Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022 video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  The final scene of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II belongs to a text message. A Russian terrorist cell is preparing to hijack a plane when a message arrives from Vladimir Makarov. His instruction is oddly specific: nobody is to speak Russian during the hijacking.

  That small detail says a lot about the game around it. Modern Warfare II is a 2022 first-person shooter from the studio Infinity Ward, published by Activision. It is the nineteenth installment of the Call of Duty series and a sequel to the 2019 reboot of the Modern Warfare line.

  Its world is full of people who hide who they are and who they work for. So who is really pulling the strings, and what are they after? How did a single game grow into a launcher, a free battle royale and a stream of seasonal updates? And why did a planned add-on become a whole new game, while the composer of the score walked away?

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• 2. The Stolen Missiles

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  Three American-made ballistic missiles sit at the center of the campaign, and none of them is where it should be. The trouble begins in July 2022, when Task Force 141 carries out a missile strike during an arms deal in Al Mazrah. The strike kills Iranian General Ghorbrani, and his lieutenant, Major Hassan Zyani, wants revenge.

  By October, Hassan is funding terrorist activity. Lieutenant Simon Riley, known as Ghost, and Sergeant John MacTavish, known as Soap, lead Marine Raiders into Al Mazrah to seize him. They fail, but they learn that he holds an American ballistic missile. A courier in Amsterdam then leads Kate Laswell, Captain Price and Sergeant Garrick to the next clue. Hassan has allied with the Las Almas Cartel and is now in Mexico.

  A first attempt to catch him at the Mexico-US border fails. Colonel Alejandro Vargas and his unit, Los Vaqueros, then join Ghost, Soap and Shadow Company for a second try. Shadow Company is a private military company under the direct command of General Shepherd, and its CEO is Phillip Graves. The operation succeeds, but political fallout with Iran forces the allies to let Hassan go despite the evidence against him.

  Data from Hassan's phone sends Price, Laswell and Gaz to Cape Vilan. There they find that the cartel owns Russian-made GPS devices for missiles. The Urzik terrorist group Al-Qatala then captures Laswell. Price and Gaz rescue her in Urzikstan, helped by old allies Nikolai and Farah Karim. Meanwhile Alejandro and Soap capture the cartel's leader. She turns out to be Valeria Garza, who once served beside Alejandro in the special forces.

  Valeria reveals that a missile sits on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. A raid there stops the launch, and then the allies turn on each other. On Shepherd's orders, Graves and Shadow Company betray Alejandro and Task Force 141. Graves captures Alejandro and takes over the base of Los Vaqueros. Shadow Company slaughters the residents of Las Almas while hunting for Hassan. Ghost and Soap flee into the city, and with help from Rodolfo, Laswell, Price and Gaz they free Alejandro and his unit.

  Laswell then explains where the missiles came from. In August, Shepherd and Graves ran an illegal transport meant to aid American allies in the Middle East. A Russian private military company called the Konni Group ambushed the convoy and stole three missiles. Shepherd covered up the failure. Price confronts him with the truth and promises to pursue him once the present threat is over.

  The finale moves to Chicago, where Valeria says Hassan is hiding. The team narrowly stops his plan by detonating his missile on its way to the Pentagon. Hassan tries to throw Soap out of a building, and Ghost kills him with a sniper shot to the head. Shepherd has vanished into hiding. Laswell tells Task Force 141 about a new leader of the Russian Ultranationalists, and Price names him as Vladimir Makarov, a name that returns in the post-launch story.

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• 3. Cast and Settings

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  Barry Sloane voices Captain John Price, the SAS officer who formed Task Force 141 as a multi-national special operations unit. Around him are Elliot Knight as Sergeant Kyle Garrick, nicknamed Gaz, Samuel Roukin as Ghost, and Neil Ellice as Soap.

  The allies come from many services and countries. Rya Kihlstedt plays Kate Laswell, a CIA Station Chief. Stefan Kapičić plays Nikolai, who leads a Russian private military company. Claudia Doumit plays Farah Karim, commander of the Urzikstan Liberation Force. Alain Mesa plays Colonel Alejandro Vargas, and Bayardo De Murguia plays his Sergeant Major, Rodolfo Parra. Warren Kole plays Graves, and Glenn Morshower plays General Herschel Shepherd.

  On the other side, Ibrahim Renno plays Hassan, an officer of Iran's Quds Force who is allied with the Urzik terrorist organization Al-Qatala. The cartel that shelters him is run by a sicaria played by María Elisa Camargo. She goes by the alias El Sin Nombre, which translates as The Nameless One.

  The campaign takes place in late 2022, and its map mixes real and invented places. Amsterdam, Chicago, the Gulf of Mexico and the Mexico-United States border are real. Las Almas is a fictional Mexican city. Urzikstan is a fictional region. The United Republic of Adal is a fictional country, and its capital, Al Mazrah, serves as a major location in the campaign and in multiplayer. Al Mazrah is also the map of the free-to-play Warzone 2.0.

  The plot is partly based on real events, among them the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. The game then adds a second layer of story that continues after the credits roll.

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• 4. Moving and Shooting

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  Swimming is one of the headline additions. Water physics and swimming mechanics arrive alongside advanced AI systems in the campaign and in co-op modes. Vehicles are overhauled too. Players can lean out of windows, mantle onto a roof and hijack a vehicle.

  On foot, the game adds dive to prone, mantle and ledge hang. It also removes slide canceling, a movement trick from earlier games. The leveling system and the Gunsmith have been revamped, so players can fine-tune individual attachments to suit their playstyles. Weapon platforms branch the progression to reduce repetitiveness, and a firing range gives players a place to practice.

  Multiplayer gains new game modes. In Knockout, two teams try to capture a package while working with limited lives. In Prisoner Rescue, an attacking team tries to extract a hostage while the defenders fortify the area around that hostage. Third-person game modes were confirmed in September 2022.

  The cooperative Special Ops mode returns with two-player missions. After launch, a three-player activity called Raids was added to it. Seasonal updates then brought more modes, among them the 2v2 Gunfight mode. Gunfight had already appeared in Modern Warfare from 2019 and in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War from 2020.

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• 5. Seasons and Aftermath

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  On the 16th of November, the first seasonal update delivered Warzone 2.0, a free-to-play battle royale and a follow-up to the original Warzone. It also introduced DMZ, an extraction mode. Teams of three fight each other and AI combatants while completing missions and trying to carry loot out of the map. Warzone 2.0 was later shortened to Warzone during Season 4.

  The story kept going outside the campaign. In December 2022, Laswell sends Price, Gaz and Farah to find former CIA officer Alex Keller, who vanished while exploring a Soviet-era bunker in the Sattiq mountains of Urzikstan. Inside, the team finds a Soviet-made thermonuclear missile and the bodies of Farah's fighters. They also find Alex alive. The warheads are gone, and Alex carries a message from Farah's brother, Hadir, who has become the commander of Al-Qatala. Join him, or leave him be.

  Price, Farah and Alex chase Hadir deeper underground. He traps them in cells, but they escape. They then secure the warhead core and sabotage the elevator that Hadir is using to flee. Mortally wounded, Hadir urges Farah to use the warhead and warns her that the real Russians are coming. Farah, Alex and the Urzikstan Liberation Force move to dispose of the warhead.

  The multiplayer and Special Ops story follows two private military companies, SpecGru and KorTac Group, with Laswell overseeing their covert operations. The action spreads beyond Al Mazrah to the Asia-Pacific island of Ashika, to an underground facility called Building 21, and to the city of Vondel in the Netherlands. In April 2023, Valeria escapes captivity and rallies the Las Almas Cartel. Later that year, a terrorist attack hits Vondel and a group calling itself the Peacekeepers seizes the city. Laswell and the Black Mous private military company discover that the Peacekeepers are the Konni Group in disguise.

  In August, Graves, who had faked his death, proposes an alliance with Farah and Alex. Under Shepherd's command, he leads Operation: Rogue Arsenal against the Zaya Observatory. Shadow Company finds chemical weapons underground, but Konni operatives disguised as Shadow soldiers hijack the planes carrying the gas, and the operation fails.

  The game also runs as a service. A battle pass and an in-game store sell cosmetic bundles for COD Points, while new maps and weapons arrive free with each season. Activision has also added guest characters. Footballers Paul Pogba, Neymar and Lionel Messi appear, as does basketball player Kevin Durant. So do streamers Nickmercs and TimTheTatman, and rappers Snoop Dogg, Nicki Minaj and 21 Savage. Fictional guests include Shredder, Lara Croft, Spawn, Skeletor, Ash Williams and Alucard. Starlight, Homelander and Black Noir from The Boys also appear, along with Lilith and Inarius from Diablo IV and the Sardaukar from Dune. Themed items based on Crash Bandicoot and Doom were released too.

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• 6. Engine and Score

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  Modern Warfare II was built alongside Warzone 2.0, and both run on a new version of the IW engine. Both also sit inside one cross-game launcher called Call of Duty HQ, later renamed the Call of Duty launcher. The engine brings a physically based material system, a hybrid tile-based streaming system, a new PBR decal rendering system, world volumetric lighting, 4K HDR and a new GPU geometry pipeline. Activision's proprietary Ricochet Anti-Cheat was present from launch.

  Sarah Schachner composed the score. She had already written the music for the 2019 reboot and for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare in 2016. In November 2022, she stepped away from writing further music for the game. She cited challenges in the working dynamic with Infinity Ward's audio director.

  Her statement on Twitter was pointed about the soundtrack release. She said its mixing and mastering were, in her words, "not my artistic intent in regards to mixing and mastering".

  The soundtrack came out digitally on the 25th of November 2022. It holds 23 tracks from the original score plus two songs by artists Edison Flood, Destani Wolf and Banda MS de Sergio Lizárraga. Other composers then wrote music for later seasons. Jason Graves worked on Warzone, Steve Ouimette on season 2, Nainita Desai on season 3, Toby Chu on season 4, and Photek on season 5. Finneas O'Connell and David Marinelli wrote the theme for Gunfight, and Tyler Bates took season 6.

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• 7. Roadmap and Release

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  In February 2022, Jason Schreier of Bloomberg News reported a break in Call of Duty's annual release cycle. It would be the first such break in nearly two decades. Activision planned to push Treyarch's next mainline game from 2023 to 2024, after the disappointing commercial performance of Call of Duty: Vanguard in 2021.

  To fill the gap, Activision gave Sledgehammer Games an expansion pack for Modern Warfare II, planned for late 2023. It was to include a new single-player campaign set in Mexico, plus new multiplayer content. By summer 2022, the plan changed. The expansion became a full sequel, titled Modern Warfare III.

  In July 2023, a series of leaks, reportedly from an internal alpha build of that sequel, spread online. Activision then confirmed that every Modern Warfare II operator, weapon and cosmetic bundle would work in Modern Warfare III.

  The marketing for the original game began the same month as the Bloomberg report. In February 2022, Activision confirmed a sequel to Modern Warfare. The title came in April. A month later, a teaser showed key art of the main characters and gave the release date of the 28th of October 2022.

  On the 2nd of June, a live-action trailer arrived. The same day, Steam replied to a tweet from the official Call of Duty account in a way that strongly suggested a Windows release there, alongside Battle.net. The first trailer, on the 8th of June, showed campaign gameplay and confirmed Steam. It was the first Call of Duty on Steam since Call of Duty: WWII in 2017. In September, a showcase called Call of Duty Next revealed a multiplayer trailer and details of Spec Ops, Warzone 2.0 and DMZ.

  The multiplayer beta opened on the 16th of September for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, and on the 22nd of September for Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. It ended on the 26th of September at 3pm Eastern Daylight Time. Pre-orders of every edition gave early beta access, and they also unlocked the campaign a week early, on the 20th of October.

  The Vault Edition added a Red Team 141 operator pack, an FJX Cinder weapon vault pack, access to a season's Battle Pass and double XP tokens. It also held the Ghost Legacy Pack, with 12 Ghost operator skins and 10 weapon blueprints for the M4A1 assault rifle, usable in Modern Warfare from 2019 and in Warzone. Unlike earlier cross-generation titles, it had no standard edition for the eighth-generation consoles. Players got a cross-gen edition or the Vault Edition. Years later, on the 1st of May 2025, the game joined Xbox Game Pass.

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• 8. Critics and Records

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  Metacritic's aggregate score for Modern Warfare II came out as generally favorable, but individual verdicts ran from lukewarm to warm. Reid McCarter of Game Informer gave it 6.5 out of 10. He wondered whether the good time in its multiplayer and in glimpses of its campaign would be enough for an audience used to the series' detached depiction of brutal warfare.

  Jordan Forward of PCGamesN gave it 6 out of 10. He felt it was lacking and empty in a way the series had not been before, and he called it a watered-down version of the 2019 game's punch. Even so, he said he would still happily gulp it down. Keith Stuart of The Guardian was warmer. Setting aside unease about delighting in hi-tech warfare, he called it "a precisely tooled, intensely immersive combat simulator".

  The campaign drew mixed opinions, and some reviewers saw a step back from 2019. Matt Purslow of IGN gave it 6 out of 10 and called it a lackluster follow-up to its refined predecessor, saved by its best-in-class shooting. S.E. Doster of GameSpot called it a greatest hits list for the series, and praised the player freedom in missions and the variety of locales.

  Multiplayer fared better. Seth G. Macy of IGN said it felt distinct while remaining what you expect from Call of Duty, and named it his favorite Call of Duty multiplayer game in years. Doster was more mixed. He found the gun customization overly complex and said the mode as a whole felt lacking.

  The sales story was far stronger. Modern Warfare II became the fastest-selling Call of Duty game of all time. Its revenue in its first three days, and again within 10 days, topped the series' earlier records, set by Modern Warfare 3 in 2011 and Black Ops II in 2012. It was the best-selling game in the United States in 2022, and the best seller in the United Kingdom in its first week. In Japan, the PlayStation 4 version sold 24,371 physical copies in its release week, the second-best retail seller that week. The PlayStation 5 version sold 17,710 copies and placed sixth on the all-format chart.

  Awards lists reflect the split between campaign and multiplayer. The Game Awards 2022 listed it for Best Audio Design, Best Action Game and Best Multiplayer. The Steam Awards listed Game of the Year and Better with Friends. At the BAFTA Games Awards, Alain Mesa was listed for his lead performance as Alejandro Vargas. The 66th Grammy Awards also listed its score under video games and interactive media. The next chapter of the series, Modern Warfare III, arrived on the 10th of November 2023.

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