Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is the best thing ever… For Battlefield

For years, EA have tried to take the battle to Activision and for years they’ve fallen short. The PR smack talk every year DICE has released a shooter has been intense, and every release does respectfully by almost any measure, except that of Call of Duty.

It’s not that they’re especially similar, because they’re not – outside of the basic premise of running around shooting one another anyway. Rather, it’s just two big games in a single genre. But now, Activision has given EA a lifeline by publishing a Call of Duty that leaves even the pretence of realism completely behind.

Why is this good news for Battlefield? Because it now stands alone. Before this release, it was always the alternative, the Labour to David Cameron’s Conservatives. Arguably one of its biggest selling points – beyond the graphics and the vehicles – was that it wasn’t Call of Duty. It didn’t matter which features were similar, which were completely different – if you hated Activision’s billion dollar behemoth, there was another option that you could laud in message boards and act holier than thou about. You can still do that, but it makes less sense.

Advanced Warfare has received, arguably, a major overhaul in regards to how you play it. On paper it looks like a very small thing, but it has successfully made camping rather more rare than it once was, has revitalized a increasingly lacklustre formula. Movement is the key – it is now over the top, with huge double jumps and a sense of verticality that just overcomplicated Ghosts, but feels right at home with the extra moves in play. It’s still all about speed and quick, accurate twitch kills, but the sense of speed has made it that much more fun, reminiscent of old arena shooters like Quake or Unreal Tournament.

The next Battlefield steps away from the modern military fiction that has dominated the FPS genre since 2007, and focusses instead on the cops and robbers dynamic. It’ll still be more realistic, more tactical, but now it stands alone. It’s not the brown, desert sands of some Middle Eastern country versus the desert brown dirt of some Middle Eastern country.

That doesn’t mean that sales will increase – in fact, given the release schedule, the change of developers and the lack of any real advertising, it’ll probably do worse – but there no longer needs to be this competition, this comparison. The knock on effect will be that Battlefield will get to stand on its own two legs, as it did in a world pre-CoD, and perhaps that’ll let it settle back into its own groove. 

Of course, this is only one story for 2015. The real interesting story will be the new engine, revamped Treyarch Call of Duty against a properly developed, heavily marketed tie-in Star Wars game. And for the first time in a generation, Call of Duty might not make the cut against its direct competitor.