Less Than Five Days Until Modern Warfare 2: Why Failure Is Impossible

“Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” came out almost exactly two years ago, and took the shooter market by storm. It has since become the absolute standard port of call for the FPS genre, with its tight, intuitive console control scheme and deep, multi-layered online achievement system. In a matter of days, Infinity Ward intends to unleash their new monster, “Modern Warfare 2,” and I’d like to take a moment to outline why it simply won’t go wrong for them.

Let me start by stating the obvious; this is a massive release across the major platforms, so big in fact that the release dates of several other shooters, such as “Singularity,” have been pushed back into next year in order to keep the spotlight firmly on “MW2.” Yet even if the game wasn’t due out for another year, I’m almost certain that the fans would’ve happily played “COD4″ just as religiously for all that time, and remained just as loyal to the sequel. In fact I’d hazard a guess that if on November 10th, Infinity Ward released a game titled “Modern Warfare: Again But Slightly Different,” very few people would’ve complained so long as they had a few new maps, guns and perks, and reviewers still would’ve rated it higher than most current generation action games (most of which base themselves of “COD4″).

But that’s the thing; the dev team really haven’t taken the easy road here, they’re actually trying to do what they did in 2007 again, and from the outside it’s looking like they’re going to succeed. “MW2″ is essentially three games straight out of the box:

1) The Story Mode, which, if it is anything like “COD4″ will be a masterpiece as well as an utter testament to the greatness of linearity in a generation full of sandboxes.

2) The Spec Ops mode, which is completely separate from the main story, and is for anyone who enjoyed playing “World at War” with friends, but wished the experience was properly geared towards that style of play.

3) Finally there’s the Online Play, which, I imagine, is the sole reason most people will buy this game, the kind of people who didn’t even bother with the story last time round, and missed some of the best the series has to offer. The online has been completely gutted and sewn back together with diamond encrusted thread – it will be shipping with around 14 maps, a wealth guns, old and new, new perks which have been thought out with player feedback firmly in mind (knife perks!), not mentioning that they now level up in same way as the guns, the more you use them.

In summary, what I’m trying to say here is that a lot of shooters in the last two years have all done “COD4 but…sandbox/space/etc” and never really come up with the goods. Ironically enough it looks like “Modern Warfare 2″ is going to be one of few games that takes the far better approach of just starting from the raw materials and giving back to their loyal fan base.

One thing I don’t appreciate however, is evidently sucking that fan base off, as all the exclusive content seems to be going in the Xbox 360 direction, but, to be honest, that’s just a testament to Xbox Live so I’ll let it go.

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