Titanfall 2 and Modern Warfare Remastered: What’s Old is New Again
The back-to-back release of Titanfall 2 and Modern Warfare Remastered gave me an opportunity to reflect on nearly a decade of playing through various First Person Shooter single-player campaigns. The original Modern Warfare was part of the trio of FPS games in 2007, alongside Portal and BioShock, that would come to define a generation of games. In a way, the three games represented a tipping point for the mainstream acceptance of games as a unique storytelling medium that could leverage interactivity in a manner that isn’t possible in other forms of storytelling.
Fast-forward to 2016, where we have a game released by the remnants of Infinity Ward, the developers who created Modern Warfare, and I can’t help but make comparisons to Titanfall 2's campaign. Of course, I’m sure there’s been quite a lot of staff turnover, and games are a collaborative effort that makes it difficult to track down who wrote or designed which aspect of either campaign, but the fact that both Jesse Stern and Steve Fukuda are still at Respawn at least allows for the assumption of some continuity in design between Modern Warfare and Titanfall 2.
Perhaps the most striking feature of Modern Warfare’s single-player campaign is the fact that you are asked to inhabit characters who die. Games have always been power fantasies of some sort, where a player death would be met with a game over screen that offered the player the chance to come back to life and try again. Sure, the campaign featured a lot of the bombast found in the previous games and in other imitators at the time, but this was the first one to try to acknowledge the cost of war by doing more than showing death — it made the player experience death.
“Aftermath” is perhaps the most powerful moment in Modern Warfare, where you as the player control the last moments of Paul Jackson, one of hundreds of marines who are killed by a nuclear explosion:
In my dissertation, I wrote that there was a sense of nihilism that came from manipulating player agency in this particular manner — giving control to the player only so that they can experience the futility of agency, and replaying the game now gives me the same feeling. At the very least, while the game treads on well-worn war clichés, even now I can recognize that the game tried to develop an anti-war message. It’s also remarkable how the campaign is better at conveying such a message, or any message, than Infinite Warfare (the game that you have to buy in order to play Modern Warfare Remastered). Not that Infinite Warfare necessarily has a bad campaign, but it’s story is nothing more than a military science fiction wrapped around a generic action story that has become the staple of the Call of Duty games not produced by the original members of Infinity Ward.
Titanfall 2’s campaign in many ways returns to the old shooter campaigns of old. As a story, it fits so neatly with the myth cycle that has become an obsession with Star Wars fans that it is immediately familiar. The generically named video game protagonist, Jack Cooper, is a trainee who is thrust into greatness when his mentor is killed and he has to assume the mantle of Pilot. Jack grows into his new role, is “killed” and “reborn”, and then fulfills the hero’s destiny by completing his journey.
While the actual story isn’t anything to write home about, the actual design of the campaign is very interesting. On the one hand it’s a bit regressive inasmuch as the first half of the game feels very much like it was designed by Valve. The first part of the game is a fairly scripted endeavor, where the player is quickly isolated from any friendly faces and motivated to learn a new gameplay mechanic — in this case, wall-running — in order to survive. It’s not quite the City 17 opening from Half-Life 2, but the opening of Titanfall 2 is certainly evocative of it. The “Valve” section of the campaign culminates with a time travel mechanic that thrusts the player into the middle of Portal-esque spatial puzzle problem. It’s a complete departure from what a veteran player would expect from a campaign released by Respawn, and that’s probably the main reason why so many people found it refreshing and reviewed it well.
That’s not to say that Titanfall 2 doesn’t have its Call of Duty “moments”. The final part of the game is full of bombast and excitement, capturing the energy of some of the set pieces that are so fondly remembered from the previous Modern Warfare campaigns. What I found interesting though is how they clearly introduced a moment that is evocative of the “Aftermath” level shown above and of the Halo Reach level “Lone Wolf”.
In the beginning of “The Fold Weapon”, the final level of the game, Jack and his AI companion BT are captured by a Mercenary named Blisk. The player watches as BT is “killed” in front of them, while they are left to die in a fiery inferno. When the game finally returns control to the player, the first mission directive is to simply “Survive”.
It is a moment where the player expects their agency stripped away from them, because it’s how FPS campaigns have evolved over the last decade or so. Indeed, the Halo Reach level has the exact same directive — Survive:
In “Lone Wolf”, the player is simply tasked to make a final, heroic last stand against overwhelming forces. There is no last minute escape, no deus ex machina to save the player — the story ends when the player is finally defeated, through attrition, by infinitely spawning Covenant enemies. The Halo Reach ending is perhaps the culmination of the nihilistic “anti-agency” FPS campaign (with The Stanley Parable being the coda), so it would be natural to assume that Titanfall 2 might follow in its footsteps and that the designers at Respawn might want to put their stamp on the first campaign since Modern Warfare 2 by re-creating the “Aftermath” moment that made the first Modern Warfare so memorable.
But the referential nature of the first part of the campaign simply foreshadowed the actual fate of Jack Cooper:
Rather than force the player to die one more time, or to play through some unwinnable scenario, the player is given the Smart Pistol — essentially the strongest weapon in the game — and for a brief moment is able to simply fly through the enemies as if they mere distractions rather than actual threats. It’s a very empowering moment for the player, as they are able to put together all the movement options that they learned by playing through the campaign to speed through the map and save themselves from the burning ship. And as Jack escapes hell himself, the opening of this level culminates with the resurrection of BT, as a new Titan is dropped into the map and Jack inserts BT’s AI core into the new body. It’s the climax of the myth cycle, in an interactive form.
In many ways it’s an ending that you might see in a shooter campaign from the last decade. The new Doom that came out earlier in 2016 is very much in the same vein, choosing to make the player a “badass” through enhanced agency. It’s a return to the old days of power fantasies and wish-fulfillment, when video game heroes simply kicked ass and chewed bubblegum and didn’t force us to consider the fallacy of interactive empowerment.
I’ll readily admit that the first time I played through that moment, I had a big smile on my face. Given the prevalence of FPS campaigns that try so hard and fail at being serious —the recently released Battlefield 1 and Infinite Warfare both ask the player to care about the death and carnage that war brings, but both fail spectacularly because of how rote they are — it’s actually refreshing to see a game go the other way, even if it is regressive in terms of its message and design.
It should be noted that the game does end with a personal sacrifice (even if it is undercut with a post-credits tease), so the game does try to pull back on making the player feel unconditionally empowered. In fact, perhaps as yet another reference or throwback, the ending is feels like a certain sequence from Shadow of the Colossus, where the player is left helpless and can only watch the ending unfold.
Perhaps it makes sense that Titanfall 2’s campaign is somewhat regressive. Moments of “anti-agency”, where the designer allows the player to play through an unwinnable sequence, have become commonplace enough that it’s possible to play on those expectations and surprise veteran players by affording them agency when they least expect it. So yes, Respawn has designed a campaign that in many ways, feels like it was developed before 2007. But the bigger picture is that the language of interactive agency that is found in video games has expanded so much that anti-agency is considered rote in 2016. We now have an interactive language that allows designers to play on both sides of a player’s expectations of agency and Titanfall 2 reflects that reality.
All of this theorizing aside, it also helps that Respawn has delivered one hell of a single-player campaign, reminding people what they are capable of if given enough time to develop a single-player experience alongside the much vaunted multiplayer experience. Playing Titanfall 2 alongside Modern Warfare Remastered is a reminder that people who make up Respawn are talented storytellers that understand the language of interactivity.
