Get your night vision goggles. We’re going dark.

We’re 2 days away from a return to Call of Duty. As we get closer and closer, I just want to take the time to react/talk about some of the news that has come out in the past few weeks.

Buckle up.

Survival Mode

This one is tough. During the PlayStation State of Play, developer Infinity Ward dripped a story trailer for Modern Warfare. Fans were surprised to see that a Spec-Ops trailer snuck in at the end and dropped a huge bomb.

Personally, I don’t care about it since I’m on the PS4. The odds of me playing this are very small. However, it doesn’t make it fair for the other percent of the community who don’t have access to it.

Community is/was pissed. Infinity Ward took a lot of heat. It’s Activision’s fault, and unfortunately, there is no remedy to this situation (besides the obvious one of making it accessible for everybody).

Part of me realizes this is Sony being stingy with cross play. They’ve been hellbent on not letting it happen because they want people to buy their console which is ludicrous because I didn’t buy a PS3/PS4 for Call of Duty. I see this as what they wanted to make cross play a real thing. News came out that the cross play for PS4 is now out of beta so moving forward, this type of behavior will not be acceptable Sony.

Loot Boxes

After Black Ops 4, the CoD community was burned. It doesn’t help that a bunch of gamers found Common Supply drops listed as a reward in the Modern Warfare Beta.

Popular leaker TheGamingRevolution has been leaking every single thing about Modern Warfare. How he hasn’t gotten in trouble, I do not know. Anyways, he’s been leaking so much that Infinity Ward developers have been sneak dissing him on reddit saying his information is false.

It was entertaining especially since TGR has been right about the majority of his leaks. Well, this put a lot of pressure on Activision which led to a huge day in Call of Duty.

I guess Activision realized they were losing a lot of preorders, and while I’m happy that this change is finally here, it’s unfortunate Treyarch had to take the lion’s share of the blame for last year’s debacle.

For this year, Call of Duty will implement a Battle Pass. I’m picturing something a long the lines of Apex Legends and Fortnite, since Activision is still hell bent on making money from Premium BP purchases. Whatever.

They have also repeated that everything can be earned in game through simply playing the game. Whether we’ll see guns in the BP has yet to be seen. This system is set to launch later in the year.

Multiplayer Shake Up

This year brings the end of the Prestige system. Now, Infinity Ward is replacing the system with the Officer Rank system.

As normal, you will level up all the way to the max level of 55. IW calls this your Enlisted Rank. Once you hit 55, you will progress into the Officer Rank system. Your rank will not reset and will instead you will continue to progress. You start off at Officer Rank 1, with 100 ranks to progress through with plenty of rewards. With the start of each season, your Officer Rank will reset.

As you level up you will unlock special Officer Challenges. Complete those challenges, and you’ll unlock a ribbon. Earn 10 ribbons and you’ll unlock an emblem. Every 10 emblems you unlock will evolve the emblem with 100 emblems making the emblem animated. Pretty cool.

I picture this system like Battlefield. In Battlefield, you continue ranking up and you can equip ribbons to show how cool you are. I’m going to miss the Prestige system, but this will be interesting. Unfortunately, one of the downsides I see is people missing out on all the rewards because your rank will reset every new season. Not everybody has enough time to grind the game out.

Netcode

This one has surprisingly been swept under the rug.

Around the time the end of the beta, the game’s net code was a hot topic. People were complaining about lagging, dying first when shooting first, etc. This video came out and caused an even hotter debate.

Community manager Ashton Williams said they were working on discussing the topic in a few weeks, but that was in the beginning of the month. I saw somewhere that IW is going to speak on Thursday about some things. What that will be about is yet to be known, but maybe this will be one of the topics.

Conclusion

This is it homies.

Call of Duty has been making waves both good and bad.

We’ll see how this turns out in 2 days.