Post Script
Is it OK for COD to consolidate the best new ideas of its genre?
The rumour that Infinity Ward is currently building its own take on Escape From Tarkov for next year’s Call Of Duty left us excited – and then gradually more guilt-ridden. Tarkov is at the forefront of the evolution that took shooters from DayZ to battle royale and beyond. Its innovation is a shift in objective: rather than push players towards an enforced circle fight, it asks them to navigate the length of a dilapidated map, strip the place of its best loot, and extract. It’s also dying for the triple-A treatment. Tarkov has a reputation for poor technical performance and finicky inventory Tetris that puts off as many players as it pulls in. Like PUBG, it’s just waiting for COD’s glow-up team to file its nails and run it a hot bath.
For players, it’s a relief to see these games liberated from their engine shortcomings and interminable beta periods. To have the best ideas in the industry served up on a shiny plate in the service games we’re already playing, with no discovery necessary, nor any trade-off in roughness. But it’s an increasingly uncomfortable pattern, in which we keep rewarding major publishers for ripping off their lesser-known peers.
When Epic announced Fortnite: Battle Royale, it credited PUBG as its inspiration. But it also beat PUBG to launch on consoles, introducing itself to a potential audience with which Brendan Greene and company hadn’t yet had the opportunity to get acquainted. PUBG developer Bluehole said it had “growing concerns” about similarities between the two games, and filed a copyright lawsuit against Epic, which was dropped in 2018. Then, earlier this year, Fortnite incorporated an Impostors mode inspired by Among Us. This time, Epic was slower to mention its source, only crediting Innersloth after the developer kicked up a stink on social media. “This was just another fun reminder of how tiny we all really are,” Among Us programmer Adriel Wallick tweeted.
In both cases, Epic appears to have got away with it – perhaps because the rest of the industry is rightly wary of opening the Pandora’s box marked ‘borrowed ideas’. But the power dynamic, especially with a much smaller developer involved, is a bad look. An ugly atmosphere remains. Call Of Duty’s studio family ought to be cautious about provoking similar friction.
In some ways, this behaviour resembles that of big tech companies. Like Microsoft or Meta, Activision’s Call Of Duty division is determined not to miss the next big idea in its field. Anything truly disruptive to the FPS genre could knock the series from its bestselling perch – and so those ideas need to be absorbed if COD is to survive. The difference is, big tech companies usually acquire the competitors they’re afraid of, a process that ensures those behind the new ideas are adequately compensated.
Perhaps Activision should look to Valve. Every time Gabe Newell’s outfit has fallen in love with a game premise it doesn’t own, it has sought to redress the balance – offering jobs to the people responsible. It’s an approach that puts the company more or less beyond reproach, and makes it much easier to be a fan, knowing that Valve hasn’t pilfered Portal from a bunch of students and left them starving in an apartment with no heating.
Then again, reproach is something to which Activision has become accustomed. If there are no lasting legal or financial consequences to polishing up Tarkov and presenting it beside Warzone with a new name, it has little reason to care. And Call Of Duty fans have learned to play under a cloud of controversy: this year alone, Vanguard has been taken to task for basing a protagonist on a New Zealand hero, Charles Upham, only to turn him Australian. Still, as the industry reconfigures itself around a handful of dominant service games, players will need to decide: are we happy for them to run with the ideas of others?