I'll be the first to admit that I have an unfortunate habit of criticizing the Call of Duty series because it's an easy series to pick on and criticizing something that so many people love gives the little hipster inside me a tiny bit of joy and makes me feel a little smarter.
That being said, I have to admit that I really, really love the Modern Warfare trilogy. I picked up the first one with everyone else right around the time Halo 3's multiplayer scene was growing a little stale, and I loved everything about it (except the unforgivable sin of infinite enemies.) For months, me and my buddies would hop back and forth from Halo 3 to Modern Warfare, and for that 2008-2009 gaming season I got a real vision of what non MMO online multiplayer could like at its best.
In this sense, I think it's important for everyone who takes gaming seriously, if that's not a contradiction of terms, to recognize both the more subjective but certainly present goodness of the Modern Warfare series, and also the undeniable, unfortunately homogenizing, but nonetheless critical influence of the series.
And let's be frank, you can rip on the CoD series as much as you want, but it's damn good storytelling.
Granted, it's not A Song of Ice and Fire or Mass Effect, but I can't think of too many series that did such a good job of creating an emotionally evocative experience. Yes, it's bland. Yes, it has an unfortunate tendency toward, "kill the brown people" and "kill the guys with accents", but when you consider both the geo-political situation of the world and the constraints of storytelling in modern, quasi-realistic war narratives, the most plausible situations do tend to involve military conflicts with middle eastern terrorists and eastern European military entities both legitimate and illegitimate.
That block being put aside, the shifting perspectives which the games utilize across the series is incredibly helpful in creating a world of believable characters. By the end of MW3, you have a solid idea of who and what most of the characters are, which is fairly surprising since most of those characters spend a solid amount of time being silent as the player-character.
Furthermore, in a narrative step above and beyond most military shooters, the cunning, ruthlessness, intelligence and fundamentally evil nature of the villains is consistently conveyed through seeing the cunning, ruthlessness, intelligence and fundamental evil of those villains in first person. You know that Shepherd is evil because you see and feel him betray you and Ghost before he lights you fire to fulfill his own ruthless ends. You know that Makarov is clever because in first person you are led to believe, and until the last moment do believe, that he really doesn't know what's up. Then, it turns out that he did the whole time and you witness the complete failure of your mission, once more in first person and living color.
Returning to my earlier point about emotional effectiveness, I have a simple question to ask. Who among you wasn't totally pumped to go fuck up Russia at the end of MW2? That's what I thought.
Yes, MW does achieve this effectiveness by falling back on the baser parts of the patriotic instincts, but if war-based fiction is not the proper scenario for falling back into feelings of patriotism, what really is?
Furthermore, means aside, this is a series that manages, with silent protagonists, to immerse the player in the emotional experiences of its characters. Furthermore, it seems in a sense to borrow from the overblown tactics of Romantic opera in doing so. By that I mean that the Modern Warfare series seems to realize, like Romantic opera, that there's a time to curbstomp all notions of subtlety and just go for it, tell your story with vigor and bravado.
This, Modern Warfare manages better than any other series in gaming.
From the devastating moment in the first game when the bomb goes up and your only recourse is to crawl around a devastated wasteland to the smug satisfaction at the end of MW3 as Makarov hangs from a rope and Price lights up a cigar, the Modern Warfare series does an excellent job of creating and fulfilling desires in a prioritized way, which is really the fundamental goal of all entertainment media.
Of course, one can't talk about CoD without talking about gameplay, and there's so much to say here that I think ultimately, there isn't that much to say.
Who here doesn't remember that fucking ferris wheel on veteran, or storming the gulag, or that blessed moment at the end of the trilogy when you finally get to be the fucker in the bulletproof suit? Modern Warfare and its much-criticized linear, scripted gameplay are perhaps this generation's best counter-example to the open world trend in gaming.
I love Elder Scrolls even more than the average bear, (no, seriously, I have something like 3,500 hours plugged into that series) but the Modern Warfare series does an amazing job of saying, "No, we made the game for you to play it this way," and making that experience fun and memorable.
I remember the ferris wheel. I remember the nuke blowing up in space. I remember watching the Eiffel tower fall, and all of those were carefully crafted, well-made, and above all else fun.
I guess the closest thing I have to a thesis here is that, for all the shit they get, Call of Duty games do, in a certain sense, fundamentally deserve the praise and the crazy sales numbers they attract. These are good games, carefully crafted and, at the end of the day, fundamentally enjoyable. The best games? No, but they are damn good.
That being said, I have to admit that I really, really love the Modern Warfare trilogy. I picked up the first one with everyone else right around the time Halo 3's multiplayer scene was growing a little stale, and I loved everything about it (except the unforgivable sin of infinite enemies.) For months, me and my buddies would hop back and forth from Halo 3 to Modern Warfare, and for that 2008-2009 gaming season I got a real vision of what non MMO online multiplayer could like at its best.
In this sense, I think it's important for everyone who takes gaming seriously, if that's not a contradiction of terms, to recognize both the more subjective but certainly present goodness of the Modern Warfare series, and also the undeniable, unfortunately homogenizing, but nonetheless critical influence of the series.
And let's be frank, you can rip on the CoD series as much as you want, but it's damn good storytelling.
Granted, it's not A Song of Ice and Fire or Mass Effect, but I can't think of too many series that did such a good job of creating an emotionally evocative experience. Yes, it's bland. Yes, it has an unfortunate tendency toward, "kill the brown people" and "kill the guys with accents", but when you consider both the geo-political situation of the world and the constraints of storytelling in modern, quasi-realistic war narratives, the most plausible situations do tend to involve military conflicts with middle eastern terrorists and eastern European military entities both legitimate and illegitimate.
That block being put aside, the shifting perspectives which the games utilize across the series is incredibly helpful in creating a world of believable characters. By the end of MW3, you have a solid idea of who and what most of the characters are, which is fairly surprising since most of those characters spend a solid amount of time being silent as the player-character.
Furthermore, in a narrative step above and beyond most military shooters, the cunning, ruthlessness, intelligence and fundamentally evil nature of the villains is consistently conveyed through seeing the cunning, ruthlessness, intelligence and fundamental evil of those villains in first person. You know that Shepherd is evil because you see and feel him betray you and Ghost before he lights you fire to fulfill his own ruthless ends. You know that Makarov is clever because in first person you are led to believe, and until the last moment do believe, that he really doesn't know what's up. Then, it turns out that he did the whole time and you witness the complete failure of your mission, once more in first person and living color.
Returning to my earlier point about emotional effectiveness, I have a simple question to ask. Who among you wasn't totally pumped to go fuck up Russia at the end of MW2? That's what I thought.
Yes, MW does achieve this effectiveness by falling back on the baser parts of the patriotic instincts, but if war-based fiction is not the proper scenario for falling back into feelings of patriotism, what really is?
Furthermore, means aside, this is a series that manages, with silent protagonists, to immerse the player in the emotional experiences of its characters. Furthermore, it seems in a sense to borrow from the overblown tactics of Romantic opera in doing so. By that I mean that the Modern Warfare series seems to realize, like Romantic opera, that there's a time to curbstomp all notions of subtlety and just go for it, tell your story with vigor and bravado.
This, Modern Warfare manages better than any other series in gaming.
From the devastating moment in the first game when the bomb goes up and your only recourse is to crawl around a devastated wasteland to the smug satisfaction at the end of MW3 as Makarov hangs from a rope and Price lights up a cigar, the Modern Warfare series does an excellent job of creating and fulfilling desires in a prioritized way, which is really the fundamental goal of all entertainment media.
Of course, one can't talk about CoD without talking about gameplay, and there's so much to say here that I think ultimately, there isn't that much to say.
Who here doesn't remember that fucking ferris wheel on veteran, or storming the gulag, or that blessed moment at the end of the trilogy when you finally get to be the fucker in the bulletproof suit? Modern Warfare and its much-criticized linear, scripted gameplay are perhaps this generation's best counter-example to the open world trend in gaming.
I love Elder Scrolls even more than the average bear, (no, seriously, I have something like 3,500 hours plugged into that series) but the Modern Warfare series does an amazing job of saying, "No, we made the game for you to play it this way," and making that experience fun and memorable.
I remember the ferris wheel. I remember the nuke blowing up in space. I remember watching the Eiffel tower fall, and all of those were carefully crafted, well-made, and above all else fun.
I guess the closest thing I have to a thesis here is that, for all the shit they get, Call of Duty games do, in a certain sense, fundamentally deserve the praise and the crazy sales numbers they attract. These are good games, carefully crafted and, at the end of the day, fundamentally enjoyable. The best games? No, but they are damn good.
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