I love the Call of Duty series. I started with COD2 and from there on have been a avid fan ever since. I even eventually joined a clan and became part of an excellent group of people who also love playing Call of Duty games plus several others.

The Call of Duty series was great up until Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare; after this Treyarch kinda thru the Call of Duty into a spin with Call of Duty World at War. The game was not my favorite and most of my friends agreed. It just was not as good as it’s predecessors for some reason. The gameplay felt slow, the guns clumsy and the killstreaks were so and so. All in all the only thing that actually made this game worth having was the zombie mode. I got a kick out of killing zombies left and right and the updated maps provided extra stuff that kept the game alive. But… eventually even that got boring after a while. Once Left 4 Dead 2 came out, zombie mode took a back seat for many of my friends.

All was good and dandy till Infinity Ward came along with the next Call of Duty version and thought the norm was not what they believed the PC community wanted and so they decided their next “big hit” Call of Duty Modern warfare 2 would be lacking dedicated servers and instead implemented the dreaded and worst idea ever invented, IWNet. Combined with the direct connection to Steam as oppose to simply using Steam to verify the copy, the game was a pain. The game itself was excellent, I actually enjoyed it a lot but eliminating the dedicated servers, blocking the console and having a worthless hacker catching system made this game almost as annoying to play as it was fun. Infinity Ward not only ignored the PC community and chose to make this a console like game, but they continued to ignore the PC community after all these problems came about and doing very little to stop on onslaught of hackers plaguing the game. Although there were many reports of large sweepings of hackers, it did very little to discourage people from hacking as we depended on a system that would choose when to boot someone as oppose to someone manually getting rid of the disruptors. At least not until recently where the latest hack actually allows people to kick others so long as they are hosting the game. How many times have I been kicked just because I had the higher score lately? I lost track and let me tell you, it sucks. Now that Black Ops is out there are even more hackers roaming the game as I’m sure no one at IW cares anymore especially after all those IW employees walked out on them. What a shame.

But Treyarch decided to listen to the complaints that IW ignored and choose to give the PC community back some of the control IW denied us. Black Ops has dedicated servers (yay!!) which means that hackers will get the boot as long as there is someone there to give them the boot. No more having to leave a server due to some idiot hacking. Dedicated serves also makes it easier to join friends in a game by simply following them in or joining the server they are on. No more waiting to be matched by the system, no more waiting to be matched only to lose the connection, no more hoping the system picks a decent host.

From what I have seen Treyarch worked hard to make this a worth while game although I can’t help but wonder how quickly someone will figure out a way to abuse the money system found in the game used to purchase upgrades and even to gamble with. All in all it seems hope has been brought back to Call of Duty with this latest game as we finally have more control than before and Clans can now finally play together without much hassle. And I say that because it was a pain to have to join 1 person in order to play against each other while having a server you can jump in any time and eventually people start coming in. Oh, lets not forget the return of the zombies. hopefully this new version will be even more exciting than the last.

Coming up next, Call of Duty Black Ops – First Impressions