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Modern Warfare 4 is coming: which Modern Warfare is the greatest?

19 October 2026 · Games

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 comes out on Friday 23 October on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, with a Nintendo Switch 2 version also announced. It is made by Infinity Ward, the studio that started the Modern Warfare name almost twenty years ago, and it leaves the old PS4 and Xbox One behind. A new numbered Modern Warfare is the right moment to ask an old question again: which Modern Warfare is the greatest? The box above shows how the world splits today, and the first answer is closer than most people expect.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came out in November 2007 and changed the series, and arguably the whole genre. Until then Call of Duty had been a Second World War series, like the original Call of Duty from 2003. Infinity Ward moved it to the present day and wrote a campaign that people still quote: the sniper mission "All Ghillied Up" in the empty streets of Pripyat with Captain Price, the gunship mission "Death from Above", and the nuclear blast that ends a level with the player still walking. Its online mode mattered even more. Create-a-class, perks, killstreaks and prestige were not all invented here, but this is the game that put them together and taught a generation how online shooters work.

Modern Warfare 2 followed in November 2009 and made everything bigger. The campaign moved from Afghanistan to Rio de Janeiro to a snowy mountain base, introduced Ghost in his skull mask and caused a storm with the airport mission "No Russian". Spec Ops added two-player missions, and the multiplayer gave players new killstreaks, from the care package to the tactical nuke. For many players who grew up on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, this is the Call of Duty: maps like Terminal, Rust and Highrise are still the ones people ask to see again, and the campaign was remastered in 2020.

Modern Warfare 3 closed the original story in 2011. Infinity Ward made it together with Sledgehammer Games, after the studio had lost its founders and many of its staff, and it finished the hunt for Makarov with Price and Soap across a Europe at war. It sold enormously and was a polished end to the trilogy, but it is usually remembered as the third part of something rather than the start of something. Between the second and third Modern Warfare came Treyarch's Black Ops, set in the Cold War, which many players rank right next to Modern Warfare 2 as the peak of the series.

So the vote comes down to two kinds of greatness. Call of Duty 4 is the revolution: without it there is no modern Call of Duty and no decade of shooters that copied it. Modern Warfare 2 is the high point: the same ideas, bigger and louder, with the maps and moments that a whole generation still talks about. Black Ops against Modern Warfare 2 is the other classic argument, and the first Call of Duty against Call of Duty 4 shows how much the series changed when it left the Second World War behind.

Whatever Modern Warfare 4 turns out to be, it will be measured against these games. Pick your side in each face-off above, and see where your choices land in the world ranking of the best video games of all time.

Vote: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare vs Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

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