Call of Duty: Warzone continues to remain a popular battle royale title, no doubt helped by Activision and Infinity Ward’s frequent updates. However, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has yet to be abandoned, having received regular updates and tweaks alongside its battle royale cousin. But players now suspect that the game has suffered from a significant downgrade regarding its visuals.
Specifically, the downgrade seems to have affected the Ground War and Specs Ops modes, which is believed to have come about from the recent 1.13 patch.
A Reddit post has compiled a list of all the changes that have been made, and it includes a decrease in quality for the lighting, shadows, textures, and even the foliage. Images were also uploaded to highlight how Modern Warfare looks now compared to before the newest patch.
As for why this downgrade has even happened in the first place, the theory seems to be that it’s because of Warzone, or rather Warzone’s optimization. One of its selling points is that players from across the different versions for console, PC, and mobile devices are all able to take part in matches together and that could be having a knock-on effect on Modern Warfare.
The post does offer a solution; namely to optimize Warzone separately:
“These are graphical changes in the Warzone, Ground War and Spec Ops map. Ground War and Spec Ops were already affected before the release of Warzone. Please use the old build for Ground War, GW with 64 players is not as demanding as Warzone.”
At the time of writing, neither Activision nor Infinity Ward have commented on this, so it’s not entirely known whether optimizing the two games separately is even viable or if that is indeed the reason for Modern Warfare’s visual downgrade.
“These kind of optimizations are indeed required for 150 player modes. However, it can be resolved by optimizing Warzone separately from Ground War. For instance, the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X can have much higher quality when compared to the lower end systems. Same goes for PC players. Before the graphical downgrade, pre update 1.13, Ground War was stable across all systems with sub 60fps. Now it’s the same, but with significantly worse graphics!”
Activision and Infinity Ward’s handling of the two games has been routinely criticized in the past, like how certain popular modes are removed and replaced with others so regularly. Even when it removed a much less popular mode, namely Modern Warfare’s Realism mode, its dedicated fan-base voiced their complaints.
Recently, players took to Reddit as well to complain about Warzone’s servers, as lag has noticeably become a lot worse and resulting in things like players seemingly not dealing any damage to their opponents.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is available on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
Source: Reddit
