Skip to main content

Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare to hold a cross-platform open beta

One more call

It's nearly time for more war. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare - a much more modern shootbang than 2007's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - is opening up a cross-platform beta from the 21st to the 23rd of September. Hurray, we get to shoot at console rubes. Boo, platform factionalism is weird and bad and it's hard to see that being a fair fight without auto-aim in the mix.

A multiplayer trailer awaits below.

Watch on YouTube

It's familiar, innit. Drones and explosions and that, but now some of the explosions are in a cave and the developers are really keen to show off the night-vision goggles. It's the same Call we've been hearing for years, with all the flaws of unfair kill-streak rewards and repetitive twitchy shooting. I'll probably still play and enjoy it for several hours, mind. I had a short-lived blast with Black Ops 4, and that's enough to tempt me in, even though this is slower-paced and made by Infinity Ward rather than Sledgehammer Games. There's enough shared DNA.

The exact beta schedule is all over the place, with different times for different platforms depending on if you've pre-ordered or not. The details are in this blog post, down past the lengthy bit on all the Twitch streamers you can watch. The devs haven't confirmed that cross-play will be in the game at launch - presumably they're waiting to see how this test goes.

There is a singleplayer campaign this time round, by the way, and the devs keep boasting about how realistic and mature it is. At E3 they showed Eurogamer a comically naff-sounding three-stage stealth event where you play as two children who have to stab and shoot their kidnapper to death.

You can get into the early access beta two days earlier if you pre-order, but don't do that. If you wait just a little bit you get to play the game for free and decide if you like it or not.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is due to come out for realises on October 25th.

Read this next