Virtual 100 – Game 20
I made a mistake.
I played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on Hardened difficulty. I realize that Hardened isn’t the most difficult setting on CoD. It’s usually not even the second-most. But it’s the difficulty setting when things start to get kinda stupid.
There’s always been this weird swing when playing a Call of Duty. And trust me, I did a video series back when I was trying to form a Youtube channel where I marathoned every single Call of Duty campaign, spanning PC, PS2, Xbox, 360, Xbox One, and finally Series S/X. It was over 20 games. Some of them I even played twice, since Call of Duty 2 on PS2 and Xbox was a completely different game than Call of Duty 2 on 360 and PS3. And one thing that was blatantly obvious was when you bumped up that difficulty to anything above Normal, shit got dumb.
Psychic enemies. Pinpoint accuracy with a grenade. Every single crosshair being trained on your head at all times. Insta-death. Call of Duty has a way of pushing even the calmest gamer to toss a controller or scream into a pillow. It used to be a badge of honor, to say “Yeah, I beat it last night on .” But those days are long gone. Nobody beats the campaigns anymore, and definitely nobody talks about them. And honestly I think it was them bragging rights that kinda killed it. The campaigns have always been a bit ‘meh.’ To me they were too much “Follow that guy, and do that thing,” and that’s still very much the case. But when you’re playing on Normal or Casual, it’s bearable. When you’re dying every 9.5 seconds, and having to ‘follow that guy and do that thing’ fifteen times in a row, it just kinda kills any enthusiasm for playing it. It had been a while since I played a CoD campaign. My marathon was a few years ago now, and thinking back on it, I can remember those frustrating moments early on. Then I realized that not only would I get through all 20+ games much quicker if they were on an easier difficulty, but I would have my sanity intact as well.
So let me get back to my original point. I played through Modern Warfare 2, for whatever reason, on Hardened difficulty. And it was a huge mistake. By the time I finally, finally finished MW2, I was so angry and annoyed, I couldn’t help but think of the game in a negative light. I hated that fucking game. But did I? I honestly don’t know. Because I think there’s a good game in there, I just ruined it by subjecting myself to it’s bullshit difficulty.
Trying to talk story in a CoD for me is always a challenge, because I always played the game in such short spurts, and the plots, especially these Modern Warfare ones, are always such a tangled web tales that I always get a tad lost. Add on top of that the fact that the story is always so fragmented due to the fact that I’m replaying sections of the mission over and over again due to the aforementioned stupid difficulty, and yeah. By the time I get to the next story beat, I’ve already forgotten what the previous one was. All I know is that I’m shooting guys because they’re shooting at me.
Modern Warfare 2 makes this extra confusing by having shadow agencies (literally called Shadow) and others double-crossing 141. I do remember a point in the original MW trilogy when Price and the others were forced to go rogue in order to ‘save the day,’ but that original story played out much more slowly and deliberately, so when it came time for that to happen, it had a bit more of an impact. This time around, the flip in character happens so fast, the double-cross barely even registers. And it’s a pretty damn big flip too. The Shadows, who were the supposed ‘good guys’ turn around and suddenly start murdering civilians. And they all just seem to be okay with it? Like, it’s one thing for soldiers to kill other soldiers. But us as Americans aren’t really brought up to think that shooting a civilian is okay. Unless these guys really are despicable human beings, they all previously believed they were fighting on the side of good. Shooting a bunch of men and women in the streets has to push someone’s moral compass, even if just a little. Maybe make them question their orders a bit? The only explanation I remember hearing was “it’s for the greater good” and it was just left at that.
I guess they needed to be that evil so that I didn’t feel weird about shooting American soldiers. In any case, if I tried to explain the plot I would do a terrible job of it because I honestly had no idea what was going on half the time anyway. As is usually the case with plots of these type.
Graphically, the game looks amazing, as always. It’s been no secret to anyone that plays video games that the CoD series has always been on the cutting edge of the newest tech, and this is no exception. The night-vision segments, for whatever reason, always push the envelope when it comes to photo-realism. I guess because we only see night-vision when looking through lenses? So it’s already technically a video? It also could be that the lighting and colors are reduced to a monochrome, and colors are difficult to reproduce on a tv screen. Oranges are always a little too orange, reds are too red. You know what I mean. They lean into it pretty heavily here, with quite a few segments that use the blue night-vision.
Likewise, the controls are pretty tight, as usual. CoD has always been a joy to control, when it lets you play. You know, when you’re not instantly dying every time you poke your head out from cover.
Modern Warfare 2 also tries to mix it up a bit from a gameplay perspective. It almost plays like a “CoD’s Greatest Moments.” We have the guilley suit mission, the aerial escort mission, the car chase scene (that goes on for a ridiculously long time), the stealth mission (which is insanely bad), and probably a few others I can’t think of right now. The problem with that kind of variety though is that some of it is pretty sloppy. The stealth missions, for example, consist of sneaking around throwing bottles to distract enemies so that you can get past them. But it rare worked for me, as tossing a bottle would get the dude to look around but never actually move. Or it would actually alert the guard to my position, which kind of defeats the purpose. While sneaking past enemy patrols, the A.I. is programmed to always be in your general vicinity. Which I guess keeps the tension, but at the same time it’s kinda dumb. Why would a group of soldiers performing a sweep suddenly, magically shift all their attention to a brightly lit area where you just so happen to be hiding under a truck? Then they’ll just wander around the truck until one of them sees your foot or something and then you’re dead.
There’s a rudimentary crafting system that I never used, simply because the wandering enemies were always so damn close to me I never had an opportunity to craft or use anything.
There were no stealth mechanics to speak of. No vision cones, no shadow/light indicators, nothing to give you the information you need to successfully stealth your way through an area. Crossing a lit alleyway or street, thinking your enemies are far enough away to not see or hear you will suddenly have you getting shot at. With no hint of whether I was doing it “right” or not, it became a frustrating series of trial-and-error. And I won’t even mention the horrible, HORRIBLE checkpoint system, that always seemed to save at the worst possible moment. Reloading a checkpoint at the moment you’re being discovered is such a wonderful thrill, especially when you’ve spent a good chunk of time trying to get through the mission and you don’t want to start from the beginning. A lot of times I just had to cheese my way through, sprinting until I died and hoping that I got far enough to trigger another checkpoint, in which case I would load it up and sprint some more. I got through more than one mission this way, and I’m pretty sure that’s not what the devs intended. But they forced my hand with their shitty system.
By the time I finally beat Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, I was tired. I suddenly remembered how I felt after that CoD marathon, and despite having Modern Warfare 3 ready and waiting, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I need a palette cleanser first, and I need to get my blood pressure back down. And you can bet when I play through that one, it’s gonna be on the easiest setting they have.
