Call of Duty 4?

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is the fourth instalment of the Call of Duty series on PC, making it seventh instalment of the series, also it’s the first Call of Duty game that isn’t based on World War II but as the name suggests guns, characters and environments are based on near future. CoD4 is a first-person shooter game that has been developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision. The announcement of the new game was made on 25th of April 2007 and followed by the release on 6th of November in North America and 9th of November in Europe. And not like with Call of Duty 2, the developers decided to publish the game with an anticheat Punkbuster and the new game is considered to be the best Call of Duty out-of-the-box yet with Infinity Ward being very active providing updates to the game with a speed that they’ve never done before (four major updates released within about a month after the game was released). I think it’s worth it to mention that Call of Duty 2, the predecessor, managed to grap two WSVG stops but only one was actually held due to the fact that WSVG was cancelled.

Gameplay

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare features a handful of gametypes such as Free-for-All (basicly deathmatch), Team Deathmatch (get as much frags as you can in the time given to you), Headquarters (recover to laptop from battlefield and defend it), Oldschool (basicly Team Deatchmatch with no classes, guns are laying on the battlefield) and Sabotage (very similar to S&D but the bomb is neutral and objectives are located in both teams’ bases).

The most popular gametype is called Search and Destroy (S&D) which means that you have two teams, one defending the bombsites and one trying to destroy them and the one which is trying to destroy those, has a bomb. It is played with the 5on5 method like any other Call of Duty game on PC and not like in the previous games, only one can plant the bomb but so far it has been impossible to drop the bomb to a teammate once you’ve picked up it. Naturally the bomb will drop on to the ground after the carrier dies. To be able to sprint and to be able to cook your grenades is brought back from previous Call of Duty title called United Offensive, published in 2004.

Call of Duty 4 also introduced some new features to the series, ability to be able to shoot through walls and objects, perks that are abilities which allow gamers to customize their characters and to give few examples I introduce few perks: the Bandolier which gives you few extra magazines as the default is only three, the Deep impact perk gives you more bullet penetration making it easier to shoot through walls. There are about 22 different perks and most of them are removed from competitive gaming as most of them aren’t made for it and so would unbalance the game. You are also able to make attachments to your weapon such as silencers, red dot sights and grenade launchers.

The present

However some parties want to remove all perks which, in my opinion, would take us back in time to Call of Duty 2 days and others want to remove some of the perks that aren’t made for competitive gaming. Parties also have disagreements about the attachments as some say that the red dot sight is way too accurate and should be removed and others wouldn’t remove it. The grenade launcher attachment is removed from competitive gaming as it is way too powerful.

Infinity Ward issued their latest patch on 19th of December, which was their fourth, that improved mod support, fixed bullet accuracy issues, made improvements to the server browser and featured a holiday version of the famous multiplayer map mp_crash with snow, snowman and presents under a huge Christmas tree.

Currently the scene is impatiently awaiting the confirmation from Infinity Ward that the promised Codtv is on its way and how much efford they have put into it as last time we saw some sort of tv properties in Call of Duty series we had a Codtv was during the first Call of Duty with cameramen on the gameserver who’s view we had to watch and we had no control what they were doing.

The Future

Althought the game has been in the stores just more than a month now, there has been several major lan events in Europe such as Multiplay i32 that took place in Newbury, England on the same weekend as the game hit the stores followed by another lan in Paris, France titled as CoD-Gamer lan on the next weekend. Both lans were sponsored by the publisher Activision with just over 7,000 euros in prize purse. The following confirmed major lans in Europe so far are Multiplay i33 held in Newbury, England between 21st and 24th of March with Crossfire Devotii Challenge taking place in the city of Enschede in Netherlands between 29th of February and 2nd of March 2008. CDC4 features a 10 000€ prize purse and it has been split with four games, Call of Duty 4 getting the biggest slice 4000€. The third one is the second largest computer festival in the world called the Gathering held in Hamar, Norway from 19th of March to 23rd of March.

With players switching over from different communities like Day of Defeat: Source, Battlefield series and Counter-Strike: Source to play the new game and several G7 organisations already having (4Kings, PGS) or planning to have (fnatic) or rumoured to have (MYM), the game’s future looks bright.