Month: November 2009

Infinity Ward castrates Modern Warfare 2

As Ars Technica says: “You have to wonder if there are any actual PC gamers working at Infinity Ward”.

When MW2 was first announced I have to admit I was salivating. Infinity Ward has made some of my favorite FPS games. So the sequel to Modern Warfare had me getting all ready for a couple of months not playing World of Warcraft to frag some n00bs (or, be fragged, as the case may be).

Then, IW dropped the bomb that they wouldn’t be allowing hosted servers. They were moving to a centralized system where their own servers choose a users machine to host the game and others playing there, sort of like consoles. That was bad. The great thing about CoD games was that clans would build great communities around their servers. If you found a great server, you could keep going there. Clans would build maps, fix physics, add weapons; you know, enhancing an already great game.

This is an important point in that the hosted server community was a huge reason the Call of Duty games were so popular. Clans spent innumerable hours building on top of the game to make it that much better. Tournaments and ranking systems grew, motivating people to keep playing. Now, with that community hobbled, all that community was going to be hard to maintain.

Then, two developers from IW did an online interview to promote the game and dropped the remaining bushel of shoes.

The short list:

  • no console

  • no choice on host

  • if the host leaves, the games pauses for 5 seconds (yeah, right) while the system selects a new host

  • no ability to lean (a regression)

  • can’t record a match (meh)

  • no ability for players to kick or ban cheaters, hackers, or plain or douche bags

Good luck with that, IW. All of this and it only costs $60. The price tag had given me pause, but with a feature set like that, I’ll be skipping this. I’d hope the games tanks so that other PC game makers won’t repeat these idiotic development decisions, but that’s wishful thinking. The game will still sell millions of copies; I just won’t be one of the throngs plunking down my cash.

PC Modern Warfare 2: it’s much worse than you thought – Ars Technica.