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For years, Call of Duty games have put us in the shoes of a soldier on a battlefield to see through his or her eyes. In every mission, you assume the role of a character. Captain Price, Frank Woods, Logan Walker, and many others in different games in the popular military shooter. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 took this thing a step further. In the campaign, you can switch characters in real time.
How Does it Works in the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Campaign?
In the mission called ‘Defection,’ US Marines and the South Korean Special Warfare Command are working on a joint operation. They have set charges inside a North Korean airbase and are waiting for their extraction chopper to arrive. In the meantime, they have to hold off enemy forces.
You are already playing as one of the protagonists, Private First Class Park Hyun-Jun. So you begin with him outside the airbase and shoot enemies with assault rifles and shotguns. Also sending drone bombs their way to explode. You are on the ground, which means there are dogs coming at you to bite. As you are holding on, a swarm of enemies rushes in, and Corporal Dunn says that we need sniper support. Our sniper Jae is shooting from a tower at the right. You just have to look in that direction and hold the square button (or whatever is assigned if customized), and you switch to Jae.
Now you are in charge of Jae providing the sniper support and shooting as many enemies as you can see through the scope. Jae drops a lot of them. Then the North Korean Army makes things more difficult by sending more troops in trucks, where Park, Captain Kal, and the team are. So you drop bombs from a grenade launcher.
The North Korean Army isn’t stopping there, so it sends mortars at the sniper position. Dunn is close to them and says he’ll take care of them. You have to look in his direction, which is straight ahead of us and to the left of the position of Park’s team, and hold the assigned button.
Now you are controlling Corporal Dunn, who rains hell using an RPG and blows the enemy mortar position. His work is not done because two BMPs arrive at the air strip. You don’t have to control Dunn and fire RPGs at the BMPs. You can also work in tandem and switch to Jae. He is in a higher position with a grenade launcher, which makes it easier to target the rolling BMPs. Whatever works best for you.
An enemy hind is one last line of defense used by the North Korean Army, so coordinate and bring it down any way you like. After that, the POV shifts to Park again, and we are outta there, running at the end of the airstrip where our exfil helo is waiting for us. It’s all the more hard hitting because we’ve been flitting between characters as we play the level, and wouldn’t work half as well if we stayed as just one of them throughout.
It Will Be a Fun Addition to the Future Call of Duty Campaigns
Adding real-time character switching will make the game challenging and all the more fun. Think of the iconic ‘Cliffhanger’ mission from the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, where we infiltrated an enemy base at the top of a mountain as Roach while Soap provided sniper support from a ridge using a thermal scope. We would be able to provide sniper support through a ridge and guide Roach. And if we have had enough with the sniping, we can switch to Roach and go on planting bombs. Also, we will know from where Soap made his way to the hangar where they both regroup.
Crowded missions like ‘Deception’ here will be more challenging, as there will be more than just two soldiers. Think of ‘Wolverines,’ ‘War Pig,’ ‘Goalpost,’ and more campaign missions like them from games long since past.
We’ve seen the open world missions be taken on by the multiple studios behind the Call of Duty franchise, so why not this? Not only would it offer a different dynamic to the levels as we play them, it’d offer replayability, chaos, and increase our affinity to the characters we’re inhabiting, and losing, as we play.
If you like reading about this feature in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, take a look and see how you can unlock the No Harm Done trophy in the campaign, or how about the most thrilling and intense moments from the OG trilogy?
Anurag Batham is a Writer at Thumb Wars, zeroed in on video games, but will also throw himself into anything in association with anime and cinema. As with his favorite video games, give him anything with a linear story, be it Call of Duty or Braid, and he will be happy. He thinks of stories as food and wants to feed his readers something nutritious, food for thought.
