Why the new Call of Duty isn’t Modern Warfare 4

By the end of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, a lot had happened in the series, from nuclear devastation to a Russian invasion of the US. So when the developers at Infinity Ward started plotting out the next game in the series, they realized something — they needed a clean slate.

“There were just so many things that made it bear no resemblance to the world we see today,” explains Jacob Minkoff, single-player design director on the new Modern Warfare. “To make a new Modern Warfare game in 2019, we had to put to bed that old storyline. But it’s still Modern Warfare.”

That’s the reason why the next game in the series, announced today, is simply called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, as opposed to Modern Warfare 4. It’s not a sequel, but more of a soft reboot, akin to last year’s reimagining of God of War from Sony Santa Monica.

The developers liken it to when Daniel Craig took over as James Bond; it’s the same general setting and characters, but with a grittier tone. The new Modern Warfare will feature familiar characters, including the likes of the fan-favorite Captain Price, but places them in a more modern context. “We wanted to bring them back and given them a new life, more fully fleshed out, more tonally mature,” says Minkoff.

The main reason for this shift, according to Minkoff, is so the story can more closely mirror the real world. That doesn’t mean Modern Warfare will feature recreations of real conflicts or situations, but instead offer scenarios inspired by them. The team at Infinity Ward use the phrase “ripped from the headlines” a lot.

Here’s how Minkoff explains the game’s relationship with real-world conflicts:

Generally what we want to do is be true to the spirit of modern conflict, but not to reproduce any specific events or specific conflicts. And that’s for a couple of reasons. The biggest one is that it would tie our hands as developers. If we were going to specifically retell something that was happening within the timeframe of us starting to develop the game, who knows where that would go by the time we were done. It takes three years to make one of these games. So we could find ourselves being in a position where we’ve completely gone off the rails and are in strange and offensive territory.

We also could end up in a place where we have a cool gameplay idea, but that didn’t happen in the real world, so we can’t do that. We want to be able to make the most interesting, compelling, emotionally impactful gameplay scenarios we can think of, and we want to separate ourselves just enough from the real world to give ourselves that freedom.

The game will feature a single-player story campaign that’s split into two halves. In one you’ll play as a high-ranking special ops soldier, and in the other you’re a rebel fighter in the Middle East. As the game is also an incredibly realistic and violent shooter, there’s a lot of potential for problematic or disturbing moments, virtual situations that won’t square nicely with what is ultimately an entertainment product about firing guns. It’s a fine line, but Minkoff says that it’s important to show these more troubling aspects of war, in order to give players a better understanding of the reality.

“We know that we aren’t going to please everybody, but we’re doing our absolute best to handle complex subject material with honor, with respect, with sensitivity,” he says. The development team uses the internal tagline “Jaws not Saw,” with a stated goal of having violence that’s intense and mature, instead of overly gratuitous and gory.

Modern Warfare isn’t necessarily trying to get across a specific political message with its present-day narrative, but there is at least one thing Minkoff hopes players get out of the experience. “I want you to have empathy,” he says. “I want you to walk a mile in the shoes of these characters, and step away from this game understanding more about what they face.”

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is launching on October 25th on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.