After amassing first-week sales of around 4.7 million across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, there’s little doubting the record-breaking success of publisher Activision Blizzard’s Modern Warfare 2. That being said, the game’s screenwriter has stepped forward to defend extremely contentious gameplay that set the Internet ablaze ahead of the sequel’s arrival.
Mmm. Nice. Image: Activision Blizzard.
The level in question takes the player on a murderous tour of a busy airport terminal alongside a squad of Russian terrorists intent on arbitrarily dispatching anyone and everyone they encounter. Certain notable moments of the killing spree see the player lobbing grenades into a concourse populated by panicking travellers and businessmen, while also calmly gunning down injured civilians as they try to crawl clear of the ensuing carnage.
Speaking with videogame magazine GamePro, screenwriter Jesse Stern insisted that the interactive sequence, which comes with an on-screen warning and can be skipped without affecting the overall narrative, was a risk the development team at Infinity Ward simply had to take.
“People have really strong reactions to the airport scene and it’s been fascinating because we all wanted to make it something that would be upsetting, disturbing, but also something people relate to …as terrifying as it is, you want to know,” said Stern of the shocking content. “And there’s part of you that wants to know what it’s like to be there because this is a human experience.”
“Ultimately, our intention was to put you as close as possible to atrocity,” he added. “As for the effect it has on you, that’s not for us to determine. Hopefully, it does have an emotional impact and it seems to have riled up a lot of people in interesting ways. Some of them good. Some of them bad.”
While clearly acknowledging the airport level’s impact and the contention surrounding it, Stern was keen to point out that – while players can opt-out of engaging in the sequence – pulling the trigger as a terrorist is not the only in-game option.
Specifically, he explained players are able to turn their weaponry on the accompanying terrorists, at which point their non-central character will be killed (something that happens at the end of the level anyway), or they can walk and watch for much of the time while the chaos unfolds around them.
“This is a triple-A game and the top grosser of all time with this huge budget behind it, yet we’re still taking major chances wherever we can and the airport level was a risk we had to take,” insisted Stern in the GamePro interview. “Sometimes you take huge risks and it really works. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all. But if you don’t take the chance, you’re not going to make something new.”
Read the entire GamePro interview by clicking here.
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