I played Modern Warfare 4’s multiplayer for a few hours, and I don’t know how to feel just yet

After two years of Black Ops’ super movement abilities, Call of Duty’s new Modern Warfare 4 coming this year is going to be a massive adjustment for many players.

Last week, I visited Infinity Ward to learn all about MW4 and its campaign’s Korean conflict, the return of a promising third gameplay mode, and, of course, its multiplayer offering. I played MW4 multiplayer for a little under two hours, and I’m still unsure what to think about what I experienced.

Slow your roll

Infinity Ward explained MW4’s movement and gameplay as “tactical and fluid,” with the multiplayer based around a theme of being “slick and sophisticated, but gritty and grounded.” Basically, this means Tactical Sprint is back, and the slippery omnimovement of Black Ops 6 and Black Ops 7 doesn’t exist here. This will be a tough pill to swallow for many, while others may welcome the change.

After a handful of matches, I’m still not totally sure what to think, but I can say that the game felt buttery smooth from beginning to end, including a new, sleek UI that features a pop-out blade menu that stays docked on the left side of the screen. It’s a huge improvement on the menus from the last few MW games. And graphically, it’s a stunner, and potentially the best-looking CoD yet.

We played a few matches of Domination and Team Deathmatch on a very solid three-lane map called Lithium, a hectic, Korean city streets-based map called Silkworm with long sightlines galore, and a very small map called Transit 213 set in a train yard. It feels familiar to what I remember 2022’s Modern Warfare II playing like, but traversal is smoother, along with a variety of technical adjustments to improve the experience. Like Infinity Ward told us on hand, the movement in MW4 is “less restricted” than what we saw in MWII (2023’s Modern Warfare III was made by Sledgehammer Games).

The adjustment back to a more “grounded” approach to movement and combat will be a lengthy period for some players, I think. After around two hours of games, I still wasn’t fully adjusted after two years of BO6 and BO7’s more frenetic pacing. But when compared to MWII’s clunkiness, it’s definitely an improvement, especially when it comes to mantling through windows, climbing walls, or sliding into engagements.

We also tried a new six-vs-six mode called Inflation, where players drop money on death, and the team that has the biggest bank account by round’s end takes the victory. But one of the more interesting experiences we played was the new 10-vs-10 Gunfight mode on an “evolving” map named Kill Block.

Kill Block is a Shoot House-sized map made of three “slices,” with each slice featuring a different map from past iterations. These include Gunfight maps, but also smaller areas ripped from other classics in the series. Each round, the slices change, creating a variety in the action-packed, party-like mode that was probably the most fun I had all day while playing.

Pick your poison

Lots of classic MW guns are back, like the M4 and various Kastov weapons, but one of my favorites was a side-loading Korean SMG, which was vaguely reminiscent of the Sten SMG in World War 2-era games. There will be 24 primary weapons at launch, along with eight secondaries and 12 all-new maps to use them on, all designed with “clearer sightlines and reduced clutter” in mind.

One of MW4’s quirkiest new additions is something called an Apex Attachment. When you max out a weapon’s level, you unlock its Apex Attachment, which is a special and oftentimes ridiculous new attachment on the gun that does not take up one of the normal five slots you can equip a weapon with.

Apex Attachments we saw included a side-loading launcher that hurls throwing-knives (seriously), and a Heartbeat Sensor-like gun screen that shows a mini radar that tracks the locations of enemy players you’ve damaged.

Each Apex Attachment is specific to its own weapon, and they seem powerful and a bit outlandish at times, incongruent with the game’s “realistic” tone. I’m a tad concerned with their implications, but with time and feedback, I’m sure they could and should be balanced fairly.

Bye-bye, bloom

One of the biggest, most influential changes in MW4 is the removal of bloom entirely. “Bloom” is the descriptor for how bullets will spray around within a weapon’s reticle, and in the past, this created a lot of frustration. MW4 uses what Infinity Ward calls its Ballistic Authority System, which basically means that firing from the hip is way more reliable than ever before.

To do this, MW4 uses a “realistic physical simulation of human motion that more precisely illustrates where the bullet will go.” It really does feel game-changing. It’s immediately noticeable when using an assault rifle and coming up to an enemy player up close. In the past, you could spray without aiming down sights, and the bullets would randomly and realistically fly out of the gun, but now, the bullets go where you’re aiming.

Other quality-of-life changes include tweaks to both FOV and depth of field to make everything during combat engagements more visible and manageable, which was a big problem in MWII. Gun smoke has also been modified so that it obscures vision less, meaning this time around, if you’re missing your shots, it likely won’t be because you can’t see what you’re aiming at.

DMZ returns

Lastly, I saw a quick peek at MWII’s extraction mode DMZ that’s been confirmed to return in MW4. I was not able to play it and can’t say much yet, but Activision provided this description of the CoD game type inspired by popular titles like Escape From Tarkov:

“DMZ is the definitive Call of Duty extraction experience, a living combat sandbox where every deployment is a new story,” the description reads. “Deploy solo or with a squad into a volatile conflict zone as an off-the-books asset tasked with recovering advanced military technology left in the wake of war. The conditions in the exclusion zone are always shifting, with changing weather, dynamic military objectives, and hostile forces moving throughout the zone.  Loot, fight, negotiate, betray, and extract with whatever you can carry. The harder you push, the harder the world pushes back. Every run is a risk, every encounter is a choice, and no two deployments play out the same way.”

After a small taste of hands-on gameplay, I’m cautiously optimistic that MW4’s multiplayer will improve on the pacing issues that MWII had four years ago. For fans of the recent Black Ops games’ unique, futuristic, and quicker feel, they may find more frustration than anything else to begin with, but a beta before launch could help shape how it feels with time to go before full release.

Modern Warfare 4 launches on Oct. 23 for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2.

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