Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019)

I started playing Call of Duty back in 2003, when its name meant something; when it followed heroes of World War II who fought honorably. In 2007, I saw it transition into something new and incredible with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. And I stopped playing the series regularly after Modern Warfare 2, when leadership changes made CoD into something less quality-driven and more of a generic annualized product. Now we have a new game titled Modern Warfare, hoping to recapture that magic moment in 2007 when the face of gaming was changed forever.

(I’m not all that into CoD multiplayer, and I haven’t played the Spec Ops missions yet, so this will just be about the campaign. Also, for clarity’s sake, I’m referring to this game as Modern Warfare, while the original Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare will be called CoD4.)

If there’s one word I would use to describe Modern Warfare, it’s “restraint.” 

Even in the classic Call of Duty games, the mantra was “every level is D-day.” Every level had to, at some point, reach a level of over-the-top intensity. CoD4 added more stealth missions to the formula, but the high points of the campaigns were even more Hollywood-bombastic than before. “Michael Bay-esque,” they were often called. And, of course, the modern CoD games have largely been obscenely over-the-top. With this new game, however, the emphasis is almost more on what’s not happening than what is. Instead of insane car chases with massive explosions, more often than not, Modern Warfare’s characters stealthily move room to room through a dark house wearing night vision goggles, silenced weapons at the ready. Instead of the famous slow-mo door breaching gimmick, now breaching happens “realistically,” in real time. You can either open a door like a normal person or smash it open—or just shoot through it, if you like. I stumbled upon a neat trick myself during my playthrough: you can carve holes in doors with gunfire, then toss grenades inside. It’s pretty great.

Despite the changes, however, there is still a massive CoD4 influence on Modern Warfare. The whole game seems to live under the shadow of the Chernobyl sequence from CoD4, comprised of the two missions “All Ghillied Up” and “One Shot, One Kill.” This is, of course, a great place from which to draw inspiration, so it’s not like it’s a bad thing. There are definite moments of “oh, we’re doing X thing, just like in CoD4.” It’s the one big element that keeps Modern Warfare from being truly great. Gameplay-wise, it’s like listening to a fantastic cover of a great song. It would have been a miracle for MW to outdo CoD4 at being CoD4, and the fact that it doesn’t and yet remains still pretty good is impressive.

Of course, while on one hand Modern Warfare is less Hollywood than its predecessors, in other ways it’s far more cinematic. Classic CoD always focused squarely on the missions themselves, with little context surrounding them. CoD4 added more story beats during the missions themselves, but still largely kept the focus only on giving those missions proper motivation and context. One could be forgiven for ignoring the story entirely and just focusing on the gameplay alone.

Modern Warfare, on the other hand, has full 24-frames-per-second film-quality cinematics in-between missions. The cinematography is legitimately impressive; the lighting feels like it was actually shot by a professional film crew rather than the glossy texture CoD is known for. (The cutscenes are pre-rendered, so this is a compliment aimed at the artists behind the scenes, not the game’s tech.) During these cutscenes, MW feels more like a military intrigue film than a game—which is less immersive, perhaps, but not necessarily bad. I feel like I know the main cast from Modern Warfare better than the cast from any other CoD game, and I like them. They’re legitimately interesting.

Despite the fact that Modern Warfare is in many ways a derivative attempt to reclaim the past, I actually found it oddly refreshing. In 2019, too many games are designed to keep players playing for as long as possible, stretching the gameplay experience too thin. I played Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey for over 70 hours and still didn’t finish it, just because at some point the same gameplay loops stopped being fun. By contrast, Modern Warfare almost feels like a throwback to game design from the 2000s: it’s a straightforward, relatively short, ultra-high-polish game with a decent story and good gameplay. It’s exactly what I want.

To be fair, most other modern Call of Duty games also have campaigns of this type, but they tend to not have the simple focus that Modern Warfare does. They feel like movie trailers designed to blow your mind without even a hint of subtlety.

I’m not planning on giving scores in any reviews I write here, but I will say that I really liked my time with this game. The fact that I could play my way through a fun game in a weekend, put it down and be satisfied with it is a feeling I wish I could find more often in today’s gaming world.

Once Upon a Time in Mexico - A Red Dead Redemption Story

I was in Escalera, a small settlement in Mexico. It's a town built along a hill, with a heavy presence from the Mexican army. Soon after arriving in town, I'd heard about tensions between the army and the civilians. Many felt that the army was tyrannical, taking advantage of the citizens rather than protecting them.

As I neared the edge of town at the bottom of the hill, I heard a woman screaming. Not a Hollywood scream, but a horrifying, painful wailing. I'd heard the sound a few times before in towns back across the river in America. It generally only meant one thing: a woman was being assaulted, and she was within maybe ten seconds of being stabbed to death unless I did something to stop it. (The "woman being stabbed" scenario is one of the common canned events that can occur in a town in RDR)

I ran in the direction of the screaming, but didn't see the woman nearby.
More screaming. I kept moving up the hill.
More screaming. At this point, I thought, it had to be over. I must have been too late. But the screaming continued, so I kept moving.

Eventually, I reached the top of the hill, and saw the woman in the arms of a man. I started to draw my gun, but stopped when I realized the woman wasn't being attacked. She was being held back. Further ahead, inside a courtyard, a man was standing before a firing squad. He was about to be executed by the Mexican army. The woman was desperately trying to reach him, arms outstretched, her voice filled with pain. What I knew about the army, combined with the woman's wailing, told me that this had to be wrong: that whatever this man did, it likely wasn't worth his execution.

I wasn't sure what to do. Two soldiers stood with guns drawn on the man, ready to fire. Two more stood at either side of the gate to the courtyard. One held the woman back. Five Army soldiers, all of whom I could perhaps take out with my Dead Eye rapid-fire ability. But, I thought, should I? These weren't mere criminals, like the gang that kidnapped Bonnie MacFarlane. These soldiers represented the law of the land. Who was I to kill five of them in order to save just one man who I knew essentially nothing about? And then what would I do? The army was all over Escalera. If I killed five of them, I would have to turn around, jump on my horse, and run away—probably killing more soldiers to make my escape. Back on the American side of the border, I never would have even considered something like that. I always tried my best to do the right thing, including supporting law enforcement, not gunning them down. On a purely cognitive level, intervening seemed like a bad decision.

But no, I thought—I felt—this doesn't feel right. I should stop this. 

This entire back-and-forth in my mind probably took all of five seconds. I decided that yes, I would intervene. A split second later, the soldiers fired.

The prisoner fell to the ground; the soldier let the woman go. The woman stopped screaming and ran into the courtyard, where she knelt at the man's body and held him quietly.


I stopped and stared at the scene for a long time afterward. No one paid me any mind. As far as the soldiers or the woman were concerned, I might as well have not existed. I was free to stand and watch and regret my inaction.

The fact that I wasn't directly involved in what happened was the worst part of it all. Unlike nearly every other situation in every other video game—including most of Red Dead Redemption—I wasn't the center of this universe. I didn't get to consciously decide whether that man lived or died. The event didn't exist explicitly for my benefit. I was just a random nobody walking through a terrifying world where people are killed while their loved ones look on helplessly and cry.

There wasn't even a proper lesson to take from it. No moment of "ah, now I understand what I should have done, and what I should do in the future." I just have to live now with never knowing.

It felt real in a way that made me uncomfortable... and was that the point all along? Is the way this event affected me a reflection of the designers' dramatic intent, or simply a reflection of me? Does it matter? There aren't any hard, fast rules in art, after all.

I don't have any answers, but this tiny scene in a giant game is something I'm going to remember for a long time.

Update

So a lot has happened since my first post, huh?

This blog is actually—finally—going to start in earnest as of now. Some upcoming topics:

• The problem with open-world games
• The twisted philosophy of Assassin's Creed
• Licensed games: why the good ones work
• An ongoing series: playing through each and every Final Fantasy game

This should be fun. See you all soon. :)


PS: I think it'll be fun to end every post with a list of games I'm currently playing.

—
What I'm playing:
-Final Fantasy (PS1 Classic)
-Bayonetta 2
-Tomb Raider (2013) (replay)
-Batman: The Enemy Within
-Persona 5

Outset Island

As I sit here writing, it's 15 minutes til the reveal of Nintendo's newest game system, codenamed NX. It's a big chance for a return to greatness for Nintendo, and it's fitting that I start my new gaming blog now. My usual gaming username these days is "Echo Leader" or some variation thereof (usually EchoLeader1), and my first console was a Nintendo 64. Hence Echo 64. The past and present of my life as a gamer.

This blog will have reviews of games, but that should be the minority. Mostly I want to focus on writing out my thoughts on gaming in general. For example, one of my upcoming posts is a review of Assassin's Creed: Syndicate bundled inside a larger look at the franchise as a whole and some of my problems with it.

So yeah. Let's see what this NX thing is. Post incoming.