Modern Warfare's creators were "very divided" over its most influential feature - unlocking guns

rockpapershotgun.com:

It's hard to imagine blockblustery first-person shooting today without Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare's online progression systems, which - inasmuch as you can assign this much clout to a single game or developer - transformed the genre back in 2007 by reinventing multiplayer as a kind of RPG. Shooters without COD-style gear levelling ladders do exist, not least Counter-Strike 2, but most of the juggernauts depend on such fixtures, especially now that free-to-play service models have become the norm. So it's jarring to hear from Mackey McCandlish, one of Modern Warfare's original developers, that the old Infinity Ward team were split over the act of using XP to unlock guns, with some worrying it would be "unfair".

"It may seem obvious now that 'Oh yeah, you unlock guns,' but internally that was very divisive," McCandlish reflected in a new IGN series retrospective. "It's like, 'No, you can't do that. You've got to earn your guns in shooters.' Or 'You've got to have fairness of guns.' You can't have an unfair advantage at the beginning, but we went with it and it worked."

By 'earning', McCandlish presumably means actually finding guns on maps classique Halo-style, rather than cranking out the XP necessary to equip them in advance, which is how I would define 'earning guns' today. Language, eh! It's a fiddly business.

McCandlish went onto describe how Infinity Ward took inspiration from role-playing games, amongst them a certain hitherto Black Isle-developed, nowadays Bethesda-run colossus. "And then on top of that, of course, unlocks and perks, which is a Fallout thing," he continued. "And in Fallout, the perk usually has a good side and a bad side of the coin.

"So we [said] 'Eh, we don't need the bad side as