The Promod era heralded something of a golden period for competitive Call of Duty, as tournaments spread across the world, the game finding a place on the schedule of several renowned events. It didn't have red dots, it didn't have anything – it was just a few guns and essentially a map of walls, that was it."
"When Promod came along it basically removed everything," says Pinney, "It kind of stripped away all the visual stuff, so the game looked really clean. Soon enough, Promod was used for many of the tournaments worldwide – there's a good chance that if you ever participated in competitive Call of Duty, you were playing Promod. It was just a few guns and essentially a map of walls, that was it." – Mark "Phantasy" Pinneyīlack was in contact with a lot of the top teams, and got quite a lot of feedback from them as to what they thought should changed about the balance on the game. "When Promod came along it basically removed everything. We just started writing down ideas, found a coder and started to work on it." "The develop for PAM had gone kind of AWOL," says Black, "so I got talking with another person that used to admin tournaments with me, known by his online handle of Kleineman, about how PAM wasn't doing what it needed to do anymore. PAM was great, but as a tournament admin, Black was one of the people that came up with the idea for Promod, the modification that became synonymous with competitive Call of Duty 4. It kept the red dot sight and the game still looked relatively similar to the stock game." "I think the only differences that PAM actually created was that it removed all kill streaks and the perks – well, most of the perks.
CALL OF DUTI MW4 PROFESSIONAL
Mark Pinney, the professional player known as Phantasy, started playing the game at launch, and within a month was playing on PAM instead. It improved sniper "hitreg" (hit registration), spawn protection, got rid of a lot of weapon sway and ditched hit markers so players couldn't just blast at the walls (a process known as "wallbanging"), fishing for markers with wild abandon. Originally, this took the form of a program called PAM, aka the Project Ares Mod, which fiddled with some of the more contentious aspects of COD4 for competitive players. The Insomnia 32 tournament was a big success, but it highlighted the need for a competitive Modern Warfare mod, something that would allow the administrators and organisers of these events to impose their own, distinct and balancing rules over the top of the base game. "You could choose any weapon, and we quickly noticed a few were quite broken at launch." He couldn't limit any of the weapons, though, and that was a problem.
CALL OF DUTI MW4 MOD
I took it out of the box and then, 12 hours later, we were having to run the tournament." The tournament in question took place at Insomnia 32, held in November 2007 at Newbury Racecourse, with a $6,000 prize pool stumped up by publishers Activision.īlack ended up with a mod that enabled just a small selection of maps – Crash, Backlot, District, Strike, and Vacant – and limited the perks to three preselected options. "We had to hack a mod together in about 12 hours, after the game was released.
" COD4 wasn't really that competitive out of the box," Black tells me. Rob Black, now working with ESL, played COD1 and COD2 professionally, before organising several competitions – including the running of the first COD4 tournament in the world. Modern Warfare wasn't quite ready for competitive play on release, but it had someone to help the process along, to embed it in the eSports consciousness of the UK and beyond. " COD4 wasn't really that competitive out of the box, so we had to hack a mod together in about 12 hours." – Rob Black This feeling, combined with strong UK representation in the ranks of professional Call of Duty 1 and 2 players, lead to a competitive scene springing to life almost immediately. Modern Warfare was an explosive title packed with bluster about the sheer scale of 21st century warfare, but its gameplay felt tight and its action tense – more like a close-contested paintball match than a roaring open battlefield.
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