Destructoid Checkpoint: The Death of a Titan

I click the little Xbox App icon, where I have pinned it to my taskbar, then close the advertisement where it asks me if I want to play Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. I already have the game installed, but nobody seems to have considered that it might be wise to have the advert check for that before it appears on my screen.

When I launch the game, it will tell me that it did not close down properly the last time. This is because time is a flat circle. We have been here before, in this seedy motel where other games were murdered. Someone keeps luring games here and killing them, and try as I might, I can never solve these crimes.

I will deny the game the ability to launch in Safe Mode, because life is risk, and the game will launch in what I assume is Risk Mode instead. When it starts up, it will instantly tell me that it needs to restart. I will forget that clicking the Restart button is a fool's errand, more self-flagellation than Sisyphean, and the game will hang as it attempts to close itself. I will try to Alt+F4 it to no avail. I will remember that I have done this all before, but the game still lies dead in the bed behind me. 

I open the Task Manager, and wonder why Google Chrome needs 60% of my RAM, but that is another murder, to be contemplated another time. I right-click on the process called Call of Duty 5 for some reason, and I click End Task. 

Nothing happens for about five minutes, and finally, the game realizes that it is dead and shuts down. I restart the game again, and I am told that it did not shut down correctly. Safe Mode is once again averted. The game starts, and the shaders start to cache. This will take some time, and I can no longer fight the crushing reality of things. I can feel my desire to play the game dying inside me.

The game is here, dead upon the cheap and bug-infested bedspread, and I am here. I am trapped in a cycle, trying to get the game to live, and my mind tells me I am driven by guilt. I have been fractured, and the stunning truth hits me. I have killed the game. I have lured it here, denied it the sanctuary of Safe Mode, and I have killed it.

Oh, wait. Actually, it was Activision that killed it. My bad.

Black Ops 7 is just as bad as you have heard it is

I don’t want you to think that I am a Call of Duty hater. If anything, I am a Call of Duty lover. I have played them all, and that is why I am so sad that I have been turned into a Call of Duty fighter. 

To put it bluntly, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is one of the worst shooter games that I have ever played. CoD will often go through stages of not quite knowing what it wants to be, such as when it leaned heavily into a Titanfall-inspired movement system but never thought to change the overall philosophy of its map design for Black Ops 3 and Infinite Warfare. The series certainly has highs and lows, but BLOPS 7 is certainly its nadir. 

Developed by ten different studios, it’s difficult to figure out what the true line of this game was supposed to be. We have a cooperative campaign devoid of AI teammates if you choose to play it solo. They will shout at you over comms, talk to you as if they are there, and show up during cutscenes, but this is all rendered hilarious by the fact that they are never there. 

It would seem that out of all ten studios, no one was working on friendly unit AI for the campaign. Another thing we can be sure of is that nobody was working on a checkpoint system for that same campaign, because there is none. If the game crashes or you lose power, then you need to replay that mission all over again. You can’t even pause the game while playing solo, which is an almost baffling decision for a game series that has always been designed to be played on the couch, where, at any moment, we might need to do that real-life stuff that can interrupt our gaming sessions. 

The story is a baffling mess crammed with ideas from people who clearly wanted to make a very different game, but are making a Call of Duty game. As such, we just have a shambolic mess of terrible dialogue and painful plot points that lurch to an ending that is in every way as disappointing as you can imagine. 

Multiplayer fixes none of the traditional problems that CoD now presents as features, with terrible spawns and awful connections going out of their way to ruin any fun that fans of the mode can find. And finally, Zombies. My beloved mode has been decimated, reduced to one of its least enjoyable iterations that we have ever seen. 

The map is a boring shambles of barely connected landmarks that you get to via a truck, and that very system means that some players in the lobby are always pushing a silly pace as they attempt to speedrun the mode with two Level 1 players who will never have played before. This version of Zombies seems designed to bring out the absolute worst in players, which is about the only thing it does well. 

The yearly cycle

At this point in its life, it is obvious that Call of Duty is being creatively damaged by its yearly cycle. I cannot speak to the experience of the developers working on the game, but it cannot be easy to try to get these non-stop installments out, no matter how many teams are working on it, as they all need to be developed in the shadow of each other.

The reason it has been sustainable has largely been because the series made money. Lots of money. Call of Duty is the third-highest-earning gaming franchise of all time, behind only Mario and Tetris. The only reason Activision, now owned by Microsoft, will have any reason to rethink the approach is if this game doesn’t make as much money.

So far, it is way too early to tell whether the sales figures will be down, but things are looking odd. Steam has a peak concurrent player count that is roughly a third of the previous game. It’s not like people were not playing games, either, as ARC Raiders has had tremendously popular weekends despite going up against the biggest shooter franchise of all time. Steam is not the be-all and end-all here, and an argument can be made that a percentage of those players have migrated their CoD needs to Game Pass, but even then, that is a lot of lost money if those people are not paying full price. 

As a huge fan of the series, it's odd to say this, but I need Call of Duty to take a beating this year, because I strongly feel that the developers need to be given room to rein the series back in and get things under control. This is not just a bad Call of Duty game, which can still be a good time; it is simply a bad game, and a bad game can never be fun.

The dev team will only be given the time they need if the folks who have their bonuses tied to the piles of cash that Call of Duty makes start to worry about the sales figures continuing to be as ridiculous as they are.

If you are considering buying Call of Duty for a loved one, or perhaps someone you hate and wish to see suffer, I beseech you not to. I fear the titan must take a crushing blow if it is to stand any chance of creative survival.