Famed first-person shooter Call of Duty is one of gaming's longest-running and most consistent franchises out there. With almost 20 years of non-stop releases, it's a series that has evolved a lot since its WWII days, but there's still a lot from the start of the series that remains the same. For starters, each Call of Duty has incredibly similar cover art, and most of the time, it doesn't really give the player any idea what the game is actually about other than it has guns. But one fan tried to create a narrative with the box arts.
Call of Duty fans are quite creative, which is rather surprising given the linearity of the shooter series. Although the series has gone from WWII all the way to the stars, it's a pretty formulaic series meant to appeal to as many people as it possibly can through all of its tried and true modes. It's hard to reflect that on the game's cover arts, so the series has largely fallen back on a generic soldier standing in a blank space with a gun.
Reddit user Grape_Hot posted a picture on Reddit trying to create a cohesive narrative between the Call of Duty cover arts. It seems likely that given rumors suggest Call of Duty 2021 will return to WWII that the covers will continue to carry this generic trend of blank-faced soldiers in rather uninteresting spaces, such as the ones seen in the Reddit post. The narrative consists of a soldier traveling through these vapid environments before the Black Ops series sees them sitting down, thinking, and then running out of thoughts. It's a pretty funny way of connecting all of the covers since they're largely completely disconnected from the actual games.
Whether or not Activision keeps the cover arts for the franchise relatively simple to ensure costs for producing them remain low is unclear, but it's likely a factor. Given all of the Call of Duty games, it seems likely that Activision will have to shake up the art eventually, as there are only so many feasible positions a soldier can be put in before it starts to repeat.
Either way, it's likely this year's entry and many more after will continue this trend. If Activision ever ends up taking some time away from Call of Duty, perhaps there's a chance the publisher will attempt to change up the traditional cover art to rebrand the series and give it a new identity. As of right now, though, it doesn't look like that's going to happen anytime soon.
Source: Grape_Hot/Reddit