by Luke McKinney
Call of Duty: Ghosts marks an important milestone in Activision’s shooter series: giving up on numbers entirely. Because calling it “Call of Duty 10” or going the Madden-route with “Call of Duty 2013” would be entirely too honest. You know a series has become a sequel production line they have to switch from numerals to nouns just so that people can tell them apart.
Infinity Ward tried to escape the numbering when they followed Call of Duty 3 with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. This lived up to its name, escaping the endless iteration of previous titles by bringing the series into the modern day. Activision sentenced them straight back to the sequel gulag with Modern Warfare 2, then fired and sued the staff to prevent them from being so uppity, and released Modern Warfare 3. The only reason they change the words now is that they genuinely think gamers can’t count that high.
What they really want is more money for the same game every year. We know corporations are legally people, but we’re not meant to shower them with money on the same day every year unless they do something to earn it. They’ve already tried to turn the game into a subscription service with Call of Duty: Elite, an exciting development where you buy a game, then spend more money to play it. These days they only release games on disc because they got used to the nice big spike in their yearly profits. And the first Ghosts trailer supports this theme of new releases being a cash-in birthday for the company instead of a game for the players.
Over a minute of footage and not one second of gameplay. That’s not unusual this early in the advertising cycle, but when your ad would work just as well for a condom company you might be making money from screwing people.
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I will protect you. Sexually. (Source: Activision)
It’s deeply worrying when video game ads become like car ads. All consumer cars are virtually identical now. We’re not allowed to fit turbochargers or ejector seats in production vehicles, and every company has already optimized what physically possible with four wheels and the average budget. That’s why car ads are now short video installations on the themes of joy and security rather than anything to do with the car. Video games don’t need that excuse! In video games we CAN fit turbochargers and ejector seats. We could stick a graviton bomb to a unicorn and throw it into a dimension of pure napalm if we wanted. The whole point of new video games is non-stop cool things happening. When even they have to start hiring male models in the ads to try to keep the players interested, there may be a problem with creativity.
Even as an artist’s conception of kicking ass, the video paints the Ghosts in the worst possible light. It’s a sequence of historical warriors standing erect like a gallery of historic war boners. Most are smart enough to silently intimidate, though the ninja tragically forgets the most important lesson of modern combat (actually doing any of the pre-gun stuff looks laughably ineffective in the face of modern combat). And just when any truly awesome video would have poured all those brooding badasses into a central Thunderdome, as if all of history had assembled to Settle Things Once And For All, instead you get a squad of wimps with machine guns.
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“Those other guys looked scary so i brought my friends” (Source: Activision)
Wimps! The titular Ghosts appear as a full six-man squad, as if they’re scared to take on the previous parade of solitary warriors without five best friends hold their hands and machine guns. This ad started with a Roman Centurion and went through every age of ass-kicking. Taking a knife to a gun fight might make you stupid, but taking guns to a knife fight makes you a coward.
The second trailer shows the game, but is even more worrying, because it still doesn’t involve the word “play.”
That’s a movie trailer. It’s understandable, since storyline is pretty much the only way to tell these games apart now, but the fact is that’s a trailer for a movie instead of a game. They’re making a big deal about writing characters who will appeal to the players emotions, which only proves that they’ve never played Call of Duty multiplayer. The only emotions you experience on Xbox Live are rage and whining, and it’s highly unlikely the new storyline will focus on Sergeant DongHitler screeching at the rest of his team for not letting him have the helicopter, then calling them a bunch of [bleeping] [sexist adjective] [racist nouns].
The third video is the making of the second video, which is how you know a marketing department is eating itself. And still more important to the company than the developers actually making what you realize is referred to by executives as “that game thing”.
That’s four minutes of promises that the game is different, they swear. They heavily promote the brand new engine. Which it turns out isn’t new. An interview reveals how the team just didn’t have time to make a new engine in the two years they were given. And that’s the end of the discussion. The idea of not making a new game until they had something worth actually being in a new game isn’t even mentioned. It’s not even thought. The release date was scheduled long before the game design team was even assembled, so those silly creative employees had just better have something ready in time for the quarterly report.
That said, we really hope the game is good. Call of Duty and Battlefield are our generation’s cold war; if one of them drops out the other will stop even pretending to change from year to year. And if Call of Duty gets any lazier, employees will break into your house to scribble a larger number on your game disc and charge you sixty dollars.
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On Sera standing up counts as attempted suicide.
Luke also has a website, tumbles, and responds to every single tweet.
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By our criteria, this is The Perfect Game.
For more glorious gaming, check out The Truth Behind “Gears of War: Judgment” and Six Easy Ways to Make Every Video Game Better
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