Commenter Bipolar.Bear.Disorder is missing the good old days of World War II in today's installment of Speak-Up On Kotaku.
Am I the only one left in the gaming community that misses World War II games? With everyone's intense focus on modern and future warfare, I feel as if World War II video games, my favorite genre, have fallen a bit by the wayside. Of course, World War II games are still being released, but not on the constant scale that used to be the norm. I understood that some people had begun to feel as if the era had been overdone and cliché, but I must admit, I really miss FPS games where aim was more important than perks, and headshots didn't have to come from sniper rifles.
With this sudden influx of contemporary war games set in the present and future, I feel like we as gamers lose an important facet that was prominent in the more well-made productions. I can't really explain what I mean by it, though. To me, it just feels like games like Modern Warfare and Medal of Honor miss some important element that was in their earlier iteration. It isn't the scope of the war, or even the actual combat itself. I just don't think that war games set in a modern period have the same "magic," for lack of a better term; that games like Call of Duty 2, Brothers in Arms, and Company of Heroes had. Maybe it's a sense of righteousness, with a clear sense of who the enemy is and what our goals are. Maybe since it took place "so many years ago," it seems as if it's another time in another place.
I just don't understand why gamers and developers had begun to ignore World War II. Maybe it was being overdone, but I'm pretty sure developers hadn't used the era to its fullest potential. There are so much other stories left to tell. There's so much things developers hadn't done yet. This current batch of modern-combat games cannot match the ones that took us up Normandy Beach, fighting through once-pristine French streets, to reach the city of Berlin.
Maybe that's what's missing in these games set in modern conflicts. In this day and age, undoubtedly fueled by countless government scandals and corruption, any war taking place seems wrong and, well, stupid. Not getting into any specifics here, but the general populace had developed distaste for war and bloodshed. For patriotism and pride. That's where World War II games came in. They weren't meant to trivialize the war, neither making it bearable and "cutesy," or making in into the Hollywood-style action-paced machismo slugfest that dominate the current shooting galleries. They were a sort of remembrance, in a way, for the countless men and women who have died in such a tragic war. In World War II, that was both humanities highest point and lowest point in history. It'd be a shame to forget it in such a quickly growing medium.
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