Modern Warfare 2 first-hand experience

[LoTekGuru]

Well I waited for about a week and a half after the release date and there really didn't seem to be any new news on gaming sites on whether IW.NET (Infinity Ward's P2P matchmaking system) was better, worse, or just what everyone was expecting. I started doing some research and I found some gaming forums that were pretty split - some users were saying the online play was just fine, others said it was laggy and unplayable from one game to the next. After reading over the experiences of several PC players, it seemed to me that the ones that had so many negative experiences either had poor internet connections, or lived in non-US locales that didn't have a large population of gamers in their local area, and thus they had a high ping to just about every urban area.

I ended up picking up the game, and I'm glad I did. The first thing I'd like to say about the online gameplay is that it's smooth. VERY smooth. I played everything from 4 player free-for-all deathmatches to 16 player team games, and very rarely was there a connection hiccup. I've played this game online now for almost 5 hours, according to Steam, and I think I've only had 3 connection hiccups. Speaking of connection hiccups, IW.NET has a very smart way to handle P2P "servers"... if the game host drops connection, or their connection becomes unstable, the game will automatically pause and do a host migration to the best suitable host. What this means for people playing the game is that the screen will pause and colors will go black and white. A message indicating that a host migration is taking place will appear, and after game data is passed to the new host and everyone is "patched in" to the new host PC, a countdown will commence, and the game will resume right where it left off. All of this takes place in a matter of seconds, and even though it may seem inconvenient and a bit hassle, it doesn't disruipt gameplay enough to make me hate IW.NET.

Does this mean that I prefer IW.NET to dedicated servers? Of course not, dedicated servers are still the best way to handle FPS games in my opinion. IW.NET does fix some of the things that are broken in P2P games though, and although I do feel they took a step backward with the PC community in regards to online play, it is by no means a reason not to buy this game. The single player is very fun (although very short, I completed it in 5:05 hours on normal difficulty) and the multiplayer is still tons of fun, if you liked CoD4. The new weapons, weapon attachments, and killstreak rewards definately make this game interesting online!

Performance-wise, this game runs smooth as silk on my rig (specs in my sig.) Auto performance tuning had me at about medium settings, but I was able to crank up resolution to the max my monitor will handle (1280x1024) and I turned every single detail as high as it would go. Fraps still has me hitting around 80 fps most of the time. I'm guessing because this game was designed for consoles they didn't go completely overboard on lighting and oversized textures, but the game looks really really good on PC as well. This should be good news for those with older hardware that are interested in this game, as you won't have to run it at it's lowest resolution/quality settings to get an almost playable game.

Anyone else pick this game up? I'm curious what other people think of it...