Activision leak details Warzone 2 and Modern Warfare 2 2023 roadmap | Hacker News Reader

Activision leak details Warzone 2 and Modern Warfare 2 2023 roadmap

ggrecon.com

59 pointsbookofjoe57 comments

Who cares? Their roadmap has looked the same for 20 years: release the same game again, with slight adjustments to gameplay, new "story", better graphics... And also new ridiculous engine bugs, more invasive anticheat, and more premium DLC crap on top of the rising price.

Activision only succeeds due to size and inertia. Big budgets, lots of artists, name recognition.

I like when obscure or indie gaming stuff shows up on this site, because there's usually something interesting to learn about it or discuss around it. Call of Duty number 30 and its set of completely uninspired additions are not the least bit interesting.

While this may be true-ish of the mainline Call of Duty games, it is very not-true of Warzone.

Warzone was an immensely popular free-to-play Battle Royale game, released at exactly the right time during the pandemic to catch the wave of isolated people looking for new, online group activities. In contrast to other Battle Royale games, it was much faster-paced and forgiving, with more emphasis on fun gunplay than realism or "tactics."

Last November, they released Warzone 2, while simultaneously effectively shutting down the original Warzone. And it's a complete 180 from the original. The game is much more like a conventional BR... extremely slow paced and "tactical," and much more difficult to recover from an early mistake. And while it's hard to point to any one piece of data, the overwhelming sense in the community is that the game is not performing well; viewers on Twitch have fallen off massively since the release, and players are down massively since release. Again, I don't want to say "the game is in trouble," but it's telling that the developers are being bizarrely forthcoming in their "here is what we're going to change, we promise" posts, compared to how they handled the original Warzone. And anecdotally, my group of ~8 people that used to play Warzone every few days all abandoned WZ2 within the first week or two.

And I continue to be absolutely perplexed by their decision. Their game was wildly successful, differentiated itself from other BRs for its gameplay, and got incredibly lucky with their pandemic timing. Why oh why would they totally eschew their winning recipe, kill all that momentum, in order to emulate less successful competitors??

I don't want to argue at length here, but I disagree: Warzone in either form was just as uninspired as regular CoD. They more or less copy-pasted game mechanics from the other BR titles that established the genre onto their game. They are now doing more mechanics-cloning with their Tarkov-esque game mode.

I also don’t want to argue at length. But I don’t think we need to! I think we’re on the same page.

If you’re into indie games, where a new game can challenge what a genre even means, then naturally Warzone will seem unoriginal. That’s a totally fair opinion, and I also prefer indie games. But that’s less of a critique than you simply not enjoying AAA games. Would you call Elden Ring uninspired because it’s just Breath of the Wild + Dark Souls?

On the other hand, there’s a class of games which they release annually, with each game being obviously just a reskin of the previous iteration, with perhaps negligible gameplay changes. FIFA is the most notorious offender here, with some releases updating nothing but player rosters, for a full sticker price. And mainline COD largely falls into that bucket… they just rehash the same gameplay while cycling through different settings (“it’s been a few years, let’s do WW2 again”).

The point I was trying to make is, WZ2 is not that latter category. The innovation may be small compared to indies, but the changes to pacing and gameplay from WZ->WZ2 were fairly radical (and, uh, disastrous), so it’s interesting to glean what we can about wtf they’re thinking and planning.

Come on, loadouts and the 'gulag' respawn mechanic were clearly novel in the BR space.

How is that any different from the original CoD w.r.t. other FPS games? Warzone is certainly at least as differentiated from Fortnite and PUBG as CoD is from CounterStrike.

> Why oh why would they totally eschew their winning recipe, kill all that momentum, in order to emulate less successful competitors??

They wouldn't be the first development team to lose the "What are we already doing right?" core features in the "What aren't we doing?" sprint.

While I agree it came out at the right time, I don't think it was faster-paced and more forgiving than the the next most popular BR Fortnite. But yes it is compared to PUBG and Tarkov. Fortite is also probably as "fun" gunplay as you can get in comparison.

In my opinion, the only reason Warzone was/is popular was because it is the COD version of Battle Royale, that most gamers wanted to see since many of us played COD growing up.

I found it okay, but it felt like a rehashed COD on a larger map.

I am a Fortnite fanboy since its inception and what keeps me around is the constant change of the map either throughout the seasons or the complete map changes every chapter. Warzone suffers because it becomes too repetitive.

Most people don't actually like batlle royale, its just happened that most free games at the time were battle royals. Now that are many more options, battle royals games aren't as big anymore.

Some substantial subset of the tens of millions of players probably care. Call of Duty titles may not be innovative or particularly original, but they're undeniably popular.

I think it's interesting to see what the planning side of a AAA live service game looks like...even if it's just a few screenshots in a tweet.

This is about seasonal road maps with dates, and specifics on what content they plan to drop for each season which is new to only the last few CoD games.

If it doesn't interest you why are you even in this thread being so unnecessarily hostile about it.

User-hostile business practices result in hostile users, I guess. Plus, this story just feels out of place on HN, to me.

I agree, who cares? Do we care when FIFA documents leak revealing how much certain countries pay for play?

There's a lot of valid criticism, but rising prices is... not quite accurate. Compared to the inflation of the last 25 years, prices for games have stayed almost constant, so relatively speaking they are a lot cheaper than they used to be (despite the ridiculously large team sizes and production value of modern AAA games). If games kept up with inflation, your average AAA game price would be more than 100€ and not 60-80€ these days.

Games have also come up with additional monetization methods to increase the overall spend past $60. Things like DLC, Season Passes, Loot crates and now battle passes have increased the potential spend as a price discrimination strategy. CoD for example has "Cod Points", which are used to buy battle passes or skins putting the price at somewhere between $60 and thousands, somewhat similar to the approach mobile games take.

They also increasingly seem to be released in various broken fashions. AAA are not quite as bad at the perpetual "alpha"-ism, but still, many are quite broken at launch.

Things cyberpunk, BF 2042 in the same genre etc.

It's sustainable because the gamer demographic has grown tremendously in the last 25 years as well. Bigger market, means more people buying AAA games in general, which allows for a larger budget without increasing the price and still being able to get a profit out of it.

That said, I'm not personally a fan of the latest generation having price increases. I went from buying games when they came out to just waiting until the games are half off and only buying games on release when there's a vital story I don't want to have spoiled for me. But 90% of my purchases are now only when the game is 50% off or more.

I think there's an important point to make that if games haven't kept up with inflation and neither have our wages, then the price hasn't changed.

Should digital goods be indexed to inflation/TAM_growth, to normalize for population growth?

Since all costs are personnel, yes.

What do you mean? This is a digital downloadable good and their sales have grown massively, bringing in massively more profit with the same team sizes. Even if teams grew, the gaming market has outgrown that by several sizes in last years.

The profits these publishers have recorded in last years are staggering - raising game prices is pure fleecing.

> raising game prices is pure fleecing

My curiosity is that there's some normalized change in game pricing, but it's really dependent on both inflation and increased size of gaming market.

Since unit costs are so low for digital goods, if you have +5% inflation over a period and +15% gamers, the price of AAA games technically should have gone down to maintain profits. (Assuming you hold development costs static, which isn't true but simplifies the problem)

I'm not sure what that inflation-TAM number would be. Maybe games are getting "more profitable" (at the same price point), maybe less.

Since there's almost no cost to the production of a sold item, all costs are salaries, social benefits, office space. Things that correlate directly to the number of people working. All these costs rise with the inflation.

You're right that more sales could mean lower prices, but I don't know the numbers. I would not have assumed CoD is so much more popular now than 10 years ago.

I enjoyed the new Warzone, and I especially enjoyed the story/single player. Was a fun afternoon.

Have you even played recent CoDs?

I have played the free warzone games as well as the paid games during the limited "free weekends" and... I'm very happy I didn't give them any money.

Well, there's an example of their roadmap changing in the last 20 years. Warzone came out in 2019.

Judging by other sources [1][2], the more relevant information here is that employee data was accessed through a breached account with privileged access. As demonstrated by the original person who revealed the information on Twitter[3].

The roadmap for both games isn't surprising to any fans of the game, the response seems to largely be "meh".

And of course, SMS phishing as the culprit.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/21/23608750/call-of-duty-lea...

[2]: https://insider-gaming.com/activision-data-breach/

[3]: https://twitter.com/vxunderground/status/1627477748359872513...

Not that I care, but I think this is more of a breach than a "leak"? Like those are just hacked documents. Though in a way that makes them more credible than regular game related leaks.

It's a breach that resulted in a leak. We don't need to get hung up on it.

> Following the launch of Call of Duty's newest battle royale and multiplayer annual release, the company has apparently been subject to a huge data brief which has been swept under the carpet.

Swept under the carpet or nobody really cares? I used to be big into CoD franchise until the BR plague (i.e. Warzone) killed everything. What provocative or exciting idea could possibly exist in these leaks?

Also, why not crowdsource criticism of your roadmap? The room full of consultants doesn't seem to be working anymore. Pretending like its a big scary breach is a fantastic way to get it into media cycles.

> Also, why not crowdsource criticism of your roadmap?

https://kotaku.com/death-threats-follow-small-call-of-duty-t...

https://kotaku.com/another-day-another-death-threat-from-gam...

https://kotaku.com/bioware-writer-describes-her-gaming-taste...

https://kotaku.com/the-nasty-twitter-hate-sent-to-the-former...

C’mon be real. Warzone Battle Royale might not be your preference but it’s silly to pretend that no-one likes it. It’s been hugely popular.

Played almost every BR game since DAY-Z and I gotta say, they are almost always more interesting that the straight ffa, team dm, or almost any of the capture, defend, or whatever weird unreal things have existed.

The combination of randomness and asymmetry with a focus on fairly tight gunplay makes losing painful and winning very fun.

To me its the time commitment. I can easily play and win a half dozen rounds of traditional TDM in the time it takes to get to the final circle in a decent round of BR.

It's also the ratio of action to (what I would call) filler. A UT2K4 CTF game is almost non-stop action. Between insertion, looking for powerups, and finding someone to fight, a typical round of Fortnite has a lot more downtime. I suspect that might be part of the popularity because it's easier to make smalltalk with the stream while smashing crates in Fortnite than it is to do so while getting shot at with rockets.

That's a fair point. All good reasons why I'm a fuddy duddy and like my good old TDM.

And this is why neither genre is the only genre. You're allowed to like and prefer different things and that doesn't take away from the other.

IMO that was the genius of Warzone’s “resurgence” mode. A lot of the fun of BR without the waiting around.

> The room full of consultants doesn't seem to be working anymore.

They're making $5 billion a year in profit with profit margins around 60-70%, seems to work fine to me

Gross profit doesn't include dev salaries, marketing or fixed costs such as offices. You're using the wrong metric.

Since when does gross profit not include salaries of employees that contribute directly to the product? Is that normal?

I think because they're a fixed cost they're deducted for net profit.

My mistake, net income is 1.5 to 2.8 billion a year for the past 6 years.

I can't wait for the world to shift to doing things for the good of the product instead of the good of the profit.

When I said it doesn't seem to be working I was referring to the fun not the money.

What makes you think that they care whether things are fun or not as long as they make money?

I think at some level AAA publishers realize that making money does eventually require providing fun, novel experiences.

Your comment is exactly why they shouldn't listen to players. The loud minority is seldom representative and often wants short-sighted stuff based on emotions rather than long-term analysis. Blindly implementing whatever the pitchforks on reddit demand is a sure way of killing your game.

I'm curious why you think Battle Royale game modes killed everything? They still have the classic multiplayer game mode.

I have a feeling some devs are more loyal to the brand than the owners, and this is an appeal to the fans

Check out the new DMZ mode. You might like that if BR wasn’t your thing but you liked the franchise.

Interesting, only couple of days after RTO announcements.

What does "RTO" stand for?

"return to office"

return to office

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