Modern Warfare 2 Not Balanced for Wikipedia

A gamer by the name of Saad recently noticed something a bit off with Infinity Ward’s representation of Karachi. Namely the fact the text scrawled around the map isn’t the right language. You may be asking yourself “Why is Saad more knowledgeable on this subject than the game’s developer?” Well, conveniently enough, Karachi happens to be his homebase.

Despite being in Pakistan, the writing on the walls and signs of Karachi is in Arabic. Considering the odds are you are an uneducated westerner just like I am, this doesn’t seem like too big of a deal. That is, until you go to Wikipedia and find out that the official languages of Pakistan are English and Urdu. Last I checked, neither of those are Arabic. Next you’re going to tell me Tango Sucka and Barackobee aren’t Urdu words either.

Saad rightfully states:

“Infinity Ward probably thought, ‘Oh hey its a Muslim country so Arabic is the language.’”

I can’t pretend I didn’t think the same thing, but I spent more time paying attention to loose freshman girls and even looser bottles of Jameson than I did paying attention in any world history class in college. I’m not a worldwide video game company with buckets of money to pour into research and development. It seems almost bizarre that not a single person in the entire company didn’t stop to go “Hey, you guys think we should check to see what they actually speak in Pakistan? It wasn’t Pakistanian, are we sure it’s Arabic?” Since nobody did and this went so long without being noticed, I assume any DLC located in São Paulo and Mexico City will see characters speaking Brazilian and Mexican respectively.

We shouldn’t be entirely surprised by this though. Infinity Ward told us that IWNet was unhackable, that playing at 100ms is perfectly fine, that the game isn’t balanced for lean, and that eliminating dedicated servers wouldn’t give the host an advantage. Telling us that everyone in Pakistan writes in Arabic seems just as believable in retrospect.

[Source: Kotaku]