As per the annual tradition, a new Call of Duty was announced after its reveal trailer went live this week. The newest installment in the CoD series is called “Advanced Warfare”, and appears to have mechanized armor suits, jet packs, and ‘futuristic’ technology to justify the advancedness. It seems to be a Titanfall/Crysis/Call of Duty love-child with a dash of Tom Clancy, which would normally really excite me. However, considering the track record of the Call of Duty franchise as of late, I shouldn’t get my hopes up. Oh, and there’s Kevin Spacey.

I’d like to give my opinion of the trailer, but first I want to preface you with my feelings of the CoD franchise, particularly pertaining to multiplayer (because that’s really CoD’s claim to fame these days, after all).  If you don’t give two twats about my opinion, then I suppose you can scroll to the bottom and watch the trailer for yourself. ↓

Now, I have been around the casual Call of Duty scene since CoD 2, and after experiencing the downhill tumble that the series has taken with the past couple of installments, I have become a bit jaded with the franchise, to say the least. I used to love me some CoD multiplayer back in the day. Between World at War, MW2, and Black Ops 1, I spent hundreds of hours on multiplayer, making new online friends and really enjoying each CoD title. The franchise was really at its peak. MW3 seemed to be where the game began to lose its footing with multiplayer, but I was at least able to enjoy some of my time with MW3, despite some of its more frustrating parts. The real nosedive came with the effortless sequel, Black Ops 2. Even upon hearing that it was actually called “Black Ops 2”, I braced myself for the worst. After they stripped away elements from BO1 that made the game fun, we were left with a tarnished multiplayer that should have never even existed. I would have rather paid for a bunch of new BO1 DLC packs than its broken sequel. That was really the start of my distaste for CoD games. Once Ghosts was announced, I was actually kind of excited for it after seeing multiplayer gameplay footage and whatnot, but then I was swiftly disappointed once I got Ghosts in my hands.

And now we have “Advanced Warfare”, which I suppose will get abbreviated as “COD: AW” or something.  After investing so much time into a single game series, it’s hard not to feel somewhat excited when a new installment comes out. I know some CoD veterans who even feel obligated to like it, almost like we don’t want to admit that a game we used to love really took a nosedive. Nowadays, Call of Duty is like shitty fast food. The first few bites are ok, and may even taste good. But even when you realize just how crappy that CoD burger is, you’re probably going to continue eating it anyway. The worst part is, most of us will make that guilt-filled trek back through the drivethrough just to do it all over again. And then we go home to play Call of Duty…rinse and repeat.

I’m not going to lie, the trailer looks interesting, and it was smart of them to use ‘the Kevin Spacey factor’ to enhance the cred of the game.  But lest we forget the patterns of CoD reveals, it’s important to note that this is only a trailer for the single player campaign. Call of Duty campaigns have consistently been good quality, even if some are more memorable than others. It really wouldn’t surprise me if the campaign for AW turns out decent, but since multiplayer is really the focal point for CoD games, I don’t want to get prematurely excited by this trailer alone (no one wants that 😉 ).

TL;DR – Multiplayer reveal or GTFO. Until then, I’ll be sitting here on my fence of skepticism.