At a presentation in Los Angeles earlier
this month, I got to watch (but
unfortunately not play) this mission from
the singleplayer campaign of Call of Duty:
Modern Warfare. Members of developer
Infinity Ward laid out a few reasons there
isn’t a ‘4’ after the title, and why they
wanted a “re-imagining” of Modern
Warfare rather than a sequel. Their aim
was to create a game that feels relevant
and “ripped from the headlines”, and
that’s pretty hard to do when the
storylines of previous Modern Warfare
games have veered so far from reality.
“In those games, by the time Modern
Warfare 3 was over, nukes had gone off in
the world, the Russians had invaded the
United States, and so there were really no
stakes remaining in that world,” says
Infinity Ward’s Narrative Director Taylor
Kurosaki. “So, what we did was we took
that storyline and we put it to bed, and we
said let’s keep all the good stuff, all the
stuff you expect from a Modern Warfare
game, and let’s transpose it into today’s
world. It’s more mature. It’s more
authentic. It’s more relevant.”
The SAS mission I watch is a tense
affair as the soldiers—including Captain
John Price, who appeared in the original
Modern Warfare games—creep into the
townhouse, position themselves in the
narrow hallways, and listen to muffled
voices through the building’s thin walls.
Night-vision goggles are switched on,doors are breached, lights are killed, and
suspects are snuffed in a cold and
efficient manner with silenced weapons.
The sequence is disturbingly reminiscent
of some of those leaked military videos
you might have seen on the internet.
The soldiers have been briefed that the
townhouse may also include
noncombatants, which requires some
quick decision-making. Most suspects are
spotted with weapons, and some have
time to fire back, but a few others are
unarmed, and even pretend to surrender
before suddenly grabbing for a nearby
weapon. The only true noncombatant
appears to be a woman holding a crying
infant on one of the upper floors—
everyone else is hostile. One woman even
claims she was being held there against
her will before suddenly lunging for a
detonator. She’s shot dead. The Wolf, the
only enemy worth taking alive, has
escaped, if he was ever even there at all.
That’s the small slice of the Tier One
operator missions I saw, a tense and
methodical engagement in close-quarters
combat. It was exciting and felt realistic
(with the exception of the player picking
up a shotgun off the floor and deciding to
use it instead of the weapon he brought on
the mission, which seems risky and
unlikely). But I also got a look at another
mission, a much stranger and more
off-putting sequence featuring an entirely
different kind of combatant.GUERRILLA TACTICS
In Modern Warfare, you don’t spend the
entire singleplayer campaign playing as a
professional soldier kitted out with
expensive gear and access to the best in
modern combat technology. You also play
as a ‘rebel freedom fighter’, which
presents you with different challenges.
“You’re going up against enemies who
are technologically superior to you,” says
singleplayer design director Jacob
Minkoff. “All you have are improvised
weapons like molotov cocktails, IEDs, and
you have superior numbers. But you haveT
here’s been a deadly terrorist bombing at
London’s Piccadilly Circus. The
perpetrators have been tracked to a
four-story house in North London.
British Special Forces prepare to infiltrate the
building to capture the terrorist cell’s leader known
as The Wolf who is presumed to be at the
townhouse. All other suspects are to be eliminated.Play both as soldiers and ‘freedom
fighters’ in this series re-imagining
CALL OF DUTY:
MODERN WARFARE
SUSPECTS ARE SNUFFED IN A
COLD AND EFFICIENT MANNER
WITH SILENCED WEAPONSRELEASE
October 25, 2019DEVELOPER
Infinity WardPUBLISHER
ActivisionLINK
http://www.callofduty.comNEED TO KNOWFIRST
LOOKDon’t point that
thing at me.
Call of Duty: Modern WarfarePREVIEW