Call of Duty 4 is a blast to play, there is no doubt about that, but it's not perfect. Chewing Pixels has posted a nice piece about the enemy AI and coding techniques used in Modern Warfare. Is it cheap to have enemies seemingly spawn endlessly just to increase difficulty? Does it really make a difference?
From Chewing Pixels: "In CoD4 there are sections where enemies just keep re-spawning until you pass an invisible trigger point. In one night-time escape mission from a crashed helicopter I took out the gunner in an enemy gunship stalking my team - at great risk - only for a new one to appear ten seconds later. I did this six or seven times to see if there actually were a bunch of spare gunners waiting in the back of the helicopter or if they were just spawning there to artificially keep the difficulty up. It is, regrettably, the latter."
I am also playing COD4 at a higher difficulty level (hardened) and find some parts of it do seem to be unfairly difficult, not due to any fantastically advanced AI, but due to an endlessly spawning stream of enemies. I have also found myself wondering, like the writer, whether it wouldn't just be smarter to run forward a bit to trigger the next script.
Like I said earlier, Call of Duty 4 is a blast to play for the most part, but things like this do tend to break your suspension of disbelief and hurt the immersive quality of the game. With the power of these new consoles, there has to be a better way...right?
