Tying a series into a yearly release schedule has consequences, especially where it has to have a new narrative and is not as easily iterated as a sports game. Activision has long alternated developers on each year’s Call of Duty, which may have helped to avoid Tomb Raider-style total burnout, even amidst Activision’s horrendous wider culture. This practice gave Treyarch more than a year to make World at War. That also meant that they had World of War well underway, its return to World War II committed to, at the point Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare hit far bigger than expected. It was too late to make the game’s immediate follow-up into Modern Warfare 2, and that would have to wait.
This does not mean that there’s nothing of Modern Warfare in World at War, however. Very much not. Many of the tools for building it were shared, and its stylistic approach is heavily incorporated. The auto-aim gets a slight power decrease, but the emphasis is still on relentlessly fast-paced action in which your role is as one of many, following shouted directions. Any time there is a slight pause, it becomes routine to expect that it will be followed by a dramatic reversal of some sort. Individual missions take after Modern Warfare, none more so than the Russia-based sniper mission.
When this works, it has an energy that it’s easy to get swept along with. When it doesn’t work… well, there was a reason why the initial breakthrough Medal of Honor games mostly sent you on solo missions outside of some big set pieces. However carefully you set up your puppets to follow their tracks around the stage and pirouette for the audience, if that audience doesn’t stand in the right place at the right time, they will see the strings. World at War does a far superior job than Medal of Honor: Frontline of making it feel like you’re in an actual warzone with many participants, but as it tries to add more engaging elements it’s still clear that the war is waiting for you.
Two explosive charges need planting. You have one. Your colleagues plant the other. “Timer’s fried” they call. The thing explodes right on cue after you plant yours, whenever that is. Every airstrike to call, every big moment, they all have to be yours. In game mechanics, you’re still the solo hero of old, at the same time as the story tries to have you just one of many. Miss your cues and things get really strange. The invisible barriers to keep you on the battlefield are just the start.
At one point I was given the task of blowing up some tanks with bazookas. I ran out of ammo, I wasn’t sure where to get more from so I pressed ahead anyway and reached a checkpoint. Then followed a good twenty minutes of repeated failed attempts at getting anywhere from said checkpoint without being blown up by tank shells. I actually got an achievement for dying so many times. I eventually managed to negotiate my way back to do what the game had expected me to do in the first place, duly chastened for having taken any kind of initiative.
The even stranger thing about World at War’s all-action approach, its progression of Modern Warfare, is that it makes the 1940s feel like a progression of modern warfare too. The approach to calling in airstrikes feels implausibly high tech, but little else can’t fit in. The characters, the no-nonsense, job-focused soldiers, are virtually indistinguishable from their counterparts of sixty years later. Medal of Honor traded in nostalgia, solemn old music, typed mission briefings. World at War starts off with a bit of vintage footage but quickly moves on to fast-moving infographics, the best replacement for radar images.
At one level, this is an improvement on mawkish sentimentality, and in its own way more respectful in presenting its historical figures as people. In another way, it’s a continuation of the same process. Presenting shooters as historical and educational was a successful reach for respectability, and World War II was an ideal setting for taking the actions of players in killing lots of people and grounding those actions in well-established virtue. Call of Duty then putting those World War II soldiers on an unchanging continuum with its modern day ones feels like a way of plugging the present day army into that same virtue.
That partial modern day perspective feels even more unavoidable when it comes to World at War’s own version of Modern Warfare’s line in moral-ambiguity-as-spectacle. It similarly alternates between different forces, but treats them a lot more differently than its predecessors US and UK forces. World at War’s Americans fighting against Japan in the Pacific are subjected to horrors and ambushes but even when wielding flame-throwers remain professionals doing their jobs, personal animus directed solely at the prime minister in charge. They’re the good guys. The chasing down fleeing enemies, the lust for their blood, the unhinged bellowing of Gary Oldman? That’s all when you play as the Russians.
Call of Duty: World at War spent a total of six weeks at the top of the UK charts. Details of what else was popular during that time after the page break.