Infinity Ward’s heavily rumored 2019 Call of Duty game has finally been revealed, including the release date of October 25 and story details about this soft reboot of the Modern Warfare franchise. There’s a lot about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare that’s still under wraps, but we had the chance to visit Infinity Ward and talk with Campaign Gameplay Director Jacob Minkoff, who revealed to us that this year’s Call of Duty would not have a zombies mode.
I asked Minkoff a question about the unified narrative and progression that will persist across the totality of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s game modes, and compared it to the stark contrast of Treyarch’s Black Ops series, which traditionally features very separate and individualized pillars that each feel like their own game.
“Because they focus on more of the stylized, graphic novel, super-hero experience, they can have the much more ‘out there’ different types of gameplay in their games,” Minkoff said, after reassuring me that he loves what Treyarch does. “But for us, we’re trying to create an authentic, realistic feeling world. We don’t have the flexibility to do something like put zombies in the game. That would compromise the feeling of playing in a world that feels realistic and authentic and relative to today’s conflicts and things we face.”
He went on to talk about the impetus for unified progression and gameplay. “Knowing that we needed to keep it more similar across the different modes, we decided to really lean into that, and make it completely continuous.”
Fans of cooperative gameplay modes in Call of Duty don’t need to worry though. Infinity Ward is making sure that there’s a way to play with your friends outside of the normal multiplayer. “We’re not ready to talk about cooperative play yet, but what I will tell you is that the single-player storyline goes directly into the co-op storyline. No stop. The events just continue. So those elements—gameplay, progression, story—they just continue throughout everything that we have on the disc or digital download.”
This isn’t all that surprising. Treyarch has been the studio that’s really headlined the Zombies movement within Call of Duty franchise. Sledgehammer’s leaned into it a little bit with its own games, and Infinity Ward played around with it briefly in Infinite Warfare, but the Modern Warfare games (and Ghost) didn’t add zombies. Minkoff asserts that adding zombies wouldn’t fit with the weight of what the studio wants Modern Warfare to be, and as such, wasn’t even an option.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare releases on October 25, 2019 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC, featuring cross-play across all platforms.
