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Gaming

Call of Duty Classic Ports Slammed for Lazy Technical Work on PS5

Emily Chen 0 comments 4 min read
Call of Duty Classic Ports Slammed for Lazy Technical Work on PS5

Activision's decision to bring Call of Duty: Black Ops 1 and 2 to PlayStation 4 and PS5 came with sticker shock, and now technical analysis reveals the ports may not justify their asking price.

Digital Foundry took a close look at the original 2010 Black Ops on PS5 and found the work disappointing. The port runs at 1080p resolution rather than 4K, a notable shortfall for a 16-year-old game now running on far more powerful hardware than the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 it originally targeted. The situation worsens when you consider the absence of anti-aliasing and a frame rate capped at 60Hz.

"A 1080p60 presentation would be potentially acceptable for the PS4 version, but for a brand new PS5 conversion, it's disappointingly poor and well below what the hardware is capable of," Digital Foundry said. The analysis went further, noting that Activision even preserved graphical shortcomings from the original release, including poor shadow quality that made sense in 2010 but has no excuse in 2024 with substantially more processing power available.

"For a native PS5 title and a somewhat high-profile port, this is a deeply odd state of affairs," the outlet concluded.

The PlayStation versions do have one advantage over their Xbox counterparts. The same games available through backwards compatibility on Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One are stuck at the original Xbox 360 resolution of 608p with no enhancements whatsoever.

Pricing presents another problem. Both games cost $40 each, with separate season passes at $29.99 apiece. A customer wanting the full experience across both titles and all DLC would spend $140 on decades-old software.

PlayStation Plus subscribers do get relief through an August 6 promotion. Members pay $20 per game and $9 per season pass, bringing the total for both complete packages to $58. Without that discount window, the value proposition becomes harder to defend.

Author Emily Chen: "Activision's taking a swing-and-a-miss here, charging premium prices for ports that look like they spent five minutes in the modernization shop."

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