Infinity Ward has opened a «brand new studio» in Austin, Texas.
30.10.2023 - 15:43 / pcgamer.com / Vladimir Makarov
October 28 marked 20 years of the Call of Duty series, as part of which some of the key designers have been talking about the greatest moments. The foundation for its overwhelming success, however, will always be original developer Infinity Ward, in particular the leap forward the studio made with the Modern Warfare series. It delivered an unforgettable and oft-controversial singleplayer campaign reflecting one view of contemporary geopolitics, alongside a best-in-class multiplayer experience that the wider series has followed ever since.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 contained what is still the most polarising level in any of the games. No Russian is an early campaign mission in which an attack is carried out at a fictional Russian airport (Zakhaev International), with civilians being shot by a terrorist group that includes the player character. It is a deeply disquieting experience to shoot unarmed civilians and, even though the latter half of the mission returns to typical COD form (with the FSB flooding in to return fire), that made No Russian a focal point for wider conversations about the genre, the nature of entertainment like COD, and even whether such things should be allowed in games.
The initial idea for No Russian came from Steve Fukuda, one of MW2's design leads. «Steve's original pitch was you're with a bunch of guys and they're all in Kevlar and they have M4s,» designer Mohammad Alavi tells IGN. «And he knows all he has to say is M4 and everybody realizes, 'Okay, so we're the Americans.'»
The M4 carbine is the standard-issue rifle for most units in the American military, and the central premise of the mission is a false flag attack executed by Russian terrorist Vladimir Makarov and his troops. Players assume the role of Joseph Allen, a CIA agent embedded within the group, and the mission's title comes from a line Makarov utters before the attack begins: «Remember, no Russian.» It is Makarov's intention that the group is seen as American, hence the importance of the weaponry and the language, and that the attack will provoke war between Russia and the USA.
Although the setting of the mission changed from its initial concept of a mall, the core of the idea was always to make the player complicit in an attack on civilians. «I often got questions,» says Alavi. "'Did you mean to make something controversial?' And I was like, 'No. That actually wasn't my intention. What I meant to make was something memorable.'"
The narrative importance was in putting the player up-close to Makarov, who is the main antagonist of the Modern Warfare trilogy, and making the character «memorable» enough in this brief sequence that players held on to that impression for the rest of the game and indeed the
Infinity Ward has opened a «brand new studio» in Austin, Texas.
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