On Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare's "One Shot, One Kill"

I've recently been making my way (slowly) through the "remaster" of Modern Warfare. It's a weird romp of a time, and one gets the feeling while playing through it that there were two ideas of what this game should be.

One was an idea that this would be a way to bring a legendary game into the hands of newly-twenty-somethings who had never played it before. If you remember playing that game when it came out originally: congratulations, you are old. An entire generation of video game players has risen up while you've been decaying, and what's even weirder is that they're closer to the "core concerns" of the industry than you are at this point. So it makes sense, in a lot of ways, to update a game that you or I couldn't shut the hell up about for the past ten years so that this new generation could play it.

The other idea seems to be that a remaster could be a way of correcting for some of the problems of that original game. These problems are mostly centered on difficulty and enemy placement, and a lot of this might be in my head. I played through the original Modern Warfare Trilogy again last year (on Veteran, no less), and I remember that there were quite a few dreaded "infinite enemy" zones in Call of Duty 4. It's just what it sounds like; enemies spawn infinitely until you move up to a certain spot in the level. You literally have to push through the waves of spawning troops, and it's basically a nightmare every time it appears.

As best I can tell, Remastered has done away with those infinite spawns. The moments that were once solved by brute force are now solved by endurance; you carve your way through the enemies that appear, and once they're gone, you can go on your merry way.

I want to pitch the idea here that Modern Warfare's mission titled "One Shot, One Kill" is one of the peak examples of having to endure something in the history of games.

Narratively, you've just assassinated a big bad guy. You're being pursued by that big bad guy's troops through the radioactive city of Chernobyl, and your commanding officer has basically led you by the nose so far. His name's MacMillan, and as you're fleeing he's run over by a helicopter. Or it smooshes into him. Something happens to his legs, or his back, and he is no longer able to walk. He remains a crack shot, though, and the end of "One Shot, One Kill" is wholly dependent on his ability to sit in the grass and solemnly shoot at the horde of Russian soldiers who are running at the player.

This mission is the core of Modern Warfare, and as such it is also the core of the changes made to the game in the remastered, higher-resolution version. Playing this mission on Veteran, the highest difficulty, is a brutal experience. The experience is designed to feel like Black Hawk Down; there are faceless Others who are assaulting your position, and it's only your smarts and skills that will allow you can MacMillan to survive this encounter.

I would encourage any person who feels like they are "real good" at games to give it a shot, because this mission is a lesson in humility. There are very few safe zones, and the enemies have uncanny accuracy. It is often too late to react when you begin to hear the "thup thup" of bullets colliding into the player character; there's no room for reaction, only proaction.

And so "One Shot, One Kill" is a moment of endurance in video games. You're trying to survive against a clock, and you need to constantly be moving, shooting, throwing grenades, and using the equipment that the game has given you in order to finesse your way through this experience. And, to be clear, doing well in this mission is enjoyable, but only in the sense that you know you will never have to do it again (unless you, like me, want those sweet sweet cheevos across a number of platforms).

The best part about the mission, however, is that it was not one of the missions that was "fixed" in the remaster. It seems to me that some of the enemy spawn rates and locations might have been altered, but it is also critical that the easiest way of beating the mission was left intact.

As you can see in this video, there is a way to "cheese" the mission. You simply start the mission, kill a few enemies who charge you, and then you run around the corner. You let the timer run out, you scoot toward MacMillan as fast as you can, and then you hop on the helicopter. This is, in fact, absurdly easy in the face of what the mission actually has you doing if you want to finish it in a "legit" way.

What I love about this "cheese" strategy is that it works to reveal the true challenge of the mission. It isn't skill at shooting (although the mission requires it). It isn't positioning (although the cheese strategy is truly optimal positioning). It's merely enduring the time that the mission takes to complete. The act of being in a place for a set amount of time is what makes the mission go forward. It's like one of those "touch the car to win the car" things from the 1990s.

I love that this mission puts pressure on the rest of the game. Like every exploit, the way that the game reveals how it can be manipulated tells you about the assumptions that the game is making about how one is supposed to exist in this mission. If you can wait it out, you can survive; under gunfire, it's hard, and around the corner it is easy. But one always has to endure time, and that's the beauty of the mission.