Ok, Black Ops: I'll cut you a deal. You stop locking up halfway through the first fricking mission, and then maybe I won't go play Medal of Honor: Airborne instead. Not out of any desire to play that aforementioned piece of pectoral-punching hyperpatriotic crap, mind you, just a bloody-minded and in all probability completely futile desire to piss you off to the most distant horizons of my potential in this department by voting with my two rational choice-making-agent-of-free-will-consumer feet. Or in this case, the ASDW keys.
Alright, that rather vitriolic opening was uncalled for. Well, at least 50% of it. Sorry. Back to nice me now. Technically, Medal of Honor: Airborne is actually a halfway decent game, for a comparative relic from (gasp) 2007. And I did have a bit of fun playing it. Notably (for the purposes of this post), the myriad of cinematic flourishes I found scattered within the single player campaign like Fantales on the linoleum after a piñata massacre smacks of a post Call of Duty: Modern Warfare FPS environment. And it’s because of this that I’m left suitably confuzzled. Despite the collective of similar gaming franchises doing their best to move with the times I thought it unlikely that the thematically stubborn MoH would ever be prised loose from its firmly concreted, Saving Private Ryan-Band of Brothers-heyday gung-ho-patriotic origins.
The reason for my thinking this has a lot to do with the franchise’s age and the fact that it’s been relegated to the margins of FPS gaming for so long under the all-consuming Call of Duty reign of popular acclaim. It’s like the MoH franchise went into hibernation for nine years after the release of Allied Assault, popping up to offer only the occasional token bad entry like a half-choked snore before waking up properly when the alarm went off in 2007 only to discover that notions of what an FPS was had changed considerably. The entire WW2 fad-phase in first person shooters had well and truly come and gone to be replaced by “Modern Warfare” as the new bullet-scarred hellhole to be in if you wanted to make it on the modern FPS scene.
Perhaps it’s for this reason that Airborne seems almost nostalgic and quaint for 50% of the time you’re playing it. The other 50% of the time is spent reminding yourself that this is not in fact another Call of Duty game. The choose-your-drop-zone gimmick is occasionally cool (i.e. when you manage to pull off an obscenely difficult skill drop like parachuting in through a window to land on top of an unsuspecting French peasant’s ice cream cake) but ultimately of marginal use. We also find ourselves with a Gears of War-style motion blur effect whenever you sprint (sprinting itself being one of many Call of Duty/Halo-esque mechanics to be found within, along with grenade warning indicators, regenerating health, iron sights, gun attachments, nonlinear gameplay and multiple objective sites). To level the charge at a WW2 shooter that it’s generic is like accusing a continent of being too big to conveniently steal, but then a game like, say, World at War manages to duck that particular spinning razor blade of accusation by a half-millimetre and just avoid getting its Padawan braid sliced off at the knot. Airborne feels like the average of every WW2 game that’s come before it, and carries an appropriately average level of fun.
More recently, the MoH franchise even loyally followed CoD into the controversy mosh pit by allowing players to select the Taliban as one of the two sides in its multiplayer mode for the more recent modern-warfare themed, generically titled Medal of Honor (2010), although unlike CoD they ultimately bowed to pressure from a variety of angles and replaced it with the necessarily ambiguous title “Opposing Force”. It’s somewhat baffling, although I must admit I’m not particularly emotionally invested on the matter, to see MoH exhibiting so many similarities to CoD. It’s a case whereby the forefather has been eclipsed by its tackier, prodigally hedonistic digital offspring.
Whatever. I suspect, although I could be completely barking up the wrong tree here, that where I’m heading with all this is to say that Call of Duty is overrated. Where the chief pitfall of the Medal of Honor series is to indulge itself with chest-thumping patriotism, the Call of Duty franchise revels in violence for its own sake; violence as sheer mindless spectacle.
Mind you, I didn’t always withhold that view. The series’ major watershed moment was the release of Modern Warfare, and the subsequent branching off into a sub-franchise that entailed marked the beginning of a downward spiral for a previously well-regarded name in first person shooters. That wasn’t to say that the signs weren’t there in Call of Duty 2 – a number of bad habits were apparent in that game that would grow into ever-more detrimental issues with the itinerant repetition that each subsequent entry in the series demanded. I won’t start rattling on about regenerating health, wave after wave of respawning enemies or lack of a quicksave key, but I do think some questionable design decisions were made in Call of Duty 2 from a purely ludic perspective that would funnel the series into the spectacle-oriented gameplay standard that it ultimately carries into the epic battle for our consumer dollars today.
Even putting this aside, there are at present some dire problems with the CoD series that need to be addressed, and the largest and most glaringly obvious of these is easily summarised. The series has lost the freshness that made the original Call of Duty such a hit. The stock-in-trade cinematic set-pieces have been taken to such an epic scope and scale, and overdone to such an extent, that nothing can impress us anymore. From the moment I started playing Black Ops, I couldn’t shake a feeling of déjà vu that has been the defining atmosphere to every single CoD game I’ve played since Call of Duty 2. It’s a sense of the generic. Every single mission is the same, just with slightly different shades of window dressing.
It’s compounded by some very fundamental realities of the series, which are not necessarily specific to Black Ops. At the basic level, these games are about shooting people. People; virtual people to be sure, but there’s no robotic alien microwave death turrets or baked-bean powered cyborg zombie stegosauruses to be found here. When you distil it down, the range of actions the player is able to perform are so one-dimensional as to be telling. You can move, sprint, jump, go prone, shoot, throw grenades, perform melee attacks. That’s about it. And every task that you complete is with the ultimate objective of being able to advance to the next area so that you can shoot more people. Albeit in slightly different settings, or wearing slightly different uniforms. Or in slightly different ways, such as using thermal imaging to strafe enemies from an aerial gunship. The essence of war is violence, and war is the essence of this game series. It takes precedence over plot, gameplay or, somewhat paradoxically, even realism. The end result is more than a tad mind-numbing.
Granted, occasionally there’s a car, boat, airplane or helicopter chase thrown in just to mix things up a bit. Indeed, the promise of that next big blockbuster cinematic scripted sequence just around the next corner was the only thing that prevented me quitting to Windows every time Mason decided to eat paving stones when playing Black Ops (which, incidentally, happens quite a bit whenever I play a CoD game as I invariably select Hardened difficulty or above, each time illogically reasoning to myself that I’m getting more of my money’s worth that way. I never learn.) The repetition is utterly maddening. The repetition is utterly maddening. The repetition is utterly maddening. The repetition is utterly maddening. The repetition is utterly maddening. The repetition is utterly maddening.
At least within the WW2 setting, there was the basis for a claim that Call of Duty had some value as a historical simulator, even if only vis-a-vis a very stylized rendering. But with the shift to fictional real-world modern scenarios (not to mention the Frederick Forsyth 60’s spy-thriller-type pulp material that the Black Ops plot appears to have been hewn wholesale from like an eco-friendly tea towel) the series has trodden further and further outside the boundaries of realism into the smelly dank jungles of sheer mindless spectacle.
With Modern Warfare 2, perhaps the most spectacularly brain-dead entry in the entire series - epitomised in the “No Russian” mission and its aforementioned attendant controversy surrounding the massacre of virtual citizens in an airport - the mandate of violent spectacle above all else has reached its logical zenith. Yet curiously, for all the controversy, there was very little actual outcome, but plenty of noise was made (read: spectacle). Not exactly of the violent variety, but. The phrase “life imitating art” is one I’m often a little too eager to trot out of the stable like a prized show pony with a jewel-encrusted saddle but I think it’s justified here. Though somewhat downplayed in comparison to its predecessor, Black Ops attracted its own fair share of the magic C-word because of its opening mission where the player is tasked with the assassination of a living real-life figure (Fidel Castro). I hope we’re not seeing the beginning of a trend. Spectacle and violence. Where does it end? (Oh look, I made it rhyme.)
None of the above really matters, though. Activision have found a winning formula for success, and it’s unlikely they’ll mess with it too radically in the next instalment of CoD, wherever or whenever that may be set. But at the same time, just as species evolve or get eaten, the series needs at the very minimum to keep pace (in both ludic and narrative arenas) with its competitors in the FPS marketplace. Which makes me think that Medal of Honor may well have just been on something vaguely resembling the right track after all.
But pulling a u-turn at the lights and screeching back in the opposite direction to Call of Duty: Black Ops. In the mean time, I just wish the blasted thing would stop bringing the fireworks show screeching to a halt just as I’m running through Cuban cane sugar fields in the middle of a CIA bombing raid. Does it have some aversion to sucrose, I wonder? Is my computer trying to help me lose weight by systematically censoring all references to junk food? Stupid thing, we’ll see if a Krispy Kreme shoved in your fan improves your attitude any. (Don’t look now, but it looks like not-nice me has returned with no particular aplomb). That should make you eat your words. Or your digits, rather. Your 1s and 0’s. Your binary. Yes. Tasty binary code…
Spot on points you make. I find the MW games increasingly frustrating in their linearity too - it's like moving down a waterslide with people to shoot at each turn. Strangely though I enjoy the multiplayer, perhaps it's the complexity of human player element.
ReplyDeleteWhat I find increasingly ridiculous is the scripted sequences. They are trying way too hard to be films and it stands out more than a bit uncomfortably. It's ok to take the player out of the action for a minute while something cool happens, but when I get asked to "press Use to stick a knife in a barrel and kick it over a cliff," it's just awkward. Asking the player to push a button to trigger a scripted event is like the developers suddenly remembering - oh yeah, games are meant to be interactive - but at the same time you don't actually have any input into the gameplay, because we've spent ages coming up with our ultra-super-awesome version of what's going to happen next.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed MW1's multiplayer. The unpredictability of the human element makes it fun. I'm just shit at it and the constant storm of abusive in-game chatter occasionally makes me despair of the species.
Thank god for the Xbox's X button (mute).
ReplyDeleteAgree completely regarding the pseudo-interactivity the games enforce. Fucking woeful.
I think all this talk of 'gamification' needs to be matched by 'filmification' or something similar. Though this endless back forth of narratology ludology debate is tiring.
Yeah, when you take a step outside it and look back, it strikes me as a tad reductionist.
ReplyDeleteIt's odd, you know - I've never thought to question the integrity of the narratology ludology debate - which basically reduces game studies to a spectrum defined at either end by a reductionist binary.
It's a direct mirror of the producer/consumer binary logic in debates about productive usership and user-end technologies wresting power from traditional sites. Only this is medium specific and internallly focussed on the game world.
Nonetheless, there's something indescribably thrilling in playing a game which is self-consciously cinematic, when it is done well. I'm inclined to think it boils down to the essential quality of a complex narrative, which, like a good detective story, is meted out in parcels in a reward/feedback system for the player advancing further in the game by stages. Combined with the situation of the player as a live actor in the drama - providing they are actually equipped with the ability to wield a decisive influence over the outcome - the story acquires a level of immersion and sense of urgency otherwise unattainable by conventional filmic techniques.