By Jim Rossignol on May 25th, 2009 at 11:34 am.
Infinity Ward have been teasing us with er teasers over the past couple of weeks, and the now the full trailer is finally here. Modern Warfare 2 a first person shooter videogame, featuring the misadventures of unpleasant terrorists and the Men Of Action who intend to stop them. The footage is heaving with clues as to the kinds of scenes we can expect to see in the game – a street full of fleeing civilians particularly caught my eye, along with that zip-line to helicopter moment towards the end. Go take a look. The game is out on November 10th.
They named him after a russian pistol. I’m sure “Makarov” is a regular surname, but I’m not surprised if that’s how they got the name.
Anyway, another Tom Clancian “evil russians” plot. How very original.
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Woah…
Time to upgrade my computer…
EDIT: Heh, I love how part way through the video the words “Checkpoint reached” flash up very briefly in the top left corner (Around the snowmobile chase). Looks like a good portion of that is actually in-game footage.
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And not an Activision logo in sight.
Its nice to see a developer receive some front line brand support for a change, rather than the publisher/distributor take all the credit. Obviously Infinity Ward’s association with the Call of Duty franchise is a fairly special one, but its nice to see none the less.
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That actually looks quite good. I’ve never been much of a fan of the Call of Duty games since the first one to be honest, though 4 did have an awesome intro sequence, and that does look pretty packed with coolness.
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Actually looks really quite fun, unlike CoD 4, which was a bit dull in places.
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Anyone else see that electrical torture part? Boo for lazy 24 “hard men” tosh. Sad to see that still sells even given the past few years.
@Skurmedel: Rather, the pistol was named after its designer. So I guess it is a regular surname!
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I stand by my theory that this is a remake of NOLF2 in disguise. Snowmobiles, Russia, a castle on a cliff…
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I hope they promote the new title by dropping the price on the old one. I’m still looking forward to play CoD 4, but $70 is simply way above what I’m willing to pay for a video game.
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Snowmobiles! Man, I haven’t driven one of those in a videogame since No One Lives Forever 2.
Game trailers are looking more like film trailers with each release.
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Am I the only one who didn’t like CoD4? It had no pacing and was really incohesive. It felt like it was made for people with a 5 minute attention span. They totally overdid it. I mean, I realize how well they do the stuff they do. The game looks and runs amazingly well, no bugs, great scripting… but it’s not much fun
The first CoD felt like a war game and CoD4 felt like it was trying to be every war/action movie you’ve ever seen. It didn’t feel like CoD at all
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In case you’re wondering, the Russian at the end is roughly “Take revenge on me, and I will avenge.” There may be a more idiomatic translation, but that’s the literal one.
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Actually, now that I think of it, “nemo me impune lacessit” is a pretty good translation, just not into English.
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@Paradukes, even if it is in-game footage, you can be sure that “Checkpoint reached” wasn’t there by coincidence.
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looks good to me. Go infinity ward.
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Damn, I can’t believe this is going to take all the way to November to come out. Also, I noticed in the middle of the video that the knife the guy is holding goes through the shoulder of one of the “hostages.”
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@teo
Your not the only one.
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@Lars: My thoughts exactly. That’s no oversight on the part of the people who made the video, but a very deliberately placed “clue” so that people on message boards can be all “ZOMG!!! TAHTS INGAMEFOOTAGE!!11111!!1einseinseinself11!!”.
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@bookwormat: Yeah me too, I’ve been holding out for around a year now for COD4 Steam Discount weekend.
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Looks very much like a spy/action film in videogame form… this could be A Very Good Thing.
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CoD4 wasn’t perfect by any means, but it’s impossible to ignore some of the craft in there. IW pulled off some brilliant individual scenes.
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craft using a sledge hammer and the patriotismn trumpet doesn’t go down well with me. COD4 was shameless propaganda, almost a game for fanatics (only this time christians) in my eyes. And it was boring. When will they drop their spawn-wave mechanic that makes their nicely scripted levels look so gamey and bad. anyways, it’s continuing success only confirms my belief that the “industry” and its “audience” aint capable of liking/understanding something more complex, subtle and/or daring in terms of gameplay/narrative. I predict massive sales for a glorified expansion. newest feature: your avatar now can open doors !!!! a revolutionary evolution for FPS
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Yeah but it never really lets you play the game. Not a minute goes buy without you being told exactly what to do.
btw, this EVE vid is awesome http://vimeo.com/2591033
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Modern Wa2are: Men of Action go!
The video looks strangely like a Time Crisis introduction video to my eyes, which amuses me more than I think it’s supposed to.
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Really bright design decisions, crafting, style and taste. Congratulations to the dev’s.
Now, time to upgrade our engines, because running this in something less than “excellent graphics mode” is a insult to the devs.
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CoD4 was too heavily scripted and linear, for sure, and it could get a bit tiresome at times, but what it did it did very well. It aimed to be an all-out blockbuster of a game, and it succeeded in doing that (even though it could never be as subtle as, say, ArmA).
@Skurmedel: There are so many flashpoints in the world that it’s a shame that developers keep rehashing the same old plots for wars in games. The Cold War has been over for nigh-on twenty years! In Clancy’s Debt of Honor (which I admit I’ve never read) there’s a hypothetical second Pacific War between the US and China in the 80s – improbable, but interesting. Personally my favourite parts of CoD4 were the Middle Eastern stages, because they were “ripped from the headlines”, so to speak. It’s a shame “Six Days in Fallujah” got cancelled.
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Can I play as a Russian and down americnz plz? plz plz. In singleplayer that is.
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I thoroughly enjoyed CoD4, although it’s certainly a guilty pleasure and rather gung-ho. Although I’d argue that it’s perhaps less jingoistic than most war shooters – at least it takes the time to show that things sometimes go wrong.
The best thing about CoD4 and probably CoD5 are, of course, the insane production value and genius bits of craft going on, as Jim says. What really excites me about the games is that they seem to offer a glimpse of what all gaming could be, in terms of technical quality. I’d love to see an RPG benefit from Infinity Ward’s attention to detail, for example.
Looks like there’s potential in CoD5 for some interesting insight into the problems of urban warfare…whether they even attempt to examine issues beyond “shoot them all!” will be interesting to see.
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So what was the propaganda in CoD4? That the Americans are fuck-ups and the British are bastards? That the Russians will save the day?
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Most of the complaints here about CoD4 (“too heavily scripted,” for instance) are of the absurdly useless kind that wants a game to be something it never aspired to. As for the endless respawning troops, the most gamey and criticizable aspect of CoD4, Infinity Ward have said that they are rethinking that structure in MW2.
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@Sum0: There may be a lot of modern conflicts one can choose from, but try making a game about one of them. Someone is going to start yelling about how your game demonizes their side and next thing you know you’ve lost a potential source of income. There’s more money in reusing the generic plots that everyone has accepted by now, so that’s te direction most games choose to go.
And of course, there are still a lot of conflicts that stem from the cold war era, so the old plots can be used and still attempt to claim to be modern.
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@Skye they are reasons for people not liking the game, and as such, perfectly valid. Just because a game is a certain way intentionally doesn’t mean you can’t criticize it for it. How good a game is isn’t the same as how much it is what it’s trying to be.
“too linear” doesn’t even begin to describe CoD4 anyway
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I believe they’ve addressed the spawn waves that occur. Easily the worst thing about COD 4 for me.
The trailer looks excellent, although I’m not sure whether to get this on pc or 360. It still feels very much a console game to me.
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Wasn’t GRAW2 banned in Juarez/all of Mexico? I too am tired of the Russia/Middle-East settings.
I’m glad to see some of this taking place in Africa. I hope this game has some “SWAT” elements worked in.
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@ Toni: Seriously? Because if so it sounds to me like you either didn’t finish the game or somehow managed to completely miss most of it’s points (so much for it not be subtle in that case).
I also don’t like horribly patriotic games but I really didn’t take that away from CoD4. What part of the Americans going guns blazing into the middle east ended well for them? The whole patriotic religious war thing the Americans had going in the game ended in complete catastrophe with the city getting nuked and the main character dying horribly and accomplishing nothing as far as defeating the main enemy was concerned. Far from being Christian propaganda, if anything I find that a rather blatant commentary on the folly of certain other cryptoreligious crusades being conducted in the real world.
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Why is it the new Transformers movie trailer music is popping up in several game trailers as well? There’s this one, and another I just watched yesterday.. though now of course I can’t bloody remember what.
Someone has fingers in many expensive pies.
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I can understand the reason for the setting – it’s a straight-up sequel plot wise after all, judging by the voiceovers. But I’m tired of shooting generic Russians like it’s 1974, and generic Arabs like it’s christmas at the Met. I want a game set in Dunstable, damn it.
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0:45 is almost exactly like a scene from Collateral, only he didn’t finish the Mozambique Drill.
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The only thing I didn’t like about CoD4 was that I never got the chance to crawl around in a ghillie suit in the forest for 20 mins getting close to my target.
Really looking forward to the next one.
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Woah, that looks quite like an action game to me.
I really hope we’ll get to visit places that have civilians now, and that they aren’t just for show during an interactive cutscene like at the start of CoD4. It’s kinda difficult to take a supposedly anti-war message seriously in a game that features no civilians.
Good trailer, though it leaves the main question unanswered: Is Capt. Price still alive? :P
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Cod4 was brilliant.
As an action adventure it had some fantastic moments and was really well crafted.
When people trot out the old ‘where’s games’ Citizen Kane?’ line I want to point out that Citizen Kane was actually really boring but if you want to play games’ Diehard then CoD4 is pretty much it.
Please please please make this good Infinity Ward!
There is a thin line between a war game that’s unpalatable and one that’s great that CoD4 never really crossed and which the likes of Graw gladly traipses across [whilst slapping minorities and pregnant women].
Hopefully they can find that line again with this one.
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Holy shit that was exciting. And I don’t often say that.
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@Walter: Well, if Mexico and the Middle East comes off as kind of controversial, it’s nothing compared to a game set in Africa. Resident Evil? Racist, says the (mainstream) press. Far Cry 2? Immoral, says the (mainstream) press.
What would they say about CoD in Africa? Neo-colonialist? Anti-African?
Better stick to Eurasia. Or heck, why not Western/Northern Europe? Lots of citites, lots of semi-rural to rural landscapes. Or hey, Canada! Not many games set in Canada!
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Some of the absolute shit that got spouted in the loading screens comes to mind. I know there was some inane “excite the rednecks” garbage from Condoleezza Rice in there, pretty sure there was a Rumsfeld one too, *eyeroll* There’s the inherent dehumanising aspect of mowing down wave after wave of rowdy coloureds, which is inevitable in this genre, but which has unavoidable implications the more naturalistic your setting and rendering gets. Yeah, the Yanks cop it, but what can we conclude from that? “We should just use an ICBM next time”? We don’t expect intelligent… er, anything from CoD games, but that doesn’t do much to ameliorate the politics. Think the death of protagonist 2 in CoD4 was daring? How about a CoD starring an Iraqi on a mission of vengeance after losing his family to a stray airstrike in post-collapse Iraq? Now you’re messing with minds…
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on which planet is COD4 $70?
Not on PC anyway. If you want to play it on a console where you pay a platform-holder-tax, that’s another story, but that’s your choice…
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That looked really good.
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Cliffski: Australia. It’s bizarre, I don’t know whether CoD4 was absolutely insanely popular here or whether there was some sort of… mistake, but it’s only in the past nine months or so that it’s drifted down from the 90-100AU bracket.
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@Ginger Yellow
It looks like the biblical “It is mine to avenge; I will repay” (Romans 12:19). Except, rather than google for the Russian text of the Bible, the makers of the trailer chose to (incorrectly) translate the phrase themselves.
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“How about a CoD starring an Iraqi on a mission of vengeance after losing his family to a stray airstrike in post-collapse Iraq?”
Well, the antagonist in the trailer *is* on a mission of revenge for what the West did to his friends.
But in any case, I don’t think it’s CoD’s place to make that kind of statement. Aside from the fact that it would anger more people than it would gather customers, I’m not convinced that that particular aspect would be constructive. Most Americans already know that the Iraq War was a clusterfuck brought on by dishonesty and poor planning. And CoD4, depending on how you see it, is either jingoistic or an example of how Western interventions can fuck up. I don’t think that most people would conclude that since Iraq was a disaster, we should nuke the place, so I don’t see how people would think that an ICBM would be the solution in the game.
I think it’s about interpretation. Personally, I didn’t see it as being too jingoistic – it’s far less jingoistic than most summer blockbusters, I’d say.
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James T – yeah, it’s a shame that the ‘call of duty’ is always from just one side of the conflict, whether in the WW2 games or CoD4. It’d be great for them to examine the concept of the ‘call of duty’ but from everybody’s perspective.
It doesn’t have to stop the game being thrilling and exciting to play, but it would give it a lot more depth and longevity in the story department.
I want a level in which you play as an American/Brit storming through a town somewhere, followed by the exact same level but from the POV of a civilian, and then again from the POV of the enemy.
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I’ve been a massive fan of CoD since the first one, though I’m not totally convinced by that trailer; Infinity Ward seem to be fundamentally changing the narrative perspective of the player.
I liked the early CoDs because the role you played was understated – I felt like I was fulfilling a small but tangible role in a huge conflict. The Modern Warfare games seem to be placing the player much closer to the center of their respective conflicts, and though that allows for more Hollywood-esque action sequences, it’s starting to feel a bit plastic.
CoD 4 struck a good balance between the narrative function of the player and the over-arching story as a whole – I hope this does the same.
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The sequel to the game that killed Halo. Nice.
Wonder what its going to kill this time around?
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CoD 4 had some badass amazing scenes. That’s true.
And FF usually have spectacular prerendered videos.
It’s the same, both have almost the same interactivity.
In other words, i don’t think the grand spectacle and cinematic experience is worth praise if they just put in the game without possibility of interaction. It’s a like a realtime cutscene (very well crafted, yeah) that you see while you still have your weapon in the corner of the screen.
Multiplayer is another world, of course.
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It’s a curious video!
Are all those mini-scenes playable? Like tight short situations that end in 10 seconds and have variable outcomes?
Cause it would be a huge change of pace from the previous games.
They might be great to play… unless they are so-called quicktime events, eww.
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fulis: Sure, it’s valid to complain about Call of Duty 4′s reliance upon scripted events. It’s also valid to whine about the roundness of an apple; your sentence is grammatically correct and meaningful on the surface, but it’s utterly useless.
If Call of Duty did not feature combat arenas structured by linear level design and tight set pieces, it would not be Call of Duty. It is at least conceivable that MW2 might change this basic format as a spinoff from the old series, but, judging from the trailer, that seems awfully unlikely—and undesirable, considering that we’re talking about Infinity Ward’s greatest strength.
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@James T
Or, the developer could be more concerned with making money.
I’m positive the developers would rather have a gigantic sack of cash with a green dollar symbol painted on in a solid gold room rather than “messing with some heads”, as they should.
Also i thought the quotes were one of the best things about the series, as regardless of whether or not they’re right or spoken by a good person, they are extremely relevant.
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@Simon
How do you resolve all that in terms of narrative though? At the end of the day the protagonist has to prevail, so how do you make the antagonist’s story compelling, when he’s going to fall short in the end anyway?
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@Y3k-Bug: Company Of Heroes: Opposing Fronts.
The good guy doesn’t always win either. Don’t ask for examples because I don’t have any!
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I didn’t find any of that particularly thrilling. Guess I must be tiring of this kind of game again.
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@cliffski: “on which planet is COD4 $70?”
Europe, Earth.
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@walter
You’ve just convinced me that I have to play Opposing Fronts now. Good on you!
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I’ve wanted to play a game where you were a vietcong soldier for ages. It would be much more fun than Allies crushing Evil Foreigns again.
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COD4 was shameless propaganda, almost a game for fanatics (only this time christians) in my eyes.
Um, I don’t know what game you played, as the one I played was pretty anti-war in its message — or, at least, it made a statement about its futility. Also, the Americans proved summarily useless, and the SAS were cold, heartless bastards, so I’m not sure what kind of Go-USA Christian fundy would go for it.
But, hey, power to ya, I guess.
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I loved the first Call of Duty, it was a great departure from the stale and dying Medal of Honor franchise which began to decay after EA and 2015 decided it was more important to keep releasing awful expansions with no support or patches what so ever.
However, after the first Call of Duty and it’s absolutely wonderful expansion, I stopped caring about the franchise, because it became incredibly apparent, to me, that it would go the same way as it’s predecessor Medal of Honor.
Just the same rehashed, cliche, settings with the same predictable plots, cookie cutter characters, and slight variations in game mechanics. Call of Duty is to Activision is what World of Warcraft is to Blizzard, a money making machine that is designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
That’s just my 2 cents.
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That sure looks pretty, but I probably won’t be playing it.
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I’m not actually asking IW to do anything at all. That my suggestion is considered ‘beyond the pale’ illustrates my point (made somewhat preemptively, because it always comes up) — people dismiss the notion that there can be ‘meaning’ in killing the baddies seen in most videogames (see the RE5 controversy, and the indignance from gamers that there should dare BE any controversy), they say that echoes of ‘Black Peril’ imagery or the wars in the Middle East are purely incidental trappings upon an identikit target, but look how quickly it becomes anything but incidental when you put a US Marine’s helmet on the target! Gap Gen, as you say, the game depicts a US military failure, but games are the only medium which comes to mind which have something more powerful than depiction — the way it makes you part of the depiction. In the palette of ways a game can express an idea, nothing is ever as remotely important as how it involves you. After all, if you die… game failure. At most you’ll have a non-standard gameover, but really, the point is to go back to the fray, so you can get it right this time. The system is built assuming your eventual victory, so you can see the ideological power in choosing whose shoes you fill; compared to that, the guy with the bullseye on his forehead having a legitimate grievance doesn’t mean much (incidentally, my broadband is capped due to the shitness of my country, so I can’t see the trailer, but I’ll wager a few bucks that the aggrieved party isn’t painted too sympathetically.)
(Perhaps some idiot will now say that I’m calling IW goose-stepping capital-p Propagandist so-and-so’s — and actually, I did find CoD4 a touch nauseating — but no, I expect they don’t even have any conscious agenda to speak of — I’m just saying that what we say and the art we make have messages and implications even if we’re ignorant of them, so if someone’s leery of what they see as a propagandistic tone to a game, that may actually be based on something, irrelevant of whether the devs are sinister ideologues or complete political innocents. …Actually, I’d say ‘complete political innocents’ output the greatest amount of propaganda these days. Just gotta give ‘em a little push, and voila!…)
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Big whoop. Can’t wait to fail repeatedly at a firefight only to find that i can win it by running straight ahead to the next script trigger.
This franchise is spectacularly overrated.
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Regarding setting for war games, personally speaking, it’s a LOT easier for me to fight against generic faceless ‘LEMONKA!’ yelling eastern bloc bad guys then it is for me to play a game set in modern day Mexico or Rwanda bussin’ caps into the locals.
I don’t know why but as I mentioned earlier there is a very fine line, it is easy to spot but only once you cross it.
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kvertiber, that makes a lot of sense.
Google tells me that the Russian (one version of it, anyway) should be: Мне отмщение, Я воздам. On the other hand, it also tells me that the Slovo Zhizny edition renders it thus: Предоставьте месть Мне, Я отомщу, so they may have mistakenly cribbed it from that.
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@ James T – Going back to the Diehard analogy, did you think that Diehard 1 was an unfair portrayal of Germans? I have to agree with the “lighten up, Francis” argument here, but then again maybe I’m one of the people keeping games from being considered art. :shrug:
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Sunjammer: “Can’t wait to fail repeatedly at a firefight only to find that i can win it by running straight ahead to the next script trigger.”
Tough but fair. I still distinctly recall a few sequences that I short-circuited just by running to the next trigger point, which magically wiped away the dozens of baddies hot on my heels.
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@Skye
An apple is not round as a result of human design. It’s a bad analogy. CoD’s linearity isn’t some divine essence.
What made the original CoD stand out was the scripted stuff, so I can see why they’ve pursued the direction they did, but I don’t think that scripted stuff is the future. Furthermore, I think CoD4 illustrates that.
There’s a difference between a game being linear, and it being too linear. Again, ‘too linear’ isn’t really the right term for CoD4. What stands out is not that the path is more narrow and linear than ever, which it is, but rather the way they force you to see and experience certain things. When you’re crawling in the grass the BMP + patrol will follow you whichever way you go just so that they pass right over you. That whole mission you’re constantly told where to look, where to move, who to shoot and when. They want to direct every second of your experience. How far is CoD4 from being a light gun game?
I think that immersion is best built with believable interactivity, not with a believable visual presentation which tends to remove interactivity.
Another thing that bugged me about the game was how they turned up the hollywood realism factor to 11. Not because you can’t have that but because of the game at the same time trying to be serious about war. I don’t think it’s a poorly made game, just not a fun one to play. Honestly, I was bored. And I did like CoD 1 a lot
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Wow you westerners really can’t get over your responsibility/self-hating tendencies can you. as a chinese i’m gonna ignore any political (in)correctness or suggestions and play through this light gun arcade shooting in one sitting just like watching any of your blockbusters
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“Wow you westerners really can’t get over your responsibility/self-hating tendencies can you.”
Millions of ultra-violent foreigner-eviscerating games sold each year say otherwise.
Don’t let this descend into another bizarre cross-culture flame war, people.
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@Sum0: Yes, sadly I think the plot was laden with racial stereotypes.
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@Ginger Yellow
“Мне отмщение, Я воздам” is how these words are routenely quoted. For instance, this (or rather the older version “Мне отмщение, и Аз воздам”) is the epigraph for Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Slovo Zhizni seems to be an a branch of Pentecostalists (hail Wikipedia) which hardly have any significant influence over here. Anyway, “месть НА мне”, which sounds in the video, is just incorrect grammar.
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I got a very Tom Clancy vibe from the story elements of the trailer (silly right-wing fantasies about terrorists and Russians), but the grand scale and variety of gameplay scenarios left me kind of astonished.
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1:58 mins of cut scene and 2 seconds of gameplay, Need more gameplay.
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how would you know to censor comments in swedish?
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Modern Warfare, to quote Tim Rogers, is the first game of the rest of our lives.
If you can’t tell how masterfully it understands narrative in video games, then you honestly have no business whatsoever talking about them.
And oh god, people still think this is a Tom Clancy thing. Jesus, read a newspaper for Christ’s sake. Or at least pay attention when following the plot instead of purposefully missing out on crucial details because you feel the infantile need to become indignant. You all sound like children who think they can get a political science degree just by sitting around drinking Wifebeaters on their parents’ money.
I have no sympathy for anyone who mistook it as propaganda. It only makes you look just as oblivious as the loud-mouthed 12 year olds you so despise online.
Sunjammer: Maybe you should just get better at the game???
Game developers wanting to make money? Jesus, whatever next? Do you also complain that books are meant to be read? Besides, Infinity Ward are masters of their crafts and have already stated they don’t intend to compromise when they know what works (Not going to compromise the game length or any of the other ridiculous complaints people have brought up, for instance). They know what they’re doing, far more than even Valve.
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Seeing the trailer actually reminded me of an action movie. If you combined the latest James Bond flick with that Chris Odonnell movie where he climbs a mountain, then you have this game. I will say it does have the best looking action sequences since “The Darkness”. This one should be good. Or on the other hand, it could turn out to be another “Diakatana” :D
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Exciting trailer. I like that they are continuing the story they started in MW1 setting up the possibility for long term characters to emerge through the series.
@toni
As far as I understand it the enemy spawning is finite now.
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They claim they’re working on that, yeah. Personally, it was never much of a problem and did a lot to add to the effect of being involved in true battles of attrition. I do look forward to see what they come up with next, though. The prospect of civilians is certainly promising.
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I REALLY liked CoD4 and i gues i am going to like its sequel too. It had the character of a modern conflict perfectly, reminded me of good popcorn films like The Kingdom and 3 Kings.
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psyk: There is no reason to suspect that the majority of this trailer isn’t gameplay. As I said on another website, “[c]ompare this trailer to the two main trailers for CoD4. Basically everything in those videos was gameplay that was shown from third-person cameras for the purposes of editing the video together. What wasn’t was a little from the load screen cutscenes, but those were so nicely integrated into the game that I don’t mind at all. Similarly, some of this new MW2 footage is obviously from the first-person, like the zip line or the snowmobile stuff. The rest is easily imagined as in-game events being shown here from an external view for dramatic effect.” Follow the link for handy viewing of the two CoD4 trailers:
http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?t=19913&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=41
fulis: Fair enough. I would come up with a different analogy, but the truth is that I have no desire to “rule out” criticism of a game’s chosen formal elements. Quite the contrary. Whereas earlier comments made pointless hit-and-run observations about the CoD formula, the discussion you are providing is useful.
I sympathize with your feelings despite my love for the kind of scripted sequences seen in CoD4, HL2, etc., but I find it hard to visualize your “ideal” Call of Duty game. We know that Infinity Ward are doing away with the move-forward-to-end-respawning structure (suibhne and Sunjammer), which I think is fantastic since it was such a transparent, arcadey gimmick. But I so enjoy sequences like the ghillie suit mission where you are told what to do. I root for the mundane in games. I like being told precisely what to do, and I enjoy “working with” an NPC character or other narrative authority. I feel that it’s important for my personal responsibilities to rise and fall, as it is exhausting to make critical decisions constantly. My favorite part of Homeworld, for example, is the first tutorial-style mission where your task is to test the resourcing and production systems of the mothership. I wish that at least some shooty and horror games would feature more game time with nothing to fight or nothing to fight with so as to heighten the excitement of action and produce a more rhythmic narrative.
The being-there of interactivity makes following directions within an unusual setting inherently immersive; the mundane becomes interesting due to context and the promise of what is possible. Restraint is a valuable characteristic in a narrative, and it would be hard to argue that there are not plenty of places in CoD4 where you are free enough to approach some situation in a number of different ways of your choosing, even if the outcome of victory will be the same.
And anyway, linear, scripted games have finely tuned pacing. That’s generally their appeal over more open-world games, I think. I love games like Stalker, believe me; but if you had your way with the Call of Duty formula wouldn’t it become just like something else that’s already on the market? I just don’t understand what you want.
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I finished COD4 on veteran, and it was one of the most painfully uncool experiences i have ever had in gaming. Fuck you achievement point addiction. On lower difficulties the scripted nature of the game is masked by actual progression. Being faced with the war of attrition COD4 becomes near the end over and over again makes tactics like figuring out what areas trigger the next step in the mission script go from becoming cheap workarounds to good measures for switching off the Infinite Russian Generators(tm) IW liberally spread around the area. If your goal is to beat the game, i’ll say figuring out how to short circuit the primary way the game tries to stop you is a solid win for the player who pulls it off.
COD4 was a great game online, i had a lot of good fun with it. The single player experience however is a series of admittedly cool cinematics that wind up feeling like you have little impact if any on how they play out. It’s total rollercoaster territory, and i’m not sure that’s what i want from a game. The moment it becomes apparent that the enemy is going to keep coming infinitely until you Go To That Door Over There is the moment immersion is irreversibly broken.
What i want is FEAR on Extreme. That’s what i want from a first person shooter experience. Tight combat arenas, enemies that fight back in a dynamic and interesting way, and no sense ever that the game is cheating. IW’s goal seems to be to show how fucking awesome and cool they are and how THEIR utterly linear tightly scripted cutscene of a single player experienceis better than that of others. I’m still waiting for them to make an actual single player game for me to play. You can only distract me with flashing lights and bleeps and boings for so long.
That said, we’ll see. I admire their dedication to high framerates and coldbloodedness. And i’m sure the multiplayer will be mental.
Edit: Kneejerk reaction to the “get better at it” comment up there. Rereading some comments. Very cool if they are serious about rethinking the way the game progresses. I know relentless bludgeoning chaos is the hallmark of COD, but i admired the few quiet moments there were in COD4 (That Scene in particular really stuck with me) and i hope they bring that a little more forward.
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Leave playing COD4 on Veteran to Xbox owners obsessed with Achievements. I bashed thru COD 4 on Normal and it was a fun 7/10 shooter. The multiplayer was why I bought the game.
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Single player could be interesting but i will likely dislike the re-gen health bollocks and tiny console port maps in multiplayer.
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I’ve always found CoD 4 to be a great game. It’s one of the most challenging games I’ve played lately and that’s really something I’ve always enjoyed in the series.
I’m no robot, but the fact that I can pull off one whole Veteran campaign makes me feel very much happy, accomplished even.
I don’t mind the fact that it is scripted to hell. It’s like a design decision and not a lack of brilliance to choose otherwise.
I treated CoD 4 as both a cinematic experience and a tough challenge. And in both ways it was a blast.
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The big groundbreaking thing for COD4, in my opinion, was that while they retained a first-person perspective throughout the game, they recognised that a story can often be told a lot better through the eyes of someone other than the protagonist.
What’s more (immersively) effective for telling you how a coup d’état occurred? An infodump in a briefing with fancy visuals? Or actually experiencing it first-hand as the one being executed?
What’s more effective in terms of narrating how instrumental an AC-130′s fire support was for getting the SAS troops evacuated? Having you run around as your usual guy on the ground, facing almost no opposition while hordes of enemies are being blown up all around you? Or putting you in the plane and letting you blow them up yourself?
Maybe there’s prior art and COD4 isn’t the first to do this. Maybe they’ve done it in prior COD games; I don’t know. But it’s the first time I’ve personally seen such willingness to put you in so many bodies in order to tell a story. (That is, put the player in other bodies, not the character, a la Cryostasis.)
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Sunjammer, play Halo 3 on Heroic or above. I’m certainly ready to acknowledge it’s more of an art than Modern Warfare, but Infinity Ward’s reinvention is a game as pure, unadulterated entertainment.
Put another way, it’s one of the most devastatingly effective lightgun games ever crafted. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
And hey, I love it for its quiet moments too. As I said before, it’s gaming’s best shot at pure narrative since the bloody 80s, when limitations made these practically a requirement. These people get it, and understand that they’re not making a film. Shit, they even managed to make the loading screens integral to the experience. That’s how you make a game.
Of course, most developers miss out on these nuances when imitating them. It’s a shame. The Halo received the same response (Hence the ridiculous “Halo-killer” hype, completely ignoring that what it does fantastically – especially by the final game in the trilogy – is create emergent sandbox encounters which require genuine ingenuity and improvisation).
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Quit knocking cod4, it was awesome :)
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I think I just jizzed my pants.
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Sunjammer you’re saying FEAR was better then CoD4?
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@Rossignol
That’s not “zip-lining.” Zip-line is a kiddy ride where you fly through the forest on a pulley to break the monotony of your 9-5 suit job.
The video showed Special Patrol Insertion/Extraction
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“Special Patrol Insertion.”
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I sigh at only having enjoyed grunt insertion. Sorry, Slightly Larger Than Average Soldier Insertion. It was fun though.
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Ey kin do a Special Patrool Insertion — ben’ over an’ I’ll shoo yeh!
@ James T – Going back to the Diehard analogy, did you think that Diehard 1 was an unfair portrayal of Germans?
Were the German population attacking McClane in endlessly respawning waves? The story concerns an uprising, but judging by the number of people you shoot, it’s a pretty popular one!
(I don’t go for the ‘games are art as soon as they’re inscrutable enough’ bollocks. Games were art from the beginning.)
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Wow, I’m honored to post under Tobias Fünke. Never-Nudes of the world undress.
Nice. Love that skyhook maneuver at the end. I’ll agree that this game trounces COD4 storywise.
I’ll also agree that the first Mod Warfare had excellent, excellent multiplayer replay value — I must’ve spent the better part of a year playing versus matches.
Props to Infinity for breaking away and doing their own thing — I never much liked Treyarch’s take on Call of Duty.
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edit: Now I’m above you AND below you! It’s an ACES sandwich! *leaves blue handprint*
Guess which age-group “You all sound like children who think they can get a political science degree just by sitting around drinking Wifebeaters on their parents’ money” makes you sound like, kiddo! (propaganda filters are more Journalism than Pol Sci, by the way).
But no, of course, anyone who wasn’t so bedazzled by CoD4′s two or three momentary clever bits that they threw out their every observation about the rest of the game is a fuckin’ pretender, man, they don’t know about all, like… narrative and shit!
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Whatever the Wifebeater is, it sounds delicious. I think I’ll have one or five of those. It’s gotta be better for me than gin, which turns me into Jack Dempsey, only I don’t remember any of it.
Edit: dang, one place says a Wifebeater is simply Stella Artois, another place says 1.0 OZ. Cola 3.0 OZ. Jack Daniels Directions: Mix with ice and get shitty! Here I was thinking it would be exotic.
Anyway, back to racial stereotyping and its presence in video games (Skurmedel, I’m looking at you): Wow, so video games should be some freaking utopia where terrorists aren’t anti-western fanatics and psychopaths with thick, villainous accents (and also happen to be Yemenis, Chechens, Iranians, or whatever)? Maybe a nice college-educated white woman named Martha from Omaha would more believably portray a suicide bomber? It’s stereotyping to assume that Pakistanis would infiltrate and commit terrorist acts in India, but it’s also true. Oscar Wilde was right on with “only shallow people don’t judge by appearances” (and by God, just to be clear, I am not calling anyone, anyone at all, ‘shallow’). Cliche but true. More cliches: I like my art to imitate life. At least in the case of video games, where the immersion factor tends to ebb when Martha from Omaha shows up with her derringer, trying to slay Soap in the name of the Knights of Columbus Women’s Auxilliary.
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Wifebeater is simply Stella Artois.
And yeah, Russian-Middle Eastern tensions escalating through fanaticism to explode in the US, UK and Europe’s faces is not far-fetched, is the point.
Neither is the US Army making an arse of itself or grey ops people being shady amoral characters.
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Forget not gentlemen that life is a subjective experience and we are all limited to our subjective perceptions of it.
That said, CoD4 rocked my effing socks. It does fall apart at higher difficulties because the gears and guts of the game start to become exposed, but I had a hella awesome time first playing through on HarderThanNormal
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I think I played this game when it was called Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield.
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@Jim: “SPIE rigging” if you don’t want to type it all out.
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Something about their graphics and framerate makes this trailer look really sharp and smooth, I dunno, hard to put my finger on it just from watching a few quick cuts.
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Digit Infinity Ward have a 60fps policy for their games when running on consoles unlike most others which race to the bottom of 30-25 fps sludge.
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“There’s the inherent dehumanising aspect of mowing down wave after wave of rowdy coloureds, which is inevitable in this genre,”
It actually isn’t but great (forced) cutscenes and staged wave-after-wave fights seem enough for the big shooter crowd who buy the same thing everytime. Pretty appalling stuff if you think about it from a game design point of view since the ‘cinematic’ linearity and endless respawns are incredibly moronic and lazy, it’s about time they started doing something about it after all those years. It gets completely ridiculous when you have other shooters pretending to be “something more” even though they offer the same archaic design flaws (Bioshock and vanilla Half-Life² for example).
I still think the success of CoD4 is mainly due to the fact we haven’t had a decent modern life shooter since SoF2 or BF2. People like the modern military guns stuff in an accessible way. There simply isn’t any decent competition for CoD4 or its sequel. It’s undeniable EA/Dice have missed a chance to cope with the huge CoD success. Bad Company, other Battlefield spinoffs, a battered Medal of Honor franchise… all pathetic attempts, they really just should have focused on one big game that would still sell by its name alone: Battlefield 3.
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Personally, I rate games against their counterparts, rather than some vivid ideal I have in my head. If I could make a better game, I would. So instead, I opt for “is this game better than the last few games of the same genre?”, and at the time, COD4 beat a whole bunch of games out of the water. If not for the action-movie-feel, then for the fast-paced storyline. I didn’t think COD4 aspired to be anything beyond intense linear action. Granted, there will always be critics of the popular things, but not everyone’s out to make a game that incorporates the storyline of “Sideways” over “Diehard”
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It’s actually called rappelling lol
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FEAR’s basic combat beat CoD4 into a fine red mist. I think it’s a good sign when you turn up a game’s difficulty that the game doesn’t turn frustrating and rather makes you work harder to progress. There’s a fine balance there, and very few first person games have really pulled that off. FEAR gives you and the AI enough complex options at any moment in terms of weapons and navigation that if you can’t outgun someone, working your way to a more beneficial vantage point to regain the upper hand is a viable option. COD4 plunks you in a hallway; there are other dudes at the end of the hallway. They are shooting. Sometimes they pause. When they do, you shoot at them. If you time it wrong, you die. Start over.
But this is really whining on my behalf, because FEAR did one thing with small arms combat in tight confines against few powerful enemies, and CoD4 is trying to do large scale combat with big guns against a ton of dudes. It’s about the intensity of a scene, rather than the intensity of individual relationships. Does that make sense?
For my money, FEAR was a better game. It gave me more gameplay and individual experiences. We can all agree that scene X of COD4 was awesome, but i had moments of FEAR where i’d luck the hell out against an ambush of 3 dudes and pull off a series of mad stunt melee/pistol kills that felt so awesome to do i reloaded *to see if i could do that again* rather than just because i died. From what i read, a lot of people did not play FEAR on a high enough difficulty to fully appreciate the pressure that AI put on you, and that’s a stone cold shame.
This “score attack” kind of feeling, where you try again to do better, rather than try again to simply succeed, is my #1 reason to go back to a game. Mere success is not what games should be about.
This is not to say that COD4 *IS* a worse game, since that’s totally subjective. Just that i feel like it only gives out what it sets out to do, and as such i’ve never felt the urge to go back to it. For comparison, i think there’s a reason COD4 is remembered most fondly for its multiplayer, where your opponents aren’t necessarily faceless nobodies who will rush at you or go through predefined motions.
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Sunjammer, play Halo 3. You will be pleased.
Anyway guys, scans of the Game Informer article have surfaced. They’re talking co-op play in its own mode, increased destructibility, larger and more branching levels, working around infinite spawns (read the mountaintop assault in the first few pages to see what they’re going for), the use of civilians in showdowns against indiscernible militia men and a lot more.
And still these guys know exactly that they want to make and how to do it. You’ve got to give them credit for at least that, even if you don’t approve of the final product.
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Hey its really unfair to link to the scans.
The poor moes that make that magazine need the sales.
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But saying that…
The first page of that article coupled with a scene from the trailer = RIP Soap??? N00000OOoooo!
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The price of working in a highly competitive trade, Radiant!
But yeah, I’m taking a guess that if that piece of footage indeed shows Soap being riddled with bullets, it’s likely because you didn’t detonate the charges on time or something. Or something else entirely!
I just hope he has a Scottish accent. And that Captain Price hasn’t faded into obscurity.
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@Radiant: Remember Metal Gear Solid on Ye Olden Playstation, where whenever Snake died, some handler back in Quantico would say, “Snake? Snake?? SNAAAAAKE!!!?!?!?!?”
I just ran that through my mind with Soap and it sounded a lot better.
Noooooooo!!! SOOOOOOOAPPP!!!!!
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COD4 was excellent, I played it around the same time as HL EP2 came out and I loved both for their fantastic pacing and great set pieces. Two of the most fun FPS experiences I have had in recent years. I am quite surprised at the *hate* that some readers seem to have for it.
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Okay, so I heard a rumor the some Weapons from the game are going to disapear from Modern warfare 2 that were in COD4. Is this true? i liked cod4s weapons besides the M16. Are there Shotguns????
i like shotguns in cod4 and if their gone then it just wont be that fun?
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