Call of Duty 4 could learn a thing or 5 from the Gubment

Posted by Ward Rubrecht at 12:38 PM May 21, 2008

Ok, so one looks like the sex and the other looks like shit warmed over. Let's move beyond that.

My name is Ward, and I'm addicted to realism. Ok, maybe not all realism; turn-based tank simulators bore me as much as the next guy under 40. No, I crave the kind of realism that motivates people to spend hours studying the spread patterns of one gun vs. another using statistical analysis, just to gain a little edge in a fast-paced shooter.

Back in the day, I used to be pretty good at a little game called America's Army. Yes, the recruitment tool designed by the government to brainwash 13-year-olds into a glass-eyed fascination with killing brown people. Most of my friends couldn't stand the game because of its slow pace and long times between rounds, but it was realistic to a fault. As a shooter grognard, that's what drew me to it. So I spent days on end camping under pine trees, drooled over upcoming patches, joined a couple clans, got my account banned for cheating without using cheats, the whole bit.

Nowadays America's Army has petered out because the Defense Department cares more about invading countries for oil than prepping the next generation of cyber-soldiers. So I've taken up Call of Duty 4, the current king of multiplayer military shooters. It's a pretty big improvement in fun, if not necessarily in realism.

CoD4's gameplay is fast-paced, but it's still pretty gritty, with customizable guns, viable camper tactics, and a hardcore mode that makes most weapons realistically deadly. But there's still some caveats to the Halo crowd that bug me--things that America's Army, with all its flaws, did better.

5. Weapon Jams

Once every umpteen times you fired your weapon America's Army, your weapon would jam and you'd have to hit a special "fix weapon jam" button before it'd let you fire again. Since it happened very rarely, I'd inevitably have to look down at my keyboard in a panic to remember what key I needed to hit. The ensuing adrenaline rush nicely simulated the stress of field-clearing a rifle mid-combat. CoD4 could benefit from this small but powerful nod to realism.

4. Grenade kill radius

In CoD4 and America's Army, you can "cook" grenades--that is, hold the little cluster of potential shrapnel in your hand while its chemical fuse burns down a little bit. This sometimes-suicidal feature lets you air nade unsuspecting noobs and makes it tougher to throw back live nades. Unfortunately, in CoD4 the fuckers still have a kill radius smaller than Dick Cheney's conscience. Sometimes you can stand on the other side of a large room from an exploding grenade and be just peachy.

In real life, the M67 hand grenade has a casualty radius of 50 feet. I understand that for game-balancing reasons, making it quite so large is impossible; everyone would just stand around hucking cooked nades into the air (this happened quite a lot in America's Army). But a little bigger would be really nice--as is, you pretty much have to bean somebody in the face to kill them.

Another grenade-based feature from America's Army that would be pretty sweet in CoD4: laying down on a nade to save your teammates. It actually worked! How cool is that?

3. Realistic reloading

In real life, a soldier carrying an M4A1 carbine has his ammo loaded into 30-round magazines (please don't say clips). He inserts a magazine, works the action, and fires. If he reloads before his magazine is expended, one round is still left in the chamber--that is, inside the gun, not inside the magazine. So when he loads the next magazine, he's starting out with 31 rounds to burn instead of 30.

CoD4 gets that part right--but totally fails by treating ammo as a "pool," and not as rounds loaded into magazines. In other words, if I start with 150 rounds, I can fire a single round, reload, fire another round, reload, 150 times, each time inserting a "new" magazine. I never run out, even though realistically I should only be carrying around five or six magazines, tops.

This means most players reload after every kill. You never have to go into a firefight thinking "I've only got two magazines left, so I can't really afford to reload. But I think I only have five cartridges left in this one." Asking your average XBox player to do that kind of math mid-combat is kind of mean, but the tactical tension would make the game a lot more fun.

2. Bunny hopping

In CoD4, shottyphiles routinely bounce around corners like a homicidal Tigger on happy pills, perforating my face while neatly leaping over a spray of automatic fire. It drives me nuts. This problem has been around since Quake, people. The first one. Can we not deal with it?

America's Army elegantly sidestepped the problem by not letting you fire your weapon while jumping. Sure, it's an eensy bit unrealistic that you can't even pull the trigger while midair. But it's ten times stupider to imagine your bullets going anywhere useful if you could do so.

1. Silencers

Applying a silencer to your gun in CoD4 decreases its range significantly. Applying a silencer in real life...wait for it...silences your weapon. Nothing more, nothing less. A silencer doesn't interact with the bullet at all--the projectile just passes through the silencer without touching its walls. All the device does is slow the release of gasses from the barrel after the bullet has left, preventing most of the "bang" noise. Why go to the bother of having licensed guns and accurately modeled miltary scopes if you're gonna screw the pooch on a core gameplay issue like ballistics?