Modern Shooters Played Out (CoD)

[TheFeniX]

I accidentally said "CoD 1 and 2" when I meant "Modern Warfare 1 and 2."

World at War (released after MW1) was pretty good in this regard as well. Yes, you're pushing the pace due to the medium, but you feel much more like a cog, a special cog, but a cog none-the-less. It also gave us a completely separate Russian campaign, and while pretty stereotypical of the Russians, was arguably more fleshed out than the American Pacific campaign. It wasn't until Blops and MW3 that I started to feel the games were just giving the player the hero treatment. You're doing morally dubious (or downright shitty) tasks all for the greater good, but what's going on doesn't really make much sense in that context. Then again, my memory is hella sketchy on MW3 since I only played it through once.

This likely has a lot to do with the yearly release schedule, which usually means a retread of gameplay and makes it even harder on the writers to give you something unique that goes with said gameplay.

But there's a lot of criticism leveled at early games in the franchise I don't think are fair. Kind of like how Seinfeld feels dated now or how people retroactively hate Scary Movie because it spawned a whole slew of shitty movies in the genre. Even Modern Warfare never felt like a Hero Simulator. You were a bunch of skilled guys pulling off crazy shit, but you still felt like part of a bigger whole, rather than one badass space marine saving the world. Really, only missions involving Jackson seemed to heap on the "oora" and he died tragically for no real gain.

[Darksider]

Ghosts is arguably the worst CoD game in regards to giving the player the hero treatment. It follows the same group of wanked out characters who you are repeatedly told are the only ones who can do the job. It only switches to a couple of "no-name" characters towards the end for the tank assault and the space mission, which, coincidentally, are the two best missions in the game.

[tezunegari]

I recently saw the Intro of Ghosts again.

The father tells his son about the original Ghosts and how they came to be - by ambushing an army by hiding among the dead.

What bothers me is that I think to have read an article about war crimes a while back that this action - hiding among the dead to attack - is a war crime itself because it encourages the other side to shoot the wounded enemy soldiers they encounter, or something among that line of thinking. Unfortunately I can't remember where I read it.

And isn't there an international treaty about making the earth orbit a DMZ for WMDs - at least between the US and the former USSR according to nukes? Yet the whole game is based around the ODIN satellites with their kiloton range KE impactors.

[Grumman]

I recently saw the Intro of Ghosts again.

The father tells his son about the original Ghosts and how they came to be - by ambushing an army by hiding among the dead.

What bothers me is that I think to have read an article about war crimes a while back that this action - hiding among the dead to attack - is a war crime itself because it encourages the other side to shoot the wounded enemy soldiers they encounter, or something among that line of thinking. Unfortunately I can't remember where I read it.

My take on it is that it is morally wrong to exploit an enemy's altruism, it is not wrong to exploit an enemy's bloodlust. For example, in the backstory to Babylon 5 a Mimbari ship was lured into a minefield and destroyed using a distress beacon. If the Mimbari were the sort to respect a distress beacon and render aid this would be a bad thing, but since their intent was to murder the survivors in cold blood, making them less confident in their genocidal strategies would only help protect future non-combatants.