Every Call of Duty Gets a Gimmick Nobody Wants
You know that familiar feeling you get when watching a video on an upcoming Call of Duty game where you’re being shown a new feature that the developers are pushing as a big deal but you aren’t sure? And then, you know that feeling when you play the game and realize the feature is exactly what you thought it would be and you feel like a dummy for even giving it a chance? That happens with almost every CoD game. With Vanguard, you got destructible cover. Nobody asked for that, and it didn’t really work all that well. With Cold War, you got a new Scorestreak system nobody asked for. With Modern Warfare (2019), you get an emphasis on tactical play and a more accessible game that, also, nobody really asked for. The list goes on and on. With Modern Warfare 2, we’re getting underwater gameplay, which we’ve seen in Call of Duty before (even in Cold War), but nonetheless, this looks to be the destructible cover of Vanguard but in Modern Warfare 2. What’s worse about these gimmicky new features is not that they’re, necessarily, the worst idea for a new mechanic, but it’s more that there’s a long list of things CoD fans actually want and these gimmicks are never those. Underwater gameplay, fundamentally, slows down your gameplay. It’s slower and more awkward to maneuver through than over land, there’s, naturally, little cover underwater, and really, the only meaningful thing you can do with it in a multiplayer match is cheese and trick unsuspecting gamers to an early death. Call of Duty fans don’t want slower gameplay, and they don’t really want new ways to get killed in cheesy ways.
While Fans Usually Ignore the Gimmick Anyways
So, these gimmicks are often ignored, like the underwater sections of Modern Warfare 2 will largely be. In Cold War, for example, where there were underwater sections in maps, most players just avoided those sections and maps. Why? Because being underwater rarely, if ever, was an advantage. Maybe it’s neat or maybe it’s just different and fresh, and maybe that’s all fine, just like destructible cover in Vanguard, but the problem is that people just don’t want to engage with mechanics that aren’t usually going to benefit them. Constantly breaking cover in Vanguard reveals your positions, chances that the cover will bug or break in a weird way, and ultimately just isn’t worth going through the trouble to engage with most of the time. There isn’t much reason to care about underwater gameplay in Cold War in the same way there isn’t much reason to care about destructible cover in Vanguard. Sure, you might go for a quick swim in a game on Raid, or you might melee some piece of wood blocking your Search route, but that’s about it. These mechanics don’t add anything meaningful to the game, and CoD players quickly learn to tell the difference between a core CoD feature and just some silly new thing being put into the latest game to make it feel a bit different from the last one. I don’t see how underwater gameplay in Modern Warfare 2 can be any different. Sure, maybe I do some swimming on the right mode in the right situation, but does that really add anything to the experience? What about if they took all that time developing a new way to render water that’s complex and dynamic and realistic and added in a set of extra maps instead? It’s hard to feel like spending those resources on almost anything else wouldn’t be better.
Boots on the Ground, Not Toes in the Sea
Time and time again, CoD fans express the idea that they want boots-on-the-ground CoD games. Usually, this is contrasting the advanced movement CoD games of the past, but it’s boots on the ground for a reason, too. See, when you start messing with movement in Call of Duty too much and you make it too fast or introduce too many ways to navigate a map, the simulation starts to break down. CoD is all about deadly, accurate guns, winning gunfights, and oftentimes, shooting first. All of this is undercut by an ability to launch in the air or fly around or anything like that. Underwater gameplay has a similar problem. You’re giving players deadly, accurate guns that kill in milliseconds where gunfights are often won by whoever shoots first the option to play around in the water and see if they can avoid getting murdered by losing a couple of miliseconds of reaction time from being in the water. Ultimately, it just feels like a bit of a needless feature to me, while other movement-related features, like being able to pull out your pistol on a ladder, feel right at home in a CoD game.
