There's been a lot of speculation about where the next Call of Duty game will take us, with most of it squarely focused on the Modern Warfare series. Someone said what sounded an awful lot like "Modern Warfare 4" in a video clip of an April preview event, and Robert "fourzerotwo" Bowling, formerly the high-profile community manager and creative strategist at Infinity Ward, posted some rather on-the-nose tweets earlier this month.
Now it looks even more like Captain Price and company are about to make their return. Earlier today, YouTuber LongSensation tweeted this:
That and a buck-fifty will buy you a cup of coffee, but shortly afterward Kotaku weighed in to say that the leak is accurate: The site said it hasn't seen the game itself, but Activision has been showing it off to press and streamers for the past couple of weeks and "many sources" have told it that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is the title.
It's easy to forget that the original Modern Warfare was actually Call of Duty 4, so this isn't exactly the same title as the first game in that sub-series, but it's close enough that it's bound to cause a few headaches for anyone who has to keep them straight.
The reason for the lack of a number, according to Kotaku, is that it will be a reboot of the series, with a greater emphasis on emotionally hefty (and uncomfortable) moments like the infamous No Russian mission from Modern Warfare 2 in which players witnessed, and could participate in, a massacre of civilians at a Moscow airport.
It's all still entirely unofficial, as Activision hasn't commented on it and surely won't before the official reveal, which based on an earnings call from earlier this month will happen sometime within the next month-and-a-bit. But if I was a betting man? I know where I'd be putting my money.
(He even Photoshopped the "3" out of his t-shirt, for heaven's sake.)