Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Modern Warfare 3 in Perspective!

So Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has a hilariously poor single player story that literally hits every note you don’t want to hit when you’re telling a story in a game. Arbitrary plot twists, nonsensical set pieces, poorly written dialogue delivered with self serious gravitas and nonsensical level design. Okay, whatever. People don’t buy Modern Warfare games for the story! They buy them because, since Call of Duty 2 in 2005, they’ve been the standard for competitive multiplayer play for first person shooters. So, with that in mind, how does Modern Warfare 3 stack up to its predecessors?

To put it briefly, quite well. The thumb for this game is decidedly pointing up, even from Modern Warfare 2. Everything about it is a little bit better than Modern Warfare 2, each retained element refined, each omitted mechanic wisely chosen. Modern Warfare 3 represents the latest refinement of the Call of Duty model, and, unlike the previous two installments, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Modern Warfare 2, it hits more often than it misses. In fact, more than that, it does so in a fashion that showcases both the focus of Modern Warfare as a multiplayer series and the problems at emerge from this focus.

In the past it’s relatively clear that balance was the central concern for Infinity Ward in their multiplayer. The first Modern Warfare game exemplifies this marvelously. Every gun has a unique personality, a unique set of pros and cons, and fits into the tapestry of the game quite well. There are no useless weapons, nor are there any weapons which eventually become obsolete. You could be successful in a match using only the starting weapons (in fact, quite a number of people would use the M-16 ad-infini and do embarrassingly well) given the right style of play and sharp enough reflexes. Even the most similar weapons cut different profiles and showcased different efficiencies. Weapons demanded different skill levels, different approaches, benefitted different styles of play, each in their own special way. The end result was a complicated game which could still be grasped and enjoyed by the most casual of players, while mastery remained reserved for the most dedicated few.

But the focus has noticeably drifted over the course of the last few titles. In fact, you might even contend that this trend began with World At War: the trend away from balance and towards refining the metagame, the feedback loop that drives sustained play in Call of Duty games. In Modern Warfare this loop was initially relatively isolated. You would rank up, earning a fancy badge, and you would unlock new weapons, perks and pieces of equipment along the way. Earning unlocks for each weapon was entirely reliant on kills you earned with said weapon, and earning new skins for the weapon revolved around getting headshots with it. Anyone could get that grenade launcher, but to unlock that red tiger camo? That was an act of love.

Modern Warfare 2 added on to this system tremendously. It replaced the simple “name tag and badge” badge system with a series of ever-evolving name tags and badges which were earned based on your ability to meet a set of isolated circumstances, varying from using a weapon a lot to jumping off a building to piloting a helicopter into a crane to killing someone with a dog. The lean, mean progression system suddenly acquired “pro” versions of each perk, which would unlock when said perk was used to accomplish its required goal. It also acquired additional killstreak rewards, unlocked through sustained play.

There were three killstreak rewards in the original Modern Warfare. Three rewards, set in stone. Modern Warfare 2 boosted that number to eleven.

Even so, many of those rewards were duplicates. I’m not entirely sure how an attack helicopter and an attack AC-130 were really that different. And while the concept of a Stealth Bomber was cool, it wasn’t functionally that different from a regular bomber. Nor was a normal helicopter sufficiently different from a Pavelow to really warrant the addition of a whole new accomplishment. Some of these new killstreak rewards were pretty cool, don’t get me wrong: care packages were a great concept, and changing the number and the mechanics of targetable explosives that you could use after a set number of kills was a brilliant way to tie some of the most enjoyable moments of the single player game into Modern Warfare’s superb multiplayer model.

But this killstreak creep had a lot of problems. The duplicates, for example, were a bit impractical from a design and balance perspective. And then there’s the way that they were structured, with an overwhelming number of late game options, one of which effectively ended the game, but a parsimonious selection of low kill killstreak rewards. The end result was a system that simply gave players who were already winning, in a community dominated by hardcore players who were already hostile to new or novice players, a new selection of tools with which to punish their fellow players.

This was echoed in the way that weapon and skill unlocks functioned. Weapons were no longer carefully balanced. There was no longer an excellent interplay between assault rifle, machine gun, submachine gun, shotgun and sniper rifle. Instead there was a coiterie of exploitative playstyles that completely broke the game when employed, changing the game from a thoughtful shooter to a zombie-horror movie or an exercise in frustration. Death streaks were added in order to alleviate this problem, and they did to some extent. But again, redundancy abounded: the careful balancing that the first Modern Warfare had done so artfully, so invisibly, was totally absent, replaced with a mishmash of features intended to counteract each other which clearly hadn’t been given enough time in the oven.

Then there was the issue of hacks. Hacking abounded in Modern Warfare 2, and since it occurred entirely on the side of a single, isolated, randomly selected client it wasn’t something that anyone could do anything about. The end result: a broken game which could be easily exploited so that players could leap in the air randomly, receive a prestige rank with each and every kill or run the game in fast motion. And basic issues, like the famed javelin bug, pervaded multiplayer. It was a mess, a big, sloppy, expensive mess.

Modern Warfare 3 entered into this stained battlefield for my affections, and appropriately sits between the original Modern Warfare, with its elegant, pared down model, and Modern Warfare 2’s bounty of features and means by which to advance. Everything that Modern Warfare 2 added is still present, but you might not recognize it. It’s cleaner, meaner and leaner. It’s a smarter game through and through, and while you could be forgiven for not noticing right away, it’s pretty clear, as time progresses, that they’ve done a lot to reduce the number of redundant killstreaks, remove game breaking elements such as teleporting ninjas and long-range shotguns that could kill in one hit and reload indefinitely, and generally turn out a more polished product.

And the Death Streaks, simplified and refined as you might expect, have also been complimented by a new set of killstreak options, including the Support killstreak, which provides unique rewards to players based not on their killcount for a given life, but rather their kills over the entire game with said class. It’s a fantastic way to allow players who don’t fit into the hardcore model of Modern Warfare to get into the game and feel like they’re contributing, and it doesn’t interrupt or override the existing killstreak model at all.

Even dedicated servers, the enemy of hacks and the cornerstone of online communities, have made their return, though the XBLA style matchmaking system remains the game’s default means of pairing you with other players. Still, the nod to the community is a nice touch, and it shows that Activision is a little worried about the Battlefield franchise stealing their bucks.

Really, the only issue I have is the total lack of weapon balance. It’s obvious that many of the clear balance issues from the previous game have simply been cut. But dual wielding submachine guns is suspiciously effective at all ranges, many of the assault rifles are replaced by weapons that are simply better versions of them and I’m almost positive that there’s a shotgun which is simply a slightly reskinned version of another shotgun in this game.

It’s unfortunate to see Infinity Ward broken up, but this is the price of doing business with Activision, it seems. And we, as consumers, will lack their acumen in fine tuning their products. Their work used to polish to a fine sheen, and it seems that this is no longer the case. Still, Raven and Sledgehammer have picked up the torch admirably. The progression system for both players in general and weapons has been fine tuned in a great way, and they’ve done a lot to make the game more customizable and friendly to new players. I’m enjoying it and playing it a lot, and while it lacks the raw polish of the first Modern Warfare, most games will. All things considered, it’s a step in the right direction and, for a studio’s first game, a fine multiplayer offering. Just steer clear of the campaign.

Next week: the story of me and my M-4.