This years entry into the COD franchise—the recently announced Call of Duty: Modern Warfare—won’t have a Zombies mode, developer Infinity Ward has confirmed.
The scoop on that comes from an interview that PlayStation Lifestyle conducted with Jacob Minkoff, the Campaign Gameplay Director over at Infinity Ward. In the interview, Minkoff discussed how the tone of Zombies fits in nicely with the over-the-top experience of the Black Ops series, but it doesn’t fit with the more realistic approach that Modern Warfare is taking. Speaking on the subject, Minkoff said:
“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. 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.”
That makes sense, as fighting zombies in a game that is promoting itself to be dark, gritty, and realistic would completely break any immersion that Infinity Ward are trying to give to players. That being said, there will be a cooperative multiplayer mode included in the place of zombies, which I’m expecting to be similar to the Special Ops mode from Modern Warfare 2 and 3. While Minkoff didn’t give away any real information on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s co-op mode, he did reveal that the single-player campaign will feed players directly into it:
“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.”
It sounds interesting, and I can’t deny that this is the most excited I have been for a new Call of Duty in long time. While I was a fan of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and its approach of offering three distinctly different, standalone game modes, I welcome the return of a campaign mode and I’m intrigued by the idea of a unified progression.
All of this coupled with the sacking off of the community-splitting season pass, a new game engine, and cross-play across all platforms, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare might just be a return to the franchises heyday. Then again, I’ve said that before.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare releases on October 25, 2019 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
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