If you plan to play the campaign for Call of Duty: Ghosts, prepare yourself for a minor spoiler: the story borders on pathetic. It isn’t that it just doesn’t work, it’s that it doesn’t even try to work. The campaign creates a unique world, and then explains how that world came to be almost as an afterthought. You have a new superpower and they attack America. That’s all you’re told. They don’t even bother to say it’s because they hate freedom.
Infinity Ward’s weak effort is almost insulting, and raises the question: why even bother with a campaign anymore? It’s a massive waste of time and resources, and the series would be better off just cutting it in favor of revamping the competitive and co-op multiplayer.
Check out this clip, which is pretty much the only explanation you receive for what kicks off a 10-year war.
That is literally it. And I’m not using the word “literally” incorrectly. I don’t mean it in the way some people would say “McDonald’s is literally the worst fast food restaurant on Earth.” (No offense, Golden Arch-iacs). The game never bothers to go into any more detail.
But let’s give that a pass for a moment – the problem is bigger than that. There is a serious lack of effort to create a compelling narrative at all. The Call of Duty games have always been the equivalent of a summer blockbuster film, where the story was generally an excuse to blow things up real pretty, but Ghosts’ problems highlight a systemic issue with the series in whole.
Black Ops chose big moments from history first and then built the narrative around that – the Tet Offensive, a rocket launch in Star City, the Bay of Pigs, etc. The next game in the series, Modern Warfare 3, just blew up the world, but at least it had familiar characters. It’s this reliance on the big moments that have killed the campaign as a viable feature, and they continue to be introduce in ways that bend the story around them, for the worse. I like mindless shooting as much as the next guy, but relying on big moments at the cost of story makes it feel like a hollow run through a shooing gallery rather than living out an action movie. You don’t need a ton of background, but you need to at least give it an effort.
Take the early section from Ghosts that occurs in space. This is a tiny spoiler, but it happens in the first 10 minutes of gameplay, and bits of it are featured prominently in the ads anyway. The 10-year-long war begins when the Federation breaks a treaty – or so one of the characters mentions in passing – and attacks a manned U.S. military orbital satellite. They do this by taking the station by surprise. In space. The Federation evades both orbital and ground detection, launches a rocket powerful enough to leave the atmosphere without anyone noticing, then proceeds to fully dock with a technologically sophisticated space station, which finally alerts the crackerjack crew that something is possibly happening.
With Ghosts, it feels like the campaign was something Infinity Ward did because they always have before. There was no real care put in to it, and so it fell heavily on the formula that worked – blow things up in interesting ways. Now, there are some fun moments in the campaign, and it does offer some mindless distraction as you murder your way through people that are, for some reason, your enemy. But for Infinity Ward, it’s a waste of time, money, and resources.
The COD multiplayer is the king of multiplayers, whether you love it or hate it. Now that Activision has the game on an annual cycle, which means both Treyarch and Infinity Ward are locked into a two-year development cycle, the time spent working on the campaign is a waste. Players may play the single player mode once, and five hours later after beating it, they will likely never look back. There isn’t even a co-op mode. But those five hours require a huge investment for the devs. Designing the campaign requires programming for the AI. It requires hiring voice actors (in this case, Brandon Routh and Stephen Lang, neither of whom are likely inexpensive). It requires art design, sound effects, and gameplay that is only used in the campaign. All of this requires dedicated development, and much of it can’t even be applied to the far more popular online modes.
On a purely business level, it makes fiscal sense to stop making campaign modes for Call of Duty, especially if the developers are going to half-ass them. Both Extinction and the multiplayer will have people playing for a year or more; and, more importantly, the modes will generate more money through DLC that adds new maps and possibly game modes. The campaign will not.
Call of Duty is a billion dollar franchise, and Activision is unlikely to mess with that formula, at least not until it begins to significantly lose followers. The publisher is a business. And whether you like it or not, it makes total sense to keep the COD franchise the way it is. Just look at how the publisher handled rhythm game franchises like Guitar Hero; it turned a budding new genre into a bubble, then overwhelmed it with too many titles until it popped. Losing the campaign would allow Activision to keep the formula as a multiplayer-focused shooter, and allow it to reallocate resources off of a feature that is becoming less important – and sillier – with each iteration.
I mean, seriously, the story has the bad guys sneaking up on people in space. That’s just sad.
Hot Coffee and News
Gerard Butler and Vin Diesel next up to not make a Kane and Lynch movie
Lucky guys gets an Xbox One early, tries to sell it for more than a car
With the PS4 and Xbox One coming, Nintendo goes to its happy place
Editors' Recommendations
- Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile is out to eliminate mobile gaming’s stigma
- Hogwarts Legacy beats out Call of Duty to become 2023’s bestselling game
- 2023 set an incredibly high bar for video game sequels
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III trailer teases a No Russian reimagining
- Activision teases Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III’s biggest improvements