Modern Warfare 2: When 3-5 Million In Sales Means Nothing
Record numbers have graced the sales charts for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Reviews tell tale of the game being nothing short of an instant “Game of the Year” winner or at least the strongest contender and many gamers across the web confirm that the game is amazing. Is this just people clamoring over the concept of ‘new’ or is the game really great?
I guess another way to spin this would be in the arena of religion. Just because a large population feel God is real doesn’t automatically make God real.
I spent a few of hours playing the game myself (because that’s about how long it took to finish), and not being much of a multiplayer person spent maybe 30 or so minutes playing online. Frankly, I wasn’t impressed. The graphics are what one would expect them to be on the current consoles and the game does do a good job of making the player stop and think about the grey morality in the airport and mall scenarios, but it doesn’t’ really add to the game. Any number of shooters does exactly the same things that MW2 does.
***SPOILER ALERT***
This time around though, the story in the single player campaign makes little sense – like an unfinished Tom Clancy novel. Players are just pushed into combat as a martyr character “Allen” as a spy who gets found out and used as a scapegoat to set the games events into motion. For the rest of the game I was left wondering, why was Allen relevant to the story as a player character when it could be summed up in a series of cinematic scenes? What purpose did shooting civilians in the Mall and Airport serve if the story is unaffected by the option to decline participation? And finally… why wasn’t General Shepard’s betrayal better explained? One minute he’s all about catching Makarov and the next minute he kills Ghost and Roach and tries to also kill Price and Soap. The game concludes with Soap killing Shepard and having to go into hiding. I’m left with the impression that Soap will be heading up a band of what will appear to be rouge operatives and a handful of people who ultimately know the truth – yet with Shepard dead, does it really matter? They’ll clear their names (how I couldn’t tell you, the only people who can confirm Soap and Price aren’t traitors that we know of are dead), and the story is told so poorly that it’s doubtful that any of it will make sense later in a third installment.
***SPOILER OVER***
Maybe I’m a jaded gamer. Maybe I just have my expectations set to high? Why shouldn’t I – I just paid $60 to play a game for 4 hours 37 minutes – that’s $13 an hour. The people who sold me that game don’t generally make that much an hour; of course I’m a bit dissatisfied. You can cry “jaded gamer!” at me all you like, but for what other audience was MW2 shooting? 1/3 is the jaded casual gamer audience and a portion of that 3 million will take one week trips into each new title or DLC that launches, only to return home regardless of their recent vacation spot. It also helps when you release a paint-by-numbers expansion for a content-starved game, packing 2 years of development time into an upfront, quick, and ultimately shallow experience, another market condition that simply should not exist but does because 3 million gamers are too short sighted to take time and really think about where their $60 goes.
The game has merit outside of the single player campaign (which seems to be a weak story filled training exercise, as was MW1). The multi-player aspects of it are fun. I don’t like MMO style of games, but I can objectively see where it’s a fun game to people. I sort of enjoyed the 30 or so minutes I spent playing it. I however, don’t feel that it has staying power to be likened with ‘greatest’ or ‘best ever’.
Before writing this I sought out to see if I stood alone in my feelings. Was I really jaded? Was I being too harsh and over complicating my sentiments? I went to GameStop this afternoon to trade in Borderlands and Demon’s Souls. I’ve played them both in excess and neither one has a high level of replay value with me beyond a second play-through. While in line the gentleman in front of me had MW2… to trade back in. I asked if he just didn’t like it. He responded with, “I hated it. I was furious.”
Upon asking what and why he was furious he described the same things that I did about the game. It was short, it made little sense, and it was way too easy even on normal difficulty. He introduced himself as Cedric described a feeling of being robbed of his $60.
“I didn’t mind shooting people in the airport or mall, but when I played online, it was weak. People were even talking about how they were going to play this until Battlefield and MAG came out.” Cedric continued, “If you like multiplayer FPS games it’s good, but it won’t be for long and like I said, those [MAG and Battlefield] will be out – people talked about them while playing it [MW2] and it was kind of indicating that there won’t be many people playing this in a couple of months”
It brought to light a point I’ve made before – online games expire when the competitors make a new one. People jump from game to game and while that might be a reason why developers don’t focus on the staying power of an MMO, it should be a reason why the focus on the staying power of the single player campaign. In this sense Infinity Ward dropped the ball hardcore and I for one feel they’re no more deserving of MW2 being “Game of the Year” than Obama being handed the Nobel Peace Prize.
I hung out in GameStop for another hour and half debating on which games I’d be getting on my trades and several other people came in trading back MW2, more than came in looking to get it (5 people traded in and two were looking to buy it). I noticed a lot of Borderlands on the pre-owned shelf, a lot of Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, and a few other MW2. What I didn’t see in any console pre-owned section was Uncharted 2, Brutal Legends, and ODST, you know, games that developers made an honest effort into making it worth the money spent on buying them. One more time I’ll say it – to get an idea on how great a game really is you have to look past the initial sales numbers. Initial sales contain a percentage of people who buy hype, have video game ADD and get fooled – the pre-owned shelf is what shows which games are too good to trade in and which games were full of hype. A title that gets a low trade in value, is in abundance on the pre-owned shelf, or shows up quickly says “poor”. The fact that MW2 has as many copies as I have fingers on the pre-owned shelf in just ONE of the 4 GameStop stores in my area one day after launch also says “poor quality”.
No matter how I feel, MW2 will attain the level of ‘greatness’. But let’s keep that greatness in perspective. MW2 is not 10x better than MoHAA/ Unreal / Counter Strike / Battlefield, and because of their amazing greatness it has reached its 3 million sales. It’s a polished MoH clone with a broken foot in the Battlefield market, and it’s a pop sensation raised and perpetuated by its own popularity. It’s the equivalent of Good Charlotte in music, Twilight in movies, or The Sims in gaming: Tofu disguised as caviar and escargot. You reach a certain popularity point, and people buy it because everyone else is doing it. The masses are lemmings, this is not news.
And those same lemmings now are indeed the MMOFPS tourist population, jumping into MW2. The same pattern they followed in MW2came from MW1 which came from Battlefield, which came from Counter Strike and Unreal and will apply to any and all future MMOFPSs. Then they will turn around and demand innovation, but only if that innovation is as polished as the copied, refined, and safe features they are use to - well except for the PC version donkey-punching, for them the beatings will continue until they love it unconditionally and because developers like Infinity Ward just can’t be bothered to truly innovate a damn thing. Quantity is not indicitive of quality and I’m sick and fucking tired of having people look at quantity as though it’s a sign of awesome.
