Hello again! I’m sort of noticing a pattern starting to form with these posts: long–short. One day will be long, the next short. And the ones in-between are kinda a mystery. So I guess it’s more apt to say long-short-who knows. I don’t have any major updates on stuff I’ve watched or read today. I expect those will have big days, meaning I’ll write a huge amount about something, but only after a few day gap. So today will be more a scattering of thoughts of unknown length as I haven’t written it yet! Let’s see what I think of.

Explanation for the Naming of My Blog Posts

with bonus yap on Call Me Maybe

First off, I’m going to explain how I name my blog posts, because it’s a short story I can use an excuse to explain how great of a song Call Me Maybe is. I just pick a song title from my summer playlist that I think fits well enough with what I’m yapping about.

Now onto yapping about how great Call Me Maybe is, have you even heard the part where she sings “Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad” because that bridge might be the best part of any pop song released in the 2010s. It’s either that, or the guitar outro of Daft Punk’s track Get Lucky. That bridge is just way too much fun, and I would say it’s really that simple, but there’s a tiny bit more to the track than that. That bridge has a subtle guitar in the background, and that along with the strings in the chorus really help the song build a little as it progresses. It all comes together for what is still one of my favorite pop songs 14 years on, the rare song I can like just as much at age 4 and age 104.

Thoughts on “modern” Call of Duty

Now for something completely different. Likely due to the impending re-release of 2010’s Black Ops and its 2012 sequel, I’ve been thinking on the Call of Duty franchise. When I was younger, I was big into it, playing mostly the Black Ops sub-series but also dabbling into the latest entries into the franchise, which at the time would’ve been Vanguard and Modern Warfare 2 (2022). It’s a bit of an argument in the Call of Duty fanbase on the franchise’s “golden age,” and of course everyone has their own answer. Was it the run of games from 2007 to 2012? Perhaps the “Advanced Movement” trilogy of Advanced Warfare, Black Ops III, and Infinite Warfare is the answer.

But there is also the modern era of Call of Duty, and its vague starting point. Some say this era is a “Warzone era” defined by the creation of the free-to-play battle royale mode of the same name, along with the integration of the games into it. This era is usually defined as starting with 2019’s Modern Warfare. My outlook of the eras is that the “Warzone era” is two eras in itself: one from 2019-2022 based on “Warzone 1,” and 2022-the present on “Warzone 2.” The difference is the game to which Warzone was based on, being Modern Warfare or its sequel, Modern Warfare 2. A huge difference of these two eras was a small creative limitation created with Warzone 2: the developers must use a unified game engine.

A game engine shouldn’t be significant to game development, but in this case it is, as in the past each developer would have their own fork of the same engine, with tweaks to create a different “feel” to each game. This helped differ Black Ops 4 from Infinite Warfare or World War II. This “feel” was both mechanical and graphical, and I think both are a huge reason why I just don’t click with modern Call of Duty. Whereas even in the “post-golden age” of 2013-2022, I still found the series very enjoyable, and in my opinion to the point I’d say those games aren’t much, if at all, worse than the era preceding, these new games just don’t work. Maybe it is my personal distaste for Modern Warfare 2 (2022), but every game since has just felt like a skin over that one. While there are iterations, like the expansion to movement in Black Ops 6 and 7, it still has that same feel, which feels much more weighted and less fluid, which I think to some extent ruin the games.

There’s also an argument for the “Warzone-ification” of the Call of Duty games. This argument, which I was against for Black Ops Cold War and Vanguard, I tend to agree with for the newer games. I understand one reason for the unification of engines was that when including content from the games in Warzone, things are now much less likely to break, as seen especially with the “Verdansk ’84” era of Warzone in 2021 from the differences between Modern Warfare (2019) and Black Ops Cold War. With the unified engine, the developers do not face this issue, but at the same time, it creates some new limitations. Things have to be done a way able to be easily ported to a battle royale, which is fundamentally very different from 6v6 multiplayer or the zombies horde-defense mode. And I think this change causes that same “feel” for every game, and as mentioned, it’s a “feel” I just don’t vibe with.

Not to mention, the unification of Call of Duty came with the unification of multiple games under one “Call of Duty” launcher, for the most recent few games and Warzone. That’s something I despise: it removes a difference from the game at a surface level for years. How is Black Ops 6 any different from Black Ops 7 when they’re on the same app on your Xbox? They’re different games! Why should they be together? Let each game have its own app and menu! You shouldn’t have to go through a centralized “Call of Duty” launcher to launch into a game. You should just be able to play it.

Unfortunately, I don’t see Activision going back on the “unified” Call of Duty. The death of that hope for me was 2023’s Black Ops 6. Seeing all of the uniqueness of the Treyarch games gone, it just felt like a certain fun to the series was gone, replaced by a focus on a battle royale I have no interest in powered by a game I didn’t like, which now will poison the games that I’d have a chance of liking.

That’s all I have for today. That’s a lie, actually. I always have more, but I don’t really want to create a 3000 word behemoth of a blog post. I usually write a bit and think “I should save some more for tomorrow.” Writing that made me think of the policy to not overdeliver by Bungie during Destiny 2, which was one of the many mistakes that game made. Maybe that’ll be blog post #12. I hope you enjoyed this one, even if it was very Call of Duty focused and you hate the series. Have a fantastic rest of your day.