[0x202020]

IMO, the release of Warzone 1, Call of Duty’s Battle Royale mode that released a few months after Modern Warfare 2019, has completely changed the priorities and incentives for the company. The goal is to sell in game cosmetics more so than the game itself, as many other games are turning to as well.

The yearly release cycle, which may be ending soon, leads to bugs that re-emerge each year and features that appear and disappear. Sure, the different studios which produce the games need some room to innovate, but the inconsistent base set of features is incredibly frustrating. CoD games are one of the games I play the most, with the other being a game which is the complete opposite, Old School RuneScape, that has been built on for ~20 years.

I play the current game MWII with friends a few hours a day most days of the week. Multiple times per session my game crashes at random, something I can’t remember with any other major games with a top of the line PC. Like many other pieces of software, chasing other revenue sources seems to have made the quality of the product take a nose dive, with consequences yet to be seen. This is disappointing to me as someone who enjoys playing the game with friends, who has competed in open-bracket events at major tournaments over a span of a few years, and worked directly with the professional league and teams (CDL and CWL) for analytics and software.

[bakugo]

> The goal is to sell in game cosmetics more so than the game itself, as many other games are turning to as well.

This has nothing to do with cosmetics and everything to do with customer standards. We're living in an age where the average customer has absolutely zero standards for the products they purchase, they simply do not care if the game barely works and crashes every 10 minutes, they will happily enjoy it and praise it anyway because they probably do not have the intellectual capacity to notice or care.

The newest Pokemon game is a prime example of this, it has no cosmetics, no microtransactions, nothing, yet it's so much more of a technical trainwreck than any CoD game, you really have to play it to believe it. It costs $60 and looks and runs worse than many PS2 games, but it sold tens of millions anyway because the people buying it are effectively zombies that only exist to obey corporations and will happily consume whatever is sold to them no questions asked.

[ziml77]

What a ridiculous statement to make about people who enjoyed the latest Pokemon games. Yes they perform like ass. Yes they're buggy. But they're still surprisingly fun.

I hated the frame rate issues and various bugs I ran into. I considered requesting a refund (like I did do for similar reasons very quickly after buying Cyberpunk 2077). But before I knew it I was hours into the game. This is actually the first mainline Pokemon game in 15 years that I've played up through the Elite Four on. For me, the fun of the gameplay was enough to outweigh the negatives.

Also, don't forget that even back when games were significantly simpler they were still loaded with issues. The original Pokemon games are a good example here. They had many bugs, some of which were quickly found to be exploitable. To me that's another data point to indicate that issues with the game's coding don't necessarily make the game bad.

[crummy]

> We're living in an age where the average customer has absolutely zero standards for the products they purchase, they simply do not care if the game barely works and crashes every 10 min

Elder Scrolls titles have been selling very well for a long time. I don't think this is new.

[ziml77]

Is there a name for the phenomenon of people thinking that some behavior of humans is new when it's actually always been that way? I feel like there should be since it's so common to see the word "nowadays" followed by a statement like that.

[mrguyorama]

It's usually called "being young and naive"

[JamesSwift]

Same experience here. I crash/bug-out multiple times per day. Every day I play, the first time I play a map it lags for the first 3-5 minutes, cycling between full speed and 20FPS. I have run into _several_ game breaking bugs in multiplayer, one of which locks me out of playing consistently (detailed in another comment in this thread).

I am big on boycotting and generally have avoided Activision games because of how they have milked things in the past. I'm incredibly frustrated with the state of the game, and disappointed I got talked into buying it by my buddies. Even worse, they just stockholm it saying things like "they just released it, you have to give it time". What? We played Halo 2 and Modern Warfare 2 at launch for a week straight and the only issue I can remember is server instability which was transient. I'm so tired of this public beta workflow, which if you are pushing a game per year you end up getting what, 9 months of _actual_ gameplay, and thats assuming the game doesnt need app-level modifications (vs fixing actual bugs) to smooth out the experience.