What was unique about Call of Duty (2003) when it released?

[DansComputer]

This isn't a trouble-shooting question or venting about a mechanic like Steam discussions usually are. I'm just interested to see if any of y'all were around when this game first came out, and what you think (if anything) made this game unique when it first released compared to other games at the time. What made this game capable of spawning the quadrillion-dollar franchise we know and love/hate today? Thanks in advance.

(For context, I was born after this game so I have no frame of reference for what was novel about it.)

[J4MESOX4D]

Actually not a lot. There were a multitude of FPS brands back then and this was just another one. People really enjoyed Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and this was seen as a follow-on made by the same developers but at a different studio. There was also Battlefield 1942 which offered huge scale online battles and other unique shooters like No One Lives Forever.

The Call of Duty game that really propelled the franchise for years to come was COD 4. People were massively interested in the modern realistic setting which not many games in this genre adopted. The multiplayer was also nicely framed in terms of progression and it was also a mainstream title for consoles when wireless online gaming was growing as was content creation. It was the right game at the right time and Activision didn't even want it.

So all in all it was Call of Duty 4 that was the game that transformed this into a longstanding franchise. The original Call of Duty was good but just another shooter in a long laundry list of them.

[IDDQD]

I was around when this first came out. I actually only really got this Call of Duty because I wanted something similar to the Medal of Honor games which I really enjoyed at the time. If you're talking about multi-player, then I have no idea since I couldn't really play it because I had a dial-up connection back in those days, haha. It was impossible to play with a ping of 400-500ms. :D

It's also a lot harder to gauge fanfare since the internet didn't exist as we know it today. We only really relied on magazines and the odd forum etc. The Call of Duty games were known of, but I doubt anyone knew it would develop into the massive franchise it is today.

I agree with the above comment though, CoD was seen as just another war FPS entering the market, and it was really CoD4 that ultimately propelled the CoD franchise into as we know it today.

Although, I don't really have much interest in the CoD games now. The last one I played was MW3 in 2011, I only just bought a few of the early one's on sale yesterday for a nostalgia kick playing the campaigns on veteran again.

[Hugh G. Rection]

Not a lot?? LOL!! Swing and a miss. I was in on this back in the day and CoD was a *HUGE* step up from other shooters out at the time. Mechanics like ADS and going prone, though features in other (ie Vietcong which was WAY ahead of it's time), were really popularised in Cod and used to good effect. Shooters at the time were predominantly run and gun, ie, your Unreals/UT, TF Classic, Day of Defeat, HL, Wolfenstein etc) with enemies who'd often chase you with little regard to their own safety, or stacked enemies that were placed along a path between you and your objective that would 'ambush' you as you stumbled upon them and relied mostly on 'bastard placement' where they would get cheap shots on you before you could react. CoD came along and had enemies that would take good advantage of cover ie, not just stand behind cover and wait for you to expose yourself, but fire out while minimising their exposure or reposition to get a better shot or find better cover when chasing you and so on. Also, the hit detection was incredibly crisp, and enemies would *actually* react to being hurt unlike games like UT and *especially* BF1942-- you could have been plinking a soldier or inanimate object, or missing entirely, it all felt the same.

Plus the combat was far more intense because of the 'cinematic' framing. Scripted events were relatively rare in shooters before CoD. It was mostly a matter of 'make your way from point A to point B and shoot your way through the enemies stacked at strategic points along the way. CoD was one of the earliest of the modern-era shooters where tight scripting directed the narrative of the game. If you were born after 2000, you'll find it harder to appreciate this is the norm now, but back then, it was revolutionary.

Now, CoD4 was was the pinnacle of this evolutionary process by getting hitting that critical mix of modern-era themes, settings, weapons etc just right (also, the player fatigue with the WWII setting was *really* kicking by 2007), but it was as big an evolutionary step up from CoD/UO/CoD2 as they were from MoHAA.

[Daikatan]

The amount of ****riding CoD 4 gets is ridiculous.

I used to hate CoD games during when they became super popular (after CoD 4), so getting to play CoD 1 feels very refreshing.

[Hugh G. Rection]

UO MP with tanks and other vehicles, when it was competing with BF1942 back in the day, was *the* sh.t. It hasn't been beaten. Back when you managed to get 30+ players on Base Assault maps with tanks tear-assing around and regular arty strikes-- it was an absolute riot. After that, CoD multiplayer was dumbed down into a milquetoast run & gun format with each subsequent release.