A few months back, when asked what his one wish would be for his company, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick said “I would have Call of Duty be an online subscription service tomorrow,” which understandably had gamers worried that Call of Duty's multiplayer modes might come with an added monthly fee in future. Activision have spoken out today to firmly put an end to those rumours.
Speaking to IndustryGamers, Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg said “are we going to be charging for multiplayer? The answer is no,” adding that “the experience you have out of the box, connecting with the online community to play Call of Duty is absolutely integral to the experience and we’ll never charge for that. It’s not going to be something we’ll attempt to monetize; it’s part of the package.”

He continues, saying “there are certainly a lot of behavioral shifts towards long-standing online relationships… But at the end of the day, all I’m trying to get across is I can unequivocally say we will never, ever charge for the multiplayer.”

It would be hard for Activision to deny it more strongly than that. For more Call of Duty multiplayer goodness, check out our pick of the funniest Call of Duty: Black Ops kills, and a guide to the best killing spots in Call of Duty: Black Op's many varied maps.

Here's a ridiculous kill streak in Modern Warfare 2 by player Sandy Ravage, commentated with hilarious enthusiasm by El Presador.

A while back I was singing the praises of StarCraft 2 pro-gaming commentators Tasteless and Artosis - their nerdily smart insights and zealous enthusiasm are perfect to make a frantic RTS comprehensible. I think El Presador's thunderously macho bellowing and hilarious improvised lingo is just as perfect for the merciless bloodbath of instakills that is Modern Warfare 2 online.



The next time I'm one-shotted from nowhere, I'm going to be thinking, "You got the beast mad now! Tom Francis is VISIBLY UPSET." Well, now that I see it written down, probably not. Some other highlights:

"Sandy Ravage senses these boys are gonna quit, so he missed on purpose with that predator missile. He knows these soldiers are ill-equipped to deal with a man of his calibre."

"They need to make a patch for this man, because man seriously - how the fuck you gonna combat the uncombatable? Matter of fact, people in the lobby oughta just quit this game. Save their own lives."

"I MEAN HOW MANY MORE DO YOU HAVE TO KILL?"

Thanks reddit.

In anticipation of the forthcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops, a few of us in the office have been sharpening our mad skillz with CoD: Modern Warfare 2.

Ignoring the editorially dubious airport sequence, it's still one of the most popular online shooters going, with difficult to conquer maps that rely on both strategy and skill.

We can't do much to speed up your reactions, but we can help to speed up your PC. If you fancy indulging this weekend, here's a quick guide to getting the fastest frames per second possible.



One of the good things about Modern Warfare 2 is that it's a relatively lightweight graphics engine. It looks great, but most systems – even laptops with integrated graphics - should be able to handle running it at a decent resolution.

On the downside, however, there's not a lot you can actually tweak. Infinity Ward removed the dev console, and hard wired most of the important legacy cvars from the underlying Quake 3 Arena engine. What's more, no matter how much you change the maximum framerate is capped at 90fps. (You should start any tweaking exercise by making a note of your current average frames per second in FRAPS.)

The in-game graphics options screen covers all the usual graphical effects and controls for turning them on and off. As with any game, start searching for speed by turning off anti-aliasing first, and then post-processing effects like Depth of Field and Soften Smoke Edges. These will have the least effect on the way the game looks, and anti-aliasing will yield the highest possible speed increase.

Unless you're using an old graphics card with a very small amount of on-board memory, reducing the texture size won't make an enormous difference to framerates. After anti-aliasing, turning off shadows and specular lighting should give you the biggest boost,  but they'll also have the biggest effect on what the game looks like. Without shadows, characters can seem to float rather than walk on the ground.



If you want to drill down a bit further into the game engine, you can edit the game engine settings. You may find anti-cheat software like VAC takes a dim view of this, but there's a couple of flags that are worth playing around with.

The configuration file is called config_mp.cfg, and you'll find it in main installation folder under 'players'. For Steam users, this is 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\call of duty modern warfare 2\players\' by default.

Open up this document in Notepad and you'll find it's a little harder to edit than cfg files from other games (if you're in the habit of playing around with cfg files that is) because the different settings aren't separated by carriage returns. You can resize the window to force long instructions onto a single line, but ultimately you'll rely on CTRL+F to navigate to different cvars.

A comprehensive list of the variables that make a difference can be found in this excellent forum post, but most of them simply relate to the same options in the in game menu. For example, setting 'seta r_dof_enable' to '0' is the same as turning off depth of field the normal way.

What you can do that the game doesn't allow, though, is turn of anisotropic filtering and the heat shimmer around fire. Do this by changing 'seta r_texFilterAnisoMax' and 'seta r_texFilterAnisoMin' to '1', and 'seta r_distortion' to '0'.



It's good to know the cfg file is there, and better to know that Black Ops will support the dev console, but the most useful change you can make is to change 'seta drawLagometer' to '1'. This brings up a small square which graphs your network throughput and will let you know if you have a spiky server connection, rather than graphics problem affecting your game.

Do remember that editing the config_mp.cfg file is at your own risk, and if you screw it up you can just delete it to restore default settings.