The DeanBeat: Activision follows up with next-gen Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II

Activision Blizzard pulled out some pretty big guns yesterday with news on Call of Duty Modern Warfare II, the new installment of Call of Duty coming out for my birthday on October 28th.

The company had to do this after wandering through the deserts of game delays and a horrific sexual harassment lawsuit. Activision Blizzard always seemed to surface bad news, even to the point where it decided to sell itself to Microsoft for $68.5 billion.

We’ve yet to see if these guns shoot straight as we’ll find out how good the game is with the multiplayer beta that starts today. But based on what it’s shown, the scale of Activision’s investment in Call of Duty is pretty mind-boggling.

With that kind of investment, it seems to me Microsoft should make Call of Duty available to Sony and any other platform it wants after acquiring Activision Blizzard. Activision Blizzard’s strategy is to monetize as many platforms as possible. I think Sony might have to worry about losing the exclusivity of getting Call of Duty betas a week ahead of Xbox and PC, but it might not have to worry about Microsoft Call of Duty being released from PlayStation games in the future. will take away from users.

Many developers

It had at least seven and more like eleven game studios working on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II – maybe 2,000 game developers by my estimate – including leads Infinity Ward, Beenox, and Raven Software. That’s a pretty big indication that the scale of investment has changed.

To verify the COD history, Infinity Ward started Call of Duty back in 2003. Treyarch joined the Call of Duty roster in 2005, and then Sledgehammer came on board in 2011. After a messy divorce with the founders of Infinity Ward (who then went on to form Respawn), Activision embarked on a rotation where one major studio develops a game every three years so that a quality three-year project can come out each year. Activision easily outperformed EA’s DICE studio, which released a new Battlefield game every few years. And Call of Duty grew into a billion-dollar annual franchise that dominated the lucrative first-person shooter market.

This worked well until a new disruption emerged in 2017 with rival PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), the pioneer of the first widespread battle royale title. PUBG has sold more than 75 million copies to date, sending Activision into a panic.

Activision spread in 2019 with Call of Duty: Mobile developed by Tencent’s TiMi Studios for Activision. The free-to-play mobile title generated more than 650 million downloads and expanded the funnel for Call of Duty games. But Activision’s studios initially responded to PUBG with relatively unreactive battle royale games as it was overwhelmed by PUBG.

It then made some big changes in the studio, pooled its resources, and staged a major comeback with the launch of free-to-play Call of Duty: Warzone. Warzone’s social game, which launched in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic, was a godsend for people who were at home playing together remotely. It was a huge hit with more than 125 million downloads. The result of Mobile, Battle Royale and Modern Warfare 2019 was a massive surge in the global Call of Duty player base.

The next two installments – Cold War and Vanguard – were weaker and kind of wasted the advantage. But the company took its chunks and kept investing. Warzone’s success has even stunned Activision and it has decided to double down on the battle royale and free-to-play franchise. And so yesterday it unleashed its triple-barreled shotgun blast.

The next generation of Call of Duty

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II will debut on October 28th with a single player campaign and multiplayer. The campaign has been toned down a bit from Modern Warfare’s disturbing massacre of civilians in 2019. It focuses more on fun and a mainstream audience.

In addition, Warzone 2.0 will debut on November 16th with a brand new map, better graphics and improved gameplay such as battles in the water. It was developed using the same proprietary game engine as Modern Warfare II, as well as Warzone Mobile, due out in 2023. These three projects represent an attempt to unify the Call of Duty experience for players across all platforms. Add to that Ricochet Anti-Cheat technology, which appears to have greatly reduced cheating in online play.

The graphics look pretty amazing, especially the versions geared towards the high-end PC, Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5. Yesterday’s demos showed a lot of nice touches when it comes to game design.

You can trick multiplayer opponents with inflatable decoy soldiers. You can fight in massive 32v32 battles with dozens of AI characters fighting on the game’s battlefield. You can hang yourself from an edge. You can lean out of a car window and shoot. You can dive underwater and ambush someone on the shore. Several circles collide in the final Warzone moments.

Warzone 2.0 has a large map with subzones, which are maps from the multiplayer game. It’s as if the game designers actually talked to each other in the studios. Yesterday’s debut matches of Warzone 2.0 gameplay looked pretty amazing, right down to a cliffhanger victory for streamer NickMercs.

All of these refinements reflect a painstaking attention to detail, and might be enough to convince players to return to an intellectual property that seemed to falter. After Battlefield’s poor performance last year, Activision Blizzard has a chance to reclaim much lost territory and more.

The stakes for competition in the first person shooter game market just got bigger. Call me a Call of Duty fanboy. But I’m going to dive headfirst into this year’s Call of Duty. And rivals might do well to stay out of the way.