I’ve been trying to work out why the characters in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare are more convincing and empathetic to me than the characters in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Partly, it’s fatigue. By the time you get to the sixth entry of any game series, you’re likely to be cynical with regards to its creative integrity—Black Ops 6 is the sixth part of a sub-series, the 21st game in the main series, and the 49th Call of Duty all told if you include spin-offs, mobile ports, free-to-play, and purely multiplayer games. The first Call of Duty was released in 2003. Taken at face value, that means we’re operating at a rate of 2.3 CPY (CoDs per year). But despite that volume, I don’t feel disengaged from these characters because I’ve stopped understanding the story. I’ve played and replayed all the mainline Call of Duty games. I know what’s going on in the fictional CoDVerse. The reason the characters in Black Ops 6, who look you directly in the eye, and talk about themselves, and answer your questions, and make jokes, all mean nothing to me is because they’re reverse engineered. They have a function in terms of creating and maintaining the game’s—and by extension the series’—genial, commercially auspicious facade. The cast of Black Ops 6 helps to simplify and sanitise Call of Duty. And the real trick is how they make it seem like CoD and its creators are trying to achieve the opposite. In terms of sheer quantity, Black Ops 6 has more story, more dialogue, more ‘lore’ than, for example, the original Modern Warfare—it appears to be a game made by people with a greater interest in narrative and ‘meaning.’ But these characters are a beard. Reid writes about how Call of Duty has stopped being a war game in any convincing (or convicted) sense, although Black Ops 6 is still set alongside the Gulf War, and evokes the imagery and proper nouns of the period. The game’s central cast has become the chewing gum and duct tape that hold together the irreconcilable parts of what passes nowadays for Call of Duty’s identity.

You can’t go anywhere near the ethics or even the surface-level realities of the Gulf War because this isn’t the Call of Duty of 2003 or 2007—this is the Call of Duty of the Nicki Minaj, and the Cheech and Chong, and the Homelander from The Boys multiplayer skins, and the purchasable gun decals that look like dragons and marijuana leaves. This is the Call of Duty economy. It’s not a videogame anymore. It’s become one of those pecuniary supermassive black holes that gets bigger by sucking in other products—put this in it, and this in it, and this in it, the DeviantArt School of Business, where you make money just by putting other shit in shit; like first you let them play as Sonic, then you let them play as Sonic in a Power Rangers costume, and then you let them play as Sonic in a Power Rangers costume with the sword from Final Fantasy. It’s got to be everything for everybody. You can’t go into even the shallowest depths of the Gulf War because that stuff just doesn’t fit now. It’s not that you risk alienating people by confronting them with something that’s harder to emotionally, intellectually digest than a franchise tie-in. It’s just that war, in that sense, isn’t what Call of Duty is about anymore. And as a critic, I don’t feel like I can reasonably hold the game to that account now. It’s sad, and it’s worse, and I’m certain that what Call of Duty is now is evil and depressing in a way that it wasn’t in the distant past, but I also think that the only way you can understand it and try to mitigate, at least in your own head, what Call of Duty is and what it’s doing, is to start to apprehend it on its own, actual terms. It’s not a war game now. I’m not sure it’s even a first person shooter, in any recognisable or conventional sense. Call of Duty has transcended (or untranscended, detranscended, whatever the precise opposite of ‘transcended’ would be) to become something else. It’s Call of Duty.

On the contrary, there are surely still some people (I’m one of them) who want Call of Duty to still be a war game, or at least a game about war—who buy and play it year on year because they’re hoping for a return to some kind of ‘tradition,’ before the series mutated into what it is today. Last year, when we were doing our podcasts on all of the Call of Duty games, by the end, I think we’d reach a mutual exhaustion and exasperation with the whole enterprise, but then it was leaked that the next CoD would be set in the Gulf War, and not many games are set in the Gulf War, and suddenly Call of Duty was interesting again. That’s why I played Black Ops 6—maybe the campaign would be a proper war game, like it used to be. And there are moments where it is, references to real-world events and people, and occasional missions, or parts of missions, that all feel closer in spirit to Call of Duty 2003, or the peerless original Modern Warfare. The first level takes place in Iraq itself. There’s one where you storm one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. Bill Clinton makes a cameo. If Call of Duty 4 was the high point of CoD’s (maybe slightly risible at the time, but in hindsight, refreshing, convicted and almost bold) self-seriousness, for about 120 seconds of its ten-hour campaign, Black Ops 6 feels at first like it’s going back there. But then there’s the zombies mission, and the casino heist mission, and the one where you have to assassinate a playboy arms dealer during a party on his yacht, and the entire game is safely removed from even the most CoD-ified abstractions of actual war. In ‘Crew Expendable,’ ‘Death From Above,’ and ‘Game Over,’ Modern Warfare makes various assertions about the nature and tragedy of its eponymous subject. In Black Ops 6, everything is reduced to being about the team.

The casino heist mission is the best showcase for this. Complete with the flamboyant camera work and editing of Steve Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven, or the Now You See Me films, it leaps between every member of your ragtag squad, letting you play as them as they execute their individual roles to bring the heist off perfectly—you enter the casino as one person, and sit at a table playing poker to distract one of the villainous high rollers, then swap into the body of another, disguised as a security guard, whose job is get access to the vault floor, and then another, masquerading as a maintenance man, who needs to pull the security cameras offline, and then another, who’s making a noise on purpose to get arrested by the on-site heavies and taken to a secure office for a beating, from which you’ll later make your escape, aided by the actions of the other three. “The most powerful weapon is ‘team’”—that’s one of the taglines for the 2022 remake of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The casino mission is that thesis in action. Its effect is to narrow the focus of the game and its audience.

Black Ops 6 spends so much time trying to characterise, and jocularise, and avuncularise the members of the squad—you can explore their makeshift base, you can talk to them and explore their ‘backstories’ through optional dialogue, they make jokes and affect these little flourishes of ingenuity designed to raise their profile in the mind of the player, and make them cooler—that the events of the real war become tertiary to the plot. You are not the US or British military, against another national military. You’re a small group of off-the-books supersoldiers working independently to bring down an equally off-the-books and independent mercenary army, its membership composed of soldiers of all nationalities, who have joined because they have their own esoteric ideology. Towards the end of the game, for a moment, it seems that the archvillain might be America’s CIA—but then it’s revealed that actually it’s just one CIA agent who’s gone rogue. In the game’s penultimate mission, you play as her and, through a highly produced, maximalistic and pyrotechnic quasi-dream sequence, relive her childhood and the events that compelled her to gradually turn bad. As part of her interrogation by your team, she’s injected with an experimental truth serum that is capable of separating the moral aspect of someone’s personality from the immoral, so that investigators can speak exclusively to the good part and get it to flip on the evil. In the finale of that mission, you play as the good part and have to win in a boss battle against your contorted, screaming, witchy bad half. It becomes the perfect metaphor for Black Ops 6 and several of the most recent Call of Duty games, including the remade Modern Warfare subseries and Vanguard. By focusing the story and the action on the fraternal team, Call of Duty separates the ‘good’ of warfare—cooperation, camaraderie, bonding—from the ‘bad,’ or rather, the aspects of war that are difficult to explore and navigate in a big-budget videogame: the moral implications, the subjective national politics, the real-world history, and so on. In Black Ops 6, you’re a good soldier, fighting alongside other good, personable soldiers, for a good cause, and your battle exists more or less in vacuum from reality.

It’s the opposite of the original Modern Warfare. In Black Ops 6, you and your squad are all elite troopers, preternaturally capable of achieving anything and everything without any permanent consequences—even if the team fails in some way, they always recover, and learn something and come out of the battle unscathed in terms of their greater objective. In Modern Warfare, Jackson, Vasquez, Gaz, Price, Soap, and Griggs are, by various interpretations, heroes of their respective militaries and those military’s causes—and Jackon, Vasquez, Griggs, and Gaz all die, and if you were playing in 2007, it seemed like Price and probably Soap did as well. The characters have their own dynamics and their unit, and a mission that divides them from the frontlines of any actual war, but they are still part of, and victim to, the machination and reality of war—they’re war people, doing war things and dying war deaths. There’s an entire level and subplot dedicated to Case and his history as a psyops guinea pig. Gaz doesn’t even get any last words. He just gets shot in the head.

But this is the grotesque genius of Black Ops 6. When, for example, it commits an entire mission to contextualising the psychology and trauma of the villain, it seems, in its own heightened, blunt force way, more humanistically concerned than some of its peers. The fact you can choose to talk to the characters, and that so much of the game is given to expanding and inviting you to find some kind of pleasure in their dynamic, seems to suggest that Black Ops 6 in some way cares about people and peoples’ lives more than the other CoD games, or other games period. The Call of Duty games are jingoistic. The Call of Duty games are gung ho and dumb. The Call of Duty games have short campaigns without much story. By focusing so entirely on its central cast and their esoteric secret missions, Black Ops 6 seems to be the remedy for these long-standing criticisms. But what it’s really doing is turning its back on attempting to deal with war, still its fundamental subject matter, in any way whatsoever—forget taking war seriously, Black Ops 6 isn’t taking war at all. That definitely means it has less of a story. It’s also dumber and more gung ho, since there’s nothing there now to moderate or mitigate or even slightly configure the meaning of all the killing. And it’s more jingoistic. It’s that exceptionalism thing—we’re so big now, we don’t have to care about the nuances of anything. The characters in Black Ops 6 ultimately all work for the American government, and the game keeps telling you that whatever they’re doing, it’s totally all right.

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Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Twitter handle is @esmithwriter.