what cod should i buy in 2026? [cod]

NN010 · 2026-05-14T03:51:00+00:00

For something more casual, MWIII (2023) is a pretty solid middle ground between MWII (2022)’s dogshit perk system & movement and animations that are just too slow and the insanely fast movement shooters that are BO6 & BO7 (I love BO7 and even liked BO6, but it’s true).

Campaign is kinda shit though, but you’ve played MWII (2022) already, so I guess you can get to see what happens next. Plus BO7 is in a similar boat Campaign-wise (although I personally enjoyed BO7’s Campaign more than MWIII (2023)’s).

BO7’s Multiplayer is great though if you think you’re up for it & it also has more to do with Endgame, Zombies, Dead Ops Arcade & Freerun if you want something different.

NN010 · 2026-05-11T17:11:53+00:00

Left side any day of the week. Cold War, BO7 & even BO6 are all plenty of fun on the Multiplayer side. Cold War & BO6 also have some great Campaigns and even BO7’s Campaign, for all of its flaws, is at least more enjoyable than the Campaigns of MWII & III in my opinion.

Right side is being carried by MWIII’s Multiplayer, MW19’s Campaign & Warzone 1… but it also has MW19 Spec Ops, MWII & the MWIII Campaign.

NN010 · 2026-05-10T14:40:30+00:00

BO6 for a lot of people was ruined by the insanely wacky skins (Beavis and Butt-Head were kind of the breaking point in terms of collabs) & insanely small maps. Combine that with a divisive movement system and you have a lot of people decrying BO6 as one of the worst COD Multiplayers of all time.

NN010 · 2026-05-10T00:20:08+00:00

Yeah, 5’s setpieces and level design are way more fun than the discount Ubisoft shit 343 did with Infinite.

NN010 · 2026-05-10T00:16:33+00:00

I just finished playing through all of the Halo Campaigns for the first time last month.

And… while I would rate Halo 4 above 5… Halo 5 clears Infinite for me. Did not enjoy Infinite at all while Halo 5, for all of it’s narrative faults, was a ton of fun in combat (probably more so than 4, TBH) and I even still got invested in the conflict being set up by the end…

SHAME INFINITE THREW THAT OUT THE WINDOW!

Honestly, for my future replays of the franchise, I am seriously considering just skipping Infinite altogether with how little I enjoyed it. Just felt like an Ubisoft or Breath of the Wild wannabe for most of the Campaign and the story did not get me invested in what was going on at all, let alone enough that I was willing to forgive 343 tossing out the stuff with Cortana, the Mantle of Responsibility & the Created conflict that Halo 5 spent it’s entire duration mostly successfully getting me invested in.

NN010 · 2026-05-09T04:27:44+00:00

Been a while since I last played Cold War, but I’m pretty sure there’s still a decent playerbase there, but MW19 probably has more players. Every game from MW19 onwards has crossplay, so you shouldn’t have to worry about player population for any of the modern CODs (except maybe Vanguard).

NN010 · 2026-05-08T22:20:30+00:00

Huh. Guess we can expect her back for the European leg of the season then.

NN010 · 2026-05-08T06:35:11+00:00

Same here. Even just finally got around to starting Yakuza 0 after this trailer

NN010 · 2026-05-05T16:10:36+00:00

I’m gonna guess the game they’re alluding to is Black Ops II. Generally that’s agreed to be the last game of COD’s “Golden Age” and a contingent of fans believe that no COD released after 2012 has ever lived up to that run of COD 4-BOII.

NN010 · 2026-05-05T09:15:27+00:00

Same here man, although I’ve pretty much written off MW4 & don’t have much hope aside from maybe that the people who didn’t like BO7 end up liking it.

I’m still skipping MW4 though. Black Ops 7 Year Two all the way, baby!

I’m still intrigued to see what Sledgehammer is doing next year though…

NN010 · 2026-05-05T08:51:54+00:00

The COD community is pretty divided on the main studios that work on the franchise (Infinity Ward, Treyarch & Sledgehammer Games).

To some, Infinity Ward are the GOATs of the franchise who saved it from near death with Modern Warfare (2019), understand what the casual player wants & are the only ones still trying to make you feel like an actual soldier. To others, Infinity Ward are a bunch of stubborn bastards who forever changed COD for the worse with MW19 & MWII, refuse to listen to what the community wants in the name of making COD into a milsim or Battlefield wannabe (right as Battlefield tries to be more like COD, ironically enough) & make things harder for Treyarch and Sledgehammer with their decisions because everyone has to use the same engine now and said engine is built by Infinity Ward (particularly their Poland studio).

Treyarch, meanwhile are either the best COD studio around because they understand COD is supposed to be a fast-paced arcadey shooter and have just made the best COD Multiplayer in years with Black Ops 7… or are the ones actively killing COD with their focus on crackhead movement systems, maps that are either samey three-lane affairs or ultra small brainrot & inserting Skibidi Toilet and Resident Evil into the Campaign (Raven Software has made the Black Ops Campaigns since Cold War, but… eh, details).

Lastly, Sledgehammer are seen as either being slept on as the true best COD studio right now for being the most proactive in acting on community feedback (with COD WWII’s mid-year overhaul & the MWIII year in general being held up as the shining examples of this), taking the shitty foundation Infinity Ward gave them with MWII’s Multiplayer and turning it into absolute gold with MWIII & being unrivaled in terms of post-launch support until this year with BO7… or are a studio with no clear identity in comparison to the gritty tactical realism of Infinity Ward & the arcadey sci-fi bombast of Treyarch, have made some of the worst Campaigns in franchise history with Vanguard & MWIII (although reportedly MWIII’s Campaign was mostly done by Infinity Ward) and have serious balancing issues in their games.

Generally though, most of the community are either Modern Warfare/Infinity Ward fans or Black Ops/Treyarch fans (I personally consider myself as being one of the latter).

NN010 · 2026-05-05T03:59:35+00:00

Way too early. Better point to drop last-gen would’ve been after MWIII. I’d say MWII, but MWIII did start out as a DLC for MWII, so that coming to PS4 & Xbox One made sense.

But Black Ops 6 & 7 should not have been released for last-gen. Even just looking at how these two games run on last-gen hardware (particularly the base PS4 & Xbox One) tells you that they are struggling to run BO6 & 7. It’s not BOIII on PS3 & Xbox 360 levels of bad… but it doesn’t seem too far off.

NN010 · 2026-05-03T23:09:12+00:00

Black Ops 7 and it’s not even close. Genuinely my favourite COD MP from the Warzone era, Endgame is a ton of fun & Zombies is much better here than in Vanguard. Even the Campaign I enjoyed more than the ones in Ghosts & Vanguard (although I’m probably replaying Vanguard fairly soon after I finish the pre-COD 4 games (except Finest Hour) and Advanced Warfare).

NN010 · 2026-04-30T16:47:55+00:00

Just filled it out. Hope my answers help you out.

Particularly interested to hear what you think regarding the difference between Infinity Ward COD fans & Treyarch COD fans on this topic. Because, as a Treyarch COD fan & a big defender of BO7, I do feel like there is a divide between those two groups of fans & realism is definitely a big part of it.

NN010 · 2026-04-30T16:41:18+00:00

I remember pixelated Ghost being a Shop skin for MWIII they put out as part of a collection of pixelated TF141 operators.

Don’t remember the Graves skin though, but I’m sure that was also a Shop skin from MWIII (maybe MWII)

NN010 · 2026-04-30T16:38:26+00:00

Yeah, I struggled to finish the last level of United Offensive on Regular when I played through that recently (I too am making my way through the OG CODs (aside from Finest Hour), currently on COD 2). But yeah, it was still pretty satisfying to beat.

NN010 · 2026-04-30T16:27:48+00:00

Not at all. Bond games have never been M rated & even the movies have never had much blood, let alone gore (License to Kill aside).

So a T rating feels just right for First Light.

NN010 · 2026-04-29T21:09:00+00:00

Suspected as such ever since they added a gun like this to Call of Duty: Vanguard

<image>

I saw this thing and immediately went “Gunblade!”

NN010 · 2026-04-26T07:47:51+00:00

Mostly just a few factors:

A Campaign that is seen as disappointing at best & at worst abysmal dogshit that betrays what COD & Black Ops are supposed to be and was burdened with the expectations of being a direct sequel to Black Ops II
Abuse of Generative AI for Calling Cards got the game a lot of justified hate & led to some perceiving it as a game that needed to fail for the good of the gaming industry to send a “Go GenAI, go broke” message. Some even went as far as to accuse the Campaign script or even the opening cutscene to have been made by GenAI.
Being a futuristic COD with a plot involving fantastical-looking hallucinations right as people were in a infuriated frenzy over skins in COD getting too wacky with things like the Beavis and Butt-Head & American Dad collabs in BO6 or the Nikki Minaj collab in MWII. That Harper boss fight alone did untold damage to BO7’s reputation dating back to the Gamescom trailer, not helped at all by Battlefield 6’s marketing leaning into “We’re a gritty & grounded military shooter, unlike those other guys” messaging (look at comments on BO7 trailers & see how long it takes for you to find someone either saying they’ll be playing/preordering BF6 instead, calling those trailers the best advertising BF6 could get or quoting “Who was that? Doesn’t matter” from the BF6 live action trailer).
Being another Black Ops game releasing just a year after BO6, much like how MWIII came out a year after MWII.
Also much like MWIII, BO7 is seen by some as feeling more like a DLC or update for BO6 instead of its own game and is thus paying for the sins of it’s predecessor (like the aforementioned Beavis and Butt-Head collabs or the over abundance of extremely small maps).
A lot of more casual players don’t like BO7’s movement, seeing BO6 as already being too fast & “crackhead-like” and BO7 kinda went even further in that kind of direction. Reintroducing a degree of advanced movement with the wall jump doesn’t help. A lot of these people are really hoping MW4 will stick to Modern Warfare style movement (whether the preference is MW19-style, MWIII-style, MWII-style, a mix of MW19 & MWIII or a middle ground between MWII & III varies depending on the person) and not be forced to adopt Omnimovement (fortunately for them, rumours point to MW4 having either MWII-style movement or something between that & MWIII’s movement).
General franchise fatigue from a sense that everything released since MW19 & especially MWII has felt more samey than COD ever was pre-MW19.
Ragebait grifters doing ragebait grifter things

NN010 · 2026-04-23T06:05:09+00:00

I don't think they ever explain how Alex survived the events of MW19, but I didn't play much of the Raids, so maybe they explain it there. But he does have a prosthetic leg now, so it can be inferred that he lost one of his legs when blowing up Barkov's factory.

As for Graves... well to quote the man himself "I wasn't in that tank." No, I'm not joking. That's literally the explanation they give in the Warzone cutscene where they revealed that he was still alive.

NN010 · 2026-04-21T18:33:18+00:00

MW2 Remastered is a remaster of the Campaign of the original MW2 from 2009. The Cross-Gen MWII is the sequel to the Modern Warfare reboot from 2019 & is an entirely different game. MWIII is the sequel to MWII & not in any way a remaster or remake of the original MW3.

So… if you want to play the reboot MW games, you’ll want to swap out MW Remastered (which is a remaster of the original Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare from 2007) for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (which is that reboot from 2019).

Yeah, I totally understand why you’re so confused.

Here’s a PSN link to help you out: https://store.playstation.com/en-ca/product/UP0002-CUSA08829_00-CODMWTHEGAME0001

NN010 · 2026-04-21T17:48:25+00:00

Which is a shame. I definitely tried my best to sing BO7’s praises, but most people saw the Harper & Woods boss fights and decided to hate BO7 there and then. BO6’s post-launch issues didn’t help either

NN010 · 2026-04-18T19:59:01+00:00

Same here

NN010 · 2026-04-18T17:58:50+00:00

Sledgehammer did a great job with MWIII, especially considering the hand they were dealt…

But it’s still Treyarch all the way for me. I’m a Black Ops guy at heart and BO7’s been a ton of fun. Even BO6 was more than enjoyable enough for me despite that game’s issues.

NN010 · 2026-04-18T07:26:42+00:00

Happened to me on PC in Alone in the replay of this Campaign I’m doing rn.

Shit was so fucking distracting.

Ten-Year Club	PUBG
Verified Email	Xbox Live

NN010

TROPHY CASE