"sQuIrT o' LeMoN!"
A taste of what's to come.
Addendum: So... You're basically free to call this like a demo... excerpt, maybe? Subtle foreshadowing for what's to come at the future. This one's a little more on the documentary side as much as it is an archival retrospect. Something that I originally wanted to plan on doing in the interest of time, but never got around to doing it for reasons that kinda just made sense and fall into place with each passing archival post I make about myself. If you're still around for this ride, congratulations, this is officially the biggest project I've ever worked on. And the most important. On top of thanking you guys as always for being able to support me. The only downside being that Allout Monte still has me blacklisted revoking his front row seat privileges because he knows for a fact that he can't even defend his arguments worth a damn while being outted as the undisputed clown bitch of the internet. And he won't even be able to do so at all (and I mean at all as if there weren't any other indicators) right after this few month long special event. Anyways, let us get down to this segment of my archival releases.
Long before TikTok, and some of the stuff I've made content on in the past, one of my beloved franchise was Call of Duty...
Which is a statement that was regarded highly by many once upon a time, now an open season for people to get clowned on for reasons I'm more than open to cover in the next few paragraphs.
Everyone knows it, everyone talks it, so I'm not going to bore you with the basics you have heard time and time again. And to some degrees I was someone who believed that the 2000's Modern Warfare Trilogy, and the Black Ops "Trilogy," was the highlight of an empire taken away too soon.
Which normally I would be swearing up and down the Memory Lane explaining all of that to you, but by now, every other YouTuber or Creator who would do this for money over "awareness" has already done that, and broken records are broken records. And after what happened, I don't really have those regards, or wish to think about those regards considering the future.
That didn't end there though, there was a point of time- I'd say around the time of Advanced Warfare, where I noticed that something was wrong. And unfortunately, my reasonings for why I was feeling something was wrong, was not the proper same reasons why I am talking about this now. But at that time my "solution" to this was lightly and politely put the franchise down, step out a bit and let them have this "phase" that there were having at the time, come back, and on paper, there's a chance it would've been back as the holly-jolly CoD that I know and I can dismiss the Advanced Warfare - BO3 era as something a little goofy, a social experiment that wasn't social experimenting.
Never to say I hated some if not all of those experiences.
Advanced Warfare was indeed Sledgehammer Games' first iteration of this momentum swing "multiverse" that was coming together in an odd but appealing way that made me have a sense of respect towards the entire franchise model. Which might've as well been a good bit of this feel like an extent of subtle foreshadowing that I should've paid attention to from zero hour.
Black Ops 3 took the highlights of some of their best narrative experiences to make a sort of moc Ghost in the Shell type story in a world I was more than inclined to tell myself that this was just a sort of "Elseworld Epilogue" to a mini-trilogy that I already believed was amazing enough as is and honestly did not think much more should be added to it.
The bitter reality now, was that I should have stuck with that era until the end knowing that it would be the last few titles to enjoy it while it lasts.
Because Modern Warfare 2019 dropped. And that was where shit hit the fan. Something was tragically wrong now. And instead of walking out when I had the chance, I minded my own business, and carried on with assumptions I should have never had in the first place. That I might as well have called my first sets of recorded cope. It wasn't until the time of Treyarch's Black Ops: Cold War came about where I spent the entirety of that life cycle learning how the sausage was truly made during that time. And when I did, I would not say the reactions were "comfy" now.
Which I'm not going to bore you with the in-depth detailings and the sort, I'm just going to speedrun the entire jist of what happened that made the entire franchise hated the way that it is:
So around Modern Warfare 2019 - BO:CW, there came along a sort of system in set on their online multiplayer experiences- which on paper and on face value, was something that did not sound as bad. To some degrees, it'd work how it would intend to work, and on first glance sounded, looked, and felt like every other day in a multiplayer space like CoD.
However. Two factors came into play to put two and two together to paint the picture that was already in place in pieces and in plain sight that stayed that way on vicious prayers that nobody is to be smart enough to find it for one of these factors:
The publishing company
and
Reading the fine print.
The first factor is a no brainer, and that is the publishing company Activision.
If you want to know in a extremely in-depth perspective that has a depth that's much more than you deserve to know, you have two options and- let's say twenty or so second timer in this:
Type in "Activision Lawsuit"
Or go here
Twenty or so seconds later me here- hey, hi. How you doing? Everyone feelin' fine after that road trip?
All morbid jokes aside, about four years ago, Activision Blizzard would go down as the most egregiously scummiest publishing company known to man. Now is it the definitive worst? Definitely not. There's still plenty of space and time here for the next set of people to take that mantle one way or another. But you'd definitely imagine that they would be the undefeated champion of this.
SA case, after SA case, alongside horror stories and literal stories of hell coming out of them. Enough to basically scare away anyone and anything especially with someone who once had high affinities for such a company.
What started as a twenty odd-some years of being able to provide content to many consumers worldwide-ish got bulldozed into oblivion in just three by outting themselves as ome of the most abusive companies if not the greediest.
On to the second, and another Segway into the topic, fine print.
Basically Activision thought it would be funny to use the entire new system to rig the entire multiplayer space for the sake of gaslighting people into getting more bundles and avoid working on the game for the sake of pretending to be Fortnite. They even went as far as to gaslight an egregious amount of times in the hopes that people are too brain-rotted enough to forget about the affair entirely. Among a shit ton of other things that Fooly would have field days upon field days with.
I had the entire knowledge now that Activision was proactively trying to turn my entire comfort franchise into a literal scam, a empty shell that was filled with nothing but money thefts, eventually pay to win, and everything in-between. Saying that I was not a happy camper at that time would be an understatement of the century, and the times when Activision spent some of said time outting themselves as unregistered sex offenders didn't do any justices either, and gave the whole ammunition that I needed at that time and forevermore.
Now the good news was that I thought for the ninety percent of the time doing this in a emotion viscously indescribable by myself even, I thought I was doing fine with it.
The bad news was that this basically became an introduction into something I had full knowledge of, but didn't have real proper experience of until that day and some other events moving forward. Which is to be saved for later. But for the reason and purpose of excerpts, that is for later.
But in the end, the entire string of events basically made me quit and abandon the entire franchise for good, never to return again, and leaving everyone and everything into a demise I hope and pray nobody else has to be the witness, researcher, and/or participant of.
There was a point in time where recently with my new XBox One and Gamepass I had an entire idea to do a retrospect on myself and the relationship with the franchise by trying out MW19-3 and BO6 after some time. Admittedly, it was kind of elaborate if not convoluted, but considering the amount of time and history- alongside taking some of Penguinz0 advice on the accounts of hating things, I thought it would be worthwhile to try. Several days, two games,
I did not last 5 days.
To this day, nothing has changed my outlook on this franchise.
(This is not for excerpt reasons, it was that trash of an experience.)
Now, bitter truth, I was never sorry for ever calling any of these things out, I still think that Call of Duty is the worst "experience" you can get in the gaming market, I think it was an absolute disgrace that this was how the entire franchise put themselves down under all because of Fortnite being the more popular at the time, and unfortunately I also considerably believe that no matter how many artists, cosplayers, content creators, and the sort you into that community, no amount of that is going to change the outlook CoD potrays now- at least as long as Activision has something to say about it. Personally, I even doubt that it would even if they're gone. But I do feel that I was a little too agro on the matter. Again, this was coming out of someone who got around to CoD 3, 4 & W@W when I was about like 9-12, who took a break for one arc and came back to see that it all turned into a dumpster bonfire fueled by dogshit. Not mentioning the part where said individual found out that it was dogshit fueling the dumpster fires. Of course, you would make it your goal to report, warn, and even get everybody to look behind the curtain, and the truth was that the community was too stockholm'd to see that. So the best course at that time was to just walk away and abandon both franchise and community, which I did. And I don't regret that.
But yea, that was about it, just a little tidbit for what's to come later.
Seeya.
