Call of Duty: Modern Warfare won’t have a season pass, will have cross-play multiplayer and RTX support

Over the weekend, following a few leaks and some rumours, Activision officially announced Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, seeing Infinity Ward return to the series that propelled Call of Duty into the juggernaut it is today. Modern Warfare will have a bunch of changes compared to Black Ops 4, including full cross-platform multiplayer and no season pass. This will also be one of the big 2019 releases to support Nvidia's RTX ray-tracing acceleration on PC.

Story-wise, we know that the campaign wants to recapture some of the shocking elements put forward in past games in the series. Specifically, the campaign is being compared to the ‘No Russian' mission from Modern Warfare 2.

Call of Duty will used input-based matchmaking this year, opening the door for cross-play across Xbox One, PS4 and PC. As we all know, a keyboard and mouse player will have an advantage over someone stuck with a PS4 or Xbox gamepad, so all matchmaking will be based on input method. Assuming there is no way to trick the system, that means PC players using gamepads will be paired against console players but those using mouse and keyboard won't be.

This year's Call of Duty will also do away with the season pass. There were reports recently that Black Ops 4's season pass did not sell as well as Activision had hoped, there has also been talk of the series going down the free to play route eventually. For now though, the team will be experimenting with making all additional maps free and relying on microtransactions instead. Black Ops 4 caused some controversy for adding microtransactions in several weeks after launch after all reviews had gone live. That same strategy will be in place once again this year but we won't be hearing many details until after launch.

The final piece of news we have regarding Modern Warfare at the moment is that it is confirmed to include Nvidia RTX support on the PC. So if you have an RTX GPU, you will be able to switch ray-tracing on for enhanced lighting.

KitGuru Says: The addition of cross-play to Call of Duty seems like an excellent move, although I am worried about microtransactions this year. The promise of no season pass sounds great at first, but that just means Activision will be looking to make its money elsewhere- as we saw with EA and Battlefront 2 in 2017. 

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