wraggster
June 30th, 2011, 13:02
Codemasters' Bodycount game director Andy Wilson has warned that the Call of Duty franchise is only as good as its last effort, and a slip-up in quality for the series could see Activision's dominance come crumbling down.
When we asked Wilson whether he thought gamers were growing tired of Call of Duty he said that yearly updates were risky when it comes to story-driven games.
"Possibly. That's the danger when you get into yearly updates," he said.
"I've never really been a fan of it - I don't think you do yourself any favours by getting into a cycle that's not a sports licence.
"With something like F1 of course you do a yearly update - I'm a massive F1 fan and I would buy an F1 game every year just to get new cars and drivers. That for me is a valid thing.
"When you're doing it with a story-driven action franchise, you can tire people out really quickly I think, and you just get to the point where it's like, 'What are we going to do next?' because we've seen it all before."
Wilson continued by suggesting that the integrity of the FPS genre as a whole seems to rest on whether or not the COD franchise can maintain its quality:
"I don't know with Call of Duty. I think we'll see by how well the next one does. It's always 'how well the next one does'. If it continues to be all the way up there, then fine.
"I think the year it slips below, the year it doesn't do quite as well as it did last time, is when you're going to start to see people panicking a little bit about the FPS genre having the bottom fall out of it.
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/309724/news/call-of-duty-sales-slip-could-cause-fps-panic-bodycount-dev/?cid=OTC-RSS&attr=CVG-General-RSS
When we asked Wilson whether he thought gamers were growing tired of Call of Duty he said that yearly updates were risky when it comes to story-driven games.
"Possibly. That's the danger when you get into yearly updates," he said.
"I've never really been a fan of it - I don't think you do yourself any favours by getting into a cycle that's not a sports licence.
"With something like F1 of course you do a yearly update - I'm a massive F1 fan and I would buy an F1 game every year just to get new cars and drivers. That for me is a valid thing.
"When you're doing it with a story-driven action franchise, you can tire people out really quickly I think, and you just get to the point where it's like, 'What are we going to do next?' because we've seen it all before."
Wilson continued by suggesting that the integrity of the FPS genre as a whole seems to rest on whether or not the COD franchise can maintain its quality:
"I don't know with Call of Duty. I think we'll see by how well the next one does. It's always 'how well the next one does'. If it continues to be all the way up there, then fine.
"I think the year it slips below, the year it doesn't do quite as well as it did last time, is when you're going to start to see people panicking a little bit about the FPS genre having the bottom fall out of it.
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/309724/news/call-of-duty-sales-slip-could-cause-fps-panic-bodycount-dev/?cid=OTC-RSS&attr=CVG-General-RSS