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I’m sick of WWII shooters. Aren’t you?
People have been saying that for years now, and I could never really agree with them because I always had a place in my heart for the Call of Duty series. Sure, World War II shooters are tired, but Call of Duty could always surprise and enthrall me.
That is, of course, until Call of Duty 3. That’s another issue, though, and I’ll get back to that later.
“The WW2 market was already well-established when we came in, and we stomped all over those guys,” an Infinity Ward representative told me. “We’re going to do the same thing with this.”
The this he’s talking about is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the first CoD title to pull away from war-torn Europe and bring players into the modern age.
That comment made me think, though, about the genre of modern-age military shooters that feature real military units using real weapons against real enemies who also use real weapons: there isn’t one.
The idea seems terribly obvious, so much so that the sheer lack of modern military shooters seems almost insane. Think about it, though; can you name any other popular military shooter that takes place right now?
There’s Tom Clancy games, sure, but those have all gone futuristic. Rainbow Six has gone future-happy with R6: Vegas, Ghost Recon has turned into GRAW which is anything but present-set. Everything else either takes place on Mars or a space station.
How can this be? Perhaps, I surmise, because it’s too hard. Making a game set in the future is easy, you can just invent whatever technologies and conflicts you want. To make a good modern warfare game you would have to get every detail right while still making the game fun to play.
If anybody had to do it, it should be Infinity Ward -- who started working on Call of Duty 4 right after they finished Call of Duty 2, a fantastic game and probably the best Xbox 360 launch title. In the meantime, Activision shoveled Call of Duty 3 onto Treyarch, who many feel was not up to par with previous titles. That’s a weasel-wordy way of saying I hated it, but a proper journalist isn’t supposed to say such things.
Call of Duty 4, which I took a look at this week at E3, puts players in control of a U.S. Marine and a British SAS trooper, much in the way previous CoD titles alternated between US, British, and Russian sides of the same faction. The game features a storyline wherein a fictional group of Chechnyan rebels stage a coup, and players will be fighting in areas near and around Chernobyl.
There is an overarching plot to the game, but the actual character you play as has no story, just as in other CoD titles.
There are over 70 weapons in the game, all of them completely realistic and appropriately represented. Other military hardware shows up in the game, too, such as the high-tech Javelin surface-to-surface missile launcher that auto-targets enemy vehicles and fires a missile (a $75,000 missile, the Infinity Ward developer reminded me) straight up, then straight back down onto the top of the target (where shielding is almost always the weakest). There’s also Cobra helicopters and other gunships to provide air support.
The level I looked at took place in a battle-torn village and featured some of the most frantic combat I’ve ever seen. The enemies all run around with multiple RPG launchers strapped to their backs, darting back and forth from cover to cover. There are hundreds of animations for characters, all of them motion-captured and activated dynamically. AI characters duck for cover naturally, shoot around corners when they need to, and stumble convincingly as they’re shot down.
I also came across a few of the “holy sh-t” moments that made me fall in love with Call of Duty. Certain weapons feature IR-sights, which are like laser sights but only visible with night-vision goggles and appear as airy, ethereal green lines emanating from your gun. Put a few soldiers in the same space and those lines dancing across rooms and through the darkness can be quite breathtaking.
There are also some awesome smoke effects, as when enemy-fired RPGs leave behind dynamic smoke trails that linger like banners in the sky. The game features a new dynamic lighting and shadow system as well, just one of the many additions to the constantly-revised Call of Duty engine.
Also new is a material-penetration system, where every surface and object is given a unique density. Soft materials like plaster walls and wooden fences can simply be shot-through. Fresh bullet holes glow green through night-vision until the heat dissipates.
As for the annoying elements of Call of Duty 3 that won’t be carried over: those stupid little mini-games they threw at you in the console versions, like twisting the analog sticks around to charge demolition explosives, or the little scripted grapple-fights where an enemy would grab your gun and force you to mash buttons or wave your Wii-mote like mad until the game would decide you won -- they’re gone (there won't even be a Wii version), bomb setting and all combat will be straightforward; the pointless scripted cut scenes that did nothing for the actual story, like early in CoD 3 where a teammate threatened to mutiny against his superior -- none of that, anything a character says will be story-oriented and nothing will ever take you out of the game.
And the cool stuff that will be coming back? Frantic, balls-out action sequences that may give you P.T.S.D.? You bet. Slower, stealthy-style sections to even out the pacing? Yeah, there’s a few sniper levels complete with ghille suits. Picking up and throwing back grenades thrown at you? Yes. Cooking off grenades so they’ll blow sooner after throwing? Yes. Tank driving? I couldn’t get an answer out of the guy; that probably means yes.
Infinity Ward seems pretty excited about the multiplayer mode. “It should beat Halo, not in terms of sales, but in terms of fun,” the developer told me. Deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, domination, all that stuff. What should make it stand out isn’t crazy mode, but rather the ease of control and gameplay. Apparently, multiplayer control should be exactly like single-player.
Like pretty much every other game at E3, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare will be out this holiday season, meaning the game is pretty-much finished and now being polished. It’s unusual, then, that there was no free-play demo at E3; it was entirely “watch somebody who made the game play it,” which often means that the demo will explode if you go anywhere off the beaten path.
Fans of the Call of Duty series who liked it for more than it’s Nazi-blasting WWII setting should rest assured that this isn’t just a modern shooter with “Call of Duty” in the name, this is a Call of Duty game from top to bottom. People who lost hope in the series after Call of Duty 3 should rest assured that CoD3 was just an offshoot, and that the very people responsible for the greatness of the original Call of Duty games are behind Modern Warfare.
Bearing in mind that I still haven’t actually touched the game, I’m obligated not to give an actual gameplay verdict. As a gamer, though, and not a journalist, I’m buying this game.
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