How Call of Duty Is Changing the MMO Genre

Another year, another Call of Duty – it’s the holiday between Halloween and Christmas that almost makes up for most of the world not having Thanksgiving. While for some the fact that it’s a yearly release is a source of concern – genuine, heart-wrenching concern – there’s no denying that it manages to bring countless people together, that it offers something people can get nowhere else. When you look at games on that scale, you’re usually talking about an MMO. As we’ve discussed before, Call of Duty isn’t an MMO, but its long-reaching influence can even be felt here.

A Yearly Event

I have to admit, I always love a little bit of Call of Duty, and although I haven’t really had much chance to play Black Ops 2, I know that I will. The zombies maps are great fun, with the Tranzit mode offering a simple but game-changing new device to keep people interested. If you like exploring, shooting zombies and teamwork, Tranzit will keep you going for hours and hours and hours. The single player, I haven’t touched yet, but it’s always a certain kind of fun. If you like explosions, twists and action sequences – and everybody does in at least small doses – Call of Duty has you more than covered, and Black Ops 2 will be no exception.

The secret to this game’s success lies firmly in its multiplayer though. Here is a game that, although not an MMO, brings together millions of people each year onto the field of combat, gives people of all ages something to enjoy, forms friends and alliances and gives players weapons and equipment to level up, unlock and modify. There’s no doubt that parts of Black Ops 2 began life in the RPG genre and are now staples in the MMORPG genre. An FPS on the scale of Call of Duty even ends up looking unnervingly like an MMORPG on paper: massive community, guilds (clans), tournaments and leaderboards, endless enemies, PvP, levelling up of your character, your weapons and equipment and even an end game solution when you’ve reached the highest level.

Sure, the way these games deliver these features are completely different, but they’re shared features nonetheless. The action is a little more hands-on in an online FPS and there’s no quests/story, but speed it up and put it on the mass market and you have Call of Duty.

But what are they giving back? How is Call of Duty changing the way we expect MMOs to work?

Call of Duty Changing the Industry

There’s no doubt that the influence of Call of Duty can be seen throughout the industry. Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 became Amazon’s most pre-ordered game of all time this week, knocking Modern Warfare 3 from the top spot. Next year, I expect Modern Warfare 4 (an inevitability) to steal the top spot. It also wouldn’t surprise me to learn that millions of people had bought it within the first week, but that’s something we won’t know for a couple of days yet.

Those sort of sales, those sorts of accolades, change the world. They certainly change the gaming world and the amount of long-running series that have deserted their roots to try and get a piece of the pie are well documented. Some people blame Call of Duty; I blame the developers of those games, personally. Whoever is at fault, Call of Duty isn’t going anywhere, and the high review scores for Black Ops 2 again cement its place as an industry leader. The new points system – which allows you 10 points for equipment, perks and modifications, so that you can truly customize your character and ditch a secondary weapon, or only have two perks if you want – is an innovation likely to be copied for years.

And here’s where the MMO world begins to be invaded. Already new MMO fans are being tempted into the genre by flashy cutscenes and showy sequences that add little to the gameplay. In Call of Duty these high-octane sequences add an awful lot to the adrenaline-fueled experience, in an MMO they add much less. People drooled over the initial “jungle fight” CGI reveal for The Old Republic, but decided to support for only a short while when it first came out. It had failed to live up to their expectations.

"In regards to the point system mentioned earlier, expect a lot of MMOFPS games to adopt it rather quickly."

It allows a degree of control over your character, without losing balance. If you want to overpower your first weapon, you need to lose your secondary weapon. If you want to have extra attachments, you’ll need to lose one of your perks. This is a great way forward for MMOFPS developers who want the player to feel like more than just a faceless, mindless avatar but don’t want to risk going pay-to-win. Even other subgenres could take advantage of it, and some may. MMORPG games probably wouldn’t benefit from stopping players becoming all-powerful – that’s the ultimate goal of any MMO – but under the right circumstances I think it would work far better than “you are not level 10, you cannot use this weapon.”

Call of Duty: A Subtle Influence

I imagine some people will read this (hello) and scoff. There’s no way the MMO industry is being altered by Call of Duty. I honestly think those people are being a little naïve. "Call of Duty is convincing people who aren’t really gamers to buy a console and try it out for the first time". Some of these people are moving onto other games and some of them will make their way onto the free-to-play circuit. I’ve seen it happen more than once, especially with younger people. These people don’t expect Call of Duty in their games, but they’ve had a level of excitement set for them, a level of action, a level of doing. These people expect more than just sitting around, waiting for something to happen.

And as the number of this already sizable group increases, the influence they have over the industry increases. People who don’t play Call of Duty, but play simply the games influenced by it, will start to evolve the same need of developers to cut the chaff, to get to the point. That’s not a bad thing really – hopefully it’ll end up with bad vehicle sections and hacking mini-games a thing of the past. It’ll come to the MMO genre though, sooner rather than later. Games like Guild Wars 2 are already pushing for a more action-based experience, and part of that is to appeal to a new set of gamers, uninterested in game for game's sake.

Conclusion

In some cases, the influence of Call of Duty on the MMO genre is obvious. In other cases, it is less obvious. It’s there though: whether you’re playing Blacklight Retribution or Guild Wars 2, there’s a little allowance in there for the Call of Duty crowd, and that allowance is only going to get better. Some will resist it, others will accept it with open arms. Any way you look at it, however, Activision are changing the industry – the entire industry.