User blog comment:Chris DC2R/Modern Warefare - Multiplayer Only/@comment-65693-20091213012023

Nelo, you're right on the dot. Local multiplayer with bots is something that is severely underrated and often completely overlooked by game designers. Personally, I own a lot of shooters, and how many of them feature multiplayer with bots? Two. Just two. Medal of Honor: Rising Sun and Geist. Now, those games came out in 2004 and 2005 respectively, so the AI by today's standards aren't that great.

But, seriously, there are millions upon millions of players who don't have online play but still want fun multiplayer, and Infinity Ward and Treyarch have been leaving them out on all the multiplayer fun. Giving the ability to have bots on teams creates the illusion of having a lot of people playing at once without any ping or connection issues—ever. Or how about if you want to recreate a campaign level, but fight as the baddies? You could just pick a map, fight as an OpFor or whomever, and enable a group of OpFor and Marine bots to run around the map shooting each other. The concept is severely underrated.

As for a Modern Warfare game that is multiplayer alone and multiplayer only, I wouldn't really see a problem with that if they did what Bungie did with Halo 2 Multiplayer Map Pack. The reason Call of Duty ever even became great series is because of its campaign. If it were to be dumped, that would be like cutting off its hands and feet. Sure, it's still there, but there's not much to it.