Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 is a Big, Dumb Mess
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- čas přidán 28. 06. 2024
- Analysing the campaign of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (2022's Modern Warfare 2, that is) - a game as nonsensical as it is hypocritical (this is just my opinion and if you liked the game that's fine!).
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Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 is back, baby, and I'm here to talk about it. Despite a couple of missions that serve as series highlights thanks to their emphasis on flexible gameplay over its trite narrative, Modern Warfare 2's otherwise lacklustre campaign fails to sell a narrative that's as nonsensical as it is downright hypocritical. In this analysis/review of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (2022) campaign I discuss how, in the game's skewed view of what it means to be "critical of war," as with 2019's predecessor, the ends always (apparently) justify the means.
0:00 - Intro plug
0:11 - "De-escalation"
2:33 - Don't worry, you're still the Good Guys
3:53 - MW2 takes itself too seriously
5:14 - Most missions are dull too
6:44 - Breaking down the best mission in the game (Recon By Fire)
9:19 - Actual, subtle storytelling
11:21 - The other good mission in the game (Alone)
12:50 - The worst mission in MW2
14:23 - MW2 is less gritty conflict, more Crash Bandicoot
15:26 - Outro
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Intro text animation by Isaac Holland - / drazgames
#callofdutymodernwarfare2 - Hry
We're a long ways away from "Secure the BurgerTown!". I miss the 360-era COD campaigns.
RAMIREZ. GO TAKE OUT THAT NUKE
Depends on certain ones. Mw3 and ghost could not balance things out
AAA Gaming peaked in that generation
The old MWs were political too. It was always imperialism propaganda. The old ones were not NEARLY as bad though
The obsession with Call of Duty of trying to play at having some edge and posturing about as a DEEP EDGY BADWARS exclusively does it a disservice. It has been begging audiences to take it as a dark and grim Serious Game for years and so escalates the level of war crimes your character is engaged in, but because it needs to sell as widely as possible it can never, ever allow any player to feel that they are not unquestioned heroes, whose deeds are always justified by the ends, or when they are not it is always due to a betrayal that the game portrays as entirely not your fault. This means that the more they try and feign engagement with the profound immorality of your acts, the more it turns into simple war crime apologism. It used to be as bad as a bad man government using a US criminal superweapons platform to attack the US for building a criminal superweapons platform was seen as unquestionable evil because it entailed him having that criminal superweapons platform - now they have the audacity to include actual, real acts in this game in an apologetic light.
Forget Spec Ops, bloody Wolfenstein did better than this - your character not only never goes as far in the depths of depravity, but they have the justification of being in an impossible war against ultra-nazis doing genocide, and show some ACTUAL INTROSPECTION of the character regretting that this war means he has do do things that he profoundly regrets to endure it.
If you can't handle real-world topics responsibly, openly reject doing so as in the most bombastic war games. Dabbling in real topics while projecting the same air of unquestioned rightness that brought you here is demonstrably less moral than just saying 'we wanted a war game and aren't up to the task of introspection so we didn't try'.
Honestly, to a point you're right
Personally I feel CoDs ambiguity was at its best in CoD4 Modern Warfare, where certain acts were present, but weren't signposted
The best example to date I would say is the AC-130 mission. You sit there in complete silence, only broken up by the plane's rotors, your team on comms and the sound of your guns as you fire upon enemies that, while armed and a danger to your squadmates on the ground, are still completely helpless to stop you.
Though the mission fails you if you destroy a church or kill a civilian, it otherwise doesnt point to the moral implications of you killing dozens of people, from the safety and emotional distance of a plane. It never treats it as more than you doing your assigned job, because thats what'd be most likely going through the mind of a gunner in such a situation
Its simple enough to not stand in the way, while still having an uncanny air to it that can make someone very uncomfortable if they're receiptive to the ideas not clearly stated
@@r0de That first Gunship mission was great, because sitting between two very up close and tense engagements the clinical, detached nature of the screen, the controls, the voices is very intentional. You've just fought like hell through handfuls of people at a time at great risk of death, and now you're looking at dots on a screen who cannot possibly harm you, killing up to twenty people at once with a single click, as a calm voice informed you that you just did a good job. It's a great, unsettling moment.
And then every single game since then has taken exactly the wrong point from it and included it for the sheer power fantasy of it.
Bringing up Wolfenstein made me cheer. God bless you for saying that.
People feared that we'd be enforced to watch political propaganda, but in reality we pay 70 bucks to play political propaganda
Ah yes because the military propaganda has never been political
70 bucks to play a GARBAGE ASS GAME
@@dunbass7149 true
At spec ops the line you: point your guns at civilians, disobey high ups, bend the rules to get the job done. In contrast to cod it actually makes a good story out of those things
My problem with Spec Ops is that, at the end of the day, you still “do the things”. It just tries to make you feel bad about it in the loading screens
I like the game, but more as an interesting experiment than a legit good game.
@@TheSkaOreo I don't think that's an issue. Spec Ops The Line is clear that "the only winning move is not to play". You could have quit the game at any time. That is your way of "not doing the things". I'd argue it's fair for the game to call you out for doing the things if you choose to keep doing them.
Even ignoring the meta reasoning, from an in-story perspective, the whole point is that Walker's actions were always bad from the very start. There's no real way to rationalize or justify them. So if there was a way to somehow "get a good ending by not doing bad things", then that would undermine the point that there was no good in Walker's mission to start with if there's something good you can do about it.
I would love to see a game with a story like Spec Ops and the budget of Modern Warfare
@@FraserSouris "It's your fault for doing it because you kept playing" is such a lame execuse. The game gives me no chance to choose something else. The White Phosphorus incident literally just waits for you to do the thing and nothing will happen until you do it. My choices are my fault, but I wasn't given a choice in the story's progression. I watched a movie that occasionally made me click the "yes, I'm still watching" button to continue.
By no means am I saying Spec Ops was a bad game, but if the devs want me to feel responsible for the plot, it's on them to let me be responsible for it.
@@archmagusofevil You don't explain how "It's your fault for doing it because you kept playing" isn't a choice, though? You just mention examples of it happening, and expect it to be self-evident. You could've noticed that there was no way forward during the White Phosphorus incident without killing civilians, and drawn the line and stopped playing at any point, it's the uncritical response to move forward in the narrative that the game is criticizing.
As someone not from Scotland, I found Soap’s voice acting to be pretty good. But I empathise with you because all the Mexican characters are voiced by other Hispanics and their accents are very noticeable and downright bad at times.
that awful russian accent americans are doing as well...
As someone from south west England, I don't buy Soap's Scottish accent whatsoever. It's almost as bad as Atlas' Irish accent in Bioshock.
I'll never understand why game/film studios have such a hard time getting actors with the same native language/accent as their characters.
Especially for Soap, since his VA in the old MW games really was a Scotsman.
The thing that really immersed myself in the story was the American accents on the Spanish words. Like, not everyone is from the same region and will have the correct dialect.
Alandro's VA did a pretty job along with Valaria and Rudy
My big issue with modern warfare reebots, is their lack of narrative tension.
We used to have plot threads in which characters were in great danger and/or died. Victory came at a cost of great sacrifices, Modern Warfare 3 went crazy with that.
After playing MW2 I laughed when Laswell was rescued after just one mission of being kidnapped. Its like good things are handed over for good guys for nothing.
I think they are too afraid to kill characters nowadays because then you cant sell them as skins or something. Hell they did that fakeout death with alex in MW 19 and it was pretty obvious then, right now they are just sooooo wooried that killing these characters will tarnish the hype for post launch content or whatever the hell the higher ups at activision think. Some days ago I saw a comparasion between OG ghost and 2022 ghost, and one of the things that they compared was the fact that 2022 ghost survives the campaign and it is stated as a point of superiority in relation to the OG, which means that, if that is their strategy, it is working really well.
@Juliano Lourenço games nowadays only work well with new players while the old rant off about mistakes, Bugs and glitches in games. But older games before bo4 wore the greatest 👍🏻
"Pay respects to breathing" lol that got me
"Aim at civilians to de-escalate" is a pretty good one too lmao
This story can be described in one word honestly "Predictable". It plays fast and loose with who lives and dies on the enemy side, but the good guys have plot armor thicker then an og MW2 jug on veteran.
Oh also they made General f**king Shepherd somewhat sympathetic....how do you screw that up? Honestly everyone may say they hate him, because he killed Ghost and Roach but we all like him because he was a good twist villain. New Shepherd just bad mouths you behind a screen (while Price deos the same), and commands he goons to throw themselves into your gun. Old Shepherd alteast had the balls to shoot you himself.
I miss the era when COD campaigns were the equivalent of Michael Bay and Tom Clancy doing coke all night.
MW2 and MW3 were the best Bay-Clancy coke trips.
Im surprised you liked Recon by Fire. I found it to be really weak because of the way that mission would suffer from pretty robotic moments of artificiality. The world feels like it was made using Warzone assets and the AI struggle a bit with coming off as "natural." They will B-line for you once alerted and the combat encounters felt very "far cry" like in how anyone beyond a few hundred meters somehow didnt hear or notice gunfire.
Yeah the devs said themselves without Warzone they wouldn't have been able to make that mission.
Exactly, that mission misses what made all guilled up good which was getting to your target using stealth and violence if needed. And I noticed he said many players liked this missions lol.
So true, also it was really frustrating for me to do everything alone. Price was even joking with that he is not coming to help me clear those places.
Remember when everyone duck when you fired your first shot in the first wave of the end of all gillied up? How the mighty have fallen.
In Alone, Ghost tells Soap to be careful who he trusts when given the option to say you trust Price, Laswell, or Alejandro.
At the beginning of the game, Laswell asks Shepherd who they should send, then we cut to Ghost meeting Soap, implying that Ghost was Shepherd's recommendation, not Laswell's. This is after the opening of the game showing Ghost previously helping Shepherd launch the missiles that would soon go missing in the strike that set the whole plot off.
I think the game introduces lots of room to doubt our heroes. Might even be setting up for Ghost being Shepherd's guy this time around.
It's good criticism, but I think too much of it hinged on the idea that the game pushes our protagonists as the "good guys", which I don't think it really does. They talk about being a team, having friends, and trust, but they never touch on the righteousness of anyone's cause.
Wow. Pretty sound. Actually you sound more reasonable than this whole video, even though i liked it. It’s just that never he presents a clear example, just states his interpretation of the ‘vibe’ the game gives.
Overall I got the general sense that the video creator didn't like the game because the writing didn't align with his own morality or what he thought they should've inserted instead. I'm left feeling really confused as to what his actual message is. Does he want a deep military game or not?
@@minecraftgravityguy exactly, he put much too much thought in this video
@@CobusGreyling he likely thinks every military game should be like Metal Gear Solid which alot of people used as a great anti war game even though it fetishizes guns and kits especially sof units like cod lol
@Arif Radzif yeah, and funny thing is, the devs stated that this game won't be dark and thought provocating giving us a heads up.
It's really funny to me how Cold War managed to spell out "War is bad" by simply shooting you in the head after letting you ride a power-trip rollercoaster, while Modern Warfare has tried hard to be the ANTI-WAR sub-franchise twice and made people want to join the army even more.
That’s their entire goal. They’re not trying to be anti war, it’s more like they’re warmongering and instilling the fear in the younger generation. This game gets funding from the US military, it is pro war more than anything else
My only take away from this game was the Little Caesar's cross-promotion. So any time someone brings up this game, I get hungry for pizza. It's odd how the huge ad campaign that was designed to make me want to buy the latest COD game, just makes me think of pizza every time I think of COD, which isn't very often, but still.
From my understanding Little Caesars is shit pizza, according to my US friends
@@0uttaS1TE It's not that bad and it's really cheap. Good for if you are tight on money and need quick satisfying food
@@Lin_Eileen
The breadsticks are really good imo
The last COD I played was really Black Ops 1, campaign wise at least. I feel what made the older CODs campaigns so memorable and great was they embraced how silly, wild and stupid they are. Because of that, people remember more from the older games then the newer ones.
Black Ops 1 is so good because it's so fucking pulpy. When your best communist friend turns out to be you hallucinating him as you murder the fuck out of everyone while screaming out WHAT IS THE NUMBERS.....
bruh. That shit was awesome.
Step 2: ascend from darkness!
Same. Black Ops was the last one I played and I couldn’t be happier.
@@TheSkaOreo That was edgy stuff, but it was better edgy stuff - the game never pretended to be more than a wild Reaganite military fever dream. If they were less obsessed with apologising for themselves they wouldn't keep accidentally doing apologism.
Nothing beats the scene when a US general personally comes down to an active warzone to shoots his wounded men with a .44 magnum as the betrayal moment
In Iraq we would point our weapons at civilians to get them to go back in their homes in a situation that could possibly escalate to violence if a crowd formed.
This worked better at night, because you could point your laser at them and they went away.
Game is pretty realistic in that regard tbh.
The least believable part for me is Ghost, a long time veteran in the British Army, not understanding Soap’s accent sometimes.
I served 15 years and there are so many jocks in the army you don’t even notice the accents after a while.
That is a wild anecdote to read in the comments of a game review 😂
@@mshankute the reviewer took issue with it being unrealistic, and he was wrong 🤷♂️
The reviewer didn't say it is unrealistic. He was pointing out how absurd it is that you are apparently a good guy breaking into people's homes and pointing a gun at them while calling it a de-escalation. Oh, that's basically the entire Iraq War for ya.
@@brucesnow7125 but it *literally* de-escalates a potentially violent situation.
It’s an operational term.
@@brucesnow7125 that’s what the police do
Damn. I kind of want a Cod campaign that doesn’t reload checkpoint when you shoot a civilian or bomb a building- but characters comment on it- and then the story has slightly routes for a different ending or 2.
I find myself constantly returning to Spec Ops: The Line whenever a story goes down the anti-war path. All these years later, I'm still questioning if I made the right call for some decisions
The only one thing I'm afraid I have to disagree with you about is that over-the-top action is not suitable for COD. I love full action, It is why I love Black ops 1 and 2. I think over top action is normal in COD as long it is close to realistic.
He didn’t say he doesn’t like bombast in COD, in fact he praises Cold War’s commitment to over the top insanity. His problem is that the Modern Warfare games are trying to present themselves as incredibly serious, so these moments of bombastic action stick out like a sore thumb and mess with the tone.
Great video here! Whether its triple A games or lesser-known titles, you always have such great scripts! I also love the part at around 1:02 about groundskeeper Willie.
I'm surprised they haven't made a game yet where Soap is dropped into Scotland, guns and all, and you have to fight off waves of people slagging off his accent.
I thought the campaign was ok. But I hated that mission towards the end where you're doing your best Solid Snake Impression trying to take out a tank by yourself using C4 while being hunted by enemies with iron man armour.
Would actually love you to make a video on A Plague Tale, because imo the writing in these games is superb!
Woof, sounds rough. Thank you for this thorough breakdown of your thoughts and experience.
I played the story in Call of Duty Modern Warfare in 2008, Moderwarfare 2 after that, and Black Ops after that. They were quite fun.
I feel like Call of Duty would benefit from moving from a story driven campaign, to story driven vignettes of interesting missions. Make them something like the spec ops modes and focus more on the bombast.
great video and thanks for sharing!
Man you gotta try modern warfare 3 then
That is what spec ops is for. Plus they did that with mw3 and it wasn't quite good. All they need to is balance out the bombast better which have done so far. IW just messed up a bit with this one
if you have not played this one its basicly what it is, there is an hang upside down shoting from a chopper/car chase down a highway mission/ the all ghillied up mission/ the stealth crafting mission/ the rapel down a skyscraper mission. every mission offers something new.
Every game doesn't need to have a deep and profound story. It can just be fun and cool to do. Infinite warfare got a lot of hate, including from me before release but I genuinely enjoyed its campaign. It wasn't a "profound" experience, but the stop and pop gameplay was actually fun. There was a submachine gun which turned into a shotgun. It was really fun to move around the arena shooting, switch to shotgun in close quarters and switch back to SMG mode all in 10 seconds. The story was pretty good.
That's fine and good. We all like our Dooms and such. The problem with Call of Duty is that it wants to play at having a deep and profound story and drops the ball incredibly badly. Infinite Warfare had some weird ideas in its story, but it never represented actual things that happened in the real world as being okay because the Good Gun-Havers did it.
@@UnreasonableOpinions on the money
That convoy mission was really a dud! The random video gamey pattern of that apc did feel really silly in context but I was *really* missing something like that when fighting the tank in that last mission. I know most people would absolutely hate it, but I would love just a few drops of Metal Gear Solid style melodrama in here. Something like Ghost's mask would be so much more fun!
You can tell they are Metal Gear Solid fans. Would not be surprised if graves was inspired by big boss in some way
The "boss fight" against Graves in his tank felt hilarious with how out of place and Metal Gear-esque it felt. Here's a "do the thing 3 times" fight while Graves and Soap hurl insults and philosophy at each other.
I'd see developers would go to the further if this series hadn't been supported/supervised by Pentagon in the aspects they feel in need of more exploration.
Perhaps it's just me since I played a lot Ready or Not (SWAT Sim) where more than often from suspects to civs refuse to comply by command alone and thus needs intimidation via threat as some armed suspects would surrender at either presence of firepower, warning shot or life-reconsideration. Not saying that it's equal since it's huge gap to compare police to extrajudicial military task force and Ready or Not's AI still needs a lot of work. It's just between MW2019 and MW22 that Ready or Not came out, they might feel like throwing in bits like that into the game in "Clean House" style segments of the game.
Can someone please tell me why people get existential crises while playing CoD games? They don't get this same problem playing XCOM.
I have no clue why people bother to get this critical of COD.
@@TheNobleFive
Mostly, because the game wants you to take it more seriously.
You two probably missed that fact, but that's okay.
this series is like that guy you knew in highschool as a really cool fun person to have at parties, but he never grew out of binge drinking every week. when you see him again he's a total mess of a person just barely functioning and you wonder how he's even still alive
I've been saying it for years at this point, but your video bringing in the comparison of Modern Warfare II to Black Ops: Cold War is a good representation of it. Treyarch does a much better job than Infinity Ward when it comes to CoD games, in that Treyarch takes the saints row approach to their fps titles, whereas Infinity Ward take the gta approach to their titles. One prioritizes gameplay, the other prioritizing the theme. My opinion is that without gameplay, the theme gets lost, but if there's gameplay, the players will naturally pick up on themes. That's why I feel Treyarch does it right.
that apc chase level 😳
man, the more you talk about Cold War, the more I think I need to get around to it.
Love the videos! You put so much time and work into them and they make my day better
The reason for betrayal by Greaves and Shadow Company felt weak. It just didn't feel severe enough to warrant them murdering civilians all of a sudden, and then the player, murdering them systematically in return. The motives in this campaign were weak and not focused enough.
It could’ve been that Graves was kidnapped and then hypnotized into a sleeper agent by someone. This can connect to black ops and maybe see that Graves was a pawn to someone we don’t expect. Maybe someone in Los Vaqueros you don’t see coming.
Honestly it’s not a bad game on itself but they way they can’t let go off old characters and create new original stuff is disappointing
I really think it's extremely difficult to make an anti-war game from the POV of badass game protagonist.
Although clearly CoD has no qualms about being prowar imperialist propaganda.
Well thats kind of what made Spec Ops work tho it’s literally a protagonist with a hero complex only to flip it on its head telling them “dude fucking stop youre making shit worse”
@@youngknight5589 I don't think even Spec Ops nailed it. A lot of the edgy, anti-war moments in that game are based on making you feel bad for things you had to do. This War of Mine is the only really good anti war game I know of.
@@ThePsychoRenegade i honestly feel the lack of choice in that game almost works because of walkers mindset on pursuing the mission which was also a criticism people have with modern military shooters where there is a heavy lack of choice to fulfill the plot
Its still frankly amazing that Spec Ops the Line is still so biting and subversive nearly a decade later - COD MW2(2) is living proof we didn't deserve that game as players.
I hate the new version of shepherd.
More accurate portrayal of generals
@@asian_mandohe’s still literally useless and the voice actor doesn’t fit and he doesn’t give good quotes in between missions like the last game
@@asian_mandowho cares about accuracy they literally had gas hanging upside down on a helicopter shooting ppl and he somehow didn’t get hit
I feel like this story is trying to be the 'Sicario: Day of the Soldado' of video games.
It should’ve been it’s own video game there. Not as a call of duty game. Six tv show is a good show about seal team six soldiers
In the first 3 minutes of the game you call in the missile strike that kills Soleimani. And instead of showing it as the unjustified and illegal attack it was- the game hand waves it away as “uhhh they were doing terrorism I guess.”
I didn’t think they’d top blaming American war crimes on Russians- but they did so in the first couple minutes.
*literally spits out drink*
YOU WHAT?!!
@@HxH2011DRA yes you call in the missile strike that kills the alternate universe Soleimani.
@@fromthebackseat4865 by the forgotten gods...
@@HxH2011DRA And you spend the rest of the game going after his replacement who made the in-universe equivalent of Al-Qaeda into a legitimate army with professional military equipment.
It's increasingly surreal to watch the Call of Duty games go from apologism for vague kinds of war crimes in fictional scenarios to actual, explicit war crime apologism for real events.
It's very ridiculous yet I am happy to see the characters from the old game I inexplicably became attached to despite their lack of any personality again.
Disagree with your point, enjoyed listening to you make it. Enjoyed the game (didn't think it was Ulysses or Godfather or Metal Gear, but enjoyed it). Didn't think the narrative was perfect but thought it had some interesting things to say. Leaving a like, carry on the good work ;-)
Got to admit I did detest the armoured enemies and the Uncharted-esq car nonsense.
Show me someone who unironically thinks the Call of Duty campaigns are anti-war, and I'll show you someone who is beyond naive.
I still think it's hilarious too look at these campaigns, and then take a look at how mad fans of the series get when you point out the obvious truth: This is just plain military propaganda.
Totally agree. The mindset that "the good guys" need to bend the rules and cut through all that red tape to get the job done is the same mindset that leads to justifying war crimes and human rights violations.
who gets mad when you point this out?
You could argue Call of Duty 4 was. It made the Americans look like dumb imperialists and was definitely a commentary on the Iraq war.
Its not military propaganda, there is no way a clean cut force would ever make themselves or the people they work with seem bad in anyway.
Theres so much just nastiness in this story. Wow, the Mexican army really is that corrupt. I sure do wanna join! Whoo, a PMC is literally killing innocent people in the street. Man, american military adventurism is something I now condone.
So true.
Although is it weird that the best COD campaign that I remember was Advanced Warfare?
COD's core problem is about twice per game, it see's what it is, and it can almost get there. MW2, the first MW2, was a Bond movie for parts and trying to be deep in parts and those parts worked. It was the rest that was deeply confused, and they did not work together. This feels like the same. It almost gets it, almost, but goes back to slamming Mountain Dew Code Red and loving it's new thin blue line sticker.
COD realises that people are becoming more aware of the imperialist programming of the entire series so it seems the writers are trying to give players some amount of "morality" which the developers obviously get to curate. I'm assuming the stories for these always say that there's corruption. The US war machine doesn't need corruption to be morally repugnant, they are and always have been.
This, a hundred times this. The American War Machine doesn’t need corruption to be unjustifiable.
+
Yiddle me this, it hits close to home, who opens our borders while closing their own?
@@chimbo7787 what’s your point? Open borders are bad?
Other than Spec Ops: The Line and maybe the Metro series does anyone know of any more explictly anti-war, shooters?
MGS from what i hear is anti war, and surprisingly Arma because of its simulation design comes off as a horror game to some Fallout is considered anti war
@@DogeickBateman i was hesitant to add that but yeah that one felt like sicario because its less of an action shooter and more ..thriller
the Valkyria Chronicles games, idk if it counts as a shooter due to the turn based gameplay, but they're war games through and through
anti-war shooter? I dont think such a thing exists.
Arma 3 in some regards as far as shooter can be anti war. There's a one DLC called Laws of War that does it especially good but in fact every official campaign is portraying war as a chaotic and confusing phenomena where you can die at any time just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Thanks for the vid
Wasnt the twist of mw2019 that you could kill most civilians without a game over, to show how its hard to know who to shoot in a combat situation. Like in the hospital or the mentioned house cleaning?
I am yet to see another dark/gritty military shooter video game beat the narrative strengths of Spec Ops: The Line, especially when it comes to the topic of warfare and how much tragedy follows in its wake.
the series has been a parody of itself since 2009, and now it's a parody of a parody taking itself seriously.
The writing in this game was truly terrible. I replayed MW2 Remastered right before hopping in, and while that story didn’t even attempt to be clever, at least it had a number of gripping moments and tried to follow its own (very silly) internal logic while keeping things fast-paced and lighthearted. The mission in this game where you raze an entire village to kidnap one man, only to release him five minutes later to completely avail yourself of the consequences, made me drop all pretense of taking this story seriously.
What could’ve worked is how Alejandro looks at the Vaqueros as his brotherhood of incorruptible bandits in a lawless land ruled by criminals and task force 141 and shadow company as his allies from the other side. And this whole friendship and brother hood not only falls in front of him, but it would be the death of Vargas. See what I’m going there
Yeah me too. The story is so dumb and boomer neocon level complete with over the top melodramatic stereotypes (hot Kurdish chick fighter, grufy Mexican, stoic Englishman, smart talking American, girl boss cia babe, etc) that Tom Clancy would be rolling in his grave.
It was just so dumb. It is literal masturbation of the dumbest enlisted or wannabe enlisted man for whom all superiors and chain of command are evil traitors, and for whom the actual politics and why they are even fighting the war doesn’t even matter, or who self soothes with propoganda.
The design nation of the Quds force as a FTO doesn’t mean anything. It was a political move to put pressure on senior members’ families. The Taliban were never designated as such because negotiations with them were on going. The few high level members who were are still livid and there is still ongoing negotiation to remove them from that list. This flys pass the teen wannabe squaddie who thinks Iran is terrorists who wanna kill Americans because why? The Quds force won in Iraq, its client militias after politicians took over from the US supported ones.
That’s the actual politics which is too boring so they redo 9/11 not realizing zoomers don’t give a shit.
They literally waged war on a sovereign nation with a PMC. That mission was basically the Blackwater massacre *100. Its war crime apologism for the black water mercs who razed Nisour Square and killed dozens of civilians also claimed to be “fighting for their lives” but in reality just found it easier to shoot first and ask questions later because they knew they have political coverage until they didn’t.
Same thing here. They destroy a Mexican town to arrest some guy and none of this involved the Mexican government? Of the writers weren’t so choked up they would have been inspired from real world when the US waged drone war in Pakistan and basically allowed the Pakistani government to take credit with its Air Force. And that the CIA took out HVTs the Pakistanis were hunting who were not focused on America or its war in Afghanistan but to overthrow the Pakistani state. A similar dynamic could have been here where the mission was a joint Us and Mexican op where you wore Mexican uniforms and the razing of the town could have been officially to suppress rebellion by some cartel linked militia that had taken it over. Like the Mexican government had been desperately wanting help to reign in the cartel and when the US said the cartel was helping Quds force in unconventional war the who’d pro quo would have been, help us neutralize this particular cartel and we want to do a show of force and in return we will allow you to extract whoever you deem an HVT.
Ignoring how diplomacy and politics actually works and making it seem the dishonourable stuff of eggheads instead of actually making the story interesting is a disservice.
This game felt like playing a fast and furious movie that thought itself really deep because vindiesal does it for his “family”. It shouldn’t have taken itself seriously )fast and furious doesn’t) or it should have had better writing if it insisted on doing so.
Remember ghost recon? That was what they were going for with this atrocity. But that would require iterate writer who were familiar with geopolitics when making geopolitical war game.
Whoever think the two modern warfare reboots are “dark” please get your brain checked
I like CoD, I have all the Black Ops games and a few IW ones. I always thought people just like the gameplay and multiplayer but no, they genuinely think of these stories as riveting.
Nothing’s changed after all these years.
The series has fallen into self parody now
Tank boss battles might be the laziest shit I have ever seen writers repeatedly do.
They could’ve taken the tank boss as one part boss battle and have Graves use a sniper rifle because like in the beginning, he likes to battle from king distance and this can create stakes in having Soap to just kill Graves from long distance and how it can almost kill him from long distance.
Reminded me of Batman Arkham knight smh
I bounced off Call of Duty with the original Modern Warfare 2 because it stopped being somewhat respectable to the stories it was glamorizing and started to go for bombast. While I can appreciate a more grounded game, nothing about the modern COD campaigns does anything for me. They've gone from anti-war titles to these mega-popular cash cows that shell out for celebrity endorsement instead of using the strengths of their gameplay to tell interesting stories. It sucks.
An open world cod campaign would be amazing
It really is dumb I can’t believe I used to take this game serious. Bad map design bad spawns drill charges flying everywhere 1 shot shotguns and no k/d but oh why would k/d matter half of my team is trying to unlock gold pistols and the other half is gold knifes! 6v6 sbmm at its finest I play solo against stacks all night sweating like it’s a championship game! No wonder why br’s have taken over there is ZERO competitive integrity in this title if you disagree then you are just a child!
Man It's depressing that the car chase is the worst mission in the game. How do you bungle a literal roller-coaster in a game that's designed to be a big long lightly interactive roller-coaster.
thank you for addressing this and questioning this "we are the good killers" mentality
Bro really said, "That guy with the mask"
I have been consistently reading the title of this video as A BIG DUMB ASS for two straight days.
It's shocking how hard this serise fell off. By the time you had skirmishes in the Middle East, climbed a mountain, commited a terrorist attack and went to WAR in the original - you're still just chasing a single dude in this new one.
Story needed to be more over the top and bombastic
I think coming towards the game with actual critical media analysis (as opposed to viewing it as a Rollercoaster) is important given that the game functions as one of many pieces of propaganda to get young poor Americans to voluntarily conscript
I really tried to like the campaign but I just wasn’t given the opportunity to shoot enough people the way I wanted to
I'm convinced this is the worst cod game I've played since Ghosts. I can't believe that people are saying that this is the best COD campaign in years. Sure there is a lot of effort put into the animations and game mechanics. But its story is terrible and its action is dull, boring and unoriginal to the extreme.
I hope the person who came up with the idea for the last, final mission, stubs his toe on many obstacles many times a day. That stupid hide and seek, survival crafting, bomb defusing, narrow arena, gauntlet run was one of the most obnoxious game design decision of this year...
Yeah, they took the really good ideas from Alone, and made it so you had to do all of that fumbling about under the increased pressure of a regular gunfight with tougher enemies, rendering those ideas frustrating and unwieldy rather than novel.
I cheesed it by crawling under a table where the armored guys couldn't shoot me
That sequence on Veteran was absurd. I kept going "There's no way they diligently play-tested this difficulty", throughout the campaign and that sequence really solidified that feeling.
If you want a serious war game, play Call of Duty 2 or Call of Duty World at War, hell, play the Sniper Elite saga, specially the third entry, where Karl in the end ask to a General: "What the difference between you and me, the difference is that I see the people that I kill." After destroying a whole facility, even that Karl is a sniper and commando working for the allies, he is as cold blooded and ruthless as the NAZI that he kills.
I told my friends that CoD games are the Michael bay movies of video games AND THEY WERE INSULTED
I almost took back what I said but I’m honestly glad I didn’t
Thank you, thank you, thank you for just telling it like it is.
everyone laments the death of the point and click adventure game, but here it is in AAA bombast alive and well
Laswell: AQ... Iranian generals with American missiles going through Mexico...
Price: Cartels smuggling WMDs for terrorists... Russian ultranationalists...
Laswell: Shepherd going rogue... Shadow PMCs... *alcohol-induced giggle* Sounds like a bad airport novel by a writer trying too hard. Just needs China or North Korea, and we'd get a bingo.
Loved the video but I still can’t believe you HATE HALLOWEEN
There's only one game that does this kind of thing well and it's Spec Ops: The Line. This is because only Spec Ops: The Line let's you play a protagonist in the wrong.
Nah there are other stories about war in videogames that can be good and told well. Spec Ops is a masterpiece but not every war game needs to be Apocalypse Now all over again.
@@minecraftgravityguy Not every war game, every war game trying to talk about morality.
I simply don't get how people think the MW2 campaign was any good. It was complete and utter schlock. Tripe of the highest order.
The story was an incoherent jumble of generic, uninteresting characters and locations, the plot clichéd mess that I didn't care at all about, and even the gameplay missed the mark. They tried so hard to "re-imagine" some of the Modern Warfare series' most iconic moments, like All Ghillied Up, and the C130 Gunship level, but they just didn't have the same impact as the original.
What made the first series so iconic was its sense of scale and the way it was presented to the player. On one side, you had Task Force 141 which did more of the covert, behind-the-lines stealthy shadow missions, and on the other, you had Ramirez who was an infantryman in the US Army where you did the bigger, more cinematic, chaotic firefights and epic combat missions. There was a balance.
In the new MW2, it's just this jumbled together mess where they try to mix the stealth stuff with the over-the-top stuff and it just doesn't work or flow.
Complete failure, in my opinion. What an epic miss
It was one of the worst in the series.
I easily say cold war is more mature than MW2, for knowing what it is and not taking itself too seriously to the point of childish edginess. I can only take the piss out of people that take MW1&2 seriously - They must have deleted the spec op's, the line thoroughly from their minds.
There is some saving grace in the Co-Op mode of both games; there isn't much of a story so nobody's tempted to add some lines that make your eyes roll, they only tell you what you need to know that relates to your objective. It can also be fun, (_*like games should be*_) and I honestly think it's underrated. I'm not talking about zombies, the spec-ops co-op has the potential to be brilliant, the Special Operations from 2019 felt like Payday 2 with a better game engine.
But of course we can't have nice things, because they don't make all the money in the world....
He really looks like Reagen. Also if anything, intentionally or not, this game shows the brutality of military/paramilitary groups. “Aim gun to calm citizen”. You’d think they’d just hand anxiety meds or something. If they were actual “heroes”. They’re more like mercenaries
I always love these videos, as someone who never even touches/installs the campaigns and ONLY plays the muliplayer for the series. The gameplay usually has great movement and shooting in multiplayer, but the campaign has too much jingoistic BS and bad level design for me to have played them since the last modern warfare 2 in 2009.
Just like the multiplayer level design, all garbage maps.
As a soldier myself. Sometimes it's better to take the shot
I still can't get over how badly the whole Shephard betrayal is handled in this game. It just happens in a cutsceene and that's that. Ther is no buildup to it. In the original MW2 you had the incredible mission where you get the data out of the house, you defend yourself against dozens of enemies, and barely make it to the rendezvous point just to get betrayed. There is a actual reason to go after Shepherd, to hunt him down. They also kill of Ghost just like that, a character that was basically a stand in for the player, a highly skilled almost unkillable soldier that just gets shot like a dog. Was is the best writing ever? No, but it worked.
This doesnt seem like news to me...? Isnt this what cod has been known for doing for years basically? I dont see the difference between now and previous years of "controversy"
For me this is all just to be expected. I mean who really plays the campaign in cod games anyways especially now? Sure theres some people but i think a lot of people are here for the multiplayer and thats it.
"Big Dumb Mess" is how I'd describe most CoD games frankly.
They take notes from Michael Bay
Nice.
I watched a couple of streamers play this game and I found it hilarious. It's so deep into corporate franchise-building that the number of callbacks just felt comical. What's not to love about a game that insists on Gritty Realism™ while not bothering to google what a ballistic missile is?
(Seriously, every one of the "ballistic missile" launches we see- which are central to the plot- are animated as cruise missiles. Ballistic missiles fly in a ballistic arc, cruise missiles fly like a plane.)
i hate how many gimmick lv this game has
that take away from the shooting
I haven't touched COD ever since MW3, believe it or not. It's a really small thing, but I admit I am proud of it
Wasn't always call of duty like that😃
Wait... War bad?!
Sounds like we have another confused, design by committee, inconsistent, incoherent, mess of a game. :(
Hamish "CODslayer" Black
I pointed a lot of this out in the subreddit and got downvoted to shit lol.
*Soap* (A Scotsman): "I'm in a coffee shop."
*Ghost* (A Southern Englishman): "Get us a tea, will ya?"
*Soap* (Again, a Scotsman): "F***in' Brits."
I feel like this tiny example by itself can illustrate the "Trying harder only to produce less convincing, if not compelling results" that Infinity Ward's reboots strike me with, as this makes me think the obviously-not-British-writer(s) were far too busy or couldn't even be bothered to check a bleeding map before they decided that they could write localised-banter between Brits. I say that as no matter how dumb (Which can still be fun!) Call of Duty 4 & it's direct follow-ups could be, nobody I know or knew has ever once questioned how "British" it's British cast was.
I know I'm harping on a tiny detail, but for a game that takes itself so seriously, you'd think they wouldn't manage to make it seem even more daft than dumber or sillier games by comparison (Including it's own predecessors).
Christ dude it’s just one line
@@Ikcatcher "Don't use examples that's cheating."
Jingo jungle
But really, it’s about family.
when seeing issues with morals and ethics IMO itsalways worth pointing out. the fact certain things can exist in pop-culture shows complantancy for ignorance.
I actually really liked the story of this game. Things I thought I wouldn't care about became the things I liked about it. An example would be the Ghost character, at first I thought his rebooted aesthetics with the literal skull mask was ridiculous, but it grew on me as the other characters make quirky remarks about it. I liked Vargas being added into the game because he is juxtaposed to the American PMC and British SAS factions. Each of these characters remind me of GI Joe characters or the movie characters in Predator, their larger then life personalities can't help but rub off on me.
Though, the story isn’t perfect, I don’t get this guy’s logic. He almost seems to have this “breaking the rules is always bad” mentality
Sounds like all the Modern CoD games have had this narrative inconsistency between "War is bad and you should FEEL bad for fighting in it!" and "Good job killing that guy, he was a dick!". At least in single player, which mainly serves as a training mode for multiplayer. You don't get that shit from Assassin's Creed.
The best CODs were on the PS3. The maps, the flow, the spawns, the matchmaking everything was better then.
You could blame marketing friendliness for making Modern Warfare 2 campaign isn't as "controversial", sometimes Medias pressures could garner bad attentions to those whose never even played a single game or any media aside from social medias and television from left, right and centre