The Call of Duty Problem - My Solution [COD]
I genuinely think the COD community’s biggest problem is that people still expect every single Call of Duty game to appeal to the entire fanbase at once, when the franchise now clearly has two very different audiences.
One side prefers the Modern Warfare style games. Grounded military atmosphere, realistic visuals and sound design, slower pacing, tactical gameplay, heavier movement and gunplay-focused combat.
The other side prefers the Treyarch/Black Ops style games. Faster movement, arcade pacing, bright visuals, crazy operator skins, movement mechanics, high kill gameplay and less focus on realism.
Neither side is wrong. They just want completely different things.
And yes, obviously there are players who enjoy both styles, but I honestly think they’re the minority now. Most people clearly lean heavily toward one side or the other, which is why every single year the exact same arguments happen:
“This game is too slow.”
“This game is too sweaty.”
“The skins ruin the atmosphere.”
“This doesn’t feel like COD.”
“Movement is terrible.”
“Camping is terrible.”
The problem is Activision keeps trying to merge two almost opposite styles of shooter into one annual release, which means neither audience is ever fully satisfied.
My solution would honestly be very simple:
Stop treating COD as one singular identity.
- Let Infinity Ward-style games fully commit to the grounded military shooter identity.
- Let Treyarch-style games fully commit to the fast arcade shooter identity.
Then give BOTH games a mandatory 2-year support cycle instead of abandoning them after 12 months.
For example:
Modern Warfare releases and gets 2 full years of support with maps, weapons, ranked, events and maybe even campaign expansions.
Then one year later, Black Ops releases and also gets 2 full years of support.
That means for one full year, both games exist side-by-side with active support, and players simply play the COD branch that actually suits their taste instead of expecting every release to somehow satisfy everyone.
(It doesnt always have to be MW or BO, but the point is have them grounded or arcadey)
I know the biggest counterargument would be:
“Wouldn’t that dilute the playerbase and make matchmaking worse?”
But honestly, I think the playerbase is already diluted naturally anyway.
Every year, huge numbers of players drop off because the current COD isn’t the style they actually wanted. MW fans tolerate Treyarch years. Treyarch fans tolerate MW years. Others quit halfway through the cycle because they dislike the direction entirely.
So Activision currently has the illusion of one giant playerbase, but in reality it’s a constantly frustrated and rotating community.
At least with this system, each game would have a smaller but far more loyal and stable playerbase over a longer period of time.
And with crossplay between PlayStation, Xbox and PC now standard, I honestly don’t think finding lobbies would be a serious issue for a franchise as huge as COD.
I also think Warzone now needs to become its own separate entity from Call of Duty multiplayer entirely.
At this point, there are people who only play Warzone and never touch multiplayer, and multiplayer players who barely touch Warzone. Trying to force every mainline COD to integrate with Warzone has probably contributed massively to the identity problems the franchise now has.
COD used to feel like different studios making different flavours of the same franchise.
Now it feels like every game is trying to become one giant merged product that satisfies everybody, and I honestly think that’s why the community has become impossible to please.