I remember back in the day when paying $45 bucks for Sonic & Knuckles seemed steep. You guys remember those days, right? Well, what you got for those $45 was a game that featured lock-on technology for Sonic 2 and Sonic 3, and you could lock it on to just about any game, which offered players numerous special stages that could be played when locked on to non-Sonic games. That was $45 very well spent. I also remember churning over a similar amount for WWF Attitude for the PSX and playing the game until the disc was scratched up with laser burns beyond recognition. More good times. In this day and age, however, $60 gets you a game that may or may not even run coming out of the box and a lot of you know exactly what game I’m talking about. It makes you question, who really wants to buy the next game in the series if they seem to be getting worse for wear when it comes to functionality in the annual outings?
Now I know, some of you might be thinking “A second Activision bashing article in the same week?” Well, this isn’t a “bashing” article per se but rather a general question to the public about their experience with the Call of Duty franchise as of late.
As many of you who played the game know, the $60 to play the game doesn’t guarantee you instant-playability (depending on the version you picked up). PS3 owners have incurred one heck of a headache after another and there are now updates to fix an update that was supposed to fix what was broken right out of the box. Some consumers have been writing in to their favorite sites to complain about the issue, while others simply grumble on forum boards and hope the issues get fixed.
Now, I originally wasn’t going to do an article about this subject and just let it ride, but take into account that Call of Duty: Black Ops generated more than $650 million dollars in less than a week, beating out Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s previous record setting $550 million dollars. Now the thing that I find funny is how a company like Frictional Games relished in the 36k copies (via Gamasutra) they managed to shift which would allow them to continue working as a team on their next project. They ensured that, despite the game being an indie title, they were putting as much quality assurance into the title as possible because they care about what people think about the game. You would think that after $550 million from a previous game in such a massive franchise the next outing would be fixed up nice and neat, right?
I think an even more appropriate comparison would be the Halo series to the Call of Duty series. There may have been a time when Call of Duty would have been considered the better game, but as time went on and more and more sequels were quickly churned out, in comparison to the deliberate, quality-ridden process Bungie used to approach each game in the series, it's obvious which one is now the better franchise and we all know I'm no fan of Halo.
Anyway, the real question here is this: are gamers looking forward to buying the next Call of Duty from Sledgehammer Games (and around the rumor mill the next installment will be a space-marines affair) despite all the woes from glitches, broken patches, ill-functioning updates and poor porting that seem to trail each new iteration in the series?
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