Call of Duty recently kicked off a week of Modern Warfare 4 DMZ news, which brought us a first look at the “action extraction” mode and some insight into developer Infinity Ward’s guiding philosophy.
Although more reveals are promised, what’s been confirmed so far left one of the biggest questions hanging over DMZ unanswered. Namely, whether the mode is going to offer a PvE-only playlist for those not keen on fighting other players. Dedicated PvE is something that inevitably gets brought up with every new extraction shooter, as we’ve recently seen with Arc Raiders, Bungie’s Marathon, and Escape from Tarkov before that. So, does Modern Warfare 4’s DMZ have anything to offer PvE players? Infinity Ward hasn’t said, but players picked up on some clues seen in recent trailers.
This all started with episode seven of From the Ward, a behind-the-scenes feature that takes us inside the studio. The focus of that episode was entirely on DMZ and it naturally showed a lot of gameplay. At minute 7:34 into the video, we see the deployment screen with four options. Three of the four are discussed, and have on-screen descriptions – except for Single Squad Mission, which suspiciously has neither.
For players eager to get any confirmation of a PvE-only mode, it was a welcome surprise. The name implies the lobby is limited to a single squad, meaning it’s a game players can only join through an invite.
Players took to Reddit and X to ask if the name actually implies what they thought it does, with some tagging the official Call of Duty account directly. While many agree with the basic definition, others believe it’s referring to something else.
“Could be a solely PvE mode for DMZ. Would be great if true as I’d rather not have to spend however long getting decent gear just to get wiped by a super,” one Reddit user wrote.
Other players, however, think it has to do with DMZ’s Lieutenant Hunts, a high-risk encounter type. Defeated Lieutenants drop their Dog Tag, and the player has to extract safely with it for the hunt to count. The counter theory, then, is that Single Squad means only one tag will drop, meaning only a single squad (or player) can extract with it. This is admittedly a weaker explanation, but in the absence of an official description, players are left to come up with their own.
Disrupting that state of affairs was another official trailer, released just one day later. The DMZ Dynamic Ops trailer spotlights one of the four options we referred to earlier. However, when the trailer shows the deployment screen, Single Squad is suspiciously absent.
So what does this mean? It’s likely the trailers show different builds of Modern Warfare 4. It’s not hard to believe an older build of the game having Single Squad, before it was either removed or pushed back to a post-launch season.
It’s also possible Single Squad is an option only available to new players to help with onboarding. The player in the From the Ward video is level 5, compared to level 28 in the most recent trailer. It’s not uncommon for multiplayer games to offer low-stress modes to ease newcomers into the experience – rival shooter Battlefield 6 has done it, and many battle royale games, such as Fortnite, limit new players to bot-only matches in their first few levels.
All of that speculation and discourse has once again highlighted the need for a PvE mode. In recent weeks, Infinity Ward did what many thought was unthinkable in adding a silly skin off toggle in Warzone and changing double XP tokens to count down in-match and not in real-time. I could see PvE DMZ being next on that list – even if it’s planned for sometime after release.
“Really strange for me why they didn’t add PvE from [the] start. Just watch [Escape from] Tarkov with both modes, everybody looks happy with that,” wrote another.
DMZ is part of Modern Warfare 4, and is available at its launch on 23rd October for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Switch 2.
