News - Giving Warzone 2 Credit

I'll be honest with you guys; lately I've been playing a lot of Modern Warfare 3, so I think it's about time where I give credit where credit is due. Sledgehammer Games has really made the best of a bad situation. This game was terrible in its release. Well, no, and in fact, there were a lot of things I liked about the game that I detailed in my review, including the lack of a prestige mode.

Burnout from playing a similar game the year before with Modern Warfare 2 and perhaps the sweatiest multiplayer experience that I can remember made this game really tough to play at the start. But here we are, 5 months on, and I can say that this game is in a pretty decent state. It is certainly miles ahead of where Modern Warfare 2 was last year.

The core gameplay is fast, and it finally feels like a Modern Warfare game in this trilogy has mastered the gameplay side of things. The game is still very sweaty, but it's nowhere near how bad it was on release. So going from game to game now, I do feel like I can get my kill streak and enjoy that Cod gameplay loop a little bit more.

There are also a lot more ranks now—450. As of the recording of this article, although that's set to increase further next week with season 3, obviously. I think 99% of us would rather have 10 prestiges plus a master prestige system on release, but at least now there is a little bit of an incentive to rank up and move past rank 55 instead of being stuck there like we were on release.

This stuff is all good, but it was kind of how I was expecting the game to go, as we knew there would be more ranks on the way, and the core gameplay has always been somewhat enjoyable. What completely caught me off guard when returning to Modern Warfare 3 recently was the amount of content Sledgehammer Games has released for this game already.

The first thing that I noticed with the playlists is that we have a 12 V12 mush pit and a small map MH pit so people can play maps other than shipment to get camos and then return to their favorite mode, gunfight. Going into the class selection, there's been a good amount of weapons, along with new attachments, aftermarket parts, and even some new perks.

And this game is definitely one of, if not the first, to add perks after its release. But the thing that impressed me the most was the new maps that have been added to the game. Now I will state the obvious: yes, this game did launch with just remasters, and I've talked about how it was unacceptable in the past, but that was the necessary evil as a result of turning what was meant to be a DLC into a full game.

But post-launch, we've so far seen six new maps added to the game, excluding the remaster of Das House. These range from fun small maps like Stash House to bright medium-sized maps like Vista or Rio. These maps play really well, and now that we have a direct comparison between them and the OG Modern Warfare 2 maps, I can say that most of them fit in pretty well with the selection.

So this was all well and good, and I thought maybe I'd try all this content, but eventually season 3 would roll around, and I'd be let down by the amount of content in that. But that comes to the reason I'm making this article, as Sledgehammer Games really seems to have an ace up their sleeve with season 3.

Six new maps, three completely new maps, a reimagined map, and two repurposed maps from War Zone. Now some make all these repurposed maps lazy, but if they play well, I really don't mind because I don't even play War Zone, so they'll feel new to me. But six maps in one season—this is a whole new level of content.

This is most likely a cause of poor launch sales, and this postlaunch content is getting people back on the game, which does seem to be working. At the very least, it gives the developers an insight into how much content they need to add to keep a stable player base throughout the entire year. This is something that I always thought with Modern Warfare 2 where they wouldn't frontload the content; they'd add loads of new maps towards the end of the game, and I didn't really see a point in that you want to frontload the content and have loads of new content towards the start of the game so that the game at least stays relevant until the next Call of Duty reveal.

But that's not it. We also have four new game modes, five new perks, four new weapons, including the mo sniper rifle and the bow 27 from Advanced Warfare, as well as new content for War Zone. Poor old zombies are left out again, unfortunately, but at this point, I'm just waiting on Black Ops Go 4 to save the zombies.

Compare this to season 3 of Modern Warfare 2, where I essentially gave up hope on that game, where we saw just three new maps, one of which was a gimmick night map. Modern Warfare 3, as I've said, isn't perfect. We still have more content in the store than the actual game, but to give credit where credit is due.

I've been Ranger, and I hope you've enjoyed