Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is fully live today, October 23, and that means the wait for DMZ is over. The extraction mode unlocks for every player at midnight local time, and Infinity Ward calls it the “action extraction shooter”: drop into the Hajin Exclusion Zone, grab everything you can carry, and get out alive.
What you are dropping into. Hajin is a sprawling Exclusion Zone shaped by the aftermath of the campaign, and Infinity Ward says it holds the largest population of enemy AI the studio has ever built. Enemies come in 4 tiers of aggression, and the toughest of them, roaming Commanders, move with strong guard squads. A new deployment screen lets you pick mission types before you drop — or go in with no objective at all and just hunt for loot.
The big catch: it is not free. Unlike the 2022 DMZ beta in Modern Warfare 2, this DMZ is not free to play. It is the third mode in the paid Modern Warfare 4 package, alongside Campaign and Multiplayer, on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and Switch 2. Players who pre-ordered digitally have been in since October 20 at 12pm CT, and the campaign opened even earlier, on October 16.
Progression that stays in the zone. DMZ runs its own progression: 70 levels earned only inside the mode, plus its own economy of cash and crafting materials that carry from round to round. Weapons are the exception — gun progression is shared with Multiplayer and Warzone, so your unlocks travel with you.
Your Forward Operating Base. Between runs you return to your FOB, a walkable home base you share with your squad. It starts as a small foothold and grows, through Operations completed across Hajin, into a working base with more than a dozen Stations: a Stash, loadout and Operator management, a gun customizer, a firing range with targets past 100 metres, a 3D printer for crafting, a vendor, a bounty board for the top PvP performers, and a boss board tracking the zone’s most powerful AI enemies. Orders missions at the base teach the mode and carry its story forward.
If you bounced off the 2022 beta, this is a much bigger swing: a persistent base, a real economy, and a zone built to punish greed. Just remember the extraction rule that never changes — if you die out there, the loot stays out there.
Sources: The Brief, Destructoid, Eurogamer (Infinity Ward developer blog).
