So, yet another Call of Duty game has been released and for the first time in more than five years, I did not take part in the event.
I didn’t leave work early. I didn’t go to my local video store and fork over my hard earned cash. I didn’t download a day-one patch. I didn’t stare at my monitor for an hour waiting for the game to install. I didn’t go to a myriad of online forums to see why the game didn’t work with my video card. I didn’t alter my default config to get better FPS. I didn’t smash my fist on my desk after being fragged for the first time in multiplayer. Nope…I gave this release a wide pass.
Given some of that stats I’ve been seeing in Steam, many of you have as well. Here we are on day two of MW3′s roll-out and I see a peak of only 76000 PC players online. Back in CoD4 and MW2 as well, that number would have been well over 120,000.
Don’t get me wrong, MW3 is on its way to set sales records I’m sure…thanks to all the console players out there, but for many PC players — the old-time, hardcore PC players — the CoD love-affair seems to be over. How do you know you are hardcore? If you have been wondering what MW3 would have been like if Grant Collier was still in charge of IW, you are hardcore.
For the rest of you, those that went out and forked over the sixty Samolians to purchase this new clone of MW2, I am sure that you got exactly what you were expecting. And that’s great. I’m very glad that some of you guys are loving the game. I asked one such gamer yesterday what he thought of the game and his answer was that it played like MW2 and then he immediately told me about how liked the killstreaks in multiplayer. That’s how much CoD has changed and more accurately, how much the CoD gamer has changed.
Some of us old fogies still bristle when anyone even mentions “killstreaks”, yet the new CoD acolyte has not only embraced the idea of non-player controlled killstreak bonuses, they see this feature as a cornerstone of the game. Not fluid movement, not registration, not balanced gameplay…killstreaks.
Sigh.
I must admit that MW3′s release makes me think back a few years to the launch of it’s direct predecessor, MW2. That’s when the PC community’s disillusionment with CoD really started in earnest. While I recently uploaded the infamous October 17th, 2009 BASH 123 episode, the cast that managed to capture the instant the IWNet bomb ripped through the CoD hardcore community, some of you may not know that there was a second podcast on that day. Eight hours after BASH 123 ended, John from efragtv.com and I simulcast a three hour, live cast that very night.
It is really interesting to hear how the initial shock of the revelations made in BASH 123 started to roll into anger and resentment. I thought it would be interesting to release that recording on YouTube as a reminder of that event. Here it is.
Part 1
Part 2
I’ll be interested in reading your reactions to MW3 release. How have you handled the evolution of CoD? Are you still interested in the series?
I’m running a GSP hosted dedicated server…and having a blast; I did not buy MW2 because I DON’T do P2P I know they will never release modtools, (that is just the world we live in) and could care less if we (the pc only community) all just died.
but it is, what it is; if it dies, it dies; take it or leave it.
They released another game? huh… Guess I missed that one. Oh well back to Battlefield.
I remember pretty well, when I’ve listened your mentioned web cast in 2009. Unfortunately, I was stupid enough to do this AFTER I bought the MW2 experiment from Las Vegas GameStop. I will NEVER forget how I felt back then, I was the ONLY guy at the store carrying THE PC version of the game on a line with more than 30 people. Everyone looked at me like I had some unknown terrible disease. I though that myself after I’ve actually played it! I’m playing computer games for more than 20 years. I’ve been trough everything that happened in that very field of entertainment, but what happened lately is a pure probe monetary suck dry. Ironically, I’m far more disappointed from the gamers than from developers, I think the gamers themselves got what they deserved for their blindness and the lack of own opinion. There are exception like ourselves, who only suffer from that, but after I’ve seen MW3′s multilayer, I’m pretty certain – we are the minority! I think with this release, the gaming for me is over. Not only COD series. I didn’t like the BF direction take either.
I’m talking about the gaming as a whole. I intend to pull out my GTX580 tonight and replace it with GT520, because the power consumption just don’t worth it anymore!
Thank you Jock for your web casts and all, which I was following closely during the years, regardless that I didn’t had the time to participate in your forums!
Wish you all the best guys!
I’m out!
Honestly Jock, and I know there are some who will want to drown me in a vat of urine for saying this, but I sincerely hope that COD9 is not released on the PC at all. Then, maybe, PC gamers will move on to some real games and leave this piece of trash in the dust. It’s like a girlfriend that dumps you for another guy, but you just can’t seem to take the hint.
I agree COD has been dead for PC for a couple years now and I don’t understand why people still give this series any kind of hope of being half decent for PC. People seriously need to move on and find a new fps game to play where the community is acually decent. The COD community is what caused this series to die. We all know COD2 along with COD4 can still be played competetively but our community always gets bored soo fast and buys the next title that comes out leaving the old games to flurish and die. This was the problem with COD from the beginning. Do you people acually think the dev’s care if the game is good or not, I don’t think so! all they care about is making a quick buck off dumb people. The future of fps gaming will be F2P and not P2P.
When that one podcast with fourzerotwo went live, I didn’t know what to think. When I heard those words “no dedicated servers”, I was astonished. I was at a loss for words. I initially thought that PC CoD community has met it’s death, the consoles now reign over the CoD franchise. When I played my first game in MW2 it wasn’t that bad. I barely had any lag, but then people started to leave and go back to CoD4 and other previous CoDs. Then VAC happened.. the cheaters were everywhere. I gave up at that point. The cheaters, the no dedis and no mods. When Black Ops came out it had dedicated servers and we were told we would get mod tools.. little did we know we would have to wait 6 months. 6 months have passed and mod tools have arrived, but is the game still populated? I checked and the population certainly had fallen quite a bit. By that time, most people were back to playing MW2 or on the alternative AlterIWnet. I will buy MW3 to play with some friends, but that’s probably the only incentive I will get out of it. Let’s hope that MW3 is the last re-hash of MW2. It would be nice if they used a new engine and re-worked the whole game. If it continues as a IW releases a CoD one year, Treyarch releases one the next, etc. I hope the franchise dies. I also hope that DICE does not make a BF game every year. BF3 is just Bad Company 2: Jets in my eyes.
Its like a racing car , lots of adjustments to the bodywork ,no new engine.Destined to failure.Even my console buddies are finding it shallow after a couple of weeks of BF3.
In my opinion The only way forward for COD is to drop Black Ops two ,transfer the Devs and build a new engine.