I’ll be honest. I haven’t played Modern Warfare 2 in quite some time. way before the XP went bananas and you could rank up hundreds of levels via one Warzone game. Infact, I think the last time I played it was just before Warzone launched. It’s never interested me, but I seen that Modern Warfare 3 launched this week and figured I’d check what’s changed.
Game Gone!
First of all, my game has completetly disappeared, instead replaced with a Call of Duty app, which acts as a central hub for all things Call of Duty. Sounds pretty sweet, but it is effectively just a full screen launcher. Why is this bad? Well. Let me show you the user flow to get into a Call of Duty Multiplayer game.
- Load Call of Duty
- Get told there’s an update and you need to restart
- Scroll down 3-4x to get to the Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer screen, click the button
- Call of Duty hub now closes and opens the Modern Warfare 2 game
- Get told there’s an update and you need to restart
- Look around, click Warzone, see what has changed
- Shader recompile is ongoing so everything is slow
- Press back
- Be prompted to go back to the Call of Duty Hub
- You are now back at the call of duty hub, on the screen for MW3
As far as I can see, there is no way to go from Warzone once you’ve opened it in the MW2 game, back to the main screen. Are you actually kidding me?
The same happened with the Campaign, I clicked it to see if anything had changed and in order to go to multiplayer I had to close my MW2 game, go back to the call of duty hub, sit through the entire loading experience AGAIN just to get into the menu.
I want to remind you, that before, you just had a main menu and you could just go into any game mode you want. This call of duty app is completely pointless because it doesn’t actually integrate with anything. Maybe it works better for Modern Warfare 3, but if that’s the case why did you completely wreck my Modern Warfare 2 experience?
Putting my tinfoil hat on, they’ve obviously tried to make it as painful as possible to get into the old games so you buy the new ones. It’s a fundamentally flawed system that didn’t need doing. Nobody needs a call of duty hub, not when it just launches the games individually anyway. Plus it isn’t integrated as it has to do the entire auth, loading, updating, anytime you launch anything.
Poor show really.
And yes, because it’s effectively forcing MW3 down my throat. I won’t be buying it.