Give Treyarch A Break

07 Jan 2010 at 00:00:00 by Andy Alderson

The recent rumours of a Call of Duty game set in the Vietnam War elicited a number of predictable responses from the gaming community. Obviously there were those who lamented the idea of taking the series back in time (again) but perhaps most expected was the reappearance of the Treyarch-haters. It seems that whenever the Californian developer makes the headlines, many game fans line up to kick it squarely in the junk.

Why the hostility? What could it possibly have done? Because from the level of vitriol in some of the forum comments I’ve seen recently you’d think Treyarch had come round their house on Christmas Day and shat in the gravy.

Sure, Treyarch’s back catalogue is hardly spotless, but it’s hard to believe that people can still hold a grudge against a developer for its early work, like the admittedly horrible Minority Report: Everyone Runs.

The earlier Spiderman games were pretty tasty and Call of Duty Big Red One wasn’t that bad so it must be the developer’s later work that is the issue. And, to be fair, it deserves criticism for the mercifully short Quantum of Solace, which somehow managed to make the COD4 engine feel about as responsive as a week-old corpse. But it seems it’s Treyarch’s involvement in the Call of Duty series that gets people all riled up like Jan Moir at a gay bar.

This is partly because of the pedigree of its COD stable mate, Infinity Ward, the mere mention of which seems to get gamers all dreamy-eyed and damper than an otter’s pocket. Yes, it’s a top notch developer and we love the Modern Warfare games to bits but I’d argue that gamers and critics alike have been a bit harsh on Treyarch’s COD instalments. 

Since the Vietnam rumours began circulating I’ve seen a lot of hostility towards World at War, more than seems reasonable for a game which scored Metacritic averages in the mid 80s. I personally enjoyed the single player game in WaW, I liked the fact that you could play the entire game in four player co-op (something I’d still like to see in Modern Warfare) and the multiplayer, barring those fucking dogs, was a blast. But some still accuse Treyarch of taking all its cues from Infinity Ward and lacking innovation, which is faintly ridiculous when you consider just how much Treyarch has shaped the multiplayer side of the Call of Duty series.

Call of Duty 3, for example, sported a glitchy and pedestrian single player game but the multiplayer was a revelation and the first online shooter I really enjoyed on the Xbox 360. Firstly, it introduced the class system to the COD series, which had previously only allowed players to choose a team and a weapon. Not only that, it had some brilliantly designed maps (Poisson, Mayenne and Les Ormes still stand out) and a very clever War mode which combined the central tenets of Domination and Headquarters and focused the action intelligently, especially on the larger maps.

The quality of the multiplayer in COD3 must be in some part due to the involvement of Gray Matter (the developer merged with Treyarch by Activision) which was responsible for the utterly brilliant United Offensive expansion on the PC. UO was a wonderfully engaging multiplayer experience and, again, laid the foundations for much of the structure we see in MW and MW2. It was the first COD game to feature a ranking system, offering rewards like airstrikes for good scoring. It was the first COD game to sport a Domination mode, arguably one of the best in Modern Warfare. It was the first COD game to discover penicillin, solve the world food crisis and reverse global warming. OK, that’s not strictly true, but my point is that it was a damn good multiplayer game and proof that Treyarch did well out of the merger with Gray Matter.

And so, when I see people using the rumours of Call of Duty Vietnam to take another tediously predictable swipe at Treyarch, I find myself siding with the developer rather than the infinite wisdom of forum warriors. I have to say I don’t share their concerns about a Treyarch-developed Vietnam, for the reasons already mentioned and one other in particular. Treyarch can do dark.

World at War was not only one of the darkest and most atmospheric games in the Call of Duty series, it also contained a few clever, ironic nods to the post war world which suggests the developer actually understood the conflict it was tasked with depicting. I suspect the Vietnam game, if it actually happens, might just surprise some of the Treyarch-skeptics.  Although, on the other hand, I’m also 100 per cent certain it could make the gaming equivalent of Citizen Kane and still be thought of as Infinity Ward’s fat, ugly sister.

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