Retrospective: Call of Duty

By Quintin Smith Published 8 November, 2009

Post-traumatic bliss.

Call of Duty was an underdog. It is very hard to get your head into that space with Modern Warfare 2 looming over us all in full SAS gear, blowing cigar smoke in our ears, receiving more pre-orders than any other game in history and scaring all the other shooters into spring 2010, but it's true. The series that dared to lock horns with Medal of Honor was once a plucky young thing with aging Quake 3 Arena tech and publishing difficulties involving a split with EA and last-minute rescue by Activision.

That's not to say the guys at Infinity Ward didn't know exactly what they were doing. This was a studio made up of ex-2015 employees, the team that made Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, subject of today's other retrospective, in the first place. Still, they had enough ideas and heart to win rookie studio of the year at the Games Developers Choice Awards, and it's nice how much of that still shines through the original Call of Duty today.

All of the team's talent is right there on display. As an FPS the game is still neat, punchy and tactile, with Nazis crumpling excellently with each well-aimed shot. Flanking and suppressing manoeuvres are always rewarded, the guns make excellent noises, and the level design alternately seduces, teases, jokes with you, tests you, and occasionally about-faces and comes flailing at you with some ruinous bastard of a mission that never seems to end.

'Retrospective: Call of Duty' Screenshot 1

The complete absence of blood is quite the thing. Not only do you not notice its absence, it makes things that much sadder. People just fall down.

Call of Duty's design philosophy, of packing a single-player campaign into fewer hours, was much rarer back in 2003. It enabled Infinity Ward to lavish so much attention on each mission that the set-pieces and memorable moments never stopped coming, and it enabled games journalists the world over to make an awful lot of very excited analogies involving rollercoasters and, in fact, every other kind of fairground ride except possibly those chunder-conjuring spinning teacups, while simultaneously marking the game down for only being eight hours long.

But to think of Call of Duty as a rollercoaster is missing its significance. It didn't win 70 game of the year awards because it was ceaselessly exciting and scary, or because of anything to do with the edge of your seat or the seat of your pants. It won 70 game of the year awards because it offered us something we'd never seen before. Call of Duty being an excellent shooter was only its rock-solid foundation - the reason it awed gamers everywhere was because it brought World War 2 to life.

All of Call of Duty's innovations, every single one, pull in the same direction. The demand for the player to use ironsights and routinely go prone, the ringing in your ears and blurring of your vision after an explosion, this density of scripting, how you were often only part of a squad - all of it was dreamed up and implemented to draw you into the game, like sealing wax between the game and your imagination. That had the very important side effect of popping the top of your head off and making you realise that, holy s***, men actually did this. Like, for real. They were given guns and put on planes and boats and taken a long way from home and told where to run and they died.

Everyone remembers being part of a suicidal charge to defend Stalingrad as weaponless Russian peasant Alexei, or that very first mission with the US Airborne where you catch up with your sergeant and find him dead, his parachute snagged on a tree. But going back and playing Call of Duty, what you realise you've forgotten is the gently harrowing tone of even the unscripted combat.

You're always made so aware of the presence of your squad-mates, these men fighting alongside you and dying uncelebrated and unremembered. And it's not just that they die all the time, but they can die so quickly and for such colourless reasons. You'll be clearing a house when a Surprise German in the corner will spray you with a sub-machinegun, and your friends will all keel over bloodlessly.

It'd be difficult to argue that Call of Duty was tasteful, but it did and still does manage to be something more than a shooter. In his Eurogamer review all those years ago, Rob Fahey described how the game's scenarios had managed to "put a lump in his throat" and "make his blood boil", even commenting that the game's art direction sometimes came across as "too pretentious". And those feelings were echoed by many, many other reviewers.

But going back and playing Call of Duty now after receiving its expansion pack and four sequels on a yearly basis like an American footballer taking one hit after another, I'm standing up, I'm taking off my helmet and I'm wondering this: 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.

'Retrospective: Call of Duty' Screenshot 2

I hope the next COD game is set in the future and there's a bit where a guy takes his space helmet off to reveal that exact moustache.

Fundamentally, Call of Duty gave the impression that war is more often than not a bad time. Modern Warfare? What is Modern Warfare? It's not actually modern warfare, for one thing. It's SAS teams dropping onto Russian cargo ships in the middle of a storm, finding a nuclear bomb and then leaping back onto their helicopter as the ship sinks.

It's shooting a man's arm off. It's also, apparently, firing missiles at a medieval castle and two men jumping over a sliding, flaming motorbike. That's not a bad time. That's awesome! What man or woman wouldn't answer the call of duty if your duty was to ride a skimobile down a mountain while firing a machine pistol with one hand?

This change isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course. I'm just very aware right now that the first Call of Duty promised an emotional depth to this series, and if all sight of that wasn't lost when they chose to set footage of men dying to an Eminem single, it currently seems very distant. 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.

Never mind the fact that they might have just made the biggest-selling videogame of all time. Playing the original game again, I feel like this series could have been more than that.

Look out for our review of Modern Warfare 2 at 8am GMT on 10th November.

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About Quintin Smith

Read more articles from Quintin by visiting the Quintin Smith archive page.

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Comments (46) Latest comment 7 months ago

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  • Geordiemp #1 2 years ago

    First

  • FooAtari #2 2 years ago

    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.
    Edited by 1 at 08/11/09 @ 09:33

  • bad09 #3 2 years ago

    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.

  • jachap #4 2 years ago

    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.

  • FooAtari #5 2 years ago

    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
    Edited by 1 at 08/11/09 @ 09:32

  • domoslaf #6 2 years ago

    @jachap

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

  • Beige_Alert #7 2 years ago

    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.

  • Br0ken_Engli5h #8 2 years ago

    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.
    Edited by 2 at 08/11/09 @ 10:12

  • comissars_handgun #9 2 years ago

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

  • CommissarMark #10 2 years ago

    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.

  • kongzi #11 2 years ago

    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..

  • local_celebrity #12 2 years ago

    @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.
    Edited by 1 at 08/11/09 @ 16:17

  • SMOM #13 2 years ago

    japchap pretty much nailed it.

  • FWB #14 2 years ago

    Good post, jachap.

  • Baranga #15 2 years ago

    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?

  • HandOfBeadle #16 2 years ago

    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.
    Edited by 1 at 08/11/09 @ 12:55

  • local_celebrity #17 2 years ago

    What a post.

    High-five, Hand of Beadle!

    Oh.

  • bad09 #18 2 years ago

    / tips hat to HandOfBeadle

  • Moggo #19 2 years ago

    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.

  • TheComedian #20 2 years ago

    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.

  • local_celebrity #21 2 years ago

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

  • Vertius #22 2 years ago

    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. :)

  • Bitkari #23 2 years ago

    Two retrospectives on the run up to MW2?

    I smell some 10 cooking.

  • HandOfBeadle #24 2 years ago

    @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?

  • Bagpuss #25 2 years ago

    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.......

  • Nova1977 #26 2 years ago

    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.

  • CaptainTrips #27 2 years ago

    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! :)

  • smelly #28 2 years ago

    "Two retrospectives on the run up to MW2? I smell some 10 cooking. "

    I smell some marketting dollars being spent... Which knowing EG - means an instant 10.

  • Zaiz #29 2 years ago

    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

  • hilts #30 2 years ago

    I agree captain!

  • YourMessageHere #31 2 years ago

    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.

  • Freek #32 2 years ago

    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.

  • smelly #33 2 years ago

    The people who negatted - "I smell some marketting dollars being spent... Which knowing EG - means an instant 10. "

    Are naieve in the extreme if they dont think this is how game sites work.. how do you think they make money exactly?

  • smelly #34 2 years ago

    And this article is one big ad... see?

    Games websites get paid to do previews and articles like this on a run up to a big game... Of course there's no reason for a company to pay for that much coverage unless they KNOW (*cough*) that the review is in the bag...

  • frankfurter209 #35 2 years ago

    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.

  • muscleblade #36 2 years ago

    @smelly

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

  • FooAtari #37 2 years ago

    @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.

  • ybfelix #38 2 years ago

    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.

  • muscleblade #39 2 years ago

    "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.

  • groovychainsaw #40 2 years ago

    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.

  • jimbo118 #41 2 years ago

    +1 groovychainsaw.

  • FooAtari #42 2 years ago

    Well said groovy. I just have no interest in MW2. Been there and done that many times over.

  • PrivateJoker #43 2 years ago

    Modern Warfare 2 releases midnight tonight and there's fuck all reviews from the main sites. What's going on here?

  • Solidsims #44 2 years ago

    In the words of the great warrior poet, Solid Snake "war has changed".
    Not just how war is fought but also how people are being portrayed modern war.

    On a sidenote, stick Eminem onto something and it instantly becomes crap and no morale...

  • Blackbrere #45 2 years ago

    You’re articles good sir have prompted me to register for this site. Excellent read and entirely true.

  • james-mw3-mw3 #46 7 months ago

    It's funny that Modern Warfare 3 had a major amount of leaked information revealed by the press. I'm thinking that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 leak was intentional; There wasn't any leak for this Call of Duty game, nor MW3!