Black Ops Cold War’s MP5 Finally Caught a Nerf

Earlier today, Treyarch announced a nerf to the MP5 on Twitter, which came pretty quickly, all things considered. Black Ops Cold War has been out for less than a week, so having a nerf out for one of the most problematic weapons in the game already is a good sign. Sure, it could have shipped with a nerfed MP5, especially since the community was by no means quiet about the MP5 in both the alpha and beta, but better late than never.

In case you can’t check yourself, or just want to see what the damage actually is, Treyarch announced a 35% decrease to the effective range on the MP5, which should hopefully slap a wall on MP5 users, preventing them from reaching out quite as far as they were before.

The other aspect of the nerf was a change to the initial recoil for the weapon. I’m not so sure that this will actually have any kind of meaningful effect on the weapon, especially since recoil as a whole in Cold War is pretty gentle, especially compared to last year’s Modern Warfare.

Only time will tell, but I’m not too sure that these were significant enough nerfs to seriously damage the MP5’s dominance in multiplayer. Sure, a lower effective range means an MP5 probably won’t be able to contest snipers as easily as it did before, but with the right attachments, and in the right hands, a lower range doesn’t mean much. I mean, just look at all eight maps the game shipped with. Outside of Fireteam: Dirty Bomb and some areas on Armada, the vast majority of the game’s maps are so small that any meaningful change to the range stat on the MP5 would reduce it to a shotgun’s range.

I’m relatively “meh” on the recoil change as well. Every weapon in Cold War is stupidly simple to control, and with the number of attachments that can further reduce recoil, there’s really nothing to worry about with this change.

Before I say this next part, let me preface by saying I’m not a game developer. I have no experience or expertise in the field, so what I’m saying could be far more difficult or time-consuming to implement, but why not just alter the rate-of-fire and damage?

The MP5 doesn’t dominate because it’s easy to control (which it is, but so is everything else) or have a really long range, it dominates because every single map is small enough that range doesn’t matter; a high fire rate and damage means that even if the other guy starts shooting first, you’ll probably win because you can put more bullets into him faster than he can you.

Like I said, there’s really no meaningful way to tell what kind of effect this nerf has had on the MP5 in multiplayer. It’s been live for all of three or four hours as of the time of writing. It could be that this hamstrings the MP5 so severely that the community has no choice but to try something else, but I doubt it. Call of Duty games have always been so gentle when it comes to nerfs that I’d be unsurprised to find the MP5 still dominating a year from now, much like its counterpart in Modern Warfare. But I can hope that maybe the nightmare of the MP5 is finally over.