Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is officially out for all players, and its extraction shooter mode DMZ is looking to be particularly popular. And unsurprisingly, the mode’s popularity has brought a longstanding player request back in the spotlight: many DMZ players have been asking developer Infinity Ward to provide a PvE-only variant of the extraction mode.
Curiously, the developer appeared to accidentally show a DMZ PvE option, which briefly got some players excited, only for Infinity Ward to later clarify it was actually a developer-only playlist, and that DMZ remains a purely PvPvE experience.
Now that millions have played it, however, it’s become hard to browse the DMZ or Modern Warfare 4 subreddits without running into posts from players pleading with Infinity Ward to offer a playlist where they can play the mode without the presence of other humans.
“Please give players the option to play DMZ without PvP,” one Reddit user wrote. “Losing your operator, weapons, equipment and collected loot because another squad ambushes you is incredibly frustrating. Having to pay upwards of 60,000 just to revive your operator, without recovering any lost gear, makes it even worse.”
Although some have pushed back at the idea for seemingly invalidating the point of an extraction mode, others argue CoD: Warzone already does something similar. That mode, for instance, offers options to players who don’t want to deal with a core aspect of battle royale, in letting them respawn after death. And so the argument goes that there’s no reason why DMZ can’t do the same.
“The common argument I see for NOT having a PvE only in DMZ is ‘because that defeats the purpose of an extraction shooter.’ Yet, Resurgence added respawns to the battle royale mode (Warzone),” argued another Reddit user. “The whole point of a battle royale is everyone for themselves, and you get ONE life.”
A small number have even gone as far as to create an online petition, albeit to minimal success. One petition asking for a PvE mode has managed 331 signatures, at the time of writing.
It’s also worth noting that Modern Warfare 4 doesn’t offer any purely PvE modes beyond the campaign. Call of Duty players have come to expect at least one mode that’s purely co-op and PvE in nature, such as Zombies, Spec Ops, or Endgame from last year’s Black Ops 7. The push for a PvE version of DMZ is likely a factor of a contingent of players who feel the game is not catering to them the way it’s typically done in recent years.
More broadly, of course, this phenomenon is not unique to DMZ; all popular extraction games have come to attract players who simply want to the looting, crafting, puzzle-solving and PvE combat without worrying about other players. Arc Raiders recently hosted a successful PvE playtest, and though it remains unclear whether the mode will return as a permanent addition, it was a major step for players who have been desperately asking for one since the game’s launch.
Bungie’s struggling Marathon has experimented with PvE modes, and now the studio is transforming the game to cater more to its Destiny audience, the majority of which want a PvE game. Meanwhile, the grandfather of the genre, Escape From Tarkov, held out long enough before eventually offering a PvE variant with its own progression in 2024.
That makes it seem almost inevitable that Infinity Ward would become subject to the same requests for DMZ. The catch is, as Arc Raiders and Tarkov have shown, these modes tend to take a long time to be implemented. The question then becomes whether or not that cohort of PvE-loving players will still be around once it arrives.
