The co-founder of Sledgehammer Games has himself worked on Call of Duty. He now fears that the 2019 CoD Modern Warfare may have been deliberately tuned by Activision to be “dark and controversial” to generate more headlines.
Who is speaking? It is Michael Condrey, who founded Sledgehammer Games in 2009. The studio has developed three Call of Duty games: Modern Warfare 3, Advanced Warfare, and WW2.
However, Condrey has been away from Sledgehammer Games since 2018, and since then, a lot has changed, as the 2020 Call of Duty will likely show.
Condrey is someone who knows Call of Duty well. He speaks in an interview with Venturebeat about the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2019.
Pressured by Activision to create more controversy
This is what Condrey says: He respects every developer who strives to ensure that their work is an expression of the artistic vision behind it.
But now that this has been said: It seems that Modern Warfare is a challenging task for any studio – especially when the publisher pressures them to make it more controversial and darker to get more headlines.
This was his work on Call of Duty: Condrey says he loves the original series of Modern Warfare. When they were working at Sledgehammer on Modern Warfare 3, it was a truly exceptional opportunity. After all, Call of Duty was at its peak then.
He and his team tried:
- To tell an intense but clearly fictional story with Modern Warfare 3
- To pay tribute to a historical conflict with WW2, as it only happened once in the world
The “Call of Duty” games from Sledgehammer Games had classic conflicts:
- It was about the understandable but fictional fear of private military companies (Advanced Warfare)
- And about the struggle of ordinary people against tyranny for their freedom. (WW2)
Good Westerners vs. Evil in the Middle East – no longer enough
This is how he sees Modern Warfare today: But today the world has changed dramatically due to Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, and Christchurch.
So he feels torn inside.
The demands to portray realistic “modern warfare” are complex. It’s no longer enough to show “Western heroes killing villains in the Middle East.”
However, he hopes that Infinity Ward simply misspoke when they said that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare should depict the “reality of war”.
In Condrey’s view, they should have aimed to describe the “unspeakable atrocities of modern warfare.”
This is behind it: When Condrey talks about his internal conflict, two points collide:
- The world has changed, and “classic” storytelling methods in video games no longer apply. These were still used by Condrey and his team. Thus, Modern Warfare is likely to lean more towards “hard” military films like Sicario or Hurt Locker
- At the same time, this also brings a harshness and cruelty, controversies and shock effects, which some find uncomfortable because it seems like money is being made from the atrocities of the world
