Call of Duty: Warzone has been a major success ever since releasing in 2020, but CoD fans are arguing that it’s severely changing how the FPS franchise operates, and not in a good way. The title brought the Call of Duty franchise back into the spotlight and it was clear that developer Infinity Ward and publisher Activision Blizzard were planning to milk it as long as possible.
The COD community believes that a shift in developmental focus is ruining the traditional 6v6 Call of Duty experience, because the team behind the game would rather accommodate the battle royale offering from Activision Blizzard that sees millions of players flooding to the title, despite numerous bugs and glitches impacting the experience no less.
With the profit margins these Fortnite-inspired battle pass systems in Warzone create, it's no wonder that traditional Call of Duty multiplayer titles are suffering from a lack of attention, resulting in glitches and hacking.
Everyone invested in the Call of Duty franchise can agree that this trend started since Warzone was released, with Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Call of Duty: Vanguard being the prime examples. The lack of new content has been eye-catching to say the least, with the only difference between these new CoD multiplayer titles being the timeframe of the action.
Comparing the menu screens from the last three CoD titles to previous franchise entries across the decade, show a clear lack of willingness to create something new.
The new prestige system which is designed to keep the player base coming back to the game, rather than offer new and unique content with each season, has also come under fire. While previous iterations had new content in the form of icons and other cosmetics keeping players interested, the latest CoD titles feel like a recycled version of older games with Warzone priorities kept in mind.
And this is all before you take in consideration that every single Call of Duty title published since Warzone came out has been even more unfinished, broken, buggy, and glitched - even for Call of Duty standards, which are set relatively low.
Fans of the franchise see the lack of time and man power in the creative process as the main reason for the decreased quality of recent Call of Duty games. If the team is pumping out a new game every two quarters or so, innovation is guaranteed to lag behind. Even more so when they design a new game with the affinities of Warzone players in mind, since they are the cash cow after all. The result ends up being Call of Duty: Vanguard and Call of Duty: Caldera, which are viewed by many Call of Duty fans as the worst additions to the franchise.
Activision Blizzard didn't make it easier on themselves, either, by firing nearly all QnA testers, burning down the structure that produced the previous title with higher quality. There is a reason for the sharp decline in production quality since Warzone dropped, and fans are arguing that it is killing the traditional 6v6 CoD that many players are still playing and struggling to enjoy. This leaves an even more sour taste in their mouths, considering these titles cost $60 and yet don’t receive any updates or competitive adjustments, despite having been out for a few years now.
Any new updates that do come out, mor often than not break another version of the game. Such is the case with new maps, which frequently suffer from ruined gameplay integrity due to glitches and cheaters.
The community believes that a Call of Duty battle royale can coexist with traditional multiplayer titles, it's just a matter of the publisher wanting to do it. They point to Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 which managed to coexist with Blackout, the battle royale mode, for the most part.
