I am starting a SPOILER chat with this.  Please stop reading if you don't want a spoiler.  My next thread will contain my questions, so I am starting this as an intro.  I need some stuff explained to me on what happened in the game.

***SPOILER***

I'm going to guess that one of your questions is about the HVI in the panic room. No, I have no idea either unfortunately :(

***END SPOILER***

Ok, my question is this: WTF happened in the game?  I am trying to understand a few things:

1. What happened with Sheppherd?  He ends up a traitor? See my next item.  And pardon myself if I got the name wrong.

2. Only thing in retrospect I can guess is this: After the nuke was launched over Washington, DC, ending up as an EMP pulse, it was killed a bunch of Americans, and stopped the Russians cold, plus also was meant to generate sympathy for the United States.  It was a triggered tit-for-tat, meant to cause the war to end.  However, Sheppherd got annoyed by this and felt it was necessary to end up turning it into a cause of war.  He knows what happened, and ends up kiling off individuals involved, as to not let the word get out. 

3. How exactly did the terrorist attack by Makarov (pardon the name if it is mispelled), exactly cause the chain of events to unfold.  Just because you have one rogue American in it, means that America was responsible?  It looked like plot writing by someone who creates videogames, not an actual writer.

Can someone explain what happened and the above points?  Thanks.

Nope.  I have bigger plot issues I am concerned about.  I am curious though why Price would be such a big deal they needed to break him out though.  This thread is to get answers to all that.  I figured creating one specific thread for it would be helpful.  Maybe someone else has some idea.

With Shepperd, I have no idea why he turned out to be a traitor, and I don't think very many people do.

As for the Makarov incident, you wouldn't just be a rogue American, but an American soldier, which does make it more believable that there could be a massive war as I result, IMO at least.

Figured that it would go to the U.N first, in our universe. 

Does everything like that really go to the U.N.? I think, that the Russians could perceive the original attack as the declaration of war, at which point the U.N. would be pretty useless (in terms of negotiations between US and Russia).

As for the Price thing, I can only assume it is something to do with how goddamn EPIC he is. :D

I will be very interested in this thread, cause I didn't understand shit what was going on with the plot.

In this regard especifically (storytelling), the game is crap. I'm one of the people that don't complain if a game has no plot or almost no plot, BUT, if you make the game STORY DRIVEN, you must do two things:

1 make a decent plot.
2 tell it in a way it's engaging and has some sense.

I suposse the story is good, for what I could tell, but honestly, most of the time I was just following where the game told me, not knowing why the hell.

This is all speculation answers by the way:

1) Shepperd becomes power hungry and betrays the alliance with the british to further his own goals. He wants to create a world of fear to allow for him to increase his military power. He was given "a blank check" to use what ever means necessary to take out makarov, so that's the first step in his descent into madness (too much power on his hands). He even says at the end that sign ups for the army have dwindled in recent times and by allowing makarov to do what he's done, it'll strike fear and a patriotism amongst the citizens and therefore he can easily influence them. That's why Shepperd took out Ghost and Roach, because they were about to get intel about the location of makarov, who is the symbol that Shepperd planned to use to inspire Americans to fight.

2) I can't really explain this one because I'm not sure what the question was asking.

3) The idea with the terrorist attack isn't that it was by Makarov, the whole point was they were pretending that it was Americans who did the terrorist attack. That's why when you're still in the elevator, he says "no russian", so that there's not a chance that people could think it was Russians that did it. With a dead American amongst the terrorists, I think the idea is that it was to trick people into thinking it was an American attack and that the airport security/russian police managed to "take one down". (So they used the dead body as a representative of the terrorist group, if it was a dead american terrorist, then the group must have been an american terrorist group, right?)

One thing that I didn't quite understand is the Captain price submarine bit. I thought he was meant to prevent the launch of the missile, but at the end of the mission, the dialogue seems to indicate that he wanted it to happen..

Here's what I got from a thread at GameFAQs, which makes sense:

I believe that the third paragraph could lead to a little part of the story of MW3.