Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

The "Call of Duty" is only on the box for brand awareness.

"Learning to use the tools of modern warfare is the difference between the prospering of your people and utter destruction."

—General Shepherd

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Modern Warfare is a Spin-Off of the World War II-themed FPS series Call of Duty, set Next Sunday A.D. or so. Technically, the three Modern Warfare games are considered the fourth, sixth and eighth installments of the main series, respectively.

The setting is best described as an Alternate History, with the divergence point lying somewhere before the Chernobyl disaster, when powerful Russian leader Imran Zakhaev started a massive Ultranationalist movement in Russia. Said movement eventually initiated a civil war against the Loyalist pro-Western faction of Russia, which serves as the backdrop in the first game and the catalyst of the Middle Eastern rebellion, another of the original's plot lines. The second game, set five years later, sees what happens to a new Cold War between the US and an Ultranationalist Russia when a covert op to unmask a wanted terrorist goes horribly wrong. The third one follows the happenings of said war and the desperate hunt for the man that caused all of this.

On May 10, 2011, gaming blog Kotaku released a leaked list of Modern Warfare 3's features, including locations in the main story, new characters and basically the entire plot of the game. Before the game was even announced. And of course, several hours after this, the game was officially announced, showing that some locales in the game include New York, London, Paris and Berlin. The new game was developed jointly by what's left of Infinity Ward (which fell apart amid a dispute with Activision over royalties from the second game) and Sledgehammer Games, a studio that was supposedly working on a third-person version of Call of Duty. Not to be confused with the Troperiffic Community episode of the same name. See also Find Makarov, a Web Original Fan Film series based on the games.

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Alpha to Delta

• Acceptable Breaks From Reality: We're not sure on how, in multi-player matches, Brazilian gangs, African militia or the Afghan Taliban... er, "Op For"... get ahold of Harriers, Pave Lows, Russian choppers, UAVs, NATO weapons and nukes, or how they're able to defend their turf from highly-trained Black Ops, but unless one likes having their multi-player turned into a curbstomp...
• The Ace:
  • Gaz in Modern Warfare, he does hold the team record on the training course and is Cpt. Price's right-hand man.
  • Soap in Modern Warfare 2, as well. Clearing the Pit in 18 seconds is a pretty impressive feat that Corporal Dunn says is amazing. If you listen for longer, you get to hear about the 'creepy dude in a skull mask' who completed it in 18.2 seconds. With a 1911.
• AKA-47: Mostly averted, only some weapons appear without their real names.
• All There in the Manual:
  • "Loose Ends" contains a lot of explanations to some apparent plot holes in Modern Warfare 2's story, if you look at the newspaper clippings. For example: it's explained Makarov, despite his own status as an Ultranationalist, was specifically harassing the new Ultranationalist government, and tensions were very high between Russia and everywhere else.
  • The Hardened edition of Modern Warfare 3 includes a field journal kept by Soap that goes into detail about his thoughts regarding each mission, along with other little details that would be hard to show in-game, as well as his gradual growing obsession with killing Makarov.
  • The text on all of the loading screens shows quite a bit of interesting background information on many of the characters. For example, the intro screens to "Blackout" in the first game notes that Nikolai was a former sergeant of a Soviet anti-tank rifle unit, and the loading screens for "No Russian" in the second list Makarov's extensive history of terrorist attacks.
• America Saves the Day:
  • Averted in both Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2 (while the details of the player character in Modern Warfare 2 are unconfirmed beyond his name, rank and unit, his senior, the now-Captain "Soap" MacTavish, and the apparent Number Two "Ghost" are both from the Special Air Service).
  • Modern Warfare's brutal, while still heroic subversion of this occurs when the American protagonist's team has been ordered to retreat because of the possibility of Nuclear arms on the battlefield. When an allied aircraft gets shot down, your team opts to land momentarily to save the crew, using the "leave no man behind" mentality. For a second there it seems the ploy works and the Americans save the surviving crew member. Instead, the nuke goes off, the chopper goes down, everybody dies, including the American player character, who while surviving the initial crash and explosion; dies of his injuries. It Got Worse. The world's apathetic response to this is what motivates the Big Bad of Modern Warfare 2.
  • The main American character in Modern Warfare 1, played for three missions, is killed, as is the main American supporting character, and it comes down to the Brit to fire the last shot of the conflict.
  • Modern Warfare 2 when Pfc Allen, deep undercover with the Ultranationalists, kills civilians instead of, well, saving them. And to make matters worse, when Makarov kills him, he leaves the very American body to be found. Much later, you find out that Shepherd helped stage the conflict so that he could abuse it as a mad attempt to get himself written into history. Then he betrays both Makarov and you... and to get at Shepherd, Price lets Makarov go, albeit not on good terms.
  • Subverted hard in Modern Warfare 2 when it turns out that Shepherd started the war with Russia in the first place in an insane attempt at creating a new era of American supremacy and getting his name written into history; moreover, the surviving American character Ramirez's unit seems completely unaware of this and all too happy to counterattack Russia.
  • SOMEWHAT played straight in Modern Warfare 3, as the USA arrives in time to shore up the defense of Western Europe, and then later the Delta Force has a Heroic Sacrifice to make sure Price and Yuri can save the Russian President and end the war.
• And This Is For:
  • In "No Russian", Makarov says "For Zakhaev" before engaging the FSB on the runway. Which is ironic, as the airport he's murdering everyone at is called Zakhaev International Airport.
  • Done twice in Modern Warfare 3: "This is for the boys at Hereford." And at the very end, "For Soap".
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: When you complete the "Ghillie in the Mist" (completed by getting one-shot kills with sniper rifles) challenges. The clothes you unlock are ghillie suits, which actually make your sniping better.
• Anyone Can Die:
  • Except Price. Or rather, Price can die, but it doesn't seem to bother him that much anymore.
  • NPCs: Vasquez, Gaz, Griggs, at least 30,000 Americans sent into Qurac, a lot of civilians in a Russian airport, Meat, Royce, Ghost... Ozone and Scarecrow are interesting, as you can save one (or, if you're really good, both), but they will die shortly before Ghost and Roach. Not to mention pretty much every major character except Price and Nikolai in Modern Warfare 3: even though in Soap and Yuri's case, they die as NPCs even though they were at one point PCs. Even more interesting with Ozone and Scarecrow, is that those two can show up as Red Shirt troops in earlier levels... so they somehow come back from the dead if they die there...
  • PCs: Al-Fulani, Jackson, Allen, Sat-1, Roach, Harkov and Yuri. Soap survives being shot in Call of Duty 4 and survives a nasty knife stab to the chest in Modern Warfare 2, but finally meets his maker in Modern Warfare 3 after falling out of an exploding building.
• Arc Words:
  • "History is written by the victors."
  • "...the will of a single man."
• Armor Is Useless:
  • In the Rio missions, the TF141 red shirts who wear Kevlar vests are only slightly more durable than the gangsters, who wear soccer t-shirts. Averted by the Juggernauts, who are just as durable as their hulking appearance, unless you can get behind them.
  • Same goes for the Op For and Militia forces in multi-player: despite a number of character models being unarmored, they are just as durable as their armored foes or allies (that is, not very). Of course, PVP-Balanced is not a bad thing.
    • Justified Trope: Modern infantry armor, while it will generally work against pistol rounds and shotgun pellets, is not going to reliably stop rounds from anything that is of at least assault rifle caliber. Now if the operators had hard armor with ballistic inserts, then they might survive rifle shots.
  • Averted in Modern Warfare 3's multi-player, where Ballistic Vests are one of the killstreak rewards you can earn. They essentially double the number of hits your character can take before dying, which makes a noticeable difference in a firefight.
• Artistic License Military: In Modern Warfare 2, when Task Force 141 is assaulting the Russian gulag, they get F-15s to soften up the landing sites first. F-15s are only used by the Air Force, not the Navy, and they're air superiority fighters. The Strike Eagle variant can act as a Wild Weasel (plane that neutralizes air defenses), but it would have made more sense to use the F/A-18 Hornet/Super Hornet, or given the Next Sunday A.D. setting, the F-35, both of which can launch from carriers, and are multirole fighters, so they would have been better suited for what those Eagles were doing.
• Asskicking Equals Authority:
  • Captain "Soap" MacTavish in Modern Warfare 2.
  • Captain McMillian in Modern Warfare 1. Not even breaking a leg when a helicopter falls on him can kill him... or even lower his sniping accuracy.
  • Cpt. Price and his absolute inability to die throughout Modern Warfare 1 (or due to being shot in the head aboard the Tirpitz during World War II, for that matter). This carries over to Captain MacTavish in Modern Warfare 2.
  • And also Modern Warfare 2's Big Bad, General Shepherd, who in the game's finale nearly kills Soap and manages to beat Price in hand-to-hand combat, never mind the fact that Shepherd had just been in a Helicopter Crash and is able to stand, let alone put up a fight.
  • Averted with Imran Zakhaev, the Big Bad of Modern Warfare. Despite surviving the loss of his arm in an earlier mission, in the final confrontation he goes down just as easily as any of his soldiers.
  • Averted with Al-Asad (newly-assumed leader of an unnamed Middle Eastern country) and Victor Zakhaev (son of the Big Bad and commander of the Russian Ultranationalist forces) as well. Al-Asad is captured as soon as you enter his safehouse, and is shot in the head after Captain Price questions him. At the end of "Sins of the Father", you corner Victor Zakhaev on a rooftop. He shoots himself in the head to avoid being captured.
• Awesome Personnel Carrier: A lot of the real world carriers make it into the game like the BTR, BMP, M2 Bradley and Humvee.
• Back for the Dead: Kamarov and Griffen.
• Badass: Soap, Price, Gaz, Griggs, Jackson, Vasquez, Roach, Ghost, Ramirez, Sgt. Foley, Dunn, Sandman, Truck, Grinch, Frost, Yuri... basically the entire main cast.
• Badass Beard: Price, Gaz, and arguably Sandman.
• Badass Crew: Several, but Task Force 141 arguably plays the trope the straightest.
• Badass Mustache: Shepherd and Price, of course. Sandman as well.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Sure, by the end of Modern Warfare 2, Soap and Price have killed Shepherd, but that doesn't change the fact that his Batman Gambit has already succeeded. If Modern Warfare 3s leaked plot is any indication, Makarov was also able to escape Shepherd's men in Modern Warfare 2s ending and causes more havoc amongst both the Russians and Americans in Modern Warfare 3.
• Bag of Spilling:
  • Most levels start you off with whatever weapons the game designers want you to have, even if you ended the previous level with a different loadout and there was no time or reason to change. "Takedown" -> "The Hornet's Nest" is the most obvious example. There are a only a few levels where your loadout carries over.
  • A particularly Egregious example is near the end of "Loose Ends". No matter what weapon you had before getting knocked off your feet by a mortar, you'll have Ghost's AK-47 given to you by the end of the mission. Not that it helps.
  • Averted in the first Modern Warfare levels "Ultimatum" -> "All In" -> "No Fighting in the War Room". "All Ghillied Up" -> "One Shot, One Kill" as well, though only a few weapons will carry over; anything else turns into an AK-47.
• Bash Brothers:
  • Soap and Price. Epically so.
  • Ghost and Roach from Modern Warfare 2.
  • Arguably Sandman and Price in the third game.
• Big Bad:
  • Imran Zakhaev in Modern Warfare.
  • Vladimir Makarov in Modern Warfare 2 seems to be this, but he is revealed to be piece in Shepherd's plan. He's the true villain of Modern Warfare 3 though.
• Big No: Gaz and Ghost both get one in their respective games, and Price gets a Star Wars worthy one when Soap dies.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • In the airport level, a poster with a picture of an aircraft and the word "Mukha" in Cyrillic letters. This word means "fly" as in "small and extremely common insect." If you are feeling charitable this could be seen as a inside joke; if you are not, then it is a Blind Idiot Translation.
  • Which is peculiar, as other Russian texts are done quite right.
  • Enemy chatter is delivered in original languages (Arabic, Russian and Portuguese). There are also some sentences uttered by Kamarov's men in Blackout mission in the first game.
  • In addition, the drunk Russian in "Crew Expendable" says "Drink to health, Captain!" right before you shoot him.
  • And Nikolai drops a rather foul-mouthed tirade at Makarov's and Shepherd's goons in "The Enemy of My Enemy"... in Russian, of course.
  • All the French from the Paris mission in Modern Warfare 3 is more than convincing, as is the German from "Scorched Earth".
• Bittersweet Ending: The third game. Makarov has finally paid for what he's done and the war's come to an end, but nearly everyone who worked to get that far, including Soap and Yuri, are dead, and the world still had to fight a war in which millions of people died, essentially, for nothing. London is devastated in the chemical attacks and most of the European capitals suffered a similar fate.
• Bizarre and Improbable Ballistics: throwing knives
• Black and Gray Morality: Your enemies are monsters, there is no question about that. That said, you and your team members sometimes resort to... less than savory methods of dealing with antagonists.
  • Such as tying Rojas to a telephone pole so his enemies can find and kill him, only after torturing his assistant with a car battery.
  • When Price contacts Makarov under the premise that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", he's essentially letting him off the hook for the time being. Although its not as if he could have gotten to Makarov at the time he made the offer anyway. The only concession Price made to Makarov was that he'd try to kill Shepherd first.
  • Also in Modern Warfare 3, Yuri, Soap and Price track down a man who knows the whereabouts of Makarov's bomb-maker, Price sets off a can of nerve gas in the room and makes a deal to give him a mask if he gives them the information. After all the information is given Price hands him the mask, only to shoot him in the head with his pistol saying, "This is for the boys at Hereford."
• Black Mesa Commute:
  • Many of the levels start with a quick helicopter ride to the starting area. It's possible to shoot, but doing so is a waste of ammo so you're pretty clearly just supposed to kick back and hum The Ride Of The Valkyries.
  • In Modern Warfare's "The Coup", when Al-Fulani is driven through the streets of the city to his execution. And you're watching through his eyes.
  • Continues in Modern Warfare 2, when the game opens with the player at an American base in Afghanistan, where he trains some local militia, runs an obstacle course, and can walk around and observe the other soldiers.
• Blinded by the Light: Flashbang grenades, the resident Trick Bombs.
• Blind Idiot Translation: The Japanese version has multiple translation issues, especially the eponymous line in "No Russian". Instead of being translated to the Japanese equivalent of "Do not speak any Russian", it ended up as "Kill the Russians".
• Bolivian Army Ending: In Modern Warfare 3: Sandman and the rest of the delta team stay behind to allow the others to escape, fending off a large amount of soldiers. To make matters worse, the diamond mine collapses on them.
• Book Ends:
  • Roach's story begins and ends with someone tossing a lit cigar (Soap tosses one at the start of "Cliffhanger" and Shepherd drops one on to Roach's body after it's been doused with gasoline at the end of "Loose Ends").
  • The first time the Modern Warfare version of Price is seen going into action, he is smoking a cigar. After he kills Makarov, he smokes a cigar.
  • To a lesser extent, the same music plays during the starting and penultimate mission briefings. The starting and ending briefings also feature a short Character Filibuster. Captain Price's is even a response to General Shepherd's.
• Bring My Brown Pants: In Modern Warfare 2's multi-player, the voiceover alerts for an incoming enemy AC130 are rather... emphatic.
  • With the exception of Task Force 141 (voice of Ghost). He doesn't seem too concerned.
  • Notably the Spetsnaz announcer who seems to lose it on finding out.
    • Oddly enough, the Spetsnaz announcer is rather calm when a friendly nuke is called in.
• Brits With Battleships
• But Thou Must!:
  • In Modern Warfare 2, the "No Russian" level, even though you are heavily armed the game prevents you from trying to thwart the terrorist attack by giving you a game over and telling you that you must go along with the massacre should you try and shoot the terrorists.
  • The politically correct German version, however, turns this into "But Thou Must Not" by NOT allowing you to shoot civilians despite this being the whole point of the level (you get a Game Over for that). Considering that you still can't shoot your "allies", there's nothing much to do for you throughout the first half of the level, except perhaps shooting the skylights for the particle effects.
  • Also, thou must reach the top of the White House to prevent the bombing run, even though when you get there there's already at least four other soldiers signaling, one from the same position as you, and Ramirez doesn't have any further role in the plot. So you could have died anywhere along the way and achieved the same result.
• Butt Monkey: The United States of America. As a result of... less-than-ethical (and intelligent) decisions (as well as being framed by Russian Ultranationalists into looking as if they supported a horrific terrorist attack), they wind up being painted as the Bad Guy by the rest of the world. Let's be fair: Shepherd doesn't give two craps about anything less than his own personal satisfaction over accomplishing his goals. People will die, civilizations will crumble, and injustices will be committed so long as Makarov is made to pay for the events of Call of Duty 4. If the United States has to become the enemy of every armed force on the planet, that's an acceptable sacrifice.
• Call Back: Many of them in Modern Warfare 2:
  • Sneaking through the snow with Soap in "Cliffhanger" homages the level "All Ghillied Up" from the previous game, but the true call back comes in "Contingency", in which Roach and Price sneak around sniping soldiers and dogs. Price even says the dogs are nothing compared to the ones in Pripyat.
    • That in itself is a shoutout to the fanbase, with whom the dogs had a rather... tenuous relationship in Call of Duty 4.

Soap: I hate dogs...

• • • Price's lines during this level also reference many of Captain MacMillan's in "All Ghillied Up". Specifically "Don't do anything stu-pid", "gooooodnight" and "this one's mine".
  • Modern Warfare 2s final level is one huge homage to Call of Duty 4s final level. Both have "game" in the title ("Game Over" and "Endgame"), both involve a vehicular chase (in Call of Duty 4, the player is being chased in a truck; in Modern Warfare 2, the player is doing the chasing in a boat); both involve said vehicle being destroyed and the player (Soap in both levels) being wounded, and then even more badly injured; and both involve Soap desperately using an emergency weapon (pistol in Call of Duty 4, knife in Modern Warfare 2) to kill the Big Bad before he kills Price.
  • Modern Warfare 2's Ghost is a callback to Gaz from Modern Warfare 1. He's voiced by the same actor, you never see his face behind his skull and his name is "Ghost". As in dead.
  • Once you rescue Price from the Gulag, Soap immediately hands over his M1911.
    • "This belongs to you, sir."
      • And then said M1911 is given back to Soap after his death in Modern Warfare 3.
  • After Makarov orders the nuclear bombing of Al-Asad's capital in a flashback, Yuri comments "This wasn't war, this was madness." which is a virtual callback to Chernov's line "This is not war. This is murder!" in World at War.
  • Price's conversation with Baseplate/MacMillan in Modern Warfare 3 is a callback all the way to the first mission (chronologically) in the entire Modern Warfare franchise, "All Ghillied Up"/"One Shot, One Kill":

Price: It was Makarov. The bastard slipped through my fingers in Sierra Leone. What does MI-6 know?
Baseplate: (sighs) You're on everyone's shit-list, John. There's no way I could get you clearance.
Price: Don't give me that! You still owe me for Pripyiat. I'm calling it in.

• • Soap's field journal in the Modern Warfare 3 Hardened Edition reveals Price's race horse is called MacGregor.
  • The family briefly seen in England is named Davis, the same as Call of Duty 2's British Player Character.
  • In the first SAS mission in Modern Warfare 3, you have two invulnerable NPCs with you: Wallcroft and Griffin. If these two names have an inkling of familiarity to them, they were part of the assault team in the first SAS mission in Call of Duty 4, and they were also generic names for British soldiers in Call of Duty 2.
  • Modern Warfare 2's multi-player map "Wasteland" has an identical layout to that of Call of Duty 2s "Brecourt" map, combined with the general appearance and atmosphere of Modern Warfare 1s Chernobyl missions.
• The Cavalry:
  • Normally, the extraction copter has a squad of soldiers inside it that immediately pours out and begins shooting anything that moves. This is normally when you're in a tight spot, as in the second part of the Pripyat sniping mission in Modern Warfare.
  • Also played straight by Nikolai in Modern Warfare 2 when he saves Soap and Price three times, first in Brazil, again in the boneyard and once more after Shepherd's death.
• Cavalry Betrayal: General Shepherd and Shadow Company.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Various times in Modern Warfare 2's multi-player. For example, Commando Pro allows you to take no falling damage and is earned by kniving enough people.
• Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys: Averted. France is merely one of the many European countries the US comes to the aid to. You fight alongside the GIGN, who prove themselves to be very capable. Also while Delta ultimately take Volk down, the GIGN were the ones who found him. France is also one of the countries NATO manages to hold onto; Germany, meanwhile, is clearly falling. GIGN troops are also a support option in Survival, and are extremely durable and more than able to hold their own against anything short of a Juggernaut.
• Chekhov's Skill: In Modern Warfare 2, the much advertised knife-throwing feature of multi-player is what Soap uses to kill the Big Bad. Also, the wall climbing with icepicks that you learn in the first mission as Roach is reused to crawl on the ground by Soap in the final mission of the game.
• The Chessmaster:
  • Modern Warfare 2's General Shepherd appears to have been outmaneuvered when his deep cover agent is used by Makarov to frame America and set off a war. And then it turns out Makarov was playing into his hands, and Shepherd is using the resultant chaos to cover his tracks.
  • Arguably, Makarov was hired by Shepherd to kill Allen and precipitate an invasion of the US by Russia. He certainly seems to think it would happen at the end...
  • Arguably, the entire series focuses on Price and his efforts to outmaneuver the Big Bad of each game. Although he's not the one to finish off Zakhaev or Shepherd, it's only because of his intervention that Soap manages to kill either. His Arch Enemy Makarov, however, dies by Price's own hand.
• Climb Slip Hang Climb: The beginning of "Cliffhanger" from Modern Warfare 2.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Nikolai gives one, in Russian, to Makarov's men and Shadow Company in The Enemy of My Enemy:

Nikolai: Holy shit! No, I'm really not paid enough for this job! The missiles alone cost so much! Your mother! Cunt!

• Co-Op Multiplayer:
  • Modern Warfare 2 featured "Spec Ops" missions, which can be played alone, or with a friend. A few require a buddy (such as one that places one player into a vehicle, like an AC-130 or a Black Hawk]).
  • Modern Warfare 3 allows Spec Ops to make its return, this time with online play even with people you don't know. In addition to the regular Mission Mode, there is also Survival Mode, with a ranking and unlock system similar to the multi-player.
• Cold Sniper: Cpt. MacMillan in Modern Warfare, though he is also brilliantly ironic and averts this when it comes time to high-tail it out of the sniping position.
• Comeback Mechanic: Deathstreaks. Much like it sounds, it's a bonus given to players who're doing particularly bad. If they die multiple times in a row without ever getting a kill, the game will give them a buff of some sort (such as increased health or dropping a grenade upon death) to help them out.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Grenade spam. It's not uncommon to have more aim bot assisted frags used than actual bullets, more than the soldiers could possibly carry.
• Continuity Nod:
  • When the team first rescues Price, the first thing Soap does is hand him back the pistol he used to kill Zakhaev at the end of the first game.
  • And in Modern Warfare 3, Price places it upon Soap's body in tribute after he dies.
  • A subtle example in the third game: Baseplate is Captain MacMillan from Modern Warfare 1. At one point, Price says, "You still owe me for Pripyat."
  • Another subtle example in the third game: the briefing/loading video for the level "Back on the Grid" ends by showing a series of photos of people affiliated with Makarov. Among the photographed people is Lev Kravchenko, The Dragon from Call of Duty: Black Ops. Less subtly, one of the buildings in that level is taken directly from a multi-player map from Call of Duty 4.
• Continuity Snarl: Is Operation: Kingfish canon or not?
• Controllable Helplessness: The level "The Coup" in Modern Warfare.
  • And the "Aftermath" level, where you get to control the dying American protagonist after the nuclear explosion, as well as the Fission Mailed sequence near the end of the game, at least until Price throws you a pistol.
  • The ending sequence in Modern Warfare 2 has your character watching Shepherd brutally beating Captain Price in hand to hand combat, with you not being able to help because of a rather large knife in your chest. At least, until you realize that you have a rather large knife in arm's reach.
  • And a bit before that, you get to see through the eyes of the mortally wounded Roach, Ghost being killed, and being burned alive after Shepherd has their bodies tossed in a ditch and doused in gasoline.
  • And being an astronaut witnessing a nuclear explosion and getting literally blown away by it. Even if you survive the force of the blast, you're dead from the big panel that you can see hurtling towards you before the screen goes black.
  • Played with in Modern Warfare 3. As Yuri, you're behind Makarov as he guns his way through the airport, just after shooting Yuri in the stomach for betraying him. You can try to shoot Makarov with a security guard's pistol, but Yuri will miss every time, and eventually pass out from his injuries.
  • Again in Modern Warfare 3: the player controls a dad using a camcorder, recording his vacation in London with his family and unexpectedly getting caught in a nerve gas attack.
• Cool Guns: Obviously.
• CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable: Doubly Subverted: at the end of "Game Over", Soap can see a soldier start CPR on Price. Soap apparently blacks out, and the soldier is now pounding on Price's chest in an attempt to revive him. The game ends giving you the impression that it fails however. Modern Warfare 2 reveals that Price is alive, meaning it did revive him, but it should be noted that it is unclear how long it took, or what Price's condition upon being revived was.
• Crapsack World: Hoo, boy. Aside from multiple nuclear detonations and an army of West-hating psychopaths in control of Russia, there's also more subtle indicators of just how screwed up Modern Warfare-Earth is, like how even private terrorists have access to large amounts of heavy-duty military hardware, and the sheer size of the favela gangs in Rio leaves you wondering just how bad things are down there.
  • To illustrate this, in the Chernobyl missions, the then-obscure group of Russian mercenaries are equipped with BMPs, attack helicopters and at least one T-72. And what were they doing there? They were selling nuclear material.
    • They mentioned how a lot of it was unintentionally similar to real life. Jesse Stern said "We also talked about how terrorists operate in the modern era. We played around with situations where we had heavily armed terrorists carrying machine guns and explosives... shortly after this, the terror attacks took place in Mumbai. That was really scary. We actually sent out e-mails saying, "All right, let's take a little break, and stop talking about these horrific things," because it felt like it was hitting a little too close to home."
  • Lampshaded sarcastically by Gaz: "Good news first, the world's in great shape."
• Curb Stomp Battle:
  • In "Heat": six SAS operatives vs. an army of angry Ultranationalists. The SAS lost a man from tank fire. The Ultranationalists lost several hundred men, five tanks and eight helicopters. The Ultranationalist leaders, unsurprisingly, were pissed.
  • The first part of the last level in Modern Warfare 3. Dozens of guards in suits with pistols against two men in juggernaut suits with belt-fed machine guns.
• Cutscene Boss: General Shepherd from Modern Warfare 2 is a quicktime event variety. It's very well done. Also Makarov in Modern Warfare 3.
• Cycle of Revenge: Zakhaev hated the Americans and Britons for ruining his country, so he started a terrorist campaign against them. They blew his arm off. He assisted Al-Asad, who also thought the Americans weakened his country, in the violent coup of his country and gave him a nuke. The Americans Marines invaded the country and defeated Al-Asad's army. He detonated the nuke that killed thousands of them. The SAS tracked down, interrogated, and executed Al-Asad. Zakhaev sent an army to kill them, they killed the army. They tried to use his son against him, who committed suicide. He launched more nukes at them and when that failed, killed whoever he could. Soap killed him for that. Now Makarov and the whole Russia hated Americans for it, complete with Makarov revealing photos of three SAS troopers and a US Marine involved in his death. Also, Shepherd hates the Ultranationalists for killing 30,000 of his men. The subsequent Russian-American War results in thousands of civilian deaths on both sides (though more on the Americans'). Soap and Price kill Shepherd in retaliation. But someone else will surely pick up the command of the American forces, now targeting both the Russians and them too... Well, at least Makarov's dead now, and the war is over. The Russian President and the American President both advocate peace as well, and Word of God states that the generals and politicians who allied with Makarov were arrested, the Loyalists were welcomed back into Russia, and relationships between Russia and the US/NATO finally evolved into peace. Hopefully this will finally end the cycle.
• Danger Deadpan: A lot of them in Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • Modern Warfare was a Darker and Edgier version of the rest of the Call of Duty, while World at War went down the Bloodier and Gorier route for World War II with the Pacific Campaign, as well as a very graphic take on the Eastern Front. Modern Warfare 2 took it further, what with Washington D.C. becoming a war zone, with the White House taken over and the infamous playable "terrorist" level. The Moral Guardians were not amused.
  • It makes a comeback in Modern Warfare 3 when you play a dad on vacation with his family, filming your little daughter. Suddenly, a truck parks near where your daughter was playing and detonates, releasing a chemical agent all over the city.
• Deadly Lunge: Com-fucking-mando (Pro).
• Death by Disfigurement: Subverted with Zakhaev's assassination attempt. Turns out "shock and blood loss" didn't take care of him as expected.
• Death From Above:
  • The levels "Death From Above" and most of "Shock and Awe" in Modern Warfare 1, as well as the gameplay moments where you can call in airstrikes and/or artillery barrages.
  • A selectable 25 Kill Streak in Modern Warfare 2 multi-player drops a tac nuke, winning the game for whoever achieved the streak, regardless of score. That is, if you have it. Other kill streak rewards do this to a lesser degree by calling in Predator UAVs with missiles, Harrier Jets, helicopters or an AC-130 'Spectre' Gunship.
  • One of the Spec Ops levels in Modern Warfare 2 involves one player as a Blackhawk door gunner clearing a path for a second player on the ground, and another is basically the first game's Death From Above with the second player taking the place of the SAS team. However, in both cases, the player on the ground is no more durable than he normally would be, and friendly fire is not disabled.
  • The "Iron Lady" mission in Modern Warfare 3.
• Death in All Directions: Modern Warfare frequently has the enemies constantly throwing grenades at you on Veteran difficulty. Averted in Modern Warfare 2, although now they sometimes resort to flashbang grenades instead.
• Death Is Dramatic: Averted. None of the playable characters that die in the series ever get a meaningful last moment with their friends or a heartfelt speech. Sgt. Jackson gets blown up by a nuke and is left all alone in a ruined city to die in agony making all of his accomplishments meaningless. Roach is shot in the gut by his commanding officer Shepherd and burned to death. Soap probably the closet thing to a main protagonist in the whole series bleeds out after an explosion and doesn't get to say any meaningful last words as his friends desperately try and fail to keep him alive. Played somewhat straight in the level "Down the Rabbit Hole", where Sandman and his team all sacrifice themselves to allow Price and Yuri to escape with the Russian President.
• Determinator:
  • Soap, who doesn't let having just gone over a frickin' waterfall or being stabbed stop him when he's after Shepherd; even after the aforementioned stabbing, Soap still pulls himself across the ground toward a gun while Shepherd and Price duke it out. When the gun is kicked away, Soap resorts to pulling the knife out of his gut and throwing it into Shepherd's head.
  • Although it isn't pointed out directly, Yuri was gutshot by Makarov four days before he shows up as the playable character in Modern Warfare 3.
  • The US military during the battle of Washington DC. One of the most memorable lines is:

Sgt. Foley: [after the helicopter is hit by a missile] Take us up! If we're going down, we're taking those SAM sites with us!

• • Captain Price in Modern Warfare 3, who will stop at nothing to hunt down Makarov.
  • Special mention has to go to Makarov, who survives being shot dead center in the chest three times and then being strangled. It's only once he gets tossed down a glass ceiling and hung by a zipline does he finally die, and spends a good thirty seconds flailing when the force should have broken his neck.
• Department of Redundancy Department: The South American arms dealer that Task Force 141 chases in Rio is known to the men as "Alex the Red". This is said by Shepherd after he dramatically gives the man's real name as "Alejandro Rojas", which, in English, means... "Alex Red". Doubles as an Incredibly Lame Pun.
• Didn't See That Coming: Played straight and averted at the same time in the third game when Yuri got punched down a staircase by Price. Yuri obviously did not expect Price to punch him or else it would not have worked so simply. The player, however, probably saw it coming from a mile away, not just because Soap planted the seeds of doubt about Yuri within Price moments earlier but because betrayal isn't exactly unheard of in a Call of Duty game.
• Dirty Coward: For all of his showboating and grand speeches about a new era to lead his country, Al-Asad proves himself to be a coward among cowards. It probably doesn't help that he was little more than a pawn of the Ultranationalists, as he wasn't even the one who ordered the nuclear detonation.
• Disposable Pilot: In "Hunted", both pilots are always killed, though most of your squad survives.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The Russians want a thousand dead Americans for every civilian killed in the airport attack. Thankfully, this isn't literal. In the third game, a tank commander sticks his head out of his hatch to discuss strategy with a supporting infantry squad and is killed by a sniper round. The tank's gunner spots the sniper and returns fire. With a 120mm High Explosive round. Actually, he was only injured by the sniper thus making this even more disproportionate.
• Downer Ending: Modern Warfare ends with most of the SAS/USMC joint task force dead and the Ultranationalist leader taken out, but as Modern Warfare 2 shows, that just makes things worse...
  • Modern Warfare 2: yes, you stopped Shepherd, but Task Force 141 has been destroyed, Price and Soap are internationally wanted fugitives for "treason" -- despite having done nothing against their home country -- along with "global terror" and "violent acts against the government", the East Coast and Washington in particular are devastated, the US is going to war with Russia without a commander (the SECDEF having given Shepherd "a blank check"), Makarov is still on the loose, and as noted on Fridge Brilliance , Shepherd already won even in death.
    • There is a bit of a high note, though: Shepherd was presumably going to use his hero status and unlimited budget to perform unilateral military actions across the globe (as evidenced by his very well equipped "Shadow Company"). Even if he ends up a martyr, his death prevented his plan from going any further. Price and Soap are still alive, and as Price admitted, the key was both for Shepherd to die and for them to live.
      • And, if nothing else, at least Shepherd would not live to see his dream carried out in full...
• Drill Sergeant Nasty:
  • Cpt. Price acts like this towards Soap in the prologue, but this attitude doesn't survive the first mission where he saves Soap from sliding off the helicopter's ramp to his doom. While Price quickly drops the attitude once the real mission starts, even a nasty superior isn't going to let one of their men fall to their doom... he's vitriolic but a true leader.
  • Price becomes this to Yuri in Modern Warfare 3 after Soap's final words were that Yuri and Makarov somehow knew each other too well. After learning the truth about the two, Price grudgingly lets Yuri tag along in the next mission, but says he has to keep up at his pace. This is mostly gone by the end of the mission though.
• Dummied Out:
  • Hackers have found a surprisingly large amount of abandoned content in the first game, including different reticule images for every rifle scope (in the final game, due to a programming oddity, all rifle scopes use "scope_overlay_m40a3", but there are seven others, including two for the M21), several abandoned levels including one where the player would have controlled an attack helicopter, and the AT4 rocket launcher, which is in the game but never accessible without cheating. Modern Warfare 2 was planned to have a level set on board the ISS rather than a brief scene featuring it, but this was cut due to fears it damaged the flow of the game.
  • There are other clues hidden within dummied-out weapons: two in Call of Duty 4, the "Brick Blaster" and "Select a location", seem to indicate that Quick Melee would have still involved bashing people over the head with your gun rather than the newly-added knife. In Modern Warfare 2, the HUD icon for the L86 LMG, as well as its maximum ammo in single-player (420, the same as most assault rifles) indicate that it was originally meant to be an L85 assault rifle instead.
• Dynamic Entry:
  • Soap tackles Rojas off a first floor balcony and onto a wrecked car as soon as you catch up to him.
  • In the third game, an American tank drives through an office that a group of Russians are taking cover in. Later in the same mission, another tank comes to your rescue by exiting directly through a brick wall without warning right on top of the Russian troops that had you pinned down, and blows up a Russian tank.

Echo to Hotel

• Earn Your Happy Ending: Sweet Jesus did they ever earn it. Khaled Al-Asad, Imran Zakhaev, Shepherd, and Makarov are dead. WWIII has ended, with Russia withdrawing from Europe. Relations between Russia and the US/NATO finally evolve into peace, and the Loyalists are welcomed back into Russia. Task Force 141 has been cleared of the charges of treason and terrorism. But Europe has been devastated by chemical attacks, and (a pointless) war. And Vasquez, Jackson, Griggs, Gaz, Ghost, Roach, Kamarov, Sandman, Grinch, Truck, Yuri and even Soap are all dead.
• Easily Forgiven: Averted. After learning about Yuri's past with Makarov, Price feels that he sufficiently regrets his actions to be allowed to live. For now. However, during the next mission, he is clearly still pissed at Yuri and doesn't fully trust him. This is apparently gone by the next mission though.
• Easy Logistics:
  • The invasion of the United States in Modern Warfare 2. The Russians are able to get an enormous amount of manpower, including armored vehicles and Havoc helicopters to the United States' Eastern Seaboard. It is implied in the Alternate History of the setting that the Russian military - particularly their Navy - is a lot more powerful than it is in Real Life, but some players found it difficult to swallow. However, by the later levels, the Russians seem to be running out of munitions and weapons, as they're shown using captured Javelin launchers and Barret rifles instead of the gear they dropped with, and when Price detonated the EMP over the East Coast the invasion instantly comes to a complete halt due to the lack of resupply.
  • During the battle in New York City, the Russians are winning, primarily because their jammers are making it impossible for the USAF to attain air superiority. Once Metal destroys it, the Air Force blows the hell out of the Russians' supply and support apparatus, forcing the Russians back to the waterline where their navy can support them. When Metal subsequently boards the Russian command sub and turns their cruise missiles against the fleet, the entire Russian invasion breaks down and they withdraw across the entire East Coast.
  • The Russian invasion of Europe. ALL OF IT. Former Soviet Generals, eat your heart out. They had the admittedly huge advantage of the simultaneous chemical strikes on all the European capitals to clear the way, and the NATO counterattack beats them back within mere days anyway. Though how exactly you drive an army into France, from Russia, without being noticed by any of the other countries between those two, remains unclear and a source of great jealousy for those nations NOT equipped with Whole Army Stealth Systems.
• Eleventh-Hour Superpower: The last level of Modern Warfare 3 puts the player in Juggernaut armor, not seen anywhere else outside of Special Ops missions, and then allows you to rampage with it by marching directly into the teeth of multiple waves of enemies, backed up by RPG teams, without any cover to hide behind... and without needing any. Then you're stripped of your armor and have to proceed normally for the rest of the level.
• Elite Mooks:
  • Shadow Company in Modern Warfare 2. They have about 50% more health than normal soldiers, and can usually survive one additional bullet compared to everyone else. They are also notably better shots than most enemies, carry better weapons, and sometimes use smoke grenades to cover themselves. Justified, as they are Americans (though it's not explained whether they are mercenaries or soldiers) and so would have access to better equipment and training than the Ultranationalist Russians you've been fighting throughout the game.
  • Juggernauts in the same game, but only in Special Ops. They take a ridiculous amount of damage... and that's not counting the fact they take five .50BMG rounds to the face before dying.
  • In Survival Mode in Modern Warfare 3, enemies get stronger over time, until you are fighting commands and heavy commandos, who take seven to ten rifle rounds or two to three knife hits to bring down, and carry western assault rifles (like the ACR) and tons of grenades.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: In Call of Duty 4, you had the U.S. Marine Corps' Force Recon and the British S.A.S. In Modern Warfare 2, you have the international special ops unit Task Force 141 (made of the best soldiers from the best units), and the U.S. Army Rangers. And one mission for the CIA.... Modern Warfare 3 sets you in the boots of Delta Force, more S.A.S., Spetsnaz and (Russian) Secret Service characters, with French GIGN and U.S. Navy SEALs as NPC allies. The aforementioned CIA mission subverts this by being completely devoid of glamor, that goes oh-so-horribly-wrong at the end.
• Emergency Weapon:
  • The knife, although several of the Modern Warfare 2 perks and the Tactical Knife 'attachment' make it less so.
  • Easily subverted in multi-player, where many veteran players have a gear and perk configuration based entirely around running around and stabbing people, and one of the more infamous issues with Modern Warfare 2.
• Empathy Doll Shot:
  • Heck, there's an abandoned teddy bear in just about every single multi-player level of Call of Duty 4. One even pops up, prominently lit, in an empty safehouse in Modern Warfare 2. Modern Warfare 2 also has one pinned to a wall with a knife through its head.
  • There is also an inflatable sex doll found in a bathtub in Makarov's hideout. No telling whose it was.
  • The inflatable sex dolls are also in multiple places in the Multi-player and Spec Ops, albeit usually tucked away out of plain sight...
• Enemy Chatter: After a Deal with the Devil, Price somehow manages to score not only Shepherd's location but also a "decryption code" allowing himself and Soap to tap into Shadow Company's wireless voice communications.
• Enemy Mine: After Shepherd's betrayal, Price invokes this to get Makarov to divulge the location of Shepherd's hideout.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave:
  • Everyone but Soap and Price dies at the end of Modern Warfare. And again (though only for Task Force 141 this time) in Modern Warfare 2. Not necessarily. Archer and Toad may have escaped at the end of the level "Loose Ends" since they were far enough away to provide sniper support. Also since Rook (as the last TF 141 member you see alive) was still alive by the betrayal, it's possible other Task Force members might still be alive.
  • Ultimately, by the end of the events of Modern Warfare 3, the only major squad members we know to still be alive are Price, Nikolai and probably Frost, who hadn't gone to the Siberian Mine mission. The Rangers from Modern Warfare 2 don't show up in Modern Warfare 3, so we don't know if they survived, and the SAS members from the London mission would have been dealing with the chemical attack, so we have no idea if they lived. They were wearing Gas Masks though, and Russian didn't manage to invade England, so they might be alive.
• Every Car Is a Pinto:
  • If a car gets shot enough, it explodes. Naturally, tanks and other armored vehicles are immune to this, which is why you have RPGs and Javelin Missile Launchers.
  • In Modern Warfare 2, cars are slightly more durable. Tanker trucks and jet engines, however...
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": A lot of the guys you hear from, you'll only know them by their callsigns. And even if you know their names, chances are the other guys they'll be talking to will only know them by their callsigns. Examples include: Overlord, Baseplate, Honey Badger, Excalibur, Gold Eagle, Disciple, Oxide, Avatar, Sat1, Hunter 2-1, Thunder 1-1 and almost the entirety of Task Force 141. Actually, Hunter 2-1 is not an example; that's the callsign for Pvt. Ramirez's unit, Foley uses "Hunter 2-1 Actual" at least twice in radio chatter to identify himself. Hunter 2-3 appears in "Team Player" as another ranger unit, so Hunter is probably the callsign of the Ranger Battalion. Hunter would actually be the callsign of the company, 2 means that they're the second platoon of that company, 3 means third squad of that platoon. Lampshaded later: "Who the hell's Soap?" and even further in Modern Warfare 3 by Soap asking who the hell is Yuri.
• Evil Versus Evil: Modern Warfare 2's relevant level is called "The Enemy of my Enemy", and is caused by Shepherd deciding that Makarov, as well as everyone else, has outlived his usefulness. It's notable that Infinity Ward could have covered all the necessary plot points in a cutscene, but chose to make a full level instead.
• Evil Sounds Deep:
  • The Shadow Company soldiers' voices, which are pretty damn scary.
  • Inverted with Makarov, who speaks in a somewhat high-pitched rasp. Doesn't make him sound any less scary though.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games are... Call of Duty in a modern war setting. Pretty self-explanatory.
• Explosions in Space: Played painfully straight during the sequence in which a nuclear warhead ICBM is launched by Price and detonates above the atmosphere over Washington D.C., creating an Electro Magnetic Pulse that disables the invading Russian vehicles... and other things. Not only does the resultant explosion have a Planar Shockwave, but there's also a delayed air pressure shockwave that destroys the observing International Space Station.
• Expy: Ghost to Gaz, they play the second-in-command to the captain of their respective squad, played by the same actor, and are executed by high-caliber pistol.
• Eye Scream: In Modern Warfare 2, Soap kills General Shepherd by throwing a knife at him. It hits him in the eye.
• Faceless Goons:
  • A lot of the Ultranationalists and Al-Asad's soldiers wear face-concealing masks, as do a few of the Favela gang members in Rio. Later, Shepherd's Shadow Company troops wear helmets and balaclavas.
  • The Juggernaut enemies, totally. From a distance, it's nearly impossible to tell where they look out of due to the angle they run at you ^{[dead link]} : the helmet on top of their head looks like it covers their entire face. When they get closer, you can then notice that they wear a intimidating-looking, face-covering mask.
• Fake Balance: Check the trope page.
• False-Flag Operation:
  • In Modern Warfare 2, Makarov kills a known American agent after said agent takes part in a civilian massacre without realizing his cover's already blown, leaving the body so the Americans will be blamed. In a variation, the evidence is not forged, just taken out of context.
  • Then it happens again when Price launches the nuke to send an electromagnetic pulse over Washington DC. Before the missile has even hit its target, even though there might have still been time to shoot it down, Shepherd is blaming Makarov in order to get his blank check.
• Fatal Family Photo:
  • After completing the "Mile High Club" mission at the end of Call of Duty 4, a photo depicting Vasquez, Price, Gaz and Griggs is shown. With the exception of Price, everyone in the photo is dead by the end of the game.
  • At the end of Modern Warfare 2, there is a photo of Task Force 141. Although only Price, Soap and Ghost are recognizable anyway, only Soap and Price are known to still be alive at the end.
  • And in Modern Warfare 3, there's a photo of Soap, Price, Sandman and Ghost. Again, with the exception of Price, everyone in the photo dies.
  • Video version in Modern Warfare 3, you briefly take control of a father recording his daughter and wife while on vacation in London. Then you notice a delivery truck in the background which is the exact same type as the ones the SAS were hunting down in the mission immediately prior... and then it detonates a dirty bomb which instantly kills the girl (and probably the wife) while the husband gets to survive just long enough to die from exposure to chemicals/radiation.
• Field Promotion: After the events of Modern Warfare, Soap has been promoted all the way from Sergeant to Captain.
• Finishing Stomp: Done to Soap by General Shepherd.
• Fission Mailed:
  • The missions "Shock and Awe" and "Game Over" in Modern Warfare.
  • There are many more of these sequences in Modern Warfare 2. The most notable examples: Roach is nearly blown up by a mortar, but survives it... just long enough to get shot in the chest and killed off for real. A little later, Soap is slammed over the head, stabbed in the stomach, and stamped on the face all in a row. None of these actually kill him.
  • And, most notably, when the defense of downed aircraft ends with blinding flash. Some time later, we learn that Pvt. Ramirez hasn't met the fate of Sgt. Jackson from the first game.
• Fluffy the Terrible: Taskforce-141, which includes some of the best of the best of both US and British Special Forces, gives its members codenames which include "Taco" and "Worm". Special mention goes to our hero "Soap" MacTavish. This tends to actually be the case with most military members. A callsign is bestowed upon you, not picked by you, and it is not usually because of your proudest moment. Soap. Do you think that "Honey Badger" is a bad name? Think again.
• Foreshadowing:
  • There's actually a decent amount of this regarding General Shepherd's Face Heel Turn.
  • More subtly, in "Game Over", black birds (presumably ravens) can be seen when the helicopter first comes into view. That helicopter then blows up the bridge you're going over for extract, sealing Gaz and Griggs's fates.
  • Also, towards the end of "Of Their Own Accord", you can hear Overlord ordering every unit in the city to "get the hell out of there!" before the nuclear missile Price launches in the next level hits.
  • The end of the Modern Warfare 3 mission "Persona Non Grata" briefly shows some rather elaborate tattoos on Yuri's arm. They're from back when he was an Ultranationalist. When his face first appears in the intro to the same level, a Call of Duty 4-era Ultranationalist with a gas mask is briefly shown in the background. Yuri was a Call of Duty 4-era Ultranationalist.
  • When Sandman is first introduced, there's a picture of him and two guys with blacked out faces. They're Price and Ghost, and the picture is the Fatal Family Photo of Operation: Kingfish.
  • An unintentional example: also in "Persona Non Grata", when taking control of the UGV, looking back at the control station reveals Yuri using Kamarov's model from Call of Duty 4. Kamarov shows up to help later on, though he doesn't actually do much before he dies.
• Forgotten Fallen Friend: Quite often. Griggs never mentions the death of Jackson, Vasquez and all his other USMC friends (though their is some cut dialogue that has Griggs compare Jackson and Soap). Gaz, Griggs and Price are barely mentioned at all in Modern Warfare 2 (except after Price's return, Soap is happy to see him alive). Ghost and Roach don't get mentioned at all in Modern Warfare 3. Price doesn't mention Sandman after he dies. The only one to get repeated mentions after his death is Soap.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: There's a surprising amount of background information on the characters during the loading cutscenes, in all the text that briefly appears. For example, in the intro to "No Russian", you can get a rather detailed breakdown of the terror campaign Makarov's been going on (he's killed thousands, making the airport massacre Tuesday), and during the loading scene for "Takedown", you can learn that Rojas supplies governments and mercenaries and serves as a buffer between the two as well.
• A Friend in Need:
  • Nikolai comes to Soap's rescue in Brazil and then remains the only one to stand by Soap and Price when they are framed as terrorists. Guess he takes care of his friends, too, even when the whole world is against them. The fact that it isn't pointed out anywhere in the game, makes it ever more awesome.
  • Then again, five years before, guess who personally "walked him out of there" when he had been caught and tortured by the Ultranationalists? That's right, Soap himself.
• From Bad to Worse: Invoked twice in Call of Duty 4. The first time is just after you've rescued the downed American chopper pilot, then as you're being evac'ed, a nuke goes off, crashing your helicopter and killing the Marine character Sgt. Paul Jackson. The second time is when the joint S.A.S.-Marine squad is making their way toward Zakhaev at the missile silo, only to watch in horror as two ICBMs launch and head toward America, where the projected casualty rate will be almost 42 million instantly killed.
  • Arguably the point of Modern Warfare 2.

Price: "Out of the frying pan" is more like it. This world looks more like hell than the one I just left.

• • Taken to eleven in Modern Warfare 3, if the advertising campaign is anything to go on. A poster with a Time magazine mock-up, showing a mostly destroyed or crumbling urban center, with the headliner "World On The Brink" featured prominently.
• Funny Background Event: If you stealthily approach the VIP's house in Arcadia, you can surprise a Russian soldier inside, who is busy raiding the fridge, despite wearing a full gas mask.
• Game Breaking Bug: Players have discovered how to glitch the console versions to allow unlimited ammo and no need to reload, ever. This leads to a More Dakka grenade spam fest the likes of which the world has never known. Ok, the Dakka bar has been raised. The glitch works on the AC-130 Killstreak Reward, meaning that it can fire its 105 mm cannon (the size of an artillery shell) at machinegun speed. ...My god (4:00). And if you think that's bad... Though that's not a hack, just a modification of local files with the caveat that you have to host for it to work.
• Gameplay Ally Immortality:
  • Only for major characters, whereas New Meat dies just as easily as the protagonist.
  • A mixed bag in the case of Task Force 141: certain men are almost guaranteed to die, although it is possible to prevent this, while other operators are outright Redshirts; on the other hand, during "Loose Ends" both Ozone and Scarecrow have this until you plant the DSM. Makarov's partners during "No Russian" also are almost guaranteed to die, and if you somehow manage to prevent this will actually stop and disappear at the end of the level.
• Gamers Are Morons: The primary justification for switching to IWnet was that it's "more accessible" than opening a server list and clicking on a server.
• Gatling Good:
  • You know the part in Call of Duty 4. Also, Modern Warfare 2 seems to be in love with this trope. Gatling guns as sentry guns, Gatling guns on helicopters, Gatling guns on planes, player-used Gatling guns, Gatling guns on SUVs, Gatling guns on Humvees, about the only thing a Gatling gun isn't attached to is tanks or being as a BFG. This is a bit of truth in video games, as Humvees, helicopters, planes and even SUVs can be equipped with Gatling guns. There are in fact real-life SUVs with Gatling gun roof-turrets exactly like the ones that Shadow Company use.
  • In Modern Warfare 3, you can wield Gatling guns on helicopters, tanks, and a remote controlled vehicle armed with a gatling gun and a grenade launcher.
• Gene Hunt Interrogation Technique: Rojas and Waraabe's interrogations head into this territory. Rojas's involves a car battery, power tools, cigarettes and a plunger. Waraabe's consists of threatening to poison him with a nerve gas, then when he talks giving him a gas mask. Then shooting him.
• Genre Savvy: General Shepherd knows when an entire squad of men suddenly drop out of contact that he's being hunted by Soap and Price and orders an immediate evacuation, knowing they can't stop them.
• Giant Mook: The Juggernauts. They soak up .50BMG rounds like a sponge, and nearly everything else is useless. To elaborate, killing a Juggernaut takes about 2.5 full magazines of assault rifle fire, 14 shotgun blasts, nearly 60 rounds of machinegun fire, or 5-6 direct hits from a M203 40mm grenade launcher, putting them on par with fantasy enemies like Heavy Armor soldiers from F.E.A.R. or Boomers from Gears of War. Fortunately, for realism and balancing issues they don't appear in the story campaign, only in the bonus Special Ops missions.
• Golden Snitch: In the multi-player of Modern Warfare 2, you can choose to have your third killstreak be a Tactical Nuke, which immediately wins the game for you after a 25 round kill, regardless of your team's score. Naturally, this didn't return in Modern Warfare 3 (though it instead had the similar M.O.A.B.: same number of kills necessary, but rather than ending the game immediately, your team just gets doubled experience for the rest of the round, and it kills every enemy on the map, no matter where they are).
• Gondor Calls for Aid: After the EMP strike, the Rangers encounter a fellow soldier acting as a "runner", who has been sent to regroup the remaining soldiers to retake the White House.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck: "Sarge? Did HQ just tell us to go "F" ourselves?"
• Gravity Screw: On the Russian plane, the pilot loses control for a moment during which everyone inside gets weightless. In the middle of a firefight.
• The Greatest Story Never Told:
  • Oh so much. Raid on the cargo ship? Lost in a storm. Your heroic saving of Pelayo? No one knows about it thanks to the nuke. Your CO's executing Al-Asad? Nope. He's presumably said to have died in the nuclear explosion. How about SAVING THE US FROM A MASSIVE NUCLEAR INVASION, watching your friends be gunned down and killing the world's Big Bad? Nope! "Missile tests" and "skirmishes". Hijacking a submarine and stopping a Russian invasion? Of course not!
  • Most likely averted with Team Metal's actions though. Their turning the battle of New York (and the invasion of America) isn't going to be forgotten (their commander even calls it "one for the books"), they won't be forgotten for saving the Vice President, the President knows that they took down Volk, and them sacrificing themselves to save the Russian President and end WWIII definitely won't be forgotten.
• Grenade Spam: Quite possibly the Trope Namer. Certainly the Trope Codifier and Ur Example.
• Griefer: "Boosting" is when players using outside voice chat on opposing sides would kill each other for the 25 killstreak Nuke with minimal deaths in the same location utilizing Tactical Insertions. Booster Justice is the most well known response to this tactic.
• The Gump: In Modern Warfare 3, it turns out that Yuri was there when Zakhaev's arm was shot off, watched the nuke go off in Modern Warfare 1, and was supposed to join Makarov in the "No Russian" airport massacre, but Makarov gut-shot him in the underground parking lot after Yuri had a change of heart. Yuri even managed to crawl up to the main terminal and was steps behind Makarov, Private Allen et al., trying to stop them before passing out from his injuries.
  • Makarov himself gets this treatment for most of that scene as well, showing him as the driver that got Zakhaev safely away after he was shot, and as the one who detonated Al-Asad's nuke.
• Gun Accessories: So very many of them; gun customization is half the fun in multi-player.
• Guns Akimbo:
  • In Modern Warfare 2, where you can get dual weapons in Story and Spec Ops Mode and unlock them in Multi-player. And you can get dual Desert Eagles. Dual Desert Eagles as 'More Dakka'? Please. Dual P90s (there's a reason it's called a "bullet hose") with the "Rapid Fire" or "Extended Mags" attachments. That's More Dakka.
  • Dual lever action shotguns are an infamous example. This particular combination ended up being one of the iconic multi-player "wrongs", alongside the Javelin and infinite glitches, noob tubing and knifing, to the point that when Infinity Ward finally released a patch to reduce their effectiveness, hackers promptly got to work trying to circumvent it.
  • In "Down the Rabbit Hole", Grinch dual wields Desert Eagles... at two different targets.
• Guns Are Worthless: One of the more popular multi-player setups in Modern Warfare 2 is Marathon/Lightweight/Commando. The high movement speed works with lag to make the user very difficult to hit, while Commando effectively renders the user invulnerable for a brief period when stabbing and allows him to stab people from farther away than usual.
  • Oddly inverted with an unfixed bug in Call of Duty 4: attaching a suppressor to the G3 causes knife stabs initiated with it to take upwards of a second to register, by which time it's entirely possible for your target to move out of the way or just knife you first.
• Gunship Rescue:
  • Modern Warfare 1: featured at least three Gunship Rescue scenes: one is in the USMC mission "The Bog", featuring two Super Cobras coming to The Squad's rescue when it's overwhelmed by enemies; the second features a Lockheed AC-130 gunship appearing just before the team faces a enemy armored platoon; and the third one is in the very end, when a Havoc arrives to rescue Soap in the last damn moment, it's too late for Gaz and Griggs though. There's also a mission where you can call in a Mi-28 at will, so whether it invokes a Big Damn Heroes moment depends entirely on you.
  • Modern Warfare 2: when Roach and Ghost escape from Makarov's safehouse, chased by dozens of Russian Mooks. 30 meters from the extraction point, you get knocked out by a mortar right next to you, only to awaken while being dragged away by the collar by Ghost. As you try to take some more enemies down through your blurry gaze, the ringing in the ears turns into the unmistakeably sound of miniguns warming up and a chopper flies over your head, completely shredding the pursuing soldiers to pieces. But once you're up on your feet and handed the retrieved data to General Shepherd, he shoots Roach and Ghost and burns their bodies in a ditch.
  • The gunship levels from the first game return in the third, in which you have to blast free a path out of Paris for the soldiers who captured Volk. Earlier in the level you can throw purple smoke grenades to call an airstrike. At the end of the level, the Delta Force soldiers are making a stand on the Pont d'Iéna against vastly superior Russian forces with heavy tank backup. Just as you start to run out of ammo and the tanks close in, American bombers come in and obliterate the Russian forces. Unfortunately this causes the Eiffel Tower to collapse. In Sierra Leone, you can take remote control of the gun on Nikolais gunship and in Berlin you are given a target designator for an A-10, "the tanks natural enemy".
• Happy Ending Override: Happens in the opening scene of Modern Warfare 2. It turns out that despite everything you did in the first game, the Ultranationalists ended up seizing power anyway and Zakhaev is now considered a national hero in Russia.
• Harder Than Hard:
  • The "Veteran" difficulty level. Technically subverted as of Modern Warfare 2, where the four difficulties roughly equate to "Very Easy" (not available in Spec Ops), "Easy", "Normal" and "Hard". It won't stop Veteran from sniping you in the crotch from halfway across the world.
  • It also subverts Easier Than Easy (assuming Recruit equates to Very Easy, which is implied at the difficulty select screen which describes it as "casual") because even on Recruit, you will die. A few times. Maybe even a lot.
• Hatedom: The rage about the Dedicated Server brouhaha and the infamous multi-player lack of balance aside aside, this hatedom is one part Hype Aversion, one part "lol it's the same game", and one part "it's not realistic".
• Hellish Copter:
  • Poor Sergeant Jackson.
  • Subverted in Modern Warfare 3. At the end of the "Black Tuesday" mission, Frost's helicopter takes a hard hit, and it looks like it's going to crash into a New York high-rise, but it levels out just in time and flies away safely.
• Hero Antagonist: The Russian police and airport security you fight in "No Russian".
• The Hero Dies: Several times, but done most tear-jerkingly with Soap.
• Heroic Mime:
  • The player character never speaks while you are playing as him. However, a Flash Back mission in Modern Warfare has you playing as the otherwise-talkative Captain (then-Lieutenant) Price, and the guy you play as in "Death from Above" is just as talkative as the rest of the gunship's crew. In Modern Warfare 2, Soap, the PC from the previous game, is now your team leader, though he stops talking when you play as him.
    • Averted in the last mission of Modern Warfare 3, where, in the vein of Black Ops, Captain Price is just as chatty as ever when it's his turn to be the Player Character again.
    • Also averted briefly in "No Russian" in Modern Warfare 2, where Private Allen is heard once ("Copy, second floor window!") while responding to a teammate.
  • In coop Spec Ops mode and multi-player, no one can hear what their own character says, but they can hear what their teammates say.
  • Also averted with both Warhammer and Yuri, though Yuri usually only talks in cutscenes.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Invoked towards the end of Modern Warfare 3 by Team Metal.
  • In Modern Warfare 1, Griggs is killed while trying to get a paralyzed Soap to safety.
• He Who Must Not Be Seen:
  • The case for all of the playable characters, although subverted by Call of Duty 4 with "Death From Above" where you can see your SAS team and usual character as little splotches of black or white (depending on whether you chose a "black hot" or "white hot" thermal setting), and turned around in Modern Warfare 2 where you're a newer operator and the player character in Modern Warfare 4 is now your NPC team leader.
  • Also used with your Mission Control: Baseplate in Modern Warfare, and Overlord in Modern Warfare 2. Worth noting is that they're both played by the same voice actor. Averted across the series in the third game, however, where the new Baseplate in Modern Warfare 3 turns out to be MacMillan from Call of Duty 4.
• "Hey You!" Haymaker:
  • Captain MacMillan does this to a soldier (who drops the only accessorized P90 in single-player) with his rifle during the level where you play as Captain Price in the past during Call of Duty 4.

Captain MacMillan: Oi! Suzy!

• • Captain Price has his own variation in "Just Like Old Times"... with a knife.
• Hide Your Children:
  • Horribly averted in the third game with the Davis Vacation Scene. It's a video from the perspective of a camcorder showing a family on vacation in London. A little girl is playing with some birds when a terrorist bomb in a truck next to her suddenly explodes.
  • Played straight in the infamous No Russian level of the second game. Despite being a major Russian airport, not a single child can be seen among all the civilians. Most likely since the nature of the level was controversial enough.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Soap kills Shepherd by pulling out the knife which the latter stabbed him with and throws it into his head while he's distracted.
• Hold the Line:
  • In Modern Warfare, after killing al-Asad you have to defend your position against enemy troops until your ride out of there arrives, steadily falling back after to more defensible positions towards the primary landing zone (LZ). This is turned around later in the mission, where you have to advance through the same territory you'd conceded to the enemy earlier, and reach the new LZ before the helicopter reaches "bingo" fuel. Gaz is not happy. Neither is the player in Veteran mode. 3 minutes to get to the LZ, and a nonstop pit of super-accurate Russian soldiers swarming from across the only two stretches of land you can pass through. You could expend 30 rounds killing 10 soldiers in front of you only to get shot dead by 10 more arriving on your flank.
  • The ending of the mission "One Shot, One Kill" has you and a paralyzed-from-the-waist-down Captain MacMillan defending a fairground in Pripyat against an endless spawn of baddies until the helicopter arrives to get you out of there.
  • "Wolverines!" in Modern Warfare 2 features a sequence where you have to defend a restaurant containing a VIP from Russian soldiers, who will climb onto the roof from two separate ladders while you're supposed to have a sentry gun pointed elsewhere.
  • "Loose Ends" has you holding a mountain estate while a portable hard drive with the worst transfer speeds ever takes anywhere from twenty-eight hours to four minutes to perform a file dump. It actually only takes around five minutes, but the file transfer status shown on the HUD makes you wonder why the manufacturer's building hardware for TF141. It doesn't help that fellow TF141 operator Scarecrow, the main NPC guard for the portable hard drive, simply stands next to it in a de facto hallway and fires towards the front door despite his complete lack of cover or even concealment, while the layout of the ground floor allows two or three routes for enemy troops to reach the DSM. Fortunately, two of those routes merge directly in front of his fire arc, and the enemy helicopter-inserted troops can be interdicted (i.e. shooting them down once they fast rope down or even shooting down the helicopter in midair).
  • The end parts of "Iron Lady" and "Down the Rabbit Hole" has you holding out for a couple of minutes protecting a VIP while evac arrives.
• Homage:
  • Zakhaev's son's tracksuit is a homage to Behind Enemy Lines.
  • A lot of the American campaign in Modern Warfare 2 uses elements from Red Dawn.
  • A ruthless American General-turned-bad who has a team of black-clad mercenary commandos called Shadow Company? Lethal Weapon, anyone?
  • Chasing Rojas through Rio in "Takedown" recalls a different team of commandos chasing Bruce Banner down those same alleyways in 2008's The Incredible Hulk.
  • Soap being held up by Russian soldiers in "Cliffhanger" is similar to an early scene from GoldenEye.
• Hope Spot:
  • Story-wise, there's a small moment in "Loose Ends" after Roach has been hit by a mortar, where it seems like he's going to make it out all right, complete with the enemy suddenly going Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy while he's magically handed a whopping nine magazines and 40mm grenades to go with his new AK. Then Shepherd shoots him.
  • A couple in Modern Warfare 3: a small one early on, when you're a Russian FSO agent tasked with locating and defending the president from an attack after a plane crash. You get him to a chopper for extraction, open the door, and find Makarov on the other side. Who promptly shoots you.
  • When Yuri and Soap have to dive out of a window when a bomb goes off near them during the Kremlin mission in the third game, Price manages to get Soap back to the safehouse, just like he did at the beginning of the game. Never have the words, "Press X to help Soap" been so misleading. It looks like he'll survive, and then... "Oh no... no, no, no, NO! SOAP! NO!! NO!!! NOOO!!!".
  • "Checkpoint Reached". The game's auto-save feature is pretty good at avoiding "unsurvivable" moments.
• How We Got Here: One mission begins with your team surrounded by smoking wreckage, with your squad leader screaming at you to get off the street and reporting on the radio how badly everything is going. It then flashes back to twenty minutes earlier as your team is being inserted at the start of an operation.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: Ramirez! Add another trope entry!
• Hyperspace Arsenal:
  • Averted, as you can only carry up to two weapons. The first Modern Warfare limited it to a primary and a sidearm, with heavier weapons requiring a Perk slot, or the Overkill perk used to equip two primaries. In Modern Warfare 2, still averted, but while the Overkill perk is gone the secondary weapon may be a sidearm, a shotgun, or an explosives launcher. The Riot Shield counts as a primary weapon, while the One Man Army perk (change classes without having to die first) prevents you from equipping a secondary weapon. Oddly enough, in third Person mode, even sidearms will be carried on the character's back. In the story modes and co-op mode though, the player character may carry any two different weapons (or weapon configurations) of any type, and will do so several times through the story. You can also see every weapon on your fellow NPCs during the story mode.
  • There are some single-player story mode weapons that mount more attachments than they can have in multiplayer; for example, the M4A1 SOPMOD (Red Dot Sight, Suppressor, M203 Grenade Launcher), or the special ACR from Modern Warfare 2's "Cliffhanger" level: Red Dot Sight, Suppressor and Heartbeat Sensor.
  • Step 1: select a class with One Man Army. Step 2: use all your ammunition. Step 3: use One Man Army to switch to a class with One Man Army. For maximum fun, equip both classes with grenade launchers.

India to Quebec

• Identical Grandson: Modern Warfare's Captain Price looks just like (right down to the righteous mustache) Captain Price in Call of Duty 2 who looked like Captain Price in Call of Duty. The Price Mustache has been passed down the Price line for generations! Also, Sgt. Reznov in World at War is an ancestor of Zakhaev from Modern Warfare. As this seems to be a theme of the series, identical names could carry the same weight even if one of the characters in question is never shown by his face: Dimitri Petrenko is both the Red Army player-character in World at War and the Loyalist medic trying to revive Price at the end of Modern Warfare. Also, Foley, who was present in the first game, makes a reappearance in Modern Warfare 2. However, the first Foley was white and a captain while the Modern Warfare 2 version is black and a sergeant. His go-to guy, Ramirez, was in United Offensive as a sergeant.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Recruit, Regular, Hardened and Veteran. Modern Warfare 2 suggests these translate to "Very Easy", "Easy", "Normal" and "Hard", respectively, due to the exclusion of "Recruit" from the difficulty list in Spec Ops.
• Implacable Man:
  • In multiplayer, anyone who knows how to properly use the riot shield. Quickly becomes the bane of the other team in Headquarters Pro matches, as the headquarters may only be captured or destroyed if no opposing players are within range.
  • The last level of Modern Warfare 3 starts with Yuri putting on a juggernaut suit and picking up a machine gun. And turns out, so do you! Then you kick the door of the van open and jump out in front of Markarovs Hotel. The guards in their fine suits don't stand a chance.
• Incredibly Lame Pun: Completion achievements in Modern Warfare 2, such as Soap On A Rope? Really?!!
  • Okay, think about this for just a moment: Soap rips a knife out of his chest and tosses it into Shepherd's face. Pretty awesome, right? Wait, where did that knife hit Shepherd? In the eye? Soap just got in his eye? Intentional or not, this is a great way to ruin the atmosphere of Modern Warfare 2's climax.
• Infant Immortality: Averted in Modern Warfare 3. We see a little girl on vacation with her family get killed by a truck bomb full of poison gas.
• In Medias Res: The series as a whole begins in the midst of a Russian civil war in 2011. We are never given any explanation as to the causes of this situation, but needless to say, it serves as a catalyst for everything else that happens. Each of the later games similarly begins in the middle of one ongoing war or another, with the context of what's going on getting explained as you go along.
• Instant Death Bullet:
  • Subverted: sometimes in campaign, if shot once in the leg, enemies will crawl around or draw their guns when downed. With the Last Stand perk, someone taking will receive a chance for payback by drawing their sidearm while downed. With the Final Stand deathstreak, your character will draw their primary weapon, and if they manage to survive long enough, will be able to pick themselves up and return to the fight.
  • Watching two players with Last Stand incap each other at the same time, and then begin wildly trying to finish the other off with their sidearms first is awesome.
    • Hilarity ensues if one of them has Final Stand, wins, then gets up in time to kill the loser when he comes back for revenge.
  • Mostly averted in Call of Duty 4, enemies can survive multiple shots to the chest. The knife and shotguns can kill in one shot though (assuming you're within range to hit with them). Played straight at the end, when Soap kills Zakhaev and his two men with one shot each.
  • Horrifically averted with Roach. He's clipped by a mortar, and then shot point-blank in the chest with a Hand Cannon. He's still alive when Shepherd sets him on fire.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: A series staple since the first game is that a closed door might as well be a steel bank vault covered in barbed wire and tigers if your superiors aren't around to open it. Justified in that doors are incredibly complicated machines that require years of specialist training to operate. Finally in Modern Warfare 3 you are allowed to open a door... and immediately get punched down a flight of stairs for doing it. Modern Warfare 2 allows you to smash through windows that are big enough. There are three other occasions in the third game where you're prompted to open a door by a superior officer earlier than the above. The first time is the side door of an Mi-8 Hip, which turns out to be carrying Makarov, who promptly shoots you and kidnaps the man you've been trying to rescue. The second leads out of a church, and upon opening it you are immediately attacked by a hyena and a group of enemies. The third is the back of a truck believed to be holding a bomb, which under normal circumstances ends up empty and nothing bad happens, yet. However, if you took the option to skip the "Davis Family Vacation" scene, the truck ends up being the real deal, exploding and killing your entire squad. There's also many of the regular fences around to stop you wandering off the map.
• Interface Screw: Dropping a M.O.A.B. in multiplayer results in a few seconds of slow-mo for everyone before the enemies of the player who called the bomb die. Should the game switch hosts while this happens, the countdown before resuming is slowed down as well, leading to a three-second timer that takes fifteen.
• In the Back
• Invaded States of America: Russia invades the United States as revenge for what they thought was a terrorist attack on their soil sponsored by the United States.
• Invulnerable Civilians:
  • Averted. The level "The Coup" in Call of Duty 4 shows civilians fleeing from and subsequently being gunned down by Al-Asad's soldiers.
  • Part of "Takedown" in Modern Warfare 2 has civilians fleeing the battle between your unit and Rojas's militia, and said civilians will be killed if they're caught in the crossfire. Killing too many yourself is a Nonstandard Game Over; in "O Cristo Redentor" (a Special Ops mission using this map), each difficulty has a certain number of acceptable civilian casualties.
  • Also averted hard in "No Russian", where killing civilians, or at least allowing it to happen, is part of the entire point of the mission.
• Ironic Echo: "Since when does Shepherd care about danger close..."
• Ironic Name: The first name of the terrorist you spend most of the game fighting (Vladimir Makarov) name means "ruler of peace".
• The Ishmael: Arguably Roach in Modern Warfare 2: while badass, he still mostly serves as a third-person viewpoint on Captain MacTavish. Until you take over as Soap again for the last few levels, that is.
  • It's actually quite an interesting example. If you've played the first game, Roach is The Ishmael. If you haven't, Roach is the main character.
• It's Up to You:
  • Many, many examples. Let's just say that unless the player moves their ass and gets across the room, the enemies will usually keep spawning at the far end indefinitely. Though, to be fair the NPCs, especially the unkillable ones, sometimes act useful to the plot too. Fortunately, in some case, it only looks infinite... particularly if you're just picking a really suboptimal approach to the objective. The first game has more justifiable examples in certain spots.
  • There are certain infinite spawns in Modern Warfare, but Modern Warfare 2 does away with them: if you kill enough people, they will stop coming in every instance. That being said, there's a lot of places that have a lot of guys attacking from a lot of directions, possibly more than you have ammunition... the Gulag (and its Spec Ops counterpart "Breach and Clear") includes vertical flanking, but at least it's generally in one direction, while the favela missions "Takedown" and "The Hornet's Nest" are all about this.
  • RAMIREZ! DO EVERYTHING!
• Iwo Jima Pose: Players in Modern Warfare 2 can be rewarded an emblem resembling the flag planting at Iwo Jima for killing a bomb-carrier in Sabotage or Demolition multiplayer game modes.
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique:
  • Shown in Call of Duty 4, where Price is beating the crap out of Al-Asad for info.
  • Done twice in the Rio missions. In "Takedown", you capture Rojas's right-hand man, and MacTavish and Ghost torture him for info. In the next mission, you can see a post-torture Rojas chained to a wall with a power drill, car battery, cigarettes, etc, on a table nearby. Making this doubly creepy is that MacTavish apparently just tortured Rojas in a public street. Much of the creepiness of the latter is undone by the hilarious presence of a plunger next to him, however. They plunged the information out of him! Plunger + Torture session = fridge horror. Maybe they threatened to sucker him to death?
  • Sandman beats up Volk at the end of "Bag and Drag", and he is presumably interrogated after "Iron Lady". They following exchange happens in the next mission.

Price: Did our man talk?
Sandman: They always talk.

• "Join the Army," They Said: Unintentional (Do Not Do This Cool Thing) or no, under a certain light the game can be seen as recruitment software. It succeeds too.
  • Kind of undone when you realize that one level involves the player killing a corrupt American general.
• The Juggernaut: The Juggernauts. They only appear in Spec Ops and as a perk in multiplayer. Until the final level of Modern Warfare 3, where you are the Juggernaut.
• Jump Scare: During "Crew Expendable", if Soap moves too far away from Price while in the first cargo hold, a mook will usually leap out of nowhere, screaming and firing a Desert Eagle. This is practically guaranteed to make any player who encounters it for the first time brown their pants, especially because the mook can kill you in a couple of shots.
• Justified Tutorial:
  • As per the habit of the parent series, the tutorial is presented as having your character on a shooting range and training course where an instructor gives you a run-down on what are obviously game mechanics, with dialog written to sound like training instruction. The player's performance in the training course prompts the game to suggest a difficulty setting. The obvious fourth wall breaks like explaining aim assist or checking if you know how to switch weapons (tick box: recruit does have arms) do tend to swing these into unintentional hilarity; particularly when it's assumed you'll do something you don't have to, such as "he's spraying bullets all over the place" which can follow a controlled burst with every round on target.
  • Averted in Modern Warfare 3, where there's no separate tutorial level and the first mission shows you hints along the way. Then again, they assume that if you're playing the campaign of the third game, you've at least played the second and know what you're doing.
• Just Plane Wrong:
  • The intro to Modern Warfare 3's second mission has dialogue by F-22 pilots preparing an attack run, only for the cinematic to clearly show F-15 Eagles. Additionally, their drop tanks appear to be mislabeled as bombs, and the description of HARMs as JDAMs is totally off.
  • In Modern Warfare 2, during the attack on the Gulag, the jets that appear to support (and sometimes hinder) the assault are F-15's. However, the group assisting you is said to be the Navy. The Navy does not use the F-15.
• Kill'Em All:
  • Modern Warfare does this twice, first to almost the entire American cast halfway through the game, then nearly all of the SAS characters at the end of the game; Soap survives, as does Price.
  • Modern Warfare 2 kills off almost everyone in Task Force 141 other than Soap, Price and possibly Archer and Toad (Sniper Team One).
  • By the end of Modern Warfare 3, everyone except Price (and Nikolai) is dead, including Soap, Yuri, Delta Force and even Kamarov.
  • It's legitimately easier to list who's still alive: Price, Nikolai, MacMillan, Burns, Wallcroft, Frost (presumably) and the Rangers: Col. Marshall, Ramirez, Dunn and Foley.
• Knife Nut:
  • One of the dominant playstyles in online games, particularly in Modern Warfare 2 (alongside akimbo shotguns and infinite-ammo grenade launchers).
  • Arguably any of the Player Characters depending on your actions. Price and Soap stand out though.
• Leitmotif: Both games have short series of notes that make up parts of a lot of the other songs in each game. In Modern Warfare 2's case, it even plays in multiplayer during quiet moments.
• Lampshade Hanging: Plenty.
  • "Who's Soap?"
    • "Who the bloody hell is Yuri?"
  • Call of Duty 4 may have a very subtle bit of this in the role Soap takes in the squad. Contrary to real-world military tactics, wherein it can take hundreds of bullets to down a single man due to suppression fire and whatnot, shooter games expect the player to expend as little ammo as possible to kill enemies. So naturally, the player takes the role of the squadron's new sniper.
• Large Ham: MAJOR PETROV, a One-Scene Wonder from "Cliffhanger" and the Spetsnaz multiplayer announcer in Modern Warfare 2. Doubles as No Indoor Voice.
• Left Hanging: Who was the VIP in Arcadia, and why was he important? It's implied he was killed by someone from Shadow Company, after he got the guy to open the door, but you never find out what was in the briefcase or who he was; the most that's revealed is he's not the Vice President, since he's saved by Sandman's team in the Modern Warfare 3 mission "Goalpost".
• Lethal Joke Item: The Winchester Model 1887, which dates from the 19th century and is available in a game which is set in the 21st century. While it has one of the longest ranges for a shotgun in-game, it's pretty mediocre in all other stats. When paired up with akimbo, however, rate of fire is effectively doubled, allowing players to easily overcome its lack of one-hit kill reliability. Prior to patching, the Akimbo Model 1887s were probably the most powerful close quarters weapons in the game, and still remain viable today.
• Letters 2 Numbers: AM3RICA, 3NGLAND, FRANC3, G3RMANY.
• Levels Take Flight:
  • Mile High Club, the Brutal Bonus Level.
  • The first half of an early campaign level and one Spec Ops mission in Modern Warfare 3 take place in the Russian equivalent of Air Force One. In a reference to the Call of Duty 4 level, the Spec Ops version is given the name "Milehigh Jack".
• Made of Iron: In this series, the player character being rocked by an explosion and temporarily losing consciousness is used as a way to change scenes. This means your characters can be knocked unconscious multiple times per mission and keep fighting.
  • Soap has had a tanker blown up at his back, went over a waterfall, got stabbed in the chest and stomped on the face. It takes an explosive bomb planted right behind him and a drop out of a multi-storey church, coupled with severe chest wounds, to finally do him in.
  • Price has survived the aforementioned exploding tanker, at least two years in a gulag, getting the crap beaten out of him by Shepherd, outrunning a bomb meant to kill him, crashing a helicopter and throwing himself and the Big Bad of the third game through a glass atrium. The first thing he does at the end of the trilogy? He simply lights up a cigar and puffs away.
  • Yuri in the third game is shown to be badass enough to survive being shot in the stomach by his former employer (then dragging himself through an airport to stop his attempted killer, being thrown down a raging river and waterfall, diving out of a building and falling several stories to the ground below, taking an RPG round that only stuns him, and taking a direct RPG round from a helicopter while in a Juggernaut suit. At another point, he gets jumped by a hyena as he opens a door. As it bites down on his arm, he keeps it at bay, draws a pistol and kills two hostile African militiamen before capping the hyena. Bear in mind, hyenas have a bite force of 800 psi, and his arm does not have a scratch on it.
  • Shepherd. He beats that crap out of Soap and Price after having just been in a helicopter crash.
• Mad Libs Dialogue:
  • Most combat dialogue in the various single-player modes. It fits together surprisingly well (most of the time), but in the second game especially you'll hear a lot of "<name>! <enemy> at your <number> o'clock!" "I can't get a shot, he's out of my line of sight!".
  • The mad libs in question include the player characters' names. Which can lead to some hilarious combinations, such as Dunn shouting "Ramirez! WOULD YOU COVER ME?!" as if it's your fault there's two dozen angry Russians trying to kill him at any one time.
• Make the Bear Angry Again: How do we instigate a fight between the world's only superpowers? Have an Ultranationalist frame the U.S. for a terrorist attack on Russia.
• Man On Fire: "Back on the Grid" has a point where a group of militia are preparing to execute a villager. If the player does nothing, the villager in question is doused gasoline, and then the militia leader pulls out a lighter, with predictable results.
• Master Apprentice Chain: MacMillan -> Price -> Gaz -> Soap -> Ghost -> Roach.
• Master of Unlocking: Typically, only the ranking officer in a squad has had the years of training required to operate a door.
  • Though in Modern Warfare 2, you get to blow open a number of doors with breaching charges.
  • There are three instances where you can open a door, without a breaching charge, in Modern Warfare 3, and something bad happens each time. Andrei Harkov opens a door on a helicopter, only to met by Makarov who promptly shoots him. Yuri kicks down a door in Sierra Leone and is attacked by a hyena. Yuri opens another door in Prague, only to to be punched down a flight of stairs by Price.
• Meaningful Echo:
  • "History is written by the victors." Interestingly, one instance is spoken by the Big Bad while another comes from a protagonist, but they're both making the same point: the victors wrote their history.
  • And again in the third game: "The will of a single man." The only difference in usage is which man is being referred to.
  • From the training mission of Call of Duty 4: "What the hell kind of name is Soap?" From Soap's Journal released with Modern Warfare 3: "What the hell kind of name is Ghost?"
• Meaningful Name:
  • Mocked. Gaz was an extremely popular character in Modern Warfare 1, and so many players came up with elaborate Epileptic Trees to justify how he could have survived being executed right in front of you. So Infinity Ward added a Suspiciously Similar Substitute of him, who uses the same voice actor and performs the same role on the team. His codename is "Ghost". According to the official comic miniseries, the "Ghost" who appears in Modern Warfare 2 is a separate and clean-shaven British operator named Simon Riley.
  • It's played straight with Roach and the absurd amount of abuse he endures to that the rest of TF141 either avoids or is killed by. He nearly falls to his death after missing a jump between cliffs, then doesn't make a subsequent jump and gets knocked out from the fall, flees a horde of angry gunmen on foot while unarmed after waking up and with no support at all (he to literally jump off of a rooftop again, this time into the air from even higher up, towards a flexible ladder suspended below a helicopter), has part of a gulag collapse on him, gets punched in the face by Price, survives a minefield ambush, and holds out for several minutes against ongoing siege with only small arms and claymore mines, and still manages to sally from the building and break through. He only dies after being clipped by a mortar blast -- from which he wakes up and is still able to aim and fire a weapon -- being shot in the stomach with a high-caliber handgun, and being set on fire.
  • After his long career in the Call of Duty series, Price comes back from the gulag and unflinchingly does some really crazy shit no one was ready for. His bill for stopping a war and killing the Big Bad is very high.
• Melee a Trois: The airplane graveyard level features a three-way shootout between the player, Makarov's men and Shadow Company. Though Makarov's men and Shadow Company are rather eager to ignore each other and focus on the player instead.
• Mercy Invincibility: The "Pain Killer" Deathstreak perk in Modern Warfare 2, except it's simply increased health for the first ten seconds after respawning. Unfortunately less than completely effective, as while spawn-camping is not necessarily rampant nor possible, spawn-kills are very possible, especially from player-controlled air support. However, by using Pain Killer in conjunction with a cleverly and secretively deployed Tactical Insertion, a savvy player can pop up metres away from the enemy position reloaded and packing a huge health boost.
• Military Alphabet: Military game. Natch.
• Misblamed: "No Russian" in Modern Warfare 2. The general consensus, before release, is puzzlement at an already wildly popular, M-rated game series going the Rated "M" for Money route, some even demanding that Infinity Ward should remove it from the game. The game allows the player to choose to skip it right at the outset or during the mission, which does not count towards any Achievements/Trophies or towards the completion percentage, and no one would even think about making that demand of a book or a movie. The idea that they're doing it for the sake of the narrative barely seemed to cross anyone's mind. To quote Destructoid:

Brad Rice argues that such a harrowing scene takes the will to fight out of him, that it makes him question if such a fight is worth the lives as stake. I can only see that as statement in favor of the game, rather than in condemnation of it. That a game could so powerfully affect Rice's state of mind, simply through watching it passively, is quite an amazing achievement if you ask me. Perhaps Infinity Ward hopes to raise and possibly answer the questions Brad throws up -- is such sacrifice worth it? Should we fight such dirty battles for the greater good? How much loss of civilian life is acceptable in the name of American security?

• Mismatched Eyes: It's very difficult to notice, but Makarov has a green left eye and blue right eye.
• Monumental Damage:
  • Look no further to Washington D.C.
  • Part of Modern Warfare 3 takes place in Paris. What more do you have to say? The New York Stock Exchange also gets quite a beating; but the Statue of Liberty and the Freedom Tower seem to be intact. The Hamburg City Hall gets hit by a few missiles, but remains standing with only superfacial damage. The church in Prague seems to be a stand in for the Saint Nicholas Church, but is not an actual recreation. But it also gets blown up with you inside. The Diamond Mine in Siberia also exist in Real Life, but it's not really a monument. The Louvre in Paris was also hit by chemical attacks, but it is unclear what type of structural damage it suffers.
• Moral Dissonance: Subverted in Modern Warfare 2. It initially looks like Price fired the nuke at Washington to wipe out the invading Russians, but instead he detonates it in the air, setting off an EMP which turns the tide for the Americans... albeit at the cost of their own electronics too. It also destroys the ISS and everybody on it.
• More Dakka: They really didn't tone down the dakka. In many ways there's even MORE in Modern Warfare 2.
  • The Akimbo weapons are the best examples, especially machine pistols or submachine guns. Light machine guns also count. You can also use the "double tap" perk from the first game, which doubles any gun's firing rate.
• Motive Rant: Shepherd gives one after stabbing Soap in the chest and pulling out his revolver.

"Five years ago, I lost 30,000 men in the blink of an eye... and the world just fuckin' watched. But after today, there will be no shortage of patriots, no shortage of volunteers. I know you understand."

• Multinational Team: Task Force 141, as well as the "Joint Operation" team from near the end of Call of Duty 4. The Call of Duty 4 team is made up of SAS and USMC Force Recon, TF141 is made up of US, British, Australian and Canadian special forces, and modeled on real-life special operations task forces operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and probably elsewhere.
  • Of course TF141 ends up being Red Shirts and cannon-fodder for Shepherd's plans, with only two Brits left and everyone else either dead or completely unaware of what Shepherd did.
• Mythology Gag:
  • In the intro to the final mission in Modern Warfare 2, it becomes clear that Price is carrying three weapons, one of which is his pistol. This is a rather crafty joke about his origins; he's such an old hand, he still has his Call of Duty 1 dedicated pistol slot, which contains the same incorrect-for-his-country M1911!
  • Price himself is taken directly from the original Call of Duty right down to his facial hair; slightly less well-known is that a Captain Foley and Major Sheppard showed up back in the first game too. Ramirez waited until United Offensive, when he turned up as a sergeant. Death in the CoD universe apparently works on the honour system.
  • In the first Russian mission of the original Call of Duty, you (as Alexei) team up with a sniper named Borodin to take out German MG nests. In the Red Square mission right after, you team up with a Sgt. Makarov to flank another MG nest.
• Nerf: The Model 1887 shotgun. All shotguns in the online mode lose reach and accuracy when used in akimbo. The Model 1887 shotgun lacked this reduction. It was fixed though in subsequent patches, turning it from a Game Breaker to a regular gun, and then to a Joke Gun.
• Never Bring a Knife to A Fist Fight: The start of the General Shepherd fight, where he defeats Soap despite the latter having a knife.
• Never Speak Ill of the Dead: Invoked by the Ultranationalists in Modern Warfare 2 to diabolical effect: after Zakhaev is killed, they portray him as a hero and martyr gunned down by evil Americans, and gain control of Russia as a result.
• New Meat:
  • Soap starts off like this in Modern Warfare, as he's whisked off to his first mission hours after reporting to Captain Price on his first day in the Regiment. Ironic to be treated so, considering that he'd had gone through and passed Selection. The reason Price seems to have no respect for Soap at the beginning of the game is because he doesn't seem to believe that a guy like Soap could pass Selection. Suffice to say, Soap proves his worth.
  • Ironically, there's a new minor character in Modern Warfare 2 called "Meat" who accompanies you and Royce in the Brazilian favela. He dies first.
  • Roach doesn't get the same treatment, as he's already an operator from whichever parent unit he was in before TF141, but he may be a relatively new member of the 141.
• Next Sunday A.D.: Price's attempted assassination of Zakhaev took place in 1996. Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2 take place in 2011 and 2016, respectively. Modern Warfare 3 is also mostly late 2016, with the final level taking place after New Year's Day.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • In Modern Warfare 2, the current Big Bad's reign of terror is attributed to the fact that, without the previous game's Big Bad, no one is around to "keep him in check". As it turns out, "No Russian" was a Batman Gambit: Makarov knew all along the player was a spy, and kills him at the end so the Russians will find the body and blame it on America, touching off a war.
  • Essentially what Captain MacMillan says after you kill the lone dog in the ruins, right before you get swarmed by a ton of dogs that will most likely kill the good Captain.
  • In the third game, Price, Yuri and Soap all travel to Russia to attack a location they all believe is Makarov's safehouse, with the help of Kamarov (from the first game. However, this plan goes awry when Makarov reveals that he knew Kamarov was a mole and knew what they were planning all along, then tries to kill the whole team with planted explosives, resulting in Yuri being injured and Soap and Kamarov dying.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • Veteran difficulty. Crazy accurate baddies, your aim is thrown off moreso and the screen bloodied more quickly when you get hit, no blindfiring, painfully short time limits... Ouch. It's so hard, it could be called I Wanna Be The Soldier. Technically, all the combat in the Modern Warfare games are short-to-medium range. Assault rifles can generally hit a small window from a thousand feet away. Veteran isn't just hard. It's realistic.
  • The Call of Duty franchise's Veteran mode is truly Nintendo Hard: The Next Generation. The ferris wheel stage in Call of Duty 4 was quite literally the only case where the only chance of survival came from acting like a devil or a moron, as in abandoning the sniper and rushing enemies with an AK-47. The only solution which worked was hiding in a one-person booth the entire time while grenades came by the DOZENS every second.
  • Modern Warfare 2 is mostly better about it. The more 'special' sequences in the game where you must go though it in a particularly different manner than the rest of the game tended to be still enraging though. You will probably still die at least once every level, so get used to that fact.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown:
  • Shepherd beating the hell out of both Price and Soap in the climax of Modern Warfare 2, by himself.
  • At the end of Modern Warfare 3, Price delivers one to Makarov. It's immensely satisfying.
• No Arc in Archery: No bullet-drop, but Granada will still arc.
• No Communities Were Harmed:
  • Played straight in the missions "Wolverines!" and "Exodus" taking place in "Northeastern Virginia". Averted once you get to Washington D.C.
  • The Oasis Hotel, "Arabian Pennisula" at the end of Modern Warfare 3, is obviously modeled on the Burj Al Arab Hotel in Dubai.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The American protagonist dies because, after saving a downed chopper pilot, he isn't far enough away when the nuke blows.
• Nominal Importance:
  • Every friendly soldier has a name. Members of the Redshirt Army have randomly-selected ones. Don't bother learning them.
  • A somewhat mixed bag in the case of Task Force 141.
• Nonstandard Game Over:
  • When you get killed by a grenade ("Watch for the grenade danger indicator") or accidentally shoot one of your teammates ("Friendly fire will not be tolerated!").
  • Also, the trailer for Modern Warfare 2 shows Captain MacTavish being gunned down if the player fails to rescue him.
  • Same goes for letting one's target (i.e. Faust or Shepherd) get away, and Price dying if you fail to crawl for Shepherd's revolver, then to retrieve and finally throw the knife from your chest at Shepherd.
• Noodle Incident:

Price: Not so fast. Remember Beirut? You're with us.
Kamarov: Hm... I guess I owe you one.
Gaz: Bloody right you do.

• No One Gets Left Behind:
  • Deconstructed hard for the Americans in "Shock and Awe" from the first game.
  • Played straight in "Blackout" (and paid back with interest throughout the rest of the series) and "One Shot, One Kill" (even though MacMillan would have been fine no matter what you did).
  • Averted in "Heat". Mac is wounded and left behind (though some leftover dialogue files suggest the player would have at least had the option of rescuing him), and Gaz also tries to motivate the player to fall back by suggesting he'll be left behind.
  • Averted for most of Team Metal (except Frost) in "Down the Rabbit Hole", who stay behind as they buy time for the helicopter to escape. Despite Price insisting that the helicopter stays for them. Notably, Sandman insists that Price and the helicopter do leave without them.
  • Subverted in "Blood Brothers". Soap is injured and you spend the entire mission getting him to safety, but as soon as you do he dies anyway.
• Notice This: Important stuff/objectives are often glowing.
• Not So Different: Zakhaev and Shepherd. They both think that their countries have become weak nations and they both want to make them strong again through bloody wars, which they think is the only way to make them strong again.
• Now You Tell Me: Subtly Played for Drama at the end of "Loose Ends". Price tells you over radio not to trust Shepherd. Shepherd, meanwhile, is setting you on fire.
• Nuke'Em:
  • The ending of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and in Modern Warfare 2, if a player manages to achieve a very difficult 25 kill streak, a tactical nuke drops on the battlefield, killing all the players. The player who initiates the launch gets XP for the players it kills and has their team win. Think it as winning because it was launched on your terms.
  • A forgotten, unused gametype appropriately titled "Global Thermonuclear War" has you holding down a nuke in the middle of the battlefield like Headquarters. When you capture it, it goes off like a normal nuke.
• Oh Crap:
  • In multiplayer, your announcer is usually calm and collected, but when the opposition rolls out a higher-end Killstreak, he loses it, though the Task Force 141 announcer is rather calm when an enemy AC-130 is called in.
  • Price doesn't think someone like Soap could pass Selection for the Regiment. Hey, wait, you're playing Soap...
  • The first game is known for the degree to which it uses this trope as a part of its anti-war themes. Throughout the game, you play as:
    • A dethroned president as he is manhandled, beaten and ultimately executed.
    • The gunner of an AC-130 gunship providing support to the main characters, showing how easy and detached the experience of killing may be.
    • A USMC Force Recon grunt who gets blown up by a nuclear warhead. Then you see through his eyes as he desperately crawls through the nuclear wasteland.
    • A sniper in a flashback mission, which explores the origin of the Big Bad.
    • An SAS operative watching helplessly as his comrades are gunned down, then personally kills the Big Bad.
  • A minor example in Modern Warfare 2: when Price opens the doors on the nuclear sub all the Ultranationalists will get the HELL out of there. This is even funnier when one of the Russians is most of the way up the ramp, and then immediately turns back around.
• One-Man Army: Averted... in theory.
• Out-Gambitted: Zig-zagged between Shepherd and Makarov. Shepherd outgambits Makarov, then Makarov outgambits Shepherd, then it turns out that was part of Shepherd's plan, then Price throws a spanner in the works, then Shepherd uses that to outgambit Makarov further, then Price and Soap go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Shepherd that may have been part of Makarov's plan. Then Makarov gets killed later.
• Painting the Fourth Wall: In Modern Warfare 2, the between-mission briefing is at one point replaced with an "EMERGENCY BROADCAST" for several minutes. In fact, every cutscene qualifies as this trope, they're presented as an information system displaying relevant details about the mission in an unrealistically efficient manner while the characters all talk over it off-screen, as if they're standing next to the player watching it. The emergency broadcast cutscene just kicks it up a notch. These type of cutscenes were also used by Treyarch in their Quantum of Solace game.
  • In one mission in Modern Warfare 2, Soap mentions that he hates dogs, echoing the feeling of many players. Captain Price says that they were nothing compared to the ones in Pripyat.
• Parental Substitute: Implied between Soap and Price, who the former affectionately refers to as 'old man'.
• Personal Space Invader: The attack dogs and hyenas.
• Playing Both Sides: General Shepherd and Makarov in Modern Warfare 2.
• Playing Possum:
  • In the single-player campaign, when critically wounded and grounded, some enemies will keep shooting at you with their sidearms (this only applies if they only take a single bullet to the leg that drops them fully and manage to crawl away long enough to turn over and draw the sidearm, as opposed to simply staggering them; a subsequent hit would kill them). In multiplayer, the "Last Stand" and "Final Stand" perks allows the player to do so, and in Special Ops the player(s) can do this... albeit it's not exactly "possum" against the AI.
  • Played with near the end of "Endgame", when Soap starts staggering towards the Pave Low crash site: as you reach it, a lone Shadow Company trooper lays on his back next to the wreckage, and as you get closer you realize that he's pointing his G18 machine pistol at you... but after a few squeezes of the trigger just result in empty clicks, he tilts the weapon and takes an almost surprised or exhausted look at it before collapsing against dirt and rock behind him and going limp. Other than seeing his comrades' pitiful fate at the end of "Just Like Old Times", possibly the only truly sad moment for Shadow Company.
  • If wounded but not killed near a wall or other object, enemy soldiers will sometimes fall against it and then prime a grenade, at which point they'll wait for the player or another enemy to move close and then drop it. They'll typically hold the grenade for about thirty seconds or so before passing out and dropping it anyway, and can be taken ut by shooting them in the leg or shoulder, which is usually exposed.
• Plot Armor: Any NPC who isn't scripted to die wears Plot Armor.
• Powerful Pick: You use ice picks to climb at the beginning of an early mission. Soap later uses his to knock some enemies off a snowmobile.
• Precision F-Strike:
  • Shepherd at the end of Modern Warfare 2.
  • Also, Corporal Dunn during the Modern Warfare 2 level "Second Sun" (well, a Precision S Strike, really); considering that he and his squadmates (including Ramirez/you) were running for their lives as, thanks to an EMP, it was literally raining aircraft all around them.
  • In "The Sins of the Father", if Soap has 100% accuracy up to that point, Griggs will say "Oh Fuck" when Victor Zakhaev rams the guard tower. Otherwise, he says "Oh shit".
• The Present Day
• President Evil: Al-Asad.
• The President's Daughter: Appears in Modern Warfare 3. She's the daughter of the Russian president.
• Press X to Die: The Big Red Button in Modern Warfare 2's "Museum" level. It will make all the people in the exhibits in the room come alive and attack you. They do warn you though. Go up to the button and a little message will pop up on screen that tells you NOT to press the button.
• Press X to Not Die: After a dog knocks you down and rears its head back your throat, a message appears telling you to press the knife button when it lunges at you to bite, which will get your character to snap its neck if done correctly. Quite a few others are scattered throughout Modern Warfare 2.
• Pretty Little Headshots: Oh so averted. Especially so in the cases of Griggs and Gaz.
• Previous Player Character Cameo: Soap MacTavish of Modern Warfare is the Player Character's CO in Modern Warfare 2.
• Punched Across the Room: In Modern Warfare 3, Yuri opens a door to a basement and gets punched down a flight of stairs by Price.
• Qurac:
  • At least in Modern Warfare, they don't bother naming the country. The pre-mission briefings show where in the Middle East various missions take place, but they take care to spread them over the geographic locations of several different real-life countries. And its overthrown president Al-Fulani is named the Arabic equivalent of "John Doe".
  • The final mission in Modern Warfare 3 takes place at the Oasis Hotel at the "Arabian Peninsula". Yet it's a dead ringer for the Burj Al-Arab Hotel in Dubai, UAE. Granted, Infinity Ward was probably trying not to get sued by the real Hotel, for suggesting they would allow the most famous terrorist on Earth to just check in with 50 of his terrorist buddies.
  • Averted in Modern Warfare 2 though, where you're fighting in Afghanistan. But that's of little importance to the plot.

Romeo to Zulu

• Ranger: In Modern Warfare 2, SGT Foley, CPL Dunn, PVT Ramirez and PFC Allen are from the 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment (1/75).
• Rare Guns: Many of the old FPS standbys are present, but special mention goes to the "PM-9" (M-9) in the third game. An obscure, never exported, Japanese Uzi variant inexplicably appears in the hands of a Russian's henchmen in the Czech Republic and as a popular weapon in multiplayer.
• Rated "M" for Manly: Well, given the target demographic...
• Real Is Brown:
  • The first game has no brown filter, but is beautifully desaturated. The bloom effect associated with this trope is used very sparingly.
  • The second game is more colorful.
  • The third game is also colouful, except for Germany, where apparently real is washed out green.
• Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic: Several characters, especially Baseplate and War Pig, speak with a fair share of "uh"'s and other stumbling.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Russian President Vorchevsky, who doesn't really want war with the United States. However, he's not as in control of his military as he would wish, and early on in Modern Warfare 3, he gets kidnapped by Makarov to derail the peace process.
• Redemption Equals Death: Yuri.
• Red Herring: In the cutscene preceding the "Turbulence" level in Modern Warfare 3, Harkov's name is labelled 'inside man', implying that as the Russian President's bodyguard, he's actually working for Makarov. Nothing comes of this, however, as Makarov murders Harkov just like the other bodyguards at the end of that level.
• Reds with Rockets
• Renegade Russian: Zakhaev and his protege Makarov.
• Reporting Names
• Retcon: "Soap's Journal" indicates that "Mile High Club", The Stinger from the fourth game, was one of the first of Task Force 141's missions.
• Reverse Grip: The only way a knife may be held and used. Unless thrown.
• Revision: In the third game, it is revealed that Yuri played a background role during several key events in the Modern Warfare timeline. He is first seen during the nuke deal held in the "One Shot, One Kill" mission from the first game (where he and Makarov are the ones who drive the injured Zakhaev to safety), as well as being present when Makarov (standing in Al-Asad's safehouse) detonates the nuke in the "Shock and Awe" mission. He is then revealed to have been present during the "No Russian" mission in Modern Warfare 2: Makarov shoots him in the stomach before he, Private Allen and the other Ultranationalists massacre the civilians in the airport. Yuri makes it to the lobby and witnesses the aftermath of the massacre before collapsing and being treated by paramedics.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: In the final mission of Modern Warfare 3, Price and Yuri don Juggernaut suits and shoot their way through a small army of terrorists on their way to kill Makarov.
• Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: The mission "Shock and Awe" in Modern Warfare, in which a nuke goes off, killing the American player character and his squad.
  • In "All Ghillied Up", if you ignore MacMillian and shoot the lone dog in the ruins, you get attacked by a pack of dogs which, if they kill him, will result in a Nonstandard Game Over.
  • Get a 25 Kill Streak in Modern Warfare 2 Multiplayer and use the killstreak reward if you have it. This is what happens for everyone. But for whoever used the nuke, it's also a "I Win" button.
  • Modern Warfare 3 has a similar killstreak for making 25 kills in one life: it still instantly kills everybody on the map, but it doesn't instantly win the game for the guy who called it in this time around.
• Rouge Angles of Satin: For God's sake, the General's name in Modern Warfare 2 is Shepherd, not any of the following: Shepard, Sheperd, Shephard, Shepperd or Sheppard.
• RPG Elements:
  • You get to "Create a Class", where you get to choose a primary weapon, sidearm (or Machine Pistol, or Shotgun, or explosives Launcher), as well as Equipment, a special grenade, and three perks. And a deathstreak reward. It overlaps with Archive Panic quite a lot, especially in Modern Warfare 2.
  • The Modern Warfare series actually has a unique system for it, though. Besides standard level ups, there is also a system where for each kill you get with a specific weapon, you get to unlock one of its many attachments. So get ten kills with the M4A1 in Modern Warfare 2, and you get to attach a grenade launcher to it. However, if you decide to switch to a different assault rifle, you lose that attachment and must get ten kills for your new AR before you can attach a grenade launcher to it (fortunately, you don't lose the grenade launcher for the M4A1).
• Rule of Cool: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare had its moments, but Modern Warfare 2 goes into it far more with the ability to go Guns Akimbo with pistols, submachine guns, Sawn Off Shotguns; throwing knives; and a plot more concerned with HSQ rather then sensibility and seeming possible.
• Rule of Drama: Every helicopter in the series that comes to pick you up has about 30 seconds worth of fuel before having to leave you. No exceptions.
• Running Gag: An unbelievably subtle one. In the first mission of Call of Duty 4 (F.N.G.), there are posters for "Porter Justice" movies on the wall. These reappear later in the game and in Modern Warfare 2 (the Brazil missions, among others, I believe).
  • Characters voiced by Craig Fairbrass complaining about their uncooperative backup.
    • Gaz in "Heat":

Sea Knight Pilot: Bravo-Six, the LZ is too hot! We cannot land at the farm! I repeat, we CANNOT land at the farm! We're picking up SAM sites all over these mountains!
Gaz: That's just great! Where the hell are they gonna land now?
Sea Knight Pilot: Bravo-Six, we're getting a lot of enemy radar signatures, we'll try to land closer to the bottom of the hill to avoid a lock-on.
Gaz: Oh, he's gotta be takin' the piss! We just busted our arses to get to this LZ and now they want us to go all the way back down?!

• • • Again in "Game Over". Although it's then subverted.

Gaz: Baseplate this is Bravo Five! We are under heavy attack at the highway bridge at map grid 244352. Request helicopter gunship support! Over!
Baseplate: Workin' on it Bravo Five. Loyalists forces in the area may be able to assist but we cannot confirm at this time. Baseplate out.
Gaz: Useless wanker!
Captain Price: Gaz, gimme a sitrep on those helicopters!
Gaz: Captain Price! We are on our own sir!"
Sgt. Kamarov: Bravo Team, this is Sgt. Kamarov, I understand you and your men could use some help.
Gaz: It's bloody good to hear from you mate!
Sgt. Kamarov: Standby, we're almost there, ETA 3 minutes Kamarov out.

• • • Ghost in "Takedown":

Ghost: Command, ready for dustoff. Send the chopper. Coordinates to fol- Bollocks! The skies are clear! Send the chopper now! Command's got their head up their arse. We're on our own.

• • • Wallcroft in "Mind the Gap":

Wallcroft: Baseplate! Where's that backup?
Baseplate: Local police are arriving on scene. Bravo 2 will be on station in five minutes.
Wallcroft: Bollocks! Nothing takes five minutes!

• Sawn Off Shotgun: Which can be dual wielded. Tycho and Gabe agree: it's the mark of a cad.
• Schmuck Bait: The Big Red Button with the "Do NOT press X/Square/F" prompt in Modern Warfare 2's post-game museum. It makes the exhibits come to life and attack you.
• Scenery Gorn:
  • The nightime D.C. levels are breathtaking in how messed up the city looks.
  • The nuclear wasteland and Prypiat in the first game definitely count too.
  • If you didn't shed a few Manly Tears over it, then turn in your passport, tovarisch ("comrade").
  • In Modern Warfare 3, multiple European cities get torn apart by fighting. Paris tops it, with the collapse of the Eiffel Tower.
• Sealed Badass In A Gulag
• See You in Hell: Price and Makarov wish each other good luck this way after Shepherd double-crosses both. Price even asks to give his regards to Zakhaev, if Makarov gets there first.
• Sergeant Rock: Foley in Modern Warfare 2 is willing to put his squad (and himself) at great personal risk to get the job done. For instance, refusing to pull back when ordered, so that they could continue to cover evacuating civilians, and ordering that a crippled Blackhawk be positioned to take out as many surface-to-air missile launchers as possible before it could go down; he maintains his cool after the EMP starts causing aircraft to fall out of the sky, gets the squad under control, and continues to lead the squad through the rest of the Second Battle of Washington, D.C. Sandman in Modern Warfare 3.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: In the single-player campaign, you can survive a lot more bullets in Modern Warfare 2 compared to the first Modern Warfare, especially on the Regular difficulty setting, and even noticeable on Veteran difficulty. This is balanced out somewhat by the sequel having more open levels giving the enemy many more opportunities to flank and ambush you, as well as having larger groups of enemies than in the first game.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Modern Warfare 3, in contrast, is roughly on par with Modern Warfare 2 on most difficulties, but is absolutely insane on Veteran difficulty, as you are given much less health than in previous games, combined with enemies that are suddenly psychic as well as given superhuman reflexes and perfect aim.
• Sequel Escalation: One of the themes of Modern Warfare 2 is how crazy things have gotten due to the events of the first game. Yes, It Got Worse than a nuke going off. There's an underlying theme about how you can't just shoot everything and hope to win.
• Serial Escalation:
  • Modern Warfare 2: Washington D.C. is turned into a war zone, with the White House and Washington Monument in ruins. The fact that it's clearly not the Capital Wasteland is what makes it truly striking, with the White House mostly intact, except for the enemy combatants occupying it and shooting at the American troops storming up the front lawn. The rest of Washington D.C. is full-on Nightmare Fuel, with fires breaking out everywhere, concertina wire strung out, Apache gunships in the air, and what looks like a casevac chopper taking off from the streets.
  • There's also the matter of character deaths. In Modern Warfare 4, you get to watch Gaz and Griggs be shot and killed. Then in Modern Warfare 2, you get to watch in first person as you and your friend are shot and burned. Then in Modern Warfare 3, you spend a whole level watching Soap fade, before a Hope Spot and then his death. Not fun.
• Shell-Shock Silence: With the exception of small arms gunfire, any kind of explosion will make your character deaf for a few seconds if he was standing next to it. Tank guns, guided missiles, grenades... you name it.
• Shooting Gallery: The opening levels of both games.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog:
  • Potentially Modern Warfare 2: Shepherd's plan succeeded although you killed him, Soap and Price are fugitives, and the USA and Russia are about to start World War III. Darned if there isn't a third installment. Let's not forget, everything Jackson and the USMC did in the original Modern Warfare was rendered inconsequential when that nuke went off. Though to be fair, they *did* effectively demolish Al-Asad's war machine and regime to the point where he got desperate enough to do it, which considering the very heavy implications that he was a threat to the entire Middle East proves that what happened was preferable to the alternative. Of course, that should tell you something about the games in general....
  • In Modern Warfare 3, it's suggested the nuke would have gone off regardless of whether Al-Asad had been caught, Makarov's dialogue during Yuri's flashback gives the impression he had intended for the nuke to go off and kill as many Americans as possible in a trap. Its consistent with his actions in that game and his far reaching plans. Adds a delicious irony: Shepherd's alliance with the man who is responsible for killing his 30,000 soldiers is motivated by the lack of response from the world at their deaths.
  • Also the second game renders many of the first game's accomplishments moot, as more than one character mentions.
• Shoot the Television: The level "Charlie Don't Surf" in the first installment of the franchise has an achievement called "Your Show Sucks" for shooting or otherwise destroying all the televisions showing Al-Asad's speech.
• Short-Lived Aerial Escape: Hunter 2-1's Blackhawk (and the accompanying SEAL team's Little Bird) in "Of Their Own Accord", General Shepherd's Pave Low in "Endgame", Makarov's Little Bird in "Dust to Dust".
• Short-Range Long-Range Weapon: The main reason helicopters were considered overpowered in the original was because of the notoriously poor accuracy of the RPG-7 (the only real anti-vehicle weapon available), making it impossible to reliably hit anything beyond 5-10 meters. Of course, the splash damage meant that using it at that range was a bad idea. In real life, the RPG-7's range is... bad... compared to other launchers. In any case, inverted with the other weapons: you can shoot across the map with a pistol, and hit far and away in large maps with assault rifles.
• Shot to the Heart: At one point in Modern Warfare 3, you need to press X to do this to Soap.
• Shout-Out: Many, many references.
  • Airplane!: before "Mile High Club":

Gaz: "We're going deep and we're going hard."
SAS Soldier: "Surely you can't be serious."
Gaz: "I am serious. And don't call me Shirley."

• • Alien a ton of them in the freighter level: "I like to keep this for close encounters." "Check those corners!" "We - are - leaving!"
    • Price gets back at it in Modern Warfare 2. "Whatever you're going to do, Soap, do it fast!"
    • A Ranger over the radio in "From Their Own Accord" also goes "We - are - leaving!".
    • While he never quotes him verbatim, pretty much everything Dunn says after the EMP could be taken right out of Hudson's mouth.
  • Apocalypse Now: a level named "Charlie Don't Surf" during a helicopter assault.
  • Behind Enemy Lines': Zakhaev's son wears a track suit almost identical to the one worn by Sasha.
  • Black Hawk Down: Modern Warfare has you landing to rescue a downed helo pilot in an obvious Black Hawk Down reference. In Modern Warfare 2, you are briefly trapped in a downed helo, and for that time re-enact the Shughart/Gordon scene from the same movie, complete with a "last magazine". Fortunately, it doesn't end the same way.
    • Plus, every single helicopter, no matter how it's shot, will go down the exact same way that Super 61 did.
    • Modern Warfare 3 has you and your highly trained special-forces friends visiting Somalia to get some information out of the local warlord. Another of your friends pilots a helicopter as support. It gets shot down, and then you have to rescue the pilot.
    • Sandman, the Delta sergeant himself, is a walking reference to Black Hawk Down, being voiced by William Fichtner.
    • When told that police help is five minutes away, Wallcroft responds that "nothing takes five minutes!".
  • Collateral: at the beginning of Takedown, the main villain waxes two NPCs in a re-enactment of the "Hey homie, is that my briefcase?" scene.
  • Command & Conquer: the TF141 uniform from "Loose Ends" is nearly identical to that of GDI soldiers from Command & Conquer: Renegade.
  • Counter-Strike: in Modern Warfare 3, the S.A.S. and G.I.G.N. special forces appear exactly like their depictions from Counter-Strike (noteable because this depiction is not necessarily reflective of their real-life appearance, especially in the case of the S.A.S., due to variances in equipment loadout and battle dress uniforms).
  • Dr. Strangelove: A level named "No Fighting In The War Room" in Call of Duty 4.
  • Fallout 3: Modern Warfare 2's damaged Washington Monument recalls the one in this game; both have exposed metal reinforcing rods, while the real monument is solid stone.
  • Generation Kill: the level in Modern Warfare 2 where you control the gun of a humvee is very similar to the end of the second episode, when the Marines of First Recon were shown being ambushed after leaving Nasiriyah. The sudden prevalence of the Military Alphabet compared to the first game, where no one ever even said "Oscar Mike", could be attributed to Generation Kill as well.
    • And the fact that every enemy infantryman is a "foot mobile".
    • Not to mention the Rangers' Humvees bearing a striking resemblance to the 1st Recon's "Ghetto Hoopties" right down to the "B[/]" identifier marking and the custom paint job the marines added themselves before the invasion.
  • Lethal Weapon: Shepherd's group is called "Shadow Company". The antagonists in the first Lethal Weapon were also called "Shadow Company".
  • Mass Effect: Shepherd is voiced by Lance Henriksen and is your overarching commander. Foley is voiced by Keith David and is your direct superior in the American campaign. With names, voices and roles like that, it's too big to be a coincidence.
  • Night at the Museum: "An Evening with Infinity Ward" a bonus level that takes place in a museum, has most of the exhibits be real, live characters, although they only act out scenes from the missions, reminiscent of Night at the Museum. Pressing a button at the main desk will cause all of those said exhibits to stop being docile and attack you.
  • Portal: the multiplayer title "Companion Crate".
  • Predator: the mission "Of Their Own Accord", where you get to tha choppa.
  • Pulp Fiction: one of the achievements in Modern Warfare 2 is called "Royale With Cheese".
    • In the first Modern Warfare, during "Crew Expendable", if the player strays too far from Price in the first cargo bay, a mook will leap out with a goddamn Hand Cannon and ambush you while screaming, pretty much exactly like the last of Brett's gang did in the movie. Making it better is that surviving the ambush is very hard; in fact, almost a miracle.
  • Red Dawn: one of the missions in Modern Warfare 2 is titled "Wolverines!". The acheivement for beating the level on Veteran is Red Dawn, as well.
  • Rainbow Six: the heartbeat sensor is a fictional device that first appeared in the Rainbow Six novel and video games. Also, Task Force 141 is very similar to Team RAINBOW in that they are both multinational teams of badass special forces soldiers.
  • Rambo: tn the Modern Warfare 3 mission "Back on the Grid", there is a part where you commandeer a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a technical and use it to mow down waves of enemies. This mirrors a scene in the fourth Rambo movie.
  • The Rock: the Gulag mission is essentially a Whole-Plot Reference which also involves breaking an SAS captain out of jail to stop a rogue American general motivated by others' callous disregard for his soldiers' lives. The shower room in the gulag is a recreation of a scene from the movie, and using green flares to avert an air strike during Whiskey Hotel references this movie as well.
    • It should be noted that Hans Zimmer did the music for both Modern Warfare 2 and The Rock, which adds a bit of depth to this particular shout-out.
  • Top Gun: a multiplayer title "Ghostrider", depicting a fighter plane.
  • Splinter Cell: in "The Only Easy Day... Was Yesterday", you have to infiltrate an oil rig, and can later acquire a F2000 assault rifle. The title itself is a motto of the Navy SEALs.
  • STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl: obviously, the main influence for the Chernobyl level in the first Modern Warfare; the Modern Warfare Chernobyl level visits many of the same locations, and as in STALKER, the vehicle graveyards are shown to contain Mi-24 Hinds (the real ones don't).
  • Star Wars: This decryption code better be worth the price we paid...
    • In the same mission, a suddenly missing patrol squad is blamed on a bad transmitter.
  • Super Mario Brothers: the emblem reward for getting ten kills in a row while having no killstreaks equipped (hence worth trying only for this) is an 8-bit image of Capt. Price that looks exactly like Mario's Super Mario Bros. 1 sprite.
  • Terminator 2: there is a certain scene in Modern Warfare with Sgt. Paul Jackson entering a playground that looks eerily similar to the one seen in the dream sequence of Terminator 2.
    • The Winchester 1887 shotgun is a reference to Terminator 2, being Arnie's choice of gun for half the film: the gun in the game is a replica of the T2 prop, including having an enlarged lever for easier spin-cocking. Going Guns Akimbo with them results in the character working the lever action by flipping the whole gun around on his finger like Arnie did.
  • Transformers: an unlockable callsign title in Modern Warfare 2 is "Transformer" and depicts a Pave Low: it is unlocked for getting the game-winning kill by calling in a Pave Low as a killstreak reward (the challenge is also called "Transformer"). In the 2007 film, Blackout transformed into a Pave Low.
  • Tron: calling in 5 Tactical Nukes (a killstreak reward earned by amassing a 25 kill streak) unlocks a title with a Tron Lines background and the text "End of Line", the MCP's Verbal Tic from the movie.
  • True Lies: getting the game-winning kill with a Harrier unlocks the multiplayer title "True Liar".
    • Also, the Prestige challenge for Harrier kills is called "You're Fired", the Pre-Mortem One-Liner from the movie.
  • X-Men/MyWayEntertainment: your trophy for killing your first Giant Mook in Special Ops: "I'm the Juggernaut..."
  • Children of Men: the Prague level in the third game has a sequence which is heavily similar to this movie's apartment scene during the uprising.
  • In Modern Warfare 2, the restaurants are thinly-veiled Bland-Name Product versions of Taco Bell, TGI Friday's, Starbucks and Burger King.
  • In the training mission for Modern Warfare 1, you melee a watermelon, probably a reference to R. Lee Ermey's hate of watermelons.
  • In-series example: doesn't the attack on the Whiskey Hotel seem a little familiar to storming the Reichstag in previous installments?
• Shown Their Work:
  • The AC-130 sequence is so spot on that it can fool actual AC-130 crew.
  • The radio transcripts in Modern Warfare 2 are spot on.
• Silliness Switch: Modern Warfare also has some silliness cheats like Ragtime Warfare, which is basically Soundtrack Dissonance on demand, or enemies exploding into tires.
• The Slow Walk:
  • The first half of "No Russian" locks you and your "allies" into doing this. Also briefly forced during the "Suspension" Special Ops mission, after a fighter jet-launched munition hits the side of the bridge, though eventually you're able to continue sprinting towards the second part of the fight.
  • Juggernauts, which use the walking animation of your "allies" from "No Russian". They can charge at you, but only if you're far away, and even then, you're still faster than them. This is used to deliberate effect in the third game, when Price and Yuri take their slow Unflinching Walk towards Makarov's safehouse while wearing the suits.
• Small Reference Pools: The only explanation possible for why the AK-47 is being used by modern Russian Federation forces.
  • Before Modern Warfare 3, the Dragunov SVD is also in its more well-known, wood-furniture version rather than the upgraded, synthetic SVD-M actually used by modern Russian forces.
• Sniper Pistol:
  • Surprisingly, your pistols can reach a LONG way.
  • The 1887 shotgun in Modern Warfare 2 has been criticized for its unreasonably long range and accuracy (in reality, shotguns are very accurate to about a hundred meters...). Thankfully, it is one of the last guns unlocked and has a shitty fire rate and reload time (compared to other shotguns), preventing most players from using it. The main reason for people hating on the 1887 is the fact that every other shotgun is atrocious at range. To the point that you can fire at someone across A ROOM and for some reason cause no damage whatsoever since all of your buckshot seems to have magically disappeared for no reason. The 1887 mysteriously lacks this problem (not to mention that the shotgun with the shortest barrel is somehow the most accurate when compared to even the M1014 which is one of the most accurate shotguns in use today...).
  • Pretty much all guns that aren't shotguns can be effective at all ranges with enough skill to use them at exceedingly long ranges: the bullets will hit whatever you aim at, with no bullet drop needing compensation for.
• Sniper Scope Sway:
  • You can hold your breath to steady your aim for a few seconds, after which the sway will be even worse until you get your breath back. You can also use perks to extend how long you can hold your breath. The same is true of the thermal scope, while the ACOG scope has a lower zoom level and less sway, but you can't hold your breath.
  • Changed around in Modern Warfare 3: all weapon sights have sway of some degree, which becomes less severe when the player is crouched or laying down. Using the "Breath" weapon proficiency lets you hold your breath like with a sniper rifle to eliminate sway for a few seconds, while the "Stability" proficiency reduces the overall amount of sway.
• Sniping Mission:
  • "All Ghillied Up" and "One Shot, One Kill" in Modern Warfare.
  • A few Spec Ops missions in Modern Warfare 2 also are designed for sniping.
• Sniping the Cockpit: At one point, your character does this to a Havoc. Then Captain MacMillan does it to another one. Which almost crashes on top of him.
• Society Marches On:
  • A dialogue between two background soldiers in Modern Warfare 2 was clearly written before December 22, 2010. Not surprising, since Modern Warfare 2 came out in November 2009.

Soldier 1: Hey man, you still gay? ...Just kidding.
Soldier 2: Don't ask, don't tell, man.

• • Prior to "No Russian", a screen indicates that Makarov is now as much of a threat as Al-Qaeda. It was more devastating then, since Al-Qaeda has been on the decline of late.
• Somebody Else's Problem: Shepherd's motivation in the sequel. After the nuclear explosion in the original murders forty-thousand American soldiers under his command, he is outraged at the apathetic response of the American people, which could only be exasperated by Russia's continued militarisation. In an attempt to motivate his own country to war and bring about a new generation of willing martyrs with which to battle foreign threats, he manipulates Makarov into sparking an invasion of the US mainland.
• Something Completely Different:
  • Yuri, in Modern Warfare 3. For the first time in the trilogy, you play as a Russian. A good guy too.
  • Harkov, Russian equivalent of Secret Service, also qualifies.
• Southern-Fried Private: Cpl. Dunn in Modern Warfare 2.
• Space Does Not Work That Way: The destruction of the space station by an apparent blast wave in Modern Warfare 2. Nukes don't have the same effects in space that they do on Earth.
• Spanner in the Works: In Modern Warfare 2, the only thing that Shepherd's Batman Gambit doesn't take into consideration is Price breaking out, going "off the grid," and being willing to do anything to succeed. Unfortunately, as fate would have it the only difference it makes is accelerating Shepherd's plans instead of stopping him.
• The Squad: Too many to count.
• Stay Frosty: Soap says this quite often in Modern Warfare 2, Sgt Foley several times, and once by a Shadow Company trooper, to the point of absurdity.
• Stealth-Based Mission:
  • The first parts of "Cliffhanger", of "Contingency" and the (intended) entirety of "Evasion" (based off of "Contingency") in Modern Warfare 2.
  • "All Ghillied Up" in Modern Warfare. Later recreated in the Modern Warfare 2 Special Ops map "Hidden".
• Stealth Pun: The snipers that are covering you in "Loose Ends" are named Archer and Toad.
• Sticky Bomb: Semtex grenades and C4.
• The Stinger: The bonus level "Mile High Club" in Modern Warfare, and the museum in Modern Warfare 2.
• Storming the Castle:
  • Modern Warfare 3 has a literal one in "Stronghold", the achievement for beating it is even called Storm the Castle, and ends with one in "Dust to Dust".
  • "The Gulag" in Modern Warfare 2 also qualifies, bonus points for having once been a castle.
• Story-Driven Invulnerability: Zakhaev in the flashback mission, and the Hind gunship in the final mission, in Modern Warfare (the bridge goes down whether or not you connect with a shot against the Hind). However, it IS possible to, with timing and a foreknowledge (or just spamming rounds everywhere), to take out the RPG guy that shoots down Deadly, the Cobra that's been covering you the entire mission. Rescuing the pilot is what got your helicopter caught in the nuke in the first place. However, Deadly will still crash, and instead of landing to help, your chopper will continue to fly off the map, ending with the game crashing.
• String Theory: Price has one in Modern Warfare 3.
• Suicide Mission: Occurs at the end of Modern Warfare 2.
• Super Dickery: Price appears to launch the nuke to demolish D.C., but he just used an EMP to destroy the Ultranationalists' air-support and transport. Unfortunately, this also destroys the International Space Station, kills a hapless astronaut in the wrong place at the wrong time, and might have brought down any American aircraft still in range when the EMP hit. To say nothing of anyone who had been on life support or a pacemaker, considering how the Modern Warfare EMP seems to work... heck, it even takes out the electronics of the American forces on the ground too, leaving you without any working optics or night-vision, and only spoken words within earshot for verbal communications, for the rest of "Second Sun".
• Super Window Jump: Soap seems to like doing this. In Modern Warfare 2, he tackles Rojas through a window, and in Modern Warfare 3, he dives through one to escape a street full of enemies.
• Supporting Protagonist: Price is the real star of the Modern Warfare series seeing as how he's the only character to live through each game. However, he's only playable twice: once in the first game as a flashback, and again in the last mission of Modern Warfare 3.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Ghost (in the second game) and Wallcroft (in the third game), who are voiced by the same person as the deceased Gaz from the first game. He also fulfills the same role as said character.
• Take That: In Modern Warfare 2, the local militia are less than helpful, and it's up to the U.S. soldiers to do all the work. The first combat mission begins with a team of Army Rangers engaged in a pitched firefight with insurgents across a river, while the sole local militia ally present, instead of helping out, is calmly sitting behind cover eating a candy bar. Further down one can also spot a trio of Rangers looking at a cell phone. The entire sequence may be a reference to a similar scene in Generation Kill, where the Marines were engaging an enemy force across a river, with only some of the Marines firing while the remainder stayed in cover, resting and eating while waiting to be rotated into combat or receive orders.
• Take the Wheel: In the second game, when Price and Soap escape the Shadow Company in a Jeep, and their driver gets hit by a stray bullet. This can be a very Unexpected Gameplay Change, as you are thrust from Rail Shooter into Driving Game with no warning whatsoever.
• Take Your Time: Many missions feature countdowns, but one notable exception is when you're chasing Rojas in "Takedown". Despite Ghost and Soap yelling frantically at you during the chase, you have as much time as you need to fight your way through the alleys.
• Taking You with Me:
  • A bug which was once taking over Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer involves players tricking the game into cooking a Javelin Anti-Tank missile. The second you die, it fires into the ground at your feet, killing everyone nearby. Fortunately for everyone ticked off about how a coding error turned half the players in any given match into running suicide bombs, the Javelin Glitch has been excised.
  • "Of Their Own Accord" from Modern Warfare 2 gave us this awesome line:

Sgt. Foley: [after the helicopter is hit by a missile] Take us up! If we're going down, we're taking those SAM sites with us!

• • And this is essentially the point of the Modern Warfare 1/Modern Warfare 2 perk/deathstreak "Martyrdom" (drop a grenade after you die) and the Modern Warfare 3 perk "Dead Man's Hand" (detonate C4 after you die).
• A Taste of Power:
  • Sort of. The default classes in multiplayer have stuff that you won't be able to use off-the-bat after you gain class customization.
  • Best example is from Modern Warfare 3: one of the default classes gives you a G36 (unlocked at level 42) as well as using the Overkill perk (level 47) to also start with a PP-90 (level 28).
• Technology Porn: Modern Warfare 3 showcases some of the U.S. Military's latest toys, including an F-22 dropping JDAM GPS-guided bombs (they only got this ability later in their production life) in a cutscene and V-22 Ospreys, used in a mission to rescue the Vice President.
• Tempting Fate:
  • In the Siberian Mine mission of Modern Warfare 3, Grinch asks if the elevator they're in can go any faster. Not thirty seconds later it takes an RPG hit and plunges down the shaft.
  • In Modern Warfare 2, before "The Pit", Corporal Dunn comments that he wants some real action rather than just blocking positions for SEALS and Delta. A few days later, America is invaded by the Russians.
• Testosterone Poisoning: Viewer discretion is advised when looking directly at Captain MacTavish. Pregnant women, non-pregnant women, all the geeks in high school, your average blue-collar worker, and Americans in general should all exercise caution when looking directly at Captain MacTavish. If Captain MacTavish looks directly back at you, contact your local poison control immediately.
• That's What I Would Do: How Price guesses Makarov's attack plan.
• Theme Tune Rap: Sgt. Griggs raps over the end credits of Modern Warfare. Possibly an Expository Theme Tune as well.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The Tactical Nuke kill-streak reward in Modern Warfare 2, which instantly kills every player on the map and ends the game in victory for your team.
• This Is Sparta: Right before the last section of the last level, Captain Price ends his speech with a simple "We. Will. Kill him".
• Throw-Away Guns: Not only can the player drop his weapons to pick up others, he's often instructed by his superiors to do so.
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works:
  • This is how Soap kills Shepherd, using the knife lodged in his chest.
  • In "Down the Rabbit Hole", Sandman kills a charging Russian with his knife, and then throws it into another charging Russian. Justified both times, as both of these characters are more than badass enough to pull it off.
• Title Confusion: "No Russian" is often presumed to mean "don't kill any Russians" because Makarov and the Ultranationalists are themselves Russian, and the first line is Makarov doing a Title Drop, using the phrase as an order to the player and his other lackies before the shooting starts. The airport, however, is in Russia, and as such, the people waiting in line to pass through the metal detectors before boarding outbound flights are most certainly Russian, barring a few tourists or businessmen returning home. "No Russian" means "don't speak any Russian, use English", to disguise the fact that the attack is conducted by Russians because Makarov intends to frame the United States for it. The ambiguity of this line is probably responsible for the infamous (in Japanese) mistranslation of this line in the Japanese version of the game as "Kill them, the Russians". It's also a REALLY dark piece of metahumour: Makarov's crew mow down the civilians at a casual pace, without any sense of urgency until the armed forces arrive. There's "No Russian" about with them...
• Title Drop:
  • From General Shepherd in Modern Warfare 2: "Learning to use the tools of modern warfare is the difference between the prospering of your people and utter destruction."
  • There's also a smaller one in that game: the main menu refers to the campaign mode as "For the Record", and Price's first line during the loading screen for the last mission is "This is for the record."
  • Gaz refers to "the sins of our fathers" in the intro for the level "The Sins of the Father".
  • "Good, that's one less loose end".
  • In "Just Like Old Times", in the beginning, if you kill both of your guards and the dog, Price will say "Just like old times".
• Title In: Used to introduce every mission, except for one ("Of Their Own Accord"). In that mission, it is delayed until The Reveal when you leave the bunker and see Washington D.C. in flames.
• Token Minority:
  • Sgt. Griggs.
  • Not just him, Sgt. Jackson is also black, although it's hard to tell with the gloves. Also, Lt. Vasquez and Pvt. Ramirez are Hispanic, and the randomly generated Marines and Rangers have no fixed ethnicity, although they mostly lean towards white (which is Truth in Television) anyway.
  • Partially subverted in Modern Warfare 2 with Sgt Foley. You'll also find guys like Worm, Meat (sometimes?) and the driver from TF141 and a few randomly generated Rangers and Task Force members are black (unfortunately, in "Takedown", the driver is the first to go... albeit at the hands of another black dude, and Meat is always the second). Also Faust and Warrabe are arguable Token minority Villains.
• Took a Level in Badass: Definitely Soap, or should we say, Captain MacTavish in Modern Warfare 2, who as your team leader is now way more hardcore than he ever was in Call of Duty 4. Like he had to take any. In the first game, just four days after entering the SAS, he took down five tanks and eight helis all by himself.
• Torture Always Works: "Did he talk?" "They always talk."
• Tranquil Fury: In the briefing for the penultimate mission of Modern Warfare 2, Soap angsts about how it's just him and Price up against Shepherd's entire Shadow Company. Price is simply checking inventory and explaining, in a voice so calm that it sends shivers down any player's spine, that there's a certain satisfaction to knowing when you will die, and that Shepherd's number is up.
• Trick Bomb: The flashbang grenade is Shell-Shock Silence and Blinded by the Light put together in one neat Sensory Overloading package. Just make sure you're not caught in the blast you've made.
• Tricolours With Rusting Rockets
• The Unfettered: Price comes back from the gulag a little crazy. He flat-out confronts Shepherd on if he's willing to do whatever it takes to win. Then he launches a nuke at the country he was sprung to save, wreaking God knows how much hell to eventually turn the tide of the war. He goes straight from that into becoming the world's most wanted man and embarking on a one-way trip to kill the Big Bad. Shepherd might have had a blank check, but Price forgot his First Bank of Badass balance years ago and is ignoring all the calls from collections.

-"The healthy human mind doesn't wake up in the morning thinking this is its last day on Earth. But I think that's a luxury. Not a curse."

• Unexpected Gameplay Change: "All Ghillied Up" and "Death From Above" in Call of Duty 4. Some of the levels in Modern Warfare 2 also qualify.
• Universal Driver's License: Averted, in that you can either fire weapons from a vehicle but not drive it (both games) or the vehicles you can control are relatively simple to do so in real life (Modern Warfare 2, using a snowmobile and a small boat; in both cases, you can only fire a small machine pistol).
• Unwitting Pawn: Everyone but Price in Modern Warfare 2 is factored in Shepherd's Batman Gambit.
• Up to Eleven:
  • Seems to be the line of thought behind development of Modern Warfare 2: "how can we take everything from the first Modern Warfare and make it AWESOME?" Whether the results are indeed awesome is in the eye of the beholder.
  • Also lampshaded in the achievements: getting one star in eleven different Special Ops missions unlocks one called "It Goes Up To Eleven".
• Urban Warfare: Most of the game, for better or for worse.
• Verbal Tic: Let's get this page edited, hooah?
  • HOOAH!
    • HEY! TROPERS ARE OSCAR MIKE!
    • According to the other wiki, hooah is Army talk for "anything other than no". Which both explains why it's only the Army Rangers who say it, and why they say it constantly. Hooah!
    • Little known info: "Hooah" is actually derived from "HUA", which means "Heard, Understood, Acknowledged".
      • Actually HUAA, "Heard, Understood, And Accepted".
    • "Oscar-Mike" means "on the move", which makes sense to be said constantly considering how often you are on the move.
  • OORAH! in the first game.
    • But this is the Marines version of Hooah, so it's to be expected as you play "Force Recon" Marines for part of the game.
  • Well known fact: no one actually knows where Hooah, Hoorah or Oorah came from. Each branch has its theories, all of which contradict each other, and none have any proof.
    • Similar words are used in armed forces all over the word. Essentially, its a manly affirmative grunt, Hooah?
• Victory Pose: The very first thing Price does after having killed Makarov, in his own Badass fashion. Without saying a word, he sits up, pulls out a cigar, and lights it.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Modern Warfare 2's level "No Russian". If you choose to play the level, what you do with the civilians is entirely up to you... the game never gives you a single prompt to open fire.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Killing civilians (in any mission other than "No Russian") results in a instant Nonstandard Game Over. Modern Warfare 2 takes a somewhat realistic approach to this: if you shoot a civilian that's been in your line-of-sight for more than a couple seconds, the game assumes you did it deliberately, and thus are a cold-blooded sociopath, and immediately fails you. However, if some dumb-ass civilian runs out in front of you from out of nowhere in the middle of a firefight, and you gun him down reflexively before having time to confirm whether or not he's armed, the game will rule the shooting as "excusable" and let you carry on the mission.
• Violent Glaswegian: Arguably subverted with Captain MacMillan: he may be a man with a heavy Scottish accent in a military force, but his appearance in the game is of that of a sniper who tells you to stay cool and maintain stealth. Also subverted in Modern Warfare 2 with Soap MacTavish ("let's get the 'ell outta hayah!"), who in addition to commanding you during the campaign is your supervisor on the Stealth-Based Mission "Acceptable Losses" on Spec Ops, and who will berate you should you fail to maintain the element of surprise in the mission. Except with knives. Almost any time Soap uses a knife, it gets creepy.
• Visual Pun: Kill a player that killed you in multiplayer gives you bonus XP, the words "Payback!" appearing on the screen, and dollar bills will fly out of the target of your payback.
• Walk It Off: Both games have a now-standard regenerating health model.
• War for Fun and Profit: Makarov and his men, even going so far to incite a war between Russia and the US.
• The War Room: The penultimate level in Modern Warfare.
• Weaponized Animal: In Survival Mode in Modern Warfare 3, on harder maps, attack dogs may have C4 strapped to them.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Shepherd's end goal is to snap average American citizens out of what he sees as willful ignorance towards how much sacrifice is necessary to maintain everything they take for granted, giving him a near-endless supply of volunteers and the funds to load them out for bear with. To say he does some extreme things to achieve this, crossing the Moral Event Horizon multiple times in hindsight, is an understatement.
• We Have Reserves:

"Since when does Shepherd care about danger close?" - Captain Price

• Wham! Episode:
  • All games have at least one. Call of Duty 4 has "Shock and Awe" and the nuke and Jackson's death, the first indication that the game really means business. Modern Warfare 2 ups the ante with a seemingly endless string of these, but the biggest is probably Shepherd's betrayal at the conclusion of "Loose Ends".
  • Modern Warfare 3 has "Blood Brothers". Makarov's still one step ahead of you, and Soap dies after it looked like he was going to make it. Also, there's the little girl and her family dying in a terrorist attack.
• Wham! Line:
  • Of Their Own Accord: Washington, D.C.
  • Two from "Blood Brothers": "Captain Price, Hell awaits you" and "Yuri, my friend. You never should have come here."
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • What exactly was in that briefcase in the panic room in Modern Warfare 2, and who was the man there?
  • Frost disappears after "Scorched Earth". There's no rhyme or reason as to why this is: he just completely disappears after the mission and is never heard from or seen again. The Wiki says, however, that he is still alive. Aside from this, he just disappears and gets no closure in the story.
  • Ramirez, Dunn, Foley and Marshall are a borderline case. They were all still alive in Modern Warfare 2, but are not mentioned in Modern Warfare 3. Archer and Toad, the sniper team providing cover fire in "Loose Ends", it's never revealed what happened to them. Shadow Company can be heard saying "Watch for snipers on thermal" and "All targets destroyed", but they may have meant Makarov's men.
• What the Hell, Player?:
  • Shooting your own teammates will give you a Nonstandard Game Over, giving you the message I"Friendly fire will not be tolerated!".
  • In Modern Warfare 1, if you instigate a fire fight during the first sniper mission and survive, MacMillan will chew you out with comments like, "The word stealth doesn't mean much to you does it?" In some cases his beratement comes off as praise, such as "You lead a charmed life, Price."
  • Going out of your way to shoot down a helicopter during a covert sniping mission will cause MacMillan to berate you for "showing off".
  • Crouching down in the back of the jeep for too long in the first game's final level causes Gaz to shout at you to get off your ass and shoot.
• World of Cardboard Speech: Price gets two of these in the final two levels of Modern Warfare 2.
• World War III: The trailer for Modern Warfare 3 explicitly states this is where the series is headed, with scenes depicting the destruction of New York, fighting in the London Underground, guerrilla warfare in France, and urban warfare in Germany.
• Wretched Hive: The favelas of Rio de Janeiro, where hundreds of armed men are mobilized to hunt you down within minutes, rather reminiscent of Black Hawk Down. This is actually Truth in Television to some extent: the Brazilian police rarely (if ever) enter the neighborhoods with anything less than fully armored SWAT teams because the gangs are so well equipped. And the SWAT teams that do get there have a skull/dagger/pistol emblem that pretty much symbolizes how much of a Badass Army you need to be to pull it off. One of the favelas was recently occupied... with the handy assistance of the Navy.
• Written by the Winners: The main topic of Price's final monologues in Modern Warfare 2. And ends with An Aesop about why committing so much force against a foe backed into a corner with access to nuclear weapons is a bad thing.
• Yanks With Tanks: Many of the missions involving the U.S.M.C. or U.S. Army feature this heavily. Particularly, the mission "War Pig" from the first game is all about this.
• You All Look Familiar:
  • Despite being an militia presumably without a uniform, the Brazilian enemies in the sequel have very few variations in clothing and faces. Other enemies in the game are similar, but there are some which are just hard to tell, due to wearing face, mouth or eye covering clothing.
  • Same goes for the African militias in Modern Warfare 3, no matter what country they're from (for the record, Sierra Leone and Somalia are at opposite ends of the continent... the former at the Atlantic Ocean coast, the latter bordered by the Indian Ocean).
• You Can Barely Stand: In all three games:
  • The first game ends with a seemingly mortally wounded Captain Price tossing his sidearm to a likewise nearly dead Soap to deliver the final shots against Big Bad Zakhaev and his two bodyguards.
  • The final battle in Modern Warfare 2 has a seriously injured Price and Soap taking on General Shepherd in a brutal hand-to-hand beatdown.
  • The last level in Modern Warfare 3 has a severely injured Yuri telling Price to go on, and then (after Price crashes the escape helicopter) Makarov having the injured Price at his mercy, before the wounded Yuri returns to distract Makarov (and give Price the opening he needs to kill him).
• You Can't Thwart Stage One:
  • One of the storytelling issues with "No Russian".
  • Thank god for video editing programs.
  • And they couldn't thwart the first/main stage of Shepherd's plot, although they killed him.
  • Or Makarov's chemical attacks in Europe.
• You Have Got to Be Kidding Me!: Griggs has a more colorful version when the door in the nuclear facility opens very slowly.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Modern Warfare 2 is a rare example of this being done not to minions, but to Unwitting Pawns. In the third game, Yuri becomes this when Makarov shoots him in the "Blood Brothers" flashback. Surprisingly though, Yuri survives his injuries.
• You Have Researched Breathing:
  • The "Tactical Knife" addon is merely a different pistol stance, with your left hand primed for quick stabs. Your character can only do this when holding a gun with this "addon", once they pick up another handgun they will also ditch the associated knife, even though there is no reason to do this. Also, the benefits of some multiplayer Perks like Scavenger or Commando.
  • The "Breath" proficiency in Modern Warfare 3 is a literal version of this: it lets you hold your breath while aiming down the sights.
• You Should Have Died Instead: Price clearly feels this way about Yuri after Soap dies in "Blood Brothers", even if he doesn't outright say it.
• Zerg Rush:
  • The main strategy of the Russians in the invasion of the USA.
  • The ending of the Brazil missions in Modern Warfare 2 has you rushed by a very angry crowd of gang members.
  • It also happens if you shoot the wild dog in "All Ghillied Up". Should you survive, MacMillian is very understandably annoyed with you.
  • What the Ultranationalist Inner Circle faction does in in Modern Warfare 3.

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