Infinity Ward’s mission of redefining Call of Duty also comes with the goal of uniting the community, which means that the team plans to launch Call of Duty: Modern Warfare with full cross-play support between all consoles and PC players. Whether you pick up Modern Warfare on PS4, Xbox One, or PC, you’ll be able to play with and against your friends on any other platform. Instead of three separate communities and playerbases, Infinity Ward is uniting everyone into one teeming Call of Duty player base across every platform.
Here’s is Infinity Ward’s official statement: “With the launch of Modern Warfare, the team is taking steps to unite the community. First, the team plans for Modern Warfare to be played together across PC and console through cross-play support. Also, the team is eliminating the traditional season pass, so that they can deliver more free maps and content as well as post-launch events to all players.”
The second part calls out another major piece of the puzzle that will keep Modern Warfare’s community united. Paid map packs and season passes can put players into different pools depending on who has paid for additional content and who hasn’t. This can also have the adverse effect of not even allowing players to get to play content they’ve paid for, if the pool of players on those maps ends up being too small for adequate matchmaking. Infinity Ward aims to fight this by eliminating the status quo of the paid season pass and map packs, keeping the whole community of players together.
Call of Duty games have toyed with different post-launch monetization and content delivery models in the past. While Infinity Ward isn’t quite ready to talk about additional details for post-launch content or address those free-to-play-style monetization rumors that cropped up a few weeks ago, they’ve made it clear that they are going to be trying something different than what we’re used to with other Call of Duty games.
It’s pretty exciting to see what amounts to the biggest AAA multiplayer game of the year committing to cross-play support at launch, and it ensures that the thriving Call of Duty community can last even longer with this new game. Dauntless was the first game to launch with cross-play between console families, and with Activision and Call of Duty following suit, I’m certain we’ll see the trend continue.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare launches on October 25, 2019 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
