Every once in a while, even before the pandemic, Glastonbury Festival would take a year off, giving up an income in the tens of millions to allow the grass to grow back, complaints from locals to subside and, perhaps most important, let us feel its absence. In 2019, organizers noted that, after a year lying fallow, their mud-covered institution was even more popular than before.
Perhaps Activision should draw more of its executive team from the festival industry, rather than the bush government (opens in a new tab). Despite bringing Guitar Hero to the ground with annualization all those years ago, it’s been too slow to see the same effect in Call of Duty. according to a Bloomberg report (opens in a new tab), 2023 will be the series’ first fallow year in nearly two decades, following poor sales for Call of Duty: Vanguard and a period of production chaos within the Call of Duty studio network. But it’s too late to impact Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which as the hosts of yesterday’s Summer Game Fest showcase reminded us, comes out this year on October 28.
“In 2019,” Call of Duty General Manager Johanna Faries said yesterday, “Modern Warfare changed everything,” and that’s true. The reboot was not only a huge commercial success in its own right, but its engine, aesthetic, and universe were the foundation of Warzone, a Covid cultural phenomenon that has been a fixture of our living rooms ever since.
Activision will not regret the way their Battle Royale went. But a side effect of his continued success on the live service is that the grass is truly downtrodden. There has been no chance to miss Modern Warfare. Its dewy glow bakes like a burnt screen in the public imagination, as familiar as Fallout and just as tired.
Faries launched “oil rigs, cargo ships, and staggering odds,” all classic features of COD campaigns. The problem is that I’ve been playing a ship-based 2v2 arena called Cargo on and off since 2019. And an oil rig map, based on the original Modern Warfare trilogy, was added to the reboot at the height of the pandemic. By now, we know these decks and porches better than our local parks and malls.
the Expendables
So it’s no surprise that the new level shown at Summer Game Fest came out as a remix of a remix: first recalling the Omaha Beach landing, the image associated with the birth of COD, before moving on to a premise pulled straight out of 90s Modern Warfare 2. namesake: get on the platform. The rug yank, discovering the target isn’t on the pad after all, comes as the team opens a cargo container, a moment designed to evoke the squad’s first mission together, 2007’s Crew Expendable. changes are hardly registered as novelty; Given that the two Modern Warfare games prior to Infinity Ward’s revival have been remastered in recent years, their settings are all too new, like fish wriggling just below Soap’s feet in the Atlantic Ocean.
None of which is to deny that Infinity Ward is packed with teams at the top of their craft. The sequence is full of exquisite and subtle touches: the crossed legs of the soldier landing on the platform in front of you, as he transitions seamlessly from a crouch to a sidestep; the silent bank of a bank of a silenced pistol firing behind a pane of glass; the angled rain and eerie diffuse lighting synonymous with sticking your head in a storm cloud.
missing dog
However, behind the scenes, greater concerns arise. Taylor Kurosaki and Jacob Minkoff, the Naughty Dog veterans who brought the studio out of creative free fall with the deeply underrated space caper Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, left in early 2021 to pursue a “rare and exciting new opportunity.” We can only hope that the thematic resonance and thoughtful character work that distinguished their games have left an indelible mark on the culture of Infinity Ward. Though it has to be said that the new focus on special forces operator Ghost, another 2000s hangover with the personality of a sock, isn’t entirely reassuring.
Ghost is a hangover from the 2000s with the personality of a sock
For all the good that Warzone has done with Call of Duty and its reinvigorated community, it has also done a number on the storytelling of Kurosaki and company. As Modern Warfare characters were brought into the battle royale as skins, the precise plot of 2019’s Modern Warfare campaign unraveled. As a fan, it’s no longer clear where the story of this new game will begin: which Warzone-exclusive events will be told or ignored, or even if key characters are alive or dead. Warzone may now be overseen by Raven Software, but it has evidently been a huge distraction for Infinity Ward, the studio that helped create it.
Add to those potential problems the huge and unfortunate fact of war in Europe. The continent has long been the playground of Modern Warfare, and Russian ultra-nationalism was the bogeyman that hung over the entire original trilogy. If this new game loosely follows the threads left by its ancestors, it might as well reintroduce Makarov as villain.
COD has always danced as close to real-life conflict as possible, after all, that was part of Modern Warfare’s early appeal ‘behind the headlines’, but given Infinity Ward’s past missteps with the story and sensitivity, it’s hard not to wonder if Activision should have made 2022 their year off.
