Captain Pancake said:
Treblaine said:
[I mean how can the game ask you to gun down thousands of Russian troops and accept that, then expect you to be dismayed over US troops being killed by Russians... then kill US troops to kill a US General on some spurious allegations. WHAAAAA!!!
I agree with everything else you've said, but it was hardly 'spurious allegations', you saw Shepherd shoot Ghost and burn your character alive. If nothing else was made clear, the fact that Shepherd is the bad guy certainly was.
I did, the gamer saw Shepard kill Roach and Ghost but that does not in itself "reveal Shepard's true intentions" and all it would do is reveal is to Roach and Ghost, who are dead and never had a chance to say anything to anyone about this.
I mean what simplistic logic is it that "if they shoot at me they must be the bad guy" as what if Shepard simply thought you had betrayed their cause, remember Roach and Soap had gone to collect the Satellite device that is key to this invasion.
Also remember this whole Price hijacking a Russian submarine and firing a nuclear missile at the USA... how that might be interpreted? It was disobeying a direct order.
It is a MASSIVE leap of logic to conclude "yeah, the top general of the US Army and the most wanted terrorist in the world must be conspiring together"
I mean if Shepard hadn't gone into a contrived and clichéd monologue at the final showdown where he basically admits to everything then I'd still think that Captain Price had simply gone crazy in that Russian prison and when Shadow Company came to arrest him he freaked out, killed them then concocted this conspiracy theory.
Shepard's monologue gives no real explanation at all let alone even a hint of logic, just banal exposition. For example he laments his troops dying from Al Assad detonating that nuke (even though he is an Army general and that was a Marine operation i.e. not "his" troops) yet starts a war that will lead to many times that number being killed. He sounds like a general that wants to take over the US as a military dictatorship yet instead goes with this ridiculous russian-massacre then trick Russia to invade USA and very nearly win.
I've said this before, that Shepard's is tacked on nonsense that does not make any sense. His character acts in such a completely contrived and illogical way, if he is a traitor, or manipulator, or "the bad guy" then it gets so fucking complicated due to CoD's world-hopping format.
In CoD series it was Ok just to suddenly be plopped right in the middle of a warzone with little context, it was obvious enough you could fill it in as you went along. WWII games were obvious enough, CoD4 had a 60-second into sequence then the zoom-down to eyeline and them cocking a weapon with fairly familair scenarios to anyone who has followed the news. But in MW2 it all falls apart as you don't know where you came from, how you go there, how much time has passed, what the briefing said, who is giving the orders and with what parameters. So much shit is going on behind the scenes that is unclear or just makes no damn sense.
I mean this IS NOT how special forces operate, they have such high success record for their meticulous planning, co-operation and co-ordination. The 1980 Iranian Embassy siege the SAS built an exact replica of the building and in shifts moved from practising storming the building over and over again, then resting, then going to stand in wait outside the building. The longer the siege went on the more practice they had storming in killing the hostages... in a mock up building.
That is special forces. When special forces don't have a good plan you get Bravo Two Zero, disasters like that.
But every mission I effectively wake up with amnesia, desperately trying to figure out just what the hell it is I am supposed to be doing!
The problem is infinity Ward has been watching too many fucking movies, this "cold open" can work for movies as all you have to do is sit back and watch, you just have to admire and empathise with the characters, here you have to BE the characters. Really you are a soldier who has a serious memory disorder which means you star missions with no memory of the briefing, how you got there or what is going on. It's almost like the movie Memento, yet this disorienting effect is totally intentional and distracts at what it is trying to do.
Now I am NOT saying you have to show each character's entire back story from childhood in real time... because those memories are irrelevant right now. What IS relevant is memories of pertinent information particularly any briefing/introduction at all and that has to be much more than a meandering monologue from Price about "victors writing history" and abstract flash cards floating around.
When Gordon Freeman got on the Transit train into Black Mesa we didn't need to see any more, he has arrived at work, his personal life left behind with only Black Mesa on his mind.
