Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Unfortunate Return of Modern Warfare's Storyline!

I absolutely loved the first Modern Warfare. It’s one of those games that resonated with me in a tremendous way. It was problematic, sure, and the potency of its single player campaign was easily overshadowed by its spectacular multiplayer, but my god. What a single player campaign! Pitch perfect, well paced, with some new, evocative themes that perfectly fit action movie topos to video game logic. The famed Chernobyl sniper level, with its mix of melancholy, tension and pulse pounding action, was almost perfect in every way. The nuclear explosion and the final car chase (following the conclusion of the most dramatic set piece, mind you!) were fantastic as well: moments that reminded you of your character’s fragility and made you realize that danger could strike and people could die even when the world wasn’t at stake.

I’d like to say that Infinity Ward has been resting on their laurels, just treading the same ground again and again, but that’s not quite accurate for two reasons. The first is, of course, that Infinity Ward is no longer making Modern Warfare games following the catastrophic layoffs that Activision implemented. The games are now being made by Sledgehammer Games, famous for making absolutely nothing, and Raven Software, famous for making slightly shittier versions of other games and Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. The second is that the set pieces in Modern Warfare 3’s single player campaign don’t just tread the same ground that Modern Warfare tread far more aptly, they stumble over it clumsily, always trading logic and intellect for a bigger explosion.

It’s as if Michael Bay made a video game and infused it with all of his unintended absurdity and acerbity. The finished product is a clumsy, awkward treatment of a type of game I really used to love, levels and pacing that ape an earlier game but lack the intellect or the controlled movement that earned the twists and turns that earlier iterations in the Call of Duty franchise used to such tremendous effect. Modern Warfare 2 already lost some of the franchise’s glamour, but it did manage to do a few things right. Modern Warfare 3 didn’t even pull that off. Instead it nakedly utilized all of the set pieces that Modern Warfare used to greater effect without pacing them correctly or inserting them with any sort of meaning or logic in the game itself.

I’m about to get into specifics, just so readers know. Spoilers to follow.

My personal favorite was a moment wherein Yuri, a character Tom Chick astutely described as “the Modern Warfare equivalent of Woody Allen’s Zelig,” and Soap, the affable be-mohawked protagonist from the first two games, are in a tower together. You’re playing Yuri this time, instead of Soap. That’s the only new thing about Modern Warfare 3 I noticed, by the way. The two of them are getting ready to snipe someone, presumably the big-bad for this game, from a clock tower. This, of course, follows a journey through a war-torn eastern European city where people are dumping bodies into rivers left and right where you’re encouraged to use stealth to avoid conflicts and quickly resolve the conflicts you’re forced into. That part should sound quite familiar to anyone who played the first Modern Warfare.

The two of you are sitting in the tower until you’re prompted to pick up your rifle and look down the scope. You’ve been up there for fourteen hours, mind you, purportedly monitoring the building across the street and cleaning your rifles or whatever. After a sniping session which is striking similar to, while a great deal less difficult or interesting than, the climactic assassination attempt that capped off the first Chernobyl’s storyline, something goes wrong. The plan, which involves one character leaping into a board room to await the arrival of the big-bad of Modern Warfare 3 just so he can look cool while he’s killing him, should’ve been foolproof! But apparently a minor character from the first Modern Warfare game (I consider it a fanboy feather in my hat that I immediately knew who Kamarov was, though I’m not sure I’m proud of said feather) tied to an office chair and covered in explosives has replaced the big-bad! After a brief bit of expository dialogue, the big-bad mentions my name and calls me his friend, which, of course, then triggers a bout of distrust and some explosives which, conveniently, were timed to go off just after he said that. You and Soap then leap out of the building on to some conveniently placed plot device – I mean scaffolding. The scaffolding breaks your fall but Soap, who has not only previously fallen great distances but has also been hit by cars, shot, stabbed in the chest and recovered just fine in the past, is done in by his fall. He then mentions that the big-bad mentioned your name on an open radio channel to Price, the badass character from the previous Modern Warfare games, before dying on a table because, well, it’s time for him to die dramatically. Price, armed with this knowledge, then knocks you down a staircase after you’re forced to open another plot device – I mean door – and you explain, through a series of first person cutscenes, why you don’t like the person who mentioned your name very much.

There’s a lot wrong with this whole setup. Right off the bat, the logic is problematic with almost every aspect of the scene. Although I will say that so much troublesome logic abounds in Modern Warfare 3 that you could hardly be blamed for missing it here if you missed it earlier. But it should seem odd to you that two highly trained military operatives who have spent half a day casing a target missed a bunch of explosives planted around them, theoretically at some much, much earlier date. It should also seem a bit out of place that two men you’ve spent the last few days murdering hundreds of people with, men you’ve at times carried to safety, men you’ve killed and bled with, would react so violently when the big-bad mentions your name in passing.

But this is just symptomatic of a larger problem within Modern Warfare 3, wherein explosions are often used to replace plot points. In fact, I spent a lot of my time while playing Modern Warfare 3 thinking of tag-lines that could’ve been applied to the game. I came up with:

Modern Warfare 3: LOUD NOISES!

Modern Warfare 3: OH SHIIIII-!

Modern Warfare 3: I GUESS WE’RE GONNA HAVE TO JUUUUMP!

Modern Warfare 3: Ear Raper

Modern Warfare 3: Revenge of the Explosions

Modern Warfare 3: OOPS! YOU FELL DOWN! THAT MUST MEAN THE PACE OF THE LEVEL IS CHANGING!

Modern Warfare 3: ARE WE DONE YET?

I’m not proud of most of them (though I think Ear Raper is a goodie and LOUD NOISES is very accurate) but the staccato explosions that substitute for plot have kind of pressed me into a place where I have to view the game in these terms to get any sort of enjoyment out of it. I have to look at it as a work of unconscious parody of what Activision sees as what its players want in order to find something that justifies the time and money I’ve invested in Modern Warfare 3. This isn’t how the series was, but it seems to be the direction it’s gone in of late.

And the end result is, as I mentioned earlier, the Michael Bay-ification of video games. There’s a lot of homosociality that borders on closeted homosexuality, a lot of explosions, and a lot of choices and developments in the story that don’t make a lot of sense. I could perhaps deal with all of these in a game which strives to earn these experiences, but Modern Warfare 3 launches into them without any real lead up. Characters die and we’re supposed to feel bad not because we’ve been encouraged to empathize with these characters, but because the script calls for us to feel bad. In one level, where you’re called on to protect the Russian president, I immediately knew upon starting the level that I would die by the end of it – I just had that feeling. Sure enough, when I came to the end of the map I was shot in the chest by the big-bad in a scene that could’ve been ripped straight from Modern Warfare 2.

And this dovetails nicely into another major gripe I had. It’s not enough that Modern Warfare 3 wants players to attach themselves to undeveloped, personality-less characters. It’s not enough that it wants to just do random shit and blow up monuments and expect us to be impressed by the sheer spectacle of what they managed to do with a graphics engine (which no one who’s played Red Faction: Guerilla would find impressive, by the by). Modern Warfare 3 has to tell us a story while haphazardly ripping off and inserting parts of other Modern Warfare games into its structure. And bear in mind, there have only been two, so this ground is both pretty familiar, and already pretty limited. The aforementioned level wherein a Russian secret service agent dies, for example, begins with a re-tread of the first Modern Warfare’s bonus level, a firefight through a plane to rescue a VIP. The map is almost identical to the original level, but is played in reverse this time for good measure. Then it dovetails into a moment where you’re killed while attempting to board a vehicle by the big-bad, a scene which happened at almost the same point in time in Modern Warfare 2. Hell, the same character even kills you in both games.

This comes up again and again. The sniper missions are especially bad – you’re asked to do synchronized sniping with your buddies in some new locations, but many of these new locations seem quite familiar, and bring back some very, very, very familiar gameplay mechanics. And then there are the climactic levels which take place in a cave/castle, reminiscent of the fortress built into a mountain that capped off Modern Warfare 2. Even the missions in Sierra Leone Somalia, included to showcase the horribly relevant issue of genocide in Africa, echo the design and mentality of the Brazil and “generic Middle Eastern” missions of previous Modern Warfare games.

It’s uniquely frustrating to see a series with such potential ridden into the ground in such a fashion. Modern Warfare was a game that broke all the rules of a first person shooter. It showcased amoral protagonists who did awful things and let civilians die if it meant completing the mission. It was a game that made you feel your character’s mortality at every turn and used death as a set piece sparingly, in such a manner that it did not elicit an emotional response so much as a thematic note, a rising pitch that resounded through the game and colored all the actions that came afterwards. Modern Warfare 2 undid much of my love for the series with its single player, and Modern Warfare 3 has carried this tradition of diminishing returns to a new extreme.

Of course, I’m harping on something largely insignificant here. Steam isn’t showcasing Community Achievements for Modern Warfare 3 right now, but I wouldn’t be shocked if many players didn’t even bother booting up the single player campaign at all. And really, why should they? Modern Warfare games have spectacular multiplayer. I expect that I’ll like Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer a little less than Modern Warfare’s, which I liked quite a bit, more than I like most people. These games have made multiplayer gameplay a feedback loop of challenges and positive reinforcement and they’ve found interesting new ways to iterate on the idea of reinforcing and encouraging improved performance even as they also sometimes muddy the formula with their efforts. I’m excited to see how Modern Warfare 3 will shake down in that respect. But I cannot help but harp on such egregiously poor storytelling in a game where the story was once a spectacular element, which could sit comfortably alongside titans the like of Bioshock. I wish I had the clarity of vision to simply see Modern Warfare 3 as I wish to: a multiplayer affair, bereft of any sloppy single player story trappings, but the single player game is so pervasive, so insistently incompetent, that I cannot do so. Alas, for the ability to purchase a copy of Modern Warfare 3 which excised these elements completely.