Well,here we are at the end of the year with one last bit of industry news. It’s kind of a shame to be ending things with a negative story, but that’s just how these things go I suppose. The story: Activision’s latest bundle for CoD: Black Ops 6 is causing more than a few players to levy pay-to-win accusations against the publisher.

According to GameSandwich, the problem bundle is the Snowtime Showtime bundle that was recently added to the game’s shop. The issue: very bright explosive animations that trigger upon killing enemies. They are, reportedly, bright enough that they fill the screens of nearby players, blinding them and basically functioning as faux flashbang grenades.

Players can work around this by turning off the game’s gore effects, but many rightly point out that they shouldn’t have to disable a feature in order to get around such a powerful on-kill effect. My take is that, yeah, this is definitely an advantage in its current form, though I wonder if it was truly intentional on the part of the developers. I could definitely see it as players tend to flock to any perceived advantage, but still.

This is actually more funny to me than anything else. First is the increasing absurdity of the skins and effects have been adding into their formerly realistic game. It’s beyond silly at this point. Then there’s the fact that everyone keeps buying CoD only to start complaining about it immediately. Should the game be the way it is? I don’t think so, but then who is it that’s deciding to buy it over and over, hmm?

I’m sure Raven Software (the developer) will dial back the brightness and scale of this effect now that people are raising a stink about it, but, seriously, we have no one to blame but ourselves for the fact that such a thing could be sold in the game in the first place.

---

What’s your take on these sorts of situations in AAA gaming? What do you think should be done about it?

Image from the Modern Warfare 3 Battle.net page