Can Footstep Audio in Call of Duty Be Too Loud?
The fear going around is the idea that footsteps are going to be super loud in Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2 such that you’ll hear people from a mile away, encouraging everybody to sit in corners and wait for people to come around the bend they can jump out at based off their footstep audio. This was, more or less, the case in Modern Warfare (2019) and Warzone, with this footstep audio problem compounding with the lack of a dedicated Ninja Perk and Dead Silence existing as field upgrade in both of these games. This added up to a strong incentive to camp, while it gave people undetectable, uncounterable silent speed boosts they could use to also kill people. All told, it felt unfair to a lot of players, and people are worried this aspect of other CoD games will also come to Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2. However, the problem, really, wasn’t with footstep audio being too loud. The problem with footstep in CoD comes down to footsteps being and there being no way to counter that. For example, in Black Ops Cold War, footstep audio was generally loud and clear. If you didn’t use the Ninja Perk that made you silent, people would generally hear you coming from a mile away. Nonetheless, nobody really complained about footstep audio in Cold War, because you had a Perk you could use if you didn’t want to make noise. You also had other Perks you could use instead of Ninja that were also powerful, like Ghost, so you had to weigh whether or not you wanted to make noise vs how much you wanted other Perks. Then, the Wildcard Perk Greed let you have twice as many Perks, if you wanted, so you could have silent footsteps among other things, too. All told, the flexibility of this system made how loud footsteps were into a mechanic in-game that had its own trade-offs, its own strengths and weaknesses, and you could choose to be silent if you cared about other players hearing you, while you could also choose other things instead.
Should We Be Worried About Footstep Audio in Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2?
The upgraded audio engine coming to Warzone 2 and Modern Warfare 2 really isn’t much of a cause for concern. Footsteps were loud in Modern Warfare (2019), sure, maybe even too loud, but footsteps in Call of Duty don’t get louder than that, so there isn’t much reason to be worried about them increasing in volume. But beyond that, really what matters here isn’t how loud footsteps are, unless they’re too quiet and become irrelevant because what matters is if there’s going to be a Ninja Perk and whether or not Dead Silence will exist in the game as a field upgrade. These kinds of balancing decisions are what will determine how well footsteps work in the game. There is reason to believe we’ll have a more traditional Perk setup in Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2 because of the reception of a lot of balancing and design decisions in Modern Warfare. In general, these decisions, by Infinity Ward’s admission, made the game more approachable to casual players and cut down on counterplay opportunities. Longtime fans of the series weren’t too happy with these choices, so Infinity Ward is changing direction. Maps, for example, are going to be more traditional three-lane maps without tons of crevices and verticality like in Modern Warfare (2019), and we’re similarly expecting Perks to have a bit more of a traditional layout. Though, of course, these finer details have to be concerned. In general, though, there isn’t a ton of reason to be very concerned that footstep audio is going to be a major pain point in either Modern Warfare 2.
