Modern Warfare 4 Developers Address Need for Balance in Call of Duty

The team behind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 believes that players have only gotten better at the game since the franchise became a pop culture juggernaut.

Speaking to IGN ahead of Modern Warfare 4’s highly anticipated beta, multiplayer design lead Jacky Reynolds expressed the belief that the average Call of Duty player has only gotten better with time. As a result, it has pushed Infinity Ward and the various teams behind Call of Duty to play their game inside and out to ensure there aren’t ways for players to exploit the most powerful items to ruin the fun for others.

“I think in general, the average player is just so much better than they were 15 years ago,” Reynolds said as part of a sweeping interview on all things Modern Warfare 4. “A big thing that we have internally, as well as making that victim experience [satisfying], is making sure that we play everything with each other to make sure that there’s not any crazy strategies that can break open a whole sandbox. Kind of like when you had One Man Army and grenade launcher rounds and you could just infinitely shoot them across the map [in the original Modern Warfare 2].”

In the original Modern Warfare 2 from 2009, players were able to combine various systems together to cause mayhem. There was a perk known as One Man Army, which allowed the player to pull out a bag and change their loadouts without dying. That may seem relatively harmless, but players discovered that you could use this to also restock ammo for things like grenade launchers. Once they figured that out, they could sit in their spawns and fire infinite grenade launcher rounds into the air and kill enemies without ever seeing them.

It’s one of the most infamous exploits in Call of Duty and, as Reynolds noted, the developers put in a lot of effort to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself. As of right now, we’ll just have to wait and see if they’ve succeeded with Modern Warfare 4. I asked if there were any weapons that fans should try before they get nerfed or if there are any Infinity Ward was specifically keeping an eye on for balancing, but the developers suggested that they wouldn’t intentionally put something in that they don’t feel is properly tuned. Ultimately, the goal is to make a game that is fun, but fair.

“As far as balancing all those things out, we’ve tried to lean into the fun, but also making things fair,” added Reynolds. “And it’s a conversation I’m sure we’re going to continue to have after this first weekend. We’ll probably get a lot of great feedback on that.”

For more, check out our interview with Infinity Ward on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 in full.

Cade Onder is a freelancer for IGN’s news team. He covers all things entertainment, including gaming, film, and more. You can find him on Twitter @Cade_Onder.