Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare

Play both as soldiers and ‘freedom fighters’ in this series re-imagining

- Chris Livingston

There’s been a deadly terrorist bombing at London’s Piccadilly Circus. The perpetrators have been tracked to a four-story house in North London. British Special Forces prepare to infiltrate the building to capture the terrorist cell’s leader known as The Wolf who is presumed to be at the townhouse. All other suspects are to be eliminated.

At a presentation in Los Angeles earlier this month, I got to watch (but unfortunately not play) this mission from the single player campaign of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Members of developer Infinity Ward laid out a few reasons there isn’t a ‘4’ after the title, and why they wanted a “re-imagining” of Modern Warfare rather than a sequel. Their aim was to create a game that feels relevant and “ripped from the headlines”, and that’s pretty hard to do when the storylines of previous Modern Warfare games have veered so far from reality.

“In those games, by the time Modern Warfare 3 was over, nukes had gone off in the world, the Russians had invaded the United States, and so there were really no stakes remaining in that world,” says Infinity Ward’s Narrative Director Taylor Kurosaki. “So, what we did was we took that storyline and we put it to bed, and we said let’s keep all the good stuff, all the stuff you expect from a Modern Warfare game, and let’s transpose it into today’s world. It’s more mature. It’s more authentic. It’s more relevant.”