Modern Warfare 2’s casual Gun Game mode has red dots on the mini-map, unlike the rest of multiplayer

The discourse surrounding Call of Duty games no longer including red dots on the mini-map marking enemies firing their guns has been refreshed in a very interesting way today.

Modern Warfare 2 just added the party mode Gun Game as an option in the weekly playlist update this weekend and players immediately jumped in for some classic fun. But they were met with an interesting and, to many, aggravating revelation.

In Gun Game, the mini-map shows players who shoot their guns as red dots on the mini-map. This may seem like a minor thing, but it has been a point of contention in one of the recent CoD titles where this feature was missing entirely. That was 2019’s Modern Warfare.

The red dots returned in 2020’s Black Ops Cold War but were missing again in 2021’s Call of Duty: Vanguard and instead required the use of a perk, and the argument raged on. In MW2 multiplayer, red dots are missing once again. And players weren’t happy about it.

Now, after finding out that red dots are available as a feature but only in a certain, casual game mode, players are up in arms about it, as evidenced by the replies to YouTuber JGOD’s tweet above.

In a blog post about the choice to not include red dots on the mini-map during MW2’s beta, Infinity Ward explained its decision.

“The design reason for this is that we do not want to punish players for firing their weapons,” Infinity Ward said. “We also want players to actively search out the origin of a gunshot versus just traveling directly to where the dot is on the mini-map.”

It’s unclear if the red dots appearing is intended for Gun Game or a bug, but one thing is clear, as it has been the past few years: a loud majority of CoD players miss the classic variant of the in-game mini-map and wish it would return.