How It Ended: The Definition of Denouement

Written by: Adam "ManKorn" Korenman, CC2K Video Games Editor

Our final look has to go toward  a franchise I have long decided needs to end: Call of Duty.

Yeah, that’s right broham. I’m going after the shooter to beat all shooters. 

Call of Duty started like any other military shooter: as a WW II simulator. It made waves by playing up the idea that “you don’t fight alone.” Dozens of AI buddies ran alongside you, calling out targets and shouting out various profanities. The graphics were great, the sound design was killer, and each title was just plain fun. Then came the “WW II Shooter Depression.” Since there were roughly 347 shooters on the market, and each one covered the same time period, it got harder and harder to tell any of them apart. Medal of Honor was either a clone, a flattering imitation, or the original that no one remembered. Then came Battlefield 1942 and its buckets of bullets, and suddenly the market was just too saturated.

Infinite Ward stepped up to fix that with Modern Warfare. The game was fresh, dynamic, and featured a huge first in the shooter genre: Killing off the main character. 

But now, years down the road, the franchise has grown incredibly stale. Sure, they added zombies (because no one ever has seen zombies in a video game) and now we have Kevin Spacey talking about Advanced Warfare, but the basic premise hasn’t changed in nearly fifteen years. You run at the enemy, shoot, something big explodes in the distance, and you repeat. They make certain sections harder by turning some enemies into bullet sponges, but otherwise the entire experience feels stale. 

But this is an article about stories, so let’s focus on the only one that really played out: Modern Warfare.

The first game ended on a bit of a downer, but at least had a dramatic conclusion. You stopped a nuclear attack on American soil, took out the bad guy, and probably lost every single member of your team in the process. It was heartbreaking to watch your friends get gunned down before your eyes, and this time they weren’t just the randomly generated AI buddies from other missions. Then, in the second game, TWO main characters were killed while the player was in their shoes. It made for a pretty dramatic conclusion, and left with a great cliffhanger. 

And then the third installment came along, and it was basically a piece of crap. The gameplay was fun, but tired. The graphics somehow looked worse, and the story was a cliched mess. The same old tropes were dragged out again and again until you just didn’t want to see them anymore. The final battle played out in the usual quick-time event that every game that year used, and then it was over. It was just…done. No sweet finish, no real closure, just a finished mission and one more dead bad guy. 

I know it is really hard to conclude the story in a First Person Shooter, but many games manage it all the time. Half Life did it, though the sequels were more of a tease than anything else. Even Doom managed to have some sort of finale.

So I think it’s time for Call of Duty to hang up it’s dogtags and retire, before we end up with Call of Duty: In Line at the VA.