The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series has had a number of shocking and notably controversial missions, perhaps none more so than the “No Russian” mission of Modern Warfare 2. With the creation of Modern Warfare 3, creative director at Sledgehammer Games Bret Robbins indicated that it was important not to go over the top for its own sake.
“What you don’t do is say, 'we’re just doing this to top ourselves.' Like you say. It needs to be something that’s authentic, that actually moves the plot forward,” said Robbins to VentureBeat. “We have some moments in the game that I think are pretty shocking, that push the envelope a little bit. But like I said before, it’s not a matter of trying to be gratuitous about it, doing shocks for shock value. You always want to push yourself and see if you can push the limits of the medium, and storytelling. We’ve got such a big audience for this game that we want to deliver something that’s memorable. Experiences that people are going to be talking about the next day after they played it, talking about with their friends. It’s really a matter of creating something unique.”
“We wanted to show, certainly in some particular cases, we wanted to show the effect of war,” added Robbins. “What happens if a modern American city gets attacked? What would that be like, what would you see? If you were walking down the street, what would happen? Civilians are part of that, innocent people are part of it unfortunately. But at the same time, it’s really a soldier’s story, it’s about how the soldiers, how the professionals, the elite professionals would react to that kind of situation. What they would do, believably. We worked with a lot of military consultants, guys that really know what they’re doing and how they would respond to these crazy situations. We just do it as realistically as we can, based on what they would do.”
