Call of Duty has become a stale, rotting corpse of what it once was. The great war simulation has turned into an audience pandering grab for money. Call of Duty needs to stop because it is the one game that embodies everything wrong with the gaming industry today. Now, I'm not saying the many, many gaming production companies that made and will continue to make Call of Duty games need to stop making games. I'm suggesting that they stop worrying about the money. Stop disrespecting our soldiers. Stop giving us the same game and calling it new... just make something new! At its core, the mechanics of COD are unmatched. Great, smooth gun-play with diverse weapons and fun game modes. But they made their mark with this game, and unless they change, it's time that Call of Duty retires the brand and goes on to bigger and better things.

15 Microtransactions

The worst thing to ever happen to the gaming industry is micro-transactions; with Call of Duty being one of the worst offenders. Everyone loves customization, exclusive gear, or ways to make your character stand out cosmetically. What pisses us all off is that games are now charging seemingly inconsequential amounts of money for content that should have just been included in the base game. Call of Duty is a huge bandwagoner  with the recent micro-transaction trend. "Supply Drops" are the latest "Loot Crates" that spit out random rewards at insanely low ratios of benefit to price. Sure, you can get the supply crates through gameplay... you'll just be grinding for hours and hours to try to get rare equipment. What's gotten even worse is Call of Duty's blatant disrespect for the player in their transactions. Why charge $2.99 so your player can "hit a dab" in a war simulator.

14 Increasingly Stale Gameplay

Look at this image above and tell me which Call of Duty game this is. It's difficult, right!? Mostly because every Call Of Duty uses pretty much if not the same exact format, and the same gameplay. Multiplayer is simple: shoot other people, don't get shot, shoot people on the objective... don't get shot. But if you die, don't worry: re-spawning in 3...2...1. Every Call of Duty runs this formula, with different maps, with some repeating throughout the series. This usually causes the same feeling after five minutes of playing... "haven't I played this game already?" After playing a few games of any Call of Duty title I already feel like I've done this dance and played this formula over and over again. The games need ingenuity, or at least diversified combat, to keep players interested.

13 Misguided Multiplayer Focus

The way multiplayer works in Call of Duty is fundamentally flawed. I won't even touch that every multiplayer is the same game as before with slightly different weapons and one or two new perks. The focus of every player who plays isn't to win, but rather earn individual glory. You may be an 8 man team but everyone is just in pursuit of their own kill-streaks, their own medals, and their own kill death ratio. This makes for awful multiplayer experiences. The feeling players want is logging on with a tactical team of soliders, operating in such a way. Instead, while you're capping B in domination no one is covering you for the objective win. They're too busy on the other side of the map teabagging a hard-scoper. Having team based goals, like in Overwatch or Destiny, allows for players to work together to win together, not elevate themselves.

12 Toxic Community / Fan Base

Anyone who has put on a headset while playing Call of Duty knows that you'll be told how to play by some 8 year old... and also that apparently he's been f****** your mom. It's just not fun. Playing with young kids who have the mouth and racial bias of a World War II veteran or KKK member makes me mute the team before even playing. The whole community seems to band together too, constantly berating and ganging up on newer players, for one of the worst gaming communities I've ever seen. Part of this plays back to the way the multiplayer works. When people aren't working together, and are instead pursuing their own goals and glory, people end up raging when things inevitably don't go their way. I've been reverse-swept in competitive Overwatch, and even then the worst comment I've heard was "dammit, we didn't need Bastion, we needed a Mercy." That's commenting on the gameplay and how to improve, not bashing and swearing and really being an immature ass-wipe for the sake of it, and definitely something COD players should learn how to do.

11 Unrealistic Combat

After a beautiful kill-streak you've nabbed yourself a tactical nuke! Congrats, the game is now over for some reason! This is where Call of Duty loses me. The unrealistic combat kills me. Whether it's the fact that some guy is diving around corners with two full-sized, 12 gauge shotguns, or that someone managed to power slide and accurately headshot me with a sniper rifle from all the way across map, nothing about Call of Duty screams realistic. Combat in the real world is nothing like Call of Duty! Obviously there's no re-spawning in real life, but other details just kill it for me, like the Akimbo machine pistols, and hitting anything at full-auto is fantasy at best.  We can leave out the robot suits, drone combat, and quick scoping BS... everything about Call of Duty is completely unrealistic.

10 Making Constant Releases Of The Same Game

At this point there's more Call of Duty games than Fast and Furious movies, and that's not a compliment on success. This is a game series that cannot even change from its rooted base and ignores its player base. By constantly releasing new games on a short timetable, the games really don't get the attention that they need, or any real improvements to the already stale gameplay. The fact that the studio is constantly pressured to make money means the room for innovation and improvement is non-existent. This money-grabbing ideology is what brought the game that broke the first person shooter into popularity, and made it the laughable and generally disliked series it is today. I would rather wait a few years for new and improved gameplay than to get a new game every year.

9 Planning DLC

Planned DLC is almost as bad of a sin as microtransactions. This is essentially squeezing money out of every player, just to stay current with a game they already bought. DLC should be a reward for players supporting a game! You sold 80 million copies? Great! Reward your fans with a free map and some free guns. This establishes brand loyalty that will keep your fans coming back to buy the next installment. By constantly forcing people to spend $15 (or buy the Season Pass for $50), you let every gamer know that you sold an incomplete game and want to charge full price for it anyways. That's a bigger FU to the fans than even Injustice 2 threw in their faces.

8 Nazi Zombies

The first appearance of Nazi zombies changed the Call of Duty series forever. Now, the popular PVP shooter has turned into a survival horror team-based game. Now that's innovation! Take what people love about Call of Duty and improve upon it, to give the loyal gamers something new to do and a reason to come back. That being said, this innovation has officially been beaten into the ground and has become more tiring than watching Tom Cruise flail around trying to be relevant. The first time playing zombies in World at War was amazing, because there was no guide and no rules. Since then, it's turned into a constant argument of who's unlocking the door, because everyone is saving their money for a Pack-a-Punch weapon. Call of Duty players do not support each other in the normal game and sure as hell don't support each other in survival.   

7 Multiple Companies: Multiple Visions

Call of Duty should be tested for pretty much every STD known to man, due to the amount of times this game has been passed around from company to company. Here, you have the same game made with different visions, and different ideas. This is even more frustrating, because now you have loyalty to different production companies. Now there's a constant battle between who makes a better (still crappy) game: Treyarch or Activision or Sledgehammer or whoever chooses to buy out the name so they can make a few million bucks off of whoever still buys this game. This is by far the dumbest decision Call of Duty has ever made. By splitting your ideas and manpower, you end up with Advanced Warfare. 

6 Not Putting Effort Into The Campaign

Campaigns have gone extinct for most games. Multiplayer, MMORPG, or MOBAs tend to get the attention over a good single player campaign. That being said, more recently single player campaigns have made a resurgence in the gaming community. Regardless, Call of Duty manages to put out the same lame campaigns over and over again. While most real soldiers rarely see combat, your character seems to make it through every combat scenario, eating bullets like Wheaties, and massacring thousands. Perfect accuracy, perfect reloads, and a healing factor that's as good as Wolverine help you be the perfect one man army. Who also seems to be a proficient marksman with every possible weapon with no training on it whatsoever. After waking up dazed, your character always survives a hero of war.

5 Disrespecting Real Members Of The Armed Services

Now, I've never served in the army or anything. I've always had massive respect for their sacrifice, and their code of honor. Call of Duty, regardless of what they may say, does not respect those who have served. Those who have had to bury their closest friends, family, and brothers and sisters had to do a lot more than juts hold the square button. They have to deal with their loved ones giving the greatest sacrifice that they can give for their country. This game makes playing solider seem fun, with none of the heartbreak and none of the real sacrifice that men and women give up every day. It's this sacrifice that lets us sit on our couches and play solider in a free country. As a citizen and supporter of our troops, I find nothing more disrespectful than making moments like this into a video game.

4 Giving People False "Training"

After running through a training course in Modern Warfare hearing your commanding officer shout "Hit the target!", the average person feels like a well-trained badass. That being said, just because your KDA in Call of Duty is 17.2 you aren't a trained solider, and you are not an operator. I've met too many people who think because they've shot a sniper rifle in Call of Duty that they know how to operate a firearm safely and accurately. This is a false sense of training that Call of Duty gives to the more naive players, which results in them carrying bravado like they are a solider and a skilled operator with none of the skills. This needs to stop.

3 Historical Piece Turned Action Movie

The first Call of Duty is one of the first games to let people into the shoes of a World War II solider. This showed players the battles, weapons, and some of the places that World War II soldiers actually experienced. This kind of history, the weapons, and the look of the game has now turned into flying robots running on walls while they hit that whip as they're MVP for their game. Call of Duty lost what made it original, and what the fans fell in love with. Instead of a badass recreation of a historical war, we end up seeing a first person action movie where Wolverine manages to kill 5000 armed trained Spetsnaz with a spoon and an unmanned drone. When money is the goal, the art suffers.

2 Being As Original As Apple Pie

You ever get a McDonald's apple pie and think "wow, that's something new"? You ever eat any apple pie and think "you know, I could eat this over and over again in a setting I've seen before, with a different table"? No one wants that, unless you are an apple pie executive who profits off pie. Enough metaphors! Nothing has been original about Call of Duty since its origin. It's the same shooter re-skinned and remastered over and over again, with the same mechanics and the same goals. You can only recreate the same game over and over so many times before someone asks you to stop and make something new. Just leave Call of Duty to die among its many brothers, and move on to new ideas, and new games.

1 Making Remasters

Nothing says "you need to stop" more than running out of ideas. Remasters are the symptom of death. Everyone managed to sit around a gaming studio, and have not a single idea other than literally re-skinning an old game? This isn't what fans want! They want people to make new games that will give them the nostalgia of how they felt playing Call of Duty for the first time, not the nostalgia of playing a game you've already played over and over again... and literally over again. The fact that gamers are willing to let game companies profit off their nostalgia and release the same game for full price does not bode well for the future of video gaming. People need to start striving for new ideas and new content.

As always, feel free to comment with your thoughts!