“All unknowns are hostile” – Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

**Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3** (Infinity Ward/ Sledgehammer/Activision, Xbox 360, 2011)

I’ve been playing Modern Warfare 3 alongside a lot of Final Fantasy XIII-2, and it’s got me thinking about the two series. They differ in a lot of ways, but they have also both been at the forefront of pushing ways to do games narrative with a view to the visually and emotionally spectacular. The original Modern Warfare landed with an impact on first person shooter narrative something like Final Fantasy VII’s on the RPG equivalent. Both did things that had technically been done before, but with a whole new scale and panache.

Much of the reason I was thinking about the two is down to Final Fantasy VII and, well, the thing. The famous twist. The fact that after hours of getting to know a character, controlling them through countless battles, building towards a future, they get killed and it all gets ripped away. Something outside of the boundaries of expectations happens and that’s it. You just keep going, working your way round the hole left by this bit of collapsed narrative. It’s brutal and moving and memorable.

And one of the big moments of Modern Warfare is its own version of that. You don’t get to know the characters to the same extent, so to compensate it blows up an entire unit and a whole pathway of the game in a nuclear explosion. It’s brutal and memorable, and it shreds expectations and conventional narrative and gameplay links at a similar early stage of the game.

Released two years after Final Fantasy VII and its death scene, the first disc of Final Fantasy VIII ends with its lead character getting run through by something big and pointy. It plays with imagery drawing on a new set of expectations, and upping the ante in the only way possible by doing it with the player’s perspective character. After a bit of a suspenseful break, it reveals that Squall survived. Rinoa, the other half of its main couple, is put in various mortal peril and taken away from the player’s control for periods, but returns safely too.

Having introduced a famous twist, a repeat cannot be as unexpected, and risks being in its shadow. For Final Fantasy VIII, playing with the threat and discarding it became the twist. There are plenty of tragic character deaths in later Final Fantasy games, including of party members, but they happen at the climax of those games. Even a new spin on the same twist in Final Fantasy VII Remake comes at the end thanks to splitting the story across games. Leaving it as a one-off is an approach which has worked. Other approaches are available.

For instance, you could double down and then double down again and then keep going. Modern Warfare 2’s No Russian mission with its civilian massacre came with a lot of pertinent distractions. It was also, though, another mission which ends with the surprise death of its main character. It didn’t even take another game to get to the next instance of that happening, with another Modern Warfare 2 mission upping the ante by putting its nuclear explosion IN SPACE and blowing up the International Space Station along with the temporary player character.

Modern Warfare 3 has an early mission where you are set the task of protecting the Russian President on board a plane. It has some invigoratingly over-the-top bits in which you float around a diving plane shooting people, before picking your way through the wreckage of the inevitable crash. Those things are all new and meet the requirement for spectacle and then some. However, when I got to the end of the mission, when the text comes up “Mission failed” and the series’s leading bad guy turns out to be there and killing you, it barely even registered as a shock. It was demonstrably just how Modern Warfare works. If you want to keep pressing the same twist buttons, you have to keep jamming those things down harder and harder.

Sometimes even that won’t work. Modern Warfare 3’s No Russian equivalent has you as a tourist filming his family on a London sightseeing trip. The interesting twist of shooting mechanic didn’t hold any appeal because it was so immediately obvious that they were just there to die in the latest city bombing. American civilians including a young girl are presented for maximum emotional effect, the setup ruthlessly efficient to try to catch you out with speed if nothing else.

That’s not so much a failure mode for Modern Warfare 3 as its only mode. It is the second UK #1 game in a row to feature a London section with a view of Canary Wharf and a shootout in a tube station, but manages to make Uncharted 3’s look like a bastion of realism. Shortly before playing the blown-up tourists, you are a soldier in an armoured vehicle chasing after a hijacked tube train. The absurdly spacious and wide tunnels take you non-stop from Canary Wharf to Westminster in less than five minutes, the intervening five stations be damned. It’s a nice metaphor for Modern Warfare 3’s whole approach.

Early on, the game uses things crashing into NYC skyscrapers and falling debris for a grim bit of real world resonance. As much as it wants to hype up real fears as part of MW3’s WW3, though, bring them into its paranoid world where all unknowns are hostile, it does so with an impatient finger on the fast-forward button. It’s the inverse of Uncharted 3’s pacing problems: gameplay that had sustained a bit more of an attention span in previous games not given the chance. Twist something the same way too many times and it might just break.