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Popularizing the modern military shooter genre since 2007.

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

Ramirez! We need to provide suppressing fire for those tropers while they describe Modern Warfare here!

Modern Warfare is a sub-series in the originally World War II-themed FPS series Call of Duty, developed by Infinity Ward (with help from Sledgehammer Games and Raven Software in 3) and published by Activision, transitioning the setting to a contemporary Next Sunday A.D.. The first three Modern Warfare games are considered the fourth, sixth, and eighth installments of the main series, respectively.note 

The first three games are set in a more turbulent version of the 2010s, wherein Russia suffers a second civil war between Federation loyalists and an extreme "Ultranationalist" party founded by rogue military general Imran Zakhaev. The first game has the United States invading a Middle Eastern country that was taken over by an Ultranationalist-affiliated warlord, meanwhile the British SAS operates to uncover a nuclear weapons plot that the Ultranationalists are orchestrating. The second game, set five years later, sees the Ultranationalists fully take over Russia and declare war on the U.S. when a covert op unwittingly results in Russian civilians dead and an American CIA agent's finger at the trigger. The third game follows up with the resulting World War III between NATO and Russia, and the desperate hunt to bring down rogue ultranationalist crime lord Vladimir Makarov—the man who caused all of this. The trilogy sees players taking control of several operators from various countries' special forces units as they try to thwart the ultranationalists and put an end to the hostilities.

A remastered version of the first entry in the series was released in November 2016 alongside orders of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, developed by Raven Software. The second entry also received a singleplayer-only remaster on 31st March 2020, with a select few multiplayer maps being instead inserted into the CoD4 remaster.

Not to be confused with the Community episode of the same name. See also Find Makarov, a Web Original Fan Film series made with Activision's endorsement based on the games that, if not actually canon, at least has a few nods towards it.


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    Alpha to Bravo 
  • Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
    • We're not sure on how, in multiplayer matches, Brazilian gangs, African militia, or soldiers from a small Middle Eastern country 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 multiplayer turned into a curbstomp...
    • The EMP killstreak in multiplayer bends the way an actual Electromagnetic Pulse would work in Real Life. However, it somehow manages to disable only the opposing team's electronics, and the effect only lasts for about two minutes, but continuously afflicts opponents even if they die and respawn multiple times during those two minutes. Of course, this is all in the name of game balance - it'd be a Game Breaker if it permanently disabled enemy electronics and entirely worthless if it disabled everyone's.
    • Riot shields can't deflect high caliber bullets fired from assault rifles in real life, but you're pretty much invulnerable from practically all gunfire when using it (since only being protected against pistols and shotguns would make the item near-useless). Just watch out for grenades, or someone meleeing you however, as those can still kill you.
  • The Ace:
    • Gaz in Modern Warfare holds the team record on the training course and is Cpt. Price's right-hand man.
    • Soap in Modern Warfare 2, as well. If you listen closely to the two Rangers in The Pit's observation area with Shepherd, they refer to Soap as having finished the course in 18 seconds. 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.
  • Achievement Mockery: A player who fails to kill anyone in a multiplayer round, and dies at least ten times, gets an achievement.
  • Adjustable Censorship: In Modern Warfare 2, you can skip the infamous "No Russian" level, and in 3 you can skip the "Davis Family Vacation" level. Interestingly, the latter actually changes the ending of the previous mission "Mind the Gap" to account for your choice, with the mission quickly fading out into "Davis Family Vacation" if you've chosen to play it, and instead ending with the truck you stopped exploding right in front of you if you chose to skip it.
  • A.K.A.-47: Mostly averted, only some weapons appear without their real names, for example the Colt Anaconda is called the rather generic .44 Magnum, or the Mk 14 EBR, a modernized M14, which in Modern Warfare 2 is called the M14 EBR in singleplayer and M21 EBR in multi.
  • 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 Ultra-nationalist, was specifically harassing the new Ultra-nationalist 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 across the series, 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.
  • Always Chaotic Evil:
    • Being a soulless monster seems to be a requirement for being in Makarov's Inner Circle. Probably why Yuri left.
    • The Russian Army as a whole isn't much better. They are way too eager to shoot down civilian evac choppers when invading America, and are just as bad in Europe - perhaps even worse, since they open their European invasion with chemical attacks. This is probably why their leaders easily get swayed to Makarov's side when Vorshevsky tries to make peace with the US.
  • America Saves the Day:
    • Averted in both Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2 ("Roach" is a British soldier serving under the predominantly-English Task Force 141 while, his senior, the now-Captain "Soap" MacTavish, and the apparent Number Two "Ghost" are both former 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, soon dies of his injuries, along with the soldier the American player character rescued. And the entire mission was rendered pointless anyway due to the target being a decoy. What makes this one worse is that the rest of the world's apathetic response to this tragedy is what motivates the Big Bad of 2.
    • And then in Modern Warfare 2 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 are 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 while Delta Force's Granite Team gets unceremoniously killed trying to save the Russian President's daughter in Germany, Metal Team later has a Heroic Sacrifice to make sure Price and Yuri can save both the Russian President and his daughter to 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" just before executing Waraabe. And at the very end, while assaulting the last of Makarov's Inner Circle, "For Soap."
  • Angry Guard Dog: The Ultranationalists seem fond of them, to Soap's despair. Waraabe on the other hand prefers hyenas.
  • Anyone Can Die:
    • Only averted for Price. Or rather, Price can die, but it doesn't seem to bother him that much anymore. Nikolai and Derek "Frost" Westbrook also seem to survive. The former because he played an advisory role to the final mission and the latter supposedly due to being taken off duty due to injuries suffered from an exploding door.
    • 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/First-Person Perspective NPCs: Al-Fulani, Jackson, Allen, Sat-1, Roach, Harkov, and Yuri. Soap survives the tanker-truck explosion at the end of Modern Warfare 1 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.
  • Antagonist Abilities: A variant. Enemies hiding behind cover will occasionally do a blind-fire (something that NPC Allies don't do), and are capable of entering last stand where they attempt a last ditch effort to attack by firing their pistol, or perform a Martyrdom (neither of which are available to the NPC Allies). In Remastered, Allied NPCs were given the ability to blind-fire behind cover, but not the ability to enter last stand.
  • Arc Words:
    • "History is written by the victors."
    • "...the will of a single man."
  • Armor Is Useless:
    • In the Rio missions, the Task Force 141 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 suggests, unless you can get behind them, which can be easily done by using slow turn speed to your advantage. If you're good you can run around them in circles and stab them a dozen and a half times to death.
    • Same goes for the Op For and Militia forces in multiplayer - 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.
    • Averted in Modern Warfare 3's multiplayer, 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. They're also available in Survival mode, where they nearly quadruple how much damage you can take.
  • Artistic License – History: The Ultranationalists are presented with Soviet-style iconography, while real-life Russian ultranationalist parties oppose communism and the Soviet Union. The imagery is mostly used to distinguish the Russian factions with clearly-identifiable "Russian" imagery for a primarily Western audience.
  • Artistic License – Military: In order to tell their story about the Invaded States of America, the games handwave Russia's actual military strength and present it as an equal to the US in terms of manpower, industry, and technology. It does get some dose of reality, though, in that the attack is also presented as a single big push with next to no support of any variety; D.C. is retaken once the EMP hits and levels the playing field, and the invasion in its entirety is pushed back at the start of MW3 when Delta Force and Navy SEALs are able to turn a Russian submarine's arsenal against its own allies.
  • Authority Equals Asskicking:
    • Captain "Soap" MacTavish in Modern Warfare 2.
    • Captain MacMillan in Modern Warfare 1. Not even a helicopter falling on him can kill him (though it does break his leg)... or even lower his sniping accuracy.
    • Cpt. Price and his absolute inability to die throughout Modern Warfare 1. 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 to a .50-caliber bullet in an earlier mission, in the final confrontation he goes down just as easily as any of his soldiers.
    • Also 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.
  • A-Team Firing: Discussed by Sgt. Foley when he's training the local Afghani militia, saying that firing fully automatic from the hip will result in a lot of misses. Since this is also the Justified Tutorial, when the player character is called upon to demonstrate, trying to aim down the sights from the start will get a prompt of "From the hip, Private, just like in the movies."
  • Audible Sharpness: In the second game Soap does this with a blade Shepard just stabbed him with right before he throws it in his eye to kill him to save Price from being beaten to death.
  • 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 in 3.
  • 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. Not to mention Makarov escapes Shepherd's men and becomes the Big Bad of Modern Warfare 3.
    • Also, Modern Warfare 2 reveals that even though you killed Zakhaev, the Ultranationalists still won the Second Russian Civil War and he is now being hailed as a martyr, even having an airport named after him.
  • Badass Crew: Several, but Task Force 141 arguably plays the trope the straightest.
  • 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" in Modern Warfare 2, where your ACR and M1014 (or whatever you replaced them with) turn into a UMP and Glock for no other reason than exposure to Brazilian air for an hour, is the most obvious example. There are a only a few levels where your load-out 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", which carry over whatever you had from the preceding mission. "All Ghillied Up" to "One Shot, One Kill" gets weird, as the M21 you start with will carry over (minus its ghillie camouflage and suppressor), but any other weapon available in the former level, including the USP you also start with, will turn into an AK-47 that kills enemies in one shot for most of the latter one... except for an actual AK-47, which instead turns into a USP.
    • The ending of "Of Their Own Accord" will have you lose your weapons in the helicopter crash, leaving you to receive an M4 from Wade as you're stuck trying to defend the crash site. "Second Sun" starts with you replaying this section with that same weapon, but then anything you keep to the end of that level will transfer over with you to "Whiskey Hotel".
    • "The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday" to "The Gulag" only averts this by a technicality, since the game actually replaces your weapons with what it wants you to start the latter mission with as you're boarding the chopper to leave the former mission, rather than during the loading screen.
    • This is somewhat alleviated in Modern Warfare 2's remaster. The ending of "Wolverines!" now has you replace whatever you ended the level holding with a SCAR-H from the waiting Humvee. You start the next Ranger level, "Exodus", with this SCAR. Upon completion of "The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday", Soap will hand you a Mk 14 EBR from the waiting Little Bird helicopter, thus explaining where you got it at the start of "The Gulag". Unfortunately, it still doesn't explain how you and Soap switched positions on the Little Bird, both in terms of order on, and which side of the helicopter you're riding.
  • 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. But General Shepherd wanted the war in the first place so he can be seen as a war hero, and will throw even other good-intentioned westerners under the bus, making this a Big Bad Ensemble.
    • Makarov becomes the singular true villain of Modern Warfare 3, as well as being the Greater-Scope Villain of the entire trilogy and pretty much the Big Bad of the series as a whole.
  • Big "NO!":
    • Gaz and Ghost both get one in their respective games, and Price gets a Star Wars-worthy one when Soap dies.
    • Price gives another epic one when they are forced to leave Delta Force behind.
  • Bilingual Bonus:
    • In an 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, Portuguese, etc). 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: For all games and the series as a whole:
    • Modern Warfare 1: Most of the SAS/USMC joint task force were killed, but Khaled Al-Asad and Imran Zakhaev were taken out. Imran's nuclear attack on the United States is stopped, covered up and forgotten, and by Modern Warfare 2, Zakhaev was martyred, and his absence had made Makarov much stronger. Despite this, the deaths of Al-Asad and Zakhaev did bring some peace into the world for a while.
    • Modern Warfare 2: Yes, you stopped the warmonger 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 still at war with Russia (as Shepherd intended, so he won even in death), and Makarov is still on the loose.

      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.
    • Modern Warfare 3: 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, 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 it's 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 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."
  • Blinded by the Light: Flashbang grenades, the resident Trick Bombs.
  • "Blind Idiot" Translation:
    • The Japanese version has multiple translation issues, most infamously 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." (殺せ、ロシア人だ)note  Not helping matters is that the Japanese version is one of the ones that punishes you with a Non-Standard Game Over if you actually do try to kill any civilians. The Japanese version of the remaster simply fixes their translation of the eponymous line, to the equivalent of "Don't speak any Russian" (ロシア語は使うな).
    • Not only that, about all the Russian in the game has a huge risk of running into the gratuitous territory. Anatoly's line at the end of "No Russian"? It really means "don't move" rather than "good, you made it". The "To air gates" sign in the same level? That's to be literally translated as "ALL EXIT". Nikolai's cursing in "The Enemy of My Enemy"? Seems to be an automatic translation; and "rbut" isn't even a proper word in Russian. Not even a curse, at that matter!
  • Bonus Level:
  • 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.
    • Yuri and Makarov's first appearance is in the same location as Price, who is there to assassinate the Big Bad. The pair's final appearance is in the same location as Price again, though this time Yuri is on Price's side.
    • To a lesser extent, the same music plays during the starting and penultimate mission briefings in Modern Warfare 2. The starting and ending briefings also feature a short Character Filibuster. Captain Price's is even a response to General Shepherd's.
    • The plot of the second game begins and ends in Afghanistan.
    • A subtle one in 3: Makarov's first appearance has him stepping out of a helicopter. His last appearance has him trying to leave in a helicopter.
    • Speaking of helicopters, the whole trilogy is bookended by the player running to and jumping aboard a helicopter. The difference? In "Crew Expendable", you're running away from something; in "Dust to Dust", you're running towards something.
    • Soap begins his first mission in the series wearing the black SAS commando uniform. He dies in Modern Warfare 3 wearing a similar black uniform, minus the mask.
    • An averted example of a bookend: had the mission to snipe Makarov in "Blood Brothers" gone to plan, the Ultranationalist threat would have begun and ended with a sniper shot at its leader.
    • A chronological example; the first and last missions of the trilogy have you control Captain Price.
  • Boom, Headshot!: While they don't explode into Ludicrous Gibs, a headshot will generally kill anyone other than a Juggernaut in one hit.
  • Break the Badass: When Price is talking to MacMillan about Soap's death, his usual gruff and mean voice is shaky and soft, as if he was fighting back tears.
  • Butt-Monkey: The United States of America, particularly in Modern Warfare 2. As a result of... less-than-ethical (and intelligent) decisions (as well as being framed by Russian ultra-nationalists 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. In fairness to them, Shepherd doesn't give two shits about anything less than his own personal satisfaction over accomplishing his goals. People will die, civilizations will crumble, and injustice 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.

    Charlie to Delta 
  • Car Fu: This can happen to you if you get too close to a moving vehicle. The same thing can be said for NPC's unlucky enough to be near a moving vehicle. In Yuri's Flash Back, Makarov is about to run over a soldier as well when escaping with Zakhaev.
  • 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 showing up to take the DSM, then kill off the remaining Task Force 141 members in "Loose Ends".
    • Also invoked at the end of the mission where you play a Russian agent protecting the Russian President in Modern Warfare 3. A helicopter arrives to escort the President out of there, only to reveal Makarov and his men are inside, and they kill the remaining agents, including you.
  • Chekhov's Skill: In Modern Warfare 2, the much advertised knife-throwing feature of multiplayer 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, and then again by Yuri during the flashback to "No Russian" in the third 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.
  • Chromosome Casting: The first game featured exactly one named female character. 2 didn't even have that. In 3, the AC-130 pilot had dialogue, but was never seen nor named.
  • 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!
  • 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 temporarily-increased health, dropping a grenade upon death, or straight-up copying their killer's custom class) to help them out.
  • Commie Nazis: The Ultranationalists might fly around the Hammer and Sickle as their logo and claim to want to return Russia to Soviet glory, but never actually seem to espouse any Marxist social or economic theory and their hatred for the west is rooted out of nationalism than it is out of Communist anti imperialism. Hell, them being super nationalistic is in their name. The Modern Warfare series might be an unintentional exploration of the real ideology that is active in Russia known as National Bolshevism, which admires the Soviet era and its industrial and military policies, not because its adherents see it as a bastion for international worker freedom, but because it represented Russia at the peak of its power.
  • 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.
    • When you're carrying a riot shield, you cannot shoot. Your enemies can, though fortunately so can your NPC allies.
  • Conservation of Ninjutsu: Some missions pit one or two squads against hordes of Rio gangsters, African militiamen, or Middle Eastern Op-For. It's a safe bet to put your money on the ones that have special ops training.
  • Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: Several segments of missions are not actually timed, but the music, your squadmates/mission control yelling at you, and, depending on the game, enemies that continuously respawn until you pass a certain trigger, create the necessary tension. Case in point: you can take your sweet time meeting up with Soap and Ghost during the first favela mission even though it sounds like Rojas will get away if you don't haul arse.
  • Continuity Nod:
    • Many names are reused from the original games. They include: (Captain) Foley, (Captain) Price, (Major) Sheppard (phonetically the same), (Sergeant) Ramirez, (Sergeant) Makarov, and (Private) Yuri. The 5th game, World at War had Dimitri Petrenko whose last name was a possible soldier of the Russian campaign back in the first game; additionally, one of the names for the Russian Secret Service agents in Modern Warfare 3's "Turbulence" mission is the extremely-similar Dmitri Petrenko. One of Makarov's underlings is called Lev, the same name as The Dragon from Call of Duty: Black Ops.
  • Continuity Snarl: Operation Kingfish has become a pretty serious one. A fan-made video, it supposedly takes place between Modern Warfare 1 and Modern Warfare 2, when Price and Soap have joined Task Force 141, and are hunting Makarov (codenamed Kingfish by Baseplate). A joint operation between the 141 (Price, Soap, Ghost, and Roach) and Delta Force (Sandman and Frost), Op. Kingfish goes awry when Makarov is revealed to have known about it beforehand and fled. Everyone escapes except for Price, who is captured (supposedly, this is how he ends up in the gulag from Modern Warfare 2). A question raised is why Frost and Roach are not in the picture of the participants that was taken before the operationnote . None of this would have been a problem if O.K. had just remained a fan film. However, Infinity Ward ended up declaring it as canon. There is also the snarl concerning the video showing a picture listing Price and Soap as the only surviving members of Bravo Six—despite the fact that in Modern Warfare 3, you play as an S.A.S. member fighting alongside the other two survivors, Wallcroft and Griffen.
  • Controllable Helplessness: Every game has at least two instances.
    • 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 fades to white and back to Ramirez.
    • Played with in 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 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 Shades: Proudly worn by Ghost, Sandman, and Grinch. And if the soldier on the cover of Modern Warfare 2 is in fact Ramirez, him as well.
  • 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 multiplayer.
  • The Coup: Two of them.
    • The first is the titular mission in the first game, where President Al-Fulani is killed by Al-Asad on public television, signifying the takeover of the unnamed Middle Eastern country.
    • The third game has Makarov having managed to influence most of the Russian military to his side. He tops it by capturing Russian President Vorshevsky and then launching a surprise invasion of Europe. It helps that this was foreshadowed in Persona non Grata, where Makarov manages to get Spetsnaz commandos to do his bidding.
  • CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable: Double 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. Modern Warfare 2 reveals that Price is alive, meaning it did revive him; though it should be noted that it is unclear how long it took, or what Price's condition upon being revived was, what with this game being set five years later.
  • 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 the Modern Warfare 1 mission "Heat": 6 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 inModern Warfare 3. Dozens of guards in suits with pistols against two men in Juggernaut suits with belt-fed machine guns.
      • When you reach the end of the level, you finally get to kill Makarov. The problem is, Price is an unquestionable Badass while there's nothing suggesting Makarov is a skilled hand-to-hand fighter. Once Price manages to actually get his hands on him, he goes down much more pathetically than, say, Shepherd did in Modern Warfare 2. Makarov's death is more of a brutal execution than a straight-up fight.
  • Cutscene Boss: With a a casual pretense of realism, there are little to no enemies in the series that can be considered bosses. However, there are two major QTE confrontations at the end of the game with the Big Bad in 2 and 3:
    • General Shepherd from Modern Warfare 2 involves him stabbing the player Soap, getting into a fight with Price, and Soap must pull the knife out his chest and throw it at him.
    • Makarov from Modern Warfare 3 involves Makarov trying to run away in a helicopter, Price catching on to the helicopter, killing the pilot and the co-pilot before crashing the plane back down. Makarov then overpowers Price, Yuri rushes to the scene distracting Makarov but is killed, and Price uses the chance to beat down Makarov, tie the helicopter cable around his neck, and smash the glass floor with Makarov's body, finally killing Makarov by hanging.
  • Cycle of Revenge: Zakhaev hated the Americans and Britons for ruining his country, so he started an Ultranationalist party to purge the country of foreign influence. 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 American 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 of Russia hated America 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, so he conspires with Makarov to create a Russo-American war. The war results in thousands of civilian deaths on both sides (though more on the Americans'). Soap and Price kill Shepherd in retaliation, and Price eventually kills Makarov, ending the cycle.
  • Darker and Edgier:
    • Modern Warfare was a Darker and Edgier version of the rest of the Call of Duty series, 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: Hitting the melee button (which swings the player's knife in front of him like he's waving a car to pass) from a short distance away from an enemy will change the knife animation to a stab and cause the player to quickly slide forward towards their opponent as if the rocket boots just kicked in. Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer features Commando, a selectable perk to give the player an even larger and more unrealistic lunge range.
  • 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 multiplayer drops a tactical nuke, winning the game for whoever achieved the streak, regardless of score. That is, if you have it. 3 replaced it with a MOAB, which acts as a "hidden" fourth streak for the same number of kills, but just gives doubled experience for the player/team who called it in for the rest of the round. 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 2 involves one player as a Blackhawk door gunner clearing a path for a 2nd 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 closest 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.
  • Deconstruction: The Modern Warfare series takes a typical Black-and-White Morality set up of evil Russians and Arabs vs. good Americans and Brits before subverting it in numerous ways. The cost of war is shown in unflinching detail with heroism being no defense against dying pointlessly, the conflict escalates due to the actions of people on both sides, and the end result of the games isn't a clear-cut victory but a truce wherein both sides choose to simply stop fighting.
  • Defcon 5: Some of the cut multiplayer gamemodes in Modern Warfare 2 are "Defcon" variants of most of the other gamemodes, including the also unused Arena, Arms Race, and Global Thermonuclear Warfare. In a Defcon variant, whoever's the first to reach DEFCON 1 receives the game-ending Tactical Nuke. Progress is made (and perks are earned) by fulfilling the objectives of the gamemode's base variant. If, after a certain point, no-one reaches DEFCON 1 within one minute, a neutral Tactical Nuke is detonated.
    • At DEFCON 5, all player stats are at normal.
    • At DEFCON 4, each player will go into Last Stand.
    • At DEFCON 3, all weapons deal more damage.
    • At DEFCON 2, all killstreaks take one less kill to obtain.
    • At DEFCON 1, a Tactical Nuke is automatically deployed.
  • Destination Defenestration: In Scorched Earth, Sandman charges a Russian soldier and throws him out of a window. Justified in that the glass was already broken.
  • Determinator:
    • Soap, who doesn't let having just gone over a 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 not that long ago before he shows up as the playable character in Modern Warfare 3.
      • He also pulls himself together one last time after being impaled by a piece of rebar to save Price from being executed at the hands of Makarov during the end of 3. Sadly, that would be his final act as he is gunned down right after intervening.
    • The US military during the battle of Washington, D.C.. 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.
    • Sandman in Scorched Earth continues to look for Alena, despite Overlord telling him to abort, the fact the city is falling to the Russians, and that the Russians drop a damn building on his team.
  • Developer's Foresight:
    • In some missions, one of your allies may take out someone silently. However, if you shoot and kill that person before your ally gets to him, they then stop and resume the mission. In one instance during "Cliffhanger" in Modern Warfare 2, Soap will note when he's about to snipe an enemy in your path (e.g. "This one's mine"), and if you manage to kill that enemy before Soap does, he'll respond accordingly (e.g. "Then again, maybe not").
    • In the stealth missions, you can sometimes fight your way out if you alert some guards. If you win, your ally will usually chastise you for not using stealth. That said, it's usually not recommended to try and take out a whole group of soldiers using just a sniper rifle and/or a pistol. And if you end up in a firefight, sometimes your ally gets killed instead to punish you for not being stealthy enough.
    • The game will acknowledge if you complete objectives in a different way than expected. For example, in one mission in Modern Warfare 3 you are expected to use colored smoke to signal an AC-130 to fire on a tank blocking your path. Your commanding officer will compliment your ability to improvise if you use an RPG instead of the smoke.
    • If you fire on and kill an ally, you get the message 'Friendly fire is not tolerated!' Some named allies get a message of 'You killed Price!' or 'You killed Soap!' instead. But they've also coded in a message for 'You killed yourself!', despite that being possible in only one level in Modern Warfare 3.note 
  • 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, as while the Marines are slogging their way through his country and his army to find him, he turns out to be hiding all the way in Azerbaijan. 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.
    • Shepherd is much the same way. Despite being a man who wants to lead the world into war and giving grandiose speeches about war, he continually sends other people out to do the dying for him. He also murders his own men through cowardly attacks versus facing the consequences of his actions. Much of the final level facing him is him running from his opponents until cornered. Played with as he's still an amazing fighter despite this.
  • Disc-One Final Boss:
    • Al-Asad. The first half of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has you trying to overthrow his new regime in an unknown Middle Eastern country, which is destroyed by a nuke. Then, after you kill him, you find out that he is a pawn of the real villain, Imran Zakhaev.
    • Zakhaev himself is this to the true villain of the trilogy, Vladimir Makarov.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: The Russians want a thousand dead Americans for every civilian killed in the airport attack. Given the likely casualties of World War 3, they seem to have succeeded. The obvious problem with this logic, of course, is that just as many Russians die in the resulting battles.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?: The ambush in Loose Ends has some of the enemies in ghillie suits, and the music playing sounds familiar to the track used in All Ghillied Up.
  • 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. 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, and if the player is discovered but manages to survive during the stealth section Price threatens to let them kill you the next time. This is mostly gone by the end of the mission though.
  • Due to the Dead:
    Price: [about Soap and other fallen SAS] There's a clock tower in Hereford where the names of the dead are inscribed. We try to honor their deeds even as their faces fade from our memory. Those memories are all that's left, when the bastards have taken everything else.
  • 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 Foxtrot 
  • 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 for Yuri. 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.
    • For gassing and then physically devastating Europe, Russia got off relatively light. Granted, Russia as a whole isn't exactly responsible for the gassing part, but they sure took advantage of it; NATO, on the other hand, likely has become too weakened by the war's end to demand reparation and might have considered moving on the better course of action.
    • Price doesn't face any immediate repercussions for launching a nuke at the US and EMPing the Mid-Atlantic area, although that might be in part because he and the rest of the Task Force are betrayed and branded as criminals just one day later.
  • Easter Egg: Many, including teddy bears and other amusing details in environments if the player chooses to look carefully. For example, in "Mind the Gap", while leaving Westminster Station, the player character can have a look at the posters, one of which should look familiar to those who preordered Modern Warfare 3. There are also maps (copyright "Infinity Ward Trans. Subway") that have humorous place names such as "Bilbo Town", "Infinity Station Ward", and "That's What We Do Town".
  • Easy Logistics:
    • The invasion of the United States in Modern Warfare 2. The Russians are able to get an enormous amount of manpower, including armoured 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 Barrett 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 Team 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. 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.
  • 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 CIA mission subverts this, however, by being completely devoid of glamor, that goes oh-so-horribly-wrong at the end.
      • Force Recon and Delta arguably subvert this. For Force Recon, they are almost entirely wiped out by a nuke, with the only survivor being executed near the end of the game. For Delta, while they accomplish a lot and turn the tide in numerous battles, many members die, with entire teams being wiped out, some with little to no fan fair, with only one possible survivor amongst the operatives that appear. Ironically, the only unit you play as that have no major character deaths is the Rangers, arguably the least elite of the units shown, unless you count Allen, but he had joined the CIA by the time he dies.
    • Controlling elite forces actually justifies why you're being handed the very latest in military hardware (thermal sights, heartbeat sensors, etc.). Cpl. Dunn remarks at one point that Delta Force have access to fancier gadgets and tools than the Army Rangers.
  • Elite Mooks:
    • Shadow Company in Modern Warfare 2. They have about 50% more health than normal soldiers, and can usually survive 1 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. In addition Shepherd was given free range of how they would be equipped because of his blank check.
    • 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 commandoes 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.
  • Emergency Weapon:
    • The knife, although several of the Modern Warfare 2 perks and the Tactical Knife 'attachment' make it less so.
    • Easily subverted in multiplayer, 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:
    • There's an abandoned teddy bear in just about every single multiplayer level of Modern Warfare 1. 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.
    • A variant of this trope appears in Call of Duty 4. After the end of Sgt. Paul Jackson's campaign, in which your aircraft is downed by a nuclear bomb, and just before your death after crawling out of the wreckage of your helicopter, it is possible to make your way to a ruined playground a few feet ahead of the downed craft, where the player can hear the faint echoes of children playing.
  • 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 Civil War: After the Ultranationalists won the war, the party got split between moderates loyal to Boris Vorchevsky, and the more militant faction loyal to Vladimir Makarov. Makarov even installed generals within the Russian military who are loyal to him, so they can continue the war after he executes his coup against the president.
  • Enemy Mine:
    • After Shepherd's betrayal, Price invokes this to get Makarov to divulge the location of Shepherd's hideout.
    • As it turns out, the entire enemy plot was one big example, which came entirely unravelled at the end of Modern Warfare 2 when everybody proceeded to stab eachother in the back.
  • Escort Mission:
    • Downplayed. You rescue and protect VIP Nikolai in the first game, but he's invincible and can fight.
    • The "One Shot One Kill" mission requires you to carry the now-disabled Captain MacMillan to safety (no sprinting). He can be killed, but he does provide excellent cover fire for you when you put him down, which is useful.
  • Even Evil Has Standards: Inverted with Makarov. He quit the Ultranationalists because they weren't evil enough. Played straight with Yuri, who saw how increasingly insane and monstrous Makarov was becoming.
  • 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, with most of the Task Force dying and the survivors split up as the group is officially disavowed, leaving Soap and Price alone again to do their works.
    • 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 Russia didn't manage to invade England, so they might be alive. However, if you skip Davis Family Vacation, they are killed when the van they stop explodes.
  • 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, Disciple, Oxide, Avatar, Sat1, Thunder 1-1, almost the entirety of Task Force 141 and the entirety of the Delta Force. Lampshaded later: "Who the hell's Soap?"
  • 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.
    • Also comes up in "One Shot, One Kill" where a number of feral dogs can attack the Ultranationalists and kill several.
  • 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.
  • Expy:
    • Sandman in 3 is basically Sgt. Sanderson plucked straight from Black Hawk Down.
    • Al-Asad's Op For insurgents, who are clearly based on al-Qaeda and various irregular jihadist forces in the Middle East.
  • Eye Scream: In Modern Warfare 2, Soap pulls a knife out of his chest after General Shepherd stabs him with it. He then kills 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 — 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.
  • Failure Is the Only Option: There are some missions where despite doing your best, at the end of the level something happens and you either fail your objective, such as rescuing the Russian President's daughter, or when General Shepard shoots you and Ghost after retrieving information on Makarov in Modern Warfare 2.
  • 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, D.C.. 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.
  • Fast-Killing Radiation: The Pripyat levels are surrounded by invisible pockets of radiation that act like a Border Patrol. If you go too far out of bounds, you'll rapidly die of radiation poisoning.
  • 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.
    • Somewhat unusually for this trope, the pictures at the first two Modern Warfare games are shown at the end, meaning the characters are already dead. For the one in Modern Warfare 3 Sandman is the only one who's face isn't initially blacked out (though it's not too hard to recognize the characters), Ghost is already dead, and when all the faces are revealed Soap is dead as well.
    • 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 chemical bomb which instantly kills the girl (and probably the wife) while the husband gets to survive just long enough to die from exposure to gas.
  • Fauxshadow: The second Modern Warfare has you thinking you're going after Makarov. But Shepherd betrays you and he becomes your priority. You have to wait for the next installment to take on Makarov.
  • Fictional Counterpart: The main antagonists of the trilogy are members of a Russian Ultranationalist Movement. They're not explicitly stated to be Pamyat, but the similarities are there.
  • Field Promotion: Between the events of Modern Warfare 1 and 2, Soap has been promoted all the way from Sergeant to Captain.
  • Final Battle: "Dust to Dust" in Modern Warfare 3.
  • Finishing Stomp: Done to Soap by General Shepherd.
  • Fission Mailed:
    • The missions "Shock and Awe" and "Game Over" in Modern Warfare. Your player character dies or seemingly dies, but the story continues, and their death or seeming death is required to progress the story.
    • 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, despite all causing a screen blackout.
    • And, most notably, when the defense of a downed aircraft ends with a blinding flash. Some time later we learn that Pvt. Ramirez hasn't met the fate of Sgt. Jackson from the first game.
    • In Modern Warfare 3, in the mission "Turbulence", your attempt to extract the Russian president will end in failure as Makarov ambushes you and kills the entire security detail. It even has an "Objective Failed" notice popping up to cement that your failure is inevitable.
  • Five-Second Foreshadowing: At the end of "Takedown" in Modern Warfare 2, Ghost attempts to call command for extraction only to be rebuffed and put on hold, to his consternation. Come the next level, we understand why...
  • Fluffy the Terrible: Task Force 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.
  • Foreshadowing:
    • Rather 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.
      • Also from "Persona Non Grata". Notice that Makarov's hitmen are equipped with top-of-the-line military gear, complete with military helicopters. It shows that he's actually managed to gain influence and/or control of most of the Russian military by that point, which is confirmed a few missions later when the rest of Europe is attacked.
    • 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. Soap is also in the picture.
    • 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.
  • A Friend in Need:
  • 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.
  • From Bad to Worse:
    • Invoked twice in Modern Warfare 1. 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.
  • Fun with Acronyms: The first training mission for the first two games are F.N.G and S.S.D.D. Shepard says it's, "Same shit, different day" just before the reveal of the mission title and F.N.G needs little introduction: you're introduced as said friggin new guy and the regiment is despairing training you up.
  • 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.
    • A very, very, very dark one in the No Russian level. A few minutes after the shooting starts, as you pass by the flight schedule amidst a floor absolutely covered in bodies and blood, it suddenly shifts all flights to "delayed". Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. It does nothing to really help that level, though.

    Golf to Hotel 
  • Gatling Good:
    • You know the part in Modern Warfare 1. 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 used as a BFG (and Black Ops fixed the latter bit).
    • 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.
  • 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. The glitch also works on the AC-130 Killstreak Reward, meaning that it can fire its 105 mm cannon (the size of an artillery shell) at machine gun speed.
  • 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. Two of Makarov's three other partners during "No Russian" also are almost guaranteed to die; if you somehow manage to prevent this, Lev and Kiril will actually stop and disappear at the end of the level.
  • Gang Up on the Human:
    • "Enemy of My Enemy" notably has two large factions of NPCs (Makarov's men and Shadow Company) fighting each other instead of you, both having several dozen men and a lot of vehicles. Your goal is to not attract attention and just get away, however, if spotted by anyone, everyone stops firing at each other and turns their attention to you immediately.
    • Also played straight if you venture too far ahead of your allies, or you go solo and try to flank the enemy. They will almost always target you the moment they detect you or you start firing at them.
  • Genre Deconstruction: The series is often described by many fans and detractors alike as being a mindless celebration of warfare and interventionist foreign policy wherein patriotic Americans save the day from evil Russians and minorities. However, if one is able to overlook the bombastic action set-pieces and over-reliance on the Rule of Cool, they'll find that the trilogy is in fact a scathing critique of exactly that type of mindset. Not only do the games have British soldiers in the leading role (whilst the Americans are given more of a supporting presence), but several tropes which one might expect from the aforementioned premise are deconstructed in a manner which paints both sides of the conflict with shades of grey (though the Ultranationalist-led Russia is still portrayed as being more in the wrong than NATO—mainly because their actions result in more civilian casualties):
    • Modern Warfare 1 juxtaposes typical American posturing about freedom/democracy/"restoring stability to the region" with unsettling hints that the Middle Eastern country being invaded was an oil-rich U.S. puppet state, and contrasts the macho, cowboy attitude of the American grunts with a U.S. Army tank named after a famous anti-war song, "War Pig", and levels named after anti-war movies like Apocalypse Now and Dr. Strangelove (which, like the American campaign, ends with massive nuclear devastation). While you're playing, the Americans seem like good guys championing peace and stability (due to your player character being on their side), but there remains an implication that, to the other side, it's an imperialist bully which can only be fought back against with nuclear weapons. By the end, any player who doesn't already have some predisposed patriotism towards the U.S. or Britain will be left feeling like the game world is just a bunch of political structures throwing propaganda at each other to cover up the void where the truth should be. Sort of like real life.
    • Modern Warfare 2 goes even further. It starts with a U.S. task force performing three separate acts of unilateral action, but things quickly sour when Russia declares war on the U.S. in response to a botched CIA operation which resulted in Russian civilians dead and an American soldier's finger on the trigger. But to the American grunts fending off the invasion, it's obvious they're the victims. The two sides, inflamed by nationalism, fight to avenge their countries with Patriotic Fervor, unaware that this is exactly why a ranking American general purposefully botched the CIA op. In-game, the war is revealed to be nothing more than a jingoistic power fantasy between petty nationalists looking to restore their nations' former, self-righteous glory, while the American soldiers on the front lines—actually fighting and dying for their country—are treated like disposable pawns by their leader.
    • Modern Warfare 3 was made after Infinity Ward's founders were fired, taking on a more generic America Saves the Day tone, but still doesn't betray the anti-jingoistic, War Is Hell attitude. The United States never actually defeats the ultranationalists (they only manage to deter them), nor is Russia portrayed as monolithically evil. Moderates on both sides just get tired of conflict and quickly make plans for a truce. However, said peace talks are interrupted when the Inner Circle—an extremist organization which was forced out of the Ultranationalist party due to its criminal activities—kills most of the Russian cabinet and kidnaps the president, consequently 'hijacking' the military and launching a full-scale invasion of Europe in their bid to restore the glory days of Soviet-era dominance. Thus, the war only ends when a coalition of American, Russian and British special forces manage to locate and rescue the Russian president from his extremist captors so that he can order the military to stand down. The trilogy ends with both NATO and Russia in disarray, countless civilian lives lost and nearly every player character or fellow soldier dead, having fought and died for the sake of ending a war which—as stated above—was only ever instigated for the pettiest of reasons.
  • 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 machine gun 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're pretty much exclusive to Special Ops missions and multiplayer in 3 - the sole time they show up in the campaign, you are said Juggernaut.
  • Glass Cannon: The AC-130 is shown in the first game as an undefeatable Infinity +1 Sword of air support precisely because the situation it's deployed in - at night, with no dedicated anti-air defenses - is exactly the situation where it shines and gets deployed for in reality, and later games go to lengths to demonstrate the actual weaknesses of strapping that much firepower to a large and slow transport plane. Its appearance as a Kill Streak reward in MW2 multiplayer gives it a few defenses (two sets of flares to throw off anti-air missiles and flying too high to simply pepper it with bullets like with the other air support streaks) but ultimately has it go down to a single hit if enough players fire at it to overwhelm those defenses. When it flies over a contested city in MW3's campaign, it requires an escort flight and still has to break off the instant enemy jets show up to harass it. One Spec Ops mission in MW3 also has it flying over a mine in enemy territory with an active air-defense system, and the first objective is for the player on the ground to haul ass and shut down those air defenses before they simply blast the AC-130 out of the sky.
  • Godzilla Threshold:
    • Toward the end of the American missions in Modern Warfare 2, things get so bad that they enact "Hammerdown", an emergency protocol for the capital being overrun where everything in Russian control is carpet-bombed. Your objective is to fight your way to the top of the White House and deploy green flares to show that it's still in American hands. Seeing how most surrounding buildings had flares too, this measure is ultimately unnecessary.
    • Before that happens, one of the first things Price does after being freed is detonate a nuclear missile above the eastern seaboard to EMP the hell out of everything, with the rationale that things couldn't possibly get worse for the Yanks. He's right to do so, since ultimately it gives the Americans a window of advantage to retake everything, as seen above.
    • In the third game the US forces are given authorization to do whatever it takes to secure a man with intel on Makarov. This culminates in the squad calling in an airstrike on Russian forces who are positioned around the Eiffel Tower. The crew of the aircraft request confirmation of the order, and there's a small but noticeable hesitation when the American CO gives it.
  • Good Colors, Evil Colors: When the Russians invade the U.S., you may notice their combat uniforms are tinted red.
  • 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 being nuked, 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 World War III definitely won't be forgotten.
  • Grenade Spam: Quite possibly the Trope Namer. Not as bad in single player as in the World War II games, though.
  • Grenade Tag: If you get stuck with a Semtex grenade, kiss your ass goodbye.
  • Gun Accessories: So very many of them; gun customization is half the fun in multiplayer. The second game onward even introduced methods to attach more than one accessory in multiplayer.
  • Guns Akimbo:
    • In Modern Warfare 2, you can get dual weapons in Story and Spec Ops Mode and unlock them in Multiplayer, up to and including dual P90s with Rapid Fire.
    • Dual lever action shotguns are an infamous example. This particular combination ended up being one of the iconic multiplayer "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 multiplayer 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 a full extra second to registernote , by which time it's entirely possible for your target to have moved out of the way if he didn't 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 an 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 and in the previous one 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 Somalia you can take remote control of the gun on Nikolai's gunship and to take care of the Russian tanks in Berlin you are given a target designator for an A-10, "the tank's 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.
  • Hellish Copter:
    • Poor Sergeant Jackson. The helicopter he got in at the end of the mission was caught in a nuclear blast before it could escape.
    • 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.
  • Heroic Mime:
    • With few exceptions, the player character never speaks while you are playing as him. However, a flashback mission in Modern Warfare has you playing as the otherwise-talkative Captain (then-Lieutenant) Price, and the AC-130 TV operator 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 take control of him again later on. There are two aversions:
      • 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. Yuri in the same game, however, plays it in the same manner as Soap in 2, where he's rather chatty in cutscenes and as an NPC in the level played as Price, but gameplay only sees him speaking over a flashback to events from the prior two games.
      • 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; otherwise, he only speaks in the cutscene preceding "Cliffhanger".
    • In coop Spec Ops mode and multiplayer, no one can hear what their own character says, but they can hear what their teammates say.
  • He Who Must Not Be Seen:
    • The case for all of the playable characters, although subverted by Modern Warfare 1 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 4 is now your NPC team leader.
    • Also used with your Mission Control: Baseplate in the first 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 Modern Warfare 1.
    • Frost has an odd example in Modern Warfare 3. We see pictures of him (albeit in full face mask and goggles), and he even has an in-game model, which gets used for player characters in Survival and some Spec Ops maps, and for Delta Force players in multiplayer... but the mode where Frost himself actually shows up, the campaign, never uses it, to the point that he's the only member of Team Metal to not show up in "Down the Rabbit Hole".
  • 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 in Modern Warfare 3.
  • Heroic Sacrifice:
    • In the first Modern Warfare, Griggs is killed while trying to get an incapacitated Soap to safety.
    • Doubly subverted in the same game when Jackson's squads of Marines successfully rescue a downed pilot when it's known that a nuclear threat is likely. They retrieve the pilot, only for the nuke to go off maybe thirty seconds after they take off again.
    • Invoked towards the end of Modern Warfare 3 by Team Metal (minus Frost).
  • "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 Modern Warfare 1.
    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.
    • 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 Task Force 141.
    • 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.
  • Hollywood Tactics: When supporting a seaborne invasion, you'd probably be better served having your carrier and the rest of your fleet stand off a little ways from the beachhead rather than being parked fifty yards from shore, Russia.
  • Homage:
    • Zakhaev's son's tracksuit is a homage to Sasha from Behind Enemy Lines.
    • A lot of the American campaign in Modern Warfare 2 uses elements from Red Dawn (1984), with the first US level even being called "Wolverines".
    • A ruthless American General-turned-bad who has a team of black-clad mercenary commandos called Shadow Company? Lethal Weapon, anyone?
    • The starting area of the level "Team Player", a pack of Humvees on one side of a large bridge, with dismounted infantry in the ditch beside it exchanging fire with enemy infantry on the other side, and a city in the distance, bears a heavy resemblance to a scene in Generation Kill episode 2 "The Cradle of Civilization".
    • 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:
    • 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. There's another one in the ensuing conversation when you slowly go for a gun, but Makarov decides to finish you just as you pick it up.
    • 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!!!"
  • How We Got Here: One mission in Modern Warfare 3 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 operation in Germany to secure a VIP.
  • Hufflepuff House: The OpFor really don't have much in the way of story relevance and lore despite being one of the main catalysts of the trilogy's plot. They have no named characters besides Al-Asad, no outright stated motivations, and their location is some vaguely defined "Middle East" (The second game reveals The Remnant is holding out in Afghanistan). Hell, they don't even have an actual name - "OpFor" is just short for "Opposing Force", a designation given to them by the US forces.
  • 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 3rd 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 Juliet 
  • Identical Grandson: Modern Warfare's Captain Price looks just like Captain Price in Call of Duty and Call of Duty 2, right down to the righteous mustache.
  • 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.
  • Impaled with Extreme Prejudice:
    • Soap suffers from this courtesy of General Shepherd at the end of 2. Fortunately you return the favor with the same knife by pulling it out and throwing it at his face.
    • Yuri gets impaled upon an iron bar during the climatic final assault on Makarov's hotel during 3.
  • 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 Price (whom you play as) and Yuri putting on a juggernaut suit and picking up a machine gun. Then they kick the door of the van open and jump out in front of the hotel where Makarov is holed up. The guards in their fine suits don't stand a chance.
  • Improperly Placed Firearms: Military usage of the Desert Eagle (only Polish and Portuguese special forces use it in any official capacity), the RPD and AK-47 are still in service despite being outdated and long since replaced by modern models in real lifenote , the Russians use NATO-calibre bullpup assault rifles like the FAMAS and the Tavor, them managing to combine 1 and 2 by having the Russians use a phased-out, NATO-calibre battle rifle like the FAL, the Russian military using shotguns at all (only the Ministry of Internal Affairs - aka the police - use shotguns), all the RPG-7s are portrayed as only having the original iron sights (almost every RPG-7 currently in use by the Russian military has some form of telescopic sight added on, and has for a while), as well as having Russian paratroopers use the normal RPG-7 instead of the RPG-7D3 variant made for them, and African militias wielding the Peruvian FAD. They also have the SAS using M4s and USPs, which no branch of the British military have ever used. The series loves this as much as Soap loves Plan B.
  • Inconvenient Parachute Deployment: In the final act of the original Modern Warfare, when the joint UK/US task force parachutes onto the Russian missile silo, the US Marine Griggs deploys his parachute too early, getting blown off course by the wind and captured by the silo defenders. The first objective is thus to rescue him.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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, you will receive a chance for payback after taking fatal damage 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 Modern Warfare 1, 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, no matter where the player actually hits them.
    • 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.
    • Also notably averted with Yuri, who has the distinction of being the only person in the campaign to not only survive being shot at point-blank range with a Desert Eagle and live, but he even has the strength to stumble around for a while before blacking out trying to stop Makarov's massacre at the airport.
  • Instant-Win Condition: Get a 25 killstreak in multiplayer? Congratulations, your team wins, no matter how much you were losing (though to even get 25 kills in a row either your team was winning anyway or it's because of an immense fluke).
  • 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.
    • EMPs do this in-universe by disabling all electronics (and all electronic weapon-guiding interfaces) and even causes static to appear on devices that are minimally electronic (like Thermal Scopes).
  • 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 Modern Warfare 1 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 Non-Standard Game Over; in "O Cristo Redentor" (a Special Ops mission using this map) each difficulty has a certain number of acceptable civilian casualties.
    • Averted in "No Russian," where killing civilians, or at least allowing it to happen, is part of the entire point of the mission.
    • The Paris missions also show lots of dead civilians from the gas attacks.
  • Irony:
    • In Modern Warfare 3 it's shown that Makarov detonated the nuclear bomb that killed the 30,000 US troops in the Middle East. The deaths of the 30,000 US troops and the lack of response from the world at their deaths led to Shepherd planning to start a war and make himself a hero, causing him to ally with Makarov, the very man responsible for killing his 30,000 men in the first place.
    • Also ironically, Imran Zakhaev and Vladimir Makarov fight to establish an Ultranationalist Russia through terrorist acts, which succeeds upon the death of Zakhaev. Once in power, the Ultranationalists then eject Makarov from their ranks for being too radical while failing to realize that he simply shares the same vision of Russia that their idol, Zakhaev, did.
  • Ironic Echo: "Since when does Shepherd care about danger close..." For added kick, the same music is played both times the quote is uttered. The second game also gives us "History is written by the victors."
  • Ironic Name: The first name of the terrorist you spend most of the series fighting (Vladimir Makarov) means "ruler of peace".
  • It's Personal: The death of Soap in 3 finally brings the conflict with Makarov home for Price. As for Yuri, his desire to end Makarov started back in "No Russian".
  • 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 the first 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!.
    • Refreshingly averted on the first mission of Modern Warfare 1: the SAS operatives are so efficient at their job that a new player might actually have difficulty getting to enemies before their AI teammates do their jobs for them. This sets the tone that "We are special forces, we do not screw around" early on, though sadly it doesn't hold throughout the game, let alone the franchise.
  • Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique:
    • Shown in Call of Duty 4, where Price is beating the crap out of Al-Asad for info. Though this is the only time in the series the technique doesn't yield information; but Price learns what he needs to know when Zakhaev calls anyway, so he just executes Al-Asad.
    • 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!
    • 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.
  • The Juggernaut: The Juggernauts. They only appear in Spec Ops and as a perk in multiplayer. Until the final level of 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. 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. In any case, there is a Special Ops mission that is basically the live-fire course from the previous game with a different layout, which could count as a tutorial level.
  • Just Plane Wrong:
    • The Mi-24 in all installments is seen armed with both a fixed twin 30mm cannon and a trainable 12.7mm gatling gun; in real-life, those weapons are segregated amongst different Mi-24 variants. Mi-24s are also shown in the vehicle graveyards of Chernobyl, where no such aircraft sit in the real graveyards.
    • In several of the SAS missions, the RAF is shown piloting Blackhawks, despite them having never used them. It is a bit easy to miss, since barring one Russian gunship all friendly helicopter pilots speak with the same American-accented voice (implying the Blackhawk is on loan from the US), but the Blackhawks seen in most of the SAS missions do have "Royal Air Force" markings on them.
    • The version of the AC-130 depicted across the series is universally the AC-130U "Spooky", as indicated by its smallest weapon being a single 25mm GAU-12, however in the loading screen for its first appearance in "Death from Above", the wireframe model is instead the AC-130H "Spectre", with twin 20mm M61 Vulcans being misidentified as a single GAU-12.

    Kilo to Quebec 
  • Karma Houdini: Russia as a whole gets away with attempting to nuke the United States, starting World War III,note  burning down half the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, sacking and burning much of central Europe, and launching WMD attacks on every major European city from London to Rome. Their president sues for peace after their invasions are catastrophically defeated and the West simply accepts this. Realistically, Russia would have been reduced to a glass parking lot after just doing half of what they did.
    • Then again, the President was implied to have been pressured into starting an invasion, and by the time he decides the war should stop, karma comes for Russia in the form of The military getting taken over by Makarov, who then kidnaps the President and his daughter in order to torture him so that he can get the nuclear launch codes.
    • The reason we don't see any comeuppance to the Russiansnote  is because the story is told from the POV of men like Price, Soap, and Ramierez; professionals who get the job done and don't care about politics. All they care about is that the war's over and their part is done mostly. It's a safe bet that it took more than an "Sorry, We'll never do it again" from Russia to get the West to the bargining table, with partial or total Disarmament a distinct possibility.
  • Kick The Son Of A Bitch: Price's summary executions of Al-Asad and Warrabe after interrogating them. Both victims really, really had it coming to them but still clearly paint Price as Good Is Not Nice, to put it mildly.
  • Knight of Cerebus: As if the Modern Warfare series wasn't dark enough already, once Makarov makes his appearance things get more serious.
  • Leitmotif: Both games have short series of notes that make up parts of a lot of the other songs in each game. In 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 2. Doubles as No Indoor Voice.
  • Last Stand: Some missions invoke this when you have to hold off a much larger force, such as near the end of Modern Warfare 3 when rescuing the Russian President and his daugther.
  • The Law of Conservation of Detail: Done remarkably well throughout each of the main campaigns. A surprising amount of the plot is communicated through very succinct lines of dialogue and/or subtle visual indicators. Just to name one: in the final level of Modern Warfare 3, when Price (the player character) leaps ahold of Makarov's chopper, a latching cable can be seen hanging from its underside. The camera barely lingers on it for less than a second, making it seem incidental, only for it to then provides the means by which Price finally kills Makarov a few moments later.
  • Left Hanging: Who was the VIP in Arcadia and why was he important? It's implied he was killed by someone from the Inner Circle, 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." It's worth noting that he uses the same model as one of Makarov's men from the airport massacre in "No Russian", so it may have been either him or someone similarly close to Makarov who could've revealed the truth about the airport attack, had they survived.
  • Lethal Joke Item: The Winchester Model 1887, which dates from the 19th century and is available in a game set 130 years after it was developed, and until the addition of the Remington 1858 in Black Ops II's DLC, the oldest weapon to appear in the entire Call of Duty series. 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.
  • Level in Reverse: One of the levels in Call of Duty 4, "Heat", used the same level data as the previous "Safehouse", only during daytime and for the most part played backwards. Spec Ops mode in Modern Warfare 2 and 3 did this more extensively, particularly with the former having a mission that takes you backwards through most of "All Ghillied Up" from Modern Warfare 1.
  • 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 Modern Warfare 1 level (since the two have nearly the same layout), the Spec Ops version is given the name "Milehigh Jack".
  • Lodged-Blade Recycling: Subverted, Soap pulling the knife Shepherd stabbed him with out nearly leads to him dying earlier, as it is generally a very bad idea to remove an object you've been stabbed from the wound unless it is done by a medical professional and they stanch the bloodflow as soon as possible.
  • Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Riot shields, which can block absolutely anything, but only head on. Your enemies can shoot at you while holding the shield up, but you can't; in return, you still get protection from the shield when it's stowed on your back.
  • 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-story 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.
    • Sandman, up until the penultimate level anyway. He takes a booby-trapped door bomb to the face and still has the presence of mind to wave the squad down from shooting at the escaping kidnappers ten seconds later.
    • 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 in gasoline, and then the militia leader pulls out a lighter, with predictable results.
  • Master-Apprentice Chain: MacMillan -> Price -> Gaz -> Soap -> Ghost -> Roach
  • Meaningful Echo:
  • 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 Task Force 141 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.
  • Mêlée à Trois: The airplane graveyard level features a 3-way shootout between the player, Makarov's men, and Shadow Company. Although, despite Nikolai and Price both suggest letting them duke it out themselves, they're all 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.
  • Mighty Glacier: Juggernauts, natch. They can take up to ten times as much small-arms fire as other soldiers but move slower due to the extremely heavy armor they wear.
  • Military Alphabet: Military game. Natch.
  • A Million Is a Statistic: The global conflict that the trilogy covers causes literal millions of military and civilian deaths, of which the player causes many hundreds and witnesses the deaths of others on his side. None of it holds a torch to the single death of Soap and the reaction it elicited from pretty much everyone.
  • Mirror Character:
    • 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.
    • Makarov and Shepherd. Both of them hate the other's home country, and are willing to use extreme force in doing as much wanton destruction to their enemies using increasingly brutal and questionable acts, including killing/attempting to kill their own allies. This even includes manipulating their own countries' militaries into doing what they want. They even both have their own Praetorian Guard units that are fiercely loyal to them, The Inner Circle for the former, and Shadow Company for the latter.
  • Mobile Shrubbery: Price and MacMillan don ghillie suits in the mission "All Ghillied Up". They work like a charm if standing still or moving slowly, though one has to wonder how much the Russian guards had to drink when they walk past a man-sized bush crawling under their jeep and think nothing of it.
  • Monumental Damage:
    • Look no further to Washington D.C. in Modern Warfare 2. Also in that game Captain Price blows up the International Space Station as part of a desperation gambit to relieve the American forces on the ground by triggering an EMP with a nuke above the Earth's atmosphere.
    • Part of Modern Warfare 3 takes place in Paris, during which the Eiffel Tower is destroyed by friendlies trying to push back the Russian offensive. The New York Stock Exchange also gets quite a beating, and the New York skyline is in flames. The Hamburg City Hall gets hit by a few missiles, but remains standing with only superficial 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 exists in Real Life, but it's not really a monument. It still collapses on top of Team Metal and the remaining Ultranationalists.
  • Monumental Damage Resistance:
    • The White House, Washington Monument, and Capitol building take a beating, but remain iconicly standing. That said, they take quite a beating, and the White House's interior gets totaled.
    • In New York during 3, the Statue of Liberty and Freedom Tower are still intact despite the beating the city takes. The latter however is justified, for obvious sensitivity related issues.
  • Mood Whiplash: Two times in rapid succession at the end of Modern Warfare. "Game Over" begins with Griggs and Gaz gamely discussing who gets to buy drinks afterwards, and ends with both of them dead and Soap and Price in less-than-ideal condition. Cue Griggs himself rapping over the end credits, followed by an Airplane! reference and "Mile-High Club".
  • 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 Modern Warfare 1. The Modern Warfare 1 team is made up of SAS and USMC Force Recon, Task Force 141 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 Task Force 141ends 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 CoD1 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. Most guns lost 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. The third game went even further and completely removed attachments from the gun.
  • Never Bring A Knife To A Fistfight: 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 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.note  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 Task Force 141, 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 1 and 2 take place in 2011 and 2016, respectively. 3 is also late 2016, with the final level taking place in January 2017.
  • 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 Prague in the Czech Republic to attack a hotel they believe will be used as a meeting place for Makarov and his remaining associates, 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. Not to mention even your AI SAS allies are so fucking useless and painfully slow on the uptake when it comes to covering you as you take point it makes you wonder if the 22nd SAS Division had come down to conscription. 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.
    • The Call of Duty franchise's Veteran mode is truly Nintendo Hard: The Next Generation. The ferris wheel stage in Modern Warfare 1 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.
    • The Achievement obtained for completing "Mile High Club" on Veteran difficulty is considered to be one of the hardest Achievements to get. Not in Modern Warfare 1, mind you - one of the hardest ON THE XBOX 360. For the longest time, this was the most sought-after achievement for its sheer difficulty and prestige.
  • 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 DC.
    • The Oasis Hotel, "Arabian Peninsula" 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.
    • The same happens to you and Ghost in Modern Warfare 2 after you download data from Makarov's computers. Shepard comes in to save the day, except he shoots both of you and then has his men burn you up to hide the evidence.
  • 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.
  • 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. Most of them have randomly-generated names, while a few have callsigns.
  • Nonstandard Game Over:
    • You get a special game over message when you get killed by a grenade ("Watch for the grenade danger indicator"), accidentally shoot one of your teammates ("Friendly fire will not be tolerated!")
    • You'll also get a non-standard game over in "All Ghillied Up", if you ignore MacMillan and shoot the lone dog in the ruins, causing you to get attacked by a pack of dogs and have them kill MacMillan.
    • In Modern Warfare 2 mission "Cliffhanger", Captain MacTavish will be held at gunpoint by a group of men at one point, and he will be gunned down if the player fails to rescue him by detonating a pack of C4 in 5 seconds.
    • 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.
    • Other things can fail your mission as well, such as shooting civilians outside of "No Russian". Or if you're doing a stealth mission, and you draw the attention of an entire base when you're supposed to sneak around. Doing so will either get you killed due to the massive amounts of enemy, or your ally gets killed. If this happens the game makes sure to let you know They Died Because of You.
  • 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 Could Survive That!: The SAS has quite a bit of Genre Blindness regarding Zakhaev's supposed death, assuming that blood loss and shock would finish him when they should have known better. Given the circumstances though, it's not as if they could take another shot to make sure.
  • No One Gets Left Behind:
    • Deconstructed for the Americans in Shock and Awe from the first game, in which a nuke goes off, killing the American player character and his squad, after they delayed their extraction to save a downed pilot, leaving them no time to escape.
    • 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.
    • Generally played straight in any mission where Price is present. He will fight tooth and nail to make sure his friends can escape, such as saving Soap repeatedly.
  • Nostalgia Level:
    • Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer map "Wasteland" has an identical layout to that of Call of Duty 2's "Brecourt" map, combined with the general appearance and atmosphere of Modern Warfare 1's Chernobyl missions. Its own Terminal map was later ported to Modern Warfare 3.
    • This isn't the first time; Call of Duty 4's "Chinatown" is a Chinese-themed revision of the classic map "Carentan".
    • Two of the second game's Spec Ops missions take place in story levels from the first Modern Warfare.
  • Nothing Is Scarier: The loading screen for Whiskey Hotel is a black screen with no sound, compared to the more active loading sequences in previous missions.
  • Notice This: Important stuff/objectives are often glowing.
  • Not So Stoic: The multiplayer announcers in the second game keep their cool even as relay that enemy helicopters, stealth bombers, and drone strikes are incoming. Then once the enemy starts using AC-130 gunships or EMP's, they appropriately lose their shit (with the exception of Ghost, weirdly).
  • 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 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.
    • Happens at the end of 'Turbulence' (the one where you play as Harkov) in Modern Warfare 3. Okay, we rescued the President, now let's open the helicopter door and complete the missio-cue Makarov. Objective Failed.
    • An awesome one comes from Corporal Dunn who is normally collected and even clean-mouthed ("Hey, Sarge, did HQ just tell us to "f" ourselves?"). And then in Second Sun, we get "EMPPPPP!!! HOLY SHIIITTTTT!" Of course all-caps are necessary.
    • The Abrams tank crews get a nice one when they suddenly realize parking garage ramps can't hold the weight of tanks.
  • Once per Episode: Each game has at least one event where you are put into the first-person perspective of someone who ends up Killed Off for Real.
  • 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 and his army that may have been part of Makarov's plan. Then Makarov gets killed later.
  • Painting the Medium: Every cutscene in the games qualifies as this trope. Most pre-level cutscenes are presented as a military 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. These type of cutscenes were also used by Treyarch in their Quantum of Solace game. A few notable sub-examples include:
    • At one point, when the mission jumps back to 1996, the GPS map becomes a printed one.
    • In Modern Warfare 2, the between-mission briefing is at one point replaced with an "EMERGENCY BROADCAST" for several minutes, representing the Emergency Broadcast of the Washington DC under Russian invasion.
    • In Modern Warfare 3, half of the cutscenes are military information system presentations, but the other half concerning the disavowed Task Force 141 are presented as a String Theory (a wall of files and pictures connected by strings) mixed with other media, representing Captain Price putting up all kinds of information and connecting the dots to track down Makarov without the use of said military information system as his group is disavowed.
  • Parental Substitute: Implied between Soap and Price, who the former affectionately refers to as 'old man'.
  • Personal Space Invader: The attack dogs and hyenas.
  • Pistol-Whipping: Exaggerated. Some enemies will try to hit you with the butt of their assault rifles.
  • 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.
  • Post-Soviet Reunion: The Ultranationalists' ambition is to take over Russia and restore the glory days of the Soviet Union, which would entail this trope being made real. This culminates in Russia launching a full-scale invasion of Europe in the trilogy's last game — not just the former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact members, but the countries of Western Europe as well.
  • 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".
  • 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.
  • Previews Pulse: A ringing trailer chord from Hans Zimmer himself.
  • Previous Player-Character Cameo: Soap MacTavish of Modern Warfare is the Player Character's CO in Modern Warfare 2.
  • Properly Paranoid: You can earn an achievement called "Precognitive Paranoia" in S.S.D.D. in Modern Warfare 2 Campaign Remastered. It involves you killing General Shepherd at the first opportunity.
  • Pun: Achievement names in the series are usually either Shout Outs or terrible puns - sometimes both. Crowning examples include Dancing in the Dark from Call of Duty 4, Soap on a Rope from Modern Warfare 2, and For Whom the Shell Tolls from Modern Warfare 3.
  • Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Right before the last section of the last level, Captain Price ends his speech with a simple "We. Will. Kill him."
  • Pyrrhic Victory: Call of Duty 4 ends with the death of Zakhaev. However this comes with the knowledge that countless citizens in Al-Asad's country and American forces were lost when the nuke couldn't have been stopped and Zakhaev himself kills off most of what remains of Soap's squadron before the killing blow is landed. The game also ends with a Bolivian Army Ending as we don't see what becomes of Soap or Price, both of whom end the game on the verge of death. This sequence of events leads into the sequel where the Ultranationalists managed to pull a win against the incumbent Russian Government, using Zakhaev as their martyr, and also where General Shepherd becomes a traitor to America out of disillusionment and disappointment in his fellow Americans to prevent the above nuclear tragedy. The sequel then ends on yet another pyrrhic victory as Shepherd is killed by Soap but it accomplishes little. Shepherd has already betrayed Task Force 141 and killed Roach, marked Soap and Price as international terrorists, and the war he was trying to incite by aligning himself with Makarov has come to fruition. Soap once again ends the game knocking on death's door as well. By the third game, we find out Makarov is planning something big after the failure to secure the western United States, who then manages to kidnap the Russian President and completely take over the Russian military, and subsequently having them try and conquer the rest of Europe. Just like the first two games, this one ends with Makarov dead, but at a heavy toll: Most of Europe and the United States are in ruins, millions dead, including Soap.
  • 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. For example, Al-Asad's unnamed capital city that you spend much of the first half of the game fighting in is either on the west coast of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain (on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula), near Riyadh in central Arabia, or the Iran-Iraq border. 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, IW 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, at least until the very end.

    Romeo to Zulu 
  • Railroading: The player has little freedom of exploration in all of the maps. One can see some evidence of this in how the game treats doors:
    • Typically, only the ranking officer in a squad has had the years of training required to operate a door. By that, we mean that the player will never get to open doors yourselves due to the railroading, and only by clearing an area can an officer open the door to the next section.
    • Though in Modern Warfare 2, you get to blow open a number of doors with breaching charges. These are however, still scripted, and often times nothing happens if the player simply refuses to plant the breaching charges.
    • There are three instances where you can open a door, without a breaching charge, in Modern Warfare 3, and something bad is scripted to happen each time. Andrei Harkov opens a door on a helicopter, only to be 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.
  • 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, with a slightly larger variety of colors, though still nothing too bright.
    • The third game is also colouful but without anything too bright, 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. This is pretty much limited to anyone who isn't fighting on foot, however.
  • 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 - it's implied he only authorized the invasion in Modern Warfare 2 due to massive pressure from the populace and hardliners, and early on in 3 he gets kidnapped by Makarov to derail the peace process.
  • Reclaimed by Nature: The "Overgrown" multiplayer map is in the throes of this process.
  • Regenerating Health: All three games, CoD4 particularly being as good as a Trope Codifier considering just how much the trilogy influenced shooters afterwards.
  • Renegade Russian: While the bear getting angry again forms part of the overarching plot of the series, considerably more of it is taken up by this trope as the largest antagonists, Imran Zakhaev and Vladimir Makarov, reside here. Zakhaev is a renegade in the traditional sense, as he wants things to go back to the way they were before the Cold War ended, and will commit any number of terrorist actions to see it through. However, Makarov is a unique spin on the archetype because the government he went renegade against are the nu-Soviets who assumed power after Zakhaev's death. Zakhaev's death was perceived as martyrdom and allowed a takeover of the government by the descendants of his ideology in the five years between the first and second games. Makarov, Zakhaev's protege, is disavowed by the new Ultranationalist government for his radical views and he begins committing domestic terrorism in order to punish those in power for defying the values that put them there.
  • 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. It was originally a pre-141 mission carried out by the S.A.S midway through the game before getting shifted to just a Brutal Bonus Level, since Gaz, though never identified by name, is alive and well during it.
    • Baseplate in the first game was an American officer acting as mission control for the SAS, but come the third game it is now the codename for the commander of the SAS
  • Reverse Grip: The only way a knife may be held and used, unless it's 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, because he was going to try to warn the authorities of the attack, before he, Private Allen and the rest of the group 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: John and Soap engage in this in the second game against General Shepherd and his army after they get betrayed. Also, 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 for everything he did in 2 and 3.
  • 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.
    • The Scottish sniper Captain in the first game's flashbacks is MacMillan. Not McMillan, or MacMillain, or whatever.
  • RPG Elements:
    • You get to "Create a Class", where you get to choose a primary weapon, sidearm (whether pistol, machine pistol, shotgun, or explosive launcher), as well as Equipment, a special grenade, and three Perks. And a deathstreak reward starting from MW2. It overlaps with Archive Panic quite a lot - especially in Modern Warfare 2.
    • The series actually has a unique system for it, though. Besides standard level ups, there is also a system where for a certain number of kills you get with a specific weapon, you get to unlock one of its many attachments. Ten kills with an assault rifle in Modern Warfare 2 and you get to attach a grenade launcher to it, twenty-five kills gets you a red dot sight, and so on; MW2 also adds a system where making kills with a weapon while using a specific attachment unlocks another similar attachment, e.g. twenty kills with that grenade launcher lets you attach a Masterkey shotgun. However, attachment unlocks are specific to the weapon you get them on, e.g. if you switch to a later assault rifle you have to make another ten kills with it before you can attach the grenade launcher.
    • Modern Warfare 3 adds a second set of ranks for the cooperative-centric Special Ops mode. They determine what you are able to buy in Survival levels, but you can gain experience and level up in either Survival or Mission modes. It also changes around killstreaks to be point-streaks and lets you set them individually for each class.
  • 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 increasing its "Holy Shit!" Quotient rather then sensibility and plausibility.
  • 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. Any more fuel than that and they will get shot down, either before they can even pick you up or before they can get you out of the combat area.
  • Rule of Symbolism: Modern Warfare 2 uses a highly implausible invasion of the United States to tell an allegorical tale about the Afghan War, and with it the dangers of Patriotic Fervor, the use of information to deceive and manipulate the masses, and the all-consuming thirst for revenge.
  • Running Gag:
    • An unbelievably subtle one. In the first mission of Modern Warfare 1 (F.N.G.), there are posters for "Porter Justice" movies on the wall. These reappear later in the game and in random places in Modern Warfare 2 and 3.
    • Rescue helicopters running low on fuel.
    • 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're 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!
  • Sawed-Off Shotgun: The Ranger, an option for a secondary weapon in Modern Warfare 2. And it can be dual wielded. Being as it's so short, it stops being effective even before the pellets disappear at its maximum range, but makes up for it with such a wide spread that even shots that would be complete misses with most of the others can instakill people.
  • 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.
    • In Modern Warfare 3, multiple European cities get torn apart by fighting. Paris tops it, with the collapse of the Eiffel Tower.
  • Scenic-Tour Level:
    • 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.
  • Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You: On the cover of the first Modern Warfare, an unknown Marine who may or may not be Sergeant Jackson is about to shoot you.
  • Second-Person Attack: Happens in all three games.
    • In the very beginning of the first, you're given nominal control of former President Al Fulani as he's being lead to his execution.
    • In the second, you've managed to escape Makarov's forces and make it to the helicopter for escape when General Shepherd shoots you and Ghost, then has his men toss you both in a ditch, and burn your bodies.
    • In the third, you're a Russian Secret Service Agent attempting to get the President to safety. You've gotten to the helicopter for extraction when Makarov appears from inside the chopper, shoots you, and abducts the President.
  • 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.
  • Sentry Gun: You can deploy one briefly in the "Wolverines!" level of the second game. Optional, but it definitely helps in the higher difficulties against the Russian onslaught. Versions with both Gatling turrets and Anti-Air missiles are possible killstreaks in multiplayer, starting in the second game.
  • 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.
  • 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 went from a nuke going off to worse. There's an underlying theme about how you can't just shoot everything and hope to win.
    • Each game has a dedicated obstacle course that seeks to outdo the previous entry.
      • The tutorial level of Call of Duty 4 had a training course inside a warehouse that was an In-Universe mockup loosely based on the opening section of "Crew Expendable", where you could hone your skills and race against Infinity Ward's best time.
      • Modern Warfare 2's tutorial level gave us "The Pit", an open-air obstacle course where you could choose your loadout from dozens of weapons, plenty of vertical and horizontal movement options, and civilian cutouts that will hurt your score if shot.
      • Since Modern Warfare 3 lacks a Justified Tutorial, the obstacle course has its own dedicated map, the Spec Ops challenge "Stay Sharp". It's set in a forest area, has even more weapons than The Pit, and you get to rescue Sandman from cardboard "terrorists" at the end.
  • Serial Escalation:
    • Modern Warfare 2: Washington, DC, 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 horrific, 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.
      • Modern Warfare 3: If Washington, DC, wasn't enough, Makarov, with help from extremist leaders in the Russian Army, invades most of Western Europe and turns each country into a chaotic war zone.
    • There's also the matter of character deaths. In 4, you get to watch Gaz and Griggs be shot and killed. Then in 2, you get to watch in first person as you and your friend are shot and burned. Then in 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.
  • Shield Bash: Quick Melee while equipping a riot shield takes the form of this, though it's slower and weaker than if using the knife.
  • Shooting Gallery: The opening levels of both games.
  • Shoot the Hostage Taker: The bonus level "Mile High Club" ends with you having to shoot a terrorist using a hostage as a Human Shield. On higher difficulty you must get a headshot or you fail the mission.
  • Shoot the Shaggy Dog:
    • The American campaign in Modern Warfare 1, despite being a Pyrrhic Victory in the grand scheme, ended terribly for the perspective of the characters. Everything that Sergeant Paul Jackson does, from taking part in the invasion of the Middle East, trying to capture Al-Asad (and failing), protecting a tank as it moves through a hostile area and rescuing a downed Cobra pilot from group of terrorists is all rendered moot as you evacuate the Middle East. A nuclear bomb goes off in the city, killing your commanding officer, your fellow teammates, the pilot you just saved, and, eventually, you. Al-Asad runs away, and the actions of the characters are reduced to nothing more than another figure in the death toll. This is done to drive home the point that war is (if you consider the actions that you just took in the campaign) pointless. General Shepherd comments on this in the sequel: "30,000 of my men died in the blink of an eye, and the world just fuckin' watched."
    • In Modern Warfare 2, this trope hits in spades. Private Allen goes deep undercover with a terrorist cell killing hundreds of civilians in a Moscow airport - and then gets shot by the cell leader Makarov. When Russian authorities discover his body, they declare war on the U.S. Later, Ghost and Roach are dispatched to gather proof that Private Allen was innocent and that there was no reason for the Russia and the U.S. to be at war. Roach then delivers the evidence to General Shepard - who then shoots him and Ghost dead, douse them with gasoline, and set them on fire amid Captain Price frantically radioing in that Shepard is not to be trusted. If only this had actually worked...
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Red-dot sights use small batteries to power their LE Ds, meaning that all the levels set in the US after the EMP in 2 have them not working properly.
    • Just like in real-life, 40mm grenades won't arm unless they've flow a certain distance before impact, meaning that if you shoot it at someone or something at point-blank range, it won't go off.
  • Silliness Switch: Modern Warfare also has some silliness cheats like Ragtime Warfare, which is basically Soundtrack Dissonance on demand, or enemies exploding into tires.
  • Sink The Life Boats: Everything that dares to fly openly gets shot at during the Russian invasion of the U.S., including civilian evacuation craft. This is a plot point in one mission where the objective is take out anti-air placements so that the helicopters can escape.
  • Skeleton Motif: Ghost from Modern Warfare 2 has a skull painted on the lower half of his balaclava.
  • Slashed Throat: If knifing someone in the campaign of any of the games results in a custom animation that plays out at no other point, chances are pretty high this will be how your character actually kills the target.
  • 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 if you're far away or (in the third game) if they're heavily injured, but even then you're still faster than they are. 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.
  • Sniper Pistol:
    • Surprisingly, your pistols can reach a LONG way.
    • The 1887 shotgun in Modern Warfare 2 had been criticized for its unreasonably long range and accuracy, before it was nerfed. (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. That said, 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 lacked this problem. Not to mention that the shotgun with the shortest barrel is somehow the most accurate one in the game, 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 let's 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 2 also are designed for sniping. Just about every Stealth-Based Mission in this series tends to overlap with this trope, for that matter.
  • Sociopathic Soldier: Makarov and his Inner Circle definitely (though Yuri's a good egg). The Russian Army as a whole probably, they are way too willing to slaughter fleeing civilians. The fact that Allen went along with the "No Russian" mission doesn't say anything good about him, but it is ultimately up to you to kill civilians.
  • So Much for Stealth: Screwing up during the stealth portion of missions will alert all nearby enemies, causing your partner to tell you to "go loud" (or something similar) or to get the hell out of there.
  • 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.
    • Generally whoever you're playing as ends up doing this towards the plans of the Big Bad in that game.
  • The Squad: Most notably, the 22nd SAS Division, Lt Vasques' USMC squad, not to mention Task Force 141 in MW 2.
  • 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. Then, of course, Sandman says it... to Derek "Frost" Westbrook.
  • 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".
    • In 3, there's the first parts of "Back on the Grid" and "Eye of the Storm".
  • Stealth Pun:
    • The snipers that are covering you in "Loose Ends" are named Archer and Toad.
    • Derek Westbrook's codename is "Frost" meaning that he's always Frosty.
  • Steel Ear Drums: Averted. Explosions that go off near you will send your PC's vision in a daze and cause Shell Shock Silence for a few seconds.
  • Sticky Bomb: Semtex grenades and C4.
  • The Stinger: The bonus level Mile High Club in Modern Warfare, and the museum in Modern Warfare 2.
  • Stone Wall: Juggernauts with Riot Shields can move around like others but have to switch to a secondary (losing the shield's protection) or use melee attacks to deal any damage at all. They're even better at soaking up fire though.
  • 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), 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.
  • Suicide Mission: Occurs at the end of Modern Warfare 2.
  • Superdickery: 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.
  • Surprisingly Sudden Death: Soap, Made of Iron badass extraordinaire and survivor of many near-fatal injuries ... finally dies by simply bleeding out when said crudely-healed wounds open up from some blunt trauma.
  • Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Ghost (in the second game) and Wallcroft (in the third game), who are voiced by the same person as Gaz from the first game. Ghost also fulfills the same role as Gaz by being the second-in-command to the captain of their respective squad, and are both executed by high-caliber pistol.
  • Suspicious Videogame Generosity: Anytime you get a break in the mission resupply yourself and choose from a large number of weapons, be prepared for trouble.
    • After capturing Makarov's safe house in "Loose Ends", the player has access to the extensive armory there, including grenade refills, a dozen or so claymore mines, and quite a few sniper rifles and heavy machine guns. Then they get word that a lot of Makarov's hired guns are on their way to counterattack. Yup, you're going to need every bit of that.
    • To a lesser extent, you can get a bunch of better weapons from the enemy armory midway through the prison mission in 2 where you break out Price.
  • 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 3 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!
    • The "Misery Loves Company" challenge in multiplayer requires the player to kill themselves and an opponent by cooking a live grenade until it detonates.
    • And this is essentially the point of the perk/deathstreak "Martyrdom" (drop a grenade after you die) in the first two Modern Warfare games and the Modern Warfare 3 perk "Dead Man's Hand" (detonate C4 after you die).
    • Also the "Last Stand" perk in Modern Warfare 1 and 2, which lets you use your side arm as you bleed out. The upgraded version in 2 lets you use any projectiles you're carrying as well.
  • 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).
  • Team Power Walk: At the very end of the first Modern Warfare, when Zakhaev, flanked by two Ultranationalist grunts, strolls onto the battlefield to execute the wounded (which, unfortunately, includes Gaz). Then Loyalist backup arrives and blows up the Hind hovering behind them, killing the moment, but also providing a distraction and allowing Soap to kill all three of them with Price's pistol.
  • Tempting Fate:
    • In "All Ghillied Up" in the first Modern Warfare, Captain MacMillan tells Price that "Target down. I think you blew off his arm. Shock and blood loss'll take care of the rest." when you shoot Zakhaev. Of course, Zakhaev survives the injury despite losing An Arm and a Leg and bleeding heavily from it, and later manages to kill more of your team later on before you finally put him down for good.
    • 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 if the player waits a few seconds before entering "The Pit", Corporal Dunn comments that he wants some real action rather than just blocking positions for SEALS and Delta Force. A few days later, America is invaded by the Russians.
    • During "Dust to Dust" in Modern Warfare 3, Yuri congratulates the player for shooting down a helicopter that is pursuing them. The helicopter crashes right into them, destroying their Juggernaut armors and leaving Yuri vulnerable to being shot by Makarov, this time fatally.
  • That's What I Would Do: How Price guesses Makarov's attack plan at the beginning of Modern Warfare 3.
  • Theme Tune Rap: Sgt. Griggs raps over the end credits of Modern Warfare. Possibly an Expository Theme Tune as well.
  • 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.
    • Throwing knives are also available in the multiplayer of Modern Warfare 2 and 3. Instant death if they hit an enemy, plus you can pick the knife back up and use it again if you can get to the body.
  • There Is No Kill Like Overkill:
    • The Tactical Nuke killstreak reward in Modern Warfare 2, which instantly kills every player on the map and ends the game in victory for your team.
    • The death of Roach and Ghost. Shot at point-blank range by a .44 Magnum, tossed in a ditch, doused with gasoline, then lit on fire.
    • Jonah Hill as the "N00b" in "The Vet and the N00b" trailer has the titular characters come up behind a marksman on a building who is completely distracted by firing away at targets below. The N00b brings out an RPG to make this kill despite the Vet's "No!". Neither of them get harmed by the excessive display though the N00b asks "Should I'd have used a knife?"
  • 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.
  • Time Skip: Modern Warfare 2 takes place five years after the end of the original, during which time Zakhaev has been hailed as a hero and his party is now the dominant force in Russian politics.
  • 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. 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... 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."
    • The Modern Warfare games of 2007 and 2019 each have a sequel called Modern Warfare 2 (written differently).
  • 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 "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 Task Force 141 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.
  • Too Broken to Break: Present in the comic prequel of the game Modern Warfare 2: Ghost. The protagonist, Simon "Ghost" Riley, is captured among other soldiers. Then they are put under torture during months until their will breaks, as the first stage of a long term program of brainwashing. This works with all of them, except for Simon. The reason? His infancy was so ridiculously abusive and traumatic, that the only thing the torture did for him on a psychological level was reawaken those traumatic memories. And as he explains to a thug before killing him, they could not break someone who is already broken.
    Simon "Ghost" Riley: There isn't a man alive that doesn't have a breaking point. Your mistake with me was that I'd already reached mine a long time ago. I was already broken, mate.
  • 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. Even in the first game, just 4 days after entering the SAS, he took down 5 tanks and 8 helis all by himself.
  • Torture Always Works: "Did our man talk?" "They always talk."
  • Torture for Fun and Information: 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.
  • 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.
  • Trope Codifier: Modern Warfare wasn't the absolute first game to use a RPG-style level-up system for its multiplayer, but it set the standard for almost all that follow. It wasn't the absolute first modern military shooter either, but it's commonly blamed by "hardcore gamers" for setting the trend, and many setpieces it used like breaching scenes and player-controlled Death from Above/fire support have also become popular.
  • Trust Password: The sign, counter-sign variant shows up in Modern Warfare 2 during "Second Sun". After the EMP knocks out comms, the Ranger team runs into another Ranger, who is acting as a runner, and call out "Star" to him twice, threating to shoot if he doesn't respond. Unfortunately, he doesn't remember the counter-sign, but fortunately the team realizes he is American and spare him, and remind him that the counter-sign is "Texas". It's used again shortly afterwards. Unfortunately, it turns out the people they've run into are Russians, and the Ranger who gives the sign ends up being killed.
  • Two-Part Trilogy: The first game is a stand-alone story about Imran Zakhaev's attempted rise to power in Russia. The second and third games are a two-parter (the second ending with a cliffhanger) about Zakhaev's former Dragon, Makarov, waging a terrorist campaign to orchestrate World War III.
  • 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."
  • 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).
  • 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. More than a few instances in the third installment, including switching point-of-view from an AC-130 to Team Metal (who you were covering a moment ago) and Yuri switching the UGV interface.
  • Unflinching Walk: Subverted. After shooting down a Russian helicopter, MacMillan calmly walks away and quips "G'night, ye bastards..." like a badass... then promptly breaks out running when he realizes that it's spinning out and headed towards HIM.
  • Unlockable Difficulty Levels: The difficulty level depends on how fast you can complete The Pit in the S.S.D.D. tutorial level. If you complete it under 40 seconds, you can unlock the Harderned difficulty, and if you complete it under 35 seconds, you can unlock the Veteran difficulty. Otherwise, these two difficulty levels are locked.
  • Unstable Equilibrium: An inevitability in multiplayer. Whoever wracks up several kills gets their choice of Killstreak to possibly keep that killing spree going and get even more Killstreaks. Mitigated a bit by Deathstreaks, which provide a little extra oomph to let losing players have a fighting chance.
  • Unwitting Pawn:
    • Everyone but Price in Modern Warfare 2 is factored in Shepherd's Batman Gambit.
    • Shepherd himself turns out to be one for Makarov, as revealed in 3. Taking into account the latter's first actions against Price, Soap, and the Loyalists, it becomes apparent that Makarov was feeding false information to Shepherd and intending to off him.
  • Updated Re-release: Modern Warfare Remastered, which was released alongside Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. It includes the original Modern Warfare with updated graphics to match modern console capabilities, containing the complete Single Player campaign and the original Multiplayer maps and gamemodes. What's especially notable is that it is not a simple texture and lighting upgrade like BioShock Remastered or Dead Island Definitive Edition, but is effectively a Remake faithfully recreating the game with modern technology and remade graphical assets, while keeping the original gameplay intactnote . Modern Warfare 2 got the same treatment in 2020, with the addition of cheats that weren't in the original, but without the multiplayer component.
  • 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. The Marines' version heard in Modern Warfare 1 is "Oorah", which makes sense as the American campaign has you as a member of Force Recon.note 
  • Videogame Cruelty Punishment: Killing civilians (in any mission other than the uncensored version of "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. Of course, even "No Russian" ends with your character being shot dead by Makarov, so in a meta way, the trope still holds.
  • 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.
  • Viral Unlockable: Some titles, such as "STD" and "Infected", are unlocked by killing a player who has the title with a knife.
  • Visual Pun:
    • Killing a player that killed you in multiplayer gives you bonus XP, the words "Payback!" appearing on the screen, and dollar bills flying out of the target.
    • Possibly unintentional one that crosses over with Stealth Pun: at the end of the second game, Soap pulls a knife out from his chest (covered with his blood, obviously) and throws it into Shepherd's eye. What's the matter, General? SOAP get in your eye?
  • 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.
  • Villain Protagonist: During the Spec Ops mission "Milehigh Jack", you play as a Inner Circle member hijacking President Vorschevy's plane.
  • The War Room: the penultimate level in Modern Warfare.
  • War for Fun and Profit: Makarov and his men, even going so far to incite a war between Russia and the US.
  • Watching Troy Burn: A variant for the American audience and the characters, witnessing Washington D.C. get turned into a hellish warzone is poignant.
  • We Have Become Complacent: Shepherd's monologue about America growing lazy and indifferent towards their global standing provides the page quote.
  • 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:
    Price: Since when does Shepherd care about danger close?
    • The Russians have a lot of men and seem to expend large amounts of them during every mission as they launch Zerg Rush after zerg rush.
  • 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, beginning with the infamous mission "No Russian" which immediately leads to a massive attack on the United States by Russia in the next mission, 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:
    • In Modern Warfare 2, the intro cutscene to the mission Wolverines! has two: "THEY'RE EVERYWHERE!" and "I'M LOOKING AT FIGHTER JETS OVER AT I-95! HOW THE HELL DID THEY GET THROUGH!?"
    • 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."
    • Another two from "Contingency", each with different reasons for Wham: "Price, do you copy?! The silo doors are open! I repeat, the SILO DOORS ARE OPEN!" "Good."
    • And probably the biggest one from 2: "Good. That's one less loose end."
    • Another one from the end of 2, revealing General Shepherd's motives: "Five years ago, I lost 30,000 men in the blink of an eye, and the world just fuckin' watched. Tomorrow, there will be no shortage of volunteers, no shortage of patriots. I know you understand."
    • And one from 3 that is arguably as big as the ones in 2: "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 without any explanation after "Scorched Earth". His spot in the squad is filled by Red Shirt McCoy, who makes it about five seconds into the penultimate mission.
    • Ramirez, Dunn, Foley, and Marshall are a borderline case. They were all still alive by the end of 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 Measure Is a Mook?: Throughout the entire series.
    Gaz: Rules of engagement, sir?
  • What the Hell, Player?:
    • Shooting your own teammates will give you a Nonstandard Game Over, giving you the message "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 berating 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: "Get off your bloody arses and FIRE ON THAT TRUCK!"
  • Winter Warfare: In Modern Warfare 2, we have the third mission "Cliffhanger" which even involves ice climbing and an escape on snowmobiles. Then there are the missions in Russia itself, one of which features a segment where Price and Roach have to avoid Russian patrols in the snow-covered forests. Several multiplayer maps also feature wintry conditions.
  • Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Him?: Averted by Makarov, who does in fact shoot your various characters, such as when he kills Allen at the end of "No Russian", and later he also shoots the FSO agent you play as. In fact he shoots you twice, the first time to kidnap the president of Russia, and then he shoots you one more time before leaving. He will also shoot you at the end of Modern Warfare 3 if you take too long to reach the gun.
  • 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.
  • Written by the Winners: The main topic of Price's final monologues in Modern Warfare 2. It also ends with a moral about why committing so much force against a foe backed into a corner with access to nuclear weapons is a bad thing.
  • 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 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 Have Failed Me: No Russian gives you a Non-Standard Game Over for harming the terrorists or failing to keep up with them.
    Makarov: I have no patience for cowards.
  • 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.
    • The third game also subtly reveals that Makarov did this to Shepherd, based on the fact that the former actually had a lot more men and resources than initially thought.
  • 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 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, which is required to be able to pick up bags of ammo dropped by dead enemies - ostensibly they should be dropping all the time, but without the perk you simply can't see or pick them up.
    • The "Breath" proficiency in 3 is a literal version of this: it lets you hold your breath while aiming down the sights of weapons that normally don't allow you to hold your breath (eg. anything that isn't a Sniper Rifle).
    • Grenade launchers in Call of Duty 4 multiplayer require you to go without a Tier 1 perk. And no, you can't grab a gun with an attached launcher off of a dead player and use that - unless your own gun had the launcher, any other launchers will be totally unusable.
  • You Can't Thwart Stage One:
    • One of the storytelling issues with "No Russian."
    • And they couldn't thwart the first/main stage of Shepherd's plot, although they killed him.
    • Or Makarov's chemical attacks in Europe.
    • In a larger sense, the entire plot Modern Warfare 1 can be considered a quasi-stage one failure. Despite all of Price's and the Americans' hard work, the Ultranationalists still managed to take over Russia.
    • Properly finishing off Zakhaev during the flashback mission instead of blowing his arm off would have saved a lot of grief throughout the entire franchise, including preventing the creation of the subsequent 2 Big Bads. Alas, you can't. No matter where you hit Zakhaev, his arm flies off. Gut shot? Arm flies off. Hit his leg? His arm flies off. Hit him right square in the face? Arm.
    • The Remastered version of Call of Duty 4 has a tongue-in-cheek Easter Egg lampshading this trope. If you shoot Zakhaev's driver (who is now remodeled to look like a younger Makarov, to go in line with one of the bigger plot twists of Modern Warfare 3) in "One Shot, One Kill", you will complete a hidden objective ("Change the future") and earn the "Time Paradox" trophy. The game still goes on as normal though.
  • You Call That a Wound?: Allied NPC's with Gameplay Ally Immortality are prone to this, sometimes shrugging off damage that really should down them. Sometimes they'll do things like get shot several times in the face, go down, then inexplicably get back up 30 seconds later as if they just needed to lie down for a bit.
  • You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!:
    • Griggs has a more colorful version of the phrase when the door in the nuclear facility opens very slowly.
    • There's also Gaz's reaction when he learns that the extraction helicopter has to land at the bottom of the hill to avoid enemy SAM sites - after you've already retreated to the top of it.
  • 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. He winds up eating those silent words in "Dust to Dust".
  • 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, MacMillan is very understandably annoyed with you.
    • What the Ultranationalist Inner Circle faction does in Modern Warfare 3.

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

In the mission "Loose Ends", Roach and Ghost were rescued by Shadow Company reinforcements after losing most of their squad acquiring valuable data from Makarov's compound. But upon meeting with General Shepherd, both of them ended up getting killed as Shepherd enacts his plan to eliminate Task Force 141.

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