Competitive Call of Duty - The ups and downs
COD Black Ops 2 are still considered to be one of the very best COD titles in the series.
To start off, I would like to say that it is sincerely both an honor and a pleasure to be on board here at TGG. I hope you all find a sufficient and ample amount of enjoyment in my articles, which will be primarily eSports based. Here’s to many more! *Please note that my views and opinions are mine, and only mine.*
Fixating in on the topic of competitive Call of Duty, which has been gaining popularity for quite some time, it appears that many are never happy, I’d like to take a crack at this, and give my input as to why I believe fans and players are constantly complaining and disappointed.
Although fans and players are, and will always continue to be disappointed with competitive Call of Duty, it’s been more than evident to me that the title in the series, Call of Duty: Ghosts has disclosed their frustration more than ever. After giving it an adequate amount of thought, a likely cause of this misfortune could be due to the success of the game’s predecessor, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.
Although the competitive community perhaps didn’t notice it at the time, Black Ops 2 set the bar extremely high in terms of eSports settings, for years to come. It was perhaps the perfect game, not necessarily in terms of it’s gameplay, but more so in terms of the features the game brought to the table.
What more could the competitive community ask for? Competitive settings, which generally coincided with those of the MLG playlist. A playlist for competitive settings, (being League Play) something that Treyarc has always kept in the back of their mind, and above all, a ranking system.
What many fail to realize, is that the developers of Black Ops 2 were rolling the dice in going out of their way to accommodate these settings and features for community, in hopes that they’d satisfy those who took interest in the growing genre of competitive gaming.
As a result of this, players and viewers see CoD Ghosts as a “failure” so to speak, in terms of competitive play. This is nothing but an unmitigated response to Infinity Ward not quite ‘one-uping’ Treyarc in terms of the competitive settings they provided in their title.
However, in fairness, the basic settings are in fact all there. Infinity Ward provided the competitive community with their own team-based competitive playlist, just with no ranking system. If you ask me, some weapons in the game are in fact very unbalanced and overpowered, and the spawning system could use some touching up, but all in all, Infinity Ward gave the competitive players what they wanted.
I also think that Infinity Ward made an imperative mistake in not bringing back the popular game modes of Hardpoint, and Capture The Flag, which results in competitive play often appearing slightly tedious and monotonous at times.
Nonetheless, what the Call of Duty eSports community needed is still there by all means. If for whatever reason eSports become a worldwide phenomenon, I can’t foresee any Call of Duty developers putting forth a full-blown effort into it, but for now, they’re doing just fine.
/Doug Detwiler
The Gaming Ground
