Modern Warfare 4 Just Got Call of Duty's Best Steam Score in a Decade

Activision let digital pre-order owners into the Modern Warfare 4 campaign on October 16, a week ahead of the full release, and the usual script didn't play out. Instead of the familiar pile-on, the game settled into a "Very Positive" rating on Steam, which puts it ahead of every mainline Call of Duty since Black Ops III back in 2015.

Why this campaign is landing differently

The story wraps up the rebooted Modern Warfare arc that started in 2019, and it runs two threads at once. On the ground in South Korea, Private Park leads a mixed South Korean and American Marine squad against a North Korean invasion that kicks off with an EMP strike on Seoul. Meanwhile Captain Price is off the leash, working outside official channels and striking uneasy alliances to chase a bigger threat. Missions also take the fight through New York, Paris, and Mumbai.

Reviewers have been calling it one of the tightest, most emotionally grounded campaigns the series has put out in years, built by Infinity Ward alongside Beenox, Digital Legends, Activision Shanghai, Raven Software, Treyarch, and Sledgehammer Games.

How it stacks up against recent entries

The comparison is doing a lot of the talking here. Recent Call of Duty games have struggled to clear the 50% mark on Steam:

• Modern Warfare 4 (campaign early access): roughly 90% positive
• Black Ops III (2015): around 84% positive, the previous series high
• Modern Warfare III: around 48% positive
• Modern Warfare II: around 47% positive
• Black Ops 6: around 46% positive
• Black Ops 7: around 39% positive

Players showed up too

It's not just a review-bombing-proof score. Steam concurrent players reportedly topped 100,000 within the first days of early access, a stronger opening than some recent entries in the series managed, even with multiplayer and DMZ still locked until the October 23 full launch.

Worth remembering that this score is still built almost entirely on campaign impressions from pre-order players, so it's an early read rather than a final verdict, and multiplayer reception could move the number in either direction once the full release crowd weighs in.

This one's for anyone who bounced off the last few Call of Duty campaigns and has been waiting for a reason to come back for the story alone.