Call of Duty: Modern Warfare players understand the inevitable doom that is an execution. There are few more painful ways to die than having to watch your Modern Warfare character go through a short execution animation followed by instantly dying. That's why Call of Duty: Modern Warfare players are also typically very excited when gameplay emerges showing a brave soul escaping what should be their inevitable death. That's the case with this new video clip being upvoted on Reddit.
The clip in question, coincidentally, starts with the player taking out an enemy without an execution. They come up behind a player either looking up the elevator shaft or trying to climb the elevator shaft poorly. Rather than executing them, which can take several seconds for the animation to play out, they simply shoot them down. Afterward, they quickly run to the elevator cabling and hold down the button to start the ascent.
Just as the player activates their ascent in the elevator shaft, which itself is an uninterruptible animation, an enemy comes up behind them and starts an execution. It's an interaction rarely seen, one uninterruptible animation against the other. The question is, who in that situation will win?
As the video shows, the player shoots up the elevator shaft like normal. They do take some damage from gunfire, presumably from a second unseen enemy, but the execution doesn't land. It's possible that if the player was a little bit slower starting their elevator shaft climb, the execution would have been able to finish.
Presumably, the reason why the player survived is that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare does break execution animations if a player somehow moves away from the executor. There are other examples of this that are much more basic. For example, a person standing on a spot with a vertical height difference breaking out of an execution because the execution can't move them correctly without clipping.
There's perhaps an argument to be made that the execution should have still gone through. That instead of the player shooting up the elevator shaft, they should have been stopped and the execution should have gone through. Regardless of how players think the Modern Warfare interaction should have gone, players will probably just shoot their opponent instead of executing them from here on.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is available now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.