Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 launches in full on October 23, a week after digital pre-order owners got into the campaign early. Launch day is when multiplayer opens to everyone, and Activision has now confirmed exactly what that looks like: 20 maps across four formats, more than a dozen modes, four of them brand new, and a Halloween pair arriving before Season 1. Here's what you get, plus what your PC needs to run it.
A war on the Korean Peninsula
Infinity Ward leads development, with Raven Software, Treyarch, Sledgehammer Games, High Moon Studios, Beenox, Activision Shanghai and Digital Legends all credited on the project. The campaign's setup is a North Korean invasion of the South, and that conflict spills into the multiplayer map list: South Korean fishing villages, reactor complexes, ferries and shopping districts sit alongside the series' usual tour of Europe, Russia and the Americas.
The standard edition is $69.99 on Steam, and the game is also sold through Battle.net, the PlayStation Store and the Xbox Store. Anyone who pre-ordered digitally has been able to play the campaign since October 16, so for most of them launch day is about multiplayer and the extraction mode DMZ.
12 core maps, with Shipment four days later
The core 6v6 rotation opens with 12 maps. Cachette and Coal both sit on the edge of a French rail terminal, and Lithium puts you inside a Mexican lithium refinery under the Sierra mountains. Lotus is a South Korean fishing village after an amphibious assault, and Mumbai hides a fugitive inside a dense residential district around a Victorian market. Munition is a North Korean command base built around a munitions depot.
The rest of the list: Nautical, a burning South Korean ferry pulling away from the fighting at dawn; Reactor U92, a South Korean reactor in meltdown with a boiling containment pool at its centre; Rooftops, the snowy roof of a New York hotel; Sentry, a Russian base in a whiteout; Silkworm, a South Korean shopping district built around a convenience store and a subway entrance; and Transit 213, a bus lot in western India full of derelict vehicles.
Shipment, the tiny container-yard map that has become a series tradition, is not in the launch rotation. It arrives on October 27, now set in a Russian harbour hemmed in by concrete apartment blocks but keeping its classic layout.
Ground War, Gunfight and Kill Block
The large-scale 32v32 Ground War mode launches with three maps, all set around the fictional South Korean city of Hajin. Imjin Farmland covers open fields, waterways and a mill on the city's outskirts. Wolves Stadium is the dense urban heart of the city, with tunnels, transit lines and rooftops around the arena. Forest sits between the two on a wooded hillside, with a guard tower, a gas station and a barracks as the key points.
Gunfight gets four small 2v2 maps: Cafe, a Paris courtyard with a fountain blocking the centre lane; Library, a wood-panelled state library; NYC, a wintry downtown stage; and Smuggler, a rail yard where you can fight on top of the train cars.
Then there's Kill Block, the most unusual map in the launch set. It's a training facility that rebuilds its layout between rounds, with more than 500 possible combinations. Some sections are new, while others borrow from classic Modern Warfare maps such as Crash, Highrise and Shoot House. It supports 3v3 and 10v10 Gunfight at launch.
Four new modes, led by a Search & Destroy with a shop
Most of the classic modes are back on day one: Team Deathmatch, Domination, Hardpoint, Kill Confirmed, Free-For-All, Search & Destroy, Gunfight and the forward-pushing Frontline. Most come in Hardcore variants too, with a limited HUD, friendly fire and no health regeneration. A Mobility Course is also included to teach the game's movement system.
The new modes are where Infinity Ward is trying something different:
- Collateral is Search & Destroy with a buy phase. Everyone starts with a pistol and $800, earns cash for kills, plants, defuses and round wins, and spends it before each round on armour, perks, equipment and weapons. There are no custom loadouts. Die and you lose your gear but keep your cash. Teams can also pool money for a UAV. First to six rounds wins.
- Inflation is a 10-minute respawn mode where kills earn cash. The more you carry, the bigger target you become: cross the High Value Target threshold and your position is revealed to everyone. An overtime period adds cash multipliers for late swings.
- Hijack has teams carry, throw and pass a Data Spike to the enemy's Comm Station, then defend the plant while it uploads.
- Combat Outpost stretches Domination across a Ground War map. Captured outposts become spawn points, and reinforcing them unlocks team rewards: a local UAV, then a JLTV airdrop, then a light tank delivered to your headquarters.
Two more modes arrive for Halloween, before Season 1 starts. Possession is a new party mode: kill an enemy and you take over their body, location and loadout, so every kill teleports you somewhere else on the map. Infected, the survivors-versus-swarm favourite, also returns.
PC requirements
The PC requirements are modest for a 2026 shooter, but storage is the catch: you need 115 GB free on an SSD at launch.
- Minimum: Windows 10 64-bit, AMD Ryzen 5 1400 or Intel Core i5-6600, 8 GB RAM, AMD Radeon RX 470, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 / 1060 or Intel Arc A580.
- Recommended: Windows 11 64-bit, AMD Ryzen 5 3600 or Intel Core i7-8700K, 16 GB RAM, AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 or Intel Arc B580.
With Shipment on October 27, two Halloween modes and Season 1 still to come, the launch lineup is only the starting point. But 20 maps and four new modes on day one give multiplayer plenty to work with from the start.
