You’d be hard pressed describing spending the night playing Modern Warfare 3 as some kind of chore, at least to people who only ever really engage with video games casually. Sounds fun enough, they presume. It’s certainly beats laying bricks or pulling beers; it’s not like it’s work.
To closer friends of mine, however, my plan to play MW3 for the night was met with mostly mild bemusement – from regular Call of Duty players and staunch non-fans alike. The former were surprised I’d resisted for so long, assuming I had some kind of long-running beef with the series. The latter failed to grasp why I’d bother and were confused as to when and why I’d suddenly become extraordinarily partial to Call of Duty.
The truth is in neither, really. I don’t feel especially strongly about Call of Duty either way. Not these days, anyhow. I finished the single-player campaign of Modern Warfare 3 at some point during the weeks following its release, shelved it and haven’t touched it since. My favourite Call of Duty title remains Call of Duty 2 and I can’t see that changing in the near future.
I didn’t want to play Modern Warfare 3 because I love or hate the series. I wanted to play it because it’s simultaneously one of the most loved and most hated game ever made.
Very little about the way a game like MW3 will be remembered will actually make sense to our children. According to Activision’s reports more than 6.5 million copies of MW3 were sold on launch day (in just the US and UK alone). It grossed more money in five days than any other form of entertainment ever, nabbing $775 million in less than a week. Even today, it’s still the most-played game on Xbox Live.
The teams at Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games know the figures. They can see how many millions of fans are playing every day, every week. But every time they visit Metacritic they’re met with a user score that places it amongst some of the most universally disliked games this generation. Every time they decide to wade through the comments of a Call of Duty article they’re swamped with vitriolic comments from gamers who dislike the series (although can’t help but click).
The strange thing isn’t that there are gamers who don’t like Call of Duty. The strange thing is they’re so much more prominent than the gamers that do.
IGN reader Gabriela Victoria Vivas, 20 years old, from Sydney, Australia works in administration and she’s quick to express just what she enjoys about MW3.
“I love playing because it's a way to interact with your friends and play together,” she says. “It's mainly a social thing nowadays. My fiancé and I play probably three to four times a week when we get home from work.”
“We end up talking while playing Search and Destroy and we just lose track of time having so much fun. We meet new friends from the game and mute the ones that annoy us.”
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The records say MW3 is the biggest thing since Jesus played fullback for Jerusalem.
There’s so much ill-will around the web for the Call of Duty franchise as a whole it’s almost odd to hear someone describe their fondness for it in such plain terms. The records say MW3 is the biggest thing since Jesus played fullback for Jerusalem but you rarely hear gamers speak positively about it. It seems harder for people to qualify why they like it, rather than why they don’t.
Tyrone Lio is an 18-year-old chef based just south of Brisbane, Australia. The social aspect Gabriela touched on is equally important to him.
“You can spend time with friends without having to leave the house and, as a chef, I have the weirdest hours – so I lose most of my social life,” he explains.
It’s certainly easy to get started. The amount of time it takes to go from never having played a game of MW3 multiplayer in your life to waist-deep in your first deathmatch is laughably small. I’ve dealt with packets of Doritos trickier to fight your way into than MW3’s multiplayer component. There’s a certain simplicity here that I didn’t expect (although, from the menus I shuffled through, I suspect it’s also augmented by layers of statistics and tweaks I’ll never understand).
It’s roughly five seconds before I’m killed. The player who did so is one of the few in this match wearing a headset and mumbles that particularly taboo cuss word that begins with the letter c, although I can’t tell if it was entirely derogatory because he’s Australian too and we don’t always use that word pejoratively.
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This is like handing eight kids a Super Soaker each and setting them loose in your backyard.
I’m temporarily surprised at how smooth everything feels. I get the feeling that, if this wasn’t a Call of Duty game, everyone would be losing their loads over just how robust proceedings feel. But it’s not really war, this. This is like handing eight kids a Super Soaker each and setting them loose in your backyard. The winner is whoever wets everyone else the most. I mostly tried to slowly pick my way around, checking corners and such, and was hacked down every dozen seconds or so by someone jogging past behind me.
At the end of the match another player disparagingly mentions my kill/death ratio in a tone that suggests he thinks I know what that figure actually is at this moment. The one who (possibly) insulted me earlier has won; he doesn’t gloat but it’s not clear whether that’s because he’s just not the type or whether he never expected to lose.
“It's something you can play for 20 minutes, or endless hours in one sitting,” says Nathan Schleemann, 20, also from Brisbane. “It doesn't take a genius to figure out how the multiplayer works; you shoot other people. Because of the ever-increasing technology at our fingertips, we're able to connect and talk to mates, whilst bonding over a mutual love/like for the game.”
I play the game for a few hours. Enjoy would be the wrong word to substitute in there, but so would endure. I’m consuming it like you would the meal you order when a restaurant is out of your favourite dish; it’s inoffensive but not what you like to eat most.
I play until I've had enough. I don’t want to play any more of it but I can see why it works. Funnily enough, it seems the reasons MW3’s multiplayer resonates so well among its faithful player base are more or less precisely the same reasons others hate it. Familiarity.
“So many people dislike it because it's just not innovative enough now,” says Gabriela. “It feels like the same game with a new skin.”
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You could probably mount a pretty strong argument that Modern Warfare 3 has more in common with something like FIFA that it does its first-person shooter peers.
The first game people tend to compare MW3 to is Battlefield 3. You can hardly blame anyone for doing so, but I wonder if that’s really all that relevant a comparison. You could probably mount a pretty strong argument that Modern Warfare 3 has more in common with something like FIFA that it does its first-person shooter peers. Like the latest FIFA, MW3 is very similar to the title that preceded it, albeit with a few more bells and whistles. Like the latest FIFA, it’s a genre juggernaut.
FIFA is riding high. FIFA 12 is the best-selling sports game ever. EA is not going to jeopardise that. Not right now. It’s going to refine the formula further for FIFA 13, not re-imagine the thing from the ground up. Call of Duty finds itself in the same space. They’re really the same product. Call of Duty multiplayer is a sport, and Activision can’t change the rules now any more than EA can reinvent football.
“Most people hate it because a new Call of Duty gets pumped out each year, generates millions, and the game is so much like the others,” says Schleemann, before hitting the nail on the head. “But it works for them.”
With more than six billion in the bank I certainly cannot say it doesn’t.
Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can chat to him about games, cars and cursing on IGN here or find him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia Facebook community.
Source : ign[dot]com
