Taking a Black Ops Pass: Call of Duty is Losing Me (Premium)

Activision is doing everything it can to turn away long-time Call of Duty fans these days. And it’s starting to work. It’s clear that Activision is feeling an existential crisis thanks to battle royale games like Fortnite. But in responding to this threat, it has deemphasized and almost ignored the traditional multiplayer experiences on which this franchise’s success rests. And this had made the latest COD title, Black Ops 4, less compelling to long-time fans as a result.

I first voiced my concerns about this game almost exactly a month ago, noting in Another Black Ops? Call of Duty is Stuck in the Past (Premium) that Activision had failed to create a blockbuster new COD series like Modern Warfare and Blacks Ops series. As a result, it had turned to nostalgia with a World War II title, WWII, that harkened back to the series’ earliest days, and was then adding a new chapter to a Black Ops series that was originally designed as a trilogy.

What’s interesting is that this failure coinciding with the addition of jet packs and wall running, two features of competing game series that had made COD seem a bit old-fashioned. So Activision appealed to the nostalgic nature of COD fans by exhuming favorite game settings from the past and returning to the classic “boots on the ground” gameplay that had been employed by most of the series’ best games.

The jet pack/wall-running titles that Activision previously feared look quaint compared to games like Fortnite and, more recently, Apex Legends. These games have ignited an e-sports frenzy that is backed by billions of dollars in prize money annually. And in doing so, they have neatly bypassed COD in ways that traditional shooter competitors never did.

Activision is right to freak out. And it was right to ditch the single-player campaign in BO4 in favor of a battle royale game mode called Blackout that sits alongside the newest game’s multiplayer and zombies modes. I had long argued that battle royale was just a game mode and not a game in its own right, and that should COD simply adopt this as a choice, it could turn back the threat.

That hasn’t happened, of course. But my bigger concern is that Activision has changed the way it supports this latest COD title in ways that are mostly negative for those, like me, who pay for both the game and its season pass (called Black Ops Pass) up-front and then expect to keep playing over the ensuing year thanks to the quarterly arrival of new content via DLC (downloadable content).

With one major exception, this system worked great with Call of Duty: WWII, the previous entry in the series. Season pass members received new map packs every quarter, and each contained four new multiplayer maps. The timely addition of new content made WWII feel fresh over time, enabling me to keep playing the game until the next title arrived. This was true of most previous COD games, too, dating all the way back to Call of Duty II, which was an Xbox 360 launch title.

The major exception in the WWII time frame, of course, was that PlayStation 4 customers got DLC like map packs one month earlier than did those gamers on Xbox One. But the content still arrived on a regular schedule, and it followed the successful, traditional path of previous games.

For BO4, everything has changed.

On the good news front, new DLC appears on Xbox One (and PC) just a week after it does on PS4. That’s a huge improvement over the previous one-month wait, of course, and it gave me hope that there would be other improvements moving forward.

There is not: BO4 shipped in October 2018, one month earlier than usual. And that meant I only spent a few weeks with the last WWII DLC drop. And this time around, Activision is not allowing gamers to purchase DLC drops individually. Instead, it is forcing us to purchase the $60 Black Ops Pass up-front if we want the new maps, a change that has reduced the number of gamers with the new maps.

Worse, Activision is digging in deeper with the “pay to succeed” model, where you can purchase collections of guns, outfits, stickers, gestures, and other items via a Black Market. You literally can’t get some in-game items without paying for them or literally playing the game forever so you can build up enough “COD Points” to afford to “pay” for them.

But worst of all, the quality and quantity of new multiplayer maps have fallen through the floor. And this is the one that hurts the most, because it impacts my ability—and desire—to keep playing this game throughout the year before the new COD title appears this fall.

BO4 shipped with 14 maps in October, four of which were remakes of older COD maps. Since then, we’ve gotten only two new maps via DLC, and both, called Elevation and Madagascar, are boring, unattractive, and too large for the Team Deathmatch games I prefer. We’ve also received four Bonus Maps—Nuketown, Firing Range Night, Seaside Sunset, and Contraband Hurricane—one of which is a remake and three of which are simply restyled versions of preexisting COD4 maps.

And here’s the thing: The remakes—the three that came with BO4 plus Nuketown—are by far the best maps in the game. Of the other 11 maps that came with BO4, only a handful—Militia, Morocco, and Seaside—are truly great. The others are barely tolerable.

This would be OK if I had lots of new content to look forward to. But Activision is only promising 8 new maps via DLC over the year, half the normal amount. Instead, Activision is adding other content to the game, for zombies and Blackout, and in the form of nonsense features.

So here we are in March, and after five months of gaming and two DLC drops, I have just two truly-new maps, both of which I find boring, and three restyled versions of existing maps, one of which was a remake to begin with. (I would have received 8 new multiplayer maps by now under the old system.) And the best maps in BO4 are from the past. Which is pretty much exactly the problem with this game and this series.

This is a new and unexpected twist on my year-ago charge that COD is stuck in the past. And it’s a painful comeuppance for someone, like me, who has done little else gaming-wise, but stick with COD over the previous 13 years.

I’ve had experiences this bad with COD before: Advanced Warfare (2014) was so bad, I just rotated between previous COD titles from the remainder of that year. And then Infinity Wars was so bad I just played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered for the rest of the next year. News that Activision may soon release a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Remastered provides me with a bit of an out for this coming year. And who knows? Maybe COD: Modern Warfare 4—you know it’s coming—will be great, and the ensuing year will turn out differently.

Maybe. But right now, I’m really starting to question my allegiance to a game series that is right now showing little love to its long-time fans. And whether I shouldn’t simply look elsewhere.

I’m not necessarily looking for suggestions here. Obviously, I can and should look at Battlefield V. And I should obviously consider just going with Xbox Game Pass and treat my daily gaming experience much like I do TV with services like Netflix and Hulu. I may get there. I’m really thinking about it.