The latest chapter in the «Ways to Piss Off Your Fanbase» saga was recently written by Infinity Ward when they revealed that they are cancelling support for dedicated servers for the PC version of ‘Modern Warfare 2′. Instead, community manager Robert Bowling said, they will be introducing a service called IWNet which will handle matchmaking between players in a similar way to how it is now done on the consoles.
Speaking on bashandslash.com’s podcastBowling revealed that players would be «completely reliant on IWNet, and there’s no dedicated server or server list, so you rely on IWNet for your matchmaking and finding games, but then you also have the private match, much like the other platforms, where you can go in and customise and, you know, turn off air support, turn off this, turn off that, customise the game rules all via private match, and invite people to the server that way.»
All this hit the ‘Call of Duty’ community like a bombshell, as many argued that this should have been something advertised before, and not mere weeks ahead of the game’s release on November 10th, 2009. And since the same community manager said in an interview with Shacknews a month ago that multiplayer on the PC would «be the same as it always was», people thought all was well and pre-ordered not only the game but expensive servers as well.
As if it wasn’t enough that the removal of dedicated servers will fundamentally change the CoD PC gaming community and how it operates, it was also heavily hinted that this new service would probably make it impossible to add custom content like maps and modifications to MW2. This means that the modding scene for the game is dead before it even had a chance to get going.
All this was, understandably, not taken well by fans of the series who have done what gamers normally do in situations like this: they’ve converged on the developer’s forums, started a petition which now has over 90,000 signatures, consulted Hitler (see below), cancelled their MW2 pre-orders, and generally made themselves heard on sites and forums all across the web. Whether or not the developers are taking note of all of this will be determined in the near future.
The new trailer for Infinity Ward’s ‘Modern Warfare 2′ has been released onto the web. The video, entitled «Infamy», starts off biblically with the narrator telling the story of history’s first murder, the tale of Cain and Abel, and then the bloodshed really kicks off.
The game is also known as ‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2′, as it is the sequel to ‘Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’. The single player campaign will take place in Afghanistan, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Russia, Kazakhstan, and a fifth, very famous, location featured in the trailer below. A co-operative game mode known as Special Ops will let two players play through various missions which take place in the locations mentioned, although they will be unrelated to the single player story. MW2 will, of course, also feature an online multiplayer mode. The release date is set for November 10th, 2009.
More information about the game is available on the official website.
