Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’s beta returns today for all players, and it’s bringing an update to answer feedback from last weekend’s initial test.
The response to the first weekend of MW4’s beta was mixed, with a fair amount of complaints and praise, but Infinity Ward got back to work quickly to try and answer the call from its most vocal players to try and find a nice middle ground on several aspects of the multiplayer experience.
When the beta goes live today, along with a taste of the new Warzone map Zodiac, Nintendo Switch 2 players will be entering the MW4 fray to mark the first time that CoD has been playable on a Nintendo console since Call of Duty: Ghosts on the Wii U way back in 2013. Welcome back, Ninty.
Read on below for all the big changes from the MW4 beta’s first weekend, including weapon tuning, changes to movement, and longer time-to-kill.
MW4 open beta patch notes
Time-to-Kill
“After some updates last week, we still weren’t where we wanted to be with time-to-kill,” said Infinity Ward. “We’re aiming for a slight increase to TTK so instead of changing base health, we focused on weapon tuning to improve durability without making weapons feel too weak at range. Every single weapon in our Beta has received an update for Weekend 2. These changes create more survivability and room for skill expression in combat. There’s more work to do here and we’re looking forward to hearing your feedback.”
Spawns
- Updated spawn logic to better separate players [added at the end of Beta Weekend 1]
- Deprioritized spawning near teammates [added at the end of Beta Weekend 1]
- Partially improved Hardpoint spawn system to improve predictability
- Added Battle Hardened to temporary spawn protection
- Temporarily disabled Hardpoint on Rooftops because of a spawn bug
Movement
The biggest change in the patch is here, where Tactical Sprint is no longer on by default.
“This is an experiment for Beta which we hope improves the pace of the game and enhances player choice,” Infinity Ward said. “If we decide to stick with this change, we need to consider its place in the Perk table and which other adjustments to Perks go along with it.”
- Tac Sprint
- Moved Tactical Sprint to the Blood Rush Perk.
- Reduced Tactical Sprint sprint-to-fire time to match base sprint.
- Reduced Tactical Sprint speed by 4 percent.
- Sprint Speeds
- Increased knife base sprint speeds.
- Increased all pistol base sprint speeds.
- Slide Adjustments
- Increased slide-to-jump delay.
- Reduced slide distance by 10 percent.
- Reduced slide speed by 9 percent.
- Stamina
- Reduced stamina by 8 percent.
- Mantle
- Fixed an issue where players could mantle much higher than intended.
- Climbing
- Fixed an issue that caused stutters when climbing ladders and pipes.
Aim Assist
“For Weekend 2, we’ve made adjustments to aim assist to reduce its impact,” the devs explained. “In full transparency, this is not the exact tuning we want, so we will be working on dialing this in ahead of launch.”
- These adjustments are global and will apply to Warzone.
Killstreaks
- General
- Increased all Killstreak costs by 1 kill.
- UAV
- Reduced UAV health by 60 percent.
- Reduced UAV height by 12 percent.
- Artillery Beacon
- Reduced the number of missiles from 6 to 5.
- Reduced the inner damage radius from 15.24 meters to 10.16 meters.
- Reduced the outer damage radius from 25.4 meters to 17.78 meters.
- Reduced the shockwave radius that knocks people down to 10.16 meters.
