Modern Warfare 3 is a brand-new, full-price entry in the rebooted Call of Duty series. But reports from leakers and official teases point to a multiplayer component filled with nothing but old maps as nostalgia triumphs over innovation. The general response so far has been palpable excitement at reliving the glory days of jumping off cranes and no-scoping your mates across High Rise, or inviting sweats from public lobbies into 1v1 matches on Rust. All I see is a bleak future for a franchise that is growing stale.

Call of Duty sells like hotcakes. There’s a reason it was leveraged in the Microsoft Activision buyout by the CMA and Sony as a reason to deny the deal. But the games have steadily gotten worse. It’s no small wonder that the originals are heralded as the best, with hundreds of thousands flocking to them when the servers were restored. The original Modern Warfare 2 even outsold the reboot.

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For the past half-decade, we’ve been playing hollow shadows of those same originals, so why settle for Aldi’s own brand of soda if Coca-Cola is cheaper? We had a legacy sequel to Black Ops, a Modern Warfare retelling turned trilogy, and yet another World War 2 game helmed by Sledgehammer, desperately trying to capture the magic of World at War and failing at every hurdle. Every step Activision takes is a poor imitation of its past.

The solution is to go back to the drawing board and come up with something new and fresh, not riddled with gimmicks or a tie-in to Warzone. Instead, we have the infamous Call of Duty machine. Nearly every Activision-owned studio is being tasked to turn this series into an unstoppable money maker, flooded with microtransactions that incentivise you to stay loyal and spend, spend, spend.

The studios don’t get the time to do anything meaningful with the games. Treyarch is doomed to the Zombies mines of every single CoD, while Sledgehammer and Infinity Ward are juggling yearly releases. Not to mention the support Warzone requires. It’s not a healthy, sustainable cycle, and also doesn’t lend itself well to creativity.

I can’t blame the studios for finally caving with a map list of the series’ greatest hits, because at this point, there’s little room for much else. Call of Duty has spent the last few years clinging to the past and trying to capture the magic of yesteryear while failing spectacularly, so why not just bring the past to the present? And by tying it to a ‘new’ game with a ‘new’ campaign and ‘new’ Zombies mode, it can shirk the remake label and present itself as something original. But it isn’t.

It’s the second Modern Warfare 3, with a multiplayer mode made up of little more than old maps, and a Zombies mode that will inevitably pale in comparison to the originals because the originals didn’t make enough money. Why do you think we got generic, bland, but paid and customisable operators instead of the personable core four characters this game mode is so often acclaimed for?

The brief rush of nostalgia that Modern Warfare 3 will inevitably bring isn’t worth it. It’s the tipping point in a franchise that is stretched too thin, desperately trying to stay relevant with new releases in such short bursts that space for something new is squeezed out. The return of old maps shouldn't come as a surprise since the mask of greed was ripped off years ago, but it also shouldn't be lauded as it's yet another nail in the coffin.

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