CoD Modern Warfare 2 has to save the shooter year 2022 alone – it won’t work

CoD: Modern Warfare 2 is expected to be released on October 28, 2022. It comes in a year that has consistently disappointed shooter fans. Now it should be the savior of the genre in the gaming year 2022, but it has to do a strange balancing act between a spirit of optimism and old structures. That can only go wrong, believes MeinMMO author Marko Jevtic.

Much has already been said about the gaming year 2022. Shooter fans in particular cannot be satisfied. Normally, the games released in the winter of the previous year are the biggest hits for months.

But CoD Vanguard, Battlefield 2042 and Halo Infinite have all disappointed. Even ‘fresh blood’ like The Cycle: Frontier doesn’t hit as well as hoped.

So CoD Modern Warfare 2 is almost automatically the great hope for shooter fans to finally gamble something really good and big again. No “insider tip” or an “established size” that has been gambled for years. But the one shooter of the year – the blockbuster, the blockbuster, the pop culture phenomenon. Historically, Call of Duty has done a pretty good job of earning these descriptions.

But I have serious doubts that Modern Warfare 2 will live up to these claims in the long term. Because of the circumstances, the game seems caught between a spirit of optimism and annual hype. And this is a mixture that can only disappoint.

CoD makes big promises that contradict each other

The best example of this is the presentation of the game at the Summer Game Fest. Geoff Keighley’s presenter introduces Johanna Faries, the “head of Call of Duty”. Then she stands at a shipyard in front of oversized printouts of the characters in Modern Warfare 2 and proudly tells us what to expect:

In 2019, Modern Warfare changed everything. And on October 28th, we herald a new era in Call of Duty with the launch of Modern Warfare 2. We’re back, we’re bigger and we’re bringing the whole team: Price, Gas, Soap, Alejandro and – of course – Ghost.

We needed a stage big enough to stage Call of Duty in a whole new way, inspired by the world we’re about to enter. Oil platforms, cargo ships and others [Schauplätze] are just the beginning. Here is Modern Warfare 2.

Johanna Faries (via YouTube)

This speech is accompanied by epic music, and then the detailed gameplay trailer starts. You can see it here:

The whole thing took less than 10 minutes. But that was enough to take away all hope that CoD Modern Warfare 2 can be more than ‘just’ a good shooter. Because everything that Johanna Faries has presented here, including the gameplay, shows a very strange and difficult balancing act that can only disappoint.

The game seems caught between two extremes. Faries speaks of a “new era of Call of Duty”, but mentions in the same breath that all familiar faces are there. “Of course” also Ghost, how could it be otherwise?

How does that fit together? How “new” can an era be when you fall back on old methods as a matter of course and present a team of elite killers from a game from 2009 like the superheroes from Avengers. By that I mean ‘of course’ the protagonists from the original Modern Warfare 2 from 2009, not the new Modern Warfare 2 with the old title.

The second half of Faries’ quote probably gives the answer to this question: She says that Modern Warfare 2 wants to “stage itself in a whole new way”. That doesn’t just sound like ‘more appearances than reality’ – so far it looks like it too.

CoD MW2 wants to break new ground – with well-known means?

When content creators and influencers got an exclusive look at Modern Warfare 2 in front of the large audience, everyone was ecstatic. It’s incredible, would break the internet and is already a “Top 5 CoD.”

But when the level gameplay was shown at the Summer Game Fest, the atmosphere was completely different. The player in the trailer moved annoyingly slowly through the level and in my head one thought dominated: “I already know all that”.

Rain, evil terrorists, a rocket, Molotov cocktails and exploding red barrels. A team you’re slowly chasing after, the slowest door opening animations since Resident Evil 1… you’ve all seen it.

Not only didn’t I see any new gameplay, I didn’t even recognize the big new staging. It struck me as a trivial mishmash of 4 games that officially have these exact names: Modern Warfare, Modern Warfare, Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare II.

But I wasn’t the only one who saw it that way. The editorial team at PC Gamer, for example, wrote that “Modern Warfare 2 seems like it’s running out of ideas,” saying in a conversation:

Call of Duty as a single player experience feels stale at this point. […]

CoD has a habit of being repetitive, but that oil rig mission was one of the most generic things I’ve seen in a long time. I can’t think of a single thing that happened in those seven minutes that I haven’t already done a billion times in the last 20 Calls of Duty. […]

It comes across as though Infinity Ward needs to tick some boxes that keep the game from feeling new. Why does it look so much like the Call of Duty 4 introductory mission? Maybe it’s to create a sense of nostalgia for games that are already 15 years old, but what I got instead was “oh, we’re doing it again”.

The editors of the PC Gamer in their article

With Modern Warfare 2, they want to herald a “new era” while also fulfilling every fan expectation that anyone with the remotest interest in the game has.

The name of the game is also an old one, as are the names of the protagonists – Ghost has to be there, of course. An oil refinery for sure, that’s just CoD. The weapons are modern and familiar, of course. Where it says Modern Warfare 2 on it, Modern Warfare 2 must certainly be inside. But I ask myself: Where is the new, the special, the interesting?

We’ve only really seen the single player so far. But most people are interested in the multiplayer. But nothing we know of MW2 so far gives the impression that anything revolutionary is going to happen here. There are killstreaks, weapon attachments and perks again. “Naturally”.

The typical CoD routine cannot sustain 2 years

One of the biggest criticisms of CoD Vanguard is the setting. The Second World War as a battlefield has been worn out for decades. CoD was responsible for this with its first games, Modern Warfare was already the course correction in 2007. As a compromise, the gameplay was then kept as old school as possible. That didn’t work: Vanguard was a big disappointment for players and for Activision Blizzard.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying months in advance that the game will be bad or not fun – I can’t comment on that yet and I don’t want to do that with this text. But I see that CoD is probably repeating the same mistakes, this time with a broader chest and more self-confidence than with Vanguard.

Even those responsible at Activision said about Vanguard: It brought too few innovations. So why are you working towards a similar concept for CoD MW2?

The CoD formula has been successful every year since at least 2007’s Modern Warfare. The games are always fun. But too often it’s like a run-of-the-mill hamburger from a fast-food chain: sometimes you feel like it and it awakens well-known feelings of pleasure. But the whole thing is not filling or satisfying.

Modern Warfare 2 is possibly the first game in CoD history that has to live for 2 years. Because in 2023 no new CoD should appear. More than ever, MW2 must be able to fill you up in the long term, because there won’t be a second portion anytime soon. And as poorly as the shooter competition performs, there is no good alternative so quickly.

So CoD Modern Warfare 2 is caught in a very bad situation. It has to satisfy CoD fans for 2 years, but at the same time it has to save a shooter year full of flops, disappointments and routine. It’s a balancing act that the game just can’t pull off successfully — even if it does everything right.

After all: a new game mode could be really good. “DMZ” is probably based on Escape from Tarkov and could appear as a standalone title. You can find out everything you need to know about it here:

CoD is supposed to get a completely new mode with Modern Warfare 2 – it probably copies Warzone’s recipe for success

Now I would like to hear your opinion on the subject. Do you agree, do you disagree? What are your expectations for CoD MW2 2022? leave a comment