It may have taken me a while to admit it – and I certainly pushed back for a time, but I worry I am getting too old for Call of Duty. Not the series as a whole; I find a lot of entertainment in the ooh-rah campaigns, and I am especially fond of the gameplay and engine evolutions of some of Activision’s post-Modern Warfare 2019 efforts. I dabble in Zombies here and there, and I’m happy to play whatever supplementary third mode is on offer in any given year, but I struggle to spend any longer in multiplayer than it takes me to reach the level cap. And I don’t think it’s just a ‘me’ problem, either.
If you play COD multiplayer with any regularity, or even keep up with community chatter around each yearly release, this sentiment should be familiar. A part of it is to do with people getting older and reflexes slowing, which has forever been the way, but as much of it is to do with changes to the game that exacerbate this issue.
A little over a month ago, Black Ops 7 added a new Classic playlist. The in-game description calls it a “classic boots-on-the-ground Black Ops multiplayer experience with simplified movement and streamlined loadouts”, and in practical terms, it restricted movement significantly so it resembled Black Ops 2’s, meaning no wall jumps or slides or ‘omnimovement‘.
Your overall movement speed is slower, and sprinting sideways is entirely disabled. Also, sprinting is limited more generally, too, meaning you’ll have to stop every few seconds for it to recharge. The only real movement “tech” you have at your disposal is jump-shooting other players.
Classic doesn’t stop there. The Lethals, Tacticals, Perks, Scorestreaks, Field Upgrades and Wildcards you have access to are only those that could conceivably exist in Black Ops 2. And you know what? It worked! Classic was so popular that Treyarch ended up making it a permanent playlist, rather than time-limited, as originally planned.
Now, Classic doesn’t solve all my problems with modern COD. It’s built on the bones of a movement system that’s far more fluid than what the playlist allows you to do. Classic plays similarly to BO2, sure, but not quite the same. Though animations are reigned in considerably, you can still blend together multiple jump-shots in a row, which was harder – and less rewarding – in BO2.
But it’s difficult to deny how much better it feels to play than the standard mode. You start to care more about positioning, and actually think of the walls as cover rather than objects to bounce off of. When the focus is taken away from movement, gunfights start to revolve more about playing to a weapon’s strengths, and they tend to favour aim and recoil control rather than how quickly you can chain together a series of camera-breaking movements to avoid (or deal) damage.
All of that brings us to Modern Warfare 4, which I really hope introduces its own version of Classic, ideally at launch. Infinity Ward is clearly interested in catering to players who like advanced movement, which was a shock as this studio tends to be the one to slow things down. We’re supposed to be taking our first look at multiplayer gameplay later this week at Fanatics Fest, and – as is now tradition – there’ll be a summer beta in the next several weeks. Many of our questions will be answered before launch.
But from what little we’ve seen of MW4, the movement looks too fast and fluid for my liking. In one clip, the character was able to quickly mantle up a ledge, sprint (the faster tactical sprint, too), and drop down into a slide. Another clip had the player slide over the hood of a car shortly before sliding again on the ground and into a supine prone.
I can immediately see how frustrating all of that is going to be when players learn to chain it together – which is easier to do than ever today thanks to all the content creators who will be advertising the latest camera-breaking movement tech that you need to master. This is an element that didn’t exist back when Black Ops 2 was around – or nowhere near to this degree. It meant that players took longer to optimise strategies, or exploits, if you like, and there was a happy period of learning in the game rather than an atmosphere of relentless competition which is there now.
I am aware you can’t go home again. No Classic mode will be able to replicate the experience of playing classic COD multiplayer. We simply know too much today to recreate those days of discovery again. When someone figured out a camping spot or a broken gun in the Modern Warfare 2 era, it took a while for everyone else to learn about it, and longer still before it was a common sight. It is simply impossible for that to happen today.
But that shouldn’t stop Call of Duty developers from offering their older fans options, because like it or not, they still make up a significant portion of the people who buy and play every year.
