A Lot in Common with its Predecessors
Just as we anticipated at the beginning of this article, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 looks identical to its two-year-old forerunner. Considering its current state, we have to wonder if we even need Modern Warfare 3 on PC. At the full retail price of $59.99, I don't believe so. Judging by its graphical progression and overall content, MW3 is more of an expansion than a new game and Activision shouldn't be charging anything beyond DLC rates.
Despite my feelings towards MW3's stagnant PC development, it shattered sales records selling 9.3 million copies on launch day. But with a small minority of that representing PC copies, the good news is that few gamers purchased this sloppy console port, and I suspect many who did promptly sought a refund.
If you're still intent buying MW3 on PC, you should be able to scrape by with nearly any modern entry-level gaming hardware. The fact that an $80 Radeon HD 6670 can deliver 30fps at 1680x1050, while the obsolete GeForce 9600 GT provides 37fps, really says it all. If you're aiming for 40 frames or better, you'll only need a $120 GTS 450 or $100 HD 6750.
Those that argue the lower-quality graphics are a good thing because games like Battlefield 3 are too demanding confuse me. There's nothing stopping anyone from playing BF3 on budget hardware, they simply need to lower the graphics to MW3 levels and they will receive similar performance. As we found when testing Battlefield 3 recently, the high quality visuals merely allow those with higher-end hardware to enjoy the game even more.
After all, if graphics are irrelevant, why did we ever leave CoD MW2 (not that it really feels like we have) or even the original CoD for that matter. That game was awesome and they could have just kept producing DLC content forever. As a huge fan of the earlier Call of Duty titles I'm disappointed with this latest release as it continues to head in the same direction as Black Ops – somewhat of a downward spiral, you could say.