If you’re looking forward to the upcoming Modern Warfare 3 open beta on Xbox consoles, you may want to prepare yourself for a frustrating few days. A veritable plague of MW3 beta hackers has been all-but-ruining PlayStation players’ time during Weekend One; there’s just no telling whether this will continue into Weekend Two and Call of Duty is yet to comment.
We know we’re all hoping that Modern Warfare 3 is something of a return to form for Call of Duty, and one of the best competitive FPS games out there when it drops, but it’s hard to imagine anyone enjoying their time playing the full release if the amount of hackers in the limited-access beta is anything to go by. The Modern Warfare 3 beta has only been available on PlayStation consoles, and it’s already plagued with hackers – something you only usually see from those playing on PC. Pursuing players with mainly ‘wall hacks’ and ‘aimbot’, the wave of hackers hitting the MW3 beta is as alarming as it is frustrating.
If you want to see these hackers in action, you can check out some footage here:
As you can imagine, encountering these issues could become quite frustrating fast. However, what’s interesting about all this is that some believe that ‘jailbroken’ PlayStation 4 consoles are the cause – even though these are traditionally banned from online play when they engage in it. This process is one that essentially removes restrictions from a platform, allowing players to install otherwise unauthorized software – be that illegally obtained games, or otherwise.
As industry insider ‘Brad Lesh‘ claims, the fact that older platforms aren’t getting the same firmware updates as current-gen platforms means that it’s harder to protect against ‘jailbreak’ hacks from players using them online. If true, this only reinforces arguments that Call of Duty should ditch last-gen platforms sooner rather than later – as much as that would exclude quite a few PS4 and Xbox One players.
The Ricochet anti-cheat system should be able to slow things down, but Warzone and Modern Warfare 2 were proof enough that it couldn’t quite stop hackers entirely. From what we’ve seen in these first few MW3 beta dates already, it seems unlikely that it will be able to eradicate them for good without fully ditching last-gen consoles – which isn’t happening this time around.
Ultimately, though, it’s hard to prove where these hacks are coming from without delving into them yourself. In any case, you should expect to encounter some if you check out the Modern Warfare 3 beta on Xbox during Weekend Two (and, of course, if you’re hopping back on via a PlayStation console). We don’t think they’re going anywhere anytime soon.
If you do want to try to enjoy your time playing ahead of the full Modern Warfare 3 release date, you can check out all the MW3 beta maps and MW3 beta weapons right here. We know your favorite MW2 map won’t be in the MW3 beta, but neither are the MW3 Aftermarket Parts; you’ll have to wait to explore and enjoy both of those, and MW3 Zombies, of course.