1UP has an article about the latest good news for would-be players of the PC version of Modern Warfare 2: you get the same feature set as the console counterparts!

Coming in the wake of the Great Dedicated Server Controversy of Ought-Nine, Infinity Ward has announced another bit of Modern Warfare 2 news that might rile devoted PC gamers. Whereas multiplayer sessions in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare allowed up to 32 players on the PC (actually 64, guys! <3 Zotmaster), Modern Warfare 2’s player cap will be reduced to 18, with 9-vs-9 matches just like the console versions. Before you grab your pitchforks, Infinity Ward does have a reason for the decision: “The max number of players on all platforms are 1v1 through 9v9. This is the number of players we focused on when we were balancing map size, perks, classes, challenges, etc.,” explained developer Mackey McCandlish in a Best Buy live chat session (via Kotaku). So in other words, rather than potentially upset the balance by artificially inflating the cap just because they can (and they probably could have), they chose instead to preserve the balance they were going for in designing every other portion of the multiplayer experience. Whether that explanation will be enough for PC gamers who thought they were getting bigger multiplayer sessions than their console friends, though, will remain to be seen.

Of course, this is basically just spin on 1UP’s part. There are exactly zero reasons why the game couldn’t have been “balanced” one way without still giving PC gamers the option to make their own modifications and customize their own game like basically every other PC game in existence.

Gamers have managed to come up with a pretty unbiased feature-for-feature comparison between MW2 and its predecessor:

(Original image source: http://static.4players.de/cs-attachments/files/102174_1257353877.jpg)

As I pointed out in a previous post, a lot of the blame for this kind of gimped feature set falls on the people who buy the games. Activision has shown that it will put out as little effort as possible while still maximizing its potential return. While console gamers may not necessarily “get it”, this kind of thing is not all that different from making, say, an original Xbox or PS2 game and porting that exact game to its respective next-generation console. It completely ignores the technology and the abilities of the new system, while still managing to charge more for it.

I’m glad I don’t support Activision.

(TE)DC