I see myself as a big Call of Duty fan. Mainly towards the “golden era” of the games with the original Modern Warfare 2 onwards, but I’ve played every mainline entry except Cold War, Vanguard and Black Ops 6. It’s time for Activision to fix the horrendous backend and hub that they’ve used since Modern Warfare 2019. We’ve already seen that Modern Warfare 4 is due to have a revised UI, but the underlying issue will still be present.
My main playtime from the “reboot” entries has been with MW2019 and MWII (2022), both of which have been on PC, so I didn’t necessarily come across any annoyance issues. However, for MW3 and Black Ops 7, these have been on PS5, where the problems rear their ugly head so much more.
Call of Duty’s Hub Issue
The Call of Duty app is one that tries to link all of the more recent titles into a single hub but it’s plain awful, confusing and has not been developed correctly. I recently reinstalled MW3 on my PS5, to be greeted with a 170GB+ download for Call of Duty itself. Upon booting and selecting the game I wished to play, I then had a further download to actually install the main portion of MW3, as you only get offered to install a few additional packs initially. Upon investigation, I noticed that Activision had directly installed full files for BO7 (I didn’t own it at this point), when all I wanted to play was MW3.
Not only is this frustrating, but I cannot fathom why we should be expected to be okay with a company forcibly installing games we don’t own to our systems. Of course, this is probably for some sort of advertisement. I should note that I was able to fully delete these files without any issue with playing MW3, so they were not required. Also, why the hell is there a MWII wallpaper still tied to booting/installing the Call of Duty app? It’s so goddamn confusing when you’re trying to play a totally different game.
Underlying Issues
Jump forward a couple of months and I’ve purchased BO7, since I heard about the Classic game mode and it was only £20 on Amazon. Whilst this installed more easily than MW3, presumably because it’s the most recent, even this cannot escape the backend issues that the Call of Duty series has been plagued with. Forced to reboot and restart multiple times because it refused to let my split-screen partner join, with it then suddenly working for no reason. Within the game itself (for splitscreen at least), scores aren’t shown correctly, kill markers do not appear, classes bug and cannot be selected until backing out. Whilst these sound like generic issues on paper, I’d wager these are caused by features and systems stacked upon each other, year after year.
I’m looking forward to Modern Warfare 4. Call it nostalgia, call it my love/hate relationship or call it genuine excitement. Either way, I am not excited to deal with this awful system any longer. It’s time for Activision to take a step back and realise it’s not what people want or need. Is there really a high percentage of players who have multiple games installed to have the need to switch between them with a Call of Duty hub? I understand that a lot of guns and operators cross over between games but then the argument stands to do we really need those yearly releases if that’s Activision’s only explanation?
