GotG Round 3: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare vs. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

@baillie: I love this kind of post, how dare people have different opinions than me.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare should be the ONLY choice here, guys. Look, I understand that everyone loves some Skyrim, but we're talking about GAME OF THE GENERATION! Call of Duty 4 broke the mold, then recreated the mold for what a first-person shooter should be. It's the game that LITERALLY redefined online multiplayer for an ENTIRE GENERATION. Skyrim cannot make ANY such claim.

We're talking about Shock 'n' Awe, about Captain Price, about loadouts, perks, progressive leveling up within a multiplayer environment, some of the best multiplayer maps that have ever existed in online gaming, bullet penetration through walls...

What has Skyrim honestly given to this generation? Proof to developers that you can ship a buggy-as-all-hell game that didn't even work on an entire platform for HOW LONG...and still sell millions of copies? A game that...in all honesty...just redressed how it handled its redistribution of skill points and not much else? Oh, sorry, you can dual wield magic. Bah.

Moreover, I just really think people need to get past the "100+ hours of gameplay" and "mods" argument they keep making with Skyrim. The same EXACT argument can be made for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on PC. There are hundreds of hours of gameplay available through the multiplayer...and there are mods GALORE, far more than Skyrim has available. The fact that Call of Duty 4 STILL has people online for it shows just how strong of a game it is. Everyone only wants to look at the PC version of Skyrim and hail it as this big fucking amazing thing. However, the PS3 version of this game was LITERALLY UNPLAYABLE...as in you COULD NOT play it.

If we strip away mods from the equation...which you honestly should when you are talking about the game of the generation IMO (because we're supposed to judge the GAME, not the SUPPORT from a community to further enhance said game, right?), Skyrim doesn't do much beyond what Elder Scrolls already did. Was it fun to play? Sure, when you weren't bugged or glitched, you were able to hit the right trigger a lot and swing things at other things to kill them. I was able to do the same thing with Call of Duty 4, but the dynamic of it was far more drastic. Beyond that, we're talking about THE GRANDFATHER of the modern-day shooter. Where Wolfenstein 3D and Doom are the granddaddies of the first-person shooter in general, COD4 is the granddaddy of the evolution of shooters as both a mainstream genre as well as a completely different online experience. It added persona to lifeless gamertags, customization to YOU. That's something that I just literally don't think Skyrim can do.

Mind you, everyone has their opinions. I just think those voting for Skyrim have the wrong opinion. Flame that how you like, but at least I'm being honest.

Call of Duty 4 is honestly the only choice I can think of for this one. I'm sad that it's going to get knock out due to this lingering hatred for Call of Duty as a whole.

This is interesting! It got me thinking about how implicitly one can account for modding within game design. I mean the developers specifically built tools to accomodate modders but they have no part in the design and construction of some of the best parts of heavily modded Skyrim. Then again, if they hadn't built the game itself with or without the tools there would be nothing for modders to build on. . . . .

Modern Warfare it is.

Skyrim for me. I played way more MW2 than the first one. Sure it was innovative but the second one was the refinement of that and so a better game overall. Also I really liked stealing dragon's souls.

Playing CoD4 with my friends is one of the, if not the, best experiences I had this gen.

@jakob187: I get that everyone keeps using the argument that Call of Duty "broke the mold" and was "so innovative" but, as the polls continue to show in the round, that doesn't really matter. Not only is that looking at this whole arbitrary thing through one very specific kind of filter (who says everyone has to vote what they thought had the most impact?), but also assumes that all of us can only come to the conclusion that CoD4 is the only such answer to that specific question. Even if it were true, I'd rather we were in an industry where all the games trying to follow the success of Modern Warfare didn't exist. I'd much rather have more developers experimenting more in their multiplayer instead of simply following the same formula since that game came out.

Also, if we're looking for games that had a massive impact on the generation, maybe we should vote for a game which helped push the DLC craze, right?

Anyways, the reason why Skyrim is among my games of the generation is because, to me, it embodies what I wanted from this generation. Could it have used some more mechanics from the past Elder Scroll games? Sure. But there are very, very few games which can match the experience I had with Skyrim, and that's why Modern Warfare doesn't stand a chance at getting my vote.

Obviously this is whole thing is subjective, people really need to stop seeing these votes as completely objective facts.

Call of Duty 4 is arguably the most influential game ever made.

@jakob187: I understand your point, but keep in mind that this is the poll that chose Portal 2 over Portal. This poll was never about the most influential game, just the most popular one.

Has it been a good influence though? Think about how much money and time developers and publishers have pissed away on games that nobody wants. They keep chasing the COD audience but that audience only wants to play COD. Its been such a waste...

@jakob187: CCCAAAAPPPS LOOOOCCCCKKKK does not actually enhance your point.

Why does everyone want to blame this on CoD hate? Does it not occur to people that there is a large chunck of people who do not care about/for FPS's or even multiplayer in any context, and that those people are going to be disproportionatly represented on an enthusiast site as opposed to reality (because in the west, FPS's are the most "mainstream" outside of casual app games)?

Only if you like FPS. There are dozens if not hundreds of games with just as large online communities that got their first and make as much or more money. Hell the only reason I even bought Modern Warfare was because the guys I raided with in WoW wanted to play it on non raid nights.

Edit: I will put this in better perspective. I still talk to those same dudes who played WoW with me and convinced me to buy Modern Warfare and play it with them. One of those dudes earlier today sent me a picture (seriously not kidding it was this morning) of a game he was playing cause he thought the scene and the action was so damn cool he had to share it. What game was it? It starts with an S and is currently winning this poll. You want to know the last time one of those dudes sent me a pic of a cool moment from Modern Warfare? .... 3 years ago... maybe?

Sure by now everyone is sick of COD and has been for a while, but god damn the first time I played the CoD4 beta I knew it was going to be game changing. That doesn't happen very often. Skyrim is fucking awesome for sure, but it was not the industry shifting titan that CoD4 was. But in the end we should vote by which game we simply think is better, for me Call of Duty wins that too. I think CoD4 should run away with this, but then again this is a hardcore video game community... so that's not going to happen.

@jakob187: I totally agree that you shouldn't necessarily count mods in GOTG deliberations. I played 200 hours of Skyrim one one character with zero mods and it was an experience unlike anything I'd had since Oblivion. Mods make Elder Scrolls games better, but they don't make them good; Bethesda makes them good. And as for the PS3 thing, yeah, it's kinda shitty that that version of the game was busted, but if the Giant Bomb crew was able to look past that for GOTY 2011, then we should be happy to look past it for this. The PC version of that game was un-fucking-believable, and that's what counts here.

If open-world RPGs in the Bethesda mold aren't your thing then that's fine, but just remember that there's just as many people who don't like multiplayer military shooters. So many people are assuming that people became tired of these games, and CoD especially, due to over-saturation - some people never liked those games, and aren't big multiplayer guys, and that's fine too.

Comparing gameplay hours between singleplayer and multiplayer games is crazy. CoD4's MP doesn't have 200 hours of "content" - it has a set number of maps which you play repeatedly. And that's fine, because that's what MP is based on, but regardless of how repetitious you think the environments and quests in Skyrim may be, it's still a game with a ridiculous amount of bespoke content with specific dialogue and design, comparable only on the level of something like an MMO.

"(Skyrim) just redressed how it handled its redistribution of skill points and not much else?" - couldn't you say that about CoD4 in the context of it basically being Counterstrike but with a tacked on perks system and respawning? Skyrim completely changed how ambient experiences could happen naturally in its environment, in a way that I'd not seen a game do before, at least not on that scale.

And people who don't think Skyrim had a big impact on the industry need to remember one thing: Dragon Age: Inquisition, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt are both being designed with large navigable open worlds and are clearly taking pages from the Skyrim book.

But really, I don't need to say all that - the poll results speak for themselves. If that sounds kind of like I'm being a dick then I wasn't really intending to, but...the people have spoken. *shrugs*

Modern Warfare. I'm going to sound like a major fanboy here (which I'm not) but that game managed to single handedly revolutionize the way modern FPS games are made, and managed to break into entirely different genres as well (how many non-CoD games use the CoD style perks systems now? Lots.) On top of all of the technical stuff, the game was fucking AWESOME. Better than any Call of Duty game that came before it, and better than any that have come after it. Modern Warfare was the biggest game in the world for years.

Skyrim was an awesome game as well, but at the end of the day it's just a heavily upgraded version of the past Elder Scrolls games - and it was fucking broken when it came out and was (still is in some cases) broken for months afterwards like every other Bethesda RPG.

I'm not quite ready to go on and say that Modern Warfare should be GotG, but it's pretty damn close. Love it or hate it, you can't deny the influence and downright massive popularity.

@atlas: To play devils advocate, why shouldn't we count mods, if we allowed LittleBigPlanet a place in these brackets.

@towersixteen said:

Well yes, if you entire design of your game is based on mods then it totally counts, but I don't think even Jakob187 was implying that Skyrim is entirely based on mods. Skyrim has dozens if not hundreds of hours of content without mods; LBP doesn't. Case by case basis.

That's totally not true. Modern Warfare is the reason why we have perk systems in recent games. It's the reason why we have level progression and unlocks in recent games. It's the reason why every action game being made for the last 6 years has some type of blood-on-the-screen health recharge system. It's the reason why people go batshit crazy for games running at a smooth 60 FPS (even more so than usual).

It's not just FPS, or even multiplayer anymore. It's hard to name a AAA produced game made since 2008 that doesn't take influence from, or directly steal, things popularized in the first (and second to some extent) Modern Warfare games.

@atlas: I would argue that it doesn't matter- if the Creation Kit is a free, included feature of the game, it should get some consideration.

@towersixteen: I don't think we can fairly give them credit for the actual content of the mods, but if you're taking about giving developers credit for making their games openly and easily moddable, then abso-fucking-lutely I agree with you. Skyrim was one of the first games that really justified Steam Workshop.

@jakob187: Since almost your entire argument revolves around multiplayer why not bring up one of the major downsides, other people? like 90% of the online gaming community seems to have raped my mother. Why would you want to spend anytime with these people? Especially time that you are supposed to enjoy... If anything CoD multiplayer should be a massive strike against it, not a strong suit. It helped create the extremely toxic atmosphere of online gaming.

@drxlecter: /mute player

Honestly, I feel that's a rather limp argument. That's like saying that a knock against Skyrim should be the "arrow to the knee" meme.

Moreover, a lot of that was there long before Call of Duty happened. Halo, Unreal Tournament, Quake...all of these games before it had the same thing in the community. Call of Duty on consoles was just a larger audience of it happening, and thus it gets thrown into the mainstream spotlight.

This is about the GAME, not the COMMUNITY, right? It's called "Game of the Generation?"

@karkarov: It isn't' just about shooters or the online community. The persistent leveling, perk system, unlocks, etc. have permeated many other genres, not just shooters.

Gorillas aren't monkeys.

That's not the game's fault because that existed WAY before Call of Duty was even thought of.

What made things so shitty are the fucking 12 year olds and trolls on Xbox Live that screw it up for everyone. It's not game specific. Call of Duty gets a bad rap for that because, well, was (is?) the most popular game in the world.

Thankfully, the PC versions didn't get that much of that type of stuff. That seems to be largely a console specific issue since a lot of the userbase is so young and immature.

Voted for COD 4, thought it would be a tough choice but it surprisingly wasn't, Skyrim was fun and I think I ended up putting about 70 hours into it but it just didn't take like Oblivion did. I really liked COD 4.

I'm pretty sure it was more Jeff giving up on the argument entirely because it was getting nowhere and Ryan walking out of the room that led to Skyrim getting those honors.

Also, I think it's fairly unfair to throw aside an entire version of a game in this kind of discussion.

All in all, it's a community thing, so I guess it doesn't really matter that much? I don't know. It matters to me. I want to know that when there is one game coming out in all of this, it's going to be the one that truly stands out above the rest. I'd like to think that everyone is really taking their time to think about these choices, but I know they aren't.

I made a case for Left 4 Dead over Skyrim, and that one didn't win. As it stands, I've got this feeling that Skyrim is just going to win the entire thing, and on a personal level, I hate the thought that a buggy game which didn't work on an entire console for an extended period of time would be considered by our community, a group of dedicated gamers, the "Game of the Generation."

Is Skyrim the one game that should represent an entire generation of games? It just personally doesn't sit well for me. I'm not going to sit here and say that I think Call of Duty 4 should be that final game either. I haven't even played it, but I think The Last of Us should be the one that wins. I know that sounds weird, but while I haven't played it, I've watched multiple playthroughs of the game (I don't own a PS3). That game looks fantastic, has some incredible dynamic gameplay to it, and the story is fucking heavy...FUCKING HEAVY. Overall, the thing just looks like everything that should be the culmination of this generation: trying to bring gameplay to cinematic art, blend them together, and somehow make that experience as real as possible for a player while also pushing the graphical and written boundaries that video games have sat on for a while. All the while, everything I've watched of The Last of Us gives each playthrough enough uniqueness that each player will have a slightly different experience with it, but the general basis is that the experience will be roughly the same for all involved. The gameplay mechanics in the game also seemed second to none, as Naughty Dog has always done a lot to push the boundaries of what a game is capable of doing in terms of gameplay as a whole. Part of that gameplay uniqueness seems to really stem from wanting to ground everything to a certain form of reality, and The Last of Us playthroughs that I've watched seem to do that rather well.

I know that I voted for The Walking Dead: Season One in the latest poll between the two, but I want The Last of Us to take the whole thing.

So in the end, none of this...I guess...really matters.

Uh I hate to burst your bubble but there have been games with level progression, unlocks, and perks since around 1970 or so. They are called RPG's, perhaps you have heard of this type of game before? I also played this game called Gears of War back in 2006.... it had regenerating health and was a shooter. When did Modern Warfare come out again? Also not to be a douche or anything but people have been bitching about steady FPS since before Counter Strike, much less Modern Warfare.

Modern Warfare is the most influential game of the last 6 years.... if you are a casual mainstream gamer who loves FPS. If you are anyone else you recognize it for what it is, a online shooter that stole mechanics from other games and acts like it invented them.

Why would I vote for a game that was worse than Oblivion's expansion?

@video_game_king: Personally I think the most influential game ever made was created by a dude called Gygax.

@karkarov:

I thought we were limiting ourselves to video games. Otherwise, yea, D&D would be up there.

Are you telling me that CoD invented RPG elements which then influences other genres? Lmao...

By that same exact argument, Skyrim is an RPG game that stole mechanics from other games and acts like it invented them. The star chart for distributing points is a skill tree, plain and simple. The first-person RPG? Go back to Eye of the Beholder and Might & Magic.

Using an argument like this invalidates not only both of the options here but multiple options throughout the entirety of the brackets. If anything, it leads to Dark Souls being one of the only honest choices on this whole set of brackets, and even then, Blade of Darkness came before it.

Moreover, while Gears of War did come before Call of Duty 4, it was nowhere close to the same level of forward progression and customization mechanics that Call of Duty 4 had. COD4 introduced a way for players of first-person shooters to create their own loadouts, to choose their own weapons through unlocks, to define how their character would interact with their own world. Is it essentially skill trees and leveling up in an RPG? Sure. How many shooters did that level of customization and detail before Call of Duty 4? How many have done it afterwards?

Yes, RPGs have been doing leveling up and customization for years, but this was not something that you saw introduced across SOOOOO many genres in such a short time like we've seen with this particular generation, and much of that is modeled after Call of Duty 4's innovations.

Moreover, the mechanics that Call of Duty 4 introduced for its multiplayer has gone into far more games than just FPS titles. Assassin's Creed and Blur are two prime examples of games in completely different genres that have used a loadout-style system inspired by Call of Duty 4. Hell, I would even be willing to say that the way you pick skills and runes within Diablo 3 as something inspired by Call of Duty 4! Look at the "skill tree" for Diablo 3 and tell me there aren't similarities! Meanwhile, not just first-person shooters have used this system, but third person as well...even games that came before it. Halo has moved to a loadout-style system. Crysis did the same. Bioshock 2's multiplayer (which was excellent and catches WAY too much flak from people)...Red Faction Guerrilla...so many that I literally cannot even count them!

It seems VERY narrow-minded to say it's just an influence to FPS.

When you look at that alone...and then look at Skyrim, I ask "what has Skyrim offered to this generation?"

I'm going to have to side with @canteu. Skyrim had pretty much zero impact on this generation.

I long gave up on giving Skyrim a chance, especially after starting one of the DLC's (Dragonborn I think) and winding up in another copy-paste Draugr dungeon from the get go. Jesus Christ, Bethesda, would it kill you to put some enemy and environment variety in some of these throwaway quests. And before I get the response of "oh, but Call of Duty is just shooting dudes and the occasional vehicle,". Well yeah, they're limited to a real world scenario and setting. A fantasy genre has no limits on what creatures can lurk in the dark. It doesn't stop there of course. The melee combat in Elder Scrolls game is just dull. Hit, hit, hit, oh let me pause and heal to full, rinse repeat. Since I played Dark Souls beforehand, Skyrim was beyond monotonous. If Oblivion was the TES game front runner for this doohickey, then perhaps I'd be more inclined to root for it. I vastly preferred the setting of Cyrodiil. Talking to some of my friends who are long time Elder Scrolls fans, they seem to be under the impression that as the series goes on, it gets more and more streamlined and I now see where they're coming from.

No impact from my point of view is better than the negative impact CoD had on the videogame landscape. Hell, CoD is probably the reason why the latest SSX game has become that huge clusterfuck.

@jclane: Why didn't you use any of the other styles of combat then? There were plenty of options.

If this was MW2 it'd be close for me but although MW did all that other stuff first other games did it better.

@cptbedlam: Completely agree, and again, when was this decided that the winner had to have the biggest impact? People need to stop trying to make other people conform to their parameters because what they think should be winning isn't.

@sodapop7: Even going as a mage or a thief (neither of which are particularly of my interest, I enjoy the heavy hitters with tons of HP and a giant two-hander that dishes out megatons of damage), it wouldn't sort out the myriad of other problems I have with that game, and I didn't even run into any technical issues. Everyone talks big game about the dragon battles and I just sit there going "I think Dark Souls and Dragon's Dogma did it better."

All this time i thought Skyrim would crush everything in its path until meeting Mass Effect 2 but this is closer than i expected. I think whichever game between TWD and TLoU wins will probably do better than CoD 4. This is actually exciting.

Canteu was apparently being sarcastic about Modern Warfare winning. He also said that he loved Skyrim. All of that aside, though... let's take a look at your point. Did Skyrim have as much impact on the generation as Modern Warfare? No, but saying that it had NO impact is flat out wrong. The witcher 3 is going big open world. So is the next dragon age game. You think they're taking queues from Call of duty? No, they're taking queues from Skyrim due to the games reception and sales. Obviously Skyrim isn't the first in the series, but neither is Modern Warfare. This also isn't Impact of the Generation. Impact matters, but it isn't the end all be all.

Even though I prefer playing Skryim, COD4 is the defining moment of this generation and completely changed the way games were made anyone not voting that way is ridiculously short sighted.

@trilogy: cues

To everyone saying it's the "most influential game ever" -Did it even have a lick of impact outside of a single genre of games? Isn't that a bit dumb, then? I mean, there is a world outside of shooters.

Medieval warfare prospers as Skyrim wins with 57% of the vote and 1035 votes cast.