ActivisionIn all the announcement hype surrounding Infinity Ward’s reboot of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, it’s clear to see that “gritty realism” is very much what the studio is going for with the 16th CoD title.
We’ve already heard that Infinity Ward decided to reboot the Modern Warfare timeline precisely because the original trilogy had started to go some fairly unbelievable places, and a fresh start allows the team to tell a completely new story that’s as relevant as it is provocative.
Activision With so much effort being put into telling a “shocking” story in the game’s single-player campaign, it won’t come as much of a surprise to learn that Infinity Ward won’t be including a Zombies mode of any kind in Modern Warfare.
PlayStation Lifestyle spoke with campaign gameplay director Jacob Minkoff, who said that inserting a mode in which you run around shooting undead monsters would be at odds with the “authentic” world Infinity Ward is attempting to build.
I’d argue it’d also be slightly insensitive to include a Zombies mode in a game that also has a harrowing-sounding level that sees you playing as a child soldier, so… yeah, smart move from Infinity Ward there.
Minkoff explained:
We’re trying to create an authentic, realistic feeling world. We don’t have the flexibility to do something like put zombies in the game. That would compromise the feeling of playing in a world that feels realistic and authentic and relative to today’s conflicts and things we face.
Activision Infinity Ward narrative director Taylor Kurosaki had previously spoken a little bit about what to expect from Modern Warfare’s single-player campaign, revealing that we’ll play as both Tier 1 operators and freedom fighters in a story focused on the state of global conflicts today.
Kurosaki explained:
This is a completely new perspective for Modern Warfare, this is a brand new thing. We spend about half the game playing alongside Tier 1 operators and about half the game playing alongside rebel freedom fighters. This is exciting not only from a storytelling perspective, where we can delve into the lives of these characters and see why they fight and what they fight for, but also from a gameplay perspective.
Even without a zombies mode, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will have plenty to keep fans busy when it launches on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on October 25.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.