A non-lethal killstreak is unusually strong in a certain mode of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, as it takes away your opponents’ ability to recognize their friends.
In Call of Duty, there is a variety of different gadgets that you can add to your loadout – including various grenades and killstreaks. Some of these aim to eliminate your opponents and get you kills, while others are harmless to your enemies and provide information to counter your opponents’ equipment.
Which gadget is it about? With Season 1 of CoD MW3, two new killstreaks were added to the game: the Swarm and the EMP.
While the Swarm sends a variety of explosive drones at your opponents and is extremely deadly, the EMP killstreak does not damage your enemies. It disables and disrupts electronic devices.
As some players noted in the CoD MW3 subreddit, this can be a death sentence for your opponents in Hardcore mode, as it takes away one of their most important abilities.
Pure chaos due to lack of friend-foe recognition
Which ability does the killstreak take away? The friend-foe recognition. Detailed information is often key to success. One of the most important pieces of information in CoD is who is a teammate and who is an opponent.
Especially in Hardcore mode of the shooter, friend-foe recognition plays an important role, as there is friendly fire. Anyone shooting at their teammates can eliminate them and cost their team valuable tickets.
As user “teallen96” writes on Reddit, the EMP killstreak disables all player names and other information in your HUD. Thus, your opponents lose the ability to distinguish friends from foes.
Players shoot at their friends out of confusion
Why is this so powerful? When players can no longer distinguish their friends from enemies, it quickly leads to pure chaos. Anyone who has ever played Escape from Tarkov knows how quickly team shooting can occur.
Players often rely on the blue or green outline that teammates have in various games. If no blue outline is visible, shots are fired first, and questions are asked later.
Especially Escape from Tarkov clearly shows how important communication and calmness are in such situations – however, there is no time for that in the much faster CoD. Particularly in Hardcore mode, you can go down very quickly… Who would want to check with their team first whether the nearest player is a friend?
If you want to know how Escape from Tarkov plays in CoD-like arena modes, you can now take a look at the Closed Beta of Escape from Tarkov: Arena since Sunday.
