Games that changed the industry 8: Call of Duty Modern Warfare

I've never been much of a fan of the Call of Duty series on a personal level, maybe because I'm not very good at it. That aside, it's impossible to ignore just how important for the industry the first Modern Warfare game was.

There are some gaming franchises out there that are synonymous with particular consoles or companies (think Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog) and there are accepted leaders in particular genres (think The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim). These are games that stand out to people across the gaming industry. I would argue that our generation has gone one step further and birthed a franchise that comes as close as possible to defining the last ten years of gaming. It is of course COD, Call of Duty- whatever you want to call it, for better or worse you’ve all heard of it.



Since the release of the Call of Duty 4 eight years ago, we have seen a revolution in the gaming world. A few articles back when I wrote about Halo 2, I talked about the online aspect of gaming. You could barely mention online gaming today without hearing a mention of COD, regardless of what you think of it’s single player mode, many have themselves engrossed in the online gameplay.

Naturally it isn’t just the multiplayer that draws people into Call of Duty. The single player campaign has much to offer as well, I remember my first time playing Modern Warfare and becoming really involved in the story of the game at the same time as the intuitive interface and controls.



That aside however, I don’t think we should really be focusing on what Call of Duty 4 is like to play. The thing with the franchise is, you don’t have to like it to appreciate the effect it has had on the industry. If nothing else, you know it because you loathe it, or you know it because your boyfriend/girlfriend won’t stop playing it. Or who knows, maybe you are the boyfriend or girlfriend playing it? At the end of the day, Call of Duty has had a simply enormous reach.

Its effect upon this industry has been so monumental that it would take someone braver than me to say that there will ever be another gaming franchise with the reach to match it. And that is enough to give it its place on this list.

As always, thanks to Exeposé Games as I use the format and editing from their site by Harry Shepherd. 

Sequels I'd like to see: Star Wars Battlefront

It has been talked about for years. And years. It seems like now at least we can safely say at some stage the third instalment of the iconic third shooter Star Wars Battlefront series will appear, although the dates are a bit sketchy, with the best estimates being sometime next year.

Ironically, despite not having had a release date for a Battlefront game since 2005, the franchise was one of the most popular to be first released on the previous, previous generation (is there even a real term for that generation other than PS2 domination period), as well as arguably the most popular Star Wars gaming series ever.

It didn't really matter if you had a preference to one of the two games (I always thought the second game seemed a bit sleeker but the Jedi/Sith/Hero thing was just a bit unnecessary), you knew that you shared some common ground with the majority of the rest of your controller bashing friends, and if you didn't it was generally accepted that there was something wrong with your friend.

source: sparkrising

So why hasn't there been a new game up to this point? Well, I suppose I might hazard a guess at the lack of new material that has been produced following the end of Obi-Wan's time as Ewan McGregor before his transformation into Alec Guinness. With a new trilogy of films due for release starting at the end of next year, a new game with intel on some of the plot and content of these new films would be fantastic for game and film fans alike. 

I could then stop here. Fantastic, the series hasn't been inappropriately milked but we're still being given (hopefully) good new content when the time is right. Yet, for some reason I find myself questioning the lack of game for what will have been ten years: surely if there is so much demand for a product, someone out there, whether the original rights holders or not, creates makes the product. It just makes most sense, particularly if we're talking about a potential decline in console based video games. Using the most popular games more frequently must sell more consoles generally.

All that said, how would I be approaching this now if our beloved Battlefront had been churned out once a year, every year, like many of the first person shooters we love to hate?