When you fire up Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer and start unlocking weapons, you’ll notice weapon tuning isn’t here. What happened? Sledgehammer Games opted to remove the feature for Modern Warfare 3. That means all new guns, along with old guns from Modern Warfare 2, will use the weapon attachment system only.
Why the change? The dev team cites community feedback. Nothing specific was mentioned, but I imagine it was a combination of a clunky system and one that the average player wasn’t using much.
With Modern Warfare 3, the devs tossed in more visual cues to help players quickly understand what the pros/cons are for each attachment. Here’s how that looks.
For the folks who want even more stats, another panel dives into even more detail. One of the many devs working on the game, Beenox, helped Sledgehammer Games with this part of the attachment system. You’ll get a clear breakdown of your current weapon and how attachments will affect it. Everything from exact headshot damage values to the precise movement speed while aiming down sights and everything in between. It’s all there.
You can also quickly find attachments that affect specific stats by using the ‘Sort Filter’ button (Y/Triangle).
Modern Warfare 3’s attachment system influences nine main stats. From the devs:
- Damage: The points of damage you inflict on an enemy, dependent on where the area of the foe you hit, within the effective range of the weapon.
- Fire Rate: The rounds per minute and the rechamber time of the weapon.
- Range: The range that your weapon effectively inflicts the damage and the velocity of each bullet fired.
- Accuracy: The spread from hip fire in degrees, and how resistant to flinching while firing you are while employing the weapons.
- Recoil Control: The gun’s kick, as well as its horizontal and vertical recoil in degrees.
- Mobility: How quickly you can generally move, crouch and move, sprint, tactically sprint, and ADS while using the weapon.
- Handling: The ADS speed, reload quickness, sprint to fire speed, and weapon swap speed.
- Rounds: The number of individual pieces of ammunition (e.g., bullets or slugs) the weapon can fire before reloading is needed.
- Reserve: The additional ammunition the weapon carries. Once the Rounds and Reserve number is reduced to zero, you’re out of ammunition.
Everyone will still be quick to push out meta builds, but now it’ll be easier to see the specific values that can make weapons become the best. And make it easier/quicker for average players to tweak their favorite weapons.
Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer servers go live at midnight EST on November 10. I also recently covered all the Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer modes coming at launch.