Is Old or New Call of Duty better?

Old.

The new ones, I wouldn't even call military or war games. They're like Overwatch with things based on real life objects. Basically it's about how good you are at performing a gymnastics routine in a firefight. Slides, spins, dives, rolls, have a pretty outfit, performing in this cute battle theme arena. Nothing really at all to do with being called for any sort of military duty.

So your question is not about the games itself, if they are better games, but what style of game world you prefer. I personally was never a fan of the old realistic World War styled games (Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Battlefield). I prefer Modern Warfare and Black Ops or one of my favorites, Titanfall. That does not mean the old games are worse, its just I do like the newer styled game worlds more.

I understand that some people want a grounded and more realistic, almost simulation like experiences of real world war scenery. There are even games focusing on that, at least on PC, like ARMA 3 or the new ARMA Reforger.

Old call of duty was brutal WW2 games. New call of duty is ADHD shootouts in a skate park with pink guns and wallrunning.

Cod 4 - BO2 will always be peak COD for me.

BO3 zombies was amazing as well.

I have amazing memories of playing the original during LANs with friends.

The sequel has a special place due to the timing of it and me getting my first apartment. Love using the kar in multiplayer. Oh you guys don’t want to go out? Guess I just play COD all night…darn.

I liked the first MW but fell off the series after that.

'Old' is before they added regenerating health, anything newer than UO is too new.

I think CoD peaked with World at War.

I stopped playing after that. I played Advanced Warfare and Infinite Warfare and thought they were cool but not what I expected from CoD. Also played CoD WW2 and that game isn't even a shred of what WaW is.

Cod Blops 2 was peak CoD IMO. MW and MW2 was where they really figured out the formula. BlOps 1 was where they figured out it needed to still be fun and innovative. MW3 kinda sucked, and BlOps 2 was where they got everything right for the last time. Ghosts was still recovering from all the mistakes of 3, and BlOps 3 completely lost the plot. CoD occasionally remembers that simple gunplay was what made it famous, bud nowadays, all online games are about whale fishing, so we'll never get better than BlOps 2.

The originals were okay. Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare II were legendary FPS games with their own fictional story, but not really a whole lotta bullshit outside of that. Was it propaganda for/against certain countries? Sure. But if you can think for yourself (i.e. you're not swayed by a fictional story), they were pretty good games. Even Black Ops was a lot of fun.

I had GamePass for a little while and decided to try the newest Call of Duty. I forget which one. The installation was confusing AF even on Xbox. Then when I went in, I could not find the actual game beyond the multiplayer and the ads. I actually had to search the Internet for how to start the game. I'd ask "how is this not obvious?" but the ads and the monetisation had become the whole point of the game. The game was not free, but it was effectively competing with Fortnite, so it was up to the same bullshit. At least with Fortnite, I have no problem getting into the standard Battle Royale match. (I know everybody loves to hate on Fortnite, but I'm an old school Unreal Tournament player, and Fortnite moves the same, due to it being the same engine... so, naturally, I am very good at it, and it's fun to school the new generation from time to time.)

When I finally got into the game, I thought it was okay at first. We did a prison break and that was fun. Like what I remember from back in the day, it was like an interactive movie. Then I switched to a female character (awesome! representation!), but after a while, I couldn't figure out where to go. The instructions were unclear, it wasn't obvious, and the Internet was no help. It was like nobody really cares about the single player experience, it's all about online now.

With the old ones, it was always very clear what they wanted you to do, and if you had the patience (think All Ghillied Up from Modern Warfare, where you have to crawl on your hands and knees between the marching soldiers and tanks, super slow, to not get caught), you were gonna get through it. Might take a try or two, but you can take all the tries you need. There was no "just run around this big open map until you figure it out". The gameplay was tighter back then, and, honestly, for a guy who started with Pong/2600, Xbox 360 era games still look good to me. I don't mind XB1/Series graphics (I'm sitting on my The Witcher 3 playthrough until the remaster comes out, since it's a free update), but 360 was perfectly fine. It's not "warts and all" to me; I genuinely think 360/PS3 era games looked great. And, with the RAMmageddon going on, remember that the Xbox 360 had no system RAM whatsoever — the system shared the 512MB of graphics memory from the GPU. (It was also a tri-core IBM PowerPC, so, basically a Mac from back then.) And the PS3 was a bit weaker in some regards and more powerful in others (IIRC it had a bunch of speciality chips that were hard to code for, but once mastered, made it the superior console to an experienced developer). Anyway, my Mac from 2022-2023 can basically play all PS3 games nearly flawlessly, and so can, I imagine, most decent (not even gaming) PCs, so... maybe we should take a closer look at that generation for our gaming.

This weekend, the Modern Warfare 4 Beta is public if you want to try that. Also Black Ops 7 Endgame is free until Season 5 ends. I enjoy the latter one very much, despite my last CoD game was probably... the first 2 or 3 releases they had. They are very different games now, but the Endgame in BO7, I like to solo most of the time to wind down.

Call of Duty: United Offensive is my favorite game of all time.

MW to Black Ops 1 were good games but I still play UO to this day.

We play competitive S&D every Tuesday and Sunday and casual CTF and BAS servers are populated every other day.

Old ones can be modded. So old.