Report: Modern Warfare 4 will actually be called… Call of Duty: Modern Warfare!

UPDATE: According to Kotaku, the game is a soft reboot of the original game and will “be heavy on troubling, realistic emotions”,  inspired by the No Russians section from Modern Warfare II. Original story below.

In a frankly bonkers sounding decision, reports from Kotaku’s Jason Schreier and YouTuber TheLongSensation state that this year’s Call of Duty won’t actually be called Modern Warfare 4, it will be called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare instead. No number, no extra subtitle, just Modern Warfare.

However, while it might sound odd, it could actually be for good reason and make a lot of sense in the long run. Outside of a remaster which does make this naming decision quite confusing, the Modern Warfare sub-series has been dormant since 2011’s Modern Warfare 3, and that game wrapped up the trilogy quite nicely.

While the branding and setting will surely be a strong part of the hype, 2019’s Modern Warfare was always going to be a fresh start of sorts. In fact, Schreier goes on to state that it’s a “soft reboot”. That would put this alongside games like God of War, Hitman, Star Wars Battlefront, Battlefield 1, Doom, Mortal Kombat and plenty more where it was felt better to restart the series naming despite them being sequels.

Schreier’s assertion actually makes sense when looking back at former COD Spokesperson Robert Bowling’s tweets from earlier this month. While many simply took the below tweet to mean that the next game was Modern Warfare 4, especially as he replied “I don’t know, it was there be four.” when asked about the photo doctoring, there’s some possibly very intentional teasing on his part.

We’re still at the point where we know very little about this year’s Call of Duty game, with Activision not announcing the game in their usual schedule. Instead it looks like we might have to wait until E3 to hear or see anything official coming out of the publisher and developer Infinity Ward.

It’s weird, but we actually know more about the development of Call of Duty in 2020 at this point, with more internal sources and leaking to Kotaku giving us a glimpse at the game’s troubled development and revealing that Treyarch have been brought in to lead the game’s transformation into Black Ops 5.

Source: Jason Schreier (Kotaku)

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