#but i don't wanna veer too hard in the other direction either

[madeimpact]

Y'know I think it could be interesting to write a thread where my little man just gets to go completely apeshit. The problem is it takes a LOT to get him to that point. But it can be done

[cerosin-bis]

might I ask for a handful of just random cod trivia ..

and/or ! just your thoughts on the games and reboots, if you’re comfy w that?

I feel like you always have some random notes or tags about weird trivia in the game but obviously this isn’t specific At All so feel free to just ignore this if it’s weird sjdndjhd

Hi! no this isn't weird 🥺 I think what gives this impression is "just" that I played most of said games a lot and got interested in the lore that's not necessarily accessible to people who, big quotation marks, are superficially in the fandom. as in people who aren't interested in multiplayer or secondary gamemodes, let alone lore and are more focused on the main cast or one particular mp character (such as könig)

This got VERY long so, my rambles and opinions about the Modern Warfare games and their reboots below.

I played mw2 and mw3's campaigns in 2010-2013. I wasn't playing multiplayer at the time, I started it with BO4 in 2018. But I fell hard into MW's multiplayer with the first reboot, mw19, in early 2020.

Just so that my words have a bit of "the player's weight": I have around 900 hours on mw19, 400 on MWII and I believe 200-300 on MWIII.

Regarding campaigns: Call of duty is Call of duty. It's literally funded by the US army. it's blatant propaganda, and I expect no less when I run a campaign. With that being said, what I expect from a CoD campaign is either being over-the-top and extra (like the original trilogy and in some ways MWIII specifically), or rooted in reality and wanna be serious like mw19. This is minding the blatant history 'rewriting' it's doing (eg. chemical attacks in syria, highway of death mission). My honest opinion on it is that the reboots don't know what they want and it's especially visible in MWII. In my opinion, the original games nailed that "american action movie" feel that the reboots kinda lost by instead veering towards something overlapping with real-life maybe a bit too much while still wanting to include crazy shit. Like, I don't think it's a balance that can work. I do like that we had more character development with MWII and it felt fun to play (in that regard I have no complaints, and I even liked the semi-open missions that a lot of ppl disliked), but it feels a bit less like call of duty. I'll be curious to see what direction they take for the next MW game, but I sure hope IW get their shit together and have a clear direction.

Transitioning to multiplayer with that. This feeling that the MW games are now an amalgamation of things sewn together hastily started with the Warzone fusion and the BOCW implementation. It became especially visible in multiplayer with the addition of crossover bundles, providing less and less "mil-sim" skins, and it was obvious that by MWIII IW would step away and let other developers (treyarch, SHG, which are both turned more towards arcade gameplay) take over the multiplayer development. Which is kinda insane: MW was always Infinity Ward's flasgship initially.

In my opinion the MW multiplayer started feeling different (in my eyes, falling off) for 3 reasons:

Catering to a younger playerbase, notably the "tiktok crowd": younger gamers want games that are incredibly fast-paced (mirroring their use of social media and those yknow "adhd videos") and like extremely flashy skins. Therefore, they'll spend money to get them. I'm not saying this to say "it's bad!" it's just an observation

The absolute success of mobile games and fortnite-like collaborations. This is mostly due to the current way people "consume" social media and games, with everything being quick and instant and fleeting. The sheer impact that these two things have had on video games as a whole is absolutely insane: they started adding microtransactions in games because it started on mobile & they realised that if you let people buy skins with real money w the press of a button, spendings increase tenfold. Same goes with the battle pass model: it's incredibly lucrative.

Crunch, changes of leadership, writers and artists probably being allowed less communication and therefore focus; and, in MWIII's case, the arrival of AI giving us some tasteless slop in cosmetics. That they sell. For real money.

I've said it countless time but I really regret mw19 multiplayer's artistic and narrative direction. It had a story that's completely absent from MWII where characters are just empty shells with a few lines of marvel-like, mary-sue grade bios. Where's the cohesive story? Where are the outwardly morally grey or flawed characters, the sub-squads, the interaction lines, the bundles that made sense with the characters' backstories?...

Long story short, I don't know if the MW series will ever go back to what made it MW. I hope so, but seeing how between 2020 and 2024 the multiplayer entirely lost its soul & the campaigns don't know what they want to show, I'm afraid it might either never come back or take a dozen years so that a reboot of reboots gets out or a new series takes over.

'til capitalism and cashgrab leadership ruins it again and the cycle begins anew.