The Hardcore Fallacy

If you’ve been around CoD4 long enough, odds are you’ve noticed the trend in public server setups. While there used to be a healthy balance between normal mode and so-called “hardcore” mode, at some point the scales became annoyingly tipped toward the latter.

It’s now somewhat difficult to find a decent normal-mode server without mods and the player limit set low enough that the game doesn’t devolve into this pointless… spamfest. A spamfest where skill is mostly made null and void and camping/playing a zone is the only thing you can do lest you die by a grenade to the groin for the fourteenth time in the past five minutes. That player limit is roughly 20 — any more and the game ceases to be a battle of talent and turns into Halo.

…Where was I? Oh. “Hardcore” mode. This might just qualify for misnomer of the year. There is, quite literally, nothing hardcore about “hardcore” mode. It’s merely a different way of approaching the same basic game, and while the changes are small — no radar, no HUD, 30 health — the overall effect on the gameplay is quite large.

I’m really bad with being terse, so I’ll summarize things first with a list in attempts to keep those with attention span problems around. Longer-winded explanations follow.

Ways “hardcore” mode makes CoD4 easier.

1. Explosives are overpowered with huge killing radii.
2. Health is so low any gun can kill with one bullet.
3. Many weapons become needlessly obsolete.
4. You can run the ideal perk setup every time without penalty.
5. Aim isn’t required to do well.
6. Camping is much more effective.

1) In normal mode all explosives have both a kill and non-kill radius that varies depending on the type. For instance, the noob tube has the smallest kill radius because it’s the easiest to use by way of its explosions being unavoidable. “Hardcore” mode does away with this non-kill radius balance because all explosives kill within it anyway, so the tube becomes quite overpowered. All explosives now gain a huge kill radius, making grenade spamming that much more effective, especially since there’s no icon to let you know one is nearby.

2) Every single gun in CoD4 has the ability to kill with a single bullet in “hardcore” mode, a feat that is supposed to be reserved for highly specialized weapons like shotguns and sniper rifles. The range for one-bullet kills varies, of course, but some of them will always be a one-bullet kill. I don’t know about you, but rapid-fire instagib isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I bought this game. “Hardcore” mode even makes shot location more useless than it is already — within a gun’s one-bullet kill range, a shot to the foot is equally as deadly as one to the forehead.

3) This is related to the last point. A gun’s power is almost entirely obsolete in “hardcore” mode. Why use a sniper rifle when a Desert Eagle is just as deadly from the same distance? You can completely avoid all difficult-to-use weapons and their annoyingly high recoil and stick with all the easy weapons that are suddenly overpowered — M4, P90, M16A4, etc.

4) In normal mode you’re given a choice — do you run Stopping Power for the brute force or do you try something else? By going with another setup, you willingly make your gun less powerful in the hope that you’ll make it up elsewhere. Same goes for using a silencer — is it worth it to take the range hit and thus make most of you kills take an extra bullet? None of this matters in “hardcore” mode. The notion of “power” is completely irrelevant, so you’re free to use the best perk and weapon setup in every situation. A silenced gun, Bomb Squad, UAV Jammer, and Dead Silence. No one will ever hear you and you’ll never get a face full of claymore. Use the M16A4, G3, or M14 and you’ll also have a silent one-bullet-kill weapon with unlimited range. There is absolutely no penalty to this setup in “hardcore” mode. In normal mode your weapon would be considerably less powerful, but since power is no longer an issue, you get to play the ninja without any repercussions whatsoever.

5) Aim is nearly a foreign concept in many firefights due to the ease of downing an enemy. Inaccurately sweeping your sights over a target while holding the fire button nearly always results in a kill. In effect, “hardcore” mode is no longer about out-playing or out-aiming the other guy. In most circumstances it’s merely a matter of who was more prepared to see an enemy in that instant. If you shoot first, odds are you’re golden.

6) Without a radar to betray your position, and with the ridiculously effective perk setup above, the effectiveness of camping skyrockets. Camping can be tactically useful, but most people overuse it because they can’t do anything else. “Hardcore” mode tells them this is okay because they don’t have to do anything else — just sit there are spray your one-shot kill bullets. No aim or skill required. Just wait for some poor sap to make the grave mistake of moving and he’s all yours.

In the end, it’s obvious to see why “hardcore” mode is so popular. By requiring less talent to do decently and feel useful to the team, the community’s bad players, newbies, and old people naturally gravitate toward it. It is, in fact, the only way they can hope to keep up. The end result is that “hardcore” mode is generally paced a lot slower because most everyone is either camping to pick people off or moving cautiously worried about the fact that they die with a single bullet.

This is fine in theory, but in the end it’s nothing more than an annoyance to people like me who regularly lay waste to public servers but have no desire whatsoever to do the clan/competitive thing. Whenever I can’t find a decent normal-mode pub, I’m forced to hop into some “hardcore” ultra-ninja bullshit mode and go 5:1. I can only hope that Infinity Ward has half a clue about gameplay balance for the next CoD and can create a hardcore mode that is actually hardcore, but I’m definitely not holding my breath.

After all, with today’s gamers, a game that requires individual talent is a dead game.