Modern Warfare 3: The $60 Expansion Pack
Another year has gone by, and once again Call of Duty is here to greet consumers at the front door of nearly every major retailer nationwide. But despite the series’ success, the Call of Duty franchise has often been accused of lacking innovation and remaining stagnant through each new iteration. With the latest advert for MW3 - which seems to be playing on just about every channel – featuring celebrities in live action role-play instead of showing actual gameplay, it’s beginning to set in that the game is just another clone of Call of Duty 4. The latest evidence that’s been uncovered doesn’t exactly help Activision’s case.
In the PC version of Modern Warfare 3, if the game crashes, the user will be asked to run in a “safe mode” on the next start-up. However, the error has an error of its own, which you can see below exhibit A:
Okay, so Infinity Ward forgot to change the error code from Modern Warfare 2, big deal. But what about this video evidence presented by FinalLevelGames?
The sad thing about this is that other developers who pour their heart out to make fresh experiences don’t even sell a tenth of what an annual Call of Duty release is able to accrue. This regular, astronomical success appears to have gotten into the minds of the development team, and in an effort to retain the award-winning formula, next to nothing has been done to evolve the series. Much of the same elements, from the gameplay, to the UI, weapons, and presentation, are absolutely unchanged. In other franchises this would be looked at as DLC, or perhaps even a map pack, but Activision can get away with just about anything until consumers’ demand change. As a result, what was once considered the undisputed king of its genre is beginning to not only look stale, but is turning into the FPS version of Madden, and without roster updates.
Are we being too critical, or is the annual release of Call of Duty damaging the series’ quality?
38 Responses to “Modern Warfare 3: The $60 Expansion Pack”
I’m speechless… wow. It saddens me.
You are spot on Jonny. MW3 isnt a bad game by any means. The gameplay is solid just like all CoD games. However, MW3 isnt better than MW2. Its literally the exact same game, with some minor gameplay changes that dont make the game any better or worse. MW3 could have been released 2 years ago and MW2 could have been released today and no one would know.
+ 9000
Honestly, I have only bought one CoD ever, and I remain even ashamed of that. I will not get this flaming bag of crap, nor any other titles by activation. I personally feel anyone who has, is truly a right idiot
I did the same thing you did. I bought CoD black ops to see why every1 was telling me to buy it and I was dissappointed. The campaign bored me in like 20 minutes and the multiplayer was all right not good or great but all right. Haven’t touched the game since, went back to playing metal gear online in mgs4.
What I’m most afraid of is that other games might take example of this, or that maybe the masses will not reconsider CoD purely for the fact that other people play it. It makes me wonder though, what Inifinity Ward was truly doing in the past 2 years.
They were bleeding talent to Respawn Entertainment, the home of the Original Infinity Ward CoD creators. What’s left at Activision can not produce a game with out 2 other firms to help out. Sledgehammer had to come in and replace those that went to Respawn.
IW would have more respect if they just made all the CoD’s expansions to the first Modern Warfare, but I’m sure they would have made less money since the kids that buy the games would need to get their parents to put their credit cards into PSN. Actually, I wish more games did that; a game that you really love and is frequently updated and expanded (free and paid).
I know I’ve been hating a lot on CoD in general, but wow. I mean c’mon.
Remember when I said “same old sh*t in a different package”? (I’ll admit I was being a little harsh but…) This is exactly what I was talking about. Hopefully this isn’t true, but if it is then this is very, very unfortunate.
The saddest part of this whole thing is there are people who will sit there and defend this.
As long as Activision get all the money and all the fans buy it without questions then why are they going to change something???? Its working for them so far and the next episode will be the same, but, if you dont buy it…
i always said that the series has refused to innovate or evolve. there are other buildings in the game just like this. rehashed. i have not bought the game but i know people on my friends list who have. and i have seen it demoed at several stores too. people will defend the game bcuz they were hungry for map-packs and new content way before this came out. now they have got their crack fix they feel like its the best crack they’ve had for a long time. we all knew CODs were rehashed since 2-3 games before this one came out. but i’m finally glad to see the media bringing it to light. activision/IW/treyarch all just cashed in on the original modern warfare and they are afraid of losing their precious mega-teenager base by changing the recipe. its just the easiest shooter on the market – anyone can be a badass. but they can only be badasses in that one game and one game only. that is probably the main reason ppl keep buying it. the multiplayer seriously lacks challenge after about a month.
OH wait! Are you proving by any means that some bad metacritic’s user reviews may actually be justified and not being trolled?!? If so, I’m really speechless.
and here all this time I thought I was just exaggerating to make my point when I said every COD game was the same…Now, it’s easy to say “that’s just one building, they shouldn’t be too heavily criticized for that.” But if they are too lazy to code in a new building design for a small part of one level, who knows what else you can find if one is truly looking. Even if there is no other visual evidence, the fact remains that they have changed nothing except for the locations/maps since COD4. My thought, honestly, being that the single player campaign is so short in each game…I think they may have created the entire campaign when they made COD4 and just stuck in the different pieces as they continued to make Modern Warfare games. That is the reason they haven’t changed the engine one bit since COD4. The only thing they work on at all between releases is the multiplayer, making new maps and a few more modes. I know that’s quite an accusation, but to me the evidence points to it being true.
Next they’ll all be bitching about sports games.
Wait… People still make sports games…?
im not surprised i told some of my friends who are cod fans not to get it its going to be the same thing. i mean how long does it take someone to realize that there being swindild for their money smh ill never get people. i have to say using the same formula may work for a certain time but eventually it gets old and your going to have to switch it up. i think mw3 is where cod goes down hill from here. on top of that i know this has nothing to do with the topic but infinity ward is with EA now and a new medal of honor is in the works if infinity ward can take cods gameplay/graphics and combine it with dice’s multi-player of battlefield like vehicles,jets, and copters everyones shifting to medal of honor i foresee it happening mark my words, or hey better yet take a picture of my comment lol
Not surprising at all, to be fair though there are some things especially on the ps3 end that call of duty does include that first party and other third party developers fail to implement for their games on the system that I believe add to an overall better experience like LAN and Split Screen support. I would never touch W@W, MW2 & B:OPS online multiplayer because of the buffet of glitches and exploits people use to win that make the game more frustrating than fun to play but when I drop by my friends or have them drop by my place to get baked and drunk it’s fun to sit back and play some split screen or LAN if we have enough people, systems and tvs available; it has been one of my favorite things to do since the Halo:CE days on Xbox. Uncharted 3 changed the trend by adding LAN and Split Screen and hopefully other developers will start doing the same because there are those out there who still enjoy this method of play and call of duty does have solid gameplay for these types of events.
What i’m curious about and could someone please enlighten me: has anything been done about the notoriously flawed multiplayer and the glitches that have plagued the past 3 iterations? If the answer is no then I believe that even at the lowest levels they’ve failed to innovate the game and it’s a simple cash grab again. Anyone who has been watching this generation closely will see activision and microsoft were the perpetrators of this mediocrity acceptance mentality that is consuming the industry and why a lot of games are being chop shopped for dlc and released seemingly unfinished; it’s sad that it will never end and those wise enough to see it are witnessing this once great entertainment medium slowly dwindle into the sad state it’s in now.
I know where all lthe hate comes from and yall can blame Activision not IW they are simply doing what they are told IHATE ACTIVISION! I bet if they where in control of the game they wouldnt keep pushing this game out every year. COD is COD the formula that made COD4 wasnt broken so they didnt need to fix it yea sure they could have up the graphics but more graphics and everything you bashers seem to be complaining about will take away from its COD feel.! its like yall want them to fix something thats perfect for what it is and yall need to stop all the complaning. The only thing that pisses me off about the game is how its not as fun as it used to be. The funny thing is everyone who bashes on COD used to love it. Who misses their 60 bucks from last year ? if you do then you shouldnt be buying games cuz you cant afford it . It may not a $60 difference in the game but the time you will put in this game is well worth it. EA does the same shit with all their sport titles but no one feels the need hate paying 60 for a few different names switched around buy it or dont buy it that simple.
That’s the problem they ruined a good thing they had with the first modern warfare; it was a solid game and this is coming from someone who played the beta for it on the xbox360 back in ’07 and who owned it for that system as well but I can’t comment for the ps3 version because I never picked it up for its lack of trophy support but the 360 version was a solid game. You’re right most who hate on it now are previous fans and I don’t blame them because they were epically let down by the 3(possibly now 4) games that followed that were degraded with horrible flaws and glitches not to mention some of the horrible design choices introduced in MW2 where multiplayer is concerned. I think people are very justified in their hate toward it and like mentioned in the article it’s smack in the face of tried and true developers who push for innovation in their games an the industry as a whole.
Unforgivable!
it was cool to climb the same tower in assassin’s creed 1, 2, and brotherhood 15 times
was no problem to kill the same helghast in killzone 3 that we already killed in killzone 2
was even cool to drive ps2′s cars around in in GT5
but when the cod franchise follow common programming ‘acceptable practice’ we can’t become immune to the ‘tall poppy syndrome’
somebody kill somebody else we got a riot on our hands!!!
What does replaceable pieces of levels have to do with programming….?
ASC’s first world was not the same as the second and thirds. They also have, at least story wise, an excuse. As they take place in the same area partially. Let us also not forget that ASC is open world, that kind of makes a difference if you haven’t noticed…
Your still fighting the same army in KZ2 as KZ3 right? Well almost the same, except for that guys private army. Oh but guess what! They WERE different enemies!
Yes, however is a car is a component someone uses, and would miss and complain about if it wasn’t in the game. It worlds the same way for guns etc… People like them and or are fans of them, and old or not, they want to keep using them. The same can not be said for these random meshes that are simply being reused for the sake of being cheap.
Please, think these things through just a bit more before you defend this crappy series. However, I must give you some credit, as at least you know wtf a “.” is unlike most of these people. Along with spacing. But unlike these people, while may have been readable, it wasn’t worth reading. Then again, I can’t decipher many of the posts people have been making on here… I was only ever required to learn up to a second language, and a real one at that.
As Blkant has stated, in more words than I will care to write, all of those things you mention are relative to the story of those games or crucial (such as cars that belong in a racing game). This is different because it’s just laziness. Like I said in my earlier comment, one building isn’t a huge deal, but how much else is there throughout the game that no one has noticed? It just sort of demonstrates how much effort the developers are willing to put into a game. I think it’s disrespectful to other developers that work their a$$e$ off and would never allow the same building twice in two different games but will never see the sales numbers of the COD series.
Quite honestly, with how little changes from one COD game to another I think they could release a new game every 6 months instead of once a year. If you aren’t going to improve the game engine, are basically just tacking on another small portion of a story, tuning the online gameplay slightly, and adding a couple new modes every time there is no reason they need a 2 year development cycle. They probably only hold off the release so that they don’t kill the franchise like they did with Guitar Hero and ensure that they continue to get the amazing sales numbers every fall.
I just realized I ended up writing as much as Blkant did after all…
In the UK this game looks like a Xbox 360 only game LoL
:P
i.e all the adverts on TV & in the Newspapers(& there has been millions of ads so far)it always shows the Xbox 360 version? Nothing about the PS3 version. MicroSoft are clever like thatit pains me to say that) ;-D making people think its Xbox 360 only :-/
Right back to the best game of the year…Uncharted 3!
Microsoft does that here in the US too. I think it’s sort of a cheap tactic to almost claim that a multi-platform game is exclusive, and quite honestly publishers shouldn’t allow it, and since they have done that for every COD game I can remember I think it is a big factor in console sales. Sony has started doing it now too (I think the Skyrim ads have the PS3/Sony logo at the end), which I can understand because they are just fighting fair, but I wish the practice would just disappear altogether.
Assassin’s Creed Revelations has Playstation logos on the commercials.
@Reality Check: They are doing the same thing in the US as well
well i definitely won’t be picking up this map-pack. and yes i am disappointed by the way the COD franchise has been treated by activision. i was once one of those fans of the series until i realised that black ops was just rehash as well. i have grown to dislike the way COD has not evolved or improved over the years. so i moved on to other franchises that have at least tried to do new things with the genre. what bothers me most is that it seems that the very same things that other games are penalised for in the reviews – cod gets away with it every year and still gets high review scores. journalists need to be consistent n their reviews. i am speaking in general here and not about the reviewers on this site in particular. it is just a trend that’s been happening over the last couple of years. we as gamers need to start speaking more clearly with our wallets to stop this from happening bcuz it is unfair to us when we are mislead by biased reviews. GT i’m looking at you
someones making a lot of money releasing the same game every year
Well, this puts the entire competition between EA and Activision in a different light.
I figured that Battlefield might get a 5% gain in market share if they were lucky. But if you can’t evolve and improve then you tend to lose your audience by brighter, shinier things. Maybe EA’s boast will actually take fruition. Although I can’t see this leading to anything super good.
Michael Bay does it, so why not everyone else?!? LOL!!
thats what happens when you play on a freakin pc
While it does look, feel, and play just like MW2, this isn’t the first game to re-use things from a past game. Look at Pokemon, they’ve released the same game a dozen times just with new pokemon.
Mario, Zelda, and Sonic all did the same thing too.
Not trying to defend MW3, just pointing out its not the first game to do things like this.
while i agree that other games have done this… its just shameful that this game – after making more money than any other in history, has been neglected by the devs and publishers alike. think about it ppl, if the devs had said “you know what, let’s make a great war game that’ll blow EVERYTHING out the water, let’s wow the fans of our series, we OWE it to them for their loyal support.” and let’s say they created something totally new with destruction at least. ppl would have LOVED it even more than they do now, just because they CARED enough to up the ante. but what do fans get in return for their loyalty? to play a rehash of yet another MW2 clone, pay for elite (services which should be free) and wait for more $15 map-packs (of which u may have already bought 2 maps from an earlier dlc). its just wash rinse repeat for activision like they did with guitar hero. it’s just sad that they have done so little to improve the game even though they have made truckloads of $$ from the franchise. sad for us gamers
Lets not forgot that the $50 pricetag for the full features of Elite isn’t as good as the Battlefield 3 Battlelog which is completely FREE. And oh, theres that small issue that Elite has been down for days now. #fail
I’m not defending COD, just logic and rationality. If a+b=billions of dollars and a fanbase as huge as the population of North America, and has been proven 4 time now, MW,WaW, MW2, BO, would you change the equation just to satisfy the small minority, and the right to say your games have evolved but at the risk of millions of dollars? I like Battlefield too, but i took them like 5 games to add prone to the mix, and just to let you know, that’s not an innovating feature.