Modern Warfare 2 Declared: Addendum
Know when you were a kid and your cat died? And mom explained it went to kitty heaven, where the biggest, most awesomest scratching post awaits? That’s the game industry. In a world where The Dark Knight wins fans with anti-heroes and morality redefined, Starcraft II won’t have LAN functionality because Battle.net is so amazing, you wouldn’t want to play the game offline!!1
In a world where the average gamer is 29, your overlords treat you like children. That’s why I waited to judge the Modern Warfare 2 clusterfuck. Now I can judge.
On November 3rd, Best Buy hosted a question-and-answer developer chat. It only took a few thousand keystrokes for Infinity Ward to bury a platform and the consumers that made Call of Duty the biggest gaming event of the year.
Modern Warfare 2 would be capped to nine-versus-nine matches, a pleasant surprise for 100-plus-player clans that rely on sixty-four-player dedicated servers. The InfinityWard.net matchmaking model uses player hosting, presumably granting hosts a significant latency advantage. The game will not feature a console (programming prompt) because the company “would like you to play the game the way [they] designed and balanced it.” The ability to lean, once a critical gameplay tactic, won’t be included because “the game is not balanced for lean.” There will be no ability to record replays, likely cut in favor of the console development cycle.
And that 196,000-signature petition? According to an Infinity Ward rep, Robert Bowling (the company’s community manager) signed it four times, so who gives a shit what you think?
The people who work for Infinity Ward (or those who tell them what to say) bought their own Kool-Aid. Modern Warfare was the epic, fuckstaining, Halo-killing, babypunching opus for video game gun fetishists. They thought PC gamers would throw up their arms and play it anyway. No lean? You’ll get used to it. No server model? Look at the pretty matchmaking system! No console? It’ll be fine.
And then you look at X-Fire’s daily stats, where 2005’s Call of Duty 2 fights it out with 2007’s Modern Warfare while 2008’s World at War barely registers. (Yes, I am aware Treyarch developed World at War.) But I guess if Infinity Ward is to abandon the platform that made them famous, we can at least thank you for the previous installments. Your once-benevolent fan base will play those instead.
Note: Edited for general flow. Thanks, Littlesaltz.
November 8th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Wow, we agree on something…wholeheartedly. The only nitpick I have is P2P doesn’t “presumably” give the host a latency advantage, that’s EXACTLY what it does, because that’s how P2P works…there’s something horribly wrong if you can’t ping your own PC at 0ms.
So yeah. Fuck MW2, fuck IW. I will not buy this POS, and if anybody here cares about PC gaming, you won’t, either.
November 8th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
You can’t even blame Bobby Kotick for that disaster because he doesn’t play video games and therefore probably didn’t tell them to remove lean and dedicated servers because he doesn’t know what those things are.
November 8th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
@grmnasasin0227
Of course I won’t, I’m downloading it and so should you; the SP of the first was acceptable.
And there are P2P models that don’t give advantage to the host. Take Starcraft for example: if not everyone received the last information, the game freezes for everyone (you can still move the camera). I don’t think they’ll implement that method though.
@article: What I’m surprised and makes me sad is that so many PC players care about MW2 as a MP title. Do they get owned at other titles so they want to move on? It’s not like they’re very different anyway. It’s only for the graphics?
I’m usually happy with MP titles and don’t need to move on on a yearly basis. Specially since the balance and the competitiveness comes years after the release.
@ghetto, if you’re not ok with piracy talk just say it. I know it’s a concern for most websites, even small ones.
November 8th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
@grmnasasin0227: I’m just using “presumably” as a disclaimer. Everyone will get to see how the game holds up in a couple of days…if anyone is playing it.
@h4x: At worst, it’s indirect. There is always the possibility that the game is meeting deadlines and they couldn’t make it work…and even then, that would be unusual.
@Shalafi: Use whatever discretion you feel is necessary. I’m pretty sure this blog is low on the totem when it comes to corporate’s war on software piracy.
November 8th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
November 8th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Actually, I would caution against pirating it; I will be getting the .iso from a friend who is buying, not from a site. The reason I say don’t torrent is because I don’t want to give them a scapegoat for poor sales. Developers are quick to pull the OH SHEET PIRACY STEALIN AWR GAEMS card, but I really don’t want to give them the option. I want the lack of sales to be solely their problem, and the lack of people buying the PC version should be deafening.
November 9th, 2009 at 6:26 am
It’ll be hard to play the PC piracy card for them after people played pirated MW2 for a week over XBL before the game even got released officially.
November 9th, 2009 at 7:15 am
@grmnasasin0227: the will, anyway. They don’t need it to be true to say it. If they have to justify poor PC sales, they’ll say it is the piracy. (And they’ll have to, because I don’t think it’ll sell).
@h4x: but they won’t have to justify poor sales on the 360 since it’ll sell lots of copies, so they won’t say a thing.
Playing the piracy card is not hard (no one is going to jump in the conference and say “lies!”), you can use it even if the game doesn’t have a working crack and has 200 downloads on TPB.
November 9th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Funny …..all gaming companies are turning into EA …..
November 9th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
While I would normally agree with that, EA actually looks like saints right now because of their close ties to Bioware…they’re giving us ME2 in January, and it’ll be the best RPG released to date.
November 9th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
I’ve to admit that EA didn’t ruin Bioware as I expected. For now.
But the fact that Mass Effect 3 is already scheduled (and 2 is not even released yet) doesn’t look like a good sign.
November 9th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
What the fuck is wrong with that? Mass Effect was always intended to be a trilogy.
November 10th, 2009 at 7:11 am
“Mass Effect was originally conceived as a trilogy, but EA has confirmed that Mass Effect “will be a franchise for [EA] for a very long time”
November 10th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Yes, so DLC and unofficial canon notwithstanding, they have to…hold on, let me break this down for you…MAKE A 3RD GAME. I don’t care when they start making it, it’s Bioware’s story line, and there’s several books out that they’re following…that’s like saying “WHAT THE FUCK GUYS STAR WARS 2 ISN’T EVEN IN THEATERS YET AND THEY’RE ALREADY WORKING ON THE 3RD ONE”…of course they are, everybody knows it’s a trilogy…the 2nd game is done.
November 18th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Well truth be told, EA are trying to change it seems. Take Dead Space ….sure it was a pretty basic survival-horror but at the same time, it wasn’t a total piece of crap. Since then they’ve started noticing that not fucking up games helps them. I want to see C&C 4 since it has potential of being great. (They gain 1 million billion points from the start by removing the “1 unit beats all” tactic)