Infinity Ward’s newest game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, features an unclear and poorly designed bonus XP System. Modern Warfare is yet another title in a long line of anti-consumer games released under Activision, which has been under fire by fans and critics due to their greedy monetization schemes that place profit over content and clarity. One such system is the bonus XP tokens that can be earned through in-game events or by purchasing third-party products like Mountain Dew bottles branded with the game’s insignia. Mountain Dew isn’t the only company known for teaming up with Activision. Others include Doritos and even Burger King.
While bonus XP tokens seem like a convenient, easy way to level up your account, they are often placed as fodder throughout the purchasable battle pass that Call of Duty has adopted since its prior, Treyarch-helmed release, Black Ops 4. The battle pass system was, of course, cribbed from Epic’s blockbuster title, Fortnite, and while this system is almost the same, featuring both a free-to-play track and a paid track, it’s more egregious here because unlike Fortnite, Call of Duty is not a free-to-play game.
Therefore, Bonus XP tokens have become fodder to pad the one hundred tier battle pass. What’s more, these tokens operate in exceedingly frustrating ways. For one, it is unclear what experience is counted and doubled by the token. The timer also counts down while waiting for a match to start, and due to Call of Duty’s notoriously finicky connection, matches could take a few minutes to find and load into, meaning valuable tokens are being wasted while the game starts. There is little transparency to be found in this system.
This Is A Persistent Problem in CoD Games
Unfortunately, this isn’t the only time that Call of Duty, being Activision’s signature title, has employed exasperating anti-consumer tactics to try and minimize rewards and push users to pay for the many microtransactions in the game. In fact, Modern Warfare is seen as a surprising improvement when compared to past titles. Black Ops 3, for example, featured weapons locked away behind loot boxes, forcing players to potentially have to spend hundreds of dollars to unlock the new content. Infinite Warfare featured randomized stats on certain weapons in their supply drop system, which gave users an immediate advantage in firefights.
Modern Warfare is an improvement on these abhorrent systems, but still has its fair share of issues. In late 2019 Infinity Ward released a cosmetic watch for your character to equip that cost a whopping twenty dollars. Although it is possible to avoid buying such a seemingly useless item, it did provide a tracker for all the player’s kills and deaths showcased on the watch’s monitor. Modern Warfare notoriously lacks this information in many of its game modes, including but not limited to team deathmatch – a mode where knowing how many deaths you have is paramount to your team’s success. Releasing an item that readily provides this information, while not an immediate advantage, can be seen as anti-consumer and, above all else, annoying. These issues are exacerbated by players feeling that Infinity Ward and Activision purposefully craft poor menus to make these expensive cosmetic items more enticing.
The bonus XP token system is another notch in a long line of poor decisions made by Activision and Infinity Ward. Hopefully in future Call of Duty titles, what with users becoming more aware of these greedy tactics, Activision decides to promote healthier more content-rich gameplay without artificially slowing or manipulating its userbase’s gameplay experience.
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