Modern Woefare

Not my best pun

I'll admit, I've been something of a lax friend towards my old pal Call of Duty lately. The franchise was a staunch companion of my youth, the hours me and my dad spent playing Spec-ops across Modern Warfare 2 are cherished in my heart. But I've not called. Ever since Modern Warfare 3 I've treated the franchise like the overpriced vaguely eastern-European landlord constantly hounding me every year for '$60' rent in order to jump aboard the next iteration of his franchise. ($70 nowadays!) In the times when I relent, typically around another's house or during trial play events, I'm always impressed by how perfectly refined the COD gameplay has become, which makes it all the sadder that I can't justify forking out the funds for a franchise that has increasingly favoured it's online features over the once flagship campaigns which got everyone talking, like the action-movie 'Fast and Furious's of the gaming world. (You'll get my £70 when you fix your damn campaign!)

I rolled my eyes hard when they ran out of steam and decided to trace their own steps in the sand by literally remaking Modern Warfare, their most successful game, although from all reports the effort that went into that first one was truly astounding! That is to say, the effort that went into the actual Modern Warfare remake, not the remaster for the original which released a stone's throw away. (God, Activision make this franchise so bloody confusing to follow.) I was rather intrigued by the way the game seemed to tell us more about the character's we loved, less like it was replacing the originals and more just recontextualing those action movie originals with a more sedate, yet differently intense modern military thriller. (With a light bit of rewriting real world war crimes thrown in there for good measure.) There really wasn't any sadly gunning for old classic story beats, which made the overlapping naming convention utterly pointless, but there we are.

Modern Warfare 2 was not quite as interesting on the campaign front, but it tried to expand out what the first game had established and provided enough campaign thrills to be interesting. See that's the thing about Call of Duty Campaigns, even when the writing isn't exactly top-notch- the mission design is the one thing they can always fall back on. They're fun and cinematic and old school in a world of games constantly falling for the 'open world' trap without any real idea of how to make open worlds that are fun to navigate. COD's tighter mission based layout feels appropriate and effective, and allows for some truly memorable little campaigns like the 'Cold War' story with it's slight multiple path variations. It's good that Call of Duty has some staunch fundamentals it can always rely on- huh? Oh, they got rid of the linear mission design, didn't they?

It's hard to really sum up everything that the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 campaign did wrong in order to earn their historic 4 from IGN, without just throwing away the list of carefully curated tallies and just saying screw it- they did EVERYTHING wrong! Giving players early access to only the campaign of Modern Warfare 3 should have been a warning sign that this was something the team wanted to slip out as quietly as possible, but their ploy didn't work. Fans played it, and they are pissed. Reactions are so bad that I've heard some wonder if MW3's campaign isn't somehow worse than Black Ops 4's. Black Ops 4 didn't have a campaign, they forgot to make one. Even 'Vanguard' is somehow winning 20-20 wistful memories despite it's awful 'momentum-free anthology dependent' campaign, gimmicky 'modern-Battlefield' style level structure and Lord of the Ring's Merry as a Nazi. (Seriously. I couldn't stop laughing.) What did MW3 do so bad to make those the good old days?

When the announcement was first made that COD was going 'open world' in it's mission layout, there was nary a single unraised brow from the peanut gallery. No one believed it would be a good idea. And now that it's here- wow it's even worse than we could have imagined! These missions, 'open combat' as they're known, basically chalk up as Infinity Ward's attempt to fill space. They are all maps taken from Warzone, thrown into the game with the most pathetically basic objectives ever (go here pick this up then extract) strung together by high quality but dissonant cutscenes stringer together by a lethargic narrative. It's pathetically no effort, requiring no assets, no design, nothing but voice over dialogue justifying the adventure. All those carefully designed globetrotting antics are thrown out for something a modder could have slapped together in a week. The few actual narrative missions tossed in there inbetween aren't enough to mount anything near the same level of cinematic excellence this franchise is used to. (Their version of 'No Russian' is pretty pathetic.)

Speaking of- I don't know what happened but somewhere along the line it seems the new Modern Warfare games gave up on telling their own much more grounded and intense narrative and have now begun chasing after the big set piece moments of Modern Warfare 2 and 3 like a lost child, resulting in the stumbling mess which is the Modern Warfare 3 Remake narrative. Full to the brim of half-hearted reimaginations of classic video games scenes that are so rushed and badly executed it fills like the writers (if indeed this mess had any writers) are simply trying to tick down as many checkmarks as they could to try and bring this in line with the original trilogy. The MacTavish key scene was almost hilarious in how stupid it is, I've already spat at their idea for No Russian, (You can tell someone only put thought in the planning stages of the narrative, but wasn't there to help design an actual playable mission which wasn't two minutes long.) but I think it's Shepard's fare which got the worst glow up. They traded an incredible two man assault cinematic climax against Shepard's rogue faction resulting in a three way fist fight and the knife throw of destiny- with a backroom silencer. In an end-credits cutscene. Pretty weak for a TV show, pathetic for a video game.

But you know what, I'm not even out of steam yet! Sure, the Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer has yet to drop (And I couldn't care less about it anyway) but can we just stop and talk about the logistics of this game for a minute? A maximum 213GB install size, are you stupid? In what world does this skeleton of a game require more than a fifth of total storage? It's not like COD games are the biggest in the industry in terms of content, so why in the hell are they always the biggest to download? I may be talking out my ass here, but this smells like embarrassingly bad optimisation choices. I remember back in the day they used to claim the game's audio files came unencrypted in order to not comprise on the all-important sound front, but that was back when these games clocked in at the 80GB mark, what is going on now? Did someone record themselves reading the entirety of War and Peace and leave it in the files? And no, the fact the game can be downloaded in parts is not a remedy, it's a salve to the wound. Heck, the campaign somehow clocks in at something close to 40GB some insane how, despite consisting of only cutscenes and recycled maps. 

I didn't think it was possible to be disappointed by a Call of Duty game, a franchise for which I suspect most expect nothing. But this is a disgrace to the art of design, of writing, of digital execution, of marketing price points. A campaign like this can only be made by a team who either got slapped together at gunpoint to pull this off in under two months, or a cabal of developers who've just had enough of creating altogether and what to demonstrate how absolutely done with their career paths they are- because those are the only extremes that would justify this assault on taste. And yes, I am angry with Call of Duty. Angry because I know where this leads to. I know what is next for the industry. I know that others are going to see this and figure they can get away with screwing single player fans because they 'don't matter' and I know DICE is seeing all this and believing themselves relieved of all the rightful condemnation they get for abandoning narratives altogether after Battlefield 4.