Modern Warfare slammed over “unacceptable” graphical downgrades

Modern Warfare players expressed their concerns on the significantly downgraded graphics across multiple modes – sourcing the problems to optimizations made for Warzone.

Modes like Ground War and Spec Ops have been reportedly depreciating in visuals since the 1.13 patch that have reduced the condition of everything from foliage, shadows, and textures in the game.

The free-to-play Warzone battle royale has an incredible reach, letting players from platforms such as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One to PC communities drop into the same matches. But this merge of platforms might have come at a price for the console experience.

According to user ‘Just-Bioinformatics,’ side-by-side comparisons of the game pre-1.13 are convincingly different than images from post-patches across 1.13, 1.19, and 1.20.

• Read more: Modern Warfare May 12 update patch notes for PS4, Xbox One, PC

“These are graphical changes in the Warzone, Ground War and Spec Ops map,” they said. “Ground War and Spec Ops were already affected before the release of Warzone. Please use the old build for Ground War, GW with 64 players is not as demanding as Warzone.”

The changes they’ve seen have affected Ground War maps such as Karst River Quarry, Krovnik Farmland, Port of Verdansk, Tavorsk District and Zhokov Boneyard.

Most of the changes take out extra elements while leaving most of the angles and barriers intact but some feel like some of these changes “can be resolved by optimizing Warzone separately from Ground War,” according to Just-Bioinformatics.

• Read more: Infinity Ward reveal what’s coming to Modern Warfare & Warzone this week

More players noticed these kinds of downgrades in their gameplay that they say can be seen in Ground War.

“Ground War textures do look like s**t these days though,” user ‘_baseball’ said. “I played some of it to get the IAV challenge done a while ago, and man. It looks like some Goldeneye 007 textures in some spots until it loads in.”

Modern Warfare has been out since October 2019 and since then IW has expanded the game’s library of content to flow well with players from different consoles/platforms.

The Call of Duty community now wants a conversation about the state of Modern Warfare after these updates and their effect on the overall game.