User blog comment:Alexmason68/The Past/@comment-3171236-20160531080332

After some reflection, I don't think its the setting people are really tired of, its the tone.

The one thing that's stayed constant since Modern Warfare 2 is the Michael Bay-tier action and story writing, which is what I think people have actually gotten sick of, not the time period or weapons. I think what people want is for the action to be toned down to something a little more believable, and the pacing and writing of the story to be better. Call of Duty gives us interesting premises and settings, but then craps on them with the writing of the story itself and the retarded, barely plausible action sequences it throws at us.

I'll pick two Call of Duty games especially hated, Modern Warfare 3 and Ghosts, to demonstrate. Modern Warfare 3 ran off a 'World War 3' premise, fighting across Europe and America in a struggle against a Russian onslaught. But Modern Warfare 3 never once felt like you were actually in a World War. You spent the whole campaign going after Makarov after he somehow got Russia to invade Europe, and chased anything barely related to him, like chemical warfare attacks in Paris or Boris Vorshevsky's daughter in Berlin. You're not fighting a real World War, you're fighting a Hollywood World War, complete with Quick Time Events and your pals in the SAS and GIGN who do little of note throughout the whole campaign.

Ghosts ran on a premise of a bunch of (ex?) special ops troops fighting a guerrilla war against an invading Federation. Did you ever once, through the whole campaign, feel like a guerrilla fighter? No, the action sequences were even more retarded than Modern Warfare 3's, with a plane crash sequence ripped off of The Dark Knight Rises, leading armored assaults on Federation bases, helicopter attacks on oil rigs, space battles, and the obligatory final "chase the bad guy on a train" level. Not to mention the game's extremely generic cast of grizzled white soldiers, a protagonist that literally never talks once even though he fights with his brother through the war, a dog who barely has use at all, and writing that's just downright awful, even for a Call of Duty game. It checks off all the boxes of generic action video game.

It's the same reason people hate the campaigns of the latest Battlefield games, and the same reason why Medal of Honor died. People are tired of Bay-esque action and shitty plot writing.

You could set the next game in any era you want, be it modern, future or past, and if you got rid of the Michael Bay influence and doubled down on the story telling and world building department, people would be singing about how the game is such a breath of fresh air.

Here's an idea I have: It's World War 3, and Russia and NATO are up against each other. Eastern Europe is the primary warzone, with additional fighting going on in the Aleutians and southern Russia, where Georgia, South Ossetia, and Azerbaijan are. You don't play as badass muscular spec ops guys with SOPMOD M4s and ice-cold demeanors, you play as average grunts sent to the front lines, cracking a few jokes to break up the tension of war. And instead of playing just one side of the war, you play both. You play under NATO some missions, and you play under Russia some missions. When you're playing under NATO, you're not just some Brit or Yank, you could be fighting with the Poles, Germans, French, Finns, maybe even some Ukrainians, so you get a feeling that a much wider war is going on than just your immediate battlefield. When you play as Russians, you get people from all across Russia of all ethnicities, some from small Siberian villages and some from apartment blocs in Volgograd. You get a feeling that no side is inherently saintly or evil, its just a shitty war that affects everyone on both sides.

And you're not always on the attack either. You could be defending, fighting battles of retreat, trying to survive heavy assaults. And the Americans aren't just kicking ass the whole time, sometimes they get their shit kicked in after Russian assaults, and sometimes they're losing.

The war seesaws back and forth, Russia makes gains sometimes, sometimes NATO makes gains. Instead of fighting all the time in cities or no-name villages, you could be fighting in trenches and fortifications in east Poland or Western Russia.

And all this without Bay action or story. Its just a war story, no more, no less.