'Buddy boost' feature cut from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

(Image credit: Activision)

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare almost had a feature called "buddy boost". As Prima Games explain, it would have allowed players to cooperate to reach higher ground, one player going into a squat and the other clambering over them to attain a better position.

But the feature was cut from Modern Warfare because, as multiplayer map design director Jeffrey Smith explained, "it's really hard to get some random person to cooperate with you. You have to let somebody kind of climb up you and get you up and they would get up there."

People just weren't likely to cooperate often enough to make it worthwhile, especially as it left the player providing the boost "waiting in a really awkward squat position" that made them easy for other players to take out.

Apparently they didn't just pull the buddy boost out, but altered the maps as well with the aim of making them more interactive.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is out on October 25. The PC early access beta starts September 19, while the open beta starts on September 21.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.