If you’re into First Person Shooters, you’re either excited about the Modern Warfare 2 trailers or you just lied about the first part of that sentence. Shame on you. Modern Warfare 2 is the latest in the incredibly popular Call of Duty series, even though it claims nothing to do with Call of Duty at all.

It’s the embodiment of the CoD4/World at War split. The fact is that Infinity Ward owns Call of Duty - never mind paperwork, or licenses, or any silly matters of “legal possession.” Anyone on any CoD4 server, ever, will tell you that their super-tight shooter made the series theirs forever. The fact that Treyarch made another game after that (a rather fine World War II shooter in its own right) really doesn’t really enter in. Though there are thousands on World at War servers who’d disagree.

What do the trailers tell us? As multi-players, not a whole lot. There are a whole bunch of single-player factors like the return of Soap, the shadow of Zakhaev, civilians, snowmobiles, and various other things about as likely to affect online play as a lead-lined box in a Farady cage. What we want to know is: what can we expect on the next generation of Modern Warfare servers?

For one thing: brilliance. The developers have stated that they’re thinking of multiplayer this time - which implies they created the single sharpest multiplayer shooter in existence by accident last time, some sort of hilarious software-coding slapstick with people flailing at keyboards and hitboxes without really trying. More than that, they created the world’s first MMOFPS (Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter). You’ve already got levels and unlocked abilities, persistent between different “quests” (different modes and opponents on different CoD4 servers) - the only things you’d need to add to create a full MMO are the crappy bits: walking from mission to mission, talking to people to buy stuff, shooting hundreds of things that aren’t other people to level up.

There are a few elements from the trailer which could be multiplayable. The first are the riot-shields, deployed (to virtually no effect) in a crowded battle. Any counter-strike server veterans will tell you that the riot shield is slightly less use than just gluing yourself to a wall, without the increased stability. We can hope that Infinity Ward will balance it a bit better. The clear panelling is a definite step forward, meaning you no longer sacrifice both your gun AND your eyes for the ability to crouch until you’re shot in the side anyway, but since it usually means “Give up your primary weapon” it’s unlikely to be a popular option.

The key to whether this is a new game or just a level pack will be in the integration of modern elements. If it hadn’t been half as good as it was, CoD4 would have scored enormously simply for not being set in World War Can-We-Go-Home-Now-II, but it’s true success was the application of intelligence and airstrikes (which were so good they were brought into CoD5 servers despite not being physically possible in the setting).

It’s hard to imagine what else they could add, but that’s why they develop the games and we play them. The trailer does refer to aiming Hellstrike missiles, a possible upgrade to the Airstrike option, but giving it a different name won’t change the effect it has on the game. What we do know for sure is come November, we’ll be running Modern Warfare 2 servers and vigorously testing them.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.