Call of Duty + United Offensive

Call of Duty
COD: United Offensive

Infinity Ward
Gray Matter Interactive

images c/o MobyGames. Base game is depicted.

In light of the controversy surrounding Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 and its use of AI-generated artwork, it can be good to go back and get in touch with this franchise’s roots. I’ve made no bones of the fact that I love World War II shooters, even the bad ones, and if you’re asking me, Call of Duty, the original classic, is the pinnacle of the art form.

How easily we forget where we came from.

Call of Duty began life rather intentionally as Activision’s Medal of Honor killer. Developer Infinity Ward was founded by key staff from 2015, Inc., the studio that developed Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, and flush with cash from Activision. It was 2002, and Electronic Arts was wrapping up a blitz of World War II games: aside from Allied Assault and its first expansion, Spearhead, it also published Medal of Honor: Frontline for the PlayStation 2, as well as the game that would come to dominate the multiplayer landscape: Battlefield 1942. EA was riding high after a successful couple of years, and Activision — recently emerging from the dotcom bubble and looking to expand under Bobby Kotick’s leadership — wanted to take them down a peg.

Infinity Ward had initially envisioned Call of Duty as being quite similar to Medal of Honor, but with more of a focus on realism. Spark Unlimited, themselves working on their own Call of Duty game, came up with the idea of multiple perspectives, and Infinity Ward realized that the OSS superspy idea was played out. After a few changes, they had a more clear idea of what the game would be like. The results speak for themselves.

Call of Duty is terror embodied. It is loud, chaotic, disorienting. Those first few moments in the American campaign, when you plant your paratrooper’s boots on the ground, are the only truly quiet moments you’ll have. After you plant the beacon you’ve been tasked with setting up, and your fellows in the 101st Airborne join you, the gates of hell open up. Get used to the buzzsaw roar of the German MG42 machine gun, because you’re going to hear it a lot.

The rest of the game is a nonstop onslaught of combat, taking you across three different campaigns: an American paratrooper, landing in Normandy the night before D-Day; British SAS, selected after outstanding service on D-Day and doing everything from dam demolition to ship sabotage; and a lowly Soviet trooper, handed ammo but no gun and told to fight the fascists back from Stalingrad, eventually marching all the way to Berlin to be present when the Soviet flag is planted atop the Reichstag.

Nazis will pour in from everywhere, on foot, in tanks, in halftracks; Call of Duty’s slogan is “no one fights alone,” and this is true, you’ll have an almost infinite supply of AI buddies to help you, but most of the time, you’ll be doing everything critical yourself. And it is all so god damn loud. That’s what makes Call of Duty so terrifying: it’s unrelenting, full of meaningless death as the bodies of Nazis and your AI buddies pile up. Your AI buddies all have names, shown above them; those names disappear when they die. There’s a few who stick around though, ‘cuz they’re important to the story; a quick perusal of the cast list reveals a lot of veteran Metal Gear Solid voice actors, but you also get Steve Blum as Captain Foley.

The tropes we came to expect from Medal of Honor are gone. Ammunition isn’t universal — you’re not going to be able to keep your .45-caliber Thompson fed off of 9mm German MP40 magazines. (It’s so not universal that even guns that ostensibly should share ammunition, such as a Kar98 and its scoped variant, do not.) The British SAS missions don’t feel at all like Medal of Honor; they too are loud, and violent, and fast-paced. And by the time we get to the Soviet campaign, all bets are off: it is unrelentingly grim, the Battle of Stalingrad a vision of Hell on Earth. No brave, noble patriotism can be found here; your only options are victory or death, and the commissars are willing to ensure it’s one or the other.

Whenever you die, the game shows depressing quotes about war, and the death it brings.

And yet Call of Duty, in spite of its clear intention of portraying combat as the chaotic nightmare that it really is, still manages to be fun, even uplifting. Movies (and a certain HBO miniseries) exert a lot of stylistic influence: you can see the DNA of everything from The Longest Day to Enemy at the Gates (oh lord, especially this!) to Band of Brothers. Call of Duty does manage to lift one thing from Medal of Honor, but it’s the most important thing: that sense of authenticity. Everything from the presentation to the music to the emphasis on re-enactment over character development drives that same authentic feel that made those early Medal of Honor games so powerfully nostalgic.

Like pretty much every popular game prior to around 2005, Call of Duty attracted a third-party expansion from Gray Matter Studios, formerly Xatrix Entertainment, and later acquired by Treyarch. United Offensive is, at heart, just more Call of Duty; while it boasts expanded multiplayer, new storylines (with some recurring characters) and even a sprint feature, there isn’t a lot to differentiate it from its base game. It’s still as loud and chaotic as ever; it’s still got references to movies like The Guns of Navarrone; it’s a little harder, too, so if you’re used to playing on normal, you may want to play on easy. Or not, I can’t tell you what to do.

You can still play Call of Duty and its expansion. They’re available on Steam; they ask entirely too much for the games individually, but if you spring for the Warchest bundle you can get the whole Call of Duty 1 experience and Call of Duty 2 for just thirty bucks — still too much, but a lot better than $20 a pop.

Of course, a game this old is going to run into some problems. Unlike Medal of Honor: Allied Assault there’s no source port; but I can report that it runs just fine on Windows 10 with some configuration tweaks. If you’re particularly weird, you can try the United Fronts mod, which combines the base game and expansion as well as a collection of fan-made content into one single unbroken narrative, though comments suggest it’s a bit buggy. Personally, I like the game just the way it is — though a little widescreen never hurt nobody, squished UI elements notwithstanding.

United Offensive

For all the first game’s ambition, the franchise has evolved far beyond what the people who worked on the original Call of Duty could ever have dreamed. It’s unrecognizable now, messy and cinematic and full of the baggage of 20+ years of geopolitics influencing culture. Call of Duty 1 feels almost naïve in comparison: remember when war games were simple?Remember when shooting Nazis wasn’t political? Remember not having to wonder if you’re helping make the world worse by spending $80 on a first person shooter?

Somewhere along the line we’ve lost our way. Call of Duty wasn’t the cause, but it’s a symptom. And I think that’s a real shame. 

  -June <3

Part of a series on Call of Duty 

Call of Duty	United Offensive	Call of Duty 2
Call of Duty 3
Finest Hour	2: Big Red One	Roads to Victory
4: Modern Warfare	Modern Warfare 2	Modern Warfare 3
Modern Warfare DS	Modern Warfare Mobilized	Modern Warfare 3: Defiance
Modern Warfare 2019	Modern Warfare II	Modern Warfare III
Warzone
World At War	WaW: Final Fronts	World At War DS
Black Ops	Black Ops DS	Black Ops: Declassified
Black Ops II	Black Ops III	Black Ops IIII
Black Ops: Cold War	Black Ops 6	Black Ops 7
Ghosts	Advanced Warfare	Infinite Warfare
WWII	Vanguard	???
Zombies