I’m essentially just making an abridged version of Raycevick’s video, but no, the skins in Cold War or even AW weren’t the start of Cod losing its identity. MW2 was.
Prior to MW2, the games were all about portraying are character as if they were just a regular soldier. You weren’t Captain America doing extreme heroics. You were just any other soldier.
Even in Cod 4 with all the nukes going off, Jackson and Soap don’t feel like super ultra badasses. Everything you do with them, you do with your unit.
And at the very end, whilst you do end up saving the world, it’s pretty bleak if you view it in a vacuum.
The final scene has a Russian loyalist failing to revive Price (implying he died) and as Soap is airlifted, the screen fades to white, just like Jackson, as if telling the player that Soap himself has passed. And what’s the last thing we hear? Everything we did in the game is essentially being swept under the rug. Our names won’t be memorialized. It’s just another day in the office.
Then MW2 comes out and it’s insane set pieces and extremely dramatic versions of characters. We went from being one man in an army to becoming a one man army.