This skin can go straight back to whatever hell it came from.
One thing I’m really loving about Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare III is just how responsive developer Sledgehammer Games has been to community complaints and requests. The studio is interacting with fans, taking ideas to heart, implementing changes and even launched an Experimental Playlist in order to test out some innovative ideas and get community feedback.
This is why I just wrote a post suggesting ways to fix SBMM. I think Sledgehammer Games might actually listen to these suggestions and give them fair consideration.
For the current Experimental Playlist, which adds blue outlines to friendly players and red outlines to enemies, my suggestion is simple: Let us see our teammates through walls and make enemy player outlines much brighter when near or ADSing.
But I digress. The point of this post is to give Sledgehammer kudos for taking action against what is by far the worst Operator skin in the game: Gaia, otherwise known as Groot or—in my group at least—bleeping trees. As in “I didn’t even see that bleeping tree, I bleeping hate that bleeping skin!”
I do feel an intense hatred toward anyone using the Gaia skin. I personally won’t use it out of principle, despite having access to it from the Modern Warfare II Season 6 Battle Pass, which was filled with spooky Halloween-themed skins like Spawn.
The problem with Gaia is that even with some changes to improve visibility, the skin is super hard to see. It blends in with the ground. It’s partly see-through. It’s thin and sticky. It’s just very difficult to actually see the dang thing half the time and that makes it a pay-to-win skin no matter how you dice it. It sucks. People who use this skin suck.
And Sledgehammer Games is awesome for taking action to remove the skin from the game. I wish they’d remove it entirely and replace it with something else, but at least they’re taking it out until they can fix the visibility issues. I’m not sure how that will look in the end. I think they need to make it a much bulkier skin. Give those twigs heft. Make it stocky, bulky, and take out the transparent parts. Give it some more clothing. Make it wear blue jeans and a muscle T-shirt. Cover it in Christmas lights.
Hey, set it on fire and burn that sucker to a crisp and never look back.
One final suggestion going forward for this franchise: If you’re going to carry over skins and guns from the previous game, at least wait until Season 1 to “enable” them in the new game. Give us at least a few weeks of pre-season without all this last-game content so we can enjoy the new guns and lobbies free of bunny rabbits and stupid bleeping trees.
