11.11.07
Modern Warfare
By all accounts, I shouldn’t have enjoyed Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare nearly as much as I did. The singleplayer is just 6 hours long, it’s almost completely linear, the action is non-stop and relentless, and the plot is a barely decent excuse for shooting terrorists (and also, according to the PCG review, stolen directly from a season of 24). Nevertheless, I’m having loads of fun playing it for the second time.
I always enjoyed the Call of Duty games, although I never bought the first two - I just borrowed them from a friend and played through them once. Out of principle, I frowned at World War 2 games because it’s been done to death, but Call of Duty kept me interested by not crediting the Americans with singlehandedly winning the damn thing. You got to play a Brit and a Soviet, and hilariously those campaigns tended to be more enjoyable than the straight-forward infantry combat of the American campaigns (even if CoD2 had that awesome D-Day scene with the Rangers).
Call of Duty 4 has finally left the World War behind and upgraded itself to a more-or-less-present-day setting. Since everybody knows modern warfare is mostly really boring, Infinity Ward have taken the liberty of inventing a war for themselves to make a game in. As the PCG review points out, this robs the series of the historical and cultural context the previous games benefited from, but since the plot was never integral to the series anyway, my experience didn’t really suffer that much from it. There’s this evil terrorist with nukes, and obviously he has to be killed with a whole army. Good enough for me.
The game immediately got some cheap points with me by handing me my favourite weapon, the H&K G36, during the training mission. Yes, I just named an assault rifle as my favourite weapon. No, I’m not particularly proud of that, but I blame war movies and computer games! And I’m totally still a pacifist in real life. In the spirit of its predecessors, the game starts you out as a British SAS agent and sends you on a couple of really neat missions before interrupting itself with a few missions as the US Marine Corp (USMC) where you have to charge around in some run-down village in THE MIDDLE EAST for a bit before you get to be the SAS again. Just like the previous games, the British campaign is by far the best, and the American one seems somewhat run-of-the-mill and uninspired. The American campaign does come to an extremely interesting end about two-thirds through the game though, but I won’t spoil it for anybody who has yet to play the game. Suffice to say it is quite the shocking little twist.
Out of principle, I prefer games with an open level design that allows you to explore the world and plan out your tactics and just generally excersize your brain a bit. This also has the benefit of squeezing a lot more gameplay out of your assets by setting a slower pace - you rarely stop to look at the scenery in Call of Duty, you’re too preoccupied with not getting shot. However, there is a clear advantage to making a completely linear game: You give your players a much more carefully controlled experience. The last mission I played through has a huge shoot-out at a TV station in a large room full of cubicles and with electronic equipment everywhere. By the time the fight is over, there’s not a single intact monitor left in the room. The destruction is glorious.
And of course the SAS campaign in particular is crammed full of fantastic experiences to break up the monotony of the USMC missions. Unfortunately I must once again agree with PC Gamer (it’s much more fun to disagree with somebody, but there’s a reason I subscribe to the mag, I suppose) that the sniper mission in Chernobyl is the best mission in the game. It is half an hour of pure scripted brilliance.
In summary, CoD4 is not Portal, but it’s about 50% longer and trades the humour and the quirkyness for a significant amount of epic. It’s definitely one of my favourite games in the rollercoaster category. The only thing I’m missing is a German campaign - for the irony.
EER said,
November 11, 2007 at 23:47
tl;dr
No seriously, there are two kinds of people, those who like completely linear shooters in which you have to kill (nearly) everything that moves and those who don’t. I usually don’t, unless I’m in the mood.
Right now, I’m going to load up some OpenTTD. Good luck in battle!
Jonas said,
November 12, 2007 at 02:11
Yeah that’s obviously not true though. See, I usually don’t like completely linear shooters either, but once in a while something in that category catches my fancy anyway. Half-Life 2 was the latest one. Before that it was Max Payne 2. Now it’s Call of Duty 4. Like I wrote, in general I vastly prefer games that are more open and let you use your brain a bit, but once in a while a rollercoaster like CoD4 can be a load of fun.
EER said,
November 12, 2007 at 07:48
Well, it might be fun, but I strongly dislike the HL2 series for exactly the reason that it’s a shooter on rails. However, I think episode 2 had some added value due to the achievements.
I have to confess that I haven’t played the CoD series > CoD1, though.
Jonas said,
November 12, 2007 at 11:03
Ah that’s a great shame about HL2 because I think they did a remarkable job of hiding the linearity. Not so much with HL1, but back then it wasn’t really necessary to hide the linearity, the importance of open gameplay was something Deus Ex impressed on everybody.
Especially the buggy levels of HL2 stand out as a great example of a really linear level design which none-the-less has small optional branches you can either zoom past or get out of your vehicle to explore.
Anyway, I think what I’m saying is that the linearity of the Call of Duty games is more obvious in a way than in HL2, so if it bugged you in HL2 it will piss you off in CoD.
fox said,
November 12, 2007 at 19:44
“if it bugged you in HL2 it will piss you off in CoD.”
Not necessarily because it feels much more natural in CoD4 that you have to go a predefined route. It’s because of the fast pace I think, you really don’t want to explore every little detail since it’s so obvious that doing so would fucking kill you right away. It’s war - all one wants to do is to survive.
Jonas said,
November 12, 2007 at 20:31
Oh, well that’s a good point. You may indeed be right.
EER said,
November 12, 2007 at 23:10
I’ll check the demo sometime in the upcoming weeks, which I’m going to download here http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/call-of-duty-4/call-of-duty-4-demo/533701
(sorry for using your blog as a notepad ;))
Smike said,
November 13, 2007 at 00:05
Teh Jonas’ blog is best utilized as a notepad. And as a SPAM depository
“…they did a remarkable job of hiding the linearity [in HL2]. Not so much with HL1, but back then it wasn’t really necessary to hide the linearity…”
But at that time, there wasn’t any linearity because there were no narratives. WHY DOES NO ONE REMEMBER THIS FOR CRYING OUT LOUD?? There weren’t any damned stories that you were immersed in as a real physical world. Everything had to be imagined and felt in RPGs before HL1. So hiding the linearity wasn’t even a concept - the mere fact that there WAS linearity wasn’t even an issue yet because stories weren’t even an issue yet, because no one had done them in that kind of real environment.
It’s not fair to compare the thing that made the breakthrough with the things that used that breakthrough as the basis for creating something extraordinary, like The Original Series to The Next Generation. Some people will always like HL1 or TOS better because it came first and did it as it should be done, others like TNG or HL2 because it did it zounds better. I’m a TNG man, but I’m also a HL1 man - I still like HL1 much more than 2, but unlike you, Teh Jonas, I played them as they came out. And that might be why.
Jonas said,
November 13, 2007 at 00:54
Ah-hah, well this time you can’t pull the “I played this game while you were still wearing diapers, sonny”-argument because I did play Half-Life when it came out in ‘98 and I had a smashing time of it (although then, as now, I was too scared to handle the zombies myself). Hell, I was mapping for it when I was 13. So don’t try and lecture me about context! Furthermore, I can still love Half-Life 1 even though I think Half-Life 2 is a better game. And I can still respect HL1 for its achievements even though I think HL2 built further achievements on top of those of its predecessor. Just like I can still respect Citizen Kane for its equilibrism even though I enjoy The Matrix a lot more.
Now, as for your claim that the games weren’t linear because there was no narrative: What would you call Wolfenstein 3D then? Its story was pretty much just the short text that was printed on the first page of the manual, and yet it still managed to be linear. Even if a game doesn’t have a story, it can still be perfectly linear, Smike.
What it boils down to is that nobody cared back then, and frankly a lot of people still don’t. However, some of us have been taught by Deus Ex that even shooters ought to give their players a bit of freedom. Or at the very least try to hide their linearity as well as possible.
…in principle. Because obviously there’s still room for the linear shooters, seeing how I’m currently playing through Call of Duty 4 for the second time.
Smike said,
November 13, 2007 at 02:30
No, something can’t be linear if it doesn’t have a story because you’re referencing the story if you say it’s linear or not. No story, no linear or non-linear modifier, just events.
And I distinctly remember you saying that you didn’t play through Half-Life until AFTER you played DX. You said that (IIRC) and I remember the reason being similar to “…although then, as now, I was too scared to handle the zombies myself…” So, hence, I wasn’t just assuming something, I was basing my postulation that you had played it firmly out of context on something you’d flat-out said, IIRC. I also recall you mentioning that you regretted that choice, as it may have modified your perspective on the game, thinking it was less cool than others thought it.
Also, when did you start that HL mapping site? April ‘99 would have had to have been the earliest, and that’s pretty darned close to DX’s release date anyway, but was either/both HL/DX released in Denmark without delay? Because either way, I remember that most people, even those tapped-in, didn’t play it until ‘99 in any case, and certainly in places other than the hub of gaming at the time, proper buzz would have been even further delayed. Especially for a youngster. So assuming you played it in April ‘99 and then started to map with it in, say, May, perhaps you played the intro and then got afraid of the head crabs and zombies, DX came out very soon after, you played that, and then went back and played HL. Is that about right? ‘Cause then everything makes sense, and obviously at that point the “sting” of HL’s narrative is sorta muted.
Jonas said,
November 13, 2007 at 09:26
Smike I can’t possibly have said that, that would’ve been a lie. I remember exactly where I played Half-Life, with my friend Claus across the street, in his basement room - yes I was scared of the zombies, but it didn’t matter because Claus played that part of the game while I watched.
You are quite likely right that I didn’t play it until ‘99, but as far as I recall, I did not play Deus Ex until 2001 because there was no advertising or hype surrounding it in Denmark and in fact for several years I was the only person I even knew who had ever played Deus Ex (I registered at the PlanetDeusEx forums almost immediate after they were created from Deus Ex Incarnate in June 2001). Half-Life, on the other hand, became ludicrously popular very soon after Counter-Strike was released in 99. I started mapping for HL when I was 13, around the time we got an Internet connection on my mother’s PC, and that was probably early 2000.
Oh and do you want me to quote you for saying level design can’t be linear? We’ll have a great big laugh about that in a couple of years when you’re older and all these inane discussions are long behind us, I’m sure.
Jonas said,
November 13, 2007 at 10:44
Clearly this argument requires a new blog post. With diagrams.
http://rooc.offtopicproductions.com/blog/2007/11/13/nonlinearity-in-level-design/
Smike said,
November 13, 2007 at 11:02
I never SAID level design can’t be linear, given that I was never talking about it in any way, shape, or form, knucklehead.
Jonas said,
November 13, 2007 at 11:44
Smike we’ve been talking about level design all along. If you’re talking Narrative, then almost all games with stories are linear. Deus Ex is linear, narratively speaking, even if it does give you a few choices of when and where to kill particular “boss” characters, but that doesn’t really affect the macro level of the story much because the game expects you to kill them eventually and no matter whether or not you visit the ladies’ room in UNATCO you will still end up in Hong Kong.
On the other hand Deus Ex has an open level design that allows for much more freedom on the micro-level than most other shooters, including Half-Life 1 and 2. YOU are the knucklehead because YOU decided we were talking about narratives and started shouting at me for “forgetting” that games before HL1 didn’t have narratives at all (never mind Ultima, System Shock, Red Alert, or the Might & Magic series, then).
Maybe you would like to get over yourself and go over this discussion again and maybe this time you’ll understand what we’re talking about.
Smike said,
November 14, 2007 at 02:22
I understood what you were talking about entirely, and was trying to bring up a new point that I felt you had missed. But it seems that you are more interested in staking ground that having an actual discussion, so I’ll leave you to that.
(And I suppose I must be mistaken regarding you playing HL, but it’s what my memory still tells me that you said.)
Smike said,
November 14, 2007 at 04:09
None of any of that was sarcasm, to be clear. I’d trust my memory if it were spoken words, but them being written, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you never said it, that someone else did, and that I just attributed it to you because you were involved in the discussion and mentioned being afraid of the headcrabs and zombies.