By 2013, the Call of Duty machine had been going strong for a decade. It was just coming off five years widely considered a golden era for the blockbuster FPS franchise thanks to the critical and commercial highs of the original Modern Warfare trilogy and Treyarch’s new and surprisingly subversive Black Ops series. But heading into a new console generation, the unstoppable sale juggernaut finally began to show some cracks. Call of Duty: Ghosts, a launch title for the PS4 and Xbox One, landed with all the grace of a wet mop, as the annualized boots-on-the-ground gameplay started to feel stale. The series was in dire need of a shake-up, and both fans and developers knew it.
When it returned the following year, the machine was ready to deliver on that shake-up in more ways than one. 2014’s Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare kicked off an entirely new era for the series; one filled with wild, experimental departures from the franchise’s core identity up to this point. And while Advanced Warfare proved to be an unpopular change for fans, it also marks one of the more interesting periods in Call of Duty’s 21-year history.
