Now that Call of Duty is back in the hands of Infinity Ward, Modern Warfare 4 is this year’s installment, coming on Oct. 23 for Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. And even though it’s early days, we already know a heck of a lot about it.
Modern Warfare 4 is set during a fictional Korean conflict, where North Korea is invading its southern neighbor. Modern Warfare mainstay Captain Price is on the run after shooting Shepherd in cold blood at the Pentagon. The player takes control of a South Korean military grunt squad, consisting of young rookies who can do nothing but take orders from their superiors, while also playing as Price in alternating missions. At times, you’ll also play as members of the North Korean dictatorship, including trying to escape during a coup.
You can read our Modern Warfare 4 campaign reveal for more details about the single-player, while below, we get into details about everything related to the multiplayer, including maps, modes, weapons, attachments, and the return of one seriously kick-ass component of Call of Duty.
All confirmed MW4 maps and modes
On the multiplayer front, there’s a lot to report. Firstly, Modern Warfare 4 will have 12 maps at launch, featuring a mixture of campaign-inspired locations alongside arenas designed specifically for multiplayer. Here’s the full list, alongside a brief description of each:
- Cachette – A remote French village with a building housing high-tech equipment.
- Coal – A quarry set among the mountains with warehouses next to more open spaces.
- Lithium – A dusty oil facility in the desert.
- Lotus –A Korean fishing village with a blazing ship in the distance.
- Mumbai – A residential area in Mumbai, with a moving train.
- Munition – A Korean military base with a missile taking off mid-match.
- Nautical – A ship at night, somewhat reminiscent of Wetwork and Hijacked.
- Reactor 92 – A Korean nuclear reactor facility.
- Rooftops – Snowy rooftops in what appears to be New York City.
- Sentinel – A snowy military base with plenty of open areas.
- Silkworm – An urban environment set in a Korean city with a subway train running through.
- Transit 213 – A bus depot next to a residential area.
Additionally, however, and most excitingly, there’s another map that changes every time you play it: Kill Block. Also known as Westbridge Training Facility, this is a first for Call of Duty: an evolving map that consists of three “slabs.” Each slab will be vastly different, so you could go from a warehouse to a forest, and the center slab includes some fan-favorite Modern Warfare locales including Crash and Killhouse from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
There are three new notable modes for the standard respawn category too: Hijack, Counter Attack, and Inflation. Infinity Ward did not share many details about the first two, but we know the latter is similar to a Team Deathmatch, with players dropping cash upon death and victory going to the team that finishes the game with the most. Alongside these, all the usual suspects return, including Team Deathmatch, Kill Confirmed, Free For All, Domination, Hardpoint, and Search and Destroy.
Gunfight is back, alongside a 10v10 variant, and on the larger scale war front, Combat Outpost and Frontal Assault are the names of two new modes that we expect to support 32v32 players, much like Ground War in previous games, although this was not confirmed. Finally, Gun Game and Drop Zone return as party modes.
Prestige looks a little different now too. The “classic” way of prestige, where you reset all of your level unlocks to continue earning XP is still there, and doing that will grant you a 20% XP boost, alongside a permanent unlock token and some exclusive cosmetic rewards. However, if you want to prestige without the penalty of losing everything, you can, but you won’t receive the XP boost or the exclusive skin.
MW4 movement system, explained
Mechanically, there are a few significant changes in multiplayer. An all-new mantle system is here, which allows players to hang off ledges and lean. In a gameplay example shown to Polygon at a digital briefing, we saw the player shimmy across a ledge and then pick off an enemy with a pistol while still hanging. We didn’t see what it looked like from the enemy’s perspective, so exactly how frustrating this will be for “headglitching” is still to be determined.
Additionally, after mantling, players can also now slide to maintain momentum, and pipes can also now be climbed in more urban maps, in the same manner as ladders. Finally, if you double-tap the slide button, you’ll slide on your back, which allows you to travel further and keep your weapon equipped. We saw this in action via an S.S.D.D-esque (Modern Warfare 2 (2009) players will remember) training course, which combined all the new movement mechanics into one fast, fluid run.
How MW4 weapons and attachments work
On the weapons front, there are 24 primary weapons in Modern Warfare 4 at launch, alongside eight secondaries. However, there are more than 500 attachments, and weapon platforms — the progression system that required leveling up specific weapons in order to unlock other weapons — has been scrapped. All weapons have straight unlock paths again.
If that feels like too many attachments, though, there’s no need to worry: a new auto-builder for your weapons, nicknamed Gunny, can help. If you tell Gunny what playstyle you want your weapon kitted out for — long range, short range, and balanced were the three examples we saw — it will use all of your available attachments to create a suitable loadout.
Apex attachments are the biggie here though, as these completely change how a given weapon behaves. There are 28 of them in total, and each one is the final unlock for a weapon. They do not take up an attachment slot, however, so can be equipped alongside your existing build. Here are some of the examples we saw:
- A revolver with a “fan fire” mode.
- A bolt-action sniper rifle with three throwing knives side-loaded for quick one-hit kills.
- A 9mm pistol with a shotgun underbarrel (yes, seriously).
- An assault rifle with tracking ammo, so once an enemy is shot, their position is highlighted on a weapon-mounted proximity display.
- An SMG becomes “the quietest weapon in Call of Duty history,” which means damage dealt to enemies doesn’t show them which direction it came from.
- A shotgun with a strobe flashlight to blind enemies.
- An assault rifle with a side-loaded missile launcher that can be guided wherever the player aims.
- A conversion kit for the M4 that turns it into a faster-firing SMG-style gun.
- An EMP barrel for the AK lets players counter killstreaks.
MW4 technical improvements
To get technical, Modern Warfare 4 is also adjusting how changing the field of view (FOV) works. In prior games (and most other FPS games), increasing your FOV allows you to see more of your surroundings, but it makes targets on-screen smaller. Now, in what the team is calling “enhanced FOV,” lens distortion is applied to the periphery of the screen to ensure the enemy you’re aiming at remains at the correct size, and looks more realistic. On similar lines, the weapon itself is now rendered at the same FOV as the rest of the environment, so weapons no longer feel compressed at a wider FOV.
From a visual perspective, VFX masking is improved so muzzle smoke when firing weapons no longer obscures aiming down the sights as much. Depth of field has also been altered, to prevent the effect from bleeding into the environment. An example we saw explained how in the real world, depth of field is helpful when aiming down the sights of a weapon, but prior to now in-game, it’s been a hindrance as it would blur the surroundings. This has been fixed, to ensure the view is clear. Similarly, smoke grenades now use volumetric tech, so like we saw with 2023’s Counter-Strike 2 release, players can now shoot holes through smokescreens.
One of the biggest areas Modern Warfare 4 is improving is around firing weapons from the hip. The team claims that every FPS game, including all previous Call of Duty titles, hasn’t done hipfiring correctly, because they’ve commonly relied on what’s known as “bloom,” where bullets exit the gun at random angles, with a chance of going anywhere within the reticle on-screen.
Now, even when firing from the hip, the bullet goes exactly where the weapon is aiming, thanks to a new method developed that simulates realistic human motion. How this will work when it comes to balancing playstyles like running and gunning with an SMG, or “no-scoping” with a sniper rifle, is yet to be seen.
DMZ returning to MW4
Finally, we’ve learned that DMZ, the extraction shooter-style mode that was introduced in Modern Warfare 2 (2022) is returning to Modern Warfare 4. Described as a “living combat sandbox where every deployment is a new story,” according to a fact sheet sent to Polygon ahead of the reveal, this is a vastly transformed and improved mode from what was considered the “beta” version of it four years ago.
“Set across a large-scale conflict zone, DMZ is built both for structured missions and emergent gameplay, where players can loot, fight, negotiate, betray, and extract with whatever they can carry,” the fact sheet continues. “Deploy solo or with a squad into a volatile living combat zone as off-the-books assets tasked with recovering advanced military technology left in the wake of war. With a living world, the conditions in the exclusion zone are always shifting, with changing weather, dynamic military objectives, and hostile forces moving throughout the zone.”
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