Why do many PC gamers Love COD1 and 2 but hate later games in series?

Note: Before we start this discussion. let me clear one thing. i am also the one of them who likes COD1 and 2 and hated others but i dont consider COD1 and 2 masterpieces and very different from modern games of series

So my friends, I was looking and researching about these games and compare to early beloved games. COD1 and 2 were not much better than newer COD games imo

let see

• COD1 was linear and scripted. so are later games in series
• COD1 has on rail segments. so are in later games
• COD1 has only NPC open door. so are in later games
• you follow marker in COD1. so in later games in series

the only difference is. in COD1 there is not much QTE and regen health (which is in COD2 and will not in CODWW2). other than i dont see much difference. these games ever when was PC exclusive were always linear, scripted, casual. calling other games dumbed down compare to COD1 is basically bit stretch.

what I like about COD1 and 2 were they were cool WW2 roller coster ride.

so what do you think? lets discuss

Probably a mix of it wasn't done to death yet and the campaigns were better.

I dun goofed

not by very large margin. the thing is newer COD games are so bad that make original one amazing.

other than COD1 and 2 were just a good games. and im sure CODWW2 will be just as good asuming it has no regen health. other than they are EXACT SAME!!

COD 1 and 2 are so old now that I barely remember but I think they were less dudebro-y and slow-mo-y and here you rank up 10 ten times in row, confetti, American flag. We have celebrities now! That's why you buy these games isn't it? You want a full game, buy some DLC! Michael Bay direction, grenades everywhere. Its vibe really changed IIRC. Those old games probably look like shit now but at the time you could take the campaigns kinda serious.

For me it's not so much COD 1 and 2 that are kinda getting in the way of liking the newer ones. For me it's that FPS games around that time were making steps forward. We were seeing squad management. Fire teams that you could position somewhere. Vehicle control. Balanced spawn positions in online play. Objective based multiplayer modes. Minor advances in A.I. Cool stuff that COD kinda killed by keeping the bar very low for the genre. I remember being shocked at the invisible walls and infinite enemy spawns in the early CODs because we were moving away from that. It was taking steps backwards. And I remember going from server browsers to COD's real shitty anti-lag code and peer to peer which kinda put a dent in their whole 'oh this is a serious worldwide sport now' act. Then they proceeded to lie time and time again about dedicated servers.

I got pretty fed up with their direction, their attitude, their pricing structure, their shitty online, and eventually with the attitude of the players that their dudebro model attracted. People who started misbehaving in other games usually were COD players who got lost. They gained quite a reputation for a while for being people you don't want to play with. Then we had an influx of bad LoL people and some others and now every game is dealing with shitty communities so it's become more of a problem of the times we're in.

COD 1, UO, COD 2 and COD 4 are masterpieces. I kinda forgot how good COD4 was until I played the remaster :0

World at War and Advanced warfare are pretty great.

All the others can be skipped.

Ghost is bottom of the barrel, one of the worst games I ever played.

I don't.

I think 1 is way too archaic. It's certainly not open either. It has health packs, sure, but without a complex level design that allows explorations, it means shit. I like some of two's missions, but yeah.

Modern Warfare and World At War campaigns are still pretty fun to play. At least they are fully aware of their style and is built in such a way.

As for MP, I only played UO extensively, I can't compare.

Last I checked the last COD PC gamers liked was COD4.

Reason because that was one of the last Call of Dutys that had actual dedicated servers.

@LegatoSkyheart: World at War had too.

Modern warfare 2 dropped many features that people took for granted, among which Dedicated Servers.

I really hope WW2 is a return to form, but I liked Sledgehammers last game :)

@R4gn4r0k: Yeah I knew World at War had them, but I only mentioned COD4 because I only ever hear about that game. Not so much of WaW even though that game introduced us to Zombies.

COD1 and 2 were decent. and COD4 did suck start the process of ruining and dumbing down FPS genre.

I was being a little negative in that post. I am curious about the new one. I hope they will do some cool things and make it work well on PC. If it turns out to be a great FPS game then I'll play it. I haven't closed the door on Activision or COD. But what COD turned in to is not for me.

64 player dedicated servers

.......... Because the idea of a scripted narrative at the release of CoD1 was something new in the genre during the time? Fast forward to now in which CoD and numerous other games have used this to oblivion where the novelty wore off.. Back in the day games dropped you on your ass much of the time with less focus on direct narrative.. We are basically seeing a pendulum trend in which games that do just that (such as the explosion in popularity of the survival genre) of dropping you off with little hand holding and far more open gameplay is now becoming more popular again..

I played the first CoD and decided right there it's not for me. I next tried CoD 4 a number of years later. But, I ended up giving the game to my nephew before I could even take off the shrink wrap.

Thus ended my CoD experience.

Cod 1 and 2 was about replaying historical battles, it had a certain dark war feeling to it. cod 2 and especially 3 became more multiplayer oriented and the historical battles were not as dark as they were in the first.. Cod 4 was a whole new route with the multiplayer prestige/killstreak mechanics.

Loved CoD 1 and UO, and liked CoD 2 , and loved CoD 4, last CoD I bought was WaW and i liked that, but after that they went down hill. I ended up just borrowing most of the CoD's after WaW I refuse paying them for rehash and milked concepts.

I've asked myself the same thing. Health in CoD dropped enough for it to not be a big issue. So it wasn't the regenerating health that did it. The gunplay in the series remains relatively unchanged either.

CoD's gimmick in 2003, which people often forget, was that you were almost always fighting along side a large group of NPCs. The game had fantastic pacing and scenario design on top of that. It stood apart from Medal of Honor by simply having more intense battles and more "grand" scenarios. It's on-rails sections were fast and intense and served as a great change of pace at just the right times. Both CoD and CoD UO were just really well paced games that had a mix of intensity and scale that no other shooter was doing at the time. Even though they were very linear and highly scripted, there were way more NPCs on screen on both sides and the game used a lot more animations and effects in the distance to make the levels seem larger than they were.

They brought that gimmick and pacing over to the modern era with CoD 4 and it culminated in the biggest and most memorable scripted sequences in Modern Warfare 2. After that they'd pretty much done all that kind of game design really allows. CoD Black Ops, Modern Warfare 3, and later games just ended up reusing all of these same gameplay sequences over and over and the general scenario design just became more predictable and boring. Forced stealth sequences attempting to be as intense as "All Ghillied Up" in CoD 4 got really boring over and over. The games got even more scripted as time goes on. I remember Black Ops 1 and 2 taking control away from the player quite a bit and most games forcing the player to just wait for the NPCs to tell them when to move. It was awful.

The series has just really suffered from fatigue. Infinite Warfare had some cool scenarios and the fun space combat stuff mixed it up well, but I found the actual shooting to be boring because their attempt to mix up enemy variety with the robots was more annoying than it was anything else. The weapons in Infinite Warfare also felt less accurate and effective than previous titles for some reason. CoD 2 introduced this sense of connectivity of your bullets impacting enemies and the environment. The Modern Warfare series had it too. However it seems to be absent lately in the Black Ops series and Infinite Warfare series. That connection of metal and meat is just not there like it was in CoD 2. So that's another issue.

There was also Modern Warfare 2 which stripped out proper dedicated servers and was a poor PC port all together. After CoD MW2, all of the PC versions of the games always felt like an afterthought. The user interfaces are cumbersome and clearly built to be navigated with a controller, some basic controls (like leaning) are just gone for no reason on the PC, dedicated servers made a return only when P2P was no longer cutting it even on the consoles, but there is no server browser to be found (which has its pros and cons, matchmaking can be fine but server browsers foster communities better), and optimization on launch is hit and miss. I've had issues with pretty much every modern CoD game not liking my specific hardware setup.

So for a PC gamer, they kind of started slapping their PC fans in the face beginning with Modern Warfare 2.

I dont see much difference between COD4 and MW2. they are EXACT same games. except MW2 was little bit better.

I think the most varied one is COD2. its campaign consist of from snowy missions to desert africa to d day and hill 400. plus it was longest COD game ever made.

COD1 was also waaay too short. so are any later games in series.

People liked the multi-player of cod 1/UO and 2 better than the new ones.

MW2 had matchmaking that didn't work on the PC, was overrun with hackers, and had leftovers from the Xbox 360 version clearly on it. It was a terrible port and is when it was clear the PC was second class to the consoles for the series. That's why PC gamers hate MW2 so much.

I prefer the MW2 campaign to CoD 4, but never played the multiplayer because of the shit they pulled with it.

1 and 2 good the rest cash cow

Do you think the situation will be different with the new one ?

Personally I fear for it, I'd love a good PC version, but if it's not up to snuff I'd rather support companies like DICE and Tripwire that make excellent PC shooters.

I was talking about SP. i didnot liked the MP in any COD game.

No, it didn't sniper. Your worthless opinion =/= fact.

Even though people will argue the mechanics changed with CoD2, the real answer is the game became popular and hipster gaming snobs dont like anything thats popular.

World at war was pretty sweet, but I never played the Multiplayer much :)

At around Modern Warfare 1 I stopped playing COD for the multiplayer

Nope, Call of Duty 4 had a great campaign, the game itself was excellent.

I kinda blame it for pushing shooters into the modern days and popularizing weapon unlocks, but it's not really CODs fault that developers or games became creatively bankrupt.

If games started sucking after COD4 it was because they did a lousy job of copying it, instead of doing something unique with the premise. Medal of Honor 2010 and Warfighter are just weak games all around, them trying to copy COD has nothing to do with how bad they are on a basic level.

Replaying COD4 in the remastered edition made me realise again how excellent and well paced the campaign is: Every mission is different and unique:

What a terrible argument: MOHAA and COD 1 were already incredibly popular in the PC scene.

CoD 1 and 2 were fun for the time because there just wasn't much out like it. However, they really haven't aged well at all. I wouldn't bother playing through them again.

@R4gn4r0k: World at war was much better than modern warfare. it was actually challenging game, has better campaign and pacing. reznov was better than price. it was last good COD game.

Dedicated servers have been part of CoD for awhile now. They just still use a matchmaking front end but the games are hosted on servers rather than clients.

Black Ops 3 and Infinite Warfare had decent PC versions. Since the PS4/Xbox One are just x86 machines, with the Xbox One running DirectX, there is basically no platform gap like there was back in the PS3/360 years. A PC build is usually the primary build today. One would expect CoD WWII to run well on the PC and be fully featured enough.

The only issue I had with Black Ops 3 was some optimization issues. It had some issue with the GTX 780 past some driver version and they never fixed it. I find that they initially build a decent PC version but don't really support it well enough on the tech end. This leads to a lot more issues with a larger variety of hardware configurations.

You'd think many issues would be eliminated by making the PC version the primary build and reinstating dedicated servers.

But still I have many fears that may only be lifted once the full game is out on PC and tested by the players (I heard about no beta for PC, so we won't get to know how well the PC version is in advance)

Gotta say I very much enjoyed Sledgehammers last game and for me it was a decent to good PC version, I just don't really trust Activision nor do I know their agenda with the PC version.

PC versions of Call of Duty have been selling way worse than console versions these past years, partly because the focus has been mainly on the console versions.

@R4gn4r0k: "Primary build" is misleading. Yeah the PC version probably is the primary build, but it only has to work on your internal development machines. You don't have to worry about tons of different hardware/software configurations out there. So while the game is being built on the PC, that doesn't necessarily mean they are optimizing for a wide variety of hardware. This is partly why we see more issues with CoD on launch for a lot of types of machines while some people report absolutely no issues.

Another thing is they'll have this game running on PCs at a show like E3 but then the game comes out and the console version is optimized way better... :P

I mean if Activision gets more money out of consoles, fine by me, they should go after that market.

I just hope that if they want to go back to CODs roots, and they mean it, it'd be great to have an enticing version ready for PC gamers too.

Sledgehammer had 3 years to get this version running on all platforms (maybe a few more platforms if they optimize for PS4 Pro and Scorpio... but more platforms could mean more problems look at BF4)

But I really want to wait until this game is out in the wild, or perhaps even a free weekend, to see how this new game will run on PC.

You don't sound that worried for COD: WW2s PC version? Or are you ?

@R4gn4r0k: I don't care that much. If it's an unoptimized piece of trash I'll just pass.

No preorder from you then, I see :D

Yeah there are many upcoming multiplayer games. The new Battlefront could turn out excellent as well, I'll pass my judgement in the beta.

I hope for the best with this one, but if it isn't, it's not the end of the world :P

Consolisation, rehashing and anti consumer business practices.

@mjorh: wow, nice video!

Because pc gamers aren't rational