Let’s Talk About The Hate For Infinite Warfare

By: Tyler Miller

It’s 2016 and that means another Call of Duty is coming out this year. With the reveal of a new game in the series also comes all the hate and scrutiny that the series gets each year (which just increases as the years go on), and this year is no different.

When the rumors and leaks for Infinite Warfare started to come out, it appeared as if just about everybody that plays Call of Duty was pissed and ready to storm the Infinity Ward offices with torches and pitchforks. All across the internet I saw comments from people saying that they didn’t want the series to go into space. They hate the future setting, they never wanted this, and they want the series to go back to the past. Oh, and we can’t forget the comments from people saying that the game is going to be trash before they even see anything from it. This all just escalated even more when the game was revealed yesterday and fans got their first look at the game.

Reading all of these comments really bothered me to say the least, for a couple of reasons. The first reason being that I can just never understand how people can be so close minded about things and not be willing to give stuff a chance. The gaming community can be an extremely toxic one, and the Call of Duty community is one of the most toxic ones out there. Its fans are rabid and have no problem vocalizing their opinions. Now there is nothing wrong with that at all, but it’s saddening to see them totally shoot down Infinite Warfare before seeing if it’s good or even trying it out themselves. For all they know, the game could be loads of fun and be one of the best games in the series. But because most of the community hates anything post-Black Ops 1, they believe that it’s just going to be crap because it’s not one of the older games.

This perfectly goes into the next reason why these comments bothered me: the fact that this future setting is actually exactly what fans of the series asked for. Fans of the series can deny it if they want to, but they asked for the series to go into the future and have a space setting. I remember reading comment sections and forums across the internet back in the Modern Warfare/early Black Ops era of the series and seeing people say that they wish the series would go into the future and head into space. They fantasized at the idea of being able to run along walls or have jetpacks. These fans marveled at the idea of the series heading into space and having multiplayer matches on different planets or in zero gravity.

A big part of the reason why people wanted the series to head into the future is because of the fact that people were becoming tired of the modern setting and the gameplay of the series. Players felt as if the series was becoming stagnant and stale, something that really hit them after the release of Modern Warfare 3. Although the game was a good game, it didn’t live up to the heights of its predecessors due to its rocky development period. It didn’t help that this was at the time when Battlefield 3 was launching and competing directly with MW3. Once this game launched, people started to want the series to go in a different direction. They started to want the series to change by bringing in vehicles, bigger maps, and a new setting (hint: it’s the future). There was no clamoring for the series to return to WWII or anything before that as those time periods had already been done to death by the FPS genre as a whole.

It’s obvious to see why the future would be a setting many people would want. It opens up so many possibilities in terms of gameplay and design. Why be limited to a standard M16 when we could play with a weapon that shoots energy beams? Why be limited to the constraints of the real world when the devs can create a whole new world to play around in? Going to the future releases the shackles of what we already know and hands us the unknown, something that can be endlessly explored.

Things started to change with the release of Black Ops 2 by Treyarch. Before this game, Treyarch had been known as the developer that released games in the past. With BO2, they started to bring the series into the future, something that had never been done before. Even though they went into the future it still wasn’t too far into the future, taking place in 2025. This was enough of a jump though to introduce new things to the series such as quadcopters, the A.G.R. (Autonomous Ground Robot), shock charges, and the millimeter scanner. Even though they didn’t change the way that you played the game too much, they did offer a change and it was welcome. And what happened? People embraced the game and the setting. They wanted more of the future. And then Ghosts came out…

Ghosts is universally seen as being a mediocre game in the series (or as trash by people who believe games can only be amazing or trash). It took place in the same time period as the Modern Warfare series and was made by Infinity Ward as well, but it wasn’t the same company that made the MW series. This was a totally new Infinity Ward that had a tough time making Ghosts due to behind the scenes issues and the fact that the game was being made for multiple platforms. Fans didn’t like the game and were desperately wanting the series to change. They got their wish with Advanced Warfare, the game that took the series even farther into the future and changed the series for the foreseeable future.

With Advanced Warfare, Sledgehammer Games made their mark on the series by introducing advanced movement with the exo-suit. The exo-suit drastically changed the way Call of Duty played as it allowed players to boost around the environment instead of being limited to just running normally. Now players could boost up into the air and gain a height advantage on their enemies, or they could boost side to side to try and juke out their opponent and survive just a bit longer than they would’ve in any of the past games. With the exo-suit also came new abilities such as being able to cloak yourself for a short amount of time, hover in the air while you rain down fire on enemies, and grenades that reveal the locations of any enemy nearby. This was everything that players had been asking for! The fans were excited about it this and extremely happy with the change. You would think they would be happy with it once they got it, but players hated it.

Fans hated the advanced movement and didn’t want it to return in Black Ops 3, but they didn’t get their wish. They got more advanced movement, with the ability to run on walls  being added to the game now. The boosting in the game wasn’t as fast as in Advanced Warfare, making it a bit easier to boost around and fight enemies that are boosting, but players still didn’t like it. People asked for change to come to the series before, and now all of a sudden we see people clamoring for the series to return to WWII or the modern time. Now people are saying that they never wanted the series to change and that they wanted it to stay the way it was, but that simply isn’t true.

Now here we are with Infinite Warfare taking us into space and giving players everything that they fantasized about years ago and they don’t want it. All these players are saying that it’s going to be crap and that it looks like garbage. Like I said earlier, this isn’t a fair thing to say though without seeing some real gameplay and playing the game yourself. I should say that there is nothing wrong with disliking a time period. There are people that don’t like futuristic shooters because it’s just not their thing, and that’s okay. The issue I have is that people have been clamoring for this type of game from the series for years, and now they say that they don’t want it and never have wanted it. It reeks of nothing but hypocrisy and makes it seem like the fans of the series truly don’t know what they want. Who’s to say that they won’t be calling for change again if the series reverts to WWII or the modern day for a couple of installments? I can totally see that happening because it already happened years ago.

It’s also important to note that games don’t get made overnight. They take time to get made and go through a number of different stages. Infinite Warfare was being made while Advanced Warfare was being released, so Infinity Ward had no idea people wouldn’t like the future setting and advanced movement. By the time people started expressing their dislike of it, it was too late for Infinity Ward to backtrack to try and do something different.

For those that don’t want to play in space, there’s the remaster of the first Modern Warfare for you to play (assuming you have the Legacy Edition of Infinite Warfare). You can enjoy yourself and have the time of your life reliving the past, and I certainly hope you do. The remaster looks great and I’ll definitely be playing it as well. With all that being said though, we shouldn’t be hating Infinity Ward for giving us what we all asked for. Infinite Warfare looks like it’ll be a pretty fun game that continues to change the way we play Call of Duty (even if it’s not drastic), and I’m going to keep an open mind until I get to play it for myself.