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The Game You Play After the Best Game in the World

For those who can’t let go, I have some advice- Let go. Where I work, people regularly use their PC’s to play multiplayer games at lunch and after work at the end of the week. Because the place is so big and stuffed with geeks there are several different games going on around the  building. There’s the WoW fraternity, TF2 players (whose ranks have been thinned recently), Left 4 Dead and CoD4 Modern Warfare. Yesterday we had some interesting conversations on our private CoD4 mailing list and it highlights a problem when you play a good multiplayer game for a long time and tire of, but have no immediate successor lined up.

So these guys have basically played Call of Duty modern Warfare at lunchtimes for over a year. They don’t like CS or TF2 or LEft 4 Dead, they love CoD4. They are very good at it and most are ranked level 55. They also play a mod, so they’ve levelled up using this bot mod only with the bots turned off so they’re basically playing standard CoD4 but one where they can only play against each other if they want to preserve their rankings). This is why its hard to tear away the TF2 guys from their game or WoW players to a new MMO. They’ve invested so much time in the game but are so sick of it but they’ve invested so much time in it but they are so sick of it but, well, you can guess the rest.

So back to this group of CoD lovers. One guy, who’s one of the better players, and the one who wrote the bot mod we played, has basically had enough. I know because I’ve played him on the 360 version as well as the PC- He’s spent more time on that one game than I have on sleeping in the past year by the looks of things. you know the type, complaining about others using the grenade launcher (the n00b tube) So he’s trying to rally the troops into playing something else. So what about Call of Duty World at War? Nope- WWII, buggy, yada yada. Which is funny because he hasn’t played it. Ok, then what?

Operation flashpoint was suggested. The group was all excited but apparently was a colossal let down. I could have told them that. Then Codename:Eagle, apparently a pre EA DICE made this before BF1942. Apparently buggy too so that went down in flames. Its funny, but I’m sure many games have this same dilemma. What do you play when you’re sick of something. I recall years ago, when we played Medal of Honor Allied Assault multiplayer, we moved straight onto Call of Duty (the original). When that grew stale, there was no immediate successor until the UT2004 demo came out. Battlefield Vietnam came out and filled the void for a while but that didn’t last. Eventually someone suggested the original Counterstrike and they went back to that (without me for the most part since CS has never gelled for me). WoW kind of killed the LAN gaming network for a few years (that and some other loopholes being closed by the IT department). Counterstrike source came and went a few times, lots of RTSes and MMo’s and then new FPSes becoming fashionable again amongst theses fairly PC-centric types with CoD4 and TF2 (and then Left 4 Dead).

But the habits are hard to kick. Left 4 Dead took away some of the TF2 players (not all), but CoD WaW has not pulled the CoD4 guys away. I’m guessing that either these dudes will be bringing in CoD2 next week or Battlefield 1942 or BF2. And it won’t last. I reckon give it a month before thy come back to Modern Warfare.

I myself played Left 4 Dead but i found the online wasn’t more fun than SP for me and I kind of lost interest after writing the review. Then I saw on steam my Day of Defeat Source needed an update so I patched it and tried it having not played it since CoD2 came out in late 2005. Well, you can see the TF2/influence now. Film grain effect and killcams straight out of TF2 (same sound effects) but that aside, this is still one of the better fast paced shooters. It has changed so little that I can’t help wondering if these guyus will ever get bored with playing these same maps over and over.

What makes guys play this sort of game over and over so much, even years later? CoD WaW has come out and sold very well, but I find the PC community to be quite small. My ISP is one of the larger server providers and there are only two normal TDM servers for CoD WaW compared to about six to eight for Modern Warfare. Hey, people are still playing Quake III somewhere.

Its hard to let go.