Update 11.10.2023 see update below.
When the beta for Modern Warfare III came out recently, one thing worried me right away. In order to access the beta, you had to login to the Call Of Duty HQ app, select the beta, then the game would close and the beta would launch. Effectively, you had to launch one game and then launch another, just to get to the beta.
Today, in a massive update, Call Of Duty HQ has replaced Modern Warfare II as its main game with Modern Warfare III, despite only the game’s campaign having been released yet. All the multiplayer and Zombies content is locked until launch tomorrow evening.
Now, if you want to play Modern Warfare II or Warzone, you have to load into Modern Warfare III / the Call Of Duty HQ app, select the game you’d like to play, and sit around twiddling your thumbs while it restarts again before taking you back into a totally different hub that has
In other words, rather than have a single hub for all these games, Activision has created two—but you can’t access Modern Warfare II, Warzone or the DMZ without first accessing the main Call Of Duty HQ app! This is extremely inefficient, time-consuming and annoying! This also applies to anyone who doesn’t even own Modern Warfare III. Even if you don’t own it and have no intention of buying it, you’ll still have to go through this process just to play the game you actually do want to play.
At least before MWIII you could move between multiplayer, Warzone and DMZ fairly quickly. You didn’t have to restart the entire game. This will make XP tokens even more irksome than they already are. If you want to move from MWIII to Warzone while you’re running a token, it’ll just keep running out while you reload. I’m not sure how this will handle parties yet—will you be forced to disband moving between games? I’ll have to test it out and see.
The fact of the matter is that a hub like this should either be seamless, allowing you access all the games from one menu and move directly into one or another, or there should not be a single hub for all these games, and you should be able to load into Modern Warfare II, Warzone, Modern Warfare III directly, bypassing a pointless hub that really just wastes time.
Making matters worse, this is in many ways a repeat of the same poorly implemented hub that spanned MW19, Black Ops Cold War, and Vanguard, but Activision and its studios have had years to figure out something better.
Update
The menu / UI / uninstall issues here are a great example of why Activision should have made this a premium DLC rather than a new game. A premium DLC that contained all the OG Modern Warfare 2 (2009) maps, the new War Mode and Zombies could have easily been sold for $40 or $50. That’s a lot of content!
The campaign, which I thought was pretty half-baked but not as terrible as a lot of people are saying, should have been held for a proper Infinity Ward-made Modern Warfare III, thus freeing up time and resources to the massively crunched developers at Sledgehammer games.
Adding a major map pack containing all the OG MW2 games in the current Modern Warfare II also makes more sense! It would have avoided the menu issues, the double loading in COD HQ, the widespread perception that all of this was just a cash grab rushed out the gates by a greed-driven Activision.
As a premium DLC, they would have had to spend less time reinventing the wheel, could have released fewer new guns (using Infinity Ward sound effects) and continued to support MWII for another year. A premium DLC would have split the community a bit, but no more than releasing a totally new game.
This all just feels like a massive missed opportunity to at least try a two-year live-service support model for Call Of Duty, and judging by all the lousy reviews of the campaign and widespread player anger over the game’s full release, I think it would have been the right move.
Read the full article here