(Bit of an autistic rant incoming, so be warned.)
The funny thing is that Call Of Duty, the very series that it is critiquing and blaming for all this, already deconstructed the modern military shooter with, believe it or not, the first two Modern Warfare games.
MW1 made it vague as to how justified the US was in terms of their actions in the Middle-Eastern nation, with heavy implications that it was simply an oil-rich puppet state that America didn't want to lose, and that part even ended in complete nuclear destruction that ended with the deaths of 30,000 soldiers, with the terrorist not even being in that area to begin with. It also had many things in the campaign nod to anti-war fiction like Apocalypse Now and Doctor Strangelove, implied that the West are little more than imperialists bullies to the opposing force, with their only chance at defeating them being the usage of nuclear weaponry, and the ending pretty much stated that all the acts of heroism went unnoticed by most of the world, with the Ultranationlists still very much at large.
Meanwhile, MW2 went even further. Long before SOTL ruthlessly mocked the idea of patriotism and always showing the main heroes as being right, despite the actions they cause, this game was already doing that. The airport scene had you being complicit in the massacre of innocent civilians, with it being the catalyst for the rest of the tragedies that followed. The whole situation of America being invaded was done to shine a mirror on how the War On Terror was from the opposite angle (a country is the recipient of a terrorist attack, one of the perpetrators was from a nation they already have a beef with, and fueled with vengeance, launch an invasion that results in the desecration of famous monuments and much more death and destruction of people that may or may not have had anything to do with it). Even better, the main villain behind everything is an American general who did it all to drum up patriotism. Heck, the entire game is filled with quotes that are speaking out against the viewpoints of ultra-nationalism and the like.
It's why whenever I say people praise SOTL for all its rebuttals of the MW games, saying it made such games utterly irrelevant and the like (looking at you Yahtzee), or compare scenes of the two to demonstrate how the former showed the apparent realistic and disturbing true manner of the latter (Errant Signal even tried to compare the civilian massacre scenes, missing the point of the latter's), I always scoff, since they don't seem to remember that the very franchise they hate, and love SOTL for mocking, already did many of the critiques, perhaps in an even more subtle manner (yeah, I just called Modern Warfare subtle, bite me). SOTL just did it in a much more mean-spirited and antagonistic manner (for **** sake, the writer of SOTL even said he was "disturbed" by the "There's A Soldier In All Of Us" ads for Black Ops 1, seeing it as evidence of how desensitized to violence and war we are and how much these games feed into that, rather than it just being a tongue-in-cheek reference to how people of all backgrounds love the game).
It's a similar case with TLOU2. Many of the things people praise it for in terms of what it critiques have already been done, just that TLOU2 does it in a far more pretentious and heavy-handed manner that the critics love.
