The age of video game rivalries is coming to an end. As markets shift, corporations merge, and fortunes change, the hostilities that once defined the industry have become legends of the past. Sonic the Hedgehog is welcome in the Mushroom Kingdom any time. Madden buried NFL 2K more than 20 years ago. Forza and Marcus Fenix have shed the bonds of exclusivity, and it seems like any day now we’ll be pressing square to reload a Needler.
The inconceivable has become reality as gaming grows ever flatter and consolidated, but there’s at least one front where the fight is still on.
Call of Duty vs. Battlefield.
The two global superpowers of first-person shooters have been locked in conflict for decades, and their simmering cold war is about to heat up. EA’s Battlefield has been on the back foot for most of it, forced to play catch-up in their fight for conquest. Activision’s Call of Duty has achieved full domination of the FPS space – but success fuels complacency, and the tides of war can turn in an instant. The field is pitched for what could be their biggest showdown yet, so we’re taking a look at how the feud between CoD and BF has fuelled both franchises to greatness.
Call of Duty and Battlefield evolved in parallel, capitalizing on trends and creating their own within a rapidly-changing industry. The combatants borrow frequently from each other, trading ideas in a back and forth arms race of dopamine optimization. They’re the Goku and Vegeta of video games: the seemingly unbeatable alpha and a challenger who refuses to accept being second best, burning with the need to surpass their rival no matter how unlikely it may seem. And, just like the Saiyans, pushing each other to the limit only makes them stronger.
Iron sharpens iron, after all, and few rivalries have spent as much time in the forge as this one. To understand the casus belli that led us to today, we begin as most conflicts do, with a…
Prelude to War
Battlefield 1942 and the original Call of Duty launched in 2002 and 2003, respectively– emerging in the post-Y2K culture that traded turn-of-the-millennium optimism for Jack Bauer, Joe Millionaire, and deceptively-labeled System of a Down songs snagged from Kazaa. The sixth generation of gaming consoles were firing on all cylinders by this point in their life cycles, a time of rapid growth and growing confidence in 3D game design. They became closer to their PC contemporaries, with in-depth CRPGs like Morrowind and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic finding huge success on home consumer hardware.
Consoles also converged on the PC’s multiplayer advantages. System Link LAN parties were a sight to behold, but the real action was online. The PS2 had an optional modem, while Xbox Live launched in 2002, not with Halo but Unreal Championship, a console spin on the premier PC shooter. The PC was the birthplace of online FPS, after all – fast-paced, physics-defying, sci-fi arcade romps, where competition meant glowing bounce pads and floating power-ups.
GoldenEye 007 broke ground on the Nintendo 64, but truly “realistic” shooters of the time lived on PC, aimed squarely at the hardcore audience. Games like Operation Flashpoint and Rainbow Six remained relatively niche for the era, perhaps because the modern setting was too fresh for an IRL audience recently thrust into a tragic global conflict. There was, however, an ideal release valve sitting over in the world of Hollywood.
Released five years prior to the Iraq War, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan inspired a wave of World War 2-themed videogames, led by Spielberg’s own Medal of Honor. Published by EA in 1999, the historical setting of it and its multiple sequels offered enough distance from current events to prove palatable. Medal of Honor’s gameplay was grounded but far more forgiving than the sweaty tactical shooters of the time, capitalizing on the cinematic intensity of war to raise adrenaline.
The third game in the series, the PC-exclusive Allied Assault, introduced multiplayer to the mix, and soon a Swedish studio named DICE and its newly-acquired developer Refraction Games threw their helmets into the fray with Battlefield 1942.
Released for PC in 2002, BF 1942 traded the storytelling and grit of its contemporaries in exchange for large-scale, chaotic combat. Tanks trolled the deserts of El Alamein and dogfighters strafed the beaches of Wake Island while players fought as specialized classes, working together to conquer their opponents. It was the anarchic action of earlier games like Tribes 2 with a fresh coat of olive drab– and it became one of EA’s breakout hits of the era.
A year later, without much fanfare, a group of Medal of Honor developers split to form their own team, taking the expertise that crafted the Omaha Beach showcase of Allied Assault and founding their own studio, Infinity Ward, with Call of Duty as their debut title. God-tier graphics, booming sound, and a captivating campaign – something Battlefield eschewed entirely – made it a surprise hit. Call of Duty outpaced BF 1942 at retail on the strength of its single-player, but its online aspect wasn’t much more than an afterthought. It would take years for Call of Duty to catch-up to Battlefield’s multiplayer advantage by taking a page from its book.
Escalation
The success of Battlefield 1942 led to a sequel, Battlefield Vietnam. It was a solid followup, but the setting didn’t really do it for people – so in true early-2000s fashion, players did it themselves. The massive mod scene of BF 1942 led to several total conversions. World War 1. The Star Wars Galaxy. Finland! One mod stood above all others, bringing the action into the modern-ish era of the first Gulf War. Desert Combat was so huge that DICE bought the devs and canonized their efforts as Battlefield 2.
2005’s Battlefield 2 added squad-based combat and a unique “commander” role to bring order to the massive combat zones, 29 in all – although many players planted themselves in 24/7 Karkand servers and called it a day.
The modern setting of BF2 was a major draw. The wars we watched on the news had become the background of our lives, and players were eager to leave the 1940s behind. It was time for a contemporary setting that was urgent and of-the-now – not a century from now. DICE’s futuristic sequel, Battlefield 2142, never caught on.
Call of Duty was slower to come around on the idea, releasing two more games set in the Second World War. 2005’s Call of Duty 2 offered a great multiple perspective campaign and debuted innovations we take for granted like grenade indicators and regenerating health. It sold gangbusters as an Xbox 360 launch title and staved off the sense of World War 2 fatigue for at least one more year.
Call of Duty 3, the first in the series not developed by Infinity Ward, failed to push the concept further. Treyarch’s debut was an awkward middle child without much new to say, a fun but empty filler episode in the family saga. Fans had grown sick of the setting – Battlefield had seized control of the 21st century and beyond while CoD was still listening to Fibber McGee and Molly on the wireless. Battlefield claimed the crown of modern combat first… but Call of Duty perfected it and rewrote the rules of gaming forever.
Supremacy
2007’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is a watershed moment for modern video games. It propelled CoD into the present with a blockbuster campaign indistinguishable from a military-glazing Michael Bay movie. More than that, it fundamentally altered our relationship with online multiplayer.
Online FPS was no longer all about winning. CoD 4 created a paradigm that rewarded players just for showing up and sticking around. An XP-based progression system offered dopamine hits in every match regardless of outcome, unlocking customizable loadouts of weapons, attachments, perks, and killstreaks. It’s innovation stacked on innovation, and when you reach the pinnacle you can’t help but hit the "Prestige" button and start it all again.
Modern Warfare turned multiplayer FPS into a lifestyle, a second job you clocked into because that Martyrdom perk isn’t going to unlock itself. Battlefield beat CoD to the concept of modern combat, but CoD made it addictive. For the first time, Battlefield found itself chasing Call of Duty, surpassed in power by the foe they once dominated. How would they respond?
First came 2008’s Battlefield: Bad Company, a modern-day console spinoff that introduced DICE’s Frostbite engine and its destructible environments. The campaign excelled with a cast of wisecracking soldiers, wide open missions, and genuine heart and humor. Bad Company 2 refined the formula and brought the series back to PC, but the pair never landed a decisive blow.
Call of Duty had become a cultural behemoth. Each new release was a bona fide happening— midnight launches wrapped around GameStops, Xbox Live servers buckling under the strain of millions, and even your snack aisle joining the war effort with Double XP Doritos and Dew. Battlefield took a long hard look at CoD’s appeal and came back with the most ambitious assault yet: 2011’s Battlefield 3.
Everything about BF3 screamed “blockbuster,” from the collapsing skyscrapers of Frostbite 2 to the box art’s blue-and-orange color scheme, an eye-catching clash of cool and warm that was ruthlessly exploited by the media of the era. If it wasn’t obvious that Battlefield was explicitly gunning for CoD, a cheeky advertising slogan made it clear: “Above and Beyond the Call.”
BF3’s main strategy for surpassing CoD was to borrow heavily from its playbook, taking progression systems, unlockable loadouts, and tighter infantry combat and marrying them to the huge scale of Battlefield. It worked extremely well, though its lackluster campaign mode couldn’t measure up to CoD’s tightly-scripted setpiece parades. Battlefield can’t beat Call of Duty at its own game, but BF3 straddled the line between sandbox heritage and zeitgeisty grind to become something unique and successful.
Still, Battlefield 3 couldn’t escape Call of Duty’s shadow – Modern Warfare 3 outsold it to the tune of tens of millions – but a series of high-profile missteps was about to open up an opportunity for Battlefield... one it would fumble spectacularly.
Attrition
CoD’s annual cadence was a blessing and a curse. With two studios trading swings, every November became natural selection in real time. The strongest mutations lived on in Call of Duty’s DNA, while evolutionary dead ends like wall running and double jumps were ruthlessly culled. It’s a lot of bites at the apple, but that opportunity comes with a cost.
Treyarch cooked with its Black Ops sub-franchise in the 2010s, but Infinity Ward struggled after the studio’s founders split to form Respawn. Unwilling to break the yearly streak, Activision tapped Sledgehammer Games to get Modern Warfare 3 out the door in 2011 while Infinity Ward got back on its feet. The yearly grind did not slow down despite the rebuilding period – other Activision developers were recruited to help deliver 2013’s title, the disappointing Call of Duty: Ghosts.
Ghost’s reputation haunts the franchise to this day. It’s not a horrendous game, but it is an uninspired one. Its utter lack of rizz dulled the enthusiasm created at the heights of Modern Warfare mania, and rumblings of oversaturation first reared their head. It was the perfect opportunity for EA to strike with a new Battlefield title that could shift the tide of the rivalry for good.
This Battlefield gaiden was developed not by DICE but by single-player veteran Visceral Games. Hardline’s fantastic War on Drugs story wasn’t enough to overcome the distinct sense of un-Battlefield-ness that came with the Miami Vice aesthetic. It was a dilution of the brand at the worst possible time while Call of Duty kept on trucking.
After Sledgehammer helped out on Modern Warfare 3, Activision dug the studio’s vibe and welcomed it into the CoD polycule. The two-developer schedule wasn’t making anyone happy, and a third studio was a relief – the devs now had three whole years to work on each game. Sledgehammer’s first release under the new cadence was the admirable, Titanfall-inspired Advanced Warfare.
Treyarch was increasingly the A-team by this point. Black Ops took big swings and embraced experimentation, leading to home runs like Zombies, a bona fide phenomenon born from a quirky evolutionary offshoot – the kind of mutation that makes cilantro taste like soap for some people.
Call of Duty might not be the first series you think of when you hear “personality,” but there’s real depth to be found in CoD’s voluminous canon. Most franchises could only dream of establishing an expansive fictional world beloved by millions of fans. Between Zombies, BLOPS, and two Modern Warfares, Call of Duty has at least three.
It’s hard to keep up. The yearly schedule shaped CoD in a hyperbolic time chamber of constant iteration, while Battlefield always had to focus on “being Battlefield.” CoD’s flexibility, its almost shameless willingness to adapt, would serve the series well as it entered a new warzone.
Last Stand
Battlefield’s moment of redemption arrived in 2016, pitted against Infinite Warfare, the first CoD released by Infinity Ward under the new triumvirate. The distant future setting received a mixed reaction, leaving an opening in their flank for Battlefield to fix bayonets and strike.
Battlefield 1 turned the clock back to the First World War, a setting infrequently explored in video games. Slow, agonizing trench warfare seemed like an ill-fit for the trickshot insanity of Battlefield, but a loose approach to history kept the action authentically over-the-top, and the fresh context helped DICE deliver one of its best campaigns ever, a rollicking war anthology with spectacle to spare. Infinite Warfare won the sales battle, as CoD almost always does, but Battlefield 1’s success showed that the franchise was still in the fight. For the first time since BF2, the contrast with Call of Duty was crystal clear.
Then they both went back to World War 2.
Sledgehammer’s Call of Duty: WW 2 didn’t rock the world, but the 2018 launch of Battlefield 5 halted EA’s momentum in its tracks. The setting was old hat, the launch was mired with similar technical issues as BF4, and the discourse didn’t do it any favors. Most of it was culture war chaff, but fans had some legit concerns about the game's roadmap and lack of identity. DICE was clearly studying its rival with time-to-kill tweaks and smaller, tighter maps, but every change only sparked skirmishes between old-school Battlefield stans and those craving something more CoD-like.
The division, some unfair, some valid, didn’t help BF5’s sales. It missed EA’s forecasts and stopped Battlefield’s ambitions of overcoming CoD on its own terms – though a new development in the online FPS space meant fresh territory ripe for the taking: the rise of battle royale.
Gamers’ long love-affair with KDR and capture points was beginning to lose steam. They yearned for loot, shrinking circles of survival, and piping hot chicken dinners. The dominance of PUBG and Fortnite sent a flaming arrow across the bow of both CoD and Battlefield.
Five months after the shaky release of Battlefield 5, DICE unleashed Firestorm, a battle royale that flopped immediately – a casualty of poor matchmaking, a high cost of entry, and being shackled to a game people were already abandoning en masse.
Call of Duty had problems of its own in 2018. Deadline issues with Black Ops 4 forced Treyarch to scrap the campaign for the first time in series history and focus its efforts on “cooperative modes,” which is a decent euphemism for “We have to do a battle royale. Sorry.” It sounds opportunistic, but there was no reason to delay the inevitable. BLOPS 4’s Blackout was extremely encouraging, and its successor devastated the live service landscape like a tactical nuke.
Warzone, released in 2020, was the ultimate evolutionary leap. Cross-platform and free-to-play, it offered tight gunplay and gamefeel honed by nearly twenty years of trial and error and tweaked the battle royale formula to adapt to CoD, not the other way around. Big lobbies, a cash economy, and the masterstroke that is the Gulag made Warzone instantly distinct. Revenues were through the roof. Call of Duty had regained its swagger.
Still reeling from the failure of imagination that was BF5, Battlefield 2042 went for reinvention. Stalwart classes became flashy hero shooter Specialists. Instead of tight squad play, players donned windsuits and grappling hooks to zip across empty maps the size of Wyoming.
The game felt incomplete thanks to bizarre omissions like scoreboards and in-game voice chat, along with the usual launch bugs and encroaching live service elements, but those are all superficial compared to the core problem. Too much had changed, and unlike the more versatile CoD’s ability to support a fairly broad spectrum of gameplay ideas, Battlefield needs to feel like Battlefield. BF 2042 did not. It was received poorly, sold poorly, and reflected poorly on a franchise in retreat.
But Battlefield isn’t out of the fight yet.
Endgame
Battlefield has burned through a lot of the goodwill it earned over the years, but the audience is fickle, and one great game can make a major difference – especially when your competition is coasting.
For all its evolutionary advantages, Call of Duty’s rotating studios strategy isn’t perfect. Stagnation is bound to set in. 2019’s Modern Warfare reboot was Infinity Ward’s enjoyable, oddly sauceless spin on its original hit, with a 64-player Ground War mode inspired by Battlefield, a sign that even the market leader couldn’t resist borrowing from number two.
Sledgehammer Games continued its World War 2 saga with the largely unloved Vanguard, but in 2022 once again found itself unexpectedly working on a video game called “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.” It began as an expansion pack for Modern Warfare 2, until a change of plans meant Sledgehammer had to bang out a fully-loaded new CoD in little more than a year.
Meanwhile, Treyarch and its single-player specialist friends at Raven Software are holding steady, a solid set of hands that consistently deliver, even after mid-development shakeups like Black Ops: Cold War. This year, BLOPS is going back-to-back for the first time – Black Ops 6 and 7 were developed side-by-side for a consecutive release in 2024 and 2025. BLOPS 7’s four-year dev cycle is the longest in series history – plenty of time to reassess what Call of Duty looks like in the modern era.
The grotesque propagation of licensed content in Call of Duty has come under fire as a bridge too far from CoD’s core values, contributing to the so-called Fortnite-ification of the franchise. In a shocking move, Treyarch signalled a pullback on carry-forward crossovers into Black Ops 7, and even turned down the kind of brand deals that welcomed Nicki Minaj, the Ninja Turtles, Beavis and Butthead into the fold.
It’s probably a wise decision, but it’s also the first time Call of Duty has flinched in a while. Juggernauts like CoD aren’t in the business of buckling to fan pressure. It might have something to do with the beta buzz of the back-to-basics Battlefield 6.
BF6 is an identity reset for the series. Classes are back, destruction reigns supreme, and the guns are accurate and deadly. The beta tests for BF6 have generated a surprising amount of excitement. There’s a sense of optimism around Battlefield for the first time in a while, precarious though it may be. The war must go on.
The greatest video game rivalries didn’t last as long as their reputations. Countless console manufacturers have broken through enemy lines only to surrender shortly thereafter. Sega and Nintendo’s storied animosity lasted just 11 years. Madden only went head to head with 2K for six, but uncs everywhere still debate their favorite football franchise. Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter are still technically at odds after three decades, but they serve such completely different audiences now there’s no real need to compete.
Not so with CoD and Battlefield– eternal sparring partners forever testing each other’s limits, locked in a grudge match that refuses to fade into mergers or vanish into nostalgia like so many before. Both franchises are fighters, the last of a dying, more interesting era. Together, Call of Duty and Battlefield have brought out the best in each other and reshaped gaming more than once. It’ll be a sad day if the knockout blow ever comes, because the fight itself is the point. The fight keeps them honest. The fight keeps them alive.
Connexion
