
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.


