Quick Look: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

Modern Warfare!

Finally, a game with no politics!

I really wanted to get this game but I went for The Outer Worlds instead, but I really can't wait to play the campaign! It looks so fluid and I love me some good FPS graphics.*

*Campaign only, F the mp

They're going to have another Medal of Honor: Call of Duty soon aint they?

Captain Price knows how to solve the Trolley Problem.

I'm going to do what i've done with the last 5 COD games not including Blops 4. Buy cheap preowned next year to beat Campaign and then try and sell it to recoup something. I remember going into store after work on Launch day to buy these games and the hype was unreal. It's just underwhelming and looks like the same game weve played for 12 Years.

Anyway Back to playing Outer Worlds....

I'm sure the campaign is good. But not $60 good. Thats why i get it cheap later on. Good choice on getting outer worlds although I downloaded it free on Gamespass and really enjoying it.

This looks rad. I wish it wasn’t Activision affiliated so I could buy it, but I can’t support them for many reasons. Bummer. : /

Wow. I can't believe it's taken this long for an FPS to incorporate slicing the pie.

STP is a tactic where you pivot off of the corner when you attempt to clear a blind spot. Jeff mentions it at around 23min when they talk about mounting on surfaces.

It's not the same Captain Price actor. It's meant to be a different character I think as he is a lot younger.

Also the voice of BJ Blaskowicz was one of the writers?!

How modern are we talking about?

I finished the campaign a moment ago (it's only about 4 hours long). It's neat and I'm glad that we have another CoD single player campaign, but there aren't that many memorable missions or moments. The couple of times you clear a building with NVGs are probably the ones that stuck with me the most.

They sequel bait a "Modern Warfare 2" really hard and name drop some characters from the original Modern Warfare and MW2. Some characters repeat memorable lines from CoD4 a handful of times too, which was pretty funny. But also kinda weird? Like it felt like the current Infinity Ward was afraid of really making a "Modern Warfare" of their own.

I mean, any FPS with movement technically already incorporates slicing the pie, since you're not supposed to stick your face against the corner anyway, but instead step away from it.

@haz_kaj: If you live in the United States you should just take advantage of Redbox. You can probably beat the campaign in a day. If you can't find a discount/free code, at most you'll spend $3 on the rental.

@deerokus: His name is Brian Bloom, and he also wrote the script for Infinity Ward's last COD, Infinite Warfare.

@steveurkel: It's good that you respect the MP.

Why is the player limiting me to 360p the fuck is going on? My internet is way fast enough to stream HD

Hrm, it's been a while since my last CoD purchase/play (Advanced Warfare), but this looks really nice.

Maybe it's time to jump back in again. I did play a shit-ton of OG Modern Warfare back in the day.

i don't notice troy baker, but i definitely notice YOSUKE

Ah, 50 player servers on Call of Duty: MW 1 was wonderful on PC.

Damn this game looks amazing with tons of tiny details. That camera shake during the reload, that transtition into ADS. Developers finally realizing that using Film camera tricks can enhance the experience

The campaign looks great from a technical perspective while simultaneously looking stale and boring to play.

Was this game written by a bunch of fox news interns because lol

Since its announcement, this game has kind of rubbed me up the wrong way. The more I see and read about it to prove that I'm hastily judging a game I haven't played nor intend to, the less my concerns are alleviated.

The developers' unfamiliarity with the real-world politics of the Middle East stopped them short of setting the game against the backdrop of an actual Middle Eastern country, but not a fictional one apparently.

What makes this worse is that this fictional country looks exactly like the fictional country of the original Modern Warfare (which came out 12 years ago) and just as Iraq looked in Battlefield 3 or wherever Bad Company was set. They're all arid war-torn rubbles, and interchangeable.

My frustration is that this game resumes the trend of unflattering (that's if I'm being charitable) cultural portraits of the Middle East in video games. In all honesty though, quite a few things, from the setting to the story premise come across as thinly-veiled Orientalist bullshit. It's almost as if you can't tell a story about the region without eventually alluding to terrorism, "Islamic" fundamentalism, or civil unrest; or without Western interventionism.

Played this a bit in the morning before work. On PC, all settings maxed and with raytracing enabled, around 100FPS at 1080p. It sure does look pretty.

Guns feel really good and "weighty", in my opinion. Can't really comment on the campaign yet.

Campaign looks really sharp and interesting. And I loved spec ops back in the day.

I usually wait a year or two to buy COD games, because I only play through the campaign and have no interest in the multiplayer. I may have to see if I can rent this.

Apparently, the campaign is about 4 hours. As someone who is only interested in the singleplayer, Spending 60$ on a 4 hour game sucks. I wish they would just split the mp and the sp so you can buy them separately.

From the first few minutes this looks ferociously out of date.

Non-specifically brown faith-based militants.

Russian but-non-state-Russian bad guys, going to great lengths to say not real-Russian bad guys, even though current Russia is the actual real-life bad guys but we are too chicken to say that.

Terrorist attack on Western city.

Seven hundred yawns. Have these devs not picked up a newspaper in the last decade.

Pathetic.

@militantfreudian: as someone that doesn’t know anything about the region - or basically just the stuff you see in movies and games - what stories could actually be told in a Modern Warfare universe? Asking out of plain curiosity.

@humanity: I highly doubt it would fly with big game companies but stories about imperialism, intervention, etc would be interesting as there’s a plethora of examples of that throughout history to today. And not just the US, plenty of countries are guilty of this.

I hope that when they check in on the co-op mode that they do it with staff only, and not public matchmaking, so we get to see what it's like under optimal circumstances. Perhaps a cross coast and cross platform feature also.

@xdeser2: As bad as this seems, I still think Ghosts was the most Fox News CoD story.

For some reason during the London level only half of the radio chatter is subtitled? Maybe it's only "plot-critical" stuff that shows up and random background stuff doesn't but it's really annoying.

And on the subject of subtitles, characters being named "UK Police 4" and "UK Civilian 3" is a bit weird, have the devs not heard of the term "British"? And for that matter you're in London, do you really need to specify everyone is British?

I was going to say Republican game of the year, but it kinda doesn't fit given current events. So I'll just cringe at the shitty jingoist gun fetishism on display.

edit: crikey, it's even worse with all that "we are at war, our hands are tied" rhetoric and immediately a pan to a random middle eastern country. Did Steve Bannon advise the devs or what?

The sound engineering they did on the guns is pretty amazing, but maybe a little too chilling for me. Menacing as hell.

@jakonovski: No, Hillary did, she needed the work

@kingloo: The US needs to invade somewhere other than the middle easy so games can finally have a new modern setting

@humanity: I think there are quite a few interesting directions a story about conflict in this region can take, none of which straddle the fence of trying to be ripped from the headlines and "apolitical" (or rather nonpartisan), or lend themselves effortlessly to bombastic action, or generate the kind of controversy that can be converted into sales.

Anyway, if Infinity Ward was intent on telling a ripped from the headlines story dealing with terrorism and civil unrest in the Middle East, the least they could've done is to tell it from the point of view of the people native to the region. Those who (in the real world) have historically bore the brunt of the violence, reckoned with its aftermath (and the aftermath of military intervention), and did most of the resisting.

However, glancing at Gamespot's review-in-progress, it seems like Farah (for all the devs' talk about the significance of the character to the story) gets the short shrift and doesn't play as prominent a role in the game as I thought. Unfortunately, there's a long history of portrayals of the region that routinely, even actively disregarded and undermined the perspective of its people. For example, in these narratives it's always assumed that the people acquiesce to foreign intervention, maybe beseech it (or maybe it doesn't matter what they think).

On the production side, the game's technically impressive. It looks and sounds amazing, except for the non-English bits I've seen. Well, I can only speak for the Arabic-speaking characters (the other language(s) seem to be Indo-Iranian), but the pronunciation of most words is off, to the point that the enemy faction's name is sometimes pronounced in such a way that it nearly means the opposite of what it actually means. Maybe investing in a dialect coach or, I don't know, hiring native speakers would've been preferable, especially after the narrative team made a big deal about having believable and sympathetic characters. I may be nitpicking here since this has been the norm, but in this particular case, it stands in contrast to the care lavished at how environments look and guns feel, and it's only indicative of where the studio's priorities lie.

@kingloo: I'd say FUKUS were, are, and will be the "real life bad guys" in most criminal imperialist enterprises but hey.

"Breaking glass to pull Modern Warfare lever" is such a great, hilarious way of putting it, Brad. It also feels like the cranked the "edge" knob to 11.

I'm not that into this. Then again, I don't know if I can ever go back to Call of Duty. I ranked MW1 & 2 among the greatest games of all-time near release but they've aged really poorly. The appeal was how good the shooting was at the time but now every FPS feels that good so the cramped rollercoaster ride level design doesn't appeal to me anymore. I'd rather they shamelessly imitate popular movies every entry like "Here's basically Pulp Fiction but you play as the main character", "Here's Bad Boys!", etc.

The really gritty, ripped-from-the-headlines narrative here contrasts sharply with how artificial the level/game design is. It also doesn't work with what these games should be: dumb, brainless Michael Bay blockbusters. This is trying to be The Hurt Locker and it's just not ... fun?

I'm conflicted about this game. The campaign looks kind of interesting in a way I haven't seen CoD games be in idk how many years but on the other side I think I'll be way too distracted while playing it by real world events that shaped this game's story.

This is obviously Syria and from what I've seen from the campaign it's using the Russian intervention in that country as part of the backdrop for their story. I haven't seen a direct ISIS caliphate equivalent in the game yet but it's interesting that they have a Kurdish fighters equivalent there as your local allies which leads to me being distracted because I can't help but keep thinking about current events where the US betrayed our Kurdish allies and those people had no choice but to turn to Russia for assistance now.

It's a minor complaint, but I really with they had a new font in the HUD, subtitles, death screen, etc. They've been using the same font since Call Of Duty 4. That's 12 years without a font update and it looks dated by now.

And no matter how many visual and graphical updates they do, the blood on the screen always looks like jelly and the game overall always looks kinda muddy, like there's some lack of crispness.

Seeing people go on like much of any of this is different from what CoD has done in the past... okay.

Not that it's okay to want a modern Spec Ops thriller game again but I mean it's the same shit with new touches in presentation.

For the people commenting on CoD's right-of-center storylines - did we all forget that Modern Warfare 1 proudly quoted war-criminal Donald Rumsfeld throughout the game?

Also, Activision thinks all brown people speak the same language regardless of what country they're from:

This shits for real disturbing!

So is this a remake of 4 or what?

Someone hasn't played Daryl F. Gates' Police Quest: SWAT. You can even watch Vinny slice the pie if you want to.

I like CoD most years, but teh last one I liked was WW2. The last one...BLOPs 3 was not to my taste. That is about all I can say about the 2018 game without sounding like a dick about it.

So, I might consider this game for teh multiplayer, but honestly I was just in WW2 and severla thousand people are online most hours for nearly all modes of play. Maybe this will shake soem fo those folks loose.

Typically Jeff and I are on the same wave-length for CoD, soi I will look forward to see more of this QL.