Those playing the Modern Warfare 3 beta on PC are begging Activision to ditch the bespoke COD HQ launcher, calling the extra rigmarole required to get into the game itself a ‘waste of time’.
The issue has mostly come to light since the ongoing Modern Warfare 3 beta opened to those on PC, as those players are finding that, in order to launch the MW3 beta, they can’t do it directly – rather, after clicking on the game’s icon in Steam or Battle.net, they are then taking to the COD HQ which almost acts as a second launcher, but just for Call of Duty. They must then pick MW3 beta from the list of Call of Duty games available to them before they can launch the game. Over on the Modern Warfare 3 subreddit, users like NokstellianDemon have voiced their frustrations with this method. “It’s such a cumbersome experience trying to start the game and especially annoying when you you know you’ll never touch Modern (Warfare) 2 again. I love MW3 as a game TBH, but I’ve never seen such an obtusely designed way to open a video game before.”
They’ve had plenty of fellow gamers agreeing with them and also pointing to how the method – designed to bring the current games together under one banner – is instead having the reverse effect. “They want to make COD HQ the place for future COD titles but the backend support is not really there. MW3 is sold as a separate thing on Steam, you launch it through HQ as a DLC basically but it’s still it’s own process. It’s a mess,” says Vallux. We can certainly attest to some of this, as when we tried to enter our PC code for the beta on Battle.net it took us a few seconds to find out how to start installing it.
In fact, as 1tankyt points out, the Xbox and PlayStation version doesn’t feel much better. “It’s also awful on consoles too, the UI feels like a mobile game trying to feed ads and it takes forever to get into the beta, whereas it was 2 clicks when it was one app.” But many are also hoping this is just a beta issue, such as Vircomore who says “I really hope this is just a beta thing and it will have it’s own button on full launch. Those of us on Battlenet have to deal with the same thing.”
If you’re having trouble trying to get the beta downloaded to play, may we suggest our how to download MW3 beta on Xbox, PC and PS5 guide. You can also check out our guide to the brand new MW3 Cutthroat mode – what is Cutthroat mode in MW3? over here. It’ll certainly be interesting to see if any changes will come to Call of Duty’s launcher now that the Xbox deal to buy Activision has now completed.
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