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What Activision Needs To Do To Keep Call of Duty Fresh

by Ben Reeves on May 01, 2013 at 01:29 PM

This year marks the 10-year anniversary of Call of Duty. Since the release of Call of Duty 2 in 2005, the series has had annual releases. In celebration of the announcement of Call of Duty: Ghosts, we came up with 50 ways for Activision to keep the series fresh.

We're serious about all these:

  1. Create a stronger emphasis on character development – the few occasions that CoD does character development well (Captain Price, Raul Menendez), it ends up being the best parts of the game
  2. Remove the rails – give us a large open world to explore à la Red Dead Redemption
  3. Customizable characters
  4. Design characters with real bone, muscle, and organ structures so that bullets more realistically penetrate their bodies
  5. Give us a story that isn't about exploding nuclear weapons
  6. Throw some Febreze on it
  7. Make all the bad guys invisible – It's called Ghosts after all
  8. Give us guns that shoot lasers
  9. Give us guns that shoot swords
  10. Give us guns that shoot grizzly bears
  11. Give us a gun that shoots atom bombs
  12. Ship it out in a Ziploc bag
  13. Make it a turn-based RPG – that would really throw us for a loop
  14. Let players play as the dogs
  15. Let players play as the kill cam
  16. Let players play as the atom bomb
  17. Cowboy hats
  18. Make the box out of grape-scented scratch-and-sniff material
  19. Make the game take a shower
  20. Set the game in the future, but make players use guns from WWII
  21. Make the guns louder
  22. Hire Christopher Walken impersonators to voice all of the game's grunts
  23. Create destructible environments more like Battlefield – we don't want to just shoot through a wall, we want to bring it down!
  24. Add GLaDOS
  25. Add portal guns
  26. Add all the characters from Team Fortress 2
  27. Have Valve make the game
  28. Add a minigame where players collect pet monsters and train them to fight alongside you
  29. People like short mobile games – what if the main story was only 25 minutes long?
  30. Similar to Assassin's Creed, add famous historical figures. What if in one mission you shrunk down to a microscopic level and entered President Obama's body in order to kill a mutant strain of some designer virus? Then you high-fived Dennis Rodman!
  31. Bring back slappers
  32. Make one level a dream sequence that is done in black and white
  33. Rocket boots
  34. Rocket pants?
  35. Give players a humorous robotic sidekick
  36. Bring back vehicles – let us drive a clown car
  37. Have mimes do all the cutscenes
  38. Add more graphics
  39. Make Zach Galifianakis the main character, but don't tell him what game he's working on during the recording sessions
  40. Add foxes – we're not talking about the animal. We want to see some sexy people in the game
  41. Do everything Irrational did with BioShock Infinite – but change all the characters' names
  42. Add foxes – the actual animals
  43. Tell us the meaning of life – but don't be too serious about it, add some jokes. Entertain us, dummies!
  44. Add cheese – everything is better with cheese
  45. Call of Duty Babies! – it worked for The Muppets
  46. Have a sequence where the player walks through a metal detector and their abs of steel set off the metal detector
  47. Have a scene where the player has to go undercover as a fat kid and wears a T-shirt at the pool
  48. Have a scene where the main character gets in a jam and has to MacGyver his way out of the situation by making a mask out of masking tape
  49. Mullets and beards – just put hair on everything
  50. The twist at the end was that it's all a dream