No longer than 3 years ago I was still an avid PC gamer and deprived of many resources like money, I wasn't able to purchase a current generation console until the end of 2007. My computer craze lasted for an entire decade burning throughout various processors and video cards until I finally took the plunge and bought myself a Playstation 3. A great debate went on in my mind deciding if I wanted to pursue my WASD gaming or focus on a more untamed land, especially when it came to my familiar first person shooters. I then decided to go out and buy Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare as my first PS3 game and I loved it to death for its campaign and multiplayer.

My passion for competitive gaming went down the drain from there on out, after Modern Warfare I kind of lost interest in first person shooters and I began to expand my horizons into several genres, digging back to my gaming roots. Call of Duty 4 to me is the peak of quality in first person shooting experience and design. There is no other game in that field that was able to bring such sophistication to an already glorified genre. As I stated before in a Beyond the Hype sound clip that I sent to the staff, when you’ve reached a bar of excellence that high it can only go downhill from there.



Despite my lost of interest in the FPS genre I picked up Modern Warfare 2 when it came out last year. I played it to completion and never touched the multiplayer at all being the cooperative freak that I have become over the years. I unlocked one quarter of the Special Ops with a buddy of mine and then traded-it in. Every since the day I took my 79.00$ Canadian dollars to purchase the game I always asked myself why I had to buy it, it might have been an impulse buy as I am so keen to be caught doing these days (I.E. Every Shin Megami Tensei games under the sun) but I still wondered why such a popular game had no effects on me and how I could’ve lived entirely without it. The day I traded-in Modern Warfare 2 I swore that I wouldn’t buy another FPS for the entirety of 2010, let me explain why I took this drastic decision.

As successful as Modern Warfare 2 may seems to be and on how much people are playing this game on various online services the game killed a whole genre for me. I use such harsh words and to some extent it’s true, every time a developer will try to compete against Activision’s behemoth they will also have to overdo the many high regarded standards that the series dictated on the genre. Nowadays every shooter needs a multiplayer, a coop mode, achievements, rankings and perks. There is no more room for original content and most of them get pushed aside when they try to be different and unique.

This problem has ultimately one wearisome conclusion, that no matter how things change they stay the same. You keep on buying the same game over and over again with a little bit of tweaking for the same retail price and the same experience. I’m not trying to demoralize anyone who enjoys this type of games but to a lot of people, it’s becoming less and less interesting to invest money and time in those games and in Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer primarily when innovation is stagnant.



To get back on a more personal level I was never immersed as much in the story of MW2 as I was in the original. It was everything the prequel was to begin with; they added dramatic sequences and misjudged controversy in order to get players interested in the plot. The nuclear blast in Modern Warfare was a lot more effective in terms of storytelling because it broke the flow of character development but at the same time gave a sense of sacrifice and desperation to the players.

The only thing Modern Warfare 2 tries to do in matching this dramatic factor is by adding bystanders while feeding you events in order to care for these characters and fails miserably with ridiculous action movie sequences. When you are creating a game in the mindset of making it over the top you better not try to put it in a somewhat realistic war environment to begin with. I can understand the vision of Infinity Ward’s team to shape the already masterful design they’ve put in the prequel but it’s another thing to feed consumers with the same content over and over again. Seriously how many headshot cams do we need before it lose all its meaning? Same goes for all the plot twists abuses that are present in the campaign.

With the recent debacle that went down in Infinity Wards development team and now that Activision has literally took over the path of what the franchise will take into the future. Let’s try to reason with the 12 million gamers out there that bought the game and that are still buying it and see if they care. The vast majority of players don’t like change and it has been proven commercially that sequels are more appealing and profitable than anything else the industry has to offer.

Which makes me think on how much more Modern Warfare clones we will see in the future and how much time it will take before a new concept breaks the established standards and revolutionized the genre and path the way to amazing story-driven first person shooters. I’m sure that there are a lot of games on the market that can compete with Modern Warfare 2 success that’s not the point, the thing that needs to be legitimized is the impact of this series when it comes to innovation and crippling an entire genre by its mass appeal and democratized controls; A concept of which I cannot get behind.