The End is Nigh: Modern Warfare 2

By Martin Gaston

‘The End is Nigh’ is a weekly column by Play.tm’s Martin Gaston, pondering the nature of videogame endings and why we do or don’t choose to finish the games we play. This week: how multiplayer turns Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 2  into the game which keeps on giving.

I finished Modern Warfare 2.

Or did I? Granted, I waded through the single-player campaign (on Veteran, thank you very much) and jumped through all the essential post-game hoops: a couple of tweets about how great it was, a few paragraphs dedicated to my personal interpretation of the airport level and my customary pomp about how doing it on Veteran makes me better than people who didn’t. Usually that means I can pop the game back in its case, slide it into its place on the shelf and write a column about how most games have structurally weak endings.

That’s the problem, though: the whole single-player experience is akin to just nibbling at the bready edges of a delicious meat-filled sandwich. To a large, dedicated chunk of its fifty trillion fans, Modern Warfare 2 is a multiplayer game: the single-player campaign is nothing more than a bombastic sideshow tacked onto the core online feature.

You wouldn’t realise it if you were reading your average review, though. Most of their bulk is devoted to waxing lyrical about the repercussions and impact of some of its more controversial segments, which leaves a couple of paragraphs at the end for the multiplayer afterthought. It seems that critical ire has been exhausted on the infamous airport scene, leaving nothing in the bank to aim at something like the half-baked (intentional word usage) marijuana undercurrent running through the customisable multiplayer titles.

Here at Resolution, the spectacular Sam Giddings distilled his review into two entities – with one devoted to specially tackling the multiplayer. Sam’s unavoidable pickle is that the multiplayer review couldn’t see the light of day until a couple of weeks after the game launched – because he had to actually play it – and in our cyclical world of games journalism everyone was already off frothing at the mouth over the sequels to Left 4 Dead and Assassin’s Creed by this point.

Standing in the queue at a midnight launch event for Modern Warfare 2, I asked a few people what mode they’d be playing when they got the game home. A few people ahead of us in the line joined in on the conversation. A couple of minutes later it felt like everyone within fifty meters had all said the same thing: multiplayer. This wonderful, never-ending, industry-shaping multiplayer mode which has proved so difficult to express critically is the core of the game to many.

But it’s hard to write about. For a start, it goes completely against the grain of the general reviews process. Being sent a copy of a game pre-release means the respective title’s online community is woefully sparse. It’s hard to get a beat of its quirks, tics and rhythms in this inefficient microcosm, and it’s not for a few weeks after launch that it’s possible to understand what it’s like playing Modern Warfare 2 online. And that’s getting repeatedly shot in the face by some guy who is on his first trot through Prestige, which would be annoying if it wasn’t so routinely brilliant.

Even if the mode gets marginalised in reviews, it’s definitely worth remembering its importance to the complete game and its millions of fans. I’ve haven’t been able to invest much more than twelve hours playing it, but whenever I bump into some free time my first thought is always to take the game down off the shelf and get stuck in. It’s a game that doesn’t end. You can’t finish it. Even if you hit the maximum level you’re encouraged to plonk yourself all the way back down at the bottom again. It’s on permanent duty, and will only be relieved when Modern Warfare 3 shows up.