Cold War was actually surprisingly quite less bad because it actually has the CIA have extremely fucked up morals and pretty much does all the shit they hate their enemies for
It still has its really major issues with its portrayal of America’s enemies (it’s still CoD after all), but it’s actually surprising that they were able and willing to take an approach that isn’t black-and-white
Gonna go into a bunch of detail for no reason in the spoiler section lol, probably avoid if you have any interest in playing it and haven’t already
major BOCW spoilers for basically all the twists
It’s revealed over the course of the campaign that not only were the nukes that Perseus is after American-made, but they explicitly placed them in every major European city with the intention of detonating them (and murdering millions as a result) in the event of a Russian invasion, with Perseus’ goal being to detonate them while leaking documents showing the US’s involvement to cause the West to tear itself apart
It’s also revealed that your player character’s entire identity (“Bell”) was invented wholesale in a torturous brainwashing program through MKULTRA just so they can get intel on Perseus that your character (who used to be a member of Perseus) knows but wouldn’t give up, the whole background thing about Bell being in Vietnam was also untrue (so technically, you don’t even really shoot those Vietnamese fighters, it happened in a flashback mission to a memory that wasn’t actually yours lol), it was implanted so that they’d have more trust in Adler with the shared history
After you find that out during a level that involves them doing even more of this torture on you last-minute so that they can get that intel, the game literally gives you the option to betray the CIA and set up an ambush with Perseus, where you’re welcomed back in open arms (as opposed to the “good” ending where Adler just kills you anyway because you’re a loose end lol), and you’re even able to give Adler a “reason you suck” speech through the dialog options before you spring the ambush, it both goes well with what the player’s probably thinking at this point and feels like a good in-character decision
It’s also revealed in this “bad” ending that Perseus isn’t a single man despite the West’s assumptions, it’s a collective, reasonably pointing out that all this couldn’t just be done by one man and that the assumption otherwise is one of the biggest failures of the West in fighting them
Now, the actions Perseus commits are still pretty horrible (it’s still a CoD villain after all…), I honestly have trouble saying it’s worse than what the US does even by the game’s standards, both sides in this game have an “ends justify the means” attitude and at least I’ll take that over the usual black-and-white “CIA good commies bad” approach lol
This was from Modern Warfare (2019), not Cold War
Cold War was actually surprisingly quite less bad because it actually has the CIA have extremely fucked up morals and pretty much does all the shit they hate their enemies for
It still has its really major issues with its portrayal of America’s enemies (it’s still CoD after all), but it’s actually surprising that they were able and willing to take an approach that isn’t black-and-white
Gonna go into a bunch of detail for no reason in the spoiler section lol, probably avoid if you have any interest in playing it and haven’t already
major BOCW spoilers for basically all the twists
It’s revealed over the course of the campaign that not only were the nukes that Perseus is after American-made, but they explicitly placed them in every major European city with the intention of detonating them (and murdering millions as a result) in the event of a Russian invasion, with Perseus’ goal being to detonate them while leaking documents showing the US’s involvement to cause the West to tear itself apart
It’s also revealed that your player character’s entire identity (“Bell”) was invented wholesale in a torturous brainwashing program through MKULTRA just so they can get intel on Perseus that your character (who used to be a member of Perseus) knows but wouldn’t give up, the whole background thing about Bell being in Vietnam was also untrue (so technically, you don’t even really shoot those Vietnamese fighters, it happened in a flashback mission to a memory that wasn’t actually yours lol), it was implanted so that they’d have more trust in Adler with the shared history
After you find that out during a level that involves them doing even more of this torture on you last-minute so that they can get that intel, the game literally gives you the option to betray the CIA and set up an ambush with Perseus, where you’re welcomed back in open arms (as opposed to the “good” ending where Adler just kills you anyway because you’re a loose end lol), and you’re even able to give Adler a “reason you suck” speech through the dialog options before you spring the ambush, it both goes well with what the player’s probably thinking at this point and feels like a good in-character decision
It’s also revealed in this “bad” ending that Perseus isn’t a single man despite the West’s assumptions, it’s a collective, reasonably pointing out that all this couldn’t just be done by one man and that the assumption otherwise is one of the biggest failures of the West in fighting them
Now, the actions Perseus commits are still pretty horrible (it’s still a CoD villain after all…), I honestly have trouble saying it’s worse than what the US does even by the game’s standards, both sides in this game have an “ends justify the means” attitude and at least I’ll take that over the usual black-and-white “CIA good commies bad” approach lol
Damn! Respect for the detailed ass spoiler section, that SURPRISINGLY changes quite a bit lol