Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Five Things I Hate About Modern Warfare 2!

In case you didn’t notice in my essay a fortnight back, I have some issues with Modern Warfare 2. A lot of them wouldn’t exist if the first Modern Warfare hadn’t been such an exceptional release. I did my best to address some of those concerns last time I was writing but in the end I wanted to discuss how Modern Warfare 2 could be redeemed. It’s rottenness, the aura of decay hanging around it, is the low hanging fruit of the Modern Warfare 2 discussion. Attacking it that way would be lazy.

That’s why, this week, as graduate applications come nigh, I’ve decided to discuss a few of the incredibly stupid, shitty things Modern Warfare 2 does that it could’ve done better just by following its predecessor’s example. Won’t you join me?

1 – Tell a God Damn Story

Modern Warfare told us a story. It was an interesting story, cogent and poignant, about how war dehumanizes us, devalues human life and forces us to do terrible things in terrible situations. It told us a story about how we were just as disposable as those dozens of baddies we had grown so accustomed to dispatching and how we, as a culture, had come to celebrate violence. Also, the story had a beginning, middle and end and it made sense.

Modern Warfare 2 doesn’t bother with that. Right from the get go you’re thrown into a faceless, senseless “ripped from the headlines” battle in Afghanistan, bereft of context or explanation. You’re fighting because the game told you to, and you’ll be enjoying this sort of storytelling for the rest of the game. The events of Modern Warfare 2 are inexplicable where they aren’t offensive, clichéd where they aren’t random and juvenile when they aren’t exploitative. Its efforts at storytelling represent the worst that video games have to offer, and it’s all the worse that Infinity Ward is reaping such benefits from their half assed efforts.

2 – Make Their Game Replayable

This is something that the first Modern Warfare had down in spades, something that the Special Ops mode tries and fails to make up for. After you’d finished the first Modern Warfare you could play through the campaign in nice little bursts that you’d receive a score for. It was, appropriately, called Arcade Mode, and it had all the slick addictiveness that made the arcade era so great.

But in Modern Warfare 2 this mode is missing, inexplicably. They could’ve copy-pasted the scoring system into the game; indeed one of the Special Ops seems to try to do just that. But instead they excised it altogether, making their flat, heavily scripted single player campaign as unreplayable as it is brief. What’s really unforgiveable is that all they had to do to make their game a little shittier was remove features that were there in the first place. Which brings us to point number three...

3 – Learn From the Past of the Genre

Modern Warfare was the pinnacle of the FPS genre in many ways. It had lots of slick little guns that looked similar but all had distinct personalities. It had a nice, intuitive control system that allowed you to use cover from a first person perspective, dropping down, popping up and leaning around walls when necessary. It also had an incredible multiplayer system, one which combined Punkbuster and dedicated servers to make a slick, niche friendly multiplayer community where anyone could find something they liked.

Players could then use all these advantages, drawn from the history of first person shooter development, to play out wonderfully brief and succinct firefights tied around a system of player advancement which made Modern Warfare slightly less addictive than crack. Modern Warfare 2 again excises two of the features that seemed like standards to both the FPS genre and Call of Duty games in general without explanation – dedicated servers and the ability to lean. It might seem nitpicky but playing without either of them now makes me feel like I’m playing a devalued version of the first game rather than a natural artistic progression from its humble origins.

4 – Offer a Balanced Multiplayer Experience

One of the best things about the advancement system of Modern Warfare was also that it never left players behind. As they continued to “move up” in experience and rank they acquired more options, but players could be just as effective using the tools available to them early in the game as they could be using their hard fought and hard won gear. In fact the last weapon unlocked was the MP44, a bit of a “middle finger” weapon which, while still effective, was considerably less so than its more modern counterparts.

Modern Warfare 2 doesn’t seem too concerned with balance. At time of writing I haven’t gotten very far in multiplayer but so far I’ve been plagued by double shotgunning dog fuckers, knife wielding, teleporting psychopaths and seemingly prescient experienced players with weapons thoroughly stacked with various high level “goodies” that assist them in shooting through walls and generally making my life miserable. What’s more, many of the guns available early in the game don’t seem to have any purpose aside from being “new weapons.” Why would anyone use an MP-5 over a Vector? Or an AT-4 over a Stinger or a Javelin? I understand wanting to give players a sense of progression across various types of play but progression without depth is a poor substitute for game design and it feels like exactly what Modern Warfare 2 has done by flooding the game with gear and upgrades that they could never possibly have balanced for.

5 – Pace Their Experience, Period

This is sort of an amalgam of all the previous points. Modern Warfare was exceptionally well paced in every respect. You’d earn new gear and new challenges with satisfying frequency in multiplayer which never felt too quick or too slow. It was encouraging and managed a delicate balance between challenge and reward that few experiences can attain. The single player experience had the same claim – each level dovetailed into the previous one until you reached a satisfying conclusion which fit the rest of the experience. In the end you were left with a nice, even game with a lot of diverse levels and experiences which held together nicely when taken a whole.

Modern Warfare 2 has none of that. The developers themselves admit that one of the levels they left in could’ve been completely excised without harming the experience and they flit between gravitas and action movie bravado without warning. You go from being shot in the chest to defending the top of a TGI Friday’s in seconds. The experience isn’t that of a rich tapestry coming together, it’s the jarring feel of stop and go traffic with someone who doesn’t know how to drive a manual transmission. You feel a little sick and irritated, and you think the person behind the wheel probably shouldn’t be there.

The fact that this pacing problem carries over to the multiplayer of Modern Warfare 2, the ostensible selling point of the game, should be frightfully embarrassing to Infinity Ward, but I have a feeling they don’t care. They made an “alright” came and it sold absurdly well. Even though it’s riddled with bugs and, at best, poorly balanced, people will still buy and praise it all for the sake of letting the emperor know about the fine nature of his new duds. And it’s a crying shame, because Infinity Ward has proven themselves to be immensely talented when they challenge themselves and take risks.

But if this is how they’re developing games from here on out I probably won’t end up buying Modern Warfare 3 when it drops. I’m sure it’ll be decent, sure, but the experience will seem cheap compared to its predecessors and the hype that it enjoys will cloud the judgment of all around it. If the pace keeps up I’d imagine Modern Warfare 3 will be an updated version of Battlefield 2 with an expanded class system and a story about a shooting at a local community pool. It would fit the direction Infinity Ward seems to want to take their games in nowadays.