The Cover Effect.

[Empty Box]

I guess you're not talking about the campaign per se. My main point on why the community of CoD 4 was more action forward in multiplay was because:

1 - Infinite respawn during the campaign: made a lot of new players learned that sitting back killing bad guys wasn't how you win. You needed to rush and flank the enemy, learn to move with wit and not just staying behind cover until the enemies are all dead.

2 - Lots of people coming from the PC community. Lots of rules in PC gaming and no camping is almost the most universal.

3 - No big name youtube guys with 400 000 + subscribers. People didn't know before about "youtube worthy" games or stats. It made some people obsessed with their stats. And since you cannot be a new player AND doing good, they start to camp because "they want good scores/stats like the dudes on youtube". After that, they play the only way they ever knew, camping. I don't care much about trickshotting though, it's actually people having fun with the game and not being super concerned by their stats.

No, not the campaign. Strangely, the campaign would follow this nearly inversely I feel, with the more "tame" covers leading to "wilder nonsensical" campaigns, while the "wilder nonsensical" covers lead to "tame" campaigns in terms of the silliness.

Endless respawn was silly, but it wasn't broken. No more endless respawn, no more challenge.

But, I do think the cover plays a rather large portion of it. You have to remember, the cover art is likely the first thing seen by more or less everyone at the store. You see a cover, you see two things, the name and the art. You see action, you unquestionably think action. You see say, Battlefield, you realize "Oh hey, this game has tanks in it!", dead center. You then proceed to decide "Do I like tanks?". So on, so forth. The older CoD's cover makes you feel like there is something to be done, some evil to exterminate right there on the cover.

If you look at just the pictures, no names or text, it's clear. That also falls in line with Activision more or less saying "It doesn't matter in terms of quality or completeness, the people want Call of Duty", as you will also note the text becomes a bit more prominent in terms of focal point. Atleast to my eye.

The MW2 on covers don't make me want to go blow something up. They dont make me want to "strap on my combat helmet" so to speak. So regardless of weather or not the cover is solely to blame, it certainly has an effect at the end IMHO.

@Zak - The other day someone seriously brought up Mechwarrior at work. I was like "Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?"

I'm also sure BF is exempt, as they also feature vehicles, which pollutes the issue I am sure. Also, BC2 had the cliche soldier action and still turned out pretty fine.

[Bolt-Action]

Lolz funny thread EB. Although it does make sense.

[SPOOKFORCE]

This is a pretty random correlation lol. I can't really see how a character's posturing on a cover has anything to do with gameplay (never judge a book by it's cover). But it's definitely a novel idea lol

[NovaGnome24]

I do understand what you're talking about, but whatever happened to the expression: "Don't judge a book by its cover."? Well, I guess that doesn't work in this case, since its a video game, not a book. The cover of a game has to actually reflect what it is about. But its not so much the cover of a game that gives you the first impression of it. For me, its actually the commercial I see on television. I don't exactly like the new video game commercials that come out, many of them don't actually show gameplay, they just show cutscenes from the game, you won't necessarily understand how the game will be played, unless its a continuation of a certain series (We all know that MW3 will be a first person shooter since we played the previous CoD games.), but if a person new to the series was going to watch the commercial, they probably wouldn't understand how the game was played if they didn't look into it. If you ask me, more companies should take a hint from Nintendo, which seems to incorporate gameplay into the commercials they make. Sure it may look a little cheesy to us, but at least we know that the game is going to be played a certain way.