It’s Time for Call of Duty to Return to One Fictional War – GameRant

It's clear why the Call of Duty franchise has remained popular for as long as it has, with the frequent releases of the IP exploring a huge range of settings and delivering different gameplay experiences to fans. Despite being considered by many as the best first-person shooter franchise, there's still room for it to innovate on some of its ideas.

One of the largest factors of any Call of Duty title is the conflict that the game chooses to focus on, with this being the decision that largely informs the narrative of an installment or the feel of its multiplayer modes. The CoD franchise has famously explored a huge range of different wars over the years, but one stands out as one of the most fascinating and tense. When considering the plethora of the franchise's modern settings, it may be time for World War 3 to come back into the fold.

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Call of Duty veterans will be familiar with the franchise's roots, in which the IP exclusively focused on portraying the Second World War for some time. Fans would understandably grow tired of this after a while, and in response, the franchise began to explore more modern and futuristic settings, with one such setting being a third World War.

This iconic portrayal of World War 3 came within the first Modern Warfare trilogy, and was focused on heavily in Modern Warfare 3. Telling the tale of Task Force 141, the original Modern Warfare trilogy portrayed some of the most hard-hitting and memorable sequences across the entire franchise, and this was largely due to the stakes of its World War 3 setting. While this particular conflict was covered quite extensively in the original trilogy, it would be fascinating to see how such a devastating conflict could be portrayed on modern hardware. With this in mind, the current reboot of the Modern Warfare trilogy fosters the perfect environment for a return to World War 3, priding itself on its gripping detail while of course possessing some of the same narrative beats of the original trilogy.

The Call of Duty franchise recently found success in its Modern Warfare reboot, with Infinity Ward telling a different tale in the MW universe, involving many of the same beloved characters from the original trilogy. Modern Warfare 2's recent release forwarded this new narrative and set up the franchise for a potentially explosive finale in its more-than-likely follow-up installment.

While the new Modern Warfare series does well to portray previous franchise characters in fresh lights, it is hard not to notice that the stakes of its overarching narrative currently feel much smaller than the originals. With that being said, the third installment to the original MW trilogy was arguably the most high-octane, and there is no reason that the upcoming Modern Warfare 3 cannot also take this narrative direction. The original MW3 was the title that portrayed World War 3 in the most horrific and memorable detail, giving further credence to how the new trilogy's third installment is the perfect opportunity to re-explore the conflict. That version of WW3 was also sparked by the No Russian incident, the same terrorist attack that Makarov carries out within the post credits scene from the new Modern Warfare 2, so it would only make sense for World War 3 to occur again in the new timeline.

As more than a decade has passed since the franchise's last portrayal of WW3, it is clear to see the appeal of revisiting the conflict with the more detailed and dynamic capabilities of modern hardware. While also crucially upping the ante of what the next Modern Warfare installment's narrative will involve, the potential success that a revived World War 3 setting could bring for Call of Duty is backed by the franchise's very own track record.

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It's Time for Call of Duty to Return to One Fictional War - GameRant