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In a hotel suite of E3 2019, Joel Emslie, Artistic Director of the Infinity Ward studio, and Jacob Minkoff, Director of Design for a Player, unveiled two levels of the Call of Duty: Modern war campaign. They showed these same two levels to the press last May, but the messages around these levels have changed. During this presentation, the two designers relied on realism and the potential emotional discomfort that the players would feel playing in the campaign.
The creative team is apparently still figuring out exactly the emotional discomfort it wants to dispel. At least one line of dialogue of the sequence shown to the press will be removed from Modern war later, they said. The line in question is delivered by a Russian soldier who apprehended a girl from the fictional country of Urskstan, where part of the game will be played. The soldier wonders if he should give this girl back to her commander, who "likes the younger ones".
During this scene, the player lives in a different girl from Ursekstan who is fleeing Russian forces. This young girl has just watched her two parents die before her eyes; the scene culminates when she ends up having a gun and forcing herself to use it. It is already a heartbreaking scene, even without involvement of sexual pedophile danger.
The first scene the developers showed was heartbreaking in a different way. It begins with a terrorist attack in London, then continues in a townhouse where part of the terrorists (and civilians) are staying. The player is part of a special forces team that infiltrates this house, eliminates each of the terrorists and leaves the civilians unscathed – ideally, that is to say. This scene shows the extent of research conducted by the Modern war the team made for the game to be real. The movements of the soldiers are based on the movements of Navy SEALs from real life who have consulted Modern warand the design team spent "a year and a half" perfecting the look of night vision sequences.
One of the civilians in this house is a woman who is holding a baby. Pulling on the baby is not advisable. "If you behave in a way that does not befit a soldier, the game will fail," Minkoff said. "But what if you do your job?" The game will try to determine if you killed this baby intentionally or accidentally. "We have a lot of heuristics behind the scenes trying to figure out: are you a psychopath fooling around and running everything? Well. But if you really try to do your job and just say, "Oh, God, I made a mistake and I feel really bad about it," we want you to feel that way. We want you to really sit down with that.
This type of error can result in different dialogue reactions from your surroundings. "If you take actions that go beyond the limit but are understandable, your dialogue with your allies will strengthen," said Minkoff. "In some cases, their performances will branch out and they will call you on, and there will be other animated captured performances."
"The story itself is linear, but in the context of the mission, if you go to the line but you do not cross it," he said, "you will end up with characters who say things like: "Dude, what did you just do? Good God. I hope nobody will have heard about it. "
Emslie and Minkoff have expressed hope that this level of realism, as well as the tough challenges that players will face in the campaign, will generate sympathy among players, as well as residents of neighborhoods that become war zones. .
"We want you to feel how difficult it is for a soldier to face the modern battlefield," Minkoff said. "And we are talking about the world they have to deal with. It's a world where one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. We talk a lot about it. We say, what is the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist? The difference is what your government says, right? Who does the CIA send its weapons to this week? They are freedom fighters. Who are they fighting for this week? Oh, it's the terrorists. "
Modern war will involve characters who have multiple perspectives on conflict in hand, says Minkoff. "We have Western allies and Western enemies. We have Russian allies and Russian enemies. And we have allies from the Middle East and enemies from the Middle East. Allies in the Middle East represent a whole new opportunity for Modern war explore, "he says.
This includes the introduction of the character Farah. The scene representing her was a flashback on a particularly tragic day of her childhood. She sees her mother crushed to death in the rubble of a building hit by a kind of artillery strike, then she sees her father being murdered by a Russian soldier. Farah and her younger brother, both of whom appear to be between 7 and 10 years old, must immediately return from the death of their parents to work together to defeat the soldier who killed their father. Farah takes out her gas mask, walks out of their homes and escapes the rest of the Russian soldiers. At the end of this level, Farah finds a gun and, with a trembling hand, raises him to aim at one of the Russian fighters.
Farah will become a rebel fighter, although Emslie and Minkoff have not specified which side of the conflict she would end up on. It is clear from this scene that it is supposed to be accessible to the English-speaking public because Farah's whole family speaks English, even with accents, even in the privacy of his home and in a very stressful situation. In contrast, all Russian soldiers speak only in Russian, with subtitles.
The point of view of the Russian soldiers is not really specified in the scene. The heavy masked Russian soldier who kills Farah's father is "a caricature, but it was for me artistic and metaphorical," said Emslie. "From time to time you take creative liberties to bring out things and make them special."
Rather than dealing with an American occupation force in their country, Farah witnesses a Russian invasion force. This group of soldiers she meets does not do what they are supposed to do. Minkoff was reluctant to spoil any major plot, but he noted that one of the antagonists would be a Russian general, whom he described as "a particular rogue general, whom you should think of as Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Nowwho comes out of the reserve and says, "I know how to protect Russia. Do not worry about legality and all that. This country – this fictitious country of Ursekstan – is fertile ground for terrorists. And if they can not administer themselves, I will do it for them. And, in the end, we are working with the Russians to eliminate it because it is a problem. "
After this answer, I asked my question about the Russian soldier who noted that his commander "liked the youngest", and about the sexual danger implicit in the character of the player at that time, who is even a young girl trying to sneak. his way out of this situation.
"Part of the reality of the war is that there are people who face unpleasant events, and there are some – I really try to work with spoilers – but what we do not want to run away, these are the realities that some people face in the war, "said Minkoff." And some of these things are addressed in the storyline.All I can tell you, is that, as in all cases, we have many consultants. "
As a follow-up, I asked Minkoff if any of the team's research on child soldiers involved, for example, pedophiles. At this point, he had a very different answer.
"It's an imaginary world," he said. "It's not the real life. This is not a real policy. It is not even a real country in the world. So no. These events are not specific to a real world search. It's an entertainment product with a fictional story. But, I asked, it's a realistic story, right? Minkoff replied "yes" and left things in abeyance.
At the end of the presentation, the public relations team followed me to tell me that the line in question was going to be cut off from the game and that it was originally conceived as a prefiguration for a later scene of the film. Modern war campaign that has apparently also been cut off. Although Farah is apparently facing significant perils in this game, this particular danger does not seem to be part of it.
At the beginning of the presentation, Minkoff had noted that even those who look like villains still consider themselves "the hero of their own story".
"We want to make sure that in this story you see war from all angles," he said. "You may not agree with what a character decides to want to do, and you may end up calling him a terrorist or villain, but you have to understand why they are fighting."
The two scenes, however, do not seem to represent these shades of gray. These two scenes describe a binary view of good and evil. There are terrorists on whom you can and must fire, and civilians who should not be used. There are good soldiers who follow the good orders of the right people, then there are bad soldiers who follow the wrong orders. Modern war will have winning states and failing states, and its failing states will also judge whether you have actually followed this binary good and bad.
Modern war is still in development and the game has already changed, even with respect to what will be included in the final versions of the scenes presented to the press. The seemingly binary nature of these scenes could prove much more complicated in practice. Maybe Farah will eventually work with American soldiers to eliminate the "bad" Russian soldiers. Or perhaps she will decide, at adulthood, to oppose Western intruders in her country. The latter seems unlikely, however, given his apparent preference for speaking English.
I'd like to believe the tone I've heard, it's a Modern war game that takes into account multiple perspectives in the war and encourages the player to sympathize with the fate of different fighters. The two scenes do not necessarily show that. But, again, the game could change. He has already.
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