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Why Movement in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Feels Weird (And It’s Not Slide-Canceling)


The Truth About Slide-Canceling in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 4
Credit: Activision

The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 beta has come, and for the first time, players across the world have had their chance to sink their teeth into Infinity Ward’s latest Call of Duty game, the first in the franchise to get top-billing for a planned two full years, at that. People loved the movement in Modern Warfare (2019), but a lot has changed in the sequel, making movement feel very different and, for many, weird. So, in this article, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about why movement feels weird in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

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The Truth About Slide-Canceling in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

The Truth About Slide-Canceling in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
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Credit: Activision

So, slide-canceling in Modern Warfare 2 has been all but eliminated. Depending on what you’re trying to do, there are some workarounds, but in effect, it’s gone. However, this is less of a big deal than many think. Movement in Call of Duty is much like the seasons: there are natural ebbs and flows and changes. Movement mechanics from CoD five years ago aren’t necessarily in this year’s game, and vice-versa.

Regardless, though, in each game you’ll find a variety of different ways to exploit the movement system of that particular game for maximum efficiency. Sometimes, it’s dropshotting, sometimes jumpshotting. Sometimes it’s slide-canceling, and sometimes it’s sprint-spamming. Sometimes it’s snaking, and sometimes it’s bunnyhopping. In the case of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019), it was slide-canceling.

But slide-canceling in Modern Warfare (2019) was in many ways a movement exploit that was too powerful. It wasn’t just useful in certain situations, whenever you were moving it was in your advantage to slide-cancel, as then you’d be moving faster. Regardless of what you were doing, slide-canceling was always the right choice.

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This made slide-canceling something of a necessity if you wanted to go up against strong players, requiring a constant series of button presses just to move around. Modern Warfare (2019) wasn’t designed with slide-canceling in mind, either; in fact, it’s been famously an oversight mechanic that Infinity Ward never really intended to be such a relevant factor to the game’s own meta.

Accordingly, slide-canceling has been removed in Modern Warfare 2, no longer requiring all players to slide-cancel all the time if they want to be competitive. While it would be a nice middle ground for slide-canceling to exist but only be useful, say, for moving around the map outside of gunfights, that would be a good compromise, but either way, slide-canceling isn’t, and hasn’t ever been, an essential mechanic for Call of Duty.

Sliding and Diving in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

The Truth About Slide-Canceling in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 2
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Credit: Activision

You can still slide, of course, in Modern Warfare 2, but you can also dive like you could back in the original Call of Duty: Black Ops. However, there are serious problems with both of these mechanics, and their interaction is another problem in itself.

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Sliding, for one, is just no longer a useful thing to do. Since you can’t cancel out of it and no real other changes have come to sliding, it’s basically an aesthetic mechanic that you can use but you won’t ever really need to use. Beyond that, sliding at the wrong time, especially in a gunfight, can most definitely get you killed.

The situation with diving is pretty similar. It’s a cool animation, and you can use it to dive behind cover, but there’s rarely if ever a tactical advantage to diving. For one, you could just slide instead, and for two, just like with sliding, you could just sprint directly wherever you need to go. Once again, it becomes something of an aesthetic mechanic that might make you feel more immersed but doesn’t really give you any sort of advantage.

Then, there’s the interaction between sliding and diving. See, the slide button is the same button as the dive button, but you just (on controller) tap to slide and hold to dive. Seems simple, right? Well, it is, but that’s kind of the issue. Most CoD players play on controller, and as has been the case for over a decade, the best CoD experience is had with a controller with bumpers or back buttons for easy access to jumping and changing your stance/sliding/diving.

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The problem is that now it’s extremely easy for those kinds of controllers to initiate a dive when you meant to slide, making the game feel altogether more frustrating and less responsive than it needs to. Plus, since there’s not really, again, a good reason to slide or dive, this is yet another incentive to just not do either.

Bunnyhopping and Reloading in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

The Truth About Slide-Canceling in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 3
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Credit: Activision

If Modern Warfare (2019) had slide-canceling, Modern Warfare 2 has bunnyhopping. Jump around a corner, ADS, then jump a few more times: this is, by far, the best way to take every corner in every game of Modern Warfare 2 you play. Accordingly, you’ll see higher-skilled players doing this a dizzying amount in their gameplay, much like you would see with slide-canceling in Modern Warfare (2019).

On a very fundamental level, it just isn’t fun or engaging to be forced to rely on the same technique for, literally, every bend in a map, every corner, and every turn, less you want to risk just be deleted from existence. The absurd prevalence of bunnyhopping is, ironically, much the same problem had with slide-canceling: there’s too much of an incentive to be doing it literally constantly.

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Then, there’s reloading. You can’t sprint while reloading, and there isn’t a perk for that, either. What’s more, though, is that you can’t reload cancel to break out an animation quickly and get into an unexpected fight either, thanks to Modern Warfare 2’s tiered reload system. Once again, this takes a movement tactic away from players and replaces it with, well, nothing.

From the nerf of slide-canceling, which on its own would be fine, to the irrelevance of sliding and diving at-large combined with the prevalence of bunnyhopping and inability to sprint while reloading or reload cancel, movement in Modern Warfare 2 is just much slower and less complicated than even its predecessor Modern Warfare (2019).

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