What’s up guys, Rogue-9 here!
The new Call of Duty is has been out for a while now and all in all, its single player campaign is not bad.
A bombastic and inspiring story of epic heroism and comradery that, for all its wonderful detail,
also gets a lot of things wrong The guns, explosives, human physiology and oh my god,
that collateral damage mission... that has to be one of the silliest thingsI’ve seen in a long while!
So let’s discuss: Everything wrong with Call of Duty World WarTwo (single player campaign)!
Now let me actually start off on a positive note here. The game is graphically stunning
and beautiful to look at and the amount of little details included in
every mission we play through is astounding!
Gun models, beautifully rendered like never before, vehicles detailed down to the actual dashboard layout,
soldier uniforms perfectly recreated and not just the fact that the clothes and equipment are authentic
but that the uniforms of the enemies you encounter change over the course of the campaign
to reflect the units you face and the time of year.
In France, you start out fighting against regular Wehrmacht infantry in grey uniforms
an odd mixture of Air Force infantry armed with shotguns and elite Waffen SS troops
in their patented Eichenlaubmuster camouflage smocks.
recreated with realistic buildings and bunker complexes.
Take the Notre Dame for example.
And of course there are the bunkers on Normandy beach but beyond that
A whole other area that is just brimming with details are the frequent mission start phases
such as the Stadttheater in Aachen
where you get some time to wander around a camp or entrenched position before the fighting starts.
or the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen.
really does a great job at giving the player a glimpse behind the scenes during calmer times
Here's a view from the centre of the bridge and a photo actually shows the section that is destroyed
in the mission both in real life and within the game.
action. With this rich level of detail in the game,
where you get some time to wander around a camp or entrenched position before the fighting starts.
Each setup with dozens of characters going about their various routines and duties
really does a great job at giving the player a glimpse behind the scenes during calmer times
Let’s start out with the weapons and the fact is that as nicely as the guns are modelled in this game,
and I really enjoyed taking a few minutes to explore these dioramas before getting stuck into the action.
Ironically, one of the things that had many players up in arms was the presence of Russian
weapons in the D-Day mission but as far as I have been able to establish, that’s not actually beyond the realm of possibility.
which makes it all the more surprising to see the amount of details that ended up wrong.
Let’s start out with the weapons and the fact is that as nicely as the guns are modelled in this game,
and beyond this, Germany actually had a mass program to refit captured PPsH—41s
Ironically, one of the things that had many players up in arms was the presence of Russian
is a simple fact and they may well have been involved in the fighting on D-Day.
But there are plenty of other inaccuracies. A general issue that affects all weapons is ammunition.
Some of the troops stationed in Normandy were veterans from the Eastern Front
and may well have brought captured weapons back with them
Only walking over the exact same weapon you’re carrying will refill your ammo.
to fire the 9x19mm Parabellum rounds and so, the presence of Russian weapons in Normandy in general
is a simple fact and they may well have been involved in the fighting on D-Day.
But there are plenty of other inaccuracies. A general issue that effects all weapons is ammunition.
Guns that should share the same ammo, like for instance the Kar 98 and the Kar 98 with scope
or the Thompson and M3 grease gun
or the MG42 and MG15, are not compatible in the game.
Only walking over the excact same weapon you're carrying, will refill your ammo
and at the same time this issue also exists in reverse, where incompatible guns still refill you.
For instance, you can be carrying a Bazooka and walking over a Panzerschreck
will give you additional ammo even though the Bazooka fired 60mm Rockets vs the 88mm rockets
of the Panzerschreck. Another general inaccuracy that effects a number of weapons,
is that the “bullet in the chamber” feature is missing.
Sure a lot of the automatic guns of the day (such as M3 grease gun, the BAR or the MP40)
fired from an open bolt, but others (like the StG 44 or all of the semi-auto pistols)
did not and when you reload a full magazine into into a loaded gun, you should end up
with the magazine capacity plus one… in CoD you don’t.
Beside these general issues, there are loads of individual small errors.
Why is an American officer carrying a British Enfield No.2 revolver?
I guess it’s not impossible but then why does it feature a swing out cylinder instead of a top break
The thompson we see during the campaign is named M1928,
even though it is clearly modelled on the M1A1 instead.
The Walther Toggle-Action semi-auto shotgun in the campaign is shown with a detachablebox magazine
instead of the internal tube magazine it would have had in real life.
The M97 Trench Gun’s capacity is wrong, with 7 shells instead of 5.
The Karabin is featured heavily in the campaign despite only around 150 of them ever being produced
and once again, it features a detachable magazine
whereas the real world counterpart was stripper clip loaded.
All of the clip-loaded bolt action rifles have an issue, in that they are always reloaded from a full clip,
even when you have only fired one shot.
The Lee-Enfield No.4 in game, can be reloaded with a single 10 round stripper clip
(instead of two 5 round clips used in real life) and you can use the stripper clip even when there is a
telescopic sight in the way (an issue,
which also affects the Springfield M1903 with scope).
The M1 Garand mid-clip reload has been simplified in game, omitting the step where you would
manually release the partially filled clip. When reloading the German machine guns,
the MG15 is never cocked after reload (even when it should be) and the MG42 on the other hand
is always re-cocked, even when it doesn’t need to be.
The M1 bazooka you see in the campaign would have been completely outdated in 1944
and the game should really have featured the M1A1 variant instead
and for it, as well as the Panzerschreck, the reload animation has also been significantly simplified,
omitting the step of attaching the wires to the rockets that would have been required for the electrical ignition.
And last, but not least, the fire rates for many of the automatic weapons are completely wrong.
The MP28 fires to quickly while many other guns, like the PPSh-41 the MG42 and MG15 fire far too slowly.
If you think about all of these inaccuracies, it feels as if the weapon design in the game
is fully trimmed towards multiplayer balance at the expense of authenticity
and I find it a shame that compromises were made for the single player mode to allow for easier balancing.
I think a lot of these historical inaccuracies could have been avoided and issues,
such as detachable magazines where there were none just seem unnecessary.
After all of the attention to detail that this game shows, it’s just weird that
whoever modelled the guns, seems to have just made it up as they went along.
But after all of these inaccuracies, probably the worst offence in term of the guns featured
in the single player campaign, is their general sound and feel.
All of the sounds and the visual recoil for all of the guns just feelweak and feeble
and worst of all are the machine guns.
And the most embarrassing thing about it is that the original Call of Duty games from 2003 and 2005
actually did a much better job.
Here check out the sound for the MG42 for instance.
It’s unbelievable that almost 15 years after the release of the original CoD, we are actually regressing
in terms of authenticity and just to show off how amazing the scenes with the MG42 could be in the new game,
I went ahead and put together a little compilation withimproved sound.
So a lot of issues with the guns but there are more details that the game gets wrong.
There are issues with explosives throughout the entire campaign.
For instance, setting of a 3m tube of TNT right in front of you like that would make for a very bad day indeed…
Also, deactivating this French field artillery piece with a thermite grenade makes sense but not like this.
Firstly a helmet full of half pound TNT blocks would do the trick but you cannot ignite Dynamite
with heat alone, you need a proper fuse with a low explosive blasting cap at the end.
As far as I know, setting fire to these explosives, even with a super-hot thermite grenade,
would have done zero damage to the gun.
And even if you properly detonated 2½ pounds of TNT like that,
this guy and the main character would be 100% dead.
No, the easiest, safest and most successful way of deactivating this gun
would have been to simply place the thermite into the gun’s breach so that the molten iron of the grenade
could essentially weld the gun shut and probably damage it beyond repair.
It’s not as flashy sure… but on the other hand it’s also not stupid.
Later on in the game, we do see thermite used to destroy different artillery pieces and
and even though the method here makes more sense, the devs still couldn’t help themselves
and they had to work in an unnecessary little explosion at the end.
And while we’re at it, yeah thermite burns really hot but melting a giant hole into the armour of a Tiger 2?
Yeah, no…
In the mission where you liberate Paris, the entire story revolves around meeting a German
defector in order to take possession of explosives that he has stolen for you.
You can find memos throughout the map where the theft of the explosives is mentioned
and two suspects are named: that poor guy out there
and our man here. And after all of that Jazz, when you finally have these explosives
and attach them to the doors, in preparation of the raid… you end up attaching American explosives.
And it’s not as if German explosives would have been hard to implement here because
in a later mission, we can see that the assets are present in the game. It’s a minor detail, I’ll admit,
but if you make ¾ of the mission revolve around these stolen German explosives
it’s kind of silly to use the wrong art asset.
Beyond these two major categories of problems, I have managed to uncover a bunch of unconnected
mistakes and issues throughout the campaign.
Why for instance, when there are so many excellent German voice lines in the Game,
clearly spoken by native speakers,
why is the most prominent single German speaking character
voiced by somebody who clearly does not know what he’s saying.
Half of the words this guy is saying are not even real.
And while we are with him, what on earth is that thing she is stabbing him with?
A conveniently placed broken bottle, fine but come on… that is not how stabbing works.
There is no way that anyone can tell me that she is casually poking those relatively blunt prongs
through several layers of clothing and into this fellow and that he just
instantly and silently goes dead like that.
And while we’re at stabbing; the game’s creators seems to fundamentally not understand human physiology
when it comes to getting poked with sharp or sometimes not so sharp objects.
Take this scene for instance: Our best buddy Zussman gets poked in the lower abdomen
and while I fully believe that that would have been rather uncomfortable,
I don’t see why he should be instantly unable to walk.
Was his spine injured? No! Is he bleeding so badly that he is already in shock?
Also impossible in such a short time and even if he was already in such a bad shape,
then what would his chances of survival be?
The same goes for this fellow here. Sure a punctured lung stings quite a bit I imagine
but surely not enough, to make someone just go dead like that
And during the D-Day mission, we see plenty of M4 Sherman Duplex Drive tanks, as is to be expected.
But for some reasons, someone decided to include a Rhino at the end,
even though the Cullin Hedgerow Device would not be invented until later on.
And speaking of tanks, including vehicle sections where you get to drive an M4 Sherman or fly a P47,
are great and all, but the vehicle controls in this game are absolutely horrible.
If you're gonna do something like this, do it right.
Occasionally some of the art assets will be mirrored for some reason…
Look I get it, not everyone working on the game will be fluent in German
but surely anyone should have been able to tell that the letters here are mirrored horizontally!
Back to the Paris mission and look how wonderfully detailed this forged ID document is!
Too bad that our buddy Major Crowley here is using the exact same document.
Not that is seems to worry this Gestapo fellow here. Also when he waved him on he said,
"Thank you, drive on."
In the bathroom, you can eavesdrop on a couple of ladies discussing the letter one of them
has received from her husband on the Russian front.
She casually mentions that he talks about how bad the weather is
and that would make perfect sense if the mission wasn’t taking place in August.
Is it possible that the letter took over 6 months to reach her,
sure but then why does she not mention this earlier on in the conversation when she is talking about
how his letters do not seem to be getting through?
And in fact, while we are on this mission, it is worth pointing out that it is one of
the few missions that is not very close to history.
While most of the missions in the campaign are real and very well-known battles that the First Infantry Division
fought in, the liberation of Paris is not one of them and neither is the campaign’s final mission,
the liberation of the Berga labour camp.
Both of these events are real of course, the partisan uprising in Paris and the existence of Berga
but the characters we follow in the game would not have been involved.
And that leads me to my final criticism of the mission during the Battle of Aachen.
During this mission, it is the player’s objective to storm the last bastion of the German defenders,
the Hotel Quellenhof, I mentioned earlier.
After successfully taking the hotel, you enter the cellar to find a bunch of German civilians sheltering there.
They are perfectly safe here for the moment but “oh no!” some of them are a little hungry…
So instead of disarming these people, leaving them here under guard with a couple of bars of chocolate
and returning to the hotel to defend it from the German counter attack,
it is decided that we must evacuate these people in the middle of an ongoing battle.
Because reasons. And of course the little girl is left behind forcing you to return to find her…
and then of course the entire hotel is once again swarming with German troops just to force this stupid
stealth sequence… And once that is over (spoiler alert!) there is another gunfight outside during which a German
soldier shoots the older sister of the little girl we just rescued…
Urgh, the whole part of the mission makes no sense whatsoever. Even at the end here,
we’re sending these unarmed civilians off in a German military truck. The most likely thing that is going to
happen is that the next set of American troops 100m away is going to see an enemy truck
racing towards them and they are going to light it up with everything they have.
Including a mission called “Collateral Damage” to highlight the cost of war is a brave idea
but who on earth came up with this convoluted, unrealistic, manufactured situation that makes
no sense whatsoever and in the end makes it one of the German soldiers fault that the sister is killed.
This mission could have sent such a powerful message if only it had been kept simple.
For instance when you come down to the cellar, you hear a sound behind the door and toss in a grenade…
only to then find out that you just fragged up half a dozen civilians.
It would have been an understandable mistake in the heat of battle
that could have nevertheless been emotionally powerful.
But instead we get this convoluted nonsense that makes me wonder what the message
of this mission is even supposed to be!
And come to think of it, the final mission about rescuing Zussman is not only tacked on in a sense that
in real life it had nothing to do with the First Infantry Division, the situation of Zussman’s capture that sets
all of this up is also hilariously implausible.
Why do these Germans go out of their way to take prisoners in the middle of an ongoing firefight,
while they are running for their lives? With both of these missions, it feels as if this game has
gone out of its way to attempt to incorporate a political message and that in order to achieve this goal,
it has thrown historical accuracy and plain old common sense, completely out of the window.
But I think the political tone of this game is a topic for a video all on its own
and we’re already running out of time here.
So I’ll stop for now and maybe I will revisit this topic in future.
Until then, are there any silly inaccuracies or mistakes I have
missed throughout the game’s single player campaign?
Let me know in the comment section below and do feel free to leave a like
or dislike to show me what you thought of the video!
And with that, thank you for watching, I hope
you enjoyed the video and I will see you in the next episode!