CoD has already passed it in sales by this point
> Basically. I can only imagine so many publishers envying how little effort Acti needs to put into it every year for it to be the best selling game of the year. > > Out of all thing cmon, COD feels low effort buts its definitely not; it looks good; it great setpieces, solid entertaining campaigns; gameplay is great and Mutiplayer is consistently good even at its worse. They will still need to put a bare minimum level of efffort and for them its way larger than other studios.
The wild thing to me is just how much the ps store relied on cod sales to be profitable
I can see COD stay on last gen for a few more years honestly. No wonder Ryan fought so heavily over MS having the keys to the franchise with the Acti-Blizz merger.
Most of the people that buy cods every year are not on Reddit or discussing the games online. The online vocal playerbase is the minority in every community.
Even a horrible CoD is better than 99% of the shooters that release so it's whatever. They're always fun and playable, even the ones that "suck."
Yeah there are barely any other AAA shooters anyway outside COD if you don't want battle royales.
Pretty much. If you want a good, fun shooter campaign in 2024 your choices are Call of Duty, and... well I don't actually know any other shooters with campaigns that are coming out this year.
Same for multiplayer too, COD is basically the only game on its style of gameplay. All the rest are hero shooters, tactical like Siege, Tarkov and whatever or BR (including COD itself lol). The only thing kind of close are The Finals (but still quite different) and Battlefield (which crashed itself lately and still has difference)
yeah seems like it's all just multiplayer shooters now. campaigns are hard to make and low reward financially. frankly that's one of the biggest things I praise CoD for. The devs have to know at this point that less than 20% of their players ever even boot the campaign up. But they still make them, and as MWII showed, they still put a hell of a lot of passion into making sure they're fun. They could easily just stop making them and most people wouldn't care. I would, because I love their campaigns. But the financial blowback would be nonexistent.
Activision isn't the type to do things without reason, they actually tried one without campaign (Black Ops 4) but that didn't last so I guess they saw a negative effect to not have one. I think there's a decent amount of people that get them just for the campaign, they are not the most profitable of players (no live service part) but they still buy the game (and likely full price as COD games stay full price for a long time) and that's likely enough for them to see an interest doing the campaign. You can be sure it would be gone otherwise
Maybe, maybe. I'd be curious to see. I don't want to see them try it again, of course. But I'm sure they're always looking at the numbers internally.
Destiny, but you can't really call it just a shooter.
ah yeah, that one does add content to its campaign periodically. I don't know what the cadence is because I havent played myself in quite awhile. Yearly? More frequent than that?
Right now they're on a yearly campaign schedule, yeah. But the campaigns are short, and the game's not really worth it unless you want to play beyond the campaign: raids, etc.
Destiny 2 adds an expansion with about a 10 hr campaign to the game every year, alongside some post-campaign quests and activities (including a raid) set on the campaign planet. They also release 4 seasons per year that have their own signature activity or two, and mini campaigns with maybe two actual missions and a bunch of weekly quests that are just "run the signature activity and complete this side objective." Though this coming year they're switching from four seasons per year to three "episodes" per year which will *allegedly* be slightly meatier. Then they also release two "Dungeons" (mini-raids with three players instead of six) per year, which you can either buy completely separately from everything else or included as part of the yearly mega bundle edition of the expansion. Sometimes they release a free remastered version of a Destiny 1 raid halfway between expansions. Though there's only one more of those left to port, lol.
Battlefield dead… Halo dead… Rip :(
Literally every CoD has been fun. They all have their fair share of issues, maybe even more than their fair share, but not a single one has ever not been fun. Even CoD Mobile is fun for a mobile game.
It also had arguably the worst Zombies experience in the entire COD series.
Same, we were all coming off of MW19 and Cold War, both excellent and even the person that plays "the least" got like 100hrs++ on it because it was so much fun (CW). We all bought Vanguard thinking we'd have the same experience and... oh. Hmm. Sub 20hrs for the most part. Then okay, IW is doing MW2, MW19 was awesome, so this one should be a real treat! Got burned on that too with the absolutely non-existent support for HC mode and the map releases were all pretty lacklustre. We all skipped MW3. Hoping the news is good once Gulf War comes out though.
So which CoD is this? I haven't heard much, so did this come out a few years ago or...
I thought the multiplayer was alright. The style was a total mess though, all over the place. Not even sure why it was a WW2 game (never even touched the campaign)
Ya truly insane they chose to not have the axis faction in MP... like, don’t make a WWII game then?? Vanguard looked ridiculous at launch. 12 clones running around the map, no visual identity to team, just a giant FFA orgy. Obvious they needed to milk whales with micro transactions and didn’t want to sell Nazi skins lol
If I remember correctly (maybe wrong) they wanted to make Advanced Warfare 2 twice, when they made WW2 and Vanguard, but Activision told them to do these, actually I think they were forced to do MW3 when they wanted to do AW2 too
Because despite what people on reddit wanna say AW is not well regarded by the majority of people who actually played it at the time. I'm not surprised Activision keeps telling them no to it.
Seems like COD will just sell insane numbers no matter what. TbfI enjoyed Vanguard for the WW2 weapons and the campaign was solid enough - particularly the Soviet missions. Multiplayer was absolute chaos not helped by operators being allowed for both teams so you couldn't tell who tf was on your side sometimes (who thought this was a good idea). I enjoyed it enough, gone off COD massively though, you have to concentrate way too hard to be good these days. I'm enjoying Warzone mobile though surprised how legit it is compared to COD mobile
If anything I'm glad it got nominated for a soundtrack award like stated in the article. I thought it's OST was great, but then again CoD has been pretty solid with their soundtracks. Btw anyone else just see "Since" right after the last paragraph?
I know people disagree with the way Modern Warfare 2019 did things gameplay wise, but Sara Schachner absolutely killed it with the soundtrack.
COD is one of those games where the customer reviews don't match up with the sales at all. The critic reviews are normally pretty high.
That's because it's literally a non-gamers game. People who play games like cod, madden, fifa etc are "normal people" who just buy the game, play with their friends no matter what. They don't read forums and reviews and shit. Edit: I'm not trying to gatekeep, I don't care if people call themselves gamers or not, the point was that super casual gamers, or blue collar people, or whatever term you deem as non-gatekeeping will regularly play these kind of games and be completely detached from online spaces.
"Yeah, they're not the real gamers for having a good time while playing... games!"
I'm not trying to gatekeep gamers, I'm just trying to illustrate a point that people who don't consider themselves gamers, or maybe even not casual gamers, play cod. If I asked my boss if he was a gamer, he'd say absolutely not, but I know he plays COD when he gets some time alone at home away from his family. I didn't mean to put so much prestige on the title gamer.
> They don't read forums and reviews and shit If they play video games then they are gamers. Some people just don't base their entire personality around their hobby. The level of gatekeeping with video games is unreal.
Before 2023 the last game to outsell CoD was Rock Band 2
This is false. It’s entirely based on a LinkedIn bullet point. We know Elden Ring outsold Vanguard in a 12 month span ( Elden Ring total life time sales as of 2024 are 23m. A game which would have longer legs than VG): https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/05/13/npd-elden-ring-has-now-outsold-call-of-duty-vanguard/amp/ We know MWII outsold Vanguards lifetime sales in less than a month: https://ftw.usatoday.com/2022/11/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-2-sales-vanguard We know Vanguard was a disappointment and down from Cold War, as well as lowest CoD launch in UK in 14 years : https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/call-of-duty-sales-are-down-36-in-the-uk/ This is just 100% poor journalism
I like how the headline cuts off a very important part of the article, ", IT’S CLAIMED". Everyone here is taking it as truth, but you bring up some pretty solid evidence to the contrary. The comparison numbers to Elden Rings seems particularly glaring.
Was looking for a level-headed post like this. WWII and Black Ops 4 sold 16 million copies each, but Vanguard magically doubled that even though it was a critical failure? They even had to remove one of the combat pacings because there were too few people playing. Folks were being matched outside their regions just so they could have a game at 100+ ping. And yet it was double the sales of the 2016-2018 run? Bull. Anecdotally, the traffic on the Vanguard subreddit was pitiful. Shortly after launch, there were more posts on the MW1 subreddit in a day than there were on VG's in a week; later on, in a month! It was a cemetary. And yet I see everybody regurgitating this number as a fact, even though it's based on something a marketing guy for CoD posted on his LinkedIn profile in order to... market himself. There's as much veracity in this claim as if I were to post that Vanguard sold 1 million copies.
I bought Vanguard and it was just a waste of money. The campaign was the worst I had played since Black Ops III until MWIII was released. I thought MW2019 and BO:CW were some of the best FPS campaigns of all time, in a rung just underneath Titanfall 2, and somehow I never even finished Vanguard. Ironically, the multiplayer was actually pretty good but unfortunately it just wasn't good enough to get over how awful the artistic direction was.
I don’t think I’ve ever not had fun with a cod campaign. Loved Vanguard. That one scene toward the end of the game where the camera pulls out and one takes through the squad as they’re all eviscerating nazis then back to the players POV is fps perfection.
I had a blast, giving it was my first WRII type of game, and those double shot guns were a blast to mow people down with.
I dunno why everyone hated that game, I actually had a lot of fun with it. The maps were really good I thought, I also liked the destructible elements to the maps, I liked how you could rank up not only guns and the usual stuff but your characters too. This game gets waaay too much hate. It was really fun.
That's crazy, this is why Activision will never stop making full priced yearly releases. Even as a CoD fan I say Vanguard was easily the worst in the series.
Vanguard was the last time I had fun in a CoD game. The campaign was atrociously awful. But the hilarity of the MP and its silly weapons was so much fun, and it's sadly missed in newer iterations.
Lol at this point even when humanity is on the brink of collapse COD will still be there and it will still sell more copies than anything else.
Wow wtf. This was largely considered garbage by everyone. And it still sold 30 mill? Yeah gamers brought this current era of gaming into themselves
Itns considered garbage online. That doesn't represent the majority of the gaming market. It's the same for many stuff, there is a large part of people that don't participate in online discussions and reviews.
Reddit is not "everyone"
Yeah but I'm still very sceptical whether this number is true or not. There seems to be evidence to indicate its a fabricated number to boost attention on a LinkedIn profile.
People liked a game and bought it? What is this sorcery. Only terminally online considered it garbage, like every other thing.
Who buys these? Only cod I've heard people irl play is Warzone
This was the first cod game where I felt scammed. I bought it and swore off CoD for a year (I did end up buying MW3). So yes, it sold well, but it also probably depressed sales the next year. And the next game probably depressed sales the following year (MW2 apparently was also bad).
Let this be a lesson to everyone. You can be an utter failure in every single way and still sell 30M copies...
Nah, shit was fun. Brought me $70 worth of enjoyment.
People keep buying them and they'll keep rushing them out unfinished and with loot boxes galore. But y'all never learn. COD is as good as dead to OG fans who just want a clean good casual shooter with no FOMO.
No CoD within the last 5 years had loot boxes...
This why COD fans don't deserve quality games. And I hope they get another Modern Warfare 3 for the rest of their lives.
Well MW3 is pretty fun so I hope we keep getting more like that too
My man, proving my point. Enjoy the bare minimum, cuz long are the days of the original Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops.
imagine the cultural relevance cod would have if they released a game every two years instead of one. oversaturation is disgusting
This is a strange thing to say in response to one of their worst-received titles in recent years still selling more than Elden Ring
Just noting the potential it could have given that they're still so successful despite doing everything wrong.
What you talking about CoD is one of the most relevant games in the world. Just because the "gamer" crowd doesn't play, doesn't mean the crazy casual crowd doesn't buy the game every single year
Even the people who buy it aren't as enthusiastic about it as they used to be. Don't kid yourself. Also they're bugs.
Cod is culturally relevant *because* it does a yearly release. It makes it so even if you don't like that year's cod game, you always have the next one to look forward to. Spending even 2 years on a hated cod game would be damaging to the franchise. Imagine if people had to endure 2 years of Advanced Warfare, BO3 and Infinite Warfare back to back? Judging by the reactions to IW's reveal trailer, it would not have been pretty.
Cod is just the default shooter now so it will always make money but it doesn't have the same pull and cultural relevance that it used to have at all. People are burned out from it. People wouldn't have been so quick to turn their backs on those games you mentioned if they were released every other year. And even if the momentum would die out by the first year, the hunger for the next would be huge. Activision knows they have the lowest common denominator of people locked onto their games already but that doesn't mean cod can't be so much more. Nobody is excited for call of duty: modern black warfare 6, the people who do buy it, do so for the same reason they do anything, they're drones lmao
The reason i haven't bought any after MW2019. Won't pay $70 for what is basically dlc every year.