There’s a lot of tension between the Call of Duty and Battlefield communities, but it isn’t helping anyone. It’s hard to escape a feeling of competition across the gaming industry. Console wars have raged for decades, though seem to be dying down as platform barriers continue to be knocked down. Franchises have always had rivalries as well, namely in the shooter space. Call of Duty vs Halo, Call of Duty vs Battlefield, the extremely short lived fan feud between Call of Duty and Ubisoft’s XDefiant… the list goes on and on. When there’s an undisputed king, especially one that has a level of infamy, there are fans that want to see a new name take the throne.
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Competition is good, though. It breeds better games as companies have to convince people to spend $70 on a new video game and they have to ensure they provide a quality, value-rich experience to players. With that said, Call of Duty has become a reliable machine, even when the quality hasn’t always been there. Every fall, there’s a new fast-paced, punchy FPS game with a multiplayer mode, campaign, and some kind of co-op experience, making it an easy sell for people looking for something quick to pick up and play. Other franchises have failed to come close to competing in recent years with Halo dropping the ball on its live service efforts and Battlefield 2042 being a total disaster.
Battlefield Can’t Grow Without New Players
With that said, Battlefield 6 looks to actually be the first real answer to Call of Duty in a long time. While it is a pretty different game, it is a game that is attempting to compete with Call of Duty’s player base, even actively inviting and sponsoring Call of Duty streamers and creators to play Battlefield 6. However, there has been a fear that Battlefield will bend the knee too much to Call of Duty players by changing key aspects of the franchise to make it more appealing. A lot of these fears came from seeing Battlefield 6‘s smaller maps, faster movement, and open weapon classes in the beta. This prompted a lot of people to start arguing on social media, claiming this is exactly what Battlefield needs while purists and veterans of the franchise pushed back, telling them to go back to Call of Duty instead.
Thankfully, the team behind Battlefield 6 has actually addressed these issues following the beta and plans to tune the movement and twitchier gameplay to be more in line with Battlefield’s grounded history. With that said, I still don’t believe banishing people to one franchise is helpful whatsoever. While I don’t think it’s smart for a game to cater to everyone, as that’s how franchises lose their identity and direction, I do think it’s good to welcome non-fans in. Not only does the series grow this way, but it also helps new people develop their tastes. Maybe they won’t like Battlefield or are going to give feedback that tries to change the core ideas of the series, that’s fine, not everything is going to be for them and not every idea has to be implemented.
However, my journey as a shooter fan began with Call of Duty when I was a kid. I was really big into the early entries of the franchise, but eventually thought the destruction of Battlefield: Bad Company was really appealing and played it. By the time Battlefield 4 came around, I was playing the series more than Call of Duty.
I bought an Xbox One in November 2013 and Battlefield 4 was the only game I had for months. Despite grinding the hell out of games like Black Ops 2, Call of Duty: Ghosts was extremely underwhelming and I had no issue playing Battlefield 4 religiously for a year straight. The sheer sense of scope and scale scratched an itch that I didn’t even know I had. Not only that, but it felt like a far more cooperative experience than Call of Duty did due to the class system with defined roles and teamplay.
That’s not to say I wrote Call of Duty off after getting a taste of Battlefield, I am still a fan of both and still engage with each of them on a deep level. I previewed Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 at Treyarch just two weeks after going to preview Battlefield 6 in Los Angeles. I live for not just these franchise, but the FPS genre as a whole. It’s possible to enjoy both while also understanding they’re different, but that’s only going to be possible if players aren’t treated with hostility. They have to be given the opportunity to learn the game and understand it, which may also mean some of them kicking habits from Call of Duty.
Sending Players Back to CoD Only Ensures Call of Duty’s Reign Continues
On top of that, telling players to go back to Call of Duty only ensures that Call of Duty sustains itself as the king of the genre. The franchise continues to succeed and has no reason to change. If you’re someone who thinks Call of Duty has gotten stale and needs to be revitalized, you should be welcoming and encouraging others to play a game that isn’t Call of Duty. The only way for this genre to be healthy is for both games to be actively challenging each other and forcing them to get better. They can’t get complacent and that will happen if players aren’t given another option.
These two franchises were at their best when they were at each other’s throats during the late 2000s and early 2010s. Both games were firing on all cylinders, especially in 2011 when Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 came out within weeks of each other. In 2016, Battlefield nearly eclipsed Call of Duty with the releases of Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Infinite Warfare was the number one best selling game of 2016, partially thanks to the fact they bundled in a remaster of Call of Duty 4, but Battlefield 1 was right behind it in second place. It’s estimated that Battlefield 1 eventually outpaced Infinite Warfare, which wouldn’t be too shocking since Battlefield 1 is still talked about and played to this day and Infinite Warfare is not.
I encourage players to play both if that’s what they want to do. You don’t have to be tribal about it as pushing people away isn’t good for the game, especially in this live service era where engagement is everything. This isn’t a case of toxic positivity where I am trying to tell you all to be friends, but more so don’t gatekeep otherwise we will be stuck in the same vicious cycles of mediocre games and player bases that don’t grow.
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