Call of Duty franchise is “review-proof”

Low critic scores won’t harm sales, but Titanfall and Destiny may pose threat.

Media reviews of the Call of Duty franchise have no impact on sales of the games, as critics become bored of analysing the latest in Activision’s yearly first-person shooter release.

That’s according to Doug Creutz of Cowen & Company, who notes that while Metacritic scores for Call of Duty: Ghosts are hovering around the 74 per cent mark they come too late to influence pre-orders and pre-sales figures.

“We think CoD has become such an embedded franchise that it is somewhat review-proof,” he said. “We think of CoD as being like EA’s Madden NFL, which continues to sell similar unit numbers year in and year out, regardless of reviews; Madden’s Metacritic has ranged as low as 78 in recent years.

“Given that CoD changes only incrementally from year to year, we think reviewers have become increasingly less likely to give very high review scores due to a certain degree of ennui with the franchise.”

He also suggested that Call of Duty’s main competitor – EA’s Battlefield 4 – “didn’t exactly cover itself in glory” with an average Metacritic score of 80 per cent on Xbox 360, but again, reviews are unlikely to impact sales.

The biggest threat to Call of Duty and Battlefield’s dominance is likely to come from new IP next year, with Titanfall and Destiny pretenders to the throne.

“Our concern lies more with next year, when Call of Duty will face competition from several new next-gen shooters, including EA’s Titanfall and Activision’s own Destiny,” said the analyst.

“To the degree that Call of Duty may become a bit of a ‘been there done that’ experience for gamers, we think it is vulnerable to losing share as new product enters the market; even if a lot of that share goes to Destiny, as a third party title it will carry a lower margin for ATVI, and we think bullish 2014 EPS estimates assume Destiny will be more incremental than cannibalistic.”

 

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Call of Duty Developer Speaks About Innovation and Constantly Raising the Bar

Gaming enthusiasts (otherwise known as jaded hardcore gamers) often criticize the Call of Duty series for annual releases that don’t feature many improvements or the sort of changes that you’d expect from a new entry of a franchise. So it’s interesting to hear Treyarch’s Dave Anthony speak about just the opposite in an interview with Destructoid.

Dave Anthony contends that Treyarch could have made a rather plain sequel, but instead “innovated on a number of features that change the Call of Duty formula.” As the Head of Story at Treyarch, Anthony went onto talk about the admiration he has for the development team:

[I’m really] proud of the team. Sometimes people might get success, get a little bit complacent, and there’s none of that at Treyarch. It’s never good enough — it’s always what can we do better — no matter what we’re working on.

Dave Anthony also spoke about Treyarch’s insatiable ambition to outdo themselves after the original Black Ops:

They could have sat down after Black Ops and been like, ‘Well, you know, we’ll just — as the popular term is — reskin it and do another one.’ That’s the last thing on their minds. They would have been disgusted with themselves for doing that. The thing that I’m so proud about Treyarch is the more success they have, the more hungry they are to make things different, to change things up.

Anthony states that this drive to innovate on previous entries is a fundamental cornerstone of Treyarch that have served them well through their entire history in developing Call of Duty:

At the beginning of each new project the mantra is always, since the very first Call of Duty game we worked on – Call of Duty 2 : Big Red One – the game we work on has to be better than the last one we did. Has to be, otherwise we failed. And ever since Big Red One it has been. I think Black Ops II is no different. I think it’s better than Black Ops 1. And I think whatever we work on next will be better than Black Ops II.

What are your thoughts on this? Is Call of Duty more progressive than many give it credit for? Or is Anthony’s personal ties to Treyarch clouding his judgment?

 

Source: playstationlifestyle

How Square Enix Screwed Up Black Ops II for Japan

For years now, Square Enix has published the Call of Duty games in Japan. Square Enix honcho Yoichi Wada is apparently a big fan of the series—and Western games. His goal is apparently to make Japanese gamers more open to playing foreign titles. That’s admirable. It would be more admirable if the company didn’t keep screwing up the games.
A few years back, Japanese gamers were very upset over spotty localization for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The line “Remember, no Russian” (AKA, Don’t speak the Russian language) was written as “Kill ’em, the Russians” in Japanese.

Now it’s Black Ops II‘s turn. The Japanese language version features jarring and nonsensical localization.

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This image is supposed to say “Eliminate Enemy Players” in Japanese, but the way it’s written seems somewhat odd (敵プレイヤーをせん滅しろ). Instead of writing “elimination” as 殲滅 (senmetsu), it’s written with “sen” in hiragana script: せん滅. As jarring as it might seem to a few Japanese players, the word can be written that way. And is. So to be fair, this isn’t actually a mistake. The rest of the multiplayer localization, however, is.

Take the multiplayer welcome screen, which seems like should say “Welcome to Multiplayer” in Japanese (マルチプレイヘようこそ or “Multiplayer e Youkoso”), but it actually says “マルチプレイヤーへよ……..ｑ”. It’s unclear what “……..ｑ” refers to. It’s unclear what much of the localization refers to.

For example, there’s this image. It wants to say “Hacking” in Japanese, but they cannot even fit the Japanese word for ハッキング on the screen. It cuts out at the corners, making the “gu” character (グ) look like the character for “ku” (ク). And “hacking” (ハッキング) in Japanese isn’t even a verb by itself; it’s a noun!

Take this image. On the screen of the above handheld device, it reads “kensaku chuu” (検索中), which means “looking something up.” Like, in a dictionary. Pretty sure the latest Call of Dutymultiplayer doesn’t have you look up words or things online while playing. (If it does, that’sawesome!) Rather, the Japanese tansakuchuu (探索中) or maybe “saachichuu” (サーチ中) would be better.

Then, there are the descriptions of the different multiplayer matches and equipment, which many Japanese players are finding to be confusing.

The truly odd thing is that most of these words should be in English. Japanese people know basic English and all study it at school. Many Japanese products—especially cars and electronics—have simple English in them. So writing “hacking” or “searching” in Japanese doesn’t actually make much sense. Players would understand what they mean.

Online in Japan, people are complaining about these mistakes and bitching at the publisher. Some of the bad localizations are even becoming memes! A modern day “All your base are belong to us”, if you will.

The Black Ops II Japanese localization seems like it was done by individuals who didn’t know the context of what they were localizing and didn’t have the opportunity to get the necessary context. Localization is more than looking things up in dictionaries. So is Call of Duty.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II is on sale today in Japan.

 

Source: Kotaku

Black Ops 2: Full patch notes for 360, PS3 and PC

Treyarch details multiple fixes in latest title updates

A list of patch notes for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC versions of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 has been released.

 

The title updates were designed to address a number of launch issues on all three platforms, with the Xbox 360 patch having released yesterday, the PS3 one on November 17, and two separate PC ones on November 16 and 21.

 

Full details of each follow, courtesy of MP1st:

Xbox 360 Title Update 1 Patch Notes

• Made infrastructure and performance improvements to Live Streaming.
• Made streaming performance improvements to video playback in CODTV.
• Addressed an issue where flight range parameters for airborne vehicles could be deleted in the middle of a match due to a network interruption. This fix resolves the following symptoms reported by the community:
• Escort drone flying under the map
• Inability to call in the Dragonfire
• FHJ-18 weapon level is now increased by destroying Scorestreak vehicles and aircraft.
• Care Package/AGR canister exploit has been addressed.
• Patched a small map exploit in Aftermath.
• Addressed a rare situation that would cause the Emblem Editor menu to overlap other menus.
• Balance pass on spawn influencers to improve cases causing non-optimal spawning under certain conditions.
• Improved performance for emblem uploads to prevent an occasional hang. If there is an error connecting to servers during an upload, you will now be able to re-try your save.
• Emblems and Clan tags will now appear correctly on the Assault Shield when stowed on the back.
• Addressed all reported UI error code messages.
• Elite Clan Friends list no longer actively sorts players when their status is updated. The player list will refresh after closing and re-opening the tab.
• Improved a number of emblem icons in the Emblem Editor.
• Junkyard IV reward added to Calling Cards.

PS3 Title Update 1 Patch Notes

• Made performance improvements to matchmaking and lobby timers to start matches faster.
• Addressed an issue contributing to the majority of reported freezes. A small number of low frequency cases continue to undergo investigation for the next patch update.
• Many backend updates have been made since launch to streamline servers for load balancing. This results in many general improvements to matchmaking, user content servers, leaderboards and online security.
• Made infrastructure and performance improvements to Live Streaming.
• Made streaming performance improvements to video playback in CODTV.
• Addressed an issue where flight range parameters for airborne vehicles could be deleted in the middle of a match due to a network interruption. This fix resolves the following symptoms reported by the community:
• Escort drone flying under the map
• Inability to call in the Dragonfire
• FHJ-18 weapon level is now increased by destroying Scorestreak vehicles and aircraft.
• Care Package/AGR canister exploit has been addressed.
• Patched a small map exploit in Aftermath.
• Addressed a rare situation that would cause the Emblem Editor menu to overlap other menus.
• Balance pass on spawn influencers to improve cases causing non-optimal spawning under certain conditions.
• Improved performance for emblem uploads to prevent an occasional hang. If there is an error connecting to servers during an upload, you will now be able to re-try your save.
• Emblems and Clan tags will now appear correctly on the Assault Shield when stowed on the back.
• Addressed all reported UI error code messages.
• Elite Clan Friends list no longer actively sorts players when their status is updated. The player list will refresh after closing and re-opening the tab.
• Improved a number of emblem icons in the Emblem Editor.
• Junkyard IV reward added to Calling Cards.

Black Ops PC updates

• Max FOV increased to 90
• Fix: Horse falling through the world in Afghanistan when playing on some CPUs with 4 or more cores
• Fix: RC-XD and the AGR sinking into the map in MP when playing on some CPUs with 4 or more cores
• General performance improvements in SP, MP, and ZM for CPUs with 4 or more cores
• Fix: crash when a 7th player tries to join a 6 player league lobby
• Improved dedicated server matchmaking
• Fix: some cases of “Connection Interrupted” in MP while loading into a match
• Server connectivity improvements
• Fix for transmission errors during League Play
• Fix: crashing when running with no Audio device
• Fix: error when going into the sound options menu with no sound device
• Make sure laptops with both integrated and Nvidia GPUs always switch to the Nvidia GPU. This will fix bad performance, ability to join matches, and possible crashes
• Multi GPU performance improvements
• Livestreaming improvements
• Fixed freeze if the player tries to change graphics options after rendering a movie or live streaming
• Speed up going into Options menu in some cases
• Fix: Various additional errors, crashes, and other compatibility issues

Source: CVG

Job Listing Indicates Sledgehammer is Working on New Call of Duty Title for PS3 and Xbox 360

It looks like Activision is gearing up for yet another current-gen Call of Duty title and Sledgehammer Games is taking the lead. A new job listing on Gamasutra for a “Senior Environment Artist” was spotted by NowGamer, and surprisingly enough, there is no mention of development for next-generation platforms. Here’s what the job description says:

We are actively recruiting top talent for our Call of Duty development team. If you are passionate and driven to do your best work, and have a desire to work on the most successful FPS franchise in the history of video games, please apply online.

[The applicant] Will be expected to create single player and multi-player levels under the direction of the art director and the creative director. [The applicant] Will insure that the level works on all relevant platforms, Xbox 360, PS3.

Whether or not this will end up being Modern Warfare 4 remains to be seen, but one thing is certain, the Call of Duty franchise does not end on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 with Black Ops II. Perhaps the next CoD will be on both current and next gen titles, which would mean that it couldn’t take full advantage of the full power of the next gen console.

Source: Playstationlifestyle