Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Games of the 7th Generation: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

So this is the "big one".  This is the game that re-refined the first person shooter genre.  To my mind, the history of first person shooters goes something like this:

Id basically invents the genre with Catacomb Abyss and Wolfenstein 3d.  They make the definitive FPS with Doom, and then they pull it into the 3rd dimension with Quake.  Meanwhile, in Chicago, a company called Bungie is following closely building shooters with their own Bungie twist, the Marathon series, it's not quite as recognized as Id's stuff, partly due to being on Macintosh instead of DOS.

Enter Halo.  Halo basically re-defines the genre by introducing huge refinements.  The player can only carry two weapons at a time, mostly due to the fact that she's playing on a controller.  This means you can't easily scroll a mouse wheel or hit a number to change weapons.  They also introduced the idea of a regenerating shield which means you no longer needed to run around finding health packs, if you made a mistake you weren't screwed, you just had to take cover until your shield regenerated.  Halo was an interesting and innovative game in many other ways, but these are the key refinements to FPS games. 

Then Call of Duty 4 came out.  It was highly anticipated.  Call of Duty on PC released in 2003, was a new standard of polish. Call of Duty 2 was, in most people's opinion, the best X Box 360 launch title.  The studio behind these games, Infinity Ward, hadn't worked on Call of Duty 3, and this was the much anticipated follow up to Call of Duty 2.  Previous Call of Duties had covered World War II, but mainly, they'd covered World War II movies.  Nearly every memorable scene from Call of Duty or Call of Duty 2 could be directly traced back to some World War II move.

With Call of Duty 4, Infinity Ward was stepping away from World War 2 and entering the realm of modern combat.  At the time, this was considered a highly risky move.  It was well known that players loved World War II games, and most modern combat games had been comparative flops (Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon).  The general wisdom was that Modern warfare just wasn't that interesting.  Turns out the general wisdom was completely wrong.

Call of Duty 4 possibly pulled one of the best tricks ever in gaming.  They made an action-movie game that everyone thought was a war-movie game.  Call of Duty 4 was the first time in gaming where I felt like I was controlling the protagonist of an interactive action movie.  Incredible moments from my favorite movies were re-created and I was the hero.  The stealth mission, the sniper shot, the one final shot with a pistol.  A bunch of action movie clichés in playable form.  It also brought Iron Sights to the masses.  A feature that drastically changed the way gunplay in a first person shooter felt. The game was about creating huge moments and letting the player experience them, almost the antithesis of previous games that were more about giving the player tools to create his own moments.

I still remember finishing the game, thinking to myself that there was a new top-tier first person shooter studio now, and then hearing the credits song and just having my mind blown.  It was a really professional sounding rap song and it was playing over the credits like a movie, and it was made for the game (by the development team), just like many 80s movies credits songs.  Then when the credits were done rolling, I noticed that in the "message of the day" area there was a snarky comment from Infinity Ward about hiring (EA had just had lay offs), and I could tell they knew they'd built something really special. 

For the impact this game had on first person shooters for the rest of the generation, this is probably the most likely choice for THE game of the generation if I had to choose one.  All this, and it was only about six hours long, which, at the time was considered way too short for a $60 game.  The developers understood something, though.  For 6 hours, nonstop action is an incredibly fun experience, for much more than six hours, it starts to actually get kind of tedious.  A very interesting insight I didn't have until much later.  Overall an incredible experience.

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