Call of Duty: Ghosts didn’t exactly receive a hugely favourable critical response when it released last November and the newest in a far too long line of Personalisation Packs is unlikely to help the ailing series’ reputation.
From this week, players who have decided to stick with the game against the odds can purchase a $2 blunt force addon that allows them to “deliver chronic lethality” by decorating their in-game weapon and playercard with a not at all puerile cannabis leaf motif. CoD hasn’t exactly been associated with the classiest members of the online gaming community for quite some time and Ghosts attempted to appealed to it’s core market further by including a ‘humiliation’ online field order that essentially resulted in rewards for teabagging.
There have been reports among the MOBA community recently that highlight some developer’s somewhat possibly short sighted support for toxic communities but this is the first DLC I have seen in a while that not looks to directly appeal to the lowest common denominator in gaming but also carries a price tag along with it. If Activision want to convince gamers that this year’s Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare can appeal to a larger player base than just racist and homophobic infantile tit fanatics with weed and Eminem on the brain, then this sort of shit will not help.
I usually tend to ignore most things to do with CoD these days but I can’t help but feel slightly incensed by this. As the biggest franchise in the industry, each iteration of CoD wrongly receives a lot attention that should go towards other games, especially from the mainstream press. Sometimes I’m happy that Activision seem to keep a considerably lower profile than most of their competitors because, of all the major publishers, they seem to be the most intent on dragging the video games medium back to the stone age.
