Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4’s campaign is available now in early access, and is arguably the strongest the series has been since its 2019 revival. Those who have played it will be aware that a lot of its heroes and villains meet their end in one of the darkest COD entries to date. It makes it all feel like a bow being tied on this particular storyline. Activision has confirmed a new Call of Duty subfranchise outside of the traditional Modern Warfare and Black Ops rotation is in the works, further signalling that it may be the end of this particular road.

But is that Activision’s plan, or if MW4 turns out to be a smash success, will the developer be tempted to head back to Captain Price and gang well one more time? The final mission of the campaign, taking place during the middle of the game’s credits, appears to suggest it might be the end of the line for the saga and one of its most beloved characters. It begs the question: Is this the end of the rebooted Modern Warfare story?

“It's a good question, and you'll not love the answer,” Jeff Negus, narrative director at Infinity Ward, told IGN.

“I don't know. What I do know is we tried to tell a definitive, conclusive story in that we were trying to set up, or rather pay off the setups, answer things that had been posed as questions, push characters into new territory that they've never been in before, raise the stakes, push the conflict.”

This new era of Modern Warfare started strongly with 2019’s acclaimed campaign that echoed much of what players enjoyed about the 2007 original. Despite the callbacks, the most exciting thing was that it felt like something fresh, with new characters blending in with familiar faces to tell a new story. The recently released MW4 pulls off a similar trick, weaving in a huge-scale Korean conflict with the more personal Price missions. But the path here was rocky, and not necessarily one that was meant to end here. In fact, it turns out there wasn’t really a fleshed-out idea of where the saga would go post-2019.

“No, there wasn't a long-term plan”, Negus revealed. “Similar to a television show where you got a first season, it comes out, people like it, cool, there's going to be another one. If you do it well, what you built can be built upon in a way where you can use it as a foundation and then push on top of that to build and go to new places.

“Four, that was of particular importance for us. Not many games get a four, let alone one that has these kinds of characters that have gone through the things they've gone through. And so while there wasn't a long-term plan necessarily for the story specifically from 2019, we definitely are self-reflexive in a way where we're looking back at the same time as being in the present in order to inform it and make it more impactful.”

Having the plot of a four-game series being developed over the course of much of the decade not entirely mapped out is understandable, but what may be surprising is that the team didn’t know where this story would be heading just three years ago after the release of Modern Warfare 3.

“It's interesting because at the end of Modern Warfare 3, there were some definitive events that took place,” Negus explained. “And because of that, particularly for Price, once you take that action, you can't come back from it. And although it doesn't change his core motivations, and in that I don't think it changes his character, it does adjust how he tries to achieve his goals; the means changed. And we weren't beholden to it, but we wanted to use it as a way to continue the story in a meaningful way, not go, ‘Don't worry about that thing that happened,’ but really lean into it and say, ‘Well, if he had done that, it would mean this. And if it meant this, how can we use that to push into new territory?’ And that's where an alliance between Price and Valeria comes in.”

There’s a lot going on in Modern Warfare 4’s story, and it's a credit to Negus and the team that it remains coherent throughout, despite having to juggle an extensive cast dotted around much of the globe. It’s a stark contrast to MW3’s limited, plot-light campaign, which introduced fan-favourite villain Makarov in what felt like a rushed manner.

The development time granted to Infinity Ward to construct it was truncated, especially when compared to the three years it had with MW4, and it shows in its quality, but also in its quantity. This is a beefy campaign with a lot of story to tell. So much so that its opening missions almost feel like an epilogue to Modern Warfare 3, as it clears the table ahead of telling its new story. So, in an ideal world, was part of this story ever meant to be in that game from three years ago?

“Short answer, no,” Negus stated. “I think the reason that this story has so much in it is that we had the ambition to continue the legacy character storylines and a very strong impulse to return to form in that, assuming the role of a low-level soldier within a bigger war landscape. And so obviously those characters that we've been with don't really fit that desire in terms of having that perspective. So it was a challenge, but ultimately an opportunity to get to redefine our returning characters and define, for the first time, a whole set of new, young, fresh faces that would give us a totally different perspective. And we combined them together, uniting them by a common theme continuing from 2019, setting up the ‘you draw the line wherever you need it’ that permeates both threads of the storyline and both perspectives.”

This approach is definitely proving a success, with Modern Warfare 4’s campaign receiving widespread praise from fans, and a thank you from the actor behind Captain Price in return to those enjoying it. Have you played it? Did you enjoy it? Let us know in the comments!

We’ve got an in-progress Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Walkthrough to help you through the campaign missions, and a guide to All Yellow Supply Crate Locations for the 10th mission, Stranded. Make sure you don’t miss out on a thing with our guide to All Collectible Note Locations, and all the Code Solutions you’ll need to open every keypad and container.

Google researchers have released a paper claiming that four Google Gemini 4 Argon AI agents just beat Minecraft without any help from humans. It took them just over 27 hours to take down the Ender Dragon in what is believed to be a world first.

Of course, it’s not as simple as just turning up and firing arrows at the thing. To reach The End and defeat the Ender Dragon in Minecraft, there are a series of trials you have to complete.

You have to get Ender Pearls, Ender Rods, and craft Eyes of Ender, before tracking down a Stronghold and completing a puzzle. This takes a fair bit of farming and requires you to work up through the basic Minecraft tools.

To start the test, Google placed a team of four agents into a random Minecraft seed with a goal of defeating the Ender Dragon. According to Google, the agents used in-game chat to coordinate but otherwise had no strategy assigned going in — just a goal.

"Each agent controlled a player via an open-source library called Mineflayer and coordinated with its teammates through in-game chat and shared memory," the researchers said. "No one assigned roles or wrote game logic. The agents planned, wrote, and debugged every program themselves. Researchers could watch the run on a live dashboard and pause or stop it at any time, but they had no cause to intervene."

The agents settled into roles quickly, with some building Enderman shelters for farming materials, others gathering food, and others focusing on exploration. They shared combat tips and helped each other recover lost gear when they died.

Over the playthrough, the four agents exchanged 229 messages, ran 2,783 programs, and died 605 times, which suggests worse performance than my kid when he was five. A fifth agent oversaw the process to make sure the other bots weren’t cheating, but you can tell they weren’t by how many times they died anyway.

It took around 13.5 hours to reach The End, and the remaining time was spent trying to kill the final boss (and dying a lot). The current Minecraft speedrun record is six minutes and 36 seconds, so the AI agents won’t be breaking any records any time soon. The agents used 1.35 billion input tokens, which would cost a normal user around $1,620. That’s $60 per hour, which works out at $15 an hour per agent. Not a bad salary for a group of computer ghosts who don’t need sustenance.

"To our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end autonomous completion of Minecraft by AI agents, achieved using only the standard Mineflayer library without pre-scouted seeds or other game-specific tools written by humans," the team wrote in a paper, via Engadget. "Winning required the agents to keep a coherent plan across thousands of dependent steps for more than a day."

What is the point of all this? The researchers said they wanted to study how teams of agents coordinate in a setting where every step is visible to help understand such systems before they are trusted with real-world tasks. "The skills required to solve Minecraft such as coordinating a team, recovering from failure, and pursuing a goal for more than a day, are also what agents need to work reliably alongside people," they said.

Last December, co-creator of Call of Duty and co-founder of Respawn Entertainment, Vince Zampella, passed away in a car accident. He left behind an enduring legacy as one of the people who shaped first-person shooters and changed video games forever.

This week saw the release of Modern Warfare 4, the latest entry in a series that Zampella led the inception of almost 20 years ago in 2007. His contribution is honoured by his former studio, Infinity Ward, in the credits for its campaign.

Upon completion of the game’s final mission, which takes place midway through the credits, his name and the others belonging to those who have sadly passed away during its production are the first to appear on screen. These include Rainer Yang, Matt Canale, and Preetam Raj Bordoloi, who also helped craft Call of Duty over the years.

Zampella was instrumental in turning COD into the megafranchise it is today, initially leaving EA after leading design on Medal of Honor: Allied Assault to create the series, before later returning to found Respawn Entertainment, which went on to develop the Titanfall and Star Wars Jedi games. He will, perhaps, always be known best, though, for the development of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, which not only stands tall today as one of the greatest FPS campaigns ever made, but also changed how online multiplayer shooters are played to this day.

His legacy is honoured in Modern Warfare 4, and it's fitting that it happens to be one of the strongest entries in the series in many years, with fans praising it and the game’s very own Captain Price thanking them.