Re: It's Hard To Blame Them...

On Mon, 28 Oct 2024 08:48:37 +0000, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

On 28/10/2024 02:19, PW wrote:

I can't blame them either.  COD Black Ops 6 is out, with mixed
reviews.
 
I haven't played a COD game probably since before Black OPs came out I
think so you can't blame me! :-)
 
I don't think I have any of those games listed!
 

>
I bought Cod:1 and its expansion and very much enjoyed them. CoD:2 + 3 I
found on the high seas. 2 was ok but it was already showing more leaning
to set scene spectaculars. 3 I finished but can't say I enjoyed.
>
I did toy with the idea of getting Cod:WWII but I'm not paying that
price for something I'll finish in a few days.

Yeah, the only reason I stuck around with the "Call of Duty" series as
long as I did was because the first game (and even more so, its
singular expansion) were excellent experiences. I rank "Call of Duty:
United Offensive" as one of the better single-player FPS games made.

COD2 was less entertaining, although not entirely because of faults of
its own. By 2005, the entire World War II FPS genre was getting a bit
stale and as much fun as it was to put Nazis in their place, I was
ready for something new. Still, the visuals were nice (I particularly
enjoyed the smoke-grenade effects) and the gameplay was solid, if not
quite as exciting as its predecessor.

I stuck with the franchise through the "Modern Warfare" trilogy, again
largely because memories of the first game gave me hope that the
franchise would reach such heights again. The gameplay of those games
wasn't too bad, but the ra-ra-America-So-Great! attitude of that
trilogy games (existant even in the original COD but somewhat subdued
by its international mission structure) was a real turn-off. So too
was the heavy-handed reliance on scripting (to the point you sometimes
couldn't even open a door without the AI doing it for you), and the
player character changing from a simple grunt into a super-human
killing machine.

    [The Modern Warfare games also killed what little remained
     of my interest in playing multiplayer games over the
     internet. The games attracted the WORST players... and I'm
     not talking about their skill levels. The foul-mouthed ten-
     year old may not have been created by these games, but they
     definitely seemed to be a mainstay of its audience.]

I had lingering hopes that "World at War" (set again on WW2
battlefields) might revitalize the series -a return to its roots, as
it were- but, no. It was everything I disliked about the Modern
Warfare games all over again. So when I finally went into "Black Ops"
in 2010, it _wasn't_ with any high expectations. Nonetheless, even I
was surprised at how bad that game was

   [Rumors that you could walk through the first mission without
    firing a shot are 100% true. The AI was so bad and the
    scripting so forced that its almost impossible to die despite
    the fact that dozens of bad guys are shooting at you.]

"Black Ops" was the final straw for me. Any hope that the series would
ever return to the heights of its first games were gone by that point;
it was undeniably clear even to the most optimistic believers that
Activision was pumping these out not because they had any good ideas
but because they made money. Each iteration was becoming less and less
interesting.

"Black Ops" was my last Call of Duty. I haven't returned since. In
fact, some years later, I swore off Activision games entirely*. It
wasn't a company I wanted to do business with, and they didn't make
games I was interested in playing.








* well, /new/ Activision games, anyway. I admit that even after that
point I continued to fill out my library with classic games made by
the company.