90% Positive. Call of Duty Hasn't Tested Multiplayer Yet.

Activision is letting this one sit on the Steam front page a little longer than usual.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 went into campaign early access Friday, Oct. 16 for pre-order buyers, and the Steam reviews that followed broke the franchise pattern. The game sits at 1,630 of 1,812 reviews positive—a 90% "Very Positive" score. You have to go back to Black Ops III in 2015, near 84%, to find a Call of Duty Steam launch this warm. Black Ops 7 hovers around 39% positive. Black Ops 6 near 46%. Modern Warfare III at 48%.

That's a real number. It's also an incomplete one.

Every review was written by someone who pre-ordered before playing, and every review covers only the campaign—the only thing unlocked. Multiplayer doesn't open until Friday, Oct. 23. DMZ, the extraction mode, gets a head start for Vault Edition buyers Tuesday, Oct. 20. The 90% score is a verdict on a 16-mission single-player experience, measured by the most committed slice of the audience, collected before the two modes that determine whether a Call of Duty game survives its first ninety days even exist for anyone.

Translation: Activision shipped a campaign into a review window specifically structured so the score you see is the best possible score the game will ever post, measured against an audience pre-selected to be favorably disposed, before the moneymaking parts turn on.

Staggered early access for pre-order campaigns is now standard practice. But it means the headline number is a campaign review, full stop.

The part nobody's reviewed yet

Multiplayer launches Oct. 23. The real test shows up in November when Season 1 arrives with battle pass pricing Activision hasn't disclosed. The pattern from Modern Warfare III suggests roughly $10 for the premium pass and $30 for BlackCell, stacked on top of a $69.99 standard edition. If Season 1 lands at that price with the same cosmetic-heavy structure that corroded trust across Modern Warfare II, Modern Warfare III, Black Ops 6, and Black Ops 7, the 90% campaign score will look like a launch-week mirage that had nothing to do with the business model everyone was angry about.

Modern Warfare 4 also skips Xbox Game Pass at launch, the first mainline entry to do so since the Activision acquisition closed. It isn't slated to join before Holiday 2027. Activision wants full-price revenue, not subscriber engagement. A good campaign makes that easier to justify. It doesn't make it free.

Multiple outlets independently confirmed the 90% figure. Steam concurrent players topped 100,000 during early access—a real signal of demand. Infinity Ward may have built the best Modern Warfare story since the 2019 reboot. That's worth something.

It isn't worth confusing with a verdict on the franchise's business model, which is the actual five-year complaint. One good campaign reviewed by pre-order buyers before multiplayer exists buys Activision a quiet week. It doesn't buy back the trust five mediocre live-service years spent.

What to watch: the Steam score once multiplayer reviews arrive after Oct. 23, and Season 1 battle pass pricing against the Modern Warfare III baseline of roughly $10 and $30.