The landslide of Advanced Warfare and Sledgehammer

Firstly I will say that I was very positive about Advanced Warfare, and remain slightly negatively speculative but mostly positive of the Call of Duty franchise. Sledgehammer had their first full debut Call of Duty game, with Advanced Warfare and were also the first in line to launch a Call of Duty that had been developed for 3 years in the new 3 year development cycle of Call of Duty developers. With there now being 3 Call of Duty Developers. With their brand new take on the game with the Exo Movement capabilities, I was delighted that the franchise had a breath of freshair. I had been impressed with Sledgehammer.

Lets talk about how the game has declined and negatively changed since then.

First, the gameplay. The gameplay became stale fairly fast, with the exo movement abilities, it took away any strategy a map had, this made the gameplay get repetitive fast. Now I won't complain too much about that, but with the game shipping with less maps than any other call of duty and less guns, I had higher expectations for what was to come. Firstly the 1st map pack was solid, and I was happy with it. Exo Zombies, although is quite generic, with a shockingly boring and bad storyline with weak characters glorified by basing them off and voiced by famous hollywood actors. The mode was fun, the map was quite weak, but I liked what SledgeHammer and Raven Software (the company that make DLC with other cod devs and were responsible for exo zombies) done to zombies. It was no Treyarch zombies, but it was a fun thing to fill the void. The multiplayer maps were fun, and complimented the exo movement fairly well.

This soon changed. The DLC from then on was poor. The 2nd map pack wasnt as a good, the multiplayer maps were boring in my opinion. The zombie map was good however and I did enjoy that. The 3rd and 4th DLC is just allround poor and generic in my opinion. Now this isnt really where I am getting at, and how Advanced warfare started land sliding downwards. This is just a point I must state to back what I will be saying later.

Gameplay Balance problems

Gameplay balance problems were the first signs of how Sledgehammer just didn't know what they were doing and the first signs of how the game started changing not for the good. The game shipped with unbalanced weapons, aka the bal27 being far superior to any other weapon in the game. Later ASM1 was buffed to now be the main SMG used. It became overpowered and SH had to nerf it. Then throughout the game many many guns were tweaked, nerfed and buffed and they could never find the balance.