Student Newspaper

'Call of Duty's Most Controversial Mission, 15 Years Later'

Share Article
'Call of Duty's Most Controversial Mission, 15 Years Later'

Like all great debut articles, this one starts with a content warning. This is an article about the infamous mission titled “No Russian” from the game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009). The mission portrays a fictional terrorist attack, seeing the player and ai-controlled teammates committing a mass shooting on a fictional airport in Moscow, directly killing hundreds of civilians. I apologise for sounding like the message when you open a Ubisoft game, but the events of the mission are entirely fictional and any resemblance to real historic moments are purely coincidental. This article is not meant to portray the fictional events in a positive light or defend the inclusion of the mission, my intention is to simply criticise the mission for its gameplay and relevance to the game, as well as observe the impact it had on the Call of Duty franchise and the video game industry as a whole. I will attempt to portray the situation in a light-hearted manner and warn you when we get to the description of events, however if this sounds like something you would rather not read, I recommend reading something else in the student newspaper. With all that being said, let’s get into Call of Duty’s biggest controversy (probably that there ever will be, given Activision’s attitude towards the franchise today).

It’s hard to think of a time in Call of Duty’s history before Snoop Dogg was a playable character, YouTubers being screwed over for basically giving the games free advertising and nonstop mediocre story modes. Early Call of Duty (specifically from CoD4: Modern Warfare in 2007 to Black Ops 2 in 2012) was considered to be the golden age of the series, and as someone who has played every CoD game from that time period but not many of the more recent games, I totally see what people mean.  Nobody talks about the pre golden age games, so I guess if we want to discuss the impact of a golden age game, we should start there.

 Call of Duty was a first person shooter set during World War 2, developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision in 2003 to immediate gratitude and success. The game was notable for having advanced AI (for the time, of course) teammates who would assist the player and react accordingly to dangerous situations, breaking the first person shooter trope of having a lone wolf main character. This helped spark a renaissance in more realistic shooters (alongside the groundbreaking game series Halo, which was going strong at the time), giving fans of the genre a new way of playing that required strategy and patience instead of running at your enemies with a double-barrelled shotgun. And since the game was a massive success, and the idea of milking a franchise to death hadn’t been discovered in the video game industry yet, Call of Duty 2 released in 2005. Developed by Infinity Ward, it was a launch title for the Xbox 360 and was generally hailed as one of the best video games of all time. Basically everything people loved about the first game was improved in its sequel: the graphics, the AI, the story, everything. The game also began the franchise’s famous streak of multiplayer modes, which needs no introduction due to its popularity as well as its irrelevance to this story. The series would return a year later with Call of Duty 3, this time developed by Treyarch (since infinity ward were busy), which was also massively successful, just in a much more boring way! The only notable things about the third game are that it started a bizarre trend of Call of Duty games getting adaptations for the Wii (fun fact, Call of Duty 3 on the Wii was the first CoD game I ever played) and that the game was a launch title for the Wii and PlayStation 3. While the franchise was doing well, it was clear that the hype for the series was dying down: people were just getting tired of realistic World War 2 simulators and wanted a new spin on the format.  Infinity Ward returned to grant that new spin.

In 2007, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was released. The game took the storytelling and gameplay of the previous trilogy and put it in the modern world, exploring fictional wars using more advanced technology to keep the player excited and engaged throughout, alongside a more enhanced multiplayer than ever before. Was this game as popular as the last three games? Did it reach similar heights or was it just a failed experiment? Well, it is today the best-selling video game that released in 2007, the same year that gave us Mario Galaxy, Assassin’s creed and Guitar Hero 2 and 3, so you tell me. The game put even more emphasis on the action and story, and while it could have stood on its own, it was very clear that Infinity Ward had already planned that they would also make modern warfare a trilogy. Plus, not only did CoD 4 get a Wii version, but it also got a DS version. While Infinity Ward was working on their next game, Treyarch filled the void with Call of Duty World at War, another World War 2 based game. The game was considered unremarkable at the time, showing Treyarch’s unwillingness to move on from the setting after it was made clear that a more modern setting was the way to go. Despite this, the game has received a resurgence in popularity recently, given its perfection of the setting and gameplay as well as being the first CoD game to include the Zombies’ mode which would soon become a staple of Treyarch’s games. There is one moment that I have left out from this history, specifically when talking about Call of Duty 2, that being the franchise’s first ever controversy. It was fairly low stakes, just a UK advertisement that intended to portray what the gameplay looked like, however the enhanced graphics and more realistic gameplay made people consider it false advertising. This, however, was nothing compared to what Infinity Ward did in 2009.

This is the part where I describe the specific events of the mission- if you feel this might be upsetting then I suggest skipping over the next paragraph. It also contains spoilers, but only for the first hour of the game.

The plot revolves around one man, Vladimir Makarov, an infamous Russian terrorist whose entire goal is to start a war between the Americans and the Russians. This is the fourth mission in the game, and the first one where Makarov is seen in the flesh. The character you play as is Joseph Allen, an undercover American spy attempting to get onto Makarov’s good side to understand what will happen next. The mission opens on an elevator, containing you, Makarov and three other gunmen, all of you holding American machine guns and wearing body armour. Makarov turns to you and delivers the famous line “Remember, No Russian”, an instruction to only speak English. The elevator opens and the four men line up in front of a crowd of around a hundred civilians at an airport security checkpoint. Without a word spoken, all four men open fire on the civilians. This begins the mission. The four men and you walk through the airport, gunning down any civilian and security guard spotted. You witness trails of blood ending in corpses of random civilians and people with injuries leaning on chairs and walls. You watch as many civilians try to escape, how many escape depends on how many you shoot. [RN1] This walking lasts for some time, witnessing departure boards all change their flights to “delayed”, looking outside at the deserted planes, and listening to the screams of survivors turn to deathly silence. Eventually, the five make it to a door leading out to the runway, where the escape vehicle is nearby. The only line of defence in the mission (aside from the security guards with little body armour and pistols) is a large group of Russian military, all equipped with riot shields. The player and accomplices slowly but surely move their way through the defence, eventually making it to a van that will get them out. As the men are entering the van, one man states that they “sent a message”, Makarov replies, “that there was no message”, he turns to you and shoots you, “This is a message,” driving off and leaving you for dead to be found by the military. In the following cutscene, It is revealed that Makarov knew you were an American spy all along and framed the attack so that, in finding an American at the scene, Russia would be convinced that it was America’s black ops unit that launched the attack, leading to a war that would make up the story for the rest of the game and it’s sequel.

Ok. So there’s a lot to unpack here, so I’ll start off with the gameplay, the thing that made the series so memorable in the first place. I remember when I first played the mission, the one thing that stood out to me more than anything was just how absolutely boring it was. You might think the actual moving through the airport would be dramatic, and it is, but in a cinematic and shocking way rather than an innovative way. And if you’ve already seen plenty of cinematic moments and don’t get shocked by such controversial ideas, there really isn’t anything left for you. Do you wanna know how long it takes to get to the runway section where you’re actually at threat of dying? Three and a half minutes. Three minutes and thirty seconds of holding the analogue stick forward (or the w button) and occasionally looking around. Now of course, because of the controversial subject and the context of the story, you don’t actually need to kill any civilians, in fact, you can very easily get to the runway without firing a single bullet. Being in no actual threat makes sense, we are talking about five guys with machine guns, but it only adds to the mundanity of the mission itself, even the security pose no threat whatsoever. And even when we get to the runway, there is no fun to be had. It is simply three waves of generic enemies with riot shields. If you know how to fight them, it’s over in a matter of seconds, if you don’t, each wave is more painful than the last.  Did I mention that Call of Duty is also known for being ultra realistic and therefore having friendly fire? If you get too far ahead to maybe make the mission move at a faster pace, you are not protected from your teammates’ gunfire and grenades, so have fun standing behind four men walking slower than those trios of people in college who walk down corridors horizontally. And then we get to the story, which I’ll try to keep spoiler free even though the game is more than fifteen years old now. One of the main criticisms that most people have with the mission is that they really did not need to go to the lengths they did to set up the rest of the story. Any other CoD game would have just talked about it in a cutscene, but this one puts the player in the middle of the action. This was justified by a developer of the game, who stated that without putting the player in the hands of the man who carried out such attacks, the player would not feel the emotional impact this attack had on the world and the individuals involved. This is very true, but also not at all something that CoD would do, like, ever. CoD is all about putting the player at risk to make them feel emotional about the importance of what is happening, so holding their hand through a mission such as this goes against that. But you can make the counter argument that the breaking of such a tradition is what makes No Russian so impactful because of how it deviates the format. But then you can also counter the counter argument by saying that you didn’t need to play the role of one of the gunmen, maybe you played as a security guard during the attack or tried to kill Makarov before he launched the attack (which links to a key story moment in Modern Warfare 3 that I will not comment on further because it is very big spoilers for honestly my favourite moment in the whole trilogy), basically, the whole debate about whether the mission is relevant to the story is an absolute mess. Long story short, they needed a really impactful story point to begin what would basically be World War 3, so they chose a terrorist attack, whether they handled it respectfully or not is the question.

Because of obvious reasons, Infinity Ward could tell before the game even released that the mission would be controversial. As a result of this, they implemented a feature where, the first time you play the mission, you are given a pop-up saying that the mission contains sensitive content that some people may find upsetting, and that you can skip the mission with no penalty whatsoever, which isn’t a lie, there are no collectibles in the mission nor achievements you can get by playing it, so you can play the game to 100% completion without ever playing the mission. They handled international versions of the game with respect too, in the Russian version the level was removed entirely (not because the mission took place in Russia, just because Russia had no ratings system for games at the time), in the Japanese and German versions of the game, the player would be given a mission fail if they killed any civilians, and in our good old country of the UK, Modern Warfare 2 was the first Call of Duty game to be given an 18 rating, and yes, it was purely because of the mission. The video games and violence conversation has been brought up regarding No Russian, however it is not relevant today as ratings systems now exist; that debate died when Doom 2 released (15 years BEFORE Modern Warfare 2) so it’s not something to bring up here. Instead, this is more a debate of video games and politics, should video games be allowed to display such tragedies with so much player interaction and be allowed to get away with it? Many argue that No Russian is proof that games are “growing up”, not shying away from the fact that such tragedies really do exist in our real world, as well as making us question whether the deaths of so many civilians really is worth it for the sake of the “greater good” that so many wars aim towards. It’s easy to draw parallels to another controversial mission in this sphere of video games, that being the infamous mission titled “By the Book” from 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V. This mission sees the player character torturing a man in order to extract information about an assassination target, with the player making specific button inputs to carry out player chosen torture methods. The context of the mission puts it in a better situation, where the game is a political satire - this specific mission is criticising the US government’s usage of unnecessary torture. Despite this, the levels of interactivity upset many reviewers, even to the point of the torture scenes being entirely cut out of the Japanese version of the game. But while GTAV can be defended as it is ultimately a satirical game, the same cannot be said for a game that takes itself as seriously as the franchise that gave us “press F to pay respects” and the Zombies easter egg where you blow up the earth. Ultimately, the damage has already been done. People didn’t entirely move on. The debate about whether the mission should have been added is still debated to this day, but more people look back on it as a cornerstone of video game industry controversies, up there with ET for the Atari and the mere existence of Mortal Kombat.

No Russian was the height of Call of Duty controversies, nowadays the franchise only gets involved in controversy when they add LGBTQ+ representation in their multiplayer. The mission was absolutely a turning point in the series’ popularity, people were excited to see what they were willing to do next. However, the fanbase would forget about No Russian when Treyarch released Call of Duty: Black Ops, the highest selling CoD game today. Call of Duty has become much less about the campaigns, they ended up not being as much of a priority as Zombies and Multiplayer (because they make the most money), especially given how terrible the most recent campaigns have been. But Infinity Ward did try to bring back the old Call of Duty methods, specifically by creating a spiritual successor to No Russian in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (not to be confused with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3) in 2023. Now I have never played the Modern Warfare reboot trilogy, and no way am I going to buy the £70 game with a 5 hour long campaign just to see a single mission. So instead, I asked a friend of mine who is a massive fan of the CoD franchise and has played the game what his thoughts on the mission are. Beware of minor spoilers!

“It’s bad. It is really really bad. OK, so the mission starts with you on a plane, you’re playing as a member of the good guy organisation, but not a soldier. You’re looking on your phone at picture of your family and the guy sitting next to you looks at your phone and says “hey, that’s such and such”, saying their names. Then he says your name and he starts threatening you, oh also he’s Russian and you’re on a Russian plane, so he’s like, “that guy walking down the aisle? He’s going to go to the cockpit and kill the captain”, and the guy next to you has a gun pointed at you, so you steal the gun and shoot at the guy in the aisle. Then you get taken to the back of the plane where Makarov is, he beats you and then straps a bomb vest to you and kicks you out into the plane aisle, and then the plane explodes and Makarov somehow gets away. Here’s the thing, the whole point of that mission is that it was a set-up, everyone on that plane was secretly Makarov’s men and were willing to die for the cause, so they were all recording you, and after landing they would leak the recording to start a war between America and Russia[RN2] . But here’s the thing, the very next mission, you go to the crash site and wipe all the evidence. So there was literally no point for any of it to have happened, it was just shock value. And also, it’s barely a mission, it’s one long cutscene where you press the shoot button maybe three times, and that’s it. The whole thing was developed poorly, I don’t even think it could be considered “shocking” because the more you learn about what happened, the less it could actually have the impact that No Russian had, no civilians died, you could even tell in the mission because, when you’re kicked out into the aisle with the bomb vest, there is a diffusor that you try to reach for but the passengers keep kicking you away from it. And the worst part? They don’t even say “No Russian” at all during the mission.”

Personally, I don’t think that No Russian was a thing that absolutely needed to happen. Did it advance the story in a unique and engaging way? Yes. Did Infinity Ward and Activision treat the mission with the caution and respect it needed? Yes. Will we see a repeat of a controversy as big and bad as this? I am sure of it, but maybe not by Call of Duty.  Regardless including an act of fictional terrorism into a video game is absolutely going to raise some eyebrows and cause some disagreements, but Infinity Ward was willing to take the criticism, and they did. The world has moved on from No Russian, and instead looking forward to whatever garbage the Call of Duty franchise is cooking up next.

By browsing our site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Find out about cookies here Accept & Close