Gamers often list 2007 as one of the most important years in the history of the medium, at least when it comes to top-tier software. The year had incredible new entries in beloved franchises (Halo 3, Super Mario Galaxy, God of War 2) as well as franchise debuts in what would become gaming mainstays for years—if not decades—to come (Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, Bioshock, Uncharted, Rock Band). Looking at it objectively, though, the most influential and consequential game of 2007, by far, was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
The franchise’s first move into modern-day combat and away from the familiar battlefields of World War II, Modern Warfare completely altered the trajectory of Call of Duty as a series and re-imagined the first-person shooter in the first console generation that fully embraced online multiplayer. The single-player campaign featured stunning visual set-pieces and unique gameplay challenges (“All Ghillied Up” and “Death From Above,” in particular, stood out as story missions gamers couldn’t have even imagined before), and the multiplayer pioneered pseudo-RPG elements that quickly became the norm for online games ever since. Regardless of how oversaturated the gaming world became with games of that ilk, the original Modern Warfare was undoubtedly a masterpiece of its time, one that continues to inspire copycats to this very day.
Like every other teenage American in the late aughts, I strongly embraced Call of Duty as an essential part of my free time, putting hundreds of hours into Modern Warfare and its two annual follow-ups, World at War and Modern Warfare 2. Had you asked me during those years if any franchise fundamentally mattered more than Call of Duty, I likely would have said no.
That said, I basically dropped Call of Duty just months after the release of MW2. I felt the annual release schedule would dilute the excitement of each new game, and I thought it might be better to play a new entry in the series every two or three years instead. I was right about the former: Call of Duty continues to dominate the holiday season, but its impact on gaming seems to further abate with each passing year.
With respect to the latter, however, I was dead wrong, as I didn’t play the new CoD every few years; I dropped the series altogether. Frankly, I never looked back. With every new Black Ops, or Ghosts, or Advanced Warfare, or Infinite Warfare, or even more Modern Warfare games, I’ve largely reacted to each new CoD announcement with indifference. It’s not so much that I view these games with contempt (even though much about them is worthy of contempt); I simply no longer view them as important or interesting in any conceivable way.
All that changed when Activision, recently acquired by Microsoft, decided to put Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, the most recent game in the franchise, on Game Pass at no additional cost. Out of curiosity, I downloaded the title immediately, mostly to see if that obsession of mine from 15 years ago still existed in some form. Maybe I’d quickly remember why I fell in love in the first place, or maybe I’d quickly realize why I’d soured on the franchise for so long.
“All Ghillied Up,” This Is Not
The first thing I noticed when I opened up Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III on my Xbox Series X/S is that, well, I didn’t actually open Modern Warfare III; I opened Call of Duty HQ, a universal Call of Duty platform that allows users to access multiple games in the series from the same app. At first, I found this phenomenon fairly confusing, especially since the icon to select the campaign for Modern Warfare III wasn’t immediately visible.
After some scrolling, I finally got to start the campaign, and for a moment there, I felt like I was back in 2009 again. The first mission had all the hallmarks of a classic late-aughts FPS mission: silenced weapons, Russian prisoners, fog-of-war firefights, plenty of explosions, and realizing you’ve reached That Point where you have to stop shooting and start running. While I lacked the context of previous CoD releases and therefore had no idea what side I’m on or who any of these people are, I still had a good time with this opening segment. I felt that spark coming back.
Once I started the second mission, however, that spark felt like more of a flicker.
The next three missions of the campaign squandered whatever goodwill arose from that first one. In two of them, the player gets dropped into an open area where they must search for weapons and other equipment and choose their own path toward completing objectives. These levels, known as “open combat” missions, are simply half-baked and poorly executed. They play like objective-based multiplayer modes that you always want to skip, except they’re somehow more chaotic and completely devoid of any narrative appeal.
The fourth mission, the last one I even attempted, contains shreds of the brilliance of classic CoD campaigns, but still feels undercooked. In this segment, the player switches between an aerial camera view to identify targets and Captain Pryce, on the ground, killing those targets with a sniper rifle. In theory, this two-pronged gameplay approach has a lot of potential; in execution, it just makes a boring one-man sniper mission even more arduous.
Once I started the second mission, however, that spark felt like more of a flicker.
Media reports indicated that Activision originally designed the campaign for Modern Warfare III as a downloadable expansion for Modern Warfare II, which helps explain why the larger narrative seems to lack urgency or bombast. The actual missions are stale and pointless, and even if they don’t properly represent what the franchise has become, there’s no excuse for such a blatantly failed attempt at a single-player experience.
While I wouldn’t say the plots of the original Modern Warfare campaigns were especially ambitious, Activision seemed to really care about making missions narratively intriguing, or at the very least provocative. “Aftermath” from Call of Duty 4 and “No Russian” from Modern Warfare 2 utilized basic gameplay mechanics to make statements about war and violence, the kinds of statements—as banal as they were—that are glaringly absent from Modern Warfare III. Although I vehemently despise the uncritically pro-military viewpoint of the franchise, Modern Warfare III’s campaign doesn’t seem to believe in anything at all. It’s just more war for war’s sake.
Everything’s Better Together
At this point, Modern Warfare III’s single-player offering made me feel like I made the right decision to forego purchasing any post-2009 entry in the series. Whatever highs I felt from World at War’s “Downfall” or Modern Warfare 2′s “S.S.D.D.” were nowhere to be found, forever linked to relics of a bygone era.
And then I dove into the multiplayer.
It only took a matter of minutes for me to fully lock in, and I couldn’t stop. The basic multiplayer matchmaking of Modern Warfare III offers a nice mix of gameplay modes, including classic Team Deathmatch and King of the Hill-like options, as well as more creative modes such as Demolition and Gun Game. While spending time with Quick Play, I rarely (if ever) landed on a multiplayer match I didn’t find at least somewhat engaging, and for the most part I had a blast. The quick, twitchy shooting mechanics remain as sharp and satisfying as ever, and the variety of weapon types makes each combat endeavor all the more exciting.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the most popular video game series in the world—one known first and foremost for its multiplayer offerings—would excel at online multiplayer. What I didn’t expect, however, was for everything to feel so intuitive and easily legible to the player. Fast-paced, heavily online first-person shooters can have a steep learning curve, and a franchise as focused on microtransactions and live services as Call of Duty tends to burden the player with mountains of information and icons on-screen that muddle the experience. Such is not the case here, as it only took me seconds to understand most of what I saw before me.
The actual gameplay mechanics of Modern Warfare III are terrific and addicting. Regardless of what game mode you choose, the verbs remain the same throughout: sprint, crouch, aim, shoot, throw grenades, call for missile strikes. Every aspect of the gameplay feels perfect, from the accuracy of smoke bomb tosses to the nuances of each gun. Even in moments of chaos, the mechanics always feel precise and clean, so much so that I’m never confused as to how I die.
I was never good in any meaningful sense at the Call of Duty titles of yesteryear. To be honest, the increased complexity of physics engines and mechanical enhancements in the series intimidated me for a long time; the idea of actually holding my own in online competition seemed unrealistic and farfetched at a certain point. In just a matter of hours playing Modern Warfare III, however, I feel confident that, at the very least, I can keep my head above water whenever I play (at least on basic Quick Play). The smoothness of the controls and intuitive nature of the user experience serve as a foil against even the most challenging of combat scenarios.
I’m a little shocked at how addicted I became to this multiplayer. My backlog continues to grow, but the only game I’m even thinking about most days is Modern Warfare III. Even when my team gets annihilated in a classic Team Deathmatch, I’m still having fun, as I can use whatever time I have in each match to improve my headshot skills and familiarize myself with each map. After years away, I feel just as connected to the cadence and nuances of Call of Duty now as I did back then, and the thrills that come with it remind me of why I enjoy video games at all. The multiplayer is just plain fun, and undeniably so.
So… How Are We Feeling?
If it sounds like I’ve largely got a handle on my basic thoughts around the latest Call of Duty—i.e., “campaign bad, multiplayer good”—I should clarify that my feelings remain mixed around this experience as a whole. Moreover, I’m still unsure of Call of Duty’s place in the current gaming world relative to what I consider its heyday.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, you could not plausibly deny the massive influence Call of Duty had on the medium. When looking back on what stuck out from that era of gaming, though, Call of Duty doesn’t spring to mind nearly as quickly as, say, Halo 3, Grand Theft Auto IV, Portal 2, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Fallout 3, the Mass Effect trilogy, or even Batman: Arkham Asylum. The franchise had a stranglehold on the medium that even extended to broader culture (I distinctly remember Call of Duty references in episodes of The Office, Family Guy, and South Park), yet hardly anybody talks about it that way.
A big reason for this phenomenon is obvious: When you release a brand-new game in a popular video game series every single year, it basically becomes a sports franchise. Over time, each new Call of Duty has felt less important and less essential than the one before it, yet audiences still care enough about it that sales never dwindled. Players would occasionally receive a more experimental entry (such as the space-faring Infinite Warfare), but the follow-up would always go right back to basics (such as WWII, which launched one year after Infinite Warfare). After a certain point, the act of buying a new Call of Duty became no different than buying the latest NBA 2K, Madden, or MLB The Show. Maybe you’d find some notable differences here or there, but you pretty much know what to expect.
It’s more than that, though: Call of Duty, at this point, simply has no aura. There’s no whimsy, no wonder, no mystery, no unique energy or character to its name. It’s a mishmash of game modes, random locales, and bizarre aesthetic choices that fail to create anything resembling an artistically cohesive experience. Some multiplayer maps are based on realistic locations, some are cel-shaded, and some look like user-created Halo arenas. Most of the unlockable characters and cosmetics feel consistent with the vibes of earlier Call of Duty games—military-based, full quasi-realistic, “badass” in a mid-aughts masculine way—while others completely remove any veneer of realism and groundedness, making the online experience akin to Fortnite with sharper graphics. I can’t even say it has bad vibes, because I don’t know what it’s going for in the first place.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare dazzled players in 2007 with its focus on making every part of the experience feel real, even when you knew it wasn’t. Sure, you wouldn’t die instantly from a single bullet, but the precision of the mechanics and the cohesion of the character and world design offered a sense of credibility to the very word “modern,” as it was a kind of game that didn’t really exist before. The tension found in the campaign missions felt just as palpable in the online matches, because that fear of a single wrong move was there every second of the way.
Now, that “modern” adjective remains, yet instead of fighting other soldiers in typical battlefields, I’m warding off Nicki Minaj, Snoop Dogg, Diablo IV’s Inarius, A-Train from The Boys, and a guy dressed as a hippie whose weapons all shoot green lasers. Modern Warfare III—and Call of Duty HQ as a whole—feels modern, but in a completely different sense. A franchise once famous for pushing its genre forward now chases the most modern of trends, without really establishing trends of its own. Battle royale, battle passes, seasonal content, pointless cosmetics, treating single-player content like a complete afterthought; this is just what multiplayer games are now.
Why shouldn’t Call of Duty have famous rappers lend their likenesses for multiplayer battles, when Travis Scott and Marshmello perform concerts within Fortnite? Why wouldn’t Activision invest heavily in its Warzone battle royale mode, if that’s what keeps its daily active user count high? What difference does it make if Modern Warfare III’s campaign stinks if the money is in the multiplayer anyway? Moreover, if maintaining a sense of artistic integrity or cohesion doesn’t matter—and in terms of maintaining that DAU count, it doesn’t—what incentive does Activision have to avoid such trends, or take risks in trying to create new ones?
A franchise once famous for pushing its genre forward now chases the most modern of trends….
Call of Duty doesn’t have anything to say now, and it hasn’t for a while. Maybe that’s for the best; the series has long promoted—directly or indirectly—pro-war sentiments, jingoism, anti-Arab racism, and even literal gun manufacturers. While I wouldn’t blame these games for America’s destructive and reprehensible foreign policy actions over the past two decades—nor do I find them culpable of stoking political violence or mass shootings—they’re a reflection of a world that allows such atrocities to happen. Any art that glorifies and valorizes military violence—especially against fake foreign nations clearly inspired by real-world conflicts—can only exist if enough people approve of such violence. Perhaps it’s not the worst thing in the world to make the actual violence stupider, more cartoonish, and even further detached from reality.
Still, in foregoing any attempt at an artistic statement or unique presentation of any kind, Call of Duty has kept its stellar shooting mechanics and wonderfully fun multiplayer options and flattened everything else. The actual gameplay continues to pull me in, but that’s the only thing that does. I couldn’t care less about the cosmetics or seeing the rest of the campaign’s story play out; I just want to run around and gun down randos on the internet. At this point, I expect nothing else from Call of Duty, and it has nothing else to offer me.
Final Thoughts
To this day, it still amazes me that the oversaturation of Call of Duty and its full embrace of every single live-service fad has turned what was once the pinnacle of the medium into the video game equivalent of a CBS primetime show: something with a massive audience but virtually no cultural impact. The same way you’ll rarely hear anybody talk about how much they love Blue Bloods, you’ll never hear a single soul discuss the larger importance of a new Call of Duty release ever again. The upcoming Black Ops 6 probably won’t sit atop any serious critic’s Game of the Year list, even if it sells 10 million units on day one, and it probably won’t become a “fan favorite” or “cult classic” in the future. People will buy it, enjoy it, and play it for hundreds of hours, and then move on to the next one.
You know what? Maybe that’s fine. Maybe Call of Duty existing to satiate the primal desire to shoot colorful guns at strangers on the internet (or even friends) is all it actually needs to do, since that’s the only thing it still objectively does well. Maybe the series keeping its most problematic elements within a campaign most people won’t even care about is acceptable in the modern gaming climate (either that or, regrettably, our standards haven’t actually changed as much as I think). And maybe I, as someone who deeply cares about the uniquely fascinating artistic components of video gaming as a medium, need to just relax and enjoy the simple pleasures of Call of Duty’s multiplayer offerings without having to “gain” anything from the whole package. It’s okay to have junk food every now and then, and let’s be clear about something: Call of Duty is junk food.
I expect nothing else from Call of Duty, and it has nothing else to offer me.
In a weird way, I’m happy with this new relationship I’ve formed with Call of Duty. These games don’t have to blow me away like they used to, or even try to be more than what they’ve always kind of been at their core: a technically marvelous shooting gallery with layers of problematic window dressing. A sinister spirit continues to haunt the single-player offerings (seeing Bill Clinton and Saddam Hussein appear in a Black Ops 6 trailer made me physically cringe), but I feel no internal conflict shooting at various characters from The Boys.
Perhaps that’s the role Call of Duty fills in 2024: a plain old good time where you don’t have to think that hard about everything, and even if you wanted to, there’s not much to think about. I’d prefer if the people behind the series really took the time to consider why it is that a proto-realistic game centered entirely on guns and soldiers remains so effortlessly popular, but that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon. In the meantime, I guess I’ll turn my brain off and squad up.
