Why did Call of Duty's Graphics get WORSE? 

Another point: MW2019 used bright sunlight and dark shadows in a lot of its maps. It's possible that they scrapped this style to improve visibility MWII actually has sharper textures and more complex animations. The only reason it might look less appealing is because they don't shine the sun down at an angle to create lots of dark shadows on the map anymore

Cuz 2019 wasn't rushed like Mw2 (2022) and Mw3 (2023)

MW 2019 IW team was such an ambitious team. They 3D scanned buildings, real life locations, guns/weapons… safe to say we definitely do not have the same team behind MW2/MW3

Don't forget that AW's graphics where a massive step up from Ghosts.

6:20 "it looks like a ps3 game" No... no it doesn't, quit being hyperbolic.

One of the reasons a lot adore 2019, is the grittiness. Not that it was something new, but it laid out the "realism" for warfare with grittiness and atmosphere and color grading.

I don’t think it’s necessarily worst, it just went more cartoonish. I definitely miss the realistic look

4:12 lol this is such a lie. Every game after Ghosts has much higher fidelity and especially starting with IW in 2016 they are all in 4k.

You spent 10 minutes talking and you said *nothing* on why it looks worse...

I still remember in 2020 when I wanted to increase the frames IN MW19 and change the render scale, and I accidentally set it to 200% = 4K, and I was amazed by what I saw to this day I sat looking at the graphics for a long time, forgetting that I wanted to raise the frames and not lower them, and that has not happened to me again in my life EVEN IN MW2 MW3 .

You forgot to mention the jump with Advanced Warfare (2014) which is when they changed the texture workflow to PBR textures over the outdated specular workflow they were stuck with since the first COD. Case in point with textures being involved like Subsurface Scattering that made face models look amazing and even by today looks great. They pretty much stuck with this till BO4 with some maps having better art and lighting direction than others such as with some of the maps in BO3 and Infinite Warfare.

I honestly don't understand why he thinks the graphics got worse. All the developers actually did was reduce the saturation to generate more realistic colours

Black Ops Cold War, actually uses a heavily modified version of Black Ops IIII's engine (heavily modified IW 3.0) using tools and underlying technology from the IW 8.0 engine! Given it's using Black Ops II's IW 3.0 build as its base, could've been worse!

People complained about the high contrast lighting in MW19 that we now consider "better graphics" - as a result, lighting, especially character lighting has been changed in MW2 and MW3 for visibility purposes to avoid "Roze skin" situations (unless the skin is literally invisible like the Groot skin). MW2 and MW3 have a purposefully "worse" art style to keep the game playable on last gen PS4s, etc. and to avoid all the visibility complaints during MW19 and WZ1.

I would play Realism mode nonstop when MW2019 first came out because the graphics were just so insanely mind blowing to me, especially the night maps

Bro did NOT just say Cold War looks like a “PS3 game”💀🙏. Cold War looks absolutely fucking amazing man.

3:55. Bro. What? Is what you said here a joke? No graphical changes in five years. Cap. 2015 BO3's graphics, especially with lighting were absolutely INSANE. Not to mention how realistic the cutscenes looked in 2014 AW and 2017 WW2. BO4 was a downgrade from BO3 IMO, but it still looks miles ahead of Ghosts.

4:55 MW 2019 did use a new engine. They didn't upgrade IW engine like the previous years, they straight up spent 5 years rebuilding it from the ground up. While the name is IW 8.0, because it is their 8th version of their in house engine, it fundamentally isn't the same as IW 7.0 or any prior versions because those were just updates to the engine. And the reason you can't find BOCW's engine is because Treyarch had been using a modified version of the IW 3.0 engine since WAW to make their games. It derived from IW 3.0 but after that it was heavily modified and they didn't make the engine theirs, they just updated for their game's need, that's why it's called IW still. But it was not the same engine used in MW 2019. In fact, we'll be seing Treyarch use the current engine for the first time in this years COD as they announced that they'll keep their new games in a single engine to better integrate to Warzone and the COD HQ.

5:33 what? battlefield v dwarfs any cod in graphics by a landslide

solid research @ 6:30 a couple of clicks would've told you that Black Ops Cold War's engine is literally just called Black Ops Cold War Engine, it's a revamp of the Black Ops 4 Engine which is just a heavily modified IW 3.0 (Black Ops 1, 2 and 3) Engine, so same as the Modern Warfare series has their own fork for each heavily modified version, all roads stem from Quake engine, Treyarch and Infinity Ward just took different roads

Mw19 had massive resources allocated. I believe they opened a studio in Poland specifically for the reboot.

I honestly really think Cold War has a certain charm to it. I really liked it.

MW19 is colorful while MW22 is just colors with fading gray

Bo3 was an incredibly beautiful game idk what you’re yapping about

BOCW is actually one of my favorite COD games visuals-wise. It looks realistic while adopting its own visual style, and my god the colors POP in that game. The only real criticism I have in terms of visuals were the weapon animations.

I remember playing the alpha of MW2019 and very much noticing how different everything was from the previous games especially BO4 since it was the most recent game. I had played since COD 4 technically and this was the first COD to actually make almost a brand new game while it still being apart of the COD franchise. It is seriously like no other.

For Black Ops Cold War: Upgraded version of Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII's engine (heavily modified IW 3.0) using tools and underlying technology from the IW 8.0 engine (basically the same engine as COD BO1 but with improvements from IW 8.0)

0:08 the bottom right

One noteworthy aspect of COD games is their consistent use of direct sunlight and shadows, even within cloudy or dimly lit maps. This emphasis on visibility often appears to overshadow the artistic elements and beauty of the game environments. This might stem from an apparent prioritization of catering to competitive gamers, potentially at the expense of aesthetic design. This approach could potentially undervalue the significance of creating visually captivating and artistically rich game landscapes. While visibility is undoubtedly crucial for competitive gaming, finding a balance between optimizing visibility and maintaining an immersive, visually striking environment could greatly enhance the overall gaming experience for all types of players. Integrating feedback from a wider spectrum of players, including those who appreciate artistry and graphics, might lead to a more harmonious blend of functionality and visual allure in future COD games.

i think cold war and vanguard can be considered good graphically if realism isnt the goal because theyve got style, but theres no excuse for the rest of the new MWs

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see much of a difference between MW 2019 and any game after that. They all look similar graphically, just stylistically different to me.

The 2019 story mode should have had the same gameplay and graphics in multiplayer. MW MP 2019 is the same old Warzone garbage, with mediocre gameplay, bad graphics. The hyperkinetic way of running and moving makes it 100% the MP for kids..

Some corrections & expansions on the information in the video (although this was a good video overall, especially with how you emphasize the importance of good art direction in how good a game looks): - While IW 8.0 is a numerical increment over IW 7.0, the engine was essentially rebuilt from scratch over 5 years (spanning both Infinite Warfare & MW19's development cycles) to prepare it for the future. So, really, it can be argued that IW 8.0 is about as related to IW 7.0 and earlier as Unreal Engine 5 is to Unreal Engine 4. - From what I've heard, Black Ops: Cold War was built on an upgraded version of Black Ops III's engine, which was built upon BOII's engine, which was built upon BO1's engine, which was built upon the fork of the IW 3.0 engine used for World At War. Yeah, Treyarch was on a separate technological path from Infinity Ward and the main IW engine for over a decade. That's why Black Ops 4 looks worse from a tech standpoint than COD WW2 and Infinite Warfare. They were originally supposed to switch to the IW 8.0 engine after BO4, but Cold War's troubled and expedited development meant that Treyarch & Raven had to stick to tech the former was familiar with. So Cold War's technically on a heavily modified IW 3.0, but in reality, its engine is just called the Black Ops: Cold War engine. - While it didn't come up in the video, Advanced Warfare, WWII & the Modern Warfare remasters were developed on a separate engine made by Sledgehammer that, while having some legacy code from IW 5.0 from MW3, is basically a new, distinct engine. But, as you noted, they did ditch this engine for IW 8.0 when making Vanguard and now IW 9.0 for MWIII. - Jason Schreier mentioned in his piece about MWIII's development that Vanguard was also made in less than 2 years, so that would imply that, like Treyarch & Raven with Cold War, they didn't have enough time to achieve the same attention to detail & realistic art direction that Infinity Ward stunned the world with when they came out with MW19. Hopefully, Treyarch's game this year, with 4 years of development time (and IW 9.0) on their side, will be able to match or even surpass MW19 & MWII in terms of graphics & art direction while also delivering a great Treyarch COD experience. EDIT: Just realized seconds after posting this comment that another factor in the shift in art direction for games after MW19 could be a prioritization of visual clarity & visibility for the sake of competitive play. It was infamously hard to see into dark areas at times in MW19 (hence why the Roze skin became so notorious), so later games may have been trying to avoid such issues repeating themselves...

Black Ops Cold War runs on the T9 engine, a heavily upgraded version of the BO3 engine which is an upgraded version of IW 3 engine. So it's a completely different engine and probably at this point it's own. Personally I wouldn't say MW 2019 is the best looking FPS game, but it definitely holds up pretty well.

"To answer that question we must go back to cod 1". I love when people who know nothing about how video games are made, try to explain how video games are made.

To say that the IW engine is the same engine across the years is the same thing as saying Unreal 5 is the same thing as Unreal 3. LOL

Fun fact: MW2019 had a longer developed time. That’s why

This is a very detailed analysis and on a topic I too have wondered about for a while! Fantastic video Exo! And I’m not even done yet.

Cold War uses a modified version of the Black Ops 3 Engine

One thing for Cold War, It was made in a different engine, IW(It stands for infinity ward) This was not used for Cold War, It was a older version that was used for black ops 4, So honestly a glow up from that but not from 2019

i might be the only person that remembers this but there was a load of videos going around of someone doing weapon inspects from mw2019 in real life compared to the cam and i could barely tell the difference

basically they stopped exaggerating the lighting which made the game look more realistic. the thing about realism is that people like to go all out with the lighting and forget that not everything is so bright and colorful.

9:53 bruh in the right top corner you can see the box-shaped skybox when the lightning glows the sky, I think its not supposed to look like that

Sorry but I have to say it - it is getting annoying when non-technical person talk about technical stuff xd Repeating "still the same engine" is so wrong. If they can modify everything in that engine, then it does not matter how you name that engine. If you need a certain feature then you just add it. You do not need to change everything to change one thing.

Bro got cooked in the chat at the beginning💀

IMO, BO3 was the peak of COD Graphics. The colour palette was excellent, the characters stood out, and it was just fantastic.

The quality of the assets plays a huge role, not just the engine.

Black Ops: Cold War, was exactly what the community asked for, simple, three lined FPS, and they delivered

how I identify mw2 from mw3 is by the little tac stance button on the right bottom corner of the screen.

I'm glad you highlighted the fact that the engine itself is not "new" I've been saying this FOREVER on my channel! Good Video Exo!

POV: u don't know what a "Game engine" is

Just because it's still the IW engine doesn't mean they didn't fully rebuild it from the ground up, you're failing to see through branding

not just graphics, features too, like wristwatches, sprays and gestures.

I like this new style of commentary videos where you talk about the game's history or stuff about the game while showing footage of your amazing gameplay and COD footage. Very relaxing and straight to the point. I think this is a good style, you should do this from time to time since it performs well, i kniw your worried about views but yohr channel is slowly getting back to where you want it. Love your vids bro ❤❤❤❤

"I carefully looked at the game, with my eyeballs" 😂

A big reason the graphics has stagnated/regressed is after the success of Warzone 1 in 2020, they shifted focus to porting it to mobile. The atrocious touchscreen style Hulu menu UI/UX in MWII/MWIII shows where their focus moving foward is. Porting Verdansk proved less streamline than desired, so many of the changes for IW8 to IW9 were for the ease of porting. This is further evident with their recent decision to make ALL games moving forward to run IW9 engine, which is a big change, Treyarch has been using their own branched engine(a heavily modified IW 3.0 engine) since development for World At War in 2006/2007. Yes, BOCW uses a modified version of IW3.0. So in summary this is all the result of the same sentiment as "dO yOu GuYs NoT hAvE pHoNeS".

a little thing to mention is the anti aliasing,mw19 has off,smaa x1 adn smaa x2,smaa x1 had a very little impact on details blurrying a little but for the good side of removing most of the aliasing and jittering,if you went off with a 1440p resolution the jittering became a lot less since there was a lot more detail that could be rendered,now as the name says smaa x2 is applied twice,making the loss of details and blurryness bigger but most of the people didn't use it so it was fine,mw2 and mw3 have FORCED smaa x2,making the game incredibly blurry and losing a lot of details,the only thing was a sharpening tool to give the illusion of getting back details.even if mw2 had actual sharper texures the anti aliasing proprobably ruined those

I’m sorry but are we gonna ignore the fact that exo is only 20 years old? I thought he was at least 25!

Man: Yaps about the engines for ten minutes Also man: "Its not about the engine"

My theory is that by slowly reducing the graphics, when the games start faltering off they can release a boosted graphics game and use it as a selling point.

If mw 2019 had good maps and didn't make horrible decisions then the game could have been a masterpiece

Lmao at the text chat in the bottom right-hand corner, beginning of video

Great video! That's an insta-sub from me. I really miss some of the MW2019 maps (Gun Runner, Hackney Yard, most of the 2v2 maps...)

Very informative video, appreciate the detailed explanation and commentary. I didn't even know that MW19 and MW2 were on the same engine with how different everything feels, MW2-3's movement and gunplay looks and feels sluggish, weightless and unresponsive like Cold War for me and one of my biggest problems with these two games that nobody talks about is the map to player scale of the game and I can't unsee it, especially inside buildings. anyways, I'd love to see you play more MW19 TDM or search and destroy, even if it is just an excuse to talk about something else. Your '19 gameplays are some of my favourite COD videos on RU-vid :)

Just boils down to what aesthetics they were going for and what dev team was behind it I mean look at just how stark the difference was between MW2019 and Cold War, the very next release. But it made sense because CW was definitely going for more of an arcadey action game while MW2019 was really trying to double down on the "realism" element from the campaign. So the games were sorta modeled for the direction they were going for and it paid off as I wound up enjoying CW quite a lot, more than MW2 and MW3 that's for sure... and Vanguard.

Song is called :Отменяй

Gotta love that Snap On Aim at 0:15 😂

hey exo, im a viewer from ages back that stopped watching your vids after a bit because they kind of got stale and now, im back because the title caught me and the content was just so enjoyable as it was different to your usual content of just gaming without much clear focus on anything. I love this type of content i would definitely say keep it up. Your views are going back up!!

I will die on this hill, but aw looked and still looks amazing graphics wise

The worst parts of MW2 and MW3s graphics is the graininess (no, not film grain.) And the poor performance. The games have a graininess to them thats still present with the film grain turned off. And the performance, (especially in WZ) is extremely unoptimized and bad.

Most modern game engines can be made to look nearly identical to one another, when they refer to updated IW engines, they're referring to new features whether that means graphical or otherwise.

In MW2019 that's all anyone was impressed about was its graphics, though the game plays horribly since map design was poor.

We need to accept that there likely will not be a cod game with the realistic art design of mw2019 in the next thew years sadly. What also made mw2019 so great was how incredibly smooth the movement and weapon handling felt. Makes me sad they removed all the good gamemodes and dont care about the anticheat anymore because thats why its kind of unplayable now

Cold war actually runs fucking amazingly in terms of feel but its VERY prone to crashing. It's still maybe the second best new age cod

i think it makes more sense for COMP games to have "Worse Graphics" since all of the Complexity in map design and modeling makes Visibility almost impossible, graphics like in bo2 are PERFECT only upgrade the Textures but dont add so much unnecessary complexity

I still think the gritty and realistic style and art direction make it look much better than MW3. I get they’re going for a more arcade and flashy style, but it just doesn’t look as good

In hindsight I think we all would’ve appreciated mw19 more if we knew what was coming.

EXO VIDEOS ARE ALWAYS BANGERS

i really miss the old look of the graphics from cod4 to mw2. something about it i think its the soft lighting really makes it feel special. now everything is so "real" that its not a game anymore its just reality.

I wish they brought back the sunlight and dark shadows to mw2-mw3. graphically MW19 was amazing just from those two features. Hopefully trey arch does something similar to mw19 on their next game. I wish they gave more graphical flexibility to the players so that we can could choose if we want the games to look more gritty or poppy/arcadey.

The graphics seem to have downgraded over the years and i feel maybe activision is enjoying all the money that they have that they just don't care about their games anymore as long as they get money they just publish it.

Great content, I just wish we could go back to simpler times of CoD4, MW2 and BO2, top tier memories and fun!

What do you use to practice aiming?

Cold War looks nothing close to a PS3 game. And it is the best recent CoD we have.

wtf is the game at 8:21 called and how tf dose it look so real?

It's because they want to add a bunch of useless blur, fog, etc. to make it look more "realistic" when literally nobody wants that, they just want to be able to see what is in front of them.

Just because their engine carries the name IW over with each iteration, doesn't necessarily mean that those iterations are "the same engine". If they would completely rebuild their engine from scratch, nothing stops them from naming the result IW Engine with a new number at the end. You can clearly see it on MW2019. This is definitely not "the same engine" as the previous game, it just carries that established name.

I think the reason MW3 2023 looks "worse" is because people wanted a more arcady game compared to mw2019 and mw2 so they made the game more arcady. and a big part of that is working to remove some of the clutter that's on the maps. mw2019 maps where very busy and therefore harder to spot enemies on. lighting is also a very big part of making games look more realistic. but its not always good to have to "good" lighting in a arcady/competitive game. The engine might also require more computing power so they sacrifice a bit of graphics for a better game

Great video!

MW2019 and BO4 felt like they were released several years apart, but MWII AND MWIII felt like they were released within weeks.

To me graphics make no difference in games if the game is fun and playable I'll play it

Can only hope they switch back to mw19 engine for mw4

Shadows and lighting is different,primarily due to player feedback where some of the darker skins could hide in the shadows

Graphics are better now than ever but in terms of immersion and environment the games peaked in 2009-2011 imo

MW2019 is Peak. The graphics, colors, environment, effects, crisp weapon sounds and overall gameplay is just simply next level. MW3 and Warzone 2.0 and Urzikstan colors and textures are kind of dull and dead, also the operators are clearly has some weird textures like a lighty effect outline.

I think it looks worse in order to make the game more accessible to weaker PCs, they can monitize the game more if the game runs in most PCs, but that's just what I think

6:18 ya ur just yapping bro

tell me you know nothing about game development, without telling me you know nothing about game development

When cold war came out I was told by a few people the reason the graphics were the way they were besides the split of the teams was between that and the gameplay. It was made to feel like the classic black ops. Which eventually got used to.

I think the devs from MW 2019 dont want to make a CoD game, but their style of FPS game more "realistic", thats why it have a different feeling from the classic CoD, they want a specific feeling thats might not be good for a CoD game that is an arcade FPS (also thats maybe why they focused on modes like Raids/DMZ/), but ACTV wants the CoD name bc it sells (just my opinion about it) (another thing that made MW 2019 really great for me was the usage of REAL weapons, like using a real AK instead of an "Kastov")