First off, for all of you that don't know, parkour, or freerunning, is pretty much jumping around buildings, ledges, or any other obstacles. I watched a video before the release of MW2 and they talked about how they were incorporating it a lot into the game as well as focusing more on vertical warfare. These are two points i'd like to cover, vertical warfare and the parkour aspect.

     Now I played MW2 quite a bit. I racked up something like 15 or 16 days playing it. I loved how everything on all the maps could be used. Sometimes you had to be extremely creative in how you got around the map. I remember watching a video on how to get to the red sign that hung above an entranceway on the map Karachi. You know what i'm talking about, the one where you had to bust out the window and croutch on the ledge, then jump to the bus and then once you had the patience to get on the bus, you had to make the daring leap across the street and land on the sign. I would spend hours trying perfect little things like this. Things like the red sign made the game interesting when the multiplayer would get repetitive. Then, I started playing MW3. I was so stoked for this game. It had so much going for it. Everything from the long wait since the last Modern Warfare, the sub par Black-ops released by Treyarch, and the new release of Elite. I was ready for the refreshing new game that MW2 was for me 2 years ago. At first i liked the game a lot, the new way to unlock things for your guns, the killstreaks, and the perks. However as i started jumping around the maps and trying to get creative, nothing worked. I searched around and found a few things, the ledge that wraps around the building on Arkaden and you could get a little tricky on the outside edge of Mission but then i was playing on Fallen and i saw a slanted overhang. If you go on top of the building that has no roof and has the metal railing around it and look on the right side of the big building it's connected to you'll know what i'm talking about. It isn't very far and you wouldn't even need to sprint jump to land on it. So i went for it. I jumped, timed it perfectly, and BAM. I stopped, mid jump and fell. I had clearly gone far and high enough to make it and it was blocked. MW2 had millions or little random spots like these! I was dumbfounded. How could a game so new and modern not have all the little nooks and crannies that it's predecessor had?! So i looked at the wood scaffolding in the middle of Fallen, kinda looked like that house in Wasteland from MW2. There has to be a way up there i thought! So i tried every feasible thing that i could think of, and nothing worked. I was upset, it felt like this game had failed me. The more i played, the more unreacheable spots i discovered. Now it feels like the maps are all alleyways with crates and no way to cut from one path to another. It has made spawn trapping unbelievablly easy and it's killing the multiplayer spirit. Instead of making a game with pathways that you can't escape from we need maps that have hundreds of ways to get from one place to another.

     Vertical warfare is more shooting up or down, like from one building to another, or having multiple levels within a building. It doesn't feel like MW3 has any of this. Do you remember maps like Favela, Highrise, Skidrow, and Quarry? Where did this style go? I had way more fun jumping around the tops of houses and finding random ledges to hide on than anything these new maps offer. The only maps that even come close to resembling this style are maybe Lockdown or Bootleg. All the new maps are flat with the few random houses, huts, and skyscrappers. I feel like that's part of what made MW2 stick out from other first person shooters. If you go back to one of the first FPS games ever, Wolfenstein 3D, the whole game was flat. There are plenty of FPS's that are wide and flat. BF3 for example, is just as, if not more entertaining than CoD. We need some elevation to our maps, something to set us apart from the other shooters out there! I just was wondering how everyone else felt about this, feel free to leave your comments!