Cognition Dissemination: A Call of Duty Against Itself
It’s another year, so another Call of Duty game is coming this fall. Activision recently confirmed that the next installment will be Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. The title’s existence was leaked ahead of time, since few secrets remain that way these days, though that gave everyone time to wrap their heads around the initially-confusing name. Keep in mind that the first Modern Warfare game released nearly a dozen years ago was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, so this name doesn’t contradict that one. It does come close to matching the name of that game’s remastered version (whose website was hijacked by this game’s, funnily enough), however, which is where the befuddlement comes in.
The game will still be developed by Infinity Ward, but the name shows how this will be a reboot of the Modern Warfare series. It’s being done to indicate how the development team wants to go in a different direction, though with some of the same characters from the campaigns of previous Modern Warfare games — both alive and dead. The characters and settings will be more modern, since the standards for “modern warfare” have changed since 2007. The intention here is to depict a “morally gray world,” where it’s difficult to distinguish the difference between right and wrong. These are grandiose ambitions for a CoD game, and I’m having a hard time seeing how it will all work.
The idea for this darker and gritter approach came from Jacob Minkoff and Taylor Kurosaki, the Campaign Gameplay Director and the Studio Narrative Director for the game, respectively. Both happen to be veteran developers who came to Infinity Ward from Naughty Dog, meaning they have experience with both the Uncharted series and, more relevant to this title, The Last of Us. The gaming market and audience have changed in the last decade, and believe they could handle a campaign with a more nuanced and serious narrative in lieu of one driven by shooting anything that moves.
In fact, it’s nice that they feel this game could use a campaign at all considering the last one, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, shipped without one. Whether this is the reason why that game sold less than what Activision wanted remains to be seen.
The game will primarily take place in an unidentified Middle Eastern country, the location of most wars these days (including a potentially-impending one). It will be played from the perspectives of two characters: A special forces operator and a female rebel fighter in the Middle East, to obtain the perspectives from two sides of the war. I had to roll my eyes a bit when I first heard they were deliberately going for scenarios similar to the infamous “No Russian” level in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, where players could take part in a mass shooting terrorist attack at an airport. (There was an option to skip the level, but sure.) This implied that they wanted to aim for a certain level of edginess, to drum up controversy for the sake of it. But given who’s working on this game, it doesn’t sound like that’s what they’re aiming for here. But that’s not to say they won’t run into problems, or that players might enjoy parts they weren’t intended to.
From the details, it sounds like the narrative team wants to create an experience on par with Spec Ops: The Line, or Zero Dark Thirty if we’re venturing outside the video game realm. Both those works challenged expectations for what depictions of war could be in their mediums, especially the former. Their intention is to create scenarios that make the player feel uncomfortable. These are good ideas for a war game, but the big problem here is whether this is what the CoD audience wants. There’s a vocal audience that missed having a campaign to play in BO4, but that game also represented what most fans apparently want from the series: A jingoist fantasy.
Basically, the narrative team is being hindered by this being a Call of Duty game, a fact also made clear during the reveal stream. There was nearly-equal focus on the types of guns players will be using across Modern Warfare’s modes. It won’t be easy to make players feel guilty about killing in games when they also want them to focus on how fun it will be to use certain guns across its play modes. The goal here is to increase sales, and they feel a deeper campaign will attract those who don’t usually play CoD games, or haven’t played one in a little while. But marketing for the Michael Bay film-inspired side of the game will get in the way, as it did during this stream. It will be tough for them to figure out which one to focus on.
Modern Warfare will release on October 25th. The segment Activision focuses on for the marketing campaign will determine which element they want their fanbase to take seriously, and I have a feeling that I know which one that will be, to the chagrin of the narrative team.
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Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
