User blog comment:Crazy sam10/Some thoughts surrounding Ghosts/@comment-3171236-20140211004607

Call of Duty tried and failed to take on a Guerilla Warfare angle.

To be fair, not many military shooters focuse on guerilla fighters, and whatever games do usually feature them as the enemy force. There are only a handful of games I can think of where the player is a guerilla fighter: Half-Life 2, Homefront, Medal of Honor: Underground, and that's really it.

I think even though Homefront was an average video game with a really short campaign, the backstory and atmosphere of the game was nailed right on the head. The way North Korea rises from an insignificant Hermit Kingdom to a major World Power in the face of a massive global depression echoes the rise of Nazi Germany, and it explains a lot (the UN is disbanded 8 years before the game due to economic collapse, Europe wants to join the US in fighting the GKR, but is waiting for a turning point to justify using their little remaining funds left to support the war effort, North Korea invades for natural resources, like farming lands, oil, and coal).

Call of Duty: Ghosts tried to do something like this, but it really leaves out a lot, like Sam said. Throughout the campaign, ot never really feels like the US Military has been significantly hurt by the Federation's attack and invasion, the player is part of a mostly Military Special Ops group (If someone can name me a Call of Duty game in the last 5 years where the player is not part of a Spec Ops team, that would be appreciated), and it never really explains what's going on in the world, or even anything about the US in the time during this war. Maybe they were just trying to focus more on the player and his brother, but even that relationship feels shallow, because very little of their own backstory is presented, and Logan really never talks during the course of the game. The silent protagonist approach really does not work here.

I think one of the things that really made Ghost's campaign bad was its antagonist. The game could have been better served if the antagonist was a major figure in the Federarion, like a high-ranking General who leads the attack against the US, but instead, it is a former Ghost who has a very poorly-explained backstory, and a motive flimsier than the paper it was first written on.

The other thing that is never really explained is why the US and the Federation even have a conflict in the first place. Why does the Federation want to invade the US? Why did the US find it necessary to build a kinetic weapon to use against the Federation? How did the Federation rise up originally? All of these points are glossed over or just ignored completely.

It doesn't feel like any of the campaign was written by a scriptwriter. It feels like it was never really fleshed out, and the whole thing was written in less than a week by someone who was just doing it to get paid (which was the "award winning" writer of Traffic they mentioned in the trailers), and didn't really care or try at all.

Oh well, I'm just bitching anyway. Maybe Sledgehammer will do good for their game.