This opens the door for the return of cult characters from the original series, John ‘Soap’ MacTavish and Simon ‘Ghost’ Riley. But it also provided a challenge for the narrative duo in bringing things up to date.
“We had opened up some cans of worms purposefully,” says Bloom of 2019’s climactic cutscene ,which teased the reintroduction of Ghost, “and not pejorative cans of worms – they were exciting! You wanted to see what the hell’s in that can!
“Now the team is three years later, so what’s the team been doing? How can we put as much of the story on camera so that it’s not like, well, a whole canon of three years that you need to know to make this work, has happened?”
Bloom cites the changes in Price and Gaz’s in-game abilities and on-screen portrayals as an example of how they tried to convey three years’ worth of character development without resorting to extended use of exposition or flashbacks.
“There’s a bit of a hand wave through the three years where we’re talking about, hey, they were prosecuting targets and Price and Gaz were getting closer and closer and better and better and becoming, a well-honed, well-oiled fire team. But now delivering on that, well, what does that look like? If you watch Price and Gaz in a 2019 scene and if you watch them in scenes in missions in ‘22, is there a noticeable clear value change?
“We’re thinking in arcs, we’re thinking in timelines, we’re thinking in continuums, and we’re thinking in delivering the promise of a premise that there is a Task Force 141, what does that mean? Who are they? Why do we need them? What would they be here for?”
“And in that way, we knew that it had to be much bigger,” adds Negus.”It had to have a bigger cast, it had to go to more places, it had to dig deeper into certain things.”
Modern Warfare II’s campaign is bigger, alright – a globe-trotting thrill-ride that impressively combines some of the series’ most spectacular set pieces to date with smaller, more character-driven missions that owe as much to the scavenging survivalism of The Last of Us and open-ended assassination in Hitman as your typical serving of CoD. So which does come first: storyline or gameplay?
“Chicken and egg is the perfect analogy here,” says Negus, picking up his colleague’s earlier thread, “because one’s never first and one’s never second.
“The mechanics themselves don’t mean anything without some context. They don’t mean anything without characters that have a perspective on the actions they’re taking. And vice versa. The narrative doesn’t have a venue, doesn’t have a way to express itself without the mechanics to do so.”
“It’s a little bit like ingredients and dishes,” says Bloom, warming to his theme. “But that ingredient might be a narrative ingredient, it might be a character, it might be a place, it might be a setting somebody was interested in, it might be a mechanic, it might be a feature, it might be a system that somebody is working on.
“It’s not unlike how bands might work – it’s just a f***ing big band…”
