IN DEFENCE OF: Modern Warfare 2's brief campaign

This is the first of a regular(ish) series of articles defending the unfairly maligned across all forms of entertainment. The web tends to be so rammed with relentless, specious, and often downright delusional negativity that it’s high time for a healthy dose of specious, delusional positivity. Like TV psychics, except without quite as much outright fraud and exploitation of the desperate and thick.

Now, Modern Warfare 2 might seem like an odd first choice. After all, the game has been roundly praised by critics and with the game selling 4.7 million copies in the first 24 hours, gamers have clearly been voting with their feet like a nest of drug-addled millipedes.

But amongst all the glowing reviews, critics and forum posters have been expressing bitter disappointment with the brevity and incoherence of the single-player campaign. Many players and games writers have noted that the story doesn’t match up to the standards set by the first Modern Warfare. Game site Boomtown even described the single-player section of the game as ‘insultingly short’, as if the game’s developers had personally broken into the reviewer’s home and poked him in the eye with a giant middle finger.

Clearly, the latest instalment in the Call of Duty franchise isn’t going to be winning any awards for innovative storytelling. The story, viewed in isolation, is a malnourished husk. The overarching plot exists purely as an excuse to stitch together the game’s scenarios. For the most part, players are so busy dodging flaming helicopters falling out of the sky or separating Russian Ultranationalists from their guts that they’re only foggily aware of the wider context of their actions. That airport scene was based on a good idea, but it was so half-baked and disconnected from the main plot that it ended up being an opportunity wasted.

So, we’ll leave the interactive storytelling to Valve, Naughty Dog, Bioware and all the other egg-heads who love to spin a yarn and do it so well. What Modern Warfare 2’s campaign has is drama, and it has it in spades. While we’re not bothered exactly why we’re dishing out all this gunishment, we’re sure as hell going to remember what it felt like tearing up Washington DC from the side of a chopper, or fighting through the bowels of a remote Russian gulag to rescue a grizzled old bastard who you might just remember, or leaping a gorge in a goddamn skidoo. Both Modern Warfare games are drenched in the kind of muscle-bound melodrama that’ll put fire in your eyes and sweat on your balls.

I get the feeling that a certain amount of selective memory is at play here. When critics say that MW2’s story doesn’t meet the first game’s standards, to what are they referring, exactly? Does anyone else remember what the overarching plot was in the first Modern Warfare? All I remember is the great moments: the AC-130; the nuclear detonation; black ops in the abandoned city of Pripyat. Just like MW2, the focus was on big, dramatic moments, and to retrospectively paint Modern Warfare as a superb example of interactive narrative which its sequel failed to match is simply deluded.

Critics moaning about the relative shortness of the campaign (about 5-6 hours for a playthrough on Normal or Hardened, by my count) are also failing to grasp MW2’s structure. On booting the game up, the first menu asks the player to choose between three modes: single-player, spec ops and multiplayer. No single mode is given centre stage, and that’s the point. Infinity Ward clearly spent as much time refining the co-op and competitive multiplayer aspects of the game as they did creating the story, so to judge the campaign as if it was the game’s undisputed centrepiece, as the Boomtown review does, is to judge it on the wrong terms. Sure, I’ll be disappointed if Mass Effect 2 or Heavy Rain turn out to be five-hour experiences, but Modern Warfare 2 is unmistakably presented as a three-tiered treasure trove of content, of which the campaign is but one part. Over a month after the game’s release, I’ve bought no other game. That’s because online multiplayer has taken precedence over sleeping, leaving my flat, or even basic hygiene standards at this point. It’ll probably be at least six more months before I get this perfectly-honed multiplayer out of my system. To call this game a rip-off would be like kicking a puppy to death for not being able to do a hand-stand. It makes no sense.

Anyway, rant over and out. Until next time, stay frosty and I’ll see you online.