Following up...

Dear Infinity Ward,

 On behalf of the gaming world, I'd like to thank you for giving us the opportunity to play Modern Warfare 2, a fantastic game that should truly be a part of every FPS fan's library. The game is reaching legendary sales while sealing up the biggest release day in the history of gaming. Even though the game itself only carries roughly 6-8 hours of storyline gaming, the addition of spec-ops mode and the perfection of what was already a great Modern Warfare multiplayer brings along unrivaled relay value that has finally unseated Halo's dominance in the field.

 Now, about your AI.

 While I appreciate the idea of giving hardened players a challenge, I'd like to point out that your game is a cheating bastard. Many games are cheating bastards, and will pull no punches when it comes to killing the player. While your game isn't impossible, it takes the idea of being a "bastard" to a level approaching...well, other Call of Duty standards. The series has been known for "phantom grenades" and impossible headshots on a twitch from a mile away, but the fans expected better of you. While your veteran mode is a long way from being impossible, it lacks any creativity in making the gamer's life hell.

 Rather, Modern Warfare 2 is strikingly uncreative in coming up with ways to backhand the player should they stand their happy-ass up from behind cover. It seems as if your programmers got lazy in this respect, falling back on the "straight line" approach. This approach is anything but realistic, because it relies on the computer being able to come up with a straight line to the player's head. This would be fine, since this happens all the time with a human behind the controls, but this is a cheating bastard of a computer we're talking about, here.

 In several instances, the computer doesn't actually have skill, nor does it "think" about it's approach to making the player dead. While this makes the gamechallenging, it is not satisfyingly challenging by any means, which I will demonstrate with examples:

 1) In the oil rig scenario, once you reach the top you find yourself in the middle of a thick smoke cloud. The enemy is fighting with thermal scopes. Now, you have to look through these scopes to see your enemy, otherwise you are blind. This logically means that your opponent should not be able to turn a corner one-hundred feet away to face away from you in a heated sprint, then turn around and headshot you in a millisecond through a dense patch of smoke. It is physically impossible to even get your sights up in the time it took for this enemy to make a three round burst into my head, let alone to stop and turn around from his sprint. If he even used his sights, I'd be amazed.

 2) Knowing that your enemies can and will own your face should you step out of line, or even when you're perfectly under cover, you should have taken better care of your checkpoints. On one occasion in the Favela, I was pursuing the story target and ran up a hill only to be gunned down by about four shooters at once with no idea where the fire came from. Understanding that this was probably just a bad corner turn, I tried again. Roughly seven out of ten times, I was given half a second to take one step in any direction before being gunned down. Even after realizing where the shots were coming from, the spawn point made it an infuriating test of patience moreso than a test of skill. This can be said for many other spawn points in the game where the player has nothing more than a second to dive to something and hope that every enemy on the map doesn't just kill them through the cover anyway.

 3) While ducking behind cover in a house to reload, I checked an attached room completely before attempting it. Still keeping my eye on the entrance to that room's entrance, I reloaded, the immediately turned towards the front door where I was met with a "dead" screen. Guess where the enemy was? The second I took my eye off of the adjacent room's entrance, an enemy had miraculously appeared not only in the room, but in the doorway attaching it to my own room. We're also talking "within a second", here.

 4) When I'm sprinting, I sure as hell can't hit a target while blindfiring a football field away. Yet, your enemies somehow manage to blindfire you from a football field away without even facing you. Oh yeah, they're all headshots.

 5) Most of those grenades, I understand, but either you're pulling some of these out of your ass or that chick in the Russian digs has one hell of an arm from across the map...and an aim...and an uncanny knack for only throwing at me when about twelve American soldiers are scattered in front of the next hundred feet of me.

 6) So Soap is running down some stairs killing everything in sight. He turns to a doorway and shoots down some opposition while I'm still on the stairs. Magically, the enemy linebacker plows through any and all support shooting in his direction, goes around Soap without even looking at him twice while he's in a doorway, runs to the stairs and opens up fire on me. The enemy in question shouldn't have even known I was there.

 7) In the very same situation, Soap is taking up nearly a third of the doorway, so enemies on both sides are free to shoot him all they want. I am hurt, so I duck behind cover to a place with no line-of-sight whatsoever. The enemy cannot see me at all, and Soap is just sitting there soaking up bullets. Rather, he would be soaking up bullets if they were shooting at him. Instead, hundreds of bullets are attacking the metal wall next to me, and maybe two shots go in his direction.

 8) On one level, I'm pretty sure that my death-gaze suggested that the sky killed me. I was prone under an ungodly amount of cover for the sole purpose of NOT dying, so I'm pretty sure the game wasn't lying.

 9) It's hard to imagine why American haven't discovered the anti-recoil technology yet. The Russians are quite capable of using the same weapons to unleash fury on a pinprick without losing accuracy.

10) The lack of a single-player kill cam leads me to believe that you don't know what killed me, either.

11) In any game, let your squad move first. Don't even enter the field of battle. Just sit there and wait. Do that for a minute. Now pop your head out and watch it get taken out by fifty people who have been tracking the untrackable the entire time. Oh, and they've fighting a war while they track you. Amazing what spider-senses can do for snipers.

 12) Somehow, if I don't sprint away from a grenade that's sort of near me, I will die. I will lob a grenade in front of about four enemies in an enclosed space, nobody will leave through the exits, and at least three people pop right back up to shoot me, or are magically not there anymore.

 13) In another instance of the sky killing me, I was behind a giant metal box and edged along the wall to pop off some heads in the smoke with my thermal scope. I did so, but I kept getting shot. I looked across the level, without leaving cover, to see if anything showed up on thermal. Nope. Yet every now and then I would get hit by something. When I finally peeked around the corner to check the top level of the building I was sieging, I died quickly only to find out that I was being shot with amazing accuracy by the same thing that was shooting my through the container. Only problem is, this person was apparently invisible to thermal and camping from midair from somewhere twenty feet in the left of the top level of the building. I still have no idea where this magical sniper is.

 14) Also, once I had finally reached the breach point, I hit a checkpoint. Every time I loaded the checkpoint, I would be shot. I decided once that I would find out what was shooting me every time. No one was there.

 15) Just why does everybody have to go to war with me rather than, I don't know, the country they're invading? In the suburbs, I parked crouched behind a curved set of yard-bricks somewhere in the middle of the curve where I wouldn't easily be seen. Of course, it helped that I had two privates to my right standing straight up even further down the curve to the point where they were really only under cover if that evil fence decided to take up arms. I peek my head out, and I died. Same thing, only I shifted slightly to the right, basically peeking out from behind the ass cheek of one of the privates. Near-death shot. The only way I could get the enemy to actually attack the wide open privates would be to peek my head out and quickly duck back so that the fire that was intended for me actually hit them. Beyond that, they could've had a barbeque and the enemy would have ignored them.

 Yes, the game is challenging and far from impossible, as I'm progressing through the veteran campaign steadily in between multiplayer matches. It's just that from the sounds of it, whoever tested your game decided that breaking the laws of reality was a great idea. Getting beaten with skill impresses me, and I can appreciate the challenge in that. There are a zillion ways to make a game, especially an FPS, harder, but you decided that the best way to go was to make sure that the majority of the enemies in veteran mode were omnipotent crack-shots with Flash-like reflexes and a taste for only the player's blood.

 -The Game Bay

 If anyone ever comes across some way to debug this game, I would be happy to put some of these to the test and post the video results. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit