Call of Duty: Vanguard (Zero Punctuation)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 พ.ย. 2021
- This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviewed Call of Duty: Vanguard.
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Lyudmila Pavlichenko was an inspiring person and a war hero like no other, but I feel like harm is being done to her legacy when you put a sniper rifle on a Soviet female character and go, "she's based on this lady Lyudmila, it's a good way to identify her without giving her character". Fuck it, Borderlands 2 payed more respectful tribute to her by naming one of the most OP Sniper Rifles after her.
Got a question...
Didn't Nick say something about not covering Activision-Blizzard games till they sort out their harrassment problems?
What changed to let this game get reviewed?
@@adis3202 The ABK Twitter account provided an update that they were happy with recent updates to the company pretty much right before Yahtzee put this review into his plans, so it was already locked in (do not forget he plans about two weeks ahead to stay on schedule) and then by the time this review was ready, the stories about Kotick came out. So we're essentially back to not covering them at this point and following the guidance of the ABK Twitter.
@@theescapist Thank you for clarifying.
Stay cool
I got off the CoD train early MW1 was last one so WAY back looks like I have not missed much
I never realized it before watching this video, but Yatzhee hit the nail on the head in terms of why I never felt attached to most of the Call of Duty characters. It's because they never came off as anything more than soldiers. Sure, they have their own unique personality traits, but I never felt the high stakes for them because I could never imagine a single one of them existing in the absense of a warzone. It was as if they were just combat robots and once the war was over they were going to power down anyway.
Very true statement like i can see a guy like bj from wolfenstein outside of a warzone easily but captain price? Not really
It's funny because if any character did mention any backstory or desire to not be fighting, everyone would take that as a death flag the way they see it with all police dramas. Soldier hopes to go home, get shot, and dies is a war game staple for extra tragedy points.
@@Archflip Is it really tragic when we don't care about any of these characters in the first place? All these disposable heroes imo just stand around waving their overswollen red white and blue testicles in service to the American war machine. Anyone who doubts it "deserves" to die. Press F to pay your respects and cough up $60+micros to pay the military.
If they were just war robots then it would be way cooler. Maybe we could customize them or something too.
Could be an idea for a future set cod game, a world where nations fight each other by using robots instead of people
@@turma8eac see they've tried leading into those kinds of things with Black Ops 3 and Infinite Warfare, but never actually addressed those bits other than "oh look robots now". Infinite Warfare had a robot who's the best character they've ever written, and that's saying something
When a game that features a ridiculously buff guy running round duel wielding shotguns killing Space Nazi's does introspection and deep subject matter better than a supposedly 'realistic' world war two shooter something is deeply deeply wrong
I agree. What's deeply wrong is that Activision hasn't died from the plague.
@@jornavyr2459
Lately, it was posing as realistic while also blaming Russians for both American war crimes against civilians and the civil rights/anti-war protests.
I guess they realized that Senator McCarthy's ghost wasn't buying enough additional content to pay for the server costs?
@@jornavyr2459
Modern Warfare was the start, and then they doubled down on the controversy surrounding that title by using far right conspiracy theories as the basis for their 80's nostalgia follow-up. (A Soviet defector was happy to tell the Reagan administration whatever it wanted to hear about the KGB's methods, if it sped up the process. Sort of similar to the problems with Curveball in the 21st century?)
Activision mostly used his claims as an excuse to get Soviet enemies in the game - it wouldn't be Call of Duty if the multiplayer was split between peacefully protesting the drug war or warning other players about the risks of overdose and addiction.
Or maybe both sides selling weapons to Iran, in order to fund terrorists in Nicaragua? There's probably a good business sim buried in that idea....hell, I'd play it just for the Congressional testimony sections.
Anyways, the ads for the game knew that "It's the same glorified rail shooter as before, but with some new textures and multiplayer maps" wasn't going to get anyone excited, so they leaned hard into the story, and did their best to scare you to death. And if it was the first time someone heard the name Yuri Bezmenov, it probably worked.
Especially if they sincerely believe Biden is the AntiChrist, and only "useful idiots" support gay marriage. (I'd rate Biden a minor demon at best.)
Anyways, it must have been a bad look, because we're suddenly back in WW2, celebrating our nation's diversity with the pulpiest of pulp heroes.
I can't wait to see if, one day, they take the same approach to the civil war. Or maybe even smallpox blankets?
that's what happens when you sacrifice artistic integrity for sales figures like every AAA game studio does
TNO had surface level discussions of, among others - American racism in the pre and post war period, Free Will and Consciousness, Maimonic Jewish Thought on the topic of god and free will, and Nazi Racial Science.
Of course, they did proceed to fuck it up with the New Colossus and Young Blood, so, you know.
The critique point about none of the characters wanting to do anything but fight the war is hilarious to me, since even something as positively silly and testosterone-filled as _Serious Sam 4_ managed to get that right.
As ridiculous as Sam's teammates (and everyone else) in that game are, they have something they wanted to do before the war. Rodriguez wanted to be a wrestler or porn star, Jones wanted to be a cook, Kenny wanted to study frogs and Quinn wanted to be a journalist. We don't know what Hellfire wanted to do before it, but even she says she misses something as simple as taking a relaxing bath or being able to go on a proper date that doesn't involve killing aliens. There's an entire series of collectible recordings dedicated to the characters reminiscing about Earth before the war and what they want back from that time. The radio show host in that game makes a very deliberate point about us not forgetting what it is that we are fighting for, not just the survival of the species but also the little things that make us human in the first place.
And this in the same game that has you use a popemobile mech to fight a giant tentacle monster in front of the Vatican.
Why does the pope have a mech? Wait no, that's not important. When will the papal states rise again?
@@thomastakesatollforthedark2231 Time to play EU4 again !
@@thomastakesatollforthedark2231
Why does the pope _not_ have a mech in real life? Walking about spraying holy water out of a cannon, blaring holy music, and chanting Bible verses.
Wait, that's just W40k.
Fucking Doom even does that. Doom Slayer wants to chill out and play video games and listen to music every now and them.
Doom guy wants to do nothing but invade hell and murder demons. That is cannon. Doom guy does not give a fuck about politics, the energy crisis, Mars politics, or whatever is happening back on Earth. He has one singular purpose and that is to go through every layer of hell and systematically destroy demons. And I loved Doom 2016.
You know it's a bad time for game releases when Yahtzee has to dedicate an episode of ZP to a Call of Duty game
I was expecting another U-Turn into indie game discussion, but he did actually have something to say about it.
He could've squeezed the GTA Trilogy into a ZP but perhaps it would've been too difficult.
@@jdbruiser that one is probably down the pipe in various ways. But it may also may be one of those games that he'd be reluctant to review due to the dogpiling, unless he wants to use it as evidence of a trend I've been calling "Refurbishments." These are games that are advertised as "Remasters" but are just bare-minimum polishings meant to either get the game to work on modern systems with no change to the gameplay or, in GTA's case, a low effort upsizing of mobile ports for a quick buck.
@@paulrus-keaton439 I think if Yahtzee reviewed the Trilogy he'd go through them individually. These "refurbishments" as you call them are a worrying trend, let's not forget the dreadful "Definitive Edition" of Mafia II last year either. R* knows there's a demand for the GTA trilogy and seeing as Grove Street Games worked on the Xbox 360 port of San Andreas, they were drafted in to work on the GTA Trilogy. But little did we know that missing songs and a general hack job would be the end result.
@@jdbruiser & @P K Yahtzee mentioned in yesterday's Slightly Something Else that he's working on a review of the GTA trilogy.
For some reason, that “fetch the mop” line made me laugh harder than any other moment in the video. This is what I come to ZP for.
I thought he said mob
@@volcryndarkstar3283 Nope. It was definitely "mop" unless you can use a "mob" to clean up puke. In my experience, mobs just inevitably lead to more puke.
Infinite Warfare though was the last time the CoD series still tried to do something new rather than chasing its past. Not really by much, given that it was a copy of a copy of Titanfall, but still, at least they weren't recycling old plots and old levels yet.
You know the “I don’t believe your characters fuck” rule is surprisingly effective writing advice
The outro with heetler, Churchill and stalin had more plot, character and emotion than the modern COD franchise
I dunno, the part where the protagonists of Ghosts get mad that their dog got shot had some emotion in it :p
(Also, y'know, Modern Warfare)
Eh I liked modern warfare 1 and 2. 3 not so much. Black ops 1 is still great in my memory i'd play the campaign again.
@@Pak_Industrial yeah i actually liked BO1
hey now, CoD WWII actually had some pretty solid character writing
@@TheXorph64 I might new COD. Ill edit the comment
Not believing COD characters do anything with their lives but war is so incredibly accurate.
Good example from the game in question: The beginning of the sniper's into bit. Even when you're supposedly at home, they literally never talk about even one thing that isn't at least tangentially related to war. The dad was a sniper in WWI, the brother is training troops, the player character is a medic, and the mother (dead, obviously) "would be proud of both of you", the implication being because they both are aiding in the war.
It would almost work if just one character had said "Hey can we talk about something else?" But that doesn't happen...
David mason: 🤨
Why do you think the series is called _Call of fucking Duty?!_ You are here to do your Duty, y'know, the thing you were Called for, and _nothing else._ And Duty is a thing that Calls for soldiers, not human beings. Human beings might have emotions other than righteousness and vengefulness, and those emotions do nothing except get in the way of answering the Call of Duty.
The longest campaign in WWII was in Burma. When can we play as members of the West African Division fighting the Japanese in the jungles in order to maintain the last allied supply line to China
And they could have Gurkhas too
i mean the Arlantic was longer but we like to pretend that was just a bettle dispite lasting almost the wars entriaty
Reminds me of a quote Dan Carlin said in his Hardcore History podcast, Supernova in the East:
Java is heaven, Burma is hell, and nobody gets out of New Guinea alive.
Wanna play as an Ethiopian resistance fighter struggling to liberate my country from the Italians
You said China, that's why. You can't even have China be the good team I'm shooters without it being banned (BF4 and I think C&C Generals).
I remember back in like 2010ish there was a count done by a gamer magazine that found out there was more WW2 games than any other time period. Iirc, more WW2 games than everything combined with the 3rd most used periods onward.
At this point I wouldn't be surprised if completing all ww2 games of the last 20 years would take longer then the actual bloody war
Seriously, we need more games set in the Napoleonic Wars. It should be just like War and Peace, with 20 hours of dicking around at fancy parties before any shooting happens.
I want to see a ww2 game set from the axis perspective but that will just be another ww2 game though......how about the American revolution or Korean war?
@@TomatoBreadOrgasm I've played some turn-based strategy games set in the Napoleonic Wars (and a ship battle game set in the same era), but I don't think I've ever seen a shooter set in them.
I like the idea of a War and Peace-inspired game where if you make the right dialogue choices at fancy parties, marry the right ingenue etc. you get bonuses in the combat sections because all the coolest soldiers want to join your company, the Tsar puts you in charge of an elite regiment, your father-in-law gives you a super-fast horse as a wedding present, etc. Sort of like Dragon Age: Inquisition but in an early 19th century Europe setting.
*Prince Andrei Bolkonsky approves +15*
@@KeithFraser82 I've got a shooter for you set in the Napoleonic wars, Holdfast, just bear in mind it's proximity chat.
That joke at the end got me. We want a Call Of Duty: Dad's Army game!
I would play the hell out of that! :)
Press F to NOT TELL EM PIKE
I want Call of Duty: 'Allo 'Allo
"Wasted" death screen, but it says "We're doomed"
"Are you sure that's wise, Sir?"
Kinda funny how the one part of warfare that no historical shooter wants to accurately replicate is the part where most soldiers actively avoid killing the enemy because they're not sociopaths.
Well, it depends, I would say that most anyone other than the player being useless is entirely accurate regarding war. The 10% or less sociopaths do most of the killing and are "the true heroes" to win the war...
@@revdarian Haha, fair point, I guess. It'd be pretty funny to do a war game where the player character gets fragged by his fellow soldiers halfway because they find him creepy.
If you wanna look at it that way then the only one that made sense was Polina. Losing her family made her nothing but vengeful and wanting to kill every Nazi she could find. Ironically cause of her backstory she and Lucas were the only 2 characters I grew attached to cause of their stories
I swear Yahtzee releases these videos around dinnertime on purpose, he's like my go-to guy for giving me videos to watch when I'm eating
I dunno where you live but it’s lunchtime
You only eat on Wednesdays?
@@shooiebooie7774 In some places dinner means lunch, not supper. Strange, I know.
He Always releases them on my lunch time. So I take it you're probably in Europe or Asia
@@JudoStev Also, different time zones exist...
Yahtzee has resigned to the fact that COD cannot innovate and the series basically is stuck in a quagmire of mediocrity and banality. It's kinda bad for the series when Yahtzee is like 'Yeah whatever.' COD setting is forever WW2. 0:56 - 1:49
I’m of the opinion that WW2 is still interesting, if you set it somewhere that isn’t D-Day, Stalingrad or Berlin. Like come on. How about being a Chinese rifleman with barely a working rifle and about ten rounds, flung at entrenched Japanese troops along with seemingly millions of fellow troops; watching as they dwindle and break beneath the sheer weight of bullets and artillery fire being directed at you; and getting blithely congratulated on the successful diversion.
City combat? How about the Warsaw Uprising? An embittered Polish teen, initially hopeful for a good life in a new Polish state, forced into action against the heart-wrenching brutality of fascist occupation; their efforts culminating in a massive battle to retake their capital from the worst of the invaders, praying for just one more minute to let the Red Army arrive; and coming to the drawn out, silent, shattering realisation that the Soviets aren’t coming, that all of their efforts just aren’t worth the trouble.
Air battles? Sea? The Battle of Crete: an island bigger than Delaware held under siege by an onslaught of hardened Wehrmacht paratroopers, British and Greeks and Australians trying manically to hold the line where there is no line; the Royal Navy being battered over and over again by dive-bombers, in an attempt to rescue the troops within from certain destruction.
Greece, Yugoslavia, Leningrad, Norway, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Egypt, Morocco, Ukraine. There are interesting places in WW2, all over the world, with interesting stories a-plenty. I didn’t even mention any of the axis nations here, the Austrians told to be German, the Romanians watching helplessly their nation be carved up by outside powers and by fascists within, Bosniak Muslims beneath the horror of the Ustaše. You just have to look anywhere that isn’t D-Day, Stalingrad or Berlin.
I like his take on WWII shooters though.
@@jacobtrowbridge7223 I unironically would like to see gameplay from the Axis side in various armies and other minor countries throughout the war like the Baltics. But then again if we did they'd just make those parts filled with evil mustache twirling Nazi's who can't go 5 seconds without proclaiming how evil they are
@@dontspeaktoelectrohead1491 Ironically you could probably deliver the most introspective storyline about the problems the allies faced by playing from the point of the axis powers.
@@jacobtrowbridge7223 Those ideas are all brilliant and incredibly emotionally compelling.
And for that reason, you're fired.
"We've always been at war with eurasia" Wasn't expecting a 1984 referance but sure am glad I picked up on it
Literaly 1984
Yes and what's even cooler is understanding references from very popular literature and not having the urge to tell everyone that you got it
WOW you must be so smart to get a reference from such an obscure book. I'm so jealous of you
You know what's funny is you can find the good citizens in these comments.
Wow a lot of negativity here.
I’m glad Yahtzee pointed out the “it’s a video game blah blah blah” argument is a straw man that distracts from the real issue. The game doesn’t feel real, not just because it rewrites history enough to be a what-if, but because there’s no nuance with the characters. You have unfailingly good “protagonists” and laughably evil antagonists. The game is a failing on all fronts, it’s just lazy.
Exactly, if you want to have “diverse” characters then have the balls to address the fact that they wouldn’t have been welcome by most of the “heroes” at the time either. You insult the people that really did exist back then by pretending it was all fine and dandy imo.
Oh and torture is surprising effective no matter how brave and patriotic you are. Characters who act like torture has no effect on them bother me endlessly 😂.
@@ducky36F Good point, I almost forgot about that. Besides the fact that the Germans forsake the basic principles of POW's (Silence, Segregate, Search, etc.) which allows all of them to be in the same room and plan, they all act like being beat and threatened has ZERO effect on them.
These are supposed to be normal humans, not super soldiers. But then again, Sledgehammer was more worried about pushing an agenda.
@@ducky36F Statistically, torture is actually one of the worst ways to get good intel from a prisoner. They are far more likely to give false information just to get the torture to stop, especially since most torture subjects have little to no valuable information to begin with. Yet another thing mass media gets wrong most of the time.
Your point about diverse characters is 100% accurate though.
Honestly, I'd prefer more games focus on the German resistance to the Nazi regime. Far too many games seem to paint the Nazis as a unified German front that all wanted to take over the world without acknowledging that the first country the Nazis invaded was their own. It would also be interesting to see a game set in the U.S. where a shocking number of politicians and citizens wanted to enter WWII...on the Nazi's side, and the attempts of grassroots movements to prevent that. Of course, THAT particular game idea is about as likely to get made as one that paints anti-capitalists in a positive light...
@@ducky36F I think very few soldiers have any valuable intel. Especially one that would still have value days after their capture. If your side knows that you've been captured, wouldn't they try to make any info you have worthless anyway (e.g. modifying important plans)?
@@Jedi_Vigilante You get a lot of games that "paint anti-capitalists in a positive light", half the Cyberpunk games for example. But unless it's independent or from a minor studio it never seems genuine of course.
That big brother "hence we have always been at war with Eurasia" was great. I'd quadruple like this for that alone, if I could.
I thought we were at war with Eastasia!
@@PowertipBrushhead that was a plot by Goldstein!
Really made me tehe
The reference was a double plus good!
WW2 is the only "war with a good narrative" because we basically stripped all the complexity and nuances from it until all is left was "nazi are bad, Japanese bad too, everyone else was good" (yeah the italians were just removed entirely).
Which is a bit like reading games of thrones and saying "undead bad, everyone else good", you are not completely wrong but you clearly didn't paid attention while reading.
I mean they were pretty terrible, so terrible that adding "Moral complexity" is usually done by people trying to whitewash Nazis
And it's also the dangerous part of "no, don't look at the nuances of the war, they're bad we're good, if you look any deeper thEN YOU'RE ONE OF THE BAD GUYS !1!!11!1!" modern ideology.
The American Civil War gets close: fairly hard to overlook that the CSA fought and killed more Americans than any conflict until WW2 to maintain the practice of slavery. The main thing that stops it short is Lincolns Assassination and the subsequent capitulation of President Johnson to southern politicians
Oh please. Elucidate why the germanic fascist dictator bent on world domination so that he could have the living space for his Arian utopia was so stripped of complexity. Explain why Rape of Nanking Emperor Hirohoto who said it was Japan's destiny to conquer the pacific and rule over its people as gods was so nuanced.
@@MindOfGenius Okay but the Axis literally were the bad guys, at the very least they were far worse than even the likes of the Br*itish
For once I'd love to see one of these WWII touch on the Winter War. Compared to many other battles and smaller wars throughout the entire clash, it is relatively forgotten in the gaming scene.
Mission Objective: Blow up the Red Army field kitchen so that their morale suffers from lack of hot food.
The problem with setting a game in the winter war is that the gameplay would propably be quite monotonic. Either you play as the finns and camp the trenches of mannerheim line or you play as the soviets and just see how close to that trench you can run before catching a bullet. Continuation war would be a better choice in my opinion, but even that had a couple years of both sides just sitting in their trenches. A storybased shooter about finnish long range patrol units would propably be cool though. Or a story about soviet desants sabotaging stuff in finland.
@@MI-vf5zs Hell, it wouldn't even need to be an entire game (as great as it could be). It could just be another war story, like how modern Battlefield campaigns are.
Snow is white though
Talvisota - Winter War is on Steam as a free mod for Rising Storm 2.
Ah, so the old hand "we put all our resources into the tech and multiplayer and the campaign was was an afterthought."
I'm currently playing through the campaign of Halo 3 again (over 14 or so years later) so this thought has been on my mind, and I'm certain it was back then too.
Wait what? You don't like the Halo 3's campaign?
@@ducksauce2696 Its not necessarily a matter of it being good or bad (or dislikable or likeable), so much as it didn't feel quite as committed to as the campaigns in other Halos might have been. And it's true, to be fair. Addition of things like Forge and Theater on top of expanded multiplayer means less time could go into the campaign. It's alright, but I don't find it has quite as memorable missions or locations or so on that Halo 1 and 2 had.
We put all our effort into remaking the same game formula and the theme was an afterthought
@@TuffMelon I played through it for the first time recently and felt the same way-it was good, but despite the stakes being ostensibly higher, it felt much more limited in scope than Halo 2 did.
@@SirVer51 Halo 3 is essentially just the originally visioned climax of Halo 2 stretched out to fill to an entire campaign. I think Bungie was creatively checked out of Halo after 2 in general.
ODST felt like it had love put into it though.
I'm surprised they bothered making a story at all, I thought every cod was you basically just drop into some locale and are directed to go shoot people
The fact that a World War is confined to Normandy, Stalingrad, and the Fall of Berlin drives me nuts. You had the Nazi invasion of Norway (where England and Norwegian resistance fought them), the fall of France, the second Sino-Japanese War, the Soviet Finnish Winter War, and continuation war, The invasion of Sicily and Italy, the numerous conflicts in the Balkans and the Baltic states. The Fighting in North Africa lasted for 3ish years!
Or any conflict in the Pacific Campaign.
Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, etc.
@Theo Nuss heck the Philippines are completely neglected
How has there not been a game focused on the brutal three-way Partisan war in Yugoslavia yet
It was called a World War for a reason, yet most games seem to forget that
You could go small scale as well, like an escort mission as a Danish resistance fighter evacuating the Danish Jews to Sweden.
The whole Baltic region may be difficult though, it's kinda sucky since they are gonna lose anyway no matter if Germany or Russia wins the war. Maybe you could do Finland, first against Russia than against Germany, I think at least some COD players would get a stiffy from getting the cance to shoot both.
1:56 Remember that children are always learning from you, even when you're not trying to teach them.
Man, I wish I could make a game about a fictional war with fictional nations from such a time period, something actually thought out.
Something like Strangereal? I heard there was supposed to be a third-person stealth shooter spinoff at some point but that got cancelled.
@@goldenhorde6944 Yeah i'd suppose something like that sounds close enough, I do love my worldbuilding.
Though my real dream for the type of game would be more like a sort of full-on war shooter like battlefield with a little foxhole sprinkled in.
There's a lot of Japanese fiction about fictional nations fighting Not!World War II with 1930s-1950s technology. I suspect it's because WWII is extremely fertile ground for military fiction because of all the various theatres and terrains and technologies and the scale of it all, but the Japanese are understandably hesitant to shine a light on their own involvement in the war for the purposes of entertainment. The Valkyria Chronicles games are probably the most recent well-known example of this.
Valkyria Chronicles and Ace Combat about both big examples of this. Apparently the trick is to make the game in Japan.
It's called "Killzone" and it wasn't too special.
The one thing I hated the most in Vanguards campaign other than the "smile at the camera with a sparkling tooth" protagonists, is they made the Germans bland as could be. Fucking Battlefield 5 made them actually interesting as they recognized the hopelessness of their situation, while in Vanguard... they're all just shitty ripoffs of Hans Landa
"bland" is the last word I would use to describe Hans Landa. dude sacrificed every major political figure from his country in a single evening to guarantee he'd come out on top.
CoD Nazis are just guns paired with flesh bags that carry them between chest-high walls.
@@wrongtime9097 Fair point. Allow me to fix that
@@jbardouc808 ah, much better
Yahtzee just as a way to boil everything down to one line. “A great big splash about in a kiddie pool version of history without the introspection to notice when the water is getting suspiciously warm.” Is the greatest roast of a game I have ever heard.
Yahtz's intro for the (respectable) shilling just keeps getting faster and faster. I love it.
I seriously can't wait for it to be like 10 seconds long in the future.
He's as much of a 'company man' than most of those he derides.
@@jaysmith2858 I'm sure you have a great grasp of how restricted his artistic freedom under this company is. Advertising for your company isn't the same thing as being under its bootheel.
Also, I'm assuming the reason the other parts of WW2 get left out is because Nartzees are an uncomplicated enemy we have no problem keeping up the hate for, but showing Japan as being the heartless, Imperialist dicks they were would be "racist" or whatever.
Fun fact - Dr. Mengele is considered a monster for all time, but Japan's Unit 731 basically got a free pass for the experiments they performed on civilians. Fuck yeah I love science!
Many more of the Japanese war criminals survived due to being conveniently distant from the main attentions of the Big Three, and not having 250 million furious Slavs breathing down their necks
could you imagine a COD level taking place in Nanking? that'd make for some interesting discourse (and probably get the game banned in Japan)
World at war had a focus on the pacific theatre though...?
@Sam Wallace There were a lot of very angry Chinese people, unfortunately for the Chinese however Britain and the US weren't interested in acquiescing to their demands for retribution and they were too distracted by imminent civil war to do anything themselves.
Perhaps the Chinese government would be interested in financing a COD-type game about the Sino-Japanese wars (with a final chapter/DLC add-on where your soldier character overthrows the Nationalists in the name of Communism); they've been making a lot of patriotic war movies there lately.
The thing that always baffles me with WW2 shooters is that if you go beyond D-Day, there's actually some really interesting theatres of war that you could make a lot out of. Like, to Yahtzee's point about Russians always being snipers, one of my favorite Russian units during WW2 were the Night Witches, an all-female night bomber regiment famous for flying canvas crop dusters that could turn off their engines and be nearly silent on approach, hence their nickname. If you added those into a COD game, you could break the traditional mold *and* introduce some novel stealth mechanics.
Oh man the Gamergaters would lose their shit about that kind of female representation
Yeah but you're talking flight mechanics in a CoD game that aren't as high-octane interesting.
But including a mission assisting the Night Witches by, say, taking out enemy spotlights so they won't be seen on their way in? That's good stuff.
And that’s not even talking about the Pacific theater. Most games might pick out some of the big battles, and by that I mean Midway, Guadalcanal, Io Jima, and that’s it. What about a mission where you try to stop the civilians of Saipan or Okinawa from committing suicide, or the chaotic and hopeless night action of Savo Island?
3:30 Wolfenstein Youngblood was just an excuse to make 80s references in a world that would likely not have the same 80s references. I mean, the Nazis won so the Vietnam War, hippies, Woodstock, Civil rights movement, etc wouldn't happen. Major world and culture events would change.
Do you really believe Hitler would want Muhammed Ali to be world heavyweight champion when he walked out on Jesse Owens winning a gold medal over German athletes?
You know it's got so tedious when he can't even call it spunkgarrgleweewee anymore 😂
I thought it was because that joke was never funny in the first place.
Stalingrad isn't really "classic" in WW2 shooters, because most of them are American-made. Not many levels on the Eastern Front in Western videogames.
And zero Chinese theater stuff. Sadge
Stalingrad was in both call of duty 1 and call of duty 2, both of which had extensive eastern front sections
Definitely true that I don't think there's been any FPS game with the Chinese theater in it
I really hoped we got some Sino-Japanese levels. There were a lot of messed up things that would have been awesome to play through.
@spindletea MOH: RS is criminally underrated title. Great story and great multiplayer
Stalingrad is in countless games, it's probably in games the same amount as D-Day.
"Oh, they set one in space. Fetch the mop." This line had me laughing hard enough that my dogs got concerned.
I can’t believe the Moon missions in Wolfenstein: New Order aren’t more celebrated.
Dammit. I need to play that game again.
I liked things like the signs urging people to sign up as a "Mondsoldat". That was pretty cool.
Of all the places to store nuke launch codes!
That Hitler Churchill Stalin gag in the end credits is so great. Yahtz stream of consciousness keeps on giving
"Characters who fuck" is genius
Finished Spec Ops the Line this week and that really was a model of a good modern war story with introspection but also exactly why you couldn't make more like it.
It also helps that the Wolfenstein: The New Order (ignore the shit fest that was TNC and TYB) Nazi's were actually NAZI. Behind all the robots and space-tech and and shit, they were as close as a game got to depicting the *actual Nazi ideology*, insofar there was a coherent one (there really wasn't). Throughout the game you get many chances to see it - from newspaper clippings, to guard's dialogue, to cutscenes and bad guy monologues that establish just how *horrible* the nazi ideology was and why. Deathshead talks about scientific-racism, creating a society of ubermensch, and genuinely thinks what he is doing is good. The civilian life is shown as controlled, paranoid, where snitching is your duty, a woman's place is either with the kinder, in the Kuche (kitchen), or the kirche (church), were even the side that *won*, the Germans, kinda live a shitty life.
In all other games the Nazi's might as well be Daleks, or generic evil robots. What makes them different from any other evil dude other than a snazzy uniform and some *casual racism*?! The fact these games make the Nazi's only *casual racist* is the most hilarious thing is.
At least World At War made up for having the enemy be a faceless rival instead of it's own force by focusing on other things - Reznov was about having retribution and how far it can go, while Roebek and his squad was about the grinding nature of facing a tenacious enemy that just won't give up and how it grinds the soul. These modern call of doodies have nothing to say of value about *any of this*, at all.
And the worse thing is, fuck it, this all can be excused if the *gameplay* is at least fun. But they make shooting Nazi's BORING. They suck as stories, they suck as games, they suck as experiences. They just *suck*.
You know a game is trash if they somehow manage to make shooting Nazis boring, lol
I wouldn't dismiss TNC because it directly addressed race in America a lot more than New Order. I'm not sure what would have been gained by simply repeating itself.
You know where they aren't nazis?
In Germany. Because Bethesda didn't want getting sued (there's laws against showing nazi symbols in public to ensure that they're not glorified)
So instead, they're "The Regime" from "Germania"
Ignore the New Colossus? TNC improved upon New Order in terms of gameplay loop and character study. Difficulty felt like it progressed, rather than just throwing enemies at you with more and more armor. The story is also genuinely one of the best narratives that exists in the video game medium. But, that is only just opinion, so to each their own :)
Damn, was hoping for another switcheroo review
@@isodoubIet I'd rather play pretentious indie trash than AAA trash that costs 4X as much & is half as stable
@@isodoubIet There is sad and pathetic, but I see you are clearly beyond that
@@isodoubIet so instead you waste your time with expensive copy-pastes of games that came out 10 years ago that somehow get more broken every release?
I'll gladly take a few corny jokes over a few crashes to desktop.
@@isodoubIet So you complain that AAA games are trash, yet shit even harder on anyone trying to break out of the AAA rut just because You didn't like it?
You know what games I don't like? Dating sims. I think they suck. But I don't hate them, because they're at least Trying to do something else and bring gaming to something outside AAA's treadmill of mediocrity. You can't Succeed in spectacular ways or find new games to love if you're too much of a coward to try weird shit or risk playing games you may not like.
You never know What you like until you've found it. I mean you literally had no idea that you'd like shooters until you Played one first, right?
@@isodoubIet ...I mean again, to be perfectly fair, these games were made by Actual Indie devs.
When you don't have an endless supply of money to throw at a problem, you gotta do Something to garner attention. Like these guys can't afford relentless advertising like AAA can, they can't cover up for their mistakes by throwing next-gen tech at the problem until it's harder to notice, they can't afford an army of lawyers to deal with the fallout of shamelessly lying to the consumers, and they don't have a pre-built in audience who will just buy it because "Well it's a Halo game and I like Halo."
You don't make a game like Papers Please or Undertale when you can afford to make a CoD game. And people are usually more forgiving of Indie games when it comes to things like graphics or polished system operation because those things take Bank to make in this day and age.
So yeah, you gotta appeal to Someone, and indie games are usually made for niche audiences, not "the general public."
Fun fact: The USSR was the first nation to criminalize racist discrimination, back in 1936.
Shame they jumped right into Stoning Gay people after that.
The issue with setting a WW2 shooter outside of D-Day, Stalingrad, North Africa, South Pacific is that a huge group of people will complain that it’s “not iconic enough”. That’s what happened when Battlefield V tried it at least.
Did people complain about that?
I mean there's nothing wrong with the setting of BFV's campaigns, it's just the stories/writing are kinda crap and they're way too short to get invested in any way
I bet those same people did not complain about all the WW2 level guns that were all over the place.
@@bavtie1 I haven't heard about people getting mad at Battlefield 5 for that. But I guess if they did, it got overshadowed by the whole 'woman with a prosthetic hand leading her own squad and fighting on the frontlines on WW2, and the lead director lying about having a daughter so he could lecture his fanbase' schtick
@@thewielder3445 For me the whole showcasing lesser known, earlier battles of WW2 wasn't a bad idea, but it wasn't executed very well. Post Scriptum did the battle of France and actually included the French army, showing they weren't the pushovers everyone says they were, but BFV didn't include them. At the very least they should have had a couple of maps at launch with more familiar battles as a kind of safety net for the other ones people may be less familiar with.
Weirdly I'd kill for a dad's army game where the germans actually invade for real and you have as massive tonal disconnect between the characters comedy antics and the grim war story
There's a 1942 movie which is a bit like that, called Went The Day Well?, in which the inhabitants of a sleepy English village have to fight off Germans infiltrating ahead of an invasion.
I know the begining bit is probably pre recorded and the same every episode. But i swear it is getting faster.
Knowing Yahtzee it's probably not pré recorded
I'm quite happy for WW2 as a setting, it still interests me and has much potential - but yes when it's the same settings over and over it becomes more dull. Every game is just Americans on D-Day, Stalingrad, a generic tropical Pacific Island and maybe if you're lucky North Africa, when you have the whole Winter War, China, Burma, Caucasus etc fronts almost untouched in mainstream games. Korea would also be a good setting I feel for a shooter, the WW2 tech people know and like with the beginings of modern equipment.
And yes with regards to forced diversity it's just not needed, like this game has the black commando with the perfect English accent (I can't prove there were none but I doubt there were many) and in doing so is purposely choosing to ignore the thousands of Indians, East Africans, Senegalese and more who actually did put in brave service during the war.
Well said
Tbf, I dunno if I trust CoD Devs to portray the effects of colonialism in a way that wouldn't be incredibly stupid
@@consensus6791 As far as I can tell, CoD has become nothing more than an annual recruitment ad for the US military. That’s why they leave everything out that doesn’t involve Americans.
I love the members post for this one! XD
😂 😂 Classic
And once again, we see "Medal of Honor" still put more effort in casually than anything nowadays can do intentionally.
Zero Punctuation angry punk rock track of the week:
*The Emotional Toll That War Has Upon Those Who Fight It* by *The Ourobouros of Tedium*
so glad your still making these, haven't seen any for a while, hey youtube stop hiding them.
This is actually one of the few cod games without any quick time events
Some parts of wwii underrepresented in FPS Games:
Eastern European Partesan warfare
Literally any part of the pacific theatre not involving the Americans (the war for China, the fighting in Burma, Vietnam and Malaya)
The North Africa campaign
"They had won the victory over themself. They loved Winston Churchill." - The End
After the first time it was proposed to me, Yahtzee's "what can you imagine the player character doing BESIDES being a player character?" question is so extremely useful and important. I think about it a lot, nowadays.
to be perfectly fair to the game's creators, "soviet sniper" is the best, if not the only way one can have a female soldier c in a WW2 game and stay true to history. At the very least as long as we are talking about ground forces
If you include partisan forces rules go out the window, women can and did fight as part of guerilla units across Europe. The USSR is just the first time women served in direct combat roles
@@Kaarl_Mills True and i considered them. But CoD games usually have actual soldiers as protagonists, and while quite a few partisans were soldiers cut off from the main military most weren't.
@Bukkie661 Really? Cool, never heard of it before. Anything i can read/ watch to learn more?
@@Altom941 The RAF had female pilots, they just didn't let them do any actual combat, just deliveries and supply runs I believe. The Soviets _did_ have a female combat squadron, if memory serves, they were given the worst planes and little recognition but they existed.
@@nicholascross3557 I am aware of the soviet pilots, they are the whole reason for second half of my original post. I did not know about female pilots in luftwaffe or indeed RAF, however, so i would like to know more. Any recommendations?
Yes Yartzee they should most definitely make Call of Duty: Dads Army. 🤣👍
A day one purchase from me I would love the level where you machine gun Nazis as Private Fraser with the Lewis Gun. Just needs a delicated button on the controller to make the characters shout their catchphrases.
Damn, I was hoping this would be a stealth review of Deltarune...
Yahtzee wouldn't want to do it until all the chapters have released. Plus I'm sure he would give a perfect review like Undertale:
"Undertale is a good game."
Yahtzee wouldn't want to do it until all the chapters have released. Plus I'm sure he would give a perfect review like Undertale:
"Undertale is a good game."
Admittedly this time period does have a little more justification for the angry sniper lady cliché than most as Russia was producing some very effective female snipers at the time.
Yes, but if you learned the history of WWII from video games, you'd be under the impression that about 75% of all Soviet infantry were female snipers
"Don't be like the fn Nazis" is so sadly relevant these days...
6:15
Ooh! Love the narrative here! Battle between three monsters, with third one getting away despite being the biggest!
@1:23
He's absolutely correct about modern warfare: How far can your artillery reach is a HUGE part of warfare.
I saw this video in my feed and thought “Are they still making CoD games?” Then I stopped myself and realised that of course they do… obviously
Let's just cross our fingers that shooties will continue to experiment and step out of their comfort zone. Maybe something like a common military vs the scary unknown.
WOO LETS FIGHT SPACE WIZARDS!
Ok... idea. Call of Duty set in the Hundred Years War. That would blow my fucking mind. We already have sword fight war games but none of them have CoD money. I'd buy the shit out of that!
Only if they title it Call of Levy.
the english french or the japanese warring period?
Personally I think that the thirty years war is criminaly underrated in storytelling
@@GreyWolfLeaderTW So what you're saying is... caveman tribal warfare? Call it Call of Ugg?
@@azzzanadra All three, at once, on my plate. Yum yum yum.
“We’ve always been at war with Euraasia” I get it
Damn it, now I want COD: Revolutionary War. Muskets, bayonets, and cannons…. With a maximum rate of fire of 2 shots a minute.
There were repeating arms around during the revolutionary war, such as the Belton Flintlock. They would have been rare, and one variant from 1690 was prone to explode, but I'd imagine a Revolutionary War COD would probably include obscure cool explody guns of the time period.
if you did the Partizan war in that period maybe the Wyoming Vally and Chery Vally Ambushes as well as the burning of the Vallies campagin for the Brits and something around Francis Marrion in South Carrolinia for the American sodev
It's disappointing that alternate history isn't used in any of these games. There are a ton of different ways things could have played out when it came to wars between the great powers during the era of 1910 to 1950. It was only through a very specific combination of circumstances that the countries that participated sided the way they did. Creating a new story using 95% the same assets should be pretty freaking easy.
*looks back at Republic Commando*
What's wrong with space FPS?
I could see one about boarding starships being pretty badass.
Despite being an FPS in the literal sense of the word, I'd argue that RC is a tactical shooter because of it's slower pacing and laser focus on squad based gameplay
@@Kaarl_Mills Isn't "tactical shooter" just a sub-genre of FPS?
@@DarthRadical people can't seem to decide.
That Starlin thing at the end. Gold 🤣
"spunkgargleweewee"
I usually follow all kind of news revolving around gaming but how in the world did I completely miss that a new call of duty released?
You didn't miss much.
i did to i saw a guide about it from IGN then realized vanguard was out
the end cartoons he puts up always make me chuckle.
I used to work with some of the devs at IW. I never get tired of sending them YC's videos.
At this point I'm impressed they actually included Nazi's in the game.
Y'know what I'd like from Call of Duty? A "Cloud Atlas"-esque plot where you go through different wars, like an expanded Black Ops 2, or Battlefield Portal with a campaign, or just Darkest of Days but done better. It'd be an admission that there isn't much else to do with CoD, but you won't hear me complain about that.
I did not expect the reference to New Order, I’m glad it’s getting the recognition I don’t think it had
That gag about vomiting on carpet is so relatable as a dog owner 😂
Where can we submit recommendations to Yahtzee? Because I've been watching this game Inscryption that I think Yahtz would really, really enjoy, it's dark and mysterious and really fascinating, with some very unique takes on the idea of magic card games, probably the most atmospheric and interesting horror game I've ever seen. Better than shlock like this, at least…
I think you just suggest by commenting, but he's already said on Slightly Something Else that he played it and wasn't a fan.
@@moistcampervan Really? Fascinating…I mean, granted, when you beat the DM the first time and suddenly the game becomes about a dude who opens card packs on camera, THAT'S really stupid, it would be so much better if beating him without solving all the puzzles just got you a bad ending, my immersion definitely took a blow when that happened…but besides that, it's really creative and unique, and the gameplay mechanics are really solid, I figured Yahtz would like it for that alone. Well, good to know. Thanks!
Never knew that dude who occasionally appeared on best of the worst also works for escapist
Glad I'm not the only one who just made that connection. Jack is great!
I wish they'd do the Battle of Bamber Bridge in one of this shooters. Now THAT'S a level I'd enjoy.
"Nipples at the touch of a questing hand" is a wonderful turn of phrase.
I’ve long since forsaken activision Blizzard and it’s puppet development teams as being capable of recapturing the spark and potential that modern warfare and Black ops had. They’re no different than illumination, banking on the lowest common denominator instead of actually trying to make their games truly memorable and worth remembering years later despite how much they try and pretend they’re doing in the marketing
"The leader dude has leader powers."
Infinity Warfare campaign was loads of fun tho, even if it suffered from cliffhangerities and was The Pacific War as told by Grandpa and in Space.
was sceptical about your video at first but you made it fun like always. must work on my expectations
Want to know something that just dawned on me the Nazis during ww2 did actually have superior technology and soldiers training because they were preparing for a massive European War. So having the Nazis essentially wearing evil iron man outfits and using distorted technology that many people can't even comprehend actually made players comprehend what it must have felt like to be an Ally soldier opposing the Nazis.
Wolfenstein the New Order is one hell of a game
Superior tech in some respects, but this is contrasted with the majority of the German army using horses for mobility for the duration of the war.
@@MrWongCx Yes but during the beginning of the war especially on the eastern front Allied casualties were so high and the Germans were moving so fast it did actually feel like going against a monster super army.
0:48
You're welcome.
I love how this video sums up quite literally every issue I have with ww2 shooters in general. Especially the no pacific war thing like what the fuck?
"and incidentally we have always been at war with Eurasia"
Is that a subtle 1984 reference in there? I caught that.
God damnit I was hoping we could keep up with the trend of positive indie game reviews disguised as Call of Duty reviews
I love it. We need more World War 2 games because an alarming number of people around the world failed the "Don't be a Nazi" test.
I remember seeing the ps2 medal of honor having the first fps dday section ive seen.
To summarize:
This game is the definition of
"Genuinely uninteresting"
Ending the video with Staling giving a :3 is certainly an artistic choice of some kind.
So Yatzhee used a picture of Al Jolson in black face around the 2:45 mark as an example of people being racist back in the 40's, which is kinda sad seeing as Al was The leading figure promoting African American culture internationally and a huge advocate for equal rights.
You know what this video made me realize ? In about six or seven decades, assuming we're all still alive and video games are still a relevant thing, we may see an action game set in the Ukraine war. And I'm assuming that right now, everyone thinking about it would feel shock and disgust at that idea (I certainly did), but it's interesting to think about. We made loads and loads of games based on another atrocious conflict because we could easily write stories with good guys and bad guys.
And people from the future would have no trouble doing that. It's a completely unjustified conflict that destroyed many many lives. So how will we feel about it in a few decades ? Will morality have changed enough to not glorify war like we did in the past ? Or will it be the same process, and the idea seems offensive and ridiculous right now because we're living through the events firsthand (My mother even houses a family of refugees) ?
I have no answer, and am not the least bit qualified to argue in favour of one, just some food for thoughts.
It wont be in 6 or 7 decades. There are games set in real conflicts in the middle east that occured in the 2000s so probably like 10 years or less before we start seeing that conflict in games or movies.
2:30
Probably because of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who was indeed a complete badass. Yugopnik did a video on her a couple years ago; would recommend
My guess as to why the lady Russians/eastern Europeans are always snipers is that people love to reference Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Ukrainian sniper in the Red Army with over 300 confirmed kills and the nickname "Lady Death". I sure wish they'd actually make games about these interesting historical characters instead of just obliquely referencing them into tropey oblivion
4:30 i’ve never laughed harder
It's a testament to Yahtzee's delivery and charisma that I never skip the "escapist" ad blurb at the beginning of recent videos because it's just so entertaining to listen to his "Micro Machines Guy" impression.
I think more modern games should use the ace combat setup. Its basically just the real world but with all the elements that are inconvenient pushed under the rug with some token explanation about the history of the world being vaguely different.