Thinking About Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II Season 01 (Premium)

Like so many software releases these days, the initial launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II was woefully incomplete. But unlike would-be competitors like Halo Infinite, COD:MWII will right those wrongs quickly, with its first major update---a so-called Season 01 release---coming next week.

I have a few thoughts.

First, the name of this game is not Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, it’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. I can’t tell you how often I see it misnamed, even by reputable game bloggers and journalists. In fact, it’s misnamed more often than it’s correctly identified. I don’t get that: there’s already a game called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 that came out in 2009. This is a different game. Name it correctly.

Second, I was delighted to discover that MWII fixed the issues that prevented me from playing its three predecessors and sticking with the years-old Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 instead. The multiplayer experiences in both Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (which, likewise, does not share a name with the original Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare) and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War had massive lag and latency issues that made them unplayable. And last year’s Call of Duty: Vanguard had terrible, previous-gen graphics, uninspiring maps, and uninteresting World War II-era weapons.

But MWII is a different story. The graphics and performance are top-notch, even on my supposedly lowly Xbox Series S. There are no lag or latency issues at all. The maps, almost to a one, are superb, and not far too large for Team Deathmatch-like games as were too many maps in the previous three levels. The weapon loadouts, killstreaks, perks, and so forth are mostly great. Even the ability to start the game up and get right into a match has been dramatically streamlined and is so much better than any COD game for years.

It's not perfect, of course. The loadout customization stuff is needlessly complex and, because of the incredibly short duration between matches, impossible to work on between games. I don’t like the new “perk package” system, which is likewise too complex. It’s weird to me that you don’t move forward through matches with the same people; instead, each match is a new set of gamers. (This could have been true of the previous few games, but I don’t recall as I didn’t play them enough.) You can’t turn off cross-play (between Xbox, PS5, and PC), at least on the platform I use. And worst of all, the game type I always play, Hardcore Team Deathmatch, is unavailable (for now) because the game launched without any Hardcore playlists.

This is a problem because in playing “normal” Team Deathmatch, I’m constantly confronted with situations in which I riddle some enemy with armor-piercing ammunition only to be quickly snuffed out by someone who has even better weapons. In Hardcore, I’d get a lot more kills, and my K/D (kill/death) ratio would be a lot higher. Speaking of which, this game has abso...

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