Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has been released to resounding joy by its fans and gamers everywhere. The bulk of their happiness, however, seems to stem from the fact that MW3 is… the same game! Yes, that’s right…Activision, in their infinite wisdom, was able to please their massive fan-base by turning out yet another Call of Duty that doesn’t seem significantly better or different than any of the others. This is evidenced in Kotaku’s “Gut Check” from earlier this week, when after the release, the over-riding advice was, “Buy this game! It’s exactly like the other ones!”

Obviously the folks at Activision are doing something right, their game has toppled nearly every other franchise in terms of market share for FPS war games and has garnered global hype over the last ten years. However, there has been very little that has been new or innovative in the franchise in that time. In fact, being a former CoD gamer myself, the last four iterations of the game have been nearly the same. Block Ops threw in some fun little game types like wager matches, but the mechanics, the physics, even the weapons and maps have felt eerily similar. The single-player campaign, especially, is incredibly similar to every other one; linear, scripted down to the last bullet, and heavily populated by “quick-time” events. (Quick! Mash the A button so you can win this “unexpected” scuffle with a terrorist!)

Evidently, the fans want the same game every year. As Brian Crecente noted on Kotaku, “Modern Warfare 3 may not reinvent anything, but if you're a fan you'd be silly to pass it up.” Obviously, Brian. They haven’t “reinvented” anything for five years. If fans are so hard-up for this game every time they drop a new $60 version of it on store shelves, why don’t they just ask Sledgehammer Games (a mutant Infinity Ward dev team) for more DLC? Seriously, everyone write Activision and ask them to have their developers just keep pushing out DLC on top of their original Modern Warfare platform (you know it was the best one anyway). Chalk them up with new maps, sprinkle in some new guns, and maybe release a branch off the single-player campaign once a year. It would save everybody a lot of money and essentially give customers what they’re actually getting: more of the same.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much, I’m not buying MW3. I jumped on the Battlefield bandwagon a year ago and have never been disappointed (much).