Last weekend I played the Modern Warfare III PlayStation beta and mostly found myself not like it at all. I think part of this was just adjusting to a new game after a year of Modern Warfare II, and partly it was switching from my normal platform—PC—to PS5. Even with a mouse and keyboard, the game just feels very different to me on PS5 vs PC.
This weekend, I’ve been playing a ton of the beta since the PC and Xbox Early Access phase launched Thursday. Some big changes and improvements have been made since last weekend, but there’s lots more work ahead for Sledgehammer Games and the other studios helping with this game.
New modes—Search & Destroy and the 3v3v3 Cutthroat mode—were added to this weekend’s beta, as well as one more map—Highrise—and ten more levels of progression, which mean new perks and attachments to unlock. Ghost and Dead Silence are here, and they completely change how you play.
In any case, let’s dive right in and check out what works and what doesn’t in Modern Warfare III so far in its beta form.
5 Things I Love About The Beta
1. Movement is fast and fluid. This is one of the best things about the new game. Movement just feels good. It took some getting used to, but now that I am I definitely appreciate how fast you can get around. Sliding feels almost right, mantling is honed in, and just the entire feel of the game’s movement is really top-notch. A lot of it is subtle, of course, but it’s there, and you can improve various aspects of movement—like strafing or sliding or mantling—based on the perk gear you equip.
2. Tac-Stance is surprisingly useful. Basically this allows you to toggle on or off the equivalent of what a canted laser did in Modern Warfare II, but without the laser. It’s a halfway point between aim-down sights (ADS) and hip-fire. I often will toggle it on for my SMGs to help with those close-quarter engagements where hip-firing might not do the trick but ADS takes too long. It’s fun to have three options!
3. The perks system is pretty good. You basically have a handful of different gear categories that dictate what perks are active, and not all of these can be combined with everything else. So, for instance, the Gunner Vest allows you to equip two primary weapons (Overkill) but you can’t equip Boots (so no Covert Sneakers, aka Dead Silence).
Mixing and matching gear let’s you fine-tune your build, and restrictions help ensure that nobody is running around with Overkill, Dead Silence and Ghost all at the same time. Other vests will remove your lethal, or double your tactical equipment. One headset gets rid of ambient noise and makes it easier to hear footsteps. I didn’t care for this system at first, but now that I understand it better, I dig it.
4. The Breacher Drone is a blast. This is a new piece of lethal equipment that is this game’s Drill Charge—as in a brand new lethal that’s super useful and fun to use (though I hope the Drill Charge returns in the full game!) Basically think of this as a paper airplane bomb. You lob it and it floats in the direction you aim until impact, at which point it blows fools to pieces. It’s a bit tricky to get the hang of, but being able to lob it through windows, or down over ledges, etc. etc. is just absolutely a blast. I have also blown myself up with this thing several times. Like I said, it takes some practice! The moment I unlocked this in the beta is the moment I really started having fun with it.
5. Visual recoil is cleaner. I have mixed feelings about the recoil in this game, but I will say this: Shooting is cleaner overall than MWII. Visual recoil and smoke SFX from guns is turned way down, making it easier to aim especially if you’re not using an optic and opting for iron-sights. I wish they would make MWII and Warzone guns line up with this game in that regard. For instance, smoke from your weapon in MWII will often blur what you’re aiming at, whereas in MWIII it appears off to the side, away from targets. You still get the effect but without it obscuring your vision.
I should note here, in this liminal space between love and hate, that I do like other things about the beta. The maps—other than Estate—are all really fun, especially Highrise. Favela and Skidrow are terrific. Rust is, well, it’s Rust. Not great, not terrible. It’s been fun to play Search and Destroy on all of these.
I also like the new Cutthroat mode which pits three teams of three against one another in a spin on Gunfight. I do not, however, like it as much as Gunfight which is just a better, more distilled mode overall. My theory is that it would have taken too many resources in such a short time-frame to implement Gunfight and all those small maps, so they opted for a mode that could use the 6v6 core maps instead. I’ll just play Gunfight in MWII I suppose, but it is a little disappointing.
Okay, on to . . . .
5 Things I Hate About The Beta
1. The sound design is bad. There’s no dodging this shortcoming. In terms of guns and the gunfire sounds, the difference between MWII and MWIII is simply night and day. Infinity Ward’s guns sound like guns. Each gun sounds and feels wildly different from the next. I can hear a gun an enemy is shooting and often identify it on audio cues alone. Sledgehammer’s guns sound like paintball guns. They’re tinny and weak-sounding. The headshot sound effect is okay, but still falls short of that satisfying clang in MWII, which has the best sound design of any Call Of Duty game (we can quibble over gunplay between Modern Warfare 2019 and MWII but sound design just gets better with every Infinity Ward release).
But gunplay isn’t the only sound design flaw. There are also the godawful Guardian killstreaks and their wah-wah-wah-wah-wah sounds, though these appear to be quieter in the second beta weekend. And then there are footsteps, which bring us to our next category . . . .
2. It’s still hard to identify teammates vs. enemies. This is both a problem with visual and sound design. Since we are already on the topic of sound, I’ll start there. Enemy and teammate footsteps are still too hard to distinguish, even when wearing the Bone Conductor headset. I often think an enemy is rushing up on me and it’s actually an ally. The simple fix here is to turn down ally footsteps and leave enemy footsteps the same (but boosted with that headset on).
The second problem is visual. Sledgehammer made some significant improvements when it comes to enemy and team nameplates and color diamonds (that float above players’ heads) since last weekend but:
- There is often a slight delay when these appear, so when you see a player the nameplate/diamond won’t show up for just a split second, but that can be the difference between life and death (or taking shots at your teammates).
- Nameplates/diamonds could still be a bit larger or a bit more opaque or have an outline so that they don’t blend in with certain surfaces so badly.
The fact is, identifying who is friend and who is foe remains unnecessarily difficult, and should be a relatively simple fix. After all, a big improvement has already been made.
3. The graphics are a step backward. Both the last two Modern Warfare games have looked spectacular. This game looks . . . okay? It’s not bad-looking but it sure isn’t very pretty, either, and it should be. The graphics look dated rather than state-of-the-art, which is weird since 2019’s Modern Warfare looked absolutely fantastic and well ahead of its time. This looks like a game from 2017. Whether we’re talking about the guns themselves (or those ugly Vanguard optics) or the textures in walls, floors, the ground etc. this game just doesn’t look that good. I’ve played all three of these games this weekend to make sure I’m not remembering things with rosy-tinted glasses. I am not.
4. Guns don’t have enough individuality. This ties back to sound design and recoil, but guns in MWIII (with a few exceptions) feel much too alike. Without more distinct recoil patterns, most of these guns are just too steady out of the box to even warrant much Gunsmith tinkering. Couple that with the sound design, which makes everything too tinny, and you have a whole arsenal of guns that feels far too similar outside of rate-of-fire and damage. I do like some of the guns (especially the pistols, oddly enough) but overall it feels like a downgrade. That being said, I’m still having fun shooting them!
5. Spawns are terrible. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth has been done on this point even from the game’s biggest fans and strongest defenders. The fact is, spawns are a mess. You’ll spawn in front of enemies or so far across the map that you’ll spend half the game running over just to get killed and there’s just very littler rhyme or reason to it! This seems very fixable, at least.
Scattered thoughts on stuff that needs to improve (I may update this list as I remember things):
- Hit detection seems to be a problem still, or maybe it’s a problem with limb damage, I’m not sure, but sometimes it takes forever to kill someone and sometimes it’s super fast, and not just because I land a headshot or I’m shooting from too far away. It just feels overly unpredictable. This is a problem with prioritizing skill over connection. But it’s also a problem that’s been linked to individual guns like the BAS-B, which was fixed.
- TTK is too high in general for my personal taste. I prefer a faster (and yes, more reliable) time to kill. I prefer 100hp to 150hp. I think a lower TTK would line up with a faster overall paced game like MWIII, and it doesn’t make sense for it to take so long to kill enemies. This makes any encounter with over two enemies almost impossible to pull off.
- I’ve seen a lot of grumbling about the SBMM (or skill-based matchmaking) and I do think it’s a little off but I also wonder if things are just worse because it’s a beta, and you get a lot of sweaty players. We got matched against a pro Twitch players and their entire team of sweats yesterday and got absolutely demolished, but then we’ve had plenty of lobbies where the reverse is true. I don’t think there’s a perfect answer to balancing matchmaking, though I’d opt for a better balance between connection and SBMM (more connection-oriented, softer SBMM). Higher TTK exacerbates this problem.
- Still not a fan of Ground War. They need to make smaller maps for this to work. It’s just tedious and boring at this point, pretty much only good for getting Longshots or sniping.
- High Alert seems to be totally broken. At least, it is far, far less useful than in MWII, to the point that I don’t even notice I have it equipped, which is terrible considering how many Ghosts there are out there.
Verdict
We’re trading a much more tactical shooter for an arcade shooter. That’s the long and short of it, and it’s going to be either a good or a bad thing depending on what you prefer. Let me explain:
In MWII, two controversial design decisions were made.
First, Dead Silence was a Field Upgrade rather than a Perk. That meant you could only use it once and its duration was limited before having to recharge. Timing your Dead Silence was a tactical decision that you could use to flank enemies, get to the bomb site undetected and so forth.
Second, the mini-map only displayed red dots when a UAV was active. In traditional COD, the mini-map shows red dots whenever a players shoots an unsuppressed weapon. This meant that you had to use your hearing to determine where shots were coming from rather than spot a player on the mini-map whenever they shot.
Both these decisions made Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare II a bit more tactical than normal. You had to choose when to move silently, and if you didn’t have Dead Silence, that meant crouch-walking. You could camp more easily, and running-and-gunning was a bit more of a risk (though we know many players still played that way).
I really like this extra level of tactical gameplay! I’m a fan of games like Counter-Strike and Valorant where footstep sounds are super important, and choosing when to move quietly and when to make noise is an important part of every match. MWII was nowhere near the same type of game, but it leaned more in that direction.
MWIII, with its faster movement, Dead Silence perk that can be active 100% of a match and changes to the mini-map (etc. etc. etc.) makes for a much more arcadey, less tactical experience and to me that’s just not as fun, even though it is still fun.
And that’s where I’m at with the beta right now. Overall, I like some of the changes but I wish the game would have retained more of the previous two Modern Warfare games’ DNA, especially in sound design.
Let me know what you think of the game so far on Twitter or Facebook.
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