Everything Wrong With Modern Warfare

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Players got a “beta” at launch… Modern Warfare is one of the best selling Call of Duty’s of all time. However, when a new Call of Duty releases it appears as if you only get half the game and have to wait another 6 months to a year before the game reaches it’s final state. Modern Warfare is no exception, at release, half of the game flat out didn’t work. At launch hundreds of thousands of PC players weren’t able to even run the game. Continuous crashing on both console and PC made the game as close to unplayable as possible. It’s almost as if Infinity Ward decided to release Modern Warfare without even testing the game out. There have been multiple updates trying to fix the crashing, some have worked, some haven’t but a month after release players are still experiencing occasional crashes.

Crashing aside, the next problem with Modern Warfare is that the in-game challenges they give players didn’t work either. There are roughly 100 challenges ranging from “Get X amount of kills with this weapon” to “Capture X amount of objectives in this game mode” that flat out did not work. After a couple updates the challenges started to work, but the progress didn’t display. Meaning if you need to get 10 kills with a pistol, and got 5 in a match and went to check your challenge it would still display 0 / 10. However, if you eventually got 10 kills with your pistol, the challenge would be completed and majority of players wouldn’t get any sort of notification or acknowledgement that the challenge was completed.

Another issue players are still experiencing, that may not be a problem to some is that each update is more than 10 GB. Some people have data caps, and can’t afford to download multiple updates each week using 100’s of GBs for Modern Warfare to patch something as small as challenges.

The developers are out of touch & lack communication… This one is directly targeted at Infinity Ward communications manager Aston Williams, and lead multiplayer developer David Mickner. Both of them are focal points for communication between the game and players, and both are pretty awful at it. For one, David has been caught “misleading” the community multiple times, and maybe even lying if you’d like to call it that. David tried to mislead the community and turn them against professional Call of Duty players by saying that “Pros have OFFICIAL channels to us and we were never informed. I fixed this in less than 5 minutes once I was aware” regarding a bug in Modern Warfare. Not only did the pros not like that and state that they don’t have official channels that are effective, the bug wasn’t actually fixed.

Ashton on the other side is more than likely just doing her job to try and promote positivity while sharing what’s changing with the game. However, she likes to label things incorrectly as “the big update”.

“The big update” I’m not sure you can even call an update. The patch in it’s entirety mostly only contains fixes for bugs, bugs that would be obvious to anybody who tested the game. The most notable part is that majority of players aren’t gaining experience (XP) which is the entire point of playing multiplayer. Not only are they not gaining profile XP, they aren’t gaining weapon XP as well. Also to go along with “the big update” they have broken laser sights on weapons as well, see for yourself:

Laser Sights Broken After Modern Warfare Update
Laser Sights Broken After Modern Warfare Update

After completing the update, they didn’t have one play tester even try out a class with a laser sight? Even one of the default classes has a laser sight.

When testing thermal sites only 1 of the few thermal sites can actually see through smokes. Is only 1 of the thermal sites supposed to see through smokes? Did they forget that they have multiple varients of thermal sites in their game? Or is it intended that not all thermal scopes can see through smokes?

Skill Based Match Making (SBMM)… It has been proven by multiple content creators that skill based match making exists in Modern Warfare. There is a strong emphasis on connection quality, but given the number of players they also put an emphasis on matching you with players in the same skill group. Skill based match making isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if you were playing a ranked game mode. However, there is no ranked play in Modern Warfare. Players looking to play quick play aren’t always looking to compete in the Call of Duty League, they are mostly looking for a casual playing experience. By matching them with players of equal skill they have to use the best weapons (because weapons in Modern Warfare aren’t even remotely balanced). Players are forced to play strategically by camping (because sound in this game is obnoxiously loud and you can hear enemies miles away).

What needs to change in Modern Warfare

  • Skill based match making
  • Weapon balancing  – We understand weapons are situational but when 1 or 2 weapons dominate in every situation something needs to change
  • The mini map – A new mini map was introduced in Modern Warfare that players dislike, why change something that’s always worked?
  • The maps themselves – Just about anybody you talk to that plays the game will tell you the map designs are awful. Bring back classics until you can make a map players like.
  • Spawns – Nothing needs to be said about this, respawn locations don’t make any sense.
  • Footstep sounds – Switch dead silence to a park if you aren’t going to actually update footstep volume.
  • Perks – Only a handful of them are useful.
  • Shadow Visibility – You can’t see players in dark corners with the new graphics engine
  • Lobbies end after each match

These are just our personal observances and opinions. If you have an opinion or another fault with Modern Warfare make sure to share them with us @GameGuideHQ_ on Twitter.

Cord is a full stack web developer by day and gamer by night. Since the early 2000's Cord has been following the competitive FPS gaming community.