By Anders Carlson

In today’s gaming market, first and third person shooters reign supreme. In particular, two franchises; Call of Duty and Battlefield, make huge sales each year. And I’m here to decide which one is best, or maybe just list their positives and negatives.

Call of Duty: Call of Duty has received a bad rap the last couple games for “being the same game but with new maps and guns”, glorified DLC. I feel that new CoDs offers more to the player than just maps and different guns. The multiplayer in CoD games has always been the benchmark for the FPS genre. Fast paced, easy to learn and not prone to lag, it has gained a large amount if players. People also cite the lack of graphical improvement went compared to Battlefield, but Call of Duty has always been made for consoles, so high end graphics are not really attainable on 5 year old hardware. This means that any computer can run most Call of Duty games. In the end, Call of Duty is a fun, easy to play, but very limited FPS.

Battlefield: One thing you can say is that it is expansive, the average Battlefield map is twice as large as a Call of Duty map. It is also more ambitious, featuring usable fighter jets, helicopters, tanks and other vehicles. Up to 32 players are common place. This makes Battlefield a much more varied game to play, with air battles, tank charges and large scale infantry fights all happening on the same map. Battlefield also uses the Frostbite Engine, which produces some of the best graphics in video games however, this also limits the game. I believe that the FPS genre is best played on a PC, and even my PC, which can run most games at the maximum setting, cannot run Battlefield 4 since the graphics card is out of date. It is 1-2 years old, which in terms of a computer is not old at all. Even Battlefield 3, which is 2 years old, I can only run at medium settings. This means that to be able to run it, you really need a high grade computer, which most people don’t have. But when it does run, it is a incredible game.

These two games are extremely different in their appeal, and choosing between them is really up to your needs. Do you want your FPS to be quick, easy and basic, or grand, open and varied? It really is up to you.