It wasn’t that long ago when Call of Duty was just about the bees knees to gamers of any stripe. In fact, as part of our 100th issue celebrations Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare got voted as one of the greatest shooters of all time. It’s quite amazing, then, to look at how the PC community – or at least Atomic’s iteration thereof – looks at the CoD franchise.
Hint: it’s generally pretty negative.
Generally, every trailer and news item to do with the brand is met with responses that range from ‘who cares?’ to ‘Activision killed, dismembered, and then sodomised my cat’. Perhaps the most eloquent (not to mention less abuse-filled) comment came from the curiously-name Xyzzy Frobozz, commenting on one of the DLC releases for Black Ops:
“The next COD is going to have to go in a pretty radical new direction before I'll look at buying it. I'm sick of having the same old girl in new clothes being wheeled out twice a year. To top it off, I then have to invest in the new map packs so I don't end up being kicked out of every second game...”That sums it up pretty well. The PC audience is tired of re-tasked code and graphics, the same-old game with the same-old perks, the relentless crawl of paid DLC and the feeling that those who do invest will have the edge.
It’s basically the case, then, based on our hands-on time with Modern Warfare 3, that the Xyzzy Frobozzes of the world are going to be less than thrilled with Activision’s and Infinity Ward’s latest milking of the giant CoD cashcow.
Some changes...
Straight up front, we’ve got to say that Infinity Ward is really making an effort to appeal to a wider market with Modern Warfare 3, and on paper it sounds great. Kill streak rewards have seen arguably the biggest change, and have now been separated out into three streams – assault, support and specialist. The assault package is your classic CoD stuff, with lots of killy rewards to reward to the killiest of players. Support, on the other hand, is more defensive in nature, bringing in UAVs, buffing team mates with extra armour and so on.
The Specialist package sounds very interesting, too, essentially unlocking more and more perks with more and kills. This is basically the perfect lone wolf package, as its possible to end up with every perk if you’re really on the ball.
The aim of these changes is to open up the game to match the way people want to play it. Great idea on paper, but having played around with the different packages, it still feels as though it’s the guy with the most kills who’ll be rewarded the best toys. It is great to have objectives like caps and defusals count toward kill streaks, but it’s not enough of a change given the inherent run-gun-respawn nature of CoD’s basic gameplay.
The new map mode, Confirmed Kill, is another great idea that still can’t quite pull the game back toward something we want to play. The idea is that to score a kill, you must not only put the enemy down, but then collect their dog-tags. This simple mechanic accomplishes a lot of things – it rewards team-play, as you can collect tags for team mates, and deny tags to the enemy. It forces campers and snipers to work with their team, so that there’s always someone around to capitalise on their pwning skills. It also lessens the impact of some of the more offensive kill streak rewards – if you can get to the site of that recent missile strike you can deny a mess of tags to the enemy. Of course, if you’re too slow, someone’s going to have a great time – as happened in our hands on session – wandering to the site and collecting whole metric arseload of win.
Most things stay the same
Despite all these tweaks – and there’s more, like weapon-levelling, new equipment, and so on – Modern Warfare 3 still looks, feels, and plays more or less the same as every game that came before it. This is even more apparent on console, where there’s really nothing new to the graphics at all – in fact, we’re really getting tired of that same death animation we’ve been seeing since CoD4!
Confirmed Kill is a rare ray of light, but it still suffers under the more general issues of the modern CoD. Hitboxes are either miniscule or comedically large, as is often highlight by the kill-cam, hit-registration is way off even on knife strikes, and the fact that you can now not only kit-out a weapon with different items (such as scopes and suppressors) as well as fiddle with recoil, stability and hitting power, simply means you can no longer rely on simple weapon-recognition to know what you’re up against. Not that CoD is really about that kind of strategy aforethought these days anyway...
And on top of all that, it’s still such a fast, explosion-filled and loud experience, with spawns placing you anywhere on the map, that it’s simple not our kind of game anymore. There seemed to be an overall shape to CoD4 matches which is simply lacking in more modern iterations. At the same time, it also seems pointless to be even talking about disliking it – Activision and Infinity Ward are quite simply not making this game for gamers like me, or many of the folks on Atomic.
There are millions out there who are going to love what IW’s bringing to MW3, and for them, the new modes and gameplay elements will be enough to spark interest, while the underlying similarity to the last two CoD games will mean it’s still very familiar. It’s a recipe for success.
Why fight it?
Posted by: Sam P
Twitter: SammyRascall
19/9/11
