"I think we're in a good place": Infinity Ward's multiplayer team talks with us about the development of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4

Call of Duty has had a rollercoaster ride the last two years. Treyarch’s initial release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 in 2024 felt like lightning in a bottle.

The game’s new omnimovement system and snappy time-to-kill were the high-octane action-heavy gameplay that many vocal fans in online Call of Duty communities had been begging for.

And yet, the excitement for Black Ops’ return quickly fizzled out after the launch of the first round of seasonal content.

Players were being thrown into lobbies that were heavily impacted by rampant cheating, and Treyarch ultimately had to delay the planned content drop for Season 2 for an all-hands-on-deck rework of the proprietary anti-cheat system, RICOCHET.

Just as the ship felt like it was beginning to right itself, Treyarch announced that it would be releasing Black Ops 7 as a direct sequel to Black Ops 6. The community was divided on the decision to forgo the head-studio rotation it was accustomed to.

Additionally, a rift formed between Zombies players who wanted Activision’s Carry Forward policy to allow them to take unlocked Zombies skins to the new game versus Multiplayer fans who — fed up with some of the more ridiculous operator bundles that were plaguing the storefront — were ready to make Carry Forward a sacrificial lamb if it let them get rid of Beavis and Butthead from the battlefield.

The launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 did little to mend the hearts of the community, as some took issue with the game’s more experimental campaign. However, Treyarch’s efforts to cater to the whims of Multiplayer fans won over a portion of gamers. Still, the game ultimately struggled to find its footing when compared to its predecessors.

Black Ops 7’s launch woes led to its publisher, Microsoft-owned Activision, reconsidering release schedules and returning to the classic studio rotation of the past. Xbox’s new CEO, Asha Sharma, also announced the game would no longer launch day one on the Xbox Game Pass service in an effort to alleviate the negative feedback following the subscription’s freshly increased price — though patient players can still expect to see it included with the service 1 year after launch.

Despite the hurdles in front of Infinity Ward, there’s an obvious pride among the team members when they talk about the newly revealed Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. “I think we’re in a good place,” says Jacky Reynolds, multiplayer design lead for Infinity Ward, “We worked a lot — really hard — to get the game pretty holistic by the end of last year. We’re massaging and tweaking and refining and trying to get it … as good as possible… before we launch it.”

Finding Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's identity in the wake of Black Ops 7

Infinity Ward has recently shared a significant amount of information about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, including the campaign’s new South Korean setting, the collection of multiplayer maps, and upcoming changes to player movement. Its player movement that has the greatest potential to be a hotbed of discussion for players.

Treyarch’s new Omnimovement system was introduced just two years ago, featuring thousands of new animations that have been integrated across both Black Ops 6, 7, and Warzone. BO7 doubled down on the faster movement with the wall jump motion, bridging the gap for players who wanted more vertical movement options and those who wanted to keep things boots on the ground.

Modern Warfare 4 has dropped the wall jump capability, firmly towing the boots-on-the-ground line. But Infinity Ward did not completely step back from Omnimovement, instead building on sliding mechanics that benefit from Treyarch’s supine positioning as well as further improving mantling, lean animations, and introducing ledge crawling. While I was speaking with the multiplayer team, I took a moment to ask how Infinity Ward decides which features from other franchises make their way into Modern Warfare.

“We’re all different games,” says Reynolds, “even though we’re under the same franchise. I think it is important that we present a different game. It’s fresh and different, so we make the game that we want to make. Modern Warfare has its own kind of vibe, and we just ran that through a big filter — does it feel like a grounded military experience?”

“That’s kind of the lens that we make our game around,” says technical designer Jack Hoppus. “How do we make something that’s really true to us, true to the Modern Warfare series? But also, how is a new player going to feel using this? Are our systems intuitive enough?"

"We’re striving for something really good with our movement system, as well. I think a player who’s just getting their hands on the game is going to be able to move around with ease, and if you play for a longer time, you’re going to really be able to master it. I feel like we have this really strong identity that we’re shooting for with this game. Someone who gets their hands on it is going to feel [that identity] right away.”

Building immersion with the little details

The identity Hoppus speaks of is quick and easy to pick up on, as Modern Warfare 4 fully embraces its South Korean staging — even using Korean-inspired stylization for the numeral in the game’s logo. The inspiration flows over into the Multiplayer mode’s maps. “We try to share as many locations as we can with the singleplayer. Under the hood, it’s … logistics. We need to scan locations, come up with a set of textures, and a bunch of boring little things. We really want it to feel like a holistic world,” says Reynolds.

“I’ve always felt like the multiplayer map is like 2 blocks down from the mission that happened in singleplayer. If you hear system gunfire, it’s another team, and they’re doing another operation. We started with Silkworm, because we needed a map that would generate assets for South Korea, and then we also started with Lotus, which was a coastal town in South Korea."

"So both of those generated an urban center and the rural center, and then we were able to give a ‘to-do list’ for teams to go and find those things,” Reynolds continued, “Find little newspaper stands and these things that make it feel authentic. Find the paint they would [use] on their roads. There’s red strips on their roads. How do we bring all these things in to make it feel as legitimate as we can?”

It's these seemingly ‘boring’ details that build upon the immersion players experience in Modern Warfare 4. Modern Warfare titles, even in the Xbox 360 era, frequently included interactive map details. However, remastered maps like Favela lost those little bits of interactivity when Modern Warfare was rebooted a few years ago.

Modern Warfare 4 embraces world immersion with those little details once more, ushering in a new creative era for the studio that is both celebrating its past identity and embracing its potential future under new studio leadership.

The Call of Duty Engine and launching on the Nintendo Switch 2

That return to immersive worlds comes at a cost, though. Earlier this month, official Call of Duty social media accounts confirmed that Modern Warfare 4 would be the first game in the series to skip launching on past-gen systems like the Xbox One X and S and the PlayStation 4. The decision to forgo last-gen consoles gave the development team the freedom to push Modern Warfare 4’s limits — which made the reveal that MW4 is to be available on the Nintendo Switch 2 at launch all the more surprising.

“Early on, getting [MW4] to run quick and responsive was the biggest [challenge],” says Reynolds, “Just tweaking its architecture, which is kind of different than our base, and to get it to sing. It’s just been great to pick it up, and it’s scary how natural it feels.”

“Oh, that’s our game,” says Hoppus through laughter, “It just plays pretty well!”

“Switching platforms these days? It’s such a streamlined system that we can have different kits playing… especially with crossplay,” Reynolds added, “Unless we really push that boundary, we’re able to mix and match and just see the nuances between the settings and make adjustments.”

Infinity Ward’s engine for Call of Duty has long been lauded by fans who mistakenly still refer to it as IW8 and speculate about the existence of IW9. However, the engine pushing Call of Duty evolved some time ago to be a shared system used by all the studios working on the franchise as “the Call of Duty Engine.” “It’s a shared engine,” says Reynolds, “we can access other games, but we try to keep as holistic as we can.”

“As we explore new tech, especially with our dynamic weather, the engine is evolving,” says Hoppus, “We put a lot of work in our engine and make sure what follows sweep this performance bar and visual bar that we want to hit for the content.”

“[The engine] has allowed us to realize ideas on the design side in a very streamlined way,” Hoppus continues, “There’s not a huge amount of friction when you come to …an idea. It’s attainable for sure.”

Not every idea gets the green light, even with the power of the Call of Duty engine. “My original idea of how to do Kill Block, we couldn’t do it, really,” says Reynolds. Kill Block is Modern Warfare 4’s new dynamic map, inspired by stadiums with retractable pitches that allow for quick transitions between grass-laid fields, hockey rinks, and basketball courts.

“They had to come up with an interesting way that it works, but my original idea … would take 18 man-years. But they figured it out. It looks like a little postage stamp, but the tech that runs that is pretty outrageous.”

Weapon changes for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4

Modern Warfare 4’s improvements don’t stop at a new setting and map tech. Weapon mechanics like aiming and depth of field underwent serious reworkings for the upcoming Call of Duty, changing the way players interact in this new world.

“Our weapons team obsesses over this,” says Hoppus, “They see details that no one else in the world would be able to see. All of the improvements that we’re doing to weapons kind of fall under this shared goal of making you feel like you’re the one holding the gun. You feel the weight of the gun."

"It’s more realistic than ever before. When we see the side-by-side videos, you’re like, ‘How did we ever ship like this in the past?’ We come at it from a realism standpoint, a gameplay standpoint, and try to make something that really fits and feels fun for the player. Like with the enhanced FOV, it’s trying to take the best of both worlds. A high FOV makes targets really small, the big FOV makes them bigger, but you don’t see as much of the sides of the screen. So our engineers and our weapon designers really took it upon themselves to find the best balance.”

Modern Warfare 4 sticks with the series’ gunsmith mechanic for weapon loadouts, though it is more simplified than past iterations. Players can choose up to five attachments for any given weapon, with the pros and cons of those attachments being displayed clearly so the player knows how it will affect the weapon once its live on the battlefield.

“The gunsmith has evolved so much that you can really [put together] any kind of build you want,” says Hoppus, “If you’re going to be good at something — like you want a really good hip firing gun or a really good quickscoping gun, I think it's easy to make that in the gunsmith now. We have over 500 attachments, right? So each one of them is going to do something different. Our [weapons team] loves working on iron sights — it’s their bread and butter! So we got some sick ones in our game now.”

Hoppus also leans into Modern Warfare 4’s new Gunny system for the freedom it affords players in trying out new attachment combinations. Gunny is a new gunsmith addition that dynamically generates weapon builds for players with the press of a button.

“For all of the attachments that you have unlocked, each supports play styles. So [Gunny] is a kind of handcrafted system from our weapons team to sort out these attachments and generate a configuration that works. It’s not going to block one of your attachments; it’s building this optimal weapon for you, and it’ll use every attachment you currently have unlocked. You can just keep cycling through it to find one,” he explains.

“Gunny works in the middle of a match, as well, so you don’t have to go back in the front end. And you can actually edit them after the fact. Something that’s really popular even among some of the hardcore players is getting an initial Gunny build, maybe try it out for a match or two, and then you’re like 'ooh, cool, I want this with no stock instead.' You can take that Gunny build and still edit it after the fact. You’re not locked into that specific configuration.”

“We make this robust gunsmithing system, but it can be overwhelming with how many choices [it has],” says Reynolds, “So that’s where the idea of [Gunny comes in]. Could we just say, ‘This is all of your stuff, this is actually a pretty good gun. Why don’t you go give it a try?’ It’s an onboarding [tool] to help people engage with the system and then hopefully, ideally, continue to engage with them.”

With so many potential combinations for Gunny to assemble weapon builds, it almost seems inevitable that the system would throw some duds. Reynolds verifies that the builds generated by Gunny have been prebuilt and aren’t entirely up to random luck, though he adds, “Sometimes they’ll set up some systems where you just get this really random, crazy one, and then we’ll try it and be like ‘Oh, it’s actually not that bad!’”

“We have the Mosen — long single bolt,” Reynolds sighs before continuing, “It’s been spitting out these snub-nose cut-off little pirate gun.” Hoppus chimes in, “But it’s great for quickscoping! People are going to be able to make their COD montages, for sure.” Hoppus and Reynolds close out the interview by sharing their current favorite loadouts for Modern Warfare 4.

“Right now, I’ve been using one of our new guns, a side-loaded SMG. I’ve been rocking with that, and I’m a quick fix guy. Ever since we debuted that perk, it’s been my favorite. I run ninja to try to, like, move stealthily around the map, and then I got some kill streaks. I run the bomb glider. I run the crossfire, and I’ll run the attack chopper so I don’t have to my gun down,” Hoppus shares.

“I’m a fan of the Odin,” says Reynolds, “That gun just looks crazy. You get the big monolithic suppressor on there, and it just looks like it’s OP.” “It’s a really strong, slower-firing AR,” adds Hoppus, “it feels really like it’s going ‘thunk thunk’. The audio team was killing it with [the Odin]! It really feels like a behemoth. It’s pretty rad.”

Modern Warfare 4 ushers in a new era for the Call of Duty franchise and Infinity Ward as a development studio. With new leadership at the helm, the team is taking the opportunity to explore new creative directions without losing sight of what makes Modern Warfare special to so many players. The team's excitement for this new era of Call of Duty is palpable and downright contagious.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is expected to launch Fall 2026 on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, PC via Steam and Xbox on PC, and the Nintendo Switch 2. The game will not be available on Xbox Game Pass until 2027, but it will support the Xbox Play Anywhere program at launch.

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