Allow me to make a small confession: I have almost always made time for Call of Duty's singleplayer campaigns. In terms of setting and storyline, they've ranged from boring to downright problematic, but expensive singleplayer shooters are also my guilty gaming pleasure, and I cannot ever seem to reconcile those two facts. I'm sorry.
If it helps, it's not just Call of Duty; there's something hypnotic about a game with decent "shooting", where the act of snapping up a rifle, peering down some iron sights and pulling the trigger feels good. So yeah, I've played a lot of Call of Duty. I've also played a lot of Destiny and Wolfenstein and Killzone. Give me a reason, no matter how flimsy, to explore a level in a reasonable linear fashion and do lots of frantic reloading and I am there. Shooters are popular for a reason!
Anyway, I was talking the other day about Call of Duty with a friend, and they were giving their thoughts on the most recent Modern Warfare trilogy's campaign. And things sounded...bad. Real bad. So bad that I realised I hadn't actually properly played through all three of the latest releases, and now very much wanted to.
I've had a pretty bad chest infection for over two weeks now, so stuck sitting at home and in need of some comfort food I grabbed all three on Steam. After what felt like 16492843 gigabytes of downloads, I was finally ready to sit down and play my way through the 2019-2023 Modern Warfare trilogy, a selection of games with a big emphasis on various multiplayer modes, but which also contained three connected storylines about Russian terrorism, the fictional Middle Eastern nation of Urzikstan and a bunch of lads who rarely smile but are always ready to shoot someone in the name of orders.
It didn't take long for me to realise that, yeah, these were pretty bad.
Call of Duty is a series whose campaigns are full of iconic moments, for better or worse. There has been some bad shit, sure, with No Russian being right up there, but there have also been a ton of truly memorable levels, from Pegasus Bridge to Stalingrad to Shock & Awe to Black Sky, reminders that this is a series built not just on bombast and spectacle, but truly enjoyable singleplayer moments and setpieces that helped redefine an entire genre.
These last few games have seen that legacy take a nosedive. It's no news to anyone that the series' campaigns have been in some form of decline for much longer than this latest arc; you could say things started going backwards before the original Modern Warfare trilogy was even finished, and especially so ever since it retreated (post-Infinite Warfare) to forever fighting the wars of 2007, trapped in a cliched, military industrial prison of its own making. But the latest Modern Warfare games aren't just following the same well-worn footsteps, they're tripping and falling on their face every second step.
There's the illusion of progress here. The cutscenes in all three games are...maybe the most technically impressive in all of video games? They definitely feature the most realistic models and lighting I've ever seen, and make the whole thing feel, initially at least, expensive. But the actual campaigns themselves play like Fisher Price takedowns of previous games. Everything has got smaller, less ambitious, less interesting. The tepid story is equal parts confusing and uninteresting, and I can't think of a single mission I'd say comes close to being truly memorable.
Well, I can, just not for positive reasons. The ridiculous stealth missions and final "boss" from Modern Warfare 2 should have been the lowlights, were it not for the entirety of Modern Warfare 3. I know the backstory here--that it was rushed out and originally supposed to be a Modern Warfare 2 expansion, and used multiplayer levels as singleplayer filler--but I still wasn't ready for just how brazen it was to actually play through. Battlefield used to dress up multiplayer maps as singleplayer missions all the time, and it worked OK! Modern Warfare 3 just drops a bunch of multiplayer levels in there, bots and all, adds a few lines of dialogue and a cutscene at the end and calls it a day.
So much of the latest trilogy seems laser-targeted at all the wrong things. They're obsessed with special operations missions comprising small teams, when Call of Duty's best levels were almost always the ones having you play as one small part of a huge battle. Your progress through a stage feels smoother, more refined, but by removing the chaos of those huge battles the games have lost a degree of experimentation and scale. They want to tell a very serious story about global politics, but hedge things so cautiously that it tastes like narrative gruel. They're so indebted to the series' past success that instead of attempts to further innovate in the first-person space, we're repeatedly subjected to hollow imitations of past glories, from ghillie-suited stealth missions to piloting an aerial death machine.
Just to be sure that I wasn't comparing the new games to rose-tinted memories, I also went back and installed the original Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2, playing both to completion. Despite those games being 17 and 15 years old respectively (!!), they were so much better in almost every way. The missions were longer, felt more varied, gave you more options to tackle objectives and were much more exciting. They were a lot less interested in gruff, well-lit cutscenes, and placed a much higher emphasis on having you play through levels where everything explodes. They're not without flaws--the setting and writing in these games, not great at launch, is exponentially worse in 2024--but as far as slick, linear first-person shooters go, the originals remain some of the very best singleplayer shooter campaigns ever made.
I can't think of many better examples of the rot at the heart of AAA executive mismanagement than firing up Modern Warfare 3--an experience that should never have been sold as a standalone game in the first place--and having to click through multiple garish store promos, then navigate away from the main landing page entirely, just to play a "campaign" that's built in large parts from shamelessly retooled multiplayer maps. For reference, when you fire up Modern Warfare Remastered, the very first menu option is "CAMPAIGN".
It's such a brazen show of contempt on the part of Activision. There is no Call of Duty without its campaigns; the World War Two games were built around them, and even the newer release's chief tentpoles--characters like Captain Price and Ghost--don't exist without the original Modern Warfare trying to tell a story.
And like I've said, those stories were often not great. But a guilty pleasure is called that for a reason, and even when things were bad--whether pressing F to pay respects or having to shoot some hinges--there was at least some enjoyable shooting to be had. Snap those sights, pull the trigger, rinse, repeat, relax.
Now there's not even that. Just an endless procession of watered-down missions and shopfront sales trying to make money off skins and season passes. Activision's real (only?) priority with the series laid bare. I get that between layoffs, consolidation and dwindling originality there are already more than enough reasons to get bummed out by AAA gaming in 2024, but something about this--given the series' longevity and importance--has just hit me extra hard.
[Theoden voice] How did it come to this? This is Call of Duty, one of the biggest series going around, with all the money in the world behind it, and even it is cutting corners? Sanding off the edges? Rushing out clearly unfinished and underbaked projects, even though its release schedule is as predictable as Madden's? What does it say about the state of this industry when even the foundations of one of the most dependable video game properties of all time can be handled with such recklessness and disdain, tossed into the trash in the name of endlessly shaking customers down for skins and season passes?
Please don't tell me. That's a rhetorical question.
