Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2’s open beta has ended. It was a trial I entered with an open mind. Though I found the visibility and repetitive inputs of Modern Warfare 2019 difficult, I put a lot of hours into it. Subsequent entries felt worse due to a regression in graphical fidelity, but I still crave what Call of Duty offers.
Not fast-paced gunplay, but a game without commitment. Rather than knowing I have to devote hundreds of hours to the experience, I can fit in sessions across a range of timeframes thanks to multiplayer matches lasting around 15 minutes and frequent checkpoints in the campaign.
It’s disappointing then that in three years between Modern Warfare entries, accessibility doesn’t appear to have progressed. Admittedly, what we’ve seen during the last two weekends has been restricted to multiplayer, but the settings available informs what we’re likely to see in the full release.
That the beta immediately dropped the player into a marketing screen, with no instruction of how to exit, wasn’t ideal. More than once I tried to back out and was booted back to the connection screen.
Accessing settings outside of a match was difficult in itself, as they were hidden behind a small, unclear options prompt on PlayStation 5.
What options were available focussed on colourblind filters and button remapping. Other aspects were more general. You could reduce motion blur and sharpen graphics (no amount of fiddling with which improved visibility for me), alter the FOV, and have impressive control over dead zones and look sensitivity. Also helpful, given the obfuscation of the beta’s menus, were options to alter the size of the UI and text.