This weekend I finally got some time to sit down and play Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer.  I played about 4 hours (not at once) and made it to a level 16 ranking.  I figure I would spend a couple minutes giving my impressions from the viewpoint of a casual player.

One thing that you will notice early on is that you are playing against players of all different ranks.  This is in stark contrast to games like Halo where you play against players only that have the same rank as you.  At first I thought that this would really suck, but I honestly like it much better.  The game does a pretty good job of balancing the teams before each match.  So if you are brand new, you tend to get paired up with a bunch of really good teammates.  This helps a lot because they tend to hunt out the campers, and you can follow them around to learn about the level.  The downside to playing against really good players is that as a casual gamer, you are always at a disadvantage.  MW2 rewards experience with better guns and other perks that give higher ranked players a huge advantage.  So, it is often like you are “going into a gun fight with a knife”.  As a casual player, you can mitigate this advantage in a couple ways.  The first and probably most effective is that you have to crouch around and use stealth a lot more than other players.  In MW2, you really only need to put a couple rounds on an opponent to get a kill.  And I found that no matter what gun they have, if you get the first shot in and it is solid, you will get the kill 9 out of 10 times.  The second strategy I use a lot is that I take on a support role.  I find a player with a solid gun and some claymores and hold up in a bunker or building with them and essentially cover the back door.  This prevents you from being exposed to care packages and you get a lot of surprise kills when someone tries to come in through the back door.

Another thing that was pretty confusing early was all the gun and perk options you are given to upgrade your player.  Being new to Call of Duty multiplayer, this was a bit overwhelming.  It really took me a couple hours to get a grasp of all the options.  But honestly, it is this depth that really makes the game a lot more fun to play.  In Halo, you are always worried about your rank, because this is the only thing that your work to achieve.  In Call of Duty, the rank is really secondary to your perks and gun options.  So, I think this really makes the game fun for a casual player.  If you mute the other players, the game really feels kind of like a “career mode” to the single player story.  But the difference is that you have some really good AI to compete against.  For this game though, I really would like to see an option to purchase perks and guns with XBox points for casual players.  I know I will get a little flack for saying that.  But, honestly, as someone who can play maybe 5-10 hours a week, it would be nice to use some of the more advanced weapons in the multiplayer.  And, I most likely will never be able to earn them organically as I cannot put in 50 hours a week.

Overall, I really dig the multiplayer on MW2.  As a casual player (read: old guy), it provides a pretty good balance so that I can have a good time playing even if it just a couple hours a week.  With that said, I still think I would like to see a way to get better guns and perks without having to hire a 12 year old kid to play when I am at work.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 8:08 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.