It’s not every day we get to see something truly new from a Call of Duty experience, and even less so am I excited for a new entry, but Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 4 aims to buck both of these trends. I recently had the opportunity to get a behind-closed-doors look at the upcoming shooter’s campaign, multiplayer, and DMZ (Call of Duty’s answer to the extraction shooter) modes before it launches on October 23, 2026.
After the session, I can confidently say this is the first time I’ve been looking forward to Call of Duty in a long while. It’s launching on modern platforms only, citing an intent to focus on current-gen development, and will also launch day-and-date on the Nintendo Switch 2.
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I was only given a hands-off presentation, but the team at Infinity Ward did a great job of explaining just what players can expect when this year’s entry launches. We’ll start with the campaign mode, which takes place immediately after the events of 2023’s Modern Warfare III.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 narratively builds on MWIII.
Captain Price is still reeling from the murder of Soap MacTavish, and after taking out General Shepherd in a mid-credits scene, his future was uncertain. But in Modern Warfare 4, Price is on a blazing trail of destructive revenge in pursuit of Makarov, the one who murdered his friend and teammate, where he’s found hiding out in New York City.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in South Korea, a young and green Private Park and his squad are thrust into their first real mission as North Korean forces begin to invade. In typical Call of Duty fashion, you’ll take on harrowing missions across the globe, with a majority of the story taking place in the new Korean setting, something the team has been excited to explore for awhile, citing the increasing popularity of Korean culture in recent years.
At first glance, the connection between Price and the grunt-squad in Korea may seem totally unconnected. Still, as you progress through the campaign’s three acts, you’ll discover that Price’s actions have significantly larger implications affecting the entire world.
This is something the team wanted to deliberately emphasize; they were interested in blending the high-octane action and grunt-squad perspective with a more espionage-thriller story, while staying true to maintaining a realistic vision and existing within the world of Modern Warfare. Larger story details are still mum, but with the return of Price and a new batch of characters in an unexplored setting, I’m eagerly awaiting my turn to get on the sticks.
Modern Warfare 4 has prioritized quality-of-life features to keep players invested.
With any Call of Duty game, multiplayer is its bread and butter, and the reason the majority of players stick around each year. For Modern Warfare 4, the design team details a host of new quality-of-life features that not only intend to enhance the player experience in terms of controls and movement but also make stylistic changes to further ground the experience in reality.
One such change, something longtime fans of Call of Duty (or any shooter, for that matter) have been clamoring for, is fixing “blooming”. This refers to the random bullet spread when firing your gun from the hip, resulting in both an unrealistic bullet path and, frankly, bad competitive game design. With Modern Warfare 4, blooming is a thing of the past; instead, opt for a much more streamlined bullet-spread technique when hip-firing.
Keeping multiplayer slick and sophisticated while maintaining a healthy balance between dynamic realism and fluid, fun gameplay was a major goal for the design team. It’s imperative that a player in any given multiplayer match feels like a badass in cinematic firefights, and with new dynamic environment design and interactions, that’s even more of a reality.
In multiplayer (and likely throughout the campaign), movement has received its biggest overhaul yet. Sliding, mantling, and climbing offer a few more options this time around, offering a much more fluid experience when chasing an enemy or trying to reach cover.
For example, in past titles, you’d climb a ledge fully with one button press. But in Modern Warfare 4, you can hand off the ledge, aim your sidearm, drop off, or climb up at will. You can even shift around ledge corners while hanging off; this helps keep the traditional fast-paced nature if you’re a run-and-gun gamer, but offers a slower, more tactical approach if you prefer to go in quietly.
Ballistic Authority is one of the guiding design principles of the latest Call of Duty title.
Ballistic Authority is the term the team’s using to describe how gunplay, movement, and overall gameplay will feel during a multiplayer match. “Every shot tells the truth”, they say, referring to the overhauled, blooming, revamped field of view that offers a much more realistic angle of your gun when aiming or idling, and the realistic contextual weapon animations depending on your position in the environment, just to name a few. But these aren’t the only changes coming to multiplayer.
Many players, myself included, love the idea of diving deep into a custom loadout to fit their preferred playstyle, and while past entries have always offered robust build options, Modern Warfare 4 improves this even further.
For aesthetics, you can choose a different operator (essentially an aesthetic character skin) separately for every class. So if you want to play as a camouflaged sniper, the ghillie suit operator works. Or if you want to run in and plant bombs, a heavily-armored operator makes the most sense. You can also set killstreaks to be unique to each class, a very welcome change that will reduce annoying and constant menu navigating between matches.
Finding the right gun with perfect attachments is always one of the most fun experiences when grinding matches, and the new Apex Attachments system offers a new high to chase. When you max out a weapon’s progression track, you’ll unlock its Apex Attachment. These are extremely useful and powerful items that put your weapon’s performance over the threshold, like a shotgun underbarrel attachment for a pistol or an enemy tracker for an assault rifle.
Our preview just scratched the surface, but it’s already looking great.
The traditional game modes you’d expect make their return, like Team Deathmatch and Domination, with a handful of new ones joining the fray. They’re called Inflation, Counter Attack, and Hijack, and while details are still limited, the design team promised the same fast and frenetic gameplay experience you’d see in other modes. There will be 12 unique maps at launch, spanning locations both new and seen in the campaign, and the new map, Kill Block, is a massive dynamic environment that will change in-game over time, with over 500 different possible configurations at launch.
Our preview is just scratching the surface of what Modern Warfare 4 has to offer. The three-act campaign is still hiding plenty of secrets and explosive set pieces, and multiplayer looks to be one of the deepest experiences the franchise has offered to date. But the DMZ mode, Call of Duty’s version of an extraction shooter, is the biggest mystery; so much so that we can’t even talk about it until early June.
Whatever the case, I’m someone who chooses not to engage much with multiplayer shooters solely due to the time commitment to improve and grind for good gear, but I can honestly say Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4> is the first time in a while I’ve been genuinely excited to get my hands on.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 launches October 23, 2026, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.
