It’s a sad truth of the world that there are only so many war crimes you can render in pornographic detail before it all starts to get ho-hum. The electric thrill wears off, the dizzying highs transform into stultifying mids, and even the Red Cross stops calling when you execute your millionth downed opponent.
This is, probably, not quite what former Call of Duty animator Chance Glasco was talking about in a recent interview with Tulsa’s News 9 network (via GameSpot), but I like to pretend it is. Glasco—one of the original coterie of former Medal of Honor devs who founded Infinity Ward back when dinosaurs walked the Earth in 2002–-recently appeared on the network to chat about his experience working on CoD and what he thinks of the series’ long trajectory over the last decade or two.
“It’s almost like The Simpsons,” said Glasco, “it’s been around so long that it feels like they’ve run out of ideas at times. It kind of wandered into left field.” You might be thinking ‘clearly here is a man who isn’t familiar with CoD’s expansive range of new weed-themed skins,’ but you’d be wrong—Glasco still plays the games regularly. Well, one part of them, anyway.
“I still enjoy playing Warzone,” said Glasco, but added he doesn’t play much outside of that. Maybe CoD’s regular multiplayer just hasn’t changed enough from the days since he was working on it, maybe he just likes throwing rocks at people in the Gulag.
I can’t disagree with the man. For as many new CoDs as there have been since Modern Warfare first came out and revealed to mankind that we could shoot people in settings other than WW2, I sometimes struggle to tell them apart. I’m not a CoD expert, but to me the biggest switch-ups in the series’ formula have been Warzone (which was very much just Activision getting on board a train started by PUBG and Fortnite) and DMZ (rest in peace). Otherwise? CoD remains CoD, save some tinkering around the edges. At least you can be Snoop Dogg now.
On some level, you can’t fault people for not wanting to mess with what works. As Glasco says of the old days, “Multiplayer really hooked people, and over time, it became huge. I wouldn’t say it peaked at Modern Warfare 2, but that was probably the best game we made.” I wouldn’t want to futz with that magic if I ran the show, although I might not have literally released a different game called Modern Warfare 2 again.
Anyway, the series remains bigger than god, so it must be doing something right, and hey, we could still be stuck in the days of endlessly repeating WW2 instead of, um, lightly fictionalised recreations of the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. Glasco certainly doesn’t want to return to those days: “I spent more time making WW2 games than America was actually in WW2, so moving to modern settings felt refreshing.”
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