Will China Embrace Call of Duty Online?

Call of Duty is a huge name in the West, and each new release seems to break new sales records in the entertainment industry. Although it’s also popular in China, it has never quite attained the same level here, in large part because its biggest following is on the consoles. To play console games online in China is difficult, expensive, and not something most Chinese gamers would ever bother with.

Now, thanks to a partnership with Tencent, Call of Duty Online is coming to Chinese PCs, and unlike previous PC titles it has been designed specifically for this market. Tencent seems an especially perfect fit, given that Tencent CEO Pony Ma and his six-year-old son are apparently big fans of the game.

But how will this new Call of Duty actually play? It’s quite clear that the game is entirely separate from the console Call of Duty games — although it aspires to recreate that multiplayer experience — and Chinese players have already expressed concerns about the balance issues that the free-to-play model may introduce to the game. If you’re a Call of Duty fan who’s wondering what that means, think back to Modern Warfare 2, before patches had fixed the horrifically unbalanced double shotguns. Now imagine that those shotguns were offered as part of a paid weapons upgrade. Does the developer nerf the shotguns, fixing the game’s balance issues but angering its paid clients? Or does it leave the guns as is, placating paid users at the expense of a fair, balanced system.

Chinese gamers are right to be concerned about this, especially because free-to-play games here often widely miss the mark when it comes to balance. A free-to-play game isn’t free to play if you can’t kill anyone without paying to upgrade your weapons, and there is already concern that Call of Duty Online could suffer this problem.

It’s also not clear what engine the Chinese version of the game will use. Attendees at Tencent’s press event have said it looked similar to Modern Warfare 2, which may mean the game looks a little outdated by Western standards, but still quite nice by Chinese ones.

The game comes at an interesting time, as other free-to-play FPS games are also taking aim at the Chinese market. The9’s Firefall, for example, is a Western-developed free-to-play FPS that’s gotten a lot of early critical praise and looks to target the Asian market quite strongly once it has been released. Of course there’s always the domestic PLA-developed America’s Army/Call of Duty hybrid Glorious Mission, although the civilian version of that game is still yet to be released, and beginning to feel like vaporware.

It will also be competing for attention with Blizzard games like World of Warcraft and Diablo 3, which is likely to be a bit awkward. Although Call of Duty and World of Warcraft are published by the same monster conglomerate (Activation Blizzard) in the West, in China the games will be operated by competitors Tencent and Netease respectively. In essence, Activision Blizzard’s local China operators for these games will be fighting each other for gamers. Either way, ActiBlizzard wins, but then again, either way it loses, too.

Of course, talking about competitors is a moot point until we can at least take a look at a beta or demo of the game, and that’s something Tencent hasn’t yet put a timetable on. It’s hard to imagine things will feel too different from the fast-but-addictive multiplayer style that’s made Call of Duty so popular in the West, but whether or not the free-to-play adjustments will ruin the game’s balance is a more more difficult question to answer.

As is so often the case when it comes to games in China, for now, gamers will just have to wait.

[image via Destructoid]