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After back-to-back Black Ops games from both developers Treyarch and Raven Software, studio Infinity Ward returns to the helm for this year's entry in the Call of Duty franchise. With Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4, Infinity Ward says it's entering a new chapter, both for the series that helped catapult Call of Duty into its status as a household name and for the studio at large. For Modern Warfare 4, that new chapter helps redefine where the series is headed. In 2019, Infinity Ward rebooted the Modern Warfare series, which first kicked off in 2007. The reboot and its two sequels work somewhat within the framework of the original three Modern Warfare games. In terms of its campaign
and story, Modern Warfare 4 is the first title in the Modern series to help step off into wholly new territory. Infinity Ward recently provided journalists a first look at Modern Warfare 4 during a preview event in Los Angeles, which gave us an idea of where the studio is taking Modern Warfare's story and how it'll continue the tale of Captain Price and Task 141. We also got the lowdown on what Infinity Ward is bringing to Modern Warfare 4's multiplayer offerings and went handson with a few of the titles new modes. After three games in which players took on the roles of highlevel operators, Modern Warfare 4 is heading back to Call of Duty's earlier roots, the campaign that focuses on the
experiences of more common soldiers. This next Call of Duty centers on a conflict taking place between North and South Korea, which looks poised to create ripples that could destabilize the entire world. As that conflict kicks off with North Korea suddenly attacking South Korea, you'll play as members of a mixed squad made up of the South Korean and US Marines. The grunt story of Marines fighting in Korea is only half of Modern Warfare 4's campaign. Though the game also continues the story of Captain Price, now in the run after the events of Modern Warfare 3. From the sounds of things, you can expect the campaign to jump back and forth between the globe trotting story of Price as he
pursues his nemesis Marov and the events in Korea until the two plot lines eventually intertwine. While we didn't get a chance to play any of Modern Warfare 4's campaign, Infinity Ward did provide us a few hours to check out some of its new additions to multiplayer. Before hopping into a match, we tried the gunsmith's new gunny feature, a recommendation engine that automatically adds attachments to your weapons, allowing you to quickly try out different combinations. Infinity Ward also introduced a new set of attachments for all its weapons called Apex attachments. These additions are unique to each weapon and are unlocked when you fully level up a gun, and they greatly change how each one works. The ones I
tried including adding an underbarrel shotgun attachment to a pistol, making it a devastatingly powerful sidearm and one that altered an assault rifle to fire submachine gun rounds, making it fast and powerful at close range. We checked out some of Modern Warfare 4's maps and new modes, like the chaotic inflation and unpredictable 10on 10 gun game. In inflation, players each start with $10,000 on them whenever they spawn. When a player is killed, they drop their money and the opposing team can pick it up. Once one team amasses a certain total of money, they win. As you gather money from opponents, your own value grows. When you're killed by an opposing player, you'll drop all the
money you've gathered before respawning with just $10,000. The player with the most money on either team is marked as a VIP target, and other players can see their location through walls. So, you'll want to try and protect your team's VIPs while working to take down the enemy's VIPs and steal their cash. Pick up enough money and you'll become a VIP yourself. The mix of chasing big targets, putting yourself in danger to grab drop cash, and working together to protect valuable teammates makes for a dynamic fight experience. It's possible for players with big piles of cash to create equally large swings. In a few of the matches I played, a win came down to one or two big VIP kills right at the
end. Modern Warfare 4 is 10on 10 gun game sees both sides using a loadout that's randomly assigned at the start of a round. Players only get one life per round and teams compete to win the most rounds by the end of the match. We played Modern Warfare 4's take on gun game on the West Bridge training facility map cenamed Kill Block. The dynamic modular map is made up of three different chunks or slabs with one on each side where players spawn and a central one where players meet in the middle. The slabs range from forests and trenches to warehouses and buildings and they're randomized each round. So, you'll play through several different configurations in the course of a single match. Kill Block has 500 possible
configurations and is about the size of Modern Warfare 3's Shoot House map. Infinity Ward said it's supported in all the games core multiplayer modes. The combination of the dynamic map and the randomized loadouts made guname blast. 10 players per team can create opportunities to strategize together. But as teams dwindle, you'll need to play more carefully in order to maintain an advantage or avoid being overrun. With each round, you're forced to figure out the best way to approach the map and to use different elements to gain high ground, take cover, avoid being flanked, and ambush your prey. The best part of the kill block map, however, is the way its many different pieces create
opportunities as you play through a match thanks to Modern Warfare 4's improved movement system. The biggest change to Call of Duty with Modern Warfare 4 is in how Infinity Ward has approached player movement with a heavier emphasis placed on making movement as fast and fluid as possible. Infinity Ward has greatly improved the ways that animations can chain into one another. And this is most noticeable when doing things like sprinting, sliding, and mantling. It is now possible to do things like chaining a mantle into a sprint, which equates to doing things like sliding over a car hood Dukes of Hazard style. The combination of movement abilities offers a lot of new opportunities for getting around maps. The parkour capabilities reminded me of something close to
Mirror's Edge, especially when used at full blast by someone very familiar with them. You can climb up pipes, grab ledges, and either shimmy along them or pop up over them with a pistol to take shots at enemies and slide into a prone position on your back so that you can churn and fire behind you. The movement adjustments aren't quite the same as the dynamic omniovement system of recent Black Ops games, but they do make combat feel fast and smooth in Modern Warfare 4. It provides a lot more options for engaging with a map, like the ability to quickly clamber up to a second story window and join a fight happening inside a building, or to make an escape by hurdling quickly over cars and walls.
It's not just movement that's gotten overhaul in Modern Warfare 4. Infinity Ward has also reworked and enhanced some of the shooter fundamentals that underpin the series. A huge one is Bloom, the effect that shooters used to simulate the loss of accuracy when guns are fired from the hip as opposed to when you aimed on the sights. Hip firing a gun without taking careful aim has the effect of spraying bullets in a general direction. Shooters create that spray effect by designating a cone of space and sending bullets to random places within the cone, an effect called bloom. Using Bloom does a fair job of simulating the idea that a gun is spraying bullets all over the place in a
general area in front of you. But it can also create frustrating situations where you can fire your gun straight at someone and have the bullets whiz past and around them while also making it so that bullets head out at strange angles in relation to your gun's barrel. With bullets going where you expect them to go and landing where your gun is pointed, the change makes firing from the hip feel more effective and realistic, especially at close ranges. Infinity Ward has also demonstrated ways that it has adjusted Modern Warfare 4's approach to field of view. With wider field of view settings, players get more situational awareness because they can see more at the sides of their screens.
But this creates an effect that makes targets in front of them smaller and seem farther away than they really are. Tighter FOV settings fix the targeting issue, but close off peripheral vision. In Modern Warfare 4, Infinity Ward is splitting the difference, widening the FOV at the sides of the screen, but without making targets in the center of the screen smaller. Developers have also reframed weapons on the screen so that they're not quite so tight to the player, making them look more realistic. In practice, all those adjustments feel great, even if many of the smaller visual changes aren't something you notice much in the heat of battle. The bloom adjustments are definitely
noticeable, however, and making firing from the hip in an emergency seem much more viable. In practice, that improves the immediiacy of Modern Warfare 4. In multiplayer battles I played, hipfiring made moves like jumping through a window or rounding a corner to get the drop on someone feel more viable as strategies than they might have in the past. That little bit of time saved by not aiming down sights can be used to your advantage much more often thanks to bullets reliably winding up where you hope they will. Infinity Ward showed off a lot of Modern Warfare 4. And even with only a small taste of how it plays, the game's new modes and gameplay enhancements seem promising. Nothing we
saw fundamentally alters what fans have come to expect from Call of Duty or a Modern Warfare game, but Infinity War had brought a lot of improvements to the formula that add up to some pretty meaningful changes that made for some fun, exciting battles.
