Every single action you take as you fight your way down ruined Middle Eastern streets is made with heart-pounding trepidation. The American side of the story imbues the player with something that doesn’t come easily to first-person military shooters: a sense of fear.
#Spec ops the line remastered series
Meanwhile, the American side is a never-ending series of wide-open war zones, flooded with cross-firing bullets, bombs, and zealots ready to die for their cause. The British side is where most of the actual character of the game is found, with the relative quiet of having to stealth around, run down prey, and slit throats in the dark forcing Soap to become familiar with his vicious yet honorable cronies.
It’s from there that the narrative splits, between John “Soap” MacTavish, a British Special Air Service (SAS) operative doing the covert intel wet work that feeds the operation to kill Al-Asad, and Paul Jackson, a boots-on-the-ground American marine following his crew into the heart of the Middle Eastern war machine to take out Al-Asad altogether. Much of that success is made possible in the game’s first half, which is kicked off by a chillingly bravura sequence that sees a Middle Eastern leader, held captive by a power-hungry despot named Khaled Al-Asad, being loaded into a car bound and gagged, driven through the streets, forced to watch his people lined up against walls and executed, before finally facing the despot’s bullet in first person, and caught on camera as the money shot to a terrorist recruitment video. Modern Warfare’s success lies in the war itself, when it gets to the dirty business of placing you in the midst of complete chaos, where the bullet that kills you is typically invisible, where there’s nothing pleasant or cathartic about the use of heavy weaponry, and where the player is rarely, if ever, a hero. It’s a rather understated success, however, borne of instincts that somehow didn’t take hold of the gaming conscience the way Prestiges and Perks in the game’s ridiculously popular multiplayer did. Instead, what we find in Modern Warfare Remastered is a game that has to work overtime to not come off as a ghost of 2007’s Christmas past, and manages to succeed more often than not. This should have theoretically rendered Modern Warfare toothless. Fast forward to 2016, though, and we find a game whose best ideas have been cribbed, improved upon, and just flat-out copied by other games, including and especially other Call of Duty titles. It was the first and most successful attempt to translate the very real, raging war America was fighting in the Middle East into a video-game narrative, despite the fact that the game goes out of its way to avoid being an actual commentary on current events. Also it didn’t sell.There was a time, nine years ago at this point, when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare did in fact represent modernity. In a 2012 piece on Polygon, Cory Davis, the lead designer, described the multiplayer on it as ‘a cancerous growth’ and that ‘the game mechanics were raped to make it happen, and it was a waste of money.’ Ouch for the multiplayer.īecause it was a brutal, painful development & everyone who worked on it would eat broken glass before making another.
This isn’t the first time the Spec Ops team has been open about their feelings on the development process. As the game’s lead writer, Williams is responsible for one of the most unique stories a shooter has ever had, but fans of it are just going to have to keep replaying the original. ‘Because it was a brutal, painful development & everyone who worked on it would eat broken glass before making another. One such person asked writer Walt Williams why it won’t get a sequel, and Williams gave a pretty clear cut reply.
It wasn’t a commercial blockbuster, though, although a lot of people still think of it fondly. Spec Ops: The Line was a shooter with a difference, and what precisely that difference was I’m not going to spoil for you, because it was pretty cool (but suffice it to say: check out Spec Ops: The Line).