November 12th, 2019
I haven’t played a Call of Duty game since Black Ops 2, mostly due to how poorly Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer was designed but also because I didn’t find any of games that followed very appealing. The “everyone is doing this so let’s do something else” ideology that led to Call of Duty 4’s smashing success starts getting a little obnoxious when it gets taken to its extremes, and Call of Duty has certainly suffered from that in recent years. “Everyone’s doing modern so let’s go into THE FUTURE.” “People are bored of the future on Earth so let’s do the future ON MARS.”
This went on for some time, reminding people not only of games that did sci-fi shooting better (Halo) but also the one that did fast-paced, twitch shooting, wall running games better (Titanfall). Fortunately someone at Infinity Ward woke up one day and went “Hey what if we just take what worked for us last time and put some actual damn effort into it again?” so now we have a reboot of the Modern Warfare series with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
Liked
Sound design: The first thing you’ll probably notice about Modern Warfare (after the game forces you to wait through installing all the shaders on PC) is the much improved sound design. Gunshots are deafening, explosions make everything shake, and the game encourages situational awareness through hearing footsteps rather than just running around with your eyes on your radar. I love the footstep change especially, as it reminds me of playing Rainbow Six: Siege without all the “If you die once you’re dead forever” punishing difficulty of that experience. Modern Warfare still feels like Call of Duty but it sounds like Battlefield, and with some of the other steps that Modern Warfare takes to get closer to Battlefield I have to wonder what DICE is going to do to stand out. But more on that later.
Weapon attachments: Call of Duty 4 only allowed for one weapon attachment at a time, and Modern Warfare 2 required a perk to use two attachments. The idea was that each attachment was a trade-off: do you want to be silent or aim better, have more ammo or use a grenade launcher, etc. This seems very quaint when you’re playing the new Modern Warfare, as most weapons can have up to five attachments at a time. Now you can have a silencer, a grenade launcher, an ACOG scope, and extended mags all at once if you want it, you mad bastard, but even that may not be optimal. Earlier Call of Duty games had attachments give limited value in terms of affecting a gun’s stats, but now with over seventy attachments per gun it leads to a lot of min-maxing as you try to find the right combination of barrels, muzzles, scopes, magazines, grips, laser sights, stocks, mounts, and perks to attach to your weapons without sacrificing too much damage output or accuracy. And yes I said “perks,” since some perks like Slight of Hand have been relegated to being attached to weapons now rather than taking up valuable space in your build. Some people were worried that this system would lead to even more abuse, but I can tell you right now that this is the first Call of Duty I’ve played where I haven’t been assailed by grenade launchers, so I’d say this change is for the best.
Crossplay: This is the first game I’ve played with crossplay features, but I must say it’s amazing to play games with my console friends again.
Graphics: There’s a lot of buzzwords surrounding the visuals in Modern Warfare, thanks in part to the same trailer they keep blasting during commercial breaks, but it’s impossible to deny that Modern Warfare looks great. The scenes where you use night vision goggles in particular are spectacular, but I have no real complaints about the visuals outside of some glitches and clothes blowing in the wind.
Willing to make changes: There is a big emphasis on player character call outs in Modern Warfare, with multiplayer characters shouting when they spot enemies, take friendly fire, deploy claymores, and other actions that the game thinks you might want to know. It’s helpful but until recently it was also really ridiculous because your opponents could hear the call outs too. So you’d sneak behind someone only for your character to scream in their ear “ENEMY NEARBY”, which obviously is a problem for those of us that like being sneaky. Fortunately Infinity Ward has changed this recently so enemies can’t hear these noises any more, and when coupled with other changes they’ve made in the lead up to the game’s release this shows how the developers are willing to listen to feedback, which I really appreciate.
Campaign moments: Modern Warfare’s campaign has a lot of problems that we’ll get into later, but the moments when it works really are something. It never quite reaches the brilliance of Call of Duty 4’s best levels, which are so well known by this point that I won’t even list them, but they’re good levels all the same. Most of the positive moments come from the game highlighting a lot of the uncertainty that comes from modern combat, where enemy combatants may be living among and dressed as civilians. The house clearing level in this game is one of these great instances, where you’re going room by room in an apartment building with no idea who in the building is going to pull a gun on you and who is just trying to live their lives in peace. It gets especially painful when a civilian whose life you just saved freaks out and grabs a fallen gun off the floor, forcing you to shoot them too. These are choices and themes that you don’t really see in mainline FPS games, which makes it memorable, but unfortunately the rest of the story in between these moments is less than ideal.
Neutral
Repetition in the campaign: How do you sour a great moment in a video game? Make people keep doing it over and over again. Modern Warfare’s campaign is nothing if not repetitive, taking great moments like its house clearing level and forcing you to do it multiple times, which brings down the whole experience. Progress on campaign levels is routinely halted by a machine gun emplacement or entrenched sniper that is bulletproof until you flank them, so much so that it becomes the only memorable part of that particular level when you’re forced to traverse a certain way or throw your flash grenades in certain places just to advance to the next “safe zone.” Drones are routinely used as well for orbital attacks or suicide bombings, but they’re so powerful and recharge so frequently that you can either save your ammo and spam them or feel forced to hide as they recharge because the game throws “hard targets” at you that you need to use the drones to destroy. Titanfall showed us that variety is the spice of life, especially in FPS games where “shoot guy and shoot guy again” can get boring quickly, but Modern Warfare takes its five good moments and then just repeats them throughout the whole single player experience.
Co-Op: Call of Duty has had an interesting relationship with co-op, be it split screen or PvE. Modern Warfare includes a series of co-op campaign missions that are certainly more interesting than what Modern Warfare 2 provided, going for a sort of mini-campaign with its own unique maps rather than MW2’s scenarios set on multiplayer maps, though there are shorter scenarios in Modern Warfare as well. Players can also bring in their multiplayer builds and unlocks into co-op and gain experience, but the experience is so minuscule it’s not even worth talking about. Once you get over the initial impressions of “Oh hey look at this large map” and “man I hate getting stuck with random people in this four player mission” you’ll find that the levels are surprisingly difficult, with enemies spawning from every direction imaginable in hordes. The AI might be dumb (and I mean incredibly dumb) but their numbers advantage is also reinforced by suicide bombers and juggernaut enemies, which aren’t the most fun enemies to fight, especially when you aren’t playing with friends. Skip it unless you’ve got three buddies and patience.
Map design: Modern Warfare might be the first FPS that I’ve enjoyed where I hate almost every map. Every time a game map loads I roll my eyes and mutter “oh man not HERE again…” to the point where I think the only map I like is Gun Runner, a train yard map with various sight lines and surprising angles of attack without feeling like you’re being spawn camped. Every other map has obnoxious lines of sight, asymmetry that feels like it influences one team more than another, questionable map design that feels like you spawn on top of enemies, or poor lighting. There have been two new maps added recently that I’ve read people like quite a bit, but at the moment I really don’t enjoy the maps that came with the base game.
Balance: Along with the asymmetrical maps there are weapon balance issues as well, for better or for worse. The M4 is one of, if THE, best assault rifles in the game, and you get it super early so almost every player is using it in every game, which gets a little boring. The two unlockable sniper rifles are far better than the Dragunov, but why use a sniper rifle at all when the shotguns have such absurd range that until the balance patch last week they were able to kill someone half a world away. I haven’t played enough since the patch to know exactly what the impact of the recent nerfs to the main shotgun, M4, and some other tweaks have had on the game, but I’m glad that they’re willing to make adjustments.
Attachments grind: With dozens and dozens of attachments it gets a little annoying when it takes a LONG time to unlock some of the most interesting pieces of gun gear. Call of Duty has had unlockable weapons for a long time, but with the limited attachments it didn’t feel like such a grind. I love all the variety that the attachments potentially offer, but when you unlock six differently shaped reflex sights one right after another it gets really boring really fast. But at least you don’t have to pay for them…
Season pass?: At time of writing there is no season pass in Modern Warfare, but it’s going to be coming out in December. I don’t know what’s going to be in it, and Infinity Ward has been worryingly quiet about it. I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt at this point, especially since there was a suggestion that you can unlock some of the content even if you don’t buy into the season pass, but if you read this before the season pass comes out just know that it’s coming and no one knows what it will be.
Hated
Technical issues: There are many small technical issues in Modern Warfare (at least on PC) that are distracting enough to ruin the experience. Some of these stem from the campaign, with severe lag during cutscenes and one level where a facial scarf that you wear is constantly flickering. Multiplayer has its own challenges as well, including strange glitches where the game screen is black until you play your first game, shader installations freezing, gun paint not properly appearing during team previews, and certain characters being unnaturally highlighted in pre-game cutscenes. Some of these issues are being patched, but it’s a little shoddy to see in a AAA release.
Ground War: Modern Warfare’s big shot at Battlefield, other than its excellent sound design, is Ground War, a territory capture gameplay mode that could be mistaken for taking place on smaller Battlefield maps. There are vehicles, large teams, and a LOT of agony if you aren’t one of those people who enjoys the thought of flying a helicopter to the top of the a tall building, bailing out, and sniping all the poor fools just trying to play the actual game. Some people seem to love this mode but I hate it, I will never stop hating it, and if I have my way I will never play it again.
Modern horrors for your enjoyment: Infinity Ward wants you to think about the “horrors of war” in this game, and while it certainly presents such horrors it does them in a very “video game” way. You’re tortured and it’s turned into a quicktime event, children murdering the man that killed their father is played as a stealth boss fight, and even the house raids lose their impact where you can accidentally kill civilians and just reload to avoid it. Video games aren’t a great medium for this sort of thing unless you specifically design parts of the game around it, and Infinity Ward is too interested in making “cinematic experiences.”
In the dark: Modern Warfare’s commercials love to show you its night vision goggles, and in the levels it lets you play with them it does a great job. However there are at least three campaign levels where night vision googles would be FANTASTIC and you aren’t given them to use, even when the characters are in a situations where they would have access to such equipment. “Hey guys let’s sneak into an enemy base in the middle of night with no night vision. Welcome to Modern Warfare.”
The multiplayer being great and the single player campaign being bland with spikes of brilliance is about what one might stereotypically expect from a Call of Duty game, but the amount of effort they’ve put into the sound design and how good many of the guns feel to use makes this the most fun I’ve had in a non-Rainbow Six multiplayer FPS in the last five years. My two main concerns are the season pass and the inevitability of every player unlocking the final Red Perk that turns your killstreaks into scorestreaks, which is what killed Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer for me. But at this point this reboot of the Modern Warfare franchise is something that I’m more than happy to play for a good while.
At least until the Master Chief Collection is released on PC.
