Modern Warfare 4 Beta Patch Notes

Friday AUGUST 28

The Modern Warfare 4 Open Beta arrives at 10 AM PT today. Thank you for sharing your experiences, best plays, and feedback with us during Weekend 1. Your input is helping shape the experience as we continue to make improvements.

We’ve made some sweeping changes to the game with focus on a few key areas: TTK, Spawns, Movement, Killstreaks and Aim Assist.

TIME-TO-KILL

After some updates last week, we still weren’t where we wanted to be with time-to-kill. We’re aiming for a slight increase to TTK so instead of changing base health, we focused on weapon tuning to improve durability without making weapons feel too weak at range. Every single weapon in our Beta has received an update for Weekend 2. These changes create more survivability and room for skill expression in combat.There’s more work to do here and we’re looking forward to hearing your feedback.

SPAWNS

In the final hours of Weekend 1, we adjusted spawns and spawn logic across all respawn modes to better separate players. Additionally, we greatly reduced spawning on squad members. 

For Weekend 2, we wanted to build on these changes with adjustments to Hardpoint specifically. We feel the mode plays best when spawns are consistent and predictable. The prototype in the Beta today is a step toward that vision, but it is far from perfect. You may still see some bad spawns on smaller maps, and on larger maps you may spawn too far from the action. We are excited about the direction and will be improving things with your feedback.

Finally, we added Battle Hardened to the temporary spawn protection, reducing the effects of flash and concussion grenades immediately after spawning.

• Updated spawn logic to better separate players [added at the end of Beta Weekend 1]
• Deprioritized spawning near teammates [added at the end of Beta Weekend 1]
• Partially improved Hardpoint spawn system to improve predictability
• Added Battle Hardened to temporary spawn protection
• Temporarily disabled Hardpoint on Rooftops because of a spawn bug

MOVEMENT

We saw a lot of feedback about Tactical Sprint over Weekend 1, and we know there are a range of opinions about it. We have removed Tactical Sprint by default, which we think improves the pace of combat and gives the game a more classic feel. For players who prefer a faster playstyle, we moved it to a Perk and enhanced it by reducing its sprint-to-fire speed penalty. We have also adjusted Tac Sprint and slide speeds to rebalance them against each other.

This is an experiment for Beta which we hope improves the pace of the game and enhances player choice. If we decide to stick with this change, we need to consider its place in the Perk table and which other adjustments to Perks go along with it.

• Tac Sprint
  • Moved Tactical Sprint to the Blood Rush Perk.
  • Reduced Tactical Sprint sprint-to-fire time to match base sprint.
  • Reduced Tactical Sprint speed by 4%.
• Sprint Speeds
  • Increased knife base sprint speeds.
  • Increased all pistol base sprint speeds.
• Slide Adjustments
  • Increased slide-to-jump delay.
  • Reduced slide distance by 10%.
  • Reduced slide speed by 9%.
• Stamina
• Mantle
  • Fixed an issue where players could mantle much higher than intended.
• Climbing
  • Fixed an issue that caused stutters when climbing ladders and pipes.

As a reminder, movement in Warzone is close to Multiplayer but not 1-to-1, as many things have been tuned specifically for Warzone gameplay. Check out yesterday’s update on Resurgence in Open Beta for more.

AIM ASSIST

For Weekend 2, we’ve made adjustments to aim assist to reduce its impact. In full transparency, this is not the exact tuning we want, so we will be working on dialing this in ahead of launch.

• These adjustments are global and will apply to Warzone.

KILLSTREAKS

In Weekend 1, we saw the feedback around Killstreak spam and we had some duplicated announcer callout bugs that made this feel even worse in-match.

For Weekend 2, we fixed the announcer issue and bumped the base cost of all Killstreaks by 1 kill. This should limit Killstreak spam and keep matches more focused on gunplay.

• General
  • Increased all Killstreak costs by 1 kill.

We also made some tweaks to Killstreak power so they aren’t taking away from the match, including reducing the radius and lethality of the Artillery Strike, and tuning the UAV to make it easier to take out.

• UAV
  • Reduced UAV health by 60%.
  • Reduced UAV height by 12%. 
• Artillery Beacon
  • Reduced the number of missiles from 6 to 5.
  • Reduced the inner damage radius from 15.24 meters to 10.16 meters.
  • Reduced the outer damage radius from 25.4 meters to 17.78 meters.
  • Reduced the shockwave radius that knocks people down to 10.16 meters.

CONTENT

If you’re just joining us this weekend, welcome to Open Beta. This weekend brings even more to Multiplayer, including our new Hijack mode and Ground War: Combat Outpost (with two new Ground War maps), plus the new Lithium 6v6 map. And for the first time in a Call of Duty Beta, you can drop into Warzone with Resurgence on Zodiac, our all-new Resurgence map.