I am not one of the obnoxious elitists you find on every video game forum hating on Call of Duty. I like these games, and I continue to buy and play them. At the same time, however, I have no delusions about what they are- they’re just arcade shooters, sort of like the FPS equivalent of a Super Smash Bros. or something.
A large part of that is because the games are not necessarily all that skill based, and it is possible to do well in a game of Call of Duty even if you are not good at it, simply because of how hilariously unbalanced they are. And it is true that Activison has tried to resolve that in recent years, most notably with Treyarch’s Black Ops II in 2012, but on the whole, the games remain what they are.
Not so with Advanced Warfare, it seems. A professional player of Call of Duty uploaded footage of the game where he accrued a 30 kills killstreak, and he got no option for a KEM or nuke strike, removing one of the most unbalanced elements from the game’s multiplayer. Equally importantly, if you pick up a modified gun, and want to add more mods to i, you will need to use allocation points, which all seem to further balance the game out. Balance is also the reason that the Toughness perk seems to have been entirely reworked.
Advanced Warfare looks pretty damn cool to me, especially after how disappointing last year’s Ghosts was. Hopefully, the game will revitalize the franchise, which has been in a bit of a slump since 2010’s amazing Call of Duty: Black Ops.