Call of Duty is one of the most consistently popular franchises in the industry. Other than sports games, not many AAA franchises see a new release every year, except for Call of Duty. Activision had recently shifted most of its studios to the Call of Duty series, possibly to help the leading developer for that year.

Last year’s Call of Duty: Vanguard had a relatively dull reception and many users had complained about the lack of content in the Zombies mode. Activision had announced a whole list of changes for Season 2 of Call of Duty: Vanguard and hopefully fans’ needs will be satisfied in this update. The perception of a game’s quality can drastically shift over the years and a new post shows how Call of Duty is the perfect example of this.

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User Latte19962 shares an image that lists Call of Duty games from the past few years. The latest release from every year is in the right column, with the previous two releases to its left. The description below makes fun of how players’ perception of that year’s Call of Duty changes over time, showing that every game goes through the same cycle. On launch, users dislike many aspects of the latest Call of Duty game, but the next year they start to appreciate it for what it offered. Two years later, users consider it to be the pinnacle of the series, and this cycle seemingly repeats every year.

Curiously, the description in the last section of every year says "R.I.P. Halo", and this meme was probably used to refer to the same cycle in the Halo franchise at some point. Regardless, a lot of the discussion in comments section is centered around 2019’s Modern Warfare, and many users feel like it only received hate from a vocal minority. Opinions are also radically different on Black Ops Cold War while other users argue that Infinite Warfare never reached the “pinnacle of the series” stage. A commentor named Caipirots appropriately described this as a hate, acceptance, and love cycle.

Most modern games see major improvements post-launch, and these updates are perhaps the reason for this shift. Such a cycle is pretty common and can also be present in players’ feelings towards the annual release of sports games like FIFA and Madden. In an ideal world, developers would take what worked in one game and keep building upon it in next year’s installment, but that is rarely the case. The varied opinions they receive from fans also probably doesn’t help.

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