If you are a gamer who’s in their late 30s or early 40s, there’s a fairly good chance that you introduction to the shooter genre in video games started on the beaches of Normandy in Medal Of Honor or Call of Duty. There’s an equally good chance that those games are forever engrained in your gamer brain because of the impact they had on you. It’s a real shame then that in today’s gaming market, seemingly no developer is leaning into the world’s history and bringing us historically accurate games. That needs to change.
In the early 2000’s seemingly every shooter that hit the market was a World War II themed shooter. Games like Halo were there and thriving, but those games were more the exception than the rule. Everyone got tired of the WWII shooter as it was overdone and a change of pace was needed. Enter the Modern Warfare era.
While some games in the Modern Warfare era had some historically accurate games, they were mostly fictional games that could feel like they were accurate. When EA brought back Medal of Honor they tried their best with the modern historical games, but it didn’t quite land. And even if the stories in these games weren’t historically accurate the combat was. The guns felt authentic, the vehicles as well.
Today’s shooter is more in the sci-fi realm. Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7 has just released and is as close to a sci-fi shooter as Call of Duty has gotten, and for the most part it doesn’t seem to have landed well with fans. I haven’t played it myself yet so I can’t fully comment on it, but I think many of the complaints aren’t necessarily that the Black Ops 7 campaign is bad, it’s just that it’s a bad Call of Duty campaign.
For as much as people want to hate on Call of Duty campaigns, many still enjoy them. However most enjoy them because they are still at least a little grounded and have a military feel for them. Sure, they have the crazy set pieces like a Fast & Furious movie, but they still at least had a military feel about them.
Battlefield 6, which also released this year to mixed reviews for its campaign from fans, still has that military feel to it at least, but it’s still feeling less authentic than it has in the past. In a vacuum, this isn’t always a bad thing. There’s obviously room in the space for sci-fi shooters, and variety is great. But someone should head back in time and look at history once again.
In A Landscape Where Remake’s Dominate, Why Not Revisit History?
For the longest time I think studio’s thought that once these specific battles, D-Day for example, had been done back in Medal Of Honor and Call Of Duty they can no longer be put into games. But lets be honest now, it’s been 20 years since we’ve seen those games, and in a world where we are remaking Halo: Combat Evolved for the 3rd time and remakes are constantly being released, why can’t we go back to these historical settings?
The impact those early Medal Of Honor and Call of Duty games had on myself and others still carry with me today. I can only imagine the impact they could have using today’s technology and graphics.
And while I keep referencing World War II, it isn’t just limited to that, though it is of course the most prevalent period. Hell Let Loose is taking its multiplayer game to Vietnam. There’s even been enough time past to do more modern things with historical context. Battlefield went back to WWI with Battlefield One with some success and that is a theatre that rarely got used even during the height of the World War shooters in the late 90s and early 2000s.
I’m aware that some of this is likely coming across as just an older gamer wanting things to go back to how it used to be but that’s not entirely the case here. I love today’s shooters, I just wish we got more variety, and as a history buff I’ve always had a soft spot for those games.
This doesn’t even have to be Call of Duty or Battlefield to make the move. I think Call of Duty might pivot after this Black Ops 7 release. It just doesn’t seem to be hitting like previous games and they might go back to the drawing board. It would likely be to more Modern Warfare, but I’d love to see them go this direction.
If it’s not one of those 2 major franchises, maybe EA can revive Medal of Honor once more. Randy Pitchford had talked about a Brother’s in Arms game being in development over a year ago, perhaps they return to their roots and deliver a great historical game.
Whoever decides to do so, there is a market there just waiting to be tapped back into. I just hope that whoever does can do it with justice, and can do it sooner rather than later.
