Call of Duty Elite premium members on XBox Live got their first downloadable Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 content Tuesday morning with a two-map "content drop" containing two new maps.
Say what you will, but the DLC was the main reason I signed up for Elite in the first place. I don't care much for stats and leaderboards that are skewed by boosters, hackers and campers. However, I am one of those people that will buy all of the downloadable maps for my Call of Duty games, so it made sense to me to essentially pre-pay and save a few bucks. I have considered asking for an additional discount for being the only person on the internet that admits he buys all the DLC on his CoD games. It seems the popular trend is to claim otherwise while downloading it all anyway.
The two new maps are called Piazza and Liberation. Elite premium members will need to download these manually, so don't think the XBox Live update it will call for today gave them to you.
I was pleased to be able to wake up this morning and not only find the content available but also working. Given the nature of some past Call of Duty DLC launches, I'll note that I downloaded and played the new maps at 7am Central time, so this is always subject to change.
Here's a quick runthrough of my early impressions of each new map.
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- Piazza
Piazza is a nice, bright map. While the map is average in overall size it more than makes up for it with a variety of heights, levels and rooms. I felt many of the maps that came with Modern Warfare 3 were lacking in this regard, so it's nice to find this covered in one of the first DLC maps available.
For those who think camping in corners with a scope and Assassin Pro makes you a professional gamer, Piazza has plenty of spots for you. In fact, one of the spawns has a nice deep corner facing a car that can be blown up all right there. Only thing missing is a little bow and a reminder to hang your head in shame.
Plenty here for other play types, too. Snipers and run-and-gun players should also be able to find strategies that work well. There's a small three-level fountain you can climb for a quick longshot over a wall, almost as if the people who designed this map thought of it.
If you just prestiged and want that oddly difficult to get challenge for falling to your death, jump the wall by that pretty beach. You won't fall far, but apparently the sand on this beach is deadly to the touch. It will count.
Overall, a fun and well planned map that is hopefully an example of what's to come for Modern Warfare 3 DLC.
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Liberation
It's apparently fall in this map, and the leaves sure are pretty. Nice looking map with a wide range of locations and environments that make each part of the map different from the next. The person who designed the Interchange map should take notes.
Far moreso than in Piazza, if you are the type of CoD player who likes to work more corners than a Las Vegas streetwalker you'll like this map. Nobody will like you, but you likely already know that. I can see the large underground area near the center being of particular interest to that play style, as well as the small drainage ditch tunnel near the bottom center of the map.
This is one of those Call of Duty maps that seems to have had less time in the design process. While far from a poor map, the devil is in the details. I can't help but feel that I should be able to jump up and climb several areas that my soldier should be able to reach easily. The worst offender is the large busted-up overpass on the left side of the map near the large fountain. Sure looks like you should be able to go up there but you can't. You can, however, enter the cavern-like area underneath it, making me think the folks behind this particular map might be corner campers themselves.
In another in a long line of Call of Duty oddities, the hot dogs and pretzels on the street cart cannot be destroyed with any weapons. Not sure if this was a skipped detail or something based on a programmer's experience buying hot dogs and pretzels from a street vendor.
Overall, Liberation is a decent map, but not one I'd vote to play over too many other maps already in the game.
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Not a bad start to the first in a long line of Modern Warfare 3 DLC, though I'm sure there will be blogs all day long that act as if they are the devil's spawn. That's the popular thing to do when reviewing anything popular, right? If that sort of thing bugs you, subscribe to this column, follow me on Twitter @OriginalPSP and check me out at PatrickScottPatterson.com.
In addition to a variety of other gaming articles and content, I will be reviewing all of 2012's Call of Duty DLC in this same fashion, as a guy who wants to play the game for fun instead of expecting the second coming of the deity of your choice. Yes, there are online Call of Duty players that don't act like a good kill-death ratio is going to qualify them for a car loan and job promotion and I'm one of them.
See you in the war zone.
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