Comrades In Arms... Or Not.

It's really scarring me that Activision is in charge of Blizzard now (after all the company is Activision-Blizzard). Activision has been dropping the ball lately. From DJ Hero not exactly blowing up at retail to the Modern warfare 2 server debacle, to them showing NO pictures of Modern Warfare Reflex for Wii they have been really fucking up.

Yes it's true that Modern Warefare 2 has more pre-orders than the Bible has followers, but a pre-order is not a confirmed sale (I for one pre-order games at multiple locations when I do pre-order a game just so I can be more sure of getting one). That is nit picking though, Modern Warefare 2 is not the problem after all. Infinity Ward make a good product and justly deserve their success... but at what cost?

Recently there has been a theory going around that Infinity Ward, with their huge influence at Activision, have been trying to seperate their CoD games from other CoD games. Call of Duty 3 was the only numbered Call of Duty game that Treyarch ever developed. Every game they have developed since then has had no number, or had a different subtitle tacked on. Every single game that Infinity Ward themselves havn't worked on has has a major subtitle change to differentiate it from their efforts with the IP.

Case in point, Modern War Reflex for the Wii from developer Treyarch. This is a port of a game from 2007, to an underpowered console, using an engine that was optimized for higher end hardware. You can expect some issues to exist int he graphics department, but Treyarch reportedly has dome an amazing job with their port of the game if everyone is to believed... but why hasn't Activision released anything but pre-alpha screenshots?

For those of you not in the know, pre-alpha comes before any real development has happened on the game. Essentially it's just the engine running on the hardware, no optimization or anything, and 999 times out of 1000 it looks like crap.

The game releases on Novembur 10th, the pre-alpha screenshots were released in August of this year... that is over two full months and not a single shred of graphics have been shown since then. And of course having the screens released in August does not mean the game was at that level back then either.

Treyarch are a talented developer capable of keeping pace with Infinty Ward on their turf. they made Call of Duty: world at War for the Wii which looked very good considering the level of tech inside the Wii. So why haven't they released new media to combat these horrible ones? Remember hwo I said that Infinity Ward might have a hand in this? Turns out that any screenshots for this project have to go thru Activision PR (obviously, you expect that of the publisher) but it ALSO has to go thru Infinity Ward.

Now why might Infinity Ward not want screens for the Wii version being released right now? They have a highly-anticipated game for the high-end consoles coming out the same month, and if you think for a second they will sacrifice just one of those sales because of some customer confusion you are very deluded.

Infinity Ward has never done anything new with any of their games yet. Everything they have done, they've done well, but I don't think they deserve their giant egos. Hell, Treyarch are the ones who started the whole class system in Call of Duty 3 which Infinity Ward then used in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Maybe if Infinity Ward backed the Wii with their titles like Treyarch does (World at War sold well over 1 million units on Wii) they might garner some respect from me. I can't stand these shallow devs, they backed the damn PS2 with every single damn game ever created, but the Wii blows up out of the gate and they have to run "tests" to see if the thing has a market for them. YOU MAKE THE GAME AND ACTUALLY ADVERTISE IT AND THERE WILL BE A MARKET!

Anyway I digress. Infinity Ward might be a great dev technically and design wise... but man do they suck at the whole comrades in arms thing. Kinda like their games where it's you and you alone with a bunch of AI who follow you and do nothing to help you...

I will update my blog when screens are finally released, I avoided it now because no way in hell will the game look that bad upon release.