Jack of All Controllers

With just hours to go until the Call of Duty Modern Warfare reveal, the biggest leaks yet have emerged from a Chinese account on twitter.

The user, who goes by the handle @Victor___Z has been correct about numerous Call of Duty 2019 details over the past weeks, so it’s fairly likely that the things he’s talked about on twitter this morning are legitimate. 

The first thing Victor mentions is that Modern Warfares marketing strategy will be somewhat different this year, featuring no season pass and instead becoming a constantly updated game in a similar way to games like Fortnite Battle Royale. Activision, according to Victor, have learnt that paid DLC is a way to split the player base, and they no longer want that. The exclusivity deal between Sony and Activision, ensuring Call of Duty fans on PlayStation consoles get early DLC also seems to have been done away with, meaning both betas and DLC will release on all platforms simultaneously.

There will also, apparently, be a new form of Microtransaction system in Modern Warfare 4, one which will be tested later on in Black Ops 4’s lifecycle. This new game will supposedly be similar to Infinite Warfare and WW2 in the way it handles microtransactions. This likely means players will be able to unlock weapons outright with challenges and some sort of in game currency instead of relying on content streams and supply drops.

According to Victor the campaign will take a form similar to many Modern Warfare games in the past, focusing on three main protagonists in three separate but intertwined story lines. Two of these are men, one of them is a woman, and their stories will have converged by the end. The story revolves around these characters past and their present, and will focus heavily on counter-terrorism.

The multiplayer of Modern Warfare seems to have some of the most changes to the previous entries in the series. There will apparently be no minimap, unless a UAV is active, and no specialists, though perks will still be a thing… including an improved version of the much derided last stand, which allowed players to continue shooting after being knocked down.

While specialists have been removed from the equation, some of these perks will supposedly have active abilities while others are passives. In essence, while Modern Warfare removes Specialists there seem to still be specialist-like elements within the game.

Fans will be happy to know that the quicker time to kill, synonymous with the Modern Warfare brand, will be returning, as will automatic healing. However, perhaps on the down side, Victor also alludes to the fact that weapon recoil will be increased and character movement speed will be more akin to the baseline set by the original Modern Warfare.

Each weapon can supposedly take four attachments at once, and the Pick-10 pioneered by Treyarch and loved by the community will bid farewell for this game. As with Black ops 3 and 4 your weapon model will change in the create-a-class screen when you change what weapon attachments you use.

Night vision will make a return Modern Warfare for the first time since… well… Modern Warfare, and will be usable in Multiplayer. Supposedly you will not be able to use your weapon sites, and your aiming method will be changed to “side aiming” when you use the night vision goggles.

Finally, the CO-OP mode in the game. Call of Duty fans have long been treated to seperate zombies installments with each new Call of Duty release, though many leaks have seemed to suggest there will be no zombies this year round. Victor doesn’t give us much more to go on, saying only that there is enough content within the mode that it can be treated as a whole new game. But the actual nature of the mode is apparently “temporarily confidential”. What he does say, in a reply to another user, is that the co-op mode will definitely not be zombies, and is different to any CoD game in the past, so fans of Extinction and Spec-Ops are also set to be disappointed.

The only hiccup in Victor’s entire story is where he claims there will be “No Modern Warfare 2 remastered.” Last year Amazon leaked the game, and there was recently a leak on the PEGI website that briefly showed the game existed. It seems strange now that Victor, who has pegged so much correctly already, would say this counter to what we already know.

The Modern Warfare reveal event will be happening at 6PM BST tonight, so we don’t have long until we know if Victor’s in depth reveal about Modern Warfare holds true.

UPDATE: Victor has remove his tweets, whether this was due to interference from Activision or not is unknown.