It wouldn’t be a Call of Duty game without problems with multiplayer spawns. The good news is the developers are quickly getting out in front of it and have pulled three maps from the Hardpoint playlist while they investigate.
As fans did the New Zealand trick to play early yesterday, it didn’t take long for videos to pop up showing issues with the spawns. Quarry was one of the more egregious examples and brings back memories of spawn camping in older shooters.
Hardpoint appears to have the biggest issues with three maps pulled from rotation: Quarry, Rundown, and Scrapyard.
Karachi was also removed from the Cutthroat playlist because a bug causes you to spawn alongside the enemy team at the start of the match.
Modern Warfare 3’s dev team has a public Trello board where you can look up known issues they are working on and see which ones have been fixed.
Since the respawn issues appear limited to specific map and playlist combinations, fixing them shouldn’t take too long.
While the community reception to Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer appears to be better than last year’s Modern Warfare 2, there are some bugs here at launch. If you’ve played Ground War, you’ve probably noticed the red dots on the minimap don’t indicate elevation like they are supposed to. I also ran into a visual bug when using hybrid scopes that blocked my sight picture completely. I had to flick the sight up and down to get rid of it.
If there’s a silver lining here, the team led by Sledgehammer Games is quick to respond and communicate when these issues pop up. Bugs are never fun, but acknowledging them and communicating with the community quickly goes a long way.
Modern Warfare 3 isn’t even 24 hours from its official launch. Expect more bugs to pop up and hopefully quick responses from the dev team. Look for small updates to roll out in the days ahead fixing the spawn issues and other bugs spotted by the community. So far, we’ve seen one small update that fixes a crash and speeds up loading times.