Well after Filefront screwed themselves out of terabytes of bandwidth, mass confusion about the key, and about a week of constant play, I’ve decided to share my opinions of the new Call of Duty: World at War PC beta. Read on, and feel free to leave your opinions in the form of a comment as well.

Pros:

The gameplay stays true to the CoD legacy. I expected Treyarch to make major improvements, almost like a CoD2:UO. They have really exceeded my expectations in nearly every way with World at War. Everything is smooth, the weapons and perks are awesome and you can tell they put a lot of effort into ensuring that everything blends well for a very repeatable and enjoyable experience. That said, there are a few things that need to be addressed…

Cons:

Stability. The client crashes or refuses to start at least once per session. The server crashes with entity errors that haven’t been seen since Quake 2. This sort of regression is likely due to the restraints of consoles, and our lazy developer friends are recycling the engine across all platforms rather than taking advantage of the higher end PC’s that run these dedicated servers. My clan’s box is pretty typical, an AMD X2 with 4GB of RAM and massive hard drive. It’s more than capable of running 10 or so dedicated server processes simultaneously and we take advantage of that capability…

Basically, these problems have been confirmed by thousands of gamers on the COD forums and have yet to really be seriously addressed. I really hope the developers take this opportunity to fix these problems before the final game is released. It would be really great if they would release a beta patch, since they will likely lose more than a few people if they don’t. No one will shell out $80 for a game they KNOW has problems.

A side note, Evenbalance really needs to get their shit together here. I updated our server using pbsetup and it effectively fubar’d our box. I had to disable PB so players could join again… wtf?

Feel free to leave your opinion of the beta in a comment below