Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will not have Zombies

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will have grit. It will have ripped headlines. It will have a mustache the size of Belgium. It will have politics. What it will not have, however, is legions of the angry undead. Campaign gameplay director Jacob Minkoff confirmed with PlayStation Lifestyle that the rebooted Modern Warfare will not have a Zombies mode. 

Treyarch's Black Ops games are also grim-and-gritty, but Minkoff said they're more of a "stylized, graphic novel, superhero experience," and so they can pull that sort of thing off. "But for us, we’re trying to create an authentic, realistic feeling world," he said. "We don’t have the flexibility to do something like put zombies in the game. That would compromise the feeling of playing in a world that feels realistic and authentic and relative to today’s conflicts and things we face." 

It's not entirely surprising, as Zombies modes haven't previously been a feature in Modern Warfare games. Infinity Ward did include them in Infinite Warfare, however, and given how prominently they featured in last year's Black Ops 4 it wasn't entirely out of the question that Activision would want to slip them into this year's game too. 

Modern Warfare will support some form of co-op play, however. Minkoff declined to share details but said that "the single-player storyline goes directly into the co-op storyline. No stop. The events just continue. So those elements—gameplay, progression, story—they just continue throughout everything that we have on the disc or digital download." 

Activision said when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was announced that it will lean more heavily into the "uncomfortable realities of war" than earlier games in the series; based on Chris' preview of the campaign, it sounds like there might be a few stumbles along that path, but I'm hopeful that Infinity Ward can pull it off. It comes out on October 25.