Just you, your enemy, and your gun.
You know those matches of Call of Duty – or any multiplayer game ever, really – where you just get saddled with a terrible team? You could have nine kills for every one death and have captured the flag personally two times, but your numbskull teammates keep throwing grenades at their own feet and trying to everything but claim the objectives. You think one of them might have somehow captured the flag for the enemy team, even.
Well, maybe your team really does suck, but maybe you’re just making excuses. If you’d like to put your proverbial money where your proverbial mouth is when it comes to your Modern Warfare 3 skillz, then perhaps the game’s new “Face Off” mode will be right up your alley.
Face Off will set players in smaller, close-quarters maps to, uh, face off in intimate 1v1 or 2v2 matchups. You won’t have a team to fall back on (other than your partner), but you won’t have a team to blame if you’re losing, either. It’ll all be on you.
Interestingly enough, in this video featuring various folks from Raven, Sledgehammer and Infinity Ward discussing the new gameplay type, they mention that Face Off could potentially work exceptionally well as a split-screen mode, to play against a buddy sitting right next to you on the couch. I’m always a proponent of more real-life split-screen competitive gameplay, so that’s pretty cool to hear, but it’s a bit surprising given that gaming has steadily been moving away from that sort of thing for the past decade. Also, your friend could totally just look at your half of the screen and cheat.
Face Off will launch as a free update this coming Wednesday, May 16th, with two playable maps. Two more maps will be included in the Collection 2 DLC pack hitting on the 22nd.
This sounds like an interesting idea. It gets infinitely more entertaining if you imagine that the characters you’re playing in the 1v1 are John Travolta and Nic Cage.
