The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered campaign is about to drop, and its launch trailer has just reminded us what we’re waiting for.
On the surface, the trailer is a technical marvel: Close-ups on people’s faces reveal detail down to the pores, and even large-scale battles look like you could drop in anywhere and find your own personal battle for your life. Some of the game’s most iconic missions get a nod, particularly the ones where the camera gets to pull out and check out war in its harrowing, beautiful entirety. [Spoilers for a nearly decade-old game below.]
The trailer also makes some smart moves for nostalgia’s sake; we start out diving into Captain Price’s eye, through which we see most of the missions that comprise the rest of the game. We’re given hints of the game’s most shocking mission– which ends with a nuclear strike, and a CoD protagonist’s story-prescribed death– and the nuclear cloud behind a playground is a powerful image from a series that, at the time, hadn’t moved completely into Hollywood from realistic depictions of war’s coldness. Here, it looks stunning.
The smartest move from the trailer, however, was rewinding through the mission clips to return to Price’s eye, just before the start of the first mission. Price represents the Call of Duty old guard. He appeared in CoD 1 and 2, as well as every Modern Warfare title; he’s an embodiment of the nostalgia many feel for the game, and in MW, he still represented what CoD was, not what the series would become.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered is only available with some preorders of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, and its campaign will release for PlayStation 4 preorderers on October 5th, with its multiplayer release happening November 4th (followed by its completed map pack in December). There are hints, but only hints, that CoD: MWR will get its own release somewhere down the line.