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Call of Duty has finally washed its hands of the far future, ejecting from Infinite Warfare's glistening cockpit and plunging headlong into the barbed wire thickets and bullet-churned foxholes of the 1940s. But given that Call of Duty is already the War To End All Wars, reshaping periods and places to fit its own, ageless and perpetually revisited strain of corridor shoot-out, what does heading back to World War 2 actually mean in practice? The resumed brownification of video game visuals aside, it means the end of the series' brief, torrid love affair with powered exoskeletons and cybernetic enhancements. Exosuits remain the fashion elsewhere - consider BioWare's Anthem, in which mechs surge like dolphins through the foliage of a collapsed Earth - and it's possible that 2018's Call of Duty (Black Ops 4, presumably) will stuff you back into a cyborg Onesie. But Sledgehammer's decision to clear the table of cybernetic enhancements is a pivotal moment for a trope that has given rise to some powerful experiments.
You could argue that exosuits, exoskeletons and cybernetic doodads in general merely revisit and elaborate upon tried-and-true mechanics such as double jumps and armour boosts. There's a certain irony to the idea that games like Titanfall and Advanced Warfare are "boundary-pushing", given that each can be viewed as a reversion to the high velocity vertical combat of Quake and Unreal. But exosuits in video games aren't just clusters of character abilities - they can also be a means of distancing you from those abilities, placing them at the disposal of what is effectively a companion character, not quite under your control. Compare Master Chief's craggy MJOLNIR armour to the sinewy Nanosuits of the Crysis games. Halo's developers have conjured up plenty of mystery about the man inside the suit, his "true" face forever threatening to surface, but when you punch out a Wraith tank or line up a Spartan laser in Halo, it doesn't occur to you to wonder whether Chief is his super-soldier exoskeleton or merely operating it. The distinction is, in practical terms, irrelevant.
In Crysis, by contrast, the Nanosuit is very much not the player character, but a kind of fellow creature, a semi-subservient entity with needs and limitations. It has "stamina" reserves that must be painstakingly managed as you flip between stealthy, defensive or aggressive play - fail to get the balance right, and the suit will "punish" you, clouding your vision and slowing your motions. Unlike Chief's MJOLNIR kit, the Nanosuit also has a voice, rasping suggestions and warnings at the subcortical level. It's a sinister reworking of the role played by Halo's AI comrade Cortana, who is often plugged directly into the Chief's armour and can thus be treated as an inward extension of his persona, a stereotypical "feminine side", but who never seriously threatens to wrest your control away.
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