A few years ago, my best friends convinced me to play Call of Duty: Warzone, the series’ battle royale installment that had shot up the charts. While I was aware of it for work reasons, I’d largely sworn off the franchise about a decade prior, returning for brief stints and forays into the Black Ops subseries that I’d come to love. And I grew to love Warzone too in time, but only through a lot of hardship, namely trying to get acclimated to it as a terrible client and launcher for other Call of Duty titles.
Call of Duty’s launcher is now the home for the entirety of the series, akin to how Riot’s launcher houses League of Legends, Valorant, and more, and it launched alongside last year’s critically panned Modern Warfare III (no, not that MW3). When it did release, it seemed to be a tacit acknowledgement that the year’s new game was little more than a glorified and rushed DLC and as such, collapsed the title into the launcher, treating it as just a notch in the larger brand’s belt, a tile in a growing menu of icons. That’s all any release in the franchise is now, reflected in the fact that there is no unique Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 in my Xbox’s game library like there would have been, once upon a time. Now it’s just Call of Duty.
Besides papering over any semblance of identity that the hardworking studios behind the Call of Duty machine have cultivated, the Call of Duty launcher is also brutally unhelpful, as well as devoid of any life. Few products have ever looked and felt so obviously designed by committee.
The point of the launcher should be to streamline the process of picking up any number of the Call of Duty games and their standalone modes. Every one of the most recent yearly releases dating back to 2019’s Modern Warfare is featured, and some of those releases are even splintered into separate modes, like Modern Warfare II. That game, as featured in COD’s launcher, is split between its single-player campaign, competitive multiplayer, co-op mode, and DMZ, a PvE-centric spinoff of Warzone that is confusingly now tied to MWII instead. Since it knows I play Black Ops 6’s Zombies mode a lot, there’s a tile on the home screen that takes me right there, and it’s one of the few times that the launcher feels intuitive and helpful.
Most of the time though, the launcher is just not that clear cut or logically consistent as a tool. At the moment, hovering over MWIII prompts me to install the game, since I don’t have it. Clicking on it invites me to pick between the game’s multiplayer component or its campaign. Vanguard, Cold War, and 2019’s Modern Warfare are also featured, and despite the fact that I don’t own the games at all, the launcher treats them as if they are already installed. That is, until you click on them out of curiosity, at which point you are taken to the store to buy and install them. That caveat somehow goes unmentioned in the launcher!
Moreover, it doesn’t seem like every title is as smartly broken up as others in the launcher are. MWII, as I already noted, has four different modes I can install separate from one another, but no such option appears to exist for older titles like Cold War. So on one hand, yes, it is clarifying to know what is where, but on the other hand, the launcher barely clears anything up.
The launcher, and Call of Duty in general, also has a huge update problem, in that every time I start the game up, whether it be Warzone or Black Ops 6 now, it always needs to restart in order to install some kind of miniscule hotfix. It’s a small hiccup that I could easily ignore if it were infrequent, but when it happens every goddamn time, that hiccup quickly grows into a larger pain. Why the fuck do I need to load every Call of Duty title twice in order to play it? Stop.
The current design of the launcher is actually a revamp of Call of Duty HQ, the going name for the launcher when it was released alongside MWII last year. Back then, it was even more garish, but it really isn’t that much better to look at now. Sure, it may not be as boisterously ugly as it once was, but it also lacks anything in the way of color or identity. And though it is now better at distinguishing separate products and their respective sizes—side-stepping Warzone’s previous issue of being packaged with the latest release—you’ll still wind up with a bloated file size if you want any variety from your time with Call of Duty, meaning it’s only kind of addressed many of the problems that the launcher was introduced and fine-tuned to fix in the first place.
Fortunately it doesn’t take long to just navigate the ugly-but-simplistic menu to get where I need to go, but in almost every other regard, Call of Duty is home to a wet fart of a launcher. I think I’d almost rather have standalone releases again than have to deal with installing and uninstalling chunks of games in the future to get the ideal Call of Duty experience. So yeah, in case you couldn’t tell, I hate it.
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