Infinity Ward Makes Key Improvements To The Formula With Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 4

After back-to-back Black Ops games both from 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 worked 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 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 Force 141. We also learned that the game will include a new version of the DMZ extraction mode, and got the lowdown on what Infinity Ward is bringing to Modern Warfare 4's multiplayer offerings and went hands-on with a few of the title's new modes.

Boots on the ground

After three games in which players took on the roles of high-level operators, Modern Warfare 4 is heading back to Call of Duty's earlier roots, with a 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 South Korean and US Marines. 

"South Korea has a particularity that every single person there has to serve in the military when they're young, and so for us, that's an interesting perspective," said Infinity Ward co-studio head Jack O'Hara during a presentation at the event. "It's been a long time since we presented the grunt perspective--since 2007 or 2009, we've made games that are more about Spec Ops operators with the CIA handler in their ear, telling them there's a guy around the corner. It's fascinating for us to go back to that perspective of young guys, 18 to 25. They have no idea what's going on, they're receiving an incomplete picture from their orders, and they're just trying to survive to the next moment."

That shift in perspective also allowed Infinity Ward to tap into the realistic, emotional side of what the soldiers experience, co-studio head Mark Grigsby told me in an interview.

"We wanted to show a group of soldiers that have personality, for one; they're not buttoned up, and [as] polished [as what] you would just see in a very super-scripted movie or TV show," Grigsby said. "We wanted to have that raw feeling and conversations between all of them, where you can feel not just their roles in their military, but their actual personal behaviors and personalities."

As with the other recent Modern Warfare games, Modern Warfare 4 is going for a "ripped from the headlines" feel in its story. O'Hara explained that that doesn't mean Infinity Ward is replicating real conflicts in video game form. Instead, it's trying to tell a story that feels realistic and genuine by drawing from, and extrapolating on, the real world. But since they didn't have access to experts and real information about North Korea's actual rulers, O'Hara said, Infinity Ward invented a fictional family to run the country. The plot kicks off as a new member of that family takes on the role of dictator.

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 on 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 globetrotting story of Price, as he pursues his nemesis, Makarov, and the events in Korea, until the two plotlines eventually intertwine.

"We had this idea of the setting in Korea and this war in Korea, and showing that grunt perspective that's in there, but we also want [to always] bring our characters, Task Force 141, into it," O'Hara told me. "But it was also a case of, we followed the journey in this reboot of the last three games of Task Force 141, and we wanted to make sure it felt like an evolution in some ways, a conclusion for them, in terms of how they've evolved as characters, so it's important to have a state change there with them. ... It's definitely been, you know, a labor to work through all those details and make sure that those two storylines intertwine in the right way."

New multiplayer maps and modes

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. Clicking the Gunny quickly generates a loadout for your gun based on the intended use-case--close-range, long-range, or balanced between the two. Gunny only uses the attachments you have available, and will present a new loadout option every time you click it, 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 included 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. 

Over a handful of matches, we checked out some of Modern Warfare 4's maps and new modes, like the chaotic Inflation and unpredictable 10-on-10 Gun Game. Infinity Ward also outlined some other modes as well, including new Big War modes that offer big team battles complete with vehicles.

Inflation feels a bit like the dog-tag-hunting Kill Confirmed mode, but with a fascinating twist. Players in the mode each start with $10,000 on them whenever they respawn. 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.

Where things get interesting is in the "inflation" part, where the mode gets its name. 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 to protect your team's VIPs, while working to take down the enemy's VIPs and steal their cash. But pick enough money, and you'll become a VIP yourself.

Inflation mixes several different elements together to make for a dynamic fight experience. Grabbing money off fallen enemies pushes you to get into close combat, but can leave you exposed if you're not careful. And while taking out as many players as possible can help your team win, going on a kill streak pushes you to play defense to either protect yourself, or your valuable teammate. 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.

The other mode that impressed during our preview was Modern Warfare 4's 10-on-10 take on Gun Game. The mode extends the original take on Gun Game with bigger teams, with both sides using a loadout that's randomly assigned at the start of a round, and teams competing to win the most rounds by the end of the match. You only get one life in each round, however, so if the other team takes you out, you have to wait for the round to end before you can respawn. The mode also tracks the remaining players on each team on your screen, so you always know how many fighters are left and can use that information to inform how you play.

We played MW4's take on Gun Game on the Westbridge Training Facility map, code named "Kill Block." This map is another experiment from Infinity Ward: It's a dynamic map that changes every time you play it. The 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, and is supported in all the game's core multiplayer modes.

The combination of the dynamic map and the randomized loadouts made Gun Game a blast, mixing strange and unpredictable encounters with an ever-changing battlefield. Ten 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 that lets you climb up into unexpected places or use speed and fluid animations to escape certain death. 

Fast and fluid movement

Beyond the addition of maps and modes, 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. O'Hara and Grigsby said they felt that, with Modern Warfare 2, the team had made choices that restricted players, like slowing them down as they went through doors. They said they approached Modern Warfare 4 with the philosophy that the player should never hit a button expecting something to happen, only to have nothing happen.

To that end, 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. Making your way over a low wall now feels a lot more like jumping a hurdle than the slower, clunkier mantle of Modern Warfare 2. It's also now possible to chain a mantle to a sprint as well, which equates to doing things like sliding over a car hood, Dukes of Hazzard-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 now do things like 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 turn and fire behind you. Infinity Ward has even built a movement course that will be part of Modern Warfare 4 at launch, allowing you to test your skills against other players.

In practice, the movement adjustments aren't quite the same as the dynamic Omnimovement system of recent Black Ops games, but they do make combat feel fast and smooth in Modern Warfare 4. It doesn't necessarily mean that every player you encounter is going to do ridiculous action-hero moves like they're in a John Woo movie, but it does provide you with a lot more options in 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.

"The other day, we were in a playtest, and I was the last person alive in my squad, and I slid and, like, turned into the ladder and slid down all in one fluid motion, and it just felt heroic and awesome, you know?" O'Hara said. "In my brain I was like, 'That's what I want to do,' and then the game did it, and that felt great. So that's kind of our philosophy, to try and get what's in people's brains through their fingers out into the game."

Improving the bones of Call of Duty

It's not just movement that's gotten an 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 use to simulate the loss of accuracy when guns are fired from the hip, as opposed to when you aim down 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 wiz 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 also demonstrated ways that it has adjusted Modern Warfare 4's approach to field of view. With wider FOV 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 of those adjustments feel great, even if many of the smaller visual changes aren't something you'd notice much in the heat of battle. The bloom adjustments are definitely noticeable, however, and make firing from the hip in an emergency seem much more viable. In practice, that improves the immediacy of Modern Warfare 4. In multiplayer battles I played, hip-firing 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 Ward brought a lot of improvements to the formula that add up to some pretty meaningful changes that made for some fun, exciting battles.