On April 13, 2022, Activision revealed a trailer for a future Call of Duty update, with an intriguing tease that could point to the inclusion of Godzilla and King Kong (we aren’t joking).
This seemingly corroborates industry insider Tom Henderson’s February 2022 Xfire report, which claims the two monsters will be added to Warzone and Vanguard soon—possibly as a limited-time event similar to Fortnite’s massive end-season boss battles. While this sounds like an exciting premise that could reinvigorate the COD franchise, Warzone’s rocky state and Activision’s worsening legal issues mean the timing of the announcement especially unfortunate.
Timing is everything
It’s probably not a coincidence that on the day of this Warzone tease and the reveal of a new Overwatch 2 character, a bombshell Bloomberg story claimed California Governor Gavin Newsom “interfered” with the ongoing Activision discrimination lawsuit in order to secure a more favorable outcome for the embattled company, causing a top lawyer to resign. It’s as if Activision had both announcements in its back pocket and was saving them for a rainy day.
The timing of the announcement undermines the hard work done by the developers across both teams. It’s hard to shake the feeling that Activision has prioritized preserving its image rather than making fun experiences for players. If the Call of Duty Godzilla tease had come at literally at any other time, it might have seemed like a more genuine attempt to appeal to fans. Sure, many massive companies are sleazy, but it feels like Activision isn’t making any effort whatsoever to hide it anymore.
Warzone still needs work
Beyond the ongoing legal battle at Activision, Warzone itself still needs a lot of work. Sure, it’s a far cry from its terrible state of six months ago, but the idea of a massive event featuring Godzilla and King Kong is worrisome for reasons that extend beyond its parent company’s legal woes.
The dev team has addressed many of Warzone’s major issues, such as terrible texture pop-in, various bugs and glitches, invisible Operators, and entire assets failing to load. However, the game is still plagued by many smaller problems that indicate a lot more work needs to be done.
One such example is the Buy Station resetting back to the top selection as you scroll down, which can cause you to get eliminated if you’re unlucky. There’s also continued movement and manteling problems that make it easy to get stuck when trying to climb through windows, convoluted weapon stats, and worst of all, cheaters. Too many lost gunfights still end with players thinking “was that person cheating?”
We’d rather see Raven Software and the other Call of Duty teams take time to iron out these issues rather than implement a massive Godzilla event. Based on the developer’s track record, we don’t have much faith that a large-scale event like this would go well. Just look at the Cold War integration in 2020, or even worse, the Vanguard integration in 2021. Both took months to clean up, introducing mounds of problems that nearly made Warzone unplayable.
Infamously, the Vanguard integration rolled out with broken weapons and invisible buildings. So, even though the thought of two massive monsters duking it out sounds cool, right now it’s hard to trust Raven and Activision to pull it off without a hitch. As much as we’d love to see Call of Duty feature more Fortnite-like events with massive boss battles that emphasize scale, Activision and its studios have bigger problems to worry about right now.
