Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's Biggest Day One Problems Seem to be Lighting and Map Size

We're coming up on 12 hours of this year's Call of Duty being out in the wild, and players are already tearing through it. Well, those that were able to log in, anyways.

Those who tried to log on last night were one of many, and unsurprisingly, the pipes got a little clogged trying to get everyone online. Many players were greeted with trouble trying to get in, including Shroud, who was making his big Modern Warfare-Mixer debut.

But the main concern around servers seemed to be that even the single-player campaign was not accessible while offline. This problem seemed to mostly affect PC players, who needed connection to the Battle.net service to access the game.

"When the servers were down for 2 1/2 hours last night we couldn't even play the single player campaign like our console counterparts could, because they had an option to play 'offline,'" wrote one Reddit user. "For some reason that was not an option for PC, which is where the frustration stems from."

However, once they got online, impressions seemed pretty positive. Many were praising both the campaign and multiplayer; the former in particular was a topic of discussion due to its use of lighting in the first mission or two. Some feel things are a little too dark, though some are pointing out methods for improving image quality using monitor and game settings. If ray tracing is going to be a whole "thing" in the next generation, it's probably good we're having this discussion now.

Prevailing concerns seem to be with the multiplayer, where quality-of-life adjustments and general frustrations with the size of maps are being hotly discussed. Many players aren't happy with how both small and large player count modes are being grouped together, leading to awkward skirmishes in large maps and chaos in smaller ones.

Many comments cite maps as being overly large, with Aniyah Palace seeming like the easy example. There's also talk of things feeling sluggish overall, compared to the recent multiplayer beta.

Things will no doubt evolve as time goes on, and Infinity Ward developers have already responded to some of the smaller concerns being raised. It is day one of Modern Warfare's full launch, and so all impressions, positive and negative, are a little inflamed compared to where things will land in a week or so.

We'll have more impressions of our own, as well as a full review, after we've had more time to spend with the game. Activision provided code at the 13th hour to most sites who didn't attend its review event, a group that includes USgamer, and so we'll be putting together our own take on Modern Warfare's reinvention of the series alongside the live community.

In the meantime, if you're interested in reading up on how Infinity Ward reinvented the CoD multiplayer blueprint from the ground-up, check out our interview with several of the game's directors breaking down all the major overhauls of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.