The last multiplayer shooter I played any decent chunk of time was Team Fortress 2. This was back when one had to pay for multiplayer games, so quite a while ago. Even then, I doubt I played more than twenty or thirty hours of it, which might as well be nothing for a game like that. Before TF2 was Unreal Tournament. I’m not sure whether I invested more time into the original or 2004, but either way I became pretty damn good at it. I loved the concept which ran through the series of every single weapon being overpowered in the right hands, so if you really got to know one weapon you could wreck people with it.
These games employed an obscure and foreign concept called balance. If you don’t know what that is, it’s when a game isn’t bullshit. Everyone on a level playing field, intelligence asymmetry. There are games that capture this so well that winning feels like a real victory, and that from losing you can learn to do better. There are games that capture this, and then is every shooter to have come out in the last seven years.
To be honest, I have played very little of Modern Warfare. I played the single player campaign of the first one and maybe half an hour of the multiplayer, and then I have never touched a single other game in the franchise since. I find the idea of integrating RPG progression into skill-based multiplayer to be conceptually flawed, and while in theory it might enable a rubber banding effect between teenagers with a lot of time and better reflexes and the old codgers, in practice it always serves the opposite effect. Having fun with a multiplayer game playing against people who have invested a lot more time and effort is hard enough in the first place, and then you compound the issue by not only giving them the advantage of skill and knowledge but tangibly better in-game equipment.
I realise these are mechanics people enjoy, or at least I assume they are since they keep being crowbarred into every multiplayer game. I realise that what I’m doing is the gaming equivalent of standing on my lawn, shaking my old man stick at some passing youths shouting “in my day we had to work for our multikills!”. I realise all of these things, but I’m still right. It’s objective bollocks when any game’s developers decide that the mechanical depth provides insufficient skill progression and choose not to fix the problem but instead duck tape an extraneous mechanic over it and hope nobody notices.
If you need to give people who have played hundreds of hours better guns for them to be able to dominate newer players, then you have designed a bad game. If you don’t start with a level playing field you undermine the element of skill. For me, but I guess not for others, that is where the fun of pitting yourself against other humans lies. The only multiplayer genres which seem to have escaped this insufferable tide mostly unscathed are RTS, MOBA, and fighting games. I really wish I could enjoy these types of game, but for whatever reason I simply can’t manage to. These days I tend to avoid multiplayer whenever possible.
