One Huge Problem Could Kill This Game

I’ve been playing Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare III’s PlayStation Beta since yesterday and while the title of this post is focused on just one problem, I’m going to give my full impressions (so far) of the game—the good, the bad and the ugly.

I’m going to say right upfront that without some serious changes to core gameplay elements, this game will be as dead as Sledgehammer’s last game, Vanguard. One issue in particular has me completely turned off to Modern Warfare III, and if it’s not fixed I’ll be playing Modern Warfare II and Warzone until Treyarch’s next game drops.

I’ve been playing on PS5 with mouse and keyboard. I’m a PC player and going back to controller is too painful. This also means that some things just feel different to me because I’m on console, so my full beta impressions won’t be complete until next week when the Xbox and PC beta launches. Still, the issues I’m having will likely not change on a different platform.

The long and short of it is simply this: Modern Warfare III should not exist. This should be an expansion to Modern Warfare II that fixed some of that game’s issues, added a bunch of new maps, but didn’t tinker with gunplay, graphics, etc. It should have launched as a premium expansion, not a full-priced game. Nobody would have cared if it didn’t include a campaign if we got another year’s worth of support and improvements for Modern Warfare II.

This was an unforced error on Activision’s part, and an unfortunate one. They had a chance to really flesh out the game we have now, and instead went the route they believed will make more money. It is my sincerest hope that they learn the right lessons this time around, even if that means Modern Warfare III sells poorly which, by the way, I believe it will if some of the more egregious issues aren’t fixed. I have big doubts that they will be.

In any case, because I’m an eternal optimist, let’s start with . . .

The Good

I’m sorry to say I don’t have much to put in this category. The game is fast but not too fast. Time-to-kill (TTK) feels pretty good (but I have some issues here also) but I’m okay with both faster and longer TTK, it just takes a while to get used to change. I like that perks are active from the start of the match, but I’m not thrilled with how you choose them (more on that in a minute also).

The maps—all taken from 2009’s Modern Warfare 2, which would have made much more sense as DLC for Modern Warfare II—are wonderful, but I’ve only played on three of them and only three modes. The ones available now are Skidrow, Favela and Estate, with Team Deathmatch, Hardpoint and Domination in a moshpit. I played one match of Ground War and will likely not play another. Not my cup of tea.

Honestly, it’s not as bad as I worried about when I first saw gameplay, and I’m having decent fun in the game, but it’s nowhere near as good as Modern Warfare II or Modern Warfare 2019. The one thing it improves on is the visual recoil / visual noise in Modern Warfare II that sometimes makes aiming unnecessarily difficult especially with iron-sights, but this comes at a truly terrible cost. Which brings us to . . .

The Bad

Brace yourselves, young padawans. This is going to be rough. You’ve probably heard a bunch of Influencers™ and Content Creators™ gush about how great the game is, but I think their opinions should be taken with a grain of salt.

Let’s rattle off some issues:

• Movement is faster but it’s also weird and clunky. Specifically, sliding is very awkward. When you slide you automatically go into tactical/canted mode, but then when you come out of the slide that goes away. Overall, movement is a mixed bag. I think this can be fixed.
• The perk system is now based on gloves, shoes and vests which is a nice touch but also a little confusing. Wearing certain items can impact other items, so you can’t just combine anything you want but it’s hard to know exactly what will impact what. It’s unnecessarily confusing. I actually don’t mind the perk timer in MWII but I would just prefer we go back to a straightforward, no-gimmicks perk setup.
• Gun sound effects are terrible. This reminds me a lot of Vanguard, where everything sounded hollow and tinny and, well, the same. The guns all sound the same! In MWII I can hear a gun and often tell what it is just by sound alone, especially guns like the RAAL that are absolutely thunderous. Why did they even have to change this? Why not just use the sound design from MWII? I thought with every dev using the same engine we could have more continuity between titles in fundamental areas like gunplay and sound design and I’m severely disappointed in Call Of Duty management for not ensuring that this was the case. What’s the point of one Call of Duty engine and a unified development process if the basics aren’t being covered? All that stuff last year about a new era of Call Of Duty just feels like empty promises and hollow talking points now.
• Now the big one, the one that kills this game if it isn’t addressed (but I’m not sure they can actually fix this, either). There is no recoil on any of the guns. I’m happy that visual recoil and the smoke effects are toned down. You can see better when you shoot. But none of the guns have any recoil which turns them all into laser beams with different damage profiles. It’s boring. It’s the exact same problem Vanguard had and I’m shocked, honestly, that nobody at Activision has paid close enough attention to this, or to that game’s problems, to fix it. This is a dealbreaker for me. I won’t play this game if the guns all feel the same. Again, a 16-map map pack of Modern Warfare 2 original maps for Modern Warfare II would have been awesome. A game that plays significantly worse than Modern Warfare II is not.

Had they simply fixed visual recoil and noise, made changes to the mini-map and added slide-cancelling I’d have been perfectly happy with this as an update to last year’s game. As it stands, this is a massive downgrade.

The Ugly

I can’t fully assess the graphics in Modern Warfare III until I play on PC since that’s where I normally play, but this game doesn’t look great. Sure, it’s “clean” but it’s also kind of ugly. Textures are muddy. It doesn’t look as good as Modern Warfare II or Vanguard. Hell, it doesn’t look as good as Modern Warfare 2019 which was honestly an absolute stunner of a game. Is this an issue with the PS5 version? Maybe. But I’m worried they seriously cut back on graphics in order to develop across current and last-gen since Activision is still, inexplicably, developing these for PS4 and Xbox One. I mean, I get it: There’s money to be made on older consoles still. But it’s really time, several years into the PS5 / Xbox Series X generation, to hang up the hat.

All told, in my time with this game so far I’m left feeling very bummed out about it. I’ve only played a few hours, but as a superfan of Call Of Duty—I have just under 1300 hours in MWII and Warzone 2—I am pretty disappointed both with the obviously rushed product we’ve gotten from Sledgehammer Games and the fact that Activision decided to make this a new game rather than an expansion to MWII. That was such a golden opportunity, and it’s obvious that this game should have been exactly that instead of a brand new release. What a shame.

But hey, at least all those influencers who went and played at the preview event are gushing about it on social media and on their various channels! It must be great, right?

Right?