Get Ken Loach to be the project director, reuse the Spanish assets from Resident Evil 4 for the locations and have a cyber Stalin as the end boss and I’d buy it tomorrow.

Personally I rather enjoyed Call of Dutys, black and white, comic book style depiction of war. It reminds me of old war movies your dad would watch on a sunday afternoon, except your in it. And it’s bloody exciting (unlike the real thing, clearly)

Maybe a bit more maturity will shake things up a bit but it’s still a bloody shooter, you galloping ballsacks, whatever theatre of war it’s set in.

Huh. While a large part of my “Oh god, WWII” reaction is typically just general disinterest in WWII as a setting, due to relatively primitive technology and a tendency to focus on “realism”, a substantial part is also due to the fact that WWII games seem to tread the same goddamn turf with the same set pieces and the same stock characters over and over.

Having some action in the Pacific, which *has* been overlooked quite a bit in favor of 560 Normandy beach landing levels, is definitely a step in the “okay maybe” direction. As is the willingness to take an M rating. Playing a Russian soldier storming Berlin sounds also relatively novel.

Relatively new frontiers help a little, but I think a much greater problem is that narrative is almost guaranteed to be stomped in a WW2 title. If you’re playing a WW2 game, you’re pretty much gonna be reduced to an ambulatory pair of arms in fatigues (or in the case of RTCW, a pair of arms and a leg! A ‘kick’ button should be standard-issue in FPSes) — the most you can hope for, character-wise, is a “please don’t kill me!” from a Nazi captive (if you’re playing one of the games with ’spy’ pretensions), and maybe a few nervous mutterings from your AI teammates, stuff like that. Even CoD4 had more than that, via its SAS bits (…and so did Crysis, if you don’t mind your characters coming out of a Carl Weathers movie). An ‘adventure’ title in, say, the DX mould need not be crippled by a WW2 setting (perhaps a bit limited by the stifling of travel etc, but hey, nothing wrong with a challenge! Make a spy game where you’re taking down a Mosley-led anti-Allies conspiracy in London! …I’d play it), but I can’t think of any, off the top of my head — you’re inevitably just a grunt leading the push up a hill (or a paratrooper leading a push down a hill. Or a commando leading a push… on the spot?

I think it looks like they’ve been watching the Thin Red Line a bit too much. Only they haven’t really understood the metaphysical juxtaposition at the heart of that film, and replaced it with loads of stuff getting blown up.

You mean the voice-over bits with the nature photography?
“Why do we fight?”
“This great evil. Where does it come from?”
“What is beauty?”
“Man, I could really go for a ham sandwich.”

You’re blowing my mind, Malick!

:p

Having some action in the Pacific, which *has* been overlooked quite a bit in favor of 560 Normandy beach landing levels, is definitely a step in the “okay maybe” direction. As is the willingness to take an M rating. Playing a Russian soldier storming Berlin sounds also relatively novel.

And you know, if they can manage to deliver the kind of intensity of experience that CoD4 offered, I might have to look into it. I have after all been vaguely nosing at the idea of maybe playing CoD 1 and 2, despite my distaste for the setting, just because of how cool 4 was.

Edit: Also, coop…coop with levelling. All right, I think I’m sold.