Infinity Ward Signs Own PC Death Sentence

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks, you know that Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was released to the world to a record number of consumers. It was released with a very good score on average- about 95% according to Metacritic. Certain anti-gaming zealots have condemned a scene that requires the player to shoot civilians in order to proceed, but for the most part, those are fairly quiet across the board. As Reddit pointed out, it’s not the only game that has a civilian death scene- Age of Empires 2 does it as well. The far greater outcry, however, has come from the PC gaming community. Their beef actually has merit. Infinity Ward has stifled many of the factors that make PC gaming so great, and the most notable of these is the elimination of dedicated servers.

Most console gamers have no idea what dedicated servers are, and probably don’t care. But it’s central to this argument, so I’ll provide a brief overview as to why this is so important. Console gamers typically connect to multiplayer matches via P2P, or peer to peer. The console connects you together, the game decides who has the best connection, and essentially connects everyone else to them. The game is run on their console, and when they leave, or their connection gets bottlenecked, the game pauses, it finds a new player to host, and the game continues on. For most PC multiplayer games, however, the process works differently. Logging into a game such as Battlefield 2, or Team Fortress 2, the player is presented with a server list that they can connect to. These servers offer many game variants. The player, once selecting a server, is connected to a third party computer somewhere and that computer runs the game for all the players. These computers are typically top of the line, with above-average bandwidth, and typically rented by gaming clans.

Why is that important? Firstly, it provides higher performance gaming for all. Most console games have optimized code written directly for the hardware in that system. This means that less data has to be transmitted to the host in order for the game to run smoothly. PCs are a different beast. Each computer doesn’t have the same hardware. So code that works well with your nVidia graphics drivers won’t necessarily work at all with someone’s ATI card. As such, more data is needed to be transferred over the internet, and the host computer has to run a few more calculations. Not enough, necessarily, to provide a drop in performance for everyone, but enough to make a lower end system work harder. The solution is in dedicated servers. With their higher bandwidth and top-notch hardware, the problems tend to balance out the problems.

As a community, PC gaming is entirely different than that of Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network. The community of PC gamers is much more favorable to modders and control freaks. Thanks to tools typically released by developers, modders are able to design new maps and game types that extend the value of a game. Team Fortress was originally a Quake mod by a team led by Robin Walker. After such success from the mod, Valve employed the mod team and produced Team Fortress Classic, and a decade later, Team Fortress 2 was created. Without dedicated servers, there wouldn’t be any viable reason to have created such a mod, as there wouldn’t be any place to play the game. For me, TF2 is the preeminent PC multiplayer game. And without the dedicated server support from iD in Quake, the world would be without it.

Aside from straight mods, the PC community is famous for making new maps for games. Again, Team Fortress 2 may be the biggest beneficiary of these community-generated maps. Several of these have been packaged together by Valve and added to the official version via Steam. Popular zombie horror game Left 4 Dead also was the recipient of community maps. Left 4 Dead also has several non-official maps in development, including my favorite, a map based off the best zombie movie ever, Shaun of the Dead. Again, no dedicated server, no special maps, and Left 4 Dead becomes unplayable after 30 hours.

There’s another big reason the PC community is up in arms about the lack of dedicated servers, and it’s mostly because IWnet effectively kills the COD:MW2 community. Sure, there are several sites on the net that will have forums and news around the game, but nowhere will people be able to come together and actually play as a community. The vast majority of servers are rented by gaming clans and communities for their members. In turn, these members pay fees or drive traffic to a website to keep these quality servers up and running. Although another ‘feature’, the 9v9 limit, will likely keep these communities very unhappy, not being able to properly play together will eliminate any chance of a good community. The cohesive community that many multiplayer games strive for are made outside official developer/publisher pages. The Battlefield and Valve community again, are a testament to this.

Essentially, the exclusivity of IWnet eliminates any word-of-mouth sales for the PC version. Instead of having people recommend the game to other people, someone searching for reviews on the game will see the appalling score from users, which is what I consider most when buying a game. The current score from IGN users is a paltry 2.0 (compared to the 8.6 for the Xbox 360 version), or less than one point better than Gamespot’s score of Big Rigs, probably the worst game in the history of video games. The game is clearly better than Big Rigs, but it’s here that the users are sticking a finger up at Infinity Ward for their idiocy.

They do have the opportunity to fix it- and IW’s Robert Bowling (perhaps better known as fourzerotwo) has said that the company has heard the complaints and are considering their options. For their sake, they better patch it pronto. Left 4 Dead 2 is out with a proven community-centric developer, and anyone with Steam and a preference for PC gaming will most likely spring for the $10 cheaper game.

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