408: Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 Rules And Xbox’s New Controller

Morgan (0:20)

Welcome to the Baunfire Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, Morgan, aka Baundiesel. This is episode 408, and this week we'll be talking about Modern Warfare 4 First Impressions, a new Xbox controller is on the way, Nvidia is probably scrapping the 5090, and much more. Be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app, leave a review on Spotify or iTunes, and subscribe to the Baundiesel YouTube channel to get all of my videos, including this podcast. I'm at almost 5,000 subscribers. That was my goal for 2026, so if you aren't already subscribed, search up Baundiesel, click the subscribe button, your notifications up to you. You want to see every video I post or not, I don't really care. I just want that number because we all need to have goals.

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Getting into those first impressions, it's great. I'm only two missions in. This isn't a review. I'm not going to pretend like I know how the whole game goes. Two missions out of 12, I believe. I did it in about an hour, I would say. That leads me to believe that we're probably looking at like a 7, 8, 9, maybe a 10-hour game. It depends on if some of the later missions are a bit longer, or if they even have maybe some open world things like they did in some of the previous games. We'll have to wait and see. I am a sucker for the Infinity Ward Call of Duty games, specifically their campaigns, so maybe I'm a bit biased. I assume if you're listening to or watching this podcast, you already have heard my whole spiel about being pretty open, about being biased, and I'm just kind of giving my takes here. But they're really fun. The first mission, as you've seen probably from trailers and stuff, is the invasion of South Korea by North Korea. That's a pretty cool mission. It introduces some new mechanics and things like that. Really well done. Then the second mission is you as Captain Price going through a nightclub, hunting some people down. It involves a lot of melee combat, which is left trigger, right trigger, and a takedown button for blocking and punching and takedowns. More intricate than I expected. Pretty cool.

Then that sets us off into what I assume the rest of the game is going to be in bouncing around the timeline and things like that.

Gameplay was fun so far. They introduced some new mechanics I don't remember from previous games, which is really good. Probably the most impressive thing I've seen so far are the cinematics. It is pretty insane that at this point, Xbox has arguably the best two studios out there for cinematics in Blizzard and Infinity Ward or Activision. However, you'd want to break it up.

The cinematics are great. They're so good. What's really cool is there's obviously some pre-rendered cinematics that look like insanely, insanely good. Then the game itself looks great. Then there's something in the middle. There's some obviously in-game cinematics that they're using. They do a cool thing where they blend in the gameplay with these in-game cinematics.

You'll be doing something. This is just in the first two missions. During a set action, the camera will pull out of the character you're playing as and show you something happening from a cinematic or third-person perspective, and then dive back in. That's something that would get really annoying if they did it too much. But I think in the way it's been applied, at least in these first couple of missions, it's really good. It adds to the experience, at least in my opinion, and it's pretty cool. I'm curious to see how they will play with that throughout the rest of the single player.

I'm really impressed so far. The game looks great, it plays great, feels really good to play.

I can't wait to beat the main campaign. I'm probably going to get more into DMZ mode, which is kind of like a Tarkov extraction mode, than multiplayer. I'm always good to get into 20 or 30 levels in the multiplayer, so I'll play for a few weeks and then I'll probably bounce out. DMZ could keep me around longer if it's an evolution of the last one they did, which I really enjoyed. I like the DMZ mode they did. Was that Modern Warfare 2? I can't remember.

I'm excited to see that. I'm excited to see what else they have coming.