Modern Warfare 3 and eSports?

image: mw3_545

MLG conducted an interview with with Brett Robins, the creative director at Sledge Hammer games, to find out about the developers slant on the game and its future possibly in MLG itself. Interpreting the answers in a cynical eSports fashion as one might, the name might have changed but its business as usual for Activision and their neglect of eSports.

The interview starts positively with Robins stating that eSports and competitive gaming will one day go mainstream "I think it’s going to happen here. With the multiplayer in Modern Warfare 3, it’s going to blow up because the multiplayer is so good this time around." However as you can see in the quote below, that doesn't mean they've actually done anything nor are they likely to in terms of eSports;

QuoteMLG: Modern Warfare 2 didn’t translate to eSports, but Black Ops took off. Were you thinking about pro gaming when you were designing Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer?

BR: We were definitely looking at that. We have guys that all they do is stay in touch with the community. So we definitely knew what was happening there. We wanted to cater to those super hardcore fans, but you have to make sure you also are catering to the casual gamer. You don’t want to leave anyone out of the experience. There’s no secret to it, just a lot of hard work to make sure everyone is happy.

You can read the full interview here on MLG.

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Comments
83
I dont get it why people buy it already....
What is the last fps that came out and really made it into eSports?
I think Zodiac is right, CoD4
Parent
Kinda sad, I don't like cod4. Would be nice if some awesome dev. would make a fast playing fps that was aimed at the comptive sense. I will dream on :]

image: JNaNk
Parent
could've been quakelive also
Parent
Honestly hoped it would be good for competitive gaming, but knew it wouldn't be - glad I didn't buy it like I did with Brink..
+1

But I kinda still wanna buy it.. :(
Parent
the worst thing is knowing all your friends love this shit when the gameplay is so hand-fed to you they dont even realise how awful it is
haha yes - this youtube somes it up perfectly!
Parent
god, this is great!
Parent
wasnt there a guy keeping in touch with the community when ET:QW was made (or was it Wolfenstein)?
wasnt it brink?
Parent
Yup, Badman was his name
Parent
and you can see how it ended. The guy has to be from the community not keeping in touch with it if you know what i mean :/

EDIT: actually it doesnt matter that much, not like its gonna change much anyway -.-
Parent
Yeah, as SPU9 said it also happened a bit for Brink. There are very few examples of the communities managers actually delivering something requested by the community. Quake & Syncerror are possibly the only positive example I can think of.
Parent
just shows how competitive players are on a verge of extinction in a larger scale market (not counting in MMO's like WoW obviously). When i think about it 'Idiocracy' seems less and less far :<
Parent
FPS-games are made for 13 year old boys and their consoles.
Parent
Starcraft 2 is the exception that proves the rule, Blizzard managed to build (as they always do) a game that has a mass market appeal and an eSports appeal.
Parent
True, but then again, beta testers of Diablo III are already complaining about difficulty level and the game beeing just plain, linear and simply too easy to lose any mission. Even Blizzard started to follow the 'more casual games' tendency. S2 might be an exception but the overall policy will become Activision-like (I really didn't like the idea of Activision Blizzard).
Parent
I wouldn't worry about Diablo 3 - When was the last time Blizzard released a bad game? I remember talking to Tasteless about SC2 when it was in Alpha/Beta and he hated it, by the time the game was release all those fears were gone.
Parent
It depends who you ask. Despite the success of SC2, a lot of the pro scene have publically stated that they dislike the game and feel that is a heavily dumbed down version of Broodwar, with some serious root concept design flaws (not to mention it is increasingly imbalanced.)

I'd be very interested in what Tasteless would say to you tomorrow if you had the same chat (behind closed doors, obviously, because he is someone who would never publically state anything bad about it)
Parent
Yeah but that is what EVERYONE says about any game that comes out after a successful title, ask a Q2 player what they think of Q3 or to come closer to home many RTCW players thoughts on ET. I wouldn't worry too much about discerning elders, in the case of SC2 the numbers of eSport players & viewers just don't lie.
Parent
They don't lie about the success sure, but your reply was to someone who was claiming that D3 is linear, simple and appealing to the mass-market. All of those are believable but none of them will stop the game being hugely successful, but it will disappoint 'hardcore' gamers - but hardcore gamers will always buy the games, so I doubt Blizzard care.
Parent
fitting name?
Parent
brink too, the guy who looked like clooney, richard ham or smth
Parent
erm, you cant look both like Clooney and Richard Hammond :p
Parent
i didnt mean the guy from top gear :P, i thought the name of the guy who looked like clooney was richard ham
Parent
i know, was just joking ;)
Parent
It's a fucking horrible console port, so no, it holds no future in eSports.
The PC nerds will say its a shit game so there will be no future for MW3 on the PC I think. But for console it would be huge, just like BF3, there will be lots of events that are having a comp for those games :) So yeah I think MW3 will be good in esports
trouble is esports is mainly done on PC, certainly at a competitive level anyway.
Parent
Oh, yeah Black Ops certainly took off, with million dollarz xboxes tournaments.
ur jokes are getting old fuzz
Parent
same joke, different game, thats all :(
Parent
and always spot on :(
Parent
black ops took off?


:D

especially black ops took off when they released a fuckedup bugged MP game which 90% of players had 10 fps on servers, then a late patch

hi xbox
black ops is extremely popular on the american console market and there are tons of money flying aroundm its just no game for the casual cf pc nerd
Parent
console for the WIN!!!!
Parent
mlg is an american company therefore they care about consoles :)
Parent
The only good competitive pc-game released the past 2-3 years has to be SC2.

Else we still play the stuff we played 5 years ago. Kinda sad but it clearly shows how few competitive gaming and players actually mean to the publishers.
cs too, ql was decent too but now dying. wc3 is dying too and bw is competetive in KR
Parent
None of the mentioned games got released the past 2-3 years.:(

Really hoping Proleague switches to SC2.
Parent
League of Legends was released in 2009 and HoN was early 2010, I agree though that it is poor that competitive side of games, particularly fps titles, is pretty much abandoned or a complete bodge job is done.
Parent
sc2 is keeping it alive, and doing an excellent job at it. cant rly consider lol competetive and hon is already dead
Parent
LoL is competitive in an eSports sense, personal bias's aside. They have massive orgs involved, some that have never been involved in other big games.

I think we are better off ignoring LoL and Sc2 though, FPS titles are easier to concentrate on in terms of competitive release of which I think there has only ever been a handful released, the last as someone has already said was probably CoD4 in 2007.
Parent
biggest things which make LoL so massive right now is that its free and that riot it extremely good at advertising their game but its still a very casual game. i wouldnt not count sc2 out, i dunno if uve heard about barcraft, but check it out and ull see sc2 is closest to making esporst mainstream
Parent
I fully agree Sc2 is #1 and its probably a good thing for eSports, it is easily the most professional game out there in terms of scene etc. as well as it being quite a simple game itself so not too hard to understand what is going on.

LoL indeed have an awesome dev team that promotes the game really well - any game would want someone like Riot perhaps barring Sc2 who have just as good already.

Compared to Bethseda or whatever they are called and Endrant seems the fps titles get the cacky post release dev teams.
Parent
biggest point is, i think that the developers aim more towards the casuals (console players, free games, console games converted to pc games) just for the $$$
Parent
That's Capitalism for you :)
Parent
i understand :P
Parent
good, because you had all that talk bout it...guess ET is one of the non-casual games then ;D
how ya doin wim?
Parent
no et is like one of me most casual of all, theres almost no competition, players whine when dates get forced and all that good stuff. its nowhere near a professional and competetive game :P its just a game where players play it for fun.

im doing oki, and u mika? :)
Parent
arent like 99,9% of all games casual, or what do you understand while saying "casual"?
Parent
no ur right
Parent
Both of them had a huge start and are slowly falling back to the earth at the moment. I think both of these games are too complex to be a part of the mainstream esports.
Parent
True perhaps, but Riot are keen to keep it going in the eSports community right now - they are heavily expanding from what I have seen. Sc2 has the massive bonus of Blizzard keeping the game up to date, and with the impending release of HoTS it will keep the title at #1 for quite a while I guess.

CS 1.6 has some puppet master somewhere, a game does not survive that long without one and it is the probable reason for a game like CoD4 which for all sense and purposes is a good eSports title falling off the radar ... I wouldnt be surprised if someone was pulling strings to make the game slip into the abyss - I remember ESL randomly removing CoD4 in preference for BlackOps in EMS a few seasons ago, considering the scene size was about 10% of the size ;) that seemed a bit weird.
Parent
Call me stupid but I honestly think there have been a few near misses (Brink could've been there, HoN is a great game but still buggy + hi S2 heroes).

And as much as I think it's dull, LoL is pretty big.

e: I still completely agree with your point.
Parent
if u played mw1,2,blackops then u played mw3 ;)
its a combination of all those 3 previous games they made
QuoteWe wanted to cater to those super hardcore fans, but you have to make sure you also are catering to the casual gamer.


This doesnt regard eSports then, only DLC's - eSports titles generally play at the most simplified levels of the game, S&D / SW etc. with limited weapons and upgrades... THIS is the main reason eSports will not take off under the flag of CoD.. as if making multi billions on title releases alone was not enough, they pinch all they can via DLC's at the expense of the eSports market.
"Hardcore" CoD fans = casual gamers.
Parent
We know that, but he is referring to eSports communities as hardcore.
Parent
Battlefield 3 – Rush Gameplay - Gives that good old Wolfenstein feeling back of pushing with a squad or a group of mates for objectives with revives and ammo boxes. Its the closest I’ve gotten to Wolf and ET in ages, and it feels pretty fucking good. CoD MW3 is basically COD MW1 rehashed.. But the console herpderps of society can’t see this and can’t spot proper team play oriented game either. They fall for the cheap tricks with flashy lights and glitter sprinkled on top.
I feel like BF3 is very un-immersive, doesnt feel real? Not sure that makes any sense, but everything feels like paper.I've not played it enough to really cast judgement just initial feelings.
Parent
I suggest playing on a good 32 man Rush server. When there are too many players, there is too much spam and it gets a bit silly especially on maps like Metro. You probably know this but the game really does revolve around your squad and squad team play. Get a good group of mates on vent and it becomes a totally different game compared to playing on your own on a 64 man server on Caspian border in conquest mode, haha.
Parent
64 people on metro is enough to drive someone insane, although I did get quite a few unlocks because of spam >_>
Parent
Haha yea it makes ET Battery public spam look childlike.
Parent
I used to think Nuketown on Black Ops was bad, each time I'm on a 64 man server now I just have to leave when Metro loads.

On a side note, Jet controls in BF3 are horrible.
Parent
I agree with the rush comment with regards to BF3. It is very enjoyable and teamplay based, yet BF3 isnt one of those games where you can see competition mods etc. Maybe i am wrong, but i hope something gets worked on to make BF3 competitive.
Parent
The multiplayer is so good that they made maps to stop campers and snipers, saying you're going to have to rely on quick scoping to get any kills as a sniper.
finally someone who says something TRUE!
Parent
I got a shortcut to dedicatedserver.exe on my desktop.
Now its up to the modders to supply us with a god promod.
And if I remember correctly that took quite a while, even for cod4. We had all this pam in els, promod in cb thing going on and the creators of promod then decided to massively rebalance their mod when promod3 became promod4. all this happend a year or so after release.
as always we can only be patient and hope for the best. until then we are bound to unlock fancy nameplates and drives some tanks in bf3.
i actualy bought MW3 (havent bought anything for 9-10 years :D ) and i have played it 18 hours (according to steam in 3 nights). Really like it - something new (for me! i havent played CoD never before). Exacly what i needed. New graphics (compared to ET), tho runs good (i have laptop) , fast enough (exacly between ET and CS) and good-enough gameplay. i only hate those helicopters and jets (that shit should be in BF not CoD) but getting used to it.

so in my point of view , i wouldnt understand if MW3 wouldnt go big - but ofcourse , i have never played any CoD before so i im not the guy who can compare it to something. strange is that ingame server list shows only about 1000 ppl online nomatter what time. it was written somewhere that 370K copies of CoD was sold in 1 day to PC. bullshit?

anyway - i like it.
Nice to see you around again :) The ingame browser in MW has always been bad regarding the 1000ppl online, the best way to check is the Steam player numbers
Parent
Personally wouldnt waste my money on MW3. CoD series has been raped to death :( Moder Map Pack 3 and counting! Got myself BF3 and its actually quite fun. Like Ngotie said playing with a group of m8s and getting some teamwork on the go makes it alot more enjoyable.

Would love to see the game have some sort of comp support tho i dunno if it will be done :( Want something to play :(
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