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. 

Games that changed the industry #7 The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Imagine yourself locked in a prison cell when, totally inexplicably, the emperor of your world appears before you looking for an escape route through your cell. Naturally you follow him with the hope of getting out only to see that he meets a nasty end at the hands of some assassins. Before he dies, he tells you to take a message out into the world. Okay you say, I could do that. After arriving outside in this world however, all of a sudden you get a desire to become a thief and forget all about the emperor and his lousy last wish.

Image credit: Gamefaqs

That is Oblivion. Or at least it’s one of many different ways that you could start it. Like GTA:San Andreas (which I looked at a few weeks back), Oblivion is a game that really showed off what gaming could be.

As one of the first games to be released on the 360/PS3 generation of consoles, Oblivion set the bar for graphics, voice acting and gameplay extremely high. It also took the RPG genre to a new level, encompassing a huge free roaming world, with more customisable traits than I have time to mention. TES IV blew everything before it away.

Image credit: Wikipedia

The most impressive aspect of this game however is a point that I mentioned before: the amount of choice you were given not just in customising your character, but also in how the game played out was truly impressive. If you wanted to do the main quest before touching the rest of the game, that was fine. Equally though, if you never wanted to do the main quest, you didn’t have to, and your experience of the game would have been at least as good.

Oblivion made the technical jump everyone was expecting for a new generation game, but what made it so special was the enormity of the world it put before you. And if that wasn’t enough, it made way for a pretty special follow up as well – a certain Skyrim, or something?