Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Hand-On Preview – Mixing It Up
Call of Duty continues to be one of the true annual franchises that keeps coming year after year even in the age of games taking forever to develop now thanks to the mixing of development teams across titles. The Modern Warfare series debuted back in 2007 from Infinity Ward at Activision and has developed every Modern Warfare game except for the third reboot, but now they’re back in charge with the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.
MP1st was given an opportunity to attend Fanatics Fest this past week in New York City and try out the game, where Activision and Infinity Ward were also offering hands-on opportunities to the public on the game for the very first time.
Fanatics Fest was a multi-day event that brought together all sorts of athletes, WWE superstars, and content creators around the idea of fandom. Call of Duty was a natural fit due to the long-running fandom and team-based nature that could be associated with sports, with Activision having a really cool booth that included some cool things, as seen in the images below, like the giant Statue of Liberty head with a Ghost Mask and the new Aston Martin-designed Dreadnought vehicle.
Fanatics Fest: Bringing It to the Fans
Inside the booth, there were stations set up for continuous 10 v 10 matches across the weekend, with teams Alpha vs. Beta. At times, they would even have a special streamer or guest take the lead as one of the members of the team as well, which was pretty cool. The game was running on PC here, but with the opportunity to use an Xbox controller, which was what I did, and it seemed that most players I was playing next to were using as well. I do know some pros were playing too, as the first game I got into had my controls swapped to those usually used by more pro players.
Each matchup of 10 v 10 was set in Gunfight, where there were round after round of last team standing, with an overtime flag spawning if the match ran out of time as an alternate win condition. This is always one of my favorite modes in Call of Duty, as it’s very fast-paced and exciting, where your deaths really matter, though not to the degree of something like Warzone where you are out of the mix for much longer. In Gunfight, you just have to wait for the next round to spawn.
The 10 v 10 Gunfight matches were a first-to-six-wins setup, so they lasted just about the right amount of time. Out out of the multiple matches I played, there were a few with domination by my team, a few where my team got destroyed, and then some where it was pretty close throughout. Playing against random people here felt like playing against random people online, so that was a pretty cool element.
For the first couple of rounds, the one key difference I could notice was the player movement that felt more fluid than in the past. This is something that the dev team said was important to them with making traversal across the map as smooth and intuitive as possible by chaining together transitions of movements. This includes things like allowing you to have your gun up while mantling, or slide or cancel out of the mantle easily. They also adding in the new supine slide that take you immediately into a backwards prone position when you slide, which helped saved my life a number of times, though I had to laugh how almost every matches started with teammates just running and immediately trying out the supine slide.
The true gamechanger that came about in my time playing, though, after a couple rounds, was my first exposure to the game’s killer feature known as Kill Block. Kill Block is a new mode that is set to support all core multiplayer modes in the game and takes the map and splits it into what are known as three slabs that can be randomized to create more than 500+ combinations at launch.
For this first hands-on, the number of slabs was fairly limited, but you could still see how much variety there was. After every couple of rounds, not only do the loadouts swap out like Gunfight in the past, but the slabs rotate entirely too, so the stage will be completely different from the previous rounds. This mixing and matching is going to make it impossible for people to straight-up memorize maps, which is something that really helps more of a casual player like myself that doesn’t have the time to dedicate to mastering every map each year.
From my time playing, the slab type that really stood out were the trenches, which also had some teammates audibly groaning on voice chats and others excited about it. This is where finding good friends to play with are definitely going to come in handy, as setups like that in Kill Block are best for teams that communicate well and can help relay information about where the enemies are most efficiently.
In my fairly limited time with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’s Gunfight multiplayer, specifically utilizing the Kill Block feature, I had a lot of fun. There is so much potential here with how many slabs they are looking to have in the main game with the mention of 500+ combinations. It also helps that Gunfight is such an easy drop-in and play mode, as is that this should be a killer feature to try and attract newcomers to the game that may have dropped the series years ago or never played before.
After playing this small part, I’m even more excited to play the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 beta next month when it drops on August 21 in early access for those who pre-order the game and in open form a week later for a few days as well. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 will then be released for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X (S), Nintendo Switch 2, and PC on October 23.
Players will get a chance to play it early, as the Modern Warfare 4 beta is set to kick off next month, and MP1st will have a ton of codes to give away.
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