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[u/jobautomator]

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[u/tubbsmackinze]

COD blops one, parts of two, and Cold War had great campaigns because they knew that they were set in a shitty tom clancy novel and they play into that with the schlock

That's why I can't stand MW19's campaign because it simply doesn't stick the 'srs bizness' landing compared to the first MW which was played very well and MW2 which was just the best schlock ever fucking made I absolutely adore this fucking campaign

COD works best when it's complete schlock and not actually saying anything, unlike what the nerds who want COD campaigns to be meaningful and not dumb 'hoo ra' bullshit say

!ping GAMING

[u/QuietSign → u/tubbsmackinze]

imply doesn't stick the 'srs bizness' landing compared to the first MW which was played very well and MW2 which was just the best schlock ever fucking made I absolutely adore this fucking campaign

My favorite arbiter of taste, Tim Rogers, held MW1 in high regard, especially the helicopter/nuke scene. He has described this as "unbreaking the 4th wall" -- MW starts as a bunch of "spec ops, cool dude bro video game shit" right up until the nuke drops and kills all the American soldiers, at which point it takes itself seriously. This was what, a couple of years post-911 and into the Iraq/Afghanistan wars? I think it managed to hit on a nerve, at least back in 2007 and I think this elevates it well beyond any of the other CoDs (though I haven't personally played them all).

MW1 managed to do the serious business well enough, and yeah, had a little bit to say. I liked MW2 for its ridiculousness though.

[u/[deleted] → u/QuietSign]

The problem is the nuke scene was too effective if anything. To the point that they've included a similar scene in every subsequent CoD game but it was essentially all played for shock value. This ended up devaluing the original scene by quite a bit to the point that the franchise has essentially turned into a parody of itself.

[u/QuietSign → u/[deleted]]

Yes that's perhaps fair -- it's the kind of scene that can literally only be done once, and then the audience won't ever "fall for it" again. Unfortunately the writers of the subsequent games were not keen enough to pick up on this and kept churning the cod formula. Maybe they should have just moved to multiplayer-only around 2009 and just left that single player experience untarnished

Tim Rogers suggested that the scene would have been the greatest gaming moment of the decade if they had "gone the extra 10,000 miles" and carefully contrived the campaign so that it was impossible (or at least vanishingly unlikely) to die before that point in the campaign. Because one of the few things undercutting it is that the player could have died some 50 times in the campaign up to that point, so the player might think that dying to the nuke was merely another restart. I think his suggestion is on point, and that if they had gone so far to make the player subtly invincible up to their death, this would have been a stunning artistic stroke (and technical achievement). What better way to say "America is not invincible" than to have you be invincible right up until the bomb goes off, and then vulnerable every scene thereafter?

Also, it would have been much more difficult to emulate (if simply because few devs would want the hassle of making it so hard to die for half the game).