Having had a weekend to get stuck into Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III’s multiplayer beta, there’s more going on here than you might expect. According to leaks and rumour, this year’s Call of Duty began life as an expansion to last year’s Modern Warfare II, with a new single-player campaign and multiplayer maps remastered from 2009’s original Modern Warfare 2. This isn’t something the multiplayer beta refutes. Of the five maps available, four are Modern Warfare 2 classics, rebuilt lovingly with updated visuals for the new game.
But here’s the twist: where most of us expected Modern Warfare III to stick with the same core gameplay as Modern Warfare II, the team at Sledgehammer Games has decided to mix things up again. Maybe it’s fan pressure — a lot of players didn’t like the slower, more tactical style of last year’s CoD — but movement is substantially faster, with more opportunities to chain together acrobatic jumps, slides, and vaults over ledges and through open windows. In a way, it’s much closer to what a lot of fans consider the ‘classic’ Call of Duty feel.
Playing old fan-favourite maps like Rust, Favela, and Estate, you’re back in the glory days of the original Modern Warfare/Black Ops era. The action flows at an incredibly fast pace, and firefights are often decided in a fraction of a second. Time to kill — the time between the moment you start blasting and the moment where your target hits the floor — is actually up slightly from Modern Warfare II, but only to the extent that a smart, fast-moving player has a shot at surviving a shot or two. The new CoD is just as brutal on the slow or inexperienced as previous games.
Up to a point, the mix of speed and classic CoD maps is a good thing. Modern Warfare III is just as exciting, unrelenting, and gung-ho as you could wish for. It’s non-stop action all the way — yet it also feels chaotic. There are good reasons why so many CoD fans love Rust, for example, but Deathmatch games played on it veer between uncontrolled carnage and one-sided bloodbaths. Either enemies and allies drop like flies, or one team dominates the central tower and their snipers destroy the opposition. You can die within seconds of spawning, over and over again.
Something’s up with the weapons, too. In the last few Call of Duty titles, different weapons have had much more of an identifiable feel, with their own handling, their own sound, and their own distinctive recoil. Here, all assault rifles, shotguns or SMGs can feel a little samey, even with a ludicrously extensive Gunsmith system with which you can customise everything from the sights to the grips to the barrel. Selecting different guns and adding custom options clearly does something to the stats that govern damage, reload times, and all the rest, but is this something you can see every time you join the fray? I’m not so sure.
Classic maps, classic modes
What about the modes? Well, here we’re talking well-established classics rather than anything new or vaguely innovative. Team Deathmatch is still very much the core of Modern Warfare III, but Kill Confirmed, where you only get the full score for a kill when you retrieve the player’s tags, actually works better to discourage tiresome camping and long-range sniping.
Domination, where you tussle over three control points, has potential, but doesn’t actually work that well on some of Modern Warfare III’s smaller, more action-focused maps. You might love it on Skidrow or Estate, but it doesn’t really work for Favela or Rust. Hardpoint is the classic running battle to grab and hold an objective, which shifts after 60 seconds. You get some thrilling skirmishes, even if not every player seems to understand the point.
As for Ground War on Popov Power, at the moment it doesn’t quite click. This is a large-scale version of Domination played with teams of up to 32 players and, with the right maps and solid teamwork, it can be a lot of fun. Popov Power, though, feels like a Domination Map built up with some additional control points, but without any wider interest. You can hop into armoured vehicles, but there’s not enough scale to make it worth the effort, while it’s hard to get a team to focus on the core objective when they could be chasing easy snipes and going for lone-wolf kills.
While all this is going on within the matches, Sledgehammer Games has also mixed things up behind the scenes, switching from the classic system of three selectable perks you can assign to give your warrior the edge in combat, to having four perks that are now conferred by wearing specific vests, boots, gloves, and miscellaneous gear. These items have to be unlocked by gaining XP in game and levelling up. This isn’t a huge departure from what we’ve had before, but it’s hard to see whether it has any impact, or whether it’s just change for change’s sake.
Is this going to be a vintage year for Call of Duty? Maybe. The classic maps and feel are going to please a lot of people, whether they were playing CoD back in the day or they’re just graduating from Fortnite. We also have the new campaign to look forward to, not to mention the ever-popular Zombies mode and a new map for CoD’s Battle Royale, Warzone.
All the same, there’s a sense that Sledgehammer still has some polishing and balancing to do. Going big on nostalgia will only get Modern Warfare III so far; it needs to make this mix of cutting-edge and retro work.
