call of duty 4

Call of Duty 4 was released in 2007, and led the way of modern shooters: It introduced kill streaks, perks and loadouts, wallbangs, a ranking system and played in a modern scenario. Yet, when I remember the game, I think of other characteristics: the snappiness and customizability.

I played multiplayer almost religously between 2011 and 2015, and I want to dedicate this post to this special game.

Quake enginge and movement

CoD4 uses the Quake engine internally, which results in some quirkiness that you can exploit:

Strafe jumping is the probably the key mechanic of the game. Running and jumping, while slightly steering and moving left or right, would lengthen your jump. This is crucial at the start of a round, when you’re rushing and nades are coming down - you might just make it if you strafe jump.

The most game breaking mechanic was bouncing: Jumping on angled surfaces - usually concrete barriers - would leap your character forwards into the air. Making yourself vulnerable like this was seldom worth it, but at the same time it’s like en passant in chess - it’s common courtesy, you’ll have do it, and you’ll have try to noscope somebody while doing it.

Wall running would make you slightly faster (slightly strafing into a wall), and setting your fps cap to a quotient of 1000 would automatically make your jumps higher and thus longer. People usually played with 125 or 250 fps, 333 fps were banned - it was that powerful!

Apart from these, you could quickly alternate your stance, from running to proning, from jumping to crouching. It felt snappy. You can only survive one or two bullets point blank, therefore you have be very efficient in dodging and using your cover.

The game received seven updates after it got released, but this was at a time when the ship for bug fixes had mostly sailed once your started selling your game. This meant that several game breaking bugs still exist to this day: Areas that silence your noise and don’t deal fall damage, lights that absorb enemy shots, or simply missing textures allowing you to peek into enemy territory.

Configs and customization

The next great thing the game had going on was also a Quake engine characteristic: Console access. You can manipulate a lot of the internal game settings. The majority is protected and can’t be changed, but the rest you can set at your own will. You can bind keys to either toggle between values, or execute small scripts:

bind X "toggle snd_volume 0 0.3"        # toggle sound
bind X "toggle com_maxfps 125 250"      # toggle fps
bind X "weapnext; wait 2; weapnext"     # reload cancel
bind X "say I'm the best!"              # text bind

Creating your own config and sharing it online felt like ritual. I spent so many hours testing variables, hoping it would give me an edge in competitive play. Playing at a lower resolution, with a forced aspect ratio that distorts the screen and making enemies appear wider, and thus easier to target. Adjusting some undocumented variable, feeling like it made you better, but not knowing what it actually does.

Certain configs became canonical, like yitch3.cfg, which was used for maxing your fps so you could reach 125 or 250 fps on a lower-end PC. People would swear by their config, or simply use a pro players config, because configs transcended players.. right?

After stumbling upon an in-depth guide I switched my keybindings: Right mouseclick now was for jumping, and space bar for putting down your sights. Quake players used to do this, and it stuck with me ever since. Was it really advantageous? It surely felt like it.

Other adjustments were purely cosmetic; most notably tweaking your scoreboard:

Filmtweaks

Filmtweaks are another great way to customize your game; they manifest how your game would look. You’d adjust things like brightness, contrast, desaturation, dark and light tint.

I tried to find filmtweaks that would give every map the same feeling, but it always felt off. Each map had its own tint you had to work around. I also played with black-and-white filmtweaks at one point..

See these examples, with the default settings first, and my custom filmtweaks after:

Scene

It’s the Call of Duty franchise, so the community was super toxic. You were competing with other hormone-ridden teenage boys for worthless elo (at least some of the time). You got flamed, you got called a cheater, people started feuds over nothing.

On the flipside, a lot of truly creative fragmovies were released ^{1 2 3 4}. I also dabbled in making one myself, but I wasn’t made for it. I always wanted to compile one after I stopped playing, but I lost thousands of recorded demos when one of my hard drives crashed.

Closing

These are just the aspects that stood out to me, but - of course - there is more: elevator glitches, mods like Galactic Warfare or Hide and Seek, the singleplayer campaign.

All in all, Call of Duty 4 felt responsive, fast, and fun. You can still spray and pray against better players, and they’ll die as easily as you do. Playing with your own setup, that you cultured, feels phenomenal.

I believe there is some parallel to TrackMania Nations: Both games feel rustic yet responsive, which is key to both their success.