Modern Warfare 2 Writer Claims Controversy Was Worth the Risk

[Mr.Black]

It's an extremely popular and well-made game and you're all nitpicking and things that don't really matter. Stop caring and just enjoy it.

 

[UtopiaV1]

Yeeeeea Activision, that's why you wrote that scene. To push boundaries.

Coincidentally, it got you a lot of media coverage, and i bet that SORT-OF helped sell more copies, eh? Still, like I said, coincidental...

 

[Osaka-chaness]

Baseless statements here!

Hey guys I'm I doing it right?

Alright, here's the basis behind my position:

Spoiler

Item the First: The betrayal by the US General of TF141. There was absolutely no reason for it, beyond "hey your boss being the big bad is wicked awesome!". Which anyone with any degree of talent in story telling can tell you is a terrible idea. They said he wanted to become a war hero or some other such rubbish when he did it. Guess what? It wouldn't have changed anything whether or not he did kill the squad. He was the CO, he'd get the credit. It made absolutely no sense and was shoehorned in so the writers had something "cool" to work with.

Item the Second: The nuke. Price just got out of the Gulag, wherein he was tortured rather heavily by Ivan for a good long time. He would not, and I repeat not, send a nuke to explode over the capital of his saviors. If anything, it would head straight for Moscow. Yet again, this makes absolutely no sense and it was just shoehorned in so we could do the DC without power level, which I will admit was rather cool taken on its own merits. Unfortunately, that doesn't forgive the complete and utter shittiness of the nuke idea in the first place.

Item the Third: This one is fairly minor and ties into the previous one. When the nuke explode, a shockwave threw the astronaut around and destroyed a couple sattelites. There are no shockwaves in space. There's nothing for the shockwave to travel through, thus it simply does not exist. It's a fairly minor quibble, but it represents most of what was wrong with the story. The writers were trying far too hard to cram in "cool" to create a coherent, logical story.

Item the Fourth, and Final: The airport level. It was an excellent idea, and what got me to buy the game to be perfectly honest, it just wasn't executed anywhere near as well as it could have been. To start, if during the opening briefing they had mentioned you were allowed to shoot the terrorists and still complete the mission, that would've been nice. I would have, but I was under the impression it was the same as the rest of the game where you fail the mission if you shoot your teammates. Other than that, there really wasn't a reason to be there. You are arbitrarily pulled out of Afghanistan and inserted into a terrorist cell made up of random Russians #2-6. There's no explanation for why you're infiltrating, what the CIA thinks their goal is, or even why it was you specifically out of the hundreds of potential recruits in the Rangers that was chosen. It's just "Oh, this guy be bad. You're gonna help him do bad things so we can spy on him." That's an incredibly thin pretext at best.


Almost all of the missions, when taken on their own, were fantastic and a lot of fun. The writing tying them all together, however, was a gigantic pile of rhino dung.

Edit: Sorry to the people who read this before I added the end of the spoiler tag.

Third item is just rather stupid, if you ask me. Considering how the rest of the game is, what does it matter that a shockwave from a nuke destroyed satellites?

As for the nuke, he didn't do it to destroy Washington DC, he did it to give the Americans a chance at keeping their own capital from falling under a Russian terrorist's rule. D.C was pretty much lost with the helicopters and tanks and such going around...the EMP from the nuke just evened the odds.

Since when have FPS stories ever been amazing, anyway? >.>;;;

 

[Agayek]

Since when have FPS stories ever been amazing, anyway? >.>;;;

Since Half-Life 1, tbph.

Then there's Bioshock, debatably Crysis, MW1 (which is why I'm so disappointed with the sequel), I thought the Halo 1 story was decent, etc. If I cared enough I could probably find at least a few more that are as good.

Edit: The shockwave itself isn't that big a deal. My problem with it is that it symbolized basically everything I didn't like about the story. It's just cramming random "wicked sick"/"oh shit" moments in just for the sake of them being there.

You missed out the bit where

Spoiler

A well known Russian international terrorist carries out the attack and doesn't wear a mask, yet every one blames the American whom they could of claimed was sent to spy on him. This is some what mitigated by the fact during the brief they say he'll work for any one and claims loyalty to no country, but still.

I'm willing to give them that. It requires a bit more suspension of disbelief than I would like, but it is at least plausible, if not likely.

 

[Mordwyl]

Sometimes you take huge risks and it really works. Sometimes it doesn't work at all. But if you don't take the chance, you're not going to make something new.

Spoken like a true entrepreneur. If only he wasn't stuck with yet another Generic War Shooter.

 

[Curly_Jefferson]

I think it's good that he's standing by what he put in the game. As for me i felt horrible shooting the civillians, i shot a couple but i felt to bad. Now that's immersion.

 

[SantoUno]

Personally I'm glad that scene was thrown in.

 

[CanOfPop]

How is putting extreme violence in any medium a risk?Seriously?
I mean there's always the risk of having it not get a rating, but if that was the case you recall it, remove the scene, and you profit because of the publicity.

lol@the people sucking up. "Developers should follow IW" Yeah they should. Removing dedicated servers is a great move.

 

[MasterSqueak]

I killed them all, civilians and cops and terrorists. It was fun.

 

[firedfns13]

Did he comment on why they made the story line so shitty?

 

[Lithium Calibre]

It was a great technique to pull players out of their comfort zone, it wasn't anything near gta standards of mass murder but in the first person perspective it was much more immersive.

 

[BLOONINJA 503]

Yay, my comment got some valid reasons why people find the story nonsensical!

And yeah, I found it pretty dumb at times too, but throughout most of it I was just shooting stuff and fun was happening.

 

[FROGGEman2]

Wait...

...They hired writers?

 

[FoolKiller]

Wow. There are a lot of interesting points of view out there. For one, I never shot AT any civilian, just above them to make sure Makarov doesn't turn around and question my actions. And for the record, I tried shooting Makarov in the back of the head and nothing happened. No death, no reaction, just plain nothing.

I also think that the only bit of risk-taking was because the game is trying to be more realistic with its portrayal of a terrorist attack. There is nothing new within its portrayal of moral choices. Many RPGs (mainly BioWare's recently) come to mind for having moral choices with consequences. And as for having pseudo realistic world with real dark and complex choices in a militaristic game, I present you: Splinter Cell - Double Agent. You can even do some of the most dastardly deeds in a game that tops even the airport level.

Spoiler

You can shoot and kill Lambert while he is strapped to a chair completely helpless, you can blow up a cruise ship and many other questionable things.

 

[Sevre]

Wait, did this guy write the script or the entire thing? Because I could've written a better story after undergoing full frontal lobotomy.

 

[DayDark]

I think the whole human nature thing is simply "go with the flow", everybody starts shooting people, so you start shooting people. Group mentality.