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 3...