Call of Duty Is Now 20 Years Old Today!

[TheKingofVault14]

On October 29th, 2003 the original Call of Duty was released on PC in North America. Since then, it's grown to be a HUGE household name within the Gaming Industry. Now in regards to it's quality now ah well, that's a story for another day, what I do want to do at this time is ask if anyone of you guys have any awesome memories with this series? It can be memories from the original Modern Warfare Trilogy, the Black Ops series, or any of the WW2 games. Either way what is your favorite moments & memories of the Call of Duty Franchise?

[SenisterDenister]

I quit playing the series after 4. I didn't like that 2 had regenerating health, and removed the ability to sprint and vehicles and everything from the expansion of CoD1. United Offensive was great and 2 was a step back from that gameplay wise. I boycott Modern Warfare 2 because they took out player run dedicated servers and stuff like the ability to lean, and I never played another one.

[Jeff]

Wasn't CoD kinda huge to begin with, relatively speaking (meaning the market has grown and all that) or am I talking nonsense?

Man the "realistic"/WW2 shooter market was way too oversaturated in the mid 00s so I just stopped paying attention to any of them as it's not my preferred setting to begin with. I think I played a few of the CoDs (I can't tell the franchises apart), some of them were ok, but I have zero memories of them except for the on-the-rails action, autoheal and the way one of them respawned me right back to where I was, maybe. The last WW2 shooter I put some serious time into was probably Day of Defeat for Half-Life. And the classic Vietcong multiplayer demo of course (Nam is just WW2 extended universe), shoutout Megatron and Zed

The CoD series past the 1st installment for me was always like the average Netflix show that you put on because you get sick of doom scrolling for quality content. It's like the Stranger Things season 3 of video games or something. To be fair this probably has a lot to do with the fact that I prefer scifi and (non-D&D) fantasy settings.

The technological gap between Fallout 1 era and CoD era is pretty astounding however; I can't tell much of a difference between games now and games from 5 years back. Games like BotW still look gorgeous

[SenisterDenister]

I think the next big step is normalizing global illumination and really for pushing things like ray-tracing without killing performance in games. Real-time global lighting and reflections and whatnot seems like the next big thing. This is funny to me because we've had dynamic and global lighting in games since fucking STALKER in 2007. I understand ray-tracing is fundamentally different but it's still funny to me that gaming still hasn't made proper lighting a priority for players, which to me matters way more than texture resolution or model's poly counts. Anything can look better with good lighting, regardless of the resolution.

I think destructible environments should be pushed more, too. I can't even think of big games that do stuff like that. That indie game Battlebit Remastered does it to a degree and even with how limited it is it's still really fun to witness buildings blowing up amid the combat. The destruction provides new cover and denies existing places to hide, and really adds to the dynamism of each time you play it. There's no guaranteed safe hideout you can always camp in since it can be destroyed. I think gaming on the whole is kind of in a slump. The technology for great things is there but it seems like 95% of companies and developers are overlooking it all.

[Jeff]

Totally agree with you on all points. I don't know anything about global lighting or any of that but I've always wondered why games paid so litte attention to lighting in general, I mean there are obvious limitations gameplay-wise and yes decent attempts have been made, but all in all it could be way better. Thankfully the washed out grey/brown look era is coming to an end at least. Maybe OLED screens and higher contrast ratios or whatever will make working with lighting easier too, who knows. Would be nice to see some sort of a neon noir adventure game for example that focused on lighting and camera work.