Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s Survival Mode is a PlayStation 4 timed exclusive

Console exclusive content is alive and well in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, as Activision and Sony revealed in the State of Play stream last night that the Special Ops Survival Mode would be available to “play first on PS4”. What makes this particularly galling is that this will be exclusive to PlayStation 4, excluding Xbox One and PC gamers from an entire game mode for almost a whole year.

Here’s the relevant segment, starting 2:15 into last night’s new story trailer:

As you can see from the small print, Survival Mode will be exclusive to PlayStation 4 until 1st October 2020.

The news comes despite Activision and Infinity Ward having previously made all the right noises about the game’s multiplayer. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will be the first game in the franchise’s history to feature cross-play multiplayer between platforms – it will match players up based on controller choice – and as an extension of that, Activision recently announced that “most” post-launch content will release on all platforms at the same time. This included “new multiplayer maps, new multiplayer modes, special ops missions and more” all of which would will release at the same time across all platforms.

I’m fairly certain that everyone took this to mean that all versions of the game would be treated equally, but don’t worry, because Activision and Sony found the wiggle room. You can still have parity with post-launch content, but what about the stuff in the game on day one? Let’s carve out a little slice of that and make that a PlayStation exclusive instead.

Call of Duty has long had timed platform exclusive DLC, starting with an agreement with Microsoft last generation to have COD map packs be timed exclusives, arriving one month earlier for the Xbox 360. The tables were turned part way into the current generation, and starting with Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, it was then Sony that had the one month head start with DLC.

For Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, Activision dramatically shook up the structure of their post-launch content plan, stepping away from the set in stone map packs and having more incremental content drops. To satisfy the terms of their agreement with Sony, this led to a 7-day head start on all content and in-game events in Black Ops 4. Obviously, if there’s cross-play, that simply wouldn’t work and so the plan had to be shelved.

I think that, after years and years of this kind of thing, we can all agree that timed exclusive content in games sucks – timed exclusive games themselves also suck, but for slightly different reasons – but more than that, it’s a pretty crummy move to try and crow about how open and wonderful you’re being with post-launch content, only to then turn around a week later and cut out a part of the game from launch.

via Charlie Intel

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1 Comment

  1. Preventing players from enjoying a gamemode for a whole year really sucks. Especially as Spec Ops is part of the base game.

    4 The Players though right???

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