The Harderned and Collector's edition come with COD 1. IIRC, the Collector's with the NVG's are sold out... For just $10 more, I'm thinking of getting the Hardened edition for COD 1.
Apostle, The Hardened Edition comes with COD2 as downloadable content, not COD1 like I said before. Also, the PS3 version of the Collectors Edition with night vision goggles is sold out... This may not be true of the XBox 360 version. Sorry for the mis-info. On the other hand, here is what you would look like wearing the MW2 NVG's... You may want to reconsider. I hope that guy cut them off before they flashed the camera.
Spike TV has a show called "Game Trailers" and last night, they airred a special episode that focused on MW2. A new mode in addition to single and multiplayer was revealed, which they call "spec ops" mode. 1 life, 1 team one objective.... They also introduced a new type of adversary they call "juggernauts." These guys can be killed only after several shots, explosives or melee. This is this COD's "Zombie-ish" add-on, I take it. Adding a Zombies mode to Modern Warfare would be terribly out of line, IMHO and rumors of an "Alien Terrorist" mode didn't fit this unique sub-franchise within COD either. Hopefully, this Spec Ops mode will be as successful as Zombies was for COD: World at War.
Me too, but Zombies works for WAW because 50 million people died in 1940's Europe. Lot's of POW's and people lost and considered dead... It's not hard to let the imagination run wild and have soldiers fight the dead bodies of people they killed in the war... It fits. In this day in age... I don't think the genres fit. I'm just saying....
From what I've seen, Modern Warfare 2 is the continuation of the first MW. They should just keep going with the series. Make an ongoing story and just keep making games about it. MW1 was the fastest selling game in history, IIRC. MW2 will probably beat that.
According to the geek at my local GameStop, MW is the best selling VG of all time having sold over 14 million copies @ $60 a pop. The general consensus is that MW2 will beat it seeing as how it's already sold over a million copies before it's been released.
I decided to upgrade my reserved prepaid copy of MW2 to the Hardened Edition. It will come with the first ever Call of Duty game, which was a PC game and never on any console. I also picked up COD 3 for the PS3 for $15 (It sucks, so far), so after 11.10.2009, I'll have COD 1,3,4,5, and 6.
The more I hear about MW2's Spec Ops mode, the more excited I get about it. In this video, it sounds like the IW rep is hinting that there will be some expandable downloadable content later on!! [YT="Modern Warfare 2 Spec Ops mode"]3riwwkxTOp8[/YT]
Is this a PC issue or something? Robert Bowling from Infinity Ward printed something about why this would be a good move for MW2. I'll post it when I get home so you PC guys can see if it makes sense to you.
It's not a good move in any sense, no mods forced to pay for updates and limited to some shitty p2p system.
The "usual" model for PC shooters is that the servers are hosted mostly by players who like the game enough to pay for hosting. These are player-owned, but they are proper servers running on good hardware in proper datacenters (i.e. they are not just hosted on a players PC/console). It's all well and good for the game company to provide servers themselves. However, there are a lot of downsides to taking away dedicated server support: #1: players can't create environments with their own moderation / rules. As anyone who plays online games knows, a lot of players are complete jackasses. It's nice to be able to create a community of people who you enjoy playing with and enforce your own set of rules about what type of behavior makes the game fun (or to find such a community that someone else created). Having dumb lobby systems or automatching just means you are going to be hearing 14-year-olds scream obscenities over the internet and into your living room that much more often. Plus, the owners and their friends are generally around to moderate the servers, to boot off any people who are making the place less enjoyable in one way or the other. This is in contrast to randomly matched games where some jackass can spoil the fun and there's not always anything you can do about it. These dedicated servers also almost always have nice mods that let players vote to change maps (early if they want) and even rule sets, or to boot out annoying players, even if there are no mods around at that time. #2: no community-created maps A lot of the best maps for many shooters are created by someone in the community. It's possible that MW2 will still make an easy way for people to play these online, but automatch systems pretty much never allow these maps to get popular, even if they are wonderful to play on. #3: no fun community mod servers Popular PC shooters have pretty much always had plethora of mods going waaay back to the oldies. For example zombie mode, role-playing modes with stats and levelling up, low gravity, etc. #4: connection quality It's not cost effective for a non-subscription game to host dedicated servers for all of the players out there. Therefore the way these systems are implemented is that the people who connect to the game host the game themselves. Either a single users PC (or xbox, or 360) hosts it, or the work is shared between the machines. The downsides here are that there is a lot more potential for shitty lag and exploits since you have to rely on the other players to have a good connection, a fast enough PC to handle the load, AND to "be honest" about what they are sending out. A dedicated server however is generally proper server sitting on a real quality connection, and it's JUST playing the role of server, not "playing the game and hosting the match" at the same time. So this means each player is communicating only the server, not to each other. This has the advantage that the server holds the real "state" of the game, so it makes it quite a bit harder for people to exploit things, and peoples laggy connections are generally only a penalty to THEM, and not everyone on the server. #5 potential for forced upgrades / loss of service As darkening mentioned: if the servers are not controlled by the players, the company can choose to yank them at any time (for example if an expansion comes out). This means you won't necessarily be able to keep playing in a few years (if you really liked the game) if the company deems that it isn't important anymore. On another note.. I also saw on steam today that they want 59.99 for the PC version, which I think is the first time that I have seen a PC game over 49.99 that wasn't either a combo pack or a "collectors edition". BUT, they could be under pressure from retailers to not undercut the console price. I've heard that places like Best Buy will threaten to not carry games if there are cheaper versions available online (but I had heard of this only for PC games at retail stores vs downloadable titles, not comparing console prices to PC prices). If you are asking yourself "why on earth would they restrict people from running servers for your game and enhancing the player experience?", I have an answer: The creators are afraid of people hosting modified servers that do not validate the users CD-keys, and therefore letting people pirate the game and still play online. Frankly I think that something as simple as a ladder or persistent stat system does a pretty good job of making people get legit keys, but companies are going to continue to over-DRM their games. Whattayagonnado? I wasn't planning to buy this game anyway, so it's not like either of these things bothers me particularly. (I'm going to be allocating my limited "try out a new game" time to Borderlands).
I'm not weighing in either way, but here is Robert Bowling aka "fourzerotwo" from Infinity Ward's latest post on his blog regarding IWNET. Long live the console.
Let me translate that hype for you: Translates to: Picking stuff yourself is such a HASSLE! Building a community of players who all like to play the same server with the same rules on a regular basis is overrated! Who want's to select from a list? Regardless of what you might WANT to choose, we know what's best for you. Translates to: We are going to let you do the stuff you already could do with most existing online games! Except if someone else (say, players in the community) comes up with a really cool mod... then I guess we won't let you do that. You don't need any free extra content created by other players! Translates to: We copied even more stuff from Steam! But hey, who wants to use a system that works for ALL of your games, when you can totally use our system that only works for this one game? Translates to: The only people you might want to kick out of a game are cheaters! Who cares if someone is just being a nuisance or a complete dickhole? Also, we're going to lie you to and make it sound like you couldn't boot people out without some ADMIN (votekick and voteban don't exist! seriously they are fake, and they totally aren't on like 99% of servers!). Also, we have even EVEN more stuff taken from Steam! (for the uninformed, Valve is the company that runs Steam. So they are actually licensing VAC and advertising it as some new feature, despite the fact that it has been out since 2002). Translates to: We added some crap that already existed in pretty much any popular PC shooter in the last 7-8 years. Only now you can't CHOOSE to have the hassle of taking ownership of your own community! After all, we know what's best for you! Anyway, enough translating. Fact is that CoD series was never the best online experience (protip: the multiplayer was never good enough!). So, I'm sure this system will be better than the one used for say, Call of Duty (original version, which incidentally was the best one as far as single player goes). But here's the bottom line: adding new features like matchmaking is GOOD. Taking away player control and existing features is BAD. Even if IWNET turns out to be pretty good, it will never be as good as the community could be if it was allowed to create and add to the experience rather than being locked out. Unless the game turns out to suck. Then it won't get the necessary community to make improvement. But then again, if it turns out that it sucks, nobody is gonna care that the online experience is gimped, because nobody is gonna play it. TL;DR version: They've added features that already exist in any popular PC shooter, whether they arose from community support or official support (good thing). They've taken away player options (bad thing). They've stymied community innovation and ownership (really bad thing).
You think that's bad, it's even worse here. Game prices are generally higher in Australia than they are overseas. Publishers justify this for a variety of reasons, such as our relatively small market (21 million people) and distance from other places meaning increased shipping costs. At the moment the Australian dollar is doing well against the US dollar, which means it is really good value to buy games off services like Steam as it lists prices in US dollars. Left 4 Dead 2 for example would cost me about half the price if I was to purchase it on Steam as opposed to retail. Activision doesn't like this as it means they are getting less money from Australian customers who buy games off Steam. So they have a filter in place that checks your country of origin and changes the price in US dollars depending on your location. If I look on Steam at the moment Modern Warfare 2 is listed for US$89.99. No difference in cost for Activision whatsoever in providing the game, they just decide to charge us almost double price. Needless to say, with the combination of that and the server issue I will not be buying this game.
With less than two weeks to go, there is some leaked video footage, very poor quality, making it's way around the internet. It's supposed to be the opening sequence of MW2. It seems genuine enough. Activision made youtube pull it down.... This is why I can't get a link to it. You are an undercover CIA operative that has infiltrated a terrorist cell. You are at an airport and your terrorist buddies and you open fire on a crowd of unarmmed civilians. As you make your way through the airport killing people, you make it to a van where Makarov himself is waiting for you. He lets the other terrorist in, but when it's your turn, he pulls out a gun and shoots you in the head. I guess you cover was blown. Very invokative of the Al-Asad/Al-Fulani opening of MW1. There are some that believe that this will be a bit controversial, but I don't think so. If you've killed one computer generated foe, you've killed them all. Unarmmed or not.
Where is the airport? You can tell by the way people dress. Are these good people, or are they non-American?
