I can assure you that Call of Duty has never done better weapon unlocks than the 2019 Modern Warfare reboot. The first iteration of Gunsmith’s balanced attachments with warped stat changes and barrels with transformation effects struck a chord with me in a way that Black Ops–Cold War and Vanguard haven’t since. For Modern Warfare 2, Infinity Ward is blasting the recreate-a-class with Gunsmith 2.0.
In Gunsmith 2.0, players unlock not only new attachments for weapons, but also new receivers that transform one gun into another. That’s right, it’s a tech tree.
Infinity Ward introduced the new system by A Video (Opens in a new tab) It was shared on Infinity Ward’s Twitter. Using the M4 as an example, developers showed how to take apart a standard M4 front receiver (which is basically where all the central internals connect) and replace it with a receiver for the M16. Before you can open the M16 receiver you have to go through the M4, which can be converted to an SMG receiver or maybe a DMR variant.
This is a big change from the way Call of Duty has handled development over the past decade. Gun unlocks are typically tied to your overall account level. It looks like that’s still the case for “basic” guns like the M4, but variants will now be tied to Weapon XP. I think a standard AK-47 will eventually evolve into an AK-74U SMG. According to Infinity Ward, this change is meant to closely mimic the modularity of actual guns, but the gun tech trees come with a nice bonus: once you open an attachment for one gun platform, it also unlocks variants for that gun.
“This takes the feeling out of opening every attachment on every device every time you want to level a device,” said Mary Evjukian, senior user experience designer. As someone who has opened the same basic red dot sight for many years, for hundreds of Cody rifles, it’s nice to cut down on the clutter.
It won’t be long before we can try out Gunsmith 2.0 for ourselves. Modern Warfare 2 Beta (Opens in a new tab) Starting next weekend, an open beta for all platforms starts this Friday for PlayStation players.
