COD Modern Warfare 4 will ‘close this chapter and launch a new one’ for the series, Activision says

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 will end the current Modern Warfare series and lead to the start of a new one, an Activision executive says.

In an interview with The Game Business, it was put to Activision chief marketing officer Tyler Bahl that Call of Duty may be entering another period of reinvention, with a live-action movie on the way and Treyarch saying it was making something nobody’s experienced before.

Bahl replied that, while he wasn’t willing to reveal how it happens, Modern Warfare 4 will mark the end of the current series and the start of a new one.

“I don’t want to give any spoilers for the game coming out, but I think in a lot of ways, this is going to be the epic conclusion of this recent series of Modern Warfare,” he said.

“It’s not that some characters and pieces can’t live on beyond this and be reinvented, but I think in a lot of ways, we’re excited by closing this chapter and launching a new one.

“And I think where we go with potential future games,  is really, we have to innovate and we have to… what we heard from the audience is they want new, or better, or different. and in a lot of ways, it’s a combination of those things. And so I think we want to make sure that what we bring to the table is exciting.”

Bahl added that taking Call of Duty in a new direction or adding a new subseries can be difficult when the player base is so large and each player has their opinion on what Call of Duty is to them.

“I think the landscape is changing right under our feet, right?” he said. “When you’re seeing new games being built overnight and you’re seeing all kinds of taste change, and how people want to play and stuff.

“And so it’s the only thing about Call of Duty when you’re this big, you have so many different components of the audience. There’s some people that just like Zombies. There’s just some people that are like ‘Black Ops versus Modern Warfare’.

“There’s just some people that just want to play a game like Prop Hunt, where they’re not actually shooting anybody, but they’re a refrigerator and they’re hiding in the map someplace.

“Great ways to experience Call of Duty, but at the same time, you know, as a marketer and from a positioning and a comp standpoint, it’s hard to speak to everyone, right? And so I spend a lot of time thinking about ‘okay, how do we reach different audiences with different messaging’, and that’s really been the focus.”

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 will be released on October 23 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2 and PC.