opinion: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is supposed to mark the future of the series for years to come. But it stands for more than that.
Even Goethe coined the phrase: Never play on Patchday. Anyone who has played much World of Warcraft over the years has been eating this lesson with their orcish breakfast since the 2000s, but 2022 applies to online games at least as universally: Never play on Launchday. Overwatch 2, Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield 2042 – against some launch problems, even puberty is a walk in the park.
At least Modern Warfare 2 isn”t a total fiasco; as a soloist I have no trouble finding matches, but if you want to form a party with more than two people, you might as well wait for a letter from Hogwarts.
No Call of Duty launch in the last ten years has been plagued by as many problems as that of Modern Warfare 2. Crashes, bugs, connection glitches, jerky menus – and I almost have to laugh about it: If you install the latest Nvidia drivers, you actually make the problems worse! My best friend spent all day Saturday turning off overlays, fixing installs, resetting drivers … and MW2 still crashes when we want to play co-op.
Infinity Ward”s poor social media sock has already run nasty into the knife here on release day, precisely because squad gaming doesn”t work for most people:
You downloaded MWII
↓
You played with the squad
↓
Just one more game turns into 10 more
↓
You and the squad at 3am
↓ pic.twitter.com/oX4ZsYs262– Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) October 28, 2022
Weapon tuning had to be deactivated at short notice, small fixes and patches will be applied throughout the weekend, but the construction sites remain construction sites. Of course, such a release is also an incredible undertaking for the devs. Via Steam alone, a quarter of a million people played MW2 at the same time (even if not in a party, haha), add to that the Battle.net users, PS5 and Xbox fans, and we”re probably talking about well over a million players active at the same time, rushing onto the servers as if the dam had burst. Whew.
But conversely, I can also understand the angry community who applied for leave and hurled 70 euros straight onto the counter in order to play Modern Warfare 2 with friends as quickly as possible.
But all of this, in my eyes, is just a symptom of a much more exciting, bigger change. Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 shows very clearly how much games are changing. It is far more than a problematic release that the devs will hopefully get to grips with in the coming days. Modern Warfare 2, more than most games in recent years, marks the end of the tangible final product.
Please, what does that mean?
Service games are older hat than the top hat by now, but many developers and publishers of big blockbusters have been dancing around the bush a bit for years. Yeah, no, so our game comes mega ready and super on the market, but we also plan content for ten years. And then we often (not always) see games like Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, Halo: Infinite, Fallout 76 or Battlefield 2042 that teach us the same lesson as vodka with Big Pump: not every mix works. If you dance at umpteen weddings, you don”t dance right at any of them.
Publishers, quite understandably, cling to the illusion of a finished product because release day is extremely important financially. EA once showed me sales curves for FIFA a few years ago – and even for a service game like FIFA, which brings in vast sums via microtransactions, the release date remains an absolute high that flushes vast amounts of money into the vault.
No marketing lead would voluntarily write on the box: Buy now our half-finished game that won”t get its major features for months. Well, except for Modern Warfare 2. Because Call of Duty does just that – and you can so tell by the game.
When the release becomes a seasonal event
Where many other games duck away from the truth in their marketing Our Game Is Not Final, Call of Duty, of all games, dares to take flight. Of all things, Activision”s flagship, the game-worthy symbol for annual releases at Christmas time. We recently talked about it in detail on the podcast, but it would never occur to me to do surreptitious advertising.
But the short version: Modern Warfare 2 will be released in umpteen content beats over the next few weeks. Pre-orderers were already able to play the campaign a week before release, now there”s multiplayer, albeit without hardcore mode, Warzone 2.0 will be released in mid-November along with the start of Season 1, then there”s Season 1 Reloaded as a mid-season event in 2022, and so on and so forth.
I”m currently testing the multiplayer of Modern Warfare 2 and I already know: I”ll probably have to revise the rating three times by the end of the year. And that could become the new standard in the long run.
On paper, Modern Warfare 2 is already a pretty hefty product. There are over ten multiplayer maps, umpteen modes, two dozen operators, an arsenal of weapons that will bring tears to DICE”s eyes, and a brilliant single-player campaign:
You can tell Modern Warfare 2
It”s paradoxical: although Modern Warfare 2 can be enjoyed for dozens of hours now (assuming it runs), it feels like scaffolding. I click through the menus and already see shelves where content will come later: an almost empty shop, empty operator customisation, missing blueprints, just standard camos for weapons. As I said, I”d rather the game be like this than lacking weapons, maps and modes.
But my best buddy summed it up quite well yesterday: Modern Warfare 2 feels like a concert where the stage, sound and drink deliveries are already ready, but the band doesn”t perform until the evening. The fact that I have never experienced such a bad menu and user interface in any other shooter reinforces the impression, of course.
Is that a problem? That certainly depends on your point of view. In any case, I find it exciting that Modern Warfare 2 embraces the service idea more than any Call of Duty before it. After all, when is a game finished that gets its probably most important expansion three weeks after release and another expansion three weeks after that? And probably another three weeks after that?
Actually, I love service games. I”m currently playing Battlefield, Gundam Evolution and now Modern Warfare 2 in parallel, eagerly awaiting every cool new update, and I also find, for example, the idea of open worlds that are constantly evolving very, very exciting.
But it will also change how we talk about games in the long term if single-player games like Assassin”s Creed Witch and Red (the one in Europe and the one in Japan) are developed in parallel with new areas, stories and changes. And I”m just as curious to see what the industry learns from Modern Warfare 2. And what not.
