Since the announcement of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare back in May, both publisher Activision and developer Infinity Ward have spoken about the importance of the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC versions of the game getting "most" of its content at the same time, rather than fragment the player base. After all, this will be the first Call of Duty title to feature cross-platform play, so it seems kind of crucial that everyone gets access to everything at the same time.
Of course, it wouldn't be a modern AAA release without some kind of exclusivity deal in place. Sure enough, Activision has confirmed that the newly-announced Survival Mode, a feature in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's Special Operations set of missions will be exclusive to PlayStation 4 players until October 21, 2020 - that's a full year, as spotted by Eurogamer. Activision has since stressed that everyone on all platforms will get the rest of the content in the Special Ops mode, as well as the campaign and multiplayer, at launch, and that it's just the Survival Mode that will be a timed-exclusive.
Activision never promised that it wouldn't pull something like this, so I guess that at least is oddly comforting. Just last week, the publisher said that "most post-launch gameplay content, including new multiplayer maps, new multiplayer modes, special ops missions and more will release simultaneously across all platforms." Most, but not all. Regardless, fans aren't best pleased with this news, which shouldn't really come as surprise to anyone.
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While I think the majority of gamers were expecting some kind of timed-exclusive, I think the real issue the community has taken is that the exclusive content is a full co-op mode, and that the length of the exclusivity is a year. Nobody really kicked off over the fact the PS4 got first dibs on the beta, after all. Just take a quick peek at the thread on the Modern Warfare subreddit to see just how unhappy people are if you somehow can't already imagine it for yourself.
Infinity Ward's Narrative Director Taylor Kurosaki has since responded to the many complaints on Twitter, saying that the timed-exclusivity deal was nothing to do with the developer.
Arguing that it was out of Infinity Ward's hands and all the studio could do was try to make the best Call of Duty they could, Kurosaki tweeted, "We do our BEST every day to give our players the best experience possible. There are decisions that are above all of our pay grades that have to be considered. I understand your feelings, but this is much better than others I have seen."
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He also argued that the Survival Mode is just "one percent" of the game, and that the other 99 percent will arrive on all platforms simultaneously.
Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare comes to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on October 25. An intense new trailer for the game's campaign was shown off during last night's PlayStation State of Play presentation, which you can check out for yourself here.
Topics: Modern Warfare, PlayStation, Call of Duty