Birds are chirping, the sun is heating up to its summer levels, and we’re officially in the middle of two premium Call of Duty titles. Which means it’s a good time for me to air out my grievances. It’s like spring-cleaning, but the cobwebs I’m trying to knock down are the ones on my favorite 20-plus-year-old franchise.
This year’s premium Call of Duty release will be the third title in the franchise to launch following Xbox’s acquisition of Activision. With development cycles spanning roughly three to four years each and more than a dozen studios adding to the proverbial Call of Duty pot, we are yet to see exactly how Microsoft’s involvement will shape the gaming juggernaut.
This year’s COD will have had the most development time under Xbox’s watchful eye to date, so it could be a good bellwether for what can be expected in the future.
That is, if there is a COD title this year. Social media is rife with rumors that the franchise will forgo a full release for 2025, and there has been little movement by Activision’s marketing division to prove otherwise.
If there’s any weight to those rumors, we could see a movement toward a prolonged multiplayer experience that spans two years instead of one, and an expansion-like campaign built upon the single-player narrative of 2024’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
I’m hesitant to buy too much into this notion that COD 2025 will be an expansion, strictly because this is a similar narrative we got in 2023 with Sledgehammer’s Modern Warfare 3. It wasn’t true then, either. That said, there are some changes that I think could benefit the franchise moving forward.
Break up Warzone and Multiplayer
In the early days of the first iteration of Call of Duty: Warzone, Activision found itself with an incredibly successful vehicle for promoting annual COD releases within the free-to-play Battle Royale. The tie-in between Warzone and mainline COD games was inevitable, and it helped to usher in new maps that helped to weave the stories together.
With the switch to Warzone 2.0, all Call of Duty titles were moved to the same narrative timeline and game engine. This was done to make those integrations between mainline titles and the free-to-play battle royale mode easier and to lessen the bloat of Warzone 1.
With each new annual title’s release, players were left waiting for the pre-season to end before Warzone would integrate with the newest launch. Black Ops 6’s launch period and pre-season were incredibly successful, but the integration of Warzone and Black Ops 6 was a shocking failure.
COD’s proprietary RICOCHET anti-cheat system all but collapsed, PC crashing and other stability issues ran amok for far too long, and the new resurgence map (remember Area 99!?) was unceremoniously removed just a couple of months after launch.
Warzone is not the only mode that suffers from this coupling, either. During the Modern Warfare 3 (2023) era, Sledgehammer Games made the baffling decision to increase the player health in Multiplayer modes to match that of players in Warzone so that weapon balance for the two games was cohesive.
This led to multiplayer gameplay becoming sluggish. A slower time to kill (or TTK for short) in a mode that’s otherwise known for being fast-paced just didn’t vibe as well as it does for the slower, more methodical action of battle royale modes.
There are some benefits to the two modes playing nicely with each other, and I don’t even hate the HQ launcher the way most players do.
But I do think that, overall, separating Multiplayer and Warzone would make it easier to balance weapons and perks per mode rather than trying to shoehorn them together via a ‘one size fits all’ strategy that just isn’t working.
Actually, let’s just break up all the game modes?
With each passing year, it becomes more and more obvious that the Call of Duty team, which consists of more than a dozen studios around the world, all excel at various gameplay elements in unique ways.
Trying to wrangle these talents together into a cohesive game that consists of multiple gameplay elements that aren’t always cohesive may be a big part of what is holding Call of Duty back.
I can’t help but wonder what would happen if Activision gave the team the freedom to separate Zombies, multiplayer, campaign, and Warzone into individual stand-alone experiences—all stored within COD HQ. Treyarch has done an incredible job with Black Ops 6’s zombies mode, releasing new maps on a bi-monthly basis and building on the Dark Aether storyline that has spanned the last few COD titles.
But the team’s efforts have also been spread thin across multiplayer, ranked play, and Warzone. For as good as Black Ops 6’s Zombies mode is now, what could it be if Treyarch were allowed to focus on it exclusively?
Yet another year of asking for less weed content
Last year, in my list of 6 things I wanted to see Treyarch change for Black Ops 6, I theorized that Call of Duty’s dev teams could come up with a toggle switch to add to the settings menu that would block weed content.
That request is carrying through to this year’s Call of Duty, because somehow Treyarch heard “less weed skins, please?” and then cranked the weed dial to 11.
Look, I’m not an old fogey (well, I am old — but that’s not the motivation behind this particular request.) who just doesn’t want to see the kids have fun. Hell, I’m the first person in line with my bank card in hand when a flashy unicorn bundle hits the COD store, so I don’t even dislike ALL bundles.
But at the end of the day, weed-themed content can pose a unique problem for some players.
Call of Duty already has a history of limiting which players can view specific skins. In the days of PlayStation exclusivity deals, PS-exclusive skins were presented to non-PlayStation players as the generic mil-sim operator skin. There’s no reason not to offer a toggle that could do the same for the drug-themed content.
Begone AI slop
Call of Duty’s dev team spans dozens of studios, and yet Microsoft-owned Activision is offloading at least some of the game’s asset production to generative AI, much to the chagrin of players. What’s worse is that the AI-generated slop assets are being sold to unsuspecting players as part of microtransactions in game bundles and doled out as rewards for in-game events — some of which also cost extra cash to fully redeem.
Nobody wants this.
Originally, Activision attempted to stay mum about the use of artificially generated images in Call of Duty titles, but Steam’s policy of requiring a disclosure on games that utilize AI eventually forced the publisher to acknowledge its use of AI.
AI-generated imagery is controversial for a multitude of reasons, spanning from claims of copyright infringement by artists whose work has been used to train large language models without the creators’ consent to the environmental damage caused by building and sustaining generative AI tech.
It also just looks bad. (I’m looking at you, Season 2 marketing images.)
Call of Duty is a multi-billion dollar franchise that consistently dominates monthly sales charts — surely the C-suite can pinch enough pennies to pay a human artist to create stickers, emblems, and other cosmetic rewards.
Out with the old, in with the new
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has felt like a swansong for the Black Ops series. The storyline has become so convoluted that it takes a flow chart and a PHD in conspiracy theories to unravel what is and is not canon.
Nostalgia for the Black Ops games of yesteryear dominated the multiplayer and prestige rewards for Black Ops 6.
It’s nice to see features like classic prestige making a comeback as they did in BO6, but I’m ready for fresh blood. The post-launch support kicked off strong, following support character Sevati Dumas (portrayed by actress Karen David), but by Season 3, the developers had fallen back on Frank Woods and Russell Adler, as well as characters from the past who are canonically dead but now playable in Warzone yet again for ...reasons.
Rather than trying to constantly fit in reasons for acquiescing to nostalgia, I’d like to see COD try out some new characters, new emblems (not AI ones, though), and maybe even fresh new stories altogether.
Situational weapon balance
This change ties back into the Warzone vs. Multiplayer balance issue I mentioned previously, but I would like to elaborate on it because it is one of Call of Duty’s biggest gameplay problems as far as I’m concerned.
Because weapons are added to Call of Duty with the intention of being usable in both Multiplayer and Warzone, it poses unique challenges to weapon balancing. Multiplayer is rapid spawn and spawn again gameplay with near constant engagement in close quarters, with mid-range gun play coming into account occasionally.
Meanwhile, Warzone often sees players engaging in longer-range encounters, where weapons like snipers and assault rifles should reign supreme.
Except that’s not what is actually happening. During the MW3 era of Warzone, we saw a shift in Raven Software and Sledgehammer Games’ strategy for weapon balancing that put more emphasis on keeping gun play consistent between Multiplayer and Warzone.
The introduction of ranked play has further complicated the issue, as the development team prioritizes weapon balance that makes every weapon type a contender against the others, regardless of engagement scenario.
Because of that prioritization, we have weapon metas that can not be easily countered by creating a loadout designed for your personal play style. We see SMGs with no recoil that can snipe a player across the map in just 3–5 rounds, whereas in older Call of Duty titles, SMGs typically had bouncier recoil and low damage at long range.
SMGs and shotguns are now just as viable at long range as snipers and marksmen. New weapon metas are no longer balanced around skill but are instead hinged upon the nerfs and buffs for weapons that roll out with each update’s patch notes.
Situational weapon balance that is affected by damage range, attachments, and the environment in which the encounter is occurring could go a long way toward improving Call of Duty’s weapon metas.
Overhaul RICOCHET anti-cheat
I’ve written quite a bit over the last few years about Call of Duty’s proprietary anti-cheat system, RICOCHET, and it has been quite the roller coaster. During the MW3 (2023) era, RICOCHET anti-cheat was at an all-time high.
The team was at its most transparent with its cheat mitigation efforts, describing new tactics that would lead to cheaters fighting other cheaters, or outing themselves publicly on social media and live streams. They also collected data that helped to improve the system.
Anti-cheat in the Black Ops 6 era has been less successful, however. The integration of Warzone and Black Ops 6 was a complete disaster during Season 1, with players going weeks without any cheat mitigation or acknowledgement of the issue by Activision after a data outage reportedly broke the entire system.
While Activision’s Team RICOCHET has continued to confirm the team is steadily improving the anti-cheat system, Activision’s legal team has been hard at work doling out cease and desists to cheat providers.
One of the more questionable anti-cheat tactics deployed by the current dev team was to give console players the ability to opt out of cross-play.
According to the Call of Duty team, most players who utilize cheats are on PC. That is an undeniable truth, and so, it's reasonable for console players to complain about being lumped in with a large pool of cheaters.
The problem, however, is that not everybody on PC is cheating, and those PC players who aren't cheating still don't want to be thrown in with those who are, with no way out. So while the solution to segregate cross-play does help on the surface, it is little more than a band-aid on an axe wound.
At the end of the day, for COD 2025 to succeed, it is absolutely going to have to get the anti-cheat right from the start. I’m okay with the team keeping RICOCHET in place, but that system needs to be priority number one before whatever releases this fall lands on gamers’ hard drives.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
