Watch the video embedded in the article, it's hilarious. Just like WWII shooters finally got played out, it looks like we're finally here with the "Modern" equivalent. It's this consistent yearly release, like Madden, with a check-list of approved "upgrades" to gameplay while doing nothing to advance the genre or even give us a different experience from older models. People buy the new version, because that's what you do.I’m in space. I’m shooting a machine gun, in space.
I don’t know what else is left to do at this point. I’ve seen every major landmark on Earth blown up from the Eiffel Tower to the Washington Monument. I’ve killed Russians, Arabs, South Americans and dirty US traitors. I’ve had my character die unexpectedly so many times, it’s become expected. I’ve saved the world and watch it be destroyed through some variant of World War 3 over and over and over.
The campaign of Activision’s Call of Duty: Ghosts is perhaps the pinnacle of all these events, and reinforces the belief that this nearly decade-old fad of modern military shooters is simply running out of interesting ways to tweak its concept for new stories.
Ghosts is a particularly relevant case to examine, as it’s meant to be a completely separate new sub-series from Modern Warfare and Black Ops. In it, you’re told of the legend of the “Ghosts” a famed military unit of 15 soldiers who stood against an army of hundreds and won. This is supposed to be impressive, but since in every Call of Duty game in history (and any shooter, for that matter), I’ve been a one-man army gunning down thousands, pardon me if I’m not particularly wowed by the concept.
The Ghosts go in and get jobs done that other units can’t, and are a bunch of supreme badasses. How this differentiates them from Navy SEALs or Army Rangers I have no idea, other than the fact that they all have cool skull balaclavas.
The US has been more or less destroyed again, much like it was in Modern Warfares 2 and 3. But it’s not the Russians invading this time, it’s a South American cabal who hijacked our space weapons program and used it to make craters out of our cities.
Like Black Ops 2 before it, Ghosts realizes that the definition of “modern” has to be stretched to an unreasonable degree for the series to look like its evolving. Black Ops 2 teleported us from’Vietnam to a fair distance in the future. Ghosts is content to advance us only a few years, and bask in a vaguely post-apocalyptic setting.
This isn’t a review of the campaign, it’s a diagnosis of the symptoms that plague the campaigns of nearly all “modern military shooters” these days, and make me think it might almost be time to retire the concept entirely. It feels like less and less thought is being put into these campaigns, but that also combines with the fact that we’ve “seen it all before” at this point, having played through nearly a dozen such stories across a multitude of different series.
It wasn’t always like this. When the first few Modern Warfares burst on the scene, there had never been a shooter campaign like it. In MW1, the Chernobyl level stands as one of the greatest in history. In MW2, “No Russian” was permanently burned into our minds. But now? By the time we reach Ghosts, it seems that ideas are either going to extremely wacky places, or are being recycled altogether.
In both Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Ghosts, released within a week of each other, I fought aboard a sinking aircraft carrier as planes slid across the deck. Past that, Ghosts takes some scripted scenes literally moment for moment from past games, as seen in the video below:
Elsewhere, when they do try to be different? Things are just getting ridiculous. Underwater and space levels, both using the same kind of physics, feel like something out of a James Bond game made while taking LSD. The addition of a new “dog” mechanic does nothing but make you click a button to insta-kill an enemy periodically.
Ghosts also represents the complete abandonment of characters in games like this. As in, there aren’t any.
Well, there are, technically (minor spoilers ahead). You play as Logan, and you and your brother Hesh(?) serve as Ghosts under your father. There’s bad guy named Rourke who was a Ghost, but was broken by the enemy and now he hunts his old team instead.
And that’s it. The protagonists’ primary defining trait is that they’re related to each other. The antagonist is trying to kill you. The end. The voice actors (actual actors like Stephen Lang and Brandon Routh) recognize the depth of their respective roles, and apparently all agreed to voice every line in the exact same tone with few inflections. The dog has the best voicework of the bunch, honestly.
Shooter campaigns need two things if they want to justify their existence: Meaningful gameplay and a compelling story. Or at least a solid attempt at either. Call of Duty: Ghosts lacks both, and subsequently has one of the weakest campaigns in recent memory.
Call of Duty has an increasingly problematic “shooting gallery” issue as the years have gone on. As in, there isn’t any real strategy to fights. You go into a room, and various enemies are scattered around behind cover. They run in and out, pop up and down, and you shoot them with a generous assist from auto-aim that’s leagues stickier than its multi-player counter. It’s incredibly easy, but turning up the difficulty doesn’t change the fundamental strategy of gameplay, it just makes you die faster.
The best shooter campaigns are ones that make combat a puzzle. There’s a room full of enemies, and you have to figure out the best way to kill them all, or sometimes, actually avoid them. Battlefield 3 may have been full of the sort of overused set pieces like prison breaks and building toppling as rival games, but it was somewhat enjoyable because there was some strategy to how you approached a room. In a hangar full of Chinese soldiers, I found I kept dying trying to take them all head on. Eventually, I learned to creep around the side of the room, so when I engaged I wasn’t surrounded, and I could ultimately sprint to my final destination. In Call of Duty, you probably would be forced to kill every enemy in the hangar before your NPC partner was physically even allowed to open the exit door you needed to go to.
Third person shooters have proven to do “strategic” combat reasonably well. More so than FPSs for the most part. Naughty Dog in particular has done great work with this between Uncharted and The Last of Us, where each encounter feels like a riddle. How do I kill three snipers, two RPG-wielders and three shotgunners with only twelve pistol shots and a hand grenade? But in Ghosts, the answer would just be to hide behind the same bit of cover, and hope the auto-aim of your 300 round machine gun snaps to each of their faces quickly enough.
Then there’s story. Sure, you can just view these campaigns as the equivalent of Michael Bay movies where explosions substitute for dialogue, but they don’t have to be. There’s a way to tell compelling stories in this genre, but they’re few and far between lately. Spec Ops: The Line drew praise not for its gameplay, which was honestly pretty generic, but of its fantastic rendition of Heart of Darkness, remade with a modern military unit in a ruined Dubai. But normally all we get are landmarks being exploded, and there are few actual characters being developed.
A bond between a military family is a fantastic seed for a compelling story to grow out of, but Ghosts is so concerned with assaulting the player with action at all times, that there’s no time for any character to develop in the least bit, and certainly not the mute, never-seen protagonist we control. It’s all of ninety seconds between when we meet these characters and when a city is demolished, and there’s never any flashback or discussion about anything that happened to them before they became ghostly killing machines.
Games can often struggle with actual gameplay, but are salvaged with compelling stories. The problem now is that Call of Duty campaigns have gameplay lacking in any amount of strategy and barely even attempt to write an effective story at this point. You need one or the other, if you can’t manage both.
It’s just not enough to blow stuff up in graphically impressive ways anymore. Shooter campaigns need more than that to prove that they should even exist. If the amount of effort put forth in making them is just going to keep decreasing, perhaps these series would be better off just devoting those resources into expanding multiplayer content further. But I miss good campaigns, and Call of Duty: Ghosts’ failures only serve to remind me of that fact.
And really, a lot of what I’m saying applies to multiplayer too. That’s a post for another day, but without playing it yet, if I guessed and said that Ghosts added some new maps, new guns, and tweaked classes and customization a bit, would I be on the right track? We’re stuck in a box in that mode too, and I’m not sure how long this genre is sustainable.
But more so than that, it's that they aren't even "modern" shooters. We're going way past Tom Clancy levels of absurdity to make menacing bad guys. It makes you wonder at what point you're going to end up in Lost Planet.
