Modern Borefare

What happens when a game emerges from its primordial developer goo and subsequently sends everyone it touches into a frothing fit of ecstasy, but actually just appeals to your lower brain functions? The game plummets from a narcotic high and into some serious withdrawal symptoms. Put simply, if you don’t remember the time you spent playing a game you won’t feel any pull to experience more great experiences.

So how do you get players to return if you don’t offer a memorable virtual excursion? Well, you make an incredibly compelling meta-game that’s affected by the gameplay, but actually adds nothing to gameplay itself.

The meta-game does two things; It awards experience for kills (which determines your level, which controls access to weapons), assists in accomplishing your objectives, and then looks at how you achieved those kills and gives you titles and/or emblems (which are nothing more than some fancy words and pictures to brag about your overall progress).

The game, of course, is Modern Warfare 2. Let’s talk about how the lack of skill, combined with a reliance upon luck for balance, produces a game that gives you little reason to return beyond its aforementioned metagame. Not covered here: the bugs and glitches, knives, grenade launchers, shotguns or imbalances any of those have when mixed with certain perks.

There are even awards for shooting like a chump.

Any game that relies upon luck or random happenstance over deliberate actions gives pause, because in those situations little effort is required to “win.” Most games do rely upon some amount of luck to one extent or another; Team Fortress 2 calls upon lucky critical attacks to break stalemates, while Solium Infernum uses random chance to add uncertainty to your decisions, and some DotA heroes are built entirely around luck (faceless void) but you know that’s a risk you’re taking by choosing them.

But few titles force poor decrepit lady luck to fall to her knees from the sheer exhaustion of deciding all the encounters in the game. There are no intense duels in MW2, whoever sees the other first is gonna kill the other guy. You might say that’s the “modern” part of the game, but last I checked re-spawning isn’t in the Pentagon’s budget quite yet; and re-spawning is the key problem in MW2.

So it makes sense that to be effective in MW2 you need only learn a few things: spawn locations (and perhaps more importantly, understanding how the bloody god of spawns actually works), and the few good vantage points. As long as your position is serviceable and your gun is loaded, the game largely turns into a point and shoot affair.

This might be fine if the game was nothing but free-for-alls, but that’s one of the game’s roughly nine gameplay modes, and trust me: getting fragged within two seconds three to seven times in a row  because you spawned with your back to the enemy team  gets old in a hurry. You shouldn’t have to cross your fingers that you’ll live a lengthy 10 seconds. But how does luck actually factor in? Via two primary methods: killstreaks and—as you might have already guessed—good ‘ole fortunate spawns.

Lets start with killstreaks, which are intended to reward you for being “good.” You might argue that this promotes skill because if you want the killstreaks, you need to make successive frags without dying yourself. Of course, you can argue just as much that it does promote camping, as people carefully and slowly rack up those points needed, leading to devastatingly brutal god-strikes; but I digress.

“Hmmmm,” said one of Infinity Ward’s developers, “How can we possibly make it so that all players, even the bad ones, can inflict these wonderful levels of ludicrous destruction upon others with no chance of reciprocal attacks?” “Well,” his companion piped up, “People really seemed to adore grenades in the first game! Why not make one that’s just like rolling dice to get a killstreak?”

And thus the lovely care package was born unto our world. Don’t want to camp your way up to the attack helicopter or AC-130 gunship? Just grab a perk and then make 3 kills. Just toss the dice and hope you get lucky. Who needs to even learn to aim anymore? Just use the care packages and anyone can score some “awesome” kills. How? Simple: a shitty spawning system.

This is no companion cube.

Killstreaks suck, for sure, but at least players have some degree of control over them, with the ability to shoot down some, or hide from others. The spawn system, however, is utterly beyond control. The game attempts to put the player into the best spots possible: close to teammates and not overly near the opposition, unless you have tactical insertion (a flare that you place—which takes up the equipment slot—marking where you’ll spawn next) or you’re playing game modes with definitive “bases.”

Sounds good right? Not really. Most levels are built for flow rather than standing battles, so whenever you spawn someone’s liable to see you magically return to the mortal coil, and you can be sure they’ll say “Hi” with some bullets. Understanding the details and dynamics of the spawn is perhaps the most important factor to your success in MW2. All it takes is a couple of matches to get the feeling that 60% to 80% of your deaths are wholly beyond your control. By plucking choice perks and/or equipment you can be a little luckier.

And there’s that wonderful word – “luck,” and you’re at its dire mercy. Why not give players the choice of where to spawn? Or simply standardize it? Because luck is exactly what the developers are aiming for in MW2; skill is expendable. They want everyone to have what they consider “fun.”  Who cares if you actively spawn in front of an opponent’s cross-hairs? You can just retaliate by gunning down 3 to 5 players frequently without any of them knowing you were there. Ta-da! Free care package.

Woohoo, shot in back again.

The game is still compelling, to a degree, but the gameplay isn’t rewarding; the metagame is: getting all that experience, unlocking all those other guns, finding all those shiny emblems and titles watching your stats progress higher and higher. There was a time when simply winning was good enough, but this brings us back to one of the core problems at the heart of Modern Warfare 2:  a lack of a memorable community, a direct result of the exclusion of dedicated servers.

The faceless masses of a matchmaking system own little strength, but they’re always there waiting to be shot in the back when they get a shitty spawn. Infinity Ward appears to have addressed this irritation by switching the focus away from community and into stat-whoring. Everyone’s playing the game to get their titles and emblems to get a new prestige. The gameplay never challenges or encourages you break beyond its narrow boundaries, so you never have anything noteworthy to show beyond all that meta-junk above.

Thinking back over the 136 hours I’ve sunk into the seas of multiplayer so far, I can’t recall a single memorable experience. Not a single one. It’s not like I just played the opening of the newest JRPG or something, that’s a collection of five whole days. Sure, I was content most of that time, but when you play that long and the hours you’ve put in just bleed together into a blob of headshots, there’s a fundamental problem.

But then again, I do almost have the much relished Gold Skulls Famas title; only 200 more headshots to go! Damn you Modern Warfare 2.