I gotta go back, back to the past, Call of Duty: WWII. Okay, the Samurai Jack theme song similarities will stop there, I promise. All jokes aside, I’m actually pretty excited for this latest entry of Call of Duty. Watch the trailer below, and then I’ll tell you why.
Yeah, not bad right? I have my reservations, but this is actually the first Call of Duty game I’ve been interested in since 4. Ya know, Modern Warfare. That’s not to say the first 3 were great, because 3 sucked dick, but the first 2 were fantastic PC Master Race shooters. Well, at that time, the thought of a console shooter was a joke. Halo hadn’t figured out how to make it work on consoles at the time, and shooters are still better on PC, but consoles have come along way.
So has Call of Duty. Originally made from defects from the team that made Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, to those some people leaving to make Destiny. CoD has always been a tight shooter. It’s always been a year or so behind Battlefield in exploring new ground, and you might yell that they copied EA DICE by going back in time, the fact is they are on a 3 year development cycle split between three developers currently. So don’t blame them for copying EA DICE, blame them for not recognizing the fact that sci-fi shooters were dead, and that going back in time was the right move 3 years ago at the start of the development cycle of these AAA shooters. Battlefield just seems to be the Simpsons to Call of Duty’s South Park.
That’s not exaclty a bad thing though. South Park is hugely popular, as is CoD. I actually prefer South Park to Simpsons, even if they did it first. On the flip side, I enjoy Battlefield more than Call of Duty. In both cases however, they are entirely different AAA shooters. Battlefield is all about using anything you can see to fight your enemy, be it a car, tank, AA gun, airplane, or your solider, it’s the entire experience in a large battlefield.
Call of Duty however, started from developers that made Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Call of Duty’s original idea was “No One Fights Alone.” At that time, you were always a one man army that killed everything. It changed that by always having NPCs with you in the campaign. I played and loved the shit out of CoD 1 & 2. This was also at a time when Battlefield 1942 changed my idea of what a shooter could be. No longer was a prop a prop, but something you could use. That’s how Battlefield changed the game. It also introduced me to mods.
This article though, is about CoD. That being so, the thing I’m most excieted about with CoD: WWII is the Normandy mission, as I played the shit out of that mission in Allied Assault, and I’ve haven’t had the experience of playing it since. I’m optimistic for a CoD game for the first time since 2, maybe 4, and I hope they hit it out of the park like Nintendo has with the Switch (Also something I bought into the hype for but laughed at the idea of the WiiU and didn’t care for the Wii). Maybe Jason is absorbing my saltiness (I was super salty at last year’s E3), or there might be something about this game that might be okay, but I hope to find out in June at E3.