Before the game came out, Activision talked about how this would be the biggest CoD ever and had been worked on by over 3,000 developers across many different studios throughout the world. Unfortunately, though, the game launched with a ton of missing features that many fans consider to be basic stuff they expect from every CoD game. Things like statistics, turning off crossplay, various UI elements, leaderboards, challenges, and much more were left out, and for a game supposed to be the first two-year CoD in history that was meant to usher in a new era of CoD 2.0, the lack of basic features stings. Technical issues, at launch, aren’t particularly unusual for Call of Duty games, but Modern Warfare II had it especially bad. Crashes, across platforms, were common, and servers, particularly for Warzone, often disconnected you or forced you to deal with tons of lag. Joining parties with your friends, at launch and even now to an extent, was a major issue. Parties just don’t work very well, and that’s been a consistent problem with CoD games for years, with many hoping that a new generation of CoD might finally fix the problem. In short, Modern Warfare II was (and still is in many cases) something of a technical mess. Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War launched with just 8 traditional 6v6 maps, and while the game has received an extraordinary amount of post-launch support that has massively increased the number of maps in the game, how many maps the game launched with was a huge point of criticism for the game. Many simply got bored of the maps in the game at launch and simply stopped playing because of that. Modern Warfare II launched with 10 6v6 maps, putting it in a very similar situation to Cold War, though fewer seem to be complaining about that. What’s more is that this comes after last year’s CoD, Vanguard, which launched with 16 6v6 maps. To put it simply, Modern Warfare II’s amount of launch maps is something of a disappointment. Since the beta, folks have been criticizing Modern Warfare II’s UI. Early on, the news dropped that Activision had hired people from Hulu’s UX team, and in Modern Warfare II, you can really feel that influence. Everything is big and blocky, and few UI elements are ever onscreen at once. Navigating around takes many more clicks of a button than it once did, and it’s quite difficult to see any kind of variety onscreen without having to move through the UI. There are so many menus, different screens, sub-menus, and UI elements of all kinds that navigating around Modern Warfare II is just something of a chore. Improvements have come, but short of a massive redesign, the UI in the game is unlikely to be thought of as good by most of the player base. With Modern Warfare II has come Warzone 2, and while it may be exciting to play around with proximity chat, test out a new gulag, and experience what the game is like when loadouts aren’t as relevant as they once were, Warzone 2 is still clunky in a lot of ways. Gulag fights feel extremely chaotic and sometimes unfair, proximity chat seems to work across huge distances that can be frustrating, getting guns and gearing up is much more complicated which can lead to annoying firefights and tough losses, loot is harder to pick up as quickly as before, and the lack of advanced movement has lowered the overall skill ceiling. Many different problems are currently plaguing Warzone 2, with many expecting changes and tweaks to the Warzone 2 formula to be coming in the months (and years) after launch. In Modern Warfare, slide-cancelling was extremely dominant. Even if you were a huge fan of the mechanic, how reliant the playerbase was on it and how necessary it was to slide cancel everywhere could feel overwhelming. Accordingly, many expected slide-cancelling to be nerfed in Modern Warfare II or even removed. Slide-cancelling was, in fact, removed in Modern Warfare II. But bunnyhopping is gone, too. In fact, there aren’t really any worthwhile advanced movements in the game outside of sprinting around and jumping around corners. You can’t really expect to outplay anybody with your movement or technique outside of the basics. Even diving and sliding aren’t particularly useful mechanics anymore. While in some ways this system might be more balanced than splitting players into those who slide cancel and those who don’t, the total lack of advanced movement takes a lot out of what you can master and get better at in the game. Put simply, Modern Warfare II’s timed perk system is something fans didn’t ask for and don’t want. The idea that you unlock your perks at different stages throughout a game just doesn’t make a lot of sense in Call of Duty. This means that teams can ‘out perk’ other teams and start snowballing, quickly turning a lead into an unwinnable situation. Plus, with the super fast TTK in Modern Warfare II being altogether less capable as an operator until you get all your perks just slows down the game even more. What’s most important, though, is that there’s little support for this system among fans, with the most vigorous defense coming down to essentially the idea that it isn’t ‘that bad’ really.
Footsteps, Ghost, Ninja, and Dead Silence in Modern Warfare II
For one, once again, footsteps are just too loud in Modern Warfare II. People can hear you coming from a mile away, so you’re fundamentally encouraged not to play aggressively and, instead, to sit in a corner and bide your time. Reinforcing this problem is the Ghost perk, once again, not protecting you only when you aren’t moving. Lastly, there’s no Ninja perk in the game to be able to just dampen your own footstep volume if you want, and instead, there’s Dead Silence that itself makes a rather distracting noise when you engage it and forces you to focus on only making plays a couple time a game when your Dead Silence is charged up. All of this, together, adds up to a group of systems that work together to make it a bad idea to do anything that’s not camping, which just isn’t especially fun for most players. One of the worst returning elements of Modern Warfare (2019) in Modern Warfare II is the spawn system. For almost all of Call of Duty history, you’ve got a spawn system that works basically like this: teams spawn at either end of a map, and if the enemy pushes too far into your spawn, the spawns flip. In special cases, if enemies are occupying both spawn points for example, you might spawn in at a third point. That’s basically how the system works, and with this system, it’s easy to be able to place where the enemy is coming from. In Modern Warfare II, though, you have squad spawns where you essentially spawn with your teammates, wherever they are. So, you’ll constantly be spawning around enemies, getting shot in the back, and you’ll never really know where enemies are coming from. This kind of spawn system was in Call of Duty: Vanguard but it was removed because of how much the community hated it, and hopefully, Modern Warfare II does the same. Of course, we’ll have to wait and see, but the spawn system in the game now is in a bad place. Another relatively core problem in Modern Warfare II comes down to the game’s minimap. For most CoD games, when you fire an unsuppressed weapon, you’ll appear on the minimap. That’s where silencers come in, allowing you to fire your gun without alerting enemies to where you’re at. However, the minimap doesn’t work like that in Modern Warfare II. In this game, red dots will appear on your compass, which is far less specific and accurate than your minimap, and they won’t appear on the minimap, even if an unsuppressed weapon is being fired. This makes tracking enemies hard, and you’ll find that in many cases somebody will just come out from an angle you didn’t expect and take you down. All told, it’s a frustrating change that a game like Black Ops Cold War didn’t bother with. SBMM has been a contentious issue in CoD since Modern Warfare (2019), and unsurprisingly, the situation has not changed in Modern Warfare II. Though, the problem is that for the first time ever Activision promised matchmaking changes coming with this game, and unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference in Modern Warfare II. The better you are, the more unfair the games will become, and you’ll frequently be punished for trying to party up with people of a different skill level. Ultimately, the matchmaking in Modern Warfare II doesn’t make a ton of sense, and many are finding that it’s best to try and exploit the system to have a good time. As always, SBMM is a sore spot for this latest Call of Duty. CoD games have had a problem with attachments being so powerful that you, really, just need a certain set of them or you’re kind of doing it wrong. Accordingly, attachments have been rebalanced in Modern Warfare II, and there are indeed drawbacks to attachments. The problem, though, is that in many cases attachments are simply best left off your gun. It’s hard to know now if an attachment’s downside actually makes the gun an all-around worse performer or not, so once again, you’re kind of stuck relying on guides on the internet to kit out your weapon rather than being able to play around and decide what works best for you. Plus, there aren’t weapon stats in Modern Warfare II, so you won’t get to see precisely how attachments impact your weapons. All told, while weapon progression might be interesting in this game, attachments are oftentimes a risky add and you don’t really know what they’re changing on your gun.
