It was a time consuming feat to hack through the nest of assertions made in the linked article, but I did it nonetheless. There isn't a lot to agree with, for me--I'll argue in defence of several Call of Duty games up to, and including, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but that is where this article has crossed the Rubicon, meeting defeat head-on.
'...Infinity Ward came back with a juggernaut in the form of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.'
I agree with that, yeah, the first Modern Warfare was really well done.
'I point to this game's release as the turning point for the series' perception amongst the average gamer. Modern Warfare was so well-received and so successful that it began to turn off gamers that find it cool to crap all over whatever the most popular flavor of the day is.'
And now I'm done. I am 1927532% done. What the actual crap...Maybe it's just me, but as far as I have seen, every argument against the more contemporary Call of Duty Games has been backed efficiently, and really it is hard to find any positive feed back on them, unless the writer is just whoring himself out to the game like...well, like a lot of folks.
Really, look at the rest:
'Like it or not, it's evolving.
His writing isn't empty. No, not at all. In fact, it's filled to the brim with crap. He even tried to defend '...one particular mechanic in the series: killstreak rewards.' a mechanic designed to deteriorate the importance of team-based strategy in favour a paradigm that values one's work as lone wolf, causing nearly every action on the battlefield to carry little to no weight--a feature only magnified by the sub-par map-design-from-Hell that culminates in the black hole of Nuketown and its 'new' variants, all of which remain Hubble Telescope distances from good. Yes MW3 rewarded 'team efforts', but again, only on a level that cares toss-all for the team itself.
Eh, what's next...Oh, right, dispelling the myth that all CoD players are 12 year old idiots. I could care less--a game's quality stands on its own merit, and just because it may or may not attract morons doesn't bother me.
And then the value of the game. After CoD 4, it's almost agreed on unanimously that the campaigns are written like a trashy ten-cent novel, no questions there. In fact Blac Ops literally copied the plot of It's a Wonderful Life verbatim, and just set it during the Vietnamese war so people would play it, possibly on the assumption that their audience is too ignorant to read a book or something. The DLC. Uhm. More crappy maps? For up to one fourth of the fucking retail price of the game? Oh and get this:
...one of the deepest and most replayable multiplayer components of any game on the market.
That needed EXTRA emphasis. Men, we are dealing with an escaped lunatic, he is most likely armed and dangerous with the ignorance 12,000 politicians, extreme caution is advised. Fuck, I probably just spoiled the entire plot of Modern Warfare 4, sorry guys. He said something about Zombies. Really, we don't give a toss at this point.
And then this:
It is a business, and its goal is to make money.
I am a proponent that video games are an art, not a proponent of corporate bullshit-ery. They can be treated as such sure, but this kid goes so far as to say that a game development company exists to make money, not art, as a rule of thumb. Agonising regret in even reading this abounds. He has the nerve to close with a couple of paragraphs that essentially try to make video games seem as much of an artistic medium as a Oneida Dining Spoon.
