Retrospective: Call of Duty Article

Where on Earth has this series' heart gone? Watch the intro to Call of Duty 1 and the Modern Warfare 2 launch trailer and you'll probably get where I'm coming from.

The heart went where the money was. (and possibly Activision had something to do with it)

I'm trying to think of two war films to compare the first and latest COD games to, but right now can't. But CoD tried to accurately portray war as grim, it tried to at least be a little accurate. MW2 is simply the latest big budget blockbuster action film.

CoD makes you glad you are not a soldier
MW makes you want to be a soldier

And most importantly one style of games sells a lot better than the other.

Nicely put FooAtari. Hopefully, and this is a BIG hopefully, EA's potential reboot of MOH will return to actually making the player almost sad about the violence that's occurring around them, and not a willing, hollering participant. MW1 managed a few emotional sequences but in no way did it seem to match the mundane horror of war that the early games managed to portray WHILST being bloody good shooters. A strange balance, but it worked nonetheless.

Yeah, well put FooAtari.

I only started COD on 2 when I got a 360 but always heard good things of the original from people. Looking forward to the re-release to find out for myself.

Er, MW1 didn't make me want to be a soldier at all. Risking your life and delaying your rescue in order to pull a fellow soldier out of a crashed and burning helicopter only to lose your life 60 seconds later in a nuclear explosion...that whole sequence gave me greater pause than anything else in the COD series. That didn't glorify war at all. The grim and gutwrenching reality of your inevitable death slowly sinks in as you stumble around and collapse in a children's playground in Iraq, thousands of miles from home. Not exactly a great recruiting tool for the US Army, ya know?

Just because IW kicked the Hollywood factor up a few notches doesn't mean the games are lacking heart.

Prepare yourself for a long one.

How cringingly wrong can a retrospective be? For a start - the game wasn't bloodless. Sure, there wasn't decapitations etc but there certainly were puffs of bloody impacts when someone got hit in much the same way as Band of Brothers depicts. One look at the linked video reveals that. Frankly, that's a triviality and I only wish to correct it due to the fact the bloodless side of the combat is something mentioned so often in the article.

The more important point is this: Call of Duty hasn't changed in the way you describe. For every death-defying leap on a helicopter in Modern Warfare there is single-handedly manning an 88 on Pegasus Bridge as the timer ticks down in the original COD. For every slaughter of charging peasants in COD, there is a nuclear blast in Modern Warfare.

The game is just as bombastic now as it always has been. The tone may have changed but the less grandstanding missions in Modern Warfare (such as storming the TV station or War Pig) are as realistic a depiction of modern war, on the ground, fighting in the streets of Baghdad as Call of Duty was a realistic depiction of the Normandy landings or Stalingrad or Pavlov's House.

More importantly - and with the new game coming out, worth discussion - is that if you wish to draw the conclusion that war isn't that great from the games you certainly can. There's enough waste and death and destruction to do so. That conclusion, however, has more to do with what you're bringing to the table than the designer's intention.

For example,for me, the mission playing as a gun operator onboard the AC-130 Spectre gunship was a real, palpable shock. The feeling of utter detachment, the sensation that it really would feel like this in real life, just watching distantly on a monitor as you flatten whole towns, with the fellow observers joking about it... to my mind, that made a point, about densensitisation and the nature of modern war. That's because I took my mamby-pamby, pink, commie liberal leanings to the game and placed what I was doing in that context of what I thought already.

The designers have openly stated that they included this mission because they thought "it was cool."

In the same way, Call of Duty can reinforce your feelings about the Second World War but I am completely convinced that IW's design decisions were guided by what they thought was cool, as much then as it is now. The reality of Pegasus Bridge is that one man was shot in the early assault, a tank was blown up and then everyone stood around under intermittent sniper fire until the relief turned up (cue bag pipes etc). Compare that to the mission in COD and it's clear that IW took what was a well-orchestrated and well executed historical coup de main and tweaked it until it was cool.

Ultimately, Call of Duty plagarises not the conflicts it depicts but the films of those conflicts. The attack on Stalingrad is Enemy At The Gates, Brecourt Manor is Band of Brothers. The pop culture depiction of modern war has an altogether different tone. Its rock music and helicopters and Michael Bay explosions. Its trash talking white trash marines in humvees. The thinking behind dumping two German divisions on Pegasus Bridge to make it cool is precisely the same as depicting the attack on Baghdad (in all but name) and capping it with a nuclear explosion. A nuke is a great way to provide narrative closure, after all, and if there's one thing that the real war in Iraq lacks, its a definitive end, but you can't have the game just stop halfway through and become endless procedurally generated humvee patrols in a hostile city.

The "heart" of the games hasn't changed remotely. They're as anti-war as you want them to be.

You know what HugeXbox360Fan , I totally forgot about that part of the game. It was a pretty dire moment. But it didn't set the tone of the game for me. What I remember for the most part is the Hollywood factor, it's style felt like an action movie rather than a realistic portrayal of war.

I'm not saying that CoD was realistic, just that IW made more of an effort in that regard than with any of the other games. As was pointed out in the article, you can even see that from the launch trailers of both games. Maybe I'm being to kind to IW but I'm inclined to think Activision may have played a large role in the change of direction for the games

@jachap

amazing, amazing post

@jachap

What HugeXbox360Fan said - fantastic post, great points and a thoroughly enjoyable read!
I enjoyed it more than these two retrospective articles combined, surprisingly...

What I liked in MW1 was the SAS missions. Not because the Marine missions were bad, but because they felt wrong. The marine missions felt like CoD missions in the WW2 setting. Rushing an overwhelming enemy, lobbing grenades like a crazy person felt awesome in France, less so in the modern day middeleast.

I agree with HugeXbox360Fan. There's plenty of really memorable and moving scenes in MW1, from the desolate emptiness of Chernobyl to the shoot-out on the bridge at the end. I think IW did a good job of injecting heart into the game, with conflict as it is fought these days.
There hasn't been a conflict on the scale of WW2 since and I don't think there's been that sort of desperation (at least not from a western viewpoint). Wars haven't been fought with that "over-the-top" mentality of trench warfare. Wars are rarely fought these days with huge battles between opponents of equal size.It's all covert and guerilla.
I don't think the heart of CoD has changed, just the heart of warfare.

Helping it all was the fact that I'd watched a lot of Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan around the time I was playing CoD and CoD:UO; and that just added to the whole feeling of WW2 being an utterly grim and glamourless experience and just made the game feel a lot more real to me.
The whole airport and civilian section of MW2 says to me that IW are still trying to convey the grimness of war. As developers they've always delivered solid shooters with a great atmosphere and I'd hope that they wouldn't feel the need to do it just for a cheap headline. If there's any game that doesn't need the publicity it's MW2.

I totally agree about the tone. I'd prefer it if Modern Warfare 2 took more inspiration from Generation Kill than from Bond Movies.

I got the orginal COD when everyone refered to it as Call of Duty, and own all the main games and expansions after that, Im a proper Vet, still install the orginal and united offensive and play them almost yearly. They are great piece of gameplay and have really draw me in each time i play.

Where has the heart gone? Into a lot of Hollywood bank accounts, that's where. It wasn't heart, it was a thin vineer of historical accuracy covering thick slabs of sentimentality with a heart of "let's make some money off of this WW2 rememberance spirit going down right now!!" And that was Spielberg and Tom Hanks and some other Hollywood bigshots. Then IW came along, saw their success and decided to profit off of that. Then a lot of other game companies profited off the succes of Call Of Duty and it became the most overdone setting for a game. So IW decided to switch it up and went for the second most overdone setting for a game: modern/near future warfare.

Heart? Don't make laugh..

@jachap

I agree. IW "at heart" have always been militaristic, gun-loving types but the fact the tone has changed is worthy of mention. At no point in Modern Warfare did I ever feel that war was a bad thing. If they were serious about portraying the grisly realities of war, how about having our character's legs blown off by an IED? How about a closing shot of troops who've lost limbs in the current conflict? That at least would make players sit up and think. But no, all we get our ads scoffing at FAGS and dreary M&S raps. The frat boys have won.

japchap pretty much nailed it.

Good post, jachap.

Modern Warfare is a very subtle satirisation of war. Its story is far more engaging and thoughtful than of most other war games.

World at War was a grim and brutal experience. It showed the horror of WW2 a lot better than COD 1 and 2. Even the main menu music was depressing! And who can forget the start of the Soviet campaign?

Can anyone imagine IW having 50 Cent in CoD1?

Jachap says that the games are based on the silver or small screen representations of war. That is true, but those adaptations were in turn informed by the subject matter at hand. World War 2 films post-Spielberg (maybe post-Vietnam?) turned into such bleak, sombre tributes to fallen heroes because the scope of the war and the human stories involved were finally captured on film. It's World War 2 that is so tragic. By contrast, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were complete mismatches. The majority of soldiers who went to these places were already soldiers, not men who were conscripted by law to die for their country. The numbers that died then and the firepower they faced vastly outweighs what our modern armies have to face. Much of the humanitarian tragedy was experienced by the civilians of Iraq and Afghanistan, those whose families were killed simply because they were at home when the sky rained artillery shells. Saving Private Ryan did well at the box office though; IW giving something like the Gaza Strip such a harrowing tale to tell would require them to tell the story from the side of the Palestinians as Israeli tanks roll in, perhaps with you controlling a civilian and running through the ravaged, corpse ridden streets as white phosphorous coats the sky and sears at your flesh.

Representing the sadness and grief felt by those who were, in many cases, just living in their homeland, would be far more controversial than getting some towelheads to run into a public place and shoot at innocents.

What a post.

High-five, Hand of Beadle!

Oh.

/ tips hat to HandOfBeadle

Having played half of the Modern Warfare 2's single player campaign, I absolutely agree with this article. There's no soul in this IW games anymore.

Perhaps why, so far, I preferred World at War.

The MW games are great fun, but the original ones were an amazing experience.

Who can forget defending Pegasus Bridge? The orchestral swells, the dying comrades, the stirring speech at the end.

After the battle of Stalingrad, when we reached the top of the capital, I fired my gun into the air and shouted - at nothing. Ridculously sad, I know, but that moment moved me more than any other moment in a game, aside from when I had to leave Paul in Deus Ex.

Great stuff - screw it, I'm gonna crank it out now. Telling, perhaps, that I've played it at least 10 times, and I don't tend to go through games again.

p.s. - super article.

I actually totally agree with the argument that the Call Of Duty games have slowly shifted to pander to a whole new concept
I totally forgot about that intro for the original CoD, and it's hard to believe that it is in the same series as the upcoming MW2

It's like theyve ditched the whole 'righteous bravery inspirational history lesson' thing in favour of 'hoo-rah we're american marines about to blow up loads of awesome', and thats a shame

Er, didn't they give GTAIV a ten on this site?

Excellent posts here guys.

I haven't played the first three CoDs, and I only joined in the Modern Warfare party by the time the GOTY version came out, because of all the praise it garnered. Nonetheless, reading these opinions made me happy that I ordered the Hardened Edition of MW2 - I can see what this "heart" is. :)

Heres some food for thought...

Most people rate the games set in WW2 pretty highly, now is that really because of the game, or because WW2 really happened and so many great films have been made about it?

The same reason people think Modern Warfare (present day) games are soul less and not as good, is that because we have had no great films about current wars and conflicts?

It's a Sunday, I'm hungover but it makes sense to me.

Two retrospectives on the run up to MW2?

I smell some 10 cooking.

@Sparkplug - it's not an especially comfortable subject for movie companies to cover at the moment. Give it 5-10 years and definitive movies will start to emerge. Look at the classic Vietnam films; they came well after the war itself officially ended, and that had started in the late 50's. The films will come, but surely CoD now carries enough weight to blaze it's own trail?

And to think just 5 years later, Infinity Ward has abandoned the PC Gamers who made them what they are, and now royally fucks them up the ass.

Fuck you IW.......

Very Good article, my reason for playing the COD games was mainly because of how respectfully they treated the ww2 and also gave you just a small idea of how crazy and scary war actually was. That first level you mentioned in your article where you find your squad leader tangled in his chute - as soon as you plant the beacon and that siren goes off anf gunfire explosion erupt all around you made me shit myself IT WAS BRILLIANT! The end of the game literally had me in tears when u watch the vid and Gray Oldman's voice over kicks in I had a lump in my throat. I loved Modern Warfare as far as me ever wanting to make a FPS then THAT would be it it made me feel the same as I felt in the 1st COD but looking as MW2 and contovesies aside it lloks like they're going for the spectacle...
There is one thing about MW2 that I do like what the video shows is that they've taken the war out of the typicle Eastern countries and threw it right into the US's back yard, kind of a hypotheticle scenario of US paranoia of the war being fought in their backyards and whatnot..but I'm rambling and once again great artcle.

"Er, didn't they give GTAIV a ten on this site?"

And so will Modern Warfare 2.
But you can expect in the end of year review that most of the oh-so-cool EG staff taking part will give it a good kicking.
Just because it has entered into the mainstream press and is so popular

I have to say, this is one of the most intelligient and well-argued debates I have ever seen on this website.

+1 to you all! :)

Uh, when wasn't Halo in the mainstream? The first Halo came out of nowhere, pretty much just like the original Half-Life, and took the world by storm. It's unfortunate that the second Halo was miserable, and the third at least had good multiplayer(if not a little repetitive). And when wasn't GTA in the mainstream? Hell, when wasn't CoD in the mainstream? The thing is, these companies -have- to give good reviews to good-selling games to continue to get business via receiving review code. Very rarely will a game get called out as being terrible unless it is absolutely despicably bad.

Such as World at War. The game was really, really bad. Really. The only worthwhile part was Nazi Zombies, because the campaign was terrible and only the bolt action rifles felt slightly realistic

I agree captain!

Excellent article, but also excellent comments from several people. Having only played COD4 due to a chronic allergy to WWII games and thus having to take the comments here at face value I'm a little more inclined to agree more with the article than with jachap, despite his persuasive and excellent post. I'm inclined to agree, however, that games are made based more on films than on realities.

While I was impressed with the gravitas and validity of storytelling that COD4 put into modern warfare and the (possibly inadvertant) chilling commentary on waging war at a distance that the AC130 gunship level provided, I did ultimately feel it was all designed not to make one feel the terrible hardships of modern war, but basically to lionise those that fight Bad Men. It may be designed to seem realistic in the moment-to-moment action, but with wonderfully hammy plot devices such as one-armed bogeyman villains (how does he reload that Hollywoodesque Desert Eagle?) who conveniently are behind everything, the wider context is far from being realistic or credible. I don't see anyone even trying to make a serious WWII game in which a person is The Villain (no, RoboHitler does not count).

The key difference as I see it is that, in basing the WWII games on films, they make them war games of war films, whereas the thing they are basing the Modern Warfare series on is the TV news media and their clumsy attempts to create antagonists in a narrative sense out of enemy people (like Bin Laden, a hate figure essentially created by the media) and make the news exciting and thriller-like. Possibly a secondary influence is Tom Clancy, who may have a good eye for military detail, but is honestly a pretty crap writer. Thus, Modern Warfare turns into a thriller more than a wargame because the source is fundamentally different, and it's a lot more difficult to be fair when you're writing fiction with an antagonist.

@Sparkplug: >"The same reason people think Modern Warfare (present day) games are soul less and not as good, is that because we have had no great films about current wars and conflicts?

That's an interesting point, but not really how I would have called it- World War II is largely viewed as an unequivocally worthy fight against The World's Most Evil Man™ and his attempt to dominate the entire world by massively oppressing one religion, which went really, really awesomely for the US/UK, while most modern wars, certainly the current crop of those in the Middle East, are viewed as a dubiously legal war more concerned with oil than freedom started by some US president we arbitrarily decided to not like, screwed up in spectacular fashion every possible step of the way, and supported exclusively by the sort of barely educated rednecks who think Fox News is a good idea- not least due to the way society and media have changed in the time between wars- the 'mainstream' doesn't exist any more, or at least is now the largest minority rather than the majority, and it's also become trendy to take a pop at whatever happens to be said largest minority in lieu of genuine criticism or humour.

This as a reasonably dominant (or at least, noisy) approach to the conflicts Modern Warfare takes influence from is going to colour the reception such treatment is going to get- it's going to take either having a pop to fall out of fashion (some hope) or for enough time to pass for the winners to write history for games set in 2000s conflicts to be seen as having heart.

The "heart" of the series has never changed. It's always been Hollywood and still is. WW2 has been presented in recent movies with the overly dramatic violin music, war is terrible, soldiers lives are tragic etc etc. That's Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, Enemy At the Gates, so that's what Cod 1 also took as it's themes. It's what people expect from WW2

Now they've moved into the modern era and so are taking it's que's from movies with a modern setting; Black Hawk Down, The Rock, those are more boombastic (with a hint of drama) so that's where CoD is now.

Selling ad space, like everyone else.

This article is critical of MW2, genius.

The whole idea of COD games being anti-war, even having a message, is so completely, intrinsically flawed it's laughable. The contradictions are ridiculous: the campaign sells a "war is bad" message, and then the player jumps online to play virtual war, where you're rewarded with unlocks and level-ups galore.

@smelly

You havent read the article i guess. This article made me think: Maybe MW2 isnt that good after all. Cant wait for reviews.

@smelly

Or how about they know this will be of interest to the readers as MW2 is just around the corner. Sure it's timed to bring in the hits, but that doesn't mean it's a bought article.

As I have played MW2, I think the author's last paragraphs are likely referring to MW2. You will see when you played it, you will see.

"This decision to exchange the game's backdrop from the most exciting moments of a real war to an action movie (complete with villain and stunts) seems a shame, to me at least. It feels like all Infinity Ward is trying to do now is drop jaws by any means necessary. "

Doesnt sound like a MW2 commercial to me at all.

In my opinion, the problem with the modern COD games is that they haven't evolved from the (superb) original template. I can't even play through the modern games without getting fed up with infinite respawns, invisible checkpoints that cut off enemy numbers, and many other mechanics that are too obvious not to spot. Once I've seen behind the curtain, I can't enjoy it any more. It's been the same for most of their games for a while now. I much prefer using my initiative, outsmarting the enemy, flanking or surprising a force before moving on, but infinite respawns and linear, confined spaces don't provide any opportunity for creative play. It's one of the areas where halo 3 could teach them a lot about how to innovate with enemy AI and level layout. This is a series that needs to evolve, but is stuck on a corporate conveyor belt churning out sequels. They are masters of the setpiece, but I need more than that, especially when the strings are so obvious.