There is a new Call of Duty video game coming out this November, and like the first three titles in the long-running, hugely successful series, it will be set during the second world war. Over the course of a 45-minute livestreamed announcement event on Wednesday night, developer Sledgehammer laid out its vision for the new military shooter: a gritty but authentic evocation of the conflict, following a young recruit to the US Army’s First Infantry division as it storms the beaches at Normandy then trudges through Europe towards Germany. The studio heads spent time talking about the realism and respect of their project, and the painstaking accuracy put into the development process.

The whole thing felt distinctly uncomfortable.

It’s not so much the sheer familiarity of the game’s setting – though that is somewhat disappointing. Operation Overlord, with its visually dramatic seaborne invasion, has provided material to video game developers for decades, lending a backdrop to the Medal of Honor and Brothers in Arms titles, as well as many earlier war simulations. And let’s be honest, the opening 20 minutes of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, a stark, pulverising recreation of the beach landings, must be seared into the consciousness of every writer and creative team thinking about setting a fiction in this conflict. It has become almost unavoidable.

Then, of course, there is the familiar narrative set-up – the untested young private in a major US infantry unit, leaving behind his life in rural America to fight and perhaps die on the beaches of FRance, or in the forests and villages of Belgium. Of course, there are valid storytelling reasons why the raw recruit is such a familiar character in war fiction; they provide a surrogate for the viewer, initiated into the horror of war at the same time as us, channeling our shock and awe. But as countless war films, from Saving Private Ryan to Cross of Iron have shown, there are fascinating, very different tales to tell through the eyes of experienced soldiers. It would have made a compelling change for a video game, and there are different ways to teach a player about their role in the world.

The trailer has all the beats we expect: the battle-worn sergeants yelling at each other, the grizzled veteran telling the protagonist, “You’re not in Texas anymore”; the exploding tank shells, the jump cuts, the panic. These are the go-to images and verbal ticks of the mainstream war story, repeated almost as shamanic incantations of duty, honour and sacrifice. Call of Duty: WWII we are told will be about a small platoon of 12 soldiers and the relationship they build. Pals fighting for each other rather than some unknowable cause. Sacrifice and brotherhood. You know the drill.

To their huge credit, the founders of Sledgehammer, Michael Condrey and Glen Schofield, emphasised that this would be a diverse story, taking in British troops and French resistance fighters. But of course, the lens we must view this global conflict through is American. While Battlefield 1 made the controversial decision to portion its narrative up into separate yet interconnected tales, CoD: WWII seems very much rooted in the experience of Ronald “Red” Daniels and his friends. It would be fascinating, one day, to have the whole of a massive mainstream WWII video game told through the eyes of a French resistance fighter, a Soviet soldier (a perspective featured briefly in Call of Duty 1 and 2), or an Indian paratrooper fighting in the Battle of Sangshak. Ubisoft’s gentle but evocative Valiant Hearts showed us what can be done with games and war when viewed from a different perspective.

But the underlying discomfort for some will be this highly telegraphed commitment to authenticity, this bowed historical reverence, which was (intentionally or not) paraded as a marketing attribute on Wednesday evening. This is Call of Duty – a series built on turbo-charged, hyper-real combat, a game about twitch-based skill in a glinting world of highly choreographed mega explosions and a game of skittish, attention-deficit narrative beats that pummel the player like endless drum rolls. From the very beginning, the genius of Call of Duty was its shameless appropriation of epic war movie tropes to create a wild, exhilarating shooter experience. There is nothing authentic about the way Call of Duty – or any other shooter game – depicts warfare. You can accurately recreate all the weapons, battles and locations (and CoD: WII clearly does this beautifully), but this is not going to be an authentic evocation of the infantry experience. It’s going to be about running around with a machine gun, killing and respawning for hundreds of hours. And that’s fine.



Perhaps it is a measure of the games industry’s continuing sense of narrative and cultural illegitimacy that great developers still need to strive for the authentic. Sometimes, it is not necessary, and sometimes it just jars. In the preview event, the focus went very quickly from a discussion about the depth and detail of the historical research, and the determination to depict an emotional, truthful story, to a section about the game’s zombie nazi mode. It was so dissonant and tonally strange, it was almost unwatchable.

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Why always strive for authenticity, why make these gestures, when fiction is perfectly capable of portraying any historical event through more subversive perspectives? Why did Call of Duty have to look towards Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan, and not Inglourious Basterds, Dirty Dozen or Cross of Iron, movies that unapologetically revelled in their fictitious, accelerated and theatrical interpretation of war? The Call of Duty ethos is much more in line with Tarantino than it is with Spielberg – it’s much more about the raw, anarchic enjoyment of violence as a spectacle . Why not just go with it?

Many of the team at Sledgehammer worked on the astonishing sci-fi horror game Dead Space. That was a title that took a lot of ideas about science fiction, monster movies and psychological horror and twisted them into something genuinely thrilling and unusual. Imagine that spirit, that sense of chaos, claustrophobia and dread, placed into a WWII-era game about a raid on a Nazi stronghold. It would be amazing. (Okay, it would probably also be the brilliant Wolfenstein: The New Order.)

Of course, Activision and Sledgehammer are free to tell the story they want to tell – and crucially the story they need to sell to their audience. But there is such an overwhelming disparity between the narrative of sacrifice, truth and loss, and the reality of playing a Call of Duty game. And there is nothing wrong with the way Call of Duty games work, the way they distort ideas of military power and conflict into discrete sense-shattering encounters. It’s fun. It doesn’t have to be justified, it doesn’t need to lean on the worn, pitted post of authentic, gritty realism. The problem is, acknowledging the reality of Call of Duty – what it is and why people enjoy it – is a lot harder than acknowledging the weight of history.