To say this month hasn’t been good for physical media lovers would be an understatement, but it looks like the beating will continue until morale improves, along with digital pre-orders.
Following the controversy of the Grand Theft Auto 6-in-a-box code, the next big release to try to pull a tricky number is the highly anticipated Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.
In a marketing and outreach effort, Activision has released a poster that tells the bad news. Whether it’s a bug or someone playing 4D chess to help manage expectations is your call, but you can’t complain about the lack of transparency at least.
No Pass Game, No Early Campaign
The teaser poster is a digital pre-order ad for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. The latest entry on the Infinity Ward side of the series is due out on October 23, and its biggest draw by a long shot is a new single-player campaign.
Naturally, some players don’t want to wait that long, so Activision offered the classic ‘pay now, play the campaign a little earlier’ deal. Nothing wrong or new there, except for the small print.
If you want to “lock in early access to the campaign” as the ad suggests, “you must pre-order digitally.” This move is confusing when you consider that this is a single-player campaign we’re talking about here, and preventing physical editions from going online is as simple as not blowing up the servers.
If you want to “lock in early access to the campaign” as the ad suggests, “you must pre-order digitally.”
The ad reiterates what we already knew: Modern Warfare 4 is “not on XBOX Game Pass this year,” a business decision likely intended to encourage one-time orders of the full game for $69.99 instead of a bundled Microsoft subscription.
It’s easy to see why Activision would want to keep sales going, given Call of Duty’s previous disappointment with Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. After a return to form with Black Ops 6, the artistically flawed Black Ops 7 came as a shock, and to this day I don’t quite understand what Treyarch was trying to do with it. Lead veteran Mark Gordon stepped down as Studio Head earlier this month, and it’s a shame that the weak release was the last in the Black Ops series.
Modern Warfare 4 Goes ‘Fighting’
As if Battlefield 6 managed to change the fate of the series by chasing a ground-based setting, Modern Warfare 4 tries to take back the nonsense and focus on what made the original Modern Warfare so great back in 2007.
You’ve still got franchise veterans like Captain Price, and there’s going to be some sort of explosive, dirty-handed world-saving mission going on from the looks of it, but the star of the show seems to be Average Joe, who looks a lot like Private Martin or Sergeant Evans from the first Call of Duty.
The playable character, Private Park, is part of a Republic of Korea Marine Corps team patrolling the city when the North Korean invasion begins. The switch to regular units from special forces is a return to the classic Modern Warfare format, where stories are split between regular units and special forces before intersecting towards the end.
Korean soldiers are very vocal about their peers being the stars of the Call of Duty game, and they took their time to tell Infinity Ward what needs to be fixed before the October release.
Even if these small mistakes come to the final version of Modern Warfare 4, this is the best chance for the series to get back on track, after Modern Warfare 2 and 4 failed to reach the heights of the 2019 reboot.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 will be released on October 23 for PC, PlayStation 5, XBOX Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2.
Korea: The Il-2 Series Fills the Hole in My Heart
The 38th parallel has never looked so beautiful.
