infinity-ward posts

Steam has delivered yet another automatic patch update to Modern Warfare 2, bringing with it some more bug fixes and changes for the Infinity Ward first person shooter. There's also been some cheats and hacks that have been dealt with in this latest update.

Some of the changes in this latest patch include normalising the sprint speed for the Care Package, Emergency Airdrop, and Sentry Gun marker grenades. They have also improved the placement of sentry guns and also fixed some player collision issues. The patch has also put in some tweaks to improve the mouse latency in the game. All in all it's a fairly minor update.

PC gamers have been waiting for a while to get an update to the PC port of Modern Warfare 2 and late on Wednesday the Steam site provided that automatic update to the Infinity Ward-developed first person shooter. The patch is mostly dealing with fixing bugs and closing some hacks in the title.

Some of the fixes include keeping people with pirated copies of the game from matchmaking with folks who own a legitimate copy of Modern Warfare 2. There are also some textures hacks that have been fixed and a glitch that let players out of a game's playable area has been dealt with.

Activision's hit shooter Modern Warfare 2 reportedly brought in over $500 million worldwide in just its first five days. Now the Infinity Ward-developed game has generated over $ billion in sell-through revenue worldwide since its launch just over two months ago.

The numbers, which come from internal estimates from the publisher, show that the game has truly achieved mainstream popularity. In fact, games like Mass Effect 2, an RPG, are aiming to go after the big Modern Warfare 2 crowd by improving the in-game shooting combat features. Kotaku quotes BioWare's Casey Hudson as saying, "We need to put Mass Effect 2 combat against the very best that is out there. And say this is absolutely state of the art shooting. I think in combat moments they will feel it is the same sort of game."

When you have one of the biggest game launches in 2009, everyone wants to know what the team behind it wants to do next. On Thursday, rumors hit that Infinity Ward would not be making the next game in Activision's Modern Warfare series. Now comes word via Destructoid that Infinity Ward's next game could in fact be an MMO title.

As usual, the article cites unnamed sources for its info saying that the developer has been hiring people away from major MMO developer Sony Online Entertainment. The article also claims there's some kind of collaboration with Blizzard (both developers are owned by Activision Blizzard) on this project. The article claims not to know exactly what the MMO will be all about although Activision execs have mentioned the possibility of a Call of Duty-based MMO in the past.

It's always a good day when a juicy rumor hits the interwebs and this one is a particularly interesting one. VG247.com is reporting through unnamed sources that developer Infinity Ward is going to take a pass on making the next Modern Warfare game and instead work on a all new game project.

The story doesn't go into detail on what that new game might be but it claims its anonymous sources have said Modern Warfare 3 might go to the newly established Sledgehammer Games or an unnamed Canadian studio. Meanwhile Infinity Ward is expected to release the first downloadable content for Modern Warfare 2 this spring for the Xbox 360 version.

Modern Warfare 2 for the PC may have become the highest selling game in the Call of Duty series for Infinity Ward and Activision but one group claims that those sales pale in comparison to the pirated copies that have been transfered via BitTorrent locations. The site TorrentFreak claims that a whopping 4.1 million illegal copies of the first person shooter were downloaded via torrent sites in 2009.

That number is a new "record" for a pirated PC game and was generated after less than two months (the game was released in early November). The Sims 3, released in June, is number two on the list with 3.2 million downloads. Somewhat suprisingly, Prototype was third with 2.35 million downloads, according to the report.

At the same time that Infinity Ward's community manager Robert Bowling announced that there would be no support for dedicated servers for the PC version of Modern Warfare 2, he also ducked answering questions about if the first person shooter would have any kind of mod tools release from the developer. Since then Infinity Ward has been silent on the mod tools issue.

At least until this week when a "tweet" from Bowling on his Twitter page answered a fan's question on dedicated servers with this reply: "Nothing on Dedicated Servers, but there may be some Mod Tools news coming in the future, I'll pass it along once I have it." We doubt that he would mention it and then later say that they won't release any tools for the mod community so we are hopeful for some good news on this front.

Gallery: Modern Warfare 2 Screenshots

Infinity Ward has already claims that PC sales of Modern Warfare 2 surpassed the sales of its predecessor, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Now a new Gamasutra report shows that the NPD Group revealed the retail store sales of the game in November in the US.

According to the report, the game sold 170,000 copies in retail stores, which is a pretty respectable number for any PC game these days. However, the story points out that those numbers do not take into account PC sales in retail stores overseas or via the Steam download service. The final sales numbers are likely much higher.

MGM is in the middle of creating a movie remake of their 1980's cult classic film Red Dawn but it looks like the MGM executives want to bring the massive gaming audience into theaters when its released in September 2010. The Hollywood Reporter's Risky Business blog has a comment from MGM Chairperson Mary Parent who said that the movie plays out like "a live-action 'Call of Duty'".

We assume she means that it plays out like the current entry in the shooter series, Modern Warfare 2, which like the original Red Dawn and the remake centers on a military invasion of the US. We find this a bit ironic since the game franchise's publisher Activision has already trademarked the "Call of Duty" title for use in, among other things, 'pre-recorded movies" And what about THQ's upcoming game Homefront which has creative input from John Milius, the writer-director of the original Red Dawn? Sounds like everyone is now jumping in on the "Invasion USA" bandwagon. Hey, maybe a remake of that Chuck Norris flick is next?

[Photo credit to RedDawn2010.com]

Even though the PC version of Modern Warfare 2 has taken critical hits from both fans and game journalists alike, sales of Infinity Ward's latest shooter title are supposedly higher than those of the previous game, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. But how do these two games really stack up against each other? In our latest article in our Big Versus series we tackle that question head on as we compared the 2007 released Call of Duty 4 to Infinity Ward's latest entry in their series Modern Warfare 2.

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