I spent pretty much all of last week playing through five Call of Duty campaigns, and at the end of it I had two overriding thoughts. The first was that it's really depressing that even a billion-dollar franchise is cutting corners in this day and age. And the second was: for a game that’s 15 years old, Modern Warfare 2 is looking really, really good.
See, of those five games I played, three had been made since 2019. And the copy of the original Modern Warfare I played was the 2016 remaster. All with what you'd say were reasonable contemporary visuals. But when playing through Modern Warfare 2 I played the 2009 original, which I assumed going into it would be something of a disaster.
A lot has changed since 2009, even for a game that would have been one of that year's biggest releases, and I was bracing myself to run into everything from resolution hiccups to stutters (a long-running plague for the series on PC) to everything just looking like plain dogshit on my 4K monitor and modern computer.
How wrong I was! The game defaulted to 4K and, with anti-aliasing and some other settings maxxed out, I settled in to play through a campaign that, in 2024, looked just fine. Characters were full of detail, environments were crisp, explosions and other effects were as bombastic as they needed to be. And in parts it looked better than fine; whenever dramatic lighting was involved, like the siege of the White House, it looked great.
Meanwhile, the new Call of Duty games look amazing, but at what cost? Their credits include thousands of people--we're talking numbers so staggering I don't even know what to make of them--but for all the cinematic quality of their cutscenes, and the general sheen around the game's visuals as a whole, their campaigns were worse--smaller, less expressive, less ambitious--in almost every single other way to games made over a decade ago and with a staff count in "just" the hundreds.
It got me thinking, in a slightly broader way than this headline's inspiration made famous: what if instead of spending all those resources, time and money making ho-hum campaigns with nice cutscenes, Activision had instead decided to make a bigger and better game that didn't look quite as nice? What if--and I know I'm speaking very generally here, at a strategic level--we got longer missions with more interesting stuff to do in them? I'm sure that sounds like heresy to the people holding the whip at a AAA publisher, because it's simply Video Game Law that each successive game on each successive platform must look better.
And like, to a point, I agree with that. Or at least did at a time. If you'd tried to sell me a PS1-looking game in 2012, for example, I'd have said "no thank you, what is this shit", because in 2012 I would have expected tangible returns from over a decade of video game hardware advancement.
But it's 2024 now, who cares! Successive "underpowered" Nintendo consoles, a torrent of small-budget indie hits and increasingly diminishing returns in hardware advancement have smashed the idea that "graphics are everything" into a million pieces. What's more, the arms race of AAA games development--with so much of its resources devoted to, again in very broad terms, visuals--is clearly becoming unsustainable.
Are "graphics" important to a big-budget video game in 2024? Sure! But are they everything? Because I just played a video game from 2009 that shit all over its 2023 successor, despite being made with a (relative) fraction of the manpower and cost. And while it didn't look amazing, it looked fine. Maybe fine is all we need!
