It’s exactly a DLC that Activision realised they could make people pay £70 for instead of half that. Only a few weeks after MW2 came out it was being floated that there was no COD for 2023, and instead a Ghost focused expansion would come out to fill the void.

Don’t like it don’t buy it but FFS stop with faux shock and horror. COD is of the most aggressively monetised franchises in mainstream gaming, from a company with zero scruples. Facts that have been valid for a decade or more and the regular news cycle attached to it all gets tiring.

Ignore the bugger and maybe they’ll be forced to do better next time when this sell’s poorer (you can hope at least). It’s not like this is some long awaited sequel either, just skip this one. There’s so much more to play this year in particular.

If you're sick of massive AAA developers running cash grabs, my suggestion is stop patronizing their games until they get their sh*t together. An excellent alternative if you're looking for a fun FPS game is Battle-Bit Remastered. I personally love this game, and there is a long running joke that the three guys that made this basically shat on the AAA developer world when they released a full featured FPS for $15 that is enjoyable and has 0 micro transactions.

wow, just like a certain game that launched twelve years ago, called "Modern Warfare 3"

I stated playing battlebit and I don’t even consider bothering with mainstream titles anymore. This release is garbage, the last 5 releases have just been progressively worse and worse, like hey even bother?

It feels like I have more fun in 1 game of battlebit than I did over the entirety of my 200+ hours of BO2, which was the last mainstream shooter I played that didn’t feel entirely like a waste of money.

I have basically been addicted to CoD for the past couple of years, but recently finally cracked and got annoyed enough that I don't play nearly as often, or nearly as long anymore. Expensive and overly monetized, absolutely, but there are so many other issues. This is my way-too-long rant that I always go on about CoD:

• Camo that is always intentionally very dark so that people will buy it, and then it will get nerfed once sales die down

• Same with OP weapon blueprints-- sell the new OP blueprint, then nerf it eventually, and then take the PR stance of claiming that you listen to fan feedback.

• Feeling like I'm playing Pokémon with all the swords and shields... I hate shields. Shields making someone practically invincible on almost half of their body, and them having zero movement penalty when they are on someone's back is absolute horseshit. Swords, where people can run faster because it's a light weapon, and you can have the Double Time perk to move even faster, so that they can just rush you and slap you with an instant kill is also absolute horseshit. I DO love sticking a shield person with Thermite, but so many other things should work against them and they just don't.

• The game crashing, and crashing often. Which for MWII was only fixed in the last couple of months, in my experience.

• The incredibly annoying "Restart Game" prompt when you load up CoD, it downloads the stupid store bullshit, and then the game needs to be restarted before you can continue

• The stupid UI. Let me get to Quick Play, IDK, quickly, maybe? I should not have to click through a million stupid tiles just to get to Quick Play

• Oh, and stop fucking changing my playlist filter to include some random game mode every now and then. If I have my filter set to just TDM, don't you damn dare any other mode onto that filter.

• Night maps. Fuck night maps. MWII has one night map, and there's zero options in these games to filter out night maps or any other map you may despise (like Border Crossing).

Despite all of this (and so, so much more) I still have 600+ hours into MWII alone, but the more I play it now, the more I find I just get angry at how shitty the entire experience actually is. The parts of it that are fun and addicting are not worth all the other bullshit. I do not intend to purchase MWIII.

https://www.ign.com/articles/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-3-campaign-disc-required-error-asks-for-mw2-ps4-disc-update

Sounds about right.

The people who care enough to complain are also largely the ones who keep buying it, so they train companies to realize that complaining is something that can be ignored because it's all bark and no bite.

I'm done with COD after last year's. If I don't buy battle pass blah blah...I spent 70 fucking dollars already, that's the price of the game not a ticket to continually pay. Fuck off.

I feel like CoD has been a joke for like the past 5-7 years. They just keep rehashing the same thing year after year and players gobble it up. My friend is addicted to it and plays it online constantly, I stopped playing it when they shifted focus from the offline single player and two player story/missions to the online Battle Royale style games. I don't find getting spawn killed and getting screamed at by 10 year olds fun.

If you bought horse armor back in the day, you directly caused this problem.

Well, you vote with your wallet. This is what happens when gamers pre-order incomplete games and scream about the state of the game on social media: you get crap products like this.

Money is the only thing that appeals to companies. If people would just vote with their wallets, we wouldn't have this situation.

Okay I'm seeing tons of comments from people about Battle Bit, but is there something good like it that features more realistic graphics? No disrespect to that game but the Roblox style instantly kills it for me.

I'm itching for a good single player arcade-y/soldier-y FPS. Anyone have a suggestion? Haven't played CoD (nor BF for that matter) since the one with the No Russian level.

As opposed to the original MW3, which was a totally unique experience from CoD MW2 because...well don't worry about that part, it was its own disk!

Heh. I was just discussing this with a friend 2 days ago. We surmised that they would half ass it even more than MW2 because this one was already half assed and still sold well, and Battlefield, which is basically their only competitor, is in shambles right now (and was in a an even more sorry state around when they probably started working on MW3).

Sounds like we were mostly correct

I'm old. I miss the WW2 CODs.

I really have no sympathy. These people have been buying the exact same game on repeat for at least a decade. Same with people who buy the exact same sports games every single year even though almost nothing has changed. Stop supporting this bullshit, there are millions of games out there. I'm absolutely tired of every fucking 16-35 year old male asking me if I'm playing the new call of duty.

I tried the beta a couple weeks ago. Right off the bat, I got windows firewall popups when launching the client which crashed the client. And it's slow to launch too. The menus are terrible. It actually launches a 2nd client from the first one, which prompted another Windows firewall popup which crashed it again, so I had to go through launching both clients again before it actually got around to launching the actual game (I don't think that one actually prompted firewall again).

The gameplay was ok. It was pretty smooth and I saw no obvious bugs or crashes. There were some balance problems, but it is a beta so I wrote those off. At the same time, nothing really stood out to me as new, novel, or innovative. I'm assuming this is what the article means by it feeling like a DLC of the last game. I didn't play the last one but I can see it not being any different. Maybe just new maps. Those kinds of things used to be released for free in games (and many games still do) in order to keep the game alive and retain players so they keep paying those microtransactions.

The biggest problem I had was that I noticed some guns are unlocked just by playing the game. But some guns specifically said they had to be unlocked in the shop. Literally pay to win weapons. I've played CoD games in the past with microtransactions and they always only sold cosmetics so I didn't mind, but weapons now? That's a no from me dawg.

Lastly, I prefer playing games with friends. But due to the nature of randomized respawns in most of the game modes, you don't really experience coordinated gameplay. You could play battle royale but I'm over that now. So I'm back on OW2 instead. While it has stupid expensive skins that used to be free, at least it's not pay to win, and I can enjoy actual team play.

If you pay that without waiting for reviews then it is a well deserved price.

Thankfully this is the first COD I've bought in like 4+ years. Still shameful