ActivisionCall of Duty: Modern Warfare, as you likely know by now, won’t be a sequel to 2011’s Modern Warfare 3. Instead, the new game intends to re-imagine the popular series with a focus on more contemporary events.
Given the the desperately bleak nature of the global conflicts of the last five or so years, it would be unusual to expect 2019’s Modern Warfare campaign to merely skim over the horrific realities of war – after all, I think we can all agree CoD is often at its best when it stops playing action movie and starts addressing the human cost of such battles.
It would seem developer Infinity Ward and publisher Activision agree, as both companies have been busy talking up Modern Warfare’s single -player campaign. By all accounts, it sounds as if we’re in for the most ambitious Call of Duty story to date.
Activision made no bones about the grim nature of the game’s story in its announcement, revealing that players are set for an “intense” and “emotionally charged” campaign that’s “edgy, culturally relevant, and thought-provoking.”
I’ve no doubt the phrases “culturally relevant” and “thought provoking” will bring out the “We Don’t Want Politics In Games” brigade soon enough, but I’ve got news for you; if you think a game called Modern Warfare isn’t going to be at least slightly political in its storytelling, you’re an idiot.
Intriguingly, Activision has also said that the narrative and progression be threaded across Modern Warfare‘s single-player, co-op, and multiplayer modes, so you’ll need to play everything to get the whole picture. We already know the game won’t have a season pass, so it doesn’t sound like “the full picture” will cost anything more than it needs to.
ActivisionIn an excellent interview with Engadget, Infinity Ward co-head Patrick Kelly shed a little more light on the Modern Warfare campaign, revealing that the team are attempting to be “provocative” without being edgy or tasteless.
Meanwhile, Infinity Ward narrative director Taylor Kurosaki confirmed that we’ll play as both Tier 1 operators and freedom fighters throughout the game’s campaign. The intention is to add a perspective we’ve never seen in a Call of Duty game before.
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.
Activision Call of Duty: Modern Warfare comes to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on October 25. Expect more details on the game’s multiplayer and online modes in the coming months.
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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.