You’ve probably heard about Modern Warfare 3′s controversial scene, or at least are aware of it. After Modern Warfare and MW2, it’s pretty much expected to have a shocking, powerful moment in the game that really hits you in the pathos. A soldier you played through a mission dying in a sudden and unexpected nuclear attack and seeing his vision fade as he’s overcome by radiation poisoning, an airport full of civilians getting killed by terrorists as you’re helpless to do anything, and so on. Modern Warfare 3 has one big moment like that, and a few that call back to it. Unfortunately, it fails at making any of those moments powerful or deep.

Spoilers ahead, so don’t read on if you haven’t played through the game (or specifically if you haven’t played through the game and don’t want it to be spoiled).

Halfway through the game, you play a father with his wife and daughter in Paris, recording them with a camcorder. A truck pulls up, stops, and the driver runs away. The girl walks near the truck and it explodes. Everyone dies.

I’m not making light of this scene. It’s exactly what happens, and it’s exactly how powerful it sounds. Really dark, powerful on paper, but in the end a bland summary of events. Family. Van. Camcorder. Boom. It tries to be the nuke in Modern Warfare or the No Russian mission in Modern Warfare 2, but it falls flat. There’s no weight in the scene, just a bunch of strangers dying.

This is how not to make a powerful scene. Infinity Ward screwed up in several ways, and instead of being a memorable thing that gamers will talk about for years, it ends up being a really dark Robot Chicken sketch.

The scene was too abrupt. It was sudden, short, and meaningless. No attempt is made to make these people seem like people we should relate to. They have no story, no personality, no names. Every character you play in the game until then was given a name and an identity, even if it was just their callsign and group. Daddy Noname and Mommy and Susan Noname didn’t register as any sort of characters. Poof, they’re there. Poof, they’re gone.

The scene was too obvious. You know a big, powerful moment is going to happen in the game. You probably heard about the scene already, or were at least aware of it. You know as soon as you’re dropped into the shoes of Daddy Noname that he and his family are goners. The mother might have just said, “This is a great vacation we’re enjoying in Paris as a typical American family! Before we visit the Eiffel Tower, honey, should we all die in an explosion of chemical weapons and pathos?”

The scene was too unimportant. The nuke in Modern Warfare gave a sudden and stark end to a character you were playing for some time, and established that the threat is greater than was thought. “No Russian” started the Russian war with America and brought Makarov’s plans into the big picture. This scene kills some strangers suddenly. Before and after it, you see many people in Paris die. You climb over bodies killed in the chemical attack. A comrade in the French special forces says most of his men were killed in their barracks during the attack. You hear over the radio that every civilian in the Louvre died. All of these things are more powerful and disturbing than the Random Noname Family that suddenly pops up just to die. There’s no build-up, no connection, and no relevance. Worse yet, because the scene basically screams “Pay attention to how sudden and dark this scene is!” it undermines all the bodies you step over after it. It calls out these people as important, marking every corpse in Paris who also died during the attacks (and these attacks happened all over the city Europe, meaning the deaths are easily in the thousands in Paris and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, outside France) as just set pieces.

Infinity Ward needs to pull back for the next Modern Warfare game. Drama and powerful moments are great if you can pull them off and there’s a place for them in the story, but here there just wasn’t. Or rather, there wasn’t room for this specific moment. And, sadly, trying for force tragedy into a story that already has plenty of horror and loss just cheapens that horror and loss by contrast.