Like any Call of Duty game, the recently-announced Advanced Warfare has been met with both excitement and cynicism.
Personally, I’m in the former camp. Over the past few years the franchise has been stuck in its ways, offering nothing but incremental changes and new story arcs. Don’t get me wrong, Modern Warfare 3, Black Ops 2, and Ghosts are fine games, though often leave me wanting.
Hopefully, this year, things will change. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare will induct Sledgehammer Games as a core member of the development trio. On top of that, their debut instalment will be running on an all-new engine, propelling the series into the latest generation of console hardware.
The focus on private military corporations (PMCs) is a great angle too, along with all the high-tech goodness being poured into Advanced Warfare. Previous games have always been about two or more nations squaring up to one another. However, whether it’s the Chinese, Russians, or any other usual suspects, “we” are always the ones to come out on top.
That’s not to say Call of Duty is heavily ideological, because it’s not. A game developed by an American studio, targeted at a western consumer base is always going heroicize the actions of “our side”, pure and simple.
Advanced Warfare looks as though it will bypass any accusations of jingoism, however, with most modern armies being privately funded. What this means is that anyone with influence and capital can become a nation, opening the door to a whole number of potential antagonists and rival factions. It’s individualistic capitalism taken to its literal extreme.
Another, often less thought about, issue Advanced Warfare tackles is realism. I’m not saying for an instant that hoverbikes, jetpacks, and PMC domination are waiting around the corner. Instead, I’m talking about player characters and how, despite only being human, they manage to outlive dozens, if not hundreds, in the heat of battle.
Whether an elite operative in Ghosts or grunt in World at War, the lead character always seems to pull through, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake.
The same will no doubt happen in Advanced Warfare. However, the inclusion of revolutionary, state-of-the-art military hardware makes the whole “1 vs. 100” scenario more believable.
The exoskeleton alone allows for vastly improved protection as well as unrivalled maneuverability, whether on ground, in air, or scaling buildings. You won’t just become advanced, you’ll almost be superhuman.
XIII_WarMachine
Call of Duty was a great series in terms of Modern Warfare. I felt the series lacked too many things after MW. Black Ops was different but still just ok. Ghosts was predictable and was given too much hype. Modern Warfare was perfect with perks, health, damage, etc. Black Ops was different in terms of damage. It became so much easier to kill your opponent. Hell I wouldn’t be suprised if you could sneeze at an enemy and kill them instantly. Ghosts has created a higher damage system with rigid maps that helps campers/boosters hide even more. If you dont believe me play Black Ops II for one hour. Write down your K\D and then play Ghosts for one hour. There is a huge difference.
Call of Duty has lacked its luster and appeal for me. It is looking like Titanfall without the Mechs. Also a new COD game every year is becoming ridiculous. Its the same car with different paint jobs and new features such as a sun roof.
hornet1990
Yep, on Blops2 I could hold my own with a slightly better than 1 KD ratio and finish more games positive than not. On Ghosts I just get slaughtered. Last night I rage quit no end of matches in the space of an hour because I just couldn’t move – spawn, move a few meters, die, spawn, die, spawn, die, spawn, die, ah f%#k it!
Eldur
All this ‘near future’ stuff leaves me a bit cold. The more iterations of this we see, or the further we get into the ‘near’, the more I find myself disassociating from the on-screen drama. CoD, of late, seems to be edging ever and ever closer to Halo / Gears of War territory and further from the visceral realism that defined the series at its outset.
What I’d actually really like to see, and this will probably be laughed/bemoaned out of the comments section, is a return to the simplicity (and emotional sucker punches) of the last World War. Barring perhaps ‘All Ghilli’d Up’, I can’t remember a CoD moment that has eclipsed the Normandy landing sequence or the opening scenes of the fight for Stalingrad.
Seeing moments like that, reimagined with new tech and all of the CoD development experience that the team(s) have gained in the past few years, could be a genuinely amazing experience. It would also give the MP elements a bit of a shakeup, which I think CoD:Ghosts proved the series desperately needs.
hornet1990
Absolutely! Wasn’t it rumoured though during the IW breakup that Activision couldn’t make any COD titles set in the modern era or past? That would certainly explain the direction since Blops2, and sadly kill any chance of a return to Normandy or Stalingrad :(
Of course that doesn’t stop someone else doing it, or heck, just don’t call it COD!
hornet1990
Strange, it just doesn’t sit well with me. I can handle the near future of Ghosts, have no problem with fantasy warfare as depicted by Battlefield 2142 or Titanfall etc but this just leaves me cold and uninterested. Blops2 started the rot…
I think it is possibly related to your comment about 1 vs 100 being more believable when if anything the history of warfare shows us that it is going completely the other way with much smaller targeted engagements, greatly reduced collateral damage etc. The idea that the skies could be filled with drones and advanced VTOL aircraft as in Blops2 with such wide scale destruction is frankly completely unbelievable; just look at the projected unit cost of an F-35 now compared to gen 4 fighters, and gen 3 before them and you’ll realise that it would bankrupt any country trying to produce that many gen 6+ aircraft! Yes drones may be cheaper, but even they’re growing in cost exponentially.
But then the direction warfare appears to actually be going doesn’t align with CODs need to be huge spectacle after huge spectacle. And whack a mole shooting gallery…
cc_star
Really looking forward to this.
I’m no FPS fan, disliked MW, W@W, MW2, loved BlOps though, loved it & I really disliked MW3, so much so I never bothered with BlOps 2.
The reason I’m really looking forward to this is Sledgehammer. Been waiting for their output ever since the top guys left EA Redwood Shores/Visceral soon after Dead Space released.
Such a shame that they got bogged down a bit in helping pick up the pieces from the Infinity Ward fallout rather than cracking on with their own vision (within the boundaries of the franchise) would love to have seen their 3rd person take on CoD.
Hopefully they’ve introduced new gameplay elements to this