YMMV / Call of Duty: Ghosts

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Yes, guns can shoot in space, though obviously not as well as they do in atmosphere.^note Even if the gunpowder is self-oxidizing to allow the gun to fire in space, exposure to vacuum may flash-evaporate the lubrication, to say nothing of leftover heat from firing having nowhere to radiate away from the gun, meaning the parts would expand and prevent movement after a couple of shots. And yes, there do exist guns that were specifically designed to fire bullets while underwater.
• Ass Pull:
  • An intro example. The fact that the Federation managed to sneak a crew of people into the ISS to hack the ODIN satellite, without ever being intercepted, let alone even detected by NASA in the few hours it would have taken them to get to the ISS.
  • The game's ending, which cements why Gabriel Rorke is so hated. He is shot point blank with a .44 Magnum and left on a crashing train that fell into the ocean. Despite Hesh and Logan barely having the strength to move after the ordeal, Rorke walks off falling into the ocean and being shot so he can have the last laugh and make a Sequel Hook.
• Audience-Alienating Ending: One of the biggest ones in Call of Duty history. Rorke surviving out of thin air and kidnapping Logan for the sake of a Sequel Hook turned off a lot of players. The fact that there hasn't been a game in the series to follow up on this game's story also means this twist is forced to stand on its own, which hasn't helped.
• Awesome Music: "Survival" by Eminem, played during the launch trailer and credits.
• Awesome: Video Game Levels: One thing that is generally agreed is that the levels taking place in space and underwater are the most creative in the campaign, and introduce a welcome change of pace from the linear corridors that make up the majority of the story mode.
• Broken Base:
  • The overall increased size of the multiplayer maps compared to the previous Infinity Ward developed games in the series. Either this is a welcome change from the common Call of Duty lazer-tag-esque corridors, or they went too far in opening up the maps, removing the fast pace newer-generation Call of Duty is known for. Afterwards though, the idea of large multiplayer maps was almost abandoned as after this game pretty much all multiplayer Call of Duty maps are as small as the ones before Ghosts.
  • Snoop Dogg inbound fo'shizzle. Some of the base have no problem in paying 3 bucks for the DLC voice pack to have Snoop be Mission Control in multiplayer; others see this as another money grab and further evidence CoD and the video game industry are spiraling toward death due to Infinity Ward using gimmicks like random celebrity cameos rather than fixing long-standing series flaws. Of course, there are those who like Snoop, but wish he would do voice acting for video games that are not in the CoD franchise.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Assault Rifles are the dominant weapon type used in multiplayer. Their accuracy and high damage output mean just a few bullets can down a player, even in normal mode. In addition, all players take the grip attachment for their assault rifles. ARs are so effective that there is literally no reason to use any of the other weapon types.
  • In the realm of submachine guns, only the MTAR and Vector are ever really used.
• Critic-Proof: Initially advertised, as at first it appeared that in spite of all the negativity surrounding it as well as the lessened expectations for this entry, Activision announced that Ghosts managed to pull off 1 billion dollars in retail sales on its first day. However, as various sources have pointed out, the 1 billion dollar figure is only how many copies retailers ordered, with the final day one figure for actual sales to players being less than Call of Duty: Black Ops II. The figure Activision gave also included PS4 and Xbox One copies, which weren't even available for sale until two or three weeks later; the whole "1 billion" figure was a blatant PR-speak so people would think they took back the sales record from Grand Theft Auto V.
  For some context on how significant it is that Ghosts' Day One sales are less than Black Ops 2, consider this: the last time a Call of Duty game sold less than its predecessor was World At War in 2008, and that was largely because gamers were disappointed to get yet another World War II game instead of continuing Modern Warfare's story, which they would need to wait a year for^*Remember that in the mid-2000s, the FPS genre was incredibly oversaturated with WWII shooters; it was not until 2009 when Modern Warfare 2 proved COD 4 wasn't a fluke that the "Modern Military Shooter" took over the genre. Until Ghosts, every COD game had broken sales records annually.
• Designated Hero: The Ghosts can come across as a bunch of jingoistic, self-righteous killers who have very little respect for the Geneva Convention, blowing up civilians and surrendering soldiers multiple times throughout the campaign. Perhaps the most noteworthy is when they destroy a Federation oil rig, along with likely hundreds of unarmed workers and the entire local ecosystem. Their unrelenting devotion to their country comes across less as "loyalty and patriotism" and more "indoctrination and Blind Obedience", as the combination of almost-total Offscreen Villainy and lack of any explanation regarding the backstory of the war beyond Elias just saying the Federation is evil and hates America gives us few reasons to consider them morally superior. Perhaps the most disturbing instance of this is when Elias retells the story of Logan following his brother's footsteps in the sand, essentially saying that he has no independence or the ability to think for himself — and this is portrayed as a good thing. As Hesh then states that the only reason Elias put them through training - described as Hell year after Hell year — was because he and Logan wanted it, it makes you wonder if Logan really wanted it or if he was just brainwashed into becoming a mindless follower. As for the other Ghosts, Merrick cares not a fig about actually making the world a better place, and admits that he just likes killing people, and the other three members of the team have too little personality.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Riley (the dog). He was created to be a Breakout Character, and he ended up more popular than most of the humans in the game which led to Riley being kept alive after being wounded during the Sin City mission. He also returns in Modern Warfare (2019) as a "pet", in which equipping the "Top Dog" finishing move allows you to have Riley by your side in the lobby and chomp down on enemies when performing the aforementioned move.
• Franchise Original Sin: Ghosts is the game in the franchise that started the trend of nerfing kill/score/pointstreaks for future games, even though the developers of those games intended these streaks to be weakened so that there would be less offensive streak-spamming and spawn-killing by offensive streaks. This had the unfortunate side-effect of making high offensive-streaks almost useless to go after. In Ghosts' case, most players just ran either the Support or Specialist Strike Packages instead of the Assault Strike Package due to many items in the Assault Package being too weak to run with (this also contributed to Ghosts' criticism for encouraging camping-style play in multiplayer).
• Game-Breaker: Par for the course for any COD game, Ghosts has its share of these:
  • Marksman rifles in general are seen as overpowered, particularly the MR-28. They're the equivalent of Black Ops 2's FAL or SMR.
  • The MSBS assault rifle was hated for being the best gun in the game with high damage, accuracy, and range. Worse yet, with the right equipment the MSBS was able to be adapted into a variety of playstyles, leaving little ways to counter it outside using your own MSBS to fight off opposing MSBS users. Some competitive leagues banned this gun from being used in matches as a result which later led to the gun receiving a nerf in damage, range, and rate of fire.
  • Ballistic vests are generally hated because they nearly double a player's health, and being part of the support scorestreak package, you're almost guaranteed to get a few.
  • The Squadmate scorestreak gives you an AI-controlled squadmate with a riot shield and pistol, which essentially adds an extra player to your team. It's also part of the support package, making it relatively easy to unlock.
  • The Amplify perk, which amplifies the footsteps of enemies, even ones using the Dead Silence perk. If you have a good set of earphones, you'll literally never be caught off guard with this perk.
  • After getting a range buff, the Bizon became the most powerful SMG in the game, if not the most powerful gun in general. You could throw a muzzle brake on the Bizon and have the Steady Aim perk, and you had a gun that puts even Black Ops 2's SMGs to shame. You could just hose everybody by the hip. The gun was immediately nerfed back to its pre-patch state in May 2014 after outrage from the community.
• Harsher in Hindsight: A flashback mission set in 2015 features an American surprise attack on Venezuela to assassinate a general. In 2019, an uprising attempt, backed by certain US politicians, largely failed.
  • After 10 years, the Ghosts were made into reality, right down to the name. An elite team of 20 Ukrainian black ops soldiers who even wear black-and-white skull balaclavas.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
  • Some of the Broken Base has christened this game as Modern Warfare 4 due to Infinity Ward not separating Ghosts enough from the Modern Warfare series.
  • Some fans have also criticized the game for not including any of the gameplay advancements from Black Ops 2 such as multiple-choice situations, optional missions and objectives, a voiced protagonist, and multiple endings. The single player mode is just as linear as a Modern Warfare game^note If you're familiar with CoD's effects on other shooters, this isn't that surprising - most gameplay gimmicks and innovations in Treyarch's games are completely ignored, both by IW's games and the legion of copycats, not because they're necessarily terrible or badly-implemented ideas, but simply because they came from Treyarch's games.
  • It's really taken to an extreme. Almost everything in at least the first level or two is straight-up copied from Modern Warfare.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • During the unveiling of the Xbox One, there was a presentation about the new graphics engine in Call of Duty: Ghosts. The "Advanced Fish AI" was quickly joked about because Super Mario 64 did it a full seventeen years earlier in 1996 (and the advanced fish AI in the released game turned out to not be so advanced, with fish frequently ignoring and clipping through the player). This one spread enough that even PAYDAY 2, which came out three months before Ghosts, had an achievement making fun of them for it.
  • The dog (modeled after a real dog!), who quickly became not only an Ensemble Dark Horse but the only character anyone can remember or care about.
• Narm:
  • How over the top the whole story is. From the bad guys not having a single redeeming trait and just end up being so incredibly generic they make you wonder why they even bothered, and their utterly unimaginative name of "The Federation", to the idea that a modern (albeit fictional) collective of all of South America somehow traveled into space to nuke the United States with their own superweapon in a ruthlessly brutal fashion for the sake of being evil bad guys that hate America and having a few levels look like post-apocalyptic ruins. That's all you get, the rest of the story focuses on the Ghosts fighting the Federation and Rorke having his own problems below.
  • While Brandon Routh’s performance as David “Hesh” Walker is decent for the most part, his utterly flat reaction to his own father being the leader of the legendary Ghosts (a group he idolizes) is laughable for containing zero surprise whatsoever, and is delivered with all the affectation of a verbal shrug.
  • A lot of things involving Rorke in general are hilariously all over the place. From the infamous plane hijack scene that snaps a plane in half to capture it and set him free in a defiance of all the laws of physics, to his Face–Heel Turn being prompted by an incredibly cliché and pulpy "exotic Amazonian torture techniques" line, to his Ass Pull survival in the ending just so he can produce a Sequel Hook that will never come. Every time the man is on-screen, an already over-the-top story becomes braindead stupid to promote an Invincible Villain in the most absurd ways possible.
• Older Than They Think: The developers had been hyping certain new features as "innovative", ignoring that other engines did them long before. For instance, "dual-render" scopes (only the scope's view is zoomed in, while your peripheral vision stays the same - Unreal Engine 2 and Source can do it^note without the massive framerate drop Ghosts tended to have when aiming on hardware at the time, either) and "advanced fish AI" that moves out of the way when you swim towards them (Super Mario 64, and for that matter every other 3D game ever with fish that don't actively try to kill you, has this - this one, especially combined with the fact that it didn't actually work when it was demonstrated, became a meme, enough so that other games like PAYDAY 2 have achievements mocking them for it). Even its "brand new engine" ended up still being the direct derivative of the Quake III: Arena engine they'd been using in 2005, with someone apparently mistaking their improvements to the graphics to mean it was an entirely new engine.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: The campaign is usually considered a mangled mess by fans but, at least for people who didn’t mind the larger than usual maps, the multiplayer is still a good time as usual for the series.
• Player Punch: At the end of the level "Legends Never Die," the game forces the player to drop Rorke in the rushing waters so the rest of the team will be spared. And unlike most Call of Duty games, where the alleged victim is telling you to sacrifice them so you'll live, Rorke is begging you not to let him die.
• Porting Disaster:
  • Possibly one of the worst optimized games to come out on the PC in all of 2013, Ghosts has a seemingly limitless amount of frame rate issues, including in menus, a narrow field of view with no way to adjust it (with a fanmade utility having a cease-and-desist order placed against it), and uses far more CPU power than it has any right to. This is made even more insulting when you remember that Call of Duty's roots are on the PC; although if you've been following the series for a while, it's not surprising either.
  • Just like with Call of Duty: Black Ops II on Wii U, the Wii U version of Ghosts never got all of the DLC and game patches the other platforms got. The only piece of DLC the Wii U version got was the multiplayer map Free Fall. Ghosts would end up being the last Call of Duty game released on the Wii U - and the last CoD game released on a Nintendo console to date.
• Replacement Scrappy: Everything from the whole continuity to characters. No surprise this continuity was abandoned outside of Call of Duty: Mobile. At first, the game went so far as to hint that the Ghosts are the villains in this continuity, but it was soon revealed that they were really working for the highest bidder. Rorke exists in it, too, but it would seem as if he isn’t an Invincible Villain this time.
• Rooting for the Empire: The game's choice of villains, a ridiculously powerful federation of fused South American countries with a bad case of Offstage Villainy, coupled with the Designated Hero portrayal of the United States, had the obvious effect to make many players in the massive Ibero-American CoD fanbase sympathize with the bad guys instead. In particular, Latin American and Brazilian fans felt it hit just too near home that they were supposed to root against a miraculous socio-political reemergence of their own countries, and even some Spaniards and Portuguese found it hard to hate something that was basically their own countries away from being almost a resurgence of their own historical empires, especially in times where their position in the European Union has been called in question and has led some thinkers to daydream with Hispanic unions of the like.
• Saved by the Fans: Apparently, Infinity Ward was deliberating whether or not to kill Riley during the course of the game. The Memetic Mutation he received from the internet was one factor in their decision to just wound him.
• The Scrappy: Gabriel Rorke is seemingly the least-liked villain in the series, chiefly due to his lack of charisma, flimsy backstory, and ability to have everything magically go his way at the drop of a hat. He has been considered a poor expy of Bob Barnes, without that character's complexities. What sealed the deal however was surviving being shot point-blank with a revolver and emerging from a train wreck not even mildly inconvenienced to get the last laugh on the heroes.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Competitive players absolutely despise the Domination game type since Domination games usually devolve into flag camping.
  • Many players were not amused when they discovered it was possible to get a KEM Strike off a Care Package.
  • The spawn system in Ghosts is by far the worst of the series so far, with players being spawned in seemingly random locations, and all too often right in front of an enemy's gun. For example, one player managed to figure out how to kill the same player four times in just as many seconds.
• So Okay, It's Average: Ghosts so far is one of the lowest scoring games in the franchise, with most reviewers giving the game middling review scores, mainly because it sticks to the same Modern Warfare formula a year after Black Ops II demonstrated some actual innovation in the series was possible.
• That One Level: During the first real mission, no less. There's a point where you must use a laser-guided missile to shoot down a chopper. Unfortunately this isn't "set-and-forget" like a Stinger. Rather you must track the chopper until the rocket knows where to go, meaning you have to expose yourself and run around, trying to avoid getting blown up by the chopper's Vulcan cannons, all while carefully pointing at it with a laser (and it takes more than two shots to down, meaning you need to reload the rockets at least once to finally get rid of it, and those things don't reload quick). Even hanging out behind the armored vehicle near the steel doors doesn't provide nearly as much cover as you would really require to pull this off. Your squadmates aren't that helpful in shooting the foot soldiers on the bridge while you're busy with the chopper either.
• The Un-Twist: Finding out that Elias was the leader of the Ghosts wasn't very shocking, in large part due to the trailers, and the fact that he knew so much about the Federation the moment they attacked.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Many did not like how Infinity Ward increased the multiplayer map sizes but kept the player limit the same, which resulted in the pace of the game slowing down. Neither did they like how Ghosts did not include either the traditional CTF game mode or the rather popular Hardpoint from Black Ops 2.
  • The idea of female soldiers, specifically that women can be in special forces, has some of the more backwards fans quite upset.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Many consider the Federation to be this as the secret files make the faction more complex and interesting with several of its member states being unwilling allies and the public unrest in the conquered Latin American nations. However, this is never expanded upon or referenced in the campaign since the focus is on the team either hunting Rorke or being hunted by Rorke.
  • The first few levels of the game lean into the idea of a Call of Duty game in a post-apocalyptic setting akin to The Last of Us, but it doesn't last long before the game diverts back to old territory like base infiltration, tank battles and the like. This also means that the Ghosts being an elite stealth unit specializing in guerilla warfare is severely underutilized: while you'd expect them to use subversive tactics to cripple their stronger opponents, most missions simply boil down to overwhelming the enemy forces with brute force and advanced weaponry, just like the rest of the series.
• Too Cool to Live: Elias. He's voiced by Stephen Lang (and looks like him to a certain degree), he's the leader of the Ghosts, he explains the backstory that reveals why Rorke hates the Ghosts so much.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: There are virtually no likeable characters. Logan is a blank slate who follows his father and brother with Blind Obedience, Elias sends his children out into warzones without the slightest hint of concern for their safety and put them through Training from Hell at a very early age, Hesh is bland with terrible voice acting, Merrick is a murderous Blood Knight who executes unarmed workers, Keegan is a Flat Character whose sole burst of characterization is his execution of an unarmed soldier begging for his life, Ajax is the Token Minority who dies moments after we first meet him and is completely forgotten about another few moments later, and Kick is a Mauve Shirt with no personality whatsoever who doesn't even need to die for the game to forget to include him. Rooting for the Empire is also off the table, as the villains are all genocidal racists who want to murder all Americans for reasons never elaborated on, and of the four important ones, two show up for only one level before dying, and another is the leader of the villains, who never appears in person or is even given a name. The only one of them with any development is Rorke, who not only has a crappy motivation (he had been a member of the Ghosts, but then another Ghost was forced to drop him from some scaffolding that was going to give out under their combined weight and kill them all, so now he wants to kill them), but is also an Invincible Villain with Plot Armor so thick that even when you kill him in the finale by shooting him directly in the heart with his own Hand Cannon and leaving him to drown in a train that crashed into the water, he ultimately wins by literally coming back from the dead with no explanation five minutes later. All of the one-off playable characters are interchangeable Heroic Mimes with just as little definition as Logan, leaving perhaps only Kyra Mosely and Lieutenant Collins as even approaching likeable - and the former is killed off after five minutes. At the very least, there's always Riley.
• Unintentional Period Piece: After the Venezuelan economy collapsed in 2016 and the country spiraled into a political crisis, its depiction as a military superpower capable of attacking the United States became a lot less believable (it was never particularly believable to begin with, but this pushes it into The Onion territory).
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The United States government as a whole. The game expects players to be horrified when ODIN is hijacked and used against the US, but no mention is ever made of the fact that ODIN's very existence was a massive departure from real world policy against militarization of space. For that matter, the culmination of the game is using it on the Federation—now, to be fair, this was against a hostile military power, but it still makes the Federation's animosity seem wholly justified when American soldiers are willing to wipe what must be millions of civilians off the map.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: To say the story is rather jingoistic would be the understatement of the decade, even more so than prior games that drew similar concerns.
  • The United States are portrayed as heroic and justified at every turn despite having the equivalent of a space station orbital cannon without any explanation beyond for deterrence as to why, the Aesop of the Walker family strongly pushes the idea that it's a father's duty to prepare his son(s) for military service for the sake of the country, and the South American Federation troops are unanimously Always Chaotic Evil, civilian-slaughtering, America-hating bad guys in the most offensive way possible. Whereas prior Infinity Ward games had multiple perspectives and tried to at least show internal strife even in the Ultranationalist Russians while emphasizing very specific villains being the real cause of turmoil, the only villains worth noting in Ghosts are Rorke, a traitor to America who wants to burn everything down because of an extremely stereotypical and infamous line of "Amazonian torture techniques", and the late General Diego Almagro, who wanted to straight up kill all US citizens residing in the Federation with no reason given.
  • Even more annoyingly and disappointingly, there was room within real history to portray the conflict as more Gray-and-Grey Morality, such as having the Federation take a hard Anti-American stance due to the very real history of atrocities, backing of dictatorships and suppression of freedom by groups like the CIA across Latin America. Had this been the Federation's motivation, particularly in the wake of the Middle East's collapse and the United States once attempting to assert its dominance over them, the story could've explored the consequences of that Cold War jingoism and how it created new enemies in the modern age. America's deployment of ODIN and demonization of Latin Americans could've then be shown in a new light. Instead, the entire situation falls squarely into Protagonist-Centered Morality.
• The Woobie:
  • Specialists Mosely and Baker are astronauts who intended to go home after three months of work on the ODIN Satellite. Unfortunately while they were still in the Satellite, the ISS was attacked by Federation troops, who intended to hijack the satellite to destroy the continental United States. This forced them to send the ODIN satellite off orbit, to prevent it from doing so, which lead both of them to burn to death via atmospheric re-entry.
  • The amount of physical and emotional anguish Logan and Hesh undergo (especially Logan, and some when they were teenagers) would be absolutely impossible to realistically survive, even if you were a One-Man Army elite.

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