User blog:MarlboroNS/War just ain't war in CoD.

IMPORTANT: The only games I discuss and want to discuss here are the three MW games.

To those of you who haven't burnt, shot, sold etc. Modern Warfare 2, hop on. Don't go on multiplayer, go on campaign, and more specifically, Of Their Own Accord. When you step outside into the warzone, look around you. Apache gunships patrol the air. Tanks lumber down the road. Fighter jets scream through the night sky. Your playing as an American, but very, very, unusually, its actually your team that is getting routed. Your allies are blowing up next to you left, right and centre. This is the perfect atmosphere for an actual war.

Creating a war is easy. Making a player actually engage in it and care about his allies is another. The MW war, the Ultranationalists vs the US, is a prime example of this. For most of the CoD4 American campaign, the balance is pretty good. Some of your allies die. But it still feels like your a one man steamroller. Your enemies have no air power and no capabilities to shoot down your helicopters. It basically feels like a grotesque shooting gallery. The one exception to this is Shock and Awe, which I think is an excellent war mission. The SAS campaign doesn't really matter, as the SAS should steamroller a disjointed group of Russian terrorists. We've seen how much trouble America has had in Afghanistan with a group of angry Arabs. The missions in CoD4 should have been more like this; your enemies knew they couldn't win in a head on confrontation with the US, so they resort to guerilla tactics, like the NVA and the Taliban employed. All in all though, this was a good background to the much wider scale conflict being planned for MW2.

The Russian invasion of the US has been portrayed in a lot of games. MW2 got it pretty spot on. The thing I love about the MW2 war is that for the majority of the missions, you lose. You have to retreat. You have big losses. This actually makes me feel like I'm part of the war. I'm no American, but when I see my tank getting blown up, I actually feel angry. I want to shoot the Russians; they are not just a mass of pixels. MW2 is the only time i've really ever felt that, and I've played plenty of war games in the past. Even the final battle for the White House is executed perfectly. Not only are Russians dying left and right, so are Americans. You may have prevented DC getting bombed to smithereens, but at what cost? Cpl. Dunn then says that we are going to Moscow. This was one part of MW3 I was looking forward to. Sadly it didn't happen.

The MW3 American campaign is crap. After all that work you did in MW2 protecting DC, all it took to win was a bunch of superhumans from a made up unit to bomb a few Russian ships. I was so dissapointed when I saw the Russians retreating after two MW3 campaign missions. Then apparently WW3 starts. Within ten minutes of a gas attack, Russian tanks are rolling down the Champs Elysees. What? How does that even happen? In a nutshell, this is the MW3 Delta campaign:

Hamburg, Germany: Defeat a legions worth of Russian soldiers with no Delta team losses.

Paris, France: Defeat two legions worth of Russian soldiers, destroy the Eiffel Tower, no Delta team losses.

Berlin, Germany: Defeat another legion of Russian soldiers, again with no losses.

I actually feel sorry for the Russians. When all of the Delta team die, I honestly didn't give a fuck. All they did was shoot a bunch of pixels over and over.....

As far as WW3 itself goes, we know nothing about the confilct. Poland and Germany, two highly trained and big armies, are destroyed after about five minutes. The Russians seem to have endless supplies of soldiers and equipment. All it takes to end the conflict is one peace council. The war itself barely lasts a week. This isin't a world war in my book.

To close, I reaffirm my opinion that actual war has been gotten right only a few times by IW in three games, which is terrible. We'll see how BO2 manages.

MarlboroNS (talk) 08:56, September 29, 2012 (UTC)