Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare: Gaming's Big Sigh

In the aftermath of the CoD: Ghosts release I sit here wondering how it got to this point.  How did Call of Duty fall so far?  I remember a time when Call of Duty was not synonymous with 12 year old accusing people of an implied homosexual lifestyle due to their weapon choices and "360 noscope by xXx420blazeitf4ggot69Xx" would make no sense to anyone and yet these are now ubiquitous with Call of Duty.  Why?  I just finished playing CoD 4 and it got me to thinking where all of this came from and I think I have a theory.

Not all that long ago, the first game came out late 2003 for reference, CoD established it's self nicely in a niche of historical based shooters for PC.  It focused on a multi-pointed way of telling the story of a conflict from a set of detached individuals.  You jump between set individuals in separate armies and points in the conflict and it tells the story of a particular campaign or battle from multiple perspectives.  And it was wonderful.  It broke so far away from standard shooter land at the time that accolades were rained upon it.  It was one of the first  military games that didn't make you a lone-wolf super soldier, you were just some foot soldier and battling with other "just foot soldiers".  It's use of level design and sound design were not like anything else out there. 

Call of Duty 2 popped up late 2005 and was also amazing.  Tweaks were made from the first, for example, this was one of the first instances of the regenerating health mechanic, but I, and many others, vastly preferred the second one.  Tracking down health-packs is fine and all, but allowing for regenerating health allows for a more authentic battle experience, before you get pissy, I'll tell you why, it forces your head back down when you're in cover.  It does a lot more to replicate the effects of suppressing fire than a health bar can and it makes that pop out head shot on the MG that has you pinned much more satisfying than worrying about how low your health bar got.  This change allowed CoD 2 to have massive, multi-wave battles that were like nothing else out there.  The story-telling was gritty and real.  There's a particular point in CoD 2, during the soviet campaign where you're in a house and you have to defend it, and it legitimately feels hopeless, that's tough for a game to pull off.

CoD 3 was not produced by Infinity Ward nor was it for PC, nor was it regarded as a classic, nor have I ever owned an Xbox 360 so I just don't care about this one and no one else seems to either so we're skipping it.


Then, after much (2 years) of waiting since CoD 2, we were given Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

And holy shit was it awesome.  I dusted it off for a play-through, figuring I'd make a post about it, but as I was playing through it, I realized that my memory of the game did not match this new experience.  This time it was much better than I remembered.  I didn't stop, I sat down, played the whole game and didn't stop.  It turns out I had whatever the reverse of nostalgia glasses on, I figured it would be worse just because it was Call of Duty.

Someone recently said the graphics "haven't aged well", fuck you

Every mission, every interaction, every battle and level seem well thought out.  The missions have luls and low points, not every second it spent mowing down 50 guys with a turret.  There's seemless transitions, variety, changes to the formula.  The game encourages thinking quickly and reacting well to new elements that are introduced.  For example, stealth can go wrong, sure you can do the level stealthy but if you fuck it up, the game doesn't just end and say, "Try again" nope, you have the opportunity to try and take out a few of them, pick up one of their AKs and run like hell.

And it has this mission in it

 The game is also nicely difficult.  It has a unique way to keep the action going that scales really well with the difficulty.  In case you've never played CoD 4, a hint, do not stop.  The enemies are not going to stop coming, you have to move up, move forward, flank them, force them back, this is not Halo, there's not 15 guys allotted for this room, keep pushing.  This requires the player to do more than just peek out over the top of their chest high wall and pick the heads off the enemies until there are none.  This means run and gun and frag and flash and find cover, don't reload, switch to pistol, keep going, keep going, keep going.

It never stagnates, even the quiet bits are interesting and makes the battles seem even more hectic as contrast.  The mission with arguably the least shooting, save for the end, the Pripyat Hike, remains in player's hearts as one of the best in gaming history.

You know the place

It just feels like someone took their time with it and really tried to innovate and succeeded.  It was a mature game, for an audience that was growing up.  The story is gritty and real.  It's told solemnly and seriously.  It's a military game where the joking feels more like a coping mechanism than trying to make the player laugh.  The game is hard and unforgiving, it was made for the gamer that had grown up with PC shooters.  But this, alas, is where the downfall of CoD starts, CoD isn't primarily a PC game anymore.

Now, I'm going to say some provocative things in the coming paragraphs.  If you find yourself mad about them, I don't care, you're probably who I'm talking about.

A big part of the problem is consoles are for kids.  They're marketed towards kids and kids spend an awful lot of their time and their parent's money on them.  Kids have a lot of free time, they play a lot of video games, their parents just wants something that they can stick their kid in front of, that's cheap, won't break, and works with stuff they've already got.  They want a console they can hook to a TV and leave the kid in front of it.  On top of that, parents think that consoles are for kids.  They had consoles when they were kids, their kids have consoles now.  They also don't really pay too much attention to ratings, but that's less of a problem than people make it out to be.

The second part about boy kids is they brag, a lot, a fucking lot, so fucking much it's all they ever talk about and peer pressure is a big deal in middle school.  And they think that it's soo cool that they are so good at the multiplayer of this mature game that's for "older kids"and how much shit they talk to other players while they're going 19:1 and the one is only from this noob who used a sniper rifle for it's intended purpose, and how much they make other people cry about how bad they are.  Then it spreads, and spreads, and spreads.  What do you think the average parent is going to do when their 11 year old son constantly whines about not having this game all his friends have, A. Explain to little Bobby that the game is just a fad and has a ranking system designed to keep people playing it, especially kids who have not had exposure to such an addictive piece of media and he'll be better off if he learned a second language while he's young, or go outside or something.  OR, do you think B. Just buy the kid the game so he'll shut up?  As a result, the kid goes online and as any who's spent 15 seconds in a youtube comment section, anonymity breeds assholes, he hears his friends spraying vitriol and they pick it up as well.

But blaming the kids is too easy and that's not the only reason why CoD is laughable these days.  Fanboys have also played their part.  It's odd that now everyone claims that CoD is a "multiplayer" game and "Why do you care about the campaign, people only play it for the achievements." which is and odd thing to be said about a game that, up until extremely recently, has been a single player focused game.  It's frustrating that a game's multiplayer is used an excuse for lazy game design and lack of innovation.  Hell, even 4 is focused on the campaign, the multi-player made a few innovations, like giving players a little bit of customization options and some kill-streak rewards, but it was pretty par for the course.  For the record, Halo 2 popularized a 1-50 online ranking system as well at the matchmaking mechanic based upon those rankings, not CoD.  But, fanboys do love to throw money at things.

I know a lot of people would disagree with me, but CoD 4 is the peak of the hill, it's from this point on things start the downward spiral.

CoD: World at War was the first casualty.  For the first time in the CoD franchise, the campaign was secondary on purpose.  The game was criticized for seeming like a Vietnam mod for CoD 4 with a very short, oddly told single player campaign but boasting a slew of new multiplayer modes and shit.

CoD: Modern Warfare 2 was better than WaW, with the campaign having some fun moments but something strange was happening along with it.  MW2's campaign had this strange feeling of being on rails a lot.  There's a lot of vehicle sections, and while they look cool, it's not an action movie, it's Call of Duty.  It used to be about a day in the life of a foot soldier and now it's heading in the direction of super solider.  I still quite enjoyed the campaign, but it's not CoD 4.

CoD: Black Ops is where the plot starts to go batshit insane.  If you played the single player campaign on this game and didn't come out confused and oddly at the same time just bored, you are not alone my friend.  It's on rails at this point.  The story mode isn't even connected, it's disjointed memories.  CoD characters used to be expendable.  In fact, it's kind of something that happens a lot, the character you're playing often gets killed at the end of their leg of the story, it's humbling an poignant, reenforces that idea that you were human the whole time.  The character is REMEMBERING these missions, of course he's fucking alive, why not make me invincible during the rail shooting sections, I obviously make it through.  Sorry, the story of Blops 1 really pissed me off.  But do you know what had a shit load of time spent on it?  You guessed it, the fucking multiplayer.

I'm not doing the rest because they're awful, Frankenstein monsters of cookie cutter shapes they pulled from previous, better CoD games.  Why they even include single player anymore is beyond me.  They've stopped caring, completely.  But the fanboys who cry, "But the multiplayer" and the spoiled little shits who cuss you out for using the right situational weapon will still buy it because it's seriously the best thing they've played, and that's really sad.  It's even more sad because the multiplayer is identical in every game.  There's, 20 new items, 10 new tiny maps and one new gametype and the most popular 15 items, 5 maps and the most popular multiplayer game type is carried over and they repeat.  I did a post about how CoD multiplayer used to have a spawn system like Team Fortress has so that there's front lines and your team mates are actually important and you could set up flanking maneuvers and push the lines back and how now it's circles with random spawn points.  So it's getting worse, and yet still keeps getting bought.

If you really want to see the whole story of CoD getting worse, just take a look at how the most hateful, jaded, angry and nostalgic gamers of all, us PC gamers, have rated it.

All scores and nifty number boxes come from Metacritic.com

And if you take a look at our understanding and loving users who independently rated it you'll see much the same

All scores and nifty number circles come from Metacritic.com

If just slightly more extreme... slightly...

And it just keeps going, and going and going.  Researching this post, I was also struck by right about the time Modern Warfare 2 dropped, the awards at the end of the wiki articles stopped being "Game of the Year", "Best Action Game" and "Best Sound Design" and became "Best 360 game", "Best Shooter: Reader's Choice", and then they just stopped getting awards.

Can Infinity Ward come back?  Yes.  There's proof in spades that, one, they can make good games and two, people want realistic military shooters with mature stories.  At some point they started pandering to the teens and twats because it made them money, but it can't last forever, it never does. 

So they can come back, but will they?  Doubtful.  The effort isn't there, the passion is gone.  It's become a platform for spec ops super soldiers and action movie heros with the ethos of a human propaganda poster and the pathos of a cinder block.  Do you remember the nuke and the aftermath from Call of Duty 4?  Do you remember coldly shooting dozens of enemies on a shitty black and white TV in an AC130?  Do you remember the ending on the bridge?  Do you remember the airport mission from Call of Duty: MW2?  Those moments mattered, it was real, it was war, you're supposed to lose yourself in the game and then realize later, what the hell was I doing?  For example, you didn't have to shoot a single person in the airport, but you did.  But now, it's so fake, why the hell should I invest anything in these characters?  They don't seem human, they're caricatures of soldiers, so blindly patriotic and over the top they start to parody themselves. 


I hope you make it back Call of Duty, I really do.