Treyarch Dev Talks CoD Gun Balance and Why It’s Broken

MP1st - David Vonderhaar, Lead Gameplay Designer at Treyarch, has recently been talking with fans about a rather touchy subject: gun balance. He also had some very bold things to say regarding the direction Call of Duty seems to be going.

[TheBeast]

Just put the phrase call of duty in a game and it is broken...

[Mister_V]

They almost got rid of it during MW2... :)

[blumatt]

CoD4 had the best balance and only had 3 Killstreaks and NO deathstreaks, the way it should still be.
3 Kills = UAV
5 Kills = Airstrike
7 Kills = Helicopter
That's perfection right there. And as far as guns went, the only guns that were a little overpowered were the M16 and the MP5 on Cod4. The online was great though. It's the only CoD game I've actually kept in my collection. MW3 is getting sold tomorrow to some guy for $40.

I still play CoD4 from time to time because it's the only one I can stand to play. lol I know there's some others that feel the same way. If there's any CoD4 veterans on here, feel free to message and add me on PSN (blumatt) and we'll play.

@disagrees
Explanation?? Stealth Disagree?? Scared to explain?? lol

@Cosmit
lol

[Cosmit]

^^ Lucky guy.

[Solid_Snake37]

@blumatt

I heard COD4 had been hacked to death, is it true?

[Mister_V]

I really wouldn't mind going back to the good old 3,5,7 system. Plus no more proficiencies or deathstreaks.

[NarooN]

@People

There are some hacked lobbies on CoD4, and while they are annoying, they're few and far between, and all you have to usually do is either leave and join a new game or in severe cases, go back to single-player and re-load multiplayer.

Still, CoD4 is better than each release that came after it.

[ZombieKiller]

What bothers me is that a Treyarch dev said this. They're TELLING us their game is broken yet selling it every year......WHY?! I think Black Ops weapons are the unbalanced ones. With the exception of the Type 95, MW3 is pretty balanced. Black Ops had the AK74u, FAMAS, and the Galil that were unbalanced. After like 3 nerfs, the FAMAS was STILL better than any of the weapons in that game. So why is a Treyarch dev talking about balance? They know NOTHING about that except that they keep screwing it up! Treyarch is NOT better, IW has better graphics, net code, sound and just pure QUALITY. AND I'M ON THE PS3 VERSION!!! Treyarch puts out a butt load of content but unfinished content. Every zombie map, and multiplayer map had SOMETHING wrong with it in the beginning. Not to mention the bad balance, the bad net code and the shitty PS3 treatment. They try to force too much into the game to compete with IW. Stop with the content, and concentrate on the quality. Activision= Quantity over quality

[snipes101]

@solid...
Yea a lot of the matches I entered into had advertisements (this is on 360) for modding sites on them right under the tac map. It was bad. I was scared to play in any for fear of getting banned cuz you know how big of Nazi's MS can be about that.

@Article...
COD4 was the best in the series because there was less to balance. There were less guns, less perks, no death streaks, less kill streaks and no Pro versions of perks. Balancing can be an extremely hard thing to do and when there are that many factors something is bound to get thrown off.

Hopefully this article is indicating that perhaps the next CoD will take the series back to the CoD4 era of the series and trim off the love handles that the multiplayer has gotten over the years. It would definitely play to their advantage to do that since it would win them much needed fans given that they have lived in Infinity Ward's shadow for years.

[dark-hollow]

Meh.
Treyarch call of duties are very boring!!
The only good thin they have done to the franchise is the zombies mode.

[KontryBoy706]

These days Treyarch CODs are BETTER than Infinity Ward CODs.

[3GenGames]

^ I didn't know because it was less of a turd compared to a huge turd made it better and worth playing. All of them stink now and have since COD4.

[Blasphemy]

I am going to give the title to COD4 as the best in the series but Black ops gets the title as the best since then. Black ops had the best overall maps in series to me. The map design in Black Ops was genius. I didn't even pick up MW3 because of how badly I hated MW2.

[A-Glorious-Dawn]

I really liked world at war, imo the only good thing treyarch has done.

[Gazondaily]

I agree. Treyarch's devs are clearly far less talented than Infinity Ward (or should I say the original IW).

Most of the decent IW staff have left.

West and Zampella were clearly the geniuses behind the previous good work of IW. I'm actually excited to see what they come up with next.

OT- Treyarch are not known for taking risks so I'm not surprised that they're hinting at removing features. COD:BO was simply awful. They couldn't even get sound-design right. I mean, footsteps.....really? You have a friggin Ninja perk that makes footsteps silent yet hardly any footsteps sound? Did they even test their own game? It took me ONE game with Ninja to realise this was completely broken. And only after a few fans complained did they have the decency to make a forum post and say oh yes, our audio team confirms this too.

THEN they amp up the sound to 1 jillion db.

Talk about useless. And that game at the time was the highest grossing entertainment release ever.

FML. No..... FAOL.

[SJPFTW]

OMG the guns are not the problem. Broken spawns, P2P, lag and game breaking glitches that could have easily been found in an open beta... thats the problem right there

COD4 was the last good COD game.

[zeddy]

my one and only problem with black ops was the horrendous lag. theres nothing wrong with the balance, its all about good players beating on rubbish players. they are the ones that are moaning. i know the type 95 is vastly over powered but anyone can use it! or any other weapon for that matter. they should make a mode where you are in matches where you compete with players with a similar k/d. start to win a couple of matches and the moaning will stop.

[Jake_the_Dog]

MW3's lag makes Black Op's seem passible.

[StrongMan]

Treyarch is the absolute worst at gun balancing.

COD WAW: MP40
COD Black Ops: FAMAS/AK74u

[Criminal]

MP40 was the biggest joke in CoD history. I was more of an STG 44/ Gewehr 43 kind of a guy.

[Mister_V]

At least they were able to patch the Fam/Ak74u, making Blops one of the better balanced CoDs in the franchise, imo.

[Rainstorm81]

Very true, and in my opinion it offers much more gameplay variety than the abortion that is MW3

[jefejose]

Yeah, we have to admit it, Black Ops has better gun balancing, spawning and maps than MW3.

[3GenGames]

Making it take over 60% of your bullets to kill 1 person most of the time (EMAGs or you won't kill 2 people, ever) isn't balancing, it's garbage. That's what Black Ops tried to do. It may have seemed like it worked for most people to say "Oh well now it's balanced!" but it's not, really. COD4 is balanced. Guns had good power, can kill 2 up to 3 people with standard magazine, and was right in every way. Them trying to make it better broke it, and it hasn't even been close to beign correct again as now you can take 1 gun and kill 4-5 people per magazine and in 5 shots. [UMP45 in MW2] or 3 people usually with the only gun in BO's that isn't the same as the others [Famas in BO] is just garbage. It's not even that it takes so many shots to kill people, it's that other guns in the same game don't follow the formula as all the others. If they all did it'd be fine, but it's not.

And when you throw in Juggernaut it screws it all up. Yeah, COD4 had it but it wasn't impossible to kill them still be being BETTER than them. And then of course there's stopping power, but yet again it wasn't overly done, it was still possible to kill them if they had it but you didn't by aiming better. With the deathstreaks birth control form of juggernaut they have made it impossible, but that's what you get when n00bs beta test your games and then give you feedback on what needs to be more powerful.

[f789790]

The FAMAS guaranteed you a kill, but that was it. It was a noob gun. You had to reload after each kill because it fired it's entire clip in 1 second.

I did fine with the Galil and regularly was at the top of the scoreboard.

[KontryBoy706]

Oh really? How about Infinity Ward and their OP commando, noob tubes, akimbo model '87s, laser beam famas, OP one man army perk, assassin perk? Etc. I'd take the MP40 and the famas/ak 74u any day of the week over all that.

[Jio]

CoD weapon balance is broken?

[ShabbaRanks]

LOL + Bubbles for you my friend

[_Aarix_]

Nothing like a good unexpected meme.

[Gamer-Z]

I never understood the reason for gun balance i mean different models of guns are supposed to be different from each other in the way of accuracy and power. The only true way to attain perfect gun balance is for the game to only have one gun so everyone is equal and no nobody is overpowered.

[GraveLord]

I agree. Guns aren't supposed to be balanced...

[Gamer-Z]

lol for once..

[Rainstorm81]

I agree but at the same time if you have one gun thats better than the rest everyone is going to flock to it.

Just look at BF3, i cant get in a room without people using the overpowered FAMAS or the ridiculous USAS-12 with frag rounds. The FAMAS is so over powered i started using it myself to keep things balanced

[SwiftShot]

Cause I never seen the golden ACR or Type 95 Bwa haha

[Kleptic]

well yeah, its either one gun, or keep them all so similar there is no point...

but there is pretty easy to have lots of guns, and keep them fairly balanced...but cod isn't the only franchise to often f' up the entire process...

just look through the symtek stat sheet for BF3...the FAMAS, mathematically, should have raised a ton of red flags before it was ever implemented...1000rpm, 945m max range (bested only by the M16's 980m), the least amount of recoil of any weapons, and the smallest degradation of any AR under full auto...of which the foregrip and suppressor attachments reduce even further...

the only set back being a reload time .5 seconds longer than most other AR's...

it should be easy in an fps...but for whatever reason, it never is...if a weapon shoots faster than others, make it less accurate...if it shoots slower, make it more accurate...if it has a lot of recoil, make it have longer range as the advantage (as more recoil should translate to a harder hitting and faster flying round, right?)...

don't do the opposite...give one weapon no recoil, nearly unlimited range, and nearly perfect accuracy under full auto...

don't get me wrong, i got my 1k kills with it...but its literally funny using other AR's after that...

someone knock some heads around...

[soundslike]

weapons don't HAVE to be perfectly balanced

sometimes its good to have easy weapons and hard weapons. That way using one or the other distinguishes the player. Its more exciting as long as the difference isn't too large.

[AtomicGerbil]

How about you earn more xp for the harder to use weapons that way you get rewarded for skill.

At the moment CoD rewards everything, even death. Let's reward skill for a change. They won't have to nerf the weapons then.

[frostypants]

Don't confuse "utility" with "balance". It is possible to make different guns have different strengths and weaknesses, but STILL make it so that they all have their place in the game.

Example: making a gun that has a higher fire rate, lower recoil, better accuracy, and additional ammo than any other single gun would be an example of blatant imbalance.

Creating a gun with higher fire rate, lower recoil, but lower accuracy and less ammo is an example of an effort to balance them out.

Also, by giving more experienced players blatantly better weapons, it gives them an even bigger advantage over new players, which is counter-intuitive.

NEW weapons should not equal BETTER weapons. Just different weapons with their own strengths/weaknesses.

Balance is totally subjective at first but it can be objectively and concretely examined by analyzing online K/D statistics...

[theflyindutchman]

u can say what u want but i think treyarc beats iw/sledgehammer.
cod bo was better balanced then mw2 and mw2.5
try to play domination on mw with the extreme little capture circle around the flag and no cover and an AC130 and a strafing run and a juggernaut and a reaperdrone and a spawn trap and a attack uav robot machinegun thing and 8 kids sitting in dark corners and an air strike.............

[f789790]

You forgot about the grenade launcher. Easy to use instant kill with a perk that increases the explosion. What an idiotic idea!

[SwiftShot]

Terrible example. Its just the map sizes not the killstreaks. Also of course ur gonna die with mad killstreaks like that.....unless ur running blind eye! use javelins to take shit down.

[Cosmit]

@Theyflyin

Don't try too hard. It might start hurting your brain.

[theflyindutchman]

it did

[admiralthrawn87]

This isn't a problem isolated to CoD. ANY game with perks creates an unbalance in the multiplayer. I'm not talking about classes, i'm talking about perks and specific item leveling and gun additions. Uncharted - unbalanced, CoD - unbalanced. Games with no perks like Halo 1-3 - much more balanced. Games with classes like TF2, Tribes, BC2, not as balanced as traditional shooters, but much more so than call of duty

[Mister_V]

True. Its quite simple. The more 'stuff' you add to any MP, the harder it becomes to balance.

[frostypants]

Say what you will about Black Ops, but it brought far more changes to the table than MW3 does (spending points to buy stuff, for example). I admire Treyarch's apparent willingness to mess with the modern CoD formula.

I would *love* to see perks AND killstreaks done away with entirely. Follow the BF model and make them unlockable equipment...equipment that actually takes skill to utilize, unlike the auto-kill nature of so many of the killstreaks.

And binding Perk-type stuff to individual weapons is a brilliant idea, and in-line with the direction Black Ops was going.

Make CoD respectable again.

[tsn]

The stupidest thing in this game or any cod is rewarding good players with airstrikes and shit I mean wtf really?

[CamelCarcass]

This is the LAST FUCKING PERSON IN THE WORLD who gets to say this. It's MUCH better than it was in blops.

[bub16]

You can tell its broken when you have a clip of 20+ bullets and its only takes 3 bullets to kill an enemy...

[artdafoo]

No body at Treyarch should be opening their traps about what's wrong with COD games, Wack Ops was the worst COD game at launch period and u bet your life Wack Ops 2 will be just as bad.

[acemonkey]

people are still going to buy it and its going to make millions so........people that promise not to buy the game dont buy it

[STANK08]

LoL. David Vahnderharr has the nerve to comment on "gun balance". There was 0 gun diversity in Black Ops. The only gun people used was famas/ak74u.

You see way more variety of guns being used in MW3.

M4/FAD/MP7/PP90m1/ACR/G36c etc. The list goes on.

Black ops guns were trash

[Der_Kommandant]

First, balance the hit detection, then balance the weapon...

[spike]

G11

[iMpuTeD]

mw4 was great except for the x3 frag grenades and the steady aim/spray combination is easily the worst in the series. And treyarch dont know what they are talkin about only good smg in blops was the ak74u and assault rifle g11 everything else was absolute crap. At least mw3 almost all the smgs are pretty good and same for assault rifles.

[Ninjamonkey82]

Im not a fan of the Killstreaks at all tbh. If there gonna do anything work on balance on the perks work around the player make it more personal. make the effect direct and effect how the player plays in game.

No sense in this oh wait ill get few kills throw a heli up then sit back and wait for it to do the damage for me thats just stupid. Cod was once about how skilled the indisvual player was. Not how quick you could get a chopper gunner up :/.

Perk ways make the player work to see that radar put it on his watch make him raise his arm to see it effect how he plays. There has to be ways to switch things up tbh its always the same thing over and over again.

I say bring it back to what CoDv1 and 2 was about Good maps. Good tactics in s&d Great TDM and DM. Hell to this limit of 8-12 players in FFA thats silly get that back up 18 lift the restrictions make proper maps that suit it.

People have come to reliant on all these perks in the current state. CODv1 made you have to master your Guns anyone that played the PC version knows this. This can be down on the console aswell. bring that back.

[Gamer-Z]

They could always go back to the basic COD4 kill streaks for the standard team death match/mercenary and make a special playlist specifically to use custom kill streaks, i think that would go along way to balancing the game while catering to both the COD vets and noobs imo.

[NeloAnjelo]

You know why its hard to balance the game?
All the stupid perks for everything.. even meaningless actions or even inactions.

The short development times, lack of proper beta testing, and rehashing the same thing only makes it worse.
A copy of a copy will ultimately lead to poorer versions.

Change the gameplay, give us a new engine, with new objectives... Innovate on story telling and online... Oh wait this IS COD... it sells millions while still being broken since MW2. Why change it? why invest in quality over qauntity... says Activision.

[Zephol]

In modern warfare 3 all the weapons all the same

[Fairchild Channel F]

Why should they change anything when you clowns will buy over ten million copies of the game and give Activision over a billion dollars in sales. And when the next one comes out, you'll all buy that one too and then proceed to come on here and bitch and complain about how bad it is.

Here's an idea: DON'T BUY IT.

In fact, shame on you for buying the last one.

[Whore_Mouth]

Why did they put a fake CoD title as their picture?

[floetry101]

Say what you will about Vonderhaar and Treyarch, the guys have done everything they can to improve their side of the Call of Duty franchise. It's a pity that Black Ops got some of the fundamentals wrong, because it's still a decent title. The way they've gone about communicating with the community is some of the finest and honest PR work I've seen. They know their limitations and the pressure they're under and everything Vonderhaar's stated in this article is absolutely right.

Of course, Call of Duty 4 will be the best Call of Duty title right up until the end of this console cycle. It's a near perfect online experience, from the maps, to the gun balance, and all the way down to how it feels. A pity then that Infinity Ward refuse to remove hackers from the best title they've ever produced.

[CYBERHATER]

Just play hard core and they will die.

[XboxInnovation]

How can a dev expect to balance Call of duty with all that crap in it? They should take the best perks in the game and make it standard for everyone, like scavenger and faster aiming down the sights for example. Take all the other crap perks and scrap them. Go back to 3-5-7 killstreaks. Concentrate on making cool maps and adding more guns and you are well on your way to making a playable call of duty again.

[AngelicIceDiamond]

People also remember Black ops became playable after 11 or 12 title updates. Hopefull 11....or 50, will make MW3 playable. But I could careless for any of the franchise only play'em because my friends play.

[salinidus]

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