You can thank/blame marketing and a Michael Bay-on-steroids storyline all you want, but there’s a reason people come back to Call of Duty games year after year, and it has nothing to do with zombies or sideburns. It has to do [[link]] with how the game feels There’s a quickness to Call of Duty games that you don’t see mentioned in many reviews, and don’t even see mentioned that often by fans, but it is, I think, the reason people who have played (or at least been exposed to) other shooters keep playing Activision’s flagship series.(new Image()).src = 'https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=995c4c7d-194f-4077-b0a0-7ad466eb737c&cid=872d12ce-453b-4870-845f-955919887e1b'; cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "995c4c7d-194f-4077-b0a0-7ad466eb737c" }).render("79703296e5134c75a2db6e1b64762017"); }); It’s intangible, in a way, sensed only through the impression that your iron sights “snap”. That death to a bad guy comes the instant you squeeze the trigger. You can put some of this down to the fact Call of Duty games run at 60 frames-per-second, and how that makes the game feel “sharper”, but that’s not the whole story. Tech specialists Digital Foundry went a little deeper than this, and directly measured the response times between Modern Warfare 3 and the closest thing we’ve got to it this holiday season, Battlefield 3 Their findings? That MW3 is over twice as fast as BF3 (50ms vs 116ms) when you’re measuring the amount of time it takes from the press of a button to an action taking place on screen. While this doesn’t make BF3 any less of a game—Digital Foundry point out that it’s in the same ballpark as many other big-name shooters—it does explain why Call of Duty games feel so responsive. Can the average gamer notice? I honestly have no idea, I am but one man, but for all the series’ faults and flaws in the pacing and story-telling departments, I’ve always felt the game has got its actual shooting down pat. This is probably why! There is of course a downside [[link]] to this, namely that because Infinity Ward (and Treyarch) emphasise this speed, and go to the trouble of rendering both a few frames of footage and a gameplay input so quickly, there’s little scope for graphical improvement this console generation. DICE’s scaling back to 30 frames-per-second, meanwhile, meant that it could squeeze things in like fancy lighting for Battlefield 3 that Call of Duty’s ageing engine could only dream of. So it’s horses for courses, basically! You can read the full, very interesting breakdown below. Modern Warfare [[link]] 3 vs. Battlefield 3 [DigitalFoundry] You can contact Luke Plunkett, the author of this post, at [email protected]. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.