How to freshen up Call of Duty: Stop using Americans

[Al-Bundy-da-G]

The Paris level? You don't see a single French unit around (sans 7 GIGN soldiers, who are only around for 2/3s of the first of the two Paris missions.

That's because they're FRENCH.

What did you expect? As soon as the first round fired they ran and hid as fast as they could.

Most realistic part of the whole game.

 

[Akimoto]

And STOP switching between characters, it prevents the player from growing onto the guy.

Black Ops tried that, and it didn't work, because Mason had the personality and depth of a tub of lard.

Black Ops was done by the B team anyway so I was not too fussy about it.

 

[Corporal Yakob]

WW2 game from the Axis perspective.

Think about it.

I think a game about the nazi side would be interesting.

Have it between two or three different characters: the hardcore facist soldier who becomes a member of the SS, A Hitler Youth idealist that fights for the fatherland while trying hard to ignore the atrocities the nazis commit, and an older soldier who is just fighting because he is. Than tell the events from each of their prospectives.

This would work excellently I think-the hardcore fascist segment could be a brief prologue section in France where you take part in the execution of British prisoners, then fighting as part of the "Crusade against Bolshevisim" in Russia for several missions before culminating in Stalingrad: his missions of the campaign would be very dark and brutal, in the manner of COD: World at War with both sides committing atrocities and the character justifying it with his beliefs, the beliefs that will drag him to a unremembered grave amongst the ruins of Stalingrad. The Hitler Youth idealist's missions could be set during the Allied push into Germany where the SS and Gendermes are as great a enemy as the approaching Americans, fighting a series of losing battles before surrendering in the last mission. As for the old veteran I'm not sure-missions in North Africa and Italy with his general theme being of loyalty to your comrades?

 

[Corporal Yakob]

If you played as the bad guys, what would the missions be like? Go murder and burn the Jew children for the Nazis? Blow yourself up in the name of Allah? The mainstream media masturbates to the idea that a game like this would pop up.

Being honest here, that would be awesome.

A game where one of your mission is to grab minoritires of the street, beat them and send them to a concenration camp. Later your mission envolves sending them to a gas chamber, or fuzilate them.

Sounds fun.

And the funniest is, the people who would like this kind of game would be less fascict than the people wanting to stop it from existence.

"Achievement unlocked: Triumph of the Will (50 gamer points)-Arrest at least 30 Jews during the mission "Bloody glass"."

 

[MiracleOfSound]

An Irish war game from the early 1900s would be awesome. Being in a rebel flying column using stealth to traverse the countryside and take out the filthy black and tans...

Totally not biased, or anything.

Who wouldn't want to play as these lads?

 

[Treblaine]

I'm one of those weirdos that bought MW3 and only played the singleplayer. On the whole I found it fun (even though it suffers from the same infuriating problems as its predecessors), but one thing really ticked me off.

See, the first mission is in New York, and you're playing as the Americans. So far, so standard. Next, you're with Price and the International stuff, again something expected. Then you get to the London level, and you're playing the SAS. So now I'm thinking that you're going to play as different nationalities throughout the game.

Nope, next level it's the Americans again. The Paris level? You don't see a single French unit around (sans 7 GIGN soldiers, who are only around for 2/3s of the first of the two Paris missions. The German levels? There are a few German tanks that show up in one tiny segment, but once again it's completely dominated by the Yanks.

There was a huge missed opportunity here! They could have shown us a much broader, intense spectrum of the whole conflict! We could have had some time playing the French, or the Polish or the Germans! Hell, what about the Czech resistance? They were awesome in that one level in Prague, why couldn't we play as them for a bit?

They had the chance to make this interesting, but instead it's all about America saving the day again. And quite frankly, I think they need to stop wanking over the stars and stripes.

But that's just my opinion. What do you think?

Edit: I forgot! That one mission where you're playing a bodyguard of the Russian President! That one mission is EXACTLY the sort of thing I'm talking about! It was great!

And how the whole Price and Soap are British SAS soldiers, and were the principal protagonists of COD4 and Modern Warfare 2

I really think your theory is bunk, just because they have squandered opportunity to play foreign troops at every opportunity doesn't prove a fatal trend. SAS AND Russian Bodyguard.

COD unlike all other shooters is the exception with an unusually wide range of nationalities, non-American.

 

[Durgiun]

It would be hella funny if in the next CoD you played as Al Qaida. Who's with me?

Naah. Make it Modern Warfare Afghanistan. Mission 1: You enter a room, and the mission instantly fails saying it was the women's quarter of the house, you have just gravely offended the whole family and created 3 new insurgents.
Mission 2, the enemy is sighted and you order your unit to engage. The mission fails and you see a movie of your character being yelled at by his CO for fighting and not calling in air support instead.

Total culture shock for FPS fans guaranteed.

I still say playing as an Al Qaida member would be a lot more fun.

 

[Dansen]

An Irish war game from the early 1900s would be awesome. Being in a rebel flying column using stealth to traverse the countryside and take out the filthy black and tans...

Totally not biased, or anything.

Who wouldn't want to play as these lads?

Didn't they get their asses kicked relatively quickly to a smaller force of British soldiers?

 

[TheIronRuler]

If you played as the bad guys, what would the missions be like? Go murder and burn the Jew children for the Nazis? Blow yourself up in the name of Allah? The mainstream media masturbates to the idea that a game like this would pop up.

Being honest here, that would be awesome.

A game where one of your mission is to grab minoritires of the street, beat them and send them to a concenration camp. Later your mission envolves sending them to a gas chamber, or fuzilate them.

Sounds fun.

And the funniest is, the people who would like this kind of game would be less fascict than the people wanting to stop it from existence.

"Achievement unlocked: Triumph of the Will (50 gamer points)-Arrest at least 30 Jews during the mission "Bloody glass"."

.
"Achievement Unlocked : "Early Bird" (50 gamer points) Make five Jews kill themselves by making them jump from their six floor apartments"
"Achievement Unlocked : Biblical Barbecue (25 gamer points) Burn Ten Synagogues"
"Achievement Unlocked : "For Goebbels!" (75 gamer points) Prevent local hoodlums from pillaging any shops"
.
History lessons do pay off.
It's sick but it might just educate people about the things that the civilian population endured. I mean, you might just play a Latvian peasant walking with his neighbors on their way to lynch some Orthodox Jews. An officer executing a small child because all of his subordinates can't pull the trigger as she stands in front of a pit of corpses that house her dead family.
This is so intense I believe that if anyone has the balls to pull it off it will become legendary.

 

[Treblaine]

And STOP switching between characters, it prevents the player from growing onto the guy.

Black Ops tried that, and it didn't work, because Mason had the personality and depth of a tub of lard.

I think there were other problems than that.

Also, Black Ops didn't REALLY try that, I counted three separate characters you played as: Mason, Reznov and Hudson while a character from a previous game you inhabited and identified with is now a completely separate character. You jump around so much from memory to memory, with disjointed narration and it turns out you were having utterly delusional hallucinations to the point you don't know what really happened nor what is happening right now.

Compare and contrast with Half Life or Portal games, that keep you totally locked and never interrupted perspective and for better or worse your character being mute does lend to the sense that you have total control over their interaction with the world, without your character you are role playing saying or doing something unexpected.

The last part of COD4 was so excellent for how it pretty much kept you in perspective of one character for a long and complex sequence of events, with effectively only loading screens separating each one.

An Irish war game from the early 1900s would be awesome. Being in a rebel flying column using stealth to traverse the countryside and take out the filthy black and tans...

Totally not biased, or anything.

Who wouldn't want to play as these lads?

Yeah, and in the sequel it can cover Irish Republican Fighters' allegiance with Nazi Germany.

Oooooh, awkward.

PS: I find it extremely awkward seeing them donning military weaponry while clearly still in civilian dress with no attempt at a uniform nor identifying regalia. That's basic rules of war. A batch on the Brest/shoulder of their jacket, a beret, anything. Or else they are just spies and saboteurs, not soldiers.

 

[MiracleOfSound]

Didn't they get their asses kicked relatively quickly to a smaller force of British soldiers?

Uh, no. They forced the British Empire out of Ireland.

 

[MiracleOfSound]

Yeah, and in the sequel it can cover Irish Republican Fighters' allegiance with Nazi Germany.

Oooooh, awkward.

Well, not surprisingly 600 years of being F'd in the A by the British Empire resulted in an 'enemy of my enemy' attitude towards them but yeah - not our proudest moment.

But the IRA of that era and ever since is a very different thing to the original one, with very different principles.

PS: I find it extremely awkward seeing them donning military weaponry while clearly still in civilian dress with no attempt at a uniform nor identifying regalia. That's basic rules of war. A batch on the Brest/shoulder of their jacket, a beret, anything. Or else they are just spies and saboteurs, not soldiers.

There were no rules of war in the Irish War Of Independence. They tended to prioritise killing British leaders over their military fashion sense.

 

[WindKnight]

Ok, I'd like to see something from the point of view of, say, Afghan militia.

Poorly equipped, fighting against terrorists who know the land as well, if not better than you.

Perhaps an option to comment on enemy behavior (IE, if you come across the aftermath of an enemy atrocity, you get to play it up to make your team hate the enemies, or keep them cool with an 'not all are like this' attitude.)

And, well, depending on how dark you want to play it, have the US or nato allies ambiguous - that backup you called in may be about to save your bacon, or make the situation worse with some friendly fire.

 

[Corporal Yakob]

If you played as the bad guys, what would the missions be like? Go murder and burn the Jew children for the Nazis? Blow yourself up in the name of Allah? The mainstream media masturbates to the idea that a game like this would pop up.

Being honest here, that would be awesome.

A game where one of your mission is to grab minoritires of the street, beat them and send them to a concenration camp. Later your mission envolves sending them to a gas chamber, or fuzilate them.

Sounds fun.

And the funniest is, the people who would like this kind of game would be less fascict than the people wanting to stop it from existence.

"Achievement unlocked: Triumph of the Will (50 gamer points)-Arrest at least 30 Jews during the mission "Bloody glass"."

.
"Achievement Unlocked : "Early Bird" (50 gamer points) Make five Jews kill themselves by making them jump from their six floor apartments"
"Achievement Unlocked : Biblical Barbecue (25 gamer points) Burn Ten Synagogues"
"Achievement Unlocked : "For Goebbels!" (75 gamer points) Prevent local hoodlums from pillaging any shops"
.
History lessons do pay off.
It's sick but it might just educate people about the things that the civilian population endured. I mean, you might just play a Latvian peasant walking with his neighbors on their way to lynch some Orthodox Jews. An officer executing a small child because all of his subordinates can't pull the trigger as she stands in front of a pit of corpses that house her dead family.
This is so intense I believe that if anyone has the balls to pull it off it will become legendary.

"Achievement unlocked: Guardian Angel (100 gamer points) Reach Argentina in the epilogue mission "Don't call me Josef"."

Damn right-I wouldn't be able to make half the tasteless jokes I do without studying history!

I think it would make for some truely meaningful moral ambiguity-having to choose wether or not to take part in anti-partisan duties with the rest of your Das Reich unit would have a lot more shock to it then the little American girl being blown up in COD: MW3.

 

[Treblaine]

If you played as the bad guys, what would the missions be like? Go murder and burn the Jew children for the Nazis? Blow yourself up in the name of Allah? The mainstream media masturbates to the idea that a game like this would pop up.

Being honest here, that would be awesome.

A game where one of your mission is to grab minoritires of the street, beat them and send them to a concenration camp. Later your mission envolves sending them to a gas chamber, or fuzilate them.

Sounds fun.

And the funniest is, the people who would like this kind of game would be less fascict than the people wanting to stop it from existence.

"Achievement unlocked: Triumph of the Will (50 gamer points)-Arrest at least 30 Jews during the mission "Bloody glass"."

.
"Achievement Unlocked : "Early Bird" (50 gamer points) Make five Jews kill themselves by making them jump from their six floor apartments"
"Achievement Unlocked : Biblical Barbecue (25 gamer points) Burn Ten Synagogues"
"Achievement Unlocked : "For Goebbels!" (75 gamer points) Prevent local hoodlums from pillaging any shops"
.
History lessons do pay off.
It's sick but it might just educate people about the things that the civilian population endured. I mean, you might just play a Latvian peasant walking with his neighbors on their way to lynch some Orthodox Jews. An officer executing a small child because all of his subordinates can't pull the trigger as she stands in front of a pit of corpses that house her dead family.
This is so intense I believe that if anyone has the balls to pull it off it will become legendary.

I think you are missing the point of teaching about nazism as like teaching about drug addiction.

The Nazi way IS an alluring lie, to unleash the inner evil brutality, I think facilitating role play of that will do a very good job of demonstrating the allure of this extremist ideology but fail in its purpose of education to prevent its repeating. It's like showing how addictive heroine is by letting all the students try a low dose of heroin to see how good it feels to shoot up.

Nazism was born and grew up on the streets in violent criminal gangs, it fed totally off the inner barbarians heady lust to kill, take, conquer and be victorious. Screw the rules and win everything. Be the bully. Be the bad guy and love it. (Now this is very different from merely fighting as a German soldier in multiplayer, you aren't performing the defining crimes and trappings of Nazism, but actually capable of the exact same things as your opponent.)


It could ONLY work if you then force them to live through the consequences of their actions, put them in their place to see their precious things destroyed, to be held prisoner at their mercy. And worse of all, to live with the guilt of what they have done, without the smugness of victory to ease their conscience.

I always thought the airport massacre in MW2 would have been much more effective if you had just been your character on holiday with no gun, no knife, no nothing and supposedly totally in the clear and then the terrorists attack. And you're just another part of the heard being driven to the slaughter. I think all of us can relate to that fear, that gut wrenching terror of what it would be like if a spree killer struck where you were: where would you go, what should you do? Try to run? Try to hide?

I can't be the only one, after a hearing of spree shootings in the news you hear a loud BANG and for a moment there is mild panic, what if this is it? You wait for further bangs, tell-tale of a shooter taking multiple shots. Nothing. Probably just a door slamming or something.

 

[Dansen]

Didn't they get their asses kicked relatively quickly to a smaller force of British soldiers?

Uh, no. They forced the British Empire out of Ireland.

I thought you were referring to the Easter Rising.

 

[Stephen Wo]

I came in here to scream bloody murder, but actually... That'd be great.
I want to see a story-based, tactical FPS where you play as Soviet Spetsnaz GRU soldiers. Sneaky stealthy, four man co-op squad gameplay. I mean, who wouldn't love that?

 

[Treblaine]

Yeah, and in the sequel it can cover Irish Republican Fighters' allegiance with Nazi Germany.

Oooooh, awkward.

Well, not surprisingly 600 years of being F'd in the A by the British Empire resulted in an 'enemy of my enemy' attitude towards them but yeah - not our proudest moment.

But the IRA of that era and ever since is a very different thing to the original one, with very different principles.

PS: I find it extremely awkward seeing them donning military weaponry while clearly still in civilian dress with no attempt at a uniform nor identifying regalia. That's basic rules of war. A batch on the Brest/shoulder of their jacket, a beret, anything. Or else they are just spies and saboteurs, not soldiers.

There were no rules of war in the Irish War Of Independence. They tended to prioritise killing British leaders over their military fashion sense.

You can't play moral relativism with the Nazis.

Uuuuh, you know what Nazi Germany thought about the Catholics? What it did to them? Not as badly as they treated the Jews but they REALLY hated them, so many Catholics were sent to the gas chamber just for being Catholic. It's the most insane allegiance in history. And again, the allegiance with Libya, surely they could find a better ally that Gadaffi!

They could find another ally, like - oh I don't know - the Republic of Ireland? They could take the North if they wanted to and have more reason than anyone but their government's opposition I think speaks volumes.

I just do not get Irish Republicanism after the formation of the Republic of Ireland. You don't see any Americans (of the United States, that was founded as a Republic) getting livid over how Canada dares to not want to be part of the Union. Even after the British Canadians burned down The White House they seem to totally accept that all of North America isn't in the Union. Why does all of the island of Ireland HAVE to be part of the republic? The north wants to stay part of UK, that's why it never joined the RoI in the first place!

And yeah, there are rules of war even in a civil war. And it's not fashion sense, it is out of respect for the peaceful civilian population. IF you dress like a civilian and fight, then you are drawing fire onto civilians. Just as if a civilian stupidly runs around in a war zone wearing camouflage clothing they are liable to be shot.

The Viet-Cong wore the distinctive "black pyjamas" in their guerilla campaign and it was accepted that the few who tried to infiltrate in plain clothes would be treated as spies and saboteurs and likely be shot. Today the Taliban dress distinctively and the various militias in Iraq wore distinctive headbands while preparing ambushes and assaults and even marched under flags!

The mandate of uniform is a VITAL part of differentiating between combatant and non-combatant. It doesn't matter where it is written, it is an inescapable reality of war that by using the guise of a civilian you are making all civilians a target.

A civilian in civilian clothes should be able to throw up their hands if confronted by the army and the army reasonably assume that they aren't actually an enemy fighter who would toss a live grenade in their truck given the chance.

And I believe this goes both ways. The British government should have recognised that they were fighting a civil war and that those captured should be treated as POWs, and those who broke the rules of war (like disguising themselves as civilians and deliberately targeting civilians) would be tried in a military tribunal for breaking those rules. Thatcher always tried to treat it as a law enforcement issue, which I think (with the benefit of hindsight) was a mistake that was not reversed till Tony Blair. He effectively did retro-actively treat all the prisoners as POWs by releasing them all at the end of hostilities, as is convention with POWs, but that recognition could have been done from the start.

The IRA should have been engaged from the beginning to follow the rules of war, to fight a guerilla campaign in a straight simple war.

The thing about POWs is the convention they won't be released till the war is over. It speeds a resolution as people on both sides want their boys home and gives final solace in victory or defeat that those apart can be together again.

Also, killing the leadership is a foolish decision (unless you can kill all of them), as you can guarantee their replacement will be more extreme. And JFK should tell you enough that Homicide is by far the worst way of killing a democratic leader as death only gives their final will resounding poignancy and be essentially impossible to oppose. Now that's political. Leaders of strategy and tactics, well how many generals did the IRA succeed in killing? Was there even one?

And then of course, Irish Republicanism was militant and violent in a time when all around was the evidence of progress through non-violence. The Civil Rights movement in America as well as the campaign to stop the war in Vietnam (more precisely, stop American involvement), even before that India's independence by Gandhi who was no warrior. Britain let other territories go where the people voted for independence. All the republicans had to do was win the public argument that they'd be better with RoI and UK. Surely that would have been easier, cheaper, more reliable and with less bloodshed, pain and distrust?

 

[jovack22]

The best campaign of COD1 was the Russian campaign.

They really should get back to that... or get away from rah rah US/UK bs.

 

[Yopaz]

Call of Duty doesn't need to freshen up. Call of Duty makes so much money they don't need to care that they have basically no good qualities to make each installment unique. They can throw in the same weapons, variations of the same story and some new maps for the multiplayer and collect their big pile of money.

It's lazy, but it's the formula for success.