Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is having a reveal week. Yesterday, Activision released a new trailer and announced that Call of Duty would return to Steam this year at a new price of $70. Today, we got a good chunk of campaign gameplay courtesy of Summer Game Fest. (opens in a new tab) showcase.
The game begins on a mission called Dark Water, when Soap, Price, and the rest of the war gang infiltrate an oil rig somewhere on the Atlantic coast with a mission to stop a nuclear missile launch. Sounds familiar? That was the conclusion of staff writer Morgan Park and senior editor Rich Stanton, two people who like CoD campaigns but worry that Modern Warfare 2 is simply renewing old ground.
Morgan Park, staff writer: Yeah, so…it sure looked like a Call of Duty, huh?
Rich Stanton, Senior Editor: Call of Duty, as a single player experience, feels completely drained at this point.
Morgan Park: I still like a good CoD campaign, but if Modern Warfare 2 is going to be much of this, then I’d have to agree. CoD has a habit of repeating itself, but this oil rig mission was some of the most generic campaign fluff I’ve seen in a long time. I can’t think of a single thing that happened in those seven minutes that I haven’t done a billion times in the last 20 service calls.
Rich Stanton: We’re in an era where ‘classic’ games seem destined to be remade every 10 or 15 years, and Call of Duty has chosen this weird route of more or less directly remaking games that aren’t that old. I’m also not quite sure where these ‘remakes’ fall, because they seem to be so afraid of altering something beloved that they never push the envelope.
Morgan Park: Yeah, it looks like Infinity Ward has a few boxes to tick that keep this from feeling new. Why make it look so much like the intro mission from Call of Duty 4? Maybe the point is to be nostalgic for games that are hitting 15 years, but what I got instead was “ah, we’re doing this again.”
And the weird thing is, just like Modern Warfare 2019, this Modern Warfare 2 isn’t exactly a “remake.” It takes old characters like Soap, Price, and Ghost and uses them for a different story that may be similar, but certainly not identical, to the original 2009 game. It’s confusing to keep up (partly because Activision opted to use the exact same name as the previous game). It’s a different story, but it also seems to reference the original. Today’s oil rig mission shares a striking resemblance to the “The only easy day was yesterday” (opens in a new tab) MW2 mission (2009).
Rich Stanton: I vividly remember the arrival of the original Modern Warfare, because it was unlike anything that had preceded it in terms of its harsh look at military reality. People remember that AC-130 gunship mission because it was deeply uncomfortable and seemed to be bringing something to light about the horrors of modern conflict. I’m not saying it was necessarily a deep or in-depth look at military culture, fundamentally this world view still has good and bad, but it felt pretty shocking.
Morgan Park: Do you remember when you get bombed? That was pretty messy.
Rich Stanton: Modern Warfare, as you know, starts with you as a dictator who is about to be publicly executed. At the end of that intro my jaw was on the ground and I was hooked. No game had ever done anything like this.
The modern success of CoD arguably dates back to what the Modern Warfare trilogy did, including on the multiplayer side, and since then it feels like the series has been stuck in the template they established. They’re amazing games but from their time, and I’m not sure Activision has the ability (or maybe even the desire) to escape that. I certainly doubt a contemporary Activision studio would be given free rein to go after the military industrial complex the way Infinity Ward once did.
Morgan Park: Yeah, I think it’s important to remember that Activision has stuck to their template because a lot of people would be upset if they didn’t. Many people want that familiarity. However, that doesn’t mean that every 6-hour campaign you run has to feel exactly like the last one.
In fact, that’s what I liked best about 2019’s Modern Warfare campaign. It had some great twists on old CoD favorites, like the Highway of Death sniper mission that (while blatantly rewriting the story of a war crime real american (opens in a new tab)) was basically the natural evolution of “All Ghillied Up”. This oil rig mission, on the other hand, felt like a retread. We continue to hide behind storage bins, crowding into doors looking for a breach, and performing canned melee takedowns on guards.
Rich Stanton: I guess that’s the question: how many times can you play one of these things before it feels like an AK-wielding hamster on a wheel? The self-referentiality you talked about earlier is great, but it’s also a symptom of a larger problem, that these games are being developed on an unprecedented production line and have a particular set of requirements to meet.
There’s also this element where Call of Duty is so much bigger now than the campaigns. Their biggest moneymaker by far now is Warzone, and Warzone 2 will no doubt continue that trend. What started out as a single-player focused series has been largely consumed by the multiplayer side and you feel like that’s where all the resources are going. It’s such a big deal now that you feel Activision wouldn’t want it to get too close to controversy anymore: in fact, it’s more closely tied to the US military and gun industry than ever before.
Morgan Park: Apparently Infinity Ward is trying to temper your sharpest tendencies (opens in a new tab) with this campaign. I’m all for not having to watch game developers justify tacky creative decisions in the name of fun playable warfare.
But you’re right Rich. As much time and money as Activision spends on these campaigns, at this point they’re pretty much just there to cut off some trailers. Six hours of pretty good shooting to prepare players for what Really play CoD for: multiplayer. That’s the part of this game we don’t know anything about yet, and as you mention, the standalone sequel to Warzone will probably be a much bigger game than MW2 itself. Perhaps Activision was right to skip the campaign in 2018’s Black Ops 4. If this mission is the most original thing to come out of Modern Warfare 2, it’s time for CoD campaigns to take a break.
