Call Of Duty Multiplayer History

Black Ops has been out for weeks now. Lotsa complaints about it that have mostly died down.

The thing is, I am a long time fan of Call Of Duty even before multiplayer became its forte. Finest Hour, Big Red One, 3, 4, World at War, Modern Warfare 2 and now Black Ops. I've played them all. the earlier ones just for single player. I only started playing multiplayer when numero quattro came out.

It was groundbreaking. Online multiplayer for first person shooters(and other games as well) would never be the same again. Class customization, perks, weapon attachments, killstreaks combined with top notch(for its time) graphics blew everyone away. Everyone played it. People who never picked up a controller/keyboard+mouse before played it. People who hated first person shooters loved it. Critics for once agreed with gamers. It received numerous awards as well as going on to become a best selling game. It was also the most distributed(pirated) PC game next to WOW, DotA and CS.

Then World at War came out. It was a huge disappointment. Back to the ancient era of WW2, it lost the 'cool' factor. In addition, the graphics had not really improved. The game was basically a copy of Modern Warfare with a WW2 skin. It was also plagued by the imbalance of the MP40 and the PTRS-41. This drove players to the Nazi Zombies mode which became a huge hit.

The sequel to the best selling game arrived. It was called Modern Warfare 2(duh). Pre-orders and expectations soared. Then the game actually came out. For a while, everyone was still bursting with excitement and adrenaline. Slowly, cracks appeared and the design team failed to patch these cracks. The multitude of killstreaks and the addition of pro-perks were too much. Everything in the game was powerful and killed instantly. Spec ops failed to cover for the failure of the multiplayer like zombies did.

Fast forward to 2010. Black Ops. Surpassing MW2, it established new records. Some minor cracks that appeared were soon patched. Everything was balanced perfectly. Each weapon and perk had its own strengths and weakness. Customization was improved. Zombies was brought back. Everyone form gamers to critics were gushing.

I am not.

Sure, it's great. Probably the best yet. However, it lacks the X factor Modern Warfare brought with it. Bottomline, it's nothing new. We've seen it all before. It's just that things have been tweaked to exactly how it should have been all the while. The franchise has been reinventing the same game since Modern Warfare. It needs a fresh start, a new system.

However, Activision doesn't seem to realise that. Next year, 2/TWO/DUE/DEUX/DOS/ZWEI/两
Call of Duty games are coming out.