Garrick to infiltrate a house where
the London terrorists are based. This
level, called Townhouse, is a set-
piece moment, up there with anything
the series has done before. Replacing
explosions are short desperate bursts
of gunfire as Price’s team sweeps and
clears rooms in the dark. It’s tense,
but not without more potential for
shocking moments. The people being
shot look very ordinary, and while
some have, or reach for, guns, it’s not
always clear who’s an enemy. At one
point a screaming baby is pulled from
a cot and, while in our playthrough
nothing terrible happened, the
potential is there for the unthinkable.
“It’s about how you feel on the
stick,” explains campaign gameplay
director Jacob Minkoff. “It’s about
having your emotional state in parity
with the character you’re playing. Soif we’re going to tell a story about
characters finding their line and
being pushed past it, feeling like
things are morally grey and they’re
uncomfortable, then we need to
make the player, in gameplay, feel
uncomfortable. And that is what
you’re seeing in the Townhouse
mission. That character that you’re
playing is eventually going to ask
the question: ‘Are we doing the right
thing?’ And if he’s going to ask that in
the story, you as the player have to be
saying, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’”Close to home
Part of the controversy so far,
however, is more because the series
usually lets its tragedies play out in
less familiar locations against clear
enemies. This reflects the greyer
battlefield of today, and it all playing050 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE
“We need to make the
player, in gameplay, feel
uncomfortable”
Studio narrative director
Taylor Kurosaki on rebooting
and not continuing the seriesA FRESH
START“By the end of Modern
Warfare 3 nukes had gone off,
the Russians had invaded the
United States and frankly, for
us as storytellers, there were no
relatable stakes left in the world
for us to craft a story around.
This is still Modern Warfare, it’s
everything you loved about that
series, all those things you
expect, but for the time you live
in. Not unlike recasting James
Bond. When they brought in
Daniel Craig they didn’t adhere
strictly to every story event that
had happened in every Bond
movie before that, but they
retained the quintessential
elements of what made Bond
Bond, and what made that
series what it was.”