Modern Warfare 2 Set to Disappoint PC Gamers

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news:

Imagine you were an executive in charge of a very successful game developer. To date, all of your games have sold incredibly well, and gamers just can't seem to get enough. The next game queued for release is a big one. One that anyone who's played any game from the series would want to play. To live up to the hype, would you give gamers what they'd expect, and more, or go the opposite direction, and give them less, or much less?

As hard as it may be to believe, Infinity Ward seems content to take the latter route with the PC version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Before you say, "It can't be that bad!", hold off, because you might just regret it. One of the biggest concerns fans of the series have is the lack of dedicated servers. That's right... rather than have all gamers in a given match hook up to a centralized server, they will instead be connecting to one server, which would be hosted by an involved player.

The biggest issue with this is the lack of stability. If the player you're connected to gets disconnected from the Internet, that means a foolish five-second delay in the match for everyone else. Then there's the issue that whoever hosts the game (the game chooses who hosts it) would have a 0ms ping, while the rest of the players certainly wouldn't. To carry into this issue comes another... the maximum amount of players per round. It's been dropped to 9v9, or 18 total, which is a stark contrast to the 40 that was allowed in the previous few titles.

Think this is all bad? It gets even worse. First, no more console. That means, that hosts of servers will be unable to adjust specific features, and on the single-player side, gamers will no longer be able to change their FOV or quickly load a specific level, among other things. Second, the ability for gamers to mod the game is gone, which has its obvious downsides. There's even more, so I recommend checking out the article below to see the rest.

As a huge fan of the CoD series (multi-player primarily... I've never beaten a single-player campaign), Modern Warfare is looking to be a huge letdown in so many ways. With all that's dropped, I actually feel thankful that LAN play has been retained, since that's one feature I use often. Despite all the disadvantages of MW2, a feature has been added to have your player profile based online, which will be hugely appreciated by anyone who's lost it before (it sucks to re-level up). Still, Infinity Ward has clearly pushed the wrong button of many gamers, and it shouldn't be too much longer to see if that will affect PC sales.

This is, for all intents and purposes, a console game that plays on your PC. You won't be able to make any tweaks, you can't adjust anything, and even better? You won't be able to make recordings of your matches. The question in the chat showed just how far the gulf between what gamers want and what Infinity Ward is giving them has become. "Is there a /record feature? Answer yes... please. We're trying to give you a 'chance'," the gamer asked. The answer was a simple "No."

Source: Ars Technica

[erick.mendes]

It's quite simple when you put it in perspective...

They want to make the PC version a no-seller, pushing player of MW2 to get it on console instead of PC.

Firstly, it looked to me as a plain simple dumb shoot in the foot toes, but it make a lot of sense.

PC sales of big franchise games is a big issue for console makers. It hurt it's sales pretty bad. So WHAT IF Microsoft and Sony had talked to Infinity Wards to convince it someway to cripple it's next BIG HIT on the PC side, so it would rather than make a big splash on PC game sales, revert it's selling potential to the console side, even beefing up a bit console sales.

It's a clearly planned move. They would have shame of it.

I can't acuse Microsoft nor Sony of it, but seriously, there must be some hidden interested party behind it that main objective is to hurt PC games sales.

[RobbyBob]

This is the reason that PC gaming is in the crapper. And companies like EA and others blame piracy as the major factor in their sales. So what they do with that is they take out major pieces of the game or they resort to DRM measures.

And the reason that Infinity Ward is doing their thing is not because they want only the console version to sell well. PC games have a tendency to have really long community lifespans. I can think of many games that came out 5+ years ago on the PC that still have an active community. IW doesn't want that. IW plans on releasing sequels YEARLY. They're milking a cash cow. If the PC version is seriously gimped, then they virtually eliminate online communities. And notice how console games almost never have lasting online communities.

So IW's motivation is definitely cash only as opposed to creative passion. If a game has a lasting community it tends to affect sales of a sequel, if only in a minuscule way.

Edit:

They want to make the PC version a no-seller, pushing player of MW2 to get it on console instead of PC.

If they wanted to make the PC version a no-seller they would have just not released a PC version. Otherwise it doesn't make sense going through all the packaging and labor costs just to release something that they don't want to sell.

[Rob Williams]

Erick, you make some great points, and I hate to admit it, but I might agree with you on a few. It does bug the hell out of me, that Infinity Ward, a developer who first became famous because of the first CoD game on the PC, is now shunning it. It's not fair, and given there is a huge market for the game on the PC, some of the company's decisions seem asinine.

RobbyBob, I agree on the piracy issue. I don't side with anyone who pirates anything, but what Infinity Ward is doing here is shooting themselves in the foot. They released a game with lacking features against the wishes of 200,000 petitioners, and now when the game is pirated to high heaven, they'll never fall back on it being themselves as the cause (of course IW is not the only cause... some people will pirate anything regardless of cost).

I've played Modern Warfare 2 for about 9 hours total so far, between the SP campaign, Special Ops and multi-player (LAN only at the time-being). So far, I am loving every aspect of the game, but it's easy to see where shortcuts were taken, especially in the graphics department. Although the game looks gorgeous, there are obvious graphic anomalies that are the result of this game being a port, not a true PC title.

Take the screenshot I've included here. This is a mission earlier on in the game, and I'm running 1920x1200 with absolute maxed detail settings. Look at the building in the background, which by the looks of things, is only 100' from me. It's comprised of ultra-low resolution textures, and is reminiscent of something you'd see way in the background, not on a building that you could almost throw a rock at.

I won't show any more screenshots since most of what I have to prove my point are later on in the game. The main issue I have is that background textures aren't at all realistic. In some games, if you look way in the distance, you still can imagine it being real. But here, you can tell the textures/buildings/environments in the background are just images and nothing but. It doesn't really detract from the gameplay, but it's certainly not what you'd expect to see from a top-rate PC game.

Luckily though, the graphics aside from these are simply amazing. There are some parts that will have you say "wow", and in particular, some could even be considered breathtaking (such as snowmobiling down a massive hill in an earlier mission).

The Special Ops is a LOT of fun, despite feeling like an after-thought. They're more fun when you are playing alongside someone with some skill, and won't be too careless, because that could mean a mission lost. On some of the harder difficulties, some of these Special Ops missions are hard, but still very fun.

I'm having enough fun with this game to review it, so I hope to have something post for it next week... perhaps with some benchmarking information as well.

[Doomsday]

cant wait to play it!!