Category Archives: Call of Duty

Fans Are Intense

I attended the Call of Duty XP event out in Los Angeles a bit over a week ago, and it was really elaborate. My summary of the event itself is here. The main draw was ostensibly the opportunity for core fans to spend an entire weekend playing and competing at Modern Warfare 3, but it was also their first look at Activision’s Elite premium content service and social networking platform for the franchise.

The company had been rolling out information on Elite in careful bits and pieces, but it wasn’t until XP that it announced the price. The company’s digital VP, Jamie Berger, feels deeper social features will create a more positive community, and Beachhead, the Activision studio in charge of developing Elite, talked to me about working closely with the other studios, plus some important lessons from the beta.

I imagine that most of the SVGL readers aren’t that into Call of Duty, given that the longtime crew usually tells me that you found my work or my blog because of my writing on weird JRPGs, or on survival horror games, or  hentai games or something. Those of you in the latter crew might be happy to learn that I’m back on the pervy games with a new monthly at The Escapist.

This month I start out fairly tame with the sexuality of Catherine, but I’m the kind of person who gets a little bored and rebellious writing the same kinds of articles for too long, and then I write things that are weird. Speaking of Catherine, I also wrote about it in my Kotaku feature and reviewed it at Paste. Catherine, Catherine, Catherine. It’s a good thing I like that game a lot.

And speaking of weird RPGs, things I like, intense fans, and me writing things that are weird when I get bored, my latest editorial at Gamasutra is about “Persona_ebooks,” the Persona-themed Twitter tribute to both that series and internet sensation “Horse_ebooks.” Maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about, but trust me, you want to. Give it a read.

I’ve started Persona 2: Innocent Sin on the PSP. It’s so weird. I don’t even… like, I need to spend several more hours on it before I know what to tell you. But I’m looking forward to those hours, so take that bit for what it’s worth.



[Today’s Good Song: Broken Water, ‘Kamilche House’]

Let’s Talk Elite


So here’s my news report on Elite, the subscription service for Call of Duty. If you manage to read all the facts about it before you come to an opinion, you’re better off than most, as the word ‘subscription’ is for backward reasons a dirty word in gaming, let alone when it’s attached to Bobby Kotick.

But I think it’s an awesome idea. I starkly do not enjoy playing Call of Duty. I will probably never be pumped to join a clan and shoot stuff no matter how social they make it. But the largest video game franchise extant is getting this entire nifty interface around it, and that interface does things way beyond what we’ve gotten with the online platforms we have, Xbox Live and PlayStation 3.
“It’s just a social network” doesn’t really do it justice. The sheer variety of data points you can measure about yourself and others, and the connection with existing social networks so you can find people to join up with based on common interests seem quite cool to me. And visually it’s very pretty, very current.
Of course, the people I personally know that play Call of Duty are my neighbor’s children (who are about ten years old), my friends who are stoners, and every dude I see shopping at GameStop around here. The franchise enjoys an enormous population, but how many of them will be interested in or able to use these high-level data points, these Twitter-like hashtag groups?
Not that Activision really needs more than 10 percent of its current userbase to subscribe in order to be very, very profitable off this thing. But anyway, the reason I like it so much is that when I look at it, I see the Call of Duty franchise as programming, as on television. Elite seems to hint at the end of discrete, solitary box products and promise something socially persistent, pervasive. I picture people buying T-shirts with pictures of their clan logo on it, or something.
Not that have a favorite TV show right now, but you know when you get really into a series? What if for five more dollars a month you could have access to all this additional content, info, find viewing buddies, et cetera? I know loads of people who’d pony up if we were talking about Mad Men or the Wire or something.
The Elite framework helps illustrate games as something of cultural permanence, that are legitimate desire objects to their audience, that can have a visual language just like sports do. I kind of hope it’s the beginning of a trend. We’ll see what happens.

Shooter Shooter Shooter Shooter

Sometimes I get triple-A fatigue and I feel just a little tapped out. I find myself a little niche where the only gaming of note I do is on my DS. I can dump hundreds of hours into a Harvest Moon or Pokemon game and never look back — in fact, I’m not even HeartGold or SoulSilver-ing yet because I’m just focusing on Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands. Yep, that’s about it!

These phases lend themselves to being light on blogging — at times like that, I’m glad I have my Twitter to toss quick thoughts and links out to you guys. Of course, I’m also busy as usual at Gamasutra. You know I love indie games that try to push or change the medium; I spent time with Jason Rohrer’s Sleep is Death, my writing on which you might have read at Kotaku, so just a little bit later, I caught up with the fascinating, loquacious and giant-brained Eskil Steenberg at Gamasutra to talk about his work on the impressionist-art MMO (though he resists the word “MMO”) LOVE.
We talk about how he suddenly decided to develop his own self-contained game engine and persistent multiplayer world without any significant design experience (truly, truly impressive), and why LOVE is, in his view, completely different than other games, most of which don’t interest him much.
I went to see Crysis 2 unveiled in New York City late last week, and I talked to Crytek boss Cevat Yerli about why, in a world where crappy-looking Facebook games can pull millions of users in just a few weeks (as venture capitalists are I think over-fond of pointing out), AAA graphics still matter. Last night on Jimmy Fallon (Kotaku has video), Cliff Bleszinski answered “graphics” first of all when asked what makes a blockbuster — because they “pull people in” initially, he qualified. Yerli and Bleszinski both work for companies with perhaps the largest footprints in the high-end development engine biz, so certainly they have an interest in that point of view.
Oh yeah, Bleszinski was premiering Gears 3‘s trailer, by the way. It has a lot of ashes and dust in it, kind of like Crysis 2‘s trailer. Ashes are so in for 2011! Seriously, it looks cool, though, and as Cliff says, it has female soldiers for the first time. He says that’s thanks to fan feedback.
Most of my time yesterday, however, was spent covering the latest and greatest in the Activision-versus-Infinity Ward drama, which you know I have been following in some depth for some time. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, exiled IW bosses Jason West and Vince Zampella now have their own studio in Respawn Entertainment, and surprise-surprise, they have EA’s backing. Wedbush’s Michael Pachter told me this is the ‘ultimate screw-you’ to Activision.
I would guess the ‘ultimate screw-you’ to Activision will happen when employees of not only Infinity Ward, but of certain other studios under its umbrella who are sick of being crunched to obscene, five-years-ago levels try to get out and send their resumes to what’s likely to be a more comfortable situation. At Respawn, I would assume they put lights in the cubicles all the time, not just when the press is visiting.
But anyway, after writing about them for weeks on weeks now, it was neat to finally talk to Zampella, West and EA (read my interview!), even if just on the studio kickoff. Most people assume the two are going to lead some kind of Modern Warfare killer on EA’s behalf, although they aren’t yet willing to confirm anything whatsoever about their project. Theoretically, they could be making anything, although I’m not exactly expecting a cartoon platformer.
It’ll be interesting to see how their product is positioned — after all, anything that competes with Modern Warfare is going to compete with Battlefield, too. As Pachter said to me yesterday, the vertex of the market that would make the most sense for the pair is the future/sci-fi-ish genre, where their only major rival would be a little franchise called Halo (and maybe Killzone or something).
Shooter, shooter, shooter, shooter. Graphics, graphics, graphics, graphics. Bummer that the industry’s top talent keeps making the same kind of games. Or maybe I’m not the market. If you’re into this kinda thing, you must be going out of your head with this bounty of exciting news.
Now I return to Harvest Moon, where I will plant and pluck turnips over and over and over and over and over.