Introduction

Single Player Playlist


The Game

We all know what Call of Duty is. It started life as a World War II shooter that made a sudden jump to the modern day back in 2007 with this game. Modern Warfare ended up killing WWII as a viable setting for military shooters for a little while, and let's be honest, that was a good thing. By that point there were three major franchises in WWII (Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Brothers in Arms) often featuring the same battles, same weapons and same enemies (read: Nazis) year after year, game after game. WWII shooters were popular, but getting stale fast. Looking back, it's kind of hilarious that CoD killed its major competitors in the market not through a war of attrition that seemed to be the strategy companies were employing in the WWII market, but by just completely ignoring the market and forcing the other franchises to adapt. Medal of Honor had two disastrous attempts at modern shooters and Brothers in Arms has basically been AWOL for the last six or so years mostly because the WWII shooter market has dried up considerably.

Despite the changes being brought about by the modern setting, if you played CoD2 you know how to play the single player in CoD4, the controls and aiming and everything are the exact same. The big change is the way the game is presented. WWII CoD games have you fighting as Russians, Americans and UK soldiers against the Germans, but the campaigns are often quite disconnected from each other. Not the case in CoD4. The SAS is waging a shadow war against Russian ultranationalists, the US is invading a country on the Arabian Peninsula, as the story unfolds on both ends you start to see how these things are interconnected. The "Tom Clancy's Wet Dream" line isn't a joke, this game is written and plays like a Tom Clancy novel at times.

The thing most people remember about the game is the multiplayer, which changed a ton about how CoD multiplayer worked. This is the game that added Perks, Killstreaks, weapon customization and a leveling up system to the franchise and it has never looked back. Not all of these ideas were new, Rainbow Six Vegas the year before had weapon and character customization and a leveling system. CoD4, though, had something going for it that just clicked with millions of people who spent dozens if not hundreds of hours playing the game alone or with friends. I was one of those people and I'm going to mention it in like every video.

The LP

I'm going to go through the entire single player on Normal/Regular difficulty. I could do Hardened, but I want to be able to get through this with minimal frustration as the game is kind of old at this point and there are things it does that make no sense and I don't want to yell at it because I get caught on a tiny object I can't see when trying to cross a room and then die. Speaking of old, the game's been out for nearly a decade now, we're going open spoilers in the thread and videos. Otherwise, the plan is to talk quite a bit about the game, why I think it's as good as it is and bring in some information about the multiplayer mode when it is relevant as the designers did take inspiration from the single player maps to build multiplayer maps and vice versa. On occasion I'll be bringing in guests. I'm going to try to keep videos between 15 minutes to half an hour, sometimes that's going to mean doubling up on missions. Maybe we'll see some multiplayer, but it is a complete shitshow on PC with most servers running Battlefield numbers rather than the six on six competition the CoD games are known for.

Why are you doing this

I did LPs of the first two Black Ops games a while back and always intended to jump back and do this game just because it's so fun. I find myself remembering specific weapons in specific rooms nearly seven years since I last played the game. The campaign is probably the second strongest in the CoD franchise (I'm going to give the title to Black Ops 2 because it was an off the rails fever dream at times), and the level design and pacing is still the gold standard in the franchise. The game is still fun as well, and I hope to convey some of that through the LP.

Videos

Multiplayer Videos

In A single convenient playlist