What Infinity Ward can do to turnaround the Call of Duty series

Lately I have gone back to playing the Call of Duty series on my PS3. This includes games such as the legendary Call of Duty 4 up to the latest Black Ops 2. As you would probably know Black Ops 2 is packed with way more features and customisation in comparison to Call of Duty 4 which was more or less plain and simple in comparison. However with that said and to be honest I seemed to be enjoying myself way more playing the classic COD4 in comparison to the other later titles.

My first instinct for this was that it was all down to nostalgia reasons – playing old maps such as Crash, Crossfire etc. Doing so did have a slight impact on my feelings towards the game. But the more I played COD4 the more it felt fluid and balanced. So I decided to give Black Ops 2 a shot again to figure out what went wrong; after all Treyarch did emphasise how balanced Black Ops 2 was meant to be right? Having playing Black Ops 2, I did enjoy myself but seemed to have periods of frustration and that’s when it hit me. The shots ‘missed’ and foreign people speaking on their headsets.

The problem with the latest Call of Duty titles doesn’t concern the actual gameplay content itself; but rather the technology implemented in the background or well lack of (when it comes to multiplayer anyway). Fixing some if not all of these issues would certainly put the Call of Duty series back in prime form.

Include dedicated servers

The latest Call of Duty titles are lacking dedicated servers which is quite an alarming issue especially for a company who sells millions upon millions of these games. I would have thought they would have invested some kind of infrastructure to back their cash cow by now. Doing so would increase the amount of happy gamers and of course help minimize some of the problems online therefore putting a stop some of the whining you see towards the game nowadays.

I understand doing so will cost the company a huge amount of money – however it’s not much compared to how much they make.

Lag compensation

This was one of the blatant issues I had when playing Black Ops 2. I currently game use a fibre optic 60MBit broadband service and so you would expect blazing fast download speeds and very decent upload speeds on my side. However in most cases I am not host and I end up in a lobby full of foreigners. This has an obvious impact on the latency especially when I’m not host causing my auto-aim to not lock in well at times and my bullets to barely miss the opponent.

The worst thing about lag compensation is you can’t really figure out if your having an off game or if the game is lagging as the technology causes ‘lag’ to become appear seamless. However in reality lag compensation is just masking the lag rather than eliminating it completely. I’d much prefer it was gotteen rid off as when I did lag in Call of Duty 4 – I knew very well due to the stuttering so had a better idea which games were unplayable and which were bearable.

Matchmaking

Whenever I play Call of Duty in the newer titles – I am always matched up against people who don’t live in the UK. I sometimes get people from France, Spain etc. They are European countries but I would much prefer playing people in my country not only due to latency reasons but for social benefits – such as trash talking etc.

I feel Infinity Ward need to take matchmaking to a new level; I’m not a big fan of joining rooms manually so would prefer it to keep an ‘automatic’ feel to joining games. However they could include a filter/option where you could choose the country you would like your players to be from – limited to their own country. Therefore everyone who has this filter set will be matched with each other when searching for games. They could also automate this without even asking (but my guess is they have already done that and failed – on my side anyway).

Glitching

One thing the Call of Duty series is famous for is the glitches players expose. For example getting out of the multiplayer maps, floating around, weapon tricks and more. Although these are patched as time goes on – it gets a bit ridiculous downloading update after update. I believe this could be solved by hosting a multiplayer public beta of some sort which would help iron out some of the glitches and of course create a better game via gamer feedback.

Other Call of Duty Annoyances?

I’m pretty sure whatever happens the next Call of Duty: Ghosts will sell like hot cakes, but I think when next generation comes around things will be a little different for the Call of Duty series.

Well these are only some of the problems that gamers have been experiencing with the Call of Duty series as of late. Fixing these would surely pave a way towards another Call of Duty classic. I’m pretty sure there are plenty more annoyances to be solved so why not let us know in the comment section below?