The earliest call of duty that IW participated in is an independent project that Activision is developing. However, due to insufficient funds and the reputation of the Medal of Honor, it almost monopolized the entire FPS game industry. Therefore, Activision is actually very uncertain about the project Call of Duty, and even once wanted to cut this project.
However, things have changed. The employees who used to work in Studio 20 15 were dissatisfied with the salary offered by the boss. After finishing the Medal of Honor, they all jumped ship and set up an independent studio called IW. Activision will pay attention to IW Studio's experience in making FPS games and incorporate it into the mission of saving the endangered.
Needless to say, activism is accurate. After the successful acquisition of IW Studio, IW quickly took over the work of Call of Duty, and finally successfully went public and achieved good results. Activision's pursuit of victory requires IW to continue to develop Call of Duty 2 and escort it into the mainframe market. At that time, "Call of Duty 2" directly scored the highest IGN 9.3, which also greatly promoted the sales of xbox 360!
However, when it came to Call of Duty 3, differences began to appear inside Activision. Because IW has long been tired of World War II-themed games, it is reluctant to make Call of Duty 3. At this time, Activision obtained an independent studio Treyarch from the outside world.
However, IW sneered at Treyarch, thinking that this studio has no experience in making FPS games, and taking over will only destroy this IP. Therefore, the relationship between IW and Trieah is very bad. However, Activision only wanted to continue to earn income, so the production of Call of Duty 3 was handed over to Treyaqi. As a result, the reputation of Call of Duty 3 has become the worst in the history of Call of Duty, and it is also the only work that has not landed on the PC platform.
This made IW very angry, how could his hard work be destroyed in the hands of others. So IW Studio began to secretly develop Call of Duty 4, which is the theme of modern war that they have always wanted to try. More than a year later, at a meeting, director IW directly produced the almost finished Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which shocked everyone.
Because activision executives know nothing about this project, and IW relies entirely on itself to raise funds. Although Activision can't wait to spend a penny financially, from a reasonable point of view, IW's act of acting first and acting second is unbearable.
However, the launch of Call of Duty 4 was a great success, which swept through the E3 exhibition that year, and then dominated the world with tens of millions of sales. IW wanted Activision to see the potential of modern war theme this time, but Activision still firmly grasped the background of World War II and strongly urged IW to return to the theme of World War II.
IW naturally refused to agree at this time, so Activision handed over the production right of Call of Duty 5 to Treyaqi. This led to a serious rift in the relationship between IW and Activision, which laid the groundwork for IW to leave Activision later.
After IW left, Call of Duty 5 came out. With this zombie model, the sales of Call of Duty 5 are not lost to Call of Duty 4. However, Activision has actually found that players with the theme of World War II are really tired. Without the support of zombie mode, the sales performance of Call of Duty 5 will be greatly reduced.
Therefore, IW continues to shift the Call of Duty series to the direction of modern warfare. Activision agreed verbally, but secretly gave IW a stumbling block to know who his "father" was. First Activision refused to allocate funds to IW R&D, and then set an unreasonable sales price for Call of Duty 6 to suppress IW's arrogance.
However, this IW is not a vegetarian either. It once again raised all the R&D funds independently, and at the same time, in order to fight back: Activision doesn't want to make money? Then I'll just break your idea of making money!
In the original script design of Call of Duty 6, the task force 14 1 successfully killed makarov, but almost all the players died.
This radicalism exploded at a glance. How can you make up such a story to follow up the modern war? So I forced IW to delete the next fifth of the plot. After General Sheffield was shot in the head, the game was over. This also makes the player's evaluation that the story is too short after Call of Duty 6 came out, but this does not affect that Call of Duty 6 won millions of sales that year. However, at this time, the contradiction between IW and Activision has intensified to the point of irreconcilable.
At this time, Activision was also very depressed, so he refused to distribute the income of Call of Duty 6 directly to the employees of IW Studio. Unless IW executives leave, everyone has no money. This behavior caused an uproar in that year. A large number of hardcore fans of IW Studio strongly condemned Activision, and director IW also went to court with Activision. However, in the end, it ended in activision complaint, and all IW employees did not get the income from Call of Duty 6 that year.
This is undoubtedly a good play for Activision, but it is tantamount to killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Almost all IW employees left their jobs, leaving only an empty shell studio. At that time, players also supported IW's fight for its own rights and interests, and condemned Activision's practice of squeezing employee value.
But for most ordinary players, call of duty or call of duty, I buy it every year. The struggle between the employee and the boss has become a thing of the past.
However, after IW left, it still left a very valuable legacy for Activision. One is the tens of millions of loyal fans of Call of Duty, and the other is the IW engine independently developed by IW. Activision is still using this IW engine for Call of Duty series, and now it has been updated to version 3.0!
In turbulent times, the founder of IW set up a rebirth studio after leaving Activision. Later, this studio was acquired by EA and developed masterpieces such as The Fall of Titan and The Fall of Apex Hero of Titan. I won't elaborate on its development history here, but I will talk about it later when I have time.
We went back to the Call of Duty series, and then Treyarch took over the Call of Duty. Unlike IW, Treachi is more like an obedient child, but after working in the Call of Duty project for so many years, Treachi has actually accumulated some abilities.
So Treyarch decided to create a brand-new series like IW, which is Black ops. Treyarch has eaten the benefits of zombie mode, and if there is no accident, black ops will still start zombie mode. However, Treyarch is a studio that started as a console game, and the only PC game experience is just Call of Duty 5.
Therefore, although Call of Duty 7: Black ops is excellent in content and good in innovation, the hardware performance of its PC version is hard. Due to the hard move of the host, the optimization of the game is very problematic, but the player is very excited to see a brand-new work, and the small problems on the PC are covered up by word of mouth.
Secondly, this is the most troublesome problem that Activision has encountered. The mess left by IW must be cleaned up. Now there are less than half of the employees in IW Studio, and the players are waiting for the appearance of Modern Warfare 3.
As a last resort, Activision had to cooperate with IW, Hammer Game and Raven Software to develop Call of Duty 8: Modern Warfare 3, which finally gave the players an explanation. I have to say that the sledgehammer game really has two brushes. Call of Duty 8 perfectly shows the charm of modern warfare, and it was seamlessly inherited in one-fifth of the story deleted from Call of Duty 6 that year. In particular, at last 14 1 the team all died, which felt like commemorating the former IW studio.
It can be said that Call of Duty 8 reached the peak of the Call of Duty series in the plot, which is also the last contribution of the old IW studio to the Call of Duty series.
The decline of word of mouth seems that the old IW will hurt his eyesight, so that the later Call of Duty series did not understand the modern background at all. From Call of Duty 9, Call of Duty began to take the pace of science fiction, but it was also from this time that players began to be dissatisfied with the Call of Duty series. At the beginning, players can keep some freshness, but they can't hold their eyes. From Call of Duty 9 to 13, they are all stories based on the future.
Players will really feel aesthetic fatigue at the end of the game. IW's bad luck happened to be made by Call of Duty 13: Infinite War when the player was most tired of Call of Duty in the sci-fi background, which completely detonated the player's disgust! In fact, Call of Duty 13 is really good, but it's a pity that players are tired of this theme.
At the same time, the rise of the battlefield has also brought a lot of pressure to Call of Duty. Activision moved out of the theme of World War II in order to save word of mouth. However, there is little innovation in the new content of World War II, and almost all FPS games with the theme of World War II can't escape the old themes of "Normandy Landing" and "Attacking Berlin".
It is impossible for manufacturers to completely ignore history, so Call of Duty 14 created the shortest single-player campaign, and the multiplayer mode was not as good as Battlefield 1, so Call of Duty 14 also set the worst evaluation in recent years.
In fact, we found that all the works of Call of Duty were produced by IW, and the reputation of Call of Duty declined sharply in recent years. For example, Call of Duty 10: Ghost, Call of Duty 13: Infinite War. I don't know if it's a curse left by old IW employees. Last year, Call of Duty 15 made great innovations, deleting single-player battles and adding escape modes. However, this great innovation did not bring much promotion to the reputation of Call of Duty, nor did it have much impact on Activision's stock.
A simple conclusion: Now the Call of Duty series is an old IP with a history of nearly 20 years. Although the word of mouth in the minds of players has indeed dropped a lot in the past two years, it still can't stop the essence of its new year's goods. After all, today's Call of Duty has formed a complete production process, just like the Spring Festival Evening, we in China often watch it every year, but we watch it every year.
In fact, the quality of call of duty games has not declined, just because there are more and more games that can compete with him. The battlefield of EA next door has already become the main competitor of Call of Duty. The popularity of chicken eating games in the past two years has also caused a big impact on this traditional FPS game.
It seems that no one can explain the main reasons for the decline of call of duty reputation in the past two years, and I feel that various factors are related. Perhaps it is the essence of Activision merchants that players have long been tired of, or perhaps the curse left by old IW employees has become a lingering haze of Activision.