Infinity Ward responds to criticism and noticeably slows down movement. Despite the drastic changes, interest in the shooter on PC remains stagnant.
We’re right in the middle of the second—and final—beta weekend for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. This time, the open beta is running on an additional platform: the Nintendo Switch 2. You can participate in the test without having to pre-order the game. In addition to all the maps and modes from the first weekend, this time you’ll also get a sneak peek at the next Resurgence map for Warzone, as well as two Ground War maps. However, none of this has made much of a difference—at least on Steam, the effort has left hardly any trace so far.
The peak of 115,145 concurrent players from the first weekend remains unbroken. On Friday, the beta came closest to this mark with just over 113,000 players—likely driven by interest in Warzone. Of course, keep in mind that we don’t have any figures for PlayStation 5, Xbox, or Switch 2. So it’s quite possible that player numbers on those platforms were significantly higher during the second weekend.
Nevertheless, Steam is considered a reliable barometer for most major blockbusters. It’s therefore quite remarkable that the numbers didn’t pick up despite the new content and free access.
Response to Community Criticism: Infinity Ward Slows Down Movement
Beyond the raw numbers, the gameplay adjustments really stand out. Infinity Ward tweaked a few settings for this beta weekend to address the community’s most vocal feedback.
The discussion about movement was already heating up on the very first weekend.Many players criticized the high pace and movement options for creating a completely uncontrollable gameplay experience. Infinity Ward therefore tweaked several parameters to test the effect. Even for a beta test, such drastic intervention is unusual and shows how seriously the developer is taking the feedback.
As an experiment, for example, the developers disabled the Tactical Sprint as a default feature. It is now tied to the “Bloodlust” perk. While the Tactical Sprint lets you run faster, it delays the process of drawing your weapon. Savvy players noticed years ago that this delay could be negated by performing a slide. This gives you two advantages at once. It was precisely this technique that dominated the first weekend. But that’s over now: Slides have also received a noticeable nerf. Their range and speed have been reduced, while the delay between sliding and jumping has increased.
Higher Time to Kill and Spawn Fixes: More Balance in Matches
The extremely short time to kill also caused quite a stir during the first weekend. Infinity Ward responded by reducing the damage of all weapons across the board in the beta. Combined with the slowed movement speed, this noticeably slows down the pace of matches and significantly increases the time to kill.
The extensive patch also overhauled the spawn system. This brings order to the chaos of the first weekend, when players constantly spawned right next to their teammates in the middle of combat instead of at the edges of the map. In addition, the developers raised the requirements for killstreaks across the board by one kill to curb rampant killstreak spamming.
Thanks to all these tweaks, the second beta weekend feels noticeably different from the first. No matter how you feel about the changes, they give both critics and satisfied players plenty of reasons to check it out for themselves. So far, however, this curiosity simply isn’t reflected in the raw numbers on Steam.
