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Call of Duty goes back to WW2

Tehdagah

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Feb 27, 2012
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Another setback in the name of muh nostalgia.

It's the most famous script: "Let's go back to the roots before the franchise gets killed due to our creative bankruptcy." Rinse and repeat.
Which is ironic because "going back to the roots" is the biggest example of creative bankruptcy.
 

Chris Avelltwo

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This is beyond due to happen. They kept progressing increasingly further into the future and adding advanced sci-fi shit like robots and jetpacks and power armor that the franchise has effectively jumped the shark, and sales have been in decline for several years now from when it peaked about 5 years ago, because people had gotten tired of that HALO bullshit. When the remaster of an old game is more popular than the new game in the series it comes bundled with, then you know your franchise is in trouble. The Activision are just so retarded though that this logical move took years longer to happen than it should have. Clearly they are incapable of independent thinking, and didn't make the change until EA brought Battlefield to WW1. Monkey see; Monkey do, I suppose.

It will be fun to get to kill Nazis and Japanese again. I just hope they don't try to impose anachronistic diversity into the game like EA and make them black...
 

DemonKing

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I haven't bought a CoD game since BOPS2, but I'm actually looking forward to this. I'm a sucker for WW2 and we've been starved for decent FPS games in the genre for years.

Praying they decide to include dedicated servers this time around (I think they did this for COD4 remastered?).

The dream is still going back to WW2 in Battlefield but that probably won't happen till next year.
 

commie

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Can't wait to storm the beach of Normandy with a heroic American soldier for the six-millionth time.

Don't forget Stalingrad!

I hope they don't go the Treyarch way and make it so all factions do warcrimes except the US like WaW. I found it particularly unsavory the way they portrayed the Soviets where you were tasked to kill prisoners, wounded, and where scene after scene you were reminded that the Germans were a beaten enemy: wounded holding back a door in desperation, hanged deserters. Yeah such things happened in reality, but making YOU as part of it makes it seem like you're not better. This wouldn't be as big a problem if all campaigns had the same 'war is hell' and 'there are no good guys' thing, but the US campaign had the US be all noble and chivalrous to the 'evil' Jap, at the end a US officer even accepts the surrender of two Japanese only to be brutally murdered by them. Reality was the US were extremely racist and brutal to the Japanese, rarely taking prisoners.

I've only noticed this type of heavy handed agenda in Treyarch's CoD's(includes BLOPS which have their ridiculous anachronisms as even bigger problems) but not so much the main IW games.

tl;dr I don't really want pathos and scripted brutality just for the shock in my CoD games. The earlier ones were Kelly's Heroes/Guns of the Navaronne/Commando comics style action games. I don't need to be reminded that war is shit.
 

Makabb

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In Call of Duty 1 i had one of most fun times in multiplayer.... than mod for red orchestra on western front....... than a little fun with bf 1943...... and since 10 years nothing, refused to install BF 1 because Origin, i hope this will be decent.
 

commie

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I want a realistic WW2 shooter where the Germans are the good guys fighting a holy crusade against the red plague of bolshevism.


This is actually a strange thing: you can win the war for the Nazis in any number of strategy games, you can fly for Germans in planes, drive in tanks, hunt in submarines, even FPS in multiplayer battles BUT you can't have a CoD/MOHAA style FPS campaign as the Germans. Only thing close is that Iron Front 1944 which is more or less a glorified Arma mod and probably gets away with it by appealing as a 'simulator'.
 

JarlFrank

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I want a realistic WW2 shooter where the Germans are the good guys fighting a holy crusade against the red plague of bolshevism.
Red Orchestra 2? The game doesn't take any sides though

I play that semi-regularly. It's quite fun (and obsoletes any WW2 Call of Duty, really, since there's a Pacific theatre DLC and a Western Front mod so you got all the theatres covered).
 

Chris Avelltwo

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This wouldn't be as big a problem if all campaigns had the same 'war is hell' and 'there are no good guys' thing, but the US campaign had the US be all noble and chivalrous to the 'evil' Jap, at the end a US officer even accepts the surrender of two Japanese only to be brutally murdered by them. Reality was the US were extremely racist and brutal to the Japanese, rarely taking prisoners.

But that is what historically happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidy#History

the wikipedia article on Perfidy that I linked said:
During the Pacific Theatre of World War II, Japanese soldiers were reported to often booby-trap their dead and wounded and/or fake surrenders or injuries to lure Allied troops into a trap then surprise attack them. One example of this was the "Goettge Patrol" during the early days of the Guadalcanal Campaign in 1942 in which an allegedly fake Japanese surrender resulted in more than 20 American dead. It has been asserted that this incident, along with many other perfidious actions of the Japanese throughout the Pacific War, led to an Allied tendency to shoot the dead or wounded Japanese soldiers and those who were attempting to surrender and not take them as POWs easily.[1][2][3]

You say the U.S. rarely took Japanese prisoners, but how many Japanese prisoners were there for the U.S. to take? If your enemy would rather commit suicide than be taken prisoner, then there's not much you can do to take them alive. There were even some Japanese soldiers who remained in hiding in jungles throughout the Pacific as far as the 1970s who refused to surrender and didn't know the war had ended. And then there's all the Banzai and Kamikaze suicide attacks. You expect the U.S. to take people with that mentality as prisoners? It was much the same for the Soviets when they fought the Japanese in Manchuria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria#War_crimes

The article in the link said:
Many Japanese settlers committed mass suicide as the Soviet army approached. Mothers were forced to kill their own children before killing or being killed themselves. The Japanese army often took part in the killings of its civilians. The commander of the 5th Japanese Army, General Shimizu, commented that "each nation lives and dies by its own laws." Wounded Japanese soldiers who were incapable of moving on their own were often left to die as the army retreated.[21]

Why didn't the Soviets take them prisoner? Pretty obvious really. So don't criticize the U.S. for not taking prisoners from an enemy that would rather commit suicide.

Anyway, U.S. war crimes and brutality did occur, but it was far, far, far less prevalent than Soviet and Axis war crimes. U.S. soldiers weren't given carte blanche to rape and pillage Germany or Japan during the occupations, and the soldiers that did were punished for it. This wasn't generally the case with the Soviets in the areas they occupied immediately after the war.
 

pippin

Guest
'war is hell' and 'there are no good guys'

Ironically, this mindset was created in the aftermath of WW1, and people were fully aware of this when ww2 started to take shape. The ideals of optimism in progress which defined Modernity died with WW1 and its consequences.
 

DeepOcean

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Anyway, U.S. war crimes and brutality did occur, but it was far, far, far less prevalent than Soviet and Axis war crimes. U.S. soldiers weren't given carte blanche to rape and pillage Germany or Japan during the occupations, and the soldiers that did were punished for it. This wasn't generally the case with the Soviets in the areas they occupied immediately after the war.
To be fair, the american soldiers only had extensive contact with civilian populations on France and Italy before entering on Germany, they saw the french and other nations as allies to be liberated and the italians were fed up with Mussolini by the time the americans landed on Italy and on both situations they didn't face extensive civilian resistance but many civilians actually help the americans and the soldiers felt symphaty for the people on those countries because no massive numbers of american civilians were being slaughtered.

On Russia, the thing was different, the russians passed through an holocaust of epic proportions, one day a civilian saw their relatives being murdered by the germans on the next day now drafted on the army, it was hard to see things on an objective way, many thought on payback and many on positions of command too. You have to keep in mind too that there were this trauma on Russia at that time and any narrative that tried to paint the germans as the good guys wouldn't fly, this obviously ignoring there is no free press on war (and even afterwards on Soviet Union).

On the case of Japan, the americans had more reason to be hostile with the japanese, but the country had already given up by the time the americans landed on it, it there was a gruesome battle that took years on japan, thisgs would change of figure. The attack o Pearl Harbor was a military target attack, the american pride was hurt but not millions of soldiers and civilians over years with the threat of the destruction of the whole nation.

To make matters worse, the soviet army recieved orders from the soviet elite to turn the east european countries on communist countries by force, and this always fly well with the population and won't cause massive problems at all...:roll: While there were war crimes on east germany, it is hard to know how much, there is always the accusation but I don't think it was nowhere close to what the japanese did on China that the chinese goverment is still hostile with Japan all those years. I don't see Germany with the same level of hostility towards Russia, maybe the germans are quiet about this... I dunno.
 
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commie

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You say the U.S. rarely took Japanese prisoners, but how many Japanese prisoners were there for the U.S. to take? If your enemy would rather commit suicide than be taken prisoner, then there's not much you can do to take them alive. There were even some Japanese soldiers who remained in hiding in jungles throughout the Pacific as far as the 1970s who refused to surrender and didn't know the war had ended. And then there's all the Banzai and Kamikaze suicide attacks. You expect the U.S. to take people with that mentality as prisoners? It was much the same for the Soviets when they fought the Japanese in Manchuria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria#War_crimes

There were many prisoners to take, at least the wounded if not more. The whole Japanese mass suicide thing is overblown based on certain campaigns(like Okinawa). Often the Japanese committed suicide cause they knew they'd be killed anyway based on earlier happenings. The proof is the statistics. The US command was actually annoyed at the lack of prisoners as it was around 1 in 800 at one point which hurt intelligence gathering. They implemented all kinds of incentives like weekend leave and ice cream rations(serious!) and the ratio immediately improved to 1 in 15. Therefore this alone was enough in drastically improving the number of prisoners taken, suggesting that the Japanese code only partially was to blame. I'd say that had the initial brutality and rumors not got around, then even fewer Japanese would have killed themselves.

Oh and the Soviets in Manchuria took prisoners at a ratio of closer to 1 in 3 or 4 in comparison. So don't rely on the old "but in America they hang blacks" argument.

If you're going to quote Wiki why not these passages that prove my earlier point:

In practice though, many Allied soldiers were unwilling to accept the surrender of Japanese troops due to a combination of racist attitudes and reports of atrocities conducted against Allied troops...Allied forces continued to kill many Japanese personnel who were attempting to surrender throughout the war.[40] It is likely that more Japanese soldiers would have surrendered if they had not believed that they would be killed by the Allies while trying to do so.[3] Fear of being killed after surrendering was one of the main factors which influenced Japanese troops to fight to the death, and a wartime US Office of Wartime Information report stated that it may have been more important than fear of disgrace and a desire to die for Japan.

So tl;dr US and allied troops shot those surrendering and prisoners and this in turn led to a fear of capture by the Japanese which in turn made them more reluctant to surrender. This of course would only enrage the US troops further seeing this 'fanaticism' and they'd be even less reluctant to take prisoners!

But this is a discussion for another forum. I'd be happy to continue there with a decent discussion on war crimes and the like :)

The point here though is that in the WaW game there's not an inkling of any real crimes by the US side while every other is portrayed badly which really stands out and which presents a degree of pathos and preachy cynicism that stands apart from the CoD series as a action game as IW tended to make it before then. Even the MW series is much more 'Bond super villain' or Clancy style of exaggerated techno-thriller. I'd rather CoD go back to that style than grim dark propaganda ala Treyarch.
 
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