If you’ve played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 enough, you’ve encountered a player snaking. Whether it was your teammate or an opponent, the elusive bobbing and weaving behind a surface remains one of the most annoying yet effective ways to gather information, stay alive, and get a kill.
In a livestream today on Repullze’s Twitch channel, Sledgehammer Games designer Greg Reisdorf essentially gave a seal of approval albeit potentially temporary to those who are snaking their way to victory.
“If you’re snaking, you are intentionally trying to mess with the game in that sense,” Reisdorf said. “But you’re trying to get that advantage, and you can do it. So take advantage of it. If you can do it, do it. And the game lets you do it.”
Reisdorf did say, though, that he and the developers wanted to strike a “balance” between players who snake and players who have to try to kill players who snake. Sledgehammer is “actively investigating” the mechanic, according to Reisdorf, but he confirmed there are no known bugs related to the game mechanic. In his words, “we’re just letting you do it a lot.”
Snaking has been a derisive strategy for years in CoD, with pros even disagreeing about whether it should or should not be allowed in competitive matches. The mechanic has, at different points, been unofficially banned in pro games through the use of gentlemen’s agreements (GAs). But as seen in just the first week of MW3 scrims, snaking is alive and well among even the best players in the world.
Whether snaking should remain a part of CoD will likely continue to be a debate until the end of time or the developers bite the proverbial bullet and nerf repeated crouching and proning. Whichever comes first is anyone’s guess. I’d put my money on the former, though.
