“Quickscoping is a cheap way to play”, the words many folks have found themselves saying over the past year of Modern Warfare 2. To hear it coming out rather bluntly from Treyarch’s man Josh Olin is like a getting a $3000 gift card through the post, delivered to you personally by Megan Fox. Funnily enough Treyarch have made changes to how the in-game perks will affect the Sniper rifle scoping capabilities to put a stop to the hated MW2 craze. They are also ditching the commando perk which lets you get a melee kill from say…30 metres (I exaggerate but MW2 players know what I’m getting at).
So are Treyarch sort of not-so-subtly undermining elements of Infinity Ward’s best selling game, or simply parts of its online culture? As someone who has only starting conforming to CoD this year I find all this modification encouraging but still quite removed. But yet I think all the recent news and updates concerning online play are looking very promising indeed, and fans and critics will no doubt be itching to test it all out.
On Twitter, Josh Olin was basically discarding those who like to Quickscope (Sleight of hand perk + game’s helpful auto aim feature) and is happy to tell them that they have to “play it straight-up” from here on. When a good friend of mine first explained the principle of Quickscoping I was doubtful about its use, but after a demonstration (involving a large number of headshots and me pressing ‘respawn’) I realized why the hardcore boys put time into practising it.
I couldn’t and still cannot Quickscope, so I certainly won’t be missing its applications but obviously we have to wonder whether players will find another equally annoying equivalent to butcher the general gaming public, most of which will have Black Ops in about 2 weeks.
Let’s just hope after all this observing and criticising of Infinity Ward’s game, that Treyarch won’t give fans new reasons to complain and drop themselves in the sticky stuff.