Call of Duty 4 Regains #1 Spot on Xbox Live

Call of Duty 4 overtakes Halo 3 This week we’re seeing the result of Round 2 for the fight up the Xbox Live charts for the prestigious “King of Xbox Live” spot and according to Xbox’s Major Nelson, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has once again taken the #1 spot of the most played game on Xbox Live for the week of 1/28 away from Halo 3.

This battle for the #1 spot has been causing a surge of “Call of Duty 4 vs Halo 3″ articles and forum debates, and I don’t think the question is necessarily as easy as “which game is better”, because that’s all just opinions. Both amazing games, the question I have is who will stay on top, and do I think we can stay on top?

So can we stay on top? Yes.

Why do I think that? Well…

I fully expect to be battling for the #1 spot back and forth with Halo at the moment, it’s a great game with a huge following, but I also know we have a hardcore community of players not to mention have quite a few things up our sleeves for the game (some announced / some unannounced).

Reason #1 — Upcoming Feature Patch:

New Kill Cams

We’re currently finishing up testing a feature patch thats going to bring a lot of enhancements and new features to the multiplayer overall that a lot of the community’s going to love. From Host Migration so when the host leaves you don’t have to research and re-invite everyone, you’ll all stick together and just assign a new host, to new Kill Cams for everything. So now those “WTF!” grenades that seemingly come from no where, you can see that a guy threw it over the house, it hit a tree branch, bounced off a rock, into a tiny window, where you happened to be pointing out of, and say…… whoa. Follow behind RPGs and M203’s kill cams, claymores, Airstrikes where you can follow the bomb from the plane until it hits you.

Host Migration:

Now you won’t have to be dropped back by yoursef when a host leaves. Instead, everyone will stay together, a new host will be assigned, and the game will auto-start back up. Keeping everyone together, no more re-inviting, re-joining games because some host leaves. This has been a tall order and something that we’ve put a lot of work into which has allowed us to really optimize online play all around not just specifically with Host migration.

Improved Sniper / ACOG Accuracy:

Sniper and ACOG scopes have been tweaked and are really improved. I use to not snipe at all (mainly because I’m a horrible sniper), but now it’s so much more fluid and natural, while still having the same difficulty to use, it has no more “WTF I know I hit that guy!” moments.

Upgraded Spectator Cam:

Now when you’re in spectator mode you can follow them in 3rd person, switch to their first person view, or rotate the camera in a full 360 degrees around whoever you’re watching.

[PATCH STATUS: Still in test, we're currently heavily testing the Host Migration before we submit it for certification at Microsoft. So heavily, we currently have the most highly paid test team ever as everyone here at IW is currently help test it, not just the QA department, we have the programmers in there right now actively working to push this thing out as quickly as possible as well as we've all been doing daily take home tests to get time on it even after the day has ended. Great progress happening on it.]

Reason # 2 — Working on new DLC Maps:

The patch isn’t the only thing heading to multiplayer that we’re working on behind the scenes here at Infinity Ward. I announced at the beginning of this week that we’re also working on some brand new maps for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and trust me, based on the feedback were getting regarding what type of new maps you guys what, you’re not going to be disappointed. We’re putting a lot of community involvement, ideas, and feedback into these maps and I can tell you right now that some of the ones we’re working on are exactly what some of you have asked for. Can’t wait to share more details with you when we get a bit further done and start showing them off a bit. Thanks to everyone who has been commenting on the New Maps post.

Reason # 3 - Possibility of new Playlists

We’ve been throwing around new playlist ideas here at the office on ways we can constantly be updating the multiplayer experience for you guys (the community). Try out a few different ideas, see how you guys like them, if it’s gold, we keep it. This sounds like a perfect question for anyone who reads this blog, you guys had great feedback on what you think would make a good map, so what do you think would make a good playlists?

Hardcore Headquarters? I know a few of you have IM’d me that.

Maybe some Team Survival? Essentially just Team Deathmatch with no respawns, last man standing wins.

I would love to get some Hardcore Team Survival going, now that would be some serious shit. No Health Re-gen, no Respawns, just you, your weapon and your 1 life. What do you think? If you could fully customize a gametype (which you can in private match) what would be the rules? What would you call it? Hell, maybe we’ll try it out. I’m being 100% serious too, I’m interested in hearing what you think makes a good game type cause I’d really love to see what we can do to test some out.

Conclusion

Those, among other things, makes me confident we can stay at #1 for quite a while with the support of the community keeping the game fun and fresh. So let’s do it, I’m gonna be gathering up a group of the IW guys and start playing at a dedicated time / day each week, maybe we’ll kick it off tomorrow night? Who’s down for some Hardcore Search and Destroy tomorrow night around 8 pm PST? Regretfully my friends list is full, so I can’t add every friend request I receive but I figured if we have a dedicated gaming night where we know a lot of you and a lot of us (IW) are all going to be on, pick a specific playlist for the night, we’ll all have a much better chance of running into each other online. See you online and be sure to comment with your Playlist ideas.

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