It’s a terrifying thing to see Seoul, the heart of k-pop and a neon paradise, come under a massive artillery barrage from North Korea’s guns in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. It’s a grim reminder that war is so terrible, the stakes are so high and the peace we know is fragile.
But this bold and hyper-realistic battleground might be what it takes to help Call of Duty recover from a rough reception for last year’s game.
This title is coming from Infinity Ward, and the studio that started Call of Duty is bringing its A-game to this year’s title, which goes on sale on October 23 and takes the franchise where it’s never been before.
The launch date itself is an expression of confidence. It is just 27 days before the expected blockbuster Grand Theft Auto VI lands from rival Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games. It’s as if the Activision folks don’t care that GTA VI is coming so close, or perhaps they are betting GTA will delay again. We’ll see if Call of Duty can win back some fans with some major upgrades to the franchise, which has sold an estimated 500 million copies to date.
I’ve been playing Call of Duty since its beginning 25 mainline installments ago in 2003. Modern Warfare 4 marks a new chapter with grounded, authentic, high-stakes military action Modern Warfare is known for, said Infinity Ward co-studio heads Jack O’Hara and Mark Grigsby in a press briefing. This is the first game to debut from the new studio heads, who have been part of Infinity Ward for a long time.
“We wanted again to refresh Modern Warfare, and to do that, we needed to go to a new set, and so we decided to go to Korea,” O’Hara said in the press briefing.
Call of Duty has never been to Seoul before, and it was a new place in the world with new architecture, new cultural influences, and the spread of a new wave of influence for Korean culture around the world. It started in the 1990s with k-dramas as they spread through Asia and later went global. K-Pop Demon Hunters won best song at the Oscars, Parasite won best picture a few years ago, and it was another merging of cultures going on.
“But the curious thing about North Korea and South Korea is they have been deadlocked since the Korean War,” O’Hara said.
And he proceeded to show a scary map of all of the black dots in the area near the border north of Seoul. The black dots represented artillery batteries that are pointed at the South.
“It’s kind of insane to realize that the capital of South Korea has these cannons pointed at it the entire time. When we talk to Koreans, it doesn’t really phase them. It’s not really something that comes up often and seems so distant and unrealistic, but it’s there,” he said. “And for us that felt like a setting that might be perfect for ripping from the headlines. In South Korea, every single person has to serve in the military when they’re young, and so for us that’s an interesting perspective. It’s been a long time since we presented the grunt perspective.”
They said that players can expect the edge and intensity that define Modern Warfare, delivered with a renewed focus on authenticity and immersion across Campaign, Multiplayer, and DMZ (a new version of an extraction experience from four years ago).
Can MW4 pull Call of Duty out of the fire?
I was impressed with what I saw in my visits to Infinity Ward, and it may be in the nick of time. I’ve played some of the multiplayer game and attended a briefing with a small group of press as the devs described the single-player campaign, DMZ, multiplayer and the tweaks to the core gameplay. They’re holding some things back still, but you can expect a steady drumbeat of news through the launch date.
Last year, Activision acknowledged that Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was a disappointment. I played the whole campaign and yet it didn’t hold me when ARC Raiders came along.
“We also know that for some of you, the franchise has not met your expectations fully,” Activision said last year. “To be very clear, we know what you expect and rest assured we will deliver, and overdeliver, on those expectations as we move forward.”
As a kind of penance, the company announced it would no longer have back-to-back Modern Warfare and Black Ops releases. The poor reviews from players came at a time when Call of Duty had extraordinary competition from EA’s Battlefield 6 and Embark Studios’ ARC Raiders.
In this game, you’ll get something new. Instead of playing elite soldiers operating in stealth, you’ll fight as front-line troops in the combined American and South Korean armies as they confront the North Korean aggression – which takes the form of a massive conventional war.
Grigsby and O’Hara told me they focused on the setting of modern Korea because it hasn’t been the centerpiece of any previous Call of Duty or major first-person shooter. And at the same time, South Korean culture, from k-pop to shows like Squid Game, has captured the world’s attention. You would never know that hundreds of North Korea artillery pieces are pointed at the South Korean capitol.
The idea of a massive ground war made it a likely scenario for Call of Duty. Infinity Ward’s style is to create realistic warfare in games that are “ripped from the headlines.”
But it does pull back from reality in some ways. After controversies related to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Activision has decided that, after all, Call of Duty is a game with its primary goal of entertainment. Its purpose wasn’t to be disturbing or to take sides.
And while the topic of assassination of North Korean leaders arises in the narrative, it isn’t focused on North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un or his family. Rather, the story is abstracted to an inter-family conflict in the country’s fictional dictatorial leadership. The dictator has died, his son takes over, and the daughter can’t abide that.
Much like we see today in the Straits of Hormuz or in the fields of Ukraine, war on the Korean peninsula pushes Modern Warfare 4 into “darker and more dangerous territory as a full-
scale invasion of South Korea threatens to destabilize the world,” Activision said.
The game shows the consequences of modern war, for sure. But don’t expect this game to be soaked in politics. It’s entertainment.
Gameplay changes
There are also a lot of gameplay changes, like the multiplayer mode dubbed Kill Block, where the map changes with every round of Gunfight. There are powerful Apex attachments for the guns, and there are AI hints that recommend how to configure your loadout in Gunsmith. Explosives now carry a concussive force that can knock you down.
Modern Warfare 4 aims to set a new technical benchmark for the franchise, built exclusively for latest generation consoles (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, the Switch 2) and PC, delivering greater scale, fidelity, density, responsiveness, and immersion across the full game, Activision said.
It’s built with the PC community in mind, Infinity Ward, in close collaboration with Beenox, to deliver more ways to tune performance, visual fidelity, responsiveness, and customization.
New and returning characters
Private Park, a young Korean grunt soldier, is thrust into combat for the first time, as he and his squad are forced to overcome impossible odds in a gripping zero to hero journey. (The devs tell me there is no reference to BTS in the game, even though its members were enlisted in the South Korean army during the making of the game).
At the same time, on the covert front, Captain John Price is back with a globe-trotting subplot of intrigue and stealth missions.
The single-player campaign game pits Captain Price against his archenemy, Vladimir Makarov, a Russian ultranationalist terrorist leader. In Modern Warfare 3, Makarov killed one of Price’s close comrades. Price took revenge by at the end of MW3 by shooting a rogue American general. So now he’s on the run, and could be hunted by his own teammates in Taskforce 141.
Price returns and forms a rogue alliance, operating outside the system and apart from the Task Force 141 team he once called his own. He fights in the shadows of moral uncertainty, while the grunts fight on the front lines. Price chases after Makarov, and then something unexpected happens. The story unfolds in three acts.
Price’s best line in the last game came up in dialogue. “Where do we draw the line?” an operator asked him. “You draw the line wherever you need it. We get dirty and the world stays clean. That’s the mission.”
The missions for MW4’s campaign are set in diverse global locations and varied combat scenarios, from trench warfare in Korea to close-quarters battles in New York, to high-speed pursuits through Paris, SAS night raids in Mumbai, and city-wide assaults to reclaim territory. The battlegrounds include Russia as well — again, ripped from the headlines enough to be uncomfortable, but not based on reality.
More info
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 will be available globally on XBOX Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and PC via Battle.net, Xbox on PC, Steam, and Nintendo Switch 2 on Friday, October 23, 2026.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 for the PC delivers a fully optimized experience, led by Infinity Ward in partnership with Beenox, for Battle.net, Blizzard Entertainment’s online
gaming service, XBOX on PC, and Steam.
Infinity Ward, in partnership with Digital Legends, is developing Modern Warfare 4 natively for Nintendo Switch 2.
I don’t know if everyone realizes it, but there are thousands of game developers on the Call of Duty team. Besides Infinity Ward and Digital Legends, the contributing studios include Activision Central Design, Activision Central Technology, Activision QA, Activision Shanghai, Beenox, Demonware, High Moon Studios, Raven Software, Sledgehammer Games, and Treyarch. That’s 12 game studios, compared to perhaps four for the Battlefield team at EA.
It’s a wonder that the game comes out every year, and others will have to bring their A game to beat it this year.
Disclosure: Activision paid my way to the event.