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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
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
