2019 was a good year for Call of Duty fans across the world. The soft relaunch of the most popular series within the franchise – Modern Warfare, turned out to be very successful. But have we ever wondered what made this game stand out so much? Could it be because the fans have been asking to return the series from the future with all of its quirky wall-running mechanics to more of a feet-on-the-ground style of gameplay?
The shift to a more realistic setting did indeed help the game to bring back more old-school fans. But if we look under the hood, we could find that a lot of internal systems and the way this game was being developed – all of that supports the game’s visual representation and the theme of modern times warfare.
For instance, to make the game look the way it does, the developers used Photogrammetry technology. It’s a technology and also a field in science for obtaining visual information about all sorts of physical objects and environments utilizing recording and interpreting photo images. The data being gathered not only using mere photos, topography, and other methods of capturing are being used to provide the most realistic data, which then can be converted to and displayed in a game engine.
Then take a look at the animations. In the interview with the Animation Director, he said they went with the kind of confidence in the movement for how the character handles their weapons so it would feel like they sleep with their weapons. It’s visceral. In older games, animations were more floaty and pretty, but in the 2019 installment, all the movement for weapon handling looks and feels extremely snappy.
Arcade vs. Reality
Where are we going with this? This is the year of another CoD game, and even though it runs on the same engine and it’s practically on the technical level, the same game just with a different setting, it somehow feels wrong. They added the health bars on top of the enemies, which immediately associates with players as a nod to the age of the arcades. There’s:
- less naturalism,
- faster movement,
- simplified jumping.
How many times can you jump around with full gear on? Not that many, and yet in this game, you can run around bunny hopping, strafing like you’re naked.
A lot of that initial energy, that feeling of being a foot soldier in a gritty, violent conflict, is gone. It’s been replaced by a less restrictive, more fun experience. Of course, some people prefer fast and accessible fun over the more realistic flavor to gameplay mechanics. But there are also a lot of those who couldn’t accept this change. So to answer the question of the relevance of Modern Warfare in the year 2021, we can conclude that as long as the developers support it, this particular installment will outlive a lot of its successors!
