I have a confession to make. I’ve only played the Call of Duty franchise for about six months and am not very good. I tend to make the mistake most new players make and that’s grabbing a gun with as much ammo as possible and then praying and spraying toward the other team. As I tried to make my creations, I discovered I needed to use other guns to unlock the attachments I actually wanted to use and it’s because of this that, I found so much pleasure in the new weapon tuning system that they introduced to the multiplayer. Let me explain.
The new system is set up so that different guns lead to different unlocks that can then be used on all guns. It can be a bit of a problem if you’re just trying to make a particular gun and then you plan to use that for the rest of eternity, but nobody really does this and most people like to have different load-outs for different types of matches. A sniper rifle does you little to no good on a level like Shipment and a shotgun does you little good on a map like Tariq. This leads to players creating different load-outs with different guns and different attachments.
My wanting to use certain attachments meant I actually had to level up weapons I had no intention of using and a crazy thing happened along the way; I found out that I really liked some of the weapons I thought I initially hated. Let’s take the M16. The name value alone makes people view it as an intimidating weapon, but it’s a very limited weapon that specializes in three-round semi-auto bursts. If you need more than three rounds down range, the M16 is absolutely not the gun to use. But if you tweak the M16 a bit, add armor-piercing rounds and a bit of balancing, all of a sudden you’re working with a gun that only needs one or two bullets to kill and it sends three at a time.
I would have absolutely never used the M16, but I had to on my way to level up the gun I wanted and I found myself enjoying that particular model in the end along with many others I had already written off. Being forced to use these weapons thrust me into the position of having to learn how best to use a gun I didn’t want to use. In learning how to use the gun, you learn what you can and can’t do, and this alone helps you improve as a player. But then you get the added effect of learning how to defend against these weapons because you sorta gain that knowledge by osmosis simply because you will die plenty of times trying to use the gun in a manner for which it is not built.
All of that might seem a little crazy and it might seem like that’s way too much work, but it was hardly as much work as I thought it was. It also helped me in my chase for different weapon camos because the challenges associated with the weapon tend to put you in those positions as you’re playing different levels. There’s an elegance to this process and a joy in discovering new weapons that you thought you’d never really enjoy. I would guess this is exactly why the developers used this new approach and I can understand why it ruffles the feathers of those who know what they want and how to use the guns already, but it was an absolute joy for someone like me who had no idea how to use them.
Too often in gaming, we only see the bigger picture from our own point of view. If I were a legacy player of Call of Duty, I probably would have joined in with the chorus of those who hated the new weapon tuning system, but being a new player allowed me to see the magic of the system for what it was, and it was something extremely helpful. It actually helped me become a more complete and well-rounded player. Hell, it even made the process of using cheesy weapons like shotguns less enjoyable because I wanted to get back to the tighter gunplay of the other weapons. Yep, it actually made me want to be less of a “shotgun p**sy,” to quote the vernacular of the community.
So, think about that the next time you hate on the weapon tuning system. It’s actually making players like me less of a troll on the battlefield. It’s helping newer players like myself fit into the Call of Duty community with greater ease and efficiency, which in turn has made me want to stick around through the lean times of player growth. Seeing that visual progression as I learn to use weapons more effectively and without dying as often has been its own reward. It’s made me come back again and again, and I would have to call that a success by any measure.