Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011) (PS3)

Note: This review contains spoilers for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009).

With a game as successful as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) (CoD:MW2), making over $1 billion within three months, the future of the Call of Duty franchise would be surely be guaranteed. However, that future would not include series creators Jason West and Vince Zampella. It’s a very infamous and well-documented story, but the short version is that West and Zampella wanted more creative control over Call of Duty (CoD) following Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’s (CoD4) success, though Activision CEO Bobby Kotick included a loophole in the agreement that control would revert back to Activision if the duo were ever fired. Soon after, Activision did everything in their power through an internal campaign dubbed “Project Icebreaker” to find a reason to replace the duo during development of CoD:MW2, which included plans to stage a fake fire drill to copy Infinity Ward employee emails. After CoD:MW2 came out and proved a massive success, West and Zampella were fired after renegotiations fell through, with Activision accusing them of “insubordination”. About 40 of Infinity Ward’s employees, numbering around 100 at the time, would quit and leave with West and Zampella to form Respawn Entertainment, who would develop the Titanfall series in partnership with Electronic Arts before later being acquired wholly by EA and making both Apex Legends and the Star War Jedi series. In the meantime, however, Infinity Ward was in the midst of developing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (CoD:MW3), now put in jeopardy without the studio’s founders, and the publisher was in a legal battle over unpaid CoD:MW2 royalties. As such, Activision would seek assistance from Sledgehammer Games and Raven Software to help with development on CoD:MW3, which would see the light of day in late 2011.

That brings us to now, as I now finish my journey through the original Modern Warfare trilogy. I didn’t remember hearing too much from other people around the release of CoD:MW3, but I did remember hearing about the drama around West and Zampella (especially the fire drill story). I was already planning on playing CoD:MW3 to round out the trilogy, but after enjoying Infinity Ward’s work on CoD4 and CoD:MW2, even with whatever criticisms I may have expressed, my curiosity grew about how the studio would handle CoD without any involvement from its creators. Although Sledgehammer and Infinity Ward did their best given the situation, it’s impossible to ignore the effect of West and Zampella’s absence in the final product.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) (PS3)

Note: This review contains spoilers for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

The explosive success of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (CoD4) would naturally justify production of a sequel, eventually confirmed and revealed as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (CoD:MW2). While I was in high school back in 2009, this was actually the first Call of Duty (CoD) game where I couldn’t escape discussion about it thanks to the massive hype surrounding it (even a teacher would mention playing it one time during a class discussion). Apart from hearing endless discussion about the multiplayer, however, I was mostly aware of one Mission, “No Russian”, due to its controversial content, which for years was the only thing I knew about CoD’s storytelling and knowingly out of context. Now, with much more knowledge about CoD than I had before, my approach is more informed by not only playing CoD4, which has an incredible campaign on its own, but also the knowledge that this was the last time that Infinity Ward would develop a CoD game with original creators Jason West and Vince Zampella still involved, a story that I’ll save for another time. For now, however, we celebrate this blog’s fifteenth anniversary with CoD:MW2, which holds up surprisingly well in spite of some issues with the campaign.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (PS3)

Back in high school, in the far-off era of the mid-2000s, I couldn’t escape discussion about Call of Duty (CoD) from fellow students, particularly the Modern Warfare trilogy (even one of my teachers played Modern Warfare 2 at the time). Despite this, however, I never really touched the games for one reason or another due to my differing tastes in games at the time. I have since played more FPS games, as you can see on this blog, but even then, I still never touched CoD and hadn’t intended to thanks to the series’ increasingly mixed reception. That would change, however, as I learned that the series had more than just the name going for it and actually left a major impact on FPS games and gaming as a whole. As such, I decided that for the fifteenth anniversary of this blog, I would finally do my due diligence and play the Modern Warfare trilogy, beginning with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (CoD4) from 2007, developed by Infinity Ward. I didn’t know exactly what to expect going in, but I walked away finally understanding the game’s appeal and lasting influence.