I’ve played every Call of Duty game since Call of Duty 1, and I have to say the most recent iterations (Modern Warfare 1/2 and World at War) take a lot of elements from MMORPGs. You have a persistent character who levels up as you kill enemies and complete objectives. You rank up, offering you new challenges to complete and new weapons and items to use, and you can customize your gear to optimum efficiency. There is also an end-game.
In fact, the only things missing are loot (if you don’t count unlocked items), a persistent world operated on main servers. If Call of Duty were to be labeled as an MMO, it would be more akin to Huxley, Crimecraft, or even Guild Wars, where the action takes place on a private instance, even though Call of Duty doesn’t have the public “hubs” for players to hang out, and there is no trading whatsoever.
But the LA Times recently posted about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s successful sales, and left this nugget at the end:
One person close to the company said it also was considering adapting Call of Duty as a massively multi-player online world.
Now, if the project is “in consideration,” then keep in mind that there are still years before this title would ever go live (around the same time Stargate Worlds gets funding and Ultima Online is too old to get the senior discount at Costco), but it did get me thinking:
I have a high wall that appears any time a shooter wants me to pay monthly (Ala Crimecraft) to play what I could be playing for free in the thousands of alternatives. Since its launch, Planetside has been one of the few first person shooter MMOs to get people to pay a monthly fee, and that is mainly due to Planetside’s offering: Massive scale battles with out instances, in a fully pvp environment, where you contribute to an overall war.
Essentially what I’m asking for is a Call of Duty-fied version of World War 2 Online: The look and feel of Modern Warfare 2, with lean, and with WW2 Online’s massive persistent world where players are always fighting for territory, and you will have my fifteen dollars a month. With great competition comes great need for originality; and frankly a massive world is the only thing separating the Call of Duties from the Call of Duty: MMOFPS and the only thing separating a monthly fee from a Crimecraft-style “But look, we’re free to play now!”
More on this Call of Duty MMO if it ever surfaces…
MMO Fallout 