I’m not sure if I’ll ever forgive 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Activision for how they shoved 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Modern Warfare 3 out the door. It apparently started life as an expansion pack, until executives refused to give up a chance to make millions on the series’ usual annual instalments and crunched developers into making a full game in a fraction of the time. The end result was rushed and disappointing, with Modern Warfare 3 currently sitting as the lowest rated entry in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Call of Duty history.
The campaign was a mess, the multiplayer was made up of old maps, and the experience as a whole was much buggier than usual. It showed the telltale signs of a team being forced to make a game work without the time or resources to do any of it right. Following its launch, I touched on the sa🐻d reality of crunch still remaining prevalent in the industry thanks to its development being so rushed, and how making money will always rise above artistic integrity. What sucks so much is how this rebooted trilogy was well on the way to a fantastic conclusion if only the dev team hadn’t been scre🍷wed over. Better yet, it was on course to surpass the original trio of games.
Note: Did you know that 168澳洲幸运5💙开奖网:Ghost and Soap are actually boyfriends? It’𒉰s true, I even wrote about it. I may have also read a 160,000 word fanfic over the weekend.
Instead of opting to retell the original trilogy as Captain Price and Task Force 141 facing off against the combined forces of Zakhaev and Makarov, Infinity Ward instead stitches thes♉e events together with new interpretations of characters and set pieces. The depictions of characters and weaponry are more grounded, even if it still leans into action movie absurdity at times to avoid awkward comparisons to the real world. The likes of Captain Price, Laswell, Soap, Ghost, and Gaz are stronger characters this time around, saying more in and out of cutsceneꦅs than they ever have before. It’s less Michael Bay and more Zero Dark Thirty, so fans quickly started to fall in love with these characters and expand them with details and developments the games were never going to touch upon.
As I replay the first two campaigns before I subject myself to the third, my TikTok has grown into an infinite scroll of , decries the death of others, by fleshing out his backstory with a caring family or a life after faking his death at the end of the underwhelming third game. Oh yes, spoilers for the fact that Soap also bites the dust in this reboot much like he does in the 2011 game. But this time ar♛ound, his friends get over it within seconds and the whole affair is glossed over.
The game moved on as fans welled up over Soap’s demise, the campaign trying to get it over in a matter of minutes, removing any sense of narrative weight and robbing players of an emotional climax. It’s obvious the whole thing wa๊s thrown together on a viciously tight deadline. I’ve seen countless videos rewriting the ending to be more compelling, or thinking about an alternate reality where Soap makes it out alive and dons a mask much like Ghost, going undercover to protect those he holds dear.
I’m often against reversing tragic character deaths in order to keep on telling stories or keep fans happy. I felt this way with Soap’s death in the 🐎original Modern Warfare 3 because his death felt earned. Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer morphed the once faceless SAS recruit i꧒nto a charming Scotsman worth caring about, with reactions from Price cementing that he’d lost someone dear to him amidst a losing war. Friends of mine in school were broken up about it between rounds of multiplayer, showing us a faint glimmer of emotional vulnerability with a game that had become known for its boastful masculinity.
When it comes to the reboot, our feelings are the polar opposite. We’re annoyed because Soap's death felt anticlimactic, like his character development from the previous game was thrown aside because the
Sledgeha🍌mmer wasn’t given enough time nor resources to do justice to the story it had spent the past half a decade piecing together. Modern Warfare 2 was a delightful surprise, especially in regard to its campaign, which delivered a spy thriller eager to set the stage for future games while giving all its characters a chance to shine. The dialogue was memorable, the acting was strong, and you really cared about all of Task Force 141 by the end.
Modern Warfare 3 takes that investment and throws it in the bin. You can see the edges of a worthwhile conclusion in its stronger scripted missions, but so much of the campaign pulls us into copy and paste versions of the Warzone maཧp to complete boring objectives as dialogue over the radio does everything it can to pull the narrative together into something that makes even the slightest lick of sense. By the time Soap bites the bullet, it already feels like a joke.
I can’t blame fans, myself included, for imagining a stronger conclusion and even seeking to create it for ourselves in the wake of Activision’s failure. It puts profits above creativity of the devs to make as much dosh as possible, not caring about their wellbeing or the satisfaction of the consumer, throwing years of narrative foundations into the fire for nothing. One silver lining of this whole debacle is how much brilliant media has come from fans after the game’s release, with art, fics, theories and so much more taking these characters and giving them a sꦦecond lease of life this blockbuster shooter was never going to be capable of.
