Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 developers from Sledgehammer Games have spoken to NME about the game’s longer time-to-kill mechanics, along with planned changes to visibility and weapon balance.
Last week (October 6), the first beta for Modern Warfare 3 kicked off on PlayStation. As fans got their hands on the upcoming shooter, a few of its features stuck out – one of which was the game’s unusually long time-to-kill (TTK), a measurement that determines how long it takes one player to kill another.
While this varies between Call Of Duty games, Modern Warfare 3 has one of the series’ longest to date. Speaking to NME, Zach Hodson, design director at Sledgehammer Games, shared the reasoning behind this year’s TTK.
“We play test a lot – we do about two hours a day at minimum,” he shared. “One of the big things we focused on was when you play that much, you want to get better. You want to feel like your investment of time is actually yielding some results, otherwise it ends up feeling like a very flat experience. We found that when we increased the TTK, it felt like there was progress being made.”
Greg Reisdorf, Sledgehammer’s multiplayer creative director, says that philosophy was the core of Modern Warfare 3‘s multiplayer design. “Our north star was to always leave a match feeling like ‘Oh I can try this thing next time, I’m getting a little bit better at my aim, I know a trick now where I can counter drop-shotting,'” he shared.
Ultimately, Sledgehammer landed on giving each player 150 health points, but it took trial and error – and at one point even an armour system – to get right.
“We tried a lot of different health values, we even tried armour for a little bit, we tried a lot of different things,” explained Hodson. “150 just felt like the right spot. We did have to tune the weapons a little bit to get it there, and obviously the [faster] movement made an impact as well. [Being] more mobile means we don’t have to go any higher than 150.”
Elsewhere, this month’s beta has prompted feedback from fans. One of the largest criticisms has been with visibility, as a number of players have complained that it’s too difficult to spot enemies in multiplayer matches. Reisdorf confirmed that some changes are already being planned based on feedback.
“We’re addressing some tuning concerns on some of the weapons, specifically the Striker,” shared Reisdorf. “We have some visibility things we’re playing with,” he added, acknowledging criticism that the series’ removal of players’ nametags has made it harder to distinguish between friend and foe.
“For launch we’re going to go deeper into the name tag land, and really address that more. We do have some soft fixes for weekend two that’ll feel better – it’s not quite where we want them, but it’s a step forward.”
Reisdorf added that slide cancelling, a mechanic that lets players skip the animation of lifting their gun, will also be improved to remove a delay that’s currently slowing it down.
Elsewhere, Reisdorf also told NME why Sledgehammer is bringing back all of the launch maps from 2009’s Modern Warfare 2, and what made that original game special.
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