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Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

Oh Jesus, it's an American war game, what did you expect? They have to make up fictional enemies in order to have something to fight. It's not realistic and it's not supposed to be.

I think it says a lot about the current state of the world, how implausible world war scenarios now seem.

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Even Hollywood movies now have a global perspective, with storyline and characters that allow people in different regions to identify and own the experience.

Wonder why CoD has not caught up with the times.

Because people don't buy CoD for the single player campaign they buy it for the multiplayer. So long as the Single Player sets up some nice maps and environments for the multiplayer that's all that really matters in selling the game.

> Because people don't buy CoD for the single player campaign they buy it for the multiplayer.

I assume 'people' means a majority. While I'm not privy to statistics specifically for CoD, one of the first games I worked on (Unreal Tournament 2004) was explicitly focused on multiplayer. It didn't even have a single-player campaign. You could play versus bots and that was about it. In spite of that, comparing sales with server data showed that only a small minority of our customers ever went online, let alone played predominantly online. I'd be surprised if CoD wasn't skewed even further in that direction considering its extensive single-player campaign.

How about because CoD is a two-dimensional game, and doesn't need to be anything more? People watch movies for plot. People don't play CoD for plot.

Hey, you could probably contact the developers and save them a lot of trouble designing a single player campaign by telling them that. Heads will roll when it turns out a random guy on the internet has a better idea of their audience than their marketing department.

Huh? All I was saying was, maybe that's why the storylines are simplistic.

I'd love to see a game where the point is to seize another country's natural resources under the guise of spreading democracy. Call of Duty: Blood for Oil. Actually, it would be way worse if a game like that was a hit.

"under the guise of spreading democracy" That's too silly, now one would buy that. Blood for oil would probably be a hit though. A story line like that, minus the democracy part, that would be a really realistic scenario and fun to play.

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