YMMV / Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

• Abridged Arena Array: Compared to the other games, MW1 has a wider variety of favored maps, depending on the server, though those added in the 1.6 update (the Variety map pack for consoles), particularly Killhouse and Broadcast, tend to be the most popular. Barring that, it's usually Crash, Crossfire, or Shipment.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is the United States a peace-loving champion of justice, or a heavy-handed bully meddling in foreign affairs to get their hands on oil reserves? Both the United States and Al-Asad play up the righteousness of their causes via the media, while the American footsoldiers are too busy doing their jobs and following orders to pontificate about morality.
  • Is Al-Asad pursuing nuclear weapons proof he's a tyrant who poses an immediate danger to the Middle East, or is going nuclear literally the only way to put a dent in the US war machine and keep them out of his country's internal affairs?
• Best Level Ever: "All Ghillied Up." Taking place in 1996 Chernobyl, you as Price work with MacMillan to kill Zakhaev. Much sneaking with absolutely well done atmosphere and tension ensue, most notably the tank patrol section, where one wrong move will undoubtedly result in death. All backed up with a perfect soundtrack, setting the tone in a fantastic way. Last but not least, the use of real life locations in Chernobyl, plus its inherent isolation making it a perfect place for terrorist deals, help lend much credibility and believability to the level.
• Broken Base: Gamers everywhere were absolutely ecstatic upon the announcement that the game would be getting a remastered version for modern consoles...until it was revealed that in order to play it, you needed to buy the special editions of Infinite Warfare which many fans saw as a blatant money-grubbing tactic. The fanbase was split between people who refused to support Activision's tactics of holding a beloved game hostage behind a game they weren't interested in, and those who really want to go back to a time when Call of Duty was good, not caring about their expenditures of up to $100. The fact that it's an almost-shot-for-shot remaster of the original game yet is eight times the size (55gb, compared to 7 for the original game, due to the decision to remodel, retexture and reanimate everything rather than bump up the original's texture quality like most other remasters) is also criticized too. And then they added Supply Drops...
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • G3-wielding enemies. Within the campaign, the G3 has the firepower and accuracy of a semi-automatic weapon - within its max-damage range, it is the third-strongest weapon in the game and the strongest weapon to show up more than once - but fires in full-automatic. Expect to die very quickly to this weapon on higher difficulties, not helped by the fact that the G3 is a common find throughout the whole game.
  • Dogs. The first time you get tackled by one, you're dead. The Action Command is just too unforgiving for you to reliably kill them in melee combat. For perspective, you only get one chance to press "melee attack", and whereas the later World at War allows you to just mash the button through the entire animation and win, here you have to be pinpoint with your timing - obviously, hitting the button while you're in the animation of the dog actually knocking you down won't work, but the timing is so ridiculously strict that it seems like you've already run out of time by the time you've perceived the button prompt.
• First Installment Wins: A variant—Call of Duty 4 is now sometimes cited by many as "the last good game of the franchise". With the release of later games like Black Ops II and Advanced Warfare, in comparison to Infinity Ward's post-MW (and pre-2019) output, CoD4 is now considered a more traditional example as the best of the Modern Warfare trilogy.
• Franchise Original Sin: Just about everything that was a common complaint about future Call of Duty games—unbalanced multiplayer, a large focus on scripted set-pieces over seamlessly interactive gameplay, a short campaign—were all present in this game, but were new, exciting and original at the time due to never having been done before.
  • The game's Signature Scene, by just about every measure, was the nuke that ended "Shock and Awe". It was as down a Downer Ending as there possibly could be for the American campaign: shocking, visceral, and utterly tragic. The problem however is that MW2 and MW3 tried to one-up the nuke scene over and over again, with player characters being abruptly killed off left, right and centre, along with levels which clearly existed only for shock value, like the airport massacre in Modern Warfare 2 (which at least had a purpose in the game's story) or the death of a child and her family in "Davis Family Vacation" in Modern Warfare 3 (which really didn't), to say nothing of several more plot points which just repeated the nuke almost verbatim, like the EMP in MW2 and the chemical attacks in MW3—by that point, they'd stopped being shocking because viewers had come to expect them.
  • It also foreshadowed the series' future reliance on linear setpieces which restrict the player's agency - Lucas Raycevick argues that Modern Warfare 2 was the point where it got out of hand, trying to create a setpiece similar to the nuke scene every 45 minutes. It worked here because it was an ending to one of the two campaigns, and one that was meant to make the player feel powerless, while later such setpieces have instead been used as power fantasies.
  • The increasingly-derided shift to futuristic sci-fi settings, which reached its nadir with Infinite Warfare, also got its start with Call of Duty 4, which was set Next Sunday A.D. and had several segments that seemed designed to show off cutting-edge technology like night-vision goggles (Price praising how they make it "too easy" to clear a house that's just had its power cut), command-detonated explosives (you get C4 in several missions, usually for an objective but also sometimes just to use how you see fit), and all the new features of modern tanks ("War Pig" has you escorting an M1 Abrams tank down a couple streets, and ends with it targeting and destroying an enemy tank through a building). It was forgiven because the technology was genuinely novel at the time - there weren't a whole lot of games, especially officially-published ones, that let you fire the guns of an AC-130 gunship before CoD4 - and as the games started shifting further into the future they found some way to counterbalance the fancy sci-fi, such as Black Ops II only being set about a decade in the future, basing all of its futuristic gear on existing technology that was being tested at the time, and also still having a few flashback missions set at the tail end of the Cold War in The '80s. People only really had a problem with the shift when the games continued pushing further and further into the future to give us two different Cyberpunk settings in Advanced Warfare (which has laser guns and powered exoskeletons) and Black Ops III (which features full-body cyborgs and rogue AI), and rebelled completely when Infinite Warfare turned the series into Gundam.
  • The series has been often derided as jingoistic and xenophobic, following the breakout success of the Modern Warfare trilogy, which ultimately lead to the creation of deconstruction games like Spec Ops: The Line to point out all the problems with its depiction of modern war. The thing is, Modern Warfare is itself a deconstruction of that exact attitude—America doesn't save the day and all of its proactive actions end in failure, such as its role in this game where 30,000 Marines are killed in a nuclear blast looking for a warlord who turns out to be in another country almost two thousand miles away. However, the message of the first two games was lost on many players, between the exciting gunplay and its increasing shift towards the Rule of Cool, which led the series to amass a Misaimed Fandom to whom Activision would willingly cater. Modern Warfare 3 thus wound up indulging its blockbuster power fantasy with a more standard America Saves the Day plot, albeit one which still retained the anti-jingoistic angle and showed the cost of war (the conflict ends with America's east coast, Europe, and Russia in disarray, countless civilian lives lost, and nearly every character whom you have played as or fought alongside across all three games dead). Subsequent games like Ghosts would be criticized for being deliberately written and marketed as power fantasies with Black-and-White Morality.
  • A common complaint about the series' multiplayer is how each installment seems to make their weapons more and more overpowered to kill opposing players faster. This can be traced to CoD4, which had a few highly-powerful weapons, chief among them the M40A3 Sniper Rifle with the ACOG,^note due to a bug, the M40A3's base damage increases by five points when equipped with the ACOG, enough that if you're running Stopping Power and your target doesn't have Juggernaut, it's a One-Hit Kill with a shot to anywhere above the feet but they were far outnumbered by more commonly-used weapons with more reasonable damage profiles. The game also included the Stopping Power perk, which boosted the damage of bullet-firing weapons by 40%, but which could be cancelled out by the Juggernaut perk, which granted a 25% health increase. Things worked mostly as intended for the next two games until Black Ops removed Stopping Power, but didn't adjust the base damage values to compensate, resulting in complaints that it now took too long to kill. The developers immediately responded by gradually ramping up the base damage of their weapons - by Black Ops' sequel another two years later, it had already reached the point where pistols, within the range at which they deal max damage, hit just as hard as the second-strongest assault rifle in the game, able to kill in just two bullets - and one-shot-kill weapons became more prominent, leading to weapons like Black Ops III's NX ShadowClaw, a ridiculous multi-shot crossbow that only has gravity-affected projectiles to balance out a generous magazine for that type of weapon, a relatively quick reload, no actual gunshots to make you appear on the enemy's minimap, and a guaranteed kill if you land a hit.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game did extremely well in the UK as well as Europe in-general, where the region made up a much greater percentage of global sales compared to other contemporary games. The fact that the game mostly focuses on the SAS and averts America Saves the Day is near-certainly a factor in that.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The name of the U.S. forces who fail to capture Al-Asad? Seal Team Six — now better known as the guys who took out Osama Bin Laden.
• Tough Act to Follow:
  • Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. It is very hotly debated as to whether either of the sequels compare to the first installment.
  • When developing Modern Warfare 2, Infinity Ward consciously chose to restrict the AC-130 to a multiplayer Kill Streak and a secondary co-op level rather than having another campaign mission dedicated to using one, because they knew it would be impossible to do it again and have it stand out as anything other than a boring and generic rehash. The next few years certainly bore out this thought, as several games afterwards - including Modern Warfare 3, after Infinity Ward got shaken up and almost entirely replaced with new hires halfway through development - all featured boring and generic AC-130 segments that are impossible to tell apart from one another.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • As a game made in the mid-2000s, Modern Warfare depicts Russia as both poor and unstable (as represented by the civil war plotline and general ramshackle state of both the civilian and military elements you see in the campaign), and also with a government broadly friendly with "the West." When the game was written, Russia was still recovering from the huge shocks of the 1990s (which featured, among other things, the collapse of the old government, a meteoric rise in crime, and looting of former government ministries by oligarchs), was fighting insurgencies in its own territory, and was trying to cozy up to the USA and EU, making these plot points more plausible. Russia's economic boom due to various reasons but especially high oil prices (its GDP per capita at PPP was five times higher at the end of the 2010s than the start of the 2000s) put that image of Russia further into the past by the time the 2020s hit. Its invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the subsequent economic sanctions did the same to the image of a Russia that was destined to become friendly with the West. The escalation of the invasion in 2022 fully sunk the idea of a Russo-American-European detente, as the USA-EU bloc basically severed almost all economic relations with the Russian Federation, openly called out its government as illegitimate and criminal, and aided Ukraine with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of aid for the express purpose of killing as many Russian troops as possible. The game ending with the Russian military pulling a Big Damn Heroes moment and calling the SAS protagonists "friend" is a particularly stark illustration.
  • As the game was a breakout hit that heavily influenced its genre for years afterward, it's in a somewhat unique position where its overall tone and level of action also date it. Shooters from before 2008, like it, tend to have slower action sequences with more downtime between much more brief shootouts and a willingness to have action that doesn't just consist of people exchanging bullets at each other (e.g. a "good" run of "All Ghillied Up" never having anyone realize you're even there, whether you're sneaking past everyone or picking them off), with loadouts that tend towards authenticity with limits on the highest of high-tech gear (the most recent guns in CoD4 were still at least half a decade old as of its release and had all appeared in several other shooters). Modern Warfare 2, in contrast, shifted the focus towards higher-octane action, where gun battles are more common and run longer (even stealth missions are inevitably dotted with several shootouts no matter what the player does) and loadouts tended towards more recent guns that were often still in the prototype phase (e.g. it was the first high-profile video game to feature guns like the TDI Vector, Remington ACR or CheyTac Intervention) or simply much cooler than a more realistic option (e.g. every Humvee now has a minigun rather than the more common M2, and the basic pump-action shotgun is now the Franchi SPAS-12).

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