Call of Duty campaigns are very popular. The data says so.

[Ambient_Malice]

I suppose it is more from a customer standpoint, than a development standpoint. I'm not going to deny that EA and Activision throw a whole lot of money and talent at these campaigns, but in reality, the these games aren't really known for their campaign.

That would really depend. There is a vast gulf between the internet and the real world. You must remember a key fact here: most people have never played a Battlefield game before Battlefield 3. There is a huge sales gulf between "pre-campaign" Battlefield and "post-campaign" Battlefield with a factor of 2-3x the sales.

The "legacy" of the series doesn't mean ANYTHING in the real world. It's like claiming that Resident Evil is known as a survival horror series, when it is actually known as a third person shooter franchise attached to a successful film series. That's just how the numbers stack up.

Just look at Call of Duty Advanced Warfare: that game came out over a year ago now, and the only real lasting impression that the campaign made was "it was about private military companies", and "it had Kevin Spacey in it".

What more does it need? All people remember about Transformers 4 is the robots beat each other up and they went to China and there was My Little Pony. It still made a billion dollars at the box office. It's very, very common for people to not remember the details of the stories of the games they played. Most people who finished Half Life 2 couldn't explain the plot to you.

Imagine if the game hadn't had a campaign, and all that time, money, and effort went into making a more varied and interesting multiplayer sandbox.

You would kiss a huge chunk of the fanbase that have either no interest in MP or only a passing interest in MP goodbye. And Activision's pen pushers would be very nervous. The games are marketed almost entirely based on their campaigns.




The Black Ops II MP trailer has 1/3 of the views of the story-driven Reveal trailer. Nothing pulls in viewers and creates hype among the general game buying public who will buy 15-30 million copies like a well cut reveal/story trailer, no matter how much people whine and complain in the comments.

It just seems that these developers are just spending so much money on these campaigns, and they aren't really getting much out of them. Honestly, I'd just rather have a bigger and better online experience, rather than a tacked on, expensive, 5 hour campaign that I will only play once, and wont remember in about a day or two.

That's the game they want to make, though. The MP is usually handled by another, smaller, subteam. These people who makes these campaigns live and breathe storydriven FPS experiences. That's their passion. A Treyarch member once said that "The death of campaigns is the death of society."

 

[CritialGaming]

They want a "cinematic" scripted FPS experience with flawless production values..

but sadly this formula ruining FPS genre and COD4 set the example for that. luckily we have Great Single player FPS coming out like Doom, Blackroom, Shadow warrior 2, Space hulk and FPS/RPG hybrids like System shock 3 and Deus Ex MD.

COD 1, UO and 2 were only good COD games. after that series pretty much suck but its become more popular. most of COD fans never played original games and start with 4.

Why do you put so much stock into games that haven't come out yet? You rattle off this list like they aren't going to be heavily scripted corridor shooters, when I guarantee you they will be. They have to have heavy scripting in order for them to tell a good story along with all the bang bang. These games always preview themselves as having an old-school style with maze like levels, but in the end....they don't, they are shooting galleries with varying degrees of success.

Call of Duty games are the Micheal Bay of gaming. Lot's of cool flashy shit with nothing between. And the dude-bro's love it! Look not for nothing, but everyone I've ever spoken too who says that their favorite game is Call of Duty basically have the IQ's of Forrest Gump. There is something to be said for the mindless enjoyment one can take away from a COD game, but i have met an incredible amount of people incapable of basic math, that love the shit out of these games.

So as we sit here on a fairly intellectual forum....kinda. We often wonder who and why people buy these yearly games, over and over and over...and really it's people who aren't smart enough to know better, or can't mentally grasp the concepts of other games. They like it, because it requires nothing from them, because they are not capable of anything.

This sounds insulting, but really it isn't. Not completely anyway. If CoD is your thing, then do you bro, do you.

 

[Evonisia]

They're very popular but they're not the main draw. The campaigns are short and aren't exactly hard to beat, and the data doesn't compare campaign with multiplayer or third mode (Zombies, Survival etc.). The campaigns have became ridiculously inconsistent in quality for the games after the first "Black Ops" so I can't find myself caring about them anymore. I'll be keeping an eye on Sledgehammer, because I at least enjoyed "Advanced Warfare" for its campaign unlike the campaign catastrophes "Ghosts" and "Black Ops III".

I'm waiting to see if CoD 4's remaster is (officially) released separately to "Infinite Warfare", because frankly the campaign is probably gonna be shit, and the rest of it likely will be too and I find CoD 4 to still be one of the best games in this series.

 

[laggyteabag]

I suppose it is more from a customer standpoint, than a development standpoint. I'm not going to deny that EA and Activision throw a whole lot of money and talent at these campaigns, but in reality, the these games aren't really known for their campaign.

That would really depend. There is a vast gulf between the internet and the real world. You must remember a key fact here: most people have never played a Battlefield game before Battlefield 3. There is a huge sales gulf between "pre-campaign" Battlefield and "post-campaign" Battlefield with a factor of 2-3x the sales.

The "legacy" of the series doesn't mean ANYTHING in the real world. It's like claiming that Resident Evil is known as a survival horror series, when it is actually known as a third person shooter franchise attached to a successful film series. That's just how the numbers stack up.

Im not really talking about the legacy of the franchise, here; even the new Battlefield games are known for the multiplayer, pretty much exclusively. I haven't seen or heard anyone even mention the campaign for any Battlefield game, other than Bad Company, for a very long time, at least unless they were being critical about it, or talking about how BF4's campaign tied into the multiplayer.

That being said, I couldn't really see how the inclusion of the campaign in the Battlefield franchise increased sales numbers, honestly. You cite the sales numbers for Battlefield 3 as being much higher than, I presume, Bad Company 2, by about 2x-3x, but I feel that this cannot be attributed to the inclusion of a campaign mode, as Bad Company 2 did also have a campaign. If we were to look at the sales of Bad Company vs Battlefield 2, it would show that Bad Company actually did only slightly better than Battlefield 2 on PC alone, or 1.4 million sales less than BF2 on all platforms.

Just look at Call of Duty Advanced Warfare: that game came out over a year ago now, and the only real lasting impression that the campaign made was "it was about private military companies", and "it had Kevin Spacey in it".

What more does it need? All people remember about Transformers 4 is the robots beat each other up and they went to China and there was My Little Pony. It still made a billion dollars at the box office. It's very, very common for people to not remember the details of the stories of the games they played. Most people who finished Half Life 2 couldn't explain the plot to you.

This is fair enough. All you really need to do is slap a famous face on it, or show something exploding in a pretty way, and it will pique interests. That being said, I am unsure as to why Transformers is so successful, but I am sure that there are many things that attribute to its success. However, I am unsure if the success of a movie franchise is really all that applicable. As for Half-Life 2, honestly, I cannot really comment, as it is a game that I never finished.

Imagine if the game hadn't had a campaign, and all that time, money, and effort went into making a more varied and interesting multiplayer sandbox.

You would kiss a huge chunk of the fanbase that have either no interest in MP or only a passing interest in MP goodbye. And Activision's pen pushers would be very nervous. The games are marketed almost entirely based on their campaigns.

This is also fair enough. Some people do only enjoy Call of Duty for their campaigns, and yeah, there are quite a lot of them.

A WHOLE

BUNCH

OF TRAILERS

The Black Ops II MP trailer has 1/3 of the views of the story-driven Reveal trailer. Nothing pulls in viewers and creates hype among the general game buying public who will buy 15-30 million copies like a well cut reveal/story trailer, no matter how much people whine and complain in the comments.

I notice that these are a lot of Reveal trailers. The issue with this is that, if you look over YouTube, pretty much every reveal trailer has a higher view count that literally any other video for that game (only exception I found was Star Wars Battlefront). This shows that, for many people, they watch the reveal trailer, see the general theme for the game, and then switch off afterwards, and don't watch any other content; as a result, I feel that this may just be a case of correlation=causation, "the campaign is in the reveal trailer, so the campaign must be selling the game", when in fact, that may not be true. However, if you did a little deeper, in the case of Black Ops 3, their actual campaign trailer actually has 1/2 the views of their multiplayer reveal trailer.

It just seems that these developers are just spending so much money on these campaigns, and they aren't really getting much out of them. Honestly, I'd just rather have a bigger and better online experience, rather than a tacked on, expensive, 5 hour campaign that I will only play once, and wont remember in about a day or two.

That's the game they want to make, though. The MP is usually handled by another, smaller, subteam. These people who makes these campaigns live and breathe storydriven FPS experiences. That's their passion. A Treyarch member once said that "The death of campaigns is the death of society."

Is it, though? Like you said before, if Call of Duty didn't have a campaign, then the pencil pushers and the execs would get a little bit nervous, so it always felt to me that these campaigns were always a little bit "tick the box" campaigns, just so that they could sell it to people who always felt "no singleplayer, no sale".

Its a weird one, because I have actually really enjoyed CoD campaigns in the past. MW and MW2 had some great missions, with a great story, but recently, they haven't really been able to recapture that. Its not to say that they aren't really trying, though, because you don't just whack Kevin Spacey into a rush job, but there has just been such a recent crash in quality for the campaigns of the two biggest AAA FPS shooter franchises, that it makes me wonder if it is even worth the effort anymore. I wish these stories and campaigns were great, because I am certainly not anti-singleplayer, but it is just a viscous cycle of "should we try and make a potential stunner, or should we just reallocate our resources", and it has gotten to the point where I really wish it was the latter, to be honest with you.

 

[MCerberus]

The last campaign I even enjoyed was Blops, and that was mostly because it took the raving lunacy of WaW and made it central to a walking pulp novel of paranoid crazy.

The recent ones though, go from bad to "It would be funny if it didn't sound like some fascist parties attempting to win seats globally". They're taking the deluded madness seriously while being completely tone deaf with the characters. I checked out completely when a trailer talked about a father's duty to make soldiers for the fatherland (which in a global act of war put super weapons in space) while lifting the overall plot from a particularly fringe white paper that played racist fears for funding.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

It's not to say that they aren't really trying, though, because you don't just whack Kevin Spacey into a rush job, but there has just been such a recent crash in quality for the campaigns of the two biggest AAA FPS shooter franchises, that it makes me wonder if it is even worth the effort anymore.

How was Advanced Warfare a rush job? The game was in development for three years. The production values are basically flawless, and I say that as someone who is lukewarm on the game because I think Syndicate was so much better.

With the obvious exception of Black Ops III, whose campaign failures are rooted in co-op compromises, how has the quality of CoD campaigns crashed? And on the other side of the fence, the campaigns of Battlefield have undergone dramatic design improvements with each new entry. Battlefield 3 was a Black remake with 2006-era design. Battlefield 4 was a Crytek-style game. Battlefield: Hardline is a police game where you drive cars and perform tactical stealth and infiltrations.

Also these campaigns take only 2-4 hours to complete anyway. Of course more people will finish them.

They take about 6-8 hours. They're not especially short campaigns for their genre.

 

[sanquin]

I see the whole "not enough people playing the campaign" as a self-inflicted problem. Campaigns started becoming heavily scripted, with a very standard story, easy, and predictable. Thus people's interest in them dwindled. Then the big companies claimed that people aren't interested in campaigns in general.

People ARE interested in campaigns. Just...good ones.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

I see the whole "not enough people playing the campaign" as a self-inflicted problem. Campaigns started becoming heavily scripted, with a very standard story, easy, and predictable. Thus people's interest in them dwindled. Then the big companies claimed that people aren't interested in campaigns in general.

People ARE interested in campaigns. Just...good ones.

But the idea that people aren't playing the campaigns is a myth. 40-60% completion is fantastic. You can't ask for more. Only 36.7% of players finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Does this mean that gamers have lost interest in Deus Ex campaigns? Should the series abandon campaigns and just do Deus Ex MP? (The first game had MP, don't forget.)

Developers in general aren't saying people aren't interested in campaigns. Developers want to make them, and it would seem a significant number of people want to play them. The heavily scripted campaigns are a selling point, although "heavy scripting+more player freedom" is a sure fire deal sweetener. People want a tightly controlled, visceral experience, just as OTHER people also want open world games like Watch_Dogs that made SO. MUCH. MONEY. The internet would have you believe that Watch_Dogs wasn't a smash hit because "the internet" often lacks a grasp on facts and how the games industry works.

Marvel film recycling the same storylines over and over hasn't stopped their films making lots and lots of money.

 

[laggyteabag]

It's not to say that they aren't really trying, though, because you don't just whack Kevin Spacey into a rush job, but there has just been such a recent crash in quality for the campaigns of the two biggest AAA FPS shooter franchises, that it makes me wonder if it is even worth the effort anymore.

How was Advanced Warfare a rush job? The game was in development for three years. The production values are basically flawless, and I say that as someone who is lukewarm on the game because I think Syndicate was so much better.

With the obvious exception of Black Ops III, whose campaign failures are rooted in co-op compromises, how has the quality of CoD campaigns crashed? And on the other side of the fence, the campaigns of Battlefield have undergone dramatic design improvements with each new entry. Battlefield 3 was a Black remake with 2006-era design. Battlefield 4 was a Crytek-style game. Battlefield: Hardline is a police game where you drive cars and perform tactical stealth and infiltrations.

I never said Advanced Warfare's campaign was a rush job. I meant is as "you can tell they were trying, because if they weren't, they wouldnt have hired Kevin Spacey for no reason.".

Also, each subsequent Battlefield game can do whatever they want to change their campaign's theme or style or whatever, but it obviously hasn't saved them from just being flat out boring, emphasised by how each Battlefield game, post Bad Company 2, has been severely criticised for their campaigns. Need an example? How about his boring snorefest of a mission. I mean, sure, it looks cool, and that is nice, but when the mission just boils down to Turret Section: The Videogame, where you would get more interactivity from playing that Rambo game disaster, you have a problem.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

I never said Advanced Warfare's campaign was a rush job. I meant is as "you can tell they were trying, because if they weren't, they wouldnt have hired Kevin Spacey for no reason.".

IMO, they hired Kevin Spacey because Syndicate had Brian Cox in more or less the same role.

Also, each subsequent Battlefield game can do whatever they want to change their campaign's theme or style or whatever, but it obviously hasn't saved them from just being flat out boring, emphasised by how each Battlefield game, post Bad Company 2, has been severely criticised for their campaigns. Need an example? How about his boring snorefest of a mission. I mean, sure, it looks cool, and that is nice, but when the mission just boils down to Turret Section: The Videogame, where you would get more interactivity from playing that Rambo game disaster, you have a problem.

Battlefield 4 and Battlefield: Hardline responded to that criticism by letting you drive cars and such.

There's nothing especially wrong with the jet section in Battlefield 3. Operating the guns on a plane is what a weapon systems officer does. One person flies the plane, the other fires the guns. Would you rather have flown the plane as the AI fires the guns for you? Frankly, the hate for BF3 was misguided. There is nothing wrong with turret sections. I suppose you could also draw some thematic parallels to the film Behind Enemy Lines, where Ownen Wilson's character was a weapon systems officer. Battlefield 3 even has blue tinted visuals like that film.

 

[Hawki]

There's nothing especially wrong with the jet section in Battlefield 3. Operating the guns on a plane is what a weapon systems officer does. One person flies the plane, the other fires the guns. Would you rather have flown the plane as the AI fires the guns for you? Frankly, the hate for BF3 was misguided. There is nothing wrong with turret sections. I suppose you could also draw some thematic parallels to the film Behind Enemy Lines, where Ownen Wilson's character was a weapon systems officer. Battlefield 3 even has blue tinted visuals like that film.

Couldn't you just...I dunno, fly the plane and use its weapons by yourself? I mean, Bad Company still let me do that with a helicopter.

You might need to make some adjustments to make the level viable (since planes in Battlefield run out of ammo quite quickly (or at least they did in BF2), but that sounds far more appealing than a turret section.

 

[sanquin]

But the idea that people aren't playing the campaigns is a myth. 40-60% completion is fantastic. You can't ask for more. Only 36.7% of players finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Does this mean that gamers have lost interest in Deus Ex campaigns? Should the series abandon campaigns and just do Deus Ex MP? (The first game had MP, don't forget.)

Developers in general aren't saying people aren't interested in campaigns. Developers want to make them, and it would seem a significant number of people want to play them. The heavily scripted campaigns are a selling point, although "heavy scripting+more player freedom" is a sure fire deal sweetener. People want a tightly controlled, visceral experience, just as OTHER people also want open world games like Watch_Dogs that made SO. MUCH. MONEY. The internet would have you believe that Watch_Dogs wasn't a smash hit because "the internet" often lacks a grasp on facts and how the games industry works.

Marvel film recycling the same storylines over and over hasn't stopped their films making lots and lots of money.

That's why I said "Not enough people" rather than they aren't playing the campaign at all or only minimally. Those companies saying such things might see 40~60% as not enough people playing. (which is, as you said, stupid. 40~60% is pretty great.)

Also, I believe it was BunnyHop on youtube that said something like this, and I agree; A game's success can't be measured by it's sales. Hype and people stupidly pre-ordering and things like that mess up the numbers. However it can be measured by how well the sequel does. As the sales for the sequel reflect the consumers' trust in the franchise a lot more than the previous game. As in, if people bought watch_dogs, but felt they didn't get their money's worth they would be less inclined to buy a sequel on launch.

 

[Pseudonym]

Of the call of duties that I did play, I played the single player of mw1 multiple times, the single player of mw2 once and I replayed some levels and the single player of mw3 once. I did the first mission of world at war and I did not touch the campaign of black ops. I've played a whole lot of mw2 online and quite a bit of mw1, black ops and mw3 online (in decreasing order of how much time).

I'd certainly say that the multiplayer is a better reason to buy one of these games than the single player because it lasts far longer and has better gameplay. Well, last time I checked, that is. It's been a while. But I can't deny I was impressed by the first time I played the campaign of mw1. After a while I did see through most of their tricks though and at that point I was no longer as impressed. That and the story is complete nonsense. It looks nice, is well presented, etc, but the story is incomprehensible gibberish, jumping from actions scene to action scene.

On topic: you are mostly right. A lot of people disregard cod campaigns because they are kind of dumb entertainment but dumb entertainment sells and cod does certain things right that most people overlook in their eagerness to dismess the games. Another thing that earns Cod a lot of scorn is being a very succesful game in a genre played by a whole bunch of tribal players. I've met countless FPS players who would tell me that their FPS of choice invalidates all fun I've ever had with any shooter they didn't like. (half-life or its sequel is often used as a cudgel this way, as well as some old FPS like duke nukem 3d and shadow warrior)

That said, statistics like these can mean a lot of things. Yes, cod campaigns seem comparatively popular. However, I think one other reason a lot of people finish cod campaigns is because they are short and easy (on the lower difficulty settings). A similar ratio of steammeasured players actually finished XCOM 2 (35% or so according to steam achievements) but you can easily spend the time of 5 cod campaigns (which I estimate from memory to be 4-7 hours) in XCOM 2 without finishing the game. Spending a long evening to power through the new cod campaign on normal difficulty will make you one of the people to have finished cod without having to care greatly about the campaign or having bought the game for it.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

They want a "cinematic" scripted FPS experience with flawless production values..

but sadly this formula ruining FPS genre and COD4 set the example for that. luckily we have Great Single player FPS coming out like Doom, Blackroom, Shadow warrior 2, Space hulk and FPS/RPG hybrids like System shock 3 and Deus Ex MD.

COD 1, UO and 2 were only good COD games. after that series pretty much suck but its become more popular. most of COD fans never played original games and start with 4.

You've got to have a pretty strange definition of "ruining". Considering that somewhere around half the people that buys a CoD game finishes the campaign and CoD games are the best selling FPS games (if not games, period.) around, that implies that CoD games is exactly what people want. You can't ruin entertainment by giving people what they want.

They might not be games for you, but they are the most popular FPS games around so they've got to be doing something right.

 

[Vigormortis]

You can chalk me up among the people who played the campaigns to completion.

I rarely touch the multiplayer, unless it's local play. Hell, I don't think I ever once joined an online game of Advanced Warfare or Ghosts, but I played a hell of a lot of local and PvE games in them.

Yeah, I'm one of those "weirdos" that buys COD games for the campaigns. I like dumb fun on occasion. Bite me.

 

[B-Cell_v1legacy]

They want a "cinematic" scripted FPS experience with flawless production values..

but sadly this formula ruining FPS genre and COD4 set the example for that. luckily we have Great Single player FPS coming out like Doom, Blackroom, Shadow warrior 2, Space hulk and FPS/RPG hybrids like System shock 3 and Deus Ex MD.

COD 1, UO and 2 were only good COD games. after that series pretty much suck but its become more popular. most of COD fans never played original games and start with 4.

You've got to have a pretty strange definition of "ruining". Considering that somewhere around half the people that buys a CoD game finishes the campaign and CoD games are the best selling FPS games (if not games, period.) around, that implies that CoD games is exactly what people want. You can't ruin entertainment by giving people what they want.

They might not be games for you, but they are the most popular FPS games around so they've got to be doing something right.

Popularity =/= quality. most of overrated games are very popular and mainstream like COD and GTA.

COD games are not for FPS fans but are for casuals. most of COD fans only play COD, madden and GTA.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Popularity =/= quality. most of overrated games are very popular and mainstream like COD and GTA.

so what quality would you say CoD is lacking? I mean, you are making that argument in regards to the two franchises that are widely regarded as having top-notch production values, great visuals, audio, set pieces and game play. There are many reasons to dislike both CoD and GTA, but saying that they are lacking in quality is kind of like saying that water is actually dry. It is simply patently false and only makes you come off as extremely partisan at best or deluded and in denial at worst.

COD games are not for FPS fans but are for casuals. most of COD fans only play COD, madden and GTA.

Source for all of this? I mean, CoD has only been the Gold Standard for FPS games for the last decade and a half and is the series that most mainstream FPS games strive to emulate...

 

[DeliveryGodNoah_v1legacy]

I do tend to play most of the campaigns in Call of Duty games. They're never bad, they're just linear, which does NOT equal bad. There will always be a place for linear video games. I like open world, dynamically designed video games as much as anyone, but sometimes I just want a straight-forward shooter where all I have to worry about it an adrenaline filled 6-8 hours of my skill as a player.

Plus, you can't argue that the production on the campaigns isn't at least partially impressive. I'm still impressed with how much they are able to create and setup with the same old game engine, and it hardly ever looks awful.

It's also decent practice before hopping directly into the multiplayer. I do the same thing with the Battlefield campaigns.

 

[B-Cell_v1legacy]

Source for all of this? I mean, CoD has only been the Gold Standard for FPS games for the last decade and a half and is the series that most mainstream FPS games strive to emulate...

Come on my dear friend, what FPS you have been playing?? I have been playing FPS since 90s. i mean a Gold Standard??? its perfect example of how not to make FPS. COD4 was not even good FPS for 2007 when Stalker and Crysis were far superior.

yes its most mainstream but also among the worst FPS franchise. only good COD games were original and UO. I was into COD before it become cool.