But I usually liked that presentation to deal with real world things. CoD2 was amazing because it really brought WW2 to "life". Fantasy life sure but as close as someone would ever want to get. The Modern Warfare games did the same stuff with battles in the Middle East and at home. Which is what I liked most about Ghost because it basically took the Burger Town level from MW2 and made it a whole game. Kind of wish they would have continued that. Kind of wish we were getting a present day war game as I feel the sci-fi aspect is covered by two series now.
Call of Duty 2*'s single player is hard to top because after MW they never seemed interested in returning to the mission design of a lot of the game. Over half the game's single player maps are figure eights or sets of circles. You fight through one area, then loop back around to that area again under different circumstances and from a different direction with a new objective. You can even "sequence break" aspects because you can bypass certain minor scripted events if you complete an objective before it triggers. (One of the Egypt set maps, you can skip something like two entire "endless waves" you have to defend a spot against if you cut across the map to complete like the 3rd and 4th objective before going back to do the first which starts it. Only, the latter waves can't come through from behind because you've blown up something or other and so the game cuts the waves off. IIRC, haven't played it again since 2008ish probably.)
The MW2 mission you mention is somewhat like some of the CoD2 one's (like the Stalingrad factory) where it shows you the entire map and then moves you to all sorts of different positions within it, but it remains the same location.
That's much more effective at making you feel like you're in an extended battle as part of an extended war instead of the post-MW endless globe (and later time) hopping from skirmish to skirmish.
The Medal of Honor reboot "solved" this somewhat by having every sequence tied to another and you going from one team to the next, most notably in the mission where you like fight up a hill, and then a guy gets sniped and you follow the path back to the sniper team then play as them, and then later air support is called in and you go up to follow them assisting other teams and back down to the first team. Plus the entire game takes place in the single theater of Afghanistan. I think that was one reason I found it more interesting, even if the gameplay wasn't necessarily too different from what CoD throws out.
AW and BOIII somewhat scaled that hectic jetsetting back by trying to tell an overarching story that follows generally one (?) person so it came about naturally to stick to continuous events. It didn't do as much for the linear maps thing though.
*In fairness, the original game and United Offensive also do some of this, but not to the extent 2 does.
