I admit I am a late arrival to the gaming community. If any high school gamers are reading this, odds are they have been gaming longer than I have. I purchased my first XBox – a Series S – in October of 2020, during my first semester of college. This was not the wisest decision I ever made, but I do not regret it.
However, I have realized an unfortunate fact way too late – all the new games are bad, and the games worth playing are the ones that have long-since seen their peak. These “good” games now have a dwindling community of die-hard fans who beat the stuffing out of any newcomers (me) who dare venture into their multiplayer lobbies. These fans are exclusively either children who gamed since they were five and swear more profusely than a sailor on deployment, or middle-aged dads trying to relive their own college glory days, when they held pizza parties while playing split-screen with their buddies into the wee hours of the morning.
Thus, I am left to wander the single-player modes – stories and campaigns that have intriguing twists and turns that one would expect of a movie. The issue is the graphics are annoyingly basic, since these magnificent pieces are from a bygone era – the 2000s. The first Assassin’s Creed games, the Bungie Halo games and the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare trilogy are among my favorites when it comes to entertaining game mechanics and gripping tales.
Modern games are a different story. Let me illustrate the problem with a title from each of the aforementioned franchises.
First, let us look at Assassin’s Creed Valhalla – a game that fails to understand what it means to be a professional assassin and instead prefers you run around with two axes screaming your head off. This illustrates one problem with modern games: developers suddenly switch the formula for a series, only to alienate existing fans while failing to attract new ones.
Next up is the game I have the most time in, and the entire reason I bought an Xbox in the first place: Halo Infinite. The issue here is the game was released negligently incomplete. The multiplayer mode began with four playlists (far, far less than its decades-old predecessors have) with no meaningful content updates for the first year. The story mode was decent if you ignored the massive time leap (and resulting plot holes) between the end of Halo 5 and the beginning of infinite. These gaps could only be understood by those who sink time into reading associated books that no one knows about. Furthermore, it was clear significant chunks of the story were cut to meet a deadline.
Finally, we have the new remake of the Call of Duty (CoD): Modern Warfare trilogy. Although I unironically loved the first installment, each subsequent game became an increasingly large exercise in laziness that peaked with the Modern Warfare 3 campaign. Although it touted itself as the first CoD campaign to have “Open Combat Missions” – an open-world design that diverged from the traditional linear styles of story missions – the hype died the moment I realized it was simply a reskinned, revamped version of Warzone (Call of Duty’s battle royale, released in response to Fortnite’s success) filled with AI. I literally only play Call of Duty for the campaigns, and to see the aspect of CoD I hate most act as filler for the part of CoD I love most nearly killed me.
In a world where any game dubbed “AAAA” immediately becomes the laughingstock of the gaming community, game developers have a clear choice between overworking their employees and angering their fans – or not. I lament I missed out on the golden era of gaming, when a group of friends could wait for the next installment of their favorite game and feel glee, or at least something other than disappointment, while playing it.
Janagan Ramanathan is a Sartell High School alum, former U.S. Naval Academy midshipman and current aerospace engineering major at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
