Should You Pay Early for Modern Warfare 4?
Call of Duty has a way of asking for your money before it shows you much. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 launches worldwide on Friday, October 23, on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, with a Switch 2 version whose preorders open later this year. Preorder the standard digital edition or the Vault Edition and the campaign unlocks a week early, on Friday, October 16. So the decision lands this week.
The standard edition costs $69.99 and the Vault Edition $99.99. If you were counting on a subscription, Upcomer reports that the game is not a day-one Game Pass title, so anyone playing on October 16 has bought it outright.
What the campaign is selling
Infinity Ward is back in charge, and the story moves the series to the Korean Peninsula. North Korea launches a full-scale invasion of the South, and one thread follows a squad of South Korean soldiers trying to survive the collapsing front. Half a world away, Captain Price wages an off-book war of revenge while staying one step ahead of the people hunting him. Activision's own store copy promises trench warfare in Korea, a chase through Paris, SAS night raids in Mumbai and close-quarters fighting in New York.
Press Start's Adam Mathew played a slice in May and came away sounding relieved. He called the Modern Warfare III campaign properly disappointing, then described a second mission in which Price corners Makarov in a nightclub and beats him to death with a new real-time melee system. Price also falls in with Valeria Garza, the cartel leader from Modern Warfare II. Mathew found the Korean invasion scenes far more brutal than the usual Call of Duty mission, and closed with a hedge worth keeping in mind: whether the studio pulls it off remains to be seen.
Korea, Paris and a war on two fronts
The beta is the other half of the argument
August's multiplayer beta was rough. Destructoid counted more than 115,000 concurrent players on Steam on day one, and more than half of them gone a day later. Steam reviews sat at 49 percent positive, a Mixed rating. PCGamesN collected the complaints: aim assist that leans toward controller players, delayed mouse and keyboard input, and a time-to-kill so short, alongside fast movement, that fights end before you can react.
Infinity Ward did respond. For the second beta weekend, MP1st reports, the studio reduced aim assist, pulled Tactical Sprint out of the default kit and into a perk, and retuned weapons for a slightly longer time-to-kill. It was also candid about aim assist: "In full transparency, this is not the exact tuning we want." Credit for saying it out loud, but that is a studio telling you the shooting is still being tuned.
So: preorder or wait?
Split the decision by what you actually play.
If you buy Call of Duty for the campaign, preorder the standard edition. Every serious beta complaint was about multiplayer, and none of it touches a story mode. The campaign is the part a preview liked, it is the only part the early window unlocks, and October 16 gives you a quiet week with it before the servers fill up.
If you buy it for multiplayer, wait. You just read the developer saying the tuning is not where it wants it. Reviews and the first week of patches will tell you more than any preorder bonus.
Skip the Vault Edition either way. The extra $30 buys four operator skins (Price, Valeria, Ghost and Blix), a Special Forces pack, five signature weapons, one season of BlackCell and a DMZ bonus. Nothing in that list changes the game you play. If you end up playing every night in December, Steam already sells a $30 upgrade you can buy later.
New to Price? Play this first
The man at the centre of this story has history. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is where Price first became a legend, and it still plays like a tight, angry thriller you can finish in a weekend. But the campaign that matters most for this one is the 2019 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, which rebooted the timeline that Modern Warfare 4 continues. Start there, then follow the trail through Modern Warfare II and Modern Warfare III if you want every grudge in place before October 16.
