Hold onto your butts everyone, because I’m about to spoil an eleven year old game. The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 remaster surprise landed on PS4 this week, and it’s a completely faithful remake of the memorable campaign — with one tiny insignificant change. If you kill the main villain early, you’ll unlock a hidden trophy called Precognitive Paranoia. You’ll save everyone a whole lot of trouble and it’s an extremely easy secret to unlock for yourself.
This is a mirror to the previous Modern Warfare remaster, where you could kill series villain Makarov before even knowing who he was in a sniping mission — though, that was a meatier addition. Not only did the MW1 remaster include Makarov, a character that didn’t originally exist in MW1, it also included a retcon from MW3. It’s difficult to explain it all here. Let’s just say that the Shepherd Easter egg was possible even in the original game — but you didn’t earn a fancy trophy for taking the shot.
How To Earn The ‘Precognitive Paranoia’ Hidden Trophy
The new hidden trophy can be earned in the tutorial mission. After training your Afghan soldiers and shooting some targets, you’ll go to a timed obstacle course. General Shepherd — a man in a beret and a mustache, is standing watch over the proceedings. He’s located right above the gate to the obstacle course.
To earn the hidden trophy and get a special ending, all you have to do is shoot General Shepherd dead.
If you’ve played MW2, you’ll know why — in a shocking, kind of nonsensical, twist, it turns out that General Shepherd is the villain of the story. Instead of being a patsy for Makarov, General Shepherd purposefully helped the Russian terrorist to try and instigate a war between America and Russia. He’s doing it for revenge against the Russian Separatists that supplied nukes to the middle-eastern tyrant that set-off an atomic bomb in Modern Warfare 1.
It’s hard to describe how nonsensical and convoluted the plot of Modern Warfare 2 is. The paragraph above doesn’t explain the insane leaps in logic, the unfilled plot holes, or the general ridiculousness of everyone’s hard-to-explain behavior. Why does Shepherd have his own secret mercenary army? Why does Taskforce 141 let Makarov escape? I can’t explain any of these things. All I know is that shooting Shepherd early probably would save the world a whole lot of heartache in this weird fictional universe.
