DuRuS takes a look at how Modern Warfare 2 is going to cope competitively after day one

Modern Warfare 2 is going to be the biggest selling game ever if it carries on at the rate it is going. There were people queuing outside the stores all round the country for a midnight launch. But the majority of people that have been buying this game are buying it for the consoles - either the Xbox 360 or the PS3.

Here at Cadred.org we are most concerned with the PC version of the game, and especially the competitive aspects of it. There has been a lot of speculation about this game for the last month or so, after InfinityWard announced some of the changes they were bringing in.

We knew there wasn’t going to be any dedicated servers and that they wouldn’t allow MODs to be brought in, something that most people thought would completely ruin the competitive aspects of the game. With a lot of people waiting to buy their game before they know if it is going to be playable in a competitive situation, I have taken the opportunity to try the game and see how it would fair in a competitive sense.

I have spent several hours trying out the game and speaking to some of the biggest players in the UK scene to try and work out exactly how the game works, as well as how it would play in a match situation. Could money be put up for grabs on a game of MW2?

The maps are not going to work in a S&D format. Though some are small enough, they are too open.

The first thing people will notice is the lack of dedicated servers. Though this has been known about for some time, it was still quite irritating to not be able to choose the server I wanted to go on. It feels very much like the console version of the game, a reoccurring theme of the entire game. Once IWNet had found me a server, I immediately saw that the majority of the issues we all had with not having dedicated servers weren’t actually going to affect the game that badly.

When playing in a competition one of the major issues when playing online is lag, the time it takes for your connection to go to the server and then come back to your PC. Most people would be happy to play Call of Duty 4 on under 50ms, but it was reported that MW2 was most likely going to be played at an average of 100ms. This shocked the majority of gamers around the world as a 100ms ping in Call of Duty 4 was merging on unplayable. Players would have to compensate for the ping by aiming slightly ahead of where they needed to shoot.

However in Modern Warfare 2, it is quite evident that they have managed to counter the high ping. It seemed incredibly smooth, running as if I was on a UK server playing Call of Duty 4. I had one map where it was quite laggy but I put that down to the host having a bad connection. InfinityWard have promised that IWNet, the built in server browser system, will pick a suitable host to run the server. Maybe they have got a few problems with that system at the moment, but hopefully this will be sorted out and the lag issues won’t be a major part of the game.

Coincidentally though we have been hearing reports that this game won’t be playable offline (IE at an event where people play over a home network rather than over the internet). Though these rumours have not been confirmed, they have also not been denied. It will be interesting to see if it is possible to play on locally hosted servers and if it is possible, how it copes. Competitively this will be a big turning point of the game, and unfortunately I cannot comment any further on it till I have some empirical facts, something I will get at the upcoming i-series where MW2 will be played.

From first thoughts this game looks promising. The lag issues are not present, and the server browser looks like it could work, even if there aren’t any dedicated servers. This carries over to the bullet registration (bullet reg), that looks incredibly promising. In the stock version of Call of Duty 4 it was not up to this standard. The majority of people that I have spoken to in the scene say that the bullet reg is just fine, and there would be no need to work on it. This has been the first bit of promising news that we have heard about the competitive aspects of the game, after a month of disappointing news. Could this actually be a good competitive game?

One of the main things that people were worried about with this game was the maps. This was the downfall of Call of Duty: World at War. Though the game got modified to make it playable competitively, the maps were all just far too big to support the Search & Destroy game type that has been used throughout Call of Duty history.

That is looking exactly the same now. The maps are not going to work in a S&D format. Though some are small enough, they are too open. There aren’t any clear paths through to the bomb sites, which we were accustomed to on maps such as Crash and Strike in Call of Duty 4. Some of the maps are great maps but they are just not suitable for a competitive climate.

Does this mean the game is not playable competitively? Most likely not in the format that we are all used to. But this may mean that a change is required. From what a lot of people who have played it so far have been saying, it may be worth trying out a new gametype. The suggested modes that have been thrown around the UK scene at the moment are Capture the Flag and Domination.

Top UK competitor Tom “D1ablo” Newman, who is currently playing for Reason Gaming, one of the leading UK organisations, talked to me about how he thinks the game should be played using a mixture of game types, as MLG have done on the consoles. Both Capture the Flag and Domination play incredibly well on MW2, and of course, Team Deathmatch is exactly how it should be.

Capture the Flag is something that was missing from Call of Duty 4, and it is certainly a popular game type. It looks like InfinityWard have worked quite hard on this mode, bringing in a clever overtime system. If the scores are equal at the end of the allowed time, then all you need to do is get to the flag, rather than take it back to your base. This builds up the tension in the game and could work quite well competitively.

The maps are also a lot more suited to these game types, as they are all fairly big and open. They also take a very urban look, with a lot of houses that you can go up into, and then move across the roofs. How willing is the scene to move to a new style of play? Most likely it is going to be quite hard to persuade them, but with i38 coming up this weekend it could be a big move in the right direction if they choose to support CTF rather than S&D.

The first major problem I encountered was the lack of the developer console. Unfortunately for MW2 there are quite a few settings that you would want to change, things such as your Frames Per Second as well as other settings. Though some of the basic settings are available in the options menu, there are still quite a few settings that are not editable. It has been possible to edit some of the settings directly through your config (something InfinityWard have made quite clear they don’t want you to do) but not all the changes take effect. It is as if they have just copied the configs straight from CoD4 but left some stuff out.

However it does look like that they intended on having a console in the game. In the instruction manual it has listed the usual key, ~, saying “Bring up Console”. This is either a massive mistake from the printers or they are intending on releasing the console in a future version of the game, maybe in a patch for the game.

Another key reason why this is needed is to allow users to record demos. This is one of the most important aspects of multiplayer competitive games. Without it, it is not possible to properly run a competitive league. Demos are needed to be able to check back over the games, like watching the recording of a football match. The officials may need to check to see if any illegal play has taken place, and without a full record function this is simply not possible.

However it certainly wouldn’t guarantee the game becoming successful. A mod is needed for it.

Hopefully the console will come about and they will have a record function built into it. If they do then this will certainly be a step in the right direction in ensuring that this game is played at a competitive level. However it certainly wouldn’t guarantee the game becoming successful. A mod is needed for it.

There are things in the game that don’t make it that fair to play and would make it impossible to put any amount of money on the outcome of the game. Things such as the perks and the rewards can all be turned off through IWNet, but there are other things that were turned off in Call of Duty 4 using a mod, namely Promod (and before that PAM). Things such as over powered guns as well as some of the accessories (stun grenades and C4) were all turned off as they were just not fair in terms of a competitive structure.

All of these things will need to be removed in MW2 if it is going to be playable at a high competitive level. There are also other things such as some as the turrets at the top of the stairs on certain maps that would really not work either. Unfortunately though the developers at InfinityWard have made it quite clear they want the game to be played as it is. In a Q&A session, hosted by BestBuy, Vince from InfinityWard claimed “We would like you to play the game the way we designed and balanced it,” when asked about the likelihood of being able to edit the game at all (ie mod the game).

Maps and graphics are another major issue that would need to be changed if the game was to be played competitively. Currently there is a lot of fog on most of the maps that makes it really hard to see everyone. Though you might argue that this is the same for everyone, so it is fair to play competitively, it does make it less attractive to people who want to become the best in their field at the game. The people who want to put the same hours they put into CoD4 (up to 8 hours a day before major events for some people!) don’t want to be playing a game that makes it harder with things that could quite easily be changed if the right people were given access to create a mod for the game.

There are also other basic factors that we have all become accustomed to that we would all love to see added to Modern Warfare 2. As of yet there isn’t a CoDTV, something that InfinityWard have been saying they are “working on” and “wanting to bring out” for the last 2 IW versions of CoD. Will the game ever get this great feature that allows rival games CounterStrike and CounterStrike: Source to be so successful?

In CoD4 we were also able to get a lot more spectator friendly features such as shoutcaster overlays built into the game to make it easy to provide commentary of the game, as well as making it more enjoyable for someone watching the game. CoD4 was such a big success competitively bringing in huge amounts of prize money because it was enjoyable to watch. Companies such as QuadV recorded huge viewing figures when they broadcasted the finals of some of the big tournaments. Such a basic thing is currently not possible to implement into the game. Though InfinityWard have been saying they want people to play the game as it is, they are isolating the competitive scene. In CoD4 people were able to play the game with its factory settings but they were also able to play it on a modded server; the choice was theirs. Now they have taken away that choice and it is currently stopping this game moving from being a potential competitive game to a competitive one.

So what needs to be done? Obviously this is only day one and I am sure there are going to be a lot more people that jump on the anti-InfinityWard bandwagon and say this game is not playable. But the general consensus that I have had from the competitive scene is that this game has potential. It isn’t a total wash out that people were expecting a few days ago. It could work. But for it to work InfinityWard have to listen to the competitive scene and either make a competitive mod themselves or give someone the access and source files to do so themselves. Without it this game is never going to work.

But I have certainly been impressed by the way this game has played from the word go. It does need some work doing to it, but the potential is there, and though the glimmer of hope that CoD may kick off competitively again is quite small, it is still something to look to. The candle has not gone out, not yet at least.