Modern Warfare 2 Writer Claims Controversy Was Worth the Risk

[Twilightruler]

I always thought it was funny that people freaked out over this. They didn't even bat an eye at prototype. And killing civilians was, if anything, more necessary in that game than in MW2. Consuming civilians gave you health and access to a disguise which is very helpful. In MW2, it's optional and yields no benefits. Prototype rewards you for killing hundreds of people...MW2 doesn't. Maybe it's the idea that you're a CIA agent but...still...Kind of a double standard.

 

[DayDark]

It has nothing to do with human nature. It's a shooter and you're playing a faux-terrorist, so you may as well just start shooting. Group mentality doesn't exist when the group consists of pre-scripted characters that are railroading you through a pre-scripted situation. In a video game.

If you get immersed into the game, then you act as if you were there. Of course you don't give a shit if you don't get caught in the illusion. You don't give a shit about any form of story telling, if all you think about is "this is just ink on paper"/"this is just an actor pretending to be a fictional character"/"these are just pixels on a screen".

 

[dalek sec]

NCIS eh? I love that show.

Same here, pretty sure Gibbs and the team could have stopped them.

OT: Just why is every single frakking "moral" group or whatever freaking out about this one level? I just don't get it.

 

[Maikan Bacon]

I didn't have a single problem with this level, I thought it was one of the better levels, I found it fun being put in the shoes of a terrorist in a game where you're normally blowing them to shit.

I'm not saying I want to now go to an airport and blow peoples brains out, im just saying, it's a god damn game!! If shoot some people in an airport is bad, then what do you people say to the likes of Prototype!? You can turn a crowd of happy shoppers into a pile of nothing resembling humans.... (fyi - I also found this most enjoyable)

It's just a game.... carebear for people who take offence to it.

 

[Pimppeter2]

I played this level with a friend. I didn't find it as "wow" as I hoped I would

NCIS eh? I love that show.

Ditto!

 

[KiKiweaky]

Voice actors name is Kevin McKidd

OT: Well I liked it even though its just a game I still felt a bit dirty hosing box of machine gun bullets into a defenceless crowd, reloading and doing it again.

Your shot and left there to act as a reason for starting a war... A country cant and will never go to war because one man was found dead, holding a gun in an airport that resembles a slaughter house. The 2008 Mumbai attacks where the attackers were considered to be part of a miltant group from pakistan being the most recent evidence.

Also the fact that during the mission at least 2 of the 4 of the gunmen with you can be killed, left behind and convieniently ignored made me think it was a rather large hole in the plot. Unless I missed something makarov or one of the other gunmen says?

 

[FiveSpeedf150]

Well... Wasn't that a given?
Controversy leads to Publicity, & no Publicity is bad Publicity.

Aaaannd publicity leads to sales, 14th yacht, etc etc.

Good on IW. And hopefully them giving the PC police the bird will inspire other video game designers, as has already been mentioned.

 

[Booze Zombie]

This game had a writer?

Fuck me...

 

[DayDark]

If you get immersed into the game, then you act as if you were there.

If you actually do this, you have serious mental problems.

I actually get immersed in some games, I can also get spooked when I watch a horror movie, even though I'm not in any danger. Hardly a problem. It actually enhances the experience.

 

[nielsvk]

Yeah, start firing on the terrorists was my first natural response. Watching in agony the pretty realistic scene unravel was heavy. Though it wasn't L4D2 explicit -and sometimes even unrealistally unbloody- it still gave me the chills. When the cops came, I didn't even started firing until I died two times in a row, knowing that not firing would not help me get any further.

That was MY natural reaction. I'm pretty shocked seeing so many people just unload into a crowd. I admit, I have no problems driving high speed through a crowd with GTA4. You can argue there is no difference. I'd say MW2 is more realistic, and GTA4 is cartoony fun. But it isn't. MW2 is a popcorn-game and GTA4 got more and more realistic throughout the series. So where is that line I will not cross? Is playing Barbarian on the C64 at the age of 7 harmfull? I thought it were funny pixels at the time.

I know one thing: my kids aren't playing these games at an age below the ESRB rating. I'll have to play those games first to see for myself.

 

[Blimey]

Aw hell, I mowed down the people in the airport level with absolute glee. There just a bunch of polygons, textures, and code. They don't feel, breathe, eat, or sleep. They don't have children or families, and thus I don't feel bad when I "end" their "lives". Besides, I'm sure many of you have gone on wild rampages through GTA4, running down cops, men, women, and old ladies. You've shot, stabbed, beaten, and blown up the good residents of Liberty City, and racked up a body count that would make Stalin blush. And while you were gleefully mowing down those little digital representations of people, you didn't care. So why should you know? Because right now its the same thing, except your in an airport, and the graphics are better. People need to get over this already and move on.

On another note, I saw that Modern Warfare 2 has made over $550 million worldwide. Holy fuck.

 

[xXGeckoXx]

Well I have to admit it, this guy has balls of steel. This guy alone has made Infinity Ward into a shining example for the other high budget game developers out there. Perhaps now we'll start seeing some MAINSTREAM GAMES.....TAKING RISKS!!!!!

oh, damn. you did not just say IW is genius because of MW2. maybe if you said this two years ago, because CoD4 was freaking a awesome SP campaign. they bloody spoil most of the game before release, basically stung together as many kewl set-peice battles together as they could, BS'd a plot putting you in another lame-ass OTP SF group.

....

first...calm down...

Second, I said that Infinity Ward was a "shining example" because of Modern Warfare 2, not "genius." Are you really going to ignore one of the most important risks taken by a video game company in the past decade, just because you have some personal vendetta against the game's campaign?

Infinity Ward may not be "geniuses" (I mean, lets face it, they can't even bring themselves to start a new franchise), but they're certainly worth applauding for doing something that hasn't been done before, and facing the consequences of doing so head on.

Nobody appreciates the kewl set peices enough in my opinion I think they where brilliant. They appealed to me in the same way die hard and james bond do and those are good strings to pull.

 

[internetzealot1]

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.

This post contains large quantities of win.

 

[cieply]

hmmm I just smiled and opened fire with them, it was amusing to kill all those running and crawling people. Still,I'm a Pole, and whats wonderful about being a Pole is that we hold a grudge against almost everyone (sort of like real world dwarfs;p) so I could actually enjoy killing those russians. Or maybe I'm just an asshole.